“I have resolved to offer myself, if you will give me the one end of a clue of hope to bear along with me.”
“Of what hope, monsieur? Your bargain should be with madame, not with me.”
He would not take her by storm, the aggravating noodle. No doubt that erst fulsome experience of his had distorted his sense of proportion in such matters.
“’Tis no bargain, of course,” he cried, in great distress. “To give me hope is to hand me nothing but a promissory note without a signature. But I would kiss it none the less for the sake of the name that might be there.”
But why did he not kiss the jade herself?
“Mon ami,” she said very kindly, “you must not concern yourself so of the favour of a poor foolish maid, who could return you, ah! so little for the noble trust you place in her; who is not even the mistress of herself.”
“Pamela!” he cried, in sudden agony, “you are not bound to another?”
“I am bound only to those who have protected and cared for me,” she answered. “It is no time this, when danger threatens, to think of separating myself from our common fortune.”
Her young bosom heaved; her eyes even filled with tears.
“Ah!” she murmured, “there is nothing invites me but the peace of the cloister. To escape from the turmoil and the menace—to know no interest of love or fortune in the company of God’s dear prisoners!”
Perhaps she only quoted from the commonplace book ofmère adoptive. At least the picture she conjured up seemed so real as to fetch a little sob from her. Ned’s heart was rent by the sound.
“My dear,” he said simply, “I would not persuade you against your conscience. God knows, in any bargain between us I should be the only gainer. I have nothing to offer you that is worth the offer but my love, dear. That is for you, in stress or sunshine, whenever you care to whistle for it. Now I will say no more; but I will cross the channel, at the very bidding of madame la comtesse, and pave the way as I can for your return. And I shall carry hope with me, Pamela. It is the beggar’s scrip; and what am I but a beggar!”
For the first time he forgot the little red heels that were still in his pocket. They were often to prove a sharp reminder of themselves, however.
Did the girl read his figurative speech in a too literal sense? Let us hope she was never influenced by a consideration so worldly. She held out her hand to him. Her blue eyes swam with tears.
“Perhaps, in happier times to come,” she said—and so they parted.
Twiceagain only, before he started for the Continent—as he persisted in thinking at her sole behest—was Ned vouchsafed the partial company of his mistress. In each instance he must forego the desire of his heart for a personal interview. Such, by accident or design, was denied him. But he had the satisfaction of being received by madame with an ease and a familiarity that were significant of a quite particular confidence.
On the first occasion he happened upon the ladies out walking in a country lane. They were botanising, under the tutorship of a Bœotian new to him—a thin, clerical-looking individual, with a little head, appropriately like an anther. The house at Bury was, indeed, a perfect surprise-tub for the uncommon personalities it seemed to have an endless capacity for turning out. Its staff was, perhaps, twenty all told; yet this number, in view of its omniferous faculties, would often appear as self-reproductive as a stage dozen of soldiers walking itself round a rock into a company.
Madame, who was engaged in “receiving” from monsieur her stick-in-waiting the names ofdébutanteshedge-flowers presented to her, waved a gracious end to the ceremony, and, greeting my lord as if he were a dear friend, invited him to pace beside her.
“It is well timed,” she said. “Monsieur has received my letter? And will Friday suit our so generous cavalier to depart?”
Ned bowed with his never-failing gravity.
“Yes,” he said simply.
The lady clasped her hands.
“Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed, with a quite melodramatic fervour, “it is the passing of the cloud. After all the tempest-tossing, to see the shore in sight!”—and she hastily lifted her skirts from contact with a roadside puddle.
“Monsieur,” said a little voice almost at Ned’s ear, “do you know what is acorolleand what anectaire?”
In some mood of impudence or mischief Pamela was come to give her company unbidden. She would pretend not to see the warning gestures ofla gouvernante. She held in her hand the parts of a dismembered flower, and she looked up at the young man as she stepped, light as his own sudden thoughts, at his side. She felt a little warmth, a little pity towards him. He was going far away, and to serve her. That she knew. It was in the nature of a tiny confidence between them. Her glance was appealing as a child’s, asking not to be left.
And as for Ned, the sight of this sweet face close to him so inflamed his heart that his formal speech took fire.
“I know when I look at you,” he said; “they are mademoiselle’s cheek and mouth classified.”
In the near prospect of his banishment he spoke out reckless of consequences. Perhaps the unexpected answer took the girl herself by surprise. She hung her head and fell back a little.
“Mademoiselle,” cried Ned, “if I might take thence a rose to wear for a favour!”
“Oh, fie!” she answered, “that is not even original; it is to repeat Mr Sherree-den’s foolishness. And they are not roses at all.”
“Nor rouge,” said Ned, “though you once implied it.”
“No,” she said, with a pert glance at hergouvernante; “madame-maman does not approve. But sometimes to rub them with a geranium petal—that is not immoral, is it?”
“I don’t know,” cried the young man; “but the geranium shall be my queen of flowers from this time!”
“Pamela!” cried madame, in desperate chagrin over every word that passed between the two, yet impotent, under existing circumstances, to give expression to her annoyance; but she ventured to summon the child pretty peremptorily to come and walk beside her, and only in this order was my lord destined to enjoy for an hour a divided pleasure.
But on the second and final occasion of his meeting her, chance and the girl were even less favourable to him. He was to start for Belgium on the Friday morning, and on the Thursday evening he walked over to Bury to receive his instructions. He found signs of confusion in the house—boxes choking the passages, personal litter of all kinds brought together as if for removal; and in the drawing-room a little concert—such as madame loved to extemporise—was in process of performance, with Mr Sheridan, in mighty boisterous spirits, for only listener. He invited Ned to a seat beside him, and clapped him on the shoulder.
“’Tis admirable,” said he; “not concert, but concertation. There is no conductor but a lightning-conductor could direct these warring elements.”
Madame, indeed, set the time on her harp; but it was the time that waits for no man. A Bœotian—of whom there were a half-dozen in the orchestra—might pant, a mere winded laggard, into his flute; another might toilfully climb the last bars on his fiddle, as if it were a gate; a third might pound up the long hill of his double-bass, and cross its very bridge with a shriek like a view-holloa: the issue was the same—none was in at the death. Pamela, in the meantime, tinkled on a triangle; Mademoiselle Sercey shook a little panic cluster of sledge-bells whenever madame glanced her way; Mademoiselle d’Orléans played on the side-drum amiably, and with all the execution of a toy-rabbit. It was all very merry, and the girls giggled famously; and Ned closed his eyes and tried to think that the mellow ring of the steel was from the forging by Love of his bolts on a tiny anvil.
By-and-by the piece ended amidst laughter, and madame came from her place and conducted her cavalier into another room.
“It is to prove yourself the most disinterested,” she said. “How can I acquit myself of gratitude to my friend—to my knight-errant?”
Ned, in the hot longing of his soul, was near stumbling upon a suggestion as to the reward it was in her power, if not to bestow, at least to influence. But he remembered his promise to Pamela, and was fain to let the opportunity pass.
Then madame, to some fine play of emotion, produced a couple of letters under seal—the first to monsieur le duc, the second to her own son-in-law, M. Becelaer de Lawoestine. To the latter gentleman’s address in Brussels she begged my lord to proceed in the first instance. The Belgian nobleman would give him honourable welcome, no less for her sake than for monsieur’s most obvious merits. Moreover, De Lawoestine would furnish him with precise directions as to where monseigneur was at the moment to be found; if, indeed, monseigneur was not at the very time the other’s guest in Brussels.
These were Ned’s simple instructions. There were tender messages to madame’s daughter; suggestions as to the attitude most effective to be assumed towards monseigneur by madame’s plenipotentiary; references to the agony of suspense madame must suffer until she should learn the result of her envoy’s mission. Madame, in truth, either acted her part so well, or lived in it so naturally, as to half convince herself, we must believe, that she was not acting at all.
“We are ready, as you see, to start the moment monseigneur’s command shall reach us,” she said. “We pray, monsieur, for the prosperous termination to your voyage.”
Her eyes were moist; she impulsively extended her hand, which his lordship less impulsively kissed. His lips, indeed, unpractised in gallantry, were in pledge to a dream; his understanding, also. Had it not been, he might have inclined to the question, How comes it that madame, in direct communication with the Duke of Orleans, is unable to acquaint me certainly as to that prince’s present address?
Ned returned to the drawing-room, prepared to repudiate any suggestion of the glamour that might be held to attach itself to a mild form of heroism. His modesty was not put to the test. The company accepted him in a frolic mood. It was full of laughter and thoughtlessness. He was rallied only on his serious mien. Pamela, wilful and radiant, would acknowledge him for no more than the means to a jest. Her affectation of indifference was secretly a stimulus to the spirits of two, at least, of the party. For a household depressed by the gloom of impending misfortune, the atmosphere was singularly volatile.
Not to the end did Ned receive one hint that his self-sacrifice was appreciated and applauded; and at last he must make his adieux without the comfort of even a sympathetic glance from a certain direction to cheer him on his way.
He had put on his hat and coat, had reached the very porch on his way forth, when a light step sounded behind him.
“Good-bye, monsieur!”
“God bless you, Pamela!”
“Monsieur, it is only the rose you asked for.”
The door slammed behind him. He held, half stupidly, in his hand a little sweet-smelling stalk with some crushed scarlet flowers.
“My God—oh, my God!” he whispered, “it is part of herself.”
Itwas on a day of the last week of broiling July that Ned knocked at the door of a house in the Rue de Ragule, near the Schaerbeck Gate in Brussels, and desired to be shown into the presence of M. le Comte de Lawoestine.
Now it seemed at the outset that his mission was in vain, for monsieur was, and had been for many days, away from home, and it was impossible for one to say when he would return. And whither had he gone? Ah! that was known only to himself, and, possibly, yes, to madame la comtesse. And was madame away also? Madame? Oh!c’était une autre pair de manches. Madame, it would appear, was upstairs at that very moment.
Ned sent up his letter of introduction and—after a rather tiresome interval of waiting—was shown into a room on the first floor. Here, to his astonishment, was the mid-day meal in progress at a long polished table. Two ladies—one seated at either side—continued eating with scarcely a look askance at the stranger; a third, placid anddébonnaire, rose from her place at the head of the board and, advancing a step or two, held out her hand.
“I have read maman’s letter,” she said, but speaking in French in a little drowsy voice, “and I have the pleasure to make you welcome, monsieur.”
She then returned to her seat, and bidding a servant lay a cover for monsieur, went on with her dinner. The very antichthon of the galvanic Genlis spirit seemed to slumber in her rosy cheeks. She had settled down to a lifelong “rest,” like an actress availing herself only of the art of her profession to play herself into a fortunate match.
“Monsieur le comte is away?” said Ned, as he took his seat by one of the silent ladies.
“He is gone south to join his regiment. He will be at Liége for a few days to inspect the fortifications. I do not know, I, what it all portends. They say the air is full of hidden menace. Anyhow, what does M. Lafayette purpose in bringing an army of ragamuffins to the frontier? He is a nobleman and a gentleman. I saw him once at Belle-Chasse. Ah! the dear industrious days! But I prefer a life of ease, monsieur; do not you? To gild baskets and work samplers, with the sun on one’s head in the hot white room! Mother of Christ, it is hot enough in Brussels! One may think one hears the sun drop grease upon the stones in the street, when Fanchon spits upon a flat-iron in the kitchen. Have you ever known a summer so sultry? The sky is packed with thunder like the hold of a ship. Then will come the rain one day and swell it and swell it, and the decks will burst asunder and the ribs explode apart. I do not like thunder, monsieur—do you? It is disturbing, like the play of children. Yet we are to have thunder enough soon, they say.”
So she talked on, in a tuneless soft voice; and there seemed no particular reason why she should ever come to an end. She never paused for an answer or for a word, nor often for breath, which long habit had taught her the art of nursing. She asked no questions as to her mother; did not, indeed, so much as allude to her until Ned indirectly forced a reference.
“And where is monsieur le duc?” said he, cutting in during a momentary ellipsis that was caused by her indetermination in choosing between two dishes of vegetables. She did not answer till she had decided—upon taking some of each. Then she turned her soft eyes on him in a little wonder.
“Monsieur——?” she began, as if she had not heard.
“The Duke of Orleans,” said Ned.
“Indeed, I do not know. He should be in Paris.”
“He has left here, then?”
“Here? Brussels, do you mean? He has not, to my knowledge, been in Brussels these six months—no, not since January, when he came to meet the demoiselle Théroigne on her return from the Austrian prisons, and conducted her back to the capital.”
“Théroigne!” exclaimed Ned in faint amazement.
“So she is called, I believe,” went on the placid creature, oblivious of the little emotion she had caused. “Monsieur has heard of her, no doubt. She is beautiful, and of easy virtue, they say. At her house in the Rue de Rohan the most violent propagandists assemble nightly to discuss the overthrow of the present social conditions. I wish they would leave them alone: they are very reasonable, I think—to all at least who have assured incomes. She is quite a force in Paris, this woman. They sent her some time last yearen missionto these Netherlands to preach the new religion. But she was arrested by the agents of the Emperor and conveyed to Vienna, whence she was dismissed no later than last January. Monseigneur was hunting with M. de Lawoestine at the time, and he heard somehow, and came straight on to Brussels, and carried the demoiselle Théroigne away.”
“And that was the last you have seen of him? Yet your mother had no doubt but that he was in this neighbourhood.”
“Oh, maman?” cried madame, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders. “But she is as full of fancies as this mushroom is of grubs.”
“Indeed,” said Ned, quite dumfoundered, “I think you must be misinformed as to monsieur le duc.”
“Very well,” she said indifferently. “It is possible, of course. M. de Lawoestine is not communicative, nor am I curious. There is no reason why they should not be in Liége together at this very moment.”
There was every reason, however, against such a meeting; but madame had not the shadow of a diplomatic acumen.
“I must follow your husband to Liége, then,” said Ned.
“You will at least lie here for the night, monsieur?”
“A thousand pardons, madame. My business is of the most pressing; and you yourself confess an ignorance as to the movements of monsieur le comte.”
“Mon Dieu! I never trouble my head about them.”
“With madame’s permission I will bid her adieu at the end of the meal.”
“As you will, monsieur. And if you do not find monsieur le duc in Liége?”
“Then I shall go on to Paris.”
“I hope, then, monsieur’s passports are in order?”
“They take me into France by way of the Low Countries. Madame, your mother, is responsible for them.”
“She is at any rate a woman of business. Nevertheless, the borders are disturbed. I wish monsieur a very fair journey. I trust he will not be struck by the lightning; but—Mother of Christ! I think there is a storm coming such as we have never seen. I shall take some peaches and some cake, and sit in the cellars till it is over.”
* * * * * * * *
My lord reached Liége on the morning of the twenty-ninth of July—a day of sullen omen to France. The early noon hours he spent in dully strolling through the streets of the antique city, now grown so familiar to him. He had called at M. de Lawoestine’s address (as supplied him by the young madame), only to find that the count was absent on some expedition and would not return till the morrow. Of the Duke of Orleans’s presence in the town he could obtain no tittle of evidence.
Now he was dull because misgivings were beginning to oppress him, and because the weather made an atmosphere appropriate to the confusion in his brain. Certainly he did not actually face, in the moral sense, the question as to whether or no he had been intentionally committed to a fool’s errand. He could not have conceived how so elaborate a jest should be planned and carried through without suspicion awaking in his heart. Naturally, knowing the soundness of his own financial position, he was not conscious of the supposed bar to his suit. His uneasiness turned rather on his new conception of Madame de Genlis as a woman of that patchwork practicalness that leaves to chance the working out of its design. She may haveintendedthat monsieur le duc should be in Brussels—it would, doubtless, have been convenient to her to find him there—and therefore she may have, through Ned, acted upon her desire rather than upon her information. But, if this were so, what a crazy perspective of possibilities was opened out! to what an endless wild-goose chase might he not be sworn! And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!
There was such anguish in the thought as to make him augment his pace till his forehead was wet with perspiration. He had come out to escape the intolerable oppressiveness of confinement in an inn. It was such weather as he had experienced upon his first visit to the town—good God! how many years ago was that now? Yet there seemed fewer changes in it than in himself. It was such weather, but intensified—and, with that, at least, his own condition kept pace. He had a warmer core in his breast than had been there before. But the tall, narrow streets, the cool churches, the blazing markets—these had no longer the glamour of the past. His thoughts were always in shadowy English lanes, in fragrant English rooms. A girl’s laugh in the street would make him lift his head as he paced; a jingle of bells on the harness of some sleepy Belgian horse would recall to him with a thrill the tinkle of a triangle. And, for the rest, the sweet pungency of geranium flowers he carried always in his breast, like a very garden of pleasant memories.
And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!
He looked up with a sudden start. Something—he could not describe what—like the silence that succeeds the heavy slamming of a door, seemed to have gripped the world. The heat for days had been immense and cruel. Men, roysterers and blasphemers, were come to a mean inclination to expend what little breath was left to them in prayer. A habit of stealthily examining the face of the heavens for signs significant of the approaching “black death” of the storm was common. The water seemed to steam in the kennels, the lead to crackle in the gutters. Some inhuman outcome, it was predicted, of these unnatural conditions must result. And now at last had the plague-stroke fallen?
Whatever it was—this inexplicable turn of the wheel—the tension of existence drew to near snapping-point under it. Poor souls crept for pools of shadow as if these were Bethesdas; here and there one dropped upon the pavement, and was rescued, as under fire, by a companion; the wail of half-stifled infants came through open windows; the sun was a crown of thorns to the earth.
The streets, at the flood of noon, grew almost untenable. Ned—perhaps from some vague association of ideas, the result of his dreamings upon English lanes—left the town and, with the desire for trees compelling him, took half-unconsciously the Méricourt road. It may have been instinct merely that directed him. He had thought since his coming—how could he help it?—of Théroigne, of Nicette, of all his old connection with the strange little village. But he had no desire to renew his acquaintance with the people of that ancient comedy—so, now, it seemed to him. And surely by this time a new piece must hold the stage; the old masks must be crumbled away or repainted to other expressions. It was so long ago. He had leapt the boundary-river of youth in the interval. He could have no place at last in the life of the little hamlet by the woods.
It may have been the sudden realisation of this, his grown emancipation, that tempted him all in a moment, and quite strangely, to the desire to look once more upon the scenes that, until within the last few minutes, he had had no least wish to revisit. It may have been that he was driven onward simply by the goad of his most haunting distress—that fancy of Mr Sheridan greatly profiting by a rival’s absence—and by the thought of the intolerable period of mental suspense and bodily discomfort he must suffer down there in the town, until his interview with M. de Lawoestine should give a direction one way or the other to his mission. Such considerations may have urged him; or—with a bow of deference to the necessitarians—no consideration at all, but a fatality.
For, indeed, this storm—an historical one—that was to break, seemed so inspired an invasion of order by the prophets of anarchy, as that it appeared to impress under its banner, as it advanced, all predestined agents (however individually insignificant) of that social and religious havoc of which its ruinous course was to be typical.
Ned, as he toiled on the first of the hill, looked up at the sky. It was as the wall of a nine-days’ furnace—his eyes could not endure the terror of the light. Nor, from his position, could they see how, far down on the horizon, a mighty draft of cloud was slipping over the world, like the sliding lid of a shallow box, shutting into frightful darkness a panic host of souls.
Here it was better than in the town; but the heat still was terrific. He was yet undecided as to whether to go on or rest where he had paused, when a carter, with a tilted waggon, came up the road behind him. For the weird opportuneness of it, this might have been Kühleborn himself. The man, as it appeared, was bound for the farther side of Méricourt. Ned, seeing the chance offered him to view from ambush, accepted his unconscious destiny, struck his bargain, and slipped under the canvas.
Kühleborn cried up his team. The sick day turned, moaning among its distant trees like a delirious troll.
* * * * * * * *
The lodestone to all this dark force of electricity that came up swiftly over the verge of the world, rising from the caldron of the East, where inhuman things are brewed! Was it an iron cross standing high in the roadway of a populous bridge; a cross that seemed to crane its gaunt neck looking ever over a wandering concourse of heads to the horizon, gazing, like St Geneviève, for the cloudy coming of an Attila; a cross held up, as it were, before the towers of Paris—a Retro Satanas to the menacing shapes that, emerging from chaos, threatened the ancient order, the ancient dynasty, the ancient religion;—the cross, indeed, on the bridge of Charenton? For in Charenton that day was pregnant conference, was a famous banquet to Marseillais and Jacobin, was sinister tolling of the death-knell of royal France. And what if the bell swung without a clapper! The very air it displaced, reeling from its onset like foam from a prow, caught the whisper of death in its passing, and carried it on to the cross.
The death of royalty and of religion; the desecration of the tabernacles; the spilling of the kingly chrism and trampling of the Host! As night at last shut upon the boiling day, concentrating the heat, the cross on the now lonely bridge stiffened its back and stood awaiting the storm. That must fly far before it could reach the pole of its attraction. But it was approaching. The cross could feel the very ribs of the world vibrating under the terrific trample of its march. At present inaudible; but there came by-and-by little vancouriers of sound, moaning doves of dismay that fled on the wind, as before a forest fire. These flew faster and more furious, fugitives in a moment before the distant explosion of artillery. The rain began to fall in heavy drops, like life-blood from the lungs of the heavens. The earth sighed once in its sleep ... in an instant a great glare licked the town....
Hither and thither, swayed, bent, but stubborn; now shoulder to shoulder with the hurricane; now clawing at the stones to save itself from being wrenched from its socket; now stooping a little to let a flying charge overleap it—through half the night the cross stood its ground, barring the road to Paris. Then at length a bolt struck and shivered it where it stood.
“It is gone!” shrieked the storm; “the way to Paris lies open. The last of the symbols of an ancient reverence is broken and thrown aside!”
* * * * * * * *
To Ned in the woods of Méricourt was vouchsafed a foretaste of this tempest that rose and travelled so swiftly; that, having for its siderite the pole-star of all revolution, rushed across a continent in fire so rabid as that it expended nine-tenths of its force before it might reach and charge with its remaining strength the electric city—the nerve-drawn city that had shrilled into the night that encompassed it, crying for reserves of dynamism lest at the last it should sink and succumb. But if the storm brought small grist to the actual mill, the morning, when it broke, voiceless and dripping, revealed sufficient evidence of how deadly had been its threshing throughout the fields of its advance. Over the north-eastern noon, and flying, a dull high monster, up the valley of the Meuse—from Charleroi to Maubeuge and across the border; down with a swoop upon St Quentin, and on with a shriek and crash into and through the woods of Soissons; opening out at last, from Pantin to Vitry, as if to invest the city and slash at it with a reaping-hook of fire—so the force had come and passed, like a tidal wave of flame, leaving a broad wake of ruin and desolation. On all the league-long roads converging to the central city were fragments of broken and twisted railings, of riven trees, of thatch and rick and chimney; on many was the sterner wreckage of human beings—poor Jacques and Jacqueline struck down and torn by branch or flame as they drove their slow provision carts towards the capital through the furious darkness. Not a dying Christ at a cross-track but the storm demon had found and shattered on his blazing anvil. The pitiful symbols of the old love, of the old belief—one by one he had splintered and flung them as he swept on his road. Nor only the symbols of the old faith, but of the new order. For entering in the end the very gates of the city, he had driven with a desperate rally of ferocity at certain sentinels ensconced dismally in their boxes against the railings of public buildings, and, consuming them, had committed their ashes to the consideration of the anarchy to which he had rushed to subscribe.
Such revelations were all for the morrow; and in the meantime Ned was become a little fateful waif of the first processes of the force.
The storm came upon him when alighted in the deep woods behind the chateau. Passing under cover through Méricourt a few minutes earlier, he had peeped through his tilt, scanning the familiar scenes with a strange little emotion of memory. Feeling this, he had almost regretted his venture. Perhaps the emotion was accountable, he thought, to the heat—to the re-enacting of an atmosphere that was charged with suggestion. He could—and did—recall a vision by the village fountain—the vision of a girl, all bold outline and colouring, standing with her arms crooked backwards under her lifted hair. He could recall another figure coming up the field-path hard by—a face of pearly shadows and wondering blue eyes under a great fragrant load of grasses. These blue eyes haunted him in the retrospect, even while he shut his own angrily upon the little ghostly impression. Why could he not dismiss the thought of them from his mind? Why had he submitted himself to the influence of the place at all?
It was too late now to retreat. His carter—a sleepy Liégeois, attired appropriately in a hoqueton, or smock, like a night-gown—led his team stolidly by fountain and “Landlust,” past church and smithy, and so through the village into the forest road beyond. Ned, in the darkness, felt in his breast for his talisman, his tiny packet of geranium flower; and bringing out his hand scented, kissed it. Then, restored thereby to reason, in the thick of the woods he hailed his jehu to a stop, descended, and, paying liberally for his journey, plunged amongst the trees.
At once the shadow of an impending fear took him in grip. The earth, he could have thought, lay rigid in a dry fever of terror. The shade he had so much coveted fell around him like a living shroud. He had always an unreasonable dread of what lay behind the curtain of trunks before him. He moved on purposeless and prickling with apprehension. Had it not been for very shame he would have turned and fled for the open, daring any meeting in the village rather than this nameless dead solitude. But he forced himself to proceed, mentally assigning himself for goal that old withered leviathan in the clearing that was the centre of some strange associations. He had been curious long ago, he admitted, to look upon this monster since the legend of divinity had attached to it. He would go so far now and satisfy his eyes, then turn and make for air and light.
Suddenly he fancied he heard far away the rumble of the receding waggon-wheels. A numb stillness succeeded. The earth seemed to breathe its last, and a napkin of cloud was softly flung over the dead face of it. The lungs of the day fell in; a few large bitter drops slipped from the closed lids of the heavens.
Straight, and in a moment, Ned sprang alert to a sense of peril. This ominous oppressiveness was nothing but the forereach of a swiftly advancing thunderstorm—but the trees and every green spire toppling into cloud an invitation to its own destruction! He must race for cover—and whither? The little hut beyond the clearing! It presented itself to him in a flash. He set off running.
The very enforced action was a tonic to his nerves. As he sped, the darkness gathered around him deep and deeper. He ran in a livid twilight. Then on the quicker beat of a pulse the wood was torn with fire from hem to hem. He was dazzled, half-shocked to a pause for an instant; but there had been a panic sound to drive him forward again directly—a huge tearing noise within the monstrous slam that had trodden upon the heels of the blaze. He could only guess what this portended. At the very first explosion a tree of the forest had been struck and riven.
Now he scurried so fast that the breath sobbed a little in his throat. He had a feeling that the Force was dodging him, heading him off from reach of shelter. Not a soul did he meet, but formless shadows seemed to cry him on from deep to lonelier deep of the maze. Then again a sudden glare took him in the face like a whip; and at once the Furies of the storm burst from restraint and danced upon the woods in fire and water, rehearsing the very carmagnole of the Terror.
All in a moment the fugitive broke into the clearing he sought, but had dreaded he would miss. Even as he ran—half deafened, yet relieved by the uproar that had succeeded a silence as awful as it was inhuman—he must slacken his pace in view of the towering giant that dominated his every strange memory connected with the place. Suddenly he stopped altogether, staring at the great tumorous trunk. Where had he read or heard that beech-trees were secure from stroke by lightning? Should he stand by, here under shelter of the enormous withered arms? In his trouble he might scarcely notice how the whole character of the isolated spot in which he stood was converted from that that figured in his memory. Yet he took it in vaguely by the sickly light—the blue-painted iron railings, having a locked wicket, that fenced in the sacred bole; the gleaming silver hearts hung here and there about the bark; the cropped ribbon of sward that encircled the tree. Yet upon this green, for all its cultivated trimness, he could have thought the underwood was encroached; and dimly he recalled St Denys’s prophecy: “If in years to come 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.” Surely the idle prediction was strangely verified.
Even where he stood, for all the little shelter of the high branches, the tempest beat the breath out of his body. Every moment the crash and welter and uproar took a more hellish note and aspect: he felt he could not stand it much longer.
Suddenly, twisting about from a vision of fierce light, he caught a startled glimpse of something he had hitherto failed to notice. The narrow track that had once led through the heart of the thicket to the hut amongst the trees was a narrow track no longer. It had been opened out and greatly widened, so as to give passage to a tiny chapel that stood at the close of a short vista of trunks.
With a gasp of relief, Ned raced for this unexpected refuge, dashed up a step, threw himself against the door, and half stumbled into a void beyond it. The door flapped to behind him. He stood, panting, in a little crypt of scented gloom. Somewhere in front a single ruby star glowed unwavering—a core of utter peace and quiet.
Thethunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It burned without a flutter, diffusing, even, the slightest, gentlest radiance throughout the tiny building. Ned, from his position near the door, could make out the whitewashed walls and ceiling; the wee square windows glazed with twilight as sleek and dusky as oxydised silver; the little litter of chairs about the floor; the altar overhung by some indistinguishable dark picture; most suggestively, most spectrally, the very painted statue at whose feet the star itself was glowing.
He stepped softly towards the shrine. A dozen paces brought him almost within touch of it—and of something else. A woman was crouched against the pedestal of the image, her hands clasped high on the stone, her face buried in the curve of her left arm. In the incessant throb and flash of the lightning through the little windows, he could see the soft heave of her shoulders, the shredded glints of light running up and down her hair as she drew quick breaths like one in terror. Something, in the same moment, convinced him that she was aware of his entrance; that, in the insane relief engendered of company, she was struggling to present as spiritual preoccupation the appearances of extreme fear. If this were so, she fought in vain to save her self-respect. Her collapse, it was evident, had been too abject; to rally from it on the mere prick of pride was an impossibility. Here to her, lost and foundered in hell, had come a first presence of human sympathy.
It was sympathy. In the dusk, in the endless flash and roll, and in the heavy roaring of the rain on the roof, Ned’s spirit, reaching across a reeling abyss, felt that this fellow-creature was in mortal terror. Too diffident, nevertheless, to make a first advance, he compromised with his pity by seizing a chair and dragging it towards him, that the very rough jar of its legs on the boards should be sound assurance to the other of a human neighbourhood. The little instinctive act, fraught with kindliness, touched off the nerve of endurance. As he dropped into the seat he had pulled forward, the prostrate figure, detaching itself from the pedestal, came suddenly writhing and crouching over the few yards of floor that separated them, and, throwing itself at his feet, put up a mad groping hand.
“I am dying of fear!” it whispered.
Ned caught the hand in a succouring grip. He could see only the glimmer of a white face raised to his. He was bending down to give it words of assurance, when to a hellish crash the whole building seemed to leap into liquid fire—to sink, weltering, into a black and humming void. The shock, the noise, had been thickly stunning rather than ear-splitting. Here, in the chapel, they were too close to the cause to suffer the sound perspective that shatters the brain. They might have been the stone, the kernel, from which the force itself had burst on all sides.
By slow degrees Ned’s eyes recovered their focus, until he could make out once more the ghostly blotch of a face looking up into his. Neither of these two, beyond an involuntary jerk of response to the enormous flame and detonation, had stirred from the attitude into which, it would almost appear, they had been stricken. The actual terror of the one, the sympathy of the other, seemed welded by the flash into a single expression of fatality. In the lonely chapel, amidst wrack and storm, to each the spectre of a memory had suddenly materialised, revealing itself amazingly significant.
“I must go,” muttered Ned, all in a moment. He spoke confusedly, trying to withdraw his hand. But the other soft clutch resisted: the other half-deafened ears could yet essay to catch the import of the murmur.
“You won’t leave me—here alone?” she said. “Oh, I shall die of the fear!”
She could waive before him all pretence of her possessing the divine favour or protection. It was her rapture that this man—who had again stepped across the years of darkness into her life—knew her soul; her rapture to woo him by the seduction of her surrender to his nobler understanding. His spirit darkened; yet, knowing her fearfulness of old, he could not in common humanity forsake her till the terror was past.
So they sat on in silence, she flung at his feet, holding his hand, while the flame and fury expended themselves overhead. Once or twice he was conscious that her lips were helping the office of her fingers; and he flushed shamefully in the darkness, yet would not seem to condone her offence—her terrible sacrilege, even, under the circumstances—by so much as noticing it. But he thought of the little flower-packet in his breast; and he cursed his bitter folly that, after such a warning as he had already had, he should have ventured himself wantonly within the charmed influence of this silken-skinned witch.
Suddenly, it might almost be said, the tempest fled by. It passed as rapidly as it had come, travelling westwards on a flooded current of wind. The noise, the glare, ceased; light grew on the dim-washed walls; the dark picture above the altar revealed itself a pious representation of the very subject that had founded the chapel. There the saint stood in effigy for all the world to worship: here she knelt self-confessed at the feet of the one man for whose hot reprobation she yearned, so long as it would kiss in pity where it had struck. Ned glanced down at the lifted face. It may have suggested in its expression some secret, half-unconscious triumph. He tore away his hand—sprang to his feet, as the clouds broke outside and sunshine came into the place.
“You must let me go,” he said. “Your saints will be enough to protect you now.”
She rose hurriedly, and stood beside him. There was something new and indescribable in her air and appearance—it might have been the mere maturity of self-love. Whatever her stress of mind during these three years, its effect had not been to warp and wither her physical beauty. Even the little angles of the past were rounded off. She was developed—a riper, more perilous Lamia.
“Hush!” she whispered, pointing to the altar, “the tabernacle!”
He gave a low little laugh.
“What!” he said, dropping his voice nevertheless, “is the presence more real to you than to me? Will you still pretend? We are alone, Nicette.”
Alone! the word was soft music to her.
“No,” she said, coming after him as he strode towards the door, “I will pretend to nothing—nothing, with you.”
She put out a hand and gently detained him.
“Oh!” she said, a very hunger in her voice and eyes, “to see you again—to see you again! Why are you here? You did not follow me? No one knew I was in the wood; and I was caught by the storm. My God, my God! to be near it all—in the midst—and the curse of heaven awake! It is folly, is it not, that talk of retribution—the folly of sinners and the opportunity of priests? Here was I alone, for all hell to torture; and, instead,youcome upon me unawares!”
He stood dumfoundered that she could thus bare her soul to him. She had no shame, it seemed, but the sweet exalted shame of the seductress: her eyes dwelt upon him in ecstasy.
“Whence do you come?” she went on, in a soft panting voice. “But what does it matter, since you are here! I knew in the end you would return. This—this” (she put her hand upon her bosom)—“Oh, it is a fierce magnet that would have drawn you across the world!”
He pulled at the door—let in a lance of brilliant light that struck full upon his face. Something in its expression appeared to startle her. She leaned forward and uttered a sudden miserable cry.
“Where have you been—what have you done! My God, let me look!”
The next instant she backed from him a little, throwing her hands to her eyes as if she were blinded.
“It is there,” she cried, “what I have longed and prayed for; but it is not for me!”
He recovered his voice in a fury.
“Prayed!” he cried. “Are such prayers, from such a source, answered? Stand off, for shame! This meeting is all an accident. I have neither sought, nor desired, to see you. It is an accident—do you hear?”
He tore open the door, jumped the step, ran a few paces, and stopped, with an exclamation of sheer astonishment. A huge ruin of trunk and branch closed his vista. The old woodland monarch, the type of stately quincentennial growth and decline, was shattered where it stood. At the last, facing its thousandth tempest, it had been wounded to death in the forefront of the battle. The brand had struck its mightiest branch, tearing it from its socket; and the crashing limb in its downfall had wrenched apart the trunk, revealing a great hollow heart of decay.
The quiet drip and fall from loaded leaves; the faint rumble of the retreating storm; the steam from the hot-soaked grass—Ned was conscious of them all as he stood a moment in awe. Then he hurried forward again—up to the very scene of the disaster.
The ruin was complete; the silver hearts were fused or vanished; the sacred fence was whirled abroad, in twisted, fantastic shapes. So much for the immunity of beech-trees. He could hardly dare to face the moral of his escape.
But he must face another as terrible, if more impersonal. It presented itself to him on the instant—a little heart within the heart—a poor decayed fragment of humanity sunk deep in the vegetable decay of the exposed hollow. At first, mentally stunned, and confused, moreover, by this arabesque of ruin, he failed to realise that what he looked upon was other than some accident of rubbish. It rested down near the ground upon what had once been the bottom of a deep well of eaten timber. It had, strangely enough, the appearance of a sleeping child.
He took a quick step forward. His very heart seemed to gasp. God in heaven! itwasa child—not sleeping, but dead and mummified!
A sound—something awful, like the breath-struggle of one who had been winded by a blow—fluttered in his ear. He leapt aside from it, staring behind him. Nicette was there, gazing—gazing, but at him no longer. Her eyes were like stones in a hewn grey mask; youth had shuddered from her cheeks.
Suddenly she turned upon him stiffly. Her soul instinctively recognised the whole that was implied by his scarce voluntarily expressed terror of her neighbourhood.
“I did not kill him,” she whispered.
“ItisBaptiste, then?”
He was familiar at once with the stupendous horror of it all. That was such, and so appalling in the light or blackness of a construction that her immediate surrender of the situation made inevitable, that his brain reeled under the shock. He was an accessory to something namelessly hideous.
Then, in a moment, she was prostrate at his feet, clinging to him, imploring his mercy, his kindness; urging him by his pity, by her agony, to withdraw her from vision of the terror, to listen to and believe her.
“Take me away!” she screamed; “it was his own doing! I did not kill him!”
He repulsed her with a raging force, still staring silently over and beyond her. It seemed to him that some ghastly sacristan was lighting up a sacrificial altar in his memory. Candle by candle it flamed into dreadful illumination, revealing the abominations that in the darkness he had been only innocently condoning. He thought he understood now what had impelled her to that strange haunting of the neighbourhood of the tree; what remorse had driven her to the prayers and prostrations that had aroused the curiosity of the village; why, panic-stricken under that threat of search, she had wrought in a moment, of her imagination, a fable that should serve her secret evermore for an ark double-cased. He recalled, in the ghastly light of a new interpretation, almost the last words she had spoken to him in a time that he had thought was dead and forgotten: “Oh, my God, not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for thy sake!” For his sake—for his sake! Was he so vile as this, then—he who had dared in dreams to mate with a purity like an angel’s—that the incense of any noisome sacrifice, if only offered up to himself, he must be held to find grateful! He broke, without meaning it, into a horrible laugh.
“Did she—the mother—not promise,” he shrieked, “to restore the little brother to you—the poor little murdered wretch! She has kept to her word. And you—you? Don’t forget you are sworn under damnation to dedicate yourself, a maid, to her service! Can you do it? God in heaven, it is not your fault if you can!”
She fell before him, as he spurned her, writhing and moaning amongst the sodden grass.
“Won’t you listen to me—oh, won’t you listen? If you would only kill me, and not speak!”
He stood immediately rigid as justice’s own sentry.
“Yes, I will listen,” he said, “and you shall condemn yourself.”
She crept a thought nearer and, feeling him keep aloof, sat bowed upon the ground, her fingers locked together in her lap.
“I will tell you the truth,” she said, low and broken. “After that first time he, my brother, was changed. He became, when you were gone, a little devil, insulting and defying me. It was terrible—his precocity. He held over my head ever a threat—monsieur, it was that he would make exposure of theliaisonbetween his sister and the Englishman.”
Ned uttered an exclamation. She entreated him with raised hands.
“Ah! it is not always the truth one fears. One day in the woods—oh, my God, monsieur, hide me!—in the woods—what was I saying! Mother of God! it was here—we quarrelled, and I was desperate. He ran to escape me, climbed the great branch that stooped to the grass. He stood high up, reviling me. I made as if to fling a stone: he threw up his arm, stumbled, and disappeared.”
She crept towards him again, yet another agonised appeal for the tiniest assurance that he had ceased to loathe her. At least this time he stood his ground.
“At first I was stunned,” she said. “He may have been killed at once, for no sound reached me. Then all at once the wicked spirit put it into my head that here, by doing nothing, was a sure way out of my difficulties—was safety from that impish slanderer, was the bar removed to my favour in the eyes of one who had confided to me his detestation of children.”
Ned sprang back, almost striking at the crouching figure.
“Not me!” he raged; “I will have no responsibility—not any, for the inhuman deed, thrust upon me! And so you left him to his fate, and went home and ate and drank, feeding your beastly lusts and desires, while he—oh, devil, devil!”
She scrambled to her feet and made as if she would run from this new terror of a hate more ghastly than all she had suffered hitherto.
“Don’t kill me!” she whimpered. “Did you not tell me you hated children? and you said they could not feel as we do.”
He glared at her like a maniac.
“You left him; what is the need to say more?”
“I did not,” she moaned, wringing her hands as if to cleanse them of blood; “I came again on the third day, and I called to him, I prayed to him, but he never cried back one word. Then I thought, Perhaps he has climbed out and fled away.”
“Liar! you are a liar! Why, then, did you seek to hide your crime by a blasphemous lie?”
“I have suffered,” she answered only, like one before the judgment-seat.
He mastered himself by a wrenching effort. He stood aside, peremptorily motioning her to pass on her way. Not a word would he speak. She went forward a few steps—a numb, haggard spectre of beauty, a soul paralysed under the immediate terror of its sentence. Suddenly she turned upon him, awful in the last expression of despair.
“They will tear me to pieces when they know!”
“Let your Virgin protect you,” he said.
Without another word she left him, going off amongst the trees. The sunbeams, peering through the leaves, touched and fled from contact with her; woodland things scurried from her path; the cleansing rain, even, stringing the branches, withheld itself from falling till she had gone. Something that he drove under forcibly struggled to rise and give voice from the watcher’s heart. She looked so small, so pitifully frail and small a vessel to carry that great load of sin. The next moment she disappeared from his sight.
He turned, with a groan, to scrutinise the horror. It was yet so far undecayed as that he was able, for all his little memory of the living child, to identify the poor remains. But, for a certain reason, he would compel himself to a nauseous task—even to touch the thing if necessary. It was not. There was actual evidence, to his unaccustomed eyes, that the boy’s neck had been dislocated by the fall.
He moved away, giving out a sigh of fearful relief. At least he would not be haunted by that anguish. And should he follow and tell her?
“No,” he thought sternly—for love makes men cruel; “as she meant, so shall she suffer the worst.”
TheViscount Murk received very gravely M. Becelaer de Lawoestine’s assurance that Monseigneur the Duke of Orleans was at the moment, and had been for months past, in Paris.
“Enfin,” said this gentleman, “if report is to be believed, it is the most timely place for him. At least he will not put himself at the head of the emigrants,” he added, with a husky little laugh.
He was plump and prosperously healthy, like his wife. They seemed admirably suited to one another—a pigeon pair, indeed. And like a pigeon was the little fat man in his white Austrian uniform. He strutted, he preened himself, he cooed. His place should have been on a roof-ridge of his own happy courts. Ned had a melancholy desire to crumble some bread for him.
“You are pale as a very ghost, monsieur,” said this same ruddy count condescendingly. “It is not to be wondered at. You have alighted upon us in stirring times; not to speak of the storm yesterday, that was enough to quell the stoutest courage. I would give up hunting a chimera, if I were you, and return to the profitable peace of my own so prudent island, without more ado—sans plus de façons.”
“If you were I, monsieur,” said Ned. “But, being myself, I run the chimera to earth in Paris.”
Monsieur le comte shrugged his shoulders.
“I will wish you success, at least. This chimera hath as many tracks as a mole. But, first, you must get to Paris.”
Ned had considered this side of the question lightly. He found, indeed, the conditions of travel curiously changed since he had last crossed the Netherlands border. Now the whole frontier, from Lille to Metz, swarmed with hostile demonstration. The Allies were in movement, Luckner and his ineffectives falling back before them. Amongst them all he hardly knew whom to claim for friends and whom for foes.
But he was wrought to a pitch of recklessness, and Providence shows the favouritism of a heathen goddess towards reckless men. His grossly enlarging doubt of thebonâ fidesof the mission to which he had been committed; his terror of having been made in a moment accessory to a hideous crime, which he could neither morally condone nor effectually denounce; the feeling—sombre heir to these two—that he was losing his hold of that new sweet sense of responsibility towards life, the consciousness of which had been to him latterly like the talking in his ear of a witch of Atlas—a cicerone to the dear mysteries of the earth he had hitherto but half understood,—these emotions were a long-rowelled spur to prick him forward through difficult places. Once in Paris, there should be no more temporising. From the Duke of Orleans’s own lips he would learn whether or no he had been bidden on a fool’s errand.
Here, in fact, was the goading stab in his side—the wound that sometimes so stung and rankled that almost he was tempted to have out madame la gouvernante’s letter to her employer and resolve dishonourably his doubts. Through the anguish of these, the piercing tooth of the recent horror sprung upon him might make itself felt only as a pain within the pain—a lesser torture, the nature of which he would occasionally seek to analyse in order to a temporary forgetfulness of the greater. Then, thinking of the holy maid of Méricourt, he would cry in his soul, “What is this gift of imagination but a Promethean fire, destroying whoever is informed with it! Better my system of a mechanical world with passion all eliminated!”—and he would think of how he had been once curiously interested in a poor lodge-keeper’s dreamings, a faculty for which had been then to him so strange an anomaly. And was it so still—to him who had learned, through love, to attune his ear to the under harmonics in every wind that blew upon the earth? Perhaps, in truth, it was this very gift of imagination that, in greater or less degree, was responsible for the irregularities one and all that misconverted the plain uses of life; that made the picturesqueness of existence, and its glory and tragedy. And would he at this very last be without it? And was not its possession—a common one now to him and Nicette—the stimulus to unnatural deeds that were the outcome of supernatural thoughts? He had at least the temptation to commit an act that would be an outrage on his traditional sense of honour. He would resist the temptation, because hehadthe tradition. But conceive this Nicette, perhaps with no traditions, and with an imagination infinitely more vivid than his. What limit was to put to her foreseeings; how should the normal-sighted adjudge her monstrous for anticipating conclusions to which their vision could by no means penetrate?
He would catch himself away from the train of thought, the indulgence of which seemed a certain condonation of a deed that his every instinct abhorred. Yet his mind took, perhaps, something the tone of the intricate close places in which it wandered; and now and again a little thrill would run through him of half-sensuous pity for the poor misguided soul that, by offering up its honour at the very shrine at which his worshipped, had only estranged what it would have fain conciliated.
* * * * * * * *
By way of Fumay—a little pretty town situate on a river holm, and overhung by a group of stately rocks called the Ladies of the Meuse—Ned, adopting the advice of the Comte de Lawoestine, entered France. At once—as if, from easy gliding down a stream, he had been drawn into and was rushing forward in the midst of rapids—his days became mere records of anxiety and turbulence that constantly intensified throughout every league of his approach towards Paris. At the very frontier, indeed, he had taken the plunge, as exemplified in his change of postilions. To the last village on the German side he had been driven by a taciturn barbarian—a cheese-featured Westphalian, picturesque, malodorous, and imperturbably uncivil. This certificated lout was dressed in a yellow jacket, having black cuffs and cape, and carried a saffron sash about his waist and a little bugle horn slung over his shoulder—the whole signifying the imperial livery of the road, then as sacred from assault as is the uniform of a modern soldier of the Fatherland. Tobacco,trinkgeld, and the unalienable right to keep his parts of speech locked up in the beer-cellar of his stomach—these appeared to be the three conditions of his service. Ned parted from him with a league-long-elaborated anathema that sounded as ineffective in the delivery as the rap of a knuckle on a full hogshead, and so, on the farther side of the border, committed himself to a first experience of the “patriot” postboy.
From the smooth and muddy into the broken water! Here was volubility proportionate with the other’s gross reticence. Jacques was no less picturesque and malodorous than was Hans. He had his private atmosphere, like the German; only it was eloquent of pipes and garlic rather than of pipes and beer. He spat and gabbled all day; and he was dressed, like a stage pirate, in a short brown coat with brass buttons, and in striped pink and white pantaloons tucked into half-boots. A sash went round his waist also, and he wore on his head a scarlet cap having a cockade. Ned was feverishly interested in this his first introduction to a child of the new liberty; but he would fain have found him inclined to a lesser verbosity. However, he was a cheerful rascal and a good-humoured, and his easy sangfroid helped the traveller out of an occasional tangle of the red-tapeism that he found immeshing official processes rather more intricately under a republican than under an autocratic form of government.
Ned’s journey to the capital was, indeed, a race a little perilous and full of excitement. The common spirit, or suggestion, of suppressed effervescence that had been his former experience, was revealed now a spouting, tingling fountain, light yet heady, hissing with froth and bubbles. The kennels of France ran, as it were, with sparkling wine, and the very mayfly of moral intoxication was hatched from them in swarms. Thoughts, words, acts; the habits of dress, of motion, of regard—all were the characteristics of an hysteria the result of unaccustomed indulgence—the result of reckless drinking at the released spring. One could never know if a chance expression—either of speech or feature—would procure one a madly laughing or a madly resentful acknowledgment. Exultation and terror walked arm-in-arm by the ways, each trying stealthily to trip up the other. It was an insane land, and now verging on a paroxysm of mania; for it was known that at last the king—the man of shifty vision—was focussing his eyesight on the north-eastern border of his kingdom, whence loomed the shadow of foreign legions moving to his aid.
The north-eastern border! To enter the land of fury from such a direction was to invite one’s own destruction. Not even luck, recklessness, and unexceptionable passports might, perhaps, have saved Ned from the homicidal madness of a people wrought to fantastic fear, had it not been for a quick-witted post-boy’s genius in availing himself of the right occasions to apply them. This was his real good-fortune—that his own innate charm of manner, his patience and sweetness, his characteristic unaffectedness in the matter of his rank, and his healing sense of humour in everything, found their response in the heart of the garrulous Jacques, and converted that amiable horse-emmet from an indifferent employé into a very fraternal road-companion.
So, through stress and danger, Ned sped on his journey, and—following for fifty leagues from the frontier in the track of the wrecking storm—was enabled to enter Paris, by the great Flanders road, some four days after his parting with M. le Comte de Lawoestine. Then—a final difficulty at the Temple barrier surmounted—he found himself once more a mean small condition of the life of that city to whose self-emancipatory throes he had once been a deeply concerned witness. And he accepted the fact without uneasiness, not knowing that before he should turn for the last time to quit the awful place of death and resurrection, the tragedy of his own life, in the midst of the thousands there enacting, should be consummated.
Onthe very day following that of his arrival, the pendulum of Ned’s particular destiny began its driving swing. He had taken good lodgings in a house in the Rue St Honoré, less, perhaps, as a concession to his rank than to his hypothetical prospects; and, issuing thence, after he had breakfasted, he had but a hundred yards to walk to reach a certain revolutionary centre that was become the goal to his long-drawn hopes and apprehensions.
It was a morning in early August, breathless and burning; and he turned into the gardens of the Palais Royal, that he might thus combine the opportunities to slake his thirst and to acquit himself of his commission to the royal proprietor of the adjoining palace. He had seated himself—unaccountably loath, now the moment was arrived, to put his fears to the proof—at a little café table under a tree, and was dreamily marvelling over the changed aspect of thisplaisanceof sedition (how in three years the temper of itshabituésseemed to have altered, as it were, from that of a beleaguered to that of a triumphant garrison), when the familiar personality of one of three men who, talking together, strolled towards him, caught his immediate attention. Ugly, austere, with his Rowlandson paunch and unaffected neat clothes; with his wry jaw and crippled scuffle of speech—Ned saw here the unmistakable presentment of his whilom friend, the king’s painter. Between M. David and another—a tall, plebeian-dressed man, with a flawed, supercilious face, the blotched darkness of which (something caricaturing that of the monarch’s own) belied the mechanical amiability of its features—walked an individual of a very benignant and serene expression of countenance, the nobility of which showed in agreeable contrast with the moodiness of its neighbours’. This man—by many years the youngest of the three—was of the middle height, with dark sleepy eyes and chestnut hair. His face, slightly marked by the small-pox, was of a rather sensuous, rather wistful expression—at once pitiful and determined, with Love the modeller’s finger-marks about the mouth and, between the brows, the little long scar cut by thought. He was dressed in a very shabby and slovenly fashion, with limp tattered wristbands, and the seams of his coat burst at the shoulders; and even the lapels of his vest were dog’s-eared—altogether a display of poverty a little ostentatious, thought Ned (who, nevertheless, had reason by-and-by to correct his judgment). Yet, for all his appearance, here was the man of the three to whom the others, it seemed, paid deference; for they hung upon his words, their eyes bent to the ground, while he walked between them, frankly expounding and with a free aspect.
Now suddenly M. David glanced up and caught the Englishman’s gaze; and immediately, to Ned’s surprise (he had a vivid memory of their last rencontre), detached himself from his fellows and came forward with extended hand.
“Surely,” said the painter, “monsieur my friend the artist of the Thuilleries gardens!”
“At monsieur’s service,” said Ned, rising, with a complete lack of cordiality. “And of the Rue Beautreillis, M. David, where a poor devil of a papetier had his factory gutted.”
He drew a little away. David’s face showed villainously distorted.
“That may be,” said he, taken aback. Then he advanced again, with an air of sudden frankness. “‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ We do not, in these days of realisation, repudiate our responsibility for the acts that in those were tentative. But a generous conqueror does not dwell on the humiliation of his adversaries. The end justifies the means, monsieur; and you, at least, if I remember, were no advocate of social tyranny. But that was long ago, yet not so long but that I can recall monsieur as a promising probationer in the art that is the most admirable in the world.”
Ned, touched upon his unguarded side, was standing at a loss for an answer, when the painter’s two companions joined the group at the table.
“Citizen Egalité,” said David, addressing the supercilious-looking man, “let me have the pleasure of making known to you M. Murk, an artist who would be a patriot were he not, unfortunately for us, an Englishman.”
Ned started.
“Egalité!” he exclaimed.
“Ci-devant Duc d’Orléans,” said the tall man himself, with a little mocking bow.
“Monseigneur,” began Ned.
“Citizen,” said the other, bowing again.
His eyes were dead stones of irony. His expression was as of one hopeless of convalescence from the weary illness of life.
Ned fetched his letter from his breast.
“Citizen Egalité—if so I am to call you,” said he, “I meet you in the good hour, being on the road, indeed, to seek the citizen himself.”
“Me, sir?”
“You, monsieur—or the Duke of Orleans. I have the honour to place in the hands of the duke a packet with the delivery of which I have been entrusted by an intimate correspondent of monsieur.”
Monsieur, looking a little surprised, received the missive, and deliberately breaking the seal, deliberately read through madame la gouvernante’s letter. Ned must discipline his sick impatience the while, and the two other men conversed apart—David in some obvious wonder over the result of his introduction.
Presently the duke, carelessly returning the paper to its folds, looked up. Ned strove, but failed, to read his sentence in the impassive face. A moment’s silence succeeded. It was a test beyond his endurance.
“I undertook to acquaint monsieur le duc, from my personal knowledge,” he blurted out, “of the causes of madame’s apprehensions.”
“Madame,” said Egalité, “is very fortunate in a courier whose discretion, she informs me, is only equalled by his disinterestedness. Madame has, indeed, always the faculty to find some one to pull her her chestnuts out of the fire.”
He spoke so languidly, so suggestively, so insolently, that Ned, despite his desperate anxiety, fired up.
“I fail to read into monsieur’s implication,” said he. “But if it is meant to signify that madame’s peril——”
“Is she in any, then? This letter merely informs me that she removes at once to London.”
The confirmation of his dread had appeared somehow so foreshadowed in his reception that the blow fell upon Ned with nothing more than a little stunning shock.
“And that is all?” said he, in quite a small stiff voice.
“All that is essential, indeed, monsieur.”
“Nothing of her terror that she is being watched and followed—that she moves within the sinister ken of the royalist emigrants—that her nerve is shattered—that she begs you to recall her?”
“Nothing. But—Heaven forgive her! I recognise her style. Oh yes, yes! It is possible she has posted and dismissed you very effectively, monsieur.”
He went off, for the first time, into a real laugh—a harsh cachinnation that he checked, as in mere disdain of it, in its mid-career. Ned waited, in rather an ugly manner of patience, till he was finished. Then, said he, wishing to right himself with himself on all points—
“Has posted me, as monsieur says; and, doubtless, for all exigent purposes, it was necessary only to post the letter to monsieur.”