Consistentin his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a little shop of semi-circular frontage that, standing like a river promontory at the north-west corner of the Rue Beautreillis—where that tributary ditch of humanity ran into and fed the muddy channel of the Rue St Antoine—seemed to have rounded from sharper outline in the age-long wash of traffic wheeling by its walls. From his window on the second floor the Englishman thus commanded a view of two streets, and, indeed, of three; for across the main thoroughfare the Rue Beautreillis, become now the Rue Royale, was continued until it discharged itself into a great house-enclosedplace, as into a mighty reservoir of decorum built for the defecation of neighbouring vulgarities. Looking east, moreover, between the belfry towers of the convents of St Marie and La Croix, Ned’s vision might reach, without strain, the very twilight mass of the Bastille; so that, as he congratulated himself, his situation was such as—barring adventitious and unprofitable luxuries—a blood prince with any imagination might have envied him.
For thence, often watching, speculative, he would see the scene-shifters of the early Revolution—come out in front of the high, mute screen of the prison, that closed his vista eastwards as if it were a stage-curtain—busy as bees on the alighting-board of a hive. Thence he would mark, in real ignorance of the plot of the forthcoming piece, or cycle of pieces, the motley companies gathering for rehearsal—the barn-stormers; the heavy “leads;” the slighted tragedians foreseeing their opportunity for the fiftieth time; the inflated supers canvassing the favour of phantom houses with imagined gems of inspiration, with new lamps for old in the shape of misenlightened renderings of traditionalrôles; he would mark the gas, so to speak, the artificial light that informed the garish scene with spurious vitality. But the prompter he could never as yet find in his place, nor could he gather the true import of the play to which, it must be presumed, all this pretentious gallimaufry was a prelude. Theorists, agitators, pamphleteers—the open, clamorous expression of that that had been suggested only to him during his hitherto wanderings—all these and all this were present to his eyes and his ears, passionlessly alert at their vantage-point on the second floor of the corner house in the Rue Beautreillis. Daily he sought to piece, from the struttings and the disconnected vapourings, the puzzle of present circumstance, the political significance of so much apparently aimless rhetoric. Daily he listened for the prompter’s bell; daily looked for the appearance of the confident author who should discipline all this swagger and rhodomontade.
Then, by-and-by, the fancy did so master him as that he would see a veritable curtain, rounding into slumberous folds, in this silent west wall of the Bastille; a curtain—with sky-arched convent buildings for proscenium—whose every sombre crease he seemed to watch with a curious moved expectancy of the unnameable that should be revealed in its lifting. For so an impression deepened in him unaccountably that beyond that voiceless veil was shaping itself the real drama, of which this outer ranting was but as the wind that precedes an avalanche; that suddenly, and all in a moment, the screen would be rent, like a sullen cloud by lightning, and the import of an ominous foregathering find expression in some withering organisation to which the surface turmoil had been but a blind. He thought himself prophetic—en rapportwith the imps of a national destiny; but nevertheless the curtain delayed to rise while he waited, though it was to go up presently to a roar that shook the world.
Still, from his window Ned could enjoy to look, as from a box in a theatre of varieties, upon a scene of possibilities infinite to an artist. He had flown from green pastures and drowsy woods—where revolutionary propagandism, however violently uttered, must waste itself on remote echo-surfaces—straight into a resounding city of narrow ways, a Paris of blusterers andmégères, of controversialists and tractarians, of winged treatises and fluttering pandects. The streets were as full of the latter as if paper-chase were the daily pastime of the populace. Only the hounds, it seemed, never ran the hares to earth; and the hares themselves were March ones, by every token of incoherence. And “Surely,” thought the young man, “it is to be needlessly alarmist to read upheaval in this yeasty ferment. Let the Bastille fall, and there behind shall show nothing more formidable than the blank brick wall of the theatre.”
But at least all his perspectives teemed with colour. The national complexion, he could have thought, revealed itself in its hottest dyes in this quarter of the town. Here were no subdued tones of speech or apparel, no powdered flunkeyism deprecating the brutal outspokenness of nature. St Antoine, even this west side of the prison bar, took life on the raw; dressed loudly as it talked; discussed its viands and its hopes with an equal appetite for un- and re-dress; was always far readier to hang a man than a joint of beef—instinctively, perhaps, to make him that was hard tender. And to this unposturing attitude Ned felt his sympathies extend. Here, at the smallest, was nakedness unashamed—material, not, as St Denys would have it, for indulgence, but for the re-ordering of a world that had confusedly strayed, not so far, from the paths of truth to itself.
Moreover, the light, the life, the movement had their many appeals to his artistic perceptives. These latter, greatly stimulated in little Méricourt, found themselves ten times awake to this second dawn of experience. He had never been in Paris before, and it was now his fate to alight and sojourn in it during an epoch-making period. He did not forget his late company: that, indeed, was for ever shadowed in the background of his mind—St Denys and Théroigne, and, most of all, the strange little lodge-keeper whose portrait he had left unfinished. But here, in the very mid-throng of vivid life, the present so taxed his every faculty of observation, so drained the inadequate resources of his skill and of his paint-box, that interests foreign to the moment must not be allowed to contribute to the pressure on his time. Like an author in actual harness who keeps from reading books for fear of assimilating another’s style, so Ned forbade a thought of Nicette to come between him and his canvas. And assuredly his business in hand was not to paint Madonnas.
At the same time, Paris wrought upon him something beneficially. Its numerical vastness—more forcibly expressed, by reason of the intenseness of its individual feeling, than that of London—amused him with a sense of his own insignificance; the conviction driven home into his mind, as he turned bewildered in a snow of pamphlets, that his profound theories of government were but childish essays in a craft, in the complicated ramifications of which there was not a street orator but left him miles behind, taught him a modesty to which he had been hitherto a part stranger. But he grew in self-reliance as he dwindled in self-sufficiency; and that was like exchanging fat for muscle—an admirablequid pro quoin a city of gauntest shadows.
To all the concentration of his faculties upon a seething pandemonium; to all his earnest efforts to record armies of fugitive impressions, and to interpret of their sum-total the nature of the force that set them in motion, Madame Gamelle acted, in unconscious humour, the part of chorus.
“But, yes,” she would say; “the philosophers have proved the world misgoverned, and these that you see are the agents of the philosophers. They are travellers who trade in the article of truth. They teach the people to know themselves; that every one may have liberty of speech; that licence shall no longer be the privilege of aristocrats.”
“And you would know yourself licentious, mother?”
“As to that—do not ask me. I recognise it only for an admirable creed. My Zoïle would call it so. He looked to the time when he would be legally entitled to ignore the marriage vow. The poorblondin! He was a fine man, monsieur, but always unlucky. He died in the heyday of his hopes, leaving me the one precious pledge of his affection.”
Then she would poke the little frowzy baby on her arm with a stunted finger, and nod to and address it in a strain of superfluous banter:—
“Eh, mon p’tit godichon! Thou wouldst teach me to know myself in thy little dirty face? Fie, then! Hast thou been seeking for my image or thine own in the basin of fine gravy soup I set aside for monsieur the lodger’s dinner?”
So it was ever with this gruesome infant. Its presentment, or that of some part of it, haunted Ned through every course of an attenuated cuisine. The butter would exhibit a mould of its features, the milk-jug a print of its lips. The rolls appeared indented with suspicious crescents in the crusty parts; the omelettes confessed a flavour, and often an impression, of a small sticky hand. The creature itself, moreover, was a shockingly ubiquitous Puck. It was always being mislaid, as was everything portable in the house. Its shrill waking cry would issue from the depths of the lodger’s bed, into which it had burrowed with a precocious sense of the humour of appropriation; its red face rise suddenly, like an October moon, from behind a cloud of sacking on the floor. It was brought up with the fagots, and ran some narrow risks of premature cremation; it was included in the week’s washing, and its little fat stomach menaced with a flat-iron. Sometimes, when one opened a cupboard, it would fall out in company with half-a-dozen plates; sometimes madame would deposit it on a table, and, forgetting that she had done so, would heap it with casual litter as she transacted her domestic business. “No doubt,” Ned thought, “it is destined to eventual immolation in a pasty.”
Indeed, his nerves were always on the jump when there was cooking forward—a lively knowledge of which fact he could by no means evade. For the process being conducted on the floor above his head, and it being customary with madame to let everything boil over, it became a familiar experience with him to see successive samples of hismenuappear and hang in sebaceous drops from a certain seasoned patch on the ceiling, whence in time they would contribute their quota of peril to a perfect little slide of grease that had formed on the boards below. Then, at such a stage, it would be not unusual for his landlady to come into view, pledge-on-arm, at the door, herbornéface irradiated with some eagerness of triumph.
“But only think, monsieur!” she would begin.
“Pardon,” Ned would interpose; “but is it well for the child to be gnawing that great lump of cheese?”
“Cheese!Oh, mon Dieu! I must have put it on the trencher, thinking it was bread, and he has taken it, the thief!”
Then the lodger must discipline his impatience, while the comestible changed hands, to a shrill clamour, the infant finally being deposited outside the door like boots to be cleaned.
“Only think, monsieur!” cries the lady again; “the delicatecompoteI could have sworn to having prepared for monsieur’s dinner a week ago, when monsieur, nevertheless, had to go fasting for anentremet! I was right; it was made, and it was not stolen. This morning I find it thrust to the very back of the oven—baked for a week, and no more eatable than a brigadier’s wig.”
Well, all this provoked Master Ned into no desire to change his quarters. He was a genially stoic rascal, and one that could wring interest out of investments that would have repelled less imperturbable natures. So, through that autumn and winter, and deep into the spring of ’89, he stuck to his corner of the Rue Beautreillis, going little into the more fashionable centres of the town, seeking artistic adventure like a knight-errant of the pencil, and doubtless elaborately misreading, in common with many thousands about him, the signs that came and went, like a moaning wind, in the channels of the rushing life of St Antoine.
Lookingon a certain afternoon (it was that of the 27th of November) from his high perch, Ned saw the people of the streets to be in a more than usual state of excitement and commotion. Once or twice latterly it had occurred to him that the ferment of national affairs was not subsiding, as he had expected it to do, under the tonic treatment of the national comptrollers—that the people were bent on levying on their taxmasters a tax more stringent than any they had themselves groaned under. Sometimes turning, as he rarely did, into the Palais Royal, and marking how, in that garden of public sedition, the very veil had been torn from innuendo; how furious agitators, each with his knot of eager listeners, found applause proportionate to the daring of their vituperation; how struggling hordes fought from door to counter of Desein’s book-shop, that they might feed their revolutionary hunger with any cag-mag of radicalism, provided it were dressed to look raw and bloody—he would fall curiously grave over a thought of the impotence of any known principle to precipitate passions held in such intricate solution, curiously speculative as to the drifting of a rudderless bark of state. For himself, he was conscious of having been shouldered from all his little snug standpoints of legislative philosophy; of the treading-under of his protoplasmic theories by innumerable vigorous feet; of his inadmissible claim to be allotted a portfolio in any government whatsoever of man by man. He was become, indeed, quite humble, and yet larger-souled than before, by reason of his content to act the part of insignificant unit in a drama, the goodly developments of which he was nevertheless still confident enough to foretell. And surely at this point he would have cried—and that, despite the augurs—as Mirabeau cried ecstatically at a later date: “How honourable will it be for France that this great Revolution has cost humanity neither offences nor crimes.... To see it brought about by the mere union of enlightened minds with patriotic intentions: our battles mere discussions; our enemies only prejudices that may well be forgiven; our victories, our triumphs, so far from being cruel, blessed by the very conquered themselves.”
“And, indeed,” thought Ned, “what reforms were ever compelled without pressure, and what pressure, that was considerate of the pressed, was ever effective?”
Now he ran downstairs in haste to inquire of Madame Gamelle the reason of the popular excitement. He found the good woman herself fluttered by it to an uncommon degree. She put the pledge into a half-empty tub of potatoes (a something despised vegetable in the France of that date), that she might gesticulate the more comprehensively.
“It is news,” she cried; “a fine ‘facer’ to the notables. How they will squirm, the rascals! We are to have the double representation. It is decreed by Louis, the good king.”
“Rather by Sieyes and M. d’Entraigues, is it not?”
“Oh, çà! That is the way to talk. But you forget the Minister of Finance, who shall go into the calendar of saints, cheek by jowl with St Antoine himself.”
On the very noon following that of the declaration respecting the Tiers Etat, lo! there was new commotion in the streets, and holiday faces and footsteps hurrying westward. Again Ned descended and again inquired. Madame received him with a shrill cackle:—
“Oh yes! it is excitement and all excitement, as you say. But what infamy that I am chained to my kennel like a vicious dog.”
“What is to do then, madame?”
“But this, monsieur: a gas-balloon is to ascend from the garden of the Thuilleries at two o’clock.”
Ned sniggered.
“The hubbub is extreme beyond that of yesterday; and madame is cut from the enjoyment? Supposing, then, I were to take her place asfruitière?”
“That is impossible. What fly has stung you? But you can go yourself, and report to me of the proceedings.”
“Well,” said Ned, “I think I will, that I may learn to differentiate between the emotions of triumph and of pleasure.”
He saw over the trees, as he turned into the gardens, the soft blue dome of the great envelope stretching its creases to the sun—an opaline mound that glistered high and lonely as an untrodden hill summit. But about the show spot itself, when he reached it, he could have thought two-thirds of all Paris collected. In one vast circle—wheel-fely and hub—this enormous hoop of onlookers enclosed the centre of attraction. On its white face-surface upturned, as on the surface of a boiling geyser, bubbles of myriad talk seethed and broke, filling the air with reverberation. Winds of laughter ruffled it; a sun of merriment caught the facets of its countless eyes. It was a wheel of jovial Fortune—of a jewelled triumphal car that had yesterday been a war-chariot, scythed and menacing.
Compact of solid humanity throughout its circumference, its edge was nevertheless frayed, like the exterior of a clustered swarm of bees, into a flitting and buzzing superficies of place-seekers. These—scurrying, criss-crossing; sometimes settling upon and becoming part of the main body; sometimes affecting a cynical indifference to a show, from view of the inner processes of which their position debarred them; in their formless excitement, their hysteric and unmannered hunt for points of vantage, their magnifying of occasion into epoch, their utter lack of the sense of moral proportion, of the sense to distinguish appreciably between affairs of moment and affairs of the moment—exhibited, as the typical traveller exhibits, those national characteristics that seem as little accommodating to revolution in principle as to revolution in habit.
“Only here,” thought Ned, “they are not discreditable exceptions to the national rule, but fair samples of the whole.”
A couple, pausing within ear-shot of him, engaged his attention at the instant. One of these, a lord ofclinquant, self-satisfied, arrogant-looking, and dressed, one might have fancied, to the top bent of bourgeoisie, saluted the other, as a skipjack humours in himself a holiday mood of affability, with an air of tolerant condescension.
“Eh, indeed, M. David!” said he. “You profit yourself of this occasion. But, if I were in your position, I should seize it to lie abed.”
The person addressed stood a half minute at acrid gaze—his shoulders humped, and his hands gripped on the ebony crutch of his cane—before he replied. He was a man of a somewhat formidable expression, with red-brown hair all writhed into little curls, as if a certain inner heat had warped it. His eyes were hard as flints; and the natural causticity and determination of his face took yet more sinister emphasis from a permanent distortion of the upper jaw, whereon an accidental blow had caused a swelling that impaired his right speech and made of his very smile a wickedness. His figure, square and firm, if inclined to embonpoint, set off to advantage his suit of dark blue cloth, very plain and neat, with silver buttons; his handkerchief and simple ruffles were spotless, and about the whole man was an appearance of cold self-containment that was full of the conscious pride of intellectual caste.
“My good Reveillon,” he said at length, “yesterday it was decreed that the deputies of the third state should equal in number those of the nobility and of the clergy put together. That was a momentous concession, was it not? Also, the eligibility for election, into the second order, of curés, and into the Tiers Etat of Protestants, was made known—truly all subjects for popular rejoicing. Doubtless, then, your employés, leaning out of the windows of the paper factory in the Rue St Antoine” (“They could not,” thought Ned. “I know the place. Every window is barred.”), “tossed their caps into the street, into the air—anywhere but into your face, cryingVive NeckerandA bas les notables!”
“It is always for you to claim the privilege to speak, as you paint, enigmas,” said the other, with a certain excited insolence of tone. He was flushed with aggravation under the hard inquisition of the eyes that had so deliberately taken his measure.
“True enough, the rascals showed enthusiasm,” he cried. “And what then, M. David?”
“Why, you would drive them to work again, would you not, when the effervescence was subsided?”
“Assuredly. What is any effervescence but bubbles that break and vanish? Their business is not to discuss politics but to roll paper, as it is yours to cover the sheets with hieroglyphics (that, I confess, I do not understand) when prepared. Well, monsieur, you get your price and they theirs. Does yours satisfy you? But it might not if I charged the stuff you buy of me with the interest of time lost over irresponsible chatter on the part of my employés.”
“Surely, my friend, here is a little spark to produce an explosion.”
“Oh, monsieur! I can read between the lines, and I am not ignorant of what may be implied in a sneer. You arepeintre du Roi, M. David; you have chambers at the Louvre, M. David. That is very well; and it is also very well to subordinate your convictions to your prosperity, so long as the sun of royalty shines on you.”
“Be very careful to pick your words, my pleasant Reveillon,” said the painter, already, in some emotion of self-suppression, articulating with difficulty.
“Why?” said the paper-maker, waning cool as the other gathered heat. “Is it not true, then, that you are a democrat?”
“What has that to do with the question?”
“It has everything, monsieur, if I am to understand your innuendoes. It signifies, of course, your dogmatic advocacy of the labour, as opposed to the capital side of industrial economy. It signifies that, in your opinion, it is tyranny to enforce discipline upon any body of men who congregate for other than belligerent purposes, and that any popular demonstration may serve Jack Smith as excuse for neglecting his work, but not Jack Smith’s master for docking the absentee’s wages.”
“They are always little enough,” said M. David, still very indistinct.
“And I throw the word in your teeth!” cried the paper-maker hotly in his turn.
The dispute aroused small interest amongst the near bystanders, whose attention was otherwise engaged. One or two, however, gave a pricked ear to it.
“I am a kind master,” continued the angry manufacturer. “I dare any one to refute it. How many hands do I employ, monsieur, do you think? Not a few, monsieur, not a few; and of them all, two-thirds are here this afternoon—here in these gardens, with permission, though I suffer by it, to attend thefêteof the balloon.”
He spoke the last words uncommonly loudly. The painter burst into a louder laugh, that distorted his face horribly.
“My exquisite Reveillon,” he said, advancing and endeavouring to take the other’s arm, only to be peevishly repulsed. “My dear soul, you are admirable! I see crystallised in you every chief characteristic of the latter-day Parisian.”
“Very well,” said the Sieur Reveillon, sullen and glowering: “see what you like; I do not care.”
“To lay down one’s work a moment to applaud the emancipation of a people: to make a nationalfêteof a balloon ascent!”
He tried to affect an air of humorous dilemma; but the part was beyond him.
“Oh!” he cried savagely, paraphrasing La Fontaine, and stamping his foot on the ground: “On fit parler les morts; personne ne s’émut!”
By a strong effort he controlled himself.
“Good M. Reveillon,” he said, “understand that my wits aremyemployés. If, following your edifying example, I give them an outing, I must accompany them like a schoolmaster. Thus your penetration may divine the reason why I do not lie abed on this rare occasion of a holiday, which, as your plutocratship suggests, should be an excuse for rest to all poor devils of workmen.”
A young mechanic, in his squalor and hungering leanness, simply typical of his class, hurried by at the moment, eagerly seeking a place to view. His roving eyes, catching those of the paper manufacturer, took a hostile, half-anxious expression as he went on his way with a louting salutation.
“One of the two-thirds?” asked David. “A testimony, indeed, to the fostering kindness of the SieurPapetier.”
“Bah!” cried Reveillon. “It is the cant. The successful must always be held responsible for the ineptitude of the improvident. He that passed was a journeyman; and a journeyman may live very handsomely on fifteen sous a-day, if he is sober and prudent. I have been through it and I know. I have no false pride, monsieurle peintre du Roi. I was apprentice—journeyman myself—before I was master.”
As he spoke, a great seething roar issued from the crowd. Ned, who had been sketching desultorily as he listened, raised his face. A huge bulge of grey went up into the sky—a mystery of bellying silk and intricate ropes straining at a little cockle-shell of a car. To the explosion of guns, to the frantic waving of flags and handkerchiefs, to the jubilant vociferating of half a city, the quasi-scientific toy rose, and was reflected as it sprang aloft in the pupils of ten thousand eyes. The circle of the mob dilated as its components yielded a pace or so to secure the better view, and the act brought the two disputants into Ned’s close neighbourhood. M. Reveillon, for all his late colloquy, was now no less hysterical than the rest of the company.
“Voilà!” he shouted, clutching at the young fellow’s arm spasmodically: “is it not a sight the very acme of sublimity! Behold the unconquerable enterprise of man thus committed to victory or destruction. There is no middle course. He is to triumph or to die.”
His excited grasp tightened on the sleeve he held. His glance travelled swiftly to and from the sketch-book, on a page of which Ned was endeavouring to hastily record some impression of the buoyant monster above. The Englishman marvelled to see this sudden eruption from so flat and commonplace a surface.
“You can discipline yourself to draw in the face of this stupendous fascination,” cried the paper-maker. “Mon Dieu! that you had been with me at Boulogne in ’85, when Rozier’s Montgolfier took fire at the height of a thousand mètres, and he and Romain were precipitated to the earth!”
He never removed his hungry gaze from the mounting balloon while he talked.
“Fifteen sous a-day!” ejaculated M. David’s voice to the other side of Ned.
“It was like the bursting of a shell,” said Reveillon, in a sort of rapturous retrospection. “We were looking—ourvivatsstill echoed in the air; the smiles with which they had parted from us were yet reflected on our faces; there came a spout of flame, very mean and small against the blue, and little black things shot from it and fled earthwards. It was fearful—heart-thrilling, that sound of a man falling through two-thirds of a mile. And the finish—the settling vibration!Mon Dieu! but I have never since missed an ascent.”
“Fifteen sous a-day!” exclaimed David.
But Ned instinctively withdrew himself from a touch that had grown unpleasant to him.
“The cloven hoof!” he thought. “And is to be without bowels the secret of every plutocrat’s success?”
“Fifteen sous a-day!” repeated David monotonously.
Reveillon came back to earth a moment, and made him an ironic bow.
“Certainly,” he said. “It is the wages of a good journeyman, and more than those of many an artist who disdains to be a time-server.”
The disintegrated crowd, swarming abroad like a disturbed knot of newly hatched spiders, surrounded and absorbed him.M. le peintre du Roisummoned Ned’s attention, peering over his shoulder.
“It is an insolent parvenu,” he said; “a Philistine double damned for grinding the faces of the poor. Permit me the privilege to look, monsieur. An artist is known by his performance. There is a severity here that entirely commends itself to me.”
Ned’schance meeting with the painter, whose art was then much exciting, in a characteristic freak of perversity, the enthusiasm of his fellow-citizens, was the prelude to a strange littlecamaraderiebetween the two that, so long as it held, was full of positive and negative instruction to the younger man. It came about in this way, that, absorbed in the discussion of a topic of common interest, the gentlemen left the Thuilleries gardens together, M. David accompanying Ned eventually to the Rue Beautreillis. At the door of the fruiterer’s shop the famous artist held out his hand bluntly.
“You have the right religion,” he said: “in an artificial world the cleanest art shall prevail. We can have no standard of truth but what we set ourselves. Strip the model, then, of all meretricious adornments. Monsieur, I shall take the liberty to call upon you.”
He came, indeed—not once but often, walking over from his studio in the Louvre; dropping in at unexpected times; criticising the methods, the actual performance of the Englishman, and even condescending now and again to add to a sketch or canvas a few touches—technical mastery without imagination—that resolved in a moment a difficulty long contended with. Through all he would never cease to expound his views on right art and government—to him inseparable words in the condition of national sanity, and both drawn in their purity from the fountain-head of the S.P.Q.R. at its strictest period. Most often he would discourse, gazing, his hands behind his back, from the window, and sometimes quite aptly illustrating his homilies with types drawn from the human mosaic of the St Antoine below him.
M. David was at this time some forty years of age, an Academician, the acknowledged and popular leader of classic revivalism. He was fashionable, moreover, and had just completed (“mettant la main sur sa conscience”) a royal commission for a “Brutus”! Courted, prosperous, and respected, some moral myosis must still distort to his inner vision all the admiration he evoked. He would make his profit of patronage, secretly raging over the opulent condescension that his cupidity would not let him be without. He would seedouble entendrein the applause of the socialélite, yet hunger for it, cursing himself that the vital flame of his self-confidence must be dependent on such fuel for its warmth. For in truth he was the tumid bug of vanity, bursting with the very scarlet adulation that his instinct told him was inimical to the artistic life and other than its natural food.
Contributing to, or proceeding from, this insane desire of self-aggrandisement, his professional and political convictions (he could not disassociate the two) ran in a restricted channel. But who shall distinguish, in any complaint that is accompanied by an unnatural condition of the nerves, between cause and effect? So M. David’s resentment of patronage may have inclined him to a creed of classic socialism; or his classic proclivities may have prejudiced him against the presumptions of self-qualified rank. In any case, he had twisted his theories, artistic and political, into one thin cord to discipline (or hang) mankind withal, and was as narrow a fanatic as was ever prepared to crucify the disputant that ventured to question his infallibility.
Now, at the outset, Ned fell into some fascination of regard for this casual acquaintance of his. Hiscredo, social and technical, would appear to jump—its first paces, at least—with M. David’s. Moreover, the glamour that naturally informed the presentment of a notable personality condescending to the regard of a tyro who could boast no actual claim to its notice, induced him, no doubt—under this influence of a flattery indirectly conveyed—to an attitude of respectful consideration towards certain foibles in the stranger that, on the face of them, seemed irreconcilable with the highest principles of morality.
It was not so long, however, before his mind began to misgive him that his “half-God” was clay-footed—that here, indeed, was but another inevitable example of that subjective inconsistency that seems so integral a condition of the Gallic temperament. Then: “It is a fact,” he thought, “that one can never start to conjugate a Frenchman but one finds him an irregular verb. Where universal exceptions are to prove the rule, what rule is possible? Anarchy, and nothing else, is the logical outcome of it all.”
For M. David would cry to him, “In a Republic of Truth every unit must be content to contribute itself unaffectedly to the full design.” Yet (as Ned came to know) was no man more greedy than this Academician for vulgar notoriety—none more sensitive to criticism or more resentful of a personal slight. So he (M. David) would preach, not plausibly but whole-mindedly, a religion of purity and cleanliness—a religion of beauty, material and intellectual, whose very ritual should be Gregorian in its sweet austerity. Such were his professions; and nevertheless in the height of his revolutionary popularity he did not scruple to introduce into his pictures details that pandered to the most sordid lusts for the grotesque and the horrible—to generally, indeed, stultify his own declarations of belief by acts that no ethics but those of brutality could justify. Finally, it was in the disgust engendered of a flagrant illustration of such inconsistency that the young Englishman, after some months of gradual disenchantment, “cut” the king’s painter; fled, for solace of a haunting experience, eastwards again, and, snuffing with some new emotion of relish the frankincense of green woods, hugged himself over a thought of his seasonable escape from that national sphinx of caprice, to symbolise whom in a word one must draw upon modern times for the “cussedness” of Wall Street.
Yet even then, had he but foreseen it, he was backing, while dodging Scylla, into the very deadly attraction of Charybdis.
In the meanwhile autumn stole footsore, like a loveless wife, in the track of summer. She was swart and powdered, notà la mode de Versailles; drouthy too, yet with a cry to shrill piercingly in every street of every town of France.
The dust of her going rose and penetrated through chinks and doorways. It overlay the pavements so thickly that one might have thought it the accumulation of that that age-long ministers had thrown in the eyes of the people, the very precipitate of tyranny. It clung, hot and acrid, to the walls of all living palaces, of all princely monuments to the dead, as if it were the expression of that proletariat censorship that would obliterate the very records of a hateful past. It was the condensed breath of destruction settling in a stringent dew, and it might have been exhaled from the ten thousand brassy throats that made clamour in the highways ten thousandfold great because they were the resonant throats of starved and empty vessels.
For the elections were on; and what if bread were dearer than money if his chosen representative was in every man’s mouth? So, through broil and famine the city of Paris echoed to its blazing roofs with jangle jubilant and acclamatory, inasmuch as the no-property qualification gave every honest man a chance of being governed by a rogue. And what prospect in a nation of contrarieties could be more humorously enticing?
Then upon this drouth and this uproar Ned saw the steel glaive of winter smite with a clang that brought ironic echoes from the hollow granaries. It fell swift and sudden; and the clamour, under the lashing of the blade, took a new tone of terror, the wail of despairing souls defrauded of their right atmosphere of hope. For who could look beyond the present with the thermometer below zero; with the prospect blotted out by freezing mists; with the thin shadows of pining women and children always coming between one and the light; with one’s own brain clouded with the fumes of dearth? Yet the elections went on; but now in a sterner spirit of desperation—of insistent watchfulness, too, that no hard-wrung concession should be juggled to misuses under cover of mistifying skies.
Of much misery that neighboured on the wretchedest quarters of a wretched city Ned was, from his position, cognisant. The sight shook his stoicism, and greatly contributed to the disruption (St Denys and M. David negatively helping) of a certain baseless little house of toy bricks that his boyish vanity had conceived to be an endurable system builded by himself. “I have been a philosophe, not a wise man,” he thought. “Life is not a chess-board, its each next step plain to the clean thinker.”
Now it was the sight of the children that secretly wrung his heart: these poor sad babies, disciplined on a primary code of naughtiness and retribution, merit and reward, marvelling from sunken eyes that they should be so punished for no conscious misbehaviour; patiently, nevertheless, retaining their faith in God and man, and making a play-ball of the bitter earth that stung their hands and shrivelled under their feet.
Well, they died, perhaps by hundreds, when the snow was in the streets. “And let them go,” said M. David. “There shall be others to follow by-and-by. As to these, warped and demoralised, they would not prosper the regeneration of the earth. We want a clean race and no encumbrances.”
That washisphilosophy—admirably Roman, as he intended it to be. It did not suit Ned.
“There is more to be learnt from a cripple than an athlete,” said that person boldly. “I would sooner, for my own sake, study in this school of St Antoine than in yours of the Louvre, M. David.”
“Truly, every artist to his taste,” said the Academician, with an unsightly grin; and it was Ned’s taste to give of his substance royally and pityingly when a voice cried in his ear of cold and famine.
“Ah, le genereux Anglais!” wept Madame Gamelle. “He has kept the wolf from my door. Would that all mothers could secure to their dear rogues such a fairy godfather as he has been to my cherished one!”
“Without doubt,” said M. David, “he has preserved to you for your virtues the blessing of an encumbrance that by-and-by shall devour you.”
Madame must laugh and protest against this inhuman sarcasm. For the great painter, despite his austerity, had a masterfully admiring way with women that derived from the serpent in Eden.
“Here, then, to prove it no sarcasm, is my contribution to the cause,” he says, and places a sou in the pledge’s fat hand.
But Ned went his way uninfluenced of sardonic counsels.
“When this horror relaxes,” he thought, “in the spring I will go back to Méricourt. I shall be able then, perhaps, to paint a Madonna with a human soul.”
The spring came; the ice melted on the Seine; but it did not melt in the breasts of an electorate hardened by suffering, consolidated in the very “winter of its discontent.” But now at least Ned could sometimes watch from his window without dread of having his soul harrowed by the desolation and misery of its prospect—could watch the fire of the sun burning up a little and a little more each day with the rekindled fuel of hope.
Now it happened that, thus observing, he was many times aware of M. David mingling with the throng below; going with it or against it; strolling, his hands behind his back, with the air of an architect who cons the effect of his own shaping work. This may have been a fancy; yet it was one that dwelt insistently with the onlooker, that haunted and disturbed him with presentiment of evil as month succeeded month and the vision fitfully repeated itself. What attraction so spasmodically drew the man to this quarter of the town? Not Mr Murk himself, for now the little regard of each for each was severed by some trifling outspokenness on the part of the Englishman, and the painter had long ceased of his visits to the fruiterer’s shop in the Rue Beautreillis. Ned, for some unexplainable reason, was troubled.
Once he was aware of M. David, moved from his accustomed deliberation, walking very rapidly in the wake of a man who sped, unconscious of the chase, before him. Ned identified the stranger as he turned off down a by-street. It was Reveillon, the prosperous paper merchant he had happened on on the day of the balloon ascent.
“M. l’Académicien follows the man like his shadow,” he thought, pondering.
This was in April, when the shadows, indeed, were beginning to strengthen in darkness.
Then one morning he started awake to the sound of huge uproar in the streets.
The curtain of the Bastille had not risen; but it had been pulled aside a little, as it were, to make passage to the forestage of the Revolution for certain supers who were to represent the opening chorus. These came swarming through in extraordinary numbers, an earnest of what should be revealed in the complete withdrawal of the screen. They seemed violently inspired, but most imperfectly drilled; and the weapons they handled were not stage properties by any means. And their object was just this—to pull about his ears the factory of a certain M. Reveillon, who had been heard to say that a journeyman could live very comfortably on fifteen sous a-day.
The execrated building was not so far from the Rue Beautreillis but that the hubbub in the air shook the very glass of Ned’s windows. He dressed hastily and ran out into the street. Turning into the Rue St Antoine, that was half choked with a chattering, hooting mob hurrying westwards, he stumbled over the heels of a man who immediately preceded him. With an apology on his lips, he hesitated and cried aloud, “St Denys!”
Even when the stranger disclaimed the title, with a wonder in his eyes unmistakably genuine, Ned could hardly bring himself to realisation of his mistake. True, his acquaintance with the Belgian had been brief enough to admit of subsequent events clouding its details in his memory; yet that, he could have thought, was vivid to recall characteristics of feature and complexion quite impressive in their way. Here were the bright, bold colouring, the girlish contour of face, the brown eyes, and the rough crisp gold of unpowdered hair. Here were the shapely stature, the little fopperies of dress even, the actual confidence of expression. Only, as to the latter, perhaps, a certain soul of sobriety, an earnestness of purpose, revealed themselves in the present instance—a distinction to justify a world of difference.
“A thousand apologies!” said Ned. “I can hardly convince myself even now.”
“I will presume you flatter me, monsieur,” said the other, with a blithe smile. “My name is Suleau, at your service. Pardon me, I must hurry on.”
Ned detained him a moment.
“Let me entreat you, monsieur—this heat, this uproar: what is it all about?”
“What, indeed, monsieur? France, I think, rolls on its back with its feet in the air. A manufacturer of paper says that his hands can live very well, if they choose, on fifteen sous a-day.Hé—he ought to know. But they wish to gut his premises, nevertheless, these new, evil-smelling apostles of liberty.Pardon! will you come with me? I cannot wait. I am a reporter, a journalist, a scribbler against time and my own interests!”
“You are not of the popular party?”
“Ah, monsieur,mon Dieu, monsieur! but I have a sense of humour remaining to me. For all that is serious I am a Feuillant.”
He spoke the last to deaf ears. Ned had fallen behind, blackly pondering.
“This David,” he muttered, “that heard Reveillon say the words, and that has haunted the St Antoine of late—this David.” And with the thought there was the man himself coming slowly on with the crowd past him. The Englishman planted his shoulder against the torrent and managed to sidle alongside the painter. He—M. Jacques-Louis David—carried a very enigmatical smile on his face, the physical malformation of which, however, served him for conscious misinterpreter of many moods. Now it expressed no disturbance over his contact with a person who had offended him.
“Good day,” said he.
“M. David,” said Ned, “I do not forget what enraged you with M. Reveillon in the Thuilleries gardens. I think you are a scoundrel, M. David!”
The other did not even start; much less did he condescend to refute the sudden charge; but he cocked his head evilly as he walked.
“Have you considered,” he said, “that if what you imply be true (which I do not admit), you are insulting a general in the presence of his bodyguard?”
“If what I imply be true,” retorted Ned hotly, “I can understand your indulging any brutal and contemptible vindictiveness.”
Perhaps, in his strenuous indignation, he might have struck at the vicious creature beside him; but the crowd, at that moment violently surging forward, swept him anywhere from his place and saved him the consequences of a foolish impulse.
Now he would fain have turned and escaped from the press, lest by any self-misconception his conscience should accuse him of lending his countenance to an iniquity; for he saw that such was planned and determined on, and for the first time there awoke in his heart some shadowy realisation of the true import of certain months-long signs and significances. He would have turned: he could not. He was wedged in, carried forward, rushed to the very outer core of the congested block of frowsy humanity that stormed and spat and shrieked under the high dull walls of the factory.
Here, perhaps, his national self-sufficiency was his somewhat arrogant counsellor.
“What has this man done,” he cried to those about him, “but exemplify that right to liberty of speech which you all demand?”
A dozen loathing glances were turned upon him. Savage oaths and ejaculations contested the opportuneness of so reasonable a sentiment. But it was not St Antoine’s way, now or at any time, to approve counsel for the defence. Only a cry, a sinister one then first beginning to be heard in the streets, broke out here and there.
“Down with the aristocrat!”
There was threat of a concentric movement upon the Englishman. He felt it as a moral pressure even before his immediate neighbours began to close inwards. One of the latter had a similar consciousness apparently. She was a coarse, fatpoissarde, and the shallow groove that was her waist seemed moulded of the very habit of her truculent arms folded in front of her.
“Eh, my little radishes!” she cried in a voice like a corncrake’s. “Advance, you! Come, then—come! Here is a cat shall strip you of your breeches if you venture within her reach.”
Ned felt, and the crowd looked, astonishment over this unexpected championship. In the momentary proximate silence that befell, the shattering explosion of many of M. Reveillon’s windows bursting under volleys of stones was a significantly acute accent.
The fishwife nodded her head a great number of times.
“Hé! my little rats, you will not come? That is well for your whiskers, indeed. And do wenotdemand liberty of speech, as monsieur says; and are we not taking it to denounce one that would deprive us of the liberty to live? How! You would raise the devil against monsieur?” (she waxed furious in an instant)—“Monsieur l’Anglais, that all the hard winter has lived like a Jacobin friar, that he might give of his substance to the cold and the starving? Monsieur l’Anglais that lodges at the fruiterer’s, and without whose help Fanchon and her brat had been rotting now in St Pélagie! Oh,san’ Dieu! I know—I know! Pigs, beasts, ingrates! It will be well, in truth, for the first that comes within my reach!”
A rolling laugh, that swelled to a roar, took up the very echo of madame’s surprising tirade.
“Vive l’Anglais! the friend of the poor, the apostle of liberty!” shrieked twenty voices.
Too amazed by this sudden rightabout of a national weathercock to protest against its misrepresentation of the direction of his own little breeze of righteousness, Ned made no resistance, when all in a moment he felt himself tossed up on billowing shoulders, and conveyed helplessly from the thick centre of operations. The clamour of hairy throats, exhaling winey fustian about him, staggered his brain. He had not even that self-possession left him to blush to find his stealthy goodness famous. And when the escort landed him at Madame Gamelle’s door, and with hurriedvivatstestified to his immediate popularity, he could think of no more appropriate remark to make to them than, “I protest, messieurs, that I have never travelled so high in others’, or so low in my own opinion, before”; which, inasmuch as it was fortunately spoken in English, and accompanied by a profoundly ironical bow, served the occasion as gracefully as much compliment would have done.
Feeling at first something like a venturesome infant that had strayed beyond bounds only to be caught back and kissed, Ned mounted to his room to await events. They came thick and swift enough to half induce him to a re-descent upon the scene of action. That temptation he overcame; but all day long, and far into the evening, he wandered, restless and apprehensive, in the Rue St Antoine, watching its turbulent course at the flood, feeling a sympathetic attraction to the electricity of its moods, conscious of the shock of something enacting, or threatening to enact, about that congregated spot where the tumult was heaviest.
Still with the passing of day came no abatement of the popular fury, but rather an accumulating of menace; and thereupon (M. le Baron Besenval, Commandant of Paris, having arrived at his decision) down swooped upon the scene a little company of thirty bronzed and brazen French Guards, in their royal chevrons and military coxcombs; which company, clearing intestinal congestion by measures laxative, readjusted the order of affairs, and persuaded exhausted patriots to their burrows.
To his bed also went Ned reassured, and slept profoundly and confidently as a rescued castaway. But, waking on the morrow, lo! there was renewal of the uproar shaking his windows, but now as if it would splinter the very glass in its frames.
The cause, when he came to examine, was not far to seek. St Antoine, a very confraternity of weasels, baulked but not baffled, was returned to the attack; and at this last it was evident that the paper-maker’s premises were damned. Indeed, the complaint of democracy had suffered a violent relapse during the night; and now, in the new dawn, it blazed and crackled like a furnace. The streets, the roofs, the windows were massed with writhing shapes; the whole quarter jangled in a thunder of voices; a pelt of indifferent missiles, deadly only in the context, rained without ceasing upon the accursed walls.
Ned paused a moment, swirled like a straw in the current of rushing humanity, to take stock of possibilities.
“If it is so they resent a hasty word,” thought he, “God save Paris in the hour of reprisal!”
He felt a little sick at heart. He would look no more.
“I will spend an idle day in the fields of Passy,” he assured himself, “and forget it all, and return in the evening to find the storm blown over.”
He went out by way of the Place St Paul, walking along the line of quays, and watching, something with the tender feeling of a convalescent, the golden frost of sunlight that gemmed the waters of the Seine. It was a fair, sweet morning, too innocent, it seemed, to take account of human passions; and by-and-by its influence so far wrought upon him as that he was able to commit himself to it with some confidence of enjoyment. All about him, moreover, life seemed pleasurably normal—not significant of fear and apprehension, as his soul had dreaded to find it.
But with the approach of dusk his innate misgivings must once more gather force till they knocked like steam in his arteries; and, so dreading, he lingered over his return until deep dark had closed upon the town. At the barrier he heard enough to confirm his disquiet, though the reports of what had happened were so formless and contradictory as to decide him to refer inquiry to the evidence of his own senses. Therefore, in silence and heart-quaking, he made his way eastwards, and presently turned into the dark intricacy of squares that led up to the Rue Beautreillis.
The street, when he reached it, seemed given over to the desolation of night. The taller houses slept pregnant with austerity as vast Assyrian images; the lamps, rocking drowsily in their slings, blinked, one could have thought, to squeeze the slumber from their eyes. Distant sounds there were, but none proceeding from points nearer in suggestion than the far side of dawn.
By-and-by, however, one—a little gurgling noise like the sob of a gutter—slid into Ned’s consciousness, as, speeding forward, his footsteps rang out a very chime of echoes. Almost in the same moment he was upon it, or upon its place of issue—a ragged huddle of shapes pulled into the shadow of a buttress.
A clawing figure, gaunt and unclean, rose at him—recognised him in the same instant, apparently, and gave out a bestial cry.
“She is going, monsieur! May God wither the hand that beat her down, and may the soul of him that directed it scream in everlasting hell!”
He seized the young man’s sleeve and drew him reluctant forward. The huddle of frowzy things parted, that he might see.
The coarse largepoissarde; the ally who had yesterday cherished his cause and sung his praises; the great breathing, truculent woman with the defiant voice! Here was the gross material of so much vigour, collapsed, mangled, and flung aside. The little choking noise was accounted for. There was a crimson rent in the woman’s throat. She died while Ned was looking down upon her.
And this mad thing that spat at the sky? Doubtless he was her husband; and he might have been a royal duke from the freedom of his language.
“What does it mean?” cried Ned hoarsely.
One of the groping shapes snarled up at him—
“It is an instance of monseigneur’s paternal kindness to his people.”
There was nothing to be answered or done. The Englishman emptied his purse to the group and hurried on. His worst apprehensions were realised. This was but a sample of what was to follow—a vision to be repeated again and yet again, in indefinite forms. Rebellion had broken and suppurated away during his absence. There were some four or five hundred dead bodies, shot and stabbed, as earnest of its drastic treatment by the national physicians. There might have been more, but that the mob had finally given before M. Besenval’s Switzers with their grape-shotted cannon. Then it retired, pretty satisfied, however, to have justified democratic frenzy by so practical an illustration of the tyranny of class hatred; satisfied, also, as to the moral of its own retreat. M. Reveillon was become a self-constituted prisoner in the Bastille; his factory was a shapeless and clinkerous medley of rubbish. Ned, turning the corner of the Rue Beautreillis, saw the ruins, dusking and glowing fitfully, at a little distance. “And how,” he thought, with a shuddering emotion, “did he, that was so fascinated by the man Rozier’s fate, regard the burning of his own ark of security?”
The street—so it seemed in the expiring red glimmer and the small, dull radiance of bracketed lamps—was a very dismantled graveyard of broken stones and scattered corpses. Amongst the latter moved detached groups of searchers, languidly official, swinging ghostly lanterns. With a groan of lamentation, Ned turned about and beat frantically on the closed shutters of the fruiterer’s shop.
The door was opened, after a weary interval, by Madame Gamelle. The woman’s eyes were febrile. She dragged her lodger over the threshold and snapped the lock behind him. A couple of rushlights burned dimly on the counter. The pledge, in holiday antic, was stuffing a bloody cartouche-box with onions from a basket.
“They killed him at the street corner,” said madame gloatingly. “He shall never murder again—the accursed Garde Française. They had for knives only the sharp tiles from the roofs; but it was easy to willing arms.”
She was transfigured, this meek vendor of cabbages. Anywhere to scratch St Antoine was to find a devil.
“Madame,” said Ned wearily, “it is all quite right, without doubt; but to-morrow, I must tell you, I am to take my leave of Paris.”
Mr Murkwas suffering from atoujours perdrixof politics. He needed, he felt, a prolonged constitutional, both to clear his brain of a certain blood-web that confused its vision, and to enable him to sort, in fair communion with the Republic of Nature, his own somewhat scattered theories of government. He was really unnerved, indeed, by what he had seen and experienced, and the prospect of quiet woods and pastures was become dear to his soul. He would return to Méricourt, as he had promised himself he would do, in the sweet spring weather—to Méricourt, where the play of Machiavelism was but a pastoral comedy after all. He would return to Méricourt and paint into the unfinished eyes of his Madonna the fathomless living sorrow of doubt—the Son being dead—as to their own divinity.
Of the two hundred miles to traverse he walked the greater number—sometimes in leisurely, sometimes in hurried fashion, as the chasing dogs of memory slept or tracked him. But, tramp as he would, he could not regain that elasticity of heart that once so communicated itself to the “spirit in his feet.” He had gone to Paris blithe and curious; he was returning, as the idiom expresses it, with a foot of nose. In eight months the spouting grass seemed to have lost its spring. May, with all its voices, could not charm him from foul recollections; the gloom of slumbering forests was full of murder. Now for the first time he realised how the great peace he often paused to wistfully look upon was Nature’s, not his; how, flatter his soul as he might with a pretence of its partnership in all the noble restfulness that encompassed it, it stood really an alien, isolated—a suffering, self-conscious inessential, having no kinship with this material sweet tranquillity—separated from it, in fact, by just the traverseless width of that very consciousego. He felt like Satan alighted for the first time in view of Eden, only to recognise by what plumbless moat of knowledge he was excluded from its silent lawns and orchards.
This feeling came to him in his worst moods. In his best, he could take artistic joy of those effects of cloud and country that called for no elaborate detail in the delineating—that were distant only proportionately less than the distant unrealities of the stars in the sky. For the impression of outlawry in a world that was only man’s by conquest was bitten into his soul for all time; and never again, since that night spent in the shambles of St Antoine, should he recover and indulge that ancient sense of irresponsibility towards his share in the conduct of man’s usurped estate.
“We are,” he thought, “squatters disputing with one another the possession of land to which we have each and all no title.”
Nevertheless—therefore, rather—his soul acknowledged the opposite to disenchantment in its review of nature unconverted to misuse. Not before had pathos so sung to him in the warm throat-notes of birds; so chimed to him in the tumble of weirs; so looked up into his face from the fallen blossom on the grass. He might have found his healing of all things at the time had Love appeared to him in sympathetic guise.
Over the last stages of his journey he took diligence to Liége, and, at the end of a long week’s ramble, set foot once more in the old sun-baked town.
Thence, on a gentle evening, he turned his face to Méricourt, and in a mood half humour, half sadness, retraversed the hills and dingles of a pleasant experience. Somehow he felt as if he were returning, a confident prodigal, to ancient haunts of beauty and kindliness.
He had proceeded so far as to have come within a half mile of the village, when, in thridding his way through a sombre wedge of woodland, he was suddenly aware of a figure—a woman’s—flitting before him round a bend in the path. There was that in his momentary glimpse of the form that led him to double his pace so as to overtake it. This he had no difficulty in doing, though for a minute it seemed as if the other were anxious to elude him. But finding, no doubt, the task beyond her, she stopped and turned of a sudden into a leafy embrasure set in the track-edge, and stood there awaiting his coming, her head drooped and her back to a green beech-trunk.
“Théroigne!” cried Ned, nearly breathless. “Théroigne Lambertine!”
“Why do you stop me?” she said, panting, and in a low voice. “You know the way to Méricourt, monsieur.”
He felt some wonder over her tone.
“Don’t you wish me to speak to you, then? Have you already forgotten me?”
She did not answer or raise her face.
“Théroigne!” he protested, pleading like an aggrieved boy. “And little as I saw of you, I have felt, in returning to Méricourt, as if I were coming back to old friends. I have had enough of Paris and its horrors, Théroigne.”
At that she looked up at him for the first time. He was amazed and all concerned. The glowing, rich, defiant beauty he had last seen. And this—white, fallen, and desolate—the face of a haunted creature!
“What is the matter?” he whispered. “What has happened to you?”
“Paris!” she said in a febrile voice. “Ah, yes, monsieur!—you come from Paris. And did you see there——”
She checked herself, struck her own mouth savagely with her palm, then suddenly gripped at the young man’s wrist.
“What are they doing in Paris? Is it there, as he prophesied—the reign of honour and reason, the reign of pleasure, the emancipation of the wretched and oppressed? He will be a fine recruit to the cause of so much republican virtue.”
She breathed quickly; a smouldering fire blazed up in her; her very voice, that had seemed to Ned starved like her beauty, gathered to something the remembered volume.
“He? Who?” said he.
She took no notice of the question, but went on in great excitement—
“What are these horrors that you speak of? Have you seen them? What are they, I say? Do they tear aristocrats limb from limb? This truth that he used to preach—my God! there is no hope for the world until they massacre them each one!”
“That who used to preach?” said Ned, quite shocked and bewildered.
“Liars! liars! liars!” cried the girl, striking hand into hand.
Then suddenly she had flung herself round against the tree, and, in a storm of tears, had buried her head in her arms.
“Go!” she cried, in a muffled voice. “Why do you come back with the other memories? Why do you notice or speak to me? Can you not see that I am accursed—an outcast?”
He would have essayed to comfort, to reassure her. Her wayward passion took his breath away. Even while he hesitated, she turned upon him once more:—
“Areyounot also of thehaute noblesse? What truth or honour or courage can be in you, then? Yes, courage, monsieur. You have fled because you were afraid they would kill you, ashefled before his pursuing conscience. You will not tell me the truth, because you are shamed in its revelation. My God! what cowards are you all! But only say to me that he is dead—stabbed to the heart—and I will fall down and kiss your feet!”
To Ned, standing there dumfoundered, came an inkling of a tragedy.
“That Suleau,” he was thinking, half mazed, “did he jockey me; and was it St Denys after all?”
He looked at the stressed and wild-wrought creature before him in sombre pity.
“So M. de St Denys has left Méricourt?” he said gravely.
At that Mademoiselle Lambertine broke into a shrill laugh.
“M. de St Denys? But who spoke of M. de St Denys? It was he, was it not, that waived his privileges of honour that he might be on a level with us that have none? And why should he leave Méricourt, where he was ever a model and an example of all that he preached?”
“It cannot have been he, then, that I saw in Paris?”
The girl gasped, stared, and took a forward step.
“You saw him? And he was amongst the killed?”
“Théroigne!”
“Monsieur, monsieur! We have heard how the people rose; we are not here at the bounds of the earth.”
“But it was no slaughter of aristocrats.”
She gazed at him dumbly with feverish eyes, then sighed heavily, shook her head, and moved out into the open.
“So you come again to Méricourt?” she said. “You will find it wonderfully changed in these few months. Now we are possessed by a devil, and now we are under the dominion of a saint. There is an idol deposed, and a holy image raised in its place. Will you be walking, monsieur, or shall I go first?”
“We will go together.”
She laughed again with a shrill, mocking sound.
“Mother of God! what an admirable persuasiveness have these aristocrats! I had thought myself beneath his notice, and, behold! he would make me his companion—and in the face of the village, too. Come, then, monsieur. Will you take yourpaillardeon your arm?”
He listened to her with some compassion (for all her wild speech he thought her heart was choked with accumulated tears), then moved forward and walked along the woodland path by her side. To his few questions she returned but monosyllabic answers. Presently, however—when they were come out within view of the village fountain, where Ned’s first meeting with her had taken place—she stayed him with a hand upon his sleeve.
“‘As she makes her bed, so must she lie on it.’ You see I remember your words, monsieur. And, if she has made her bed as the virtuous disapprove, in England she may yet lie soft on it?”
“Without doubt, in England or elsewhere, so long as she lives only for the present.”
“Ah! little Mother of God! but how natural to these aristocrats comes the preaching-cant.”
All in a moment her eyes and her speech softened most wooingly, and she put up her hands, in a characteristic coaxing manner, to the young man’s breast.
“I am ill and weary now,” she said. “It is not good to suffer long the hatred of one’s kinsfolk, the gibes of one’s familiars. But in another atmosphere I should learn to resume myself—at least to resume all that of me that concerns the regard of men. The result would be worth the possessing, monsieur. Monsieur, when you return to England, will you take me with you?”
As she spoke, a light step sounded coming up the meadow-path, before mentioned, that ran into the head of the woodland. It approached; Théroigne, with a conscious look, fell back a little; and immediately, moving staid and decorous over the young grass, the white lodge-keeper of the chateau came into view. She suffered, Ned could see, one momentary shock of indecision as her eyes encountered his; then she advanced, and, without a word, went on her way into the wood. But, as she passed, she acknowledged Ned’s salutation with a grave little inclination of her head, and with the act was not forgetful to withdraw her skirts from contact with those of Mademoiselle Lambertine, who, for her part, shrank back and made not the least show of protest or resentment.
Ned, however, regarded with some twinkle of amusement the slow-pacing figure till it was out of sight, and then he only turned to Théroigne with a questioning look.
The girl came up to him again, but doubtfully now, it seemed, and with a certain wide awe in her eyes.
“You must not say it, monsieur,” she whispered; “you must not say what I can read on your lips. She has seen the Blessed Virgin since you were last here—has seen and spoken with her.”
“God forgive me for a scoffer! And that is why she is all in blue, I suppose, and why her blue skirt must not touch hems with your red one?”
Théroigne hung her head.
“When does monsieur return to England?” she said only.
Ned clasped his hands behind his head and stretched vigorously.
“Very soon, I think. Mademoiselle Théroigne, I am tired of you all. Very soon, I think.”
She made as if she would have touched him again; but he gently put her away from him. At that she looked up in his eyes very forlorn and pleading.
“Mademoiselle Théroigne,” said he, “I do not know or ask you your story. Here, since I left, all flowers seem to have run to a seed that is best not scattered abroad. I cannot, of course, prevent your going to London if you choose. Only, for myself, I must tell you, that myself is at present as much as I can undertake to direct and govern. Besides, it is not at all likely that you would findhimthere.”
In an instant she was again all scorn and passion. Her lip lifted and showed her teeth. She humped her shoulders; her hands clinched in front of her.
“Not to understand,” she cried, “that that is my very reason for desiring the refuge of your barbarous land! To escape from myself and the murder in me!”
“But why leave Méricourt at all?”
The blight of her fury was as sudden as the blast that springs from a glacier.
“Mayyouknow what it is to roll in a trough of spikes and find no release in your agony! Cold, passionless, insolent! Lazarus, to refuse to dip your finger in water! But I will go in spite of you: I will go, monsieur, and laugh and snap my fingers in your face!”