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Title: Dr. Vermont's fantasy and other stories
Author: Lynch, Hannah
Language: English
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OTHER STORIES ***
DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY
AND OTHER STORIES
_All rights reserved_
DR. VERMONT’S
FANTASY
BY
HANNAH LYNCH
[Illustration]
LONDON
J. M. DENT AND COMPANY
BOSTON: LAMSON WOLFFE & CO.
MDCCCXCVI
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
Three of these stories--‘Armand’s Mistake,’ ‘A Page of Philosophy,’
and ‘The Little Marquis’ have already appeared in _Macmillan’s
Magazine_, and I am indebted to Messrs. Macmillan for the kind
permission to republish them.
CONTENTS
DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY--
PART FIRST--MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT PAGE
The Island, 3
A Midnight Vision, 19
The Story of Mademoiselle Lenormant, 36
AN INTERLUDE, 55
PART SECOND--DR. VERMONT
Dr. Vermont and his Guests upon the Island, 74
New Year’s Eve, 90
EPILOGUE, 118
BRASES--
I., 131
II., 152
III., 167
A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY, 187
ARMAND’S MISTAKE--
I., 227
II., 246
III., 261
MR. MALCOLM FITZROY--
I., 269
II., 292
THE LITTLE MARQUIS, 305
DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY
_To Frederick Greenwood_
_PART FIRST_
MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT
(_Told by the traveller_)
THE ISLAND
IT was a warm autumn that year--a luminous exception upon which the
last summer of the century was borne somewhat oppressively to the very
verge of winter. The middle hours of the afternoon could be intolerable
enough in a big, busy city well upon the confines of the South. The
rush and whirr of looms was carried far upon the air, and even into the
quietest streets wandered the noisy echoes of the boulevards.
Yet it was dull and flat for the solitary stranger, without interest
in factories, or provincial entertainment in friendship. It was doubly
dull for a woman past youth and all its personal excitements to be
extracted from fleeting curiosity and thrills of anticipation; denied
by reason of sex the stale delights of café lounges, and by reason
of station the healthier and livelier hospitalities of _cabaret_ and
peasant reunions.
Travelling-bag and portmanteau lay strapped in the hotel hall. The
train for Paris would not leave until late that night, and to while
away the intervening hours I went forth beyond the town. I chose the
farther end of the long boulevard, the middle of which I had not yet
passed. Down there the brilliant air lost its clearness in a yellow
mist, as if flung from the sky in a fine dust of powdered gold. Upon
its edge hung the last visible arms of the trees on either side,
lucidly, of unwonted greenness, the green we note in painted French
landscapes, brightly touched with yellow. I felt that something fresh,
cool, and soft must lie behind that golden veil. It led my imagination
as a child is led out of the real, by the illusive promises of
fairyland.
Here sound was deadened, and city movements seemed to faint away
upon the weariness of the long hot day. I glanced back at the town.
Behind me stretched the dusty boulevard, and sharpened above it,
against the tremulous pellucid blue of the heaven, the profile of
quaint church-spires and heavy masses of buildings. Ahead, my way was
blocked by the wide grey river, black where the shadows touched it,
silver where the full light shone upon it. A bridge of grey stone
spanned it from the end of the boulevard to the other side, the
unexplored:--a bridge so old, so worn, so silent and empty, that it
might appropriately be the path to the city cemetery.
This bridge I crossed in all its glamour of sad enchantment. One of
its arches was broken, and made a dangerous gap above the broad, quiet
waters. There were no lamps, no visible indication of life about. I saw
that it led to an island encircled by a battered and decayed dark wall,
with little castellated ornaments that gave it the look of a feudal
fortress of unusual extent and dimensions. Midway I stood upon the
bridge, and wondered what sort of land might be before me. At first I
believed it to be uninhabited, until much gazing discovered a thin curl
of blue smoke far away, beyond a square tower. It was nearing sunset
now, and the island lying west, showed out more darkly from a broad
band of reddish glory. It wore all the more dead and desolate air
because of the floating and quickened light above it.
Have you ever, in some quaint French town washed by a wide river,
watched these lovely sunset contrasts on the blackened greyness of
stone masses and on the sombre placidity of water? The best effects
you will find upon the Loire, and if you can recall them, you will
see, better than words of mine can paint, the salient features of that
river-view set with towers and a decayed, old grey wall.
I was saturated with the sadness of it, and my glance was still wedded
to its dead charm, when a bloused peasant came out of the under shadows
and luminous red upper sphere, like a cheerful commonplace note in the
picturesque mystery of the imagination. Very real he looked, and not
in the least like a ghost from other centuries. Prosperous, too, as
befits a peasant who has earned his right to nod to his betters, and
mayhap clink free and fraternal glasses with them through an ocean of
blood. He came along, whistling a patriotic tune, with his hands in his
pockets, and his hat in villainous emphasis cocked over one ear.
‘Can it be,’ I asked myself, in a pang of disappointment, ‘that this
enchanted island contains the ubiquitous _cabaret_, and that the
impossible legend of liberty, equality, and fraternity has penetrated,
with its attendant train of horrid evils, into this home of silence and
poetic decay?’
I interrupted my gloomy moralising, for which, like all persons
naturally gay, I flatter myself I have a decided turn, and hat,
metaphorically, in hand, sued this roadside rascal for information.
‘Yes, people lived upon the island, not many--mostly women: laundresses
upon the side that ran unprotected down to the water edge. I might
see their sheds if I made the round of the wall. There was a large
Benedictine convent at one end, and a cemetery eastward--but no hotel
accommodation, no shops, no vehicles of any sort, and but one miserable
little wine-shop, where they sold the worst brandy in all France.’
Of this liquid I concluded the fellow had been drinking somewhat
copiously, and left him to push inquiries for myself.
I know not why, but the moment I set foot upon the island, and heard
the slow swish of the eddying river against its projecting base,
thought was checked upon mild and pleasurable suspense. Something
unexpected must surely happen, I believed, and step by step destiny
seemed to impel me forward in its pursuit. My footfall rang sharply
upon the empty path, and I felt it would be ignominy to leave this
strange spot until fate had spoken, and its voice been interpreted
adequately for me by circumstance.
How still everything was, and how softly the day’s heat was stealing
out of the atmosphere! One bright star shone like a lamp over a noble
ruin, and for this I made. No sound of living voice, no clang of wooden
shoe or beat of hoofs broke the heavy silence, and by this fact I knew
that I must still be remote from the washerwomen’s quarter. There was a
fearful look about the low rocks that reached behind the ruins down to
the black water, whose perilous stillness was unwholesomely revealed by
the margin of quivering light shed from the rosy sky.
A few yards farther brought me to the open cemetery gate. Here I
entered with a shuddering sense of the romantic appropriateness of
its aspect. Did ever churchyard wear so solemn, so forsaken an air of
death? Death was breathed in the profuseness and dankness of the weeds
that sprawled over and almost enveloped the tombstones; in the grassy
walks unworn by tread of foot; in the graves that showed no sacred
care of hand, no symbol of fond remembrance or bereaved heart. Who
were these dead so forgotten and so alone? So near a busy city, and so
remote from living man?
Suddenly my wondering fancy was visibly answered by sight of a slim
old woman in black, who slowly came toward me by a narrow side-path. I
stopped her with an elaborate apology, and we speedily fell into talk.
She had been born on this island sixty years before, when the century
was entering into middle life, and now at its close these had been
the permanent limits of her vision. About a dozen times she may have
crossed the bridge, or walked the streets of the city yonder, and only
once had she gone down the river in a barge to have a peep at the real
South--the ardent, rose and lavender-smelling South!
‘I pray you, Madame, tell me, who am a restless vagabond, never three
months happy in the same place, how life looks to one like you, who
have never left the boundary marks of birth, who have grown and lived
amid unchanged scenes, and have been satisfied to look for sixty years
upon these low grey walls and the spires and chimneys of that distant
city?’ I asked, profoundly astonished.
In the old dame’s wrinkled parchment face gleamed a pair of singularly
vivid brown eyes that held, I suspect, more wisdom than my dissatisfied
and travelled glance. She eyed me curiously one long eloquent moment,
and then remarked, with some astuteness and much benevolence, that
change brought idle misery, and monotony its own reward of ignorance
and content. Further questions about the island led to an offer from
her to show me where she lived--an offer I accepted eagerly, and
together we left the cemetery, now revealing all its melancholy charm
in the last flushed smile of a lovely autumn sunset.
Save for the glimmer of gold upon an upper casement, the grey street
was already cast into twilit gloom, and a faint ray here and there
seemed to make its own pathway through the dim troubled blue of the
atmosphere. Unmistakably evening was upon us, and the ghosts of the
imagination would surely soon be abroad among these haunted scenes.
But nobody could be less spectral than my companion, both in speech and
in looks. She was communicative to rashness, and when I asked where I
could obtain lodging upon the island, for a week or a month, as long as
the caprice pleased me--she fixed me in a mild interrogative way, and
paused, as if equally in doubt of my discretion and of her own.
There was no hotel, no lodgings that she knew of, but if Madame really
desired it--if, in fact, she could trust Madame to be discreet and
reserved, she did not know that it might not be managed somehow. But
she would not engage herself.
I pressed for an explanation, and so aflame was I with sharp interest
and curiosity, that I know not what wild pledges of reserve and
discretion and prudent behaviour I proffered. Willingly at that moment
would I have undertaken to deny my whole past, and give the lie direct
to nature. What more potent than passionate sympathy? and the old
woman, I think, must have felt some desperate need for a willing ear
in which to pour her pent-up confidences. The cup of silence to which
experience had condemned her was full to overflowing, and my voice it
seems shook the brim.
She told me then that she was the confidential servant and sole
companion of a maiden lady who lived alone with a little niece in a big
barrack of a house below the Benedictine monastery. There was a story,
of course, which perhaps one day I should hear, if matters could be
so arranged that I might sojourn a while beneath their roof. But this
also was a promise withheld. Nothing depended on her, though she had
influence--naturally, she added, with a look of meaning that set my
heart in a flutter. I declare it made me feel young again, and full of
thrilling alarm, on the heels of romance, in the quest of breathless
adventure. I cannot explain how this old peasant had the knack of
accentuating commonplace words, and of lending them a significance far
beyond that with which we are accustomed to associate them. But she
did so, and there was a nameless charm and tremor conveyed in her added
‘naturally,’ with its accompanying suppressed intimation of glance.
The Benedictine monastery lay in massive gloom below, reaching an
aerial coldness of sharp point and spire along its jagged tops. Feudal
gashes in the arches let in large slips of green sky and glimmering
stars, and its rough stone wall along one side was the division
between the convent and the garden of my companion’s mistress. No, not
even the cemetery I had left could, in the dreariest hour, look more
inexpressibly dark, and lifeless, and forsaken than that old garden.
Its beauty was the beauty of death and sadness and neglect. There
were rotten arbours and stone seats, and mossy, weed-grown paths. The
underwood was impenetrably thick, and only the fine old trees lifted
a calm front, indifferent to man’s unkindness. They needed no human
hand to care them, and so they throve, and willingly gave grateful
shade, and the splendour of their foliage, and the majesty of their
form to the dead scene. But of flowers there were none. A coating of
moss, bleached and faded, had grown over the old sun-dial, which now
was hidden under the branching trees. Not a bird sang, nor did any
live thing skurry into hiding upon sound of my footstep, as I wandered
through the dusky alleys, while my guide went inside to consult her
mistress.
The quiet of an empty garden, showing no sign of care or an active
presence about it, while within view of smoke and fierce city
activities, is surely not comparable with any other quiet in nature.
Restriction adds to its intensity. The silence becomes almost palpable
from the hum of existence afar, and the spirit of the place seems more
vividly personal by reason of the narrowness of vision. You may walk
along the loneliest beach man ever trod, and feel less alone than I did
in that garden. The dimness of the biggest forest would be comforting
after the intolerable motionlessness of its leaves and plumy weeds.
I was beginning to wonder if it would be possible for me to fulfil my
contract should the lady of the house consent to share her roof with
me, when I heard a child’s clear, joyous laugh. It was a sound of
heavenly music to me just then, and effectually dispersed the gruesome
mist which was fast enveloping my reason. The desolation of the place,
and the ghastly images which threatened nightmare, could only be
accidental, I wisely concluded, if such laughter--fresh, untroubled,
and sweet--might be heard unrebuked. When the old woman reappeared,
alarm was already soothed, and I was back in the grip of fascinating
excitement.
‘Mademoiselle gives me permission to dispose of the lower
_appartement_, which we never occupy now,’ she said, with a smile so
human and inviting that I could have embraced her on the spot.
We walked toward the house, which, though gloomy enough, showed nothing
to match the mystery of the dark garden. Three broad discoloured
steps led to the hall of the lower story, which was offered for my
occupation, and inside the large stone hall I noted a little carriage
and two wooden horses worked by springs.
‘The sound of Gabrielle’s carriage will not, I hope, disturb Madame?
She generally plays here, as there is not space enough upstairs.’
I expressed myself delighted to be in close neighbourhood with the
child’s playground.
‘These used to be poor Madame’s rooms,’ she added, with a big sigh, as
she opened the door of a fine, chill salon.
‘The mother of Mademoiselle,’ I conjectured.
‘Oh, no; Mademoiselle’s mother always preferred the rooms
upstairs--those which Mademoiselle now lives in. These were her
sister’s--young Madame, Gabrielle’s mother.’
‘She is dead?’
‘Alas! yes. It is unlucky to be too much loved--unlucky for loved
one and for lovers. Dr. Vermont has never been here since his wife’s
death--has never even seen little Gabrielle since she was born, and
Mademoiselle has never once smiled.’
I was content to reserve my curiosity for another moment, and applied
my attention exclusively to the question of my installation. My vanity,
I will own, was something flattered by its magnificence. There were
two handsome salons, a bed- and dressing-room, and a dining-room,
all richly furnished in Empire style. The best taste may not have
prevailed, but there could be no question of substantial effectiveness,
and already an air of other days hung round it, and made a pathetic
appeal to the judgment.
As my companion showed me over the kitchen and pantries and other
domestic offices, I noted on the farther side of the narrow passage,
beyond my bedroom, a closed door which she did not offer to open. My
sympathy with Bluebeard’s wife was instantly awakened, and that door
became an object of burning interest to me.
From the kitchen she conducted me through the dining-room window into
a long glass-roofed gallery, jutting out beyond the house and seeming
to hang over the river, so completely hidden were the rocks below. The
city lights along the opposite bank were visible, and the heavy masses
of boats and barges made moving shadows through the dusk.
‘How lovely!’ I exclaimed, sniffing the soft air delightedly. ‘Here
will I sit and walk and read and muse. A month, did I say! I could
cheerfully end my days here.’
‘We have no servant at your disposal, Madame,’ the old woman said,
phlegmatically checking my enthusiasm by a reminder of the trials of
existence. ‘But until you have procured one, I shall be glad to give
you any assistance in my power.’
I thanked her heartily, and inquired if I could find a fiacre to drive
at once for my luggage to town. There was no such thing on the island,
she calmly informed me. Nothing in the shape of a wheeled object ever
crossed the bridge from the city except the morning vans and the weekly
butcher’s cart. Once a week the laundresses wheeled their barrows of
linen into town and returned on the same day with the supply for the
week’s washing. She could recommend a little maid, whose mother would,
no doubt, be glad to undertake to market for me for a consideration,
and her I could engage on my way to the hotel.
I left the amiable old dame to prepare for my reception that night,
and set forth in the dropping twilight in search of the maid and my
portmanteau. I had the wisdom, however, to dine at the hotel before
returning to the gloomy island.
A MIDNIGHT VISION
IT was late when I drove across the bridge from the town. The noise
of rumbling wheels upon the pavement, as the cab clattered past the
arches, was of such unearthly volume as to arouse the soundest sleeper.
In one or two casements lights and alarmed faces showed; but for the
rest, the islanders turned upon their pillows, scarcely vexed by idle
speculation upon the disturbance.
The darkness of the house chilled my heart, as the cab drove up the
grassy pathway, and when the door opened, and the old dame stood in the
hall in the uncertain illumination of a single candle, the solitude
of the place looked so insufferably strange, that I rubbed my eyes to
ascertain if I were really awake and not dreaming. But a substantial
cabman was waiting for his fare, and the woman’s thin yellow hand was
holding mine in a cordial clasp. I believe the honest creature had
already begun to miss me, and had been counting the minutes until my
reappearance.
She led me into the dining-room, where a supper of _pâté_, fruit, and
burgundy was prepared for me, and though I protested that I was not
hungry, she compelled me to make a pretence of eating, for the excuse
of lingering to talk to me. Mademoiselle had long since retired. She
herself had slept a little in order to be fresh for the excitement of
my return.
We sat till far into the night, chatting about the great world, about
Paris, which to her meant all the sin and misery and gaiety of the
entire universe; and about the big town of Beaufort across the river.
This impelled me to stand up and draw the curtain, that I might have
a peep at it from the gallery. The old woman followed me, and stood
leaning beside me against the flat stone balustrade. The lights now
along the water were few and widely spread--but in the heaven they had
multiplied and twinkled, variously-hued, upon their dark ground.
‘Down there lies the road to Beaufort--the road to Paris,’ my companion
murmured wistfully. ‘It is now ten years since Mademoiselle has been
watching it, but never a soul comes by it--never a soul.’
‘Whom is she watching for?’ I asked, in a tone insensibly lowered by
her whisper.
‘For Dr. Vermont--little Gabrielle’s father.’
‘Is he the only relative she has?’
‘The only one. It is a sad story. The poor lady is eating her heart
out with sorrow for the dead, and idle sorrowing for the living. The
dead at least loved her--but the living! Ah, there is nothing harder in
nature than the heart of a man turned from a loving woman.’
‘Does Dr. Vermont know that Mademoiselle loves him?’
‘Know!’ she cried indignantly. ‘Mademoiselle is a proud woman. _I_
know because I divine it. He too might divine it, if feeling could
touch him. But he was always a hard man. He stays away, and he does not
write. He cares no more for his child than he does for Mademoiselle.’
She dropped into silence, and I did not want to scare her by appearing
in any way to force her confidence. I was poignantly wakeful from
interest and the atmosphere of mystery I breathed; nevertheless, I
yielded at once to suggestion that the hours were lengthening towards
morning, and was glad enough to find myself shuddering among the cold
sheets that had lain long in lavender presses, while I listened to the
echo of the old woman’s footsteps upon the stairs and the sound of key
in lock and bolt drawn.
* * * * *
I was sleeping soundly when Joséphine brought me my morning chocolate
and drew up the blind. She informed me that Mademoiselle hoped I
had slept well, and would do me the honour of calling on me in the
afternoon. This courtesy both astonished and gratified me. I had
understood that Joséphine had half smuggled me into the house, and that
her mistress had only given a grudging consent to my admittance.
The morning I devoted to examination of my quarters. I found the door
of the mysterious chamber locked, but as the key was on the outside,
I had the indiscretion to turn it and look in. It was a luxurious
bedroom, and was as blue as one of Lesueur’s paintings. Young Madame
Vermont must indeed have adored the colour to suffer it in such
monotonous excess. The bed, of black polished wood, was hung with blue
silk curtains; the carpet was of blue cloth, and blue prevailed in the
handsome rugs that relieved it. The couches, the chairs, were covered
with blue silk, and blue muslin even draped the long looking-glass.
The bed looked ready for use; the blue embroidered coverlet was
turned down, and across the lace-edged sheet was flung an unrolled
night-dress, as if somebody were momently expected to lift it. On the
dressing-table several dainty objects of feminine toilette lay ready
to hand--even a little crushed lace handkerchief was thrown hastily
against a silver hand-mirror. Beside the bed was a pair of black velvet
slippers, and across a chair a frilled and expensive wrapper. Even the
water in the carafe on the table was fresh, and there were matches
beside the silver-wrought candle-stick. A beautiful jar on an inlaid
table in the window recess contained hot-house flowers that were only
beginning to fade, but their untainted perfume told of water daily
renewed.
It was easy to divine the secret story of that woman’s chamber.
Mademoiselle cherished the delusion, as unsubstantial food for her
hungry heart, that its occupant was merely absent, and might be
expected any day--any hour. She refused to accept the irrevocableness
of death, and kept the chamber ready for the wandering spirit when the
ties of earth should recall it. This was the meaning of the turned-down
bed and unfolded night-dress; of the flowers in the jar sent from the
city and carefully watered each evening; of the little handkerchief
eloquently wisped against the silver mirror. I retreated softly, and
closed the door as if of some sacred place.
After an interview with the maid who came to wait upon me, I lounged in
the gallery until the midday breakfast. The aspects and surroundings
enchanted me still more by day than they had done the night before.
I felt alone--solemnly alone between large spaces of sky and water.
Underneath, the river flowed broadly, and upon its bosom the big barges
travelled southward, and lighter vessels glided swiftly by to drop
behind the bridge, whence the eye could follow their path no more.
Below the broken arches and towered points of the bridge went the road
to Beaufort and the wide world, a white dust-blown band along the grey
horizon. Under a blazing sun showed the outlines of the city, and the
strained ear might detect the far-off murmur of looms by help of the
factory chimneys. But this needed an effort of imagination in so heavy
and dense a silence.
After breakfast I bethought myself of a visit to the melancholy garden
by way of change. On the stairs I caught the pleasant patter of small
feet and the shrill, sweet notes of a child’s voice. I stepped into the
hall, where Gabrielle was at play. She was not pretty, but so lively
and spirited and quaint, that she gave a fuller notion of the charm of
childhood than any pretty child I have known. She knew neither shyness
nor fear. When she saw me, she stopped her play, and approached me
boldly.
‘You are the strange lady Joséphine says I am not to bore,’ she said
gravely, without any resentment or surprise that she should be asked to
consider me.
‘I hope you will bore me a good deal, little one,’ I replied. ‘I love
children, and am delighted when they take notice of me and chatter to
me.’
‘I like chattering, too, but my aunt is very silent. She is always
learning lessons and reading books. Do you learn lessons still?’
‘Sometimes, when I am not too lazy. But I am like you, I don’t like
lessons and work,--I prefer play.’
‘If you like, I will play with you,’ she offered, with a serious
condescension that was captivating. ‘I have no one to play with except
Minette and Monsieur Con. Wouldn’t you like to see Minette? She is a
little fluffy, white kitten. Monsieur Con is my rabbit. Come and I will
show them to you.’
This was the start of a friendship delightful enough to have moored my
barque to those island shores for an indefinite period, if even there
had been no irresistible interest of environment and personality to
enthral me. But Mademoiselle Lenormant’s character was a character of
unusual fascination--not in the sense of sexual attraction but from
the point of view of study. She came and sat with me for half an hour
late that afternoon. I could not fitly describe her as formal, for she
breathed of austere sadness and study. Her pretensions to beauty, in
the accepted form, can never have been great, but defective features
found an abundant apology in the extreme delicacy of the pallid
face and a certain wistful eagerness and suppressed tenderness of
expression. It was a face to haunt you into the silent watches of the
night, in its mute eloquence of suggestion--like a spirit or a picture.
Having looked once upon it, it dwelt for ever apart in the memory,
constantly provoking thought, conjecture, and raking the fanciful
waters of romance by gliding dreams of sorrow and solitude, and the
tragedy that finds no voice or fraternal sympathy upon the noisy
surface of life.
Silence I should say had been the great feature of her existence.
Even upon the odd impersonal subjects that sprang up for discussion
in our conversations, her talk was scant and weighted with an unusual
intonation, as if speech came to her amiss. She pondered each
commonplace I uttered, and gazed steadfastly into space or down upon
the river before replying, which she did very seriously after a long
pause. At first this eccentricity of hers much disconcerted me. To
exclaim in soft rapture, ‘How lovely the stillness here is!’ and a few
minutes later, when you had quite lost sight of the trite observation,
to have it cast back upon the wavering plain of dialogue in some such
manner, and in tones of musing gravity:
‘You think such stillness as this lovely? It is perhaps the novelty of
it alone that enchants you’--
Or, in response to a previous half-forgotten remark received in
absolute silence, that the way the boats and barges dropped suddenly
out of view as they passed under the bridge was strangely attractive,
to find the idea caught by the heels, and gently forced into earnest
discussion by a word of imperious invitation. For there was an
air of extremely winning command about her, that from the first I
found impossible to resist. Her neck was long, and the head upon it
beautifully set, and her movements, her gestures and looks, were
those of a princess in disguise. An over-wrought imagination might
of course--possibly did--exaggerate this air of command and these
sovereign attitudes, but I came afterwards to see that I was not alone
in my delusion, and that upon ardent youth of the other sex, her
quiescent influence could be potential to salvation.
Of the nature of her occupations and ideas I remained quite in the dark
for some days to come. Regularly, of an afternoon, she would visit
me in the gallery, where we sat and discussed the ‘eternal verities’
in an abrupt, unenthusiastic way. I could see that she purposely
withheld herself, her real self, from intrusion or impertinent survey.
Seclusion had taught her prudence, and reticence was a natural gift.
But how in the name of the marvellous, upon an empty island, where
social intercourse is undreamed of, had she come by knowledge of the
hollowness of casual expansion and the nothingness of ready sympathy?
This is a lesson the cynical society deity teaches us after harsh
and prolonged experiences of considerable variety, and except to its
votaries, could only be known to those hermits who went into the desert
to rest from the vanity of experiment and pleasure.
Joséphine’s garrulity, however, made instructive Mademoiselle’s
reserve. From her I learnt, by meagre instalments, this enigmatic
lady’s story. But not much until a little scene had pushed me upon the
other side of discretion, and driven me to sue for enlightenment.
It happened thus. In the grip of wakefulness I had gone out to walk
about the gallery. There was no moon, and upon the turn of the season,
the night was chill and starless. Across the smoke-coloured heaven odd
masses wandered, pursued by the wind that blew down from the North. The
river below made a stain of exceeding blackness in the dark picture,
and beat the rocks in angry protest against the whining uneasiness
of the air. For it whined dismally round the island, and blew among
the trees of the garden like an army of dreary banshees. A sense of
horror of the place grew upon me, and I began to hunger for the big
bright world beyond; for gas-lit streets and the sordid aspects of city
life. I yearned to jostle my fellows along the highways once more,
and listen to the sound of vocal dispute upon the public place. I saw
in vision streams of people emerging from illuminated theatres, heard
the cheerful roll of carriages, and the noisy murmur of laughter and
speech. I longed for it all again--all that I had despised, and told
myself in the midst of its enjoyment that I hated. After all, I was but
a poor mountebank of a hermit. Town born, I could never hope to free
myself permanently from the influences of birth, and I knew that sooner
or later nostalgia for city sounds and sights--for the multitudinous
accompaniments of its existence, must find me and pursue me into the
heart of the most congenial solitude, into the most heavenly of rural
retreats.
The gallery ran round the angles of the house, and on the other side
looked down into the garden and in upon the window of Madame Vermont’s
blue room. I went round it in a thirst for movement, but, fearful of
disturbing the sleep of others, I walked very softly. To my complete
surprise, and I will not aver without a momentary qualm of terror, I
saw the reflection of a stream of light upon the near window of the
blue chamber. I hardly believe in ghosts; but it would indeed be rash
to hint that it was no vague dread of the supernatural that started
my unequal heart-beats just then. I felt the blood gush and swell to
bursting the arteries about my temples and throat, and at the back of
my ears. Fright was not a check upon curiosity, but rather a strong
impetus. Though I might approach in a conflict of emotions, I did not
hesitate for one moment to approach, and was confronted with sharp
disappointment when I saw that the stream of light upon the floor fell
from an earthly candle-stick, and that Mademoiselle was leaning over
the polished foot of the bed and gazing steadfastly at the empty pillow.
It did not take me an instant to recover my balance and watch the scene
with revived interest. This was my second glimpse of the blue chamber,
and a poignant note was now added to its fascination. There was a more
speaking look about the turned-down sheet, the unrolled night-dress
across it, and the hastily flung wrapper. Not of death--but of an
unwonted disparition and a watched-for return it spoke. Not of anguish
and bereavement was it eloquent, but of the fruitless and undying
hunger of expectation. At such an hour, so sanctified by pervading
sorrow and silence, the blue of the room was no longer garish, but an
appropriate setting for imprisoned regret. Its very uniformity and
depth of colour suggested the solemnity, the profundity of a rich sky
unstained by cloud, and, enveloped in this mystic hue, Mademoiselle
seemed to be the spirit of sorrow resting upon the grave of all
joy--mute, placidly unhopeful, visibly unafraid. For surely such
solitude as hers was calculated to bend the proudest head and break
the strongest heart, and in presence of her indomitable courage I felt
abashed and mean by confrontation with my recent idle terror.
I knew well that it was my duty to turn away my eyes and leave so
sacred a vigil unwatched, but when duty and curiosity, strongly roused,
come into mortal conflict, it is not often that the former conquers.
I waited to see how long Mademoiselle would linger in that room, what
her movements might be, and how she would depart for the upper house.
And as I waited, I saw her come round by the side of the bed with a
quick, sudden step, and gently smooth the pillow. In doing so, her
hand rested heavily in the middle, and made a distinct impression. She
started back, and I could see that desperate emotion stiffened her thin
white face, and the large grey eyes she lifted, in the full light of
the candle upon the table beside her, were full of pain. By a gesture
so slight, it appeared she had startled memory into wakeful protest,
and now she hastened to quiet it, and trod feverishly upon the living
embers to still their fires by giving to the bed its proper aspect
of emptiness. She turned the pillow, gathered up the ruffled sheet,
crushed the night-dress into careless folds, and thrust it beneath the
blue coverlet. As white was hidden under the blue, resignation seemed
to have banished expectation angrily, and brought the curtain down
ruthlessly upon the poor pathetic comedy weakness played for its own
diversion.
She took the candle up, stood near the door, and gazed slowly around
her. The little handkerchief wisped against the silver mirror caught
her eye. She jerked forward and grasped it eagerly; so flimsy was it
that it almost melted in her slight palm. I remembered there was a
faint, subtle odour of violets about the room, which seemed to emanate
from that handkerchief. I can imagine how it must have risen and
tyrannised her senses, can measure the strength of its appeal and its
delicate charm. No women are so astute and penetrative in their use of
scent as Frenchwomen. It is their study to spread their essence with
refined cruelty, and leave an imperishably perfumed trace to check
the wandering imagination, and keep tenanted by a personal odour the
sanctuaries of the heart they have forsaken.
The effect of the faded sweetness of the handkerchief was to irritate
her to what I concluded to be a resolution to have done with this
miserable comedy of expectation. She held it from her fiercely, and
threw back her head to get further away from its insidious appeal,
and then approached it to the flame of the candle. It needed but a
flutter of light against it, and the flimsy thing was a brief yellow
flare. She watched until the flame had burnt itself out, and then threw
the charred rag upon the marble top of the night-table, and swayed
unsteadily towards the door. By the way she grasped her throat with one
frail, nervous hand, I could divine how the thick sobs shook her, and I
wondered more and more upon the mystery of her life, and what elements
combined to form the mimic tragedy of that midnight solitude.
Outside the breath of winter was upon us, and the wind bit and stung
with the sharpness of ice. It was December now, and vigils upon the
terrace, once the sun was gone down and the stars were out, were a
forbidden pleasure in careful middle-age.
THE STORY OF MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT
THE month of December ran itself out with a more ruffled mildness than
November had done. For one thing, it was cold, blustering weather, and
for days together ice sheeted the broad river. The boats and barges
plied less frequently, and foot-passengers now rarely threaded the long
boulevard from the city to the island bridge. Only the morning vans
relieved us of a complete sense of separation from our fellows, and
at odd intervals, the postman came, and carried a whiff of the outer
world into our retreat. On Saturday we had the excitement of watching
the laundresses wheel their barrows of linen across the bridge, and
diminish with the distance upon the chill, bleak road, sometimes
brightened by rays of winter sunshine. But for the rest we shared such
desert stillness as might be found in the heart of an empty forest,
instead of upon the edge of a busy and populous town.
Within the walls, life went pleasantly enough. My presence downstairs
had served to tame Mademoiselle somewhat. She stood less impenetrably
apart, and her discourse grew daily less impersonal. When walks upon
the terrace and musing under the roof of the gallery meant perilous
exposure, she would invite me upstairs to her own _appartement_. This
I enjoyed. It gave me a sense of fraternity in silence as well as
companionable speech at discretion.
Her rooms were less spacious than those I occupied, but more
comfortable, and not without a surprising effort at cosiness. In her
salon a wood fire burned brightly, and the deep worn arm-chairs had an
inviting aspect. Everything was faded, often frayed and rent, but the
pictures were old and of some value, and books bulged out beyond their
natural shelves, and overflowed upon the floor, and crowded the tables.
Books, books everywhere,--old books, tattered books, dog-eared, dusty,
and moth-eaten; wearing all a heavy, learned look, and suggestive of
historical research. I laughingly remarked this to her one day, as I
removed a big tome from the low chair I wished to sit upon. She blushed
that soft pink flush belonging to faces habitually pallid. It made her
look delightfully young and interesting, and conveyed the hope to me
that the last barrier of her glacial reserve was about to break down.
‘I have been for many years engaged upon research among these volumes,’
she admitted slowly, after a pause; ‘I am writing an important book.’
‘An important book?’ I cried interrogatively.
‘Yes: the life of the Emperor Julian. I regard him as the great
Misunderstood of the Christian world, and I wish to rehabilitate him,’
she said; and there was such a touching and simple prayer for sympathy
and encouragement in the glance she fixed on mine, that I had not the
heart to remember that others had attempted the same task, and that no
amount of learned eloquence and indignation would teach the Christian
world to regard as desirable a better understanding of him they call
the great Apostate.
‘Would it be an indiscretion to solicit information upon your plan
of defence?’ I asked insidiously, with intent to force her into
self-exposure. To me the character of the Emperor Julian was of
comparative insignificance beside her own, but this fact I naturally
kept to myself.
‘I shall bring him into noble relief by means of Frederick the Great
as a background--Frederick, that other famous and less reputable
disciple of Marcus Aurelius. Have you ever remarked how alike and how
unlike they were--one so sincere and the other so cynically insincere?’
Upon a dead island, without new books, or newspapers, or theatres,
and but little out-door life, because of the ferocity of the weather,
the Emperor Julian and Frederick the Great were as good subjects
of discussion as any others, and I entered the lists in combative
mood, fully equipped in argument and opinion, and captivated by the
grim earnestness and complete guilelessness of the Imperial Pagan’s
defender. Of modern literature she was, perhaps not unwisely, ignorant,
and knew not of a man named Ibsen who, some years earlier, had
also strayed upon this ground. She had been chiefly inspired by an
abominable novel of a French Jesuit, over which she waxed exceedingly
hot. Her anger was splendid, and I should have rejoiced to see the
Jesuit, Julian’s traducer, confronted with this thin spiritual-looking
lady, who thrilled from head to foot with generous hatred of all
meanness and unfairness.
‘As a Christian, my defence will have more weight than if I were imbued
with the cold agnosticism of the day,’ she added naïvely.
‘Surely,’ I assented, full of admiration, and more pleased to think
of her as a Catholic eager to make atonement to an ancient enemy of
her faith, than ‘the cold agnostic’ she dismissed in a tone of implied
disapproval.
‘You wonder, perhaps, at the serious nature of my studies and labour,’
she observed. And then, upon a little explanatory nod and arch of
delicate brow, ‘You see my father was a scholar, and as we lived here
quite alone and rarely received visitors, it was impossible for him to
avoid taking me into his confidence. And then, when his health began to
fail him, it naturally devolved upon me to help him, as far as I could,
and spare his eyes.’
Her glance travelled wistfully round the room, and a ray of mild
recognition fell upon each big volume. It was not difficult to
understand how vividly of the past they spoke to her, how eloquent
of association was their wild disorder. In the high embrasure of the
back window, which looked down upon the river, and showed a glimpse
of the chimney-tops and tall spires of Beaufort, there was a dainty,
blue-lined work-table, and near it a revolving book-stand and a
rocking-chair. From where I sat, I could note that the books were
modern--some of them were bound coquettishly, but the greater number
were paper-covered. I was not wrong in supposing this to have been
the favourite recess of the late Madame Vermont. The blue satin of
the work-table betrayed her, and a hurried inspection of the backs of
the books convinced me that her taste in literature was all that is
most correct and elegant. No ancient tomes these. No bramble-strewn
paths to historic research. Nothing whatever about the Emperor Julian;
still less about Marcus Aurelius. Bourget, Feuillet, Gyp, Loti, Marcel
Prévost, Anatole France and company: these were the friends of pretty
Madame Vermont’s solitude, the entertainers of her frugal leisure.
From the start, without description, word, or hint, I had understood
Madame Vermont to be uncommonly pretty. I pictured her small, blonde,
charmingly coquettish, and self-conscious. I endowed her with every
conventional fascination, and felt sure that if I had been a man
I should have adored her, like the rest. As a matter of fact, my
imagined picture of her came very near reality. Only instead of fair
hair, she had the loveliest brown that made a flossy network round
a little rosebud of a face; her eyes were bewitchingly blue, limpid
like a child’s, and her cheek was adorably hued. Just the conventional
angelic being to turn male heads, and set their hearts in a flutter;
just the sort of home idol to keep nurses and sisters--especially
elder, grave, and sensible sisters--perpetually on their knees, and
the domestic incensor perpetually filled with the freshest of perfumed
flattery swung by the most abject adorers.
Now that the icy winds prevented us from sitting out in my gallery,
Mademoiselle had grown accustomed to receive me upstairs. For there
was no conquering her repugnance to my rooms. She found it less hard
to walk with Joséphine to the cemetery than to sit and talk of other
matters with a stranger in her dead sister’s house. Of me, however,
she had grown fond:--at first in a furtive way, as if not quite sure
that she was right in yielding to the weakness. Gradually she emerged
from this quaint and insular uncertainty; saw that there was no shame
attached to the discovery that a new face could delight her, and
graciously abandoned herself to the influence of a full-blown affection.
Every morning Joséphine came down with Mademoiselle’s compliments,
and her desire to be informed if I had slept well. Every afternoon I
mounted to drink a cup of English tea with her, and listen to her last
pages on the great Misunderstood, and sometimes maliciously spur her
into passion by some sceptical raillery, which always brought pained
reproach to her sad eyes and a slight flush to her pale face. She took
everything in earnest, even my feeble jokes, which after a while, when
she began to understand them, she would proceed to discuss in her own
quaint, slow way.
‘I suppose it must be a matter of temperament, or perhaps it is an
Irish peculiarity,’ she would say, and inspect me very seriously.
I assured her that the Irishman was not born who could not change his
opinion at a moment’s notice for the fun of the thing, and in the midst
of comedy fall foul upon tragedy for pure diversion’s sake. She shook
her head despondently, and decided at once that there could be found
no earnest scholars, no born leaders of men, in a band of amiable
buffoons.
My moments of recreation and distraction were enjoyed with Gabrielle,
when we walked round the desert island in search of adventures, or with
elaborate care, tried to make each other understand the caprices of our
wandering fancies in the alleys of the sad, mysterious garden. It was
pure joy to feel the little hand clinging to my arm or lost in my palm
like a soft, small bird, and hear the pretty patter of running steps
alongside of my brisk strides. For, to atone for its late appearance,
the winter was mortally cold, and there was no dallying with frozen
toes and frost-bitten ears. But to make up for this foolish superiority
of mine in the matter of steps, Gabrielle was indulgence itself to my
decided inferiority upon imaginative ground. I certainly could not
imagine so many things out of nothing, and it was clear that I could
not make up so many charming adventures for Minette and Monsieur Con.
But in my gross grown-up way, I was not an unsympathetic confidante
for the grievances and perplexities of solitary childhood. Indeed,
Gabrielle admitted, with off-hand majesty of look and deportment,
that I was rather a nice and entertaining person for a little girl to
talk to, not above the simple pleasures of play, and not beneath the
romantic joys of story-telling. Now she loved her aunt; oh, yes, she
certainly loved her aunt above and beyond all the world. But her aunt,
you see, was so very solemn, and then she read so many books, she was
quite _entichée_ of those big, hard-looking books. _Entichée_, she
admitted, in answer to my amused and not altogether edified surprise,
was an expression she had caught from my servant Marie. It was Marie,
she repeated imperiously, who said her aunt was _entichée_ of books,
and she was pleased to find it a very good word. She was the quaintest
and drollest little philosopher and playmate melancholy middle-age
could desire, and I am not without shrewd suspicion that I learnt more
from her than she from me.
Of an evening, as I sat alone downstairs over my coffee, and snoozed
comfortably over one of Mademoiselle’s books, or puffed a meditative
cigarette in front of the bright wood fire, Joséphine would come down
for a chat on her own account. It amused me to draw her out upon the
subject of Mademoiselle, and bit by bit I pieced her story together.
* * * * *
Monsieur Lenormant, the father of two girls, had had a serious
political difference with his family, who were all staunch
Bonapartists, while he stood by the republic, and flung his hat into
the air whenever they played the _Marseillaise_. With no desire to
parade this difference, and being a shy and sensitive man, despite his
republican sympathies, he chose evasion by the road of retreat. He
left Beaufort, where his family were an influence, and bought the old
house on the island. Here few were likely to disturb him, and political
temptation could not be expected to pursue him.
His ostensible excuse was the possession of scholarly tastes and
indifference to the present. The death of his wife upon the birth of
a second girl, Adèle, was seemingly a further inducement to seek the
soothing shade of solitude. So the widower, accompanied by his wife’s
confidential servant, Joséphine, and an old gardener, Marcel, drove out
of Beaufort, with his children, his books, and his cats. In a little
while he was settled and hard at work among the ancients, and the
current world of republicans and Bonapartists alike forgot him.
There was a difference of five years between the children, and soon,
too soon, little Henriette was established upon the semi-maternal,
wholly self-sacrificing pedestal of _la grande sœur_. All she had known
of spontaneous childhood was before her mother’s death. Henceforth
she was ‘mother’ herself, with Adèle for an adored and adorable small
tyrant. While still in short frocks, her father, too, had got to rely
on her, and cling to her as to a grown-up woman. He would gravely
debate with her upon matters it was but humane to suppose she could
understand nothing of. This may be an excellent school for training
in abnegation and patient endurance, but it is a hard one. Henriette
slipped into maturity without any of the sunshine of childhood across
her backward path. She was an uncomplaining, studious little girl, and
it is not surprising that Monsieur Lenormant should have gone to the
grave without the remotest suspicion of the wrong he had done her.
Did she not love her father devotedly? Did she not worship the pretty
Adèle? And what more can any sane and reasonable young woman demand of
life than ample opportunities for the practice of self-abnegation and
the worshipping of others?
When Henriette was a slip of a girl and Adèle a child of ten, young
Dr. Vermont, the only son of Monsieur Lenormant’s comrade of youth,
came down to Beaufort from Paris, in the full blaze of university
honours, and not without promise of future scientific renown, backed
by a substantial income and solid provincial influence. This young man
looked surprisingly well upon horseback, and found it good exercise
to ride frequently from the town to the house of his father’s old
friend upon the island. Arrived there, it amused him to notice Adèle,
who was free of anything like bashfulness, and in return, thought him
the nicest person she had ever seen. Meanwhile, a grave, tall girl,
too thin for her ungraceful age, looked on with very different eyes.
To her Dr. Vermont was the traditional Phœbus Apollo of girlhood. She
knew nothing of romance, or novels, or poetry, but she felt the dawn of
womanhood upon sight of him, and blushed in divine self-consciousness.
She was a plain girl then--unfinished, unformed, and painfully
reserved; and it was not to be expected that such an elegant article of
semi-Parisian make, as Dr. Vermont, should have an eye for material so
crude and undeveloped. Had Dr. Vermont been thirty instead of twenty,
he might have thought differently, but we all know how grandly exacting
and dramatic twenty is. Whereas his conquest was not in the least
astonishing. He was a fine-looking lad, with plenty of pluck and grace
and worldly wisdom. He carried himself with a noble self-consciousness,
was sufficiently attentive to his moustache to convince mankind of
its supreme importance, and already his handsome dark eyes wore that
look of mild scrutiny that never left them. Altogether a youth with
justifiable pretensions and fascinations of an intellectual and bodily
nature, and one by no means likely to learn to abate them by experience.
As the years went by, and the little women of the dark house by the
river grew with them, the wealth of Monsieur Lenormant declined, and
when Dr. Vermont, now a distinctive _somebody_ in his profession, came
down one summer, and rode out from Beaufort to see him, matters were so
bad that he found it his duty to come every day during the rest of his
vacation. Adèle was now sixteen, a lovely flower opening in the sun of
romantic dreams. Can we wonder if Dr. Vermont’s glance rested on her in
amazed admiration? Dr. Vermont said nothing, but he looked. He looked
constantly, and his glances were not without eloquence for the maiden
blushing vividly beneath them. All this Henriette saw, and loved her
sister none the less, wished not the less heartily both her dear ones
happiness and success, though her own misery came of it. Only Monsieur
Lenormant understood nothing of the situation. His dream always had
been to marry his favourite Henriette to his young friend Vermont, but
death overtook him before he could accomplish it.
One evening, as Dr. Vermont sat beside him with his hand upon his
pulse, the poor gentleman looked up at him anxiously.
‘I have written for a relative, a lady, to come and look after my
girls, but you, François, I expect to be their real protector. I like
to think of you as my daughter’s husband. She is a good girl, François,
an excellent girl. She has been a devoted daughter, and an adoring
sister. She will make the best of wives.’
‘I am sure of it,’ said Dr. Vermont musingly, as he glanced down to
where the two girls were silently embroidering in the deep recess of
a window above the river. He knew perfectly well which daughter he
was expected to marry and which he intended to marry, but he kept his
counsel, and gazed in soft approbation upon the charming profile of
Adèle.
When he came next day, Monsieur Lenormant had departed from this
world of marriage and giving in marriage, and the lady relative had
arrived. A formal engagement with Adèle was speedily entered upon, and
the Doctor took the train for Paris, a happy prospective bridegroom,
with the advantage of being in no hurry to jump into domestic
responsibilities. His betrothed was somewhat young, and meanwhile he
would have leisure to pursue pleasure elsewhere, and nourish her placid
love upon the most expensive boxes of sweets direct from Boissier,
and instalments of light and elegant literature to teach her what to
respect of life and from mankind.
The bride was eighteen and the groom twenty-eight, when they were
married one spring morning in the Mairie and in the Cathedral of
Beaufort. That marriage still brought tears to Joséphine’s old eyes,
and tempted her to unhabitual eloquence. How lovely the bride had
looked!--too lovely, too delicate for health and long life. Eyes
limpid like an angel’s, so sweetly blue and soft, a face upon which
the tenderest breath would bring a stain of deepened colour, form slim
and curved and dainty in every detail. The groom was proud, radiantly
proud, perhaps not tender enough and unapprehensive of the rough winds
of life for a creature so fragile and for bloom so evanescent. But he
looked distinguished, well-bred, and eminently Parisian; and what more
could provincial spectators desire?
A more interesting figure far was the grave, sad young lady, who smiled
upon her happy sister through her tears, and could find words above
the pain of a breaking heart to remind the groom that Adèle had always
been petted and spoiled and cared, and fervently implore him to do the
same by her, and treat her more like a child than a wife. The scene was
clear before me. Mademoiselle, as she must have been at twenty-three,
not pretty, but captivating enough for eyes not blinded by mere animal
beauty, as the Doctor’s were. And he, fatuous, sure of himself, at
heart indifferent to others, and intoxicated with foolish marital
satisfaction. Did he know that tragedy brushed his happiness that
moment--softly, benignantly, with blessing instead of prayer, with gaze
of hope instead of reproach?
Joséphine could tell me nothing, and it pleased me to believe that he
understood, and some day might remember.
After some months in Paris, the little bride was brought back to the
dark house by the river by an anxious husband, there to linger in the
warmth of two loves, two devotions, waited upon, worshipped in vain.
The opening of her baby’s eyes was the signal for the closing of her
own. Not then, not then could Dr. Vermont be expected to understand. As
far as I could gather from Joséphine’s account, he passionately loved
his young wife. Her death crushed him for a while, and he walked the
earth like one blind to the changes of seasons, blind to surrounding
faces, and fronting a future that would remain for ever a blank.
Mademoiselle came, and gently touched his hand to remind him that he
was not alone in his sorrow. He neither felt the fraternity nor the
unspoken tenderness. The paleness of her cheek held no eloquence of
suffering for him; the sadness of her eyes left his heart untouched. As
for the child, far from feeling a thrill of paternity upon sight of it,
he desired never to behold it more. He would regard it henceforth as
the cause of his moral ruin, the beginning of a broken and joyless life.
In this hard and sullen mood he returned to Paris, and Gabrielle
grew up with Mademoiselle, without any knowledge of her father, who
apparently had forgotten the existence of both.
AN INTERLUDE
A DECISION FIN DE SIÈCLE AT THE CAFÉ LANDER
IN the middle of the rue Taitbout, there is a little café, which was
not so well known twenty years ago as it is now, at the end of the
nineteenth century. Then it was only beginning to emerge from the
inferior position of crémerie. Came one day, from the unconventional
region of the Latin Quarter, somewhere in the seventies, an
enterprising proprietor; and in his wake followed a train of noble
youths, enthusiastic in the praises of Lander, wishful for the further
enjoyments of his hospitalities, and with kindly memory of his
generosity in the matter of credit.
Lander brought the pleasant ways of the _Quarter_ across the town
with him, and the band of noble youths stood by him, encouraged and
sustained him. In consequence, the Café Lander flourished exceedingly,
and its circle of clients daily increased, until it was known, far
and wide, as the resort of embryo genius. For all the boisterous and
good-tempered young fellows who crowded round its tables, and emptied
bocks and consumed coffee (fifty centimes a cup with _fine champagne_),
were coming great men. They were the future lights in literature, art,
philosophy, and politics. The real living great man they professed to
regard with respectful admiration, but they wanted none of him in their
midst. In the slang of the day, he had made his pile, and reposed on
velvet and laurels among the Immortals. When he would have become a
part of the past, and the future was their present, they could afford
to be on more intimate terms with him. But for the present, they
belonged exclusively to the future.
These young fools had their place a while, and expectation dwelt
indulgently upon them. They chatted loudly of isms and ologies and
oxies, with refreshing crudeness: upheld the realistic, the romantic,
the psychological, and Heaven knows what other schools of literature.
They prated of form, and matter, and art, and style, as only Frenchmen,
bitten by love of these things, can prate. And then, one by one, they
dropped out of the ranks of embryo genius, having accomplished nothing,
with the great epic unwritten, unwritten the drama, the psychological
novel that was to teach M. Bourget something new about women; unwritten
the important _History of the Franks_, that was to throw into relief
hitherto unrevealed aspects of the character of their conquerors;
unsolved the problems of metaphysics under discussion, undiscovered the
great political panacea of the age, unpainted the grand masterpiece.
With the first stone of their reputation still to be laid, they went,
and the café saw them no more.
Some of them became commonplace advocates, and made uninteresting
citizens and fairly reputable fathers of families: or sordid notaries,
or humdrum bourgeois. Romance shook its bridle rein with a regretful
backward glance: ‘Farewell for evermore,’ and the converted fool turned
upon his heel to enter into the ignoble strife with his fellows in
quest of daily bread. Others there were who had a troublesome way of
right-about-facing upon fond expectation. They jilted the muse for
historical research, or discarded art for literature, or drifted
from sonnets to the stage. One youth of philosophic tastes was known,
with inexcusable fickleness, to shake off the secular garb, and array
himself in the white of the cloister. He was the only one who made
a serious reputation; he became a fashionable preacher, and wrote a
_History of the Church_ which brought upon him the wrath of Rome.
But if they were mostly crude, ineffectual youths, they had bright
faces, and eager glances, and hearts full of hope and enthusiasm. They
were each confident of his own powers, inapprehensive of defeat or
failure, bound upon a fiery race for experience and new sensations,
contemptuous of the past, and looked gaily toward a future of glorious
achievement. Not a city but furnishes the type, and in no other city
is it so persistent as in Paris. Paint one such, and you paint all her
young men, nourished upon vivid imagination, upon inexhaustible hope
and unconquerable self-faith.
Into this circle of frank and amiable egotists, Dr. Vermont dropped
accidentally some ten years ago. Being of an experimental turn of
mind, and apt to fall upon mild curiosity in his casual scrutiny
of impetuous youth, he stayed. It is a mistake to assume that an
interest in youth, and a tolerance of its nonsense, is an indication of
lingering kindness of heart Dr. Vermont liked youth as a vivisectionist
likes animals. It taught him much that he desired to know, and where
it did not teach him precisely, it helped him along the path of
observation. Men are grown-up children; boys are rude philosophers,
artists, poets, what you will.
A cold, passionless man was Dr. Vermont, the one feeble flame of human
feeling he had thrilled to having faded out of memory almost upon the
death of his just buried young wife. She, too, had interested him, only
differently, being of a less calculable and possibly less shallow order
of being than the embryo great men of Lander’s. Widowhood had sundered
him sharply from all personal ties, and left him all the freer to
indulge his passion for experimental psychology.
As he sat evening after evening, and drank his coffee and little glass,
and smoked a meditative cigar, it amused him to encourage the vivacious
contentment around him, and lead the unborn reputations to reveal
their bent. His influence upon young men was a thing to make older and
saner persons gape. It was, perhaps, all the stronger and more subtle
because it was unrecognised. He was feared, and yet admired, to an
incredible degree. His mild, sarcastic face, with its finished features
and wholly effaced humanity of expression, put a point upon emulation
and goaded to rash display. But none were made to feel the rashness
of their flights, or the absurdity of their theories. Dr. Vermont was
too clever a man to scare expansion, or cow ambition. This was how he
kept his hold upon the fresh-moustached lads around him. This was how
they spoke of him among themselves as a good fellow--_un bon garçon,
malgré_--well, in spite of a great many things.
Thus he sat, and smoked, and listened, while the years passed, and
out of the circle familiar faces went and new ones came. It must be
admitted there was not much variety in the entertainment. Always the
same questions of form and expression, of style and matter; always the
same comparison of international literatures and the relative virtues
of different forms of government; above and beyond all, sex and its
unexplained and stinging problems. They never tired, and each batch
came up, fresh and eager for the old discussions. Names may vary,
fashions may alter, but the rough, broad facts of life are there,
immutable like nature, ever recurrent like the ebb and flow of the tide.
A sense of weariness was upon Dr. Vermont the December night I write
of, as he walked toward the Café Lander. Most of the lads were
dispersed by the Christmas vacation. But he knew precisely those
who were expecting him. Anatole Buzeval, his favourite, a charming
young fellow, with healthy Norman blood in his veins, and in spite of
the disastrous environment of Paris _fin de siècle_, with something
throbbing under his coat that suspiciously resembled a boy’s free
heart. He came from a Norman fishing town, near the beat of the
channel, washed by a friendly old river and wooded by still friendlier
trees. In boyhood, he had walked in the woods, he had fished in the
river, he had known the delights of amateur seafaring, and rode, and
shot live things, and was first awakened by love to the melody of
the birds, and to heroism by the genial spirit of endurance of the
fishermen. These influences kept him partially sheltered from the
century-worn cynicism and exhausted emotions prevailing. It accounted
for the ring of sincerity in his laughter, for the zest of his
ephemeral enthusiasms and the courageous freedom of his blue eyes. But
he was nevertheless bitten by the disease of the hour, and his speech
was tainted with the cheap _fin de siècle_ indifference and dejection.
He was the youngest of the party, the most intelligent and the
brightest. Beside him sat Gaston Favre, a youth who would have been an
artist if the death-throes of the century left him any room to believe
in art. Nothing any longer interested him, but he was still capable of
remarking upon sight of a bad picture--
‘Now, if it were worth the trouble, or really mattered, there is food
for indignation in that picture.’
Whereupon he would survey it in the spirit of ostentatious tolerance,
without a wince or a critical flash of eye.
The third, Julien Renaud, was a little older than these two, and
professed a dead interest in politics. Time was when Lander’s echoed
with the noble flow of his eloquence. Time was when it was confidently
believed that he was destined, not only in his own imagination, to
reach the tribune, and thunder effectively against the abuses of
government. But that was in M. Constans’ hour, and M. Constans was
notoriously Julien’s pet aversion. In those remote days, he was
antagonistic toward what he called ‘the whole shop of the Elysian
Fields,’ and relished M. Carnot as little as he had ever relished
‘old Father Grévy.’ But these were now half-forgotten ebullitions of
youth, and like his beloved France, he was battered and bruised by the
defeats of life into complete indifference. Nothing mattered. In reply
to everything, he had but one response, a quiet shrug, a weariedly
lifted eyebrow, and a murmured _cui bono_ upon a long-drawn sigh.
On this evening the chosen drink was punch, which resulted in more
boisterous converse, and showed Anatole in almost a lyric mood. The
first mention of the insipidly recurrent phrase of the hour--‘end of
the century’--inspired him to fall upon mirthful reminiscences, just as
Dr. Vermont entered the café.
‘M. le docteur désire?’ said the waiter, helping him off with his
overcoat.
The doctor named his drink as he took a seat, and blandly scrutinised
each flushed and smiling face.
‘We were talking, Doctor,’ Anatole cried, ‘of ways of ending the
year. Do you remember, two years ago, when I first joined you, coming
straight from Barbizon, where I chummed with a queer and amusing Scotch
artist? how I taught you all to sing what I conceived to be a Scotch
melody--_Les Temps Jadis_--and we drank at midnight an execrable
decoction called in Scotland a tod-dy, standing, and gave an English
shake-hands all round, which I am told is the way in Scotland of
toasting the departing year?’
The Doctor paused in the act of lifting his glass, and nodded, as
he threw out a couple of absent names in signification of his keen
remembrance of the evening.
Followed good-natured and regretful words for each absent face. _Les
temps jadis_ were not such bad times after all, though the melancholy
Scotch might chant them with more melody than the vivacious sons of
Gaul. Jean this was an excellent heart; Henri that, a capital good
fellow, the pity was he stuttered so. Frédéric, poor fool, had settled
down, and married a _dot_ and a squint, and the squint, alas! was so
marked, that the dowry was a totally inadequate compensation. Upon
which, Julien made cynical mention of the greater security of marital
rights when backed by aid so powerful as a squint.
‘But, since women are only happy in virtue of their lovers and not in
virtue of their husbands,’ shouted Anatole, with a charming look of
_rouerie_, ‘what a dismal future for Frédéric’s wife! I declare I could
find it in my heart to rush off and console her. I should be so blinded
by my own burning eloquence, as I flung myself at her feet, that I
would have no eyes left for the squint.’
‘Not until you came to yourself in a revulsion of feeling, my friend,’
sneered Julien Renaud.
‘Has any one seen Henri Lemaître since the night we drank our Scotch
tod-dy, Anatole, and sang, or tried to sing, _Les Temps Jadis_?’ asked
Dr. Vermont.
‘No. He was last heard of in Japan, studying the gentle art of
self-defence, as practised by the gentle Japanese. He derided the duel,
and loathed European pugilism, and he thought something might be done
towards a more civilised settlement of disputes by borrowing of the
remoter civilisation of the land of the chrysanthemum. What will you?
Did he not study the washy water-colours of the immortal Monsieur Loti?’
‘Oh, an affection for Pierre Loti would explain any absurdity!’ said
Gaston Favre, with a grim smile. ‘If we could hope to sit here a
hundred years hence, and make a summary of the gods of the coming
century, I wonder what sort of intellectual company should we have
under discussion.’
‘Finished humbugs, I dare swear,’ shouted Anatole. ‘Already, from force
of mere good writing, we have fallen upon intellectual inanition.
The last century wound up by unveiling the goddess of reason; we’ve
unveiled the goddess of form, and the devil swallow me, if there is
anything to be found behind our excellent style. Each light of a new
school sounds a loud trumpet to inform the world that he has at last
discovered truth. So does a silly hen who lays an ordinary egg, the
counterpart of her fellow-hen’s. You can’t convince her of the fatuous
impertinence of her cackle, nor prove to her that there is nothing
particularly great in the laying of eggs. I declare, nowadays, every
trumpery artist and scribbler takes himself as seriously as the hen,
and divides his time between laying and cackling.’
‘Each one has his theory, and it is more important that he should
reveal that theory to the public than even paint his picture, write his
play, or novel, or story upon it. So much has America taught him by
means of that strange institution, the interviewer.’
‘Ah,’ cried Anatole, in a burst of exaggerated despair, ‘I gave up
France when she took the American interviewer to her bosom, and the
best papers were not ashamed to give us the opinions of the latest
Minister, and expose the lack of taste and modesty in the youngest
Master.’
‘Not France alone, _mon cher_,’ interposed Dr. Vermont; ‘English
journalism has become no whit less vulgar and personal. Vulgarity,
ostentation, fraud, rapacious advertisement--these are all the symptoms
of the great moral disease of the century. Were a Lycurgus to rise
up for each state, I doubt if the nations of the earth would have
the wisdom to return to frugality, courage, and simplicity--so much
have we lost by the long race of civilisation, so much our superiors
were the old Pagan Spartans, and so dead are we to all promptings of
delicacy,--without moral or physical value, without even valour.’
The Doctor spoke dejectedly, as if the hope of all good had died within
him. The young men suddenly remembered that they, too, were weighted
with a like lassitude and unbelief, and finished their punch in silence.
‘I expect we shall see the century out in a lugubrious spirit,’ sighed
Anatole, when, upon a sign from Dr. Vermont, the waiter had replenished
their glasses.
‘Where’s the use of facing a new one?’ asked the Doctor, with a vague,
dull glance into space. ‘The same chatter, the same humbug, the same
vulgarity and fraud. Always the same, and inevitably the same. New
idols, new theories, new habits start up to prove more monotonous than
the old ones----’
‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ interrupted Gaston Favre.
‘Exactly, and Alphonse Karr was not the first to find it out. I have a
better plan, lads, for saluting the new century than your Scotchman’s
tod-dy and _Les Temps Jadis_,--than even the insipid shake-hands of
Albion.’
The punch had gone to the young heads, and gave them a craving for
excitement. Each one leant forward over his glass, with shining eyes
and flushed cheeks, eager and expectant. It was not often that Dr.
Vermont condescended to plan for their amusement.
‘Let us suppose ourselves singing _Les Neiges d’Antan_, and toasting
our old acquaintances. We shall awaken into a new century, just the
same as the old. The more it changes, the more it will be the same. Are
you not prospectively tired of it already?’
He looked round gravely upon the young men, and excitement died out of
each glance under the sad indifference of his. They felt upon their
honour to be no less weary and cynical than he. A nod of emphatic
agreement from the three young pessimists was supplemented to the
Doctor’s monologue, as he continued--
‘Suppose we salute the twentieth century--already worn before birth--by
a single pistol-shot, the mouth of each man’s to his brains. As we
are none of us likely to do anything with our brains, more than the
hundreds of other young men I have seen vanish from these tables into
nothingness, there can be no patriotic objection to our blowing them
out in company.’
The young men sat back in their chairs, and drew a long, deep breath.
They were almost sobered for the moment, and profoundly troubled by
their leader’s extraordinary proposition. However firmly we may be
convinced of the nothingness of life, such a method of toasting the
new year is calculated to give the stoutest courage pause. Not that
they held any squeamish objections to suicide--quite the contrary,
they professed to regard it as the natural and legitimate remedy for a
broken heart, damaged honour, or a ruined life. But, _tudieu!_ they all
sat there drinking their punch in freedom and security, with pockets
not inconveniently full, it is true, but with sound hearts and sounder
appetites. The prison was not before them: then, why the deuce should
they be offered the grave?
‘I thought, like Solomon, you were disposed to complain of the sameness
of all things under the sun,’ sneered the Doctor.
‘That is true, Doctor,’ assented Anatole. ‘But suppose we were to find
things just as same beyond the sun--or a good deal worse? For, after
all, we may flatter ourselves with being sceptics, but what security
have we that the pistol-shot will be the end of it all? and what if it
happened to be infernally disagreeable somewhere else, and there was no
getting back?’
‘Bah, another glass of punch will put you all right,’ laughed Julien.
‘On reflection, I find the Doctor’s proposal an excellent one. We are
sick of everything here--wine, women, and song, such as Paris now
furnishes. Then, let us go and see for ourselves what is going on among
the stars. There’s this comfort, Anatole, we go in a body, if there
is anything ugly to face. That’s the difficulty about suicide,--its
lugubrious solitude. In company, one may snap his fingers at fear.
To see three friendly faces round you, all ready to plunge at once
into the same boat, and exchange jokes simultaneously with old Father
Charon! When you lift your own cocked pistol to your forehead, to see
three other hands and all four be shot together out of the mystery,
either into eternity or--_le néant_.’
‘Ah, there, you’re not sure either, Gaston,’ Anatole protested,
reproachfully.
‘That’s just it, boy; I know nothing now, but with the dawn of the new
century I should know everything.’
‘My humble contribution to the Doctor’s plan is the proposal that we
blow our brains out together--I mean in the same room,’ suggested
Julien.
‘Precisely; I have just been thinking the matter out. Now here in
Paris, we should excite excessive attention. But it might better be
managed in some quiet place--near the sea, or close to a river bank,
where our bodies might disappear easily, without giving rise to
immediate alarm. I know of a half deserted island down near Beaufort,
my native town. You will hardly believe that a place so near a busy
factory town--one of the largest provincial cities of France--could
be so forsaken and desolate. I doubt if any one lives on it now. My
father-in-law had a big gloomy house on that island. I don’t think
there was another inhabitant but himself. We might go down there, and
toast the new century in among the dark rocks above the river.’
‘Beaufort! a commonplace train with such an end in view,’ sighed
Anatole.
‘Not necessarily a train. What is to prevent us from taking horse, as
your favourite heroes of Dumas did?’ said the Doctor, smiling a little
at him.
‘With all my heart, if we are going to ride to Beaufort,’ cried
Anatole. ‘I don’t care if I am shot then.’
_PART SECOND_
DR. VERMONT
(_Told by the author_)
DR. VERMONT AND HIS GUESTS UPON THE ISLAND
IT wanted three days to the end of the year. The afternoon had been
so exceptionally mild, that Mademoiselle Lenormant and her foreign
friend were still sitting out on the gallery enjoying the sunset. The
air was very clear, and the heavens beautifully coloured, though the
winter dusk was beginning to drop. But it was as yet a mere suggestion
of dimness that did not hide, while it accentuated, the edge of bleak
and empty road along the sky-line. It sharpened the outlines of the
bridge and its castellated points below. The river was smooth like dark
glass, and rosy clouds made a blood-red margin along its outer bank.
No wind blew among the trees of the melancholy garden, visible from
the other side of the gallery, and so still was it, that the farthest
sounds sent back their travelling echoes. The footfall of a solitary
peasant crossing the bridge made a martial clatter, so clear and strong
and self-assertive was it upon the pavements that seemed to sleep since
feudal times.
Little Gabrielle sat in a corner of the gallery in jacket and hood,
hugging Minette, who bore the discomfort bravely, while she spelled out
a story from a large picture-book on her knee. It was satisfactory to
see that the kitten took as much interest in the story as the reader,
and enlivened the study by occasional lunges at the brown finger
following each line. The child’s pretty voice hardly interrupted the
low conversation of the two ladies, who faced the view of Beaufort, and
watched the road, while they discoursed upon the philosophy of life.
Mademoiselle Lenormant always watched that road, whether she sat in the
gallery or upstairs in her own room. It was the rival of Gabrielle and
her books, for she would willingly leave either at any moment to look
at it.
Joséphine came down to carry Gabrielle inside, out of the chill air,
and the child was still protesting loudly, and calling imperiously on
her aunt to rescue her from private tyranny, when Mademoiselle bent
forward with an excited gesture, her eyes riveted upon the point where
the road seemed to issue from the sky.
‘Do you not see something down there--something dark that moves?’ she
breathed, without looking at her companion.
‘Effectively. It appears to be a group of men on horseback. Yes,
Mademoiselle, it is a party of riders, and they are coming straight
towards the bridge.’
Mademoiselle shook from head to foot, and went and caught the
balustrade to steady herself, while she continued to examine the blot
of moving shadow upon the landscape, that increased with each wink of
eyelid, until soon it was a visible invasion of males on horseback. A
dull thud of hoofs was borne upon the air, and near the bridge, one of
the party, apparently the leader, drew up, and seemed to address the
others. These at once fell behind, three in number, and the foremost
turned his face to the island, and galloped ahead.
‘Joséphine, viens, viens vite,’ shrieked Mademoiselle, her whole face
dyed pink, and her grey eyes dark and luminous with emotion.
Joséphine hurried out, cap-strings flying, all in a state of wild
concern. What was it, but what on earth was it? What did Mademoiselle
see?
Mademoiselle began in a thick voice--
‘Je crois, Joséphine, que c’est le docteur’--and then stopped, and drew
her hand slowly across her eyes, like one awakened from a moment’s
stupor. ‘C’est Monsieur le docteur qui nous arrive enfin,’ she added,
in her usual voice, and with a full return to her old self.
Joséphine peered over the balustrade, but she only saw three moving
shapes upon the bridge, the outlines of horse and man intermelted to
her vision.
‘The foremost rider must now be half way up the street,’ cried
Mademoiselle’s companion, glad yet ashamed that she should be there at
such a moment.
‘Take Gabrielle, Joséphine, and put on her pretty grey dress and her
laces. Marie will open the door for Dr. Vermont.’
Joséphine carried off the startled child, too frightened to ask
questions or demur, and at that moment the bell rang loudly, with
violent emphasis.
‘I will leave you now, dear Mademoiselle,’ said her friend, with
sympathetic pressure of her fingers. ‘Monsieur will doubtless require
this _appartement_, in which case I can return to Beaufort this
evening.’
‘No, no, there is a bedroom upstairs. You will not leave me so
abruptly, not now, when perhaps I may most need a friend. Stay yet a
while.’
A heavy step was crossing the hall, and came through the dining-room
towards the gallery. The foreigner, on her way to her own room, caught
sight of a lean, youngish-looking gentleman, with a fair beard and
thin brown hair worn off temples, deeply marked by life. He glanced at
her keenly, as he stood for her to pass, and she had time to note the
social polish of his manners, and the melancholy dignity of his aspect,
and then he crossed the floor and stepped out through the window,
searching with mild brown eyes for the woman who had waited for his
coming for ten long years.
His face lit up with a soft smile when he saw her, and he went
forward, upon the pleasant exclamation--‘Ma sœur!’ His intention was to
bestow upon her a formal embrace. His hand was stretched out, and when
her cold slim fingers touched it, and lay in his palm, and he saw the
lustre of unshed tears in the sad grey eyes that met his own steadily,
and a rosy flame tremble like confession over the cheeks’ pallor, a new
impulse came to him, and he simply lifted her hand to his lips.
‘Henriette,’ he murmured, in a troubled voice.
‘The silence has been long, François,’ she said, and smiled.
He still held her hand, and gazed at her curiously. She was not so
changed as he, and if the years had thinned, they had not lined her
face. At thirty-three, he even found her more attractive than at
twenty. There was that about her which compelled interest, and gave an
odd charm to the simplest speech.
‘Henriette, you have much to pardon me, and your indulgence will have
to go still further than you dream. Ah, how vividly a forgotten past
may bear down upon a man at the first sight of a familiar place! All
my life down here had clean gone from my mind. This queer old house,
your father, you, even Adèle, have been for me years past, not even a
memory, much less a link with all that is gone. It is incredible how
completely a man may forget. No regret, no remembrance pursued me in
Paris, and the instant I crossed the bridge it all surged back on me,
not as remembered days, but as the actual present. Verily, we are droll
rascals, Henriette, and mercilessly tyrannised by experience.’
He had dropped her hand now, and was leaning against a pillar, staring
across at Beaufort. Mademoiselle’s brows twitched sharply, but she
uttered no word of reproach, partly from pride, and partly from
surprise.
‘It will be good news for Gabrielle, and for me, if such a change
decided you to remain here now,’ she said.
‘Gabrielle?’ he interrogated softly.
‘Your child, François!’
Oh, this he understood as a reproach, though it touched him but
slightly. He made a step forward, still questioning her with movement
of brow and eyelid.
‘_Tiens!_ It is true. Is it credible I could forget I had a child? Oh!
I know what you must think of me, Henriette; and the worst of it is,
you cannot think badly enough of me;’ he said, laughing drearily.
‘It would be a poor satisfaction for me to think badly of you,
François. I am not your judge. It is enough for me that you have come
back--at last.’
‘What a sweet woman!’ cried Dr. Vermont, in amazement. ‘My sister,
your kindness confounds me. Life has not taught me to expect anything
like it, and I begin to believe I am not the sage I have lately loved
to contemplate. What, indeed, if these steadfast, silent creatures be
the sages after all, and we, the philosophers and seekers after light,
but the fools, who wear cap and bells, and mistake them for badges of
sovereignty.’
‘Here comes Gabrielle, François,’ said Mademoiselle, interrupting his
reflections.
The little girl lingered shyly upon the edge of the gallery, which
Joséphine endeavoured to make her cross by whispered entreaty and
pushes. She did not know this man who was her father, and her small
brains were busy contriving a way to greet him. She made a pretty
picture thus, in grey silk and white lace, with a broad crimson sash,
and a big bow of red ribbon on the top of her curly brown head. Dr.
Vermont stared at her as an object of natural curiosity rather than a
charming little girl, his own daughter.
‘She is very like you, Henriette,’ he said, and held out his hand with
an ingratiating smile.
Gabrielle came slowly forward, and took it; then looked up into his
face in grave and silent deliberation. She decided suddenly to offer
her cheek for the paternal kiss, which she did, with much conscious
dignity and no sense of pleasure whatever.
‘Let me see,’ said Dr. Vermont, when he had perfunctorily kissed her,
‘she is now about ten. The very age her mother was when I first beheld
her. Poor pretty Adèle! She does not in any way resemble her.’
He sighed deeply, and Henriette’s eyes, fixed on Gabrielle, filled with
tears.
‘What rooms does Monsieur wish me to prepare for him?’ Joséphine asked
in the pause.
The Doctor started, and remembered, with a quick disagreeable
sensation, the nearness of his friends, and its extraordinary
significance. If that good soul Joséphine but knew! If Henriette
suspected!
‘That reminds me, Henriette--I have left three friends outside. I
suppose you can put us up down here, or upstairs, for a couple of
nights?’
‘Only a couple of nights?’ Mademoiselle exclaimed.
‘Yes. By the dawn of New Year’s Day we shall be far from Beaufort, so
we will leave you on New Year’s Eve after dinner. What accommodation
have you here?’
‘You have forgotten that, too! There is your old room--the large one
opposite, which a friend of mine has been using. There is a canapé,
which one of the gentlemen can sleep on. And then there is my sister’s
room, and in the little dressing-room off it, another bed could be put
up. I think you can manage.’
‘Capitally. We shall be lodged like kings. Gaston and Julien in my old
room--yes, I quite remember it now. Yellow hangings, and an engraving
of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and a picture of Madame Lebrun. Not so?
Anatole will sleep in the dressing-room, and I in the blue room. Is it
still so blue? There used to be a photograph of my favourite Del Sarto,
“The Madonna with St John.” Poor Adèle! What would I not give to be
the same enamoured young fellow of ten years ago, violently combating
death? But I have lived twenty years since, and everything is dead for
me.’
He thrust his hands into his pockets, and went toward the door in
search of his friends, without troubling to note the effect of his
heartless words upon Henriette.
These he found trotting unconcernedly up and down the broken pavement.
With all eternity before them, a few minutes more or less outside a
particular door could not affect them. And when they were ushered into
the house by the Doctor, and presented to his sister-in-law, they
cast a glance of pity upon her that she should be at so much pains
to welcome doomed, indifferent men. They listened politely to her
apologies for the insufficiencies of their installation, and to her
prayers for indulgence in the matter of _cuisine_; and shook their
heads in despondent wonder. As for Anatole, he was as lugubrious as a
funeral mute, and the Doctor’s cynical animation at table completely
mystified him.
When once the fumes of punch had abated, poor Anatole saw his mad
engagement in quite a novel light. The thought of that pistol held
by his own hand to his own brains drove him to panic. He looked wan
with fear, and fierce from desire to conceal his fear. He was a
coward in both senses: without courage to stand out against a foolish
engagement, and equally without courage to face death. Despite his
boasted conviction that one death is as good as another, and any
possibly better than life, he entertained a very private notion that
suicide is a social as well as a moral crime, hardly justifiable by the
most abject blunder and excesses--and by nothing less than absolute
dishonour.
Besides, at heart he loved life, and he only played at pessimism not
to look less jaded and cynical than the rest of the century. It was
the fashion not to be gay, to have no belief, to have exhausted all
emotions, and reached the end of all things. Now what would those
around him say if it were known that Anatole Buzeval relished in the
privacy of his own chamber Alexandre Dumas, and shed tears at the death
of Porthos? What self-respecting Parisian of his day would associate
with a youth, whose favourite hero was D’Artugnan, and who loved
the great optimist Scott, whose novels he studied stealthily in an
indifferent translation, and knew by heart.
He was abashed by contemplation of his own spuriousness as member of
an effete circle, where death was regarded as the best of all things;
and Mademoiselle Lenormant was seriously distressed by the wretchedness
of his appetite and the misery of his boyish face. She forgot herself
in another, and left the Doctor to entertain her friend, who had
been invited to join them at dinner, while she set herself the task
of rescuing the poor lad from his own reflections. Anatole was an
affectionate and grateful young fellow, and the way to his heart was
inconveniently easy of access. When he went to bed that night, to his
other woes was added the delightful misfortune of being head and ears
in love with the Doctor’s sister-in-law.
This was a complication not unnoted by Dr. Vermont or his companions.
The Doctor calmly stroked his beard, and watched Anatole between the
pauses of his conversation on matters English with the foreign lady.
The foreigner, he was pleased afterwards to describe, as intelligent,
but as she had already touched the rim of the arid plain of middle-age,
with equal dulness, far from the hills of youth and from the valley of
old age, he saw no reason to pursue her thoughts or shades of speech
upon her face--by the way, he did not like English women; they lacked
_atmosphere_, and were born without any natural grace, or coquetry, or
any desire to please--and hence he had the more leisure to devote to
inspection of Mademoiselle Lenormant and his susceptible comrade. He
understood all the boy thought hidden of the struggle within him. He
contemplated a magnanimous turn at the last moment, and caressed it
in all its dramatic details. Meanwhile, it amused him to follow the
conflict, and watch the childish eagerness with which Anatole, thinking
his last hour at hand, abandoned himself to this new fancy, with a
volume of eloquent declaration on the edge of his eyelids.
And yet the Doctor’s calm inspection was not without a twinge of anger,
as at a kind of infringement of his personal rights. As he sat in the
old salon, where in his youth he used to chat with Monsieur Lenormant,
he was in the grip of the past, softened, almost sentimental. Nothing
was changed about the place, which wore the same homely aspect of
shabbiness and comfortable untidiness. But three of the personages
of that little drama were dead: Monsieur Lenormant, Adèle, and young
Dr. Vermont. For he, too, had been young and bright and pleasant.
Once he had thrilled from head to foot when Adèle, with a charming
movement, took one of his long fingers, and helped him to vamp the
_Marseillaise_, and their eyes met in a foolish fluttering glance, and
_tudieu!_ his own were wet!
These were extraordinary things to remember, perhaps, but not so
extraordinary as the persistence with which his backward glance rested,
not on the image of his lovely young wife evoked from the past--but
upon Henriette as she then was. That picture of grave, silent girlhood
haunted him in a singular and unexpected way. The forgotten drama rose
up, and confronted him with its ruthless _dénouement_. And if he were
not too proud and wilful ever to acknowledge regret, he might know
that it was there the sting lay, as he remembered: that he should have
played an ignoble trick upon poor old Monsieur Lenormant, and have
looked at Adèle instead of at Henriette--on one memorable occasion.
He had played for his happiness, and happiness had passed him by.
Perchance, had he played a more honourable game, happiness would have
been with him all these years, and the noble woman, whose suffering
in his choice he now knew he had then divined, would have brought
him finer and more delicate enjoyment than that which he had found
elsewhere.
‘Yet who knows?’ he added, as a sound lash upon sentimental musing.
‘There is no such thing as happiness, and I should have tired of her
goodness as I have tired of the badness of others.’
But he smiled indulgently, when Anatole droned a melancholy melody upon
her charms that night.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
WHILE the young men were still sitting over their coffee and rolls in
uncheerful converse, Dr. Vermont stole upstairs--not to see Gabrielle,
but to talk to Henriette. His thoughts had been with her all night, and
he was eager for sight of her by day.
When he entered, a spot of insufferable radiance burnt into the hollow
of her thin cheek; but this confession was counteracted by the extreme
sadness of her greeting. She, too, had thought during the night, and
thought had cruelly struck at her life-long idol. For had he not
forgotten Adèle? and was Adèle’s child anything more than his by name?
To have found him indifferent to her because of the dead! But to find
him indifferent to both! There was the point of pain, and with it the
wrench of a wounded faith, which could never more uphold her in her
solitude.
She looked at him anxiously, to see if a night spent in the blue room
had stamped his cynical, handsome face with a trace of suffering, of
revived feeling. The poor lady could not be expected to interpret any
such sign except as homage to her dead sister. So she lifted up her
heart in honest gratitude for the touch of humanity in his manner as he
held Gabrielle to his knee, and stroked her brown hair gently. Such is
the guileness and simplicity to be found on a forsaken island, where
gossip is not, and society revelations are unknown.
‘And you have lived here the old quiet life, Henriette, with no thought
of marriage or change,’ the Doctor said musingly, and noted with
pleasure the charming habit of blushing she had retained, like a very
young girl.
‘Surely, François, you would have expected to be apprised of my
marriage, or of any other change?’
‘I? Why should I? Had I not of my own will dropped out of your
existence? If I chose to forget our relationship, what claim on your
courtesy could I urge? You are too sensitive, too loyal, too good,
Henriette. You were always that. Your father used to say so, and so
used Adèle. Ah! they loved you well--those two. I wish now for your
sake--I honestly wish you had dealt me the measure I deserved, and my
neglect would have stung you less.’
‘It did not sting me, François. I have no pride of that kind. Life is
too full of pain. But I was sorry and grieved for Gabrielle’s sake.’
Had she not the right to hide the rest from him--simple-minded lady?
who believed she had succeeded--since she so honourably strove to hide
it from herself? Dr. Vermont pushed the child away, and came and stood
before his sister-in-law. His imperious glance compelled hers, which
she lifted timidly, apprehensively.
‘You are an angel, Henriette--oh, I don’t mean in the hackneyed
conventional sense, but as a man means it when the goodness of another
forces him to face right and wrong, and he feels he cannot undo the
wrong and cannot choose the right. It is a miserable position. Ah! if
it were not so late? But my tongue is tied. My first mistake was here,
in this very room, years ago--twenty, thirty, a lifetime may be. Your
father lay on the canapé dying, and I was sitting beside him. He spoke
of you; I knew well that he spoke of you, though he did not mention
your name. It was you he wished me to marry, and I, following his
glance, looked at Adèle instead. Happiness seemed to woo me from that
flower-like face, and I believed in happiness then. Now!’ he shrugged
in his expressive way, and added, in a softer voice, drooping humbly to
her: ‘God forgive me, Henriette, but now I question the wisdom of that
choice.’
‘It was a natural choice, François, and it would be anguish for me to
think that you could regret it. Spare me that sorrow. Surely I have
suffered enough, and have not reproached you. But this indignity would
indeed give voice to the pain of silent years, and bid me utter words
neither you nor I could forget. I gave her to you,’ she went on, in a
dull tone of protest. ‘It was the best I had, my dearest and sole one
on earth. But what did it matter if I was the lonelier, so that you and
she were happy together? I have asked so little of life. Leave me that
remembrance, François. No man had a sweeter wife than my Adèle, and for
her I can be satisfied with a loyalty no less from her husband than
that which I have given her.’
She glided from the room without another look for him. He stood and
stared after her, with a fantastic, almost amused movement of eyebrow,
though the heart within him felt heavy to bursting with an odd
assortment of sensations.
When they met again, it was at the luncheon table, with his companions
and Mademoiselle’s foreign friend.
‘Anatole devours her with his eyes,’ he said to himself. ‘Poor moth! he
is sadly burnt, and the fact that she is eight or nine years his senior
makes his hurt the graver. There are compensations in a hopeless love
when the ages are reversed.’
But his mild sarcastic face wore no look of dejection or dismay as he
sat and discoursed upon Shakespeare and Molière with the foreigner,
only of intelligent survey and an amiable satisfaction in all things,
including the clowns of Shakespeare, from whom most Frenchmen
instinctively shrink. After lunch they played chess and discussed,
in the usual way, the school of realists, décadents, symbolists, and
the recent revival of romanticism in a gentleman, said to combine the
melodious style of George Sand with the adventurous spirit of the
great Dumas. It was only when the foreigner retired, and the young men
went upstairs to study the stars in the friendly odour of tobacco, that
the Doctor ventured again to address Henriette.
‘He is an interesting lad, Anatole--eh?’
‘Very. But it distresses me to see him so sad and worried at his age.
He appears to have some trouble on his mind,’ said Mademoiselle,
leaning her elbows on the table and her chin upon her folded hands.
‘He has fallen in love with you--that’s his trouble, Henriette. I
assure you, up in Paris, he is the reverse of sad or worried. He is the
life of Lander’s.’
Dr. Vermont achieved his purpose: he made her blush from neck to
forehead.
‘You forget, François, that you are talking to a middle-aged woman of a
very young man,’ she said, in surprise.
‘Not so middle-aged as that,’ laughed Dr. Vermont, unjoyously. ‘And the
others,--do they appear to have any trouble on their minds?’
‘It has not struck me. I should say they are rather futile men, who
would probably fail in any undertaking in an abject way,’ she said,
dismissing them.
But she did not dismiss Anatole from her mind, and when he came to say
‘Good-night’ to her, she greeted him with so much direct and personal
sympathy in her smile, in her glance, and in the slight pressure of
her fingers, that I declare the poor fellow was only restrained by the
presence of Dr. Vermont from bursting into tears then and there, and
confessing all to her. Instead, he choked an inclination to sob, and
turned despairingly on his heel.
It rained heavily all next day--the fatal New Year’s Eve. With an
instinct for dramatic fitness, Anatole spent the first half in a state
of suppressed tearfulness, as an appropriate ending of his young
life. He was unrecognisable to himself even, for never before had he
dropped into the elegiac mood. With the lyric, with the martial, with
the bacchanalian, he was familiar enough. He tried to recover his
self-esteem by imagining what his state would be on the battle-field.
But the satisfaction he might feel in shooting a German, or bayoneting
an insolent Englishman, was wanting to take from the horror of
contemplated death; and the candid wretchedness of his face provoked
sympathetic misery in the glance of all who beheld him. What would he
not give for one more sight of the old fishing town in Normandy, for a
chat with the genial honest fishermen who had never heard that accursed
phrase, _Fin de siècle_, and little cared whether they were at the
beginning or the end of the century. No, if his mother were alive, he
was convinced he never would have entered into that wicked jest upon
matter so solemn as death. He would have known better, had he even a
sister, like that sweet and noble-looking lady, Mademoiselle Lenormant.
It was too late now, and this was his last day. Thank God it rained!
It rained so darkly and so dismally that the regrets of life were
mitigated by the mournfulness of nature. It was relieved thereby of
much of its attraction and of all its enchantment. Had a single ray of
sunlight fallen upon the damp earth, it would have shaken him to the
depth of his being. This fact he jealously kept to himself, dreading
the sneer of those two superior young men, Julien and Gaston, who
thought themselves such very fine fellows because they persisted in
their indifference to eternity, and cared not a rush for the poor
old world they were going from. But Anatole knew better than to envy
them. He held that it requires but a bad heart, or none at all, and
feeble brains atrophied by the cheap philosophy of the hour, to reach
this stage. So, while they smoked and joked downstairs in dismal
hilarity, he sat upstairs with the ladies, and drank tea, and made a
gallant effort to play with little Gabrielle. How happy he might be
if this were to be permanent reality, and Paris, with its unrest, its
bitterness, its noise and glitter, an ugly dream!
Dr. Vermont showed himself neither upstairs nor downstairs. Before
lunch he walked to Beaufort, and on his return, he slowly made the tour
of the island. It had been mentioned that upon one side of the island,
as you stepped from the bridge beyond a broken arch and a dangerous
reach of rocks down to the inky waters, there was an old tower.
Monsieur Lenormant’s house was lower down on the opposite side, facing
the cemetery. This tower had been an ancient fort when the entire isle
was the fortified retreat of an illustrious and rebel house. It had
sustained sieges, and known the roar of musketry, and it still stood
nobly upon its martial memories, albeit a ruin of centuries. All was
silence and desolation on this side of the island. No one walked its
pavements, and the laundresses wheeling their barrows to town from the
lower end, instinctively chose the inhabited quarter to pass.
‘A man might rot to carrion here,’ said Dr. Vermont, as he stood
between the battered walls of the tower, and looked up at the weeping
heavens, and then down at the sullen and swollen river. ‘None would
know, and a few days’ persistent rain would rush the river beyond the
rocks in among these ruins, and carry our bodies away to the sea.’
And then he walked with his hands in his pockets, unmindful of the
rain, to the neglected cemetery. He stood a while against the white
tomb of his young wife, upon which some flowers lay, a lifeless pulp in
a pool of water. Thirty-nine only, and two days ago he believed he had
tasted all life had to offer, and wanted no more of its bitterness or
its sweetness? But he would not humble himself to admit that he had
erred two days ago, and that there still remained at the bottom of the
cup a draught he would willingly drink. He put the present from him,
and the stirring voice of a troubled consciousness, and leaned there in
the rain to dream a while of youth, and hope, and all things good that
have been and are no more.
It was late in the afternoon when he returned and shut himself in the
blue-room to write letters. This done, he examined a pair of pistols,
loaded one which he laid upon the table, and with his odd, hard
smile, carried the other into the dressing-room where Anatole slept,
and placed it on the bed. There was still half an hour to dispose of
before dinner--his last half hour of solitude. He took up the candle,
and walked slowly round the room, inspecting each object, pricking by
association, memory, that just then needed no pricking. The pity was
that the man’s sharp face never lost its calm irony of expression,
and his shapely mouth never lost its trick of quiet smiling. For him
absurdity lay at the bottom of all things--if not absurdity, something
so much worse as to be beyond toleration.
Man in all his moods, he insisted, was a mixture of grossness and
absurdity, and it mattered little which of the two elements prevailed.
The one excess worked mischief for himself, and the other mischief for
his neighbours.
When the dinner-bell rang, Dr. Vermont appeared still smiling and
humorously observant. He it was who spoke most, and most coherently,
at table. Julien and Gaston swaggered a little, and their faces were
pale and excited. Anybody with an eye in his head might have guessed
they were morally perturbed, and Mademoiselle, mindful of the hurried
departure that night, questioned her foreign friend, sitting below
with Dr. Vermont, in a swift, apprehensive glance. But the Doctor was
so cool and steady, and discoursed so blandly with his neighbour,
that she dismissed her fears, and set herself to cheer and encourage
poor Anatole. If his depression were really due to a violent fancy
for herself, then she was in duty bound to act the part of mother, or
at least of elder affectionate sister,--which she did with consummate
ability, and drove the unhappy lad to despair.
After dinner the Doctor, instead of rising, said, laughing--
‘Henriette, to-night we men will follow the example of our barbarous
brothers of England, and will remain over our wine after the ladies. To
borrow a habit from your countrymen, Madame, cannot offend your taste,
though I am afraid I should not find a Frenchwoman tolerant of it.’
‘I believe Englishmen sit at wine and the ladies retire,’ said
Mademoiselle, hesitating. She did not like the innovation, and frankly
showed it.
‘Your pardon, Henriette, we have our plans to discuss. You, Madame,
too, will hold us excused?’
‘Certainly, Monsieur, I think it a commendable custom which keeps men
and women so much apart. They meet then with greater zest and novelty.’
Dr. Vermont held the door for the ladies and bowed. He stooped and
kissed little Gabrielle, and held her head a moment against him. And
then when the door closed, he shrugged his shoulders, and sighed.
‘That’s the Englishwoman for you--a creature without tact or charm.
The British matron is only fitted to be a mother of a family. She can
neither hold us back, nor encourage us with dignity. Ah! lucky we are,
gentlemen, to be the slaves and masters of that adorable bundle of
perversities--_la femme française_!’
While he spoke he uncorked a bottle of Monsieur Lenormant’s fine old
Burgundy, and filled each glass to the brim.
‘_Allons, Messieurs._ Let us drink the last hours away. I give you a
toast to begin with--the delicious Frenchwoman.’
The young men half emptied their glasses at a draught, and then cast
haggard glances at the sarcastic Doctor. He slowly drained his glass,
and lifted the bottle again.
‘And since our delightful torment would never consent to go unmated,
even in a toast, let us drink, gentlemen, to her inadequate, but
sympathetic partner--the gallant Frenchman.’
The first bottle of Burgundy loosened their tongues again, and inspired
them to a febrile gaiety. They laughed loudly, broke into snatches of
song, and by the time the second bottle was empty, one and all had
fallen upon sentimental reminiscences. They thought themselves back
at Lander’s, and the discretion of the ladies’ retreat could not be
questioned. Anatole thundered roughly upon the perfidy of a certain
Susanne, and Gaston vowed that none of her crimes could equal the trick
one Blanche played him--the men used to call her ‘Blanche of Castille,’
in recognition of the many virtues she seemed to have inherited from
her illustrious namesakes, doubtless; and Julien interposed dryly, with
a droll anecdote of a lady once known in Paris as ‘_La Perle Noire_’.
Dr. Vermont said nothing, but listened and attacked the third bottle.
He reached across, and filled Anatole’s glass, and smiled upon him
almost pleasantly.
‘Never mind Susanne, or any other perfidious fair, my lad. It comes
to the same at the end, whether they have been faithful or not. They
die, and we die, and sleep “a long, an endless, unawakeable sleep”.
It’s half-past nine now,’ he added, looking at his watch. ‘In two more
hours, we shall be starting out upon the road that has no ending, leads
nowhither, unless it be to dark, bottomless space.’
‘Why so?’ asked Julien. ‘May we not be shooting through the stars?
Anatole in his present mood will make straight for Venus, but I,
seeking compensation for the dulness of a peaceful life, will rather
choose Mars. One ought to fall in for some good fighting there, eh?’
Anatole stood up, and went over to the window. The melancholy flow of
water from the drooping eaves could be heard, and the sky was as black
as the river and the landscape. No light in the heavens, no light below
nearer than Beaufort, no sound but the splash of rain. The susceptible
fellow shivered visibly, and went back to the table to comfort himself
with another draught of Burgundy.
‘There is not a star to be shot into,’ he said gloomily; ‘and it is
raining as if the whole universe were melted.’
‘We have a couple more toasts to drink, gentlemen,’ said the Doctor,
standing. ‘Are your glasses filled?’
Well, if they could do nothing else, they could at least get drunk
before they went on a voyage among the stars, or fell asleep like dogs
for eternity.
‘An Englishman, when he is tired of life, takes to drink; a Frenchman
blows his brains out,’ Julien observed, as he helped his neighbour to
the bottle.
‘Upon my conscience, I do not know that the Englishman has not the best
of it.’
‘He is of hardier build, my friend, and can take his drinking and
pessimism in equal doses. We are the slaves of our nerves, and can
stand neither pessimism nor drink.’
‘Are you ready? The toast is the downfall of France.’
The young men stolidly laid down their untasted wine, and looked at the
Doctor for explanation. They themselves might go to the dogs, and the
mischief take them there, or elsewhere. The universe might melt away
into nothingness, but France, beloved France, must ever stand fast,
proud and honoured and beautiful. Drink to her downfall? Was Doctor
Vermont mad?
‘Why not?’ said Doctor Vermont imperturbably. ‘We shall be no more. And
what can it matter to us? France has had her day, as Egypt, Greece, and
Rome had theirs. I would have her spared the misery of a slow decline.
It is now the turn of Russia, which will be the civilisation of the
future. If you prefer it, we will drink then to Russia.’
So they drank to Russia, long and deeply; and Anatole, who had a pretty
tenor voice, intoned the Russian Hymn, which the others listened to on
their feet. And then to keep up the musical glow, and the golden moment
of unconsciousness, he burst into the _Marseillaise_, knowing well that
few can resist that most thrilling and spirited of national songs.
When he had finished the last verse, and the last chorus was sung,
his companions sat silently gazing into their empty glasses. They had
finished six bottles of Burgundy between them, and were now passably
drunk, though not incapable of presenting themselves before the ladies
to say good-bye. The Doctor went first, and waited for Anatole outside
the salon door.
‘Remember, boy, it is “Good-night”--not “Good-bye,”’ he said sadly, as
he pressed his friend’s shoulder.
Mademoiselle and her companion sat before a low wood fire, chatting
quietly. They heard the songs from the dining-room, and smiled and
shook their heads. Mademoiselle remarked that the young men were
discourteous enough to carry the habits of the Latin Quarter into
private houses, but since her brother-in-law tolerated such behaviour,
it was not for her to object, since they were his guests.
When the door opened, both ladies looked blankly round at the invasion.
The Doctor stood a moment on the threshold and arched his brows in
smiling signification. The foreigner felt she would give a good deal
to get behind that smile, and understand that queer lifting of the
eyebrow. That the man wore his smile as a mask, she had no doubt, and
she was not without suspicion that behind it lay concealed a different
personage from the actor on view. He advanced, and came and stood in
front of his sister-in-law, looking down on her with a new gravity on
his reckless handsome face. The flush under his eyes gave a brilliance
to his wistful gaze that justified the fascinated flutter of the poor
lady’s heart. For she had never seen him look in the least like that,
though she had seen his eyes melt to another.
‘Henriette, good-night,’ he said softly.
She gave him her hand, with a glance of sharp inquiry.
‘Is it good-bye, François?’
‘Good-bye? Why good-bye? It’s a lugubrious word. _Au revoir, ma sœur._’
His lips touched her fingers an instant, and already he had turned to
shake hands with her companion. Gaston and Julien came behind him, and
bent their bodies in two in a dignified salute, but Anatole held out
his hand, and clung feverishly to hers when she took it, while his eyes
held hers in dismayed conjecture. Was it despair she read in them, or
terror, or simply the pain of young love? But his speech was lagging
and broken, not that, she decided, of a sober man, and she withdrew her
hand abruptly, with a curt movement of dismissal of her head.
The boy turned to follow his companions, and felt his heart break
within him as he went downstairs. While they passed through the
blue-room, the Doctor again leant in affectionate pressure upon his
shoulder.
‘Courage, Anatole. No woman is worth a pang.’
‘Ah, Monsieur le Docteur, you cannot think that of her. She is worth
the best man could offer, and all he might suffer. You know it, Doctor.
Deny if you admire her.’
‘I don’t deny it, if that will console you.’
‘And you can fling away such a chance,’ moaned Anatole.
‘I fling away nothing, for the simple reason, I have nothing to fling
away. It is not chance any of us lack, chances of making fools of
ourselves, of others. Chance, my friend, is generally another word for
blunder. Some philosophers call the world chance, and is not that the
biggest blunder of all?’
‘You mystify me, Vermont. I call perversity the worst of all blunders.
And is it not perversity, if you love Mademoiselle Lenormant, to----’
‘Who says I love Mademoiselle Lenormant? I loved her sister, in a way,
and she is dead. You’ll find your pistol all ready there on the bed.
Put it into your pocket. It is half-past eleven. Tell the others I will
join them instantly.’
Before crossing the passage to the other bedroom, Anatole stole softly
upstairs, and knocked at the salon door. Mademoiselle Lenormant opened
the door, and surveyed him in disapproving surprise.
‘In what way can I serve you, Monsieur?’ she asked. He slipped into
the room under her arm. There was an empty chair near, and into it he
dropped, glancing up at her prayerfully.
‘Mademoiselle, I am about to face a long, perhaps a perilous voyage,’
he said, and the slight break in his voice and the wet lustre of his
boyish blue eyes captivated her judgment, and melted her into all heart
as she listened and looked down upon him.
‘I have come back to you, to ask you before I set out for the unknown,
just one moment, to place your hand on my forehead and say, “God bless
you, Anatole.” Do you pardon the presumption?’
She bent forward, brushed the tossed hair off his forehead, kissed it
tenderly, and said, ‘God bless you, Anatole.’
Silently and sobered the four men went out into the wet night. They
walked round the island first to make sure that every house slept.
There was not a light anywhere, not a sound. They trod the ground as
quietly as booted men can tread, and came round by the cemetery and
the low broken wall to the tower. Here they entered, and the Doctor
struck a match that through the blurred illumination they might see
the advantages of the spot he had chosen to salute the new century. It
was certainly better than the sensation they should create anywhere
near Paris. I doubt not that each one privately regretted the rash
engagement they had made over their punch at Lander’s a week ago. But
none had the courage to give the first voice to regret. False shame and
fear of ridicule held them tongue-tied, and resolved to make the best
of their bargain.
When they had selected a spot near the hollow of the encroaching rocks,
where, if they fell, they might be washed unnoted down into the river
when the flood came high, Julien separated himself from the group,
and walked over to the lower wall, whence the lights of Beaufort
could be seen. These lights were rare and dim, but they cheered him
inexpressibly. They were eloquent of life in the monotony of darkness.
He sat on the edge of the wall, and stared past the shadow of the
bridge, out into the terrible loneliness of night, and shuddered at
the roar of the eddying river below. Upon the breast of that river one
might float into the beautiful South--a word made up of the sense of
sweetness, and flowers, and sunshine, and blue waters, and clear skies.
When he was a youngster he used to tell himself that he would save up
his money, and go to Italy. And now he was no longer young, had not
saved up his money, had not seen Italy, and was going to die--and
leave it all behind.
At that moment a peal of bells was heard from over the water, and
Gaston Favre announced in a cold, dull voice that the cathedral of
Beaufort was pealing the midnight chimes. Had there been light, each
man would have been seen to quiver from head to foot, and then grow
rigid upon his feet.
‘My friends, is it agreed that we salute the dying century upon the
last stroke of the cathedral bell?’ asked Dr. Vermont, in a hushed,
muffled voice.
‘It is agreed,’ said Gaston, after an imperceptible pause. The four men
gathered together, and took their pistols out of their breast-pocket.
Dr. Vermont lifted his face up to the cold wet wind. His lips parted
to the heavens’ moisture, and he felt refreshed. Since there could be
pleasure in the fall of raindrops upon heated lips, why not even then
admit that life may be worth living? Why not see the bright background
to present pain as well as the dark contrast of evil behind joy? We
have said the Doctor was a proud and wilful man, and he would accept no
sensation as admonishment of error,--but this gave him some pause.
In one swift backward glance, he saw the long roll of travelled
years--years misspent, possibly, but not without their baggage of
unearned joys; saw the start of resplendent youth ringing him onward to
a manhood of renown: remembered friends he had once regarded with other
than mere cynical interest: moments that had throbbed with light, and
all the loveliness of untainted freshness--perfumed, dewy like a May
orchard in blossom, swathed in youth’s eternal purple. While the lads
around him faced the inevitable, as they thought, and though shrinking,
white-lipped, and frozen with horror, from his cold acquiescence,
endeavoured to warm themselves to the last act in the spirit of bravado
and contemplation of the deluged earth, he had taken a sudden rebound
from his old attitude. It was no longer the dislike of life and the
weariness of experience that held him in chill imprisonment The old
desire for boyish blisses, and the cordial of laughter mantled and
burst in his brain like a riot of song. It was a revelation, with all
the meaning of prayer first understood. A pulsing regret for all he
was leaving, for what he had known, and, above all, for that which was
yet unknown, swept him instantly upon a fiery wave. It shot his arm
down nervelessly. The pallid, spiritual face of Henriette seemed to
hang in the sullen space of black sky and wet black earth. It glowed
like a lamp, and shed a faint illumination upon the dusk. The faded
monotone of her voice murmured prayerfully above the weighted splash
upon the stones, and awoke the essential impulse of existence. While
such women lived and prayed for men, could the deeps of life be said to
have closed? ’Tis an old-fashioned notion, but, like most old-fashioned
things, ’tis the simplest and the best. It softened the hard
retrospection of Dr. Vermont’s glance, and lent a wavering tenderness
to his peculiar smile.
Upon the sixth stroke of the cathedral bell, he offered his hand in
silence to Julien Renaud, who squeezed it roughly, in assurance of
undiminished courage. Poor lad! He needed the assurance sadly. Upon the
eighth stroke, Dr. Vermont sought Gaston’s hand, but the limp moist
fingers he grasped made no effort to respond to his pressure.
‘Courage, Gaston,’ he cried, in a friendly, animated voice, and upon
the tenth stroke he turned to Anatole, and had there been a ray of
light above or around, Dr. Vermont’s face would have been seen to
undergo a wonderful and beautiful change. Honest affection that makes
no pretence of concealment, humanised it, and a magnanimous resolve
filled its expression with cheering purport. The worst of us, you
see, have our heroic moments, only it often happens that, like Dr.
Vermont’s, they pass unnoticed in the dark.
‘There is happiness ahead for you yet, Anatole,’ he breathed quickly
through his teeth, while he swung the unhappy young fellow’s arm once
up and down, in warm emphasis to communicate the reassuring fluid to
him.
‘Gentlemen, ’twas an excellent joke, and as might be expected of such
excellent lads as you, carried out with uncommon spirit and dash. I’m
proud of you, gentlemen, and shall feel honoured in the privilege of
saluting the new century in your midst. We fire heavenward--a good
omen--and then we shake hands again, in cordial assent that humanity
is not so worn but it may still be relied upon for entertainment.
You will say there are higher things. I’m not so sure there are not.
Anyway, ’tis not an excessive claim that youthful pessimists may
without shame start a fresh century as cheerful philosophers. The
heavens are not always weeping, and most of us are the better for the
sun’s shining.’
He spoke rapidly, and a muffled shout dying away upon a thick sob,
broke from each troubled breast. The first throb of emotion spent
itself in obedience.
When the last stroke of the cathedral bell had fallen upon the silence
with a prolonged thin echo, a loud simultaneous report was heard to
startle the night, and travel above the roar of the river, far across
the empty country.
Gaston and Julien Renaud, utterly unnerved by the reaction, fell
sobbing into each other’s arms, but Anatole, bewildered past
understanding, thought he was shot, and fell in a heap at Dr. Vermont’s
feet.
EPILOGUE
(_From the travellers notebook_)
THE suppressed excitement of the past two days has more than made up
for the stillness of the two months that preceded them. Against these
forty-eight hours of trembling anticipation and surmise, the long
weeks of undisturbed and pleasant converse and childish chatter make a
background of placid years, instead of weeks.
I see them filled with fireside talks, dips into musty volumes, walks
in a long gallery, to the murmured music of water, and in frosty
starlight, with the lamps of Beaufort lending cheerfulness to the
scene. Sometimes an expedition to some castellated town, southward, and
wanderings through vividly coloured streets, or among lovely hills,
where winter flowers grew and sweetened the air, and the grey of the
river was shot with blue, as it glided into sunnier regions. And then
the friendly greetings upon return, and a child’s excited demand to
know what I had seen, how far I had travelled, perhaps since morning,
or the day before; above all, what I had brought back for her.
Beautiful calm days, already remembered regretfully as part of the
for ever past! They will outlive, I hope, recent events, though they
have sent them to slumber a while in the cemetery of the mind. For
perturbation fell upon us, from the hour Mademoiselle and I stood
watching a party of riders bear down toward us along the great road,
like a picture sharply evoked from the time of postchaise and tragedy
carried upon the momentous clatter of hoofs.
I had met Dr. Vermont, had spoken to him, and found he did not realise
in any way my expectations. He was a well-bred man, as far as the
superficialities of the drawing-room permitted me to judge. But his
face was inexplicable and tormenting. It may once have been a strong
face, but its strength was almost effaced by life. And yet there was
no weakness about it--only an indifference that saps at strength. It
could look daring and reckless, was never without a smile of quiet
irony, and there was surely enough humorous observation in the mild
brown eyes to fill his days with easy pleasure and interest. But was
there not something worse than sadness behind this good-humoured mask?
I thought so from the first, and my impression was soon justified by
an incredible episode. I also believed that before the Doctor had been
twenty-four hours in the house, he had fallen in love with Mademoiselle
Lenormant. But why he should have wanted Anatole to marry her, I cannot
understand. Surely, surely, he knew that she loved him! must have known
it all along.
When he and his companions left the salon on that last evening, I said
good-night at once to Mademoiselle. I almost reproached myself with
seeing so much, divining so much that remained untold. I sat in my
room with a pen in my hand, unable to write from excess of interest in
what was going on around me. Why should peaceable modern men start off
upon a midnight expedition in this mediæval fashion? Neither my own
imagination could devise an adequate explanation, nor did I receive any
assistance from the objects that surrounded me in Monsieur Lenormant’s
room, which I attentively examined. How heavily, drearily the rain
fell, and what an awful darkness outside! I stood at the window and
listened to the midnight chimes from the cathedral and churches of
Beaufort. On New Year’s Eve most people feel sentimental at this hour,
and recall the various places and circumstances in which they have
listened to the peal of bells upon the death of the old year. But this
I felt to be a sadder occasion than any other New Year’s Eve, because a
whole century was dying with it, the only century I was familiar with,
and I rather shrank from trial of the new.
An extraordinary sound followed at once upon the last peal of the
bells. It seemed so close, that it jerked me back from the window,
quite shaken with the reverberation. There could be no doubt either of
its nature or of the fact that it rose from some near point upon the
island. It was more than a single pistol-shot. Now, the washerwomen
could not have devised that singular method of saluting the new-born
century. Neither could the chaplain of the Benedictines, who occupied
an old, dark house at the end of the island upon our side. The
wine-shop of Geraud always closed at nine o’clock, and on such a wet
night no living soul would have crossed the bridge for the sake of his
bad liquids.
I went to Mademoiselle’s room, anxious to hear what opinion she would
have upon the startling occurrence.
‘Somebody has been murdered near us,’ she cried excitedly, when I
entered.
‘Good heavens! what ought we to do?’
‘I don’t know what we ought to do, but what I should like to do would
be to go and see for myself,’ she said, and looked questioningly at me.
‘You are a brave woman, Mademoiselle; I should have feared to propose
it, but I will gladly accompany you.’
‘Let us go and call up the chaplain of the Benedictines. He and I
are almost the lords of this island, and if any one were wounded, or
in need of our help, it is our duty to be on the spot. We will take
Joséphine’s big umbrella and her lantern.’
The rain was awful, and the darkness of the night was so thick that
we seemed to cleave a way through it as we buffeted with the driving
downpour. To my troubled ear, our steps, along the deluged pavement,
carried a portentous message into the silent night. There was a light
in the priest’s house, and the sound of our footsteps approaching
brought him to the door even before we had knocked.
‘Who is it? What is it?’ he whispered.
‘It is I, Mademoiselle Lenormant, father. We want you to come and
examine the island with us. There is shooting somewhere, and somebody
may have been murdered or dying.’
‘You have a lamp. Wait a moment, and I will join you.’ Outside he said,
‘Let us try the cemetery. Phew! how it rains. It is a deluge. I am not
surprised at your courage, Mademoiselle, for it is not since yesterday
that I know you. But your friend--ah, I forgot, she is English, and the
Englishwoman, I have always heard, is capable of anything.’
I doubt not the little compliment of the good chaplain was as welcome
to my friend as to myself, and warmed us both upon that dreary
adventure. In silence we beat our way round to the cemetery, and then
only remembered, what we should not have forgotten, that it was locked.
Seeing how unlikely it was that any one should have contrived to get
inside without the key for any black purpose whatsoever, the chaplain
thought it unnecessary to go back for it. So we then decided to examine
the rocks along as far as the tower, and afterwards go over the ruin.
There was nothing about the rocks but an occasional water-rat, that ran
into hiding as soon as the gleam of the lantern revealed him. Nothing
along the pavement under the low wall. We bent under the nearest broken
arch of the tower, and entered it upon the river side. At first our
lantern only served to accentuate the darkness, and show the deeper
masses of shadow in the walls. We groped forward, and held our breath,
in mingled fear and expectation. Nothing stirred; only the rain fell
heavily with the noise of splashing when it touched the water below. I
advanced foremost, and my foot brushed something that was not jagged
stone or bramble.
‘Bring your lamp here, Monsieur, whoever you are,’ a familiar voice
cried out, in an imperious tone.
I started, and stood to let the priest and Mademoiselle approach,
wondering what it could mean. The priest held the lantern down low,
and we at once recognised Dr. Vermont’s pale face looking up from a
tangled heap of black against his knee.
‘We stopped before crossing the bridge to fire a shot in welcome to the
new century, and this unstrung boy must needs topple off his balance,
and faint away in sheer fright,’ he hurriedly explained.
‘A very strange proceeding, Monsieur,’ said the priest, frowning.
I knelt down and touched poor Anatole’s chill face, but Mademoiselle
had no word. She could only stand and stare in haggard amazement.
‘I have not asked your opinion, Monsieur. It is your help I desire,’
said Dr. Vermont, with an unabated ferocity of pride.
‘Am I not shot?’ asked Anatole vaguely, opening his eyes and glancing
about in terror.
He made an instinctive gesture to feel for the wound on his forehead,
and sat up straight. He was wild and giddy, and, seeing me first, could
not take his eyes off my face; he even stretched out his hand in awe to
touch me.
‘But for that confounded darkness, we might have had him in shelter
long ago,’ muttered Dr. Vermont. ‘Julien and Gaston have gone to look
for a lamp. Can you stand, Anatole?’ he asked the bewildered youth.
Anatole stood up quite promptly, without any assistance. The rain fell
from every part of his form in rills, and, as he shook himself free, he
breathed a deep, happy sigh.
‘Great God! I am saved,’ he murmured, and staggered forward.
‘Will nobody explain this hideous mystery?’ shouted the chaplain, like
ourselves on the verge of hysterics from emotion.
Dr. Vermont, standing with the lantern in his hand, shrugged
impertinently, and a ray of light glancing off his pale face, revealed
its enigmatic smile.
‘Take my arm, Henriette,’ he said, very gently, approaching
Mademoiselle, who throughout the scene was silent. ‘My poor girl,’ I
heard him add, in quite an altered tone, as he gathered her trembling
frame to him.
* * * * *
At an end for me the quiet studies and the pleasant talks upon the
lovely long terrace of that old house by the grey river. At an end
for Mademoiselle the waiting; at an end the long shadow of deferred
hope stretched like a pall upon the backward years. I know not if the
defence of the Emperor Julian has been concluded. When last I heard
from her she was in Italy with Joséphine, Gabrielle, and Gabrielle’s
strange father. She stands clear before me in her new home, the snow
gathering early upon her head, and the mark of the silent, tragic
years deepening the austerity that autumnal joys could never melt from
sensitive lips and shadowed glance. I frame her image against some
old Italian palace in the blackened arches of its balcony, and see
her, when the stars are out, and regret throbs more poignantly, gazing
across the blue waters that wash her beloved land, the mirthful, sunlit
waters, into which flows her own grey river.
The old house beyond the broken arches of the bridge, that leads to
the desolate island, has been sold. Who now sits upon the terrace that
overlooks the towers and spires of Beaufort? I cherish the hope that it
is some one with a bosom not insusceptible to the thrill of romance,
some one with a heart that still can beat to the swift measure of fear.
Anatole I have since seen in Paris. He is working steadily at some
profession, and sharp illness has made a saner and stronger man of
him. Upheaval, after a while, when the elements quiet down again,
generally brings reform. The Café Lander knows him no more, I have
ascertained, and while he shrinks from mention of Dr. Vermont’s name,
he is ever glad and grateful to talk of Henriette Lenormant. He bore
his dismissal bravely, after she had so devotedly nursed him through
that heavy shock, and he is generous enough to give thanks for the
cherishing friendship of the woman he loved in vain.
Gaston Favre has accepted an official post in the provinces, and Julien
Renaud is an industrious journalist.
BRASES
_À Madame Bohomoletz_
BRASES
I
LIKE another foreigner, I had my ideal of the Irishwoman--bewitching,
naturally, but built upon somewhat hackneyed and high-coloured lines:
vivacious play of feature, blue-black hair, violet eyes, and complexion
made up of lilies and roses. So when Trueberry, the gallantest friend
man ever found on English shores, asked me to join him in a trip to
Erin, imagination hastily evoked this resplendent creature of my
desire, and I straightway proposed to myself the pleasing excitement
of a flirtatious romance. I told Trueberry I thought nothing more
delightful than the prospect I had formed, to fall in love, and ride
away. Trueberry, in his fatal Saxon way, made some grim rejoinder about
the riding away being the pleasantest part of it.
We shot and rode and fished, and stared at the girls, without any
fervour of glance or flutter of pulse, it must be confessed, I alertly
on the look-out for this creature of dazzling contrasts and laughing
provocation. With fancy still uncomforted, Trueberry was dangerously
hurt, and we were several miles distant from the nearest village. A
peasant offered to help me carry my comrade down the glen, and assured
me that the lady of the grey manor would be glad to receive him. Our
claim at the hall was courteously responded to by an old man-servant,
who drew a couch out on which we stretched my moaning friend, and then
I was directed to the doctor’s house, some way along the uplands. My
guide offered me the shelter of his roof hard by, when I spoke of
looking for a lodging.
It was late in the afternoon when the doctor and I reached the manor.
The sun was level on the western horizon, an arch of misty gold upon
a broad sheet of silver lying behind the nearer low-hanging clouds,
so that the silver heaven, beyond this chain of grey and opal hills,
looked mystically remote and clear, while lower down lake and purple
mountains were softened by a fine white veil of mist, and the sea was
visible curling its delicate foam upon the crest of the tide among
the rocks. The valley below was dusk, shut in by the grand sweep of
girdling mountains, and so still was the air that every far-off sound
carried, from the echo of ocean’s murmuring to the nearer crash of a
waterfall hissing down the rocks, and the pleasant lilt at my feet of
a little rivulet lipping its daisied marge. The birds were in full
chorus, and each of the dense trees nested song. We left the breezy,
wandering moors, which swept the horizon in a measurelessness of space
as triumphant and vast seemingly as the illimitable Atlantic rolling
from their base, and took the narrow road that sloped down to the glen
of firs and oak, where the light could scarce make a path among the
deepening shadows. Outside all was great, in air, on land, on water.
Here intolerable compression of space and such a diminution of light
as to harass nerves and imagination. My preoccupation about Trueberry
rather stimulated than blunted my visual faculties, and I noted with
abhorrence each detail of the sharp, precise landscape; the thin vein
of water glimmering through the darkening grass like a broken mirror,
the abrupt curve of the road from the shoulder of the bluff, and the
stiff, dim plumes of the heather washed of purple pretension in the
twilight, while through a clump of black firs the rough front of the
manor made a fainter shade in the grey air. The solitude was scented
with the fragrance of wild thyme, and as we approached, old-fashioned
odours blew against us from the garden.
Trueberry was restored to a vague consciousness, and lay with shut eyes
in a darkened room. I walked outside with the doctor, who was a cheery,
hopeful fellow, and in diagnosing my friend’s case, furnished me with
no occasion for alarm. I found it strange that no member of the family
had come forward to explain the gracious hospitality by a personal
interest in the wounded man. As I stood in the chill air musing on this
odd unconcern, I heard a light step behind, coming from the house. I
turned, and faced the woman who was to dominate my heart by one swift
sweep of all that had ever claimed it.
She looked at me, and in one grave, steadfast glance the miracle was
accomplished. Is this love? I have been so often, so continuously in
love, and yet have never known anything that approached it. It was
like the mystery of life and death--not to be explained, not to be
conquered, not to be eluded. It needs no will to be born, to die; so it
needs no will to surrender to such an influence. Upon a single throb of
pulse, it has established itself permanently upon the altar of life,
and sentimental fancies and shabby yearnings drop out of memory with
the sacramental transfusion of soul.
Of course I saw that she was a beautiful woman, but this only
afterwards. What I first saw was the deep impersonal gaze that drew
the heart from my breast. It met mine with a full, free beam, and held
it upon a wave of inexplicable emotion. Bondage to it was a glory,
a consecration of my manhood. The subtle, the elusive nature of my
captivation was the spiritual point upon an ordinary passion. It was
the spurs, the belt of knighthood. For this I understood to be no mere
command of senses, but the imperative claims of life-long allegiance,
whether for suffering or for happiness.
Perhaps by nature I was attuned to such surrender. Since ever romantic
hopes first broke their deeps in my boyish brain, and my heart was
lifted on the first warm wave of desire, I have eagerly yearned for
free passionate servitude to one sovereign lady. There was always the
mediæval strain in me, though I have fluttered idly enough, like the
moth round the flame, and hovered in a sort of protective sympathy and
admiration, round pretty womanhood, not objecting to being trampled on
as a holocaust to graceful and bewildering caprice. But now had come
the enslavement of the soul, not of the senses; of the spirit, not of
the eye. Homage did not bend in banter, but was exalted on the wings
of reverence. It was only afterwards that I remembered the details of
the face: its unchanging pallor and exceeding finish, the peculiar
unrippling sheen of the blonde hair, like gold leaf in its unshaded
polish, the inner curves of coil as deep an amber as the outer edges,
without shadow of curl or ring round neck and temple. So smooth and
shining a frame was admirably adjusted to the small, grave, glacial
oval, with its look of wistful abstracted charm, with a delicate
chiselling only an inspired pencil could copy, with an exquisite line
from brow to chin. Such was the transparency of the colourless skin
that like a shell, it seemed in the light to reflect the warm rose of
life beneath. Under the arch of the unerring brows, long grey eyes,
shadowed blackly, that in girlhood must have presaged storm, but now
the black lay broodingly, a seal to the clear grey depths. You looked
into, not through them; and found them too bewilderingly unstirred by
the yearning trouble of the gazer.
There was, perhaps, a conscious but not an undignified expression in
her dress. Sweeping folds of grey matched the austere stillness of
her eyes, as did the full cambric of throat a wanness reminiscent of
a mediæval saint. Long sleeves lined with silk fell backward, and the
inner ones were of crimped cambric: hardly affectation, but the supreme
touch to beauty so visibly haloed as hers. Her voice was in keeping
with the clear eloquence of her glance; full, unperturbed, sustained
without conscious modulation or trick, harmonious like all sounds
of natural sweetness. It fell with the sentence, as the Irish voice
habitually does, but softly, without abrupt cadences or huskiness.
‘All that lies in our power for your friend’s care and comfort will be
done,’ she said, after her unhurried survey of me. ‘There is little
to offer in such an out-of-the-way place but home medicines and home
resources, and there will not be much in the way of distraction for
him, since I live here alone with my children, and my solitude is
unbroken. I regret that you have decided to lodge elsewhere, but pray
do not spare us your visits. The house is your friend’s, and I am
honoured in being of use to him.’
It was hardly a bow she made, but drooped her eyelids with a curious
movement, and lowered her chin from its ineffable upward line. The
words I scarcely heard, though every fibre trembled with emotion at
her speech. I thought the voice, with the softening syllables dropping
into silence, more exquisite than any music dreamed of. Its tones
accompanied me as a murmur rather than the remembrance of actual
words in my walk up to the free bluff, whence I could look down on
the grey manor, and mixed with the resounding roar of ocean, as the
wind blew the melody of the waves shoreward. What was the distinction
of this woman who through all the days to come offered me rapture
and agony by noontide and by midnight? Not her beauty so much as her
essential difference from others. Not the gleaming gold of her hair,
but the solemn simplicity of her bearing in such accord with the vast
and unbroken solitude around her. Her voice I acknowledged without
shrinking or terror, as we accept all essential elements, to be
henceforth the dominant key of life for me, the note to sound my depths
and touch me at will as an impassive instrument. Was this woman free? I
asked myself, with a thrill of revolt, as I remembered her mention of
children. But no word of husband! This fact let in a ray of hope upon
my dread. I could never again belong to myself with the cheap security
of an hour ago, and what was there for me if there was no room for me
in the chambers of her heart?
At the cottage I found my host frying some salmon for supper. He
was a tall, bent peasant, meagre and pallid from much thinking and
under-feeding, with all the Celt’s quaint mixture of melancholy and
humour in his keen blue eyes and wrinkled smile. He did the honours
of his humble dwelling with stately courtesy, and was too proud and
well-bred to offer futile apologies for the poverty of his shepherd
fare and rude bed.
‘Your friend, sir, is not anything worse, I trust,’ he said. I gave
him the doctor’s report, and said it was now a case for complete rest
and care. I reddened with remorse, remembering how little I had been
thinking of Trueberry.
‘Ah, ’tis he that’s in excellent hands,’ said the peasant, turning the
salmon, and then dreamily rested his cheek against the closed hand that
held the fork, with his elbow supported on the other wrist.
‘May I not learn to whom we are indebted for so much kindness?’ I asked
tremulously.
‘Your friend, sir, is at the house of Lady Brases Fitzowen,’ he
answered, and I shrank beneath the sharp look he cast on me. ‘’Tis
herself, sure, we all love and delight in as if she was one of God’s
angels.’
This seemed to me in my exalted mood as such an obvious statement that
I received it with the same simplicity it had been uttered. Were we not
brother Celts,--albeit, I a Parisianised Breton, and he an illiterate
native of wild Kerry uplands? His tribute to the lady of my destiny
raced a flame through me like a delicious flattery.
‘I have seen her,’ I said, striving to command my voice in unconfessing
tones. ‘I can quite believe you. I should like to know something of
her, if you will not deem my curiosity an impertinence. She spoke of
her children. Does her husband live?’
‘He does,’ the peasant answered, I thought sullenly.
I caught a fork fiercely in my hand, and bent to trace figures with it
on the cloth, hoping thereby to shield my excessive pain from his sharp
scrutiny.
‘She did not mention him to me,’ I half cried.
‘’Tis natural. They’re no longer one.’
Oh, the warm revulsion, the wild joy in that queer reply. I read in it
the peasant’s definition of divorce. It sprang light and flame through
me, and heated senses benumbed a moment ago. It gave definiteness to
rash hope, and melted away all doubt and apprehension. Brases free
was to be wooed. Heaven knows conceit was never more eliminated from
self-judgment than then, but I felt the urgent claim of the rare
passion so instantaneously born. All my worth lay in the quality of
that love, and it was not such that any woman could reject without a
pang.
‘Then she is free,’ I said, and heard the thrill in my own voice.
‘Free!’ exclaimed the peasant, frowning. ‘That’s as may be. Them
Protestants believe such-like things, but we don’t, sir. However things
happen, we hold folk once married can only be freed by death. I take
it, sir, you come from foreign parts, though ’tis a wonder to me how
you have learnt the English tongue so well. May be, beyond in your
land, they’re like the Protestants, and play fast and loose with the
marriage tie.’
He laid the dish of salmon on the table, and disappeared outside. My
state of mixed emotions, of exasperated nerves, of pulses throbbing
against my consciousness like a discordant instrument, anger with that
prejudiced peasant predominating, reduced me to the level of savage
and child. The fellow in his implied abhorrence of divorce was so
aggravatingly phlegmatic, so heartlessly unconscious of all it might
mean for me. I did not knock him down or force him to eat his obnoxious
words, but sat still and endeavoured not to observe the rest of his
rational preparations for the evening meal. I was on fire for further
facts of the tale, but dared not question, in my uncontrollable
temper. When the peasant at length seated himself opposite me, with
a dish of salmon, smoking potatoes, and a bottle of potheen between
us, I was able to make a fair pretence of hunger. I had no difficulty
in praising the salmon and the big flowery potatoes, the best of the
world, and novelty supplied the needful sauce. The potheen was simply
barbarous, a suitable drink for Caliban or the Indian brave, and no
amount of water could soothe it to my French palate. But between lively
grimaces over it, I was enabled to ask, without self-betrayal--
‘Then, I suppose, Lady Fitzowen’s husband does not live at the manor?’
He looked at me gravely over his glass, and nodded.
‘They are divorced?’
‘Not quite as I should say. Separated, they call it.’
Here was a toppling down of the airiest edifice built of gossamer. I
could have cried out at the stab like any thwarted child. And yet the
barrier of a living husband, like an unclean skeleton, between us, made
that vision in the early twilight no less pure and spiritual than when
not seen across the tragic story, _married widowhood_. A widow, still
had sanctity lain upon my suit, where now reproach would lie as a pall.
Suppose my love drew hers, how should I live through terror of waking
some poisonous snake to her mortal injury, of the nameless dread of
slander to breathe its dark flame against her sinless brow? A shadow
upon such devotion as mine was an unacceptable desecration. Torture
itself prompted me to further questioning.
‘Was it she who sought separation?’
‘I believe it was her people, sir. He was a bad lot, they say, wild
after the women, and not over nice in his ways. She’s gentle now, but
she was proud and passionate as a girl, and she felt the shame of the
thing and ran. ’Tis a wonder the poor crathurs don’t oftener run, the
provocation thim fine gentlemen gives them. Anyway, her people settled
the matter, and she came to live here, ’tis now close on four years
ago. The second child was born here, God bless it, and we all love it
like our own.’
I went outside to smoke a cigarette in the solitude of starlit night.
One never wants for proof of how much cruelty, shame, misery, and
injustice may be gathered into an innocent girl’s existence by
marriage. I had already seen much of it, and was familiar with the
musings melancholy contemplation of it provoked. But here was matter
not for musing but for fiery revolt. Every nerve thrilled with a
sympathy so complete as to make her retrospective pain most personally
mine, to thrust my individuality from its old bright environment out
for ever into her desperate loneliness. Joy seemed to me a miserable
mockery, the portion of trivial, contemptible humanity. The best proof
of moral worth lay in the excess of suffering endured. Virtue was
measured by the degree of pain, and laughter dwelt with the ignoble
jesters and clowns. Sorrow was a diadem upon that golden head, I
murmured, and looked for confirmation in the cold radiance of the stars
above, darting their shuttles of lambent flame in and out the purple
depths of sky.
I peered down through the darkness, searching for the grey manor among
the massive shadows. But no lighted window revealed it to my yearning
gaze, and somehow I felt glad that Brases had suffered. Tears were the
mark of the elect, and had given her eyes that penetrating, unjoyous
clearness of the stars, had given her beautiful lips their set line of
austere silence, had placed on that frail white brow the conquering
seal of valour and forbearance. A passion so remote from whimpering
sentiment as that which she had inspired, was one to take pride in, and
I cared not now whether grief or weal were my portion, for I, too, was
crowned, and, like her, stood apart.
I was glad to face the wide, empty moors by sunrise. The valley lay
below the brilliantly lit mountain shoulder, where scarcely a shadow
offered rest for the eyes. The Reeks opening out, peak upon peak,
glittering and wild, made a magnificent picture. Here a crescent of
shattered points, there a sunny tarn through the hollow of the cliff,
shot with amber rays; and downward, deep valley beyond deep valley,
dusk with foliage, and broken by zigzag pathways. I sat on the shelf of
a rock, whence I could perceive the glen and grey mass of the manor. An
eagle sweeping over the brow of the bluff, the shrill cry of curlews in
their undulary shoreward flight, presaging tempest, the thunder of the
Atlantic in the steady roll of its surges, were the sole sounds in my
majestic solitude.
I sat and dreamed, and filled in the unknown pages of that one volume
now for me, the life of an innocent and high-spirited girl, urged in
the passivity of an untroubled heart into an uncongenial marriage.
The thought that she might have loved a worthless husband was an
intolerable smart, and I rejected it for the more bearable belief
that she had entered bondage in a neutral condition, without any
apprehension of the warmer moments of life, unawakened to the imperious
claims of the heart.
And in dwelling bitterly on the penalties of such experience, the
illimitable price exacted for limitable error, I started to my feet
in angry denial that part of the price was the harsh sentence against
other choice. What did it matter if the world’s wisdom rebuked our
folly? What did it matter if the callous eye saw stain where I felt
glory? What did anything matter, so long as I had the will to leap all
barriers that lay between Brases and me? To pass through flame and
wave, so that she was on the other side of peril with outstretched
arms?
The manor, with its air of rude decay, was curious rather than
picturesque. It fronted a lawn that dropped into a thick plantation
of fir, along which ran a silver trout-stream. The gravelled walks
wandered away into the woodlands that waved in brilliant arches of
beech and larch by an upward slope to the horizon, where the spires of
pine scalloped the skyline. Trueberry was asleep, so I amused myself
by inspecting the portraits of the hall. They were all members of my
hostess’s family. That was obvious, even if the old butler had not
informed me of the fact. A fair lady in velvet and long ruffles looked
at me with her clear eyes, just so sweet, but bolder, and one tall girl
was so vividly like her that I greeted her with a flame of enamoured
recognition I would not dare bestow on the living woman. The same
gold-leaf of hair, the same exquisite intangibility of look, the same
wanness of cheek and ineffable upward line of chin and brow.
When at last I saw Trueberry, I found him coherent and eager for my
visit. He lay in a faded, heavily-curtained room, so old and dim that
the bright rays of morning penetrating through the crimson curtains
sparkled incongruously, and turned squares of the silk into blood-red.
Coming in from the sunlit air, its sombreness shot me blind, and I
could see nothing until I had blinked the sun out of my eyes.
‘What a dark room!’ I cried.
‘Oh, it’s a delightful room,’ said Trueberry dreamily, with the look of
a visionary. ‘I’m so glad I had that accident, and was carried in here.
Visions seem to start out of half-forgotten romances, and everything
is suggestive. It’s so dark and quaint and big. Just the room to be
ill in, and not mope. I like my condition, too, now that pain is on
the wane. Fact and fancy are so deliciously inextricable. I never know
what is really happening and what I am imagining. Last night I saw a
picture that seemed to be real, and was in perfect harmony with the
antique air of the room. A sort of Saint Elizabeth in a mediæval frame.
You know one’s ideal of St Elizabeth?’ he added, looking at me with
a little quizzical stir in his languid glance. ‘Sweet, serious, and
lovely, carrying roses from heaven, and smiling softly on children and
the sick. She smiled at me when she saw me staring.’
‘Your hostess?’ I asked, chill with apprehension.
‘I suppose so, if it wasn’t a dream. There’s fever in my blood still,
and at night the imagination is a terrible agent. Yet the picture
remains so distinct upon memory: the voice was so real, so musical, I
can hear it still.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, curious and alarmed.
‘I was trying to make out my surroundings in the dull lamplight, and
wondering where you were, when a curtain was lifted by the whitest hand
I have ever seen, and framed in the folds was a beautiful pale woman in
grey. She held a lamp high up, and the light caught and played over her
brilliant hair till it shone like living gold. I feared to wink lest
the vision should vanish. The light revealed the bust, while the folds
of the skirt fell into heavy shadow. It was the crimped white about
neck and wrists and the long queer sleeves that made me imagine fever
had evoked some recollection of Italian galleries--half Giotto, half
Botticelli: but she actually moved, and the unfathomable gravity of her
gaze held mine, and when she smiled, I ceased to feel pain.’
He spoke almost to himself, as if he had forgotten my presence, and
as I looked down at him, so drowsily contented, I saw the old tragic
monster lifting its terrible head between us. For the first time I was
conscious of a jealous pang in contemplation of his favour of person.
_Grands dieux!_ and I so fatally ugly! And if Trueberry had possessed
nothing but good looks, I had my brains and my reputation to balance
that advantage. But he was no mere hero of sentimental girlhood--he
was a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with all the finest qualities to
repay a noble woman’s love, with all the personal charm to captivate
a fastidious woman’s fancy. What had won my admiring friendship might
be trusted to win Brases’ responsive love:--his sincerity, a certain
picturesque dash that always made me think of Buckingham as described
by Dumas--Anne of Austria’s Buckingham. It breathed so essentially the
high air of romance, the chivalry, the ennobling sentimentality of
vigorous manhood. He was no troubadour, but as I have said, Buckingham
to the heels in modern raiment, unflinching before peril, of delightful
manners, faithful to friend, implacable to foe, brilliant, generous,
and full of romantic spirit. Such a woman as Brases I deemed above
susceptibility to a mere facile charm of manner, averse from so
vulgar a quality as fascination. But Trueberry did not fascinate: he
captivated. He carried sunshine with him to appeal to the austerest
temperament, and in some subtle way, without an effort, became a need.
A more attractive manliness was nowhere to be met, and if in friendship
I found him indispensable, what would he not be to the woman whose
heart he won?
Should I repeat the peasant’s talk? Better not. Silence between us was
best until speech could not be avoided. So I took an aching heart back
to the cottage, with a promise to return in the afternoon.
II
That afternoon, passing through the hall on my way to Trueberry’s
room, I was arrested upon no direct effort of will by the face of the
pale blonde girl, looking at me so vividly out of canvas through the
dear glance my own ached with longing to behold. Standing thus, my
ear detected with a thrill of recognition the light footfall behind
me. I turned, and the sight was water to a man fevered with thirst.
All morning I had wondered if a transient state of nerves might not
be accountable for an effect perhaps over-excited imagination had
exaggerated. But this second meeting was full confirmation of the
agonising power of Brases over me. I rejoiced in this added proof of my
servitude. Because of her presence, life revealed deeper meaning, earth
fresher hues. My heart fluttered on the topmost crest of emotion, and
tossed on a violent wave of joy. The awful quietude of our full long
gaze held me tranced in silence.
‘You found your friend better,’ she said, and her voice in that tense
moment was like the bursting of the surges upon their swell. My eyes
must have told it with fatal illumination, had hers not absently fallen
on a portrait. ‘I should gladly press you to stay here with him, but I
fear you would find it dull. The house, I know, is gloomy, and I see
no one. But if you can face the dulness for your friend’s sake, if it
would lessen your anxiety----’
‘You are too kind,’ I burst out eagerly, for some inexplicable reason
repelled by the suggestion of Trueberry and myself together under her
roof. ‘My friend is in the best of hands, and I should not dream of
trespassing so far. Besides, I enjoy my walks to and from the cottage.’
What an idiot I was, to be sure, and what a miserably inadequate
refusal! Yet could I give my real reason? That a sharp-witted man of
the world, an intelligent French writer of some fame, should be driven
to inane stuttering at the greatest moment of his existence, was
surely a grotesque fatality. I saw with a shock the contraction of the
delicate brows, and the surprised interrogation of the proud glance
she levelled at me. Then pride and surprise ebbed back to their still
depths, and the brows smoothed by sheer effort of will, I divined,
and she smiled coldly, a little austere smile, remote and frosted
like a ray on ice. A woman of my own land would have read below the
commonplace words the deeper melody of the heart’s unuttered eloquence.
But Brases, so untutored, so wrapped in her musing and undiscerning
solitude, had not this tact of sympathy, this subtle divination, this
keen scent of sex. Her simplicity was mournful and gentle, but not
penetrative nor scrutinising. Mute fervour I saw would leave her
untroubled, and with Trueberry near, I feared to hope her regard would
ever gleam and drop in glad surrender at my coming, or her pulses
quicken to the bidding of my touch. I felt crushed, out of reach of
comfort, and resolved no more to tread that haunting pathway from the
little rocky plateau to this sombre valley, but to go out with my
immeasurable pain into the soothing limitlessness of earth and sea and
air upon the moors. Yet there was the misery of it--I could not command
my will. I felt the folly of it; I apprehended the misery of a rivalry
between Trueberry and me,--self at odds with the finest friendship that
ever knitted men together. But I as well knew that my hunger to-morrow
for Brases would be greater even than to-day, and a starving man will
gnaw at straw when you refuse him bread.
I found Trueberry half raised upon his pillow, a pink flush like the
reflection of a flame upon his pallid cheek, and the blue of his eyes
burning darkly.
‘Have you seen her?’ he asked, meeting my hand affectionately.
‘Yes.’
The dull, brief tone must have struck him as implied negation of his
visible enthusiasm, for he scanned my face quickly, and asked in a
surprised voice--
‘Don’t you find her beautiful, Gontran?’
‘Most beautiful,’ I replied, with grim emphasis.
I sat down, and took up a volume of _The Ring and the Book_, which lay
on a little table close to an arm-chair at the foot of the bed.
‘No, no, Gontran. Not that, pray. She has been reading it to me,’ he
shouted, as if a wound were pressed.
I looked at him queerly, I felt; how far he had travelled already,
when it was ‘she’ with him, and he could voice so candidly the trouble
of blood and being. Or else my passion was the deeper, and ran in
a mysterious channel, where speech is desecration, thought hardly
delicate enough to follow its intangible flow.
‘You remember those lovely lines, beginning--
“First infancy pellucid as a pearl”?
‘They might have been written of her,’ he continued, in his dear,
fresh, expansive way. ‘Pompilia, infant, child, maid, woman, wife,
the ideal of our earth. Why, it was surely of her that Browning was
dreaming.’
I continued in silence to finger the book her hand had touched, and my
eye fell on that chivalrous passage, clear even to my foreign eye in
spite of antipathy to Browning’s roughness:
‘And if they recognised in a critical flash
From the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,
His need of--say a woman to perish for,
The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,
Do no harm, save to himself--?’
Sully Prudhomme, I thought, would have expressed the idea more
exquisitely. I preferred the soft musical murmur of that unapproachable
little poem, the breathing soul of a tenderer chivalry:
‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,
Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,
Plus rien, même plus d’amitié
Je n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.
Mais elle est pâle, délicate,
Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.
Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,
Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,
N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.
Je sais comment sa main repousse,
Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,
Ne la faites jamais pleurer.
Je pourrais vivre avec l’idée
Qu’elle est chérie et possédée
Non par moi mais selon mon cœur.
Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,
Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,
Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’
But the virile sweep of the sentiment Browning revealed had something
of ocean’s strength and immensity that aroused the sea-born Breton
under the extraneous veneer of culture. A Parisian cannot escape the
charm of classic polish, but now and then with us the Celt runs riot,
and sentiment rebels against the leash of form.
Under the cynicism of the analytical novelist’s sacrifice,
renunciation, the conquering strife of passion over duty, noble
failure, the greatly borne martyrdom of humanity, are the things that
have ever appealed to me. I have always desired to love and be loved in
the cleansing fire of pain rather than in the facile yielding to the
senses. So that there really was no logical reason why I should whimper
and mope because Brases had not dropped into my arms by some magnetic
influence. And even if she chose elsewhere! So long as her choice was
justified by happiness, what need had I to complain? I murmured Sully
Prudhomme’s lines, of a more subtle beauty of feeling than Browning’s,
and Trueberry cocked a wistful brow.
‘Repeat them louder, they sound so beautiful,’ he urged, and I repeated
them.
‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,
N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’
he cried, with water in his eyes. ‘Could you picture yourself, Gontran,
saying that of the woman you loved to the man who had gained her!’
‘I hope so,’ I replied, smiling. ‘The bitter would be so sweet. And
then the magnificent retort upon broken hopes:
“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,
Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?
_Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur._”’
I spoke lightly, like the cynical boulevardier, while inwardly I was
bleeding. But Trueberry, bereft, by weakness and love, of all power of
scrutiny or penetration, saw nothing of my suffering. He was in the
absorbing paradise of a new-born claim, in the unconscious premonition
of response, and smiled vaguely at me, dear fellow, as if a strong but
agreeable opiate had drugged him.
Trueberry was so improved next morning that I found the children
playing in his room. They were a little lad and girl in the toddling
age, prettily named Brendan and Mave. I have never seen children so
well-bred, so charming to look at and to talk to. The boy had thick
brown curls, with a reddish gleam in them, and his mother’s eyes, while
the girl had her gold hair, with big eyes, like the leaf of a purple
pansy. They lisped, as only angels ought to lisp, and fetched your
heart between your eyelashes from very delight and sympathy.
While we played and chattered, and those pretty creatures rolled over
Trueberry, the waves of their embroidered skirts entangled in his beard
and neck, they like white balls, taking their falls so good-humouredly,
and then on the ground, standing like birds to shake out their snowy
plumage, the door opened, and Brases smiled upon the threshold.
Trueberry’s pinched expressive face waved pink, and gazing blue
went instantly to black. I stood grasping the back of my chair, and
saw Brases for the first time not icily aloof, not throned on dead
dreams. There was a human flame under her pallor, and her smile had
an approachable womanly sweetness. It deepened the grey of her eyes,
and lent an ineffable softness to her sad mouth. The curves of the
lips pleaded like a child’s for tenderness and unexacting devotion.
I could have bent a knee to her in a rush of feeling less lofty than
homage, and said: ‘Bid me suffer, dear one, so that you are happy.’
To my surprise, she shook hands with me, in cordial frankness, hoped
I was pleased with the condition of my friend, and then bent and took
Trueberry’s hand with a very different air. Of course, he was her
invalid, and no woman worth the name is ever the same to the sick
and the strong. For Brases to look at me like that, and hold my hand
with that gentle imperiousness, I, too, should have to be wounded and
stretched under her roof on my back.
She had no Irish fluency, and her speech was curiously strained and
elaborated, without, however, any obvious affectation. The words came
deliberately, and yet with a fearless reticence. It was repression,
not secrecy. Life with her was a tale of baffled personal hopes,
of unmeasured pain, of nature overcome, of lower impulses proudly
unrecognised, of cold allegiance to duty, and the unfathomable
tenderness of maternity. Her children, as she told us, with their
little arms about her neck, were her one joy.
‘I fear I spoil them,’ she added; ‘but I strive to make them think of
others, while they, alas! so well know that I only think of them.’
Mave, I was glad to see, was the mother’s favourite. At all times I
like a woman to love her girls best; the preference breathes in my
esteem, so essentially of distinction and lovableness. But æsthetic
gratification here was sharpened by the fact that Mave’s father had
never seen her. To me Mave was all her mother’s child, for which
reason, during my visits, I never failed to coax her on my knee, where
she would sit at first in a stiffened attitude of good behaviour, until
she got used to my dark, foreign face, and gleefully ran to greet me.
While she nestled and gurgled in my arms, lisping her excited speech,
Trueberry and Brendan chanted nursery rhymes, taught each other
surprising verses, and told one another fairy tales.
It was the day Trueberry first got up that conjecture stabbed me with
the jealous knife of certainty. Despair closed round me like a physical
grasp, and I toppled rudely over my airy ideal of renunciation and
self-effacement. I had dwelt with such soothing vanity of spirit on my
gracious bending to the happiness of my sovereign lady and my friend,
and when I saw them then exchange a long, grave, shining gaze of full
confession, and noted the enchanting air of command with which she
waved him back to his chair, when he stood to greet her, the deeps of
nature burst their barriers.
Unstrung and irritable from the strain of my false position, I walked
rapidly up to the cottage, asking myself whether I should go or stay,
and unable to decide which would cost me more. My host was smoking
a pipe outside, in placid contemplation of a patch of potatoes. He
directed secretive eyeshot sideways on me in sharp inquiry, then bent
his glance again upon the green leaves, and meditatively kicked away a
stone.
‘’Tisn’t good for a young man of your years, sir, to lead this sort of
life,’ he said. ‘Foreign cities are gay places, I’ve heard tell. ’Tis
among them you ought to be. The moors, and the rocks, and the sea, the
praties I plant and eat, and the salmon I catch, satisfy the likes of
me, but I’m thinking, sir, ’tis poor work for you, counting the stars
be night, and crying for the moon be day.’
‘A man might be worse employed than watching the stars,’ I replied,
ignoring his rebuke.
‘To be sure, sir. ’Tis a candle-light that teaches us a wonderful power
of patience. When you look at them, the wear and tear of life seems a
useless sort of thing.’
‘So it seems, viewed in any light--rush, or gas, or sun,’ I assented
drearily. ‘But why do you want to get rid of me, if I am content to
stay?’
‘I’d be grieved to think you imagined me anything but proud of your
company, sir; but I’m thinking it ’ud be best for yourself to go away.
You look down a bit lately, and ’tis me own heart bleeds for you.
But you’re young, agra, and them sort of troubles soon pass. ’Tis
surprising how wonderful quick the heart is to mend any time.’
His intention and sympathy sprang tears to my eyes. He saw this, and
touched my shoulder gently, nodding a sapient head.
‘I make bold to tell you, sir, that a fine pleasant boy like yourself
has no business to go hankering after one as has known deception and
wept misfortune, an’ whose husband lives. Them’s foreign ways, I know.
Haven’t I read a power of books? Take my word for it, ’tis better to
run after the girls. There it’s all fair and square, above board, and
’tis natural. ’Tis your duty to her and yourself to turn your back on
us.’
‘It always is our duty to be most miserable, I fear,’ I said
dejectedly. ‘But why should a woman wear weeds because a scoundrel
lives? in the bloom of youth, beautiful, with a maiden heart for the
winning? and what law is broken by honourable devotion?’
I forgot I was talking to a peasant, and stood there in the sunlight,
pleading Trueberry’s cause. For what now had I to do with her heart,
or she with my love? My hour of ordeal had come, and I confess I
was surprised by my own frailty. I had expected to bear it so much
better, to act so much more gallant a part. Instead, I was broken with
jealousy, and my eyes were blinded with tears. I had not conquered
nature, did not swim triumphantly in the upper sphere of impersonal
feeling, submissive to an ideal sway, glorying in the supreme servitude
of unacknowledged, unexacting devotion. I was a poor exasperated human
wretch, unjustly angry with my friend for his selfish blindness, wrath
with the woman’s serenity, which could not interpret my feeling, vexed
that neither, in their bliss, should care whether I lived or died of
it. I had craved so little,--the pale ray of hope, insubstantial as a
dream, but cherished with frenzy. And now how was I to still the fierce
ache of regret in the years ahead? Bereavement fronted me, a silent
spectre, my mate for evermore. The precious hours had gone, sleepless
nights and sullen days, in a hinted persistence of prayer in her
presence, of longing out of it, and nothing to come of all the anguish,
of revolving transport and agony, but this sense of miserable failure.
Looking down from the plateau to the glen, it seemed to me that I had
been accomplishing this backward and forward march from cottage to
manor by an unreal measurement of time. The years before sank into
insignificance beside these two weeks of frustrated yearning. I went
into the house to shut my grief away from the friendly scrutiny of my
peasant friend, and battled with the monster that wrecks our dignity
and our intelligence.
III
Next morning, with seared eyelids, and heart a red raw wound,
conscious of the peasant’s disapproving inspection, my feet carried
me unreluctantly toward torture. It was part of my implacable fate
that I should diagnose my own misery through the happiness of the two
beings who bounded the limits of sensation for me. Trueberry was alone,
and greeted me with a vagueness of glance that denoted retrospective
bliss. He was glad to see me in a quiet way, as a feature in enchanting
environment.
We smoked in silence until our incommunicative companionship was
abruptly disturbed by the arrival of a couple of officers from
a neighbouring garrison town. Pleasant fellows both, carrying a
rollicking breath of Lever into the surcharged atmosphere. They spoke
at the top of their voices, hailed us with obvious delight, joked,
quizzed, and gallantly misconducted themselves from the point of
view of lucky and unlucky lover. I was reminded that I was French,
and made an effort to do honour to my land. While they stayed, I
shook off melancholy, and matched their breezy recklessness with
the intoxication of despair. Heaven knows what we laughed at, but
everybody except Trueberry shouted hearty guffaws, and seemed to regard
life as the most entertaining of jokes. They chaffed Trueberry on his
captivity to isolated beauty, and hinted in their broad barrack way
at the perils of bewitchment. Trueberry went white with repressed
anger, and I dusky as a savage. I wanted to fell the harmless fool for
a pleasantry common enough in affairs of gallantry between men, but
Trueberry passed it off with his superlative breeding, and the officer
adroitly changed the conversation.
When Brases joined us before lunch, the younger of the two again
provoked me by approaching her with a slight military swagger, his air,
as he took her beautiful hand, so clearly saying: ‘Madame, allow me to
observe that you are a remarkably handsome woman, and I shouldn’t mind
being your captive myself.’ Not that he was impertinent or fatuous, but
his admiration was of a crude and youthful and self-assured flavour.
Trueberry lifted a dolorous lid upon me, as if seeking sympathy in me
for the exquisite torment of this outer desecrating breath upon the
divine and hidden.
They left us as cheerily as they had come, bidding me persuade Lady
Fitzowen to come to their garrison ball next week. The major begged
to know what sins the county had committed, to be so punished by its
fairest woman. I saw Trueberry’s fingers clench ominously, and my own
lips shut upon a grim twist for all response. Brases stared at them
softly, as if they were a long way off, and then a little puzzled smile
stirred her eyes as she sought Trueberry’s glance.
‘I wish you could persuade Monsieur d’Harcourt to go,’ was her
acknowledgment of their invitation. ‘He does not look nearly so well as
when he first came.’
I grasped this notice as a famished dog pounces on a stale crust. I
flung her an enchanted beam of gratitude, and red ran momently through
the grey universe. She came out, and stood beside me on the broad
gravel, when the officers had driven away, and I found courage to urge
her to come with me to the ball at Kilstern. It was no baseness to my
friend, surely, that I should hunger and thirst and pray for one little
moment of her life unshared with him!
‘Had I any such foolish desire, Monsieur, my obligations as hostess
would still prevent me. It is so little I can do for your friend, so
much I would gladly do. But it is no privation for me to dispense
with society. I never liked it, and have only bitter recollections
of it. I ask nothing now from life but peace,--and strength to live
my days for my children’s sake, striving not to wish them shortened,
and remembering that there is much else besides personal hope and
happiness. One despairs so quickly in youth, and then the children
come, with their sweet faces made up of morning light, soft as flowers,
with the smile of paradise in their clear eyes. And youth for me lies
so far away,’ she added, with a scarce perceptible change of voice, and
a ray lighting up her delicate face, showed a smile so wan and faint as
rather to resemble the memory of a smile, reminiscent as the spectre of
that youth she greeted as an alien, and I listening, wished I had died
before hearing words so sad from her lips.
Her gesture in one less superlatively sincere might have been taxed
with coquetry, so exquisite was its expression; her white hands fell
in a gentle depression with the finger-tips curved inward.
‘Even music no longer pleases me,’ she continued, sweeping the
circumscribed scene with a flame of revolt under the drawn arch of the
lovely brows. ‘It is not sad enough. That is why I am so fond of the
ravening melancholy of ocean’s song down upon the desolate beach. I
listen for it at night as I lie awake, and it is the eternal funeral
march of my dead youth.’
It was hardly by an effort of will that she ceased speaking: speech
dropped from her as sound drops from the receding wave, and I could
have cried aloud in passionate protest as I saw the veil drawn over
this transient revelation of herself. Never had she spoken to me so
before. Never had she referred to her past. And the hint that all joy
for her lay in her children fired my brain with hope’s delirium. Surely
I had been mistaken in my haunting dread, and stupidly interpreted the
looks between her and Trueberry. He might love her, as I loved her,
but her feeling was only the soft interest of compassion. And yet--and
yet----!
Leaving her, I walked slowly down the path. At the gate I looked back.
She was still standing there, staring across the hills, with the sunset
hues upon the amber of her head, and revealing the matchless purity
of line and tint of face and throat. Not surrender, not love, did
that dejection of air denote. The thought went with me, rooted in my
heart, and kept me awake, tossing on a fever-troubled pillow. I started
up, and stood at the window to watch the stars till dawn sent a grey
glimmer down the dusk, and a white cloud sped like a wing over the sky.
I had a foreboding of rashness, of perilous explosion on the morrow,
unless I had the wisdom to steal out alone into the empty world. If
they loved one another, it was plainly my duty. But, oh! to be able to
look into her eyes, and cry: ‘I love you, yet I leave you. For me death
were easier, but my death would stain your bliss with regret’s shadow.’
I questioned the stars in my blind anguish to learn if there were
no resources in nature to wall in this terrible blank of being that
stretched so miserably, so limitlessly before me as a future without
Brases or Trueberry. Old interests, old tastes, old desires had
dropped from me, and I stood beggared of sum and aim of life.’
I was abroad upon the moors by sunrise, lessening my feeling of
personal diminution in the earth’s grandeur and the wavering immensity
of the Atlantic as it rolled under the lemon-tinted horizon. I took
my last look of forked mountains against the grey-shot blue of the
heaven, of shattered rocks, and sombre tarn seen through the opening of
a valley, and the distant plain, an inner sea of bracken and heather.
Ever the sound of water, of moaning wave, of mingling rill, of foaming
fall, the shrill cry of eagle and curlew, and the melody of the early
birds. An hour hence should find me trudging to Kilstern, away from the
wild beauty of this place--the home of Brases! On my way back, I met my
host, and mentioned my intention. ‘That’s as it should be,’ was all he
said.
His curt approval galled me, and to silence discourteous retort, I
flung myself over the stone ledge, and took the manor path like a
chased creature. With what unconscious accuracy of observation I noted
each leaf, each colour and form of a scene memory was destined to
retain for evermore! following with eager eyes the light as it made
its own short road of gold among the dense shadows, and these as they
picked out in blots the sunny spaces.
The hall door as usual was open, and in passing the portraits, I took
my last look of the boy with curls and ruffles, and beyond of the girl
with the proud fair face that might be a portrait of Brases in younger
days. I inspected it steadily, and traced where resemblance stopped in
the lack of the subtle stamp of the soul, the ennobling seal of grief.
It was a Brases who had never wept, never thought, a creature of mere
bodily beauty.
I found Trueberry walking up and down in restless expectation. I could
see that sight of me brought an uncontrollable smart of disappointment
to his eyelids, and his expressive mouth twitched like a child’s.
‘What’s the matter, Gontran?’ he asked, with an affectionate effort,
and placed one hand on my shoulder. ‘You look frightfully battered, my
poor fellow.’
‘Last night I meant to go away in silence,’ I said, not able to meet
his kind glance, ‘but to-day I decided I owed my friend a franker
course. Neither of us is responsible for the fact, but we must separate
now.’
‘You would desert me, Gontran--now!’ he cried, and the bitter tone of
his reproach fetched a sob to my throat.
‘I wish to God it should not be, that I had the unselfish courage to
stay and witness your happiness----’
‘Happiness!’ he shouted frantically. ‘My poor boy, I am more miserable
than yourself,’ he added, with a dejected movement.
‘Then you are deceiving yourself,’ I said, shrugging and turning
impatiently on my heel. ‘She loves you. I have seen it in her eyes,
felt it to the inmost fibres of consciousness in her voice.’
‘And if it were so!’ Trueberry cried, in a soft, fond tone of
interjection, that brought my fierce look back to his face. He called
himself miserable, but bliss sparkled out of the depths of his frank
eyes. He fronted daylight, the proud and conscious lover, and the
shadow upon his radiance was, after all, but a becoming tone to temper
fatuity to my amazed and acrid scrutiny. Without it, I might have
longed to strike him, in my state of moral degradation.
‘How much nearer am I to her for that?’ he went on, in reply to my
hateful look. ‘My dear friend, there is nothing for us both but to take
up our staff and knapsack, and trudge wearily out of this enchanted
valley into the busy garish world, carrying with us the remembrance of
an unstable and beautiful dream. We are equals in fortune, Gontran.’
‘Equals,’ I roared, goaded by the fiery bar of his speech. ‘What
equality exists between success and unsuccess? between the chosen and
the neglected? between heat and cold, sun and ice, glory and shame,
tears and laughter? The barrier to your happiness may be levelled by
fate at any moment. You have but to wait and watch the newspapers.
While I----’
‘Don’t be rough, old man. You would be sorrier than I if you hurt me
now, when I can ill bear more pain. For I am dismissed, sent away. Oh!’
He sat down and covered his face with both hands, and I, in awakened
wickedness of spirit, gloated over his convulsive wretchedness.
Suffering had blunted conscience, and the finer feelings, and left
me abjectly enslaved to all the baser sensations that assail weakened
humanity. In such moments, happily brief, the savage is uppermost,
whatever the training of the gentleman. The soul sleeps, and the body,
with all its frenzied needs and desires, stands naked, primitive,
elemental, the mere animal living through the senses. The handsome
sobbing creature had all, and I had nothing. Yet he dared to speak of
equality in misery between us.
‘Good-bye,’ I said, and moved to the door.
Trueberry sprang up, and clutched my arm. His dear, simple nature could
understand nothing of the vileness that the finer and more complex
order of being may contain. To him I was not an embittered rival, but a
cherished friend to whom he boyishly clung in his unbearable sorrow.
‘Must we separate, Gontran?’ he entreated. ‘Why, since we both go
to-day?’
The inalterable sweetness of his temper shook me on a crest of remorse,
and conquered assaulting vindictiveness. I felt so mean beside him that
I could have begged his pardon for unuttered insult. His superiority
more than justified Brases’ choice, though the dear fellow lacked my
brains, and my name commanded considerable stir.
I consented to go with him, and hurried back to the cottage, where
I found my host busy over my portmanteau. I told him my friend was
coming with me too, upon which he scrutinised my face mildly, and, I
thought, with satisfaction. He strapped the portmanteau, and remarked
in a dry tone: ‘That, too, is as it should be, and I am glad there
is no quarrel.’ Taking no note of my astonishment at his incredible
discernment, he added: ‘You’ll drink a last drop of the mountain dew to
your success and happiness in another spot, sir, where the girls, God
bless them! are fresh and pretty and plentiful as the flowers in May.’
He went into the kitchen, and I stood at the window watching light
chase shadow over the bold visage of a reek, and assured myself
gloomily that there were a thousand ways, after all, of threading a
path through despair. Whose life is crowned with happiness?--and hope
of it must come to an end sooner or later. Pleasure still remains when
we have shed the last tear, and whatever may be said to the contrary
in pessimistic moments, pleasure to the last peeps out at us through
the thorniest brambles, with its varied allurements. This I told
myself, and though I could think of no possible pleasure at the time,
or compensation for the miserable duty of facing life, I drearily
supposed I would come, like another, to find my round of petty joys and
mean delights. There was something to be done even by a fellow so sick
at heart as I: books to be written, books to be read, people to see,
and people to avoid, countries to travel in, and women to criticise.
My host stood at the top of the path, bareheaded, cheering me on with
his gracious ‘God speed ye, sir!’ until the bend of the hill hid his
honest friendly face from me. I sought Trueberry in his room, and saw
his gloves, and hat, and portmanteau on the table. I wandered about
the house, through unfamiliar chambers, till, on lifting a curtain, a
picture arrested me with a curdling thrill. The blood flowed from heart
to brain on a dizzy wave, where it surged, so that I had some knowledge
of the sensation of insanity. This explains my sin against honour in
standing there. I could not have left the spot by any imperative order
of conscience. I stood as immovable as a hypnotised figure. Like a
spectator of the drama, with feelings unconcerned, I was quick to note
the searching pathos and beauty of the picture.
They two stood together in the middle of the room, she with her hands
on his shoulders, he with an arm round her waist, holding one of her
little hands clasped above. The passionate gaze of both was matchless
in its eloquence. Both faces were white and luminous, as if touched
with a ray from heaven, anguish adequately mixed with transport. Such a
look from a woman’s eyes was surely worth dying for.
‘Brases, must I go away?’ Trueberry asked brokenly.
She moved a little in his embrace, and pressed her face against his
breast, then recovered herself, and said firmly--
‘You must, dear friend.’
‘Think of it, beloved,’ he cried, holding her closer to him. ‘Such
links as chain us. We two as one, is it not madness to dream of living
apart? Every beat of life within you, Brases, must cry out against this
parting. It is murder of our souls. Go, I may, but with you, Brases.’
‘Don’t make me go over it again,’ she pleaded, in a tired voice, ‘it
was so hard before. While a man lives who calls me wife, can I come to
you with a tarnished name?’
‘Tarnished!’ The smile he shed upon her was convincing enough to redeem
a fallen angel, it was so warm, and soft, and indulgent, with all
love’s sweetness and shelter. ‘The stain is on his name, and that you
would drop. The law will release you. Come, come. You cannot live alone
now, any more than I can. Think of what it means--craving light and
love and happiness, all within reach, and we dying apart on the brink.’
‘No, no, don’t tempt me. Your desire is my weakness. Your voice draws
my being from its roots, and my pulses beat to the rhythm of yours. See
how much I confess, and then be merciful, and go.’
‘Is it always right to follow our ideal of duty, when nature points
so clearly another way?’ he still urged. ‘What reason have we always
to regard our judgment as better than hers, since she is so big and
mighty, and we so small and helpless.’ He held her hand pressed against
his lips, and I could hear his murmuring speech through the trembling
fingers. ‘What is the past with such a present as ours, such a future
as we might have? My love would soon blot it from your memory. Trust
me, Brases, I too have my past with its burden of regrets I would fain
forget.’
‘Ah, had I met you before fatality crossed my path,’ she said, upon a
quick sob, ‘when my palm was as clean as a child’s, how my spirit would
have bounded to the wedding of yours! But that may never be now.’
Her arms dropped renouncingly, and the smile that travelled slowly over
her blanched face shed a rapturous light upon his. His eyes held hers
in willing bondage. Though this was her farewell I could divine the
supreme effort that kept her from his arms, by the fingers fluttering
like the wings of a bird against her dress, while it were hard to say
which her half-lifted, gently averted face, with the eyes straining
back to his, most eloquently expressed: surrender or renouncement.
Trueberry sprang to her and caught her to him, and their lips met in a
kiss that had the solemnity of a sacrament. I staggered back, clapping
my hand over my mouth to prevent a shout of white-hot anguish, and
could see the darkness sweep down upon me like a big comforting wing.
I hoped it was death come to gather me like a suffering, inarticulate
child, into its soft mother’s arms.
But I struggled back into life, and had again to front the road of care
and blind endeavour. How long later I cannot say, but I saw Brases
standing over me, looking at me in pitying wonder. She took my hand
in both of hers, and bending, softly kissed my cheek. This was the
mother’s kiss I hoped death had given me. I stared at her, too broken
for wonder or emotion, and sitting down beside me, with my hand still
in hers, she said--
‘We were very much frightened, you were so long unconscious. Mr.
Trueberry told me you have not slept of late, and that you are very
unhappy. I, too, am unhappy, and that is why I kissed you. But you are
better now, and you will try to forget your pain, or, at least, to
bear it well. It is the best any of us can do. They will drive you to
Kilstern, and you will return to France alone, carrying my best wishes
for your welfare. Mr. Trueberry has gone already.’
I struggled to my feet, swallowed the wine she poured out for me, and
then, in a dull, uneager voice, asked, ‘Did Trueberry leave no message
for me, Madame?’
‘He was very much concerned, and full of sympathy, but he has his own
trouble to bear, and thinks he will bear it best alone. He will write
to you to Paris in a few days.’
A trap was at the door, and she came out with me, and when we had
shaken hands in silence, stood looking after me, as I was indeed
forcibly carried away. She was dim to my sight, a mere blurred grey
figure, with light about her head, and the landscape looked watery and
broken, as if seen through bits of bobbing glass.
A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY
_À M. Gaston, Paris
de l’Institut de France_
A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY
THERE was a break in the soft stream of Rameau’s eloquence when
somebody spoke of Krowtosky. The interruption came from Louis Gaston, a
brilliant young journalist, whose air of sanctified rake and residence
in the Rue du Bac, in front of a well-known shop, earned him the
nickname of _Le Petit Saint Thomas_.
Krowtosky’s name diverted the channel of the murmurous, half-abstracted
discourse to which we had lent an attentive ear, physically lulled,
and though charmed, not boisterously amused by Rameau’s sly anecdotal
humour and complaisant lightness of tone. Rameau always talked
delightfully, without any apparent consciousness of the fact;
above all, without any apparent effort. He never raised his voice,
gesticulated slightly, accentuated no point, and left much to his
listener’s discretion; and his calm drollery was all the more delicious
because of the sedate and equable expression of his handsome face.
‘Krowtosky,’ he repeated, as he turned his picturesque grey head in
Gaston’s direction; with a deliberate air he removed his glasses,
slowly polished them, and interjected, ‘Ah!’
‘You must remember that queer Russian who used to hold forth here some
years ago,’ Louis Gaston continued, in an explanatory tone; ‘a heavy,
unemotional fellow, with desperate views. He began by amusing us, and
ended by nearly driving us mad with his eternal _Nirvana_.’
‘Oh, yes,’ somebody else cried, suddenly spurred to furnish further
reminiscences. ‘His trousers were preternaturally wide, and his
coat-sleeves preternaturally short. You always imagined that he
carried dynamite in his pockets, and apprehended an explosion if you
accidentally threw a lighted match or a half-smoked cigarette in his
neighbourhood.’
‘He had small eyes, and a big nose, the head of an early Gaul, and a
hollow voice,’ I remarked.
‘A monster to convince the Tartars themselves of their superior
ugliness, if they entertained any doubt of it,’ half lisped a
Frenchman recently crowned by the Academy, and as unconscious of his
own ill-looks as only a man, and above all a Frenchman, can be.
‘The good-nature of your remarks and your keen remembrance of Krowtosky
prove that he must be a personage in his way,’ said Rameau mockingly.
‘What became of him?’ asked Le Petit Saint Thomas, between slow puffs
of his cigarette.
‘Poor fellow! He has fallen upon grief.’
‘Naturally; it is the great result of birth. A love affair?’
‘Worse.’
‘Blasphemy, Professor! ’Tis the sole sorrow of life. The rest are but
the trifling ills of humanity.’ Gaston spoke with all the authority of
a young man who is perpetually in and out of love, is backed upon the
thorny path of literature by rich and devoted relatives, and has never
known a day’s illness upon his road.
‘It can’t be marriage, for that violent resource would merely drift
him into deeper depths of Pessimism, which would be a gratifying
confirmation of his theories.’
‘It can’t be love either,’ I suggested. ‘Pessimism and love don’t
mate. Marriage it might be; for even a pessimist may be conceded the
weakness of objecting to a demonstration of the nothingness of marriage
in the person of his own wife.’
‘It might be debt, if that were not a modified trouble since the
inhuman law of imprisonment was abolished.’
‘Behold the force of imagination, Professor,’ exclaimed Gaston,
pointing to a visionary perspective with his cigarette, in answer to
Rameau’s glance of contemplative irony. ‘I see our monster married to
an unvirtuous _grisette_, or an amiable young laundress, who discovers
the superior attractiveness of an optimist poet on the opposite side
of the way. She can hardly be blamed for the discovery; for though we
may applaud the courage of a woman who marries a monster, it would be
both rash and cruel to expect her to add fidelity to her courage. Where
women are concerned, it is a wise precaution to count upon a single
virtue.’
‘Your wit, the outcome of natural perversity, flies beyond the mark,’
said Rameau, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The real sorrows of life are
very simple, and command respect by their simplicity. The others are
the complications, the depravities of civilisation at which we cavil
and laugh. Krowtosky has not stumbled in double life, but he has just
lost a baby girl.’
There was dead silence. A perceptible start of emotion found expression
in an interjectionary arch of brow, a sigh blown on the puff of a
cigarette, and an uneasy shifting of attitudes. A baby girl! What a
slight thing in the hurry of life, what a simple thing in its crowding
perplexities! The tragic end of men and women whom the years have worn
and fretted; the sudden death of happy youth in the midst of its bright
promises; the peaceful sadness that accompanies the departure of the
old, who have honourably lived their lives and accomplished all natural
laws:--but the closed eyes of a little baby girl! What is it more than
tumble of a new-born bird from its nest, leaving no empty space? Upon a
boy paternal pride might have feasted, and the sting might remain that
new avenues to fame and fortune were closed by his sharp withdrawal.
Yet despite the insignificance of the loss, none of the faces round
Rameau wore a look of indifference or surprise. For a moment each
man was serious, touched, and uninclined for wit at poor Krowtosky’s
expense. Upon dropped lids I seemed to see the big grotesque head, so
full of honesty and strife, bent in grief over an empty cradle; and I
was wrung by a smart of anger when Gaston lightly asked, ‘Is there then
a legitimate Madame Krowtosky?’
‘All that is most legitimate,’ replied Rameau gravely.
‘You have followed the story?’
‘Since I played the part of confidential friend--why, I know as little
as you.’
‘And the lady?’
‘Ah, the lady! Her I only know on report that cannot exactly be
described as impartial.’
‘Is it a story worth telling?’
‘In its way it is curious enough, especially unfolded in the
illumination of Krowtosky’s jumble of crude philosophy and speculative
theories, and, above all, told in his queer French. He has honoured
me with a correspondence in the form of a journal. It is extremely
interesting, and I have preserved it. Some day I will publish
it,--when the philosopher is dead, of course.’
‘Then begin now, my dear Professor,’ I urged. ‘Try its effect _en
petit comité_.’ We read assent in the Professor’s way of crossing
his legs, while he drew one hand slowly round the back of his head.
When he had carefully polished and adjusted his glasses, each of us
chose a commodious attitude, and looked expectantly at him. After a
pause, Rameau began in his soft conversational tone, subdued like the
indefinite shade of the lamp-screen that cast its glimmer over heads
and profiles, showing vaguely upon a background of dull tapestries.
‘Krowtosky looked much older than his age. He was, in fact, very young,
Pessimism being one of the most pronounced symptoms of the malady of
youth. He is still young, and the malady has yet some years to run. He
came here with a letter to me from an old friend in Moscow, and a very
big bundle of hopes.
‘I hardly know what he expected to make of Paris, but Paris, I imagine,
made nothing of him. I did what I could for him, which was not much,
and from the first I had no illusions whatever upon the nature of his
probable success. I found a lady ambitious to read Turgenieff and
Tolstoï in Russian. I sent Krowtosky to her; but after the second
lesson she dismissed him on the plea of his unearthly ugliness; his
heavy Calmuck face diverted her attention from Turgenieff’s charming
women and Tolstoï’s philosophy, and gave her nightmares. I encouraged
the poor fellow to come here, which he did, and most of you met
him frequently. He was interesting in his way, very, but crude and
boundlessly innocent. He had the queerest notions upon all things,
and having sounded the _Décadents_, he professed to find them hollow.
I think he suspected those gentlemen of an unreasonable sanity and
an underhand enjoyment of life. The French Realists he dismissed as
caricaturists; he said they were reading for the devil when he was
drunk and in a merry mood. I daresay he meant the Czar.
‘He railed at the mock decay of modern civilised life, and imagined
that a glimpse of Pessimism beyond the Pyrenees would prove
instructive. He was convinced that he would find it there of less
noxious quality, exhibiting the sombre melancholy and dignity of a
great race fallen into poetic decay and unvexed by the wearisome
febrile conditions of its development here. “You understand nothing of
the spirit of calm fatality,” he would say, apostrophising the nation
in my humble person for lack of a more enlightened audience. “You are
everlastingly in strife with your own emotions and despairs; and these
you decorate, as you idly decorate your persons, with persistent vanity
and with wasteful care.” I deprecated the charge upon my own account,
and assured him that it took me exactly four minutes to decorate my
person each morning. Four minutes, I claimed, cannot be described
as an exorbitant charge upon Time for the placing and adjusting of
eighteen articles, and as he seemed to doubt the number, I told them
off, including my hat and _pince-nez_. I mentioned a few Frenchmen who
I thought accepted the luxury of unemotional despair calmly enough, and
were as incapable of strife as a tortoise. He shook his head; he was
not easily to be convinced. His Pessimism was so black that our sombre
Maupassant was a captivating Optimist beside him. And provided with
this meagre intellectual baggage, he set out for half-forgotten and
ruined lands, beginning with Spain.’
‘He fell in for a fortune, I suppose,’ Gaston interrupted.
‘He had not a sou, which is the best explanation of an expensive
voyage. Remark, my friends, that a man only becomes really extravagant
and reckless upon an empty purse. An empty purse and an empty stomach
are equally effectual in producing light-headedness, and vest us in the
cloak of illusion. Illusion I opine to be one of the things that look
best in rags. Krowtosky travelled third class, and was prodigiously
uncomfortable, which, after all, is another method of enjoying life
upon his theory. He ate Bologna sausages, and refreshed himself with
grapes upon the wayside.
‘His first letter was dated from Bayonne. It was a long and a curious
letter, and so interested me that I resolved to follow up the
correspondence with vigorous encouragement, for it was not an occasion
to be missed by a student of mankind. I will read you some extracts
from these letters, which I have here in a drawer of my writing-table.’
The packet of letters found, Rameau went on reading, with the
perfect and polished irony and charm of enunciation that could cast
an intellectual glamour over an auctioneer’s inventory. ‘“I have
chosen you as the recipient of the impressions and incidents of my
voyage,--why, I hardly know; I am not inspired by any strong sympathy
for you. My esteem and my liking are very moderate indeed; you have
a face that rather repels than invites confidence, and I ought to be
discouraged by the fact that I have no faith in your sympathy for
me, and have every conviction that you are the last person likely to
understand me. The friend who would understand me, and for whom I
should enjoy writing these impressions and the adventures that may
lie ahead, is at present voyaging in far-off waters; I think he is
somewhere about the Black Sea, but I don’t know his address, or when
or where communication might chance to reach him. So, having cast
about me for a confidant, choice alighted upon you; but you need not
read my letters if they bore you. They are written rather for my
own gratification than for yours. If I possessed literary talent,
the public would be my natural victim....”
‘This was a flattering beginning, you will admit, but it sharpened my
curiosity. After that I began to look forward to Krowtosky’s post-day,
as some people look forward to the _feuilleton_ of the morning paper.
His queer minute handwriting never found me indifferent or unexpectant
of diversion.
‘At Toulouse he wrote again: “A young girl got into the carriage with
me. We were alone, and she soon gave me a visible demonstration of
the strange eccentricities oddly explained by the single word _love_.
Why _love_? It is simply a malady more or less innocuous and only
sometimes deadly; but love, no! I was not flattered; I am above that
weakness, because nothing pleases me. I was interested, however, and
investigated the case with scientific calm. So might any physician have
diagnosed a disease. It struck me for the first time as a form of mild
insanity. I asked myself why the poets and romancers amuse themselves
in writing of it rather than of the other fevers and bodily illnesses
that overcome us. For everything about this young girl convinced me
that love is but a sickness. I studied her gestures, her expression,
her tones of voice and her attitudes; all served to prove my theory.
One minute I offered to open the window, and the next I suggested that
perhaps it would be better to close it. She assented. Though curious,
it was rather monotonous, but she assented to everything I proposed.
If I looked at her, she looked at me; if I looked away, she continued
to look at me. After a couple of hours’ study, I felt that I quite
understood love and all its phases. I found it in the main a silly
game, and an excitement only fit for brainless boys and girls in their
first youth. But the most remarkable feature of humanity is its crass
stupidity; it is a monstrously shabby and feeble institution, male and
female. This young girl, now; I daresay you and others would call her
pretty. Bah! I can see but the ugliness of women. Behind their forehead
thought does not work; their eyes only express the meanest and most
personal sentiments. Big black empty eyes and sensual red lips; a round
lazy figure and nerveless hands! I protest there is more intelligence
and matter for study in a dog than in these insipid creatures, all
curves and no muscles. Men, say they, don’t understand them. Are
dolls worth understanding? They are actuated solely by impulse and
personal claims. What is there in this worth understanding? I escaped
from my conquest, now grown irksome, upon the frontier, and I am
resolved never to give evidence of a similar weakness. It is degrading
folly. What, for instance, can women see in us to inspire this most
infelicitously-called tender passion, and, in the name of all that is
eternal, what are we supposed to see in them to justify it?...”’
‘A sympathetic dog, to go snarling in that cantankerous way through
life because the Almighty has seen fit to cast a flower or two across
his path,’ growled the indignant Petit Saint Thomas, to whom love was
the main object of existence.
‘Scenery does not interest him much,’ Rameau went on, with an
acquiescent nod; ‘but he has a good deal to say upon his impressions
of the Spanish race in particular, and of all other races in general.
The subject is not a new one, and Krowtosky is only really entertaining
when he is talking of himself, or of his next-door neighbour in
connection with himself.
‘“I am on the whole much disappointed in Madrid,” he continues further
on, “not because it is a duller town than I had imagined, but because
local colour and national individuality are almost extinct. It proves
the disastrous tendencies of all races to amalgamation and imitation.
Yet, after all, Rameau, what is the real value of local colour? It
is more often than not a mere matter of imagination, and one of the
illusions we fancy we enjoy. Any one with a lively imagination can
invent a more vivid local colour for all the countries he has never
visited than he is likely to find in any of them. Witness Merimée
and his band. They duped their public like the vulgarest literary
conjurors, and showed us that a trick will serve us instead of what we
are pleased to call Nature. And the deception was but the result of
our stupid hunger for the unusual. As if anything under the monotonous
stars of an unchanging heaven can be unusual; and as if everything in
this old and ugly world is not hideously familiar! The more varied our
travels the more similar our experience. For, Rameau, our real ills
are monotony and stupidity. Man resembles man, as rats resemble rats,
only he is a good deal less interesting and more noxious. You have a
fine head, and I have a misshapen one. Well, the same perplexities,
needs, instincts, appetites, passions, and impulses agitate us, and
explain our different actions, which, _au fond_, have no variety in
them whatever. We change the symbols of our faiths, while these remain
fundamentally the same, and we give our countries different names to
represent the unchangeable miseries of humanity....”
‘Here you have the malady of youth in its crisis. A _décadent_ poet
could not chant more lugubriously, though perhaps less intelligibly.
The sick youth laments in the same irritable tone the vulgarity of the
_madrileñas_, the exaggerated prowess of the gentlemen of the arena,
exalts the patient and noble bulls, rails at the puny byplay of the
picadors and at the silly enthusiasm of the spectators. He rushes
distractedly from an inexpensive inn, where a band of merry rascals
joined him and over wine sang the praises of the Fair. Praise of the
eternal feminine he cannot stand. Poor wretch! Had he been Adam in
the Garden of Paradise, Eden would have ceased to be Eden upon the
impertinent introduction of Eve. We find him complaining that he
should have left a score of maundering youths in Paris doing dismal
homage to the Sex, to drop upon a sillier band in Madrid hymning the
everlasting subject. He protests the Spanish women, for all their
eyes and arched feet, are untempting and insipid, like the rest. They
are not the dolls of the North; they are the animals of the South. He
confines his curiosity to Spanish literature, and is in pursuit of
its apostle of Pessimism. “I am taking lessons in Spanish,” he writes
from another inn. “I teach Russian to as poor a devil as myself, in
exchange for his help in his own tongue. Between us we are making
creditable progress. He is writing an article on the Russian novelists
for a review that will pay him something like twopence a page. Yet he
preserves his faith in literature! Mighty indeed is man’s capacity for
cherishing illusions. I advised him to break stones for a lucrative
change, but he seems to doubt the value of the advice since I do not
follow it myself. This is one of the things that prove man a rational
being. We read Castrès together. You have doubtless heard of Castrès,
the poet of Spain, and said to be sufficiently sedative as regards
the happy hopes of youth. Such is my Spaniard’s description in reply
to a question of mine upon his tendencies. I have inserted the phrase
as a concession to the perverse taste for local colouring. The phrase
paints the man; he lives upon onions and bread into the bargain, and
dreams with a cigarette between his lips. This morning I went to see
Castrès.... I found the great man writing and smoking at the same time
in a big sparsely furnished bedroom. He is low-sized and heavily built,
with soft black eyes and a forest of hair round and about his sallow
face. He looks as if he dined well and liked women. There is always
something unctuous and fatuous about a man who likes women, which
becomes intolerably accentuated if women should happen to like him too.
The expression suggests a mixture of oil and sugar. We discussed the
_Décadents_ under their new name, and hardly appreciated the advantage
of exchange, symbolism being no whit less empty and vapid; another
demonstration of the worthlessness of novelty, since, however much we
vary things, we end where we start, at the Unchangeable. Castrès agrees
with me that Naturalism is dead; but what the devil, he asked, is
going to take its place? Naturalism under a new name, I replied, which
is only romance upside down. Whether we invent animals or angels, it
matters little. It is romancing all the same, and only proves that one
man likes _eau sucrée_ and another likes _absinthe_. It is a concoction
either way, and about as useful in one form as in the other.... Of
Castrès the man I thought as indifferently as I did of Castrès the
poet. I asked him how Pessimism stood in Spain, and who were its
representatives. He shrugged, spat, and surveyed me dismissingly, and
with his big soft eyes.... ‘_Caramba!_ I can’t say I know much about
it. But I believe it will never flourish here. We have too much sun,
and life is, on the whole, easy enough for us. An hour of sunshine, a
crust of bread, and a bunch of grapes, or the taste of an onion and a
lifted wine-skin upon the roadside, and there you have a Spaniard built
and ready for love-making. What more does he want? And in a land where
women are fair and facile, wherefore should he whine, and see black
where God made blue? I have here a volume of poems just published by a
young girl--Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I have glanced through
the volume, and I don’t think you can ask for anything finer in the way
of Pessimism. It is enough to make a sane man cut his throat, if he had
not the good sense to pause beforehand, in distrust of the sincerity of
the writer who could survive the proof-reading of such dismal stuff. It
reminds me of what I have heard of Schopenhauer, who, after wrecking
all our altars, could sit down and enjoy a heavy dinner. He despised
none of the pleasures of life in practice, while decrying them all in
theory. You’ll probably find that this young woman dines heartily, and
employs her evenings over her wedding outfit, if she is not already
married and nursing her first baby. I took the book away and read it
with my poor devil that evening. You will not be surprised to learn
that I found it very much superior to anything of Castrès’ I have read.
He might well sneer at her in self-preservation, that being the weapon
the strong have ever preferred to use against the weak. It is bad
enough to find real talent in a young woman, but absolute unbelief, the
doctrine of complete negation! To find in this land of To-morrow, a
feminine apostle of the _Nirvana_....”’
‘Ah,’ interrupted Gaston, ‘I was wondering what had become of the word.’
‘“A feminine apostle of the _Nirvana_,”’ continued Rameau, with an
expressive smile. ‘“Judge if masculine opinion in Spain would be
indulgent. Even my poor devil, though no less struck than I with the
poetry, found it much too strong for a woman. ‘But she is doubtless
old, and then it matters less. The discontents and disappointments of
old maidenhood have drifted her into deep learning and irreligion,’
he added, by way of consolation. ‘Old or young,’ I exclaimed, ‘it is
all one to me. For me she is a thinker, not a woman. And I am going
straight off to her publisher, from whom I’ll wrest her address, if
need be, by reason of a thick stick.’
‘“The services of a stick were not required. My request was immediately
complied with. I carried the lady’s book in my hand, and was no doubt
mistaken for a recent purchaser. My poet lives on the fourth floor
in a very shabby house, in a very shabby street at the other end of
Madrid. I deemed it wise to defer my visit until after dinner. It
was half-past eight when I climbed the four flights, and stood on
the landing, anxiously asking myself if I had made up my mind to
ring. Had it not the air of an invasion? While I was yet debating the
door opened, and an untidy-looking maid shot out into the passage. I
captured her before the twilight of the stairs had swallowed her, and
demanded to see the Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I understood
that it would not serve me in her eyes to give evidence of uncertainty
or bashfulness. ‘She is inside; knock at the middle door and you’ll
find her,’ screamed the untidy maid, and in another moment she was
whirling down the stairs, and I was left to shut the hall door and
announce myself.
‘“The house was tidier than the maid. I crossed a scrupulously clean
hall and knocked at the middle door, as I had been directed. A low,
deep voice shouted, _Come in!_ While turning the handle gingerly, I
thought to myself, the poor devil was right; only a woman of massive
proportions and very advanced years could bellow that order. The
scene that met my eyes was prettier than absolute conformity to my
ideas demanded. In a neat little sitting-room, lit by a shaded
lamp, were seated three persons; a stout Spanish woman engaged with
a basket of stockings, a pale, thin young girl with melancholy eyes
of an unusual intensity of gaze, and a small lad sitting at her feet,
and reading aloud from a book they held together. The child had the
girl’s eyes, but while curiosity, belonging to his years, brightened
their sombreness with the promise of surprise and laughter, hers held
an expression of permanent sadness and soft untroubled gloom. It
was superfluous information on the mother’s part, in response to my
mention of the poet’s name, to indicate her daughter majestically,
as if she wished it to be understood that she herself had no part in
the production of matter so suspicious in a woman as poetry. I was on
the brink of assuring her that nobody would ever deem her capable of
such folly, and begging her to return to her stockings as occupation
more appropriate than the entertainment of an admirer of the Muse she
despised, when Pilar quietly said, ‘Be seated, sir.’ From that moment
I took no further heed of the Señora Villafranca than if she had been
the accommodating _dueña_ of Spanish comedy and I the unvirtuous, or
noble but thwarted, lover who had bribed her. In ten minutes Pilar
and I were talking as freely as if we had known one another from
infancy; far more freely, possibly, for in the latter case we should
long ago have talked ourselves to silence. How do these young girls
manage to get hold of books, Rameau, when all the forces of domestic
law are exercised to keep them apart? There is not a living Spanish
or French writer with whom this child, barely out of her teens, is
not acquainted. Her judgment may often be at fault,--whose is not,
if backed by anything like originality? But to hear her discuss
Naturalism! Castrès, puffing his eternal cigarette, walks you through
_les lieux communs_, but this girl takes flights that fairly dazzle
you. And then her Pessimism! The queer thing is that she has found
it for herself, and Schopenhauer has nothing to do with it. For that
matter, nobody living or dead seems to have had anything to do with
the forming of her. She is essentially _primesautière_. You French
do manage to hit upon excellent words; _primesautière_ perfectly
describes this Spanish maid. She is all herself, first of the mould,
fresh, though so burdened with the century’s malady. So young, and she
believes in nothing--but nothing, Rameau! She hopes for nothing, for
nothing! She plays with no emotions, feigns no poetic despairs, utters
no paradoxes, and is simplicity itself in her gestures, expressions,
and ideas. She calmly rejects all the pretty illusions of her sex,
without a pang or regret, because, for her, truth is above personal
happiness.
‘“We talked, we talked--talked till far into the night, while the
fat mother slumbered noisily in her chair, and the little boy slept
curled up at his sister’s feet. Can you guess what first put it into
my head to go? The smell of the lamp as the wick flickeringly lowered.
‘_Dios mio!_’ cried Pilar, ‘it is close on two o’clock, and we have
been chattering while my mother sleeps comfortlessly in her chair,
and my little brother is dreaming on the carpet instead of in his
bed. Good-night, sir; I must leave you and carry my baby to bed.’ She
stooped and lifted the sleeping boy with her arms. Such bodily strength
in one so frail much astonished me. I would have offered her help,
but the little lad had already found a comfortable spot in the hollow
of her neck, and with a cordial nod to me she disappeared into the
inner room. I had not expected this evidence of womanly tenderness from
her, and the picture haunted me on my way down the dark staircase and
through the dim starlit streets.”
‘The extracts from the next letters are singularly characteristic,’
said Rameau, well pleased by our profound attention. ‘Krowtosky, upon
his return to Paris, has taken a third-class ticket from Madrid to
Bayonne. To the poet he has said his last farewell, and probably wears
upon his heart her precious autograph. Not that Krowtosky is ostensibly
sentimental. He rejects the notion of such folly, and if by chance he
dropped into pretty fooling, be sure he would find a philosophical
way out of the disgrace deservedly attached to such weakness. “I am
travelling to Bayonne,” he writes, “and I will reach it to-morrow
afternoon, but I am convinced that once there I shall straightway take
the train back to Madrid. Odd, is it not? Yet I feel that I shall be
compelled to return to that young girl. And this is not love, mark you,
Rameau; not in the least. I know all about that. Did I not study it in
the case of that young girl I met at Toulouse? Well, nothing I feel
for Pilar in any way resembles the foolish sentiment her gestures and
looks expressed. I am quite master of myself, and do not hang on any
one’s lips or glances; but I must see Pilar again. Do you know why I
hesitated outside her door that first evening I called upon her? I had
a presentiment, as I climbed up those stairs, that I should marry her.
We may reject a faith in presentiments, but they shake us nevertheless.
How slowly this train goes! The landscape, across which we speed in the
leisurely movement of Spanish steam, is flat and ugly, an interminable
view of cornfields. There is a wide-hatted priest in front of me with
an open breviary in his hand. Perhaps I shall find myself craving
service of one of his brothers some day. What an odd fellow I am, to be
sure! I intend, oh certainly I intend to take the Paris train to-morrow
night from Bayonne, and as certainly I know I shall find myself on my
way back to Madrid! And it cannot be for the pleasure of passing a
couple of days and nights in a beastly third-class carriage, which is
nothing better here than a cattle-pen....”
‘Of his reception by the poet, of his sentiments and wooing, he
writes very sparingly. His great terror is that I should detect the
lover where he insists there is only a philosopher. Philosophy took
him from Madrid, and Philosophy brought him back within forty-eight
hours. Philosophy sued, wooed, and won the Muse, and led him to his
wedding-morn. While engaged in its service, he writes in this jocose
strain the very evening of his marriage: “This morning in a dark
little church, in a dark little street of Madrid, we were married.
Though neither of us believes in anything, we agreed to make the usual
concession to conventional feeling and social law, and were married in
the most legal and Christianlike fashion. Nothing was lacking,--neither
rings nor signatures, nor church-bells nor church-fees, nor yet the
excellent and venerable fat priest, a degree uglier than myself, who
obligingly made us one. While this ceremony was being performed, I
could not forget the inconvenient fact that neither of us brought the
other much in the shape of promise of future subsistence, not even
hope, of which there is not a spark between us. This preoccupation
distracted me while the priest mumbled and sermonised, and a wicked
little French couplet kept running through my head:
Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanterie,
Mais quand un et un font trois,--c’est diablerie!
Meanwhile the fat priest discoursed to my wife, most excellently, upon
the duties and virtues of the true Christian spouse, to which discourse
my wife lent an inattentive ear. Perhaps she also was thinking of the
future,--somewhat tardily. My dear Rameau, have you ever reflected
upon the amazing one-sidedness of religion on these occasions? Wives
are eloquently exhorted to practise all the virtues, and not a word
is flung at the husbands. It is something of course for us to learn,
by the aid of the Church, that all the duty is on the other side,
and that we have nothing to do but command, be worshipped, and fall
foul of infidelity. The beautiful logic of man, and the profound
Pessimism of woman! She never rebels, but accepts all without hope
of remedy. The real Pessimists are women. They admit the fact that
everything is unalterable, evil without amelioration; everything is,
and everything will remain to the end. Man occasionally rises up, and
takes his oppressor by the throat, but woman never. There is a point
at which his patience vanishes, but hers is inexhaustible. She is the
soul and spirit and body of the malady only diagnosed this century.
Conviction that suffering is her only heritage is hers before birth,
and she placidly bends to the law of fate often without a murmur,
always without the faintest instinct of revolt. Is she an idiot or an
angel? The latter rebelled in paradise; then she must be an idiot. Man
is activity, she is inertia; that is why she yields so readily to his
ruling. These are thoughts suitable to the marriage of two Pessimists.
There will be on neither side revolt or stupid demands upon destiny. I
am simply interested in the development of this strange union of the
barbarous North and the barbarous South, and watch this unfamiliar
person, my wife, placed in an enervating proximity by a queer social
institution. I wonder if she will eventually prove explosive; meantime
it is my privilege to kiss her. I have not mentioned it, but she has
very sweet lips.”
‘After this there is a long lapse of silence. I fear the delights of
poor Krowtosky’s honeymoon were soon enough disturbed by the grim
question of ways and means. As I was only a fair-weather friend in
default of the sympathetic confidant voyaging in distant waters, I
imagine at this period the traveller must have returned, and received
the rest of the journal so wantonly intrusted to me, or Krowtosky must
have confided his troubles to his wife. When next I hear from him,
it is many months later, and he has just obtained a professorship in
a dreary snow-bound place called Thorpfeld. From his description, it
is evidently the very last place God Almighty bethought himself of
making, and by that time all the materials of comfort, pleasure, and
beauty had been exhausted. “As Thorpfeld is not my birthplace,” writes
Krowtosky, “I may befoul it to my liking. It contains about seven
thousand inhabitants, one poorer and more ignorant than another. What
they can want with professors and what the authorities are pleased to
call a college, the wicked government under which we sweat and suffer
and groan alone can tell. Six out of a hundred cannot read, and three
of these can barely write. The less reason have they for a vestige
of belief in man, the more fervent is their faith in their Creator.
Nothing but anticipation of the long-delayed joys of paradise can
keep them from cutting their own and their neighbours’ throats. They
ought to begin with the professors and the rascally magistrates.
As if snow and broken weather were not enough to harass these poor
wretches in pursuit of a precarious livelihood, what little money the
magistrates or the professors leave them is wrung from them by the
popes. Even Pilar is demoralised by her surroundings. She has left
off writing pessimistic poetry, and has betaken herself to Christian
charity. ’Tisn’t much we can do, for we have barely enough to live upon
ourselves, but that little she manages to do somehow or other. These
hearts of foolish women will ever make them traitor to their heads. I
naturally growl when I find our sack of corn diminished in favour of a
neighbour’s hungry children, or return frost-bitten from the college
to find no fire, and learn that my wife has carried a basket of fuel
to a peasant dying up among snow-hills. She does not understand these
people, and they do not understand her, but they divine her wish to
share their wretchedness, her own being hardly less; and then she is a
pretty young woman! Timon himself could hardly have spurned her. But
where’s her Pessimism? Has it vanished with the sun and vines of her
own bright land, or has it found a grave in the half-frozen breast
of a strange Sister of Charity unknown to me and born of the sight of
snow-clad misery such as in Spain is never dreamed of? You see, I am on
the road to poetry instead of my poor changed young wife.
‘“Last evening when I came home from a farmer’s house, where I had
stopped to warm myself with a couple of glasses of _vodka_, I found her
shivering over the remaining sparks of a miserable fire. She looked so
white and unhappy and alone, so completely the image of a stranger in a
foreign land, to whom I, too, her husband, am a foreigner, that I asked
myself, in serious apprehension, if I might not be destined to lose
her in the coming crisis. ‘Pilar,’ I cried, ‘what ails thee?’ And when
she turned her head I saw that she was crying silently. ‘I want my own
land; I want the sun and vines of Spain, where at least the peasants
have wine and sunshine in abundance whatever else they may lack!’ I
should think so, I grimly muttered, remembering that over there the
mortar that built up the walls of a town was wet with wine instead of
water, and that fields are sometimes moistened with last year’s wine
when the new is ready. Pilar is right, my friend. There is no poverty
so sordid and awful as that of the cold North. But what could I do? I
could not offer her the prospect of change. She was sobbing bitterly
now, and I had no words of comfort for her. If only she had not
forsaken her principles and her poetry! But the baby may rouse her when
it comes. She has not smiled since we left Spain, poor girl. We must
wait meanwhile; but Rameau, it is very cold.”’
‘Poor little woman!’ murmured Gaston. ‘I hardly know which is the
worst fortune for her, her transplantation or her marriage with that
maundering owl Krowtosky. Krowtosky married to a pretty Spanish poet!
Ye gods, it is a cruel jest! There would have been some appropriateness
in the laundress or the _grisette_, but a Spanish girl with arched feet
and melancholy eyes! I vow the jade Destiny ought to have her neck
wrung for it. Is there a Perseus among us to free this modern unhappy
Andromeda?’
‘Poor Krowtosky! he deserves a word too,’ I modestly ventured to
suggest, touched by that little stroke, _It is very cold_, and his fear
of losing his wife. ‘He is more human than he himself is aware, and we
may be sorry for him too.’
‘Ah, yes,’ assented Rameau, and he dropped an easy sigh. ‘If he is a
bear, he is an honest bear. His next letter was just a note to announce
the birth of a little girl and the well-being of the mother, which was
followed by a more philosophical communication later, as soon as the
gracious content of motherhood had fallen upon the young Spaniard.
Relieved of his fears, he plunges once again into high speculation,
and throws out queer suggestions as to the result of such conflicting
elements in parentage as those contributed by Spain and Russia. He
has found an occupation of vivid interest,--that of watching the
development of his child, which he is convinced will turn out something
very curious. Pilar, he adds, has so far recovered her old self as to
have written a delicious little poem, which has just appeared in the
_Revista_. It is over there, if any of you can read Spanish.’
‘And the baby is now dead,’ said Gaston.
‘Dead, yes, poor mite! It had not time to show what the mingling of
Spanish and Russian blood might mean. Krowtosky’s letter was most
pitiful. That I will not read to you; it affected me too deeply. It
was the father there who wrote. Unconsciously the little creature had
forced a way into his heart, and discovered it a very big and human
heart despite his Pessimism and Philosophy. What hurt him most was the
cruel hammering of nails into the baby’s coffin, and the sound keeps
haunting him through the long wakeful nights. Of the bereaved mother he
says little. His mind is fixed on the empty cradle and the small fresh
mound in the churchyard, whither he goes every day. I believe myself
that it is the first time his heart has ever been stirred by passionate
love, and now he speaks of never leaving Thorpfeld,--a place he has
been moving heaven and earth to get away from the past six years.’
‘I promise you, Professor, that I’ll never laugh at him again,’ said
Gaston, very gravely. ‘There can be nothing absurd about a man who
mourns a little child like that. Give me his address, and I’ll write to
him at once.’
‘It may be a distraction for him, and at any rate it will serve to
show him that he is remembered in Paris,’ said Rameau, eager to comply
with the request. We thanked the Professor for his story, with
some surprise at the lateness of the hour. The door-bell rang, and
the appearance of the servant with the evening letters arrested our
departure. With a hand extended to the sobered St. Thomas, Rameau took
the letters and glanced as he spoke at the top envelope, deeply edged
with black. ‘_Tiens!_ a letter from poor Krowtosky,’ he exclaimed. He
broke the seal and read aloud: ‘My dear friend, I thank you for your
kind words in my bereavement. But I am past consolation; I am alone
now; my wife is dead, and my heart is broken.’
ARMAND’S MISTAKE
_To Demetrius Bikélas_
ARMAND’S MISTAKE
I
UNTIL the age of twenty-one, Armand Ulrich submitted to the controlling
influences around him,--somewhat gracelessly, be it admitted. He sat
out his uncle’s long dinners, and solaced himself by sketching on
the cloth between the courses. He showed a discontented face at his
mother’s weekly receptions in a big Parisian hotel, and all the while
his heart was out upon the country roads and among the pleasant fields,
where the children played under poplars and dabbled on the brim of
reedy streams. At twenty-one, however, he regarded himself as a free
man, and threw up a situation worth £50,000 a year or thereabouts.
From this we may infer that he was a lad full of bright hopes and fair
dreams.
He was the only son of a Frenchwoman of noble birth and of the junior
partner of a wealthy Alsatian banking-house. His taste for strolling
and camping out of doors, sketch-book in hand and pipe in mouth, was
partly an inherited taste, with the difference that transmission had
strengthened instead of having weakened the heritage. In earlier
days Ulrich junior had not shown an undivided spirit of devotion to
commercial interests; he had, on the contrary, permitted himself the
treasonable luxury of gazing abroad upon many objects not connected
with the business of the firm. Amateur theatricals had engaged his
affections in youth; five-act tragedies, in alexandrines as long as the
acts, had proved him fickle, and operatic music had sent him fairly
distraught. He aspired to excel in all the arts, and as a fact was
successful in none.
When congratulated upon his brother’s versatility, Ulrich senior would
contemptuously retort that the fellow was able to do everything except
attend to his business. As a result, he was held in light esteem at
the bank, and the meanest client would have regarded himself insulted
if passed for consultation to this accomplished but incompetent
representative of the firm. However agreeable his tastes may have
rendered him in society, it cannot be denied that they were of a nature
to diminish his commercial authority. Humanity wisely draws the line
at a sonneteering banker, and looks upon the ill-assorted marriage of
account and sketch-book with a natural distrust.
This state of things broke the banker’s heart. He had a reverence for
the firm of Ulrich Brothers, and if he considered himself specially
gifted for anything, it was for the judicious management of its
affairs. Thus he lived and died a misappreciated and misunderstood
person. To him it was a grievous injustice that he should be treated as
a man of no account, because of a few irregular and purely decorative
accomplishments. His heart might be led astray, he argued, but his head
was untampered with, and that, after all, is the sole organ essential
to the matter of bonds and shares. A man may be a wise head of a family
and an honest husband, and not for that unacquainted with lighter
loves. Such trifles are but gossiping pauses in the serious commotions
and preoccupations of life. But no amount of argument, however logical,
could blind him or others to the fact that commercially he was a dead
failure, because a few ill-regulated impulses had occasionally led
him into idle converse with two or three of the disreputable Nine;
and mindful of this, he solemnly exhorted his son Armand to fix his
thoughts upon the bank, and not let himself be led astray like his
misguided father by illusive talents and disastrous tastes.
Armand Ulrich was a merry young fellow, who cared not a button for
all the privileges of wealth, and looked upon an office stool with
loathing. He only wanted the free air, his pencil, and a comfortable
pipe of tobacco,--and there he was, as he described himself, the
happiest animal in France. Before his easel he could be serious enough,
but in his uncle’s office he felt an irresistible inclination to burst
into profane song, and make rash mention of such places of perdition
as the Red Mill and the Shepherd Follies,--follies perfectly the
reverse of pastoral. He was not in the least depraved, but he took
his pleasure where he found it, and made the most of it. A handsome
youngster, whom the traditional felt hat and velvet jacket of art
became a trifle too well. At least he wore this raiment somewhat
ostentatiously, and winked a conscious eye at the maids of earth. With
such solid advantages as a bright audacious glance, a winning smile,
and a well-turned figure, he was not backward in his demands upon their
admiration, and it must be confessed, that men in all times have proved
destructive with less material.
But he was an amiable rogue, not consciously built for evil, and he
cheated the women not a whit more than they cheated him. He knew he was
playing a game, and was fair enough to remember that there is honour
among thieves. For the rest, he was fond of every sort of wayside
stoppages, paid his bill ungrudgingly, in whatever coin demanded, like
a gentleman, and clinked glasses cordially with artists, strollers, and
such like vagabonds. The frock-coated individual alone inspired him
with repugnance, and he held the trammels of respectability in horror.
Whether nature or his art were responsible for a certain loose and
merry generosity of spirit, I cannot say; but I am of opinion that, had
his mind run to bank-books instead of paints, though his work might be
of indifferent quality, he might have proved himself of sounder and
more sordid disposition.
Even the brightest nature finds a shadow somewhere upon the shine,
and the shade that dimmed the sun for Armand was his mother’s want of
faith in his artistic capacities. He loved his mother fondly, and took
refuge from her wounding scepticism in his conviction that women, by
nature and training, are unfitted to comprehend or pronounce upon the
niceties of art. They may be perfect in all things else, but they have
not the artistic sense, and cannot descry true talent until they have
been taught to do so. It has ever been the destiny of great men to be
undervalued upon the domestic hearth, and ’tis a wise law of Nature
to keep them evenly balanced, and set a limit to their inclination to
assume airs. Thinking thus, he shook off the chill of unappreciated
talent, and warmed himself back into the pleasant confidence that
was the lad’s best baggage upon the road of life. For a moment an
upbraiding word, a cold comment upon dear lips, might check his
enthusiasm and cloud his mirthful glance, but a whistled bar of song,
a smart stroke of pencil or brush, a glimpse of his becoming velvet
jacket in a mirror, were enough to send hope blithely through his
veins, and speed him carolling on the way to fame.
It chanced one morning that he was interrupted at his easel by a
letter from that domestic unbeliever who cast the sole blot upon his
artist’s sunshine. There was a certain haziness in Armand’s relations
with art. He worked briskly enough at intervals, but he was naturally
an idler. The attitude he preferred was that of uneager waiter upon
inspiration, and he had a notion that the longer he waited, provided
the intervals of rest were comfortably subject to distraction, the
better the inspiration was likely to be. He had neither philosophy nor
moral qualifications to fit him for the jog-trot of daily work. So
that no interruption ever put him out, and no intruder ever found him
other than unaffectedly glad to be intruded upon. Such a youth would of
course attack his letters in the same spirit of hearty welcome that he
fell upon his friends.
But as he sat and read, his bright face clouded, and his lips screwed
and twisted themselves into a variety of grimaces. He had a thousand
gestures and expressions at the service of his flying moods, and before
he had come to the end of his mother’s letter, not one but had been
summoned upon duty. The letter ran thus:--
MY DEAR SON,--It will, I hope, inspire you with a little common sense
to learn that your cousin Bernard Francillon has just arrived from
Vienna to take your place at the bank. I have had a long interview
with your uncle, who makes no secret of his intentions, should you
persist in wasting your youth and prospects in this extravagant
fashion. And I cannot blame him, for his indulgence and patience
have much exceeded my expectations. This absurd caprice of yours
has lasted too long. You are no longer a boy, Armand, but a young
man of twenty-three, and you have no right to behave like a silly
child, who aspires to fly, instead of contentedly riding along in
the solid family coach provided for him. If I had any confidence in
your talent I might, as you do, build my hopes upon your future fame,
and console myself for present disappointment in the faith that your
sacrifice is not in vain. But even a mother cannot be so foolish as
to believe that her son is going to turn out a Raphael because he has
donned a velvet coat and bought a box of paints. Some natural talent
and cultivation will help any young man to become a fair amateur,
perhaps even a tenth-rate artist; but for such it is hardly worth
while to wreck all worldly prospects. Take your father as an example.
He did all things fairly well; he drew, painted, sang, composed, and
wrote. What was the end of it? Failure all round. He had not the
esteem of his commercial colleagues, while the artists, in whose
society he delighted, indulged his tastes as those of an accomplished
banker whose patronage might be useful to them. While he was wrecked
upon versatility, you intend to throw away your life upon a single
illusion. Whose will be the gain?
Your whim has lasted two years, and you cannot be blind to the little
you have done in that time. You have not had any success to justify
further perseverance. Then take your courage in both hands; assure
yourself that it is wiser to be a good man of business than a bad
artist; lock up your studio and come back to your proper place. If
you do so at once, Bernard will have less chance of walking in your
shoes. He is much too often at Marly, and seems to admire Marguerite;
but I do not think a girl like Marguerite could possibly care for
such a perfumed fop.
When you feel the itch for vagabondage and sketch-book, you can be
off into the country, and it need never be known that your holidays
are passed in any but the most correct fashion. As for your uncle, he
will not endure paint-boxes or pencils about him. He is still bitter
upon the remembrance of your father’s sins in office hours. I am told
he used to draw caricatures on the blotting pads, and write verses on
the fly-leaves of the account-books. He was much too frivolous for a
banker, and I fear you have inherited his light and unbusinesslike
manners. But be reasonable now, and come at once to your affectionate
mother,
SOPHIE ULRICH.
Poor Armand! The mention of Raphael in connection with the velvet coat
and paint-box was a sore wound. It whipped the susceptible blood into
his cheeks, for though sweet-tempered, a sneer was what he could not
equably endure. Surely his mother might have found a tenderer way to
say unpleasant things, if the performance of this duty can ever be
necessary! And bitter to him was the assumption that his choice was
a caprice without future or justification. Having swallowed his pill
with a wry face, he was still in the middle of a subsequent fit of
indigestion, when the door opened, and a young man in a linen blouse
cried gaily: ‘It’s a case of the early bird on his matutinal round.’
‘Come in, since the worm is fool enough to be abroad. You may make a
meal of him, my friend, and welcome, but a poor one, for he’s at this
moment the sorriest worm alive.’
The young man shot into the room, inelegantly performed a step of the
Red Mill to a couple of bars of unmelodious song of a like diabolical
suggestion, and seated himself on the arm of a chair, twisting both
legs over and round the other arm and back. In this grotesque attitude
he languidly surveyed his friend, and said sentimentally: ‘I have
had a letter from her this morning. She relents, my friend, in long
and flowery phrases, with much eloquence spent upon the harshness
of destiny and the cruelty of parents. Where would happy lovers be,
Armand, if there were no destiny to rail against and no parents to
arrange unhappy marriages?’
‘Nowhere, I suppose. Doubtless the parents have the interests of the
future lover in view when they chose the unsympathetic husband, and
everything is for the best. I congratulate you. For the moment, I am
empty-handed, and filled with a sense of the meanness of all things;
so I am in a position to give you my undivided attention,’ said Armand
dejectedly.
‘What’s this? I come to you, to pour the history of my woes and joys
into a sympathetic bosom, and if you had just buried all your near
relatives you could not look more dismal.’
‘I should probably feel less dismal, had I done so. But it is a serious
matter when your art is scoffed at, and you are told that you imagine
yourself a Raphael because you wear a velvet coat and handle a brush.’
‘_En effet_, that is a much more serious matter,’ Maurice admitted, and
at once assumed an appropriate air of concern.
Armand glanced ruefully at his coat sleeve, and began to take off the
garment of obloquy with great deliberateness.
‘Spare thyself, my poor Armand, even if others spare thee not. Knowest
thou not that the coat is more than half the man? A palette and a
velvet coat have ever been wedded, and why this needless divorce?’
‘I will get a blouse like yours, Maurice, and wear it,’ said Armand,
with an air of gloomy resignation befitting the occasion.
‘And who has reduced you to these moral straits, and to what deity is
the coat a holocaust?’
For answer Armand held out his mother’s letter, which the young man
took, and read attentively, with an expression of lugubrious gravity.
He lifted a solemn glance upon Armand, and shook his head like a sage.
‘Your mother is not a flattering correspondent, I admit. It is clear,
she expected you to justify your immoral choice by an extraordinary
start. She does not define her expectations. ’Tis a way with women.
But I take it for granted that she esteemed it your duty to cut out
Meissonnier, or by a judicious combination of Puvis de Chavannes and
Carolus Duran, show yourself in colours of a capsizing originality,
and finally go to wreck upon a tempest of your own making. For there
is nothing in life more unreasonable than a mother. But go to her
to-morrow, and tell her you have doffed the obnoxious coat, and intend
to live and die in the workman’s modest blouse.’
‘I am not going,’ Armand protested sullenly. ‘I have made my choice,
and I can’t be badgered and worried any more about it.’
As behoves a poor devil living from hand to mouth upon the
problematical sale of his pictures, Maurice Brodeau had a tremendous
respect for all that wealth implies, and like the rest of the world,
regarded Armand’s renunciation of it as a transient caprice that by
this time ought to be on the wing. He expressed himself with a good
deal of sound sense, and thereby evoked a burst of wrathful indignation.
‘Money! Money! Ah, how I hate the word, hate still more the look of the
thing! I have watched them at the bank shovelling gold, solid gold
pieces, till my heart went sick. Where’s the good of it? It fills the
prisons, takes all life and brightness out of humanity, builds us iron
safes, and turns us into sordid-minded knaves. Where’s the crime that
can’t be traced to its want? and where’s the single ounce of happiness
it brings? We are dull with it, envious without it, and yet it is only
the uncorrupted poor who really enjoy themselves and who are really
generous. The rich man counts where the poor man spends, and which
of the two is the wiser? In God’s name, let us knock down the brazen
idol, and proclaim, without fear of being laughed at, that there are
worthier and pleasanter objects in life, and that it is better to watch
the fair aspects of earth than to jostle and strive with each other
in its mean pursuit. My very name is distasteful to me, because it
represents money. It is a password across the entire world, at which
all men bow respectfully. And yet, I vow, I would sooner wander through
the squalor and wretchedness of Saint-Ouen, any day, than find myself
in the neighbourhood of the Rue de Grenelle. There may be other houses
in that long street, but for me it simply means the bank. So I feel
upon sight of my mother’s hotel. Her idle and overfed servants irritate
me. Everything about her brings the air of the bank about my nostrils,
and I only escape it here, where, thank God, I have not got a single
expensive object. I smoke cheap cigarettes, which my poorest friends
can buy. I drink beer, and sit on common chairs. Well, these are my
luxuries, and I take pride in the fact that there is very little gold
about me. I can sign a cheque for a friend in need, whenever he asks
me, and that’s all the pleasure I care to extract from the legacy of my
name. For the rest, I would forget that I have sixpence more than is
necessary for independence.’
A youth of such moral perversity was not to be driven down the
cotton-spinner’s path, you perceive, and Maurice, with the tact and
discretion of his race, forbore further argument, and contented himself
with a silent shrug.
But Madame Ulrich was not so discreet. She was a woman of
determination, moreover, and knew something of her son’s temperament.
If in her strife with what Armand gloriously called his mistress she
had been worsted, as was shown by the boy’s sulky silence, she could
enlist in her service a weapon of whose terrible power she had no
doubt. A man may sulk in the presence of his mother, but unless he has
betaken himself to the woods in the mood of a Timon, he cannot sulk in
the presence of a beautiful young woman, who comes to him upon sweet
cousinly intent.
At least Armand could not, and he had too much sense to make an effort
to do so. On the whole, he was rather proud of his weakness as an
inflammable and soft-hearted youth. He saw the fair vision, behind his
mother’s larger proportions, for the first time in his studio, and made
a capitulating grimace for the benefit of his friend, who was staring
at the biggest heiress of Europe with all his might, amazed to find her
such a simple-looking and inexpensively arrayed young creature. Maurice
had perhaps an indistinct notion that the daughters of millionaires
traversed life somewhat overweighted by the magnificence of their
dress, bonneted as no ordinary girl could be, and habited accordingly.
‘One sees thousands of women dressed like her,’ he thought to himself,
after a quick appraising glance at her gown and hat. ‘A hundred
francs, I believe, would cover the cost. But there is this about
a lady,’ he added, as an after reflection, while his eyes eagerly
followed her movements and gestures, the flow of her garments and the
lines of her neck and back; ‘simplicity is her crown. There is no use
for the other sort to try it; they can’t succeed, and we know them. If
Armand does not follow that girl to bank or battle, he’s an unmannerly
ass.’
It was not in Armand to meet unsmilingly the arch glance of a smiling
girl, even if there were not beauty in her to prick his senses and hold
him thrilled. Forgetful of the unwelcome fact that she was worth more
than her weight in solid gold, he melted at the sound of her voice, and
his foolish heart went out to her upon the touch of her gloved fingers.
Not as a lover certainly, for was she not the desired of all unmarried
Europe? There was not a titled or moneyed bride-hunter upon the face
of the civilised world with whom he had not heard her name coupled,
while he was ignorant of the fact that the great man, her father, had
destined him to complete her, until he bolted in pursuit of fortune on
his own account.
It flattered him to see that she had captivated his friend, too, not
contemptuous of the prospect of exciting a little envy in the breast
of that individual; and he shot him a look of radiant gratitude when
he saw him bent upon engaging the attention of Madame Ulrich, who was
nothing loth to be so caught. She smiled sadly, as Maurice chattered
on in high praise of her son’s genius, and quoted the opinion of their
common master in evidence of his own discernment. From time to time she
cast a hopeful eye upon the cousins, and mentally thanked Marguerite
for her delicate tact and rare wisdom.
Not a word of comment or surprise upon the bareness of the studio
or the shabbiness of the single-cushioned chair upon which she sat;
no allusion to his sacrifice, or wonder at it. The charming girl
seemed to take it for granted that a lad of talent should find the
atmosphere of commerce irksome, and gallantly admitted that such a
choice would have been hers, had she been born a boy. To wander about
the world with a knapsack, and eat in dear little cheap inns with rough
peasants; to wear a silk kerchief and no collar, and have plenty of
pockets filled with cord and penknives, and matches, and tobacco, and
pencils, and pocketbooks; to sleep under the stars, and bear a wetting
bravely,--this is the sort of thing she vowed she would have enjoyed,
did petticoats and sex and other contrarieties not form an impediment.
Such pretty babble might not be intended to play into her elders’
hands, Madame Ulrich perhaps thought, but it was very wise play for
that susceptible organ, a young man’s heart, whether conscious or not.
And that once gained, one need never despair of the reversal of all his
idols for love.
When they left the studio, Armand stood looking after them, with his
hands in his pockets, under his linen blouse, plunged in profound
meditation, the nature of which he revealed soon to his friend.
‘And to think there goes the biggest prey male rascal ever sighed for,
Maurice. What title do you imagine will buy her? Prince or duke, for
marquis is surely below the mark. Think of it, my friend. There is
hardly a wish of hers that money cannot gratify, unless it be a throne
or a cottage. And the throne itself is easier come by for such as
she than the cottage. What an existence! What a dismal future! What
lassitude! What hunger, by and by, for dry bread and cheese and common
pewter! A more nauseous destiny must it be, that of the richest woman
in the world than even that of the richest man. At least a man can
smoke a clay pipe, and take to drink, or the road to the devil in any
other way. But what is there left a woman whose wedding trousseau will
contain pocket-handkerchiefs that cost a hundred pounds apiece! My
aunt Mrs. Francillon’s handkerchiefs cost that. Mighty powers! what an
awful way these charming and futile young creatures are brought up! And
you see for yourself, this girl is no mere fashionable fool. She, too,
would have sacrificed the title and the handkerchiefs, if it were not
for the restrictions with which she has been hedged from birth. Let
us bless our stars, Maurice, that we were not born girls, and equally
bless our stars that girls are born for us.’
II
Madame Ulrich and her niece came again to the studio. They came very
often. Armand began by counting the days between their visits, and
ended in such a state of lyrical madness that Romeo was sobriety itself
alongside of him. In anticipation of the sequel, Maurice supported the
trial of his morning, midday, and evening confidences with a patience
deserving the envy of angels. And not a thought of commiseration had
the raving young madman for him, and only sometimes remembered, at the
top of his laudatory bent, to break off with courteous regret for the
unoccupied state of his friend’s heart.
‘I wish to God you were married to her,’ said Maurice one day, and
Armand naturally trusted the prayer would be heard at no distant period.
It was the hour of Marguerite’s visit. To see the charming girl
seated in the shabby arm-chair he had bought at a sale in the Hôtel
Drouot, so perfectly at home, and so naïvely pleased with little
inexpensive surprises, such as a bunch of flowers in a common jar,
an improvised tea made over their daily spirit-lamp, much the worse
for constant use; to see her so vividly interested in the everyday
life of a couple of Bohemians, the cost of their marketings, their
bargains, and the varieties of their meals, their cheap amusements,
unspoiled by dress-suit or crush hat, and eager over that chapter of
their distractions that may safely be recounted to a well-bred maiden.
Armand had never known any pleasure in his life so full of freshness
and untainted delight. Bitterly then did he regret that there should
be episodes upon which a veil must be dropped. These, I suppose, are
regrets common to most honest young fellows for the first time in
love. He would have liked to be able to tell her everything, not even
omitting his sins; as she sat there, and listened to him with an air so
divinely confiding and credulous. He had a wild notion that he might
be purified from past follies, and not a few dark scenes he dared not
remember in her presence, if he might kneel and drop his humbled head
in her lap, and feel the touch of her white hands as a benediction and
an absolution upon his forehead. He was full of all sorts of romantic
and sentimental ideas about her, little dreaming that the clock of fate
was so close upon the midnight chimes of hope, and that the curtain was
so soon to drop upon this pleasant pastoral played to city sounds.
One day his mother came alone. One glance took in the blank
disappointment of his expression and all its meaning. She scrutinised
him sharply, and found the ground well prepared for the words of wisdom
she had come to sow. She spoke of Marguerite, and the troubled youth
drank in the sound of her voice with avidity. Did he love his cousin?
How could he tell? He knew nothing but that he lived upon her presence;
that the thought of her filled the studio in her absence; that he dwelt
incessantly upon the memory of her words and looks and gestures. This
he supposed was love, only he wished the word were fresher. It was
applied to the feeling inspired by ordinary girls, whereas she was
above humanity, and he was quite ready to die for one kiss of her lips.
When the blank verse subsided, Madame Ulrich bespoke the commonplace
adventure of marriage, and made mention of two serious rivals, an
English marquis and his cousin Bernard Francillon. The mention of the
marquis he endured, and sighed; but his cousin’s name stung his blood
like a venomous bite, he could not tell why. His brain was on fire, and
he sat with his head in his hands in great perplexity.
It was the hour of solemn choice; the renunciation of his liberty
and pleasant vagabondage, or the hugging in private for evermore of
a sweet dream that would make a symphonious accompaniment to his
march upon the road of life. Could the flavour of his love survive
the vulgarity of wealth, of newspaper-paragraphs, wedding-presents,
insincere congratulations, a honeymoon enjoyed under the stare of the
gazing multitude, the dust of social receptions, dinners, and all the
ugly routine he had flown from? On the other hand, could he ask a
daintily reared girl, like his cousin, to tramp the country roads and
fields with him, to wander comfortless from wayside inn to hamlet,
and back to an ill-furnished studio, at the mercy of the seasons, and
with no other luxuries than kisses, which for him, he imagined, would
ever hold the rapture and forgetfulness of the first one? The choice
meant the clipping of his own wings, and perhaps moral death; for her,
ultimate misery, or the tempered loveliness of a dream preserved, and
substantial bliss rejected.
He could not make up his mind that day, and sent his mother away
without an answer. Maurice Brodeau was not informed of his dilemma.
It was matter too delicate in this stage for discussion. But the night
brought him no nearer to decision, and standing before his easel,
making believe to be engaged upon a sketch he had lately taken at
Fontainebleau, he held serious debate within himself whether he ought
to consult his friend or not.
In his studio upstairs, Maurice was loitering near the window in an
idle mood, and saw a quiet brougham stop in front of their house in the
Avenue Victor Hugo. He watched the slow descent of an old man dressed
in a shabby frock-coat, untidily cravated, who leaned heavily upon a
thick-headed cane. The old gentleman surveyed the green gate on which
were nailed the visiting-cards of the two artists, and jerked up a
sharp pugnacious chin.
‘Our ancient uncle, the respectable and mighty banker, of a surety,’
laughed Maurice, on fire for the explanation of the riddle.
The head of the firm of Ulrich pushed open the gate, sniffed the air of
the damp courtyard, and solemnly mounted the wooden stairs, making a
kind of judicial thud with his heavy stick.
‘The jackanapes!’ he muttered, for the benefit of a tame cat. ‘It is
a miracle how these young fools escape typhoid fever, living in such
places.’
Maurice cautiously peeped over the banisters, and saw the old gentleman
turn the handle of Armand’s door without troubling to knock. ‘Good
Lord!’ thought the watcher, ‘it is fortunate friend Armand has broken
with that little devil Yvette, or the old bear might have had the
chance of putting a fine spoke in his wheel with cousin Marguerite.’
Armand in his linen blouse was standing in front of his easel, with
his back to the door. He was certainly working, but his mind was not
so fixed upon his labour but that he had more than an odd thought for
his cousin. Pretty phrases, gestures, and expressions of hers kept
running through his thoughts, as an under-melody sometimes runs through
a piece of music, unaggressively but soothingly claiming the ear. They
brought her presence about him, to cheer him in the midst of his solemn
preoccupations upon their mutual destiny. While his reason said no, and
he regarded himself as a fine fellow for listening to reason at such
a moment, her lips curved and smiled and bent to his in imagination’s
first spontaneous kiss. And then he told himself pretty emphatically
that he was growing too sentimental, and that it behoves a man to take
his pleasure and his pains heartily and bravely, and not go abroad
whimpering for the moon. Just when he had made up his mind to shoulder
his moral baggage and, whistling merrily, face the solitary roads, he
was made to jump and fall back into perplexity by a crusty, well-known
voice.
‘Well, young man! So this is where you waste your time?’
Armand swung round in great alarm, and reddened painfully.
‘You look astounded, and no wonder. ’Tis an honour I don’t often pay
young idiots like you. Ouf, man! Look at his dirty jacket. Your father
was a rock of sense in comparison. At least, he did not get himself
up like a baker’s boy, and go roystering in company with a band of
worthless rascals.’
‘I presume, uncle, you have come here for something else besides the
pleasure of abusing my father to me.’
‘There he is now, off in a rage. Can’t you keep cool for five minutes,
you hot-headed young knave? What concern is it of mine if you choose
to die in the workhouse? But there’s your mother. It frets her, and I
esteem your mother, young sir.’
Armand lifted his brows discontentedly. He held his tongue, for there
was nothing to be said, as he had long ago beaten the weary ground of
protest and explanation.
‘The rascal says nothing, thinks himself a great fellow, I’ve no doubt.
The Almighty made nothing more contrary and mischievous than boys. They
have you by the ears when you want to sit comfortably by your fireside.
Finds he’s got a heart too, I hear. Mayhap that will sober him, though
I’m doubtful.’
Armand stared, and changed colour like a girl. He eyed his uncle
apprehensively, and began to fiddle with his brushes. ‘I--I don’t
understand you, sir,’ he said tentatively.
‘Yes, you do, but you think it well to play discretion with me. I’m the
girl’s father, and there’s no knowing how I may take it, eh, you young
villain?’
The old man pulled his nephew’s ear, and laughed in a low chuckling
way peculiar to crusty old gentlemen.
‘Has my mother spoken to you about,--about----?’
‘Suppose she hasn’t, eh? What then?’
‘I am completely in the dark,’ Armand gasped. ‘How could you guess such
a thing, uncle?’
‘Suppose I haven’t guessed it either, eh? What then?’
Armand’s look was clearly an interrogation, almost a prayer. He
blinked his lids at the vivid flash of conjecture, and shook his head
dejectedly against it. ‘You can’t mean--no, it cannot be that----’
The old man waggled a very sagacious head.
‘Marguerite!’ shouted the astounded youth, and there was a feeling of
suffocation about his throat.
‘Suppose one foolish young person liked to believe she had a partner in
her folly, eh, young man? What then?’
‘My cousin, too!’
‘And if it were so, eh? What then?’
‘Good God! uncle, why do you come and tell me this?’ The dazed lad
began to walk about distractedly, and was not quite sure that it was
not the room that was walking about instead of his own legs.
‘I think we may burn the sticks and daubs and brushes now, eh, young
man?’ laughed the old man, waggling his stick instead of his head in
the direction of Armand’s easel, and giving a contented vent to his
peculiar chuckle. ‘Burn the baker’s blouse, and dress yourself like
a Christian. When you are used to the novelty of a coat and a decent
dinner, you may come down to Marly and see that giddy-pated girl
of mine. But a week of steady work at the bank first, and mind, no
paint-boxes or dirty daubers about the place. If I catch sight of any
long-haired fellow smelling of paint, I’ll call the police.’
Armand gazed regretfully round his little studio. He picked out each
familiar object with a sudden sense of separation and a wish to bear
them ever with him in that long farewell glance. But the sadness was
a pleasant sadness, for was not happy love the beacon that lured him
forth, and when the heart is young what lamp shines so radiantly and
invites so winningly? Still, it was a sacrifice, though beyond lay the
prospect of a lover’s meeting, in which the thought of stuff so common
as gold would lie buried in the first pressure of a girl’s lips.
‘You are not decided, I daresay?’ sneered his uncle.
Armand met his eyes unflinchingly, and held out his hand. ‘A man who is
worth the name can’t regret love and happiness. For Marguerite’s sake I
will do my best in the new life you offer, and I thank you, uncle, for
the gift.’
‘That young fop from Vienna will feel mighty crestfallen,’ was the
reflection of the head of the Ulrich Bank, as he hobbled downstairs.
He disliked the elegant Bernard, and was himself glad to have back
his favourite nephew, though the means he had employed to secure that
result might not be of unimpeachable honesty.
The banker’s departure was the signal for Maurice, on the look-out
upstairs. He bounded down the stairs, three steps at a time, and shot
in upon the meditative youth. Armand glanced up, and smiled luminously.
‘The besieged has capitulated, Maurice.’
‘So I should think. For some time back you have worn the air of a man
on the road to bondage.’
Brodeau had never for an instant doubted that this would be the end of
it. He mildly approved the conventional conclusion, though not without
private regrets of his own.
‘A girl’s eyes have done it,’ sighed Armand sentimentally.
‘Of course, of course, the old temptation. But she would have inveigled
Anthony out of his hermitage. A sorry time you’ll have of it, I
foresee, though I honestly congratulate you. It is a thing we must
come to sooner or later, and the escapades of youth have their natural
end, like all things else. Only lovers believe in eternity, until they
have realised the fragility of love itself. It was absurd to imagine
you could go on flouting fortune for ever, and living in a shanty like
this, with a palace ready for you on the other side of the river. But
there is consolation for me in the thought that you will give me a big
order in commemoration of your marriage--eh, old man?’
When it came to parting the young men wrung hands with a sense of more
than ordinary separation. For two years had they shared fair and
foul weather, and camped together out of doors and under this shabby
roof, upon which one was now about to turn his back. The days of merry
vagabondage were at an end for Armand, and his face was now towards
civilisation and respectable responsibilities. He might revisit this
scene of pleasant Bohemia, and find things unchanged, but the old
spirit would not be with him, and the zest of old enjoyments would be
his no more.
‘Many a merry tramp we’ve had together, Armand,’ said Maurice, and
he felt an odd sensation about his throat, while his eyelids pricked
queerly. ‘We’ve got drunk together on devilish bad wine, and pledged
ourselves eternally to many a worthless jade. We’ve smoked a pipe we
neither of us shall forget, and walked beneath the midnight stars in
many a curious place. And now we part, you for gilded halls and wedding
chimes, I to seek a new comrade, and make a fresh start across the
beaten track of Bohemia.’
Maurice crammed his knuckles furiously into his eyes. His eloquence had
mounted to his head, and flung him impetuously into his friend’s arms
with tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘You’ll come back again, won’t
you, Armand?’
‘Come back? Yes,’ Armand replied sadly; ‘but I shall feel something
like Marius among the ruins of Carthage.’
‘I’ll keep your velvet jacket, and when you are tired of grandeur
and lords and dukes, you can drop in here and put it on, and smoke a
comfortable pipe in your old arm-chair.’
Maurice went straightway to the nearest café, and spent a dismal
evening, consuming bock after bock, until he felt sufficiently
stupefied to face his solitary studio, where he shed furtive tears
in contemplation of all his friend’s property made over to him as an
artist’s legacy.
Though brimming over with happiness and excitement, Armand himself was
not quite free of regret for the relinquished velvet jacket and brushes
and boxes, as he made his farewell to wandering by a journey on the
top of an omnibus from the Étoile to the Rue de Grenelle, and solaced
himself with a cheap cigarette.
For one long week did he work dutifully at the bank, inspected books
with his uncle, and repressed an inclination to yawn over the dreary
discussion of shares and bonds and funds, of vast European projects
and policies in jeopardy, and he felt the while a smart of homesickness
for the little studio in the Avenue Victor Hugo. In the evening he
dined with his mother, and found consolation for the irksomeness of
etiquette in the excellence of the fare. He thought of Marguerite
incessantly, and spoke of her whenever he could, but he did not forget
Maurice or the cooking-stove, on which their dinners in the olden days
had so often come to grief. He might sip Burgundy now, yet he relished
not the less the memory of the big draughts of beer which he and
Maurice had found so delicious.
III
But all these pinings and idle regrets were silenced, and gave place to
rapturous content the first afternoon on which he walked up the long
avenue of his uncle’s country house at Marly. The week of trial was at
an end, and he was now to claim his reward from dear lips. Everything
under the sun seemed to him perfect, and even banks had their own
charm, discernible to the happy eye. There was a beauty in gold he
had hitherto failed to perceive, and crusty old gentlemen were the
appropriate guardians of lovely nymphs. In such a mood, there is melody
in all things, and warmth lies even in frosted starlight. Nothing
but the sweetness of life is felt: its turbidness and accidents, its
disappointments, pains, and stumbles, lie peacefully forgotten in the
well of memory; and we wish somebody could have told us in some past
trouble that the future contained for us a moment so good as this.
‘Mademoiselle is in the garden,’ a servant informed him, and led the
way through halls and salons, down steps running from the long window
into a shaded green paradise. And then he heard a fresh voice that
he seemed not to have heard for so long, and on hearing it only was
his heart made aware how much he had missed it during the past age of
privation.
‘Ah, my cousin Armand!’
There was a young man dawdling at her feet in an attitude that sent
the red blood to Armand’s forehead. This was Bernard Francillon,
his other and less sympathetic cousin. The young man jumped up, and
measured him in a stare of insolent interrogation, and Marguerite,
with a look of divine self-consciousness and a lovely blush, said,
very softly: ‘So, Armand, you have let yourself be tamed, and you
have actually forsaken your delightful den, I hear. How could you, my
cousin? The cooking-stove, the fishing-rod, the easel, blouse, and
velvet jacket,--all abandoned for the less interesting resources of our
everyday existence!’
Her eyes and voice were full of arch protest, and her smile went to the
troubled lad’s head, more captivating than wine. ‘It was for your sake,
Marguerite,’ he answered timidly, in tones dropped to an unquiet murmur.
‘Permit me, cousin, to retire for the moment,’ said Bernard, turning
his back deliberately upon his disconcerted relative.
What was it in their exchanged looks, in their clasped hands, in
Bernard’s unconscious air of fond proprietorship, in Marguerite’s
half droop towards him of shy surrender, that carried to Armand the
conviction of fatal error? He watched his rival departing, and turned
a blank face upon the radiant girl, whose delicious smile had all the
eloquence and trouble of maiden’s relinquished freedom. She met his
white empty gaze with a glance more full and frank than the one she
had just lifted so tenderly to Bernard Francillon. ‘I don’t understand
you, Armand. Why for my sake?’
‘It was your father’s error. He thought you loved me, and I, heaven
help me! till now I thought so too,’ he breathed in a despairing
undertone, not able to remove his eyes from her surprised and
delicately concerned face.
‘Poor Armand! I am very sorry,’ was all she said, but the way in which
she held her hand out to him was a mute admission of his miserable
error. He lifted the little hand to his lips, and turned from her in
silence.
The sun that had shone so brightly a moment ago was blotted from the
earth, and the music of the birds was harsh discordance, as he wandered
among the evening shadows of the woods. All things jarred upon his
nerves, until night dropped a veil upon the horrible nakedness of his
sorrow. He felt he wore it upon his face for all eyes to see, and
he thanked the darkness, as it sped over the starry heavens. Beyond
the beautiful valley, where the river flowed, the spires and domes
and bridges of Paris showed through the reddish glimmer of sunset as
through a dusty light. Soon there would be noise and laughter upon the
crowded boulevards, and a flow of carriages making for the theatres
through the flaunting gas-flames; and happy lovers in defiant file
would be driving towards the Bois. How often had he and Maurice watched
them on foot, as they smoked their evening cigarette, and sighed or
laughed as might be their mood. Would he ever have the heart to laugh
at lovers again, or laugh at anything, he wondered drearily! And there
was no one here to remind him that sorrow, like joy, is evanescent, and
that all wounds are healed. _Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe,_--even
pain and broken hearts.
Here silence was almost palpable to the touch, like the darkness of
Nature dropping into sleep. He turned his back upon Paris, and faced
the dim country.
MR. MALCOLM FITZROY
_A Don José Maria de Pereda
de la Academía Real_
MR. MALCOLM FITZROY
I
IT is all very well and worthy to devote a lifetime, or part of it, to
the study of foreign architecture. But a friend reproachfully reminded
Fred Luffington that English minsters are worth a glance. Fred did not
dispute it. There was a certain charm in the novelty of the idea. So he
packed his portmanteau, and took the boat to Dover, to assure himself a
pleasant surprise.
At York he bethought himself of an amiable old Flemish priest, in
whose company he had studied a good deal of Antwerp at a time when
Antwerp wore for him the colours and glory and other attendant joys
of paradise. The priest, he remembered, was settled hard by, as the
chaplain of a Catholic earl. He would take the opportunity of studying
village life as well as the minsters of England; and smoke a pipe of
memory, and drink big draughts of the beer of other days, with his
friend, the Flemish priest.
Fendon was as comfortable a little village as any to be dreamed of out
of Arcadia. Its warm red roofs made a cosy circle under the queerest of
rural walls, round a delightful green. A real green, a goose common,
with an umbrella tree in the middle, and a village pump under an odd
grey dome of stone supported by rough pillars. All the houses were
buried in trees, and all the palings overgrown with honeysuckles.
Fred Luffington sniffed delightedly. Though it was June, there was
plenty of damp in the air, and lovely moist smells came from the hedges
and fields. Yes; this was enchantment, a whiff of pure sixteenth
century, the very thing described by old-fashioned writers as ‘Merrie
England.’ It did not look very merry, to be sure; rather sleepy and
still. But it was not difficult to swing back upon imagination into the
days of Good Queen Bess.
Fred’s glance grew vague, and the lyrical mood was upon him. He mused
upon may-poles, foaming tankards, and the rosy maids and swains of
the centuries when there was ‘love in a village.’ There were no rosy
maids or sighing swains about, but he imagined them along with the rest
of Elizabethan decorations, evoked confusedly by remembrance of past
readings.
Everything combined to keep him in good humour. The name of his inn,
the only inn, was ‘St. George and the Dragon.’ Who but a scoffer or
a heathen could fail to sleep well at an inn so gloriously named? As
an archæologist, Fred was neither, so naturally he slept the sound
sleep of the believer, somebody infinitely superior to the merely
just man. Anybody may be just, but it takes a special constitution to
believe, in the proper manner. Fred Luffington was all that is most
special in the way of constitutions, so after a charmed inspection
of the sign-board--a rude picture of the saint in faded colours on a
semi-effaced horse with a remarkable dragon at his feet--he sauntered
in through the porch to be confronted with a perfectly ideal buxom
landlady. This was more than heaven, he devoutly felt, and said his
prayers on the spot to the god of chance, who so benevolently watches
over the humours of romantic young men.
Mrs. Matcham, spick and span and respectable, beamed him welcome of a
mediæval cordiality. He felt at once it was good to be with her, and
took shame to himself for having been so long enamoured of foreign
parts, and unacquainted with the pleasant aspects of English country
life. She deposited his bag on a table at the bottom of a red-curtained
four-poster, and remarked that she was granting him the privilege
of occupying the room of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. There was such a full
accompaniment of condescension and favour in her smile, and so complete
a signification of the importance and fame of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, that
Luffington felt abashed by his own ignorance of the personality of the
local great man, and kept a discreet silence.
When he descended to the dining-room, his delightful landlady, entering
with the tray, paused in critical survey of the table.
‘I have placed your seat before the fireplace, sir. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
always prefers it so. But perhaps you would like to sit in front of the
window.’
Luffington seized the fact that any taste but that of the mysterious
great man’s would be evidence of inferiority. But it was necessary to
make a stand for originality. The expected docility fired revolt in
his veins. At the price of consideration, he decided for the window in
front, instead of the fireplace behind. The pleasures and pangs of our
life depend upon little things, and the little thing in question gave
a silly satisfaction to Luffington, and disproportionately pained the
good landlady.
After his late lunch, Luffington strolled forth to pick up rural
sensations on his way to the Flemish priest’s. He encountered glances
of dull interest, but nowhere the rosy village maid and her pursuant
swain that his studies in pastoral literature had taught him to expect
as the obvious decoration of a quiet rustic scene.
‘There is nothing so misleading as literature, unless, perhaps,
history,’ he observed, in a fond retrospect of the centuries. ‘The
disappointments of the present build for us the illusions of the
future,’ he added incoherently.
The Flemish priest was tending his bees, with a thick blue veil tied
over his felt hat, when he heard the garden gate swing upon its hinges.
He looked up and saw an elegant young man pointing, as he came along,
a meditative cane in the neighbourhood of his dearest treasures, a row
of white and blue irises.
‘_Santa Purissima!_ Can these sons of perdition not learn to keep their
shticks and their long limbs from ze borders if they must invade our
gardens?’
He slipped off his veil and showed a fat yellow face streaked with the
red of anger. Luffington held out his hand, laughing.
‘By all that’s holy! My young friend of Antwerp. Welcome, welcome!
Ah, my boy! how many, six, eight years ago! What a lad you were then
with your dreams of love and fame! And how have they fared, those
dreams--eh? Gone ahead, or dropped behind, as ’tis the way with young
dreams? _Hein!_’
Luffington nodded sentimentally, like one rocked upon sudden waves of
regret. The dreams had dropped behind with the years, and it was an
effort to recall them to vivider shape than a cloud with a sunny ray
upon it.
‘Have you any of the old tobacco?’ he asked. ‘A pipe might lead us over
the forgotten ground again, and revive the dead persons of that little
Antwerp drama. You’ve added bees to botany, I see. Could you get up
a massacre of the drones while I am here? I’ve never been able to put
full faith in all the astounding stories we have of the bees, and might
be converted by a practical demonstration.’
‘Come along inside, and leave my bees alone, you insolent sceptic of
the world. That’s your French air--the very worst to breathe. I suppose
you take brandy and mud in your literature, too. I heard you talk of
Dumas once, and thought it bad, but now, of course, you’re down with
the naturalists, the symbolists, and the philosophers of insanity.’
‘Not a bit. I haven’t got beyond dear old Dumas, where you left me.
And here I am, anchored momentarily in Arcadia, among the bees and the
flowers, under the protection of St. George, with a mighty minster near
at hand.’
Under the congenial influences of Pilsener and a certain French tobacco
affected by the pair, they sat in a book-lined study and talked of many
things. It was only at table, later, that Luffington, over his soup,
remembered to mention the name of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy.
‘An old friend of the family,’ the priest explained, meaning the earl
and his wife. Upon the Harborough estates there could, of course, be
only one family in all conversation.
The priest walked back to the inn with Luffington, and accepted a glass
of rum punch from the hand of Mrs. Matcham.
‘Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy always says that nobody can make rum punch like
me,’ she remarked, not without the hue of modesty upon her cheek at
sounding her own praises; and her glance sparkled to Luffington’s upon
his acknowledgment of the truth.
‘There are drawbacks to a sojourn upon the vacant hearth of a god,’
he said, when the door closed upon her exit. ‘His worshippers are
invidiously reminiscent, and you court unfavourable comparison whether
you sit, sleep, eat, or drink.’
But the punch was good, the bed excellent, the quiet conducive to
dreamless sleep. Luffington was abroad early next morning, indifferent
to the thought of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, as he sipped the dew with a
shower of song in his face, and the light at his feet ran along the
grass and through the trees in dimpled rivers of gold. The priest had
told him that the earl loved his trees like children. Fred did not
wonder, as he hailed them ‘magnificent,’ and went his way among them in
full-eyed admiration.
It was a placid, even scene, such as one dwells on in loving memory
when homesick in far-off lands. Lordly oaks and beeches and sentimental
firs beshadowed the well-trimmed lawny spaces. The air played freely
round and about them, and the light was broad and soft. If you stepped
aside from the lawn and level avenues, you might lose yourself in
the pleasant woods, alive with the chatter of birds, in the midst of
fragrance and gloom. Water was not absent, and if you crossed the
deer-park, you could follow its lazy way to Fort Mary, where the earl
had a summer residence, aptly named by the French governess, ‘Le Petit
Trianon.’ Luffington liked the notion. It was all so artificial, so
costly, so preposterously pastoral, that his mind willingly went back
to Versailles, and the musked and scarlet-heeled century. The ground
was green velvet, unrelieved by as much as a daisy. It demanded Watteau
robes, and periwigged phrases and piping strains of Lulli and Rameau.
The boats were toys upon an artificial lake, and it was like hearing
of children’s games to learn of regattas held here every summer. The
idea of a Venetian fête was more appropriate to celebrate the birth of
the heir, and lords and ladies in rich Elizabethan disguises grouped
upon the velvet sward, upon the balcony of the ‘Trianon,’ or making
pictures of glitter and sharp shadow upon the breast of dark water in
the gleam of variously coloured lamps.
Luffington stopped to chat with a loutish fellow who was rolling the
ground down to the minute pier, and chopping off the heads of the
innocent daisies, along his path.
‘The notion of improvement is inseparably wedded to that of
destruction,’ Fred mused, as he placidly surveyed the process, and
dived his stick among the layers of massacred innocents. The thought
opened his lips, but the lout lent an uncomprehending ear to his
speech, shook his head as at obvious eccentricity of reflection,
and rolled on with his look of gross stupidity. This proceeding
disconcerted the traveller, who wanted to talk, and imbibe at the
founts of rustic wit. He glanced around, and spied a little boat
swaying among the rushes. Could he use it? The lout looked up
sideways, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and offered his
daughter as ferryman. At that moment Fred heard a thin unmusical sound,
like that of a string drawn flat:
‘Friends, I’ve lost my own true lover,
Tra la la la la la la.’
Through a clump of noble trees a little maid approached, not more
beautiful to the eye than was her flat, tuneless voice to the ear. She
assented without any eagerness to row him across the lake, and had
nothing more interesting to communicate than that Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
was very fond of Fort Mary.
‘Decidedly I must see this fellow if I have to wait a month,’ thought
Fred, with a pardonable feeling of irritation.
On his way back, he hailed his friend among the flowers and bees, and
stood leaning over the gate to acquaint him with his intention to start
at once upon exploration of the neighbourhood. The Flemish priest stood
in the blaze of sunshine, and mopped his forehead repeatedly before
urging him to wait another day, when he would be able to offer the
advantage of his own trap and himself as guide.
‘I can’t go to-day,’ he said, with an air of importance. ‘Her ladyship
has appointed this afternoon to come and consult with me about the
schools.’
It was evident to Mr. Luffington, as he went off in search of lunch,
that after Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, the Countess of Harborough was the
figure of importance. The defection of his friend and the absence of
romance among the villagers turned him to misanthropy, and as, late in
the afternoon, fatigued after a long walk through the woods, he entered
the inn porch, he told himself emphatically that he would leave Fendon
on his way to the cathedral, and thence return to London.
He found the inn in a state of unwonted flurry, which was explained to
him by a telegram announcing the arrival of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy upon
the last train.
‘And I’ve the great man’s room,’ said Fred to himself, laughing, as he
set out for the priest’s cottage.
The dinner was good, the wine not execrable, the tobacco best of all;
and in excellent spirits, quite restored to his belief in men and
women, Fred started off alone for ‘St. George and the Dragon,’ under a
suspicion of moonlight just enough to send a quiver of silver through
the trees, and show the darkness of the road, but not enough to send
reason distraught down sentimental byways and insistently urge the
advantages of open air meditation. He reached his inn sane and safe,
and bethought himself of unanswered letters. Suddenly he was disturbed
in the glow of composition by the sound of swift steps on the stairs
and the ring of violent, angry speech.
‘A stranger in my room, Mrs. Matcham! Tut, tut. This is what I cannot
permit. Instantly order him to clear out.’
Luffington looked up inquiringly as the door opened with an aggressive
bang, and a queer attractive-looking fellow stood eyeing him
imperiously upon the threshold. He had imagined Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
a respectable English gentleman, florid, prosperous, eminently
aristocratic. He was confronted with the reverse. Before him stood in
a threatening attitude, and frowning hideously, a man almost too dark
for English blood, too small and too vengefully passionate of feature
and expression. His hair, which curled, was of a dusty black, as if it
had lain in ashes. His lips were full and red, covered with the same
dust-hued shadow, and teeth so white, nostrils so fine and sharp, brows
so low and oddly beautiful, surely never belonged to the respectable
English race. His eyes were long, of a liquid blackness, through which
red and yellow flames leaped as in those of an untamed animal, and his
hands were brown and small, like the hands of a slender girl.
‘Do you hear, sir? This is my room,’ he cried.
There was a foreign richness in his voice that matched the quaint
exterior, and was equally in puzzling contrast with his pretensions
as an Englishman.... Luffington was convinced he had to do with some
adventurer over seas, and he curtly replied that for the present the
room was his. Mrs. Matcham, scared and anxious, shot him a glance of
prayer over the shoulder of her domineering customer.
But Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy was not to be silenced or turned out by the
superior airs of a strolling jackanapes. He paced the room in his
quick, light way, opened familiar drawers and presses, inquired after
missing objects, and never stopped in a running murmur upon the
impudence of travellers and the insolence of intruders.
‘May I point out that you are condemning yourself?’ Luffington dryly
remarked, as he watched him in wonder. ‘Intrusion can never be other
than insolent.’
‘Then why the devil are you sitting here, sir?’
‘For the simple reason that I slept here last night, and the room is
mine as long as I stay at this inn.’
‘Mrs. Matcham, you had no business to let this chamber when there are
others unoccupied in the house. You know I am liable to turn up at any
moment, and that I cannot sleep in any room but this.’
There was something so boyish in the tone of complaint, that Luffington
insensibly softened to the odd and ill-mannered creature, and smiled
broadly.
Mrs. Matcham was affirming the comforts of a back room, when he stopped
her shortly with a protest that this was information for Mr. Fitzroy,
whom the matter concerned.
‘I tell you, sir, I will not give up my room,’ shouted Mr. Malcolm
Fitzroy.
Luffington shrugged, and made a feint of resuming his writing, upon
which Mr. Fitzroy plumped down into an arm-chair, crossed his slim
legs savagely, and ordered the landlady to bring in his carpet bag,
and produce glasses and two bottles of his special port. Luffington
said nothing, but smiled as he continued to write, and took a sidelong
view of his strange enemy. The more he looked, the more he wondered at
the singular prestige of such a person in a place like Fendon. He had
not the appearance of a gentleman, was the reverse of imposing, and
according to the Flemish priest, was ‘just one of the poorest dogs in
Christendom.’
‘He pays Mrs. Matcham thirty shillings a week, and nobody else
anything, and he travels third class like myself,’ the priest added,
but Luffington thought that his air was that of a man who holds back
something.
‘Well, sir,’ said Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, as if he were pointing a cocked
pistol at an antagonist, ‘you have an opportunity of assuring yourself
that there is good port to be had in at least one inn in Great Britain.’
‘I am ready to accept the fact upon your statement, but I am no judge
of port. It’s a wine I never drink.’
‘Claret, I suppose? Abominable trash, but there’s good stuff of
that sort too, eh, Mrs. Matcham? Two bottles of one of their
castles--Lafitte, La rose--something in that way.’
He yapped out his words like the spoken barks of an angry terrier,
and poured himself out a glass of Harborough port, which he fondly
surveyed, then tasted with a beatific nod.
‘Nowhere to be had out of England. Bloodless foreigners go to the deuce
on their clarets. They’d be content to sit at home, and let their
neighbours’ wives alone if they drank port. But then you have to go to
an earl’s cellar for anything like this.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fred Luffington, now restored to good humour, and very
much amused by his extraordinary companion. ‘But as we all haven’t a
key to such cellars, it is safer to stick to the harmless grape-juice
than court gout with doctored port. I’m for the foreigners myself,
whatever their domestic sins may be. Port is as heavy as your climate,
your women, your literature.’
Mrs. Matcham, partly reassured, entered with two bottles and one of
those hideous green glasses described as claret glasses. This she
placed in front of Mr. Luffington, and taking a bottle from her hand,
Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy filled the unsightly chalice. Luffington drank his
wine appreciatively, pronounced it rare, and wandered off upon the
exciting topic of vintages. He no longer wondered at the prestige of a
man who could command such claret.
‘You’re a Londoner, I suppose--an impudent Cockney?’ said Mr. Fitzroy,
observing him as he put aside the green glass and stretched behind
for his toilet tumbler. ‘Right you are there, my friend. One of the
pleasures of good wine is to watch the play of light in its depths of
colour. It passes my imagination how such complacent ugliness as this
came to be manufactured.’ He took the glass in his fingers, stared at
it, shook his head and flung it into the grate.
‘Mrs. Matcham may object to such summary justice,’ laughed Luffington.
‘Mrs. Matcham object to any act of mine, sir? That would be a
revolution. I’ve only to say the word, and both Mrs. Matcham and John
Graham are ready to take you by the scruff of the neck and plant you
in the middle of the common.’
‘Instead, we sit pledging each other in the best of wines, and your
antecedent ill-humour is, I hope, carried off, once you have named a
continental Englishman, ‘Impudent Cockney’.’
Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy’s sombre eyes were instantly shot with mirth.
He smiled delightfully, and as he did so, looked less and less of
a Briton. It was the lovely roguish smile of a child that flashed
from wreathed lips and ran up like light to the broad brows arched
expressively. You would have forgiven him murder on the spot, much less
a rude speech. He dipped into his glass, and sipped vigour therefrom
for a fresh onslaught.
‘Ah, the continent! Generally means France, and France, of course,
means Paris, and Paris, by God, means every devilry under the sun.
Barricades, Bastilles, Julys, Septembers, baggy red breeches, Cockades,
Marseillaises, Communism, Atheism, in a word, hell’s own mischief.’
‘I commend your mental repertory, sir. It is a neat historical survey
extending over the past hundred years. We will say nothing of its
justice. When our aim is the saying of much in little, we must be
content to dispense with justice. But at least permit me to remark that
Paris does not mean the continent for me--very much the reverse.’
‘Then you ought to have sense enough to be drinking port instead of one
of your washy French castles,’ roared Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, attacking
his second bottle after he had thrust Fred’s second under his nose.
The night wore on, and the two men gradually grew to view one another
through the rosiest glamour. Luffington was ready to swear that his
companion was the most entertaining he had ever encountered, and Mr.
Malcolm Fitzroy, as he subsided into sleep upon his friend’s sofa, knew
not whether he was most satisfied in having gained his point about
the room--albeit Luffington enjoyed the bed--or in having made the
acquaintance of such a remarkably agreeable young fellow--no nonsense,
no cockloftiness, no French Atheism, or any other perverse ’isms for
that matter, he murmured as he wandered into the devious country of
dreams.
Early next morning Luffington walked down to the priest’s cottage,
to describe the night’s adventures to his friend. They paced the
garden pathway, Fred puffing a cigar, and both were enjoying a hearty
laugh over the story, when two figures stood upon the bright edge
of meadow that led into the deer-park. Clear and unshadowed in the
morning sunshine, it was as pleasant a picture as the eye of man could
desire, and to Fred, after his travels, all the pleasanter for being
so distinctly English. A fair, handsome lady, in a light tweed dress,
a broad-brimmed hat tied under her chin with long blue ribbons; from
her arm swung a long-legged child, short-skirted, with an Irish red
cloak blown out from her shoulders, upon the swell of which her long
bright hair flowed like a sunny streamer. The child was looking up with
an urgent charming expression, and talking with extreme vivacity. The
lady smiled down upon her, tapped her cheek, and carried her along at a
quick pace toward the cottage.
‘Her ladyship and her stepdaughter,’ said the priest. ‘It’s beautiful
to see how they love one another. If all mothers were like that
stepmother! But the wisest of us talk a deal of nonsense about women.
Isn’t she handsome?’
Luffington admitted that she was, in the strictly English way--somewhat
empty and expressionless, and feared that forty would find her fat.
The countess stopped at the gate, and chatted most affably. She gave
the priest a commission that postponed their projected excursion
till mid-day, and kindly invited Luffington to look over the Hall at
his leisure. The little girl offered to show him her collection of
butterflies, and then skipped away, with her blonde hair and red cloak
blown out sideway like a sail.
‘Has the Countess of Harborough no children of her own?’ asked
Luffington.
‘No; Lady Alice is the earl’s only child, and both he and the countess
adore her.’
The postponement of their excursion drove Luffington alone into the
solitary woods. But solitude among trees had no terrors for him;
enchantment sat upon his errant mind as fancy led him over dappled
sward and under the foliaged arches of mossy aisles. He came upon a
bridge, under which a slant of water chattered its foamy way over large
stones, and fell into sedate and scarce audible ripples between green
banks and a thick line of shrubs. The outer bank he followed in a
pastoral dream, to the accompaniment of a pretty consort of bird-song
and babbling stream. He discovered that it led straight to Fort Mary,
and here he sat on the edge of the pier, dangling his legs over the
lake, as he smoked and forgot the hours.
The ‘Trianon’ lay behind, and as he lifted a leg, and sprang upon the
gravel, he was conscious of the sound of a stifled sob carried, he
believed, from the trees edging the sward, which the lout had rolled
the day before. He stepped upon it, and he might have been walking on
plush. As he went, the sound of sobs grew heavier, and he could count
the checked breaths. He heard a man’s voice say softly: ‘My poor girl!
Mary, Mary, courage.’ There was no mistaking that gentle and soothing
voice, though he had heard it rasping and angry the night before. A
break in the column of trees showed him a picture, the very reverse of
the sweet domestic English picture that had charmed him a few hours ago.
The Countess of Harborough was weeping bitterly in Mr. Malcolm
Fitzroy’s arms.
II
Fred Luffington had once had the misfortune to see ‘an impossible
brute’ preferred to his elegant self by an old love of Antwerp, hence
he had long given up pondering the oddnesses of women’s love-fancies.
He was a gentleman as well, and kept that sharply incorrect picture to
himself. He met the countess again, and dropped his eyes, ashamed of
his knowledge. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy he eyed with a droll smile, and the
more he looked at him, the more incomprehensible the matter appeared.
But he was good company, that Fred admitted heartily, and shook
his hand with a cordial hope of meeting him again, now that their
little difference was settled, and had led to such cheery results. He
counselled him to take to claret, and to himself remarked that his
domestic ethics seemed none the better for the drinking of port, which
evidently had not taught him to let his neighbour’s wife alone. He had
met Lord Harborough once crossing the Park, and perfectly understood
the countess’s sobs. That was all he did understand. He could fancy
himself sobbing if he were a woman condemned to live his days with that
hard-featured, red-haired little man, bearing himself so primly and so
distractingly respectable.
‘Yes, that explains her odd choice,’ said Luffington, turning his back
upon Fendon, after a last grasp of the Flemish priest’s hand. ‘There’s
a taint of disreputableness about the local hero, who looks as if he
had rolled so much in the dust in infancy, that neither soap nor brush
has been able to give him a respectable head ever since.’
Fred Luffington went abroad again, and forgot all about the Flemish
priest and the half revealed drama of Fendon. A couple of years later
he had engaged to meet some friends at Lugano and, travelling from
Basle, decided to leave the train at the entrance to the St. Gothard
tunnel, and walk over the mountain. The weather was glorious, and such
scenery is enough to make a saint of the biggest sinner. The flush of
roseate snows, whose white from very purity is driven to flame; the
crystal splendours above, the shadows of the valleys revealed in the
twisted gaps like flakes of blue cloud softening the sunny whiteness,
wooded depths and sparkling water, with the ineffable beauty of the
turquoise stillness of the grand lake below: combined to make even
the breathing of a worldly young man a prayer of thanksgiving. Fred
Luffington never could gaze on the Alps without feeling his sins drop
from him like a garment, and his soul stand out, naked and innocent
before the majesty of creation.
He had been walking since mid-day, with rests in craggy nooks, and now
at sundown it behoved him to look out for shelter. He waited until he
had seen the last effects of an Alpine sunset before branching into a
narrow wooded path, which he was informed led to a little village. At
the first châlet, he knocked for admittance, and a fat woman came to
the door, in a state of evident perturbation. Her face cleared when she
discovered that he spoke Italian.
‘There is a sick man here. We think he must be an Englishman, but we
do not understand him, and he neither knows French nor Italian. If the
gentleman would but look at him. The doctor says he will not recover,’
she burst out, without stopping for breath.
Luffington followed her upstairs, and entered a tolerably clean little
room, where the sick man lay, either asleep or unconscious. Luffington
stood, and looked at him long and musingly. Where ever had he seen that
thin, sharp, foreign face, the curls of dust-hued black, the oddly
beautiful brow and full lips? A small brown hand lay upon the coverlet,
and it sprang a gush of sympathy to his eyes. Suddenly the closed lids
opened and revealed eyes of the sombre dead blackness of the sloe,
without the red and yellow flames he now so vividly remembered. So
this was the end of that sorry drama of Fendon! Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
was dying in a far-off Swiss village on the top of St. Gothard. And
the countess? Fred bent, and whispered his name, and begged to be used
as a friend. A gleam of recognition broke the dark blankness of the
dying man’s glance, and he made a feeble movement of his hand, which
Luffington caught and held in a gentle clasp. The sick man’s eyes
filled gratefully. He knew he was dying, and he was comforted by the
presence of Luffington.
All through the night Fred sat and nursed him. He was melted in
kindness and gratitude that this chance of redeeming some unworthy
hours had fallen to him. He held the dying man’s hand, listened to
his babble, and promised to destroy a packet of letters in a certain
ebony box, into which he was to place poor Fitzroy’s watch and pocket
book, and a copy of the _Spanish Gypsy_, the only book he possessed,
and deliver it into the hands of the Countess of Harborough. In the
presence of death, Fred could hear her name without any squeamishness.
‘Take from under my pillow a locket, and open it for me. I want to see
her face again.’
Fred did so, and could not help recognising the features of the
countess. He asked if Mr. Fitzroy had any other friends to whom he
could carry messages.
‘Friends? I have none,’ he said, in a toneless way, empty of all
bitterness or pain. ‘I neither sought friendship nor offered it. I have
loved but one being on this earth, and it has been my duty to stand
by and see her suffer, and now I must go, while she remains behind
unhappy, with none to comfort her. There is no comfort on earth for
miserable wives. When I think of them, I am wroth to hear men complain.
What do we know about pain compared with them? And yet they bear it.
The God that made them alone can explain how. But this last blow! How
will she bear that? Mary, Mary, my poor unhappy girl!’
He closed his eyes, and seemed to dose, then opened them, and clutched
Luffington’s fingers, like a startled child.
‘Don’t leave me,’ he breathed, through shut teeth. ‘It is so lonely
among strangers. Ah, if I were only back in my room in the ‘St. George
and the Dragon,’ with good Mrs. Matcham! Poor Mary! The worst of it
is, I have never been able to punch that rascal’s head. Never. For her
sake, I have had to “my Lord” him, when I wanted to be at his throat.
Well, I played the game gallantly. Nobody can deny that. It’s for her
now to continue it alone. The locket! Where’s the locket? Let it go
with me. It contains all I have loved on earth, and I’ll lie all the
quieter underground for having it with me.’
The dawn found him lifeless, and Luffington sitting with his stiff cold
hand clasped in his own. The locket, containing the likeness of the
Countess of Harborough and a thick twist of blonde hair, was buried,
along with the remains of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, in a little Alpine
churchyard.
* * * * *
One summer evening, the Flemish priest of Fendon was reading his
breviary in the garden, not so intent upon prayer that he had no eye
for his flower-beds, which he had just watered. He turned hastily
as the garden gate swung back, and recognised Fred Luffington, who
approached with an air of unwonted gravity. He carried a square parcel
under his arm.
‘My dear young friend,’ cried the enchanted priest, keeping, while he
spoke, a finger between the leaves of his breviary.
‘I have a painful commission for you. You must take this box at once
to the Countess of Harborough, and acquaint her with the news that Mr.
Malcolm Fitzroy is dead. I buried him in Switzerland a month ago.’
The priest shook his head sadly. He scrutinised Luffington’s features
sharply, and said--
‘Thank God, she knows that already--that is, the death. But I suspect
this box will open old wounds.’
‘Poor woman! Tell her Mr. Fitzroy sent this by a trusted friend. I
destroyed her letters. For her sake, I wish I were not in the secret,
but unhappily, by accident, I learnt it long before I found the poor
fellow dying in a Swiss châlet.’
‘Ah,’ muttered the priest, and felt for his pipe. ‘It’s unfortunate.
Not a soul but myself has known it for years--not even the earl, and
such a secret has cost me many an uncomfortable moment.’
Luffington cast a strange glance upon him. His words were inexplicable.
Known it for years! Secret unshared by the earl! Was the ground solid
beneath his feet, that a virtuous priest should contemplate the
likelihood of such a secret being shared with the earl?
‘It’s not to be feared I should betray a lady. God knows, I am no saint
myself, to blame anybody.’
‘I don’t blame her much myself. I deplore the need for duplicity, but
it was not her doing. They placed her in a false position. But while I
cannot but admire the tenacity of her affections and her loyalty to a
natural claim, I have ever been urging her to make a clean breast of
it to her husband. It was not her business to expiate the wrong of
others, but confession would have placed her and the unfortunate man
now in his grave upon a proper footing, and lent the dignity of candour
to their relations.’
Luffington felt mercilessly mystified. Even suppose the lovers not
altogether criminal, how could the earl’s recognition of their
irregular situation lend dignity to it? He spoke his perplexity, and
cast the good priest into a panic.
‘What did you mean by telling me you knew everything?’ he cried,
wrathfully. ‘Malcolm Fitzroy her ladyship’s lover! Poor woman, poor
woman! I thought you knew, and now I must break confidence, to clear
her, and tell you the wretched story.’
He drew Fred into his study, carefully closed the door, and there laid
bare a situation as odd as the personality of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. A
titled lady in Northumberland lost a new-born infant, and was herself
pronounced in danger unless a child could be found to take its place.
A gypsy outcast was discovered to have given birth to twins on the
same day, and was glad enough to resign the baby girl to the bereaved
aristocrat. The twins were the result of an intrigue between an English
gentleman and a handsome gypsy. The little girl blossomed into youth,
as English and refined as could be, and her foster-mother, whose
life she had saved, could not bring herself to part with her. As no
other children came, she grew up the daughter of the house, adored by
her self-made parents. The boy was his mother’s son, an intractable
vagrant, incapable of control, with the saving grace of a passionate
attachment to his sister.
When the Earl of Harborough came forward as a suitor, the old lord
and his wife debated long upon their duty to him and to his house,
and their desire for their darling’s advancement. The latter instinct
prevailed, and the earl believed himself the husband of a well-born
English maiden. The adopted parents were both dead, and the countess,
unhappy in her marriage, had nobody to turn to in her troubles but her
gypsy brother. To make good his dubious footing at the Hall, Fitzroy
had cast himself in the way of the earl, and secured an extraordinary
popularity in the village and upon the estate. The earl thought him a
droll fellow, unbent patronisingly to him, and enjoyed his odd vagabond
habits.
This was the secret of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy and the Countess of
Harborough.
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
_To Alice Cockran_
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
HERVÉ DE VERVAINVILLE, Marquis de Saint-Laurent, was at once the
biggest and smallest landlord of Calvados, the most important personage
of that department and the most insignificant and powerless. Into his
cradle the fairies had dropped all the gifts of fortune but those two,
without which the others taste as ashes--love and happiness. His life
was uncoloured by the affections of home, and his days, like his ragged
little visage and his dull personality, were vague, with the vagueness
of negative misery. Of his nurse he was meekly afraid, and his
relations with the other servants were of the most distantly polite and
official nature. He understood that they were there to do his bidding
nominally, and compel him actually to do theirs, pending his hour of
authority. With a little broken sigh, he envied the happiness that he
rootedly believed to accompany the more cheerful proportions of the
cottager’s experience, of which he occasionally caught glimpses in his
daily walks, remembering the chill solitude of his own big empty castle
and the immense park that seemed an expansion of his imprisonment,
including, as part of his uninterrupted gloom, the kindly meadows and
woods, the babbling streams and leafy avenues, where the birds sang of
joys uncomprehended by him.
Play was as foreign to him as hope. Every morning he gravely saluted
the picture of his pretty mother, which hung in his bedroom, a lovely
picture, hardly real in its dainty Greuze-like charm, arch and frail
and innocent, the bloom of whose eighteen years had been sacrificed
upon his own coming, leaving a copy washed of all beauty, its delicacy
blurred in a half-effaced boyish visage without character or colouring.
Of his father Hervé never spoke,--shrinking, with the unconscious pride
of race, from the male interloper who had been glad enough to drop
an inferior name, and was considered by his friends to have waltzed
himself and his handsome eyes into an enviable bondage. And the only
return he could make to the house that had so benefited him was a
flying visit from Paris to inspect the heir and confer with his son’s
steward (whose guardian he had been appointed by the old marquis at
his death), and then return to his city pleasures, which he found more
entertaining than his Norman neighbours.
On Sunday morning little Hervé was conducted to High Mass in the church
of Saint-Laurent, upon the broad highroad leading to the town of
Falaise. Duly escorted up the aisle by an obsequious Swiss in military
hat and clanking sword, with a long blonde moustache that excited the
boy’s admiration, Hervé and his nurse were bowed into the colossal
family pew, as large as a moderate-sized chamber, roughly carven and
running along the flat wide tombs of his ancestors, on which marble
statues of knights and mediæval ladies lay lengthways. The child’s air
of melancholy and solitary state was enough to make any honest heart
ache, and his presence never failed to waken the intense interest of
the simple congregation, and supply them with food for speculation as
to his future over their mid-day soup and cider. Hard indeed would it
have been to define the future of the little man sitting so decorously
in his huge pew, and following the long services in a spirit of almost
pathetic conventionality and resignation, only very occasionally
relieved by his queer broken sigh, that had settled into a trick, or a
furtive wandering of his eyes, that sought distraction among ancestral
epitaphs.
He was not, it must be owned, an engaging child, though soft-hearted
and timidly attracted by animals, whose susceptibilities he would have
feared to offend by any uninvited demonstration of affection. He had
heard himself described as plain and dull, and thought it his duty to
refrain as much as possible from inflicting his presence upon others,
preferring loneliness to adverse criticism. But he had one friend who
had found him out, and taken him to her equally unhappy and tender
heart. The Comtesse de Fresney, a lady of thirty, was, like himself,
miserable and misunderstood. Hervé thought she must be very beautiful
for him to love her so devotedly, and he looked forward with much
eagerness to the time of her widowhood, when he should be free to marry
her.
There was something inexpressibly sad in the drollery of their
relations. Neither was aware of the comic element, while both were
profoundly impressed with the sadness. Whenever a fair, a race, or
a company of strolling players took the tyrannical count away from
Fresney, a messenger was at once despatched to Saint-Laurent, and
gladly the little marquis trotted off to console his friend.
One day Hervé gave expression to his matrimonial intentions. The
countess, sitting with her hands in her lap, was gazing gloomily out of
the window, when she turned, and said, sighing: ‘Do you know, Hervé,
that I have never even been to Paris?’
Hervé did not know, and was not of an age to measure the frightful
depth of privation confessed. But the countess spoke in a sadder voice
than usual, and, in response to her sigh, his childish lips parted in
his own vague little sigh.
‘When I am grown up, I’ll take you to Paris, Countess,’ he said, coming
near, and timidly fondling her hand.
‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess, and she stooped to kiss him.
‘M. le Comte is so old that he will probably be dead by that time,
and then I can marry you, Countess, and you will live always at
Saint-Laurent. You know it is bigger than Fresney.’
‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess musingly, thinking of her lost years
and dead dreams, as she stared across the pleasant landscape.
Hervé regarded himself as an engaged gentleman from that day. The
following Sunday he studied the epitaph on the tomb of the last
Marquis, his grandfather, who had vanished into the darkness of an
unexplored continent, with notebook and scientific intent, to leave his
bones to whiten in the desert and the name of a brave man to adorn his
country’s annals. Hervé was all excitement to learn from the countess
the precise meaning of the words _distinguished_ and _explorer_.
‘Countess,’ he hurried to ask, ‘what is it to be distinguished?’
‘It is greatly to do great things, Hervé.’
‘And what does _explorer_ mean?’
‘To go far away into the unknown; to find out unvisited places, and
teach others how much larger the world is than they imagine.’
This explanation thrilled new thoughts and ambition in the breast
of the little marquis. Why should not he begin at once to explore
the world, and see for himself what lay beyond the dull precincts of
Saint-Laurent? He then would become distinguished like his grandfather,
and the countess would be proud of him. The scheme hurried his pulses,
and gave him his first taste of excitement, which stood him in place
of a very small appetite. He watched his moment in the artful instinct
of childhood with a scheme in its head. It was not difficult to elude
a careless nurse and gossiping servants, and he knew an alley by which
the broad straight road, leading from the castle to the town, might
be reached over a friendly stile that involved no pledge of secrecy
from an untrustworthy lodge-keeper. And away he was scampering along
the hedge, drunk with excitement and the glory of his own unprotected
state, drunk with the spring sunshine and the smell of violets that
made breathing a bliss.
Picture a tumble-down town, with a quantity of little streets breaking
unexpectedly into glimpses of green meadow and foliage; rickety
omnibuses, jerking and rumbling upon uncouth wheels, mysteriously held
by their drivers from laying their contents upon the jagged pavements;
little old-fashioned squares, washed by runlets for paving divisions,
with the big names of _La Trinité_, _Saint-Gervais_, _Guillaume le
Conquérant_, and the _Grand Turc_,--the latter the most unlikely form
of heretic ever to have shaken the equilibrium of the quaint town;
a public fountain, a market-place, many-aisled churches, smelling
of damp and decay, their fretted arches worn with age, and their
pictures bleached of all colour by the moist stone; primitive shops,
latticed windows, asthmatical old men in blouses and night-caps, in
which they seem to have been born and in which they promise to die;
girls in linen towers and starched side-flaps concealing every curl
and wave of their hair, their _sabots_ beating the flags with the
click of castanets; groups of idle huzzars, moustached and menacing,
strutting the dilapidated public gardens like walking arsenals, the
eternal cigarette between their lips, and the everlasting _sapristi_
and _sacré_ upon them. Throw in a _curé_ or two, wide-hatted, of
leisured and benevolent aspect, with a smile addressed to the world as
a general _mon enfant_; an _abbé_, less leisured and less assured of
public indulgence; a discreet _frère_, whose hurrying movements shake
his robes to the dimensions of a balloon; an elegant _sous-préfet_,
conscious of Parisian tailoring, and much in request in provincial
salons; a wooden-legged colonel, devoted to the memory of the first
Napoleon, and wrathful at that of him of Sedan; a few civilians of
professional calling, deferential to the military and in awe of the
colonel; the local gossip and shopkeeper on Trinity Square, Mère
Lescaut, who knows everything about everybody, and the usual group of
antagonistic politicians. For the outskirts, five broad roads diverging
star-wise from a common centre, with an inviting simplicity of aspect
that might tempt the least adventurous spirit of childhood to make,
by one of those pleasant, straight, and leafy paths, for the alluring
horizon. Add the local lion, Great William’s Tower, a very respectable
Norman ruin, where a more mythical personage than William might easily
have been born, and which might very well hallow more ancient loves
than those of Robert and the washerwoman Arletta; a splendid equestrian
statue of the Conqueror, and a quantity of threads of silver water
running between mossy banks, where women in mountainous caps of linen
wash clothes, and the violets in spring and autumn grow so thickly,
that the air is faint with their sweet scent. Afar, green field upon
green field, stretching on all sides, till the atmospheric blue blots
out their colour and melts them into the sky; sudden spaces of wood
making shadows upon the bright plains and dusty roads, fringed with
poplars, cutting uninterrupted paths to the horizon.
The weekly fair was being held on the Place de la Trinité, when Hervé
made his way so far. The noise and jollity stunned him. Long tables
were spread round, highly coloured and decorated with a variety of
objects, and good-humoured cleanly Norman women in caps, and men in
blue blouses, were shouting exchanged speech, or wrangling decorously.
Hervé thrust his hands into his pockets in a pretence of security,
like that assumed by his elders upon novel occasions, though his
pulses shook with unaccustomed force and velocity; and he walked round
the tables with uneasy impulses towards the toys and sweetmeats, and
thought a ride on the merry-go-round would be an enviable sensation.
But these temptations he gallantly resisted, as unbecoming his serious
business. Women smiled upon him, and called him, _Ce joli petit
monsieur_, a fact which caused him more surprise than anything else,
having heard his father describe him as ugly. He bowed to them, when
he rejected their offers of toys and penknives, but could not resist
the invitation of a fresh cake, and held his hat in one hand, while he
searched in his pocket to pay for it. Hervé made up for his dulness by
a correctness of demeanour that was rather depressing than captivating.
Munching his cake with a secret pleasure in this slight infringement of
social law, he wandered upon the skirt of the noisy and good-natured
crowd, which, in the settlement of its affairs, was lavish in smiles
and jokes. What should he do with his liberty and leisure when his
senses had tired of this particular form of intoxication? He bethought
himself of the famous tower which Pierrot, the valet, had assured him
was the largest castle in the world. Glancing up the square, he saw
the old wooden-legged colonel limping towards him, and Hervé promptly
decided that so warlike a personage could not fail to be aware of the
direction in which the tower lay. He barred the colonel’s way with his
hat in his hand, and said: ‘Please, Monsieur, will you be so good as to
direct me to the castle of William the Conqueror?’
The colonel heard the soft tremulous pipe, and brought his fierce glare
down upon the urchin with hawklike penetration. Fearful menace seemed
to lie in the final tap of his wooden leg upon the pavement, as he
came to a standstill in front of Hervé, and he cleared his chest with
a loud military sound like _boom_. Hervé stood the sound, but winced
and repeated his request more timidly. Now this desperate-looking
soldier had a kindly heart, and loved children. He had not the least
idea that his loud _boom_, and his shaggy eyebrows, and his great
scowling red face frightened the life out of them. A request from a
child so small and feeble to be directed to anybody’s castle, much less
the Conqueror’s, when so many strong and idle arms in the world must
be willing to carry him, afflicted him with an almost maternal throb
of tenderness. By his smile he dispersed the unpleasant impressions
of his _boom_ and the click of his artificial limb, and completely
won Hervé’s confidence, who was quite pleased to find his thin little
fingers lost in the grasp of his new companion’s large hand, when the
giant in uniform turned and volunteered to conduct him to the tower.
Crossing the Square of Guillaume le Conquérant, Hervé even became
expansive.
‘Look, Monsieur,’ he cried, pointing to the beautiful bronze statue,
‘one would say that the horse was about to jump, and throw the knight.’
The colonel slapped his chest like a man insulted in the person of a
glorious ancestor, and emitted an unusually gruff _boom_, that nearly
blew little Hervé to the other side of the square, and made his lips
tremble.
‘I’d like, young sir, to see the horse that could have thrown that
man,’ said the Norman.
‘There was a Baron of Vervainville when Robert was Duke of Normandy.
He went with Robert to the Crusades. The countess has told me that
only very distinguished and brave people went to the Crusades in those
days. They were wars, Monsieur, a great way off. I often try to make
out what is written on his tomb in Saint-Laurent, but I can never get
further than Geoffroi,’ Hervé concluded, with his queer short sigh,
while in front of them rose the mighty Norman ruin upon the landscape,
like the past glancing poignantly through an ever youthful smile.
The colonel, enlightened by this communication upon the lad’s identity,
stared at him in alarmed surprise.
‘Is there nobody in attendance upon M. le Marquis?’ he asked.
‘I am trying to be an explorer like my grandpapa; that is why I
have run away at once. I am obliged to you, Monsieur, but it is not
necessary that you should give yourself the trouble to come further
with me. I shall be able to find the way back to the Place de la
Trinité.’
The colonel was dubious as to his right to accept dismissal. The sky
looked threatening, and he hardly believed that he could in honour
forsake the child. But, _sapristi!_ there were the unread papers down
from Paris waiting for him at his favourite haunt, the Café du Grand
Turc, to be discussed between generous draughts of cider. He tugged
his grey moustache in divided feelings, and at last came to a decision
with the aid of his terrible _boom_. He would deliver the little
marquis into the hands of the _concierge_ of the tower, and after a
look in upon his cronies at the Grand Turc and a glass of cider, hasten
to Saint-Laurent in search of proper authority.
Hervé was a decorous sightseer, who left others much in the dark as to
his private impressions of what he saw. The tower, he admitted, was
very big and cold. He did not think it would give him much satisfaction
to have been born in the chill cavernous chamber wherein William had
first seen the light, while the bombastic lines upon the conquest of
the Saxons, read to him in a strong Norman accent, gave him the reverse
of a desire to explore that benighted land. With his hands in his
pockets, he stood and peeped through the slit in the stone wall, nearly
as high as the clouds, whence Robert is supposed to have detected the
charming visage of Arletta, washing linen below, with a keenness of
sight nothing less diabolical than his sobriquet, _le diable_.
‘I couldn’t see anybody down so far, could you?’ he asked; and then
his attention was caught by the big rain-drops that were beginning to
fall in black circles upon the unroofed stone stairs. The _concierge_
watched the sky a moment, then lifted Hervé into his arms, and hurried
down the innumerable steps to the shelter of his own cosy parlour.
Excitement and fatigue were telling upon the child, who looked nervous
and scared. The rain-drops had gathered the force and noise of several
waterfalls, pouring from the heavens with diluvian promise. Already
the landscape was drenched and blotted out of view. An affrighted
peasant, in _sabots_ large enough to shelter the woman and her family
of nursery rhyme, darted down the road, holding a coloured umbrella
as big as a tent. The roar of thunder came from afar, and a flash of
lightning broke through the vapoury veil, making Hervé blink like a
distracted owl caught by the dawn. Oh, if he were only back safely
at Saint-Laurent, or could hold the hand of his dear countess! No,
he would not explore any more until he was a grown-up man. A howl of
thunder and a child’s feeble cry----
Meanwhile confusion reigned in the castle. Men and women flew
hither and thither, screaming blame upon each other. In an agony of
apprehension, the butler ordered the family coach, and was driven into
town, wondering how M. le Vervainville would take the news if anything
were to happen to remove the source of his wealth and local importance.
_Parbleu!_ he would not be the man to tell him. Crossing the Place de
la Trinité, he caught sight of Mère Lescaut gazing out upon the deluged
square. In a happy inspiration, he determined to consult her, and while
he was endeavouring to make his knock heard above the tempest and to
shield his eyes from the glare of the lightning flashes, Mère Lescaut
thrust her white cap out through the upper half of the shop door, and
screamed, ‘You are looking for M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent, and I
saw him cross the square with Colonel Larousse this afternoon.’
‘_Diable! Diable!_’ roared the distracted butler. ‘I passed the colonel
on the road an hour ago.’
The endless moments lost in adjuring the gods, in voluble faith in
calamity, in imprecations at the storm, and shivering assertions of
discomfort which never mend matters, and at last the dripping colonel
and swearing butler meet. M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent and Baron de
Vervainville was found asleep amid the historic memories of Robert and
Arletta.
This escapade brought M. de Vervainville down from Paris, with a new
tutor. The tutor was very young, very modern, and very cynical. He was
not in the least interested in Hervé, though rather amused when, on the
second day of their acquaintance, the boy asked--‘Monsieur, are you
engaged to be married?’ The tutor was happy to say that he had not that
misfortune.
‘Is it then a misfortune? I am very glad that I am engaged, though I
have heard my nurse say that married people are not often happy.’
The tutor thought it not improbable such an important personage as
the Marquis de Saint-Laurent had been officially betrothed to some
desirable _parti_ of infant years, and asked her age and name.
‘The Countess de Fresney. She is not a little girl, and at present
her husband is alive, but I daresay he will be dead soon. You know,
Monsieur, she is a great deal older than I am, but I shall like that
much better. It will not be necessary for me to learn much, for she
will know everything for me, and I can amuse myself. I will take you
to see her to-morrow. She is very beautiful,--but not so beautiful as
my mamma--and I love her very dearly.’
It occurred to the cynical tutor that the countess might be bored
enough in this uncheerful place to take an interest in so captivating a
person as himself. But when they arrived at Fresney, they learnt that
the countess was seriously ill. Hervé began to cry when he was refused
permission to see his friend, and at that moment M. le Comte, an
erratic, middle-aged tyrant, held in mortal terror by his dependants,
burst in upon him, with a vigorous--‘Ho, ho! the little marquis, my
rival! Come hither, sirrah, and let me run the sword of vengeance
through your body.’
And the merry old rascal began to roll his eyes, and mutter strange
guttural sounds for his own amusement and Hervé’s fright.
‘I do not care if you do kill me, M. le Comte,’ the boy sobbed. ‘You
are a wicked man, and it is because you make dear Madame unhappy that
she is so ill. You are as wicked and ugly as the ogre in the story she
gave me last Christmas. But she will get well, and you will die, and
then I will marry her, and she will never be unhappy any more.’
‘Take him away before I kill him--the insolent little jackanapes! In
love with a married woman, and telling it to her husband! Ho, ho! so
I am an ogre! Very well, let me make a meal of you.’ With that he
produced an orange and offered it to Hervé, who turned on his heel, and
stumbled out of the room, blinded with tears.
But the countess did not get well. She sent for Hervé one day, and
kissed him tenderly.
‘My little boy, my little Hervé, you will soon be alone again. But you
will find another friend, and by and by you will be happy.’
‘Never, never, if you die, Countess. I shall not care for anything, not
even for my new pony, though it has such a pretty white star on its
forehead. I do not want to grow up, and I shall never be married now,
nor--nothing,’ he cried, with quivering lips.
That evening his friend died, and the news was brought to Hervé, as he
and the tutor sat over their supper. Hervé pushed away his plate, and
took his scared and desolated little heart to the solitude of his own
room. During the night, the tutor was awakened by his call.
‘Monsieur, please to tell me what happens when people die.’
‘_Ma foi_, there is nothing more about them,’ cried the tutor.
‘And what are those who do not die supposed to do?’
‘To moderate their feelings,--and go to sleep.’
‘But I cannot sleep, Monsieur. I am very unhappy. Oh, I wish it had
been the count. Why doesn’t God kill wicked persons? Is it wicked to
wish the count to be dead, Monsieur?’
‘Very.’
‘Then I must be dreadfully wicked, for I would like to kill him myself,
if I were big and strong.’
At breakfast next day, he asked if people did not wear very black
clothes when their friends died, and indited a curious epistle to his
father, begging permission to wear the deepest mourning for the lady
he was to have married. Vested in black, his little mouse-coloured
head looked more pitiful and vague than ever, as he sat out the long
funeral service in the church of Saint-Gervais, and lost himself in
endless efforts to count the candles, and understand what the strange
catafalque and velvet pall in the middle of the church meant, and what
had become of the countess.
After the burial his tutor took him to the cemetery. The bereaved child
carried a big wreath to lay upon the grave of his departed lady-love.
Kneeling there, upon the same mission, was M. le Comte, shedding
copious tears, and apostrophising the dead he had made it a point to
wound in life. Hervé knelt opposite him, and stared at him indignantly.
Why should he cry? The countess had not loved him, nor had he loved the
countess. The boy flung himself down on the soft earth, and began to
sob bitterly. The thought that he would never again see his lost friend
took full possession of him for the first time, and he wanted to die
himself. Disturbed by this passionate outbreak, the count rose, brushed
the earth from his new trousers with a mourning pocket-handkerchief
already drenched with his tears, and proceeded to lift Hervé.
‘The dear defunct was much attached to you, little marquis,’ he said,
and began to wipe away Hervé’s tears with the handkerchief made sacred
by his own. ‘You were like a son to her.’
‘I don’t want you to dry my eyes, Monsieur,’ Hervé exploded, bursting
from his enemy’s arms. ‘I do not like you, and I always thought you
would die soon, and not Madame. It isn’t just, and I will not be
friends with you. I shall hate you always, for you are a wicked man,
and you were cruel to Madame.’
The count, who was not himself accounted sane by his neighbours, looked
at the amused and impassable tutor, and significantly touched his
forehead.
‘Hereditary,’ he muttered, and stood to make way for Hervé.
The birds were singing deliciously, the late afternoon sunshine
gathered above the quiet trees (made quieter by here and there an
unmovable cypress and a melancholy yew, fit symbols of the rest of
death) into a pale golden mist shot with slanting rays of light, and
the violets’ was the only scent to shake by suggestion the sense of
soothing negation of all emotion or remembrance. Out upon the road,
running like a broad ribbon to the town, unanimated in the gentle
illumination of the afternoon, the tutor and Hervé met the colonel
limping along one might imagine, upon the sound of a prolonged _boom_.
Hervé’s tears were dried, but his face looked sorrowful and stained
enough to spring tears of sympathy to any kind eyes. The colonel drew
up, touched his cap, and uttered his customary signal with more than
his customary gruffness. Hervé stood his ground firmly, though he
winced, for he was a delicate child unused to rough sounds.
‘How goes it, M. le Marquis? How goes it?’ shouted the colonel.
‘M. le colonel, it goes very badly with me, but I try to bear it. My
tutor tells me that men do not fret; I wish I knew how they manage not
to do so when they are sad. I did want to grow up soon, and explore the
world like my grandpapa, and then I should have married the Countess of
Fresney, if her husband were dead. But now everything is different, and
I don’t even want to see the tower of William the Conqueror again. I
don’t want to grow up. I don’t want anything now.’
‘Poor little man!’ said the colonel, patting his shoulder. ‘You’ve
lost a friend, but you will gain others, and perhaps you’ll be a great
soldier one of these days, like the little Corporal.’
Hervé shook his head dolorously. He saw nothing ahead but unpleasant
lessons varied by sad excursions to the countess’s grave.
The unhappy little marquis was moping and fading visibly. He could
not be got to take an interest in his lessons, and he proudly strove
to conceal the fact that he was afraid of his tutor’s mocking smile.
The news of his ill-health reached M. de Vervainville in Paris, and at
once brought that alarmed gentleman down to Falaise. On Hervé’s life
depended his town luxuries and his importance as a landed proprietor.
Was there anything his son wished for? Hervé reflected a while, then
raised his mouse-coloured head, and sighed his own little sigh. He
thought he should like to see Colonel Larousse. And so it came that one
morning, staring out of the window, the boy saw a familiar military
figure limping up the avenue. Hervé’s worried small countenance almost
glowed with expectation, as he rushed to welcome his visitor, the sound
of whose _boom_ and the tap of his wooden leg upon the parquet, as well
as his dreadful shaggy eyebrows, seemed even cheerful.
‘Do you think, Monsieur,’ Hervé asked gravely ‘that you would mind
having for a friend such a very little boy as I?’
The colonel cleared his throat and felt his eyes required the same
operation, though he concealed that fact from Hervé.
‘Boom! Touchez là, mon brave.’
Never yet had Hervé heard speech so hearty and so republican. It
astonished him, and filled him with a sense of perfect ease and
trust. It was like a free breath in oppressive etiquette,--the
child-prince’s first mud-pie upon the common road of humanity. Hervé
became excited, and confided to the colonel that his father had ordered
a toy sailing-boat for him, and that there was going to be a ball at
Saint-Laurent in honour of his birthday, though he was not quite sure
that he would enjoy that so much as the boat, for he had never danced,
and could not play any games like other children. Still if Colonel
Larousse would come, they could talk about soldiers. Come? Of course
the colonel came, looking in his brushed uniform as one of the heroes
home from Troy, and Hervé admired him prodigiously.
The birthday ball was a great affair. Guests came all the way from
Caen and Lisieux, and Hervé, more bewildered than elated, stood beside
his splendid father to receive them. Ladies in lovely robes, shedding
every delicate scent, like flowers, petted him, and full-grown men,
looking at these ladies, made much of him. They told him that he was
charming, but he did not believe them. One cannot be both ugly and
charming, little Hervé thought, with much bitterness and an inclination
to cry. Their compliments gave him the same singular sensations evoked
by the tutor’s smile.
‘I do not know any of these people,’ he said sadly to Colonel Larousse.
‘I don’t think a ball very cheerful, do you? It makes my head ache to
hear so many strange voices, and feel so much smaller than anybody
else. My papa amuses himself, but I would like to run away to my boat.’
‘_Boom! Mon camarade_, a soldier sticks to his post.’
Hervé sighed, and thought if the countess had been here that he would
have sat beside her all the evening, and have held her hand. And the
knowledge that he would never again hold her hand, and that so many
long weeks had passed since fond lips had kissed his face, and a
sweet voice had called him ‘Little Hervé, little boy,’ brought tears
of desperate self-pitying pain to his eyes. In these large illuminated
salons, vexed with the mingled odours of flowers and scented skirts,
by the scraping of fiddles and the flying feet of laughing dancers,
unmindful of him as other than a queer quiet boy in velvet and Alençon
lace, with a plain grey little face and owlish eyes that never smiled,
Hervé felt more alone than ever he had felt since the countess’s death.
Stealthily he made his escape through the long open window, and ran
down the dewy lawn. How gratefully the cool air tasted and the lovely
stillness of the night after the aching brilliancy within! Hervé
assured himself that it was a pleasant relief, and hoped there would
not be many more balls at the castle.
The lake fringed the lawn, and moored against the branches of a weeping
willow was his toy-boat, just as he had left it in the afternoon. It
would look so pretty, he believed, sailing under the rising moon that
touched the water silver and the blue stars that showed so peacefully
upon it. He unknotted the string, and gaily the little boat swam out
upon his impulsion. If only the countess could come back to him, he
thought, with his boat he would be perfectly happy. ‘But I am so alone
among them all,’ he said to himself, with his broken sigh. ‘I wished
somebody loved me as little children are loved by their mammas.’
The boat had carried away the string from his loose grasp, and he
reached out his arm upon the water to recover it. A soft, moist bank,
a small eager foot upon it, a frame easily tilted by an unsteady
movement, the dark water broken into circling bubbles upon a child’s
shrill cry of terror, and closing impassably over the body of poor
forlorn little Hervé and his pretty velvet suit and Alençon lace,--this
is what the stars and the pale calm moon saw; and over there upon
the further shore of the lake floated the toy-boat as placidly as if
it had worked no treachery, and had not led to the extinction of an
illustrious name and race.
‘Where is M. le Marquis?’ demanded M. de Vervainville, interrupting an
enchanting moment upon discovery of his son’s absence from the salon.
A search, a hurry, a scare,--music stopped, wine-glasses at the
buffet laid down untouched, ices rejected, fear and anxiety upon
every face. M. le Marquis is not in the salons, nor in the tutor’s
apartment, nor in his own. The grounds are searched, ‘Hervé’ and ‘M.
le Marquis’ ringing through the silence unanswered. His boat was found
and the impress of small footsteps upon the wet bank. M. le Marquis de
Saint-Laurent and Baron de Vervainville was drowned.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty at the
Edinburgh University Press
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Some minor inconsistencies and obvious typographical and punctuation
errors have been corrected silently.
On page 184, ‘He will write to you to Paris’ has been changed ‘He will
write to you in Paris’
On page 217: A duplicate ‘for’ has been removed in ‘The less reason
have they for for a vestige of belief in man’
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Dr. Vermont's fantasy and other stories" ***
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