DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY
AND OTHER STORIES

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PART FIRST
MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT

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; [Pg 4] 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 [Pg 5] 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 [Pg 6] 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. [Pg 7]

‘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. [Pg 8]

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 [Pg 9] 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 [Pg 10] 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 [Pg 11] 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 [Pg 12] 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 [Pg 13] 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 [Pg 14] 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 [Pg 15] 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. [Pg 16]

‘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. [Pg 17]

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.’ [Pg 18]

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. [Pg 19]

THE STORY OF MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT

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 [Pg 56] 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 [Pg 57] 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, [Pg 58] 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 [Pg 59] 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 [Pg 60] 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 [Pg 61] 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 [Pg 62] 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 [Pg 63] 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. [Pg 64]

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, [Pg 65] 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 [Pg 66] 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 [Pg 67] 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 [Pg 68] 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, [Pg 69] 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 [Pg 70] 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. [Pg 71] ‘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.’ [Pg 72]

‘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.’ [Pg 73]

‘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.’ [Pg 74]

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 [Pg 75] 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, [Pg 76] 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, [Pg 77] 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 [Pg 78] 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 [Pg 79] 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 [Pg 80] 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 [Pg 81] 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 [Pg 82] 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! [Pg 83]

‘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! [Pg 84] 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 [Pg 85] 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, [Pg 86] 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, [Pg 87] 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 [Pg 88] 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 [Pg 89] 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. [Pg 90]

NEW YEAR’S EVE

EPILOGUE

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 [Pg 132] 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 [Pg 133] 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 [Pg 134] 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 [Pg 135] 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 [Pg 136] 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, [Pg 137] 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 [Pg 138] 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 [Pg 139] 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 [Pg 140] 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 [Pg 141] 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. [Pg 142]

‘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, [Pg 143] 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 [Pg 144] 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 [Pg 145] 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 [Pg 146] 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 [Pg 147] 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? [Pg 148]

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, [Pg 149] 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. [Pg 150]

‘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 [Pg 151] 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 [Pg 152] 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.

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 [Pg 153] 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 [Pg 154] 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 [Pg 155] 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. [Pg 156]

‘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—

‘They might have been written of her,’ he continued, in his dear, fresh, expansive way. [Pg 157] ‘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:

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:

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? [Pg 159] 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.

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:

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 [Pg 160] 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 [Pg 161] 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 [Pg 162] 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 [Pg 163] 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 [Pg 164] 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 [Pg 165] 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 [Pg 166] 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. [Pg 167]

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 [Pg 168] 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. [Pg 169]

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! [Pg 170]

‘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 [Pg 171] 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——! [Pg 172]

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 [Pg 173] 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 [Pg 174] 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 [Pg 175] 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 [Pg 176] 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 [Pg 177] 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 [Pg 178] 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 [Pg 179] 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. [Pg 180] 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 [Pg 181] 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 [Pg 182] 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 [Pg 183] 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, [Pg 184] 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. [Pg 185]

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 [Pg 188] 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 [Pg 189] 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 [Pg 190] 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 [Pg 191] 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, [Pg 192] 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. [Pg 193] 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 [Pg 194] 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 [Pg 195] 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 [Pg 196] 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 [Pg 197] 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....” [Pg 198]

‘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; [Pg 199] 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 [Pg 200] 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 [Pg 201] 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 [Pg 202] 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 [Pg 203] 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 [Pg 204] 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 [Pg 205] 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 [Pg 206] 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 [Pg 207] 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 [Pg 208] 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, [Pg 209] 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, [Pg 210] 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, [Pg 211] 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 [Pg 212] 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 [Pg 213] 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 [Pg 214] 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: [Pg 215]

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 [Pg 216] 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 [Pg 217] 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 [Pg 218] 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 [Pg 219] 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 [Pg 220] 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 [Pg 221] 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 [Pg 222] 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 [Pg 223] 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

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 [Pg 228] 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 [Pg 229] 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 [Pg 230] 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, [Pg 231] 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. [Pg 232]

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 [Pg 233] 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 [Pg 234] the end of his mother’s letter, not one but had been summoned upon duty. The letter ran thus:—

[Pg 236]

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 [Pg 237] 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.’ [Pg 238]

‘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. [Pg 239] ’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 [Pg 240] 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 [Pg 241] 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 [Pg 242] 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 [Pg 243] 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. [Pg 244]

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 [Pg 245] 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 [Pg 246] 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.’

Madame Ulrich and her niece came again to the studio. They came very often. Armand [Pg 247] 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 [Pg 248] 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 [Pg 249] 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. [Pg 250]

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. [Pg 251] 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. [Pg 252]

‘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 [Pg 253] 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.’ [Pg 254]

‘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 [Pg 255] 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 [Pg 256] 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 [Pg 257] 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 [Pg 258] 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 [Pg 259] 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 [Pg 260] 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 [Pg 261] 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.

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 [Pg 262] 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 [Pg 263] 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 [Pg 264] 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 [Pg 265] 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

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 [Pg 270] 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 [Pg 271] ‘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. [Pg 272]

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 [Pg 273] 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 [Pg 274] 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, [Pg 275] 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, [Pg 276] 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 [Pg 277] 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 [Pg 278] 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 [Pg 279] 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. [Pg 280]

‘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 [Pg 281] 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 [Pg 282] 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 [Pg 283] 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. [Pg 284]

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 [Pg 285] 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 [Pg 286] 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 [Pg 287] 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 [Pg 288] 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 [Pg 289] 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?’ [Pg 290]

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 [Pg 291] 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. [Pg 292]

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 [Pg 293] 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 [Pg 294] 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. [Pg 295]

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 [Pg 296] 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 [Pg 297] 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 [Pg 298] 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.’ [Pg 299]

‘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 [Pg 300] 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 [Pg 301] 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 [Pg 302] 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. [Pg 303]

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 [Pg 306] 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 [Pg 307] 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 [Pg 308] 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. [Pg 309]

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. [Pg 310]

‘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.’ [Pg 311]

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 [Pg 312] 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 [Pg 313] 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 [Pg 314] 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 [Pg 315] 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 [Pg 316] 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 [Pg 317] 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 [Pg 318] 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 [Pg 319] 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 [Pg 320] 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. [Pg 321] 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 [Pg 322] 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 [Pg 323] 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 [Pg 324] 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 [Pg 325] 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, [Pg 326] 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 [Pg 327] 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 [Pg 328] 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 [Pg 329] 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. [Pg 330]

‘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 [Pg 331] 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 [Pg 332] 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, [Pg 333] 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. [Pg 334]

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.