“Permit me to say,” said Ned coolly, “that this is a very foolish and unnecessary exhibition of temper.”
But she flounced round her shoulder and ran from him, storming and crying out, and disappeared down the track leading to her home. And, as for him—he went on to the “Landlust.”
Duringthe course of his short journey from the wood-skirt to the inhospitable hostelry of his former acquaintance, Ned could have thought himself conscious of an atmosphere vaguely unfamiliar to his recollections of Méricourt. These were not at fault, he felt convinced, because of climatic changes; because of an aspect of seasonable reinvigoration in a place that he had last seen sunk in lethargy; because of an increase in the number of people he saw moving in the street even. They recognised themselves astray, rather, over a spirit of demure gravity—a chosen tribe smugness of expression, so to speak—that seemed to inform with pharisaicminauderiethe faces of many of those he passed by; and even he fancied he could distinguish—in the absence of this self-important mien—strangers (of whom there were not a few) from those that were native to the hamlet.
There seemed, in short, an air of wandering expectancy abroad—almost as if the unregarded village, committed hitherto to a serene isolation, were become suddenly a field for prospectors, ready to “exploit” anything from a three-legged calf to asainte nitouche. Conversing couples hushed their voices as he went by, their eyes stealthily scanning him as one that had ventured without justification within a consecrated sanctuary. A berline stood drawn up by the green-side, its occupants, two fashionable ladies from Liége, converted from the latest fashion in hats to the last in emotionalism. The blacksmith, in his little shop under the walnut-tree, familiarly rallied his Creator from stentorian lungs as he clanked upon his anvil. Across thePlacethe ineffective Curé was to be seen escorting a party towards the church; and, over all—visitors and inhabitants—went the sweet laugh of May blowing abroad the scent of woods and blossoms.
Ned turned into the “Landlust,” feeling somehow that his dream of rest was resolved into a droll. Nor, once within, was he to be agreeably disillusioned in this respect. The Van Roon seemed to positively resent his recursion—to regard him in the light of an insistent patient returning, on trifling provocation, to a hospital from which he had been discharged as cured.
“What! you again!” she cried sourly. “One would think moogsieur had no object in life but to canvass the favour of Méricourt.”
Ned, the yet imperturbable, answered with unruffled gallantry—
“Indeed, in all the course of my travels I have never seen anything to admire so much as madame in the conduct of her business. Whichever way I have looked since my departure, it was always she that filled my perspective.”
“If that is the same as your stomach,” said madame rudely, “you will have found me hard of digestion.”
“At least I am hungry now.”
“That is a pity. You shall pick Lenten fare in the ‘Landlust’ in these days.”
“Is it not rather a question of payment, madame?”
“No, it is not,” she snapped out viciously. “Moogsieur imposes his custom on me. He may take or refuse; what do I care, then! We have nowadays other things to think of than to pamper the gross appetites of worldlings.”
“A thousand pardons! Is not that a strange confession from an inn-keeper?”
“You may think so if you like. It makes no difference. To charge an egg with the price of a full meal—where one is willing to pay it—it simplifies matters, does it not? Anyhow, to be served by one of the elect (it is I that speak to you)—that is a privilege your betters appreciate at its value.”
“Well,” said Ned, “I am at sea, and I have a mariner’s appetite. Give me what you will, madame.”
She accepted him, as once before, with a sort of surly mistrust. A former unregenerate friend of his, she said, was seated in the common kitchen. He had best join this person while his meal was preparing.
Thither, much marvelling over all he had heard and been witness of, Ned consequently bent his steps. He had not expected much of the “Landlust,” but this exceeded his devoutest hopes. It had the effect also of arousing in him something of a wicked mood of indocility.
Entering the long room, the first object to meet his eyes was the sizar of Liége University. The little round man sat at the table, a glass ofeau sucréeby his elbow, a pipe held languidly between his teeth. An expression of profound melancholy was settled on his features. He looked as forlorn as a tropic monkey cuddling itself in an east wind. At the sight of Mr Murk he started, and half rose to his feet.
“The devil!” he muttered; and added—not so inconsequently as it appeared—“You are welcome to Méricourt, monsieur.”
Ned laughed.
“Is it so bad as that?” said he, “and has he become such a stranger here in these months?”
The other beckoned his old enemy quite eagerly to a seat.
“You have not heard, monsieur? It is improbable, without doubt; yet Méricourt is at the present moment the centre of much reverent attraction.”
“Is it? You shall tell me about it, Little Boppard. Yet you yourself are reprobate, I hear; and you will have your debauch of sugar and water.”
In reply, the poor body whispered, in quite a chap-fallen and deprecating manner—
“I am of nature a thirsty soul, monsieur. I must take my smoke, like the Turk, through bubbles of liquid. What then! this is not my choice; but it is expected of us in these days of spiritual elevation to drink at the Fountain of Life or not at all.”
“There are different interpretations as to the character of the Fountain. Each is a schism to all others, no doubt. Mine, I confess, is not of sweet water.”
Ned spoke, and rapped peremptorily on the table. M. Boppard’s little eyes, glinting with prospicience, took an expression of nervous admiration of this daring alien.
“Ah, monsieur!” he cried in fearful enthusiasm, “do not go too far. This is not the joyous ‘Landlust’ of your former knowledge; the type of extravagant hospitality; the club of excellent fellowship. Things have happened since you were here. Now we drinkeau sucrée, or, worse still, the clear water of regeneration itself. Cordials and cordiality are dreams of the past.”
His voice broke on a falling key. A scared look came over his face. The cow-like girl had opened the door and stood on the threshold mutely waiting.
“A bottle ofmaçon,” said Ned, and, giving his order, saw with the tail of his eye the student’s countenance change.
“A half bottle,” he corrected himself, “and also a double dose of cognac.”
The girl stood as stolid on end as a pocket of hops.
“Do you hear?” said Ned.
She blinked and lifted her eyelids. A sort of drowsy exaltation appeared in these days the very accent to her large inertia—its self-justification, in fact, before some visionary consistory of saints.
“Do you hear?” said Ned again, with particular emphasis.
“It is not permitted to get tipsy in the ‘Landlust,’” said she, like one talking in her sleep.
Ned jumped to his feet quite violently.
“Take my order,” he shouted, “or I’ll come and kiss every woman in the house, beginning with Madame van Roon!”
She vanished, suddenly terrified, in a whisk of skirts, and the door clapped behind her. The young gentleman laughed and resumed his seat.
“So, Méricourt has found grace?” said he; “and grace is not necessarily to be gracious, it seems. Yet, you still come here! And why, M. Boppard?”
The student shook his head. His face had grown much happier in a certain prospect.
“Why do I, monsieur? Can I say? Of a truth it ceases to be the place of my affections; yet—I do not know. The bird will visit and revisit its robbed nest; will sit on the familiar twig and call up, perhaps, a vision of the little blue eggs in the moss. I have been content here. I cling, doubtless, to the old illusions that are vanished.”
“Amongst which is the Club of Nature’s Gentry?”
“Hush!”
The wine was brought in as he spoke. For what reason soever, Ned’s argument had prevailed. Probably decorum would not risk a scene dangerous to its reputation.
“Hush!” murmured the sizar, twinkling and portentous in one, when they were left alone again. “It is vanished, as monsieur says. It ceased, morally and practically, with the disappearance of M. de St Denys.”
“Whither has he gone, then?”
“It is supposed to Paris; and may the curse of God follow him!”
Ned paused in the act of drinking.
“What do you say, M. Boppard?”
“He was a liar, monsieur. He used us to his purpose and, when that was accomplished, he flung us aside.”
“And his purpose?”
The sizar dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Our queen, monsieur,” he said, “our queen, that represented to us the beautiful ideal of all our most passionate aspirations! He seemed to avow in his attitude towards her the sincerity of his code of honourable socialism. He lied to us all. He converted her nobility to the uses of a common intrigue; and from the consequences of his crime he fled like a coward, and left her to bear the curses of her people and the sneers of the community.”
“Yes?” said Ned; and he took a long draught, for he was thirsty. Indeed, he had foreseen all this.
The student’s eyes filled with tears.
“She was much to us—to me, this Mademoiselle Lambertine,” he said pitifully. “If there were mercy in the world, she should have been allowed to bury her dishonour with her dead child in the church yonder.”
Ned reached across and patted his companion’s arm.
“You are a very amiable little Boppard,” he said.
“Monsieur,” answered the student, “for whatever you may observe in me that is better than the commonplace, she is responsible.”
“It shall go to her credit some day, be assured. And now, what is this other matter? It is not only the fall of its idol, the discovery of monseigneur’s baseness, that has sobered the community of Méricourt?”
“By no means.”
The student pulled at his pipe vehemently. Coaxing it from the sulking mood, his expression relaxed, and he breathed forth jets of smoke that he dissipated with his hand.
“By no means,” said he. “The moral debility that ensued, however, may have rendered us (I will not say it did) peculiarly susceptible to the complaint of godliness. At any rate, monsieur, we were chosen for a high honour, and——”
He paused, sighed, and shook his head pathetically.
“It is true, then, that the virgin revealed herself to the lodge-keeper?” said Ned. And he added: “Boppard, my Boppard! I believe you are not, in spite of all, weaned from the fleshpots!”
The student smiled foolishly and a little anxiously.
“Let me tell you how it began, monsieur,” said he. “The bitter scandal of monseigneur and—and of our poor demoiselle was yet hot in women’s mouths (ah, monsieur, what secret gratification will it not give them, that fall of an envied sister!), when an interest of a different kind withdrew these cankers from feeding on their rose. Baptiste, the little brother of Nicette Legrand, disappeared, and has never been heard of since.”
“The child! But, who——?”
“Monsieur, it was the Cagots stole him.”
“Did they confess to it?”
“Confess! the pariahs, the accursed! It is not in nature that wretches so vile should incriminate themselves. But there had been evidence of them in the neighbourhood; one, indeed, had been employed by Draçon—whose farm abuts on the lower grounds of the chateau—to roof a shed with tiles. This Cagot Nicette had seen upon many occasions covertly regarding the child—conversing with him even, and doubtless, with devilish astuteness, corrupting his mind. Two days after the job was completed and the man disappeared, the unhappy infant was nowhere to be found. They sought him far and wide. Nicette was prostrate—inconsolable. She had been foremost in the denunciation of Théroigne. Now, she herself, desolated, defrauded of him to whom she had been as a mother—well, God must judge, monsieur. At last the strange gloating of that sinister creature recurred to her, and she spoke of it. With oaths of frenzy, the villagers armed themselves and broke into the woods, where the miscreants were known to sojourn. Their camp was deserted. They were fled none knew whither; and none to this day has set eyes on them or the little Legrand.”
“Or questioned, I’ll swear, the unconscionable flimsiness of such evidence. And Nicette, M. Boppard?”
“She wandered like a ghost; in the woods—always in the woods, as if she maddened to somewhere find, hidden under the fern and moss, the mutilated body of her littlefanfan. You recall, monsieur, the old eaten tree, the despoiled Samson of the forest, that held the moon in its withered arms on a memorable night of jest and revel?Mon Dieu! but the ravishing times!”
“The tree, my Boppard? Of a surety I remember the tree.”
“It became the nucleus, monsieur—the clearing in which it stands the headquarters, as it were, of her operations of search. There appeared no reason for this, but surely a divine intuition compelled her. At all periods she haunted the spot. Oftentimes was she to be secretly observed kneeling and praying there in an ecstasy of emotion. To the Blessed Virgin she directed her petitions. ‘Restore to me,’ she wept, ‘my darling Baptiste, and I swear to dedicate myself, for evermore a maid, to thy service!’ One day, by preconcerted plan, a body of villagers, armed with billhooks and axes, with the Curé at their head, surprised her at her post. ‘It is not for nothing, we are convinced,’ said the good father, ‘that you are led to frequent these thickets. Hence we will not proceed until we have laid bare the ground to the limit of ten perches, and, by the grace of God, revealed the mystery!’”
“Well, M. Boppard?”
“Now, monsieur, was confessed the wonder. At the priest’s words, the girl leapt to her feet. Her eyes, it is said by those that were there, burned like the lamp before the little altar of Our Lady of Succour. Her face was as white ascardamines—transparent, spiritual, like a phantom’s against the dark leaves. ‘You must do nothing,’ she said—‘nothing—nothing. Here but now, at the foot of the tree, the Blessed Virgin revealed herself to me as I kneeled and wept. Her heel was on the head of a serpent, whose every scale, different in colour to the next, was a gleaming agate; and in her hand she held a purple globe that was liquid and did not break, but round whose surface travelled without ceasing the firmament of white worlds in miniature. “Nicette,” she said, in a voice that seemed to have gathered the sweetness of all the sainted dead, “weep and search no more, my child; for some day thy brother shall be restored to thee. I, the Mother of Christ, promise thee this!”’”
“Boppard,” said Ned quietly, “is the description yours or Mademoiselle Legrand’s?”
“It is as I heard it, monsieur. I have not wittingly intruded myself.”
“Yet you are a poet.”
“But this is prose I speak.”
“True: the prose of a nimble imagination. And, moreover, you are a student and a philosopher; and you believe this thing?”
Boppard nodded his deprecatory poll.
“Perhaps because I am also a poet, as monsieur says.”
“It is probable. And Nicette is a poet; which is why she walks, as I understand, in the odour of sanctity.”
“I do not comprehend, monsieur.”
“Why should you wish to? This vision, this revelation—it has proved profitable to Méricourt?”
“Again, I do not comprehend monsieur.”
With the words on his lips, he pricked his ears to a murmuring sound that came subdued through the closed lattice. He rose and, instinctively reverential, tip-toed to the window. Ned followed him.
Across the sunny green, her eyes turned to the ground, her hands clasped to her mouth, her whole manner significant of a wrapt introspection, passed M. de St Denys’ little pale lodge-keeper; and, as she went on her way, men bowed as at the passing of the Host; children caught at their mothers’ skirts and looked from covert, wonder-eyed; the fashionable ladies scuttled from their berline and knelt in the dust, and snatched at and kissed the hem of thedévote’sgarment. She paid no heed, but glided on decorously, and vanished from Ned’s field of observation.
“She is a poet,” repeated that young man calmly.
The student crossed himself.
“She is a priestess, monsieur,” said he. “She reads in the breviary of her white soul such mysteries as man has never guessed at.”
“That I can quite understand; and it will be an auspicious day for Méricourt when they start to build a commemorative chapel.”
“It is even now discussed. Already they have the sacred tree fenced in, and the ground about it consecrated. Already the spot is an object of pilgrimage to the pious.”
“As once to the Club of Nature’s Gentry—the ravishing club, oh, my poor Boppard! Alas, the whirligig of time! But, one thing I should like to know: to what did Mademoiselle Legrand look for a livelihood when her master ran away?”
“Doubtless to God, monsieur. And now, the faithful shower gifts at her feet.”
Prettyearly on the morning following his arrival in Méricourt, Ned strolled up the easy slope leading to the lodge of the chateau, and found himself lingering over against the embowered gates with a queer barm of humour working upon a commixture of emotions in his breast. Now it seemed that his very neighbourhood to the Madonna of his memory was effecting a climatic change both within and without him. For the first, little runnels of irresponsible gaiety gushed in his veins; for the second, the weather, that had been indifferent fine during his journey, appeared to have broken all at once into full promise of summer. It was not, indeed, that his sympathies enlarged in the near presence of one who might hold herself as a little moon of desire. It was rather, perhaps, because in the one-time surrender of her very soul to his inspection, she had made of him a confederate in certain unspoken secrets, the knowledge of which was to him like a sense of proprietorship in a picturesque little country-seat. Yet here, it may be acknowledged, he indulged something a dangerous mood.
He stood a minute before passing through the gates. The warmth of a windless night still slept in the velvety eyes of the roadside flowers. Morning was heaping off its bed-linen of glistening clouds. From a chestnut-tree came the drowsy drawl of a yellow-hammer. A robin—small fashionable idler of birds—abandoned the problem of a fibrous seed and, flickering to a stump, discussed the stranger impertinently and with infinite society relish. Only the swifts were alert and busy, flashing, poising, diving under the eaves; thridding Ned’s brain as they passed with a receding sound like that made by pebbles hopping over ice; seeming, in their flight of warp and woof, to be mending the pace set by the loitering day. Feeling their activity a rebuke, the visitor passed through the open gate.
Within, all was yet more pretty orderliness than that he had once admired. The lodge stood, sequestered trimness, between the luminous green of its porch and the high rearward trees that spouted up into the sky, full fountains of tumbling young leaves. The little paths were swept; the little long beds, bordered withtrique-madameand planted with lusty perennials, were combed orderly as the hair of their mistress, and weeded to the least vulgar seedling; white curtains hung in the cottage windows; and everywhere was an added refinement of daintiness—a suggestion of increased prosperity.
“Now, Mademoiselle Legrand,” thought Ned, “has shown herself a little person of resource.”
He could hear the moan of the horn coming familiarly to him from the back garden. The sweet complaining cry woke some queer memories in him. He went forward a few paces up the drive—walking straight into weediness and the tangle of neglect—that he might get glimpse of the chateau. The place, when he saw it, glowered from an encroaching thicket. Even these few months seemed to have confirmed the ruin that had before only threatened. Its dusty upper windows were viscous, he could have thought, with the tracks of snails. Grass had made good its footing on the roof. It looked a forgotten old history of the past, with a toppling chimney, half dislodged in some gale, for dog’s-ear.
Ned turned his back on the desolate sight, and lo! there was the bright patch of brick and flower like a garden redeemed from the desert. It appeared to point the very moral of the times, but in its ethical, not its savage significance. He went to seek the priestess of this little temple of peace.
As he turned into the garden, a peasant woman was coming out at the lodge door. She had an empty basket lined with a clean napkin on her arm.
“Que la sainte virge vous bénissè par sa servante!” she murmured as she passed by the visitor.
Nicette was nowhere visible. Ned stole into the house and along the passage. A strip of thick matting, where had formerly been naked flags, deadened the sound of his footfalls. Laughter, but laughter a little thrilling, tingled in his veins. A certain apprehension, that time might not have dealt as drastically as he had desired it would with a misconstructive fancy, was lifted from his mind since yesterday. He felt there could be small doubt but that his own image had been deposed and replaced by a very idol of vanity—a self-conscious Adaiah that must find its supremest gratification in proving its consistency with the character assigned it. Indeed, his moderate faith in himself as an attractive quantity inclined him, perhaps, to underrate his moral influence. He had not yet learned that to many women there is no chase so captivating as that of incarnate diffidence.
He came softly upon Nicette in the dairy that was a little endeared to him by remembrance. Perhaps he would not have ventured unannounced to seek her in the more inner privacy of her own nest. But the cool dairy was good for a neutral ground. She stood with her back to him. The sunlight, reflected from vivid leafiness through the window, made a soft luminosity of the curve of her cheek, that was like the pale under-side of a peach. It ruffled the rebellious tendrils of hair on her forehead into a mist of green; it stained her white chaperon with tender vert, and discoloured the straight blue folds of her dress. Was she, he thought, a half-converted dryad or a lapsing saint?
“Nicette!” he said aloud.
She gave a strangled gasp and faced about, her eyes scared, a hand upon her bosom. She had been disposing on a slab a little gift of spring chickens and some household preserves.
“Did I startle you?” said Ned. “But you knew I was returned and must surely come and see you.”
“Monsieur, you steal upon me like a ghost,” she muttered.
“Of what, girl? Of no regret, I hope?”
Her cheek was gathering a little dawn of colour.
“All ghosts of the past are sorrowful,” she said low.
“True,” he answered, seriously and gently. “I did not mean to awaken sad memories. And thou hast never had news of the little one?”
“Never, monsieur.”
“It is lamentable.”
Her eyes were watching him intently.
“You commiserate me, monsieur?” she said.
“How can you doubt it, Nicette?”
“Yet you do not love children?”
“Don’t I?”
“But their cunning and their vindictiveness, monsieur?”
“What of them?”
“What, indeed? It is monsieur’s own words I recall.”
“Nicette, can you think me such a brute? I hold myself abashed in the presence of the innocents. If I have ever decried them, it was only because their truthfulness rebuked my scepticism. They have shown me how to die, since I saw you last, Nicette. I shall try to remember when my hour comes.”
She passed a hand across her eyes, as though she were bewildered.
“But this inconsistency,” she began, murmuring.
Suddenly she straightened herself, and came forward.
“Truly, I knew you were arrived, monsieur; and you reintroduce yourself to good company on your return to Méricourt.”
“And truly I do not take my cue from a scandalous world to cold-shoulder an old friend.”
He came sternly into the dairy, and sat himself down on the slab by the chickens, his legs dangling.
“Sit there,” he said, and dragged a chair with his foot to his near neighbourhood.
The girl hesitated, shrugged her shoulders, and obeyed.
“Monsieur, it is evident, has not learned——” she was beginning. He caught the sentence from her:—
“That you are a saint? No, I have not learned it in these few minutes—unless innuendo is the prerogative of sanctity. I, a sinner, met a fallen woman yesterday, and I pitied her.”
Mademoiselle Legrand hung her head. Ned recovered his good-humour and laughed.
“Oh, little Sainte Nicette!” he said. “Why do you let me talk to you like this? Because you are a saint? Then I will not take a base advantage of your condition. But shall I finish the portrait, Madonna? I have been brought face to face in Paris with the divine suffering of mothers. I have discovered the secret of the eyes. Shall I finish the portrait, Nicette?”
She shook her head.
“But think how you could instruct me, girl! The lineaments—the very form and expression; for you have seen them!”
“Hush!” she exclaimed, in a terrified whisper. “Oh, monsieur, hush! It is blasphemy; it is terrible.Ito pose for the divinity revealed to me! Surely, you are mad!”
He leaned down to her as he sat.
“Nicette,” he murmured, “there is an old confidence between us, you know, and I recall your fine gift of imagination. Confess that it is all an invention.”
“That what is an invention?”
“Do you not know? This vision in the woods, then.”
She sprang to her feet. A line of red came across her forehead.
“You mock me!” she cried. “I might have known that you would; but it is none the less hateful and cruel. Believe or not as you will.”
She was enraged as he had never seen her before.
“But these offerings,” he said, quite coolly: “the chickens and the little pots of jam, Nicette—or is it guava jelly? One may make a good investment of the imagination, I see.”
It was not pleasant of him; but he could be merciless to what he considered a bad example ofescamoterie.
For a moment the girl looked like a very harpy. Her fingers crooked on the bosom of her dress as if she would have liked to lacerate her heart in desperate despite of its assailant. Then, suddenly, she dropped back upon her chair, and, covering her face with her hands, broke into a very pitiful convulsion of weeping.
Qui se fait brebis, le loup le mange!
Assuredly Ned had invited his own discomfiture. He had thought to operate upon this tender conscience without any right knowledge of the position of its arteries of emotion. He had bungled and let loose the flood, and straightway he was scared over the result of his own recklessness.
He let Mademoiselle Legrand cry a little while, not knowing how to compromise with his convictions. He loved truth, but was not competent to cope with its erring handmaid.
At last: “Nicette!” he whispered, and put his hand timidly on the girl’s shoulder.
She wriggled under his touch.
“No, no!” she sobbed, in a drowned voice. “It is terrible to be so hated and despised.”
“I do not hate you, little fool,” he said. “You beg the question. For what reason, Nicette? Are you afraid, or at a loss, to describe to me this vision?”
She seemed to check her weeping and to listen, though her bosom was still heavy with sobs.
“I am afraid,” she whispered.
“Of me? Nicette, shall I not finish the portrait?”
“No, no!”
“But you have seen the Mother, and know what she is like.”
“You would not believe.”
“At least put my credulity to the test.”
A long pause succeeded. The sobs died into silence. By-and-by the girl looked up—not at her inquisitor, but vaguely apart from him and away, as if her gaze were introspective. She clasped her hands together, holding them thus, in reverential attitude, against her throat.
“Nicette,” murmured Ned, “tell me—what is the Mother like?”
“It was a mist, monsieur, out of which a face grew like a sweet-briar blossom—a face, and then all down to her pink feet that trod the wind-flowers of the wood. Within her hair were little nests of light, glowing green and violet, that came and went, or broke and were shattered into a rain of golden strands. They were the tears she had shed beneath the cross. She wore the wounds, a five-pointed star, upon her breast, and I saw the rising and falling of her heart as it were the glowing of fire behind wood ashes. All about her, and about me, was a low thick murmur of voices that I could not understand. But sometimes I thought I saw the brown fearful eyes of the little people look from under the hanging fronds of fern, imploring to put their lips to the white buds of her feet. Thenhereyes gathered me to their embrace; and I sailed on a blue sea, and was taken into the arms of the wind and kissed so that I seemed to swoon.”
She paused, breathing softly.
“Truly,” said Ned: “this was the very pagan Queen of Love.”
“She is the Queen of Love, monsieur, else had my eyes never been opened to see the little folk of the greenwoods. For to be Queen of Love is to be Queen of Nature, and both titles hath she fromle Bon Dieu.”
Suddenly the girl edged a little nearer her companion, looked up in his face appealingly, and put her clasped hands upon his knee as he sat.
“God made Nature, monsieur,” she whispered. “God is Love. Oh, I read in the sweet eyes many things that were strange to my traditions!—even that human side of the Mother, that monsieur has sought to disclose. God is Love, and He hath given us passion, not forbidding us passion’s cure.”
Ned’s brows took a startled frown, and he made as if to rise. Nicette stole her hand quickly to his.
“Monsieur, it cannot be wrong to love—it cannot be that He would lend Himself as a subtle lure to the very sin His code denounces. It is the code—it is the Church that has misconstrued Him.”
Something in the young man’s face gave her pause in the midst of her panting eagerness. She drew back immediately, with a little artificial laugh.
“La Sainte Mariewas all in white,” she said, “with a blue cloak the colour of the skies. And what is the fashion with the fine ladies in London, monsieur?”
Mr Murk had got to his feet.
“Mademoiselle Legrand,” he said, “you are all of Heloïse, I think, without the erudition. Now, I am not orthodox; yet I think your description of the Virgin very prettily blasphemous. And what has become of the serpent and the globe of liquid purple? You can explain your picture, I see, to accommodate the views of its critics. I admire you very much, and I bid you good day.”
He was going. She leapt across his path and stayed him. A bright spot of colour had sprung to her cheek.
“You will leave me?” she cried hoarsely. “You shall not go, thinking me a liar!”
“No more than the author of ‘Julie,’” he said, drily and stubbornly. “You have the fine gift of romance, but I don’t like your vision.”
“It is the truth! I give you but one of the hundred impressions it made upon me.”
“Very well. It is a bad selection, so far as I am concerned.”
“How could I know—you, that have traded upon my confidence! You tempt me and throw me aside. I will not be so shamed—I, that am no longer obscure—whose every word is worth——”
“As much as one of M. Voltaire’s, no doubt. He may value his commercially, at ten sous or fifty. What then? You have the popular ear. Do you want to make your profit of me also?”
She twined her fingers together, and held them backwards against her bosom.
“Whither are you going?” she panted.
“I am on my way back to England.”
She took a quick step forward.
“You shall not leave me like this! You have made me what I am. Monsieur—monsieur——”
In a moment the storm broke. Once more she was drowned in tears. She threw herself upon him, and her arms about his neck.
“It is love!” she cried. “You are my God and my desire. I have followed you in my heart these long months—oh, how piteously! Do anything with me you will. Disbelieve me, spurn me, stamp on me—only let me love you! These months—oh, these desolate, sick months!”
She clung to him, entreating and caressing, though he muttered “For shame!” and strove to disentangle her fingers. She would not be denied in this first convulsive self-consciousness of her surrender.
“I will give myself the lie: invite the hatred and scorn of the world: swear my soul to damnation by acknowledging myself an impostor, if that will make you merciful and kind—no, not even kind, but to take me with you. I will admit I am vile in all but my love: that you tempted me unwittingly: that you had no thought of being cruel—of being anything but your own gracious self, to whom a foolish maiden’s heart fled crying because it could not help it!”
Catching glimpse in her passion of the stony impassibility of his face, she fell upon her knees, clasping her arms about him and sobbing—
“You must speak—you must speak, or I shall die! You don’t know what binds me to you. Not your love, or your respect or pity: only a little mercy—just enough, one finger held out to save me from falling into the abyss! Look here and here! Am I not white and sweet? I have cherished myself ever since you went and my heart nearly broke. I have thought all day and all night, ‘What bar to his approach can I remove if some day he shall come again?’ And when at last I saw you were returned, I would have given all the vain months of adulation for one glad word of welcome from your lips.”
She grovelled lower, writhing her face down into her arms.
“Only to be yours!” she moaned: “to do with as you will.”
At that at last he stooped, and dragged her forcibly to her feet. She stood before him trembling and dishevelled, and he glared at her, breathing heavily like one that had run a race.
“Before God, I never knew,” he said: “but you shame me and yourself. I will believe your story if you wish it; and what does that lead to?—that I hear you abusing the high choice of Heaven—misapplying God’s truth to the abominable sophistries of passion. Not love, but the foulest—there! I won’t shame you more. I think I have never heard such subtle blasphemy. To hope to influence me by casuistry so crooked! If you ever awakened my interest, you have lost the power for ever. Mercy! the utmost I can show you is by passing here and now out of your life——”
She broke in with an agonised cry—
“Mon Dieu! Oh, my God! Not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for your sake!”
“What you have done!” he cried fiercely. “I am no party to the vile chicanery. For your sufferings—they will cease when the fuel of this passion is withdrawn. Such fires blaze up and out in a day.”
He was cruel, no doubt—crueller than he meant to be; but his heart was wrathful over the baseness of the snare set for it.
On the echo of his voice there came the sound of approaching steps up the road. He recovered his composure on the instant.
“You will have visitors,” he said. “You had best go and make yourself fit to meet them. You will know where your interests lie. For me, the most I can do is to treat all this as a mad confidence.”
He was going; but she pressed upon him, panting and desperate.
“Don’t leave me like this! There—into the bedroom, till they are gone! Monsieur, for pity’s sake! You put too much upon me. I will explain. For God’s sake, monsieur!”
He drove past her—hurried down the passage. As he neared the door, he saw the light obscured by a couple of entering figures—a complacent-smiling curé, who ushered in a fashionable pilgrim exhaling musk and tinkling with gewgaws.
“Exortum est in tenebris lumen rectis,” murmured the priest as he gave place with a slight bow.
“Exactly so,” said Ned, and made his way to the road.
There he stood a moment, blinking and gulping down the fresh spring air.
Mr Murkwalked straight from the lodge of the chateau out of the village, stopping only on his way to take up his knapsack at the “Landlust.” He moved, very haughty and inflexible, with a high soul of offence at the attempt manifested to subject him to the charge of collusion in what he considered a particularly unpleasant species of fraud. It was that, more than the outrage to his continent self-respect, that angered and insulted him—that he could under any circumstances be deemed approachable by imposture, even though it should solicit in ravishing guise. He had never as yet, indeed, through any phases of fortune, regarded himself as other than a philosophic alien to his race; a disinterested spectator of its wars of creeds and senses, perched out of the battle on a little cloudy eminence of spiritual reserve, whence it was his humour to analyse the details of the contest for the gratifying of a curious intellectual cosmopolitanism. And even when for nearer view of some party struggle he had descended—or condescended—so far as that he had felt upon his face the very bloody sprinkle of the strife, he had chosen to read, in the emotions excited in his breast, an instinctive revolt against the injustice of pain, rather than a sympathy with the sufferings of which he was witness.
Now, however, he seemed to have realised in a moment by what common means Nature is able to impeach this treason of aloofness. He had held himself a thing altogether apart in that conflict of blurred, indefinite forms. He had been like a spectator watching an illuminated sheet at an entertainment, when (to adopt a modern image) there had sounded in an instant the click of the cinematograph snapping the blur into focus, and, lo! he beheld his own figure active amongst the crowd, a constituent atom travelling through or with it, a mean, small condition of its gregariousness—repellent, attractive, infinitesimally influential, according to the common degree of his kind. Holding his soul, as he fancied, veracious and remote, he had seen it magnetic, in its supposed isolation, to another that, in its essential guile, in its infirmity and untruth, would seem to be his spirit’s actual antithesis, yet whose destinies, rebel as he might, must henceforth for evermore be associated with his. He was no amateur counsel to a recording angel, in fact, but just a human organism subject to the influences of neighbour temperaments.
Now, the considerable but lesser pang in this shock to his pride of solitariness was felt in the realisation of his impotence to claim exemption from the ordinary vulgar taxes imposed by the gods upon vulgar animal instincts. He must be sought if he would not seek; nor could he by any means escape the penalties of his manly attributes. He was a thing of desire; therefore he represented the one moiety of the race to which he would have fain considered himself an alien.
But he did not regard with any present sentiment but that of anger the woman who had thus been the means to his proper understanding of his own personal insignificance. For her sex, indeed, he had no natural liking but that negatively conveyed in a sort of chivalrous contempt for its inconsequence (whereby—though he did not know it—he may have offered himself an unconscious Bertram to a score of Helenas). Now, to find his austere particular self made the object of a sacrifice of utter truth and decency, both alarmed and disgusted him. The very jar of the discovery tumbled him from cloud to earth. Yet, be it said, if it brought him with a run from his removed heights, he was to fall into that garden of the world where the loves, their thighs yellow with pollen, flutter from flower to flower.
For by-and-by, in the very glow and fever of his indignation, he startled to sudden consciousness of the fact that it was the implied insult to his honesty, rather than that actual one to his sense of modesty, that most offended him; that his heart was indulging a little rebellious memory of a late dream, it appeared, that was full of a strange pressure of tenderness. He caught himself sharply from the weakness; yet it would recur. He began to question the propriety of his attitude towards women generally. Serenely self-centred, perhaps he had never realised the necessity of being, in a world of artificiality, other than himself. Now he faintly gathered how poor a policy of virtue might be implied thereby—how, under certain conditions, Virtue might be held its own justification for assuming analias.
And thereat came the first reaction in a pretty series of moral rallies and relapses.
“Bah!” he muttered, “the girl is a little lyingcocotte—a Lamia from whose snares I am fortunate to have escaped without a wound.”
In the meantime his heart turned towards home with a strange heat of yearning—towards his England of stolid factions and sober, unemotional sympathies; of regulated hate and the liberal schooling of love. He had submitted himself to much physical and mental suffering in order to the acquirement of a right understanding of men; and at the last a woman had upset and scattered his classified collection of principles with a whisk of her skirt. He felt it was useless to attempt to rearrange his specimens unless in an atmosphere not inimical to sobriety.
“I will go home,” he thought, as he stepped rapidly forward. “And at any rate I am here at length out of the wood;” and straightway, poor rogue, he fell into a second ambush by the roadside.
For, coming to a sudden turn in his path when he was breaking from the copses a half mile out of the village, he was suddenly aware of a shrill cackle of vituperation, of such particular import to him at the present crisis as to constrain him to stop where he was and listen.
“Oh, çà, Valentin—çà-çà-çà!” hooted a booby voice. “A twist, and thou hast secured it!Oh, çà! bring it away and we will look.”
“Let go!” panted another voice, in a heat of jeering violence. “I will have it, I say!”
Then Ned heard Théroigne, pleading and tearful—
“Valentin, thou shalt not! It is mine! What right hast thou to rob and insult me?”
“The right that thou art aputain—a snake in the grass of a virgin community. Give it me, or I will break thy arm. Right, indeed! but every well-doer has a right to act the executive.”
“Thou shalt not take it!”
“You will prevent me? Oh, the strength of this conscious virtue! And does not thy refusal damn thee? Pull across, Charlot! I will wrench her arms out. It is another accursed whelp that she has strangled and would bury in the wood.”
“You vile, cruel beast!” cried the girl.
“Oh, hé—scream, then!” panted the other, while Charlot sniggered throatily. “There is no riggish lord now to justify thee in thy assaults on decent landholders. I will look, if only for the sake of that memory. Thou wert the prospective fine lady, wert thou?Oh, mon Dieu! and what ploughboy has ministered to thee for this in the bundle?”
Mr Murk, indignant but embarrassed, had stood so far uncertain as to his wise course of action. Now, however, a shriek of obvious pain that came from the girl decided him. He hurried round the intercepting corner and saw Mademoiselle Lambertine, blowsed and weeping, flung amongst the roots of a tree. Hard by, where the trunks opened out to the road-track, a couple of clowns, bent eagerly over a bundle they had torn from their victim, were discussing the contents of their prize—a few poor toilet affairs, some bright trinketry of lace and ribbons, a dozen apples, and a loaf of white cocket-bread.
All three lifted their heads, startled at the sound of his approach. Théroigne sat up; the boors got clumsily to their feet. In one of these loobies Ned had a sure thought that he recognised the fellow whose face had once been scored by those very feminine fingers that were now so desperately clutching and pulling at the grass amongst the tree-roots. He could see the red cheeks, he fancied, still chased with the marks of that reprehensible onset. The other rogue, he was equally certain, was of those that had baited a wretched Cagot on a morning nine months ago.
Here, then, was the right irony of event—a huntress Actæon torn by her own hounds. Ned stepped forward deliberately, but with every muscle of his body screwed tight as a fiddle-string.
Come over against the clodpoles: “You are pigs and cowards!” said he, and he gave the farmer an explosive smack on the jaw.
The assault was so violent and unexpected, the will that inspired it was so obviously set in the prologue of vicious possibilities, that the victim collapsed where he stood, bellowing like a bull-frog. It is true that he lacked a familiar stimulus to his courage.
“Now,” said Ned, “return those goods to the bundle and fasten them in; or, by the holy Virgin of Méricourt, I’ll lay an information against you for brigands before M. le Maire.”
There was an ominous stress in his very chords of speech. They may have recognised him or not. In any case this change of fortune might unsheathe the terrific claws of a hitherto unallied enemy. Charlot dropped upon his knees and with shaking fingers began to manipulate the bundle.
“It is enough,” said Ned between his teeth. “Now, go!”
The two scurried off amongst the trees, glancing over their shoulders as they went, with scared faces. The next moment Ned was aware that Mademoiselle Lambertine had crept up to him, and was holding out her hands in an entreating manner.
“Monsieur!” she whispered.
He faced about. The girl was arrayed for a journey, it seemed. A cloak was clasped about her neck; from her brown hair hung over her shoulders, like the targe of a Highlander, a round straw hat with an ungainly width of brim; stout shoes and a foot of homespun stocking showed under her short skirt. Nevertheless the glowing ardour of her face and form triumphed over all disabilities.
“They are brutes and cowards,” said Ned gravely. “I don’t think they will trouble you again. Here is your property.”
She did not take it at once. He shrugged his shoulders and laid it on the ground at her feet.
“Monsieur!” pleaded the girl. Something seemed to choke her from proceeding.
At length: “I have been waiting in the woods since dawn,” said she, in a sudden soft outburst, “hoping for you to pass.”
“For me?”
“I came out into the track now and again, dreading that you had gone by while I watched elsewhere, and once these discovered me, and—and— Ah, monsieur! You see now what I have to endure.”
“Truly I see—more than I would wish to. You are leaving Méricourt, then?”
She looked at him, defiant and imploring at once.
“You would not condemn me to it? You would not even say it is possible for me to stay here?”
The young man did, for him, an unaccustomed thing. He swore—under his breath. It might have been the devil of a particular little crisis essaying to speak for him; it might have been the cry of a momentary conflict between sense and spirit.
The appeal addressed to either was, indeed, as mournful and seductive as the minor play of a pathetic voice could make it. If he gazed irritably at the woman facing him, still he gazed at all because he was stirred to some emotion. The sadness of wet, unhappy eyes, of parted lips, of hands clasped upon the dumb utterance of an impassioned bosom—all, in their single offer and plea to him, were, no doubt, such a temptation to an abuse of that consistency with his theories that his temperament so encouraged him to cherish, as he had never before felt. But he was still so little sensitive to one form of witchery that it needed only a tickle of humour to restore his moral balance.
He laughed on a certain note of aggravation.
“Méricourt is all moonstruck, I believe,” said he. “This is too absurdly flattering to my vanity. First—but there! Mademoiselle Lambertine, I will not pretend to misread you. Yet you do not love me, I think?”
She shook her head, drooping her eyes to him. Patently she had elected to stake her chances on white candour as the better policy with this Joseph.
“Well,” said he, “it is as it should be. And you are equally convinced I am indifferent to you?”
But at that she came forward—so close to him, indeed, as to make her every word an invitation.
“Now,” thought Ned, inured to such appeals, “she will throw her arms round my neck in a minute.”
But he did Théroigne indifferent justice.
“You think yourself so,” she murmured. “It will be only a little while. Already, in the prospect of freedom, I begin to renew myself since yesterday. What if my soul is torn and crippled! The blood will glow in my veins no less hotly than before—a fire to melt even this cold iron of thy resolve. Oh, look on me—look on me! I can feel all power and beauty moving within me like a child. ThatIshould be scorned of clowns! And yet the chance gives me to you, monsieur, if you but put out your hand. It is not love. That thou hast not, nor I; nor is the power longer to me or the gift to you. But I am grateful, for that thou hast helped me under sore insult. Ah! it avails nothing to plead accident—to say, ‘It was the outrage I avenged for manliness’, not the woman’s, sake.’ What, then? Thou hast wrought the bond of sympathy, and thou canst never forge it apart. Perhaps, even, didst thou strike hard, thou mightst some day hit out the spark of love. Take me, and thou wilt desire to: I swear it. Do I not breathe and live? Am I not one to vindicate in prosperity the choice of her protector? Thou hast a nobility of manliness that is higher than any rank. But, if in thine own country thou art great, thou shalt be greater through me. I will minister to thy ambition no less than to thy senses. I will——”
She paused, breathing quickly, and watchful of the steady immobility of his face.
“Monsieur,” she whispered, most movingly, “if you see in me now only a lost unhappy girl, who in her misery would seem to seek the confirmation of her dishonour, believe—oh, monsieur, believe that it is only to escape the worser degradation that threatens her through the relentless persecution she suffers on account of her trust in one that was monsieur’s friend.”
“No friend of mine,” muttered Ned, and stopped. He must collect his thoughts—endeavour to answer thisséductriceaccording to her guile. Instinctively he stepped back a pace, as though to elude the enchantment of a very low sweet voice.
“Listen to me,” he said distinctly. “Mademoiselle Lambertine, I pity you profoundly; and, if I have anything more to say, it is only, upon my honour, to marvel that one of such intelligence as yourself should ever have submitted her honour to the handling of so exceedingly meretricious a gentleman as M. de St Denys. You see I repay your confidence with plain-speaking. For the rest I can assure you it is not my ambition to be beholden for whatever the future may have in store for me to a——”
She stayed him, with a soft hand put upon his mouth.
“Do not say it,” she said quite quietly. “It is enough that you reject my offer. That you may repent when you find your fiercer manhood—when you realise what you have lost. Well, you have been good to me; though, if I have suffered here in the wood while I waited for you, it was not because my heart was other than a stone.”
“Then, for shame!” cried Ned, “so to sell yourself!”
“Ah!” said Théroigne, in the same quiet voice; “but I have made my bed according to monsieur’s proverb, and it is a double one—that is all. And is it not gallant when a woman falls to help her to her feet?”
“It is not gallant to help her, the victim of one lie, to enact another.”
“Surely; and monsieur is the soul of truth.”
She adjusted her cloak and hat, stooped and took up her bundle.
“I am distasteful to monsieur,” she said. “Very well.”
For some reason Ned was moved to immediate anger.
“Your hat is, anyhow,” he snapped. “I think it quite preposterously ugly.”
But she only laughed and waved her hand.
“You will think better of me in England,” she cried.
He was moving away. He stopped abruptly and faced about.
“You are still determined to go, then?”
She nodded her head. Without another word he turned on his heel and strode off down the road.
Before—hurrying like a weaponless man through sinister thickets—Ned had come to within a mile of Liége, the memory of the rather grim comedy he had been forced to play a part in was tickling him under the ribs in provocative fashion. That his vanity—no unreasonable quantity—should have received, as it were, in a breath a kiss so resounding, a buffet so swingeing, set his very soul of risibility bubbling and dancing like champagne.
“And ought I to be gratified or offended,” he thought, “that I am chosen the flame about which these moths circle? But it is all one to such insects whether it be wax or rushlight, so long as it burns. That’s where I missed fire, so to speak. The flutter of their poor little feverish wings put me out. I am a cold taper, I fancy. I have never yet felt the draught that would blow me into a roar. What breath is wasted upon me, in good truth!”
Some detail of his path gave him pause. He sat down on a knoll, had out his book and pencil, and began to sketch. Now his blood ran temperately again. If he had been ever momentarily agitated in thought as to his ideals of conduct, the little disturbed silt of animalism was precipitated very soon, and the waters of his soul ran clear as heretofore. He laughed to himself as he sat.
“I believe if I had stayed another day the Van Roon would have made overtures to me.”
By-and-by he fell into a pondering fit. He rested his chin upon his clenched hand and, gazing into the distance, dreamed abstractedly.
“Have I a constitutional frost in my blood, as my uncle believes? Is my every relation with my fellows to be for ever unimpulsive and coldly analytical? That should lead me at least to a nice selection in pairing-time: and to what else?—a career stately, sober, colourless; a faultless reputation; all the virtues ranked upon my tombstone by-and-by for gaping cits to spell over, and perhaps, if I am very good, for a verger to expound. And my widow that is to be—my fair decent relict that shall have never known me condescend to a weakness or perpetrate an injustice, that shall never have felt the frost melt in her arms!”
He jumped suddenly to his feet, his teeth—very even and white ones—showing in a queer little smile. He stretched; he took off his rather battered hat and passed a hand through the crisp umber stubble of his hair. His solemn eyes shone out as blue as lazulite from the sun-burn of his face. He seemed, indeed, from his appearance no fitting catechumen in a religion of everlasting continence. There must be underwarmth somewhere for the surface so to flower into colour.
“She would marry within six months of my death,” he cried; “probably a libertine who would dissipate her estates, and break her heart, and die, and be mourned by her long after my memory was drier than a pinch of dust to all who had known me.”
He laughed again on a note that sighed a little in the fall.
“Am I like that? Do I build all this time with dry dust for mortar? Am I a loveless anchorite because my sympathies will not answer to the coarseness of an appeal that my taste rejects? Is it quite human to be very fastidious in so warm a respect? Or do I only wait the instant of divine inspiration to recognise that other self that seems hidden from me by an impenetrable veil?”
He shook his head despondently, collected his traps, and went on his way to Liége.
There he remained no longer than was necessary to a settlement in the matter of certain bills of credit and to the chartering of a vehicle for his onward stages. He was to return to the coast by way of Namur, Lille, and Calais. For the time he was all out of humour with a nomadic philosophy, and desired only to reach England by as short a route as possible.
He set sail in the Fanny Crowther packet, and had a taste of Channel weather that was as good as a “constitutional” after a debauch. He was two days at sea, beating forth and back at the caprice of squabbling winds; and when at last he landed in Dover it was with the drenched whitewashed feeling of a convalescent from fever.
He was setting foot on the jetty, discomfortable in the conviction that his present demoralisation was offering itself the target to a hail of local wit, when a thin neigh of a laugh that issued from a yellow curricle drawn up near at hand drew his peevish attention. Immediately he fetched his nausea under control, and stepped towards the carriage with a fine assumption of coolness. There may have appeared that in his attitude to induce a respectable manservant to jump from the dickey and offer to bar his progress.
“All right, Jepps,” said he. “I’m not one of ‘Peg Nicholson’s knights’ with a petition.”
The man bowed and made way for him.
“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Edward,” said he, and added in an accommodating voice, “I’d little call to know you, sir.”
“Eh, what? Ned!” gasped one of the occupants of the curricle, no other than the Right Honourable the Viscount Murk indeed.
His lordship sat on and forward of a great cloak lined with silver fox-skin (a luxurious cave into which he could withdraw whenever a draught nosed his old sapless limbs), the neck-clasp of which he had unhooked for the display of a diamond brooch that gathered voluminous lawn about the sagging of his throat. In every detail of his condition he was the bowelless and mummified coxcomb, packed prematurely into exquisite cerements, predestined to a corner in the museums of limbo; and topping his finished refinements of costume, his beaver was tilted like an acute accent to so distinguished an expression of hyperdynamic foppery.
“You are surprised to see me, sir,” said Ned (he glanced as he spoke with something like astonishment at my lord’s companion); “nor I much less to find you here. As for myself, I have gleaned such a harvest of experience in a few months that I must needs come home to store it.”
His uncle stared at him, but with a rallying expression of implacable distaste.
“Rat me!” he said candidly; “I’d hoped to hear of you a martyr to your theories, and that manstrous Encyclopedia set up for your tombstone.”
He turned indolently to his companion.
“This is the heir to ‘Stowling’ and the viscounty and all the rest of the beggarly show, if he can be induced to candescend to it,” he said viciously, and gathered up the reins in his lemon-gloved hands.
The other nodded, with a pretty display of white teeth and a shifting affectation that was extravagantly feminine. A dainty three-cornered hat was perched on her powdered hair, that was pulled up plainly and rolled over each temple in a silken ringlet. She had on a richly embroidered jacket with wide lapels; a rug was over her knees; and seated on it, fastened to her left wrist by a tiny golden chain, was a red monkey that chattered at the new-comer.
“Monsieur Edouard,” said she, caressing the insular barbarity of speech with her tongue, and her pet with fluttering finger-tips, “who have sold himself the birtheright to a dish ofpotage. Oh que si!mais si jeunesse savait! But I have heard of Monsieur Edouard; and also I have heard of Monsieur Paine.”
Her voice was as artificial as her manner. Playing on the alto, it would squeak occasionally like a greasy fiddle-bow. And her age, despite the smooth and rather expressionless contour of her features, might have been anything from thirty-five to sixty.
“But she has not wrinkles to cement and overlay,” thought Ned, “else would she never dare to laugh so boldly.”
He did not like the truculence of her eyes; nor, indeed, the whole air of rather professional effrontery that characterised her. Nevertheless there was that about her, about the atmosphere she seemed to exhale, that curiously confounded him.
“I have not the honour of an introduction,” he said, a little perplexed, “nor the right to return madame’s compliment—if, indeed, it was meant for one.”
“Not in the least,” she said, with an insolent laugh. “I have no applause for thehéritier légitimethat is a traitor to his trust.”
She sank back, toying with her little red-furred beast. My lord laughed acidly, but made no offer to enlighten or question his nephew.
“So you have returned,” he said only. “All the devil of it lies in that, and” (he scanned his young relative affrontingly) “in your unconverted vanity of blackguardism. Get up, Jepps.”
Ned laughed in perfect good-humour, as the curricle sped away.
“After all,” thought he, “perhaps itishard to be claimed for uncle by a rag-picker. I will resume my decorative self, find out where my lord lodges, and wait upon him in form and civility.”
He had his insignificant baggage removed to temporary quarters, ransacked the mean little town for what moderately becoming outfit it could yield, shaved, rested, and refreshed himself, and issued forth once more on duty’s quest.
“And what is the old man doing here?” he thought; “and who is the enigmatical Cyprian?”—whereby, it will be observed, he jumped to baseless conclusions. But he gave himself no great concern about the matter, admitting that the probable explanation of his uncle’s presence in the sea-port town lay in that flotsam and jetsam of the Palais Royal bagnios that many tides washed up on the coast.
“He may be acting the part of a noble and unvenerable wrecker,” thought he—it must be confessed, consistently with the common estimate of his kinsman.
My lord had rooms in one of the fine mansions then first beginning to sprout over against the harbour for the accommodation of wealthy sea-bathers. He was dressed—with all the force of the expression as applied to him—for dinner, and received his nephew in a fine withdrawing-room overlooking the bay. He snarled out an ungracious welcome. He was, as ever, wrapped and embalmed in costly linen smelling of amber-seed, and was with all—so it seemed to the nephew—a touch nearer actual comminution than when he had last seen him. To strip him of cartonage and bandages would be, it appeared, to commit him to dust. But the maggot of vanity still found sustenance in the old wood of his brain.
“I am honoured,” he said, “that you give my table the preference over a tavern ordinary. Have you learned to equip yourself with a palate in these months?”
“At least I’ll promise to do justice to your fare, sir.”
“Will you? You shall be made Lord Chancellor if you do. No, no, Ned! To know beef from matton is the measure of your gastranamy. Ain’t you hungry, now?”
“Ravenous, sir.”
“Il n’y en a pas de doute. You dress like a chairman (I’m your humble debtor, egad! that you’ve recommitted the rags you landed in to the dunghill), and you’ll eat like one. A gentleman’s never hungry. He appraises his viands, sir. ’Tis for flunkeys to devour. One must not yield oneself to a condition of emptiness. That implies a dozen of little disadvantages that are inimical tobon-ton. But you know me hopeless of ever convincing you in these matters.”
He rose with a slight yawn, and walking to the window, looked out into the darkening evening. The old limbs might have creaked but for their perpetual lubrications. Not an inquiry as to the course of his travels did he address to his undesirable heir. It was more than enough for him that he had returned at all.
“If not that you have discovered a palate,” said he, with a sour grin, “then I suppose I am to attribute this visit to your high sense of duty.”
A carriage drew up on the stones below as he spoke.
“Enfin!mon cher—mon aimable chevalier!” he muttered to himself with relief.
“You have company, sir?” said Ned.
“You can stop for all that,” said the uncle tartly. “Madame, as you have seen, knows how to take her entertainment of a monkey.”
Madame was ushered in as he spoke. Ned’s only wonder, upon identifying her as the lady of the curricle, was over the fact of her separate lodging. He had expected to find her in my lord’s suite. She came into the candle-light, an amazing figure of elegance, rouged, plastered, and befeathered, but even surprisingly decorous in attire. She wore long mittens on her arms, the upper exposed inches of which flickered with a curious muscularity when she fanned herself.
“So,” she said, making exaggerated play with her eyes over the rim of the toy, “we shall have the fatted calf to dinner. And did you find the husks of democracy to your liking, sir?”
“I found them tough,” said Ned.
She laughed like an actress. She shook her finger at him archly.