Mr Murksat on a bank, solemnly preparing for an idyll.
“But I cannot subscribe to it in one respect,” thought he; “for, if I persist in being myself, I shall look upon all this as the most idiotic fooling.”
“Little Boppard,” said he, “what will society do now you have severed yourself from it?”
“Monsieur,” said the student angrily, “I am not to be laughed at.”
“How, then, of this freedom of speech?”
“You are an interloper. You do not understand.”
“But I am eager to learn; oh, little Boppard, I am so eager to learn!”
“I will not be called so. It is infamous!”
“But it was thus M. de St Denys named you to me.”
“It is different. I am nothing to you.”
“Oh, mon pauvret! it is not so bad. You are at least a little man to me.”
One of the hobnails broke into a guffaw.
“Listen to him! this stranger is a droll! Good! It is much noise about nothing, Boppard.”
“You most happily cap me, sir,” said Ned, with great gravity. “May I have the pleasure of taking wine with you?”
“But a bucketful, Edouard!” cried the fellow boisterously. He brimmed the horns as he spoke. A vinous pigment already freckled his cheeks.
“I see here nothing but an excuse for an orgy,” thought the visitor.
The company sprawled over a bank to one side of the clearing where the great tree stood. The wine-flasks lay cool in moss. The two countrymen had thrown off their coats and bared their shaggy chests to the night. Overhead the moon was already of a power to strew the forest lanes with travelling blots of shadow, like dead leaves moving on a languid stream. A cricket chirruped here and there in spasms, as if irresistibly tickled by the recollection of some pleasantry. From time to time, across the dim perspective of a glade, a momentary indiscernible shape would steal and vanish.
Ned pondered over the enchantment—as moving less prosaic souls—of moonlit haunted woods.
“Now, I wonder,” thought he, “if I could put myselfen rapportwith the undefinable in less Philistine company!”
As if in reply, “What would not Nicette interpret of these fairy solitudes?” said a dreamy voice at his back.
He turned his head. Théroigne had come softly, and was seated with St Denys a little above him on the bank.
“She is not of the club, then?” said Ned.
The student laughed truculently, throwing back his head with a noise as if he were gargling.
“Little Boppard is beyond himself,” said Ned. “We shall make a man of him yet.”
The two potwallopers hooted richly at that.
“Monsieur is quick to launch insults,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine frigidly.
“Why, what have I said?”
The young man looked piously bewildered. St Denys sniggered—even, Ned could have thought, with a little note of vexation.
“Friend Edouard,” said he, “in Méricourt theportièreLegrand stands pre-canonised.”
“Understand!” chuckled a bumpkin. “She isportièreand a virgin—save that she bears the sins of the community.”
“Beast!” cried Théroigne. Then she went on sarcastically—“To belong to us! Oh yes! but it is likely, is it not? She who communes with the Blessed Virgin like a dear familiar.”
“It is so,” said St Denys. “That is her reputation.”
He was himself, for all his Jean-Jacques Pyrrhonism, an evident subscriber to a local superstition.
“Now,” said the perplexed Englishman, “I perceive that to be oneself is to invite resentment.”
“Not to give or take offence,” said Théroigne, with fine impartiality.
“Both of which have been done, mademoiselle. So, let us cry quits. And what would Mademoiselle Legrand make of all this?”
“How can I tell? She is the saint of dear conceits. She has the inward eye for things invisible to us. ‘Where do the threads of rain disappear to, Théroigne?’ says she. ‘Oh, mon Dieu, Nicette! Am I a Cagliostro?’ ‘I think,’ she says, ‘they are pulled into the earth by goblins working at great looms of water. Each thread draws like spun glass from the crucible of the clouds, and so underfoot is woven the network of springs and channels.’Ciel! the quaint sweet child! Whither come her fancies? They are there in the morning like drops of dew.”
St Denys broke in with a rippling snatch of song:—
“‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,Qui ce matin avoit descloseSa robe de pourpre au soleil,A point perdu, ceste vesprée,Les plis de sa robe pourprée,Et son teint au vostre pareil.’”
“‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,Qui ce matin avoit descloseSa robe de pourpre au soleil,A point perdu, ceste vesprée,Les plis de sa robe pourprée,Et son teint au vostre pareil.’”
“‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
A point perdu, ceste vesprée,
Les plis de sa robe pourprée,
Et son teint au vostre pareil.’”
He stopped.
“Sing on, my heart,” whispered Théroigne.
“Monsieur the Englishman does not approve my music.”
“Monsieur!” began the girl, in great scorn; but, to stay her, St Denys lifted up his voice a second time:—
“When Clœlia proved obdurateTo Phædon’s fond advances,Repaid with scorn his woful state,With flout his utterances,‘Forego,’ he cried, ‘this acrid strain,From such sweet lips a schism,And dumbly quit me of my painBy posy symbolism!‘For hope, a white rose; for despair,A red, pluck to thy bosom!’—He turned; then looked—the wilful fairHad donned a crimson blossom.But, so it chanced, within the cupA cupid, honey-tipsy,In rage at being woken up,Thrust out and stung the gipsy.Then, all compunction for his deed,For cap to the disaster,Rubbed Phædon’s lips with honey-mead,To serve the wound for plaster.”
“When Clœlia proved obdurateTo Phædon’s fond advances,Repaid with scorn his woful state,With flout his utterances,‘Forego,’ he cried, ‘this acrid strain,From such sweet lips a schism,And dumbly quit me of my painBy posy symbolism!‘For hope, a white rose; for despair,A red, pluck to thy bosom!’—He turned; then looked—the wilful fairHad donned a crimson blossom.But, so it chanced, within the cupA cupid, honey-tipsy,In rage at being woken up,Thrust out and stung the gipsy.Then, all compunction for his deed,For cap to the disaster,Rubbed Phædon’s lips with honey-mead,To serve the wound for plaster.”
“When Clœlia proved obdurate
To Phædon’s fond advances,
Repaid with scorn his woful state,
With flout his utterances,
‘Forego,’ he cried, ‘this acrid strain,
From such sweet lips a schism,
And dumbly quit me of my pain
By posy symbolism!
‘For hope, a white rose; for despair,
A red, pluck to thy bosom!’—
He turned; then looked—the wilful fair
Had donned a crimson blossom.
But, so it chanced, within the cup
A cupid, honey-tipsy,
In rage at being woken up,
Thrust out and stung the gipsy.
Then, all compunction for his deed,
For cap to the disaster,
Rubbed Phædon’s lips with honey-mead,
To serve the wound for plaster.”
“Is it pretty or not, monsieur?” asked Théroigne mockingly, advancing her foot and giving Ned a little peck in the back with it.
“It suits the occasion, mademoiselle, and, no doubt, the company.”
St Denys laughed out.
“Hear the grudging ascetic!” he cried. “It is martial music that shall fire this temperate blood!Ho, Boppard,mon petit chiffon! give him a taste of thy quality.”
“He will laugh at me, Basile.”
Nevertheless, the sizar got upon his legs. It brought him three feet nearer the stars. His voice was a protesting little organ; but the spirit that inspired it was many degrees above proof.
He sang:—
“Decorous ways,Though Mammon praiseWith self-protective art—We’ve learnt through ruth,The damnèd truth,Why he affects the part.Courage, then! Courage, my children!Virtue is all gammon,Imposed on us by Mammon,Not to spoil the fashion.Giving him monopoly—hatefully, improperly—Of the sweets of passion.
“Decorous ways,Though Mammon praiseWith self-protective art—We’ve learnt through ruth,The damnèd truth,Why he affects the part.Courage, then! Courage, my children!Virtue is all gammon,Imposed on us by Mammon,Not to spoil the fashion.Giving him monopoly—hatefully, improperly—Of the sweets of passion.
“Decorous ways,
Though Mammon praise
With self-protective art—
We’ve learnt through ruth,
The damnèd truth,
Why he affects the part.
Courage, then! Courage, my children!
Virtue is all gammon,
Imposed on us by Mammon,
Not to spoil the fashion.
Giving him monopoly—hatefully, improperly—
Of the sweets of passion.
—Monsieur, I will not be laughed at.”
“A thousand pardons,” said Ned. “I thought from your expression you were going to be sick. But, never mind. Go on!”
“I will go on or not as I please. I protest, at least, I can crow as well as monsieur.”
“Like a bantam cock on a dunghill, little Boppard. You hail the awaking of the proletariat. And are the verses your own?”
“I will not tell you. I will not tell you anything. I have never been so insulted.”
He seemed to sob, plumped down, and drank off a horn of wine in resounding gulps. The two rustics rolled to their feet and began to fling an uncouth dance together. They had canvassed the bottle freely, and were grown very true to themselves. They spun, they hooted, their moonlit shadows writhed on the ground like wounded snakes. Wilder and more abandoned waxed their congyrations, till at length one flung the other upon the bank at the very feet of Théroigne.
Now this fellow, potulent and pot-valiant, and taking his cue from sobriety, scrambled to his knees, threw himself upon the girl, and crying, “No hurt to my neighbour!” endeavoured to salute her after an example set him.
His reception was something more than damning. Théroigne, with a cry of rage, met the impact tooth and nail, and following on the rebound, became in her turn the furious aggressor. A devil possessed her fierce mouth and vigorous young arms. Her victim, wailing with terror, tried to protect his face, from which the blood ran in rivulets. For a moment or two she had everything to herself. The others stood paralysed about her where they had got to their feet. Then St Denys seized and struggled to draw her away. Even at that she resisted, worrying her prey and gabbling like a thing demented.
“Leave the brute his life!” cried M. le Président. “It is not he, after all, that is most to blame. Do you hear, Théroigne? I will twist your arm out of its socket, but you shall come!”
She uttered a shriek of physical pain, and, releasing her hold, stood panting. On the grass the wretched creature nursed his wounds, and sobbed and wriggled. His comrade, sobered beyond belief, dumbly glowered in the background.
Ned took off his hat in a shameless manner of politeness.
“These fraternal orgies,” said he, “are a little difficult of digestion to a stomach prescriptive. On the whole, I think, I prefer the despotism ofsavoir-vivre. With monsieur’s permission I will e’en back to Méricourt.”
“We must bear in mind that he is an Englishman,” said the sizar. “His traditions are not of the licence of good-fellowship.”
Itwas characteristic enough of M. de St Denys to bear his guest no grudge for the fiasco, chiefly brought about, it must be admitted, by that guest’s malfeasance. With no man was the evil of the day more sufficient to itself; and he would be the last to insist upon that discipline of conscience that burdens each successive dawn with a new heritage of regrets. Moreover, the dog had the right humour, when he was restored to it, to properly appreciate Ned’s immediate comprehension of rule one and only of the Brotherhood; and on his way home with Théroigne, the comedy of the situation did gradually so slake the turmoil of his soul as that he must try to win over his companion to regard the matter from anything but a tragic standpoint. In this he was but partly successful; for woman has a cast in her humorous perceptives that deprives her of the sense of proportion.
“Is it so little a thing?” she said hotly. “But it was thy honour I fought to maintain. And no wonder, then, that men will take sport of that in us which they hold so cheap in themselves.”
However, his mended view of the affair impressed her so far as that, meeting with the Englishman by the village fountain on the morning following the orgy, she condescended to some distant notice of, and speech with, him. For, indeed, with her sex, to punish with silence is to wield a scourge of hand-stinging adders.
Ned, serenely undisturbed by, if not unconscious of, a certain toneless hauteur, greeted Mademoiselle Lambertine with his usual politeness. He was not, in truth, greatly interested in this fine animal. He recognised in her no original quality that set her apart from her fellows. Beauty of an astonishing order was hers indeed—beauty as much of promise as of fulfilment. The little remaininggaucherieof the hoyden dwelt with her only like a lingering brogue on the tongue of an expatriated Irishman. It was rough-and-tumble budding into a manner of caress. But beauty, save as it might contribute to themotifof a picture, was no fire to raise this young man’s temperature, and in Théroigne’s presence he seemed only to breathe an opulent atmosphere of commonplace. She was glowing passion interpreted through colour—siennas and leafy browns, and golds like the reflection of sunsets; a dryad, a pagan, a liberal-limbedtetonnière. If she were ever to find herself a soul, he could imagine her standing out richly as a Rembrandt portrait against torn dark backgrounds. But at present she seemed to lack the setting that occasion might procure her.
“Why do you toil this long way for water?” said he.
“For the reason that monsieur travels,” she answered coldly.
“Do I comprehend? I loiter up the channels of life seeking the spring-heads.”
“Whence the waters gush sweet and clear. Down in the dull homesteads one draws only stagnation from the ground.”
“Or from the barrels underground. Méricourt would do well, I think, to make this fountain its rendezvous.”
“Oh, monsieur! one need not drink much wine, I see, to yield oneself to insolence.”
“Well, you are angry over that kiss. But it was a jest, Théroigne. My heart was as cold as this basin.”
Did this improve matters?
“No doubt,” she said, flushing up, “you only lack the opportunity to be a Judas. And is it so they treat women in your barbarous island?”
“They treat them as they elect to be treated. We have a saying that as one makes one’s bed, so one must lie on it.”
“It is a noble creed!” cried the girl derisively. “It is the Pharisee speaking in English.”
“Nay, mademoiselle. It is to be vertebrate, that is all. To condone evil on the score of provocation to evil, to excuse it on the ground of constitutional tendency—that is the first infirmity of declining races.”
She looked at him mockingly, then fell into a little musing fit.
“Perhaps it is the right point of view,” she murmured; “but for us—mon Dieu! our eyes will get bloodshot and our vision obscured, and—yes, I would rather die of fire than of frost.”
She turned upon him, still pondering.
“It is strange. They say you are a great lord in your own country.”
“I am nephew to one, and his heir.”
“And is he like you?”
Ned permitted himself a snigger.
“He is very unlike me. He is thedoyen, perhaps, of Lotharios.”
“An old man?”
“Yes, old.”
“And you travel like acommis voyageur—for experience, says the gross Van Roon! There must be something of courage in you Englishmen, after all, though you will run before us where you are fewer than ten to one.”
Ned changed the subject.
“Why were you so hurt last night by my reference to Nicette?”
“She is a saint.”
“How do you know?”
“How does a blind man know when some one sits at an open window by which he passes? He feels the presence—that is all.”
“That is all, then?”
“No; but this—Nicette cried lustily till the waters of baptism redeemed her, and thereafter never again: so early was the devil expelled from that sweet shrine.”
“And the little brother—is he a saint too?”
Théroigne laughed contemptuously.
“Baptiste? Oh, to be sure! the little unregenerate! He is the devil’s imp rather.”
“They are orphans?”
“Since three years. The girl mothers him, the graceless rogue.”
“I wronged her in ignorance, you see. That club of good-fellowship—it was all so concordant, so much in harmony with its own laws of frolic give-and-take. Why should a very saint be superior to so genial a fraternity?”
“We are a fraternity, as monsieur says, extending the hand of brotherhood to——”
She broke off, uttering a sharp exclamation as of terror or disgust, and shrunk back against the well rim. A figure had come into view—by way of the meadow path, up which Nicette had borne her load of fodder—and had paused over against the fountain, where it stood obsequiously bowing and gesticulating. It was that of a tall, large-boned man, fair-haired, apple-faced, with a mild, deprecating expression in its big blue eyes. Its head was crowned with a greasy cloth cap, shaped like the half of a tomato; its shirt, of undesirable fustian, was strangely decorated over the left breast with a yellow badge cut into something the shape of a duck’s foot; its full small-clothes—that came pretty high to the waist and were braced over the shoulders with leather bands, yoked to others running horizontally across chest and back—seemed in their every stereotyped crease the worn expression of humility.
“What is it, my friend?” said Ned.
Théroigne put a hand on his arm.
“Do not speak to him, save to bid him return whither he came. God in heaven! I can see the grass withering under his feet! Monsieur, monsieur” (for Ned was walking towards the man), “it is one of the accursed race!”
The creature fawned like a Celestial as the young man approached.
“Monseigneur, for the love of God, a drink of water!” said he.
His dry, thick lips seemed to grate on the words.
“Why not?” said Ned. “You have only to help yourself.”
“Let him dare!” shrieked Théroigne. “Monsieur, do you hear! it is a Cagot, a Cagot, I say!”
The man looked up, with a despairing forlorn gesture, and drooped again like one to whom long experience had taught the hopelessness of self-vindication.
“Is that so?” asked Ned.
“Alas! monseigneur, it is so.”
“What do you do it for, then; and what the deuce is it? Here—have you a cup or vessel of your own?”
With a hurried manner, compound of supplication and triumph, the creature, fumbling in its shirt, brought forth an iron mug. Ned received and carried it to the well. Théroigne sprang from him.
“You are not to be warned? It will poison the blessed spring.”
“Nonsense,” said Ned; but recognising her real agitation and alarm, he offered her a compromise. He would carry the mug to a little distance, and there she, standing back from it, should drop in water from her pitcher. To this she consented, after some demur; and the Cagot had his drink.
“That makes a man of you,” said Ned, watching the poor fellow take all down in reviving gulps.
The other shrugged his shoulders despondingly.
“Monseigneur, I can never be that. It is forbidden to us to stand apart from the beasts. We had hoped in these days of——” he broke off, shook his head, and only repeated, “I can never be that, monseigneur.”
“Then I would not come among men to be so treated.”
“Nor should I, but that my one pig had strayed and I dared to seek it. Monseigneur—if monseigneur would soil his tongue with the word—has he——”
“I have seen no pig. No doubt it will be returned to you, if found.”
“Returned!Hélas! but a poor return, indeed.”
“It will not be?”
“The lights, the entrails—a little of the coarser meat, perhaps.”
“How is that, then?”
“Where we squat, monseigneur, thither come the authorised of the pure blood. ‘These are your bounds,’ say they; and they signify, arbitrarily, any limit that occurs. Woe, then, to the Cagot sheep or pig that strays without the visionarycordon! Whoever finds it may kill, reserving to himself the good, and returning to the unhappy owner the inferior parts only of the meat.”
“It is of a piece with all I see, here more than elsewhere—the grossest inconsistency where the senses seek gratification. Truly, I think, the emancipation of the race is to be from self-denial.”
He gave the man a piece of money—rather peremptorily checking the fulsome benedictions his act called forth—and saw him slink off the way he had come. For all its show of servility, there had appeared something indescribably noble in the poor creature’s rendering of an ignoble part. It was as if, on the stage of life, he were willing to sacrifice his individuality to the success of the piece. Not all scapegoats could so triumph physically through long traditions and experiences of suffering. These Cagots—they might have come from the loins of the wandering Jew.
He walked back to Théroigne, his heart even a little less than before inclined to her. She held away from him somewhat, as if he were contaminated.
“A fraternity, extending the hand of brotherhood,” he said—repeating some words of hers uttered before the Cagot had intervened—“to whom was mademoiselle about to say? to all, without exception?”
She looked at him, half fearful, half defiant.
“This man is of the accursed race,” she cried low.
“A Jew?”
“A Cagot.”
“And what is that?”
“You do not know? They come from France, where she sits with her feet in the mountains—outcasts, pariahs, with blood so hot that an apple will wrinkle in their hands as if it had been roasted.”
“I should have fancied that a recommendation to you of Méricourt.”
“Ah, grace of God! With them it is nothing but the emitting of a pestilent miasma. These people are brutes. They would even have tails, but that their mothers are cunning to bite them off when they are newly born.”
Ned went into a fit of laughter.
“It is true, monsieur.”
“It is at least easily proved. And they come from the south?”
“From the south and from the west. It is not often we see them here; but this new spirit that is in the air—mon Dieu!—it stirs in them, I suppose, with a hope of better times—of release from the restrictions imposed upon them for the safety of the community; and now they will sometimes wander far afield.”
“And what are these restrictions?”
“They are many—as to the isolation of their camps; as to their tenure of land or carrying of weapons; as to buying or selling food; as to their right to enter a church by the common door, to take the middle of the street, to touch a passer-by, to remain in any village of the pure after sundown. They must grow their own flesh, find their own springs, wear, each man, woman, and child the duck-foot badge, that they may be known and shunned. Indeed, I cannot tell a tithe of the laws that control them.”
“But for what reason are they set apart?”
“Little mother of God! how can I say? They are Cagots, they are accursed—that is all I know.”
Even as she spoke an angry brabble of voices came to them from the direction of the path by which the outcast had retreated; and in a moment the man himself reappeared, scuttling along in a stooping posture, and hauling by the ear his recovered pig, that squeaked passionately as it was urged forward. But now in his wake came a posse of louts—young chawbacons drawn from the fields—who pelted the poor wretch with clods of clay, and were for baiting him, it seemed, in a crueller manner.
Ned ran down and placed himself between victim and pursuers. The former, bruised and breathless, pattered out a hurried fire of explanation and entreaty.
The young gentleman faced the little mob—half-a-dozen or so—that had closed upon itself—compact claypolism.
“What do you want with this man?” he said.
His demand evoked a clamour of vituperation.
“What is that to you? It is the law! The mongrel is accursed—l’âme damnée—le tison d’enfer! Down with this insolent the stranger! he is a Cagot himself!”
Ned waited calmly for the tumult to subside.
“I ask you what this man has done?” said he.
“Cannot you tell the heretic by his smell? Oh-a-eh! here is a fine Catholic nose! Out of our way—the pig is forfeit!”
They hissed and yelped, and raised a shrill chorus of “baas” at the unfortunate. Curiously, he seemed to feel this last form of insult more acutely than any. Suddenly a clod of earth, aimed presumably at the poor creature, hurtled through the air and struck Ned’s shoulder in passing. It might have rebounded on the assailant, so immediate was the retribution that followed. The erst-calm paladinwentfor the vermin like a terrier, and like a terrier repaid his own punishment with interest.
The great chuff howled and blubbered and wriggled under the blows that rained upon him. Presently Ned, exhausted, swung his victim in a hysteric heap upon the ground, and stood to breathe himself. Then it was that the reserve, withdrawn in affright, seeing his momentary fatigue, gathered heart of numbers, and came down upon him in phalanx. He received them, nothing dismayed, and accounted for the first with a “give-upon-the-nose,” and for another with a “poached eye.” He was patently tired, however—enervated by the heat of the day—and his adversaries, recognising this, were encouraging one another to annihilate him, when all in a moment a volume of water slapped into their faces and quenched their ardour for ever.
A new champion had come upon the field, and that was no other than Mademoiselle Théroigne with her pitcher. She laughed volubly, on a menacing note, in the washed and streaming countenances.
“Beasts, pigs, cowards!” she shrilled. “For one Englishman—name of God!—for one trumpery Englishman to lay you out flat as linen on a bleaching-green! Get back—hide yourselves in your furrows, or play bully to the little rabbits in the field corners! Not to the bucks—that were too bold.”
She made as if to follow up the water with the vessel. Ned cried out: “You will break the earthenware sooner than their heads, mademoiselle!” in agony lest she should blaze beyond self-extinguishment, as on the previous evening; but she only stiffened her claws like a cat and prepared to spring. It was enough. The swamped and demoralised crew gathered up its wreckage and fled incontinent, and was in a moment out of sight round the curve.
Ned took off his hat to his tutelary divinity—this Athena to his Achilles.
“Your weapons were better than mine,” he said; “but your task was harder: for you had to fight against prejudice as well.”
The Cagot, still holding his pig by the ear, crept up to the young man and caught and ravenously kissed his hand. Then he looked wistfully at a brown-haired goddess.
“Oh,mon Dieu, no!” said Théroigne. “You must not touch me or come near me.”
She turned and addressed Ned, almost with an entreating sound in her voice:—
“You have courage of every sort, monsieur. But for me—yes, it is as you say. My heart warms to such valour; but I cannot forget in a moment these long traditions—this fear and this abhorrence. Do not let him approach me.”
She stepped back, as if to escape a very radiated influence. But she spoke softly to the Englishman, and with the manner of one who in giving help has wrought a little conscious bond of sympathy.
“Bid the man go hence by the Liége road,” she said. “So will he evade his persecutors. But a few toises out he can enter the woods and work round to his lair.”
“I will see him on his way, mademoiselle.”
He bade her good morning quite respectfully, and drove the Cagot before him from the village. It was slow progress, for the recalcitrant pig must be humoured. The man looked back from time to time, his face full of the most human gratitude. A little way on he paused by an outlying cottage until his benefactor was come up with him. Then, smiling brightly, he stayed Ned with a significant gesture, and went on tiptoe to the door that stood open. A loaf lay on a table within. This the Cagot seized with a muttered word, and so came forth again, hugging his prize.
“What, the devil!” cried Ned.
He had seen a woman within the hut. She had shrunk, crying out, from the intruder, but had made no effort to defend her property.
“A thief!” exclaimed the Englishman.
“Nenni!” said the man in a deprecatory voice. “It is one of our poor little privileges. I appropriated the bread that monseigneur might see.”
“The deuce, you did!”
“We may take it—but, yes, we may enter and take, wherever we see it, a cut loaf turned upside-down, with the sliced part to the door. I will return it if monseigneur wills.”
“No,” said Ned. “This privilege is on a par with all the rest. Let the fool pay toll to his own inconsequence. Lead on, my friend.”
Very shortly they turned into a forest track, plunging amongst trees for a half mile or more. Here Ned pushed up to his humble wayfellow.
“Why are you accursed?” said he.
“God help us, monseigneur! I know not. Thus they hold and keep us. Wheresoever in our wanderings we alight, we must report our names and habitations to thebailliof the nearest jurisdiction, that no loophole may be left us to escape from ourselves; for it is forbidden to us to intermarry with the pure of blood, lest we thereby, merging into the community, lose our unhappy distinction.”
“But, whence come you, and what have you done to merit this—this——?”
“Monseigneur, we are accursed. It is not given to us to know more than that.”
Was there a faint note of stubbornness, a suggestion of some conscious secret withheld, in this abject reiteration of abasement? Ned was in doubt; but at least it seemed these strange people carried horror with them like a hidden plague-spot.
“Tell me,” said he, “why did you cower when the louts cried ‘Baa’ to you?”
The man looked up furtively.
“It is our ears,” he muttered. “They will call them sheep’s ears, monseigneur.”
“Certainly, it would appear, they are not designed for rings. That is a progressive evolution, my friend.”
The Cagot did not answer. A few steps farther brought them into a little dell traversed by a brook. Here, by the water-side, was stretched a single tent of tattered brown canvas.
“Alone!” said Ned, surprised.
“Alone, monseigneur, save for the woman and the littlebien fils de son père. In these days the tribes are much broken up. They wander piecemeal. There are rumours abroad—hopes, prospects, as if it were prelude to the advent of a Messiah. I think, perhaps, I have seen to-day a harbinger—an angel bearing tidings.”
He gazed at the young man with large solemn eyes. His face was full of a wistful patience—not brutalised, but mild and intelligent.
“Oh, truly, I am the devil of an angel!” said Ned; and he waved his hand and turned.
“Monseigneur, I will never forget,” said the Cagot.
InNicette’s little lodge, doors and windows stood all open. Even then the languid air that entered fell fainting almost on the threshold. The heat of many preceding days seemed accumulated in vast bales of clouds piled up from the horizon. It scintillated, livid and coppery, through its enormous envelopes, eating its way forth with menace of a flood of fire.
Obviously the dairy was the nearest approach to a temperate zone, and thither Ned bent his steps, carrying his paint-box and canvas. He found the girl there, as he had expected. She was seated knitting near the flung casement, wherethrough came a hot scent of geranium flowers. In the blinding garden without silence panted like a drouthy dog. Only the horn, high on its perch, found breath to bemoan itself, gathering up the folds of muteness with an attenuated thread of complaint.
Mademoiselle Legrand looked cool and fragrant, for all the house was an oven; but a little bloom of damp was on her face, like dew on a rose. In a corner, standing with his hands behind his back and his front to the wall, Baptiste, the sad-eyed child, did penance for some transgression, it would appear.
“I must not lose my Madonna for a misunderstanding,” said Ned.
Nicette rose to her feet, flushing vividly to her brow. The weary white face of the boy was turned in astonishment to the intruder.
“Monsieur,” said theportière, in a little agitated voice, “you must not ask me. For one you hold so cheap to represent the stainless mother! It cannot be, monsieur.”
Ned deposited his paraphernalia on a chair, went up to his whilom model, and took her hands in his with gentle force.
“Nicette,” he murmured, so that the child should not hear him, “I refuse, you know, to accept this responsibility. It is your own consciousness of justification, or otherwise, that is in question. The mother had a human as well as a divine side. I will use you for the first.”
“Use me!” she whispered. “Monsieur——”
She drooped her head—tried to withdraw her hands. Her lips faltered desperately on the word.
“Tell me the truth, little Nicette. May not a saint love guava jelly? It is a fruit of the sweet earth—perhaps the very manna of the Israelites.”
He held her young soft wrists in hostage for an answer—much concerned for an exchange of confidence. The girl, making alac d’amourof her fingers, suddenly came to her decision.
“I am very wicked,” she said in a small voice, between eagerness and tears; “I am not a saint at all. Monsieur may do with me as he will.”
Now surely this young man had the fairy Temperance to his godmother when he was christened. His point gained, he disposed his model with a very pretty eye to business, and was soon at work.
“Nicette,” said he, “how has this youthful whipper-snapper misconducted himself?”
“Baptiste, monsieur? He was dainty with his food; and—the day was hot, and perhaps I was ever so little cross.”
She accepted the understanding, it will be seen—thrilled perhaps over the secret ecstasy implied in this prospect of a lay confessor.
“Well,ma chérie,” said Ned, “you may relax discipline now, may you not? It worries me to have this inconversable ape criticising me from his corner.”
“Baptiste,” said Nicette, “you may go and play—in the shadow, Baptiste.”
The child went out dully, with a lifeless step. It would seem he recognised no enticing novelty in the form of words.
“Now we will have a comfortable coze,” said Ned.
“How, monsieur?”
“That means we will exchange confidences, girl.”
Nicette smiled.
“You do not love children, monsieur?” she asked.
“Truly, I think not. They know, I fancy, so much more than they will tell. I feel nervous in their company, as if they might blackmail me if they would. It is no use to be conscious of my own innocence. Vague terrors assail me that they may be in possession of dark secrets that I have forgotten. For them, they never forget.”
“It is so, indeed, with little doubt.”
“Is it not? They inherit the ages, one must admit. They are like eggs, full of the concentrated meat of wisdom; and as such it is right to sit upon them. It is a self-protective instinct thus to hurry their development, for so their abnormal precocity distributes itself over an ever-increasing area and weakens in its acuteness.”
“And they have cunning, monsieur.”
“Without doubt—the cunning to evoke and trade upon sympathy with sufferings that they pretend to, but are physically incapable of feeling.”
The girl looked up, her eyes expressive of some strangeness of emotion.
“Are they not able to feel, then, monsieur?”
“Not as we do, Nicette. Their nervous organism has not yet come to tyrannise over the spiritual in them. Turn thy head as before,babouine. The light falls crooked on thy mouth. No; I wish never to be burdened with a child, either my own or another’s.”
A low boom of thunder rolled up the sky. Nicette started and drove her chair back a little distance from the window.
“That is vexatious of you, you pullet. Are you afraid of thunder?”
“Oh yes—dear mother!—when it is close.”
“But that is yet far away.”
“It will advance—it is thediligenceof the skies bringing inhuman company.Mon Dieu! when one hears the driver crack his whip, and the horses plunge forward, and there follows the rumbling of the wheels!”
“Talk on. I love to hear thee. But take courage first to resume thy pose.”
“Monsieur, I am frightened.”
“What, with me for thy Quixote! I have conquered windmills before now. There—that is to be a good child. Do you find it hard to understand my chatter?”
“Monsieur, on the contrary, is an adept at our language.”
“This is nothing to how I speak it when I have a cold. Still, do you know, I have never quite got over the feeling that it is very clever of a Frenchman to talk French. ‘And so it is,’ Théroigne would say, but you will not. Nicette, have you ever heard speak of the Club of Nature’s Gentry? What a question, is it not? But I like to hear you laugh like little bells.”
“Monsieur, it is a very dull club.”
“Which is the reason you are not a member?”
“A member! oh,mon Dieu! that is not my notion of enjoyment.”
“Great heaven! Here is an astonishing shift of the point of view.”
“How, monsieur?”
“Never mind. So, freedom of speech is not to your fancy?”
“It is not freedom, but an excuse for silly licence. Those clowns and the grotesque small Boppard—it is to discuss wine, not politics, that they assemble. A full mug is the only challenge they invite, and the larger the measure, the greater that of their courage. But they talk so much into empty pots that their voices sound very big to them.”
“Not Boppard, mademoiselle. He at least hath this justification—that he is a poet.”
“Has monsieur discovered it, then? Monsieur is cleverer than all Méricourt. We must make monsieur the student a crown of vine leaves.”
“Nicette, dost thou think I will suffer a pullet to cackle at me? What, then, if not a poet?”
“But a maker of charades impossible to interpret, by monsieur’s permission.”
“My permission, you jade! Here is the measure ofyourcourage, I think. And have you no fear that I shall make M. de St Denys acquainted with your opinion of his club?”
“None, monsieur.”
The thunder rolled again. The girl, starting and clasping her hands, cried—
“Monsieur, let me come from the window! Oh, monsieur, let me, and I will light a blest candle!”
“A little longer—just a little longer. I foresee a darkness presently, and then, lest my Madonna be blotted from my sight, the candle shall burn.”
The girl looked out fearfully at the advancing van of the storm. It was still brilliant sunshine in the garden, but with an effect as if the outposts of noon were falling back upon their centre, already half-demoralised in prospect of an overwhelming charge. The wind, too, beginning to move like that that precedes an avalanche, was scouting through the shrubberies with a distant noise of innumerable tramping feet; and the fitful moaning of the horn rose to a prolonged scream, that drew upon the heart with a point of indescribable anguish.
“Why, however,” said Ned, “have you no apprehension that I shall tell tales to M. de St Denys?”
“I said I had no fear, monsieur.”
“Would he not resent this so unflattering opinion of his satellites?”
“What is his own of them, does monsieur think?—that a tipsy boor assists the cause of freedom? Monsieur, my master is not blind, save perhaps in thinking others so.Saint Sacrement! the sun has gone out! It was as if a wave of cloud extinguished it.”
“Never mind that. In thinking others blind to what, girl?”
“I must not say—indeed, I must not say.”
“Is this to be a saint—to damn with innuendo? Fie, then, Nicette!”
“Monsieur, do not be angry. Oh, I will tell you whatever you will. This club then, it is a pretext, one cannot but assume—a veil to hide perilous sentiments, not of politics, but of——”
“But of what?”
The girl hung her head. The increasing gloom without lent its shadow to her face.
“Monsieur has no mercy,” she whispered.
“But of what, Nicette? Tell me.”
“Monsieur—of intrigue.”
As if the very word completed an electric circuit and discharged the battery, a flash answered it, followed almost immediately by a splintering shock of thunder. The girl uttered a shriek, started to her feet, and ran to the middle of the room, holding her hands to her eyes.
“I am blind!” she wailed—“oh, I am blind!”
Ned hurried to her—gripped her shoulder.
“Nonsense!” he cried; “it will pass in a moment. Let me look.”
He could hardly hear his own voice. The lightning might have been a bursting shell that had rent a dam. The thunder of the rain out-roared that of the clouds—overbore the struggling wind and pinned it to the earth—smote upon the roof in tearing volleys, and made of all the atmospheric envelope a crashing loom of water.
“Nicette!” cried the young man, frightened to see the girl yet hide her face from him. He was conscious of something crouching at her feet, and, looking down, saw that terror had driven Baptiste, the little boy, to the refuge of their company.
In his panic, Ned impulsively seized the maid into his arms.
“You are not hurt!” he implored. “I kept you by the window. My God! if you should be injured through my fault!”
She was not at least so stunned but that his impassioned self-reproach could inform her cheeks with a rose of fire. The stain of it, could he have seen, soaked to the very white nape of her neck.
“Hold me,” she whimpered. “Don’t let me go, or I shall die!”
She strained to him, patently and without any thought of dissimulation, palpitating with terror as the rain roared and the frequent detonations shook the house. In the first of his apprehension he thought of nothing compromising in the situation—of nothing but his own concern and the girl’s pitiful state.
Presently, in a lull, he heard her exclaiming—
“Mother of God! if I were to go blind!”
“Don’t suggest such a thing!” he cried in anguish.
“Would you be sorry—even for poor Nicette, monsieur?”
“Sorry, child! Look up, in God’s name!”
She raised her face. Her lids flickered and opened.
“Can you see?” he asked, distraught and eager.
“I—something—a little,” murmured the unconscionable gipsy. “I can see monsieur’s face—far or near—which is it?”
She put up a timid hand. Her fingers fluttered like a moth against his temple.
“I don’t think I am blind, monsieur. My eyes——”
In his jubilation he took her head between his palms, and, with a boyish laugh, kissed each of the blue flowers—to make them open, he said.
“No, I am not blind,” said she.
Mr Murk, recalling, on the morning after the storm, certain ultra-fervid expressions of remorse into which, during it, he had been betrayed, and realising, possibly, how of a saint and a sinner the latter had proved the blinder, turned the search-light of his recovered vision inwards, and examined his conscience like the most ruthlessly introspective Catholic. He worked out the sum of argument very coolly and carefully; and the result, condensed from many germinant postulates, showed itself arithmetically inevitable.
“If I intrigue, I sacrifice my independence, my free outlook, my peace of mind, my position in relation to my art—comprehensively, my principles.
“Enfin—on the other hand, I gain a very stomachy little white powder in a spoonful of jam.
“Taking one from four, therefore, I find myself debited with three charges that it is ridiculous to incur. Love, in short, is a creditor I have no desire to be called upon to compound with. I will cut my visit a little finer than I had intended, and go on to Paris at once. Perhaps—for I have not finished my Madonna, and the model curiously interests me—I will return to Méricourt by-and-by, when this shadow of a romance has drifted away with the cloud that threw it.”
Thus far only he temporised with his inclinations. For the rest, it appeared, he likened that which most men feel as a flame to an amorphous blot of darkness travelling across his sunlight. The point of view of the girl did not enter into his calculations. Possibly—most probably, indeed—he could not conceive himself inspiring a devouring passion. He knew innately, he thought, his limits—the length of his tether, moral, intellectual, and physical—and had never the least wish to affect, for the sake of self-glorification, a condition of mind or body that he was unable to recognise as his own. This led him to that serene appreciation of his personal capabilities that passes, in the eye of the world, for insufferable conceit. For to boast of knowing oneself is to assume a social importance on the strength of an indifferent introduction. Public opinion will never take one at one’s own valuation. It must be educated up to the point of one’s highest achievement. To say out, “I know I can do this thing,” is to deprive it (public opinion) of the right to exercise and justify itself.
Ned, however, would not over-estimate, nor would he (even nominally) cheapen himself as a bid to any man’s favour; and that, no doubt, would be sound equity in the impossible absence of inherent prejudice. But a judgment—in any world but a world of definite aurelian transitions—that holds itself infallible may err in the face of fifty precedents; and Ned’s, founded in this instance upon the self-precedent of sobriety, took no account of emotions that were completely foreign to his nature. In short, very honestly repudiating for himself any power of attraction, he failed to see that this very artlessness of repudiation wasper sean attractive quality.
Now he put his resolution into force without compromise, and informed his host, during the seconddéjeuner, that he was on the prick of departure.
St Denys expressed no surprise, no concern, very little interest.
“Most certainly,” said he, “I applaud your attitude towards life. It exhibits what one may call an admirable cold cleanness. Probably, at this point, you are putting to your visit that period that most strictly conforms to the rules of moral punctuation. I have too complete a belief in the rectitude of your judgment to question that of your withdrawing yourself from Méricourt without superfluous ceremony. I envy you, indeed, your power of applying, without offence, to the oblique turns of circumstance that simple directness which is your very engaging characteristic. We, less fortunately endowed by nature, are for ever seeking those short cuts to a goal that delay us unconscionably, in everything but theory. You, monsieur, recognise instinctively that to fly straight for your mark is to reach your destination by the nearest route.”
“I am conscious of no particular coldness in my manner of regard,” said Ned good-humouredly. (He did not resent the implied sarcasm, nor did he allow it to affect his point of view. If he had given offence, it was simply by his literal construction of views he had been invited to share, and he could not admit the right of the dispenser of such views to put any arbitrary limit to another’s application of them.) “Unless, indeed,” he went on, “it argues a constitutionalsang-froidto have decided, at the thinking outset of life,againstthe despotism of passion, andfora republic of senses, material, ethical, and intellectual.”
“Assuredly not. But even a republic must have a president.”
“I elect my heart, monsieur, to the honour, and give it a casting vote. There, at least, is a little core of fire in all this frost.”
“Dieu du ciel! thou shouldst command a future, if thou wouldst, in this Paris to which thou journeyest. It is such as thou that have their way and keep it; while we poor hot-headed impressionables take wrong turnings, and fetch up, struggling and sweating and trampling our friends under, in villainous blind alleys. To discipline your senses and keep your heart! God of heaven! that is a state to be envied of angels, who sometimes fall—even they.”
“I understand you to speak ironically.”
“I protest I do not, monsieur. I covet your power of unswerving fidelity to truth. What would it not be worth to me in the hot days that are coming! I shall go under—I shall go under, I feel it and know it—because I must fight with the crooked creese of dissimulation if a straighter weapon fails me.”
He spoke obviously with considerable emotion—with a sincerity, moreover, that, rather than the other, appealed to the Englishman.
“It appears, monsieur,” said the latter, “that you predict a very serious disruption of the social order.”
“It appears, indeed. There is a caldron always kept seething in that unlovely kitchen of the Isle de France—a stock-pot that for long ages has boiled down the blood and bones of the people into the thick soup affected of thebeau monde. But, at last, other things go to feed it—this reeking kettle. Monseigneur in his fine palace will pull a face over the flavour; yet he must sup of it or starve. There makes itself recognised something metallic to the taste, perhaps; as if the latest victims had been dropped in with their knives and pistols unremoved from their pockets. Maybe, also, there precipitates itself a thick sediment of coins, to which I may claim to have contributed—as also, possibly, I have added my mite to the combustible material—the inflammatory pages with which a waking generation of agitators fuels this kitchen fire. Monsieur may live to see the pot boil.”
“May live to see it boil over, even, and scald the toes of the cooks. But I do not believe in this pass, monsieur, and regret only that you should, from whatever motives, seek to give a sinister turn to reforms that could be more effectively compassed by a bloodless revolution.”
“Monsieur, were a senate of Edward Murks an electoral possibility, I would hope to accomplish the Millennium while the world slept.”
Ned looked at his host with some instinct of repulsion. So here, in the guise of a scatterling aristocrat, was one of those seedling firebrands that were beginning to sprout all over the soil of Europe like the little bickering flames that patch the high slopes of Vesuvius: advocates holding briefs in the indictment of society; licentious pamphleteers; unscrupulous journalistic hacks seizing their opportunity in the fashion for heterodox—subordinate contributors, some of them, to the contumacious Encyclopedia; irresponsible agents, all, to a force they could not measure or justify to themselves by any scheme of after-reconstruction.
But what, in heaven’s name, induced this man to a mutinous attitude towards a social system of which, by reason of his position, he need take nothing but profit? His opportunities of selfish gratification would not be multiplied by the sacrifice of caste and fortune. He was not, Ned felt convinced, a reformer by conviction. Unless the itch for cheap notoriety was the tap-root of his character, what was to account for this astonishing paradox?
What, indeed? Yet a motiveless losel is no uncommon sight. To be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth is to be endowed with what it is obviously difficult to retain. It is to be awarded the prize before the race is run, and that is no encouragement to sound morality or healthy effort. Easily acquired is soon dissipated. What wonder, then, if Fortunatus, shedding wealth as naturally as he sheds his milk-teeth, looks to Nature for a renewal of all in kind.
“Well,” said St Denys, “you are going to Paris. It is the beacon-light about which the storm birds circle. If you seek experience, you will there gain it; if novelty—mon Dieu!—you will have the opportunity to see some strange puppets dance by-and-by.”
“And doubtless those who would hold the strings are in the clouds.”
“Not so, monsieur. These marionettes—they will move on a different principle, by trackers, like an organ. It may even be possible to make one or two skip, touching a note here in this quiet corner of Liége. But I do not know. When the time comes for the performance, this puppet-man himself may be in Paris.”
“You allude to M. de St Denys?”
“Do I? But, after all, he is very small beer.”
Nicette sang like a bee in a flower. Her cot was the veritable summer-house to a garden-village—luxuriously cool as an evening-primrose blossom with a ladybird and a crystal of dew in the heart of it. She was always self-contained, always tranquil, always fragrant. Her reputation, like that of some other saints, was founded, perhaps, upon her constitutional insensibility to small irritations. Cause and effect in her were temperament and digestion—read either way—influencing one another serenely. That sensitiveness of the moral cuticle that, with the most of us, finds intentional aggravations in habits and opinions that are not ours, she would appear to be innocent of. She never complained of nail-points in her shoes or crumbs in her bed; and that was to be bird of rare enough feather to merit distinction. Indifference to pain is considered none the less worshipful because it proceeds from insusceptibility to it: the name of sanctity may attach itself to the most self-enjoying impassibility. The moral is objective; for how many dyspeptics—sufferers—are there, turning an habitual brave face to their colourless world, who would be other than damned incontinent by a whole posse of devil’s-advocates were a claim advanced to dub them so much as Blessed?
This refreshing maid, however, was not of cloisteral aloofness all compact. She had a wit for merry days; and, no doubt, a calid spot in her heart that needed only to be blown upon by sympathetic lips to raise a heat in her that should make an intolerable burden of the very veil of modesty. For such Heloïses an Abelard is generally on the road.
Now she was busy in her sequestered cot, touching, rather than putting, things into order. She had a gift for cleanliness. Her hands winnowed the dust like the fluttering wings of butterflies. Baptiste, ostensibly occupied with his catechism-book, watched her from his corner, unwinking like a squatting toad.
He saw her pause once, with her fingers stroking the back of the chair on which the stranger artist had sat yesterday. A smile was on her lips. Then she moved into the little closet that was her sleeping-place and made her bed, patting the sheets caressingly, as if some child of her fancy lay underneath.
“She will punish me if she sees me looking at her now,” thought the sad, sharp child; and he bent over his task.
“Tiens! little monkey! Here is a biscotin for thee,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine at the door.
The child caught and began to devour the cake ravenously.
“That will give thee a better relish for the food of the soul,” said Théroigne.
She came in languorous and flushed, fanning herself with a spray of large-flowered syringa. The heavy scent of it floated over the room, penetrating to Nicette in her retreat.
“Oh, the sweet orange-blossom!” cried theportière. “Is it a bride to visit me?”
Théroigne stopped the action of her hand. Her teeth bit upon her under lip.
“Orange-blossom!” she exclaimed.
She passed into the closet; dropped listlessly upon a joint stool.
“That is not for me—not yet,” she said. “It is only syringa. See, little minette.”
“I see, Théroigne.”
“Why do thine eyes appear to rebuke me, thou little cold woman? Yet, I think, I come to visit thee for coolness’ sake: I am so hot and dull. This lodge, it is like a woodland chapel; and here where we sit is the confessional.”
“And art thou come into it to confess?”
“To thee? tola sainteNicette! I should expect her to shrink and close, like a sensitive leaf, to my mere approach. Tell me—What is the utmost wickedness thou hast confided to thy pillow here? I wager my littlest peccadillo would overcrow it.”
“It is for me to confess, then, it seems?”
“Only thine own sweetness, child. This bed of thine—it is planted in a ‘Garden of the Soul.’ And what grows in it, little saint?—white lilies, gentle pansies, stainless ladysmocks? Not Love-lies-bleeding, I’ll warrant.”
“Fie, Théroigne! what nonsense thou talkest.”
“Do I? My head is light and my heart heavy. Mortality weighs upon me this morning—oh, Nicette, it weighs—it weighs!”
“Hast thou done wrong?”
“Much; and every day of my life.”
“Confess to me, and I will give thee absolution.”
“Absolution! to a woman from a woman! Never, I think; or at least saddled with such a penance as would take all savour from the grace. Well, as thou hast made thy bed——”
“So must I lie on it.”
“What! thou know’st the stranger’s motto? Little holy mother, but it is true; and I have made my bed, Nicette; and it is not a bed of flowers at all.Aïe! how the world swarms with pitfalls! Yet, at least, there is to-day an evil the less in Méricourt.”
“What evil?”
“The Englishman.”
“He is gone?”
“He is gone. I met him yesternoon on the Liége road. He had a staff in his hand and a knapsack on his shoulders.”
Nicette was at the tiny casement, delicately coaxing its curtains into folds that pleased her. She was too fastidious with her task to speak for a moment.
“Well,” she said at length, “it is an evil, I suppose, that only withdraws itself for a day or two?”
“Better than that, little saint. He goes all the way to Paris. ‘But Mademoiselle Théroigne,’ says he, ‘I leave my heart behind me. I will come back to reclaim it in the spring. In the meantime, do me the favour to keep it on ice; for I think Méricourt is very near the tropics.’ Bah! is he not an imbecile? We are well quit of him.”
“In the spring!”
Nicette came round with a face like hard ivory.
“Théroigne—why did he speak to you like that? It is not wise or good of you to court so insolent a familiarity.”
“I did not court it, and I am not wise or good.”
Mademoiselle Lambertine looked startled and displeased.
“What has come to thee, Nicette? It is not like thee to rebuke poor sinners save by thy better example.”
“And that is a negative virtue, is it not? Now were time, perhaps, that you give me the pretext, to end a struggle that my heart has long maintained with my conscience.”
Théroigne rose, breathing a little quickly, her bent forefinger to her lips.
“Nicette!” she cried faintly.
“I must say it, Théroigne. This club—this thin dust thrown into the eyes of Méricourt——”
The other went hurriedly to the door.
“I had better go,” she said; “I cannot listen and not cry. Not now, Nicette, not now! I have no strength—I think the Englishman has left a blight upon the place!”
Her footsteps retreated down the garden path—died away. Nicette, listening, with a line sprung between her eyes, came swiftly from her bedroom. Close by the door of it—crept from his stool—Baptiste, his mouth agape, had been eavesdropping, it seemed. She seized him with a raging clinch of her fingers.
“Little detestable coward!” she cried, in a suppressed voice—“little sneakmouchard, to spy like a woman! How have I deserved to be for ever burdened with this millstone?”
“You hurt me!” whimpered the child, struggling to escape.
“Not so much as the black dogs will, when they come out of the well in the yard to carry you to the fire. Little beast, I have a mind to call them now.”
“They might take you instead. I will assure them you are wicked too—that I heard you say so to monsieur the Englishman.”
She shook him so that his heels knocked on the floor. For the moment she was beside herself.
“The Englishman!” she hissed—and choked. “Est-ce bien possible!Sang Dieu!—O, sang Dieu! and if it were not for thee—he hates children—he might be now——!”
She checked herself with a desperate effort. She tightened her grip. The boy screamed with pain.
“Be quiet!” she cried furiously. “If some one should hear thee!”
“I want them to. I want them all to come in, that I may tell how you pretended to be blind that monsieur might kiss you.”
She recognised in a moment that he was goaded at last to terrible revolt. She cried “Hush!” in a panic, and without avail. The child continued to shriek and to revile her—repeating himself hysterically in the lack of a sufficient vocabulary. Changing front, it was only after long and frantic effort that she could coax and bribe him into silence. And, when at length she had induced him to a reasonable mood, and could trust herself away from him, she went and threw herself upon her bed and, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, cried empty the fountains of her wrath and her terror.