“Of a truth,” she replied, “they cannot have been to your stomach at all. You asked for bread, was it not, and they gave you a shower of stones? One does not desire one’s high convictions to be set up for a mark to violence. And so you turned the tail and came home to our dear monseigneur.”
“I have come home to England,” said Ned. “As to this, my happening on my lord, it is a simple accident.”
He spoke with some coldness of reserve. He had no idea whom he addressed. His kinsman had disdained to introduce him or to give him the least clue to madame’s identity.
The lady laughed again.
“But do not call it acontretemps!” she cried. “It is a dispensation of Providence that milord, though a very Bayard of courage, is detained by sentiments of chivalry. We were to have journeyed to Paris together had news of the riots not reached us; and hence arrives this so amiable meeting.”
“I was there,” said Ned shortly. “I saw M. Reveillon’s factory gutted.”
She paused in her fanning. She looked strangely at the young man a moment.
“You were there?” Then she resumed her bantering tone: “and found what bad bed-fellows are theory and practice. Perhaps it shall reconcile you to milord here, whoserôleof orthodoxmuscadinyou shall for the henceforth make your own.”
“Egad!” cried the viscount, who, it seemed, accepted the revolutionarymuscadinfor better than it was worth. “But I had my fill of riots in ’80, when the cursed rabble took me for a papist and singed my coat-tails.”
Madame nodded her head brightly. Her dark eyes contrasted as startlingly with her overlaid cheeks as might the eyes in a face of wax.
“So you were wise and came away,” she said, still addressing the young man. “But milord was wiser. He would not help to inflame a popular prejudice. The majesty of the people must be respected—when it takes to singeing one’s coat-tails.”
“Well,” thought Ned, “I must be right. This is Madame Cocotte from the Palais Royal. Or else—I wonder if she is in the pay of a very neighbouring government?”
A thought or two—of madame’s manner of presenting her little sarcasms—quickened his curiosity. To countermine the supposed agencies of Pitt, the inflexible and reserved, the bottomless Pitt—was it unreasonable to suppose that France was employing some very engaging decoy-ducks to the corruption of an aristocracy that might be fifth-cousins to State secrets? True, Monseigneur the Viscount’s confidence was of little worth but to his valet; yet the first rung of the ladder may be used for the secondary purpose of scraping one’s boots on before climbing.
Madame was the only guest. She had brought her monkey with her, and the little brute was carried screeching to a chair by her side at the dinner-table, where it sat sucking its thumb like a vindictive baby and snatching at the dishes of fruit.
“Fi, donc!fi, donc!De Querchy!” she would cry to it. (She had named the beast, it presently appeared, after an enemy of hers, M. le Comte of that title.) “C’est ainsi que tu donnes une leçon de politesse à ces barbares, nos amis?”
My Lord Murk laughed at all her insolence—especially when her sallies were directed at his nephew. She spared the young man no more than she did her host’s wine, to which, Ned was confounded to observe, she resorted with a freedom that was entirely shameless. Indeed, she drank glass for glass with the elder of the gentlemen, and indulged herself with a corresponding licence of speech that quite confirmed the younger in his estimate of her character. But he was hardly prepared for the upshot of it all as directed against himself.
“Monsieur Edouard,” she once said (it was after the servants had left the room), “have I not your language in perfection?”
“Indeed, madame,” he answered stiffly, “even to a peculiar choice in words.”
She laughed arrogantly.
“I accept your insult!” she said—and flung the glass she was drinking from full at him.
“Là, là, là!” she shrieked. “You threw up your arm: it is only the coward that has the instinct to throw up his arm to a woman!”
My lord laughed like an old demon. Ned was on his feet, white and furious.
“You are a woman!” he cried, “and the more shame to you!”
She jumped from her chair. As she did so the monkey sprang to her left shoulder, on which it seated itself, gibbering and quarrelling.
“I claim for the only privilege of my sex to despise the Joseph!” she cried. “For the rest, I can fight for my honour, monsieur, as you shall see!”
She skipped, for accent to the paradox, in great apparent excitement; hurried to a window embrasure, stooped, and faced about with a naked rapier in her hand.
“Draw!” she cried; and, running over to the door, turned the key in the lock and feinted at the amazed young man. All the while the monkey clung to her, adapting its position to her every movement.
“Is this a snare?” said Ned coldly. He looked at his uncle, his hand clenched at his hip. But he wore no weapon but his recovered composure.
The old villain drew his own blade and flung it across the table to his nephew.
“Fight, you dog!” he sputtered and mumbled. He was deplorably drunk. “Fight!” he shrieked, “and take a lesson to your cursed self-importance!”
He threw his glass in a frenzy into the fireplace, and screeched out, “Two to one in ponies on madame!”
The lady cried “Ah-bah! He tink me of the ‘fancy.’” For all her assumed heat she was really self-possessed. Ned understood her to be playing a part; but he could not yet comprehend how he was concerned in it. He took up his uncle’s sword.
“These,” he said coolly, “are dangerous toys. But, if madame will play with them, I must prevent her from doing harm to herself or me.”
She gave a little staccato shriek of mockery, and attacked him without hesitation. The monkey still perched on her shoulder. With her third pass, Ned felt that his life was in the hands of a consummatetireuse; her fourth took him clean through the fleshy part of the right shoulder.
Madame withdrew and lowered the red lance, that dropped a little crimson on the carpet, like an overcharged pen. The tipsy old lord had scrambled to his feet. His inflamed eyes seemed to gutter like expiring dips. He yelled out oaths and blasphemy.
“Kill him!” he shrieked: “I hate him—do you hear! kill him!”
Ned, reeling a little, and clutching at a chair-back, dimly wondered if this were indeed but a villainous plot to rid his kinsman of a detested incubus. He felt powerless and sick, but madame’s voice reassured him.
“Bah!” she cried gruffly, “you are very tipsy indeed. Hold your tongue, and drink some more wine!”
He was conscious, then, of her near neighbourhood; of the fact that she was binding up his arm.
“It is leetle—but enough,” he heard her mutter.
Then she looked over to where my lord sat glowering and collapsed.
“A coach, if you please!” she said peremptorily. “It must not arrive that he pass the night heere in your house.”
The uncle laughed inanely.
“What!” he said, “d’ye think I should finish him and put the blame on—on another? Take him to the devil, if you will.”
“No,” said she, “but I weel convey’a heem to his lodgings out of the devil’s way.”
Ofso wanton and inexplicable a nature had been the assault committed on him, that for some three days succeeding it Ned could have fancied himself lying rather in a stupor of amazement than in the semi-consciousness engendered of a certain degree of pain and fever. Hiscontretempswith his uncle; the latter’s more than usually uncompromising attitude of offence towards him; most of all, the strange vision of madame, with her obvious intention to insult and disable him,—all this in the retrospect inclined him to consider himself the late victim of a delirium that was reflex to the hideous pictures painted in Paris upon his brain.
But, on the fourth morning of his retirement, finding himself awake to the humour of the situation, he knew that his distemper was retreating, and that he might claim himself for a convalescent.
“Astonishment is a good febrifuge,” he thought. “How long have I lain in it, as in a cooling bath?”
And it is indeed strange how blessed an exorcist of pain is absorbing wonder. Not knowledge of drugs for the body but of drugs for the mind shall some day perhaps redeem the world from suffering: the Theatre of Variety, not of the hospital, be the Avalon of the maimed and the smitten.
He had no memory as to who—if anybody—had visited him during the course of his fever.
“But, no doubt,” he thought, “this moderate blood-letting has very timely rectified a bad effusion to my brain, and madame is my unconscious physician.”
He got out of bed, feeling ridiculously weak and emaciated, but with a luminous blot of wonder still floating in the background of his mind. This globe of soothing radiance so made apparent the near details of his past and present as that he had no difficulty in remembering where he was or what had detained him there. He felt no uneasiness over his condition, or any present desire to have it ended. For the moment he was blissfully content to gaze out of his window—that commanded obliquely an engaging little prospect of sunny sand and strolling figures—and to pleasantly scrutinise the picture as it passed, in silent camera-obscura, over the tables of his brain. Pain, emotion, and thirst were all absorbed in an enjoying, indefinite curiosity.
But by-and-by, as he gazed, there wandered—or appeared to wander—into and across his perspective, a couple of figures whose mere presence there in company seemed to sadly shake his confidence in the assurance of his own convalescence. Apart, he might have admitted their reality. It was their conjunction that hipped his half-recovered sanity. For how should madame—that enigmaticaltireuse—pair herself, out of all the little crowd, with Théroigne Lambertine, whom he had left in Belgium? Moreover, this was a transformed Théroigne—a Théroigne not of ungainly skirts and preposterous hat, but one that had at length acquired the first adventitious means to an expression of her wonderful beauty; a Théroigne of lawn and paduasoy, of waking airs and graces, of defiance still, but of the defiance that had superbly trodden persecution underfoot.
Then in a moment the vision vanished from his ken.
“I will go to bed again,” he thought. “I have something yet to sleep off.”
Presently he reached out and rang a bell that stood on a table beside him. Simultaneously with the jangle of it, Æolian sounds ceased somewhere down below, a slow step came up the stairs, and a heavy man entered the room, consciously, as if it were a confessional-box.
“Good morning,” said Ned. “I think I’m better.”
The heavy man nodded—a salutation compound of respect and satisfaction—paused an embarrassed minute, turned round, and made as if to retreat.
“Hallo!” exclaimed Ned.
The man faced about.
“What day is it?” said Ned.
“Sunday,” answered the man.
“You are my landlord?”
“Aye.”
“Your wife is out?”
“Aye.”
“At church?”
“Aye.”
“And you are keeping house?”
“Oh aye.”
“Has any one called on me during—eh?”
“The lady.”
“What lady?”
“Her wi’ the parly name.”
“What name?”
“Never cud say.”
“Well, what did she come for?”
“For to dress your arm.”
“My arm!”
Ned fell back in astonishment. The heavy man immediately made for the door.
“Here!” cried Ned.
The man slewed himself round rebellious.
“Was that you playing down below?”
“Aye.”
“Harp?”
“Aye.”
This time he got fairly outside, shut himself on to the landing, apparently dwelt there a minute, and, secure in his retreat, opened the door again and thrust in his head.
“Servant, sir,” said he.
“Oh, all right,” said Ned.
“You’ll be a-dry, belike?” said the man.
“What’s that?”
“Drythe, you’ll call it, for a glass of hale.”
“Certainly not,” answered the convalescent snappishly.
“’Tis a very good substitoot for the stomach,” said the man, and vanished.
“Hi!” shrieked Ned again.
The face reappeared.
“Why don’t you bring your harp and play up here, confound you!”
The eyes opened and withdrew like phantasmagoria. Presently the man was to be heard stumbling upstairs with a burden—in fact, he brought in his instrument and seated himself at it.
“Play?” said he; and Ned nodded.
And now the young gentleman was to read in that book of revelations that treats of the incongruous partiality of divinity in its giving moods. The man beside him was, to appearance, a dull enough fellow, a plodding, leather-palmed, labouring man of smoky intelligence. Yet, for all their horny cuticle, his fingers seemed to burn as luminous as those of the Troll in the fairy tale. They spouted music; the fire of inspiration ran out of their tips along the strings till the ceiling of the common little room vibrated deliciously as the dome of an elfin bell. And he extemporised, it would appear; he wove a web of chords about himself as it were a cocoon, out of which he should one day burst and be acknowledged glorious.
“Surely,” thought Ned, “if it isn’t necessary to be a fool to be a musician, at least the majority of born musicians are fools.”
That was his opinion, and he held it in common with a good many people. The musical, more than any other form of temperament, would appear to be self-sufficient. Its stream may flow and harp, like an Iceland river, through a woefully barren country.
The heavy man played on and on, enraptured, exalted, till his wife came home from church. Then she flew like an angry bee to the sweet twang of his instrument, and opened on him wide-eyed and -mouthed.
“Saving your honour’s presence——” she began.
“Or my life,” said Ned. “He hath built me up my constitution as Amphion built the walls of Thebes. I asked him to come and play, and he hath finished me my cure.”
“Well, now, fegs!” said the woman dubiously. “And they call him pethery John,” said she. “’Tis his fancy to confide himself to his harp once in the week. The stroke of his chisel, the taste of his bacon, the cry of the sea—every thought and act of the six days will he work into them wires on the seventh. An honest, sober man, sir, weren’t ’t for his Sabbath folly.”
“And what is his business?” asked Ned, for the husband had shouldered his harp and disappeared.
“A stonemason’s,” she answered; “and none to come anigh him.”
She added with pride, “He’s a foreman at the excavating over to the cliffs yonder.”
“Oh!” said Ned. “And what are they excavating for?”
“Lord save your honour!” she cried, “don’t ye know as we’re a-fortifying against the coming of they bloody French?”
“No,” said Ned.
“Well,” she answered, “we be.”
Then she recalled her manners.
“But I’m gansing-gay to see your honour so brave,” she said, with a curtsey.
“And I’m vastly obliged to you, ma’am,” said Ned. “And nobody has come near me in my sickness, I understand, but the lady?”
“Only the lady, sir.”
“And, now, whoisthe lady?”
“But Madame d’Eon, sir, at your sairveece,” said a voice at the door.
Ned fell flat on his back. A formless suspicion, that had rankled in him like an unextracted thorn ever since he had received that prick in the shoulder, suddenly revealed itself a definite shape.
After a minute or two he raised his head from the pillow and looked cautiously around.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, and dropped it again.
Husband and wife were gone, the room door was closed, and at his bed-side, monkey on wrist, sat the strange lady who had been the very active cause of his discomfiture.
“D’Eon, did you say?” he murmured.
“Veritably,” she replied serenely.
“Oh! the——”
“Exactly: the Chevalière Charlotte-Genevieve-Louise-Augusta-Andrée-Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont.”
“The chevalière!” said Ned faintly.
“Or chevalier,” she answered, with a very pleasant laugh.
He raised himself determinedly on his elbow and scrutinised his visitor. He saw beside him a comfortable, motherly looking creature, apparently some sixty years of age, with a sort of Dutch-cap on her head topped by a falling hat, and fat white curls rolled forward from the nape of her neck. Her face, sloping down from the forehead and up from the throat, came as it were to a sharpish prow at the tip of the nose. Its expression was of a rather mechanical humour, and the eyes seemed deliberately unspeculative. Only the mouth, looking lipless as a lizard’s, was a determined feature. For the rest, in dress and manner, she appeared the very antithesis of the loud and truculent trollop who had thrust a quarrel upon, and a sword into him, three nights ago.
And this was the famous chevalier, the enigma, the epicene, upon the question of whose sex the accumulated erudition of a King’s Bench had once been brought to bear—with indefinite result. This was the hermaphrodite dragoon and lady-in-waiting; the author, the plenipotentiary, and at the last, in this year of grace, the astonishingtireuse-d’armes, who had excelled, on their own ground, the Professors St George and M. Angelo, and who now replenished one pocket of her purse by giving lessons in the admirable art of fencing.
And, at this point of his cogitations, Mr Murk said—
“The chevalier is at least a wonderful actress.”
Thereat madame chirred out a little indulgent laugh.
“It is well said!” she cried. “Monsieur isun homme d’esprit.”
“And I take no shame,” said Ned, “to have let her in under my guard.”
She looked at the young man seriously.
“The shame was mine,mon petit—the shame of the necessity was mine to wound you at all.”
“You had not intended to kill me, then? It was not plotted with my lord?”
She flushed, actually—this player of many parts.
“Milord!” she cried, “his hired bravo!”
“Well,” said Ned, “you must admit I have some excuse for thinking it.”
“So!” she answered, recovering herself with a long-drawn breath. “It is true.”
She smiled upon him.
“Had I chalk-marked you at the first,mon cher, I could not have hit you nearer where I intended. When I desire to keel, I keel. When I weesh for to place onehors-de-combat—pour citer un exemple—” she touched his shoulder delicately with her finger-tips.
“You intended to put me on the shelf?” said Ned, surprised.
She nodded.
“On my uncle’s behalf?”
“Ah!” she cried, “you weesh too many answer. I will tell you it was all arrange by me. It was only when the old man smell blood he get beside of himself. You come in my way: I must remove you. That is it.”
“But I have never seen you in my life till three days ago, madame!”
“Nor I, you. What then?”
Ned lay back, thinking things over; and presently he talked aloud:—
“My lord comes to Dover,en routefor Paris. He is accompanied by a friend—the Chevalier d’Eon. This chevalier is a diplomatist, and something more. He—she—has served—possibly does serve—a royal master. At this juncture it is to be conceived that her talents forespionnageare being urgently summoned to exercise themselves.”
He paused a moment, glancing askew at his companion. She did not look at nor answer him, but her face expressed some curious concern. A little covert smile twitched his mouth as he continued:—
“There are whispers (I have heard them and of them) in more than one city of the world, that a certain notable Prime Minister gives his secret endorsement to the revolutionary propaganda of the Palais Royal. Would it not be a daring thing on the part of a spy, and a thing grateful to his employers, to endeavour to prove this of the exalted Englishman? But the Englishman is self-contained—almost inaccessible. If he is to be approached, it must be with an elaborate circumspection—by starting, say, the process of under-mining so far from official centres as the very suburban quarters where he takes his little relaxation during the Parliamentary recesses.”
Pausing, consciously, in his abstract review (murmured, as if he were seeking to convince himself), Ned was aware that the chevalier had leaned herself back against the wall at the bedhead, and was softly caressing the monkey. A tight little smile was on her lips; she caught his glance and nodded to him.
“C’est bien, cela,” she whispered.
He went on, echoing her:—
“C’est bien, cela, madame; and I may be altogether a fool, and a fanciful one. But, here (recognising now the significance of reports that have reached me) is where I trace a connection between the fact of my Lord Murk and the Chevalier d’Eon becoming suddenly acquainted, and the fact that the notable Englishman and my lord are villa-neighbours at Putney, where each has his holiday establishment, and where—altogether apart from politics—both meet on the social grounds of a common appetite——”
“For gossip?”
“For port wine, madame.”
La chevalière broke out into a sudden violent laugh. For the first time her voice seemed to contradict her sex.
“Oh, mon Dieu!c’est une fine mouche!” she cried. “She think to make catspaw of our tipsy monseigneur! I undurestand.Mon Dieu, it is excellent! This contained, this inscrutable, this Machiavel, that but wash his head in the bottle as it were to cool it, to yield his confidence to apaillard, a toss-the-pot, an old, oldp’tit-maîtrethat have nevaire earn in his life one title to respect! Say no more. It is a penetration the most admirable that you reveal.Oh, mon Dieu!avec tant de finesse on nous crédit!”
Ned waited till her merriment had jangled itself into silence.
“Not to constitute my lord a spy,” said he quietly, “but to equip him with one.”
“Comment?” said madame. “I do not undurestand.”
“I don’t say you do. It is a hypothetical case I put. I assume, for instance, that the chevalier is perfectly aware of my lord’s propensities, and is even willing to act the part of hisconciliatrice.”
Madame jumped to her feet, breathing heavily.
“Why did I not keel you!” she muttered. Her eyes were awake with fury. Little coal-black imps seemed to battle in them as in pools of gall. Ned sat up on his bed.
“I assume,” he went on coolly, “that the chevalier, looking about her for her instrument, marked down this dissolute nobleman with a villa at Putney, and decided to accommodate him with a French mistress—a Cressida whom she should coach to act the part of spy to a spy.”
“C’est bien ça,” whispered madame again.
“The chevalier, then, has, we will say, made my lord’s acquaintance; has excited the libidinous old man; has proposed a trip to Paris. The two travel to Dover; and here an unforeseen difficulty supervenes. My lord hears of the Reveillon riots. He refuses to proceed. The chevalier is in despair. She is, however, let us conclude, taking advantage of her position to note the disposition of the new fortifications, when chance puts into her hands the very opportunity for which she has vainly manœuvred. One day there lands from the packet a countrywoman of hers—a beautiful peasant-girl of Liége, whose seduction and abandonment by a rascal aristocrat have made her amenable to any unscrupulous design upon the class that is responsible for her ruin. To the protection of my lord the viscount, the chevalier—by whateverruse-de-guerre—is happy to commit the demoiselle Théroigne Lambertine, who, poor fool, chances into her hands at the crucial moment.”
Madame, uttering what sounded like a blazing oath, dashed, in an uncontrollable fit of passion, the little beast she held in her arms upon the ground. The poor wretch whipped across the fender and lay screaming with its back broken. She ran and trod upon it with a heavy foot, stilling its cries.
“It is a De Querchy!” she shrieked. “It is so I crush my enemies!”
Then she came towards the bed, her mouth mumbling and mowing, as if the ghost of the departed brute were entered into her.
“You are the devil!” she hissed, “and you will tell me how you shall use your knowledge.”
“In no way,” said Ned.
His throat drummed with nausea. His whole nature rose in revolt against this exhibition of infernal cruelty; but he kept command of himself and of his cold aloofness.
“In no way?” she said thickly. Her jaw seemed to drop. She stared at him. “You will do noting?”
“No more than you,” he said. “You are welcome to your plot for me.”
Her eyes rather than her lips questioned him.
“Because,” said he, “I am convinced there is nothing to find out; and you will be occupied in hunting a chimera when you might be more mischievously engaged elsewhere.”
She nodded a great number of times. The sweat stood on her forehead.
“You had no thought to interfere?” she said. “Vous êtes à plaindre. I might have left you alone after all. But I dreaded you would stand by, and comprehend, and upset my plans, did I find asujetfitting to my pu-repus.”
“Indeed, you had no reason to fear, madame. I am not so attached to my uncle’s company as that I should have been tempted to linger in it beyond the term prescribed by etiquette; and this time, be assured, I found in it no additional attraction.”
She made a deprecating motion with her shoulders, then seated herself again—but away from the bed—as if in exhaustion.
“At least,” she murmured, “I have been yourcamarade de chambre. And it seem I have nurse a viper in my bosom.”
Ned could only bow to this quite typically French example of moral obliquity.
“You think the devil hath instructed me, or that I am the devil,” he said. “It is not so, madame. I have lately been in Paris. I have kept my eyes and my ears open. Moreover, I happen to have come across Mademoiselle Lambertine—to have heard her story—to have known how she contemplated a descent on England. Add to this that, looking from the window some hours ago, I saw the girl (‘parmi d’autres paons tout fier se panada’—you know the fable, madame?) walking in your company; add that the public generally hath an interest in the Chevalier d’Eon’s reputation, and I, at least, in that of my uncle; add, perhaps, that a sick man’s brain is abnormally acute, especially when exercised over the causes predisposing to his malady; add that I have revolved these matters in my head as I lay here, and pieced them together in the manner presented to you, and upon my honour I think I have afforded you the full explanation.”
The chevalier rose. She had round her throat a thin band of black velvet that looked stretched almost to the snapping-point.
“Je crois bien,” she said; “and you have missed your vocation—you are lost to the secret sairveece, monsieur.”
“Certainly,” said Ned. “I am quite unable to lie.”
She answered, unaffected, and with recovered gaiety—
“I take, then, monsieur his word that he shall not interfere.”
She added, shaking her finger at him—
“Nevaretheless, it is not all as you say, but it is a good guess of half measures.”
“Very well,” said Ned, with entire composure. “And that being understood, perhaps madame will take up the one victim to her ardour, and leave the other to his convalescence.”
He bowed very politely, and lay down with his face to the wall.
She gazed at him a moment, with an expression compound of perplexity and lively detestation; then, reclaiming De Querchy, went from the room fondling the little broken corpse.
Duringthe short course of his restoration to vigour, Mr Murk, indulging that power of self-abstraction that was constitutionally at his command, gave himself no further concern about his uncle’s affairs, paramorous or political. His resolving of the Chevalier d’Eon’s little riddle of intrigue was, perhaps, an achievement less remarkable than it appeared to be. His own knowledge of my lord’s partial boon-companionship with the Prime Minister at Putney, and the notoriety of a particular kind that attached to the chevalier’s name, coupled with the more or less perilous gossip he had heard abroad, had winged the shaft that had—something to his surprise—struck so near home. Now (having proved to his satisfaction his own percipience), in the conviction that the artifice of thisintrigantewas destined to procure of itself nothing but a political abortion, he rested tranquilly, and devoted his spare—which was all but his meal—time to trying to play the harp.
This was a mournful misapplication of energy. He had never known but one tune—the “Young Shepherd by love sore opprest,” which he would intone in moments of exaltation. Now he could not reconcile it to the practical intervals of performance, but was fain to introduce crippling variations in his hunt for the befitting string. It was the merest game of disharmonic spillikins, the contemplation of which affected his landlord almost to tears, and to any such enigmatical protest as the following:—
“You’ve no-ought to make such a noration about nothing!”
“Very well,” Ned would answer; “but the spheres, you know, wrought harmony out of chaos.”
Nevertheless he took his characteristic place in the hearts of the simple folk with whom he lodged.
When, by-and-by, he was in a condition to stroll out into the living world once more, it was agreeable to him to learn that the old seaport place had been quit for some days of all that connection that had been the cause of his detention in it. His uncle was returned to town, carrying presumably Mademoiselle Lambertine with him; and the chevalier also had disappeared. He dozed out his second week, therefore—yielding his brain to the droning story of the sea—on the mattress of the sands; and, at last, revivified, braced up his energies and turned his face to the London that had grown unfamiliar to him.
* * * * * * * *
In accusing his nephew of inhabiting at some beggarly “Cock-and-Pye” tavern, my Lord Murk had uttered a vexatious anachronism that testified to little but his own antiquity. In the nobleman’s youth, indeed, the fields called after this hostelry, though then occupied by the seven recently laid-out fashionable streets that made “a star from a Doric pillar plac’d in the middle of a circular area” (abrégé, “Seven Dials,” though the capital of the column was, in fact, a hexagon only), were a traditional byword for low-life frivolity. Their character, however, was now long redeemed, or, at least, altered.
But, though Ned might not so far condescend to a philosophic vagrancy as to consort with beggars and “mealmen,” it was certainly much his humour, at this period of his life, to rove from old inn to inn, having any historic associations, of his native city; while during long intervals his chambers knew him not. Thus his uncle was so far near the mark as that for months antecedent to his continental excursion traces of him were only occasionally forthcoming from amongst the ancient hostelries that neighboured on the St Giles quarter of the town. The “Rose” on Holborn Hill, made memorable by the water-poet; the “Castle” tavern, where, later, “Tom Spring” threw up the sponge to death; the “George and Blue Boar,” ever famous in history as the scene of Cromwell and Ireton’s interception of that damning letter that the poor royal wren, who hovered “between hawk and buzzard,” was sending to his mate; the venerable “Maidenhead,” with its vast porch and ghostly attics—in all of these antique shells, and in many others, had the young man buried himself for days or weeks, according to his whim, until periodically his uncle would be moved to exult over the probability of his having been knocked on the head in some low-browed rookery, his very detested eccentricities serving for the means to his removal. Then suddenly Ned would put in an appearance at the house in Cavendish Square, and all the old rascal’s dreams would be shattered at a blow.
Now, upon his return, our solemn young vagabond had no thought but to resume this motley habit of existence. New alleys of interest he would explore, adapting his moral eyesight to a focus that late experience had taught him the value of; feeding his philosophy and humanity with a single spoon.
He disappeared and, remote in his retreats, was little tempted to emerge therefrom by the reports that were occasionally wafted to him of his uncle’s scandalous liaison with a beautiful Belgian girl, who had come to rule the viscounty.
Then—when he had been for some six weeks serving the interests of his own education in the character of a sort of spiritual commercial traveller—one day he happened upon Théroigne herself.
On this occasion chance had taken him westward, and he was walking meditatively under the trees bordering the Piccadilly side of the Green Park, when a voice, the low sound of which gave him an irresistible thrill, hailed him in French from a carriage that drew up at the moment in the road hard by. This carriage was a yellow “tilbury,” glossy with new paint and varnish, with the Murk arms on the panels and a foaming bright chestnut to draw it; and a very self-conscious “tiger” held the chestnut in while a lady jumped to the pavement.
“I congratulate you,” said Ned, doffing his hat in the calmest astonishment; “you have made a slave of opportunity.”
Indeed she had the right selective faculty. Her schooling might have extended through a couple of months, and here she was a queen of inimitable charms. She had suffered no illusions of caste; but recognising herself as to the purple of beauty born, she had simply allowed her instincts for style to develop themselves in a congenial atmosphere. And thereto a present air of pride and defiance lent its grace. She made no secret to herself of what she was, and yet that was merely the glorified accent to what she had been. The brilliant dyes of the tiger-moth are only the hues of the caterpillar intensified. This—the brilliancy, the bright loveliness, and the soft consciousness of it all—had been embryo in her from the first. She took Ned’s hands into hers in a wooing manner. A scent of heliotrope, like an unsaintly aureola, sweetened her very neighbourhood.
“Where have you been?” she said; “and why hast thou never come near me?”
“Why should you want me to?” he answered in genuine amazement. “You have made your bed, Mademoiselle Lambertine.”
“I have not made it; no, it is not true.”
She looked about her hurriedly.
“It is for you to advise me—to make it yourself—to lie in it if thou wilt. Hush, monsieur! we cannot talk here. Come and see me—come! It will be well for you.”
“Well for me! But I have no private shame to traffic in, nothing to accuse myself of, mademoiselle.”
“Ah,mon Dieu! but, by-and-by, yes, if you refuse me.”
Ned hesitated. Perhaps we may have observed that curiosity is a constituent of philosophy.
“Well,” he said, “where, and when, do you want me to come?”
“So!” she whispered eagerly; “j’en suis bien aise. To the house of the lord your uncle. Come this evening, when dinner is served and done with. I will receive you alone.”
She gave him her hand, with a rallying smile played to the gods in the person of the tiger, and accepted his to her carriage.
“’Ome!” she said to the boy.
“Unconscious irony,” muttered Ned to himself, as the “tilbury” sped away; “and how the dear fool has caught the trick of it!”
Something—a rare sentiment of pride or humour—persuaded him to appear before her in the right trappings of his station. He could look a very pretty gentleman when he condescended to the masquerade of frippery; and silk and embroidery, with a subscription to conventions in the shape of a light dust of powder on the wholesome tan of his cheeks, revealed him a desirable youth. Still Mademoiselle Théroigne, though obviously taken aback before this presentment of an unrealised distinction, was immediate in adapting herself to the altered relations implied thereby. The perceptible imperiousness of her attitude towards him showed itself finely tempered by admiration. As to her exercise of the softer influences, she had graduated in these (with honours) while yet a child.
She welcomed him in a little boudoir that had been fitted up for her on the ground floor. Lace and buhl-work, crystal and dainty china, were all about her. On the walls were sombre, amorous pictures, winking in the glassy shine from girandoles. A decanter and goblets stood on a gilded whisp of a table under a mirror, and hard by a tiny brown spaniel lay asleep on a cushion. She might have been own sister to this whelp from the curl and colour of her hair.
On this she wore no powder, but only a diamond star and loop in emphasis of its loveliness. She was dressed without ostentation, yet every knot and frill were disposed in a manner to suggest the liberal beauty of her figure. But she had, in truth, no need of artifice to show her radiant in the eyes of gods and men.
Now, looking at her, Ned thought, “How in this short time has she renewed herself from that haunting ghost that possessed me on the Liége road? There is something uncanny in this resurrection: I apprehend the ‘seven devils’ must have entered into her.”
And he felt a little discomfortable, as if he were at last brought into acute antagonism with a force that he had hitherto despised for the vanity of its pretensions.
She took his hands and looked into his face. There was a strange yearning inquiry in her eyes. This very licence of touch, so inappropriate to their cold relations one with the other, put him on his guard, though he would not at the moment resent it.
“You knew I was there, at Dover?” she said. “Ah! I sorrowed for your wound,mon ami; but I could not come. Monseigneur would not let me; the chevalier would not let me.”
“Never mind that,” said Ned, withdrawing his hands. “It only concerns me that you have been consistent to your promise, and that my lord attaches, in your person, another scandal to his record.”
“But that is not true,” she said, shrugging her shoulders; “and, even though it were, will not your philosophy condone it? Little holy Mother! is it that such as you, and he—that other of Méricourt—would use Liberty only as your pander, disowning her when she has served her purpose!”
She was all too young in vice as yet to play, without some real emotion, the part she had elected to fill.
“He taught me from his devil’s gospels!” she cried; “and you saw, and would not interfere, because your faith was the same as his.”
“I was in Méricourt—for how many days?” said Ned. “And is this all your confidence, Mademoiselle?”
She flushed and bit her lips. The tears were in her eyes.
“You are always cold,” she said. “You do not pity me or make allowance. To be wooed to worship an ideal; to be wooed through the hunger in one’s soul for the truth that God seemed to withhold! When he taught me that religion of equality,hebecame my God. I saw the disorder of the world resolve itself into love and innocence. How was I, inexperienced, to know how a libertine will spend years, if need be, in undermining a trust that he may indulge a minute’s happiness?”
She had spoken so far with self-restraint. Now, suddenly, she flashed out superbly—
“You would not do the same—oh,mon Dieu, no! but you will condone his wickedness—yes, that is it! Liberty to you all is the liberty to act as you like; to use the State and abuse it; to use the woman and throw her aside!”
“Hush!” said Ned, a little startled and concerned. “Your liberty, I take it, you have committed to the keeping of my lord. He may curtail it, if you talk so loud.”
She drew back imperiously.
“The old tipsy man!” she cried, in a pregnant voice. “I decoy, and I repulse, and I madden him. I have learnt my lesson, monsieur. Hark, then!”
She held up her hand. From the dining-room adjacent came a quavering chaunt—the maudlin sing-song of ancient inebriety.
“I know,” said Ned. “He is half-way through his second bottle.”
“Is it the music,” cried the girl, “that I have bartered my honour to listen to? There are greater voices in the air—the thunder of cannon; the roar of an emancipated people!”
“Certainly it is true, by report,” said Ned, “that the French Bastille is fallen into the hands of the mob—a consummation remotely influenced, no doubt, by the Club of Nature’s Gentry.”
“Into the hands of Liberty, monsieur. The reign of falsehood is dead. The ideal triumphs, however far its wicked apostles may have sought to misconstrue it! And I am of the people! I am of the people—the people!”
She gazed up—as if in a sudden inspired ecstasy—then buried her face in her hands. Her full bosom heaved. She was beyond all control overwrought.
“Théroigne!” exclaimed Ned, moved out of, and despite himself.
She looked up again, with flashing wet eyes.
“My love is sworn to Liberty!” she cried; “my hate to those who would make of her a pander to their own base desires. So much of his teaching remains; and let him abide by its consequences. It is for me to drive the moral home, to reveal him for the thing he is—the thing he is!”
Then Ned, holding no brief for St Denys, was tempted to an inexcusable utterance—
“He was the father of your child, Théroigne.”
The girl started as if she had been struck. She raised her eyes and clasped her hands; and she said, in a quivering voice—
“I thank God—oh, I thank God he is dead. The little poor infant! And what would he have made of his baby—he, that had the heart to disinherit and condemn to lifelong torture his own brother that he had played with as a child!”
Ned stood amazed.
“His brother!” he cried—“the sailor that perished in the West Indies! But monsieur himself told me of his brother’s fate.”
She gazed at him intensely. During some moments the evidences of a hard mental struggle were in her face. Then she gave out a deep sigh.
“He lied, as always,” she said in a low voice: “Lucien is at this day a wretched prisoner in the Salpétrière, the madman’s hospital of Paris.”
“Théroigne! What do you say!” cried Ned.
“It is true,” she went on. “He was disfigured—driven insane by the explosion; but he was not killed. He returned in his ship to Cherbourg, and there Basile received him of the surgeon and conveyed him to Paris. He was never heard of again. Basile brought to their father the news that Lucien was dead of his wounds and buried at sea. Monseigneur was old and childish, and Paris was far away. That was seven years ago; but it was only recently that, sure of my loyalty, and careless of the respect, of the right to which he had deprived me, he boasted to me of his ancient crime, justifying it, too, on the score that a reconstituted society must, to be effective, be pruned of all disease, moral and physical.”
“He should have hanged himself. Such inhuman villainy! Mademoiselle Lambertine, you have every reason to hate this man.”
“Ah! you think I colour the truth. My God, it is black enough! Why else, himself like a reckless madman, did he squander his double inheritance? He foresaw the redistribution of property; he was ever prophesying it. He must drink deeply of pleasure if he would empty the cup before flinging it into the melting-pot. Moreover, Lucien had been the old man’s favourite; and, ah! he hated him for that.”
She stopped a moment, panting; then went on, her voice lower yet with hoarseness:—
“Say, at the best, it was remorse made him a spendthrift, and his conscience that salved itself with a lying pretext. Does that condone his perfidy to me? Yet, I swear that he so blinded my eyes and my heart that, while he was close to me I could not, despite his confession of wickedness, see him for the wretch he was. Now——”
She came suddenly quite close up to the young man.
“Edouard!” she whispered, in a voice so wooing that it seemed to stroke his cheek. He should have leapt away; but for the first time the fragrant sweet sensuousness of her presence bewitched him. She put her hands timidly up to his shoulders, and let her gaze melt into his. The motion of her bosom communicated to his heart a soft slow throbbing. In the pause that ensued, the voice of the old drunken debauchee sounded fitfully from the dining-room.
“Now,” she murmured, “I see the truth stripped of all that passion that so falsely adorned it. I see it in you, as in myself, a generous principle that owes nothing to self-indulgence. Thou couldst use this in me, thou cold, beautiful man—thou couldst use me to such ends, and never fail of thy self-respect.”
She slipped her hands a thought closer about his neck.
“This evil magnificence,” she said—“so strange and so terrible to the poor country girl. Every evening the old lord gets tipsy over his wine; every evening he prays to me on his knees. To-night I thought he would have died—the passion so enraged him. I swear that is all. Oh! I have something cries in me for action; some voice, too, summons me to that dark city where is being born, in agony and travail, the child of our hopes—yours and mine. Not his now—Edouard, not his. I pray only to meet him there, that I may denounce him before the Liberty he has outraged. Take me hence. I am weary of the vile display; weary of being sought the tool to designing men. Take me away to Paris, where the era of the new life is beginning!”
In a paroxysm of entreaty, emboldened by her little success, she so tightened the soft embrace of her arms as to bring her lips almost into touch with his.
“Have I not proved myself, as I promised, a possession to covet?” she whispered.
Now, upon that, Ned came to himself at a leap. He loosened her hands; he repulsed and backed from her.
“What shameless thing are you,” he cried—the more violently from a consciousness of his late peril—“that you persist in the face of such rejection as you have already forced from me? I do not desire your favour, madame. To offer it to me here, in this place, is nothing but an insult. Nor, believe me, do I covet the possession of one who——”
“Hush!” she cried peremptorily. She stood away from him, panting heavily. Her face glowed with a veritable inner fire.
“It is for the last time, monsieur—be assured, it is for the last time,” she breathed out.
Then she blazed into uncontrollable passion:—
“Senseless, and a fool! I would have given you a soul to dare and to do. This is not a man but a block. It is right, monsieur: you would freeze the hot life in me—make it of your lead, this poor gold of my humanity. That other was better than you—he was better, for after all he could lie bravely. My God, to be so scorned and flouted! But, there you shall learn—ah, just a little lesson! You are very proud and high, yet I also shall be high if I choose.”
She checked herself, came up to and dared him in a rage of mockery.
“To-morrow we go to Putney. It is all arranged. And I have but to say the word, the little word, and I am Lady Murk! You twitted me with the child—my God, the man you are! What now, if his ghost—his image—were to thrust itself in between you and——”
The door was flung open—pushed, that is to say, with a respectful violence nicely significant of emergency. Jepps stood on the threshold.
“My lord, will your lordship please to come at once?”
So said this admirable man; and what need was to say more? Ned, in a moment, was in the dining-room.
Mademoiselle Théroigne had presumed a trifle too far on her desirability. At least, consulting her own interest, she should have withheld, one way or the other, from the beast of her ambition that incitement to feed passion with fire.
The Viscount Murk lay amongst the glasses on the table, dead of a rushing apoplexy. That is all that it is necessary to say about him.
When, later, Ned could somewhat collect his faculties, he recalled dimly how a white face, crowned with a mass of beautiful hair, had seemed to hang staringly—before it suddenly vanished—in the doorway of the fatal room. But, when he came to question Jepps about Mademoiselle Lambertine, he heard that the lady—after returning to her own apartments for a brief while—had quitted the house without sign or message.
Yet one other visitor disturbed that night the house of death—the Chevalier d’Eon. She came in a chair from the theatre, and Ned, going forth to her, saw her startled old face twisting with chagrin, as he thought, in the light of the flambeaux. She had heard the news from a link-boy in the square.
“I can do nothing by coming in, I suppose?” she said.
“Nothing whatever,” answered Ned passionlessly. “He is quite beyond your influence.”
Edward, Lord Murk—now three years enjoying the viscounty—was established, during the summer of ’92, at “Stowling,” his lordship’s seat near Bury St Edmunds. Since his uncle’s death he had spent the greater part of his time here—perhaps because his associations with the place were less of the disreputable old peer than of the traditions and thepersonnelthat had made it dear to him in his youth. He had sold both the Cavendish Square property and the villa at Putney; and was consequently, no doubt, very meanly equipped with domicile for a gentleman of his position.
That, maybe, to him was a term little else than synonymous with “opportunity.” Position at its best enabled him to realise on some ethical speculations of his earlier educational period. His Paris experiences had given to these their final direction; and though he was theoretically as convinced as ever that men should be made virtuous by Act of Parliament, the tablets of his soul, bitten into by the acid of human suffering, were come nowadays to exhibit the expression of a very human sympathy.
He gave with a large discriminating nobility; yet, no doubt, he was little popular in the neighbourhood, because in his benefactions he was discerning, and because, in indulging his liberality, he would forego any display of the wealth that he was ever passing on to others. Already for a peer he was poor; and, had he chosen, he might have cited, in favour of his conception of a mechanical morality, the fact that an emotional morality secretly despised in him that poverty by which it profited. But he did not choose. The spirit of philosophy still dwelt in him very sweet and sound.
In all these three years he had not once been abroad. Following—as keenly as it was possible for him to do in those days of crippled international communication—the progress of the great Revolution (perhaps, even, contributing at its fair outset to the sinews of war), he had yet no inducement whatever further to embroil himself, an inconsiderable theorist, with a distracted people. Between a turbulent chamber of his history and the halls of tranquillity in which he now sojourned had clapped-to a very sombre door of death; and this he had not the inclination to open again.
Still, often in his day-dreams he would be back at Madame Gamelle’s, watching all that life scintillating against the curtain of the Bastille. And now this curtain had, in truth, gone up, revealing, not, as he himself had prophesied, the “blank brick wall of the theatre,” but democratic force represented in a vast perspective—a procession so endless that it seemed drawn out of the very brain of the North, where all mystery is concentrated.
That, now, was an old story. Three subsequent years of planting and levelling had changed the face of the world’s garden of conventions, and during all that time the world itself had stood round outside the railings, peering in amazed upon a ruthless grubbing up and carting away of its pinkest flowers of propriety.
That was an old story; nor less so to Ned was the tale of his little sojourn in Méricourt; and thereon, for all his rebelling, his thoughts would sometimes dwell sweetly. The very quaintness of his reception, unflattering though it had been, had still an odd thrill for him. The memory of a happy period put to long wanderings by serried dykes, of the old hamlet basking in the ferny bed of its hills, of all the ridiculous and the tragic that, blended, made of the little episode in his life a sore that it was yet ticklingly pleasant to rub over—these, the shadows of a momentary experience, would rise before him, not often, yet so persistently that he came to attach almost a superstitious significance to their visitings. For why else, he thought, should the ghost of one haunt the galleries of a thousand pictures! Some connection, not yet severed, must surely link him to that time.
Yet, during all this period of his responsibility, no whisper to suggest that tohisshadows he was become other than a shadow himself reached him. It may have been breathed inaudibly, nevertheless, through the key-hole of that closed door.
Of Théroigne he had heard no word after her flight from the house of death. Nor had he desired to hear, or to do else than free himself of the dust of a scandal that, for months after his succession, had clung to him as the legitimate inheritor of a villainous reputation. And this desire he had held by no means in order to the conciliation of Mrs Grundy, but only that he might be early quit of the hampering impertinences of commiseration and criticism.
Once, it is true, he had almost persuaded himself that it was his duty to seek for either verification or disproof of the girl’s almost incredible statement about the man Lucien de St Denys. The conviction, however, that the story as relatedwasincredible; that it was revealed to him under the stress of passion and of immeasurable grievance; that no man—least of all an astute rascal—would be likely to put into the hands of a woman—the baser sequel to whose ruin he was even then contemplating—a weapon so tipped with menace to himself,—this growing upon him, he was decided in the end to forego the resolving of all problems but those that were incidental to his own affairs. Therefore he settled down with admirable decorum to the righteous lording of his acres.
Still occasionally a restless spirit—that Harlequin bastard of Ariel and the earth-born Crasis—would whisper in his ear of vast world-tracts unexplored, of the meanness of social restrictions and of the early staleness that overtakes the daily bread of conventions, of the harmonics of phantom delights that may be heard in the under-voices of flying winds, of life as it might be lived did men serve Nature with honesty instead of deceit. Then a longing would arise in him to be up and away again; to throw off the shackles of formality and pursue his more liberal education through the fairs of the nations. Then his days would show themselves empty records, strangely fed from some darker reservoir of emptiness, the source of whose supply would be a weary enigma to him. And in such moods it was that the gardens of the past blossomed through his dreams, and figures, sweet and spectral, would be seen walking in them—Théroigne sometimes, sometimes Nicette, and again others—yet these two most persistently.
* * * * * * * *
The demesne of “Stowling” was situate a long mile from Bury St Edmunds against the Lynn Road. All about the grounds relics of an ancient grandeur were in evidence, though the house itself, a graceful Jacobean block, with projecting wings and stone eyebrows to its windows, was a structure significant of a quite moderate condition of fortune. The property, in point of fact, had been flung, at “Hazard,” into the lap of that same Hilary, Lord Brindle (own pot-companion to Steele and to Dick Savage of the “Wanderer”—with whom, indeed, he had often cast at Robinson’s coffee-house, near Charing Cross, where the broil occurred in which Lady Macclesfield’s bastard stabbed Mr Sinclair to death), who was wont to justify his own viciousness by the aphorism, “Whatever we are here for, we are not here for good.” Very few of the Murks, it must be confessed, had been here for good, though none had endeavoured to disprove one side of themotwith more pertinacity than the late viscount. Yet, at last, a successor was to the front who would inform with gravity and decorum the family seat that had been acquired, rebuilt, and maintained by the wild lord in a manner so questionable.
For Ned the house was big enough; to him its grounds presented a retreat that had all the melancholy charm of a cloister to its monks. Nameless antiquity dreamed in its clumps of mossy ruins; in its fragment of a Norman gateway; in its tumbled “Wodehouse” men—sightless, crippled giants, with clubs shattered against the skull of Time; in its wolfish gurgoyles snarling up from the grass. Hereabouts could he wander a summer’s day and never regret the world.
Not often was he to be seen in the old town hard by; yet from time to time he would walk over on a sunny day and loiter away an hour or so in its venerable streets. And therein one morning (it was breathing kind July weather) he saw a vision that seemed to typify to him the very “sweet seventeen” of the year.
Now Ned’s knowledge of women had been mostly of the emotional side; and a certain constitutional causticity in him had been wrought out of all patience by the attentions to which he had been subjected in the respect of one order of passion. It is true his innate sense of humour rejected for himself the plea of excessive attractiveness, and, indeed, any explanation of the pursuit, save that he had happened coincidently into the scent-area of a couple of questing creatures of prey. Still, built as he was, the experience was so far to his distaste as to incline him always a little thenceforth to an unreasonable hatred of the dulcetly sentimental in, and, indeed, to a shyness of, the sex altogether.
Upon this, however, the little July-winged vision—which blossomed into his sight as he turned the corner into a quiet street—he looked with that inspiredpremier coup d’œilthat aurelians direct to a rare living “specimen” of what they have hitherto only known in unapproachable cabinets. He looked, and saw her spotless, as recently emerged from some horny chrysalis of his own late incubating fancy. (“This isipsa quæ, the which—there is none but only she.”) He looked, and the desire of acquisition gripped his heart—if only he had had a net in his hand!
She had bright brown hair and china-blue eyes, and her hair curled very daintily, and her eyelashes dropped little butterfly kisses—as the children call them—on her own pretty cheeks. She was of an appealing expression, a thought coy andspirituelle; and she was indescribably French, too, in her tricks of gesture and the very roguish tilt of her hat.
That was by the way to this travelled Cymon. Emigrants nowadays were commoner than sign-boards in the streets of Bury. What concerned him was that the girl appeared to be in trouble. She rested one hand on the sill of a low window in the wall; her forehead had a pained line in it; she sucked in her lower lip as if something hurt her; from time to time an extraordinary little spasm seemed to waver up her frame.
At least one reprehensible suggestion as to the cause of this convulsion might have offered itself to a vulgar intelligence—the tyranny (to put it sweetly) of over-small shoes. My Lord Murk, leaving his fine prudence and philosophy squabbling in the background, walked up to and accosted the sufferer in deadly earnest and quite courtly French—
“Mademoiselle is in distress? I am at her service and command.”
The lady gave an irrepressible start, and shuddered herself rigid. Certainly she was abominably pretty—straight-nosed, wonder-eyed as a mousing kitten. But she answered with unmistakable petulance, and in a winning manner of English, “I am beholden to monsieur; but it is nothing—nothing at all. I beg monsieur to proceed on his way.”
Ned bowed and withdrew. The dismissal was peremptory; he had no choice. But, daring to glance back as he was about to take another turning out of the empty street, he was moved to pause again in a veritable little panic of curiosity. For, on the instant of his espial, a “clearing” spasm, it seemed, was in process of bedevilling the angelic form; and immediately the form repossessed itself of the nerves of motion, skedaddled round a corner, and disappeared.
Now sudden inspiration came to Master Ned gossip. He perceived that the lady had been standing upon a grating. Like a thief, in good earnest, he stole back to the scene of thecontretemps, and went into a silent fit of laughter. Two little high red heels, bristling with nails, were firmly wedged between the bars of the grille. With a guilty round-about glance, he squatted, and dug and beat them out with a sharp stone. Then (observe the embryonic crudeness of romance in the shell), he put them—nails and all—into his tail-pocket.