“Your name—your profession?”
“St Denys, by principle and practice a demagogue,” faltered the prisoner.
“Dost know of what thou art accused?”
“I am innocent, M. le président—before God, I am innocent!”
Something white moved forward—struck him on the shoulder.
“And beforeme, Basile de St Denys?”
He whipped about, and uttered a cry like a trapped hare.
“It is enough,” said the judge, with admirable intuition. He was by this time so far sated with his feast of blood that a nicely balanced “situation” was like an olive to his wine. He would not cheapen the flavour by unduly extending it.
“The citoyenne Théroigne pronounces sentence,” he said. “I wash my hands of the matter. Let the prisoner be enlarged.”
He took a gulp from a glass at his side, and bent to write in his book. His guards laid hands on their victim. With a shriek, St Denys tore himself free, and fell at the feet of the woman.
“Théroigne!” he cried, abasing himself before her—clutching at her skirt, “don’t let them take me—me, that have lain in your arms!”
Grovelling on the floor, he turned his agonised face to the president.
“She did not denounce me, monsieur! your generosity misinterpreted her motive.” (He caught again at the dress, writhing in his dreadful shame.) “Say you did not mean it! Give me a little time to repent. I have wronged you, Théroigne; but I never ceased to love you in my heart. Give me time, in mercy, and I will explain. You have not seen. You don’t know the foulness and the horror of it!—Théroigne!”
Looking up, he saw the stony impassibility of her face, and sank upon the boards, moaning “Pardon—pardon!”
She stood gazing down upon this poor revealed baseness—this idol self-deposed.
“Pardon!” she said at last, in a quiet, even passionless voice. “And do you conceive, monsieur, the exorbitance of your demand? But I will put the case to these citizens, and take their verdict.”
She raised her beautiful hard face, addressing the board—
“What price, messieurs, for an innocence ravished under pretext of a union of free-wills—a union that was to be more indissoluble than marriage, yet that lasted only a summer’s day? What price for a broken contract when the shame threatened; for the dastardly desertion of a wounded comrade; for the bitter desolation of a heart doubly widowed and slandered through its trust? What price for the ruined honour of a family, for the curse of a father? What price for exile from all the peace of life; for—my God! what price for a faith, that was so beautiful, destroyed; for a name that necessity has made infamous amongst men?”
She paused, and a loud murmur from her listeners eddied through the room. She caught at her skirt, seeking to release it from the clutch of him that held it. It was doubtful if the dying wretch took in much of the significance of her words. He crouched there, only whimpering and swaying and entreating her half articulately.
“Thou wouldst always teach me the immortality of such a faith,” she cried in quick passionateness, “whilst thou wert giving me to an immortality of shame.”
Suddenly she threw her hands to her face.
“Oh me! oh me!” she wailed in a broken voice.
For the first time some core of anguish in Ned seemed to melt and weep itself away.
“It is come at last,” his heart exulted. “She will pardon him.”
As swiftly as it had seized her the emotion fled. She held out her open palms, as if in a devil’s blessing, above the prostrate man.
“They are soiled with blood!” she cried. “Let the victims, when my name is execrated, testify against you, not me!”
She seemed to listen to the moaning entreaty that never ceased at her feet. The president shifted in his chair and was restless with some papers. This situation—it was interesting, tragic, spiced with unexpected revelation; but the occasion, apart from it, was peremptory; the killers were clamorous outside over the unaccountable break in the programme.
“My honour,” cried Théroigne, “my early innocence, my faith and peace of mind! If I name the return to me of these as the price of blood, what is thy answer?”
His moaning rose only like a wind of despair. She drew herself erect and turned to the judges.
“Messieurs—the price?”
The whole company seemed to spring to its feet. A roar went up from it—and subsided.
“It is answered,” said the president. “Take M. St Denys away.”
There was a scurrying forward of men—a sudden stooping—a struggle. Shriek after shriek came from the ground. Ned leapt into the fray like a madman.
“To subscribe,” he screamed, “to the revengeful fury of a wanton! It is not liberty or justice. Why, look at her, look at her. The beast that would murder twenty innocents to secure the destruction of one that had wounded her vanity. Gentlemen! to be so governed by a harlot—to be——!”
He choked as he fought. There were savage hands at his throat.
“Do not harm him. I would not have him harmed.”
It was Théroigne that spoke. She stood apart, white and chill as a figure of ice.
He spat curses at her, that mingled with the deadlier tumult. Monsieur le président made his voice heard above the din.
“Eject this person, without hurt, from the rear of the prison.”
Seized, then, despite his frantic struggles; protesting; striving for foothold; conscious always of the desperate outcry—faint, and fainter—of the unhappy man he had sought to befriend, Ned felt himself hurried along corridors, borne down steps and by way of echoing dank vaults—thrust violently into a world of spacious silence.
A door shut with a steely clang behind him. Before, stretched a desolate waste tract of fields. The moon was at its full-flood light, and the whole world seemed to float quietly on a sea of peace.
He threw himself, face-downwards, amongst the tufts of coarse grass, and cried upon the flood to overwhelm him.
Atthe end of November the young Viscount Murk was still a sojourner in Paris. Always reserved and self-contained, he was become by then a creature of wilful and habitual loneliness, with something, indeed, of the moral dyspepsia that is induced of the morbid appetite that leads one to feed upon one’s own heart. And when the heart is so inflamed of love as to be sensitive to the least imaginary slight, assuredly the dyspepsia, as in Ned’s case, shall be acute.
Men of few or no friendships have a very undivided passion to bestow when at last the call comes to them. At the same time such are wont to signalise the early stages of their complaint by a diffidence so exaggerated as that, in the nature of nature, it must degenerate in course into a desperately injured vanity. It is to be feared that, at this period of his ailing, Ned was horribly big with a sense of grievance generally against the social order, that seemed so parsimonious of the favours (as represented by one only favour, in fact) that his position entitled him to draw upon. What was the good, in short, of being possessed of acres, a lordship, an agreeable personality, if all could not procure him the single modest gift he had ever asked of Fortune?
That was a sentiment for his bitterest moods. In his more reasonable, he would acknowledge to himself, with a sorrowful rapture, that no human desert could prove itself worthy of the Hebe-goddess at whose pretty feet he had worshipped.
So he waited on and on—because irresolution, also, is a necessary concomitant of extreme diffidence. He waited on, remote from his natural state, constantly on the prick of flight, yet always fearing to move, lest a vilely humorous destiny should take his sudden decision for the point to a game of cross-purposes. He waited on, shrinking ever more into his unwholesome self; avoiding company—comradeship, even; but half-conscious of the screeching barbaric world about him; hearing only distant echoes from the world over-seas. Now and again it would occur to him—upon his receipt of those periodic advices from his steward that made the almost sum of his communications with a life that had grown curiously shadowy to him—to put his own native instruments (in the person of this same steward) to the use of ascertaining and reporting upon the movements of Madame de Genlis and her charges. But always he was faced thereupon by a score ghosts of apprehension—that such confidences might beget familiarities vulgarising to the aloofness of his passion; that the necessary interval that must elapse before he could procure a reply must debar him from the independence of action that he still claimed, without enjoying; most, that the coveted news itself, when it should reach him, might do no better than confirm a haunting fear. And so he dwelt on, passing at last, it seemed, into the very winter of his discontent.
Shunning—since that September night of a tragedy that had stricken him for the time being half-demented—personal intercourse with any—even the gentle Vergniaud—whose precepts and practice of liberty seemed so grotesquely irreconcilable, he lost something of his former feeling of a moral participation in the scenes enacting about him. Of the revengeful woman, with whose destinies a joyless fatality had appeared to connect him, he had seen nothing since the hour of his agonising experience at the Salpétrière—had heard only, with a savage exultation, that her latest connection with the moderate party was undermining her popularity with that more formidable class of which the link-women on the prison steps had been prominent representatives.
“She will be devoured by her own dogs,” he would think; and “God in heaven!” he would cry in his soul, “to what an association with cutthroats and queans has Providence thought fit to condemn me—me whose heart burns always like a pure steadfast lamp before the shrine of its divinity!”
* * * * * * * *
One bitter evening Ned found himself abroad in the streets—a mere waif of destiny, hustled and jogged into the kennels by an arrogant wind. The iciness of this dulled all his faculties, blinded him as he struggled aimlessly on. “It must make the stones weep,” he thought, “or why should my eyes fill with water!” The lamps slung across the narrower gullies danced like boats at their moorings. The very shop fronts seemed to flap their sign-boards, like hands, for warmth.
He had crossed the river and penetrated the Faubourg St Germain as far as the Rue de Vaurigard. On his right, the sombre towers of the Luxembourg reeled into the night; on his left, a starry quiver of lamps shaped out the portico of the Théâtre-Français.
He was numb with cold. The glow and movement about the theatre drew him—as they often did nowadays—to a bid for temporary self-forgetfulness. He ran up the steps, entered a warm and lively vestibule, and took a box ticket for the performance.
This, when he came to view it, opened with a one-act sketch—“Allons, ça va!”—a very patriotic and warlike little piece. He had seen it before, and it did not greatly interest him. He was, in fact, sitting in the covert of his retreat watching rather the house than the players, when all in a moment his heart bounded, and he shrank back into the shadow of the wall-hangings. Opposite him he had seen a party enter a screened box, aloge grillée—nothing very significant in itself. But a minute later the grating had swung open, revealing—Pamela.
She did not at first catch sight of him. She sat to the front of the tier—she and the little pink-eyed daughter of Orleans. Her cheeks, her hair, her eyes were all a soft glory under the radiance of the lamps. He thought he had never seen her look so happy and so beautiful.
There were figures, the indistinct forms of men, standing behind the ladies; but these he could not identify.
A great sigh of ecstasy, half anguish, escaped him. He leaned forward, and at that instant the girl raised her face and saw him.
Under the shock of recognition, he was conscious of nothing but that he had bowed across the house—that he had immediately leaned back in his seat, his pulses drumming, his eyes blinded with emotion.
When he dared to look again—the grille was closed.
A swerve of actual vertigo seemed to send him reeling. The next moment, thinking—though, indeed, he had done, had looked, nothing to attract observation—that his condition must be patent to the audience, to the stage, he brought his reason by a huge effort under command.
The grille was shut. The door of heaven had been slammed in his face.
Now, he must fight to ignore the fiends of wicked alarm that swarmed about his brain. He would close all his avenues of intelligence—render himself a thing mute and dumb, his faculties in abeyance, until the moment of resolution should arrive. There might be any explanation, other than one personal to himself, of the shutting of the grating. Should he flog his reason for a wherefore, it would be like brutally coercing an innocent witness. He must not, in the name of sanity, allow his soul to be drawn into profitless speculations. Upon the supreme ecstasy of knowing that here, after all these sick months of waiting, was the period to be put at last to his uncertainty, he must concentrate his thoughts, permitting none to side issues.
He triumphed by sheer force of will—sitting out the end of the little play. But the instant the curtain fell he rose to his feet, swept the frost from his brain, and—without giving himself stay or pause in which to think—left his box and made his way round to the opposite side of the house. His head now seemed full of heat and light; he was not conscious of his lower limbs.
Almost immediately he came upon two men stepping from the rear of a box into the passage. One of these was the Duke of Orleans. The other was a tallish young man, a little older than himself, of a fine intelligent expression. Both gentlemen were dressed to the prevailing taste in clothes that were something an ostentatious advertisement ofbourgeoisie. But the extravagance was vindicated in the younger of the two by the mournful spirit of romance that seemed to inhabit behind a pair of very soft grey eyes.
Ned addressed Egalité at once, and in a manner, unwittingly, almost imperious; for in this tender present sensitiveness of his condition he imagined he foreread in that person’s stony regard a repudiation of his acquaintanceship, and he was desperate to preoccupy the situation. He had not, indeed, forgotten the confidential words uttered by the duke at the moment of their first and latest parting; and now his heart went sick in the fear of what might be implied by Egalité’s obvious intention to stultify, by avoidance of him, any significance such confidence might have been held to express.
“I have the honour to reintroduce myself to monsieur le duc,” he said. “I congratulate monsieur le duc upon the safe return of those, with the delivery of a letter referring to whose movements in England I some months ago had the pleasure to charge myself.”
The prince’s eyes opened and shut like an owl’s. His bilious face seemed to deprecate a peevish derision it could not withhold.
“I do not recognise,” he began, looking through mere slits between lids, “whom I have——” then suddenly he checked himself impatiently and turned to his companion with a shrug of his shoulders.
“My lord,” he said, “let me make known to you M. le Vicomte Murk, who once was good enough to constitute himself Hermes to your adorable Pamela.”
Ned stood rigid under the shock of all that was implied in the insolence. The duke’s young companion stepped forward and shook him by the hand. Did this stranger know, or intuitively guess, something of the silent tragedy that was enacting before him? His soft eyes were at least full of generosity and sympathy.
“I know your lordship by name,” he said. “I am Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and I am sure Pamela will like to thank you in person for your disinterested service.”
Ned drew himself up, like a martial hero giving the signal for his own execution.
“I will take my sentence from her lips,” he said to the kind eyes, and passed into the box.
He was close to her at last—and for the last time. She turned to glance at him, and instantly away again, with a pert tilt of her chin. He saw her stealthily advance a hand in the shadow, and twitch her companion by the skirt. The little lady gave a start.
“What is the matter, coquine?” she exclaimed. Then she saw Ned, flushed pink, and dropped the gentleman a shy bow.
She was happy to renew monsieur’s acquaintance, she said. And had monsieur been in Paris all these months since they last had the pleasure of seeing him in “nôtre cher Bury”?
Yes, monsieur had been in Paris the whole time: that was to say, ever since, in pursuit of monsieur le duc, he had left Belgium, whither, it would appear, he had been despatched on a fool’s errand.
Mademoiselle gave a little deprecating shrug of her shoulders.
“And monsieur, no doubt, has justified us in our choice of a messenger?” murmured Pamela, from ambush of the box curtains.
Ned turned upon the young voice. His tongue was dry; his very features seemed stiffened into a mechanical expression of suffering.
“Yes,” he said. “I have been as great a fool as Uriah.”
The girl gave a little laugh. Probably she understood only the vague inference. She drew aside the curtain and looked upon the house. Her head budded from dusk into light, standing out like an angel’s seen in a dream. The soft moulding of her face and neck was painted in dim sweet eclipse—violet, where it intensified in the deeper curves. In her shadowy hair—like a dryad’s curled by moonlight—a single diamond—a very star of morning—burned. It was Ned’s fate—the common irony of love—to find the prize figure never so desirable in his sight as at the moment of its bestowal on another. His heart was sick with a very hunger as he looked down on her.
“O Dieu—quelle horreur!” she exclaimed, referring to some one of the audience. She tapped her foot, drew back her head, suppressed a tiny yawn.
“What has become of Edward?” said she, as if she were unconscious that their visitor were not withdrawn.
“It is my name,” said Ned.
She glanced at him disdainfully, with the ghost of an insolent laugh.
“You here still, monsieur? Will you please go and tell the fiddles to begin?”
“And shall I dance to them to entertain you?” he said.
Her attitude robbed his passion even of a redeeming dignity. His devotion seemed comparable with the sick devotion of a schoolboy towards a holiday coquette.
“Mon Dieu!” she cried. “You would at least entertain us more than now.”
The catgut gave its first screech as she spoke.
“I will go,” he said hurriedly; but he yet lingered out the final anguish.
“Have I not already entertained you enough? And I have not yet congratulated the prospective Lady Fitzgerald. And what shall I do with the flower you gave me, Pamela, when I accepted madame’s service because I loved you?”
For the first time she flushed angrily.
“You have no right to say it,” she cried. “And do you suppose I constitute myself the fairy godmother to every little weed I bestow!”
Mademoiselle d’Orléans half rose from her seat.
“Nay,” said Pamela, gently coaxing her to resume it: “for monsieur will see the wisdom, I am sure, of not further enlarging upon an error of his own.”
He uttered a deep sigh.
“An error!” he said—“My God—yes, an error!”—and he bowed low and left the box. The little kind royalty uttered a sob as he vanished.
And such was the manner of the end—no renunciation ennobled of chivalry on his part; no compassion, no sympathy on hers. And he could blame no one but himself. His imagination, it seemed, had clothed a skeleton with flesh. Unlike dreaming Adam, he had awakened and found his imagination a lie. He walked from the tawdry gates of his fool’s paradise, and felt the wind rattle in his bones.
Outside, he found the two men withdrawn. He made his way into the street, a strange numbness in his brain. It was like exaltation—the mere mad ecstasy of self-obliteration. For the time it seemed to carry him forward—a spirit disembodied, shorn of every instinct but that of flight. The wind thrust at, the dust choked, the jumping lamps mocked him. He paid no heed to a malice that was powerless any longer to influence his movements.
Pressing forward aimlessly, he came out on the Pont Neuf. Few passengers were now abroad; and these, butting with a sense of personal grievance against the blast, took no notice of the significant attitude of one who, upon such a night, could stop to dwell upon the river. But presently a single pedestrian—a woman—going by, uttered a stifled exclamation, checked herself, slunk into the angle of a buttress, and stood watching him.
He was gazing upon the black swing of water below. Suddenly he rose, returned a few paces the way he had come, and went down into the gloom of the quay where it stooped under the bridge’s shadow. The woman followed stealthily.
The wind had long ago taken his hat. He unbuttoned and flung open his coat. She came swiftly to him and seized him by the arm. He turned upon her—dragged himself free with a start of repulsion. His face underwent a change—flashing into an expression of mad fury.
“Again!” he shrieked. “Why do you pursue and haunt me! I think you are my genius for all devilry!”
For a moment it looked as if he would strike her—her, Théroigne. She stood, where he had thrust her, without the shadow thrown by the bridge, a dim glow falling upon her face from a far lamp above. Even in this tumult of his rage he was conscious of an inexplicable new meaning in her eyes. They were like caves of darkness alive with a suggestive inner movement.
“I called to find you,” she said stilly, without emotion. “Thecitoyen propriétairetold me you were abroad—probably at the theatre. I followed on the chance; and destiny, it seems, was my guide.”
“Why did you call? Why did you follow?—we have nothing of a common interest. I loathe you—do you hear! I curse the day on which you came into my life!”
She never moved.
“Is it not our common interest,” she said, “to wish to die?”
He gasped, and stood staring at her.
“Ah!” she went on; “but I had heard, and wondered for the result. They were betrothed no further back than yesterday; they are to be man and wife in a few weeks. He is an impatient lover—this handsome chasseur. In a few weeks she will lie in his arms—the pretty, loving babouine.”
He lifted his hand again with a furious gesture; and at that she cast back the hooded cloak which she had held clutched about her face and breast, and, coming swiftly to him, dared him with her brilliant eyes.
“Strike!” she cried; “it is what I ask. Only thou shalt strike thyself through me. What! thou know’st now what it is to be trampled under by the feet thou worship’dst! And thou shalt be haunted evermore by the shadow of another man’s happiness. Strike, I say, and kill, like me, thy spectre of unfulfilment with despair!”
She tore at her dress, baring her white bosom to him.
“Strike!” she cried again; then suddenly her hands dropped limp, and she moaned to herself.
“I dare not think. I cannot sleep. He is always there, weeping and imploring. But there is something between—a deep red pool, with an under-motion. If I were to wade in—my God!” she cried—“I am afraid even to die!”
She held up her hands to the man before her, as if in prayer.
“Take me with thee—there, into the water. I will not struggle, if thou hold’st me tight. Thou wert his friend for a little while, and thou also hast suffered. Thou wilt plead for me, monsieur, wilt thou not?—thou wilt plead?”
Her voice broke in a shiver. For all its wretchedness, the heart of her hearer was stricken anew.
“Thou Théroigne,” he said; “thou poor twice-abandoned fool. Wouldst thou urge upon me that a first error is to be atoned by a second! Oh, thou woman—not to understand how cheap that love must be held that would disprove itself to spite its object!”
God knows what angel of light or darkness had been at his elbow a moment earlier. Now, he put his hand into his breast as he spoke.
She looked at him, lost and wild.
“Thou didst not come to throw thyself into the river?” she muttered.
“No,” he said—“but only this.”
He cast it from him with the words—something he had taken from his pocket—a little spiked and scented parcel, so ridiculous and so tender. It had fulfilled its mission at last. That was “writ in water.” And the poor cherished heels, stuck with a sprig of withered geranium, went down to the sea—or, perhaps, into the maw of some sentimental pike that would swallow it all, as we mortals swallow any absurd love-story.
Now, if the action was inspired by a despairing man’s intuitive altruism on behalf of a despairing harlot, we may not call it bathos.
Suddenly the woman broke into a shrill laugh.
“Was it an unfruitful token? Better thou and I!” she cried. “And so thou still hold’st love inviolable?”
He answered with his eyes. She came quite close to him—looked up into his face.
“That is well. Come with me, then, now the madness is past.”
“With you!” he exclaimed scornfully. All his repulsion of her was returning before the reclaimed devil in her eyes.
“With me, murderess and courtesan. Oh! it is not for myself,” she said. “It is for another—whose confession to me an hour ago sent me to seek thee out—that I would carry thee.”
He stared, dumfounded, muttering “Another? what other?”
“One,” she said, “that hath pursued thee long months with bleeding feet and a broken heart. One, that I came upon to-day, lost and wandering in the cold streets, and that I, being no man, took home with me and comforted.”
“What other?” he murmured again, but with a dreadful intuition of the truth.
“Nay,” she said, “love hath not done with thee. Only thou must run with the hare instead of hunting with the dogs.”
“What other?” he repeated dully.
“A saint, monsieur; yet one that, for all her chastity, hath caught the infection of these liberal times.”
She gazed into his face piercingly.
“I swear I never guessed,” she murmured. “I swear I hold her the dearer and the purer that she is revealed human in the end. The handmaid of God! Ah! but so to testify to His choice by this long discipline of her heart! And now, directing her in this pursuit of thee, He ratifies the new licence; and she shall not be less the saint because her passion is sanctified of a human love.”
“It is a vile blasphemy,” said the man. “You speak of Nicette Legrand.”
She clapped her hands.
“But, yes,” she cried in shrill triumph; “I speak of Nicette Legrand, whose heart, it seems, thou stolest—one of the common things that thou, and such as thou, would use to the profit of an idle hour, whilst thy honour was pledged elsewhere. But who enlists Love in his service shall engage a parasite to devour him.”
“Nicette!” he only murmured once more.
“Take thy fill of her name,” said the girl scornfully. “I tell thee, Love presumes upon his hire. Didst thou think he had discarded thee? He shall prove a tyrant whom thou thought’st to make thy servant.”
He fell, suddenly, quite calm and cold.
“Well,” he said, “so Nicette is in Paris?”
She answered—
“In Paris—a month’s long journey, by rock and briar, for those poor, patient feet. Oh,” she cried, “that I should ever have unwittingly wronged her by seeking to convert this block—this stone—to my own passionate uses!”
“And so she hath explained it to you?” he said, in the same even tone. “Well, she is a liar, from first to last; and at least it is fitting that a murderess should give sanctuary to a murderess.”
She stared at him, breathing softly.
“Am I to killyou?” she said.
He laughed without merriment.
“Listen to me, Théroigne. I never desired this woman, or gave her one pretext for asserting that I did. If she says otherwise, she lies. If she tells you that she left Méricourt to follow me, she lies. She has fled because she has been discovered in a deception as vile, a crime as inhuman, as any that have blackened the world since the race began.”
She still stared at him, her lips moving, but she did not speak.
“I have been in Méricourt since you,” he went on, without a change of intonation, “and I was witness to what I say. The bubble is burst—the superstition, by this time, a black memory. The tree that she haunted, she haunted because it contained in its hollow heart the dead body of Baptiste, her little brother, whom she had murdered—morally, before God, whom she had murdered, I say—out of her hatred of him. She haunted the scene of her crime, and, when that was threatened with detection, she invented the legend of the vision to cover it. But retribution abided, and, when that threatened, she fled.”
For a moment silence fell between the two. The wind shrilled in their ears; the hollow wash and sweep of the river came up to them.
“If it is true,” whispered Théroigne at last—“if it is true!”
“It is true.”
She seemed to gaze at without seeing him.
“So worn and so pitiful!” she muttered; “and I took her in, and clung to her, and found my own religion justified in hers.”
Suddenly she was hurrying from him, speeding upwards towards the bridge. He stood paralysed an instant; then sprang and overtook her, walking by her side.
“Where are you going?” he cried.
“To hurl her into hell!” she shrieked, “if it is as you say.”
They drove on together, across the river, through the blown darkness.
Presently she stopped, and turned upon him once more.
“Why do you follow me?”
“To see that you do nothing that shall enable you before God to testify against me.”
“Ah!” she cried, with a most bitter derision. “You are not desperate. You have never loved, as I read it—as Nicette reads it. You have never staked your soul against your heart. And this is what she hath done for the sake of one little glimpse of her heaven—of seeing you without being seen.”
“She sent you to tell me so?”
“You lie!” said the woman quietly. “I took her secret from her because she was worn and despairing; and then she implored me only to show her where she might, hidden, look upon you once again, and so die and rest forgotten.”
She struck her palms together.
“And now—now!” she muttered.
She fled on her way. The man had some ado to keep up with her. He went, indeed, at length, with loaded steps, on this wild, sorrowful night. To love and lose, and to be so loved! It was a stab of poignant anguish to his heart that what he had held so sacred in himself should be claimed of a vileness with which he had no sentiment in common. But this—surely this: the love that can exonerate even wickedness done for its sake. The wretched woman loved him—perhaps with a love as intrinsically pure as that he had given to Pamela. He groaned as he sped on.
They crossed the quays, and hurried by the Place of the Three Marys. A frowzy tricoteuse, coming from a wine-shop, recognised Théroigne, and stood barring their path.
“Ame traîtresse!Modératrice!” cried the creature, in guttural fury, and broke into a torrent of oaths.
The girl shrank against the wall, proffering no retort, her eyes wide with fear. Ned took her arm, put the woman on one side, and they scurried on their way, pursued by a blatter of expletives.
The wind cut into their faces with blades of ice as they turned into the Rue de Rohan.
Infront of the fire a girl lay on the floor asleep. She had placed herself on her side, facing the glow and cuddled into it; but in the relaxation of profound slumber her head had fallen back, so that the light from a lamp on the wall illuminated her features. These looked curiously, pathetically child-like under the seal of a rest so deep that her bosom hardly rose and fell to accent it. Her lips were a little parted; her cheeks a little hollow, and quite colourless. From every ruffle of her hair—fine and pale golden as a rabbit’s fur—that lay spilt about her head, to the toe-tips of her white bare feet (that nestled into one another despite some inflammatory wounds that scarred them as cruelly as if they had been bastinadoed), she was so almost motionless as to seem like a figure in tinted porcelain—King Cophetua’s beggar-maid, it might have been; for, indeed, her clothes were very stained and ragged.
The door opened, and a woman came swiftly to her side and gazed down upon her—a woman, under the fierce glow and lust of whose beauty she seemed to shrink into the mere semblance of a doll thrown down by a passionate child.
The woman looked, then suddenly fell upon her knees and stooped her lips to the ear of the sleeper.
“Nicette,” she cried low, “Nicette!”
The girl on the floor started; then she stirred, moaned, put her hand restlessly to her forehead, and again, with a sigh, dropped back into the pit of slumber. But the moment of half-consciousness seemed to have robbed her of the perfect weanling innocence. Now her respirations came harder; every breath she exhaled proclaimed her woman. Still, she dreamt happily; and a smile trembled on her lips.
Seeing it, Théroigne turned and beckoned to the man to come close. He approached from the door and stood behind her, away from the sleeper’s range of vision. The woman pointed down at the dreaming face.
“Dost thou still accuse it?”
“Awake—yes,” he said.
She frowned, and again bent to call into the girl’s ear.
“Nicette! where is thy brother Baptiste?”
A shadow, like that of a cloud that ruffles water, went over the quiet face. The regular breathing hitched and wavered; some broken soft ejaculations came from the lips. Suddenly the lids flickered—the eyes opened, unspeculative for a moment, then snatching the soul of them from unearthly sweet pastures, in whose fragrance it had lovelily nested. Still they were full of the glamour of holiday, remote in their vision, coy of things material.
“Théroigne!” she murmured, happy and confident, her half-recovered self only the core of a little atmosphere of the most loving warmth of emotion and feeling.
The woman bent and lifted the other—up, into her arms.
“Didst thou hear me call?” she said caressingly. “And what wert thou dreaming of, dearest?”
“Great God!” thought Ned, “is this Théroigne, in actual truth, a fiend!”
“Dreaming!” said the girl softly; “of what am I always dreaming, Théroigne?”
“Of what, indeed! Of things lost and longed for? Perhaps, sometimes of the little poor brother that was murdered and hidden in a tree?”
A voice shrieked at her back.
“Damnation seize thee!”
She let fall her burden and, scrambling to her feet, turned upon the voice.
“What, then!”
“So wanton!” cried Ned—“so wanton and so cruel!”
His fury leapt in a moment, like a boiling spring. He could not have explained or controlled it—could not even have traced its source to a deep incorruptible chivalry that was instinctive tohissex and beyond the understanding of the other.
“Cruel?” she exclaimed madly. “And am I not thy delegate—thy informer?”
“Not, so to take advantage, like a cursedmouchard, of this poor drugged wretch!” he cried. “Why, God in heaven! areyouso much less foul——?”
“You devil!” she cut in—“you dog! Didst thou not thyself, a minute ago, slander her behind her back?”
“I accused her openly,” cried Ned—“as I accuse her now!”
A stifled scream of agony answered him. He looked into a corner of the room, whence, from shadow, the sound had come. The dreamer—momentarily half stupefied by her fall—had risen, while they raged, and stood shrunk into an angle of the wall.
Théroigne leapt upon her—seized her by a wrist.
“Look!” she screeched, “upon him that thou wouldst give thy life to see, not being seen; to prevail with whom thou wouldst sacrifice thy honour and thy fame with heaven. Hear him now—how he regards thy devotion. Tell him—tell me, rather—he lies. Tell me thou art not a murderess; and I will crush the slander back upon him till it tears like a splintered rib into his heart!”
She stood quivering—glaring—worrying the arm she held.
“Speak!” she panted brokenly, “and leave the rest to me.”
A moment’s silence succeeded the terrible outcry.
“It is true what he says,” then whispered Nicette. “I murdered Baptiste.”
Théroigne dropped the wrist she clutched, and swung back heavily against the wall.
“My God!” she muttered, “my God!”
Then she mastered herself faintly, like a weary creature.
“It was my last hope—the queen, the gentle mother. To justify, through her handmaid, the passion of woman for man. It is ended. There is no good in the world—no truth—no virtue. Oh, my heart, my heart!”
She caught herself from the cry, in a rally of quiet fury; pointed to the door, her arm extended along the wall.
“You have killed my faith,” she said.
Her gesture was crowningly significant. Without a word, the girl stole fearfully from her shadowy covert—hurried across the room—passed from it, and was gone.
* * * * * * * *
Into the street she fled, ran a few paces, stopped, and looked wildly about her. Snow had begun to fall. The wind whipped her thin tattered skirts about her ankles. In all the mad night there was no beacon towards which she might make, for the little lightening of her despair. She glanced once about her; then crouched, with a dying moan, upon a doorstep.
Her face was buried in her hands when, an instant later, Ned silently came upon her. He stood, looking down.
Once, earlier in the evening, he had thought “She” (not the wretched girl at his feet) “might have dismissed me as effectually by gentler methods.” Yet, had he, for his part, shown more compassion towards this unhappy outcast—stained though she was—who lay here so committed to his mercy?
He bent suddenly, and put his hand upon her shoulder. She did not even start now, but she uncoiled herself, with a shiver, and gazed up at him, without recognition, it seemed.
“What do you intend to do?” he said. “Where will you go?”
She only shook her head weakly and amazedly.
He stepped back, looked up into a blinding gloom of darkness and spinning flakes. The patterns these wrought seemed the very moral of Heaven’s enactments—hieroglyphics drawn upon a slate of night. He was not theologian enough to interpret them. For him—with a sense of being enclosed and shut down within a very confined vault of human suffering (with God, maybe, walking serene and unwitting high up on the sunny lifts of ether above the earth)—the issues of life were become brutally restricted. He had had aspirations. They had been crushed under by the heavy night that had dropped upon his world. Now, in a moment, he could feel only that he was alone with a woman who loved him without one thought of the meaning of the hieroglyphics; that it lay with him, unsupported, to direct the destinies of two souls—his own and another’s—that Fortune had isolated in tragic companionship.
And contrasted with the human piteousness of this other—this soul that had claimed him in the darkness into which his own had fallen—how did not the shibboleth of convention suddenly confess itself a ridiculous fetish of strings and patches—a block for a fashion-plate?
He had no plan of conduct at last but to drift—and, if by way of sunny pastures, so much the less troubled would he be.
His heart was moved to a dull aching passion in this first realising of its emancipation from a wounding thrall.
“Get up!” he cried violently. “Do you hear? Get up, and come with me!”
He turned away, and going a few paces, looked round to see if she were following. Ay, like a dog. She had risen and jumped to his order before it was well issued.
He strode on, the fall already making a soft cold mat to his feet. It was no great distance to his rooms; the Rue St Honoré was near deserted, and he went down it swiftly. Once again only he turned to see that the girl was not lagging. Then he cursed himself and came to a stop under a lamp. She was hobbling towards him as fast as her bleeding feet would permit her. He had never given a thought to this—that she had been driven half naked into the night. As she came up, she dumbly begged of him with a little pathetic smile, timid and conciliatory, not to be angry with her for halting. He saw a trickle of blood flow into the white carpet where she waited.
Now he stood to the struggle between his pride and his humanity. She was slight and thinly clad. He might have carried her in his arms the little remaining distance. But a hard devil rasped his heart—that particular Belial that tempts consciences to very wanton self-mutilations.
“I had not thought,” he said coldly. “I should have been more considerate. I will walk slowly the rest of the way.”
“I hardly feel it—indeed, monsieur, indeed,” she answered, brokenly and eagerly. “I will come faster.”
He went on again, and she crept behind him. Arrived at last at his door, he rapped on it, and stood away, signing to her to enter.
The citizen Theophilus, although he was a good patriot, bowed the gentleman and his companion into the sadly lit hall with a conscious elaboration of thebel air. He was at different times cook andconcierge, and always proprietor—a man of admirable tact. Now he smiled, and informed monsieur the Englishman that there was a grateful hot fire in his room; that the night was a disgrace to Paris; that a steaming potage could be served to the citoyenne in a moment, did monsieur desire it.
He did not shrug his shoulders, or appear to notice the bare raw feet set upon the mat, or anything strange in this apparition of a dazed young woman standing there with the snow in her hair. That was his delicacy. For the rest, reputations were not marred nowadays by any refusal to subscribe to such old-fashioned codes of propriety as were only practised, if at all, in the prisons, where the remnants of a social hypocrisy awaited consignment to the rag-tearing machine in the Place Louis XV. Citizen Theophilus would have as little thought of bestowing a suggestive wink on the mating of a couple of swallows as on the foregathering of a young man and maid under his eaves.
“I will do myself the honour,” he said, “to conduct monsieur’s dear young friend to monsieur’s apartments.”
He skipped up the stairs in advance, candle in hand, like anignis fatuus. He was a little man—always dancingly restless—with a lean face, and iron-grey corkscrew curls that he would keep well oiled, as though they were the actual springs of his movements.
Arrived in Ned’s apartments (they were in one suite, sitting- and bed-rooms, with a folding-door between), he lit the candles, poked the logs into a blaze, and stood for orders.
“The potage, monsieur?”
Ned transmitted the inquiry with a look.
“No, pray, monsieur—not for me,” murmured the girl.
“Very well,” said Ned frigidly. “It will not be needed, my Théophile.”
The landlord protested, bowed, and flirted himself from the room. The two were left alone.
Ned walked to the window, lifted the blind a moment, and looked out upon the dumb white whirling of the snow. Then suddenly he spoke over his shoulder—
“Go and warm yourself at the fire.”
She crept to the hearth immediately and sat herself before the glow, putting out to it her stiff frozen hands in token of obedience.
He took to pacing up and down the room, not removing from his shoulders the thick redingote in which he was wrapped. Presently he came and stood near her, his elbow resting upon the mantel-shelf.
“I want you to listen to me,” he said.
She uttered no sound, but only looked up at him, pathetically pliant to his will. Her prince, for all her sins, had come to her with the glass slipper. Would her poor swollen foot ever go into it? Her blue eyes, like a child’s, sought his pity and forgiveness.
But he was resolute to blind his heart to the appeal.
“An hour ago,” he said—slowly, as if weighing his every word to himself—“I could not have done this. The interval has proved a fruitful one to us both.”
She clasped her hands as she gazed at him; a film seemed to come over her eyes. She murmured in a tranced, half-fearful voice. The warmth it seemed had drugged her brain.
“What happened! It was misty and shining. But, to be with you!—yes, thou art here, and the fire, and Nicette. That was always in the deep heart of my visions.”
He took no notice of her half-audible wanderings.
“I would not have you suppose,” he went on tonelessly, steadily, “that I shall allow any conversion by you of this accident into opportunity. I brought you to shelter for only the reason that I decline to burden myself with any shadow of compunction for what share my duty forced me to take in your punishment. For the rest, we remain, as always, wide poles apart.”
In the pause he made she dropped her head—crept a little nearer to him—crouched at his feet. Not to be haunted by the wistful eyes, by the look, like a dog’s, that was so full of the silent struggle to comprehend, made his task easier.
“You may stop here,” he said, “until I am able to procure you other quarters, and the means, if possible, to a living. That will not be later than to-morrow, I hope. For to-night, at least, you are to sleep in my room yonder, and I will make shift to lie out here. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Very well,” he said, “but I saddle the agreement with one fixed condition. As long as you remain here—whether it is for one day, or two, or more—you are to hold no communication with me—are never to speak to me, unless I first address you.”
She rose to her knees, clasping her hands again to him. Her hair was fallen over her cheeks; she looked a very small forlorn subject for extreme measures.
“I shall be near you,” she said, half-choking.
He took her arm and motioned her to her feet.
“It is understood, then. You had better go to bed now and rest and recover and get warm.”
He put a candle into her hand, led her to the door of the bedroom, thrust her gently within, and clicked the latch upon her. Then he went and stood over the fire.
What had he done? What was he doing? Even as he had spoken, making his condition, he had known that that was a wild absurdity, impossible of fulfilment. What had moved him to it but a sudden recrudescence of that self-mutilating spirit? He had had no deliberate thought to goad a willing jade, or to return, in kind, to love, the humiliation he had suffered from it. Yet he knew that he was doing so, and it was a perilous lust to indulge.
His heart was full of ache, his brain of phantoms. These were reflected, coming and going, in the still red logs of the fire. They represented, in a thousand aspects, the three ghosts that would haunt his life for evermore. All women—all fair and fateful shapes; and, of the three, the vilest, because she had figured for the purest, was the one that had come to claim him at the last. It was a fierce satire upon the lesson of ennobling ideals.
Pamela, and Théroigne, and Nicette. He felt it no sacrilege now to name this trinity in a breath. Indeed, which alone of the three had made it her sport to coquet with hearts, holding their suffering as nothing to the gratification of her vanity? Not either of those peasant girls of Méricourt—whose passionate blood would always rather flame to the ecstasy of pursuit than to the selfish rapture of being hunted for the sake of their own beautiful skins.
His thoughts swerved from one figure to another. This Lord Edward Fitzgerald—how had he come to usurp the very throne of desire? He knew a little of him by repute—had heard of the ardent young soldier and apostle of the new liberty, melancholy and something wild, breathing the spirit of romance. He had no grudge against him, at least. And what of Mr Sheridan, whose influence alone he had apprehended? Ghosts they were to him now. What profit was it to seek to analyse their bodiless significance?
Sweeping and shadowy, the smoke of all such phantoms reeled up the chimney. Only one face remained with him.
He glanced at the bedroom door, lay down on the rug before the fire, and, wrapping his cloak about his haggard face, committed himself to the hopelessness of slumber.
Thecitizen Theophilus was at points of discussion with a rather dissipated-looking phantom of respectability that had descended upon him at an extremely early hour.
“Let the citizen—and, moreover, monsieur the Englishman—rest assured,” he said, “that I accept his commission with a high sense of the compliment implied. But it is not specific:oh, mon Dieu Jésus! that is all I complain—it is not specific.”
“In what way?”
“For example, there is, for consideration, the toilette of Vesta, as well as that of Aurora.”
“Why, deuce take it, man; you don’t suppose I expect the girl to go to bed in her petticoats, if that’s what you mean?”
“C’est bien, monsieur. Je sais la carte du pays.” (He bridged his fingers, tapping the tips together to accent every item.) “I am to procure, then, the citoyenne a wardrobe, plain in character and of modest proportions. It is for the reason that the citoyenne may possess such attire as will not militate against her chance of obtaining respectable employment. Scrupulously so, monsieur. This wardrobe is to be for both day and night. Also, scrupulously so. Moreover, it is to be of the limitations that will not tend to encourage the idea of a prolonged sojourn in a present sanctuary, offered (I have monsieur’s word for it) on grounds of the most disinterested platonism. Finally, so long as mademoiselle remains under monsieur’s protection—I crave one thousand pardons!—under monsieur’s guardianship—she is to receive every ordinary consideration as to service and meals.”
He flourished his hands outwards, and bowed, his curls bobbing like wood shavings.
“I shall have the honour to punctually acquit myself of these commissions. Monsieur need give himself no further concern in the matter.”
“You are a treasure, my Théophile,” said Ned; and he stepped out into the morning.
It was very cold and bright and beautiful, for wind and cloud had dropped behind the horizon. The pavements, the roofs, the steeples were wrapped in white that looked as soft as swan’s-down. The whole city, it seemed, had put on its furs against the opening frost.
Ned stepped, without sound, over the flags. The hour was still so early that hardly a soul was abroad. His tired eyes felt the restfulness of the rounded beds of snow; his throat took in the stinging wine of the morning in grateful draughts. He had had but a little troubled sleep, and his wits seemed plugged and his brain sore. He wanted to think. He wanted to understand why it was that his thoughts—that should have been all of the tragic quenching of a flame that had for so long been his beacon in waste places—were unable to rescue themselves from a weary toing-and-froing before the closed door of his own bedroom. He wanted to understand, and he could not. Only it dully presented itself to him as a monstrous thing that the later image should dominate his mind. If he could recover but a little clearness of moral vision, he was sure he would see what a foul wrong to his own loyal heart he was being led into committing.
So he tried to reason—in the lack, as he felt, of reason itself. And still the cold air would not cleanse his brain of the impurity; and still the figure that haunted him as he walked was not Pamela’s.
Then he whispered aloud—as if to see whether spoken words would not prevail with him: “She is a murderess. I have given her scarcely a thought but of loathing. And now—because of a specious dumb appeal—Damnation! For all she has gone through, she is as sound of wind and limb as a pagan Circe—a perfect animal still. I think she cannot suffer without a soul.”
He strode on more rapidly.
“I must find her another lodging—at once, without delay.”
Walking preoccupied, unregarding his direction, he had made down one of the side streets that led into the Place Louis XV. Suddenly the sound of shrill jolly voices startled him. He looked up in amazement, to see close before him something, the fact of whose existence he had hitherto most shrinkingly ignored. Sanson and his satellites were engaged in washing down the guillotine. They were as voluble as grooms over a carriage—and, indeed, the machine had its wheels and shafts and splashboard—even its luggage-basket—all complete.
Now, committed involuntarily to view of it, Ned inspected the horrible engine with some curiosity.
“Hullo, then, my jackadandy!” cried one of the grooms boisterously. “Art thou seeking a barber?”
“No,” said Ned; “but the answer to a riddle.”
The man fondled a beam, grimacing.
“It is all one,” said he. “Here is the oracle.”
“I believe it is,” said Ned; “only I am not yet sure of the question;” and he turned away.
He breakfasted at acafé, made a particular little purchase to which he was whimsically attracted, and returned about mid-day to his chambers.
They struck very cold and quiet. There did not seem a sound in the house. He entered his sitting-room and closed the door. The girl was crouched in her old place upon the rug. She looked up at him mutely as he went by her, without a word, to the fire.
He let a minute pass while he warmed himself. Then he said, not turning his head—
“You want to speak to me?”
“Oh yes, yes!” she answered at once and eagerly; “to thank you for these.”
“The clothes? You needn’t thank me. It was my own interests I consulted in giving them to you. Your rags would have been no recommendation to a possible employer.”
“An employer?—monsieur—an employer?”
“Certainly. Did you imagine I intended to keep you on here indefinitely?”
She made no reply.
“Have you breakfasted?” he said.
She answered “Yes” gratefully, in a low voice.
He twisted about then, and regarded her. The wise Theophilus had, he saw, acquitted himself sensibly of his order. The girl was clothed freshly and simply. Her own instinctive niceness of touch, her kitten-like cleanliness, had ministered daintily to the result.
The young man’s brain swam for a moment. He could have thought he was back again in the lodge at Méricourt, the unsullied, fragrant presentment of a little jelly-loving Madonna charming the luminous shade of the dairy in which she sat; the sun, blazing upon the garden phloxes without, touching this his natural child’s head softly with a single beam.
In the same moment he dashed his hand, so to speak, upon the struggling fancy. He would not have it rise further to confront him. It was undeserved of its subject at the least. The promise it had once suggested had never been vindicated, and he would insist upon that now as an actual aggravation of the girl’s demerits, seeing that, at this late hour of her practical punishment for a wickedness confessed, she could still so far look her old self as to inspire—and demoralise—a certain emotion of regard. Even the very hollows in her cheeks seemed filled since yesterday; and she wore her new shoes and stockings without a hint of their discomforting her wounded feet.
Was it then that a constitution could be so flawless as to be debarred, by ignorance of suffering, from suffering’s prerogative of moral exaltation—that the nerves of emotion inherited from the nerves of physical feeling? If it were so, it were idle in this case to be considerate of the former.
He put his hand into his coat pocket and, producing a small parcel, held it out to her.
“You have breakfasted,” he said; “but doubtless you will yet have an appetite for this?”
She took it from him wonderingly. If he had designed it as a grimly ironical test of her disposition, he had reason to be discomfited by her reception of the pleasantry.
She glanced at the superscription—it was a little box of guava jelly,—then suddenly let the packet fall, and threw herself on her face upon the rug.
She lay so long and so still without sound or movement that presently he grew uneasy.
“Get up!” he cried at last, touching her—and hating himself for doing so—with his foot.
She stirred—rose to a sitting posture. Her eyes had a dazed, stunned look in them.
“Nicette!” he exclaimed, a little troubled by the fixity of her gaze. He saw then that she was gulping, as though trying to speak.
“What is it?” he asked, mutinous against the gentler spirit that was possessing him. He had to bend his head to hear her.
“While they lived—it was always he—that received—the praise, the tit-bit, the love.”
“Who received?”
“Baptiste.”
He drew himself up with an astonished expression. What answer was to make here—what course pursue with a soul so inadequate? She spoke of her parents, it seemed; was pleading their favouritism in vindication of her crime. It was a confession of moral obliquity so ingenuous as to baffle argument. For the first time a shock of conscious pity for a thing so handicapped in the pursuit of the living principle shook him. He bent down, seized the box of sweetmeat, and flung it into the fire. The girl gave a strange little cry, and gazed up at him, her mouth breathless, her eyes glazed with the floating of sudden tears.
“What now?” said Ned.
Her voice broke in a quick sob.
“I thought there was no hope or forgiveness, that you meant to hate me for evermore.”
He turned away. How could he be other than moved and stricken? She had not, after all, so much sought to extenuate her crime as to plead for herself against the hatred she had thought his act was meant to express.
There was silence for a time; then he sat down in a chair apart from her, and spoke, gazing into the fire.
“How can you think it mine either to hate or to forgive? How—” (he struck his hand to his forehead—turned upon her in utter desperation). “Nicette! do youeverfeel remorse for your deed?”
“I dare not think of it,” she whispered. Then suddenly she cried out, “I think the people of my dreams are often more real than the living about me. They come and go, sweet or terrible. Was it one of them left Baptiste to die in the tree! Oh, monsieur, monsieur! if I could learn it—that I was not guilty of his death! Or if I could die myself and atone!”
She buried her face in her hands.
“Now,” thought Ned, “shall I tell her the truth—that, practically, she is not guilty?”
“No,” muttered the little Belial voice in his ear; “what value lies in the practical significance? The moral is the truth. Besides, are you so sure that her imagination is not at this moment calculating its probable effects on you? Think of her consummate and enduring art in affecting a character, in playing a part.”
The frost of scepticism nipped his pretty burgeon of pity. He hardened his heart and drew back again.
“Die!” he said, with a little caustic laugh; “well, for one of your imagination, it should be easy in these days to devise a quite lawful means of introduction to Monsieur Sanson.”
She glanced up at him quickly, with a look of agony; then drooped her head and said no more. A second long silence fell between them. But by-and-by Ned found himself restlessly driven to open upon her again.
“What happened after I had left you that time?”
She seemed to wake to his voice, shuddering out of some scaring dream.
“My God! they sought for me; they burned my lodge; they killed my poorgénisse. They would have crucified me like the thieves; but I hid, and escaped in the night.”
She paused. “Go on,” he said.
“I fled into the woods. There, when I was lost and near starving, I fell, by God’s blessing, upon the Cagots who had once before visited our parts. They were returned, making their way towards Paris because of the cry of equality. They had lost their child; it had been hunted by boys, and had died of the ill-treatment. They were alone, those two, and they took me in and fed me; and by-and-by, when it was safe for me to move, I went with them on their journey to the great city.”
“Great God!” cried Ned, striking in in sheer amazement. “And these were they upon whom you allowed suspicion of the murder to rest, whom the merest chance saved from suffering the consequences of a crime of which you alone were guilty!”
“But, monsieur—oh, monsieur, I knew, when the cry rose, that they were gone from the neighbourhood. And, indeed, they are always so execrated that it could make no difference.”
Ned sank back in his chair.
“Well?” he said, with a veritable groan.
“I went with them; and we were long, long by the way; and on the way the woman also died. I think it was of nothing less than starvation. Then the man and I came on alone to Paris, and Théroigne met us, and took me from him.”
“And the woman died of want, and it never occurred to you that you were a burden on those whom you had—oh, God, how to unravel this warp! Hold your tongue, Nicette! Let there be silence between us, in pity’s name!”
She shrunk down as if she had been struck. Her confidences, it seemed, were of no avail to move him.
But presently he spoke again—
“Why, last night—when I accused you before the woman, your friend—did you not give me the lie? She would have taken your word before mine.”
And she answered, in the very voice of desolation—
“Because, if I had lied, I should have lost you.”
He leapt to his feet.
“I cannot breathe or think!” he cried. “I must leave you—I must go out!”
As he hurried from the room, she dragged herself to his empty chair, and threw her arms about it with a moan of agony.
* * * * * * * *
All day he wandered through the streets, and only returned home when darkness had closed many hours upon the city. “She will be in bed by now,” he thought.
The firelight made a glow about the room, revealing it untenanted. He sat himself down before the hearth, feeling utterly weary and vanquished. He had done nothing, planned nothing as to the girl’s removal. His brain seemed incapable of concentrated thought.
“I should have lost you—should have lost you.” The cry had been drawn into his very veins. It adapted itself to his pulses—to the knocking of his heart. What was to be the answer?
This, it seemed—a white figure that stole from the bedroom—crept into the firelight—crouched down on the floor beside him and took his unresisting hand. He felt the tremulous clutch, and dared not move. He felt his hand kissed, pressed against warm, bare flesh—felt a hot trickle lace it.
The paroxysm of emotion ceased, and then suddenly she spoke, whispering—
“It can never be?”
“Never,” he said low.
He knew, through the utmost conviction of his stricken soul, that it was all wrong and impossible—that hemustanswer as he had done.
He felt a quiver pass through her frame. She spoke again in a moment.
“My sin—I know it—holds us apart. I have not atoned, and, until I have, it holds us apart. Do you think, monsieur, Baptiste has forgiven me?”
“I think he has, Nicette.”
“But you cannot—not yet, though I love you so dearly. Perhaps I should not love you so well if you could. Yet it seems a strange thing to me why you helped me at all.”
He half rose from his chair; but she gently detained him, and he sank down again.
“You must go back to bed, Nicette. We will talk it all over to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?” she said. “Shall we be any nearer one another to-morrow?”
He shook his head. A very little sigh escaped her.