A model at Cardillac's and this wretched room. That was the story.
We had entered that room a man and woman, the woman with a laugh on her lips. We sat on the side of the bed together—two children. Children just as we were that day sitting by the pond in the woods of Lichtenberg, with little Carl and his drum.
For Eloise had never grown up. The thing she was then in heart and spirit she was now.
Then, as the moon drew away slowly, and the room grew darker, we talked: and I can fancy how the evil ones who are for ever about us covered their faces and cowered as they listened and watched.
"And little Carl?" asked Eloise. "Where is he?"
The question, spoken in the semi-darkness, caused a shiver to run through me.
"Who knows?" I said. "Or what he is doing? Eloise, I am half afraid. I met a man to-night, a musician; he saw me at the Schloss that time which seems so long ago. He spoke about Carl, and then I came with him to the ball. Only for him, I would not have met you, and it all seems like fate. Let ustalk of ourselves. You can't stay here in this house: you must leave it to-morrow. I will arrange everything. I am rich. Think of it!"
She laughed and clung closer to me. Despite her bitter experiences, she had no more real knowledge of the world than myself. Money was a thing to amuse oneself with—a thing very hard to obtain.
"You will leave this place and live in the country. You will never go to Cardillac's again. Think, Eloise; it is May! You never see the country here in Paris. The hawthorn is out, and the woods at Etiolles are more beautiful than the forest was at Lichtenberg. Why, you are crying!"
"I am crying because I am happy," said she, whispering the words against my shoulder.
Then I left her.
I cannot tell you my feelings. I cannot put them into words. It was as if I had seen Moloch face to face, seen the brazen monster in the Square of Carthage, seen the officiating priests and the little veiled children seized by the brazen arms and plunged in the burning stomach.
I had seen that day Eloise Feliciani, the living child, and Amy Feraud, the cinder remnants of a child consumed; and God in His mercy had given me power to seize Eloise from the monster, scorched, indeed, but living.
I found the Boulevard St. Michel almost deserted now, and took my way along it to the Seine.
"What are you to do with her?"
That is the question I would have asked myself hadI been a man of the world. But I knew nothing of the world or the convenances. I was not in love with her. Had I met her for the first time that night it might have been different; but for me she was just the child of Lichtenberg, the little figure I had last seen standing at the door of the Hôtel de Mayence, holding in her arms the black cat with the amber eyes.
What was I to do with her? I had already made up my mind. I would put her to live in the Pavilion of Saluce. I had not a real friend in the world except old Joubert, or a thing to love. I would be no longer lonely. What good times we would have!
I leaned over the parapet of the Pont des Arts, looking at the river, all lilac in the dawn, thinking of the woods at Saluce, and watching myself in fancy wandering there with Eloise.
Then I returned to the Place Vendôme. It was very late, or, rather, very early; and before our house a carriage was drawn up, and from it M. le Vicomte Armand de Chatellan was being assisted.
He had only just returned from the Duc de Bassano's, and he was very tipsy. He was an object lesson to vulgar tipplers. Severe and stately, assisted by Beril on one side and the footman on the other, the grand old aristocrat marched towards the door he could not see.
I watched the pro-consular silhouette vanish. One could almost hear the murmur of the togaed crowd and the "Consul Romanus" of the lictors.
The meeting with Eloise so disturbed my mind that I had quite forgotten one thing—Franzius. I had promised to see him after the ball—an impossible promise to fulfil considering the way the affair ended.
When I awoke at six of this bright May morning, which was the herald of a new chapter of my life, Franzius and his old fiddle, one under the arm of the other, entered my mind directly the door of consciousness was opened by Joubert's knock at the door of my room.
I had told him to waken me at six. So, though I had fallen asleep directly my head touched the pillow, I had slept only two hours when the summons came to get up.
But I did not care. I was as fresh as a lark. Youth, good health, the absence of any earthly trouble, and the spirit of May, which peeped with the sun into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Chatellan, made life a thing worth waking up to.
But it was different with Joubert. He was yawning, and as sulky as any old servant could possibly be, as he put out my clothes and drew up the blind.
"Joubert," said I, sitting up in bed, "do you remember, nine years ago, when we were staying at theSchloss Lichtenberg, a little girl in a white dress and a blue scarf, and white pantalettes with frills to them?"
"Mordieu!" grumbled Joubert, putting out my razors. "Do I remember? Well, what about her?"
"I met her last night."
Joubert, who, with a towel over his arm, was just on the point of going into the bathroom adjoining, wheeled round.
"Met her! And where?"
"At a students' ball." Then I told him the whole business; told him of the ruin of the Felicianis, of the death of the Countess, of Eloise's forlorn position, and of the plans I had half made for her future; to all of which he listened without enthusiasm. "But that is not all," said I. And told him of my meeting with Franzius, the wandering musician whose music had held me in the gallery of the Schloss, whilst the assassin had been at work plunging his dagger into the pillow of my bed.
"You met him, and he brought you to the place where you met her," said Joubert when I had finished. "Mark me, something evil will come of this. Mon Dieu! the Lichtenbergs have not done with us yet. On the night before the General fought with Baron Imhoff he came to the Pavilion—you remember that night? He took me outside in the dark—you remember he took me out? And what said he? Ah, he said a lot. He said: 'Joubert, even if I fall to-morrow the Lichtenbergs will not have done with us. Fate, like an old damned mole'—those were his words—'has been working underground in the families of theSaluces and Lichtenbergs for three hundred years and more. She's showing her nose, and what will be the end of it the Virgin in heaven only can tell. If I fall, Joubert,' said he, 'I trust you to keep my boy apart from that child of Von Lichtenberg's they call Carl. Keep him apart from anyone who has ever had anything to do with the Lichtenbergs.' And look you," continued Joubert, "the first night you have liberty to go and amuse yourself, what happens? You meet two of the lot that were at the Schloss: one leads you to the other, and now you are going to set the girl up in the Pavilion. Think you I would mind if you filled the Pavilion with your girls, filled the chateau, stuffed the moat with them? Not I, but there you are: wagon-loads, army corps of girls to choose from, and you strike the one of all others—— Peste! and what's the use of my talking? You were ever the same, self-willed, just the same as when you were a child you would have your box of tin soldiers beside you in the carriage instead of packed safely in the baggage—just the same!" And so forth and so on, flinging my childish vagaries in my teeth just as a mother or an old nurse might have done.
"All right, Joubert," said I, dressing; "there is no use in arguing with you. I am going to offer the Pavilion as a home to Mademoiselle Feliciani. That is settled. No evil can come to me for helping the unfortunate."
"Yes; that's what those sort of people call themselves," grumbled Joubert. "Good name, too, for her."
"So," I finished, "order a carriage to the door as quick as it can be got, and come with me to Etiolles, for I want to get the Pavilion in order."
"Monsieur's orders as to the carriage shall be attended to," said the old man with fine sarcasm, considering that he had turned "Monsieur" over his knee and spanked him with a slipper often enough in the past. "But as for me, I will not go; no, I will not go!"
He vanished into the bathroom to prepare my bath.
When I was dressed I ordered Potirin, the concierge, to send a man to the Closerie de Lilas, and, if the place was still standing after the riots of last night, to obtain Franzius' address. Then, when the front door was opened for me, I found the carriage waiting, and on the box, beside the coachman—Joubert!
I smiled as I got in, and we started.
It was an open carriage; and in the superb May morning Paris lay white and almost silent; the Rue St. Honoré was deserted, and a weak wind, warm and lilac perfumed, blew from the west under a sky of palest sapphire. We passed Bercy, we passed through Charenton and Villeneuve St. George's, the poplars whitening to the west wind, the villages wakening, the cocks crowing, and the sun flooding all the holiday-world of May with tender tints. The white houses, the vineyards, the greenswards embanking the sparkling Seine: how beautiful they were, and how good life was! How good life was that morning in May, effaced now by so many weary years, effaced from time but not from my recollection where it lies vivid asthen, with the Seine sparkling, and the wind blowing the poplar-trees that have never lost a leaf!
The road took us by the skirt of the forest ringing with the laughter and the chatter of the birds.
Old Fauchard's married daughter was in charge of the Pavilion. I had not seen the place for a long time; it had been redecorated by order of my guardian, and the old gentleman used it occasionally for luncheon-parties; a charming rural retreat where the Amy Férauds and Francine Volnays of the Théâtre Montparnasse enjoyed themselves, plucking bulrushes from the ponds in the forest, and chasing with shrill laughter the echoes of the Pompadour-haunted groves.
The little dining-room had a painted ceiling—a flock of doves circling in a blue sky. The kitchen was red tiled, and clean as a Dutch dairy. The bedrooms—bright and spotless, and simply furnished—were perfumed with the breath of the forest coming through the always open windows; the hangings were of chintz, flower-sprinkled, and light in tone. If May herself had chosen to build and furnish a little house to live in, she could not have improved on the Pavilion of Saluce, furnished as it was by a Parisian upholsterer at the direction of a Parisian boulevardier.
I had breakfasted in the kitchen—there was nothing to be done, the place was in perfect order—and, telling Fauchard's daughter (Madame Ancelot) that I would return that afternoon with a lady who would take up her abode at the Pavilion for an indefinite time, I returned to Paris, dropping Joubert in the Rue St. Honoré, and telling the coachman to take me to the Rue du Petit Thouars.
In the Rue du Petit Thouars I sent the carriage home. The horses had done over forty miles. I would take Eloise down to Etiolles by rail, or we would hire a carriage. It did not matter in the least; it was only twelve o'clock, and we had the whole day before us.
It would be hard for the worldly minded to understand my happiness as I walked down the Rue du Petit Thouars towards the street where she lived. I had found something to love and cherish, but I was not in the least in love with Eloise after the fashion of what men call love. You must remember that ever since my earliest childhood I had been very much alone in the world. Drilled and dragooned by old Joubert, and treated kindly enough by my father, I had missed, without knowing it, the love of a mother or a sister. Little Eloise had been the only girl-child with whom I had ever played; and, though our acquaintance had been short enough, that fact had made her influence upon me doubly potent. I had found her again. She was now a woman, but, for me, she was still the child of the gardens of Lichtenberg. And the strange psychological fact remains that, though I had loved the beautiful Countess Feliciani with my childish heart, loved her almost as a man loves a woman, nota bit of that sort of love had I for Eloise, who was the Countess's facsimile. The very fact of the extraordinary likeness would have been sufficient to annul passion.
Perhaps it was because I had seen the Countess suddenly turned old and grey, sitting in that wretched room in the Hôtel de Mayence, the ruin of herself, a parable on the vanity of beauty and earthly things.
I do not know. I only can say that my love for Eloise was as pure as the love of a brother for a sister; and that my heart as I came along the sunlit Rue du Petit Thouars, rejoiced exceedingly and was glad.
I turned down the dingy little Rue Soufflot, and there, at the door, going into the dingy old house where she lived, poised like a white butterfly on the step, was Eloise.
"Eloise!" I cried, and she turned.
My hat flew off to salute her, as she stood there in the full afternoon sunshine like a little bit of the vanished May morning trapped and held in some wizard's filmy net.
"Toto!" cried Eloise, in a voice of glad surprise. And, as our hands met, I heard from one of the lower windows of the house a metallic laugh.
Glancing at the window, I saw the face of the grenadier of the night before, the one who had worn a cock's feather in his hat—Changarnier the student—who, according to the bonbon girl, was so jealous of my new-found friend.
He had a cap with a tassel on his head, a long pipe between his lips, his linen was not over-clean. Atypical student of the Latin Quarter, confrère of Schaunard and Gustave Colline, he laughed again, showing his yellow teeth. I looked at him, and he did not laugh thrice.
"Come," I said, taking the hand of Eloise, whose brightness had suddenly dimmed, as though the sound from the house had cast a spell upon it. "Come." And I led her towards the Rue du Petit Thouars.
She came hesitatingly, downcast, as if fearful of being followed; and I felt like a knight leading some lady of old-time from the den of the wizard who had held her long years in bondage.
In the Rue du Petit Thouars she seemed to breathe more freely.
"I had forgotten Changarnier," said she, in a broken voice. "How horrible of him to laugh at us!"
"Beast!" said I, fury rising up in my heart at the fate that had compelled her to such a life and such surroundings.
"Ah, but," sighed Eloise, "he can be kind, too—it is his way."
"Well, let us forget him," I replied. "Eloise, you are mine now. You will be just the same as you were long ago. Do you remember, when we were all together at Lichtenberg, and the King that morning put his hand on your head? You remember when we met him in the corridor, and the Graf von Bismarck? You were holding his hand when I saw you first, and he was talking to my father and General Hahn and Major von der Goltz. Then you saw me——"
"Ah, yes!" cried Eloise, her dismal fit vanishing;"and you made such a funny little bow. And—do you remember my dress?"
"Oui, mademoiselle."
"Oui, mademoiselle! Oh, how stupid you are!" cried she, catching up the old refrain from years ago. She laughed deliciously. Childhood had caught us back, or, rather, had flung back the world from around us, for we were still children in heart and soul.
"And now," said I, "what are you to do for clothes?"
"For clothes?"
"You are not going back to that place; you are never going near it again. You must buy everything you want. I have plenty of money, and it is yours. See!" And I pulled out a handful of gold.
"O ciel!" sighed Eloise. "How delightful! But, Toto——"
"No 'buts.' What is the use of money if you do not spend it? I have a little house for you, all prepared, in the country. Oh, wait till you see it—wait till you see it. We will take the train, but you must buy yourself what you want first, and I can only give you an hour. Will an hour be enough?"
She would have kissed me, I believe, there and then, only that we were now in the Boul' Miche. Her butterfly mind was entirely fascinated by the idea of new clothes and the country. The dress she was in, of some white material, though old enough perhaps, was new-washed and speckless, and graceful as a woman's dress of that day could be. Her hat, in my eyes, was daintier far than any hat I had seen in my life.Women, no doubt, could have picked holes in her poor attire, but no man. Just as she was that day I always see her now, beyond the fashions and the years, a figure garbed in the old, old fashion of spring, sweet as the perfume of lilac-branches and the songs of birds. At the Maison Dorée, 152 Boulevard St. Michel, within the space of an hour, and for the modest sum of a hundred francs or so, she bought—I do not know what; but the purchases filled four huge cardboard boxes covered with golden bees—the true luggage of a butterfly. When they were packed in and about a cabriolet I proposed food.
"I am too happy to eat," said Eloise; so, at the fruiterer's a little way down, I bought oranges and a great bunch of Bordighera violets, and we started.
It was late afternoon when we reached the little station at Evry. Ah, what a delightful journey that was, and what an extraordinary one! Happy as lovers, yet without a thought of love; good comrades, irresponsible as birds, laughing at everything and nothing; eating our oranges, and criticising the folk at the stations we passed.
"Listen!" said Eloise, as we stood on the platform of Evry and the train drew off into the sunlit distance. I listened. The wind was blowing in the trees by the station; from some field beyond the poplar trees came the faint and far-off bleating of lambs; behind and beyond these sweet yet trivial sounds lay the great silence of the country; the silence that encompasses the leagues of growing wheat, the pasture lands all gemmed with buttercups and cowslips, the blue,song-less rivers and the green, whispering rushes; the silence of spring, which is made up of a million voices unheard but guessed, and presided over by the skylark hanging in the sparkling blue, a star of song.
Men, I think, never knew the true beauty of the country till the railway, like a grimy magician, enabled them to stand at some little wayside station and, with the sounds of the city still ringing in their ears, to listen to the voices of the trees and the birds.
I sent a porter to the inn for a fly; and when it arrived, and the luggage was packed on and about it, we started.
"It is like a cage," said Eloise, "with all the birds outside."
We were sitting in the little room of the Pavilion that served as dining-room and drawing-room combined; the windows were open, the sun had set, and the birds in the wood were going to bed. Liquid calls from the depths of the trees, chatterings in the near branches, and occasional sounds like the flirting of a fan came with the warm breeze that stirred the chintz curtains and the curls of Eloise's golden hair as she sat on the broad window-seat, her busy hands in her lap, like white butterflies come to rest, listening, listening, with eyes fixed on the gently waving branches, listening, and entranced by the voices of the birds.
Through the conversation of the blackbird and the thrush came what the sparrows had to say, and the "tweet-tweet" of the swallows under the eaves.
All a summer's day, if you listened at the Pavilion, you could hear the wood-dove's mournful recitative, "Don'tcryso, Susie—don'tcryso, Susie—don'tcryso, Susie—don't," at intervals, now near, now far.
The wood-doves had ceased their monotonous advice, and now the swallows took flight for the pyramidsof dreamland, and Silence took the little, chattering sparrows in her apron, and then the greater birds. Branch by branch she robbed, reaching here, reaching there, till at last one alone was left, a thrush on some topmost bough, where the light of day still lingered. Then she found him, too; and you could hear the wind drawing over the forest, and the trees folding their hands in sleep.
Then, from away where the dark pools were, came the "jug-jug-jug" of a nightingale asking the time of her mate, and the liquid, thrilling reply: "Too early." Then silence, and the whisper of ten thousand trees saying "Hush!—let us sleep."
"Would monsieur like the lamp?"
It was Fauchard's daughter, lamp in hand, at the door. Her rough-hewn peasant's face lit by the upcast light, was turned towards us with a pleasant expression. I suppose we were both so young and so innocent in appearance that she could not look sourly upon us, though our proceedings must have seemed irregular enough to her honest mind. She looked upon us, doubtless, as lovers. We were good to look upon, though I say it, who am now old. We were young; and everything, it seems to me in these later days, is forgivable to youth.
"Oh, youth, what a star thou art!"
* * * * *
Then I rose and took my hat from the table near by.
"But you are not going?" said Eloise, one white hand seizing my coat-sleeve, and a tremble of surprise in her voice.
"But I must," replied I. "I must get back to Paris. I will come to-morrow morning. Madame Ancelot here will look after you. There are books. You will be happy, and I will come back in the morning, and we will have a long day in the forest. We will take our luncheon in a basket, and have a picnic."
"Ah, well!" sighed Eloise, looking timidly from me to Madame Ancelot, who, having placed the lamp on the table, stood, with all a peasant's horror of fresh air in the house, waiting to shut the windows, "if youmustgo—— But you will come back?"
"To-morrow; and you will look after her, Madame Ancelot, will you not?"
"Mais oui," said the good woman with a smile and as if she were talking to two children. "Mademoiselle need not be afraid; there are no robbers here; nothing more dangerous than the rabbits and the birds; and if there were, why, Ancelot has his gun."
Eloise tripped over to the woman and gave her a kiss; then, glancing back at me, she laughed and ran out into the tiny hall to get her hat.
"I will go with you as far as—a little way," she said, as she tied the strings of her hat, craning up on her toe-tips to see herself in a high mirror on the wall.
On the drawbridge she hung for a moment, peeping over at the still water of the moat, in which the stars were beginning to cast reflections.
"How dark, and still, and secret it looks!" murmured she. "Toto, has it ever drowned anyone?"
"Why do you ask?" replied I to the question that I myself had put to Joubert years ago.
"I don't know," said Eloise, "but it looks as if it had."
Ah, the evil moat! The water lilies blossomed there in summer; all the length of a summer's day the darting dragon-flies cast their blue-gauze reflections upon the water; Amy Féraud and Francine Volnay might cast their laughter and cigarette-ends for ever on its surface, leaning over the bridge-rail and seeing nothing. It was left for the heart of a child to question its secret and divine its treason.
The path from the Pavilion cut through the trees and opened on the carriage-drive to the château. When we reached the drive, Eloise, terrified by the dark and the unaccustomed trees, was afraid to return alone. So I had to go back with her to the drawbridge.
"To-morrow!" said she.
"To-morrow!" replied I.
She gave me a moist kiss—just as children give; then, as if that was not enough, she flung her arms around my neck, squeezed me, and then ran across the drawbridge, laughing.
"Good-night!" I cried; and "Good-night!" followed me through the trees as I ran, for, even running most of the way, I had scarcely time to catch the last train at Evry.
It was late when I reached Paris; and as I drove through the blazing streets I felt as though I had taken a deep breath of some intoxicating air. The vision of Eloise in her new home pursued me. I felt as though I had taken a child from the jaws of a dragon. I had done a good act, and God repaid me,for Eloise had brought me a gift far better than pearls. She had brought me all that old freshness of long ago; she had brought me fresh in her hands the flowers of childhood; she had given me back the warmth of heart, the clearness of sight, the joy in little things, the joy without cause, which the war of sex and the world robs from a man.
A breath from my earliest youth—that was Eloise.
At the Place Vendôme, the servant whom I had commissioned to find out Franzius' address handed me a paper on which he had written it. It was in the Rue Dijon, Boulevard Montparnasse.
I put the paper in my pocket, ran upstairs, and, hearing voices and laughter through the partly opened door of the great salon on the first floor, I burst into the room.
Great Heavens!
The child who gets into a shower bath, and, not knowing, pulls the string, could not receive a greater shock than I.
The room was filled with gentlemen in correct evening attire. It was, in fact, one of what my guardian was pleased to call his "political receptions."
I was dressed in a morning frock-coat, the dust of Etiolles was on my boots, my hair was in disorder, my face flushed. If I had entered rolling-drunk, in evening clothes, I would not have committed so great a crime against the convenances.
And it was too late to back out, simply because my impetuosity had carried me into the room too far.
My guardian gazed at the spectacle before him, but not by as much as the lifting of an eyebrow did that fine old gentleman betray his discomfiture.
He turned from the Spanish ambassador, to whom he was talking, came forward and took my hand; inquired, in a voice raised slightly so as to be distinct, about myjourney; apologised for not having informed me that it was one of his political evenings, and introduced me to the Duc de Cadore.
Then—and this was his punishment—he totally ignored me for the remainder of the evening.
I cannot remember what the Duc de Cadore said to me, or I to him; but we talked, and I ate ices which I could not taste. I would have frankly beaten a retreat, now that I had made my entry and faced the fire, but for a young man who, engaged in a conversation with two of the attachés of the Austrian Embassy, looked in my direction every now and then. It was my evil genius, the Comte de Coigny.
The same who, as a boy in the garden of the Hôtel de Moray, had told me of the ruin of the Felicianis. I had not come across him since he left the Bourdaloue College. He was now, it seems, an attaché of the Emperor's, and he was just the same as of old, though bigger. A stout young man, with a stolid, insolent face; and I guessed, by his side-glances, that his conversation with the Austrians was about me, and that I was being discussed critically and sarcastically.
God! how I hated that young man at that moment; and how I longed to cross the room, and, flinging theconvenances to the winds, smack him in the face! But that pleasure was to be reserved for another hand than mine.
When the unhappy political reception was over, and the last of the guests departed, I sought my guardian in the smoking-room, to make my apologies.
"My dear sir," said my guardian, with a little, kindly laugh that took the stiffness from the formality of his address and turned it into a little joke, "on my heart, I did not perceive what you were attired in. A host is oblivious of all things but the face and the hand of his guest. Were the Duc de Bassano or M. le Duc de Cadore to turn up at a reception of mine attired as a rag-picker, I would only be conscious that I was receiving the Duc de Cadore or the Duc de Bassano. They would be for me themselves,however their fellow-guests might sneer!
"And how have we enjoyed ourselves in Paris?" asked the kindly old gentleman, turning from the subject of dress, and lighting a fresh cigar.
"Oh, very well," I said. "And, by the way, I have met an old acquaintance."
"Ah!"
"Mademoiselle Feliciani, a daughter of Count Feliciani."
"Count Feliciani, the—er—defaulter?"
"I don't know what he may have done," said I, "but I met them years ago, at the Schloss Lichtenberg. Then they were entirely ruined. I met Mademoiselle Feliciani last night in a most curious way; and she has been living in great poverty. In fact,I"—and here I blushed, I believe—"I have taken her under my protection."
Protection! Oh, hideous word, uttered in the simplicity of youth! Beautiful word, that men have debased—men who would debase the angels, could they with their foul hands touch those immaculate wings.
"I hope, sir, you don't object?"
"Object!"
"I have given her the Pavilion to live in," continued I, encouraged by my guardian's smile of frank approval. "The only thing that grieves me is," I went on, "that her mother is dead, and that I cannot offer her my protection, too."
My guardian opened his eyes at this; and I blundering along, blushing, surprised into one of those charming confidences of youth which youth so rarely betrays, told him of the beauty of the Countess Feliciani, and of how much I had admired her as a child, and how I had visited her and seen her, prematurely aged, ruined, the gold of her beautiful hair turned to snow, her face lined with the wrinkles of age; and then it was, I think, that M. le Vicomte began to perceive that my relationship with Eloise was other than what he had imagined.
"A pure love!" I can imagine him saying to himself. "Why, mon Dieu! that might lead to marriage—marriage with a Feliciani—an outcast, a beggar! We must arrange all this; it is a question of diplomacy."
But by no sign did he betray these thoughts. He listened to the woes of the Felicianis, the picture ofsympathetic benevolence; and, when I had finished, he said: "Ah, poor things!" And then, after a moment's reverie, as though he were recalling the love affairs of his own youth: "It is sad. Tell me, are you very much enamoured of this Mademoiselle Feliciani?"
"Good heavens!" I said. "No. I care for her only—only—that is to say, I only care for herself."
A confused statement apparently, yet an unconscious and profound criticism on Love.
The Vicomte raised his eyebrows. He was I think, frankly puzzled. He saw my meaning—that I cared for Eloise as a child or a sister. His profound experience of life had never, perhaps, brought a similar case to the bar of his reason; his profound knowledge of men and women told him of the danger of the thing.
"How has Mademoiselle Feliciani been living since the death of her mother?" asked he.
"She has been a model at Cardillac's studio," I replied.
"Indeed? Poor girl! And now, may I ask, what do you propose to do with this protégée of yours?"
"I? Just give her a home and what money she requires."
"In fact," said the Vicomte, "you, a young man of nineteen, are going to adopt a beautiful young girl of the same age, or younger, out of pure charity, give her a house to live in, pay her expenses——"
"Yes," I replied. "God has given me money; and I thank God that He has given me the means ofrescuing the sweetest and the purest woman living from a life that could lead her nowhere but to the morgue. Monsieur, what is the matter?"
The Vicomte was crimson, and making movements with his hands as though to wave away a gauzy veil. At least, that was the impression the outspread fingers gave me.
Then he laughed out aloud, the first time I had ever heard him laugh so.
"Forgive me," he said. "I am not, indeed, laughing at you. I am amused at no thing or person: it is the imbroglio. What you have told me is interesting, and I take it as a profound secret. Say nothing of it to anyone; for if it were known——"
"Yes?"
"Why, the whole of Paris would be laughing!"
I arose, very much affronted and huffed. And I was a fool, for what my guardian said was perfectly correct. The situation to a French mind was as amusing as a Palais Royal farce. But I knew little of the world, and, as I say, I arose very much affronted and huffed.
"Good-night, sir."
My guardian rose up and bowed kindly and courteously, but with the faintest film of ice veiling his manner.
"Good-night."
"Good-morning."
"Ah! there you are. Toto—see!"
Eloise, without a hat, working in the little garden of the Pavilion, held up a huge spade for my inspection. The moat divided us, and I had my foot on the drawbridge, preparing to cross.
Up at six, I had come to Evry by an early train, and walked from the station. It was now after ten, and great was the beauty of the morning.
"I have dug up quite a lot," said Eloise. "Look!—all that. Madame Ancelot says I will make a gardener by and by—by and by—by and by," she sang, tossing the spade amidst some weeds; and then, hanging on my arm, she drew me into the house.
A perfume of violets filled the sitting-room. The place was changed. The subtle hand of a woman had rearranged the chairs, looped back the curtains and arranged them in folds of grace, peopled with violets empty bowls, wrought wonders with a touch.
On the sofa lay a heap of white material, which she swept away.
"That will be a dress to-morrow or the next day," said Eloise. "You will laugh when you see it, it will be so beautiful. And I have packed a basket for ourpicnic. Wait!" She ran from the room, and I waited.
Looking back, now, one of my pleasantest recollections is how she took my money, took the new life I had given her, thanking me indeed, full of gratitude, but as a thing quite natural and between friends. If we had wandered out of the gardens of Lichtenberg together, children, hand in hand, and passed straight through the years as one passes through a moment of time, to find ourselves at Etiolles still hand in hand, our relationship—as regards money affairs—could not have been less unstrained. I had bonbons; she had none; I shared with her. Nothing could be more natural.
She returned with the basket packed, and her hat, which she put on before the mirror. Then we started on our picnic in the woods, I carrying the basket.
"What part of the woods are you going to?" inquired Madame Ancelot as we crossed the drawbridge.
"The grand pool," replied I, "if it is still there, and I can find it."
Then, a footstep, and the world of the woods surrounded us, its silence and its music.
The place was full of leaping lights and liquid shadows. Here, where the trees were not so dense, the sunlight came through the waving branches in dazzling, quivering shafts; twilit alleys led the eye to open spaces, golden glimmers, and the misty white of the hawthorn trees.
The place was a treasure-house of beauty, and we trampled the violets under foot.
"Run!" cried Eloise.
I chased her, lost her, found her again. I forgot my lameness, I forgot my guardian, the convenances, and the fact that I was come to man's estate and carrying a heavy basket. The trees echoed with our laughter, till, tired out, panting, flushed, with her hat flung back and held to her neck only by the ribbon, Eloise sat down on a little carpet of violets and folded her hands in her lap.
"Listen!" said she, casting her eyes up to the trembling leaves above.
A squirrel, clinging to the bark of a tree near by, watched us with his bright eyes.
"Chuck, chuck." A bird on a branch overhead broke the silence, and, with a flutter of his wings, was gone. And now from far away, like the voice of Summer herself, filled with unutterable drowsiness and laziness and content, came the wood-dove's song to the mysterious Susie:
"Don'tcryso, Susie—don'tcryso, Susie—don'tcryso, Susie.Don't!"
"And listen!" said Eloise, when the wood-dove's song had been wiped away by silence and replaced by a "tap, tap, tap," far off, reiterated and decided, curiously contrasting with the less businesslike sounds of the wood.
"That's a woodpecker," I said. "Isn't he going it? And listen! That's a jay."
Then the whole wood sang to the breeze that had suddenly freshened, the light flashed and danced through the dancing leaves, the trees for a moment seemed to shake off the indolence of summer, and theforest of Sénart spoke—spoke from its cavernous bosom, where the pine-trees spread the hollow ground, from the pools where the bulrushes whispered, from the beech-glades and the nut-groves. The oaks, old as the time of Charles IX., the willows of yesterday, the elms all a-drone with bees, and the poplars paling to the trumpet-call of the wind, all joined their voices in one divine chorus:
"I am the forest of Sénart, old as the history of France, yet young as the last green leaf that April has pinned to my robe. Rejoice with me, for the skies are blue again, the hawthorn blooms, the birds have found their nests, the old, old world is young once more. For it is May."
"It is May; it is May!" came the carol of the birds, freshening to life with the dying wind.
Then we went on our road, Eloise with her hands filled with freshly gathered violets.
I thought I knew the forest and the direction to take for the great pool; but we had not gone far when our path branched, and for my life I could not tell which to take.
The path to the left being the most alluring, we took it; and lo! before we had gone very far, recollection woke up. This narrow path, twisting, turning, sometimes half obscured by the luxuriance of the undergrowth, was the path I had taken years ago—the path leading by the old-forgotten gravel-pit into which I had fallen, maiming myself for life; the path along which I had followed the mysterious child so like little Carl.
Perhaps it was the old recollection, but the path forme had a sinister appearance; something that was not good hung about it. Unconsciously I quickened my steps. I was walking in front; and as we passed the spot where I had seen the child standing and looking back at me from amidst the bushes, Eloise laid her hand on my arm, as if for closer companionship.
"I do not like it here," said she. "And I saw something—something moving in those bushes."
"Never mind," I replied; "we will soon reach the open."
When we did, and when we found ourselves in a broad drive which I remembered, and which led to the place I wanted, the sweat was thick on my brow; and I determined that, go back how we might, I would never enter that path again. It had for me the charm and yet the horror that we only find associated in dreamland.
"There was a child amidst the bushes," said Eloise. "I just saw its head; and—I don't know why—it frightened me, and——"
"Don't," said I. "I believe that place is haunted. Let us forget it."
The grand pool at last broke before us through the trees—a great space of sapphire-coloured water, where the herons had their home, and the dragon-flies.
It was past noon. We were hungry, so we sat down on a grassy bank by the water, opened the basket, and, spreading the food on the grass between us, fell to.
We had finished our meal—simple enough, goodness knows. Our drink had been milk carried in one of those clear glass bottles used for vin de Grave, and the bottle lay on the grass beside us, an innocent witness of our temperance. We had finished, I say, and we were watching a moorhen with her convoy of chicks paddling on the deep-blue surface of the pond, when voices from amidst the trees drew our attention; and two stout men in undress livery, bearing a basket between them, came from beneath the shade of the elms, and straight towards us. After the men, and led by Madame Ancelot's little boy, came a party of ladies and gentlemen, amidst whom I recognised my guardian. The old gentleman, as though May had touched him with her magic wand, had discarded his ordinary sober attire, and was dressed in a suit of some light-coloured material, very elegant, and harmonising strangely well with the exquisite toilets of his companions. He wore a flower in his buttonhole, and he was walking beside a girl whom I recognised at once as Amy Féraud. The two other women I did not then know; but one of them, dark and beautiful, I afterwards discovered to be the famous model La Perouse. The two men who made up the party were peers ofFrance; and if Beelzebub himself had suddenly broken from the trees I could not have been more disturbed than by this eruption of Paris into our innocent paradise.
In a flash I saw the whole thing. This was some move of my guardian's. I had told Madame Ancelot that we would be by the grand pool, and Madame Ancelot's boy had led them.
But M. le Vicomte was much too astute an old gentleman for subterfuge, whatever his plan might be.
"Welcome!" he cried, when we were within speaking distance. "I have been searching for you. Ah, what a day! We have just come down from Paris on M. le Comte de ——'s drag. My ward, M. Patrique Mahon; M. le Comte de ——."
I bowed stiffly as he introduced me to the men.
"And mademoiselle?" asked the old gentleman, raising his hat and standing uncovered before Eloise.
But I had no need to introduce my companion. La Perouse (oh, what a voice she had! Hard, metallic, shallow, low)—La Perouse, with a little shriek of recognition, cried out: "Marie! Why, it is Marie!"
Then she kissed her, and I could have struck her on the beautiful mouth, whose voice was a voice of brass, for innocence told me she was bad, and part of Eloise's wretched past.
Ah, me! If an eclipse had come over the sun, the beauty of the day could not have been more spoilt, the loveliness of spring more ruined.
The stout servant-men, with the dexterity of conjurers, unpacked the great basket, spread a wide cloth,and, in a trice, a luncheon was spread out to which the Emperor himself might have sat down.
There was no resisting M. le Vicomte. We had to sit down with the rest, and make a pretence to eat.
But Eloise refused wine, as did I.
"Ma foi!" said La Perouse. "What airs! Good champagne, too. Come, taste."
"Mademoiselle prefers water," I put in; and then, unwisely: "She is not accustomed to wine."
La Perouse stared at me, champagne-glass in hand, and then broke out laughing. She was about to say something, but checked herself, and turned to the chicken on her plate.
But La Perouse, as the champagne worked in her wits, returned to the subject of Eloise's abstinence.
In that dull brain was moving a resentment which the vulgar mind had not the power to repress.
"What! not drink champagne?" said the fool for the twentieth time. "Ah, well! It was different in the days of Changarnier. How is he, by the way, the brave Changarnier?"
I rose to my feet; and Eloise, as if moved by the same impulse, rose also.
"Mademoiselle," said I, as I offered Eloise my arm, "does not drink champagne. It is a matter of taste with her. Did she do so, however, I am very well assured that the evil spirit in it would never prompt her to talk and act like a fool!"
There was dead silence, as, with Eloise on my arm, I walked towards the trees. Then I heard the shrilllaughter of the women; but I did not heed, for Eloise was weeping.
"Come," I said; "forget them."
"It is not they," replied Eloise. "I do not care aboutthem."
I knew quite well what she meant. It was the Past.
Do not for a moment confuse that word "past" with conscience. Whatever sin might have been committed by the world against Eloise Feliciani, she, at heart, was sinless. No; it was just the Past, a blur of miasma from Paris, a breath of winter.
"Come," I said; "forget it! All that is a bad dream that you have dreamt; all those people, those women, those men, are not real: they are things in a nightmare; they have no souls, and when they die they go nowhere—they are just ugly pictures that God wipes off a slate. This is the real thing: these trees, these birds; and they are yours for ever. I give you them; they are the best gift that money can buy."
I wiped her eyes with my handkerchief. She smiled through her tears; and we pursued our way to the Pavilion, followed by the rustle of the wind in the leaves, and the song of the wood-doves—lazy, languorous, soothing—filled with the warmth and the softness of summer.
When I returned to Paris that night I sought for my guardian, and found him in the smoking-room.
Angry though I was with the trick he had played me, his manner was so bland and kind that I was at a loss how to begin.
He it was, indeed, who began by complimenting the beauty of Eloise, her grace and her modesty.
In fact, he had so much to say for her that I could not get in a word.
"All the same," finished he, "I do not quite see the future of this business. You offer Mademoiselle Feliciani a home, you provide for her, your intentions are absolutely honourable, yet you do not love her. That is all very well, mind you. It is somewhat strange in the eyes of the world, but I understand the position. You are a man of heart and honour, and she is, so to speak, an old friend; but what is to be the end of it?"
"I don't know," replied I.
"Just so. She is not a child. It is the nature of a woman to love, to enter into life. Picking daisies in the woods of Sénart may fill a summer morning, but not a woman's life. I am not entirely destitute of the gift of appreciation, the poetry of things is not yet dead for me, and I can see, my dear Patrique, the poetry of two young people, each half a child, playing at childhood. But the garment of a child, beautiful in itself, becomes ridiculous when you dress a man in it. Impossible, in fact. In fact," finished the old gentleman, suddenly dropping metaphor and using his stabbing spear, "you are getting yourself into a position that you cannot escape from with honour; for even if you wish you cannot marry this girl, for the simple reason that Paris would not receive her as your wife."
"I do not wish to marry Mademoiselle Feliciani," replied I, "nor does she dream of marrying me. I found her in wretchedness; I rescued her. I loved heras a friend. Have men and women no hearts but that they must sneer at what is natural and good? What is the barrier that divides a man from a woman so that comradeship seems impossible between them, simplicity, and all good feeling, including Christian charity?"
"Sex," replied M. le Vicomte de Chatellan.
Next day, when I returned to the Pavilion of Saluce, I took a companion with me—Franzius.
I called early at his wretched lodging in the Rue Dijon; the sound of his violin led me upstairs, and I found him, seated on the side of his bed, playing, his soul in Germany or dreamland.
A day in the country, away from Paris, the houses, the streets! If I had offered him a day in paradise the simple soul could not have expressed more delight.
"Well," I said, "it is nine o'clock. We will just have time to catch the train at Evry. Get ready and come on."
He took his hat from a shelf, placed it on his head, put his violin under his arm, and declared himself ready.
"But surely you are not taking your violin?"
"My violin—but why not?"
"Going into the country!"
"But why not? Ah, my friend, it never leaves me; without it I am not I. It is myself, my soul, my heart. Ach!"
"Come on—come on!" I said, laughing and pushing him and his violin before me. "Take anything you like, so long as you are happy. That's right—mind the stairs. Don't you lock your door when you go out?"
"There is nothing to steal," replied Franzius simply.
In the street I hailed a fiacre and bundled the violinist in, protesting. The mad extravagance of the business shocked him. He had never been in a fiacre before; even omnibuses were luxuries to this son of St. Cecilia, who had tramped the continent of Europe on foot. Yet he wanted to pay when we reached the station; and the return ticket I bought for him pained his sense of independence so much that I took the fare from him. Then he was happy—happy as a child; and I do not know what the other passengers thought of the young beau, elegantly dressed, seated beside the shabby violinist, both happy, laughing, and in the highest of spirits; the violinist, unconsciously, now and then plucking pizzicato notes from the strings of his instrument, caressing it as a man caresses the woman he loves.
We walked from Evry to Etiolles under the bright May morning, under the sparkling blue, along the delightful white dusty roads, the larks singing lustily, and the wind blowing the vanishing hawthorn-blossoms upon the dust like snow.
Then, at the drawbridge over the moat, Eloise was waiting for us, and we followed her into the Pavilion, Franzius with his hat crushed to his heart, bowing, the violin under his arm forgotten, his whole simple soul worshipping, very evidently, the beautiful and gracious goddess who had received us.
Ah, that was the day of Franzius's life! We haddéjeûner in the little garden, under the chestnut-tree alight with a thousand clusters of pink blossom. He forgot his shyness completely, and told us stories of his wanderings, unconsciously dominating the conversation and leading us hundreds of miles away from Etiolles to the forests of the Roth Alps and the Hartz. The great forests of the Vosges, so soon to resound to the drums of war and the tramping of armies, spread their perfumed shade around us as we listened. Castle Nidek, whose ruined walls still echo to the ghostly hunting-horn of Sebalt Kraft; the Rhine and its storeyed hills; the white roads of Germany; Pirmasens and the Swan Inn, with its rose-decked porch; mountain rivers, leaping waterfalls, skies turquoise-blue against the black-green armies of the high mountain pines—all spread before us, lay around us, domed us in as he talked the morning into afternoon, and the afternoon half away.
What a gift of description was his; and how we listened as children may have listened to the story of the wanderings of Ulysses! Then, to forge his simple chains more completely—to give the last touch to his magic—he played to us.
Gipsy dances! And you could hear, as the smoke of the camp-fires blew across the figures of the dancers, the feet of the women and the men who had wandered all day keeping time on the turf to the tune—a tune wild as the cry of the mountain kestrel, filled with all sorts of wandering undertones, heart-snatching subtleties.
Czardas and folk-airs he played, and the wonderfulspinning-song of Oberthal, in which you can hear, through the drone of the wheel and the flying flax, the history of the poor. Just a thread of song told by the thread of flax—the flax that forms the swaddling-clothes, the bridal linen, and the shroud of man. And lastly a tune of his own, more beautiful than any of the others.
"But why don't you write music?" I said, when we were seated in the railway-train on our way back to Paris. "You are a greater musician than any of those men who are famous and rich."
"My friend," said Franzius, "I am the second violin at La Closerie de Lilas."
It was the first time I had heard him speak at all bitterly, and I said no more. I did not approach the subject again, but that did not prevent me from making plans.
I would rescue this nightingale from its cage in a beer-garden and put it back in the woods; but the thing would require great tact and infinite discretion.
"Have you any music written out—you know what I mean, written out on paper—that I could show to a friend?" I asked him, as we parted at the station.
"I have several 'Lieder,'" replied Franzius. "Very small—just, as you might say, snatches."
"If I send a man for them to-morrow morning, will you give them to him? I will take the greatest care of them."
"But they are so small!"
"Never mind—never mind! I have influence, and may get them published."
He promised. And I saw the light of a new hope inhis face as he departed through the gaslit streets on foot—this child of the forest and the dawn, to whom God had given wings, and to whom the world had given a cage!
I went to the Opera that night. It was "Don Giovanni"; and as I sat with all the splendour of the Second Empire around me, tier upon tier of beauty and magnificence drawn like gorgeous summer night-moths around the flame of Mozart's genius, the vision of Franzius wandering through the gaslit streets, with his violin under his arm, passed and repassed before me.
He seemed so far from this; his music, before this triumphant burst of song, so like the voice of a cicala, faint and thin, and of no account.
Yet, when I went to bed, the tune that pursued me from the day was the haunting spinning-song of Oberthal—the song so simple and full of fate, the song of the flax, caught and interpreted by the humming strings, telling the story of the cradle, the marriage-bed, and the grave!
I did not go to Etiolles next day, for I had business that detained me in Paris; but I went the day following, and Eloise received me, pouting.
"Ah well, wait!" said I, as I followed her into the Pavilion. "Wait till I tell you what I have been doing, and then you won't scold me for leaving you alone."
"Tell, then!" said Eloise, putting a bunch of violets in my coat, and pressing them flat with her little hand.
"I will tell you," said I, kissing the littleviolet-perfumed hand. And sitting down, I told her of how I had asked Franzius to let me have his music.
"He sent me the three songs yesterday morning," I went on. "I cannot read music, though I love it; but that did not matter. I had my plan. I ordered the Vicomte's best carriage to the door, and drove to the Opera House, where I inquired of the doorkeeper the address of the best music-publisher in Paris. Flandrin, of the Rue St. Honoré, it seems, is the best, so I drove there.
"It was a big shop. Flandrin sells pianos as well as songs. He is a big man, with a big, white, fat face with an expression like this." I puffed out my cheeks and opened my eyes wide to show Eloise what Flandrin was like. She laughed; and I went on: "He was very civil. He had seen me drive up to his door in a carriage and pair, and I suppose he thought I had come to buy a piano. When he heard my real business his manner changed. He said he was sick of musical geniuses; he would not even look at poor Franzius's 'Lieder.' 'Take them to Barthelmy,' he said. 'He lives in the Passage de l'Opera; he publishes for those sort of people, and he is going bankrupt next week, so another genius won't do him any harm.' 'I haven't time to go to Barthelmy,' I replied. 'Besides, I don't want you to buy these things. I want to buy them.'
"'Well, my dear sir,' said Flandrin, 'if you want to buy them, why don't you buy them?'
"'Just for this reason,' I replied. 'M. Franzius, who wrote these things, is not a shopman who sells pianos; he is a poet. He would be offended if Ioffered him money for his productions, for he would know that I did it for charity's sake. I want you to buy these things from him. I will give you the money to do so, and, by way of commission, I will buy a piano from you. My only condition is that you come with me now in my carriage and see M. Franzius, and pay him the money yourself. Of course, you will have to publish the things, too; but I will give you the money to do that as well. Here are a thousand francs, which you are to give M. Franzius. Send one of your pianos round to No. 14, Place Vendôme, M. le Vicomte de Chatellan's. And now, if you are ready, we will start.'
"He came like a lamb. The purchase of the piano had put him into a very good humour. He seemed to look upon the thing as a practical joke; and the idea of paying an unknown musician a thousand francs for three pieces of music seemed to tickle him immensely, for he kept repeating the sum over and chuckling to himself the whole way to the Rue Dijon.
"Franzius was in bed and asleep when we got there. I led Flandrin right up to the attic; and you may imagine Franzius's feelings when he woke up and found us in his room—the best music-publisher in Paris standing at the foot of his bed waiting to offer him a thousand francs for his 'Lieder'! A thousand francs down! Oh, there is nothing like money! It was just as if I had opened a window in his life and let in spring. I saw him grow younger under my eyes as he sat up in bed unconscious of everything but the great idea that luck had come at last and some hand had opened the door of his cage. Even old Flandrin was a bit moved,I think. Ah, well! I bundled Flandrin off when the business was done, and then I made Franzius write a note to the Closerie de Lilas people, telling them that at the end of the week he was leaving there, and then I told him my plan. You know old Fauchard, the forest-keeper's cottage? It's only half a mile from here; it's right in the forest. Well, he has a room to spare, and he will put Franzius up for twelve francs a week. He will be free to write his music——"
"Ah, Toto," cried Eloise, who had been trying to in a word for the last two minutes, "how good of you!"
"Good of me! Why, I have only done what pleased myself! It's a debt. The man saved my life—but no matter about that. Get your hat and come with me, and we will go to Fauchard's and make arrangements about the room."