Our Lady of Darkness
Date: 2021-10-07T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Historical fiction; France -- History -- Revolution; 1789-1799 -- Fiction; British -- France -- Fiction

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Title: Our Lady of Darkness

Author: Bernard Capes

Release date: October 7, 2021 [eBook #66489]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR LADY OF DARKNESS ***

EPIGRAPH.

“She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles, and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. ... And her name is Mater Tenebrarum--Our Lady of Darkness.”—De Quincey.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS

A NOVEL

BY
BERNARD CAPES
AUTHOR OF ‘THE LAKE OF WINE,’ ‘ADVENTURES OF
THE COMTE DE LA MUETTE,’ ETC.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCIX
All Rights reserved

CONTENTS.

BOOK I. | BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS.
BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

From two till four o’clock on any summer afternoon during the penultimate decade of the last century, the Right Honourable Gustavus Hilary George, third Viscount Murk, Baron Brindle and Knight of the Stews, with orders of demerit innumerable—and, over his quarterings, that bar-sinister which would appear to be designed for emphasis of the fact that the word rank has a double meaning—might be seen (in emulation of a more notable belswagger) ogling the ladies from the verandah of his house in Cavendish Square. That this, his lordship’s daily habit, was rather the expression of an ineradicable self-complacency than its own justification by results, the appearance of the withered old applejohn himself gave testimony. For here, in truth, was a very doyen of dandy-cocks—a last infirmity of fribbles—a macaroni with a cuticle so hardened by the paint and powder of near fourscore years as to be impervious to the shafts of ridicule. He would blow a kiss along the palm of his palsied hand, and never misdoubt the sure flight of this missive, though his unmanageable wrist should beat a tattoo on his nose the while; he would leer through quizzing-glasses of a power to exhibit in horrible accent the rheum of his eyes; he would indite musky billets-doux, like meteorological charts, to Dolly or Dorine, and, forgetting their direction when despatched, would simper over the quiddling replies as if they were archly amorous solicitations. Upon the truth that is stranger than fiction he had looked all his life as upon an outer barbarian, the measure of whose originality was merely the measure of uncouthness. Nature, in fact, was a dealer of ridiculous limitations; art, a merchant of inexhaustible surprises. Vanity! he would quote one fifty instances in support of the fact that it was the spring-head of all history. Selfishness! was it not the first condition of organic existence? Make-believe! the whole world’s system of government, from royalty to rags, was founded upon it. Therefore he constituted himself understudy to his great prototype of Queensberry; and therefore he could actually welcome the loss or deterioration of anything bodily and personal for the reason that it presented him with the opportunity to substitute mechanical perfection for natural deficiency. Perhaps at no period of his life had he so realised his ideal of existence as when, upon his seventy-seventh year, he found himself false—inside and out—from top to toe.

“Death,” he chuckled, “will be devilish put to it to stab me in a vital part.”

He said this to his grand-nephew, the orphaned heir-apparent to his title and moderate estates and to nothing else that he valued.

The young man was, indeed, his uncle’s very antithesis—his butt, his foil, his aggravation. He, the nephew, considered no doubt that he held a brief for the other side (truth to oneself, we will call it); and he was never at great pains to disguise his contempt of a certain order of licence. Cold, dry, austere, he had yet that observant faculty that, conceiving of circumstance, may fall pregnant with either justice or inhumanity. At present, from the height of his twenty-five years, he looked with a tolerant serenity into the arena of struggling passions.

“This is all vastly foolish,” was his superior reflection. “Am I destined to make a practice of turning my thumb up or down?”

Now, on a certain day of ’88, he walked into the house in Cavendish Square and joined his unvenerable elder on the balcony.

“Give me the parasol, Jepps,” said he. “I will hold it over Lord Murk’s head.”

The man obeyed, and withdrew. The uncle turned himself about, with a little feint of protest.

“Well,” he said resignedly, “your chacolate makes a pretty foil to my azure; and if you must dress like an attorney’s clerk, you hev at least the unspeakable satisfaction of posing as background to a gentleman.”

His glasses dangled from his neck by a broad black ribbon. He lifted them as he spoke, and conned a passing face.

“Egad!” said he, involuntarily extending his left hand as if to deprecate interruption, “what a form! What a ravishing and seductive elegance! Strake me, Ned, but if thou wert other than a bran-stuffed jackalent, I’d send thee thither to canvass for me.”

He scratched his chin testily with one from several little cocked-hat notes that lay on a chair at his side. His fingers were steeped to the knuckles in gems; his cheeks, plastered with chalk and rouge, looked in texture like the dinted covering of honeycomb. Now and again he would shoot at his young relative a covert glance of extreme dislike.

“Rat thee, Ned!” he exclaimed suddenly; “thou hast a devilish face!”

“’Tis no index to my character, then, sir, I can assure you.”

“You needn’t, egad! There’s a shrewd measure of reserve in these matters. Show me a face that’s an index and I’ll show you an ass. But I’d like to learn, as a mere question of curiasity, why you persist in dressing like a cit, eating at beef ordinaries, and sleeping at some demned low tavern over against the Cock and Pye ditch?”

“Sure, sir, in this connection at least, you’ll grant me the authority of fashion?”

“Fashion! Paris fashion! Franklin fashion! But it’s not for the heir to an English viscountcy to model himself on a Yankee tallow-chandler.”

“I model myself on the principles of independence, sir.”

“Principles, quotha! Why, ’od rat me, Ned, you make me sick. Principles of independence are like other principals, I presume—clamorous for high rates of interest.”

“I think not, indeed.”

“Do you, indeed? But you’re a convert to the new religion, and rabid, of course; and a mighty pretty set of priests you’ve got to expound you your gospels.”

“Who, for an instance?”

The uncle leered round viciously. When he was moved to raise his voice, old age piped in him like winter in an empty house.

“I don’t know why I call you Ned,” he protested peevishly. “I don’t feel it, and it fits you worse than your cravat. Who, for an instance, Mr Edward Murk? Why, a defaulting exciseman for one, a reskel by the name of Paine, that writ a pamphlet on Common Sense to prove himself devoid of it.”

“According to the point of view.”

“Oh, I cry you pardon, sir! I judge from a less exalted one than this patriarch of principles here.”

“But Voltaire—Diderot, my lord?”

“Gads my life! And now you hev me! A school of incontinent rakes to reform the warld! And not a man of ’em, I vow, but had drained his last glass of pleasure before he set to disparaging the feast.”

The nephew was silent. What, indeed, would it profit him to answer? He looked, with a passionless scrutiny, at the face so near his own. He could have thought that the old wood, the old block, had shrunk beneath its veneer, and he had an odd temptation to prod it with his finger and see if it would crackle.

“Oxford,” snapped his lordship, “is the very market-garden of self-sufficiency. Thou needst a power of weeding, nephew.”

“Oh, it’s possible, sir; only I would clear the ground myself.”

“Indeed! And how would you set about it?”

“By observing and selecting, that is all; by forming independent judgments uninfluenced by the respect of position; by assuming continence and sobriety to be the first conditions of happiness; by analysing impressions and restraining impulse; by studying what to chip away from the block out of which I intend to shape my own character, with the world for model.”

“I see, I see. A smug modest programme, i’ faith. I’d not have thy frog’s blood, Ned, though it meant another twenty years of life to me. And so you’ll do all this before you step into my shoes—and may the devil wedge them on thy feet!”

“You are bitter, sir. I think, perhaps, you misconstrue me. I’m no fanatic of prudery, but an earnest student of happiness. Were I to convince myself that yours was the highest expression of this, I would not hesitate to become your convert.”

“I’d not ask thee, thou chilly put. Hadst thou been my son, ’twere different. But thou’st got thine independent jointure, and thou’lt go thy ways—over the Continent, as I understand,—not making the Grand Tour like a gentleman of position, but joggling it in diligences, faugh! or stumping on thy soles like a demned brawny pedlar. And what is to be thy equipment for the adventure?”

“A fair knowledge of French, a roll of canvas, and a case of colours.”

“Cry you mercy, sir; I’d forgat you were an artist. Wilt thou paint me some naked women?”

“Ay, sir, and see no pleasant shame in it.”

“Ned, Ned—give me a hope of thee!”

“Oh, sir, believe me, ’tis only when woman begins to clothe herself that indelicacy is suggested. A hat, a pair of shoes, a shoulder-strap even, would have made a jill-flirt of Godiva.”

“H’mph! Looked at from my standpoint, that’s the first commendable thing thou’st said. But it’s a monstrous ungentlemanly occupation, Ned; and that, no doubt, is the reason that moves thee to it.”

“No, sir; but the reason that a painter, more than another, has the opportunity to arrest and record for private analysis what is of its nature fugitive and perishable. His canvases, indeed, should be his text-book, his confessor, and his mentor.”

“Oh, spare me, Parson! Thou shalt go cully my neighbour here with thy plaguey texts. They’ll fit him like a skin glove.”

“What neighbour, sir?”

“Him that sold his brush to Charlie Greville’s mistress, a grim little toad—Romney by name—that my Lord Thurlow pits against Reynolds for something better than a whore’s sign-painter.”

“Well, sir, doubtless the man will learn to read himself in his work, and to profit by the lesson.”

“Master Ned Parson, when do you go? It cannot be too soon for me.”

“I may start at any moment.”

“Heaven be praised! And whither?”

“Possibly by way of the Low Countries at the outset. Will your lordship give me some letters of introduction?”

“What! Your independence doesn’t strake at that?”

“You greatly misapprehend me, sir. I go to seek mental, not bodily discipline; chastisement, as a forcing medium, ceases of its effect with the second age of reason.”

“And that you have come to, I presume. Go to the Low Countries, i’ Gad’s name, and find your level there! I’ll give you fifty recommendations, and trust to procure you a year’s hospitality from each. Only, one word in your ear, Ned: if you bring back a prig to wife, I’ll hev the two of ye poisoned, if I hang for it.”

The nephew condescended to a smile of some amused toleration.

“My marriage, when it occurs,” said he, “will mark a simple period in the evolution of my character. That, it may be easily understood, might require a foil to its processes of development, as a hen swallows gravel to assist her digestion. You need feel no surprise, sir, if in the end I marry a properly wicked woman.”

“Egad! ’tis my devout hope you will, and that she’ll brain you with that demned Encyclopedia that you get all your gallimaufry about equality from. Call back Jepps, and I’ll dictate the letters.”

CHAPTER II.

On a supremely hot noon of August, Mr Edward Murk, walking leisurely along a road pounded and compounded of small coal, came down towards the ancient city of Liége, and paused at a vantage-point to take in the prospect. This was a fair enough one to any vision, and fair in the extreme to eyes so long drilled to the interminable perspectives of Flanders—to loveless dykes, to canals like sleek ingots of glass, to stretched ribbons of highways tapering to a flat horizon—as that a tumulus would seem as sweet a thing for them to rest on as a woman’s bosom. Now his sight, reining up against hills, gave him a certain emotion of surprise, such as he might have felt if a familiar hunter had unexpectedly shied at a hedgerow.

He stood a little above the town, looking over and beyond it. In the middle-distance of his picture—pulled into the soft arms of hills that, melting to their own embrace, became mere swimming banks of mist—floated a prismatic blot of water—the vista of the Meuse—dinted like an opal with shadowy reflections, and lit with sudden sparks in dreamy places. Thence, nearer, a greystone bridge—its arches glazed, he could have thought, with mother-of-pearl windows, like a Chinese model in ivory—bestrode the river channel, seeming to dam back, against his foreground, an accumulated litter of wall and roof and gable, that choked the town reaches, and, breaking away piecemeal, stranded its jetsam all down the valley. Here and there fair steeples stood up from the litter; here and there, in his close neighbourhood, gaunt chimney-stocks exhaled a languid smoke, like tree trunks blasted in a forest fire.

Some distance to his left a pretty lofty eminence, that broke at its summit into a fret of turret and escarpment, stood sentinel over the ages; while below this, and nearer at hand, the great block of an episcopal palace sprouted from a rocky plateau, the velvet slopes of which trailed downwards into the very hands of the city.

“The bishop and his train-bearers,” thought Mr Murk. “The town holds up the skirts of the palace. That must all be changed by-and-by. But I confess I should like to record a little of the picturesqueness of life before the roller of equality is dragged over the continents.”

He had out his tools then and there, and essayed to give some expression to his mood. The sun crackled in his brain; a pug of a child, in a scarlet linsey petticoat, came and sniffed beside him, offending his ears and his eyes; a dawdling cart mounting the hill lurched into his perspective and blotted out its details foot by foot. Down below, in his farther foreground, a cluster of buildings, lying under a church-tower in a bath of shadow, invited him as if to a plunge into cool waters. He glanced crossly at the obtrusive child, collected his traps, and strode down the hill.

At its foot, however, he seemed to come upon the actual furnace-floor of noon—a broad Place that bickered, as it were, throughout its length with iridescent embers. These were figured in crates of Russian cranberries glowing like braziers, in pomegranates bleeding fire, in burning globes of oranges, in apricots pearly-pink as balls of white-hot glass; and over all, the long looped awnings of olive and stone-blue and cinnamon served to the emphasising of such a galaxy of hot dyes as made a core of flame in the heart of the blazing city.

The close air prickled with a multitudinous patter of voices like blisters of fat breaking on a grill. Old Burgundian houses—baked to a terra-sienna, drowzing and nodding as they took the warmth about their knees—retained and multiplied the heat like the walls of an oven. The shop windows were so many burning-glasses; the market-women fried amongst their cabbages like bubble-and-squeak; the very dogs of draught, hauling their gridirons of carts, had red-hot cinders for tongues. There seemed in the whole width of the square no shadow of which a devil could have taken solace.

Exhaling some little of the breath that remained to him in an appropriately volcanic interjection, Ned mounted the steps of the church he had looked down upon, brushed past the outstretched hand of a fly-blown beggar, and dived into the sequestered obscurity of amber-scented aisles.

Here the immediate fall of temperature took him by the throat like a shower-bath. “If I shiver,” he thought, “there is a goose walking over my grave.” So he stood still and hugged himself till his blood was accommodated to the change. Then he penetrated into the heart of the place.

He had visited many churches in the course of his travels, dispassionately, but with no irreverence. It interested him no less to note the expressions of faith than of faces. Generally, it seemed to him, religious ideals were not transmissible. There was seldom evidence that the spirit that had conceived and executed some noble monument yet informed its own work through tradition. The builders of cathedrals wrought, it was obvious, for little clans that, through all the ages, had never learned the respect of soul. They, the latter, had stuffed their heritages with trash, because their religion must come home to them in the homely sense. They could not think but that the God of their understanding must be gratified to have His houses adorned after the fashion of the best parlour.

Now, to see a fine interior vulgarised by the introduction of barbaric images, of artificial flowers, and of pictures hung in incongruous places, offended Mr Murk as a fooling elephant in a circus offended him. He recognised and condemned the solecism in the present instance, yet at the same time was conscious of an atmosphere foreign to his accustomed experience—an atmosphere so like the faint breath of a revived paganism that he looked about him in wonder to see whence it emanated.

There could be, however, no doubt as to its source. The whole church was a grove of orange, oleander, and myrtle trees. They stood in tubs, filling the intercolumniations of the stone avenues, climbing the steps of the altar, thronging about the pulpit. The quiet air held their fragrance like smoke. They could fatten and bloom unvexed of any wind but the sweet gales blown from the organ.

And even as Ned looked, this wind rose and wooed them. Some one was at the keys, and the soft diapasons flowed forth and rolled in thunder along the roof.

The young man strolled down the nave. Music of itself held no particular charms for him. Its value here was in its subscription to other influences—to the cool perfume of flowers, to the sense of serene isolation, to the feeling of mysticism engendered of foggy vastness traversed by the soft moted dazzle of sunbeams. Such, spanning gulfs of shadow, propping the gross mechanism of the organ itself, seemed the very fabric of which the floating harmonies were compound. There needed only a living expression of this poem of mingled scent and sound and colour, and to Ned this was vouchsafed of a sudden, in a luminous corner he came upon, where a painted statue of the Virgin standing sentry in a niche looked down upon a figure prostrate before it in devotion.

A little lamp, burning with a motionless light like a carbuncle, was laid at the Mother’s feet. About her shoulders, suspended from the neighbouring walls, were a half-dozen certificates of miracles approuvés—decorated placards recording the processes and dates, some of them quite recent, of extraordinary recoveries. One of these related how to a Marie Cornelis was restored the sight of an eye that had been skewered by a thorn. Faith here had at least made its appeal in a sure direction. Who could forget how that other woman had worn a crown of thorns about her heart?

Now the gazer would have liked to know what manifestation of the supernatural was craved by the young girl, fair and quiet as the image itself, who knelt before the shrine. She, this dévote, reverencing, with her mouth pressed to the clasped knuckles of her hands, had so much of the Madonna in her own appearance as to suggest that she might perform, rather than demand, miracles. Her eyes—Ned fancied, but could not convince himself—were closed, as in a rapture of piety. She was very pure and colourless, apart from an accidentalism of tinted rays; for over her soft brown hair, from which a folded chaperon of white linen had slipped backwards, wings of parti-coloured light, entering through a stained window, played like butterflies. Lower down, the violet haze that slept upon her cheek gave her something of a phantasmal character; but her fingers were steeped in crimson as if they were bloody.

At her side knelt a little lad, five or six years of age, with a most wistful small face expressive of as great a humility of weariness as the girl’s was of worship. He looked at the stranger with curiosity, and with the dumb appeal of the petty to the great and independent; and as he looked he lifted, one after the other, his poor chafed knees and rubbed them. His round, pale eyes were underscored for emphasis of this appeal, but without effect on Mr Murk, who had indeed no fondness for children.

Presently the girl rose. With the action the wings of light fled from her hair; her passionless face revealed itself a sunless white fruit. There was no consciousness of the observant stranger under her lowered lids.

“Viens, donc, Baptiste!” she whispered; and the little boy, gazing up at her in a breathless manner, got to his feet.

The two genuflected to the High Altar, and stole reverently from the building. Mr Murk followed immediately. He had a desire to win into the confidence of this butterfly Madonna.

Outside he saw the girl and child go down into the blazing market as into a lake of fire. Giving them fair law, he started in pursuit.

Arrived at the level, he found he had for the moment lost sight of his quarry. He strolled up and down, gathering what shade he could from the awnings. Voluble market-women, waxing tropically gross in their vegetable hotbeds, rallied him on his insensibility to their cajolery. Stolid Flemish farmers, with great pipes pendulous from their mouths, like tongues lolling and smoking with drought, winked to one another as he passed in appreciation of the rich joke that here was a foreigner.

The gentler classes, it seemed, were all in siesta. Low life, vehement, motley, and picturesque, held the square as if it were a fortress under fire.

Now, whether as a consequence or, in spite of, this gregal plebeianism, a strange unusual atmosphere, Ned fancied, was abroad in the town. He had been conscious of a similar atmosphere in other cities he had visited en route, and of an increase in its density in steady ratio with his march southwards. It was not to be defined. It might have been called an inflection rather than any expression, like the change of note in the respiration of a sleeper who is near waking. It only seemed to him that he moved in an element compounded of shadows—the shadow of watchfulness; the shadow of insolence; the shadow of an evil humour cursing its own century-long blindness; the shadow of a more wickedly merry humour, rallying itself upon that old desperate screwing-up of its courage to attack a boggart Blunderbore that had fallen to pieces at the first stroke; the shadow, embracing all others, of a certain Freemasonry that was deadlily exclusive in the opposite to a conventional sense.

“And this is for no dispassionate soul to resent,” thought Mr Murk, who as a child had set his feet square upon the basis of an independent impartiality, and, at the first age of reason, had pledged himself to forego impulse as being the above-proof of ardent spirits and fatal to sobriety.

“Now,” he admitted to himself, “Jacques Bonhomme is simply awaking to knowledge of the fact that he may boast a family-tree as thick-hung as his lord’s with evil fruit, and that he was not spawned of the mud because no record exists of his grandfather.”

By-and-by, strolling down a little court, he turned into a wine-shop for a draught to his dusty throat. He drank his maçon, mixing it with water, in a tiny room off the tap of the auberge; and, while he was drinking, the sound of a low vehement voice in the street brought him to the window.

He looked out. It was his very Madonna of the butterflies, and presented under a new aspect. Her hands were at the neck of the child; she was rating him in voluble viraginian. The poor rogue sobbed and protested; but he would not loose his grip of something of which she strove to possess herself.

“P’tit démon!” she gabbled—“but I will have it, I say! It is no use to weep and struggle. Give it me, Baptiste—ah! but I will!”

“No, no!” cried the boy; “it is mine—it has always been mine. Thou shalt not, Nicette!”

She so far secured the bone of contention as to enable Ned for a moment to recognise its nature. It was a silver medal—a poor devotional charm strung round the infant’s neck. The child by an adroit movement recovered possession. She looked about her, unconscious of the observer, as if, safe from interruption, she would have dared torture and maltreatment. Then suddenly she fell to wheedling.

“Babouin, little babouin, wilt thou not make this sacrifice for thine own loving Nicette, who is so poor, so poor, little babouin, because of the small brother she keeps and feeds and clothes?—wilt thou not?”

“No!” cried the child again, half hysterical. “It is mine—it was blessed by the Holy Father!”

“But the guava, Baptiste! the sweet red jelly in the little box! I have eaten of it once before, and oh! Baptiste, it is like the fruit that tempted the first mother. And it so seldom comes to market, and I have not a sou; and before next wage-day all may be appropriated. Wilt thou not then, mon poulet, mon p’tit poulet?”

But the poulet only repeated his tearful pipe.

“Thou shalt have thy share!” pleaded the girl. “I swear it.”

“I should not,” sobbed Baptiste. “Thou wouldst eat up all my medal, and it was blessed by le Saint Père.”

Ned, peering forth, saw his Madonna jerk erect, her eyelids snapping.

“Give me thy hand, then,” she said, in a cold little voice. “Thou shalt walk back to Méricourt all the way, and have thy medal to supper at the end. Give me thy hand!”

The child cried out when she took it. Ned showed himself at the window.

“Nicette,” he said, with particular softness, “I will exchange thee a louis-d’or for one single little confidence of thine.”

The girl started, looked round, and stared at the speaker in breathless consternation. A bright spot of colour, like pink light caught from an opal, waxed and waned on her cheek.

“How, monsieur?” she muttered.

Ned held out the coin.

“Here is a surfeit of guava jelly,” said he, “if thou wilt tell me what was the miracle thou cravedst of the Holy Mother yonder.”

He knew, watching her face, that she would reject the condition, and that with all suitable decorum. But he saw the pupils of her eyes dilate at sight of the gold piece.

“Monsieur, it seems,” said she, “can better afford to jest than I to accept insult”—and she hurriedly caught at her charge’s hand and drew the child away.

Mr Murk, with plentiful complacency, paid for his wine and sauntered in pursuit. At a particular fruit-stall he saw his peasant Madonna linger a moment, hesitate, and then go on her way with an up-toss of her chin. He came to a stop and considered—

“Méricourt! But I have an introduction to Monsieur de St Denys of Méricourt. How far, I wonder? This Nicette would make an admirable study to an artist. I will go to Méricourt.”

CHAPTER III.

Facing an opulent sunset, Ned made his way some three or four miles out of Liége through scenery whose very luxuriance affected him like the qualmish aftermath of excess. It gave him a feeling of surfeit—of committal to a debauch of colour that it was no part of his temperament to indulge. If his soul had attached itself to any theory of beauty, it was to a theory of orderliness and sobriety, that took account of barbaric dyes but to set them to an accordant pattern. Its genius was of an adaptive rather than an imaginative bent. It desired to shape his world to man, not man to his world—to appropriate the accidents of nature to the uses of a wholesomely picturesque race—to emasculate the bull of violence by withdrawing from its very experience the hues of crimson and orange.

On any display of passion this young man looked with cool dislike. His instincts were primarily for the gratification of the understanding. The premeditated involutions of fancy did not engage his sympathies. The mystery of brooding distances peopled with irisated phantoms, of the hazy wanderings of the undefined, he was not greatly concerned to penetrate. Claude he would have preferred to Turner, and Nasmyth to either. Fuseli he already detested; and Blake was his very bête noire. Things rude, boisterous, and ugly he would wish to crush under a heel of iron, thinking to enforce the peace—rather after the fashion of his times—by breaking it. But he would raise, not level, the world to an equality—would make out of its material a very handsome model, in which the steeples should clang and the water-wheels turn and the seasons pulsate by a mechanism common to all.

Such was his creed of eventual reconstruction of a social fabric, the downfall of which was much predicted of the jeunesse politique of the day; and in the meanwhile he was very willing to acknowledge himself to be in the condition of incomplete moral ossification—to be travelling, indeed, for the sake of bone and gristle, and in order to convert the misuses of other characters to the profit of his own.

Now he advanced with a certain feeling of enforced intemperance upon a prospect of superabundant beauty. The great noontide heat was become a salt memory, to be tasted only for emphasis of the bouquet of that velvety wine of air that poured from the heights. Distant hills ran along an amber sky, like the shadows of nearer ones. Far away a jagged keep surmounting a crag stood out, deep umber, from a basin in the valley brimming with blue mist. Closer at hand a marrowy white stream, sliding noiseless over the crest of a slope silhouetted against the northern vaults, seemed the very running band drawn from the heavens to keep the earth spinning. The grasshopper shrilled in the roadside tangle; comfortable doves, drowsing amongst the chestnut leaves, exchanged sleepy confidences. Sometimes the clap of a cow-bell, sometimes the hollow call of a herdsman, thrilled the prosperous calms of light as a dropped stone scatters a water image. These were the acuter accents on a tranquillity that no thought could wound.

At last, when the sun flamed upon the horizon like a burning house of the Zodiac, the traveller came through a deep wood-path upon the village he sought, and was glad to see dusk mantling its gables and blotting out the red lights of the open valley in which it lay.

If Madame van Roon, keeper of the hostel Landlust, cut her coat according to her cloth, she should have been in affluent circumstances. Daniel Lambert might have furnished her his vest, a couple of dragoons their cloaks for skirt. This, proceeding from a mighty roll of padding—a veritable stuffed bolster—that circled her unnamable waist, swayed in one piece, like a diving-bell in a current, with her every movement. Her stays, hooped with steel after the Dutch mode, would have hung slack on a kilderkin. The lobes of her fat ears stretched under the weight of a pair of positive little censers. But the finished pride of her was her cap, a wonder of stiff goffering, against the erect border of which her red face lay like a ham on a dish-paper. With so full a presence, she had only to stand in a doorway, if inclined to argument, and not so much as a minor postulate could evade her.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est doncg cette manière de moogsieur là!” she gasped at our gentleman with a choking shrillness. “Mais où est vôgtre valetaille, vôgtre équipage?”

She quarrelled gutturally, like an envious stepmother, with the speech of her adoption.

“I am in my own service, madame,” said Ned, in no small wonder; “and that is to own the best master a man can have.”

She slapped the three-partitioned money-pouch that hung at her middle.

“Oo, ay,” she gurgled truculently; “and a fine master of economy, I’ll be bound.”

Ned, for short argument, fished out a palmful of pieces. She admitted him grudgingly even then; but the young man was completely satisfied.

“This is excellent tonic,” he thought, “after an enervating experience. In Méricourt, it seems, there is food for study.”

He appeared to have struck a sort of Franco-Flemish neutral ground. He was put to wait in a little kitchen like a bright toy. The floor was ruddy brick, the walls were white tiles. Outside the window a shallow awning tinkled sleepily, in spasms of draught, with the stirring of innumerable small bells. The stove or range, a shining cold example of continence, seemed innocent of the least tradition of heat. On the polished dark dresser vessels of copper, of pewter, and of brass—stewpans, lidded flagons, and the narrow-necked, wood-stoppered, resonant jugs, in which it was the Dutch fashion to bring milk from the fields—shone with a demure sobriety of tone in the falling light.

But the meal, when it came, was served in the French manner and without stint. The traveller, seeing no preparations toward in the spick room he inhabited, was falling into a mood of gentle depression before his fears were dissipated. Then he ventured an inquiry of the solemn wench who brought in his tray. She almost dropped the load in her amazement.

“Holy Saints! Cook here! in the show kitchen!”

She put down, with crushing emphasis, a fresh table-napkin, a small blunt knife, a silver fork, and a silver spoon—all à la française. This was luxury as compared with recent experiences. Ned looked serious over the knife. He did not know that French meat stewed to the melting-point dismembers itself at a touch.

He had a very succulent salmis; and no fewer than four hot eggs, cuddled in a white clout, were served to him.

“Am I to devour them all?” he asked of the girl.

“With the help of God,” she answered ambiguously, in her soft Picardian.

By-and-by madame l’hôtesse condescended to come and talk with him while he ate. She was veritably chargée de cuisine; she seemed to fill the place, width and height.

“What is your condition in your own country?” she asked, with fat asperity.

“I am grand-nephew to a monseigneur, to whose title and estates I shall succeed.”

“Vraigment!” she clucked incredulously. “How arrives it, then, that you ‘pad the hoof’ like a colporteur?”

“I travel for discipline and for experience, madame. Wisdom is not an heirloom.”

She nodded her head.

“Truly, it must be bought. I myself am a merchant of it.”

“Doubtless,” said Mr Murk. “Witness your politeness to one who can afford to pay for politeness.”

She seemed an atom disconcerted.

“Well,” she said, “there is no accounting for the vagaries of the quality. And is his meal to moogsieur’s liking?”

“It is very well, indeed.”

“Tout va biend! I was in the half mind that you would wish your meat raw à l’anglaise.”

“That is not the English fashion.”

“Oh, pardon! they tear it with their hands and teeth, for I know. And sometimes it is worse.”

“How worse, then?”

She nodded again pregnantly.

“Vampires! They will prey on the lowly of their kind. Oh, it is infamous! My cousin, le bon Gaspard, saw a dish of theirs once in Barbade—le Maure dans le bain, they called it—a slave’s head served in sauce. This will be unknown to moogsieur?”

“Unquestionably.”

“It is possible. It is possible, also, that gentlemen who travel incognito may learn some vulgar truths. I accept your ignorance in proof of your aristocracy. Those who sit in high places look only at the stars.”

“You alarm me, madame. Indeed, I remember now that in my country it is possible to procure for eating ‘ladies’ fingers.’”

“Oh, the barbarians! Is it not as I said?”

Ned rose.

“May I suggest to madame that I have not yet seen my bedroom?”

“Plaît-il, doncg? if it will give you any gratification. But there is company there at present.”

The gentleman stared. Madame van Roon backed from the doorway, gave an inaudible direction, and disappeared. The solemn girl took her place.

“By permission of monsieur,” she said; and Ned followed her out of the room. She led him down one short passage straight into the practicable kitchen. A rather melodious sound of singing greeted him on the threshold. He stopped in considerable wonder, postponing his entrance while he listened.

“Little Lady Dormette,

Hark to my crying!

Would not you come to me

Though I were dying?

Little Lady Dormette,

Kiss my hot eyes,

Make me forget!

Little Lady Dormette,

Why have you left me?

Sure not to lie with him

That hath bereft me?

Little Lady Dormette,

Oh, do not kiss him,

Lest he forget!

Little Lady Dormette,

Thee I so grieve for;

If thou forsakest me,

What shall I live for!

Little Lady Dormette,

Crush thy heart to mine,

Make it forget!”

The voice was small, sweet, emotional, but a man’s; the soft throb of a guitar accompanied it. All bespoke a certain melting effeminacy that was disagreeable to Ned. He pushed open the door however, made his salutation, and stood to take stock of his surroundings.

Here, in truth, was revealed the working heart of the model—the stokehole of that vessel of which the outer room exhibited but the polished bearings. The fat air was heavy with the smell of lately cooked food; the pots, the trenchers, the waste parings that had served to the preparation of the latter were even now in huddled process of removal by a panting cuisinière, with whom the company present did not hesitate to exchange a dropping-fire of badinage. A foul litter of vegetable and other rubbish disgraced the white deal of the table—cabbage leaves and broken egg-shells and a clump of smoking bones. In the scuttle was a mess of turnip peelings, on the hearth an iron pail brimming with gobbets of grease and coffee-grounds and the severed head of a cock.

“A Dutchman’s cleanliness,” thought Ned (and he had some experience of it), “is like the elf maid’s face, a particularly hollow mask. He reeks fustian while he washes his windows three times a-day.”

The room was long and low, with black beams to its ceiling, from which hung bushes of herbs. A steaming scullery opened from it on the fire side; on the other, against the distempered wall, stood a row of curtained cupboards, half-a-dozen of them like confessional-boxes; and in the intervals of these were, perched on brackets, five or six absurd little figures—saints and Virgins, the latter with smaller dolls, to represent the Christ, pinned to their stomachers. There was but a single window to this kitchen, at its far end; and a couple of lamps burning rancid oil seemed the very smoking nucleus of an atmosphere as stifling as that of a ship’s caboose in the tropics.

A figure seated on the table struck a tinkling cord as Ned advanced, and sang up a little impertinent stave of welcome.

“Behold, Endymion wakes from Latmus!” said he, and flourishing a great flagon of wine to his mouth, he tilted it and drank.

He was a smooth-cut young fellow, with features modelled like a girl’s. His hair, his brows, the shade on his upper lip toned from brown to rough gold. His eyes were soft umber, his cheeks flushed sombrely like autumn leaves. He was as assured of himself as a gillian, and a little theatrical withal in his pose and the cock of his hat.

There were two others in company—a serene large man, with deliberate lids to his eyes and straight long hair, and a round-faced sizar from the University of Liége. These latter smoked, and all three drank according to their degree of wine, hollands, or brandy-and-water.

“You flatter me, monsieur,” said Ned a trifle grimly, and he sat himself down by the table and returned with a pretty hardihood the glances directed at him.

For some moments no one spoke. The placid man—a prosperous farmer by token of his button-bestrewed jacket and substantial small-cloths—put a piece of sugar-candy in his mouth and drank down his glass of hollands over it in serial sips. The student, looking to him on the table for his cue, sat with the expression of a chorister whom a comrade secretly tickles. Mr Murk felt himself master of the situation so long as he resisted the temptation to be the first to break the silence.

Suddenly the young man with the guitar unbonneted himself, kicked his hat up to the ceiling, gave an insane laugh on a melodious note, and turned to the new-comer.

“I surrender,” said he; “I would rather lack wine than speech.”

“Both are good in moderation,” said Ned.

“Bah! a monk’s aphorism, monsieur; moderation makes no history. It is to grow fat under one’s fig-tree—like Lambertine here” (he signified the contented farmer, who chuckled and shut his eyes).

“And what of the wise Ulysses?” quoth Ned.

“He saved himself for the orgy,” cried the stranger. “He was moderate only that he might taste the full of enjoyment. I go with you there.”

“Not with me, indeed.”

“No, of course. There are blind-worms amongst men. For me I swear that human life has an infinite capacity for pleasure.”

He took another great pull at his pot and laughed foolishly. His face was ruddy and his eyes glazed with drink.

“You were singing when I came in,” said Ned. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”

The student sniggered, the cuisinière sniggered, the farmer waved a tolerant hand.

“You see?” said the musician. “We make no business here of any man’s convenience but our own. I shall sing if I want to.”

He twitched the strings with some loose defiance, and swerved into a little vacant amorous song.

“Does that please you?” he asked at the finish.

“It neither pleases nor disgusts me,” said Ned. “It is simply not worth considering.”

“You must not say that,” said the round-faced student.

Mr Murk turned upon him gravely.

“I am a foreigner, sir, as you see,” said he. “I come amongst you to enlarge my experience and to correct a certain insular habit of prejudice. To this end I use a sketch-book, and sometimes I paint portraits. I shall have the honour of depicting you as a starling.”

“Oh, eh!” said the student. “That is funny. And why?”

“It feeds on the leavings of my lord the rook,” said Ned.

The farmer chuckled heartily, and the musician burst into a wobble of laughter.

“I am the rook!” he cried—“I am milord the rook! You are a man of penetration, monsieur, and I take you to my heart.”

He endeavoured to do so literally, and fell flat off the table on the top of his guitar, which he smashed to pieces. And then he composed himself to slumber on the floor, and in a minute was snoring.

“He acts up to his creed,” said the farmer, in a tone of unruffled admiration. “You must not misjudge him, monsieur the artist. M. de St Denys is generous to a fault.”

“St Denys! Is that M. de St Denys?”

The other swang his large head.

“It is so. His reputation extends itself, it would appear. He makes himself a name beyond Méricourt for the most liberal principles.”

“Liberal to excess, indeed.”

The student ventured again.

“He illustrates what he professes.”

“An infinite capacity for piggishness?”

“No, monsieur; but to extend the prerogatives of pleasure; to set the example of a cultivated licence that the canaille may learn to elevate itself to the higher hedonism.”

Ned had nothing to say to this boozy ethology. The other two chorused crapulous praise of the fallen musician.

“He is the soul of honour,” said the farmer, who seemed a man of simple ideas.

“He devotes himself, his oratory, his purse, to the cause of intellectual emancipation,” cried the student.

“And what does his father, M. de St Denys, say to all this?” asked Ned.

Lambertine shook his perplexed head. The student humoured a little snigger of deprecation.

“There is no father,” said he. “M. de St Denys the younger reigns at the Château Méricourt. I see you sneer, monsieur. It is natural for a victim of insular despotism. Here the prospect widens—the atmosphere grows fresh. You will not have heard of it, no; but it is true that there is a sound in the air. Monsieur, I will not be sneered at!”

“And what is to be the upshot of it all?” inquired Ned, ignoring the protest.

“According to M. de St Denys, a universe of gentlemen.”

“He is, at the same time, the soul of honour,” said Lambertine.

“Well,” said Mr Murk, “I think I will go to bed.”

He appealed to the cook, who still fussed among her pans, with a look of puzzled inquiry. She answered sourly—

“You can take your pick. There are plenty to choose from.”

It was then he discovered, to his profound astonishment, that the confessional-boxes were sleeping-places, to the use of one of which he was unblushingly invited in the very face of his company.

“Well,” thought he, “I am travelling for experience;” and he took his knapsack, chose that cupboard nearest the window and farthest from the table, and, withdrawing himself behind the curtains, undressed, folded and laid his clothes aside, and philosophically composed himself to slumber on a little bed that smelt of onions.

Conditions were not favourable to rest. The heat was suffocating; the atmosphere unspeakable. In the distance the voices of his late companions droned like hornets in a bottle—sometimes swelled, it seemed, into a thick passion of tearfulness. Without brooded an apoplectic silence, broken only by a spasmodic rumbling sound that might have signified dogs or cattle, or, indeed, nothing more than the earth turning in its sleep, or the rolling heavenwards of the wheel of the moon. Now and then some winged creature would boom past the window, its vibrant note dying like the voice of a far-off multitude; now and again the seething rush of a bat would seem to stir up the very grounds of stagnation. Suddenly a heart-wrung voice spoke up outside his curtain—

“Monsieur! I am not to be laughed at. Bear that in mind!”

There followed a sound of sobbing—of footsteps unsteadily receding; and thereafter a weary peace was vouchsafed the traveller, and he dreamed that he was put to bake in the selfsame oven that had provided his supper.

“That is a fine economy,” he heard the cook say—“to roast the rooster!”

The words troubled him excessively. He thought them instinct with a dreadful humour—too diabolically witty to admit of repartee; and so, lapped in despondency, oblivion overtook him.

CHAPTER IV.

Writhing, as it were, from the edges to a central core of heat, Ned woke to find himself wriggling like an eel in a bath of dripping. He sat up in his dingy cupboard, and feeling and seeing a slant of sunlight blazing through its curtains, plunged for the open and breathed out a fainting sigh of relief.

Shrill murmur of voices from a distance came to him; but the kitchen, stalely redolent of wash-houses, was deserted of all save himself.

A pudding-basin on a magnified milking-stool—presumably a washhand-stand—was placed in a corner; and thereat he fretted out an ablution that was a mere aggravation of drought. Then he dressed himself with a sort of fierce and defiant daring, rather hoping to be taken to task for some intolerable solecism in his rendering of local customs.

He was disappointed. The solemn girl came into the kitchen when he was but half-way through his toilet, and, without exhibiting the least interest in his condition, set to preparing and serving his breakfast.

By-and-by he seated himself at the table.

“I am sorry to have kept you out of the room,” he said, with superfluous sarcasm.

“I do not understand,” she said indifferently.

“At least you will know now how a gentleman dresses.”

“It is possible,” she said. “But, if I were one, I should put on my shirt first.”

“Well,” said he, “where is M. de St Denys?”

She stared at him like a cow; but it was the provoking part of her that she would not avert her gaze when he returned it.

“Where,” said she, “if not at the chateau?”

“He recovered his feet then, it would seem?”

“His feet? Oh, mon Dieu! they were not lost! What questions, monsieur!”

“Are they not? And who now is this Lambertine?”

“He is Lambertine—a farmer very prosperous, of Méricourt.”

“With whom the lord of the manor consorts? M. de St Denys, then, is not fastidious in his choice of company?”

“Truly, even you need not hesitate to address him, if that is what you mean. He listens to all alike; he holds himself a human being like the rest of us. When he walks in the sun he will not think his shadow longer than that of another man of his height.”

“And he is the soul of honour?”

“Essentially, monsieur. He would extend the right of an equal indulgence in pleasure to all.”

“Ah, ma chérie!” said Ned calmly, “how you must love him!”

“That is of necessity,” said the girl. “He has lowered himself to make us do so.”

Ned ate a very large and deliberate breakfast, and then issued forth into the village, carrying his letter of introduction with him.

“This St Denys,” he thought, “has been reading Diderot and the Encyclopedia. Has he also theories of reconstruction? My uncle would not think it amusing that his letter should so miscarry.”

A little breeze had risen, blowing from the south. It made the heat more tolerable, and it was the begetter of a pretty tableau by the village fountain. For there, with her pitcher set on the well-rim, stood a bright Hebe of the sun, ripe, warm, and glowing as the very fruit of desire. Now she had put her hands back under her free-falling hair—that was thick and pheasant brown and wavy like a spaniel’s—and had lifted it, sagging, that the cool air might blow under and comfort the roots. She was a full-bosomed wench, and the pose threw her figure into energetic and very graceful relief. Ned, who was really passionless, and responsive only to the artistic provocation, went up to her at once.

“I should like to draw you like that,” said he.

She twitched involuntarily; but, with immediate intuition, maintained her posture, and conned him from under languorous lids.

“How, monsieur?” said she.

“Exactly as you are. I have my tools with me. I beg you to do nothing but just breathe and enjoy life.”

Actually, before she could deny him, he was sketching her. Then, suddenly—watching first the quick travelling of his pencil—she lowered her arms and, like a foolish virgin, extinguished the light of inspiration.

“I think you are very impertinent,” she said.

“If beauty,” said he calmly—for he had secured the essentials of his picture—“will distribute largesse, it must not be surprised to see it scrambled for.”

The girl’s lips parted, as if the fairy bee were probing there for honey.

“What insolence!” she murmured. “Am I then beautiful? But perhaps monsieur sees his own image reflected in my eyes, and falls in love with it like the damoiseau Narcisse.”

She showed the slightest rim of white teeth. It was as if the bow of her mouth revealed itself strung with silver. Her eyes, when open, floated with deep amber lights; her cheeks were sweet warm beds dimpled by Love’s elbow; she was full of bold rich contrasts of colour—a young vestal flaming into the lust of life.

Ned was a little surprised to hear a peasant girl, as he thought her, imaging from mythology.

“I never fall in love,” he said gravely; “not even with myself.”

The girl laughed out, putting her arms defiantly akimbo.

“Then I would not be a suitor there,” she said.

“To me? And why not?”

“Because no man ever loved a woman well that did not love himself better.”

She took her sun-bonnet and pitcher from the low wall.

“I have heard of such as you,” she said. “It is to make your art your mistress, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Ned. “Come and see why.”

He held the sketch out to her. He had been working at it all the time he talked.

“Little Holy Mother!” she murmured, after a vain attempt to repress her curiosity, “is that I?”

“Is it not?” he said; “and would not you love an art that enabled you so to record impressions of beauty?”

“It is an impression, my faith! Am I black and white like a spectre? Where are my brown hair and my red cheeks?”

Ned tapped his breast-pocket.

“In your heart, monsieur?”

“In my paint-box, mademoiselle.”

“Well,” she said, “they may remain there, for me. I shall never come to claim them.”

“You had best not,” he said. “It is full of ghosts that might frighten or repel you.”

She was moving away, when she stopped suddenly.

“Look who comes!” she cried low. “There is the pretty subject for your pencil!”

The fountain stood at the village head, on ground somewhat raised above the wide street, or Place, round which the hamlet was gathered. Not a soul seemed to be abroad in the hot sleepy morning. The jalousies of twenty small houses were closed; the ground-haze boiled up a fair man’s height as seen against any dark background; the tower of the little white church looked as if its very peaked cap of lead were melting and sinking over its eyes—an illusion grotesquely accented by the exclamatory expression of the arrow-slit of a window underneath. There was scarce a sound, even, to emphasise the stillness—the tinkle of a running gutter, the drowsy weak ring of iron on a distant anvil—these were all. Méricourt lay sunk in panting slumber in the lap of its woods, its chimney-pots gasping at an inexorable sky.

But now there came towards and past the fountain, from a hidden meadow path, a second girl, who bore upon her head, gracefully poising it, a fragrant bundle of clover, young forest shoots and tufted grasses, under the shadow of which her face was blurred as soft and luminous as a face in tender crayons.

“It is a picture,” said Ned.

“It is half a saint,” said the girl.

Then she cried, in her flexible rich voice—

“Holà, Nicette! I shiver here in a colder shadow than thine.”

“Nicette!” muttered Ned, and he scrutinised the passing figure more closely.

“How, Théroigne?” answered back the other, without slackening her pace or turning her head.

“There runs a new spring in Méricourt!” cried the girl, with an impudent glance at the young man.

“But a new spring! and how dost thou know?”

“My little finger told me. It has veins of ice, Nicette. Thou needst not scruple to bathe in it, for all thy modesty.”

The clover-bearer passed on, with a little ambiguous laugh.

“And she is a saint?” said Ned.

“Half a saint, by monsieur’s permission—a sweet bon-chrétien with one cheek to the sun and one to the convent wall.”

“And presently to fall of her own sweetness, no doubt.”

To his surprise the girl drew herself up haughtily at his words.

“You exceed the bounds of insolence, monsieur,” she said frigidly. “It is like blasphemy so to speak of Nicette Legrand. And what authority has monsieur for his statement?”

“How can I have any, Théroigne, but your own show of levity towards me?”

She seemed about to retort angrily, changed her mind, shouldered the pitcher, and turned to go.

“At least,” said Ned, “have the goodness to first direct me to the Château Méricourt.”

She twisted about sharply.

“The chateau! What do you seek there?”

“Only my friend, M. de St Denys.”

“Your friend!”

She conned his face seriously; then suddenly her own lightened once more.

“Of a truth,” she said, “I would rather be your friend than your lover.”

“Love is much on your lips, mademoiselle.”

“You should say he shows his pretty judgment. But Nicette has the mouth of austerity. Follow her, then. She will have no need to rebuke you, I’ll warrant.”

“There is some contempt in your voice, mademoiselle. Is not that to give yourself a little the lie?”

“How, monsieur?”

“But now you chid me for speaking lightly of this very Nicette.”

“She has a better grace than I, perhaps, to care for herself. I mean only she will lead you whither you desire.”

“To the chateau?”

“She keeps the lodge at its gates.”

She frowned, nodded her head, and went off with a little mocking song on her lips, turning down a side track that led to farm buildings. She was a lithe voluptuous animal, breathing a lavish generosity of life. Ned watched her in a sort of rigor of admiration as she retreated. A high stone wall, pierced at regular intervals with loopholes, enclosed the steading she made for. Above the coping showed the roofs of the house, and of numerous substantial barns that backed upon the wall; and, at a point in the latter, frowned a huge studded gateway, strong enough to withstand the shock of anything less than artillery.

By this gate the girl paused a moment, looked back, and seeing the stranger still observant of her, whisked about resentfully enough to bring down upon her head a sleet of acacia petals from a bush that stood hard by. Then she vanished, and Ned turned him to his pursuit of the other.

She had already reached the farther end of the Place, and he followed rapidly, lest she should disappear from his ken. But he came up with her as she was leaving the village by a road that mounted on a slight gradient amongst trees. At the wrought-iron gates of the chateau, set but a few hundred yards farther in a thicket of evergreens, he addressed her, as she was shifting from her head the great burden it had borne.

“That is much for a girl, Nicette. I will help you with it.”

She looked at him, he could see, with some abashed recognition. Her lips, that were a little parted in breathlessness, trembled perceptibly. Without a protest she let him receive and drop upon the road the truss of clover. Some strands of the bundle that were yet entangled in the disorder of her rabbit-brown hair gave her an unlicensed strangeness of aspect; but for the rest it was the Madonna of the old church of Liége—the colourless, pure dévote with the Greek profile and round blue eyes small-pupiled.

“Nicette,” said the young man, who, if cold, had an admirable assurance, “to pass from Théroigne to you is to go to sleep in the sun and wake to the twilight.”

She gave a little gasp.

“Does monsieur come to visit the chateau?” she murmured.

“Or its master?—yes. But first I will help you in with this.”

“No, no!” she protested faintly.

“But, yes, I say. Open the gate, Nicette. And for what is this great heap of fodder?”

“It is for my beautiful génisse—Madeleine of the white star.”

She pushed open the gate. Within, to one side, was a low trellised lodge, set within the forward apex of an elliptical patch of garden. Farther back was a byre, and behind all a lofty bank of trees. A fine avenue of Spanish chestnuts led on to the house, which was here hidden from view.

“Whither?” said Ned.

She intimated the rearward shed, with a half-audible note of deprecation. He shouldered and carried the truss to its destination. A liquid-eyed cow, with a rayed splash of white on its forehead, blew a sweet breath of wonder as he entered. Within, all was daintily clean and fragrant.

“Now,” said he, “I must go on to the chateau. But I shall come again, Nicette, and paint you into a picture.”

The girl stood among the phloxes utterly embarrassed. He made her a grave salutation and pursued his way to the house. At a turn of the drive he came in view of the latter—a sombre grey building, sparely windowed, and with a peak-roofed tower—emblem of nobility—caught into one of its many angles. A weed-cumbered moat, with a little decrepit stream of water slinking through the tangle of its bed, surrounded the walls; and in front of the moat, as he encountered it, a neglected garden fell away in half-obliterated terraces. Here and there, placed in odd coigns of leafiness, decayed wooden statues of fauns and dryads, once painted “proper”—or otherwise—in flesh tints, had yielded their complexions piecemeal to the rasp of Time; and, indeed, the whole place seemed withdrawn from the considerations of order.

Much wondering, Ned crossed an indifferent bridge—long ceased, it would appear, from its uses of draught—and found himself facing the massive stone portal of the chateau.

“There is a canker hath gnawed here since my uncle’s day,” thought he, and laid hold of a long iron bell-pull. The thing came down reluctant, and leapt sullenly from his grasp, and the clank of its answer called up a whole mob of echoes.

The door was opened by an unliveried young fellow—a mere peasant of the fields by his appearance.

“M. de St Denys? But, yes; monsieur would be at home to receive—unless, indeed, he were not yet out of bed.”

Ned recalled a figure prostrate on the wreck of a guitar.

“Convey this letter to your master,” said he; “and show me where I may wait.”

He entered a high, resounding hall. A boar’s head set at him from above a door in a petrified snarl. Opposite, a great dark picture—fruit, flowers, game—by Jan de Heem, made a slumberous core of richness in the gloom. These, with a heavy chair or two, were the only furniture.

The man conducted him to a waiting-room near as desert and ill-appointed as the vestibule. The whole house seemed a vast and melancholy barrow—an imprisoned vacancy containing only the personal harness and appointments of some lordly dead. Its equipments would appear to have conformed themselves to its service, and that was reduced to a minimum.

Ned heard the sound of a listed footfall, and turned to meet the master of Méricourt.

M. de St Denys came in with the visitor’s letter in his hand. He was in a yellow morning wrapper that was in cheerful contrast with his sombre surroundings, and a tentative small smile was on his lips. He wore his own hair, bright brown and unpowdered, and tied into a neck ribbon. A little artificial bloom, like the meal on a butterfly’s wing, was laid upon his cheeks to hide the ravages of dissipation, but the injected eyes above were significant of fever. He was, nevertheless, a pretty creature of his inches (and they might have run to seventy or so)—exhilarating, forcible, convincing as a man. Only, as to that, his mouth was the hyperbolic expression, justifying his sex rather by force of appetite than of combativeness.

“M. le Vicomte Murk?” said he, raising his eyebrows.

“Prospective, monsieur,” said Ned; “but as yet——”

“Ah, ha!” broke in the other, showing his teeth liberally, “you wait to step into old shoes. It was my case once—five years ago. I had not the pleasure to know your uncle, M. le Vicomte.”

“Pardon, monsieur. I am a plain gentleman.”

“Truly? We order things otherwise here—for the present, monsieur—for the present.”

Obviously he had no least recollection of the contretemps of the previous evening.

“And you are travelling for experience?” (He referred lightly to the letter in his hand, and lightly laughed.) “Possibly you shall acquire that, of a kind, in little rustic Méricourt. We are in advance of our times here—locusts of the Apocalypse, monsieur, having orders to respect only the seal of God.”

“We, generically, monsieur would say?”

“Oh! I include myself.” (He made a comprehensive gesture with his hand.) “Behold the monastic earnest of my renunciation. I am vowed to a religion of socialism that takes no account of superfluous frippery. I devote my pen and” (he laughed again) “dissipate my fortune to the cause of universal happiness.”

“Yourself thereby, I presume, securing the lion’s share.”

“Of happiness? Truly, I think, I have hit upon the right creed for a spendthrift. But my conscience is the real motive power, monsieur, though you may be cynical of its methods.”

He spoke with an undernote of some ambiguity. It might have signified deprecation, or the merest suggestion of mockery.

“And how shall the sacrifice of your fortune promote the common happiness?” said Ned.

“Plainly, monsieur,” answered St Denys, “by scattering one at least of the world’s heaps of accumulated corruption. Wealth is like a stack of manure, a festering load that is the magnet to any wandering fly of disease. Distribute it and it becomes a blessing that, in fertilising the soil, loses its own noxious properties. But I would go further and ask what advantages have accrued from that system of barter that turns upon a medium of exchange? Has it not cumbered the free earth with these stacks till there has come to be no outlook save through aisles and alleys of abomination?”

“That may be true,” said the other, curiously wondering that so much disputation should be launched upon him at this outset of his introduction; “but civilisation, during some thousands of years, has evolved none better.”

M. de St Denys shrugged his shoulders.

“Civilisation!” he cried. “But you retain no faith in that exposed fetish? Is not civilisation, indeed, one voice of lamentation over its own disenchantment? Can any condition be worse than that of to-day, when the ultimate expression of the social code reveals itself a shameless despotism? Do you ever quite realise—you, monsieur, that through all this compound multiplication of the world’s figures, its destinies remain the monopoly of a little clique of private families? One seems to awaken suddenly to a comical amazement over man’s age-long subscription to so stupendous a paradox. Let us soothe our amour propre by submitting that it was an experiment that has proved itself a failure.”

“Nevertheless, monsieur,” said Ned gravely, “I think that in rejecting this civilisation by which you profit—in encouraging rebellion against the established forms that necessity has evolved out of chaos and wisdom included in its codex—you, to say the least of it, are moved to drop the substance for the shadow.”

He spoke with some unconscious asperity. He could not bring himself to admit the entire earnestness of one, of whose self-indulgent character he had had such recent proof. This metal, he fancied, was plated.

“I cannot believe,” he added, “that so complex a fabric could have triumphed over the ages had it not been founded upon truth.”

“But successive architects,” cried St Denys, “may have deviated from the original plan.”

“Still, it holds and it rises; and I for one am content to go up with it—to re-order its chambers, perhaps, but never to quarrel with the main design.”

“And I for one would descend and leave it. Ah, bah! one may mount to the topmost branch of a tree, and yet be no nearer escaping from the forest. I find myself here in interminable thickets, monsieur. I see the poor, leaf-blinded denizens of them nosing passionlessly for roots and acorns in a loveless gloom; and I know the long green fields of light and pleasure to stretch all round this core of melancholy, if only these could find the way to win to them. Is self-discipline necessary to existence? Surely our very butterflies of fashion prove the contrary.”

“Now what,” thought Ned, “is the goad to this inexplicable character?”

“Does monsieur, then,” said he, “advocate a creed of hedonism?”

“Why not?” cried the other. “Shall not man enlarge, develop, and become more habitually one with his amiable instincts under the influence of pleasure, than he ever has done in his bondage to a religion of self-denial? To deny oneself is to deny God, after whose image one is made.”

“A pretty conceit,” said Ned; “but it spells degeneracy.”

“Ay, monsieur; and to the very foundations—as far back as the garden of Paradise.”

“What! You would revert to primitive conditions?”

“To the very ‘naked and unashamed’—but applying to that state the influence of long traditions of gentle manners. We will admit the happiness of the community to be the first consideration, and reconstruct upon a basis of nature.”

A spot of colour came to his cheek. His eyes kindled with a light of febrile enthusiasm.

“To be free to enjoy, in a world of yielding generosities,” he cried; “to be cast from restrictions designed to the selfish aggrandisement of infinitely less than a moiety of our race; to strip indulgence of the shamefulness that century-long cant has credited it withal—that is the El Dorado I give my efforts and my substance to attain.”

“There,” thought Ned, “is confessed the animalism to which the other is but a blind. But this is half-effeminate vapouring.”

He had no sympathy, indeed, with theories so untenable. This lickerish, unconstructive paganism was far from being the lodestar to his own revolutionary cock-boat. Yet he could not but marvel over M. de St Denys’ extremely practical expression of extremely frothy sentiments. Involuntarily he glanced round the room.

“Yes,” cried the other, observant of the look. “I am not one of those doctors who refuse their own medicine.”

A thought of surprise seemed to strike him.

“But I run ahead of my manners,” cried he, with a quick laugh. “You charge me with a letter, and I return you a volley of exposition. I have not even offered you a seat. Pray accommodate yourself with one. And you knew my father, sir?”

“I had not the honour. He was a friend of my lord viscount.”

“Who gave you a letter to him. There is figured out the value of the social relations. He has been dead, sir, since five years. He left two sons, of whom I am the younger. My brother, Lucien, a sailor, who held his commission to the West Indies under De Grasse, perished there in ’81 in an explosion of powder. The estate devolved upon me. We have not your laws of primogeniture, and had poor Lucien returned, we should have shared the burden and the joy of inheritance——”

He had been leaning carelessly back against a table while he talked. He now came erect, and added, with a queer look on his face—

“—and the pleasure of welcoming to Méricourt the nephew of our father’s friend.”

“You are very good, sir,” said Ned.

“I would fain believe it, monsieur. I have the pleasure to offer you the use of the chateau as an hotel for just so long as you care to stay.”

Ned, taken momentarily aback, hesitated over the right construction of so enigmatical an offer.

“Ah!” said the other, “it is to be considered literally.”

“In the business aspect, monsieur?”

“Assuredly. You must understand I have waived the privileges of my class, amongst which is to be numbered the right to acquit the wealthy of taxation. The ponds must feed the rivulets, monsieur.”

Seeing his visitor lost in introspection, “Enfin,” he cried, with a musical laugh, “that is the practical side. It is not based, believe me, upon a system of profits. For the social, I take you to my heart, monsieur, with all enthusiasm.”

And so Ned became a guest at the chateau at cost price.

CHAPTER V.

Monsieur the master of Méricourt would seal that queer compact of entertainment with the nephew of his father’s friend over a bottle of Niersteiner, which he had up from the cellar there and then.

“’Tis a rare brand,” quoth he, his eyes responding with a flick to the drawing of the cork; “and we will share both bottle and expense like sworn brothers!”

Ned sipped a single glass reluctant. So much the better for the other.

“I am your debtor!” he cried, as he drained the flask. “Draw upon me for the balance when you will.”

His face was flushed. He talked a good deal, and not in an intelligent vein. The visitor accepted him as an enigma that time should solve. There seemed so much firmness of purpose, so wanton an infirmity of performance, in his composition. Certainly, having the courage of his convictions in one way, and the consequent right to expound them literally in another, he might lay claim to consistency in flooding himself with wine before eleven o’clock in the morning. Still, to Ned, this implied a certain contradiction, inasmuch as no creed of right hedonism could include excess with its penalties.

“Monsieur, mon ami,” cried St Denys, on a wavering, jovial key, “you will oblige me by indulging, while here, your easiest caprices. Come and go as you will; I desire to put no restraint on you. You shall pay only for your clean linen, and for your food and drink. The first two you will find at least wholesome. For the last, behold the proof! If you want luxury, you must seek elsewhere. My socialism is eminently practical. The free expression of nature—that is the creed we seek to give effect to in this little corner of the world. But we are no Sybarites.”

“Nor I,” said Ned; “but, for you—you are a man of strong convictions, monsieur?”

St Denys laughed, sprawling back in his chair, and waved his hand significantly to the empty walls.

“Just so,” said Ned. “But I am a very chiffonnier for raking in the dust for hidden motives.”

The Frenchman cocked a sleepy lid, scrutinising his guest with a little arrogance of humour.

“They are here, no doubt, these motives,” said he. “Perhaps I am astute, perhaps I have the seer’s eye. If I foretold you a deluge, what would you do?”

“Invest my money in an ark.”

“A floating capital, to be sure. But you could never realise on it if you weathered the storm.”

“And you, monsieur?”

“And I, monsieur?—I should endeavour, very likely, to extract the essence of twenty years from one; I should at least spare no expense to that end. Were I foredoomed to founder, I would make myself a wreck that I might sink the more easily.”

He came scrambling to his feet.

“Do you like music?” he cried. “I will canvass you in the prophetic vein. I see the rising of the waters.”

He was looking about vaguely as he spoke.

“What the devil is become of it?” he muttered.

“Are you hunting for your guitar? You will find it flat beyond tuning, I am afraid.”

“How, do you say?”

“M. de St Denys, you fell asleep, literally, on it last night in the ‘Landlust.’”

“‘Landlust!’ Oh! Dieu du ciel! I am beginning to remember.”

“Why,” he chuckled, with hazy inspiration, “your veritable figure, monsieur, stands out of the fog.”

“Indeed, it was thick enough to stand on.”

“And little Boppard, and the gross old Lambertine, who is father to our village Aspasia, the fat old man. But I must introduce you to Théroigne Lambertine, monsieur, to add one beat a minute to your politic pulses.”

“Indeed, I think I have already introduced myself.”

“The deuce you have!”

“And is she your Aspasia? And who is her Pericles?”

“Harkee, monsieur!” said St Denys, with a fall to particular gravity, “that will never do.”

Then he broke into a great laugh.

“The father,” he cried, “is the bulwark of paradox. See that you never strive to take him by storm. He is of those who would undermine the Church while confessing to the priest. He clings to the old formulæ of honour that, in others, he pronounces out of date. He advocates free thought as a eunuch might advocate free love, without an idea of what it implies. His advance is all within his own ring-fence—round and round like a squirrel in its cage. He will go any distance you like there, only he must not be ousted from his patrimony. The world for all men thinks he, but his farm for Jack Lambertine. Popped into his pet seed-crusher, he would bleed a vat of oil. But he is an estimable husbandman; oh yes, he is that, certainly.”

“He gives you a better character, it seems, than you him.”

“Why, what have I said to his discredit? He has made the whole human race his debtor in one respect.”

“What, for example?”

“M. Murk, mon ami, he has produced a Théroigne.”

Ned, paint-box in hand, presented himself at the lodge-door. A sound of low singing led him through a very lavender-blown passage to the rear of the cottage. Here he came upon Nicette in a little bricked dairy dashed cool with recent water. She was skimming cream from a broad pan with her fingers. The tips of these budded through the white, like nibs of rhubarb through melting snow.

“Behold her as she stands!” said the intruder. “Here is the milk-washed Madonna for my picture.”

He put down his box and approached the maid. She stood startled, her hands poised above their work. Ned took her by the wrists, and, conducting his captive with speechless decorum to a sink, pumped water over the sheathed buds till they flushed pink with the cold.

“Now,” said he, “dry your hands on that jack-towel, Nicette, and we will get to work.”

The girl’s eyes floated in a little backwater of tears. Crescents of hot colour showed under them on her cheek-bones.

“Monsieur will make a jest of me,” she said, in a rather drowned whisper.

“I will make a Madonna of you, Nicette, if you will pose yourself as I wish.”

Her lips quivered. She looked down, twiddling her wet thumbs.

“I am established at the chateau, Nicette. I am a friend of M. de St Denys, who would have me dispose of my time to my best entertainment.”

“And that monsieur seeks of the poor lodge-keeper?”

“Truly, for I am an artist above all things.”

This cold fellow had a coaxing way with him. After not so long an interval he was busily at work, with the girl seated to his satisfaction. The sweet coolness of the dairy received, through a wide-flung window, the scent of innumerable flowers that thronged the little garden without. To look thereon was like gazing on the blazing square of a stage from the sequestered gloom of an auditorium. There was an orchestra, moreover, all made up of queer Æolian harmonics.

“What is that voice, Nicette, that never ceases to moan and quarrel?”

“It tells the wind, monsieur.”

“What does it tell? A story without an end, I think.”

He rose and looked through the window. A little complaining horn, pivoted on the top of a long pole, swung to the lightest breeze and caught and passed it on in waves of protest. Upon a slack wire or two that, like tent ropes, held the pole secure, lower currents of air fluttered with the sound of a knife sharpening on a tinker’s grindstone.

Ned grunted and resumed his seat.

“It would drive me silly to have that for ever in my ears. How can you stand it, Nicette?”

“It speaks to me of many things, monsieur.”

“What, for instance?”

“Monsieur will laugh.”

“No, I will not.”

“The whispering of the flower spirits, then; the steps and the low voices that come from beyond the dawn before even the shepherds are awake; sometimes the noise of the sea.”

“You have travelled?”

“Ah! no, monsieur. But I have heard how the great waters mutter all their secrets to their shells; and I like to think that my air-shell up there is in the confidence of the strange people one cannot see.”

Ned paused in his work, and dwelt musingly on his companion’s face.

“So,” said he, “you are a half-saint on the strength of these little odd ecstasies.”

“Indeed I am no part of a saint.”

“Now, Nicette, you must put no restraint on your speech whenever I am with you. You interest me more, I think, than anybody I have ever seen. Do you know, I have no imaginative faculty like this of yours. I am too inquisitive to dream nicely. I like to get to the bottom of things.”

Obviously there was some lure about him that drew the girl, in tentative advances, from her reserve.

“I do not think there is a bottom to things,” she said, looking up, a little breathless at her own daring. “Some day, perhaps, when monsieur thinks he has reached it, he will fall through and find himself flying.”

“Shall I?” said Ned abstractedly, for he was wrestling with a difficulty. Then he went on, with a quick change of subject,—“are you very fond of your cow?”

Nicette’s eyes opened in wonder.

“Of Madeleine? Oh yes, monsieur.”

“How often do you feed her?”

“But twice in the day.”

“Of green meat that you gather?”

“It is the fashion with us. Is it not so to stall the cattle in the country of monsieur?”

“Only at night. And how often do you feed your little brother?”

The unexpected question completely dumfounded the girl. Ned laughed, put his brush in his mouth, and fetched a louis-d’or from his pocket.

“Will you take this now, Nicette?”

Something to his consternation, she rose hurriedly from her seat, made as if to leave the room, and broke into a little fit of weeping. He went up and spoke to her soothingly—

“Silly, pretty child! are you ashamed? You are none the worse in my eyes for showing some inconsistency. Think only you are in the confidence of one of your strange people. Here, take it, Nicette.”

She threw his hand away. The coin rang on the floor.

“I will not, I will not!” she cried. “Oh, please to go, monsieur. How can I sit for the Madonna any more when you make me out so wicked!”

CHAPTER VI.

“M. de St Denys,” said Ned, “are you not here the children, so to speak, of an ecclesiastical benefice?”

“We are in the circle of Westphalia, monsieur—children, certainly, of the Duc de Bouillon, who is suffragan of the Archbishop of Cologne.”

“And how does his lordship accept this moral emancipation of little rustic Méricourt?”

The other laughed carelessly.

“As he would accept the antics of children, perhaps. It does not trouble me. In a few years all livings will be in the gift of the people.”

“You are serious in thinking so?”

“Why not?”

“Because I cannot interpret you, or comprehend for what reason you run riot on a road of self-abnegation.”

“Perhaps it is the war of the spirit with the flesh, monsieur. Who knows, were a man of vigour not to reasonably indulge his senses, if his senses would not maliciously lead his judgment astray? Shall an anchorite prescribe for the hot fevers of life? I like to test the passions I would legislate on.”

“And you foresee the triumph of the races over their rulers?”

“I foresee the bursting of the dam of humour—the mad earth-wide guffaw in the sudden realisation of a preposterous anachronism. I see all the old landmarks swept away in a roar of laughter—the idols, the frippery, the traditions of respect for what is essentially mean and false, the egregious monkeys of convention solemnly dictating the laws of society to their own reflections in looking-glasses.”

“And what then?”

“The reign of reason, monsieur: the earth, with its flowers, for the children of its soil; the commonage of pastures, of woods, and of valleys; the adjustment of the relations of love and increase to the developments of nature; the death of shame, of artificiality, of ignoble sophistries.”

Ned shook his head. Was the man sincere in all this? Did he seek to adapt himself, with and in spite of his weaknesses, to what he considered the inevitably right? or were his repudiation of caste, his sacrifice of fortune, a mere wholesale bid for the notoriety that is so frantically sought of melodramatic souls? His voice was vibrant with enthusiasm; he seemed to lash himself into great utterances, to feel conviction through force of sound; and then in a moment he would (figuratively) swagger to the wings, cock his hat, and bury his face in a foaming tankard.

The two young men were strolling through a twilight of woodland. They had dined at four o’clock, had sat an hour or so over their bottle, and were then, by arrangement of St Denys, to present themselves at a certain rendezvous of local esprits forts.

“Thou shalt handle Promethean fire,” said the lord of Méricourt, “and shalt kindle in the glance of a goddess.”

“Very well,” answered Ned. “I will come, by all means; but she will not find me touchwood.”

They had mounted from the back of the village at the turning into the road of the chateau. A few hundreds of yards had brought them to the fringe of the dense forest that rolled in terraces of high green down to the very outskirts of the hamlet. Thence they had passed, by tracks of huddled leafiness, into deeps and profounder deeps of stillness.

The silence about them was as the silence of a peopled self-consciousness—as the under-clang of voices to a dreamer whose heart works in his breast like a mole. Every bird’s song was an echo; the germ of new life under every pine-cone seemed stirring audibly in its little womb. If a squirrel scampered unseen, if a rush of wings went by unidentified, the sound became a memory before it was past. Nothing of all beauty was material. The thurible of the sun, trailing clouds of smoke, was withdrawn into the sacristy of the hills; the music of the vesper hour fled in receding harmonics under a roof of boughs; long aisles of arborescence, dim with slow-drifting incense, held solitude close as a returned prodigal. Here was the neutral ground of soul and body; thronged with unrealities to either; full of secret expectancies that massed or withdrew to the shutting and opening of one’s eyes.

The dusk formed like troops in the bushy hollows. Still M. de St Denys led his companion on. Suddenly he stayed him, with a hand on his sleeve.

A sound, like the rubbing cheep of a polishing-cloth on wood, came to their ears from somewhere hard by. Stepping very softly, the two men stole into a clearing dominated by a single huge beech-tree—an old shorn Lear of the forest. At its roots a young boar was engaged whetting its tushes, that curled up like the mustachios of a swinge-buckler. The muscular sides of the beast palpitated as it swung to and fro.

Now St Denys, with meaningless bravado, left his friend and walked up to the brute, that cocked its ears and was still in a moment. Ned caught the porcelain glint of its eye slewed backwards,—and then St Denys flogged out at the bristling flanks with a little riding-switch he carried in his hand. The pig fetched round; the young man uttered a shrill whoop and lashed it in the face; and at that the animal plunged for the thicket and disappeared.

Ned went on to the tree. He thought all this a particularly thrasonical display, and would not appear to subscribe, by so much as referring, to it.

“A mammoth in its day,” said he, looking up at the vast wreck of timber that writhed enormous arms against the darkening sky.

“Ay,” said St Denys, assuming indifference of the slight. “That has been a long one, too. I can scarce remember it but as it is now, and I am rising twenty-seven. It held itself royal and unapproachable, you see; defined the commonalty of the forest its limits of approximation to it like a celestial Mogul. The girth of this clearing in which it stands is the girth of its former greatness. No sapling even now dare set foot in the sanctum sanctorum. These forests have their traditions as men have.”

“Perhaps modelled on ours.”

“Perhaps. We shall see. Come here again in a year—two years; and if thou tell’st me this charmed circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.”

Again there seemed the theatrical posing. The speaker put a hand on the trunk of the great tree.

“Here is the very bienséance of vanity,” he said—“the archetype of society. Withered, denuded, worm-eaten to a shell, it yet decks its cap with a plume of green, wraps its palsy in a cloak of stars, and stands aloof like something desirable but not to be attained.”

“A shell, you say? It looks solid as marble.”

“It is a king, monsieur, without a heart. Some day when the storm rises it shall fall in upon itself. I know its hollowness from a boy. I have climbed fifty times this drooping bough here—which you may do now, if you will. Up there, where the branches strike from the main stem, one may look down into a deep well of decay.”

He caught his hand away with a repelling exclamation.

“Bah! it sprouts fungus at less than a man’s height; it is rotting to the roots. It shall take but a little heave of the tempest’s shoulder to send it sprawling.”

Ned humoured the allegory with some contempt.

“Thrones do not crash down so easily,” said he. “Their roots extend over the continents.”

St Denys came from the tree, slid his arm under his guest’s, and drew his gentleman down an obscure track that ran into the thicket.

“So you love kings?” said he.

“I neither love nor decry them. I wish to walk independent, like a visitor from another star, availing myself of every opportunity of observation. I shall not swerve from my convictions when they are formed.”

“And as far as you have got at present?”

“I see more evil rising from the depths than descending from the heights. I see the peaks of volcanoes held responsible for the eruptions that are hatched by turbulent forces far down below—compelled to be their mouthpiece, indeed. Kings are what their people make them. Let the forces subside, and the very cones in time will come to pasture quiet flocks.”

“Or let the lava overflow, overwhelm, and obliterate—distribute itself and grow cool. So shall the pasturage be infinitely more extended. Oh, inglorious conclusion! to justify individual evil on the score that it has no choice!”

“I do not,” said Ned calmly. “I recognise only the right of the individual to an independent expression of self. To secure this he must conform to a social code that excludes the processes of tyranny.”

“And that code must read equality.”

“No; for men are not equal. The world must always exhibit a sliding-scale of intellect and capacity; the unit, a perpetual aspiration. Materially, there must be a desideratum—an ultima ratio to ambition. Call it king, consul, dictator. Whatever its name, it is merely the crystallisation of a people’s character and energy—the highest effect given to a national tendency.”

“But all this, my friend, is not compatible with hereditary titles.”

“No; and there I pause.”

“It is gracious of you. A little further, and you will recognise the impossibility of patching up old fustian to wear like new cloth. Better to commit all to the fire than to spare the sorry stuff because a bit here and there is less decayed than the rest.”

As he spoke a square of mellow radiance met them at a turning of their path. The light proceeded from the window of a wooden hut or shanty—a tool-shed it might have been, or at the best a little disused hunters’ lodge. It was sunk in a bosket of evergreens; built of luffer-boards that gaped in many places; and its roof of flaking tiles was all sown with buttons of moss.

“The headquarters of the brotherhood,” said St Denys, with a laugh; and he pushed open a creaking door and drew his visitor within.

“Holà, Basile!” came in a triple note of greeting.

Ned found himself—wondering somewhat—in a bare, small room, furnished only with a table and plain benches of chestnutwood. At this table were seated the exiguous sizar of the “Landlust,” and a couple of rather truculent-looking gentry—farmers of small holdings, by reasonable surmise. An oil-lamp burned against the wall, and its light swayed wooingly on the face of the fourth member of the company—Théroigne Lambertine, whom the young man had foreguessed to be the goddess. She sat, raised a little above the others, at the head of the board, a smile on her lips, her eyes awake with daring. Her hair was loosely caught under a scarlet handkerchief; about her bosom a white fichu was only too slackly knotted. Ned had never seen a living creature so richly secure in the defensive and aggressive qualities of beauty. She looked at him with a little defiance of recognition.

“Mes amis,” said St Denys, “I have the pleasure to introduce to you a visitor whom you will know as Edouard. He is all, I may tell you, for reforming society.”

“That is a discipline thou shalt not wield here, Edouard,” cried one of the loobies, with an insolent laugh.

Ned faced the speaker gravely.

“Not even for the whipping of a jackass?” said he.

There answered a cackle of derision. St Denys caught his friend by the arm.

“It is unfair, it is unfair!” he cried merrily. “I have brought him hither without a word of explanation.”

Then he took his captive by the lapels of his coat.

“Monsieur, or Edouard,” said he, “this is the one spot within the compass of the nations where a man is entirely welcome for himself so long as he is it. Here we throw off every unnatural restriction, say what we will, do what we will—provided no evil consequence is entailed thereby. We are the club of ‘Nature’s Gentry,’ founded upon and governed by that solitary comprehensive rule. We neither give nor take offence, for where absolute freedom of speech is permitted all may be said that there is to say. Cast from the prohibitions of conventions, truthful beyond conceits, we restrain ourselves in nothing that is of happy impulse, deny ourselves no indulgence but that of doing hurt to our neighbour.”

“Basile has spoken,” said Théroigne in her full voice; “Basile is very great! And thou, thou tall staidness, come and pay thy homage to Nature’s queen.”

Ned turned swiftly, walked up to the girl, and kissed her cheek.

“What the devil!” cried St Denys hoarsely.

“Have I done hurt to my neighbour?” said Ned, facing round.

The Belgian laughed on a false note.

“You are immense,” said he. “The brotherhood takes you to its heart. See that you, on your part, resent nothing.”

He turned, with rather a frowning brow, to the table. Théroigne, flushed but unabashed by the Englishman’s boldness, watched her predial lord covertly.

“A small gathering to-night,” he said; “but what of that when the Queen presides?”

He fancied himself conscious of a new startled intelligence in the eyes of two, at least, of his company. This stranger (the look expressed), how had he appropriated to himself what they had never dreamed but to respect as unattainable? Truly it had been for him to rightly interpret to them their own law.

St Denys stamped his foot impatiently.

“Why do you blink here like moping owls?” he said. “The air is balm; the moon walks up the sky; there is not a bank but breathes out a sweet invitation.”

They bustled to their feet at his words. One man pulled from under the table a hamper loaded with wine-flasks and horns.

“We revel in the open,” said St Denys to Ned. “We give our words flight, like fairies, under the stars. Nothing remains to rankle, or to generate mischief, as in the close atmosphere of rooms.”

“Very well,” said Ned, “the open for me;” and he stepped out, accompanied by three others, into the sweet-blown wood.

The moment he found himself alone with her, St Denys turned upon Théroigne.

“Mademoiselle coquette,” said he, showing his teeth, “I could very easily strike you on the face!”

“And why?” she said quietly, her eyes glittering at him.

“Oh! do you not understand?”

“Little mother of God!” she cried low, her nostrils dilating, “but here is a consistent president! Did not the stranger conform to rule? Would you have had me give you the lie by repulsing him?”

“To the devil with the rule!” cried the other in suppressed passion. “You know it for a blind—not as an excuse for licence. This folly, this ridiculous club! is it not designed but to enable us to indulge a passion of romance—under the very ægis of M. Lambertine, too, when he chooses to leave his tavern and his pipe?”

The girl in a swift transition of mood came from her seat and put up her hands caressingly to the young man’s shoulders.

“Basile, mon ami,” she murmured; “it is ridiculous, I know; but it is an excitement in this little dull world of ours. Thou sport’st with professions of opinion that are not the truth of thy soul. Thou knowest, as I know, dearest, that these wild theories spell disaster; that through all the waste of the ages honour is the pilot star that it is never but safe to steer by. Oh, do you not, Basile?”

“Surely,” said St Denys impatiently. “What have I said to disprove it? But honour will not dispel the fog through which these ships of state are driving to their doom. I who prophesy the crash—God of heaven, Théroigne! dost thou think my ambition surfeits on this scurvy junto of clodhoppers? It is play, my beautiful—just play to pass away the time.”

“And I too play, soul of my soul—but I will no more. This Englishman, if he dares again, he shall suffer. Thy honour shall be mine, as thou hast sworn to save me from myself—oh, Basile, darling, remember how thou hast sworn it!”

CHAPTER VII.

Mr Murk sat on a bank, solemnly preparing for an idyll.

“But I cannot subscribe to it in one respect,” thought he; “for, if I persist in being myself, I shall look upon all this as the most idiotic fooling.”

“Little Boppard,” said he, “what will society do now you have severed yourself from it?”

“Monsieur,” said the student angrily, “I am not to be laughed at.”

“How, then, of this freedom of speech?”

“You are an interloper. You do not understand.”

“But I am eager to learn; oh, little Boppard, I am so eager to learn!”

“I will not be called so. It is infamous!”

“But it was thus M. de St Denys named you to me.”

“It is different. I am nothing to you.”

“Oh, mon pauvret! it is not so bad. You are at least a little man to me.”

One of the hobnails broke into a guffaw.

“Listen to him! this stranger is a droll! Good! It is much noise about nothing, Boppard.”

“You most happily cap me, sir,” said Ned, with great gravity. “May I have the pleasure of taking wine with you?”

“But a bucketful, Edouard!” cried the fellow boisterously. He brimmed the horns as he spoke. A vinous pigment already freckled his cheeks.

“I see here nothing but an excuse for an orgy,” thought the visitor.

The company sprawled over a bank to one side of the clearing where the great tree stood. The wine-flasks lay cool in moss. The two countrymen had thrown off their coats and bared their shaggy chests to the night. Overhead the moon was already of a power to strew the forest lanes with travelling blots of shadow, like dead leaves moving on a languid stream. A cricket chirruped here and there in spasms, as if irresistibly tickled by the recollection of some pleasantry. From time to time, across the dim perspective of a glade, a momentary indiscernible shape would steal and vanish.

Ned pondered over the enchantment—as moving less prosaic souls—of moonlit haunted woods.

“Now, I wonder,” thought he, “if I could put myself en rapport with the undefinable in less Philistine company!”

As if in reply, “What would not Nicette interpret of these fairy solitudes?” said a dreamy voice at his back.

He turned his head. Théroigne had come softly, and was seated with St Denys a little above him on the bank.

“She is not of the club, then?” said Ned.

The student laughed truculently, throwing back his head with a noise as if he were gargling.

“Little Boppard is beyond himself,” said Ned. “We shall make a man of him yet.”

The two potwallopers hooted richly at that.

“Monsieur is quick to launch insults,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine frigidly.

“Why, what have I said?”

The young man looked piously bewildered. St Denys sniggered—even, Ned could have thought, with a little note of vexation.

“Friend Edouard,” said he, “in Méricourt the portière Legrand stands pre-canonised.”

“Understand!” chuckled a bumpkin. “She is portière and a virgin—save that she bears the sins of the community.”

“Beast!” cried Théroigne. Then she went on sarcastically—“To belong to us! Oh yes! but it is likely, is it not? She who communes with the Blessed Virgin like a dear familiar.”

“It is so,” said St Denys. “That is her reputation.”

He was himself, for all his Jean-Jacques Pyrrhonism, an evident subscriber to a local superstition.

“Now,” said the perplexed Englishman, “I perceive that to be oneself is to invite resentment.”

“Not to give or take offence,” said Théroigne, with fine impartiality.

“Both of which have been done, mademoiselle. So, let us cry quits. And what would Mademoiselle Legrand make of all this?”

“How can I tell? She is the saint of dear conceits. She has the inward eye for things invisible to us. ‘Where do the threads of rain disappear to, Théroigne?’ says she. ‘Oh, mon Dieu, Nicette! Am I a Cagliostro?’ ‘I think,’ she says, ‘they are pulled into the earth by goblins working at great looms of water. Each thread draws like spun glass from the crucible of the clouds, and so underfoot is woven the network of springs and channels.’ Ciel! the quaint sweet child! Whither come her fancies? They are there in the morning like drops of dew.”

St Denys broke in with a rippling snatch of song:—

“‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,

Qui ce matin avoit desclose

Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,

A point perdu, ceste vesprée,

Les plis de sa robe pourprée,

Et son teint au vostre pareil.’”

He stopped.

“Sing on, my heart,” whispered Théroigne.

“Monsieur the Englishman does not approve my music.”

“Monsieur!” began the girl, in great scorn; but, to stay her, St Denys lifted up his voice a second time:—

“When Clœlia proved obdurate

To Phædon’s fond advances,

Repaid with scorn his woful state,

With flout his utterances,

‘Forego,’ he cried, ‘this acrid strain,

From such sweet lips a schism,

And dumbly quit me of my pain

By posy symbolism!

‘For hope, a white rose; for despair,

A red, pluck to thy bosom!’—

He turned; then looked—the wilful fair

Had donned a crimson blossom.

But, so it chanced, within the cup

A cupid, honey-tipsy,

In rage at being woken up,

Thrust out and stung the gipsy.

Then, all compunction for his deed,

For cap to the disaster,

Rubbed Phædon’s lips with honey-mead,

To serve the wound for plaster.”

“Is it pretty or not, monsieur?” asked Théroigne mockingly, advancing her foot and giving Ned a little peck in the back with it.

“It suits the occasion, mademoiselle, and, no doubt, the company.”

St Denys laughed out.

“Hear the grudging ascetic!” he cried. “It is martial music that shall fire this temperate blood! Ho, Boppard, mon petit chiffon! give him a taste of thy quality.”

“He will laugh at me, Basile.”

Nevertheless, the sizar got upon his legs. It brought him three feet nearer the stars. His voice was a protesting little organ; but the spirit that inspired it was many degrees above proof.

He sang:—

“Decorous ways,

Though Mammon praise

With self-protective art—

We’ve learnt through ruth,

The damnèd truth,

Why he affects the part.

Courage, then! Courage, my children!

Virtue is all gammon,

Imposed on us by Mammon,

Not to spoil the fashion.

Giving him monopoly—hatefully, improperly—

Of the sweets of passion.

—Monsieur, I will not be laughed at.”

“A thousand pardons,” said Ned. “I thought from your expression you were going to be sick. But, never mind. Go on!”

“I will go on or not as I please. I protest, at least, I can crow as well as monsieur.”

“Like a bantam cock on a dunghill, little Boppard. You hail the awaking of the proletariat. And are the verses your own?”

“I will not tell you. I will not tell you anything. I have never been so insulted.”

He seemed to sob, plumped down, and drank off a horn of wine in resounding gulps. The two rustics rolled to their feet and began to fling an uncouth dance together. They had canvassed the bottle freely, and were grown very true to themselves. They spun, they hooted, their moonlit shadows writhed on the ground like wounded snakes. Wilder and more abandoned waxed their congyrations, till at length one flung the other upon the bank at the very feet of Théroigne.

Now this fellow, potulent and pot-valiant, and taking his cue from sobriety, scrambled to his knees, threw himself upon the girl, and crying, “No hurt to my neighbour!” endeavoured to salute her after an example set him.

His reception was something more than damning. Théroigne, with a cry of rage, met the impact tooth and nail, and following on the rebound, became in her turn the furious aggressor. A devil possessed her fierce mouth and vigorous young arms. Her victim, wailing with terror, tried to protect his face, from which the blood ran in rivulets. For a moment or two she had everything to herself. The others stood paralysed about her where they had got to their feet. Then St Denys seized and struggled to draw her away. Even at that she resisted, worrying her prey and gabbling like a thing demented.

“Leave the brute his life!” cried M. le Président. “It is not he, after all, that is most to blame. Do you hear, Théroigne? I will twist your arm out of its socket, but you shall come!”

She uttered a shriek of physical pain, and, releasing her hold, stood panting. On the grass the wretched creature nursed his wounds, and sobbed and wriggled. His comrade, sobered beyond belief, dumbly glowered in the background.

Ned took off his hat in a shameless manner of politeness.

“These fraternal orgies,” said he, “are a little difficult of digestion to a stomach prescriptive. On the whole, I think, I prefer the despotism of savoir-vivre. With monsieur’s permission I will e’en back to Méricourt.”

“We must bear in mind that he is an Englishman,” said the sizar. “His traditions are not of the licence of good-fellowship.”

CHAPTER VIII.

It was characteristic enough of M. de St Denys to bear his guest no grudge for the fiasco, chiefly brought about, it must be admitted, by that guest’s malfeasance. With no man was the evil of the day more sufficient to itself; and he would be the last to insist upon that discipline of conscience that burdens each successive dawn with a new heritage of regrets. Moreover, the dog had the right humour, when he was restored to it, to properly appreciate Ned’s immediate comprehension of rule one and only of the Brotherhood; and on his way home with Théroigne, the comedy of the situation did gradually so slake the turmoil of his soul as that he must try to win over his companion to regard the matter from anything but a tragic standpoint. In this he was but partly successful; for woman has a cast in her humorous perceptives that deprives her of the sense of proportion.

“Is it so little a thing?” she said hotly. “But it was thy honour I fought to maintain. And no wonder, then, that men will take sport of that in us which they hold so cheap in themselves.”

However, his mended view of the affair impressed her so far as that, meeting with the Englishman by the village fountain on the morning following the orgy, she condescended to some distant notice of, and speech with, him. For, indeed, with her sex, to punish with silence is to wield a scourge of hand-stinging adders.

Ned, serenely undisturbed by, if not unconscious of, a certain toneless hauteur, greeted Mademoiselle Lambertine with his usual politeness. He was not, in truth, greatly interested in this fine animal. He recognised in her no original quality that set her apart from her fellows. Beauty of an astonishing order was hers indeed—beauty as much of promise as of fulfilment. The little remaining gaucherie of the hoyden dwelt with her only like a lingering brogue on the tongue of an expatriated Irishman. It was rough-and-tumble budding into a manner of caress. But beauty, save as it might contribute to the motif of a picture, was no fire to raise this young man’s temperature, and in Théroigne’s presence he seemed only to breathe an opulent atmosphere of commonplace. She was glowing passion interpreted through colour—siennas and leafy browns, and golds like the reflection of sunsets; a dryad, a pagan, a liberal-limbed tetonnière. If she were ever to find herself a soul, he could imagine her standing out richly as a Rembrandt portrait against torn dark backgrounds. But at present she seemed to lack the setting that occasion might procure her.

“Why do you toil this long way for water?” said he.

“For the reason that monsieur travels,” she answered coldly.

“Do I comprehend? I loiter up the channels of life seeking the spring-heads.”

“Whence the waters gush sweet and clear. Down in the dull homesteads one draws only stagnation from the ground.”

“Or from the barrels underground. Méricourt would do well, I think, to make this fountain its rendezvous.”

“Oh, monsieur! one need not drink much wine, I see, to yield oneself to insolence.”

“Well, you are angry over that kiss. But it was a jest, Théroigne. My heart was as cold as this basin.”

Did this improve matters?

“No doubt,” she said, flushing up, “you only lack the opportunity to be a Judas. And is it so they treat women in your barbarous island?”

“They treat them as they elect to be treated. We have a saying that as one makes one’s bed, so one must lie on it.”

“It is a noble creed!” cried the girl derisively. “It is the Pharisee speaking in English.”

“Nay, mademoiselle. It is to be vertebrate, that is all. To condone evil on the score of provocation to evil, to excuse it on the ground of constitutional tendency—that is the first infirmity of declining races.”

She looked at him mockingly, then fell into a little musing fit.

“Perhaps it is the right point of view,” she murmured; “but for us—mon Dieu! our eyes will get bloodshot and our vision obscured, and—yes, I would rather die of fire than of frost.”

She turned upon him, still pondering.

“It is strange. They say you are a great lord in your own country.”

“I am nephew to one, and his heir.”

“And is he like you?”

Ned permitted himself a snigger.

“He is very unlike me. He is the doyen, perhaps, of Lotharios.”

“An old man?”

“Yes, old.”

“And you travel like a commis voyageur—for experience, says the gross Van Roon! There must be something of courage in you Englishmen, after all, though you will run before us where you are fewer than ten to one.”

Ned changed the subject.

“Why were you so hurt last night by my reference to Nicette?”

“She is a saint.”

“How do you know?”

“How does a blind man know when some one sits at an open window by which he passes? He feels the presence—that is all.”

“That is all, then?”

“No; but this—Nicette cried lustily till the waters of baptism redeemed her, and thereafter never again: so early was the devil expelled from that sweet shrine.”

“And the little brother—is he a saint too?”

Théroigne laughed contemptuously.

“Baptiste? Oh, to be sure! the little unregenerate! He is the devil’s imp rather.”

“They are orphans?”

“Since three years. The girl mothers him, the graceless rogue.”

“I wronged her in ignorance, you see. That club of good-fellowship—it was all so concordant, so much in harmony with its own laws of frolic give-and-take. Why should a very saint be superior to so genial a fraternity?”

“We are a fraternity, as monsieur says, extending the hand of brotherhood to——”

She broke off, uttering a sharp exclamation as of terror or disgust, and shrunk back against the well rim. A figure had come into view—by way of the meadow path, up which Nicette had borne her load of fodder—and had paused over against the fountain, where it stood obsequiously bowing and gesticulating. It was that of a tall, large-boned man, fair-haired, apple-faced, with a mild, deprecating expression in its big blue eyes. Its head was crowned with a greasy cloth cap, shaped like the half of a tomato; its shirt, of undesirable fustian, was strangely decorated over the left breast with a yellow badge cut into something the shape of a duck’s foot; its full small-clothes—that came pretty high to the waist and were braced over the shoulders with leather bands, yoked to others running horizontally across chest and back—seemed in their every stereotyped crease the worn expression of humility.

“What is it, my friend?” said Ned.

Théroigne put a hand on his arm.

“Do not speak to him, save to bid him return whither he came. God in heaven! I can see the grass withering under his feet! Monsieur, monsieur” (for Ned was walking towards the man), “it is one of the accursed race!”

The creature fawned like a Celestial as the young man approached.

“Monseigneur, for the love of God, a drink of water!” said he.

His dry, thick lips seemed to grate on the words.

“Why not?” said Ned. “You have only to help yourself.”

“Let him dare!” shrieked Théroigne. “Monsieur, do you hear! it is a Cagot, a Cagot, I say!”

The man looked up, with a despairing forlorn gesture, and drooped again like one to whom long experience had taught the hopelessness of self-vindication.

“Is that so?” asked Ned.

“Alas! monseigneur, it is so.”

“What do you do it for, then; and what the deuce is it? Here—have you a cup or vessel of your own?”

With a hurried manner, compound of supplication and triumph, the creature, fumbling in its shirt, brought forth an iron mug. Ned received and carried it to the well. Théroigne sprang from him.

“You are not to be warned? It will poison the blessed spring.”

“Nonsense,” said Ned; but recognising her real agitation and alarm, he offered her a compromise. He would carry the mug to a little distance, and there she, standing back from it, should drop in water from her pitcher. To this she consented, after some demur; and the Cagot had his drink.

“That makes a man of you,” said Ned, watching the poor fellow take all down in reviving gulps.

The other shrugged his shoulders despondingly.

“Monseigneur, I can never be that. It is forbidden to us to stand apart from the beasts. We had hoped in these days of——” he broke off, shook his head, and only repeated, “I can never be that, monseigneur.”

“Then I would not come among men to be so treated.”

“Nor should I, but that my one pig had strayed and I dared to seek it. Monseigneur—if monseigneur would soil his tongue with the word—has he——”

“I have seen no pig. No doubt it will be returned to you, if found.”

“Returned! Hélas! but a poor return, indeed.”

“It will not be?”

“The lights, the entrails—a little of the coarser meat, perhaps.”

“How is that, then?”

“Where we squat, monseigneur, thither come the authorised of the pure blood. ‘These are your bounds,’ say they; and they signify, arbitrarily, any limit that occurs. Woe, then, to the Cagot sheep or pig that strays without the visionary cordon! Whoever finds it may kill, reserving to himself the good, and returning to the unhappy owner the inferior parts only of the meat.”

“It is of a piece with all I see, here more than elsewhere—the grossest inconsistency where the senses seek gratification. Truly, I think, the emancipation of the race is to be from self-denial.”

He gave the man a piece of money—rather peremptorily checking the fulsome benedictions his act called forth—and saw him slink off the way he had come. For all its show of servility, there had appeared something indescribably noble in the poor creature’s rendering of an ignoble part. It was as if, on the stage of life, he were willing to sacrifice his individuality to the success of the piece. Not all scapegoats could so triumph physically through long traditions and experiences of suffering. These Cagots—they might have come from the loins of the wandering Jew.

He walked back to Théroigne, his heart even a little less than before inclined to her. She held away from him somewhat, as if he were contaminated.

“A fraternity, extending the hand of brotherhood,” he said—repeating some words of hers uttered before the Cagot had intervened—“to whom was mademoiselle about to say? to all, without exception?”

She looked at him, half fearful, half defiant.

“This man is of the accursed race,” she cried low.

“A Jew?”

“A Cagot.”

“And what is that?”

“You do not know? They come from France, where she sits with her feet in the mountains—outcasts, pariahs, with blood so hot that an apple will wrinkle in their hands as if it had been roasted.”

“I should have fancied that a recommendation to you of Méricourt.”

“Ah, grace of God! With them it is nothing but the emitting of a pestilent miasma. These people are brutes. They would even have tails, but that their mothers are cunning to bite them off when they are newly born.”

Ned went into a fit of laughter.

“It is true, monsieur.”

“It is at least easily proved. And they come from the south?”

“From the south and from the west. It is not often we see them here; but this new spirit that is in the air—mon Dieu!—it stirs in them, I suppose, with a hope of better times—of release from the restrictions imposed upon them for the safety of the community; and now they will sometimes wander far afield.”

“And what are these restrictions?”

“They are many—as to the isolation of their camps; as to their tenure of land or carrying of weapons; as to buying or selling food; as to their right to enter a church by the common door, to take the middle of the street, to touch a passer-by, to remain in any village of the pure after sundown. They must grow their own flesh, find their own springs, wear, each man, woman, and child the duck-foot badge, that they may be known and shunned. Indeed, I cannot tell a tithe of the laws that control them.”

“But for what reason are they set apart?”

“Little mother of God! how can I say? They are Cagots, they are accursed—that is all I know.”

Even as she spoke an angry brabble of voices came to them from the direction of the path by which the outcast had retreated; and in a moment the man himself reappeared, scuttling along in a stooping posture, and hauling by the ear his recovered pig, that squeaked passionately as it was urged forward. But now in his wake came a posse of louts—young chawbacons drawn from the fields—who pelted the poor wretch with clods of clay, and were for baiting him, it seemed, in a crueller manner.

Ned ran down and placed himself between victim and pursuers. The former, bruised and breathless, pattered out a hurried fire of explanation and entreaty.

The young gentleman faced the little mob—half-a-dozen or so—that had closed upon itself—compact claypolism.

“What do you want with this man?” he said.

His demand evoked a clamour of vituperation.

“What is that to you? It is the law! The mongrel is accursed—l’âme damnée—le tison d’enfer! Down with this insolent the stranger! he is a Cagot himself!”

Ned waited calmly for the tumult to subside.

“I ask you what this man has done?” said he.

“Cannot you tell the heretic by his smell? Oh-a-eh! here is a fine Catholic nose! Out of our way—the pig is forfeit!”

They hissed and yelped, and raised a shrill chorus of “baas” at the unfortunate. Curiously, he seemed to feel this last form of insult more acutely than any. Suddenly a clod of earth, aimed presumably at the poor creature, hurtled through the air and struck Ned’s shoulder in passing. It might have rebounded on the assailant, so immediate was the retribution that followed. The erst-calm paladin went for the vermin like a terrier, and like a terrier repaid his own punishment with interest.

The great chuff howled and blubbered and wriggled under the blows that rained upon him. Presently Ned, exhausted, swung his victim in a hysteric heap upon the ground, and stood to breathe himself. Then it was that the reserve, withdrawn in affright, seeing his momentary fatigue, gathered heart of numbers, and came down upon him in phalanx. He received them, nothing dismayed, and accounted for the first with a “give-upon-the-nose,” and for another with a “poached eye.” He was patently tired, however—enervated by the heat of the day—and his adversaries, recognising this, were encouraging one another to annihilate him, when all in a moment a volume of water slapped into their faces and quenched their ardour for ever.

A new champion had come upon the field, and that was no other than Mademoiselle Théroigne with her pitcher. She laughed volubly, on a menacing note, in the washed and streaming countenances.

“Beasts, pigs, cowards!” she shrilled. “For one Englishman—name of God!—for one trumpery Englishman to lay you out flat as linen on a bleaching-green! Get back—hide yourselves in your furrows, or play bully to the little rabbits in the field corners! Not to the bucks—that were too bold.”

She made as if to follow up the water with the vessel. Ned cried out: “You will break the earthenware sooner than their heads, mademoiselle!” in agony lest she should blaze beyond self-extinguishment, as on the previous evening; but she only stiffened her claws like a cat and prepared to spring. It was enough. The swamped and demoralised crew gathered up its wreckage and fled incontinent, and was in a moment out of sight round the curve.

Ned took off his hat to his tutelary divinity—this Athena to his Achilles.

“Your weapons were better than mine,” he said; “but your task was harder: for you had to fight against prejudice as well.”

The Cagot, still holding his pig by the ear, crept up to the young man and caught and ravenously kissed his hand. Then he looked wistfully at a brown-haired goddess.

“Oh, mon Dieu, no!” said Théroigne. “You must not touch me or come near me.”

She turned and addressed Ned, almost with an entreating sound in her voice:—

“You have courage of every sort, monsieur. But for me—yes, it is as you say. My heart warms to such valour; but I cannot forget in a moment these long traditions—this fear and this abhorrence. Do not let him approach me.”

She stepped back, as if to escape a very radiated influence. But she spoke softly to the Englishman, and with the manner of one who in giving help has wrought a little conscious bond of sympathy.

“Bid the man go hence by the Liége road,” she said. “So will he evade his persecutors. But a few toises out he can enter the woods and work round to his lair.”

“I will see him on his way, mademoiselle.”

He bade her good morning quite respectfully, and drove the Cagot before him from the village. It was slow progress, for the recalcitrant pig must be humoured. The man looked back from time to time, his face full of the most human gratitude. A little way on he paused by an outlying cottage until his benefactor was come up with him. Then, smiling brightly, he stayed Ned with a significant gesture, and went on tiptoe to the door that stood open. A loaf lay on a table within. This the Cagot seized with a muttered word, and so came forth again, hugging his prize.

“What, the devil!” cried Ned.

He had seen a woman within the hut. She had shrunk, crying out, from the intruder, but had made no effort to defend her property.

“A thief!” exclaimed the Englishman.

“Nenni!” said the man in a deprecatory voice. “It is one of our poor little privileges. I appropriated the bread that monseigneur might see.”

“The deuce, you did!”

“We may take it—but, yes, we may enter and take, wherever we see it, a cut loaf turned upside-down, with the sliced part to the door. I will return it if monseigneur wills.”

“No,” said Ned. “This privilege is on a par with all the rest. Let the fool pay toll to his own inconsequence. Lead on, my friend.”

Very shortly they turned into a forest track, plunging amongst trees for a half mile or more. Here Ned pushed up to his humble wayfellow.

“Why are you accursed?” said he.

“God help us, monseigneur! I know not. Thus they hold and keep us. Wheresoever in our wanderings we alight, we must report our names and habitations to the bailli of the nearest jurisdiction, that no loophole may be left us to escape from ourselves; for it is forbidden to us to intermarry with the pure of blood, lest we thereby, merging into the community, lose our unhappy distinction.”

“But, whence come you, and what have you done to merit this—this——?”

“Monseigneur, we are accursed. It is not given to us to know more than that.”

Was there a faint note of stubbornness, a suggestion of some conscious secret withheld, in this abject reiteration of abasement? Ned was in doubt; but at least it seemed these strange people carried horror with them like a hidden plague-spot.

“Tell me,” said he, “why did you cower when the louts cried ‘Baa’ to you?”

The man looked up furtively.

“It is our ears,” he muttered. “They will call them sheep’s ears, monseigneur.”

“Certainly, it would appear, they are not designed for rings. That is a progressive evolution, my friend.”

The Cagot did not answer. A few steps farther brought them into a little dell traversed by a brook. Here, by the water-side, was stretched a single tent of tattered brown canvas.

“Alone!” said Ned, surprised.

“Alone, monseigneur, save for the woman and the little bien fils de son père. In these days the tribes are much broken up. They wander piecemeal. There are rumours abroad—hopes, prospects, as if it were prelude to the advent of a Messiah. I think, perhaps, I have seen to-day a harbinger—an angel bearing tidings.”

He gazed at the young man with large solemn eyes. His face was full of a wistful patience—not brutalised, but mild and intelligent.

“Oh, truly, I am the devil of an angel!” said Ned; and he waved his hand and turned.

“Monseigneur, I will never forget,” said the Cagot.

CHAPTER IX.

In Nicette’s little lodge, doors and windows stood all open. Even then the languid air that entered fell fainting almost on the threshold. The heat of many preceding days seemed accumulated in vast bales of clouds piled up from the horizon. It scintillated, livid and coppery, through its enormous envelopes, eating its way forth with menace of a flood of fire.

Obviously the dairy was the nearest approach to a temperate zone, and thither Ned bent his steps, carrying his paint-box and canvas. He found the girl there, as he had expected. She was seated knitting near the flung casement, wherethrough came a hot scent of geranium flowers. In the blinding garden without silence panted like a drouthy dog. Only the horn, high on its perch, found breath to bemoan itself, gathering up the folds of muteness with an attenuated thread of complaint.

Mademoiselle Legrand looked cool and fragrant, for all the house was an oven; but a little bloom of damp was on her face, like dew on a rose. In a corner, standing with his hands behind his back and his front to the wall, Baptiste, the sad-eyed child, did penance for some transgression, it would appear.

“I must not lose my Madonna for a misunderstanding,” said Ned.

Nicette rose to her feet, flushing vividly to her brow. The weary white face of the boy was turned in astonishment to the intruder.

“Monsieur,” said the portière, in a little agitated voice, “you must not ask me. For one you hold so cheap to represent the stainless mother! It cannot be, monsieur.”

Ned deposited his paraphernalia on a chair, went up to his whilom model, and took her hands in his with gentle force.

“Nicette,” he murmured, so that the child should not hear him, “I refuse, you know, to accept this responsibility. It is your own consciousness of justification, or otherwise, that is in question. The mother had a human as well as a divine side. I will use you for the first.”

“Use me!” she whispered. “Monsieur——”

She drooped her head—tried to withdraw her hands. Her lips faltered desperately on the word.

“Tell me the truth, little Nicette. May not a saint love guava jelly? It is a fruit of the sweet earth—perhaps the very manna of the Israelites.”

He held her young soft wrists in hostage for an answer—much concerned for an exchange of confidence. The girl, making a lac d’amour of her fingers, suddenly came to her decision.

“I am very wicked,” she said in a small voice, between eagerness and tears; “I am not a saint at all. Monsieur may do with me as he will.”

Now surely this young man had the fairy Temperance to his godmother when he was christened. His point gained, he disposed his model with a very pretty eye to business, and was soon at work.

“Nicette,” said he, “how has this youthful whipper-snapper misconducted himself?”

“Baptiste, monsieur? He was dainty with his food; and—the day was hot, and perhaps I was ever so little cross.”

She accepted the understanding, it will be seen—thrilled perhaps over the secret ecstasy implied in this prospect of a lay confessor.

“Well, ma chérie,” said Ned, “you may relax discipline now, may you not? It worries me to have this inconversable ape criticising me from his corner.”

“Baptiste,” said Nicette, “you may go and play—in the shadow, Baptiste.”

The child went out dully, with a lifeless step. It would seem he recognised no enticing novelty in the form of words.

“Now we will have a comfortable coze,” said Ned.

“How, monsieur?”

“That means we will exchange confidences, girl.”

Nicette smiled.

“You do not love children, monsieur?” she asked.

“Truly, I think not. They know, I fancy, so much more than they will tell. I feel nervous in their company, as if they might blackmail me if they would. It is no use to be conscious of my own innocence. Vague terrors assail me that they may be in possession of dark secrets that I have forgotten. For them, they never forget.”

“It is so, indeed, with little doubt.”

“Is it not? They inherit the ages, one must admit. They are like eggs, full of the concentrated meat of wisdom; and as such it is right to sit upon them. It is a self-protective instinct thus to hurry their development, for so their abnormal precocity distributes itself over an ever-increasing area and weakens in its acuteness.”

“And they have cunning, monsieur.”

“Without doubt—the cunning to evoke and trade upon sympathy with sufferings that they pretend to, but are physically incapable of feeling.”

The girl looked up, her eyes expressive of some strangeness of emotion.

“Are they not able to feel, then, monsieur?”

“Not as we do, Nicette. Their nervous organism has not yet come to tyrannise over the spiritual in them. Turn thy head as before, babouine. The light falls crooked on thy mouth. No; I wish never to be burdened with a child, either my own or another’s.”

A low boom of thunder rolled up the sky. Nicette started and drove her chair back a little distance from the window.

“That is vexatious of you, you pullet. Are you afraid of thunder?”

“Oh yes—dear mother!—when it is close.”

“But that is yet far away.”

“It will advance—it is the diligence of the skies bringing inhuman company. Mon Dieu! when one hears the driver crack his whip, and the horses plunge forward, and there follows the rumbling of the wheels!”

“Talk on. I love to hear thee. But take courage first to resume thy pose.”

“Monsieur, I am frightened.”

“What, with me for thy Quixote! I have conquered windmills before now. There—that is to be a good child. Do you find it hard to understand my chatter?”

“Monsieur, on the contrary, is an adept at our language.”

“This is nothing to how I speak it when I have a cold. Still, do you know, I have never quite got over the feeling that it is very clever of a Frenchman to talk French. ‘And so it is,’ Théroigne would say, but you will not. Nicette, have you ever heard speak of the Club of Nature’s Gentry? What a question, is it not? But I like to hear you laugh like little bells.”

“Monsieur, it is a very dull club.”

“Which is the reason you are not a member?”

“A member! oh, mon Dieu! that is not my notion of enjoyment.”

“Great heaven! Here is an astonishing shift of the point of view.”

“How, monsieur?”

“Never mind. So, freedom of speech is not to your fancy?”

“It is not freedom, but an excuse for silly licence. Those clowns and the grotesque small Boppard—it is to discuss wine, not politics, that they assemble. A full mug is the only challenge they invite, and the larger the measure, the greater that of their courage. But they talk so much into empty pots that their voices sound very big to them.”

“Not Boppard, mademoiselle. He at least hath this justification—that he is a poet.”

“Has monsieur discovered it, then? Monsieur is cleverer than all Méricourt. We must make monsieur the student a crown of vine leaves.”

“Nicette, dost thou think I will suffer a pullet to cackle at me? What, then, if not a poet?”

“But a maker of charades impossible to interpret, by monsieur’s permission.”

“My permission, you jade! Here is the measure of your courage, I think. And have you no fear that I shall make M. de St Denys acquainted with your opinion of his club?”

“None, monsieur.”

The thunder rolled again. The girl, starting and clasping her hands, cried—

“Monsieur, let me come from the window! Oh, monsieur, let me, and I will light a blest candle!”

“A little longer—just a little longer. I foresee a darkness presently, and then, lest my Madonna be blotted from my sight, the candle shall burn.”

The girl looked out fearfully at the advancing van of the storm. It was still brilliant sunshine in the garden, but with an effect as if the outposts of noon were falling back upon their centre, already half-demoralised in prospect of an overwhelming charge. The wind, too, beginning to move like that that precedes an avalanche, was scouting through the shrubberies with a distant noise of innumerable tramping feet; and the fitful moaning of the horn rose to a prolonged scream, that drew upon the heart with a point of indescribable anguish.

“Why, however,” said Ned, “have you no apprehension that I shall tell tales to M. de St Denys?”

“I said I had no fear, monsieur.”

“Would he not resent this so unflattering opinion of his satellites?”

“What is his own of them, does monsieur think?—that a tipsy boor assists the cause of freedom? Monsieur, my master is not blind, save perhaps in thinking others so. Saint Sacrement! the sun has gone out! It was as if a wave of cloud extinguished it.”

“Never mind that. In thinking others blind to what, girl?”

“I must not say—indeed, I must not say.”

“Is this to be a saint—to damn with innuendo? Fie, then, Nicette!”

“Monsieur, do not be angry. Oh, I will tell you whatever you will. This club then, it is a pretext, one cannot but assume—a veil to hide perilous sentiments, not of politics, but of——”

“But of what?”

The girl hung her head. The increasing gloom without lent its shadow to her face.

“Monsieur has no mercy,” she whispered.

“But of what, Nicette? Tell me.”

“Monsieur—of intrigue.”

As if the very word completed an electric circuit and discharged the battery, a flash answered it, followed almost immediately by a splintering shock of thunder. The girl uttered a shriek, started to her feet, and ran to the middle of the room, holding her hands to her eyes.

“I am blind!” she wailed—“oh, I am blind!”

Ned hurried to her—gripped her shoulder.

“Nonsense!” he cried; “it will pass in a moment. Let me look.”

He could hardly hear his own voice. The lightning might have been a bursting shell that had rent a dam. The thunder of the rain out-roared that of the clouds—overbore the struggling wind and pinned it to the earth—smote upon the roof in tearing volleys, and made of all the atmospheric envelope a crashing loom of water.

“Nicette!” cried the young man, frightened to see the girl yet hide her face from him. He was conscious of something crouching at her feet, and, looking down, saw that terror had driven Baptiste, the little boy, to the refuge of their company.

In his panic, Ned impulsively seized the maid into his arms.

“You are not hurt!” he implored. “I kept you by the window. My God! if you should be injured through my fault!”

She was not at least so stunned but that his impassioned self-reproach could inform her cheeks with a rose of fire. The stain of it, could he have seen, soaked to the very white nape of her neck.

“Hold me,” she whimpered. “Don’t let me go, or I shall die!”

She strained to him, patently and without any thought of dissimulation, palpitating with terror as the rain roared and the frequent detonations shook the house. In the first of his apprehension he thought of nothing compromising in the situation—of nothing but his own concern and the girl’s pitiful state.

Presently, in a lull, he heard her exclaiming—

“Mother of God! if I were to go blind!”

“Don’t suggest such a thing!” he cried in anguish.

“Would you be sorry—even for poor Nicette, monsieur?”

“Sorry, child! Look up, in God’s name!”

She raised her face. Her lids flickered and opened.

“Can you see?” he asked, distraught and eager.

“I—something—a little,” murmured the unconscionable gipsy. “I can see monsieur’s face—far or near—which is it?”

She put up a timid hand. Her fingers fluttered like a moth against his temple.

“I don’t think I am blind, monsieur. My eyes——”

In his jubilation he took her head between his palms, and, with a boyish laugh, kissed each of the blue flowers—to make them open, he said.

“No, I am not blind,” said she.

CHAPTER X.

Mr Murk, recalling, on the morning after the storm, certain ultra-fervid expressions of remorse into which, during it, he had been betrayed, and realising, possibly, how of a saint and a sinner the latter had proved the blinder, turned the search-light of his recovered vision inwards, and examined his conscience like the most ruthlessly introspective Catholic. He worked out the sum of argument very coolly and carefully; and the result, condensed from many germinant postulates, showed itself arithmetically inevitable.

“If I intrigue, I sacrifice my independence, my free outlook, my peace of mind, my position in relation to my art—comprehensively, my principles.

“Enfin—on the other hand, I gain a very stomachy little white powder in a spoonful of jam.

“Taking one from four, therefore, I find myself debited with three charges that it is ridiculous to incur. Love, in short, is a creditor I have no desire to be called upon to compound with. I will cut my visit a little finer than I had intended, and go on to Paris at once. Perhaps—for I have not finished my Madonna, and the model curiously interests me—I will return to Méricourt by-and-by, when this shadow of a romance has drifted away with the cloud that threw it.”

Thus far only he temporised with his inclinations. For the rest, it appeared, he likened that which most men feel as a flame to an amorphous blot of darkness travelling across his sunlight. The point of view of the girl did not enter into his calculations. Possibly—most probably, indeed—he could not conceive himself inspiring a devouring passion. He knew innately, he thought, his limits—the length of his tether, moral, intellectual, and physical—and had never the least wish to affect, for the sake of self-glorification, a condition of mind or body that he was unable to recognise as his own. This led him to that serene appreciation of his personal capabilities that passes, in the eye of the world, for insufferable conceit. For to boast of knowing oneself is to assume a social importance on the strength of an indifferent introduction. Public opinion will never take one at one’s own valuation. It must be educated up to the point of one’s highest achievement. To say out, “I know I can do this thing,” is to deprive it (public opinion) of the right to exercise and justify itself.

Ned, however, would not over-estimate, nor would he (even nominally) cheapen himself as a bid to any man’s favour; and that, no doubt, would be sound equity in the impossible absence of inherent prejudice. But a judgment—in any world but a world of definite aurelian transitions—that holds itself infallible may err in the face of fifty precedents; and Ned’s, founded in this instance upon the self-precedent of sobriety, took no account of emotions that were completely foreign to his nature. In short, very honestly repudiating for himself any power of attraction, he failed to see that this very artlessness of repudiation was per se an attractive quality.

Now he put his resolution into force without compromise, and informed his host, during the second déjeuner, that he was on the prick of departure.

St Denys expressed no surprise, no concern, very little interest.

“Most certainly,” said he, “I applaud your attitude towards life. It exhibits what one may call an admirable cold cleanness. Probably, at this point, you are putting to your visit that period that most strictly conforms to the rules of moral punctuation. I have too complete a belief in the rectitude of your judgment to question that of your withdrawing yourself from Méricourt without superfluous ceremony. I envy you, indeed, your power of applying, without offence, to the oblique turns of circumstance that simple directness which is your very engaging characteristic. We, less fortunately endowed by nature, are for ever seeking those short cuts to a goal that delay us unconscionably, in everything but theory. You, monsieur, recognise instinctively that to fly straight for your mark is to reach your destination by the nearest route.”

“I am conscious of no particular coldness in my manner of regard,” said Ned good-humouredly. (He did not resent the implied sarcasm, nor did he allow it to affect his point of view. If he had given offence, it was simply by his literal construction of views he had been invited to share, and he could not admit the right of the dispenser of such views to put any arbitrary limit to another’s application of them.) “Unless, indeed,” he went on, “it argues a constitutional sang-froid to have decided, at the thinking outset of life, against the despotism of passion, and for a republic of senses, material, ethical, and intellectual.”

“Assuredly not. But even a republic must have a president.”

“I elect my heart, monsieur, to the honour, and give it a casting vote. There, at least, is a little core of fire in all this frost.”

“Dieu du ciel! thou shouldst command a future, if thou wouldst, in this Paris to which thou journeyest. It is such as thou that have their way and keep it; while we poor hot-headed impressionables take wrong turnings, and fetch up, struggling and sweating and trampling our friends under, in villainous blind alleys. To discipline your senses and keep your heart! God of heaven! that is a state to be envied of angels, who sometimes fall—even they.”

“I understand you to speak ironically.”

“I protest I do not, monsieur. I covet your power of unswerving fidelity to truth. What would it not be worth to me in the hot days that are coming! I shall go under—I shall go under, I feel it and know it—because I must fight with the crooked creese of dissimulation if a straighter weapon fails me.”

He spoke obviously with considerable emotion—with a sincerity, moreover, that, rather than the other, appealed to the Englishman.

“It appears, monsieur,” said the latter, “that you predict a very serious disruption of the social order.”

“It appears, indeed. There is a caldron always kept seething in that unlovely kitchen of the Isle de France—a stock-pot that for long ages has boiled down the blood and bones of the people into the thick soup affected of the beau monde. But, at last, other things go to feed it—this reeking kettle. Monseigneur in his fine palace will pull a face over the flavour; yet he must sup of it or starve. There makes itself recognised something metallic to the taste, perhaps; as if the latest victims had been dropped in with their knives and pistols unremoved from their pockets. Maybe, also, there precipitates itself a thick sediment of coins, to which I may claim to have contributed—as also, possibly, I have added my mite to the combustible material—the inflammatory pages with which a waking generation of agitators fuels this kitchen fire. Monsieur may live to see the pot boil.”

“May live to see it boil over, even, and scald the toes of the cooks. But I do not believe in this pass, monsieur, and regret only that you should, from whatever motives, seek to give a sinister turn to reforms that could be more effectively compassed by a bloodless revolution.”

“Monsieur, were a senate of Edward Murks an electoral possibility, I would hope to accomplish the Millennium while the world slept.”

Ned looked at his host with some instinct of repulsion. So here, in the guise of a scatterling aristocrat, was one of those seedling firebrands that were beginning to sprout all over the soil of Europe like the little bickering flames that patch the high slopes of Vesuvius: advocates holding briefs in the indictment of society; licentious pamphleteers; unscrupulous journalistic hacks seizing their opportunity in the fashion for heterodox—subordinate contributors, some of them, to the contumacious Encyclopedia; irresponsible agents, all, to a force they could not measure or justify to themselves by any scheme of after-reconstruction.

But what, in heaven’s name, induced this man to a mutinous attitude towards a social system of which, by reason of his position, he need take nothing but profit? His opportunities of selfish gratification would not be multiplied by the sacrifice of caste and fortune. He was not, Ned felt convinced, a reformer by conviction. Unless the itch for cheap notoriety was the tap-root of his character, what was to account for this astonishing paradox?

What, indeed? Yet a motiveless losel is no uncommon sight. To be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth is to be endowed with what it is obviously difficult to retain. It is to be awarded the prize before the race is run, and that is no encouragement to sound morality or healthy effort. Easily acquired is soon dissipated. What wonder, then, if Fortunatus, shedding wealth as naturally as he sheds his milk-teeth, looks to Nature for a renewal of all in kind.

“Well,” said St Denys, “you are going to Paris. It is the beacon-light about which the storm birds circle. If you seek experience, you will there gain it; if novelty—mon Dieu!—you will have the opportunity to see some strange puppets dance by-and-by.”

“And doubtless those who would hold the strings are in the clouds.”

“Not so, monsieur. These marionettes—they will move on a different principle, by trackers, like an organ. It may even be possible to make one or two skip, touching a note here in this quiet corner of Liége. But I do not know. When the time comes for the performance, this puppet-man himself may be in Paris.”

“You allude to M. de St Denys?”

“Do I? But, after all, he is very small beer.”

Nicette sang like a bee in a flower. Her cot was the veritable summer-house to a garden-village—luxuriously cool as an evening-primrose blossom with a ladybird and a crystal of dew in the heart of it. She was always self-contained, always tranquil, always fragrant. Her reputation, like that of some other saints, was founded, perhaps, upon her constitutional insensibility to small irritations. Cause and effect in her were temperament and digestion—read either way—influencing one another serenely. That sensitiveness of the moral cuticle that, with the most of us, finds intentional aggravations in habits and opinions that are not ours, she would appear to be innocent of. She never complained of nail-points in her shoes or crumbs in her bed; and that was to be bird of rare enough feather to merit distinction. Indifference to pain is considered none the less worshipful because it proceeds from insusceptibility to it: the name of sanctity may attach itself to the most self-enjoying impassibility. The moral is objective; for how many dyspeptics—sufferers—are there, turning an habitual brave face to their colourless world, who would be other than damned incontinent by a whole posse of devil’s-advocates were a claim advanced to dub them so much as Blessed?

This refreshing maid, however, was not of cloisteral aloofness all compact. She had a wit for merry days; and, no doubt, a calid spot in her heart that needed only to be blown upon by sympathetic lips to raise a heat in her that should make an intolerable burden of the very veil of modesty. For such Heloïses an Abelard is generally on the road.

Now she was busy in her sequestered cot, touching, rather than putting, things into order. She had a gift for cleanliness. Her hands winnowed the dust like the fluttering wings of butterflies. Baptiste, ostensibly occupied with his catechism-book, watched her from his corner, unwinking like a squatting toad.

He saw her pause once, with her fingers stroking the back of the chair on which the stranger artist had sat yesterday. A smile was on her lips. Then she moved into the little closet that was her sleeping-place and made her bed, patting the sheets caressingly, as if some child of her fancy lay underneath.

“She will punish me if she sees me looking at her now,” thought the sad, sharp child; and he bent over his task.

“Tiens! little monkey! Here is a biscotin for thee,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine at the door.

The child caught and began to devour the cake ravenously.

“That will give thee a better relish for the food of the soul,” said Théroigne.

She came in languorous and flushed, fanning herself with a spray of large-flowered syringa. The heavy scent of it floated over the room, penetrating to Nicette in her retreat.

“Oh, the sweet orange-blossom!” cried the portière. “Is it a bride to visit me?”

Théroigne stopped the action of her hand. Her teeth bit upon her under lip.

“Orange-blossom!” she exclaimed.

She passed into the closet; dropped listlessly upon a joint stool.

“That is not for me—not yet,” she said. “It is only syringa. See, little minette.”

“I see, Théroigne.”

“Why do thine eyes appear to rebuke me, thou little cold woman? Yet, I think, I come to visit thee for coolness’ sake: I am so hot and dull. This lodge, it is like a woodland chapel; and here where we sit is the confessional.”

“And art thou come into it to confess?”

“To thee? to la sainte Nicette! I should expect her to shrink and close, like a sensitive leaf, to my mere approach. Tell me—What is the utmost wickedness thou hast confided to thy pillow here? I wager my littlest peccadillo would overcrow it.”

“It is for me to confess, then, it seems?”

“Only thine own sweetness, child. This bed of thine—it is planted in a ‘Garden of the Soul.’ And what grows in it, little saint?—white lilies, gentle pansies, stainless ladysmocks? Not Love-lies-bleeding, I’ll warrant.”

“Fie, Théroigne! what nonsense thou talkest.”

“Do I? My head is light and my heart heavy. Mortality weighs upon me this morning—oh, Nicette, it weighs—it weighs!”

“Hast thou done wrong?”

“Much; and every day of my life.”

“Confess to me, and I will give thee absolution.”

“Absolution! to a woman from a woman! Never, I think; or at least saddled with such a penance as would take all savour from the grace. Well, as thou hast made thy bed——”

“So must I lie on it.”

“What! thou know’st the stranger’s motto? Little holy mother, but it is true; and I have made my bed, Nicette; and it is not a bed of flowers at all. Aïe! how the world swarms with pitfalls! Yet, at least, there is to-day an evil the less in Méricourt.”

“What evil?”

“The Englishman.”

“He is gone?”

“He is gone. I met him yesternoon on the Liége road. He had a staff in his hand and a knapsack on his shoulders.”

Nicette was at the tiny casement, delicately coaxing its curtains into folds that pleased her. She was too fastidious with her task to speak for a moment.

“Well,” she said at length, “it is an evil, I suppose, that only withdraws itself for a day or two?”

“Better than that, little saint. He goes all the way to Paris. ‘But Mademoiselle Théroigne,’ says he, ‘I leave my heart behind me. I will come back to reclaim it in the spring. In the meantime, do me the favour to keep it on ice; for I think Méricourt is very near the tropics.’ Bah! is he not an imbecile? We are well quit of him.”

“In the spring!”

Nicette came round with a face like hard ivory.

“Théroigne—why did he speak to you like that? It is not wise or good of you to court so insolent a familiarity.”

“I did not court it, and I am not wise or good.”

Mademoiselle Lambertine looked startled and displeased.

“What has come to thee, Nicette? It is not like thee to rebuke poor sinners save by thy better example.”

“And that is a negative virtue, is it not? Now were time, perhaps, that you give me the pretext, to end a struggle that my heart has long maintained with my conscience.”

Théroigne rose, breathing a little quickly, her bent forefinger to her lips.

“Nicette!” she cried faintly.

“I must say it, Théroigne. This club—this thin dust thrown into the eyes of Méricourt——”

The other went hurriedly to the door.

“I had better go,” she said; “I cannot listen and not cry. Not now, Nicette, not now! I have no strength—I think the Englishman has left a blight upon the place!”

Her footsteps retreated down the garden path—died away. Nicette, listening, with a line sprung between her eyes, came swiftly from her bedroom. Close by the door of it—crept from his stool—Baptiste, his mouth agape, had been eavesdropping, it seemed. She seized him with a raging clinch of her fingers.

“Little detestable coward!” she cried, in a suppressed voice—“little sneak mouchard, to spy like a woman! How have I deserved to be for ever burdened with this millstone?”

“You hurt me!” whimpered the child, struggling to escape.

“Not so much as the black dogs will, when they come out of the well in the yard to carry you to the fire. Little beast, I have a mind to call them now.”

“They might take you instead. I will assure them you are wicked too—that I heard you say so to monsieur the Englishman.”

She shook him so that his heels knocked on the floor. For the moment she was beside herself.

“The Englishman!” she hissed—and choked. “Est-ce bien possible! Sang Dieu!—O, sang Dieu! and if it were not for thee—he hates children—he might be now——!”

She checked herself with a desperate effort. She tightened her grip. The boy screamed with pain.

“Be quiet!” she cried furiously. “If some one should hear thee!”

“I want them to. I want them all to come in, that I may tell how you pretended to be blind that monsieur might kiss you.”

She recognised in a moment that he was goaded at last to terrible revolt. She cried “Hush!” in a panic, and without avail. The child continued to shriek and to revile her—repeating himself hysterically in the lack of a sufficient vocabulary. Changing front, it was only after long and frantic effort that she could coax and bribe him into silence. And, when at length she had induced him to a reasonable mood, and could trust herself away from him, she went and threw herself upon her bed and, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, cried empty the fountains of her wrath and her terror.

CHAPTER XI.

Consistent in his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a little shop of semi-circular frontage that, standing like a river promontory at the north-west corner of the Rue Beautreillis—where that tributary ditch of humanity ran into and fed the muddy channel of the Rue St Antoine—seemed to have rounded from sharper outline in the age-long wash of traffic wheeling by its walls. From his window on the second floor the Englishman thus commanded a view of two streets, and, indeed, of three; for across the main thoroughfare the Rue Beautreillis, become now the Rue Royale, was continued until it discharged itself into a great house-enclosed place, as into a mighty reservoir of decorum built for the defecation of neighbouring vulgarities. Looking east, moreover, between the belfry towers of the convents of St Marie and La Croix, Ned’s vision might reach, without strain, the very twilight mass of the Bastille; so that, as he congratulated himself, his situation was such as—barring adventitious and unprofitable luxuries—a blood prince with any imagination might have envied him.

For thence, often watching, speculative, he would see the scene-shifters of the early Revolution—come out in front of the high, mute screen of the prison, that closed his vista eastwards as if it were a stage-curtain—busy as bees on the alighting-board of a hive. Thence he would mark, in real ignorance of the plot of the forthcoming piece, or cycle of pieces, the motley companies gathering for rehearsal—the barn-stormers; the heavy “leads;” the slighted tragedians foreseeing their opportunity for the fiftieth time; the inflated supers canvassing the favour of phantom houses with imagined gems of inspiration, with new lamps for old in the shape of misenlightened renderings of traditional rôles; he would mark the gas, so to speak, the artificial light that informed the garish scene with spurious vitality. But the prompter he could never as yet find in his place, nor could he gather the true import of the play to which, it must be presumed, all this pretentious gallimaufry was a prelude. Theorists, agitators, pamphleteers—the open, clamorous expression of that that had been suggested only to him during his hitherto wanderings—all these and all this were present to his eyes and his ears, passionlessly alert at their vantage-point on the second floor of the corner house in the Rue Beautreillis. Daily he sought to piece, from the struttings and the disconnected vapourings, the puzzle of present circumstance, the political significance of so much apparently aimless rhetoric. Daily he listened for the prompter’s bell; daily looked for the appearance of the confident author who should discipline all this swagger and rhodomontade.

Then, by-and-by, the fancy did so master him as that he would see a veritable curtain, rounding into slumberous folds, in this silent west wall of the Bastille; a curtain—with sky-arched convent buildings for proscenium—whose every sombre crease he seemed to watch with a curious moved expectancy of the unnameable that should be revealed in its lifting. For so an impression deepened in him unaccountably that beyond that voiceless veil was shaping itself the real drama, of which this outer ranting was but as the wind that precedes an avalanche; that suddenly, and all in a moment, the screen would be rent, like a sullen cloud by lightning, and the import of an ominous foregathering find expression in some withering organisation to which the surface turmoil had been but a blind. He thought himself prophetic—en rapport with the imps of a national destiny; but nevertheless the curtain delayed to rise while he waited, though it was to go up presently to a roar that shook the world.

Still, from his window Ned could enjoy to look, as from a box in a theatre of varieties, upon a scene of possibilities infinite to an artist. He had flown from green pastures and drowsy woods—where revolutionary propagandism, however violently uttered, must waste itself on remote echo-surfaces—straight into a resounding city of narrow ways, a Paris of blusterers and mégères, of controversialists and tractarians, of winged treatises and fluttering pandects. The streets were as full of the latter as if paper-chase were the daily pastime of the populace. Only the hounds, it seemed, never ran the hares to earth; and the hares themselves were March ones, by every token of incoherence. And “Surely,” thought the young man, “it is to be needlessly alarmist to read upheaval in this yeasty ferment. Let the Bastille fall, and there behind shall show nothing more formidable than the blank brick wall of the theatre.”

But at least all his perspectives teemed with colour. The national complexion, he could have thought, revealed itself in its hottest dyes in this quarter of the town. Here were no subdued tones of speech or apparel, no powdered flunkeyism deprecating the brutal outspokenness of nature. St Antoine, even this west side of the prison bar, took life on the raw; dressed loudly as it talked; discussed its viands and its hopes with an equal appetite for un- and re-dress; was always far readier to hang a man than a joint of beef—instinctively, perhaps, to make him that was hard tender. And to this unposturing attitude Ned felt his sympathies extend. Here, at the smallest, was nakedness unashamed—material, not, as St Denys would have it, for indulgence, but for the re-ordering of a world that had confusedly strayed, not so far, from the paths of truth to itself.

Moreover, the light, the life, the movement had their many appeals to his artistic perceptives. These latter, greatly stimulated in little Méricourt, found themselves ten times awake to this second dawn of experience. He had never been in Paris before, and it was now his fate to alight and sojourn in it during an epoch-making period. He did not forget his late company: that, indeed, was for ever shadowed in the background of his mind—St Denys and Théroigne, and, most of all, the strange little lodge-keeper whose portrait he had left unfinished. But here, in the very mid-throng of vivid life, the present so taxed his every faculty of observation, so drained the inadequate resources of his skill and of his paint-box, that interests foreign to the moment must not be allowed to contribute to the pressure on his time. Like an author in actual harness who keeps from reading books for fear of assimilating another’s style, so Ned forbade a thought of Nicette to come between him and his canvas. And assuredly his business in hand was not to paint Madonnas.

At the same time, Paris wrought upon him something beneficially. Its numerical vastness—more forcibly expressed, by reason of the intenseness of its individual feeling, than that of London—amused him with a sense of his own insignificance; the conviction driven home into his mind, as he turned bewildered in a snow of pamphlets, that his profound theories of government were but childish essays in a craft, in the complicated ramifications of which there was not a street orator but left him miles behind, taught him a modesty to which he had been hitherto a part stranger. But he grew in self-reliance as he dwindled in self-sufficiency; and that was like exchanging fat for muscle—an admirable quid pro quo in a city of gauntest shadows.

To all the concentration of his faculties upon a seething pandemonium; to all his earnest efforts to record armies of fugitive impressions, and to interpret of their sum-total the nature of the force that set them in motion, Madame Gamelle acted, in unconscious humour, the part of chorus.

“But, yes,” she would say; “the philosophers have proved the world misgoverned, and these that you see are the agents of the philosophers. They are travellers who trade in the article of truth. They teach the people to know themselves; that every one may have liberty of speech; that licence shall no longer be the privilege of aristocrats.”

“And you would know yourself licentious, mother?”

“As to that—do not ask me. I recognise it only for an admirable creed. My Zoïle would call it so. He looked to the time when he would be legally entitled to ignore the marriage vow. The poor blondin! He was a fine man, monsieur, but always unlucky. He died in the heyday of his hopes, leaving me the one precious pledge of his affection.”

Then she would poke the little frowzy baby on her arm with a stunted finger, and nod to and address it in a strain of superfluous banter:—

“Eh, mon p’tit godichon! Thou wouldst teach me to know myself in thy little dirty face? Fie, then! Hast thou been seeking for my image or thine own in the basin of fine gravy soup I set aside for monsieur the lodger’s dinner?”

So it was ever with this gruesome infant. Its presentment, or that of some part of it, haunted Ned through every course of an attenuated cuisine. The butter would exhibit a mould of its features, the milk-jug a print of its lips. The rolls appeared indented with suspicious crescents in the crusty parts; the omelettes confessed a flavour, and often an impression, of a small sticky hand. The creature itself, moreover, was a shockingly ubiquitous Puck. It was always being mislaid, as was everything portable in the house. Its shrill waking cry would issue from the depths of the lodger’s bed, into which it had burrowed with a precocious sense of the humour of appropriation; its red face rise suddenly, like an October moon, from behind a cloud of sacking on the floor. It was brought up with the fagots, and ran some narrow risks of premature cremation; it was included in the week’s washing, and its little fat stomach menaced with a flat-iron. Sometimes, when one opened a cupboard, it would fall out in company with half-a-dozen plates; sometimes madame would deposit it on a table, and, forgetting that she had done so, would heap it with casual litter as she transacted her domestic business. “No doubt,” Ned thought, “it is destined to eventual immolation in a pasty.”

Indeed, his nerves were always on the jump when there was cooking forward—a lively knowledge of which fact he could by no means evade. For the process being conducted on the floor above his head, and it being customary with madame to let everything boil over, it became a familiar experience with him to see successive samples of his menu appear and hang in sebaceous drops from a certain seasoned patch on the ceiling, whence in time they would contribute their quota of peril to a perfect little slide of grease that had formed on the boards below. Then, at such a stage, it would be not unusual for his landlady to come into view, pledge-on-arm, at the door, her borné face irradiated with some eagerness of triumph.

“But only think, monsieur!” she would begin.

“Pardon,” Ned would interpose; “but is it well for the child to be gnawing that great lump of cheese?”

“Cheese! Oh, mon Dieu! I must have put it on the trencher, thinking it was bread, and he has taken it, the thief!”

Then the lodger must discipline his impatience, while the comestible changed hands, to a shrill clamour, the infant finally being deposited outside the door like boots to be cleaned.

“Only think, monsieur!” cries the lady again; “the delicate compote I could have sworn to having prepared for monsieur’s dinner a week ago, when monsieur, nevertheless, had to go fasting for an entremet! I was right; it was made, and it was not stolen. This morning I find it thrust to the very back of the oven—baked for a week, and no more eatable than a brigadier’s wig.”

Well, all this provoked Master Ned into no desire to change his quarters. He was a genially stoic rascal, and one that could wring interest out of investments that would have repelled less imperturbable natures. So, through that autumn and winter, and deep into the spring of ’89, he stuck to his corner of the Rue Beautreillis, going little into the more fashionable centres of the town, seeking artistic adventure like a knight-errant of the pencil, and doubtless elaborately misreading, in common with many thousands about him, the signs that came and went, like a moaning wind, in the channels of the rushing life of St Antoine.

CHAPTER XII.

Looking on a certain afternoon (it was that of the 27th of November) from his high perch, Ned saw the people of the streets to be in a more than usual state of excitement and commotion. Once or twice latterly it had occurred to him that the ferment of national affairs was not subsiding, as he had expected it to do, under the tonic treatment of the national comptrollers—that the people were bent on levying on their taxmasters a tax more stringent than any they had themselves groaned under. Sometimes turning, as he rarely did, into the Palais Royal, and marking how, in that garden of public sedition, the very veil had been torn from innuendo; how furious agitators, each with his knot of eager listeners, found applause proportionate to the daring of their vituperation; how struggling hordes fought from door to counter of Desein’s book-shop, that they might feed their revolutionary hunger with any cag-mag of radicalism, provided it were dressed to look raw and bloody—he would fall curiously grave over a thought of the impotence of any known principle to precipitate passions held in such intricate solution, curiously speculative as to the drifting of a rudderless bark of state. For himself, he was conscious of having been shouldered from all his little snug standpoints of legislative philosophy; of the treading-under of his protoplasmic theories by innumerable vigorous feet; of his inadmissible claim to be allotted a portfolio in any government whatsoever of man by man. He was become, indeed, quite humble, and yet larger-souled than before, by reason of his content to act the part of insignificant unit in a drama, the goodly developments of which he was nevertheless still confident enough to foretell. And surely at this point he would have cried—and that, despite the augurs—as Mirabeau cried ecstatically at a later date: “How honourable will it be for France that this great Revolution has cost humanity neither offences nor crimes.... To see it brought about by the mere union of enlightened minds with patriotic intentions: our battles mere discussions; our enemies only prejudices that may well be forgiven; our victories, our triumphs, so far from being cruel, blessed by the very conquered themselves.”

“And, indeed,” thought Ned, “what reforms were ever compelled without pressure, and what pressure, that was considerate of the pressed, was ever effective?”

Now he ran downstairs in haste to inquire of Madame Gamelle the reason of the popular excitement. He found the good woman herself fluttered by it to an uncommon degree. She put the pledge into a half-empty tub of potatoes (a something despised vegetable in the France of that date), that she might gesticulate the more comprehensively.

“It is news,” she cried; “a fine ‘facer’ to the notables. How they will squirm, the rascals! We are to have the double representation. It is decreed by Louis, the good king.”

“Rather by Sieyes and M. d’Entraigues, is it not?”

“Oh, çà! That is the way to talk. But you forget the Minister of Finance, who shall go into the calendar of saints, cheek by jowl with St Antoine himself.”

On the very noon following that of the declaration respecting the Tiers Etat, lo! there was new commotion in the streets, and holiday faces and footsteps hurrying westward. Again Ned descended and again inquired. Madame received him with a shrill cackle:—

“Oh yes! it is excitement and all excitement, as you say. But what infamy that I am chained to my kennel like a vicious dog.”

“What is to do then, madame?”

“But this, monsieur: a gas-balloon is to ascend from the garden of the Thuilleries at two o’clock.”

Ned sniggered.

“The hubbub is extreme beyond that of yesterday; and madame is cut from the enjoyment? Supposing, then, I were to take her place as fruitière?”

“That is impossible. What fly has stung you? But you can go yourself, and report to me of the proceedings.”

“Well,” said Ned, “I think I will, that I may learn to differentiate between the emotions of triumph and of pleasure.”

He saw over the trees, as he turned into the gardens, the soft blue dome of the great envelope stretching its creases to the sun—an opaline mound that glistered high and lonely as an untrodden hill summit. But about the show spot itself, when he reached it, he could have thought two-thirds of all Paris collected. In one vast circle—wheel-fely and hub—this enormous hoop of onlookers enclosed the centre of attraction. On its white face-surface upturned, as on the surface of a boiling geyser, bubbles of myriad talk seethed and broke, filling the air with reverberation. Winds of laughter ruffled it; a sun of merriment caught the facets of its countless eyes. It was a wheel of jovial Fortune—of a jewelled triumphal car that had yesterday been a war-chariot, scythed and menacing.

Compact of solid humanity throughout its circumference, its edge was nevertheless frayed, like the exterior of a clustered swarm of bees, into a flitting and buzzing superficies of place-seekers. These—scurrying, criss-crossing; sometimes settling upon and becoming part of the main body; sometimes affecting a cynical indifference to a show, from view of the inner processes of which their position debarred them; in their formless excitement, their hysteric and unmannered hunt for points of vantage, their magnifying of occasion into epoch, their utter lack of the sense of moral proportion, of the sense to distinguish appreciably between affairs of moment and affairs of the moment—exhibited, as the typical traveller exhibits, those national characteristics that seem as little accommodating to revolution in principle as to revolution in habit.

“Only here,” thought Ned, “they are not discreditable exceptions to the national rule, but fair samples of the whole.”

A couple, pausing within ear-shot of him, engaged his attention at the instant. One of these, a lord of clinquant, self-satisfied, arrogant-looking, and dressed, one might have fancied, to the top bent of bourgeoisie, saluted the other, as a skipjack humours in himself a holiday mood of affability, with an air of tolerant condescension.

“Eh, indeed, M. David!” said he. “You profit yourself of this occasion. But, if I were in your position, I should seize it to lie abed.”

The person addressed stood a half minute at acrid gaze—his shoulders humped, and his hands gripped on the ebony crutch of his cane—before he replied. He was a man of a somewhat formidable expression, with red-brown hair all writhed into little curls, as if a certain inner heat had warped it. His eyes were hard as flints; and the natural causticity and determination of his face took yet more sinister emphasis from a permanent distortion of the upper jaw, whereon an accidental blow had caused a swelling that impaired his right speech and made of his very smile a wickedness. His figure, square and firm, if inclined to embonpoint, set off to advantage his suit of dark blue cloth, very plain and neat, with silver buttons; his handkerchief and simple ruffles were spotless, and about the whole man was an appearance of cold self-containment that was full of the conscious pride of intellectual caste.

“My good Reveillon,” he said at length, “yesterday it was decreed that the deputies of the third state should equal in number those of the nobility and of the clergy put together. That was a momentous concession, was it not? Also, the eligibility for election, into the second order, of curés, and into the Tiers Etat of Protestants, was made known—truly all subjects for popular rejoicing. Doubtless, then, your employés, leaning out of the windows of the paper factory in the Rue St Antoine” (“They could not,” thought Ned. “I know the place. Every window is barred.”), “tossed their caps into the street, into the air—anywhere but into your face, crying Vive Necker and A bas les notables!”

“It is always for you to claim the privilege to speak, as you paint, enigmas,” said the other, with a certain excited insolence of tone. He was flushed with aggravation under the hard inquisition of the eyes that had so deliberately taken his measure.

“True enough, the rascals showed enthusiasm,” he cried. “And what then, M. David?”

“Why, you would drive them to work again, would you not, when the effervescence was subsided?”

“Assuredly. What is any effervescence but bubbles that break and vanish? Their business is not to discuss politics but to roll paper, as it is yours to cover the sheets with hieroglyphics (that, I confess, I do not understand) when prepared. Well, monsieur, you get your price and they theirs. Does yours satisfy you? But it might not if I charged the stuff you buy of me with the interest of time lost over irresponsible chatter on the part of my employés.”

“Surely, my friend, here is a little spark to produce an explosion.”

“Oh, monsieur! I can read between the lines, and I am not ignorant of what may be implied in a sneer. You are peintre du Roi, M. David; you have chambers at the Louvre, M. David. That is very well; and it is also very well to subordinate your convictions to your prosperity, so long as the sun of royalty shines on you.”

“Be very careful to pick your words, my pleasant Reveillon,” said the painter, already, in some emotion of self-suppression, articulating with difficulty.

“Why?” said the paper-maker, waning cool as the other gathered heat. “Is it not true, then, that you are a democrat?”

“What has that to do with the question?”

“It has everything, monsieur, if I am to understand your innuendoes. It signifies, of course, your dogmatic advocacy of the labour, as opposed to the capital side of industrial economy. It signifies that, in your opinion, it is tyranny to enforce discipline upon any body of men who congregate for other than belligerent purposes, and that any popular demonstration may serve Jack Smith as excuse for neglecting his work, but not Jack Smith’s master for docking the absentee’s wages.”

“They are always little enough,” said M. David, still very indistinct.

“And I throw the word in your teeth!” cried the paper-maker hotly in his turn.

The dispute aroused small interest amongst the near bystanders, whose attention was otherwise engaged. One or two, however, gave a pricked ear to it.

“I am a kind master,” continued the angry manufacturer. “I dare any one to refute it. How many hands do I employ, monsieur, do you think? Not a few, monsieur, not a few; and of them all, two-thirds are here this afternoon—here in these gardens, with permission, though I suffer by it, to attend the fête of the balloon.”

He spoke the last words uncommonly loudly. The painter burst into a louder laugh, that distorted his face horribly.

“My exquisite Reveillon,” he said, advancing and endeavouring to take the other’s arm, only to be peevishly repulsed. “My dear soul, you are admirable! I see crystallised in you every chief characteristic of the latter-day Parisian.”

“Very well,” said the Sieur Reveillon, sullen and glowering: “see what you like; I do not care.”

“To lay down one’s work a moment to applaud the emancipation of a people: to make a national fête of a balloon ascent!”

He tried to affect an air of humorous dilemma; but the part was beyond him.

“Oh!” he cried savagely, paraphrasing La Fontaine, and stamping his foot on the ground: “On fit parler les morts; personne ne s’émut!”

By a strong effort he controlled himself.

“Good M. Reveillon,” he said, “understand that my wits are my employés. If, following your edifying example, I give them an outing, I must accompany them like a schoolmaster. Thus your penetration may divine the reason why I do not lie abed on this rare occasion of a holiday, which, as your plutocratship suggests, should be an excuse for rest to all poor devils of workmen.”

A young mechanic, in his squalor and hungering leanness, simply typical of his class, hurried by at the moment, eagerly seeking a place to view. His roving eyes, catching those of the paper manufacturer, took a hostile, half-anxious expression as he went on his way with a louting salutation.

“One of the two-thirds?” asked David. “A testimony, indeed, to the fostering kindness of the Sieur Papetier.”

“Bah!” cried Reveillon. “It is the cant. The successful must always be held responsible for the ineptitude of the improvident. He that passed was a journeyman; and a journeyman may live very handsomely on fifteen sous a-day, if he is sober and prudent. I have been through it and I know. I have no false pride, monsieur le peintre du Roi. I was apprentice—journeyman myself—before I was master.”

As he spoke, a great seething roar issued from the crowd. Ned, who had been sketching desultorily as he listened, raised his face. A huge bulge of grey went up into the sky—a mystery of bellying silk and intricate ropes straining at a little cockle-shell of a car. To the explosion of guns, to the frantic waving of flags and handkerchiefs, to the jubilant vociferating of half a city, the quasi-scientific toy rose, and was reflected as it sprang aloft in the pupils of ten thousand eyes. The circle of the mob dilated as its components yielded a pace or so to secure the better view, and the act brought the two disputants into Ned’s close neighbourhood. M. Reveillon, for all his late colloquy, was now no less hysterical than the rest of the company.

“Voilà!” he shouted, clutching at the young fellow’s arm spasmodically: “is it not a sight the very acme of sublimity! Behold the unconquerable enterprise of man thus committed to victory or destruction. There is no middle course. He is to triumph or to die.”

His excited grasp tightened on the sleeve he held. His glance travelled swiftly to and from the sketch-book, on a page of which Ned was endeavouring to hastily record some impression of the buoyant monster above. The Englishman marvelled to see this sudden eruption from so flat and commonplace a surface.

“You can discipline yourself to draw in the face of this stupendous fascination,” cried the paper-maker. “Mon Dieu! that you had been with me at Boulogne in ’85, when Rozier’s Montgolfier took fire at the height of a thousand mètres, and he and Romain were precipitated to the earth!”

He never removed his hungry gaze from the mounting balloon while he talked.

“Fifteen sous a-day!” ejaculated M. David’s voice to the other side of Ned.

“It was like the bursting of a shell,” said Reveillon, in a sort of rapturous retrospection. “We were looking—our vivats still echoed in the air; the smiles with which they had parted from us were yet reflected on our faces; there came a spout of flame, very mean and small against the blue, and little black things shot from it and fled earthwards. It was fearful—heart-thrilling, that sound of a man falling through two-thirds of a mile. And the finish—the settling vibration! Mon Dieu! but I have never since missed an ascent.”

“Fifteen sous a-day!” exclaimed David.

But Ned instinctively withdrew himself from a touch that had grown unpleasant to him.

“The cloven hoof!” he thought. “And is to be without bowels the secret of every plutocrat’s success?”

“Fifteen sous a-day!” repeated David monotonously.

Reveillon came back to earth a moment, and made him an ironic bow.

“Certainly,” he said. “It is the wages of a good journeyman, and more than those of many an artist who disdains to be a time-server.”

The disintegrated crowd, swarming abroad like a disturbed knot of newly hatched spiders, surrounded and absorbed him. M. le peintre du Roi summoned Ned’s attention, peering over his shoulder.

“It is an insolent parvenu,” he said; “a Philistine double damned for grinding the faces of the poor. Permit me the privilege to look, monsieur. An artist is known by his performance. There is a severity here that entirely commends itself to me.”

CHAPTER XIII.

Ned’s chance meeting with the painter, whose art was then much exciting, in a characteristic freak of perversity, the enthusiasm of his fellow-citizens, was the prelude to a strange little camaraderie between the two that, so long as it held, was full of positive and negative instruction to the younger man. It came about in this way, that, absorbed in the discussion of a topic of common interest, the gentlemen left the Thuilleries gardens together, M. David accompanying Ned eventually to the Rue Beautreillis. At the door of the fruiterer’s shop the famous artist held out his hand bluntly.

“You have the right religion,” he said: “in an artificial world the cleanest art shall prevail. We can have no standard of truth but what we set ourselves. Strip the model, then, of all meretricious adornments. Monsieur, I shall take the liberty to call upon you.”

He came, indeed—not once but often, walking over from his studio in the Louvre; dropping in at unexpected times; criticising the methods, the actual performance of the Englishman, and even condescending now and again to add to a sketch or canvas a few touches—technical mastery without imagination—that resolved in a moment a difficulty long contended with. Through all he would never cease to expound his views on right art and government—to him inseparable words in the condition of national sanity, and both drawn in their purity from the fountain-head of the S.P.Q.R. at its strictest period. Most often he would discourse, gazing, his hands behind his back, from the window, and sometimes quite aptly illustrating his homilies with types drawn from the human mosaic of the St Antoine below him.

M. David was at this time some forty years of age, an Academician, the acknowledged and popular leader of classic revivalism. He was fashionable, moreover, and had just completed (“mettant la main sur sa conscience”) a royal commission for a “Brutus”! Courted, prosperous, and respected, some moral myosis must still distort to his inner vision all the admiration he evoked. He would make his profit of patronage, secretly raging over the opulent condescension that his cupidity would not let him be without. He would see double entendre in the applause of the social élite, yet hunger for it, cursing himself that the vital flame of his self-confidence must be dependent on such fuel for its warmth. For in truth he was the tumid bug of vanity, bursting with the very scarlet adulation that his instinct told him was inimical to the artistic life and other than its natural food.

Contributing to, or proceeding from, this insane desire of self-aggrandisement, his professional and political convictions (he could not disassociate the two) ran in a restricted channel. But who shall distinguish, in any complaint that is accompanied by an unnatural condition of the nerves, between cause and effect? So M. David’s resentment of patronage may have inclined him to a creed of classic socialism; or his classic proclivities may have prejudiced him against the presumptions of self-qualified rank. In any case, he had twisted his theories, artistic and political, into one thin cord to discipline (or hang) mankind withal, and was as narrow a fanatic as was ever prepared to crucify the disputant that ventured to question his infallibility.

Now, at the outset, Ned fell into some fascination of regard for this casual acquaintance of his. His credo, social and technical, would appear to jump—its first paces, at least—with M. David’s. Moreover, the glamour that naturally informed the presentment of a notable personality condescending to the regard of a tyro who could boast no actual claim to its notice, induced him, no doubt—under this influence of a flattery indirectly conveyed—to an attitude of respectful consideration towards certain foibles in the stranger that, on the face of them, seemed irreconcilable with the highest principles of morality.

It was not so long, however, before his mind began to misgive him that his “half-God” was clay-footed—that here, indeed, was but another inevitable example of that subjective inconsistency that seems so integral a condition of the Gallic temperament. Then: “It is a fact,” he thought, “that one can never start to conjugate a Frenchman but one finds him an irregular verb. Where universal exceptions are to prove the rule, what rule is possible? Anarchy, and nothing else, is the logical outcome of it all.”

For M. David would cry to him, “In a Republic of Truth every unit must be content to contribute itself unaffectedly to the full design.” Yet (as Ned came to know) was no man more greedy than this Academician for vulgar notoriety—none more sensitive to criticism or more resentful of a personal slight. So he (M. David) would preach, not plausibly but whole-mindedly, a religion of purity and cleanliness—a religion of beauty, material and intellectual, whose very ritual should be Gregorian in its sweet austerity. Such were his professions; and nevertheless in the height of his revolutionary popularity he did not scruple to introduce into his pictures details that pandered to the most sordid lusts for the grotesque and the horrible—to generally, indeed, stultify his own declarations of belief by acts that no ethics but those of brutality could justify. Finally, it was in the disgust engendered of a flagrant illustration of such inconsistency that the young Englishman, after some months of gradual disenchantment, “cut” the king’s painter; fled, for solace of a haunting experience, eastwards again, and, snuffing with some new emotion of relish the frankincense of green woods, hugged himself over a thought of his seasonable escape from that national sphinx of caprice, to symbolise whom in a word one must draw upon modern times for the “cussedness” of Wall Street.

Yet even then, had he but foreseen it, he was backing, while dodging Scylla, into the very deadly attraction of Charybdis.

In the meanwhile autumn stole footsore, like a loveless wife, in the track of summer. She was swart and powdered, not à la mode de Versailles; drouthy too, yet with a cry to shrill piercingly in every street of every town of France.

The dust of her going rose and penetrated through chinks and doorways. It overlay the pavements so thickly that one might have thought it the accumulation of that that age-long ministers had thrown in the eyes of the people, the very precipitate of tyranny. It clung, hot and acrid, to the walls of all living palaces, of all princely monuments to the dead, as if it were the expression of that proletariat censorship that would obliterate the very records of a hateful past. It was the condensed breath of destruction settling in a stringent dew, and it might have been exhaled from the ten thousand brassy throats that made clamour in the highways ten thousandfold great because they were the resonant throats of starved and empty vessels.

For the elections were on; and what if bread were dearer than money if his chosen representative was in every man’s mouth? So, through broil and famine the city of Paris echoed to its blazing roofs with jangle jubilant and acclamatory, inasmuch as the no-property qualification gave every honest man a chance of being governed by a rogue. And what prospect in a nation of contrarieties could be more humorously enticing?

Then upon this drouth and this uproar Ned saw the steel glaive of winter smite with a clang that brought ironic echoes from the hollow granaries. It fell swift and sudden; and the clamour, under the lashing of the blade, took a new tone of terror, the wail of despairing souls defrauded of their right atmosphere of hope. For who could look beyond the present with the thermometer below zero; with the prospect blotted out by freezing mists; with the thin shadows of pining women and children always coming between one and the light; with one’s own brain clouded with the fumes of dearth? Yet the elections went on; but now in a sterner spirit of desperation—of insistent watchfulness, too, that no hard-wrung concession should be juggled to misuses under cover of mistifying skies.

Of much misery that neighboured on the wretchedest quarters of a wretched city Ned was, from his position, cognisant. The sight shook his stoicism, and greatly contributed to the disruption (St Denys and M. David negatively helping) of a certain baseless little house of toy bricks that his boyish vanity had conceived to be an endurable system builded by himself. “I have been a philosophe, not a wise man,” he thought. “Life is not a chess-board, its each next step plain to the clean thinker.”

Now it was the sight of the children that secretly wrung his heart: these poor sad babies, disciplined on a primary code of naughtiness and retribution, merit and reward, marvelling from sunken eyes that they should be so punished for no conscious misbehaviour; patiently, nevertheless, retaining their faith in God and man, and making a play-ball of the bitter earth that stung their hands and shrivelled under their feet.

Well, they died, perhaps by hundreds, when the snow was in the streets. “And let them go,” said M. David. “There shall be others to follow by-and-by. As to these, warped and demoralised, they would not prosper the regeneration of the earth. We want a clean race and no encumbrances.”

That was his philosophy—admirably Roman, as he intended it to be. It did not suit Ned.

“There is more to be learnt from a cripple than an athlete,” said that person boldly. “I would sooner, for my own sake, study in this school of St Antoine than in yours of the Louvre, M. David.”

“Truly, every artist to his taste,” said the Academician, with an unsightly grin; and it was Ned’s taste to give of his substance royally and pityingly when a voice cried in his ear of cold and famine.

“Ah, le genereux Anglais!” wept Madame Gamelle. “He has kept the wolf from my door. Would that all mothers could secure to their dear rogues such a fairy godfather as he has been to my cherished one!”

“Without doubt,” said M. David, “he has preserved to you for your virtues the blessing of an encumbrance that by-and-by shall devour you.”

Madame must laugh and protest against this inhuman sarcasm. For the great painter, despite his austerity, had a masterfully admiring way with women that derived from the serpent in Eden.

“Here, then, to prove it no sarcasm, is my contribution to the cause,” he says, and places a sou in the pledge’s fat hand.

But Ned went his way uninfluenced of sardonic counsels.

“When this horror relaxes,” he thought, “in the spring I will go back to Méricourt. I shall be able then, perhaps, to paint a Madonna with a human soul.”

The spring came; the ice melted on the Seine; but it did not melt in the breasts of an electorate hardened by suffering, consolidated in the very “winter of its discontent.” But now at least Ned could sometimes watch from his window without dread of having his soul harrowed by the desolation and misery of its prospect—could watch the fire of the sun burning up a little and a little more each day with the rekindled fuel of hope.

Now it happened that, thus observing, he was many times aware of M. David mingling with the throng below; going with it or against it; strolling, his hands behind his back, with the air of an architect who cons the effect of his own shaping work. This may have been a fancy; yet it was one that dwelt insistently with the onlooker, that haunted and disturbed him with presentiment of evil as month succeeded month and the vision fitfully repeated itself. What attraction so spasmodically drew the man to this quarter of the town? Not Mr Murk himself, for now the little regard of each for each was severed by some trifling outspokenness on the part of the Englishman, and the painter had long ceased of his visits to the fruiterer’s shop in the Rue Beautreillis. Ned, for some unexplainable reason, was troubled.

Once he was aware of M. David, moved from his accustomed deliberation, walking very rapidly in the wake of a man who sped, unconscious of the chase, before him. Ned identified the stranger as he turned off down a by-street. It was Reveillon, the prosperous paper merchant he had happened on on the day of the balloon ascent.

“M. l’Académicien follows the man like his shadow,” he thought, pondering.

This was in April, when the shadows, indeed, were beginning to strengthen in darkness.

Then one morning he started awake to the sound of huge uproar in the streets.

The curtain of the Bastille had not risen; but it had been pulled aside a little, as it were, to make passage to the forestage of the Revolution for certain supers who were to represent the opening chorus. These came swarming through in extraordinary numbers, an earnest of what should be revealed in the complete withdrawal of the screen. They seemed violently inspired, but most imperfectly drilled; and the weapons they handled were not stage properties by any means. And their object was just this—to pull about his ears the factory of a certain M. Reveillon, who had been heard to say that a journeyman could live very comfortably on fifteen sous a-day.

The execrated building was not so far from the Rue Beautreillis but that the hubbub in the air shook the very glass of Ned’s windows. He dressed hastily and ran out into the street. Turning into the Rue St Antoine, that was half choked with a chattering, hooting mob hurrying westwards, he stumbled over the heels of a man who immediately preceded him. With an apology on his lips, he hesitated and cried aloud, “St Denys!”

Even when the stranger disclaimed the title, with a wonder in his eyes unmistakably genuine, Ned could hardly bring himself to realisation of his mistake. True, his acquaintance with the Belgian had been brief enough to admit of subsequent events clouding its details in his memory; yet that, he could have thought, was vivid to recall characteristics of feature and complexion quite impressive in their way. Here were the bright, bold colouring, the girlish contour of face, the brown eyes, and the rough crisp gold of unpowdered hair. Here were the shapely stature, the little fopperies of dress even, the actual confidence of expression. Only, as to the latter, perhaps, a certain soul of sobriety, an earnestness of purpose, revealed themselves in the present instance—a distinction to justify a world of difference.

“A thousand apologies!” said Ned. “I can hardly convince myself even now.”

“I will presume you flatter me, monsieur,” said the other, with a blithe smile. “My name is Suleau, at your service. Pardon me, I must hurry on.”

Ned detained him a moment.

“Let me entreat you, monsieur—this heat, this uproar: what is it all about?”

“What, indeed, monsieur? France, I think, rolls on its back with its feet in the air. A manufacturer of paper says that his hands can live very well, if they choose, on fifteen sous a-day. Hé—he ought to know. But they wish to gut his premises, nevertheless, these new, evil-smelling apostles of liberty. Pardon! will you come with me? I cannot wait. I am a reporter, a journalist, a scribbler against time and my own interests!”

“You are not of the popular party?”

“Ah, monsieur, mon Dieu, monsieur! but I have a sense of humour remaining to me. For all that is serious I am a Feuillant.”

He spoke the last to deaf ears. Ned had fallen behind, blackly pondering.

“This David,” he muttered, “that heard Reveillon say the words, and that has haunted the St Antoine of late—this David.” And with the thought there was the man himself coming slowly on with the crowd past him. The Englishman planted his shoulder against the torrent and managed to sidle alongside the painter. He—M. Jacques-Louis David—carried a very enigmatical smile on his face, the physical malformation of which, however, served him for conscious misinterpreter of many moods. Now it expressed no disturbance over his contact with a person who had offended him.

“Good day,” said he.

“M. David,” said Ned, “I do not forget what enraged you with M. Reveillon in the Thuilleries gardens. I think you are a scoundrel, M. David!”

The other did not even start; much less did he condescend to refute the sudden charge; but he cocked his head evilly as he walked.

“Have you considered,” he said, “that if what you imply be true (which I do not admit), you are insulting a general in the presence of his bodyguard?”

“If what I imply be true,” retorted Ned hotly, “I can understand your indulging any brutal and contemptible vindictiveness.”

Perhaps, in his strenuous indignation, he might have struck at the vicious creature beside him; but the crowd, at that moment violently surging forward, swept him anywhere from his place and saved him the consequences of a foolish impulse.

Now he would fain have turned and escaped from the press, lest by any self-misconception his conscience should accuse him of lending his countenance to an iniquity; for he saw that such was planned and determined on, and for the first time there awoke in his heart some shadowy realisation of the true import of certain months-long signs and significances. He would have turned: he could not. He was wedged in, carried forward, rushed to the very outer core of the congested block of frowsy humanity that stormed and spat and shrieked under the high dull walls of the factory.

Here, perhaps, his national self-sufficiency was his somewhat arrogant counsellor.

“What has this man done,” he cried to those about him, “but exemplify that right to liberty of speech which you all demand?”

A dozen loathing glances were turned upon him. Savage oaths and ejaculations contested the opportuneness of so reasonable a sentiment. But it was not St Antoine’s way, now or at any time, to approve counsel for the defence. Only a cry, a sinister one then first beginning to be heard in the streets, broke out here and there.

“Down with the aristocrat!”

There was threat of a concentric movement upon the Englishman. He felt it as a moral pressure even before his immediate neighbours began to close inwards. One of the latter had a similar consciousness apparently. She was a coarse, fat poissarde, and the shallow groove that was her waist seemed moulded of the very habit of her truculent arms folded in front of her.

“Eh, my little radishes!” she cried in a voice like a corncrake’s. “Advance, you! Come, then—come! Here is a cat shall strip you of your breeches if you venture within her reach.”

Ned felt, and the crowd looked, astonishment over this unexpected championship. In the momentary proximate silence that befell, the shattering explosion of many of M. Reveillon’s windows bursting under volleys of stones was a significantly acute accent.

The fishwife nodded her head a great number of times.

“Hé! my little rats, you will not come? That is well for your whiskers, indeed. And do we not demand liberty of speech, as monsieur says; and are we not taking it to denounce one that would deprive us of the liberty to live? How! You would raise the devil against monsieur?” (she waxed furious in an instant)—“Monsieur l’Anglais, that all the hard winter has lived like a Jacobin friar, that he might give of his substance to the cold and the starving? Monsieur l’Anglais that lodges at the fruiterer’s, and without whose help Fanchon and her brat had been rotting now in St Pélagie! Oh, san’ Dieu! I know—I know! Pigs, beasts, ingrates! It will be well, in truth, for the first that comes within my reach!”

A rolling laugh, that swelled to a roar, took up the very echo of madame’s surprising tirade.

“Vive l’Anglais! the friend of the poor, the apostle of liberty!” shrieked twenty voices.

Too amazed by this sudden rightabout of a national weathercock to protest against its misrepresentation of the direction of his own little breeze of righteousness, Ned made no resistance, when all in a moment he felt himself tossed up on billowing shoulders, and conveyed helplessly from the thick centre of operations. The clamour of hairy throats, exhaling winey fustian about him, staggered his brain. He had not even that self-possession left him to blush to find his stealthy goodness famous. And when the escort landed him at Madame Gamelle’s door, and with hurried vivats testified to his immediate popularity, he could think of no more appropriate remark to make to them than, “I protest, messieurs, that I have never travelled so high in others’, or so low in my own opinion, before”; which, inasmuch as it was fortunately spoken in English, and accompanied by a profoundly ironical bow, served the occasion as gracefully as much compliment would have done.

Feeling at first something like a venturesome infant that had strayed beyond bounds only to be caught back and kissed, Ned mounted to his room to await events. They came thick and swift enough to half induce him to a re-descent upon the scene of action. That temptation he overcame; but all day long, and far into the evening, he wandered, restless and apprehensive, in the Rue St Antoine, watching its turbulent course at the flood, feeling a sympathetic attraction to the electricity of its moods, conscious of the shock of something enacting, or threatening to enact, about that congregated spot where the tumult was heaviest.

Still with the passing of day came no abatement of the popular fury, but rather an accumulating of menace; and thereupon (M. le Baron Besenval, Commandant of Paris, having arrived at his decision) down swooped upon the scene a little company of thirty bronzed and brazen French Guards, in their royal chevrons and military coxcombs; which company, clearing intestinal congestion by measures laxative, readjusted the order of affairs, and persuaded exhausted patriots to their burrows.

To his bed also went Ned reassured, and slept profoundly and confidently as a rescued castaway. But, waking on the morrow, lo! there was renewal of the uproar shaking his windows, but now as if it would splinter the very glass in its frames.

The cause, when he came to examine, was not far to seek. St Antoine, a very confraternity of weasels, baulked but not baffled, was returned to the attack; and at this last it was evident that the paper-maker’s premises were damned. Indeed, the complaint of democracy had suffered a violent relapse during the night; and now, in the new dawn, it blazed and crackled like a furnace. The streets, the roofs, the windows were massed with writhing shapes; the whole quarter jangled in a thunder of voices; a pelt of indifferent missiles, deadly only in the context, rained without ceasing upon the accursed walls.

Ned paused a moment, swirled like a straw in the current of rushing humanity, to take stock of possibilities.

“If it is so they resent a hasty word,” thought he, “God save Paris in the hour of reprisal!”

He felt a little sick at heart. He would look no more.

“I will spend an idle day in the fields of Passy,” he assured himself, “and forget it all, and return in the evening to find the storm blown over.”

He went out by way of the Place St Paul, walking along the line of quays, and watching, something with the tender feeling of a convalescent, the golden frost of sunlight that gemmed the waters of the Seine. It was a fair, sweet morning, too innocent, it seemed, to take account of human passions; and by-and-by its influence so far wrought upon him as that he was able to commit himself to it with some confidence of enjoyment. All about him, moreover, life seemed pleasurably normal—not significant of fear and apprehension, as his soul had dreaded to find it.

But with the approach of dusk his innate misgivings must once more gather force till they knocked like steam in his arteries; and, so dreading, he lingered over his return until deep dark had closed upon the town. At the barrier he heard enough to confirm his disquiet, though the reports of what had happened were so formless and contradictory as to decide him to refer inquiry to the evidence of his own senses. Therefore, in silence and heart-quaking, he made his way eastwards, and presently turned into the dark intricacy of squares that led up to the Rue Beautreillis.

The street, when he reached it, seemed given over to the desolation of night. The taller houses slept pregnant with austerity as vast Assyrian images; the lamps, rocking drowsily in their slings, blinked, one could have thought, to squeeze the slumber from their eyes. Distant sounds there were, but none proceeding from points nearer in suggestion than the far side of dawn.

By-and-by, however, one—a little gurgling noise like the sob of a gutter—slid into Ned’s consciousness, as, speeding forward, his footsteps rang out a very chime of echoes. Almost in the same moment he was upon it, or upon its place of issue—a ragged huddle of shapes pulled into the shadow of a buttress.

A clawing figure, gaunt and unclean, rose at him—recognised him in the same instant, apparently, and gave out a bestial cry.

“She is going, monsieur! May God wither the hand that beat her down, and may the soul of him that directed it scream in everlasting hell!”

He seized the young man’s sleeve and drew him reluctant forward. The huddle of frowzy things parted, that he might see.

The coarse large poissarde; the ally who had yesterday cherished his cause and sung his praises; the great breathing, truculent woman with the defiant voice! Here was the gross material of so much vigour, collapsed, mangled, and flung aside. The little choking noise was accounted for. There was a crimson rent in the woman’s throat. She died while Ned was looking down upon her.

And this mad thing that spat at the sky? Doubtless he was her husband; and he might have been a royal duke from the freedom of his language.

“What does it mean?” cried Ned hoarsely.

One of the groping shapes snarled up at him—

“It is an instance of monseigneur’s paternal kindness to his people.”

There was nothing to be answered or done. The Englishman emptied his purse to the group and hurried on. His worst apprehensions were realised. This was but a sample of what was to follow—a vision to be repeated again and yet again, in indefinite forms. Rebellion had broken and suppurated away during his absence. There were some four or five hundred dead bodies, shot and stabbed, as earnest of its drastic treatment by the national physicians. There might have been more, but that the mob had finally given before M. Besenval’s Switzers with their grape-shotted cannon. Then it retired, pretty satisfied, however, to have justified democratic frenzy by so practical an illustration of the tyranny of class hatred; satisfied, also, as to the moral of its own retreat. M. Reveillon was become a self-constituted prisoner in the Bastille; his factory was a shapeless and clinkerous medley of rubbish. Ned, turning the corner of the Rue Beautreillis, saw the ruins, dusking and glowing fitfully, at a little distance. “And how,” he thought, with a shuddering emotion, “did he, that was so fascinated by the man Rozier’s fate, regard the burning of his own ark of security?”

The street—so it seemed in the expiring red glimmer and the small, dull radiance of bracketed lamps—was a very dismantled graveyard of broken stones and scattered corpses. Amongst the latter moved detached groups of searchers, languidly official, swinging ghostly lanterns. With a groan of lamentation, Ned turned about and beat frantically on the closed shutters of the fruiterer’s shop.

The door was opened, after a weary interval, by Madame Gamelle. The woman’s eyes were febrile. She dragged her lodger over the threshold and snapped the lock behind him. A couple of rushlights burned dimly on the counter. The pledge, in holiday antic, was stuffing a bloody cartouche-box with onions from a basket.

“They killed him at the street corner,” said madame gloatingly. “He shall never murder again—the accursed Garde Française. They had for knives only the sharp tiles from the roofs; but it was easy to willing arms.”

She was transfigured, this meek vendor of cabbages. Anywhere to scratch St Antoine was to find a devil.

“Madame,” said Ned wearily, “it is all quite right, without doubt; but to-morrow, I must tell you, I am to take my leave of Paris.”

CHAPTER XIV.

Mr Murk was suffering from a toujours perdrix of politics. He needed, he felt, a prolonged constitutional, both to clear his brain of a certain blood-web that confused its vision, and to enable him to sort, in fair communion with the Republic of Nature, his own somewhat scattered theories of government. He was really unnerved, indeed, by what he had seen and experienced, and the prospect of quiet woods and pastures was become dear to his soul. He would return to Méricourt, as he had promised himself he would do, in the sweet spring weather—to Méricourt, where the play of Machiavelism was but a pastoral comedy after all. He would return to Méricourt and paint into the unfinished eyes of his Madonna the fathomless living sorrow of doubt—the Son being dead—as to their own divinity.

Of the two hundred miles to traverse he walked the greater number—sometimes in leisurely, sometimes in hurried fashion, as the chasing dogs of memory slept or tracked him. But, tramp as he would, he could not regain that elasticity of heart that once so communicated itself to the “spirit in his feet.” He had gone to Paris blithe and curious; he was returning, as the idiom expresses it, with a foot of nose. In eight months the spouting grass seemed to have lost its spring. May, with all its voices, could not charm him from foul recollections; the gloom of slumbering forests was full of murder. Now for the first time he realised how the great peace he often paused to wistfully look upon was Nature’s, not his; how, flatter his soul as he might with a pretence of its partnership in all the noble restfulness that encompassed it, it stood really an alien, isolated—a suffering, self-conscious inessential, having no kinship with this material sweet tranquillity—separated from it, in fact, by just the traverseless width of that very conscious ego. He felt like Satan alighted for the first time in view of Eden, only to recognise by what plumbless moat of knowledge he was excluded from its silent lawns and orchards.

This feeling came to him in his worst moods. In his best, he could take artistic joy of those effects of cloud and country that called for no elaborate detail in the delineating—that were distant only proportionately less than the distant unrealities of the stars in the sky. For the impression of outlawry in a world that was only man’s by conquest was bitten into his soul for all time; and never again, since that night spent in the shambles of St Antoine, should he recover and indulge that ancient sense of irresponsibility towards his share in the conduct of man’s usurped estate.

“We are,” he thought, “squatters disputing with one another the possession of land to which we have each and all no title.”

Nevertheless—therefore, rather—his soul acknowledged the opposite to disenchantment in its review of nature unconverted to misuse. Not before had pathos so sung to him in the warm throat-notes of birds; so chimed to him in the tumble of weirs; so looked up into his face from the fallen blossom on the grass. He might have found his healing of all things at the time had Love appeared to him in sympathetic guise.

Over the last stages of his journey he took diligence to Liége, and, at the end of a long week’s ramble, set foot once more in the old sun-baked town.

Thence, on a gentle evening, he turned his face to Méricourt, and in a mood half humour, half sadness, retraversed the hills and dingles of a pleasant experience. Somehow he felt as if he were returning, a confident prodigal, to ancient haunts of beauty and kindliness.

He had proceeded so far as to have come within a half mile of the village, when, in thridding his way through a sombre wedge of woodland, he was suddenly aware of a figure—a woman’s—flitting before him round a bend in the path. There was that in his momentary glimpse of the form that led him to double his pace so as to overtake it. This he had no difficulty in doing, though for a minute it seemed as if the other were anxious to elude him. But finding, no doubt, the task beyond her, she stopped and turned of a sudden into a leafy embrasure set in the track-edge, and stood there awaiting his coming, her head drooped and her back to a green beech-trunk.

“Théroigne!” cried Ned, nearly breathless. “Théroigne Lambertine!”

“Why do you stop me?” she said, panting, and in a low voice. “You know the way to Méricourt, monsieur.”

He felt some wonder over her tone.

“Don’t you wish me to speak to you, then? Have you already forgotten me?”

She did not answer or raise her face.

“Théroigne!” he protested, pleading like an aggrieved boy. “And little as I saw of you, I have felt, in returning to Méricourt, as if I were coming back to old friends. I have had enough of Paris and its horrors, Théroigne.”

At that she looked up at him for the first time. He was amazed and all concerned. The glowing, rich, defiant beauty he had last seen. And this—white, fallen, and desolate—the face of a haunted creature!

“What is the matter?” he whispered. “What has happened to you?”

“Paris!” she said in a febrile voice. “Ah, yes, monsieur!—you come from Paris. And did you see there——”

She checked herself, struck her own mouth savagely with her palm, then suddenly gripped at the young man’s wrist.

“What are they doing in Paris? Is it there, as he prophesied—the reign of honour and reason, the reign of pleasure, the emancipation of the wretched and oppressed? He will be a fine recruit to the cause of so much republican virtue.”

She breathed quickly; a smouldering fire blazed up in her; her very voice, that had seemed to Ned starved like her beauty, gathered to something the remembered volume.

“He? Who?” said he.

She took no notice of the question, but went on in great excitement—

“What are these horrors that you speak of? Have you seen them? What are they, I say? Do they tear aristocrats limb from limb? This truth that he used to preach—my God! there is no hope for the world until they massacre them each one!”

“That who used to preach?” said Ned, quite shocked and bewildered.

“Liars! liars! liars!” cried the girl, striking hand into hand.

Then suddenly she had flung herself round against the tree, and, in a storm of tears, had buried her head in her arms.

“Go!” she cried, in a muffled voice. “Why do you come back with the other memories? Why do you notice or speak to me? Can you not see that I am accursed—an outcast?”

He would have essayed to comfort, to reassure her. Her wayward passion took his breath away. Even while he hesitated, she turned upon him once more:—

“Are you not also of the haute noblesse? What truth or honour or courage can be in you, then? Yes, courage, monsieur. You have fled because you were afraid they would kill you, as he fled before his pursuing conscience. You will not tell me the truth, because you are shamed in its revelation. My God! what cowards are you all! But only say to me that he is dead—stabbed to the heart—and I will fall down and kiss your feet!”

To Ned, standing there dumfoundered, came an inkling of a tragedy.

“That Suleau,” he was thinking, half mazed, “did he jockey me; and was it St Denys after all?”

He looked at the stressed and wild-wrought creature before him in sombre pity.

“So M. de St Denys has left Méricourt?” he said gravely.

At that Mademoiselle Lambertine broke into a shrill laugh.

“M. de St Denys? But who spoke of M. de St Denys? It was he, was it not, that waived his privileges of honour that he might be on a level with us that have none? And why should he leave Méricourt, where he was ever a model and an example of all that he preached?”

“It cannot have been he, then, that I saw in Paris?”

The girl gasped, stared, and took a forward step.

“You saw him? And he was amongst the killed?”

“Théroigne!”

“Monsieur, monsieur! We have heard how the people rose; we are not here at the bounds of the earth.”

“But it was no slaughter of aristocrats.”

She gazed at him dumbly with feverish eyes, then sighed heavily, shook her head, and moved out into the open.

“So you come again to Méricourt?” she said. “You will find it wonderfully changed in these few months. Now we are possessed by a devil, and now we are under the dominion of a saint. There is an idol deposed, and a holy image raised in its place. Will you be walking, monsieur, or shall I go first?”

“We will go together.”

She laughed again with a shrill, mocking sound.

“Mother of God! what an admirable persuasiveness have these aristocrats! I had thought myself beneath his notice, and, behold! he would make me his companion—and in the face of the village, too. Come, then, monsieur. Will you take your paillarde on your arm?”

He listened to her with some compassion (for all her wild speech he thought her heart was choked with accumulated tears), then moved forward and walked along the woodland path by her side. To his few questions she returned but monosyllabic answers. Presently, however—when they were come out within view of the village fountain, where Ned’s first meeting with her had taken place—she stayed him with a hand upon his sleeve.

“‘As she makes her bed, so must she lie on it.’ You see I remember your words, monsieur. And, if she has made her bed as the virtuous disapprove, in England she may yet lie soft on it?”

“Without doubt, in England or elsewhere, so long as she lives only for the present.”

“Ah! little Mother of God! but how natural to these aristocrats comes the preaching-cant.”

All in a moment her eyes and her speech softened most wooingly, and she put up her hands, in a characteristic coaxing manner, to the young man’s breast.

“I am ill and weary now,” she said. “It is not good to suffer long the hatred of one’s kinsfolk, the gibes of one’s familiars. But in another atmosphere I should learn to resume myself—at least to resume all that of me that concerns the regard of men. The result would be worth the possessing, monsieur. Monsieur, when you return to England, will you take me with you?”

As she spoke, a light step sounded coming up the meadow-path, before mentioned, that ran into the head of the woodland. It approached; Théroigne, with a conscious look, fell back a little; and immediately, moving staid and decorous over the young grass, the white lodge-keeper of the chateau came into view. She suffered, Ned could see, one momentary shock of indecision as her eyes encountered his; then she advanced, and, without a word, went on her way into the wood. But, as she passed, she acknowledged Ned’s salutation with a grave little inclination of her head, and with the act was not forgetful to withdraw her skirts from contact with those of Mademoiselle Lambertine, who, for her part, shrank back and made not the least show of protest or resentment.

Ned, however, regarded with some twinkle of amusement the slow-pacing figure till it was out of sight, and then he only turned to Théroigne with a questioning look.

The girl came up to him again, but doubtfully now, it seemed, and with a certain wide awe in her eyes.

“You must not say it, monsieur,” she whispered; “you must not say what I can read on your lips. She has seen the Blessed Virgin since you were last here—has seen and spoken with her.”

“God forgive me for a scoffer! And that is why she is all in blue, I suppose, and why her blue skirt must not touch hems with your red one?”

Théroigne hung her head.

“When does monsieur return to England?” she said only.

Ned clasped his hands behind his head and stretched vigorously.

“Very soon, I think. Mademoiselle Théroigne, I am tired of you all. Very soon, I think.”

She made as if she would have touched him again; but he gently put her away from him. At that she looked up in his eyes very forlorn and pleading.

“Mademoiselle Théroigne,” said he, “I do not know or ask you your story. Here, since I left, all flowers seem to have run to a seed that is best not scattered abroad. I cannot, of course, prevent your going to London if you choose. Only, for myself, I must tell you, that myself is at present as much as I can undertake to direct and govern. Besides, it is not at all likely that you would find him there.”

In an instant she was again all scorn and passion. Her lip lifted and showed her teeth. She humped her shoulders; her hands clinched in front of her.

“Not to understand,” she cried, “that that is my very reason for desiring the refuge of your barbarous land! To escape from myself and the murder in me!”

“But why leave Méricourt at all?”

The blight of her fury was as sudden as the blast that springs from a glacier.

“May you know what it is to roll in a trough of spikes and find no release in your agony! Cold, passionless, insolent! Lazarus, to refuse to dip your finger in water! But I will go in spite of you: I will go, monsieur, and laugh and snap my fingers in your face!”

“Permit me to say,” said Ned coolly, “that this is a very foolish and unnecessary exhibition of temper.”

But she flounced round her shoulder and ran from him, storming and crying out, and disappeared down the track leading to her home. And, as for him—he went on to the “Landlust.”

CHAPTER XV.

During the course of his short journey from the wood-skirt to the inhospitable hostelry of his former acquaintance, Ned could have thought himself conscious of an atmosphere vaguely unfamiliar to his recollections of Méricourt. These were not at fault, he felt convinced, because of climatic changes; because of an aspect of seasonable reinvigoration in a place that he had last seen sunk in lethargy; because of an increase in the number of people he saw moving in the street even. They recognised themselves astray, rather, over a spirit of demure gravity—a chosen tribe smugness of expression, so to speak—that seemed to inform with pharisaic minauderie the faces of many of those he passed by; and even he fancied he could distinguish—in the absence of this self-important mien—strangers (of whom there were not a few) from those that were native to the hamlet.

There seemed, in short, an air of wandering expectancy abroad—almost as if the unregarded village, committed hitherto to a serene isolation, were become suddenly a field for prospectors, ready to “exploit” anything from a three-legged calf to a sainte nitouche. Conversing couples hushed their voices as he went by, their eyes stealthily scanning him as one that had ventured without justification within a consecrated sanctuary. A berline stood drawn up by the green-side, its occupants, two fashionable ladies from Liége, converted from the latest fashion in hats to the last in emotionalism. The blacksmith, in his little shop under the walnut-tree, familiarly rallied his Creator from stentorian lungs as he clanked upon his anvil. Across the Place the ineffective Curé was to be seen escorting a party towards the church; and, over all—visitors and inhabitants—went the sweet laugh of May blowing abroad the scent of woods and blossoms.

Ned turned into the “Landlust,” feeling somehow that his dream of rest was resolved into a droll. Nor, once within, was he to be agreeably disillusioned in this respect. The Van Roon seemed to positively resent his recursion—to regard him in the light of an insistent patient returning, on trifling provocation, to a hospital from which he had been discharged as cured.

“What! you again!” she cried sourly. “One would think moogsieur had no object in life but to canvass the favour of Méricourt.”

Ned, the yet imperturbable, answered with unruffled gallantry—

“Indeed, in all the course of my travels I have never seen anything to admire so much as madame in the conduct of her business. Whichever way I have looked since my departure, it was always she that filled my perspective.”

“If that is the same as your stomach,” said madame rudely, “you will have found me hard of digestion.”

“At least I am hungry now.”

“That is a pity. You shall pick Lenten fare in the ‘Landlust’ in these days.”

“Is it not rather a question of payment, madame?”

“No, it is not,” she snapped out viciously. “Moogsieur imposes his custom on me. He may take or refuse; what do I care, then! We have nowadays other things to think of than to pamper the gross appetites of worldlings.”

“A thousand pardons! Is not that a strange confession from an inn-keeper?”

“You may think so if you like. It makes no difference. To charge an egg with the price of a full meal—where one is willing to pay it—it simplifies matters, does it not? Anyhow, to be served by one of the elect (it is I that speak to you)—that is a privilege your betters appreciate at its value.”

“Well,” said Ned, “I am at sea, and I have a mariner’s appetite. Give me what you will, madame.”

She accepted him, as once before, with a sort of surly mistrust. A former unregenerate friend of his, she said, was seated in the common kitchen. He had best join this person while his meal was preparing.

Thither, much marvelling over all he had heard and been witness of, Ned consequently bent his steps. He had not expected much of the “Landlust,” but this exceeded his devoutest hopes. It had the effect also of arousing in him something of a wicked mood of indocility.

Entering the long room, the first object to meet his eyes was the sizar of Liége University. The little round man sat at the table, a glass of eau sucrée by his elbow, a pipe held languidly between his teeth. An expression of profound melancholy was settled on his features. He looked as forlorn as a tropic monkey cuddling itself in an east wind. At the sight of Mr Murk he started, and half rose to his feet.

“The devil!” he muttered; and added—not so inconsequently as it appeared—“You are welcome to Méricourt, monsieur.”

Ned laughed.

“Is it so bad as that?” said he, “and has he become such a stranger here in these months?”

The other beckoned his old enemy quite eagerly to a seat.

“You have not heard, monsieur? It is improbable, without doubt; yet Méricourt is at the present moment the centre of much reverent attraction.”

“Is it? You shall tell me about it, Little Boppard. Yet you yourself are reprobate, I hear; and you will have your debauch of sugar and water.”

In reply, the poor body whispered, in quite a chap-fallen and deprecating manner—

“I am of nature a thirsty soul, monsieur. I must take my smoke, like the Turk, through bubbles of liquid. What then! this is not my choice; but it is expected of us in these days of spiritual elevation to drink at the Fountain of Life or not at all.”

“There are different interpretations as to the character of the Fountain. Each is a schism to all others, no doubt. Mine, I confess, is not of sweet water.”

Ned spoke, and rapped peremptorily on the table. M. Boppard’s little eyes, glinting with prospicience, took an expression of nervous admiration of this daring alien.

“Ah, monsieur!” he cried in fearful enthusiasm, “do not go too far. This is not the joyous ‘Landlust’ of your former knowledge; the type of extravagant hospitality; the club of excellent fellowship. Things have happened since you were here. Now we drink eau sucrée, or, worse still, the clear water of regeneration itself. Cordials and cordiality are dreams of the past.”

His voice broke on a falling key. A scared look came over his face. The cow-like girl had opened the door and stood on the threshold mutely waiting.

“A bottle of maçon,” said Ned, and, giving his order, saw with the tail of his eye the student’s countenance change.

“A half bottle,” he corrected himself, “and also a double dose of cognac.”

The girl stood as stolid on end as a pocket of hops.

“Do you hear?” said Ned.

She blinked and lifted her eyelids. A sort of drowsy exaltation appeared in these days the very accent to her large inertia—its self-justification, in fact, before some visionary consistory of saints.

“Do you hear?” said Ned again, with particular emphasis.

“It is not permitted to get tipsy in the ‘Landlust,’” said she, like one talking in her sleep.

Ned jumped to his feet quite violently.

“Take my order,” he shouted, “or I’ll come and kiss every woman in the house, beginning with Madame van Roon!”

She vanished, suddenly terrified, in a whisk of skirts, and the door clapped behind her. The young gentleman laughed and resumed his seat.

“So, Méricourt has found grace?” said he; “and grace is not necessarily to be gracious, it seems. Yet, you still come here! And why, M. Boppard?”

The student shook his head. His face had grown much happier in a certain prospect.

“Why do I, monsieur? Can I say? Of a truth it ceases to be the place of my affections; yet—I do not know. The bird will visit and revisit its robbed nest; will sit on the familiar twig and call up, perhaps, a vision of the little blue eggs in the moss. I have been content here. I cling, doubtless, to the old illusions that are vanished.”

“Amongst which is the Club of Nature’s Gentry?”

“Hush!”

The wine was brought in as he spoke. For what reason soever, Ned’s argument had prevailed. Probably decorum would not risk a scene dangerous to its reputation.

“Hush!” murmured the sizar, twinkling and portentous in one, when they were left alone again. “It is vanished, as monsieur says. It ceased, morally and practically, with the disappearance of M. de St Denys.”

“Whither has he gone, then?”

“It is supposed to Paris; and may the curse of God follow him!”

Ned paused in the act of drinking.

“What do you say, M. Boppard?”

“He was a liar, monsieur. He used us to his purpose and, when that was accomplished, he flung us aside.”

“And his purpose?”

The sizar dropped his voice to a whisper.

“Our queen, monsieur,” he said, “our queen, that represented to us the beautiful ideal of all our most passionate aspirations! He seemed to avow in his attitude towards her the sincerity of his code of honourable socialism. He lied to us all. He converted her nobility to the uses of a common intrigue; and from the consequences of his crime he fled like a coward, and left her to bear the curses of her people and the sneers of the community.”

“Yes?” said Ned; and he took a long draught, for he was thirsty. Indeed, he had foreseen all this.

The student’s eyes filled with tears.

“She was much to us—to me, this Mademoiselle Lambertine,” he said pitifully. “If there were mercy in the world, she should have been allowed to bury her dishonour with her dead child in the church yonder.”

Ned reached across and patted his companion’s arm.

“You are a very amiable little Boppard,” he said.

“Monsieur,” answered the student, “for whatever you may observe in me that is better than the commonplace, she is responsible.”

“It shall go to her credit some day, be assured. And now, what is this other matter? It is not only the fall of its idol, the discovery of monseigneur’s baseness, that has sobered the community of Méricourt?”

“By no means.”

The student pulled at his pipe vehemently. Coaxing it from the sulking mood, his expression relaxed, and he breathed forth jets of smoke that he dissipated with his hand.

“By no means,” said he. “The moral debility that ensued, however, may have rendered us (I will not say it did) peculiarly susceptible to the complaint of godliness. At any rate, monsieur, we were chosen for a high honour, and——”

He paused, sighed, and shook his head pathetically.

“It is true, then, that the virgin revealed herself to the lodge-keeper?” said Ned. And he added: “Boppard, my Boppard! I believe you are not, in spite of all, weaned from the fleshpots!”

The student smiled foolishly and a little anxiously.

“Let me tell you how it began, monsieur,” said he. “The bitter scandal of monseigneur and—and of our poor demoiselle was yet hot in women’s mouths (ah, monsieur, what secret gratification will it not give them, that fall of an envied sister!), when an interest of a different kind withdrew these cankers from feeding on their rose. Baptiste, the little brother of Nicette Legrand, disappeared, and has never been heard of since.”

“The child! But, who——?”

“Monsieur, it was the Cagots stole him.”

“Did they confess to it?”

“Confess! the pariahs, the accursed! It is not in nature that wretches so vile should incriminate themselves. But there had been evidence of them in the neighbourhood; one, indeed, had been employed by Draçon—whose farm abuts on the lower grounds of the chateau—to roof a shed with tiles. This Cagot Nicette had seen upon many occasions covertly regarding the child—conversing with him even, and doubtless, with devilish astuteness, corrupting his mind. Two days after the job was completed and the man disappeared, the unhappy infant was nowhere to be found. They sought him far and wide. Nicette was prostrate—inconsolable. She had been foremost in the denunciation of Théroigne. Now, she herself, desolated, defrauded of him to whom she had been as a mother—well, God must judge, monsieur. At last the strange gloating of that sinister creature recurred to her, and she spoke of it. With oaths of frenzy, the villagers armed themselves and broke into the woods, where the miscreants were known to sojourn. Their camp was deserted. They were fled none knew whither; and none to this day has set eyes on them or the little Legrand.”

“Or questioned, I’ll swear, the unconscionable flimsiness of such evidence. And Nicette, M. Boppard?”

“She wandered like a ghost; in the woods—always in the woods, as if she maddened to somewhere find, hidden under the fern and moss, the mutilated body of her little fanfan. You recall, monsieur, the old eaten tree, the despoiled Samson of the forest, that held the moon in its withered arms on a memorable night of jest and revel? Mon Dieu! but the ravishing times!”

“The tree, my Boppard? Of a surety I remember the tree.”

“It became the nucleus, monsieur—the clearing in which it stands the headquarters, as it were, of her operations of search. There appeared no reason for this, but surely a divine intuition compelled her. At all periods she haunted the spot. Oftentimes was she to be secretly observed kneeling and praying there in an ecstasy of emotion. To the Blessed Virgin she directed her petitions. ‘Restore to me,’ she wept, ‘my darling Baptiste, and I swear to dedicate myself, for evermore a maid, to thy service!’ One day, by preconcerted plan, a body of villagers, armed with billhooks and axes, with the Curé at their head, surprised her at her post. ‘It is not for nothing, we are convinced,’ said the good father, ‘that you are led to frequent these thickets. Hence we will not proceed until we have laid bare the ground to the limit of ten perches, and, by the grace of God, revealed the mystery!’”

“Well, M. Boppard?”

“Now, monsieur, was confessed the wonder. At the priest’s words, the girl leapt to her feet. Her eyes, it is said by those that were there, burned like the lamp before the little altar of Our Lady of Succour. Her face was as white as cardamines—transparent, spiritual, like a phantom’s against the dark leaves. ‘You must do nothing,’ she said—‘nothing—nothing. Here but now, at the foot of the tree, the Blessed Virgin revealed herself to me as I kneeled and wept. Her heel was on the head of a serpent, whose every scale, different in colour to the next, was a gleaming agate; and in her hand she held a purple globe that was liquid and did not break, but round whose surface travelled without ceasing the firmament of white worlds in miniature. “Nicette,” she said, in a voice that seemed to have gathered the sweetness of all the sainted dead, “weep and search no more, my child; for some day thy brother shall be restored to thee. I, the Mother of Christ, promise thee this!”’”

“Boppard,” said Ned quietly, “is the description yours or Mademoiselle Legrand’s?”

“It is as I heard it, monsieur. I have not wittingly intruded myself.”

“Yet you are a poet.”

“But this is prose I speak.”

“True: the prose of a nimble imagination. And, moreover, you are a student and a philosopher; and you believe this thing?”

Boppard nodded his deprecatory poll.

“Perhaps because I am also a poet, as monsieur says.”

“It is probable. And Nicette is a poet; which is why she walks, as I understand, in the odour of sanctity.”

“I do not comprehend, monsieur.”

“Why should you wish to? This vision, this revelation—it has proved profitable to Méricourt?”

“Again, I do not comprehend monsieur.”

With the words on his lips, he pricked his ears to a murmuring sound that came subdued through the closed lattice. He rose and, instinctively reverential, tip-toed to the window. Ned followed him.

Across the sunny green, her eyes turned to the ground, her hands clasped to her mouth, her whole manner significant of a wrapt introspection, passed M. de St Denys’ little pale lodge-keeper; and, as she went on her way, men bowed as at the passing of the Host; children caught at their mothers’ skirts and looked from covert, wonder-eyed; the fashionable ladies scuttled from their berline and knelt in the dust, and snatched at and kissed the hem of the dévote’s garment. She paid no heed, but glided on decorously, and vanished from Ned’s field of observation.

“She is a poet,” repeated that young man calmly.

The student crossed himself.

“She is a priestess, monsieur,” said he. “She reads in the breviary of her white soul such mysteries as man has never guessed at.”

“That I can quite understand; and it will be an auspicious day for Méricourt when they start to build a commemorative chapel.”

“It is even now discussed. Already they have the sacred tree fenced in, and the ground about it consecrated. Already the spot is an object of pilgrimage to the pious.”

“As once to the Club of Nature’s Gentry—the ravishing club, oh, my poor Boppard! Alas, the whirligig of time! But, one thing I should like to know: to what did Mademoiselle Legrand look for a livelihood when her master ran away?”

“Doubtless to God, monsieur. And now, the faithful shower gifts at her feet.”

CHAPTER XVI.

Pretty early on the morning following his arrival in Méricourt, Ned strolled up the easy slope leading to the lodge of the chateau, and found himself lingering over against the embowered gates with a queer barm of humour working upon a commixture of emotions in his breast. Now it seemed that his very neighbourhood to the Madonna of his memory was effecting a climatic change both within and without him. For the first, little runnels of irresponsible gaiety gushed in his veins; for the second, the weather, that had been indifferent fine during his journey, appeared to have broken all at once into full promise of summer. It was not, indeed, that his sympathies enlarged in the near presence of one who might hold herself as a little moon of desire. It was rather, perhaps, because in the one-time surrender of her very soul to his inspection, she had made of him a confederate in certain unspoken secrets, the knowledge of which was to him like a sense of proprietorship in a picturesque little country-seat. Yet here, it may be acknowledged, he indulged something a dangerous mood.

He stood a minute before passing through the gates. The warmth of a windless night still slept in the velvety eyes of the roadside flowers. Morning was heaping off its bed-linen of glistening clouds. From a chestnut-tree came the drowsy drawl of a yellow-hammer. A robin—small fashionable idler of birds—abandoned the problem of a fibrous seed and, flickering to a stump, discussed the stranger impertinently and with infinite society relish. Only the swifts were alert and busy, flashing, poising, diving under the eaves; thridding Ned’s brain as they passed with a receding sound like that made by pebbles hopping over ice; seeming, in their flight of warp and woof, to be mending the pace set by the loitering day. Feeling their activity a rebuke, the visitor passed through the open gate.

Within, all was yet more pretty orderliness than that he had once admired. The lodge stood, sequestered trimness, between the luminous green of its porch and the high rearward trees that spouted up into the sky, full fountains of tumbling young leaves. The little paths were swept; the little long beds, bordered with trique-madame and planted with lusty perennials, were combed orderly as the hair of their mistress, and weeded to the least vulgar seedling; white curtains hung in the cottage windows; and everywhere was an added refinement of daintiness—a suggestion of increased prosperity.

“Now, Mademoiselle Legrand,” thought Ned, “has shown herself a little person of resource.”

He could hear the moan of the horn coming familiarly to him from the back garden. The sweet complaining cry woke some queer memories in him. He went forward a few paces up the drive—walking straight into weediness and the tangle of neglect—that he might get glimpse of the chateau. The place, when he saw it, glowered from an encroaching thicket. Even these few months seemed to have confirmed the ruin that had before only threatened. Its dusty upper windows were viscous, he could have thought, with the tracks of snails. Grass had made good its footing on the roof. It looked a forgotten old history of the past, with a toppling chimney, half dislodged in some gale, for dog’s-ear.

Ned turned his back on the desolate sight, and lo! there was the bright patch of brick and flower like a garden redeemed from the desert. It appeared to point the very moral of the times, but in its ethical, not its savage significance. He went to seek the priestess of this little temple of peace.

As he turned into the garden, a peasant woman was coming out at the lodge door. She had an empty basket lined with a clean napkin on her arm.

“Que la sainte virge vous bénissè par sa servante!” she murmured as she passed by the visitor.

Nicette was nowhere visible. Ned stole into the house and along the passage. A strip of thick matting, where had formerly been naked flags, deadened the sound of his footfalls. Laughter, but laughter a little thrilling, tingled in his veins. A certain apprehension, that time might not have dealt as drastically as he had desired it would with a misconstructive fancy, was lifted from his mind since yesterday. He felt there could be small doubt but that his own image had been deposed and replaced by a very idol of vanity—a self-conscious Adaiah that must find its supremest gratification in proving its consistency with the character assigned it. Indeed, his moderate faith in himself as an attractive quantity inclined him, perhaps, to underrate his moral influence. He had not yet learned that to many women there is no chase so captivating as that of incarnate diffidence.

He came softly upon Nicette in the dairy that was a little endeared to him by remembrance. Perhaps he would not have ventured unannounced to seek her in the more inner privacy of her own nest. But the cool dairy was good for a neutral ground. She stood with her back to him. The sunlight, reflected from vivid leafiness through the window, made a soft luminosity of the curve of her cheek, that was like the pale under-side of a peach. It ruffled the rebellious tendrils of hair on her forehead into a mist of green; it stained her white chaperon with tender vert, and discoloured the straight blue folds of her dress. Was she, he thought, a half-converted dryad or a lapsing saint?

“Nicette!” he said aloud.

She gave a strangled gasp and faced about, her eyes scared, a hand upon her bosom. She had been disposing on a slab a little gift of spring chickens and some household preserves.

“Did I startle you?” said Ned. “But you knew I was returned and must surely come and see you.”

“Monsieur, you steal upon me like a ghost,” she muttered.

“Of what, girl? Of no regret, I hope?”

Her cheek was gathering a little dawn of colour.

“All ghosts of the past are sorrowful,” she said low.

“True,” he answered, seriously and gently. “I did not mean to awaken sad memories. And thou hast never had news of the little one?”

“Never, monsieur.”

“It is lamentable.”

Her eyes were watching him intently.

“You commiserate me, monsieur?” she said.

“How can you doubt it, Nicette?”

“Yet you do not love children?”

“Don’t I?”

“But their cunning and their vindictiveness, monsieur?”

“What of them?”

“What, indeed? It is monsieur’s own words I recall.”

“Nicette, can you think me such a brute? I hold myself abashed in the presence of the innocents. If I have ever decried them, it was only because their truthfulness rebuked my scepticism. They have shown me how to die, since I saw you last, Nicette. I shall try to remember when my hour comes.”

She passed a hand across her eyes, as though she were bewildered.

“But this inconsistency,” she began, murmuring.

Suddenly she straightened herself, and came forward.

“Truly, I knew you were arrived, monsieur; and you reintroduce yourself to good company on your return to Méricourt.”

“And truly I do not take my cue from a scandalous world to cold-shoulder an old friend.”

He came sternly into the dairy, and sat himself down on the slab by the chickens, his legs dangling.

“Sit there,” he said, and dragged a chair with his foot to his near neighbourhood.

The girl hesitated, shrugged her shoulders, and obeyed.

“Monsieur, it is evident, has not learned——” she was beginning. He caught the sentence from her:—

“That you are a saint? No, I have not learned it in these few minutes—unless innuendo is the prerogative of sanctity. I, a sinner, met a fallen woman yesterday, and I pitied her.”

Mademoiselle Legrand hung her head. Ned recovered his good-humour and laughed.

“Oh, little Sainte Nicette!” he said. “Why do you let me talk to you like this? Because you are a saint? Then I will not take a base advantage of your condition. But shall I finish the portrait, Madonna? I have been brought face to face in Paris with the divine suffering of mothers. I have discovered the secret of the eyes. Shall I finish the portrait, Nicette?”

She shook her head.

“But think how you could instruct me, girl! The lineaments—the very form and expression; for you have seen them!”

“Hush!” she exclaimed, in a terrified whisper. “Oh, monsieur, hush! It is blasphemy; it is terrible. I to pose for the divinity revealed to me! Surely, you are mad!”

He leaned down to her as he sat.

“Nicette,” he murmured, “there is an old confidence between us, you know, and I recall your fine gift of imagination. Confess that it is all an invention.”

“That what is an invention?”

“Do you not know? This vision in the woods, then.”

She sprang to her feet. A line of red came across her forehead.

“You mock me!” she cried. “I might have known that you would; but it is none the less hateful and cruel. Believe or not as you will.”

She was enraged as he had never seen her before.

“But these offerings,” he said, quite coolly: “the chickens and the little pots of jam, Nicette—or is it guava jelly? One may make a good investment of the imagination, I see.”

It was not pleasant of him; but he could be merciless to what he considered a bad example of escamoterie.

For a moment the girl looked like a very harpy. Her fingers crooked on the bosom of her dress as if she would have liked to lacerate her heart in desperate despite of its assailant. Then, suddenly, she dropped back upon her chair, and, covering her face with her hands, broke into a very pitiful convulsion of weeping.

Qui se fait brebis, le loup le mange!

Assuredly Ned had invited his own discomfiture. He had thought to operate upon this tender conscience without any right knowledge of the position of its arteries of emotion. He had bungled and let loose the flood, and straightway he was scared over the result of his own recklessness.

He let Mademoiselle Legrand cry a little while, not knowing how to compromise with his convictions. He loved truth, but was not competent to cope with its erring handmaid.

At last: “Nicette!” he whispered, and put his hand timidly on the girl’s shoulder.

She wriggled under his touch.

“No, no!” she sobbed, in a drowned voice. “It is terrible to be so hated and despised.”

“I do not hate you, little fool,” he said. “You beg the question. For what reason, Nicette? Are you afraid, or at a loss, to describe to me this vision?”

She seemed to check her weeping and to listen, though her bosom was still heavy with sobs.

“I am afraid,” she whispered.

“Of me? Nicette, shall I not finish the portrait?”

“No, no!”

“But you have seen the Mother, and know what she is like.”

“You would not believe.”

“At least put my credulity to the test.”

A long pause succeeded. The sobs died into silence. By-and-by the girl looked up—not at her inquisitor, but vaguely apart from him and away, as if her gaze were introspective. She clasped her hands together, holding them thus, in reverential attitude, against her throat.

“Nicette,” murmured Ned, “tell me—what is the Mother like?”

“It was a mist, monsieur, out of which a face grew like a sweet-briar blossom—a face, and then all down to her pink feet that trod the wind-flowers of the wood. Within her hair were little nests of light, glowing green and violet, that came and went, or broke and were shattered into a rain of golden strands. They were the tears she had shed beneath the cross. She wore the wounds, a five-pointed star, upon her breast, and I saw the rising and falling of her heart as it were the glowing of fire behind wood ashes. All about her, and about me, was a low thick murmur of voices that I could not understand. But sometimes I thought I saw the brown fearful eyes of the little people look from under the hanging fronds of fern, imploring to put their lips to the white buds of her feet. Then her eyes gathered me to their embrace; and I sailed on a blue sea, and was taken into the arms of the wind and kissed so that I seemed to swoon.”

She paused, breathing softly.

“Truly,” said Ned: “this was the very pagan Queen of Love.”

“She is the Queen of Love, monsieur, else had my eyes never been opened to see the little folk of the greenwoods. For to be Queen of Love is to be Queen of Nature, and both titles hath she from le Bon Dieu.”

Suddenly the girl edged a little nearer her companion, looked up in his face appealingly, and put her clasped hands upon his knee as he sat.

“God made Nature, monsieur,” she whispered. “God is Love. Oh, I read in the sweet eyes many things that were strange to my traditions!—even that human side of the Mother, that monsieur has sought to disclose. God is Love, and He hath given us passion, not forbidding us passion’s cure.”

Ned’s brows took a startled frown, and he made as if to rise. Nicette stole her hand quickly to his.

“Monsieur, it cannot be wrong to love—it cannot be that He would lend Himself as a subtle lure to the very sin His code denounces. It is the code—it is the Church that has misconstrued Him.”

Something in the young man’s face gave her pause in the midst of her panting eagerness. She drew back immediately, with a little artificial laugh.

“La Sainte Marie was all in white,” she said, “with a blue cloak the colour of the skies. And what is the fashion with the fine ladies in London, monsieur?”

Mr Murk had got to his feet.

“Mademoiselle Legrand,” he said, “you are all of Heloïse, I think, without the erudition. Now, I am not orthodox; yet I think your description of the Virgin very prettily blasphemous. And what has become of the serpent and the globe of liquid purple? You can explain your picture, I see, to accommodate the views of its critics. I admire you very much, and I bid you good day.”

He was going. She leapt across his path and stayed him. A bright spot of colour had sprung to her cheek.

“You will leave me?” she cried hoarsely. “You shall not go, thinking me a liar!”

“No more than the author of ‘Julie,’” he said, drily and stubbornly. “You have the fine gift of romance, but I don’t like your vision.”

“It is the truth! I give you but one of the hundred impressions it made upon me.”

“Very well. It is a bad selection, so far as I am concerned.”

“How could I know—you, that have traded upon my confidence! You tempt me and throw me aside. I will not be so shamed—I, that am no longer obscure—whose every word is worth——”

“As much as one of M. Voltaire’s, no doubt. He may value his commercially, at ten sous or fifty. What then? You have the popular ear. Do you want to make your profit of me also?”

She twined her fingers together, and held them backwards against her bosom.

“Whither are you going?” she panted.

“I am on my way back to England.”

She took a quick step forward.

“You shall not leave me like this! You have made me what I am. Monsieur—monsieur——”

In a moment the storm broke. Once more she was drowned in tears. She threw herself upon him, and her arms about his neck.

“It is love!” she cried. “You are my God and my desire. I have followed you in my heart these long months—oh, how piteously! Do anything with me you will. Disbelieve me, spurn me, stamp on me—only let me love you! These months—oh, these desolate, sick months!”

She clung to him, entreating and caressing, though he muttered “For shame!” and strove to disentangle her fingers. She would not be denied in this first convulsive self-consciousness of her surrender.

“I will give myself the lie: invite the hatred and scorn of the world: swear my soul to damnation by acknowledging myself an impostor, if that will make you merciful and kind—no, not even kind, but to take me with you. I will admit I am vile in all but my love: that you tempted me unwittingly: that you had no thought of being cruel—of being anything but your own gracious self, to whom a foolish maiden’s heart fled crying because it could not help it!”

Catching glimpse in her passion of the stony impassibility of his face, she fell upon her knees, clasping her arms about him and sobbing—

“You must speak—you must speak, or I shall die! You don’t know what binds me to you. Not your love, or your respect or pity: only a little mercy—just enough, one finger held out to save me from falling into the abyss! Look here and here! Am I not white and sweet? I have cherished myself ever since you went and my heart nearly broke. I have thought all day and all night, ‘What bar to his approach can I remove if some day he shall come again?’ And when at last I saw you were returned, I would have given all the vain months of adulation for one glad word of welcome from your lips.”

She grovelled lower, writhing her face down into her arms.

“Only to be yours!” she moaned: “to do with as you will.”

At that at last he stooped, and dragged her forcibly to her feet. She stood before him trembling and dishevelled, and he glared at her, breathing heavily like one that had run a race.

“Before God, I never knew,” he said: “but you shame me and yourself. I will believe your story if you wish it; and what does that lead to?—that I hear you abusing the high choice of Heaven—misapplying God’s truth to the abominable sophistries of passion. Not love, but the foulest—there! I won’t shame you more. I think I have never heard such subtle blasphemy. To hope to influence me by casuistry so crooked! If you ever awakened my interest, you have lost the power for ever. Mercy! the utmost I can show you is by passing here and now out of your life——”

She broke in with an agonised cry—

“Mon Dieu! Oh, my God! Not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for your sake!”

“What you have done!” he cried fiercely. “I am no party to the vile chicanery. For your sufferings—they will cease when the fuel of this passion is withdrawn. Such fires blaze up and out in a day.”

He was cruel, no doubt—crueller than he meant to be; but his heart was wrathful over the baseness of the snare set for it.

On the echo of his voice there came the sound of approaching steps up the road. He recovered his composure on the instant.

“You will have visitors,” he said. “You had best go and make yourself fit to meet them. You will know where your interests lie. For me, the most I can do is to treat all this as a mad confidence.”

He was going; but she pressed upon him, panting and desperate.

“Don’t leave me like this! There—into the bedroom, till they are gone! Monsieur, for pity’s sake! You put too much upon me. I will explain. For God’s sake, monsieur!”

He drove past her—hurried down the passage. As he neared the door, he saw the light obscured by a couple of entering figures—a complacent-smiling curé, who ushered in a fashionable pilgrim exhaling musk and tinkling with gewgaws.

“Exortum est in tenebris lumen rectis,” murmured the priest as he gave place with a slight bow.

“Exactly so,” said Ned, and made his way to the road.

There he stood a moment, blinking and gulping down the fresh spring air.

CHAPTER XVII.

Mr Murk walked straight from the lodge of the chateau out of the village, stopping only on his way to take up his knapsack at the “Landlust.” He moved, very haughty and inflexible, with a high soul of offence at the attempt manifested to subject him to the charge of collusion in what he considered a particularly unpleasant species of fraud. It was that, more than the outrage to his continent self-respect, that angered and insulted him—that he could under any circumstances be deemed approachable by imposture, even though it should solicit in ravishing guise. He had never as yet, indeed, through any phases of fortune, regarded himself as other than a philosophic alien to his race; a disinterested spectator of its wars of creeds and senses, perched out of the battle on a little cloudy eminence of spiritual reserve, whence it was his humour to analyse the details of the contest for the gratifying of a curious intellectual cosmopolitanism. And even when for nearer view of some party struggle he had descended—or condescended—so far as that he had felt upon his face the very bloody sprinkle of the strife, he had chosen to read, in the emotions excited in his breast, an instinctive revolt against the injustice of pain, rather than a sympathy with the sufferings of which he was witness.

Now, however, he seemed to have realised in a moment by what common means Nature is able to impeach this treason of aloofness. He had held himself a thing altogether apart in that conflict of blurred, indefinite forms. He had been like a spectator watching an illuminated sheet at an entertainment, when (to adopt a modern image) there had sounded in an instant the click of the cinematograph snapping the blur into focus, and, lo! he beheld his own figure active amongst the crowd, a constituent atom travelling through or with it, a mean, small condition of its gregariousness—repellent, attractive, infinitesimally influential, according to the common degree of his kind. Holding his soul, as he fancied, veracious and remote, he had seen it magnetic, in its supposed isolation, to another that, in its essential guile, in its infirmity and untruth, would seem to be his spirit’s actual antithesis, yet whose destinies, rebel as he might, must henceforth for evermore be associated with his. He was no amateur counsel to a recording angel, in fact, but just a human organism subject to the influences of neighbour temperaments.

Now, the considerable but lesser pang in this shock to his pride of solitariness was felt in the realisation of his impotence to claim exemption from the ordinary vulgar taxes imposed by the gods upon vulgar animal instincts. He must be sought if he would not seek; nor could he by any means escape the penalties of his manly attributes. He was a thing of desire; therefore he represented the one moiety of the race to which he would have fain considered himself an alien.

But he did not regard with any present sentiment but that of anger the woman who had thus been the means to his proper understanding of his own personal insignificance. For her sex, indeed, he had no natural liking but that negatively conveyed in a sort of chivalrous contempt for its inconsequence (whereby—though he did not know it—he may have offered himself an unconscious Bertram to a score of Helenas). Now, to find his austere particular self made the object of a sacrifice of utter truth and decency, both alarmed and disgusted him. The very jar of the discovery tumbled him from cloud to earth. Yet, be it said, if it brought him with a run from his removed heights, he was to fall into that garden of the world where the loves, their thighs yellow with pollen, flutter from flower to flower.

For by-and-by, in the very glow and fever of his indignation, he startled to sudden consciousness of the fact that it was the implied insult to his honesty, rather than that actual one to his sense of modesty, that most offended him; that his heart was indulging a little rebellious memory of a late dream, it appeared, that was full of a strange pressure of tenderness. He caught himself sharply from the weakness; yet it would recur. He began to question the propriety of his attitude towards women generally. Serenely self-centred, perhaps he had never realised the necessity of being, in a world of artificiality, other than himself. Now he faintly gathered how poor a policy of virtue might be implied thereby—how, under certain conditions, Virtue might be held its own justification for assuming an alias.

And thereat came the first reaction in a pretty series of moral rallies and relapses.

“Bah!” he muttered, “the girl is a little lying cocotte—a Lamia from whose snares I am fortunate to have escaped without a wound.”

In the meantime his heart turned towards home with a strange heat of yearning—towards his England of stolid factions and sober, unemotional sympathies; of regulated hate and the liberal schooling of love. He had submitted himself to much physical and mental suffering in order to the acquirement of a right understanding of men; and at the last a woman had upset and scattered his classified collection of principles with a whisk of her skirt. He felt it was useless to attempt to rearrange his specimens unless in an atmosphere not inimical to sobriety.

“I will go home,” he thought, as he stepped rapidly forward. “And at any rate I am here at length out of the wood;” and straightway, poor rogue, he fell into a second ambush by the roadside.

For, coming to a sudden turn in his path when he was breaking from the copses a half mile out of the village, he was suddenly aware of a shrill cackle of vituperation, of such particular import to him at the present crisis as to constrain him to stop where he was and listen.

“Oh, çà, Valentin—çà-çà-çà!” hooted a booby voice. “A twist, and thou hast secured it! Oh, çà! bring it away and we will look.”

“Let go!” panted another voice, in a heat of jeering violence. “I will have it, I say!”

Then Ned heard Théroigne, pleading and tearful—

“Valentin, thou shalt not! It is mine! What right hast thou to rob and insult me?”

“The right that thou art a putain—a snake in the grass of a virgin community. Give it me, or I will break thy arm. Right, indeed! but every well-doer has a right to act the executive.”

“Thou shalt not take it!”

“You will prevent me? Oh, the strength of this conscious virtue! And does not thy refusal damn thee? Pull across, Charlot! I will wrench her arms out. It is another accursed whelp that she has strangled and would bury in the wood.”

“You vile, cruel beast!” cried the girl.

“Oh, hé—scream, then!” panted the other, while Charlot sniggered throatily. “There is no riggish lord now to justify thee in thy assaults on decent landholders. I will look, if only for the sake of that memory. Thou wert the prospective fine lady, wert thou? Oh, mon Dieu! and what ploughboy has ministered to thee for this in the bundle?”

Mr Murk, indignant but embarrassed, had stood so far uncertain as to his wise course of action. Now, however, a shriek of obvious pain that came from the girl decided him. He hurried round the intercepting corner and saw Mademoiselle Lambertine, blowsed and weeping, flung amongst the roots of a tree. Hard by, where the trunks opened out to the road-track, a couple of clowns, bent eagerly over a bundle they had torn from their victim, were discussing the contents of their prize—a few poor toilet affairs, some bright trinketry of lace and ribbons, a dozen apples, and a loaf of white cocket-bread.

All three lifted their heads, startled at the sound of his approach. Théroigne sat up; the boors got clumsily to their feet. In one of these loobies Ned had a sure thought that he recognised the fellow whose face had once been scored by those very feminine fingers that were now so desperately clutching and pulling at the grass amongst the tree-roots. He could see the red cheeks, he fancied, still chased with the marks of that reprehensible onset. The other rogue, he was equally certain, was of those that had baited a wretched Cagot on a morning nine months ago.

Here, then, was the right irony of event—a huntress Actæon torn by her own hounds. Ned stepped forward deliberately, but with every muscle of his body screwed tight as a fiddle-string.

Come over against the clodpoles: “You are pigs and cowards!” said he, and he gave the farmer an explosive smack on the jaw.

The assault was so violent and unexpected, the will that inspired it was so obviously set in the prologue of vicious possibilities, that the victim collapsed where he stood, bellowing like a bull-frog. It is true that he lacked a familiar stimulus to his courage.

“Now,” said Ned, “return those goods to the bundle and fasten them in; or, by the holy Virgin of Méricourt, I’ll lay an information against you for brigands before M. le Maire.”

There was an ominous stress in his very chords of speech. They may have recognised him or not. In any case this change of fortune might unsheathe the terrific claws of a hitherto unallied enemy. Charlot dropped upon his knees and with shaking fingers began to manipulate the bundle.

“It is enough,” said Ned between his teeth. “Now, go!”

The two scurried off amongst the trees, glancing over their shoulders as they went, with scared faces. The next moment Ned was aware that Mademoiselle Lambertine had crept up to him, and was holding out her hands in an entreating manner.

“Monsieur!” she whispered.

He faced about. The girl was arrayed for a journey, it seemed. A cloak was clasped about her neck; from her brown hair hung over her shoulders, like the targe of a Highlander, a round straw hat with an ungainly width of brim; stout shoes and a foot of homespun stocking showed under her short skirt. Nevertheless the glowing ardour of her face and form triumphed over all disabilities.

“They are brutes and cowards,” said Ned gravely. “I don’t think they will trouble you again. Here is your property.”

She did not take it at once. He shrugged his shoulders and laid it on the ground at her feet.

“Monsieur!” pleaded the girl. Something seemed to choke her from proceeding.

At length: “I have been waiting in the woods since dawn,” said she, in a sudden soft outburst, “hoping for you to pass.”

“For me?”

“I came out into the track now and again, dreading that you had gone by while I watched elsewhere, and once these discovered me, and—and— Ah, monsieur! You see now what I have to endure.”

“Truly I see—more than I would wish to. You are leaving Méricourt, then?”

She looked at him, defiant and imploring at once.

“You would not condemn me to it? You would not even say it is possible for me to stay here?”

The young man did, for him, an unaccustomed thing. He swore—under his breath. It might have been the devil of a particular little crisis essaying to speak for him; it might have been the cry of a momentary conflict between sense and spirit.

The appeal addressed to either was, indeed, as mournful and seductive as the minor play of a pathetic voice could make it. If he gazed irritably at the woman facing him, still he gazed at all because he was stirred to some emotion. The sadness of wet, unhappy eyes, of parted lips, of hands clasped upon the dumb utterance of an impassioned bosom—all, in their single offer and plea to him, were, no doubt, such a temptation to an abuse of that consistency with his theories that his temperament so encouraged him to cherish, as he had never before felt. But he was still so little sensitive to one form of witchery that it needed only a tickle of humour to restore his moral balance.

He laughed on a certain note of aggravation.

“Méricourt is all moonstruck, I believe,” said he. “This is too absurdly flattering to my vanity. First—but there! Mademoiselle Lambertine, I will not pretend to misread you. Yet you do not love me, I think?”

She shook her head, drooping her eyes to him. Patently she had elected to stake her chances on white candour as the better policy with this Joseph.

“Well,” said he, “it is as it should be. And you are equally convinced I am indifferent to you?”

But at that she came forward—so close to him, indeed, as to make her every word an invitation.

“Now,” thought Ned, inured to such appeals, “she will throw her arms round my neck in a minute.”

But he did Théroigne indifferent justice.

“You think yourself so,” she murmured. “It will be only a little while. Already, in the prospect of freedom, I begin to renew myself since yesterday. What if my soul is torn and crippled! The blood will glow in my veins no less hotly than before—a fire to melt even this cold iron of thy resolve. Oh, look on me—look on me! I can feel all power and beauty moving within me like a child. That I should be scorned of clowns! And yet the chance gives me to you, monsieur, if you but put out your hand. It is not love. That thou hast not, nor I; nor is the power longer to me or the gift to you. But I am grateful, for that thou hast helped me under sore insult. Ah! it avails nothing to plead accident—to say, ‘It was the outrage I avenged for manliness’, not the woman’s, sake.’ What, then? Thou hast wrought the bond of sympathy, and thou canst never forge it apart. Perhaps, even, didst thou strike hard, thou mightst some day hit out the spark of love. Take me, and thou wilt desire to: I swear it. Do I not breathe and live? Am I not one to vindicate in prosperity the choice of her protector? Thou hast a nobility of manliness that is higher than any rank. But, if in thine own country thou art great, thou shalt be greater through me. I will minister to thy ambition no less than to thy senses. I will——”

She paused, breathing quickly, and watchful of the steady immobility of his face.

“Monsieur,” she whispered, most movingly, “if you see in me now only a lost unhappy girl, who in her misery would seem to seek the confirmation of her dishonour, believe—oh, monsieur, believe that it is only to escape the worser degradation that threatens her through the relentless persecution she suffers on account of her trust in one that was monsieur’s friend.”

“No friend of mine,” muttered Ned, and stopped. He must collect his thoughts—endeavour to answer this séductrice according to her guile. Instinctively he stepped back a pace, as though to elude the enchantment of a very low sweet voice.

“Listen to me,” he said distinctly. “Mademoiselle Lambertine, I pity you profoundly; and, if I have anything more to say, it is only, upon my honour, to marvel that one of such intelligence as yourself should ever have submitted her honour to the handling of so exceedingly meretricious a gentleman as M. de St Denys. You see I repay your confidence with plain-speaking. For the rest I can assure you it is not my ambition to be beholden for whatever the future may have in store for me to a——”

She stayed him, with a soft hand put upon his mouth.

“Do not say it,” she said quite quietly. “It is enough that you reject my offer. That you may repent when you find your fiercer manhood—when you realise what you have lost. Well, you have been good to me; though, if I have suffered here in the wood while I waited for you, it was not because my heart was other than a stone.”

“Then, for shame!” cried Ned, “so to sell yourself!”

“Ah!” said Théroigne, in the same quiet voice; “but I have made my bed according to monsieur’s proverb, and it is a double one—that is all. And is it not gallant when a woman falls to help her to her feet?”

“It is not gallant to help her, the victim of one lie, to enact another.”

“Surely; and monsieur is the soul of truth.”

She adjusted her cloak and hat, stooped and took up her bundle.

“I am distasteful to monsieur,” she said. “Very well.”

For some reason Ned was moved to immediate anger.

“Your hat is, anyhow,” he snapped. “I think it quite preposterously ugly.”

But she only laughed and waved her hand.

“You will think better of me in England,” she cried.

He was moving away. He stopped abruptly and faced about.

“You are still determined to go, then?”

She nodded her head. Without another word he turned on his heel and strode off down the road.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Before—hurrying like a weaponless man through sinister thickets—Ned had come to within a mile of Liége, the memory of the rather grim comedy he had been forced to play a part in was tickling him under the ribs in provocative fashion. That his vanity—no unreasonable quantity—should have received, as it were, in a breath a kiss so resounding, a buffet so swingeing, set his very soul of risibility bubbling and dancing like champagne.

“And ought I to be gratified or offended,” he thought, “that I am chosen the flame about which these moths circle? But it is all one to such insects whether it be wax or rushlight, so long as it burns. That’s where I missed fire, so to speak. The flutter of their poor little feverish wings put me out. I am a cold taper, I fancy. I have never yet felt the draught that would blow me into a roar. What breath is wasted upon me, in good truth!”

Some detail of his path gave him pause. He sat down on a knoll, had out his book and pencil, and began to sketch. Now his blood ran temperately again. If he had been ever momentarily agitated in thought as to his ideals of conduct, the little disturbed silt of animalism was precipitated very soon, and the waters of his soul ran clear as heretofore. He laughed to himself as he sat.

“I believe if I had stayed another day the Van Roon would have made overtures to me.”

By-and-by he fell into a pondering fit. He rested his chin upon his clenched hand and, gazing into the distance, dreamed abstractedly.

“Have I a constitutional frost in my blood, as my uncle believes? Is my every relation with my fellows to be for ever unimpulsive and coldly analytical? That should lead me at least to a nice selection in pairing-time: and to what else?—a career stately, sober, colourless; a faultless reputation; all the virtues ranked upon my tombstone by-and-by for gaping cits to spell over, and perhaps, if I am very good, for a verger to expound. And my widow that is to be—my fair decent relict that shall have never known me condescend to a weakness or perpetrate an injustice, that shall never have felt the frost melt in her arms!”

He jumped suddenly to his feet, his teeth—very even and white ones—showing in a queer little smile. He stretched; he took off his rather battered hat and passed a hand through the crisp umber stubble of his hair. His solemn eyes shone out as blue as lazulite from the sun-burn of his face. He seemed, indeed, from his appearance no fitting catechumen in a religion of everlasting continence. There must be underwarmth somewhere for the surface so to flower into colour.

“She would marry within six months of my death,” he cried; “probably a libertine who would dissipate her estates, and break her heart, and die, and be mourned by her long after my memory was drier than a pinch of dust to all who had known me.”

He laughed again on a note that sighed a little in the fall.

“Am I like that? Do I build all this time with dry dust for mortar? Am I a loveless anchorite because my sympathies will not answer to the coarseness of an appeal that my taste rejects? Is it quite human to be very fastidious in so warm a respect? Or do I only wait the instant of divine inspiration to recognise that other self that seems hidden from me by an impenetrable veil?”

He shook his head despondently, collected his traps, and went on his way to Liége.

There he remained no longer than was necessary to a settlement in the matter of certain bills of credit and to the chartering of a vehicle for his onward stages. He was to return to the coast by way of Namur, Lille, and Calais. For the time he was all out of humour with a nomadic philosophy, and desired only to reach England by as short a route as possible.

He set sail in the Fanny Crowther packet, and had a taste of Channel weather that was as good as a “constitutional” after a debauch. He was two days at sea, beating forth and back at the caprice of squabbling winds; and when at last he landed in Dover it was with the drenched whitewashed feeling of a convalescent from fever.

He was setting foot on the jetty, discomfortable in the conviction that his present demoralisation was offering itself the target to a hail of local wit, when a thin neigh of a laugh that issued from a yellow curricle drawn up near at hand drew his peevish attention. Immediately he fetched his nausea under control, and stepped towards the carriage with a fine assumption of coolness. There may have appeared that in his attitude to induce a respectable manservant to jump from the dickey and offer to bar his progress.

“All right, Jepps,” said he. “I’m not one of ‘Peg Nicholson’s knights’ with a petition.”

The man bowed and made way for him.

“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Edward,” said he, and added in an accommodating voice, “I’d little call to know you, sir.”

“Eh, what? Ned!” gasped one of the occupants of the curricle, no other than the Right Honourable the Viscount Murk indeed.

His lordship sat on and forward of a great cloak lined with silver fox-skin (a luxurious cave into which he could withdraw whenever a draught nosed his old sapless limbs), the neck-clasp of which he had unhooked for the display of a diamond brooch that gathered voluminous lawn about the sagging of his throat. In every detail of his condition he was the bowelless and mummified coxcomb, packed prematurely into exquisite cerements, predestined to a corner in the museums of limbo; and topping his finished refinements of costume, his beaver was tilted like an acute accent to so distinguished an expression of hyperdynamic foppery.

“You are surprised to see me, sir,” said Ned (he glanced as he spoke with something like astonishment at my lord’s companion); “nor I much less to find you here. As for myself, I have gleaned such a harvest of experience in a few months that I must needs come home to store it.”

His uncle stared at him, but with a rallying expression of implacable distaste.

“Rat me!” he said candidly; “I’d hoped to hear of you a martyr to your theories, and that manstrous Encyclopedia set up for your tombstone.”

He turned indolently to his companion.

“This is the heir to ‘Stowling’ and the viscounty and all the rest of the beggarly show, if he can be induced to candescend to it,” he said viciously, and gathered up the reins in his lemon-gloved hands.

The other nodded, with a pretty display of white teeth and a shifting affectation that was extravagantly feminine. A dainty three-cornered hat was perched on her powdered hair, that was pulled up plainly and rolled over each temple in a silken ringlet. She had on a richly embroidered jacket with wide lapels; a rug was over her knees; and seated on it, fastened to her left wrist by a tiny golden chain, was a red monkey that chattered at the new-comer.

“Monsieur Edouard,” said she, caressing the insular barbarity of speech with her tongue, and her pet with fluttering finger-tips, “who have sold himself the birtheright to a dish of potage. Oh que si! mais si jeunesse savait! But I have heard of Monsieur Edouard; and also I have heard of Monsieur Paine.”

Her voice was as artificial as her manner. Playing on the alto, it would squeak occasionally like a greasy fiddle-bow. And her age, despite the smooth and rather expressionless contour of her features, might have been anything from thirty-five to sixty.

“But she has not wrinkles to cement and overlay,” thought Ned, “else would she never dare to laugh so boldly.”

He did not like the truculence of her eyes; nor, indeed, the whole air of rather professional effrontery that characterised her. Nevertheless there was that about her, about the atmosphere she seemed to exhale, that curiously confounded him.

“I have not the honour of an introduction,” he said, a little perplexed, “nor the right to return madame’s compliment—if, indeed, it was meant for one.”

“Not in the least,” she said, with an insolent laugh. “I have no applause for the héritier légitime that is a traitor to his trust.”

She sank back, toying with her little red-furred beast. My lord laughed acidly, but made no offer to enlighten or question his nephew.

“So you have returned,” he said only. “All the devil of it lies in that, and” (he scanned his young relative affrontingly) “in your unconverted vanity of blackguardism. Get up, Jepps.”

Ned laughed in perfect good-humour, as the curricle sped away.

“After all,” thought he, “perhaps it is hard to be claimed for uncle by a rag-picker. I will resume my decorative self, find out where my lord lodges, and wait upon him in form and civility.”

He had his insignificant baggage removed to temporary quarters, ransacked the mean little town for what moderately becoming outfit it could yield, shaved, rested, and refreshed himself, and issued forth once more on duty’s quest.

“And what is the old man doing here?” he thought; “and who is the enigmatical Cyprian?”—whereby, it will be observed, he jumped to baseless conclusions. But he gave himself no great concern about the matter, admitting that the probable explanation of his uncle’s presence in the sea-port town lay in that flotsam and jetsam of the Palais Royal bagnios that many tides washed up on the coast.

“He may be acting the part of a noble and unvenerable wrecker,” thought he—it must be confessed, consistently with the common estimate of his kinsman.

My lord had rooms in one of the fine mansions then first beginning to sprout over against the harbour for the accommodation of wealthy sea-bathers. He was dressed—with all the force of the expression as applied to him—for dinner, and received his nephew in a fine withdrawing-room overlooking the bay. He snarled out an ungracious welcome. He was, as ever, wrapped and embalmed in costly linen smelling of amber-seed, and was with all—so it seemed to the nephew—a touch nearer actual comminution than when he had last seen him. To strip him of cartonage and bandages would be, it appeared, to commit him to dust. But the maggot of vanity still found sustenance in the old wood of his brain.

“I am honoured,” he said, “that you give my table the preference over a tavern ordinary. Have you learned to equip yourself with a palate in these months?”

“At least I’ll promise to do justice to your fare, sir.”

“Will you? You shall be made Lord Chancellor if you do. No, no, Ned! To know beef from matton is the measure of your gastranamy. Ain’t you hungry, now?”

“Ravenous, sir.”

“Il n’y en a pas de doute. You dress like a chairman (I’m your humble debtor, egad! that you’ve recommitted the rags you landed in to the dunghill), and you’ll eat like one. A gentleman’s never hungry. He appraises his viands, sir. ’Tis for flunkeys to devour. One must not yield oneself to a condition of emptiness. That implies a dozen of little disadvantages that are inimical to bon-ton. But you know me hopeless of ever convincing you in these matters.”

He rose with a slight yawn, and walking to the window, looked out into the darkening evening. The old limbs might have creaked but for their perpetual lubrications. Not an inquiry as to the course of his travels did he address to his undesirable heir. It was more than enough for him that he had returned at all.

“If not that you have discovered a palate,” said he, with a sour grin, “then I suppose I am to attribute this visit to your high sense of duty.”

A carriage drew up on the stones below as he spoke.

“Enfin! mon cher—mon aimable chevalier!” he muttered to himself with relief.

“You have company, sir?” said Ned.

“You can stop for all that,” said the uncle tartly. “Madame, as you have seen, knows how to take her entertainment of a monkey.”

Madame was ushered in as he spoke. Ned’s only wonder, upon identifying her as the lady of the curricle, was over the fact of her separate lodging. He had expected to find her in my lord’s suite. She came into the candle-light, an amazing figure of elegance, rouged, plastered, and befeathered, but even surprisingly decorous in attire. She wore long mittens on her arms, the upper exposed inches of which flickered with a curious muscularity when she fanned herself.

“So,” she said, making exaggerated play with her eyes over the rim of the toy, “we shall have the fatted calf to dinner. And did you find the husks of democracy to your liking, sir?”

“I found them tough,” said Ned.

She laughed like an actress. She shook her finger at him archly.

“Of a truth,” she replied, “they cannot have been to your stomach at all. You asked for bread, was it not, and they gave you a shower of stones? One does not desire one’s high convictions to be set up for a mark to violence. And so you turned the tail and came home to our dear monseigneur.”

“I have come home to England,” said Ned. “As to this, my happening on my lord, it is a simple accident.”

He spoke with some coldness of reserve. He had no idea whom he addressed. His kinsman had disdained to introduce him or to give him the least clue to madame’s identity.

The lady laughed again.

“But do not call it a contretemps!” she cried. “It is a dispensation of Providence that milord, though a very Bayard of courage, is detained by sentiments of chivalry. We were to have journeyed to Paris together had news of the riots not reached us; and hence arrives this so amiable meeting.”

“I was there,” said Ned shortly. “I saw M. Reveillon’s factory gutted.”

She paused in her fanning. She looked strangely at the young man a moment.

“You were there?” Then she resumed her bantering tone: “and found what bad bed-fellows are theory and practice. Perhaps it shall reconcile you to milord here, whose rôle of orthodox muscadin you shall for the henceforth make your own.”

“Egad!” cried the viscount, who, it seemed, accepted the revolutionary muscadin for better than it was worth. “But I had my fill of riots in ’80, when the cursed rabble took me for a papist and singed my coat-tails.”

Madame nodded her head brightly. Her dark eyes contrasted as startlingly with her overlaid cheeks as might the eyes in a face of wax.

“So you were wise and came away,” she said, still addressing the young man. “But milord was wiser. He would not help to inflame a popular prejudice. The majesty of the people must be respected—when it takes to singeing one’s coat-tails.”

“Well,” thought Ned, “I must be right. This is Madame Cocotte from the Palais Royal. Or else—I wonder if she is in the pay of a very neighbouring government?”

A thought or two—of madame’s manner of presenting her little sarcasms—quickened his curiosity. To countermine the supposed agencies of Pitt, the inflexible and reserved, the bottomless Pitt—was it unreasonable to suppose that France was employing some very engaging decoy-ducks to the corruption of an aristocracy that might be fifth-cousins to State secrets? True, Monseigneur the Viscount’s confidence was of little worth but to his valet; yet the first rung of the ladder may be used for the secondary purpose of scraping one’s boots on before climbing.

Madame was the only guest. She had brought her monkey with her, and the little brute was carried screeching to a chair by her side at the dinner-table, where it sat sucking its thumb like a vindictive baby and snatching at the dishes of fruit.

“Fi, donc! fi, donc! De Querchy!” she would cry to it. (She had named the beast, it presently appeared, after an enemy of hers, M. le Comte of that title.) “C’est ainsi que tu donnes une leçon de politesse à ces barbares, nos amis?”

My Lord Murk laughed at all her insolence—especially when her sallies were directed at his nephew. She spared the young man no more than she did her host’s wine, to which, Ned was confounded to observe, she resorted with a freedom that was entirely shameless. Indeed, she drank glass for glass with the elder of the gentlemen, and indulged herself with a corresponding licence of speech that quite confirmed the younger in his estimate of her character. But he was hardly prepared for the upshot of it all as directed against himself.

“Monsieur Edouard,” she once said (it was after the servants had left the room), “have I not your language in perfection?”

“Indeed, madame,” he answered stiffly, “even to a peculiar choice in words.”

She laughed arrogantly.

“I accept your insult!” she said—and flung the glass she was drinking from full at him.

“Là, là, là!” she shrieked. “You threw up your arm: it is only the coward that has the instinct to throw up his arm to a woman!”

My lord laughed like an old demon. Ned was on his feet, white and furious.

“You are a woman!” he cried, “and the more shame to you!”

She jumped from her chair. As she did so the monkey sprang to her left shoulder, on which it seated itself, gibbering and quarrelling.

“I claim for the only privilege of my sex to despise the Joseph!” she cried. “For the rest, I can fight for my honour, monsieur, as you shall see!”

She skipped, for accent to the paradox, in great apparent excitement; hurried to a window embrasure, stooped, and faced about with a naked rapier in her hand.

“Draw!” she cried; and, running over to the door, turned the key in the lock and feinted at the amazed young man. All the while the monkey clung to her, adapting its position to her every movement.

“Is this a snare?” said Ned coldly. He looked at his uncle, his hand clenched at his hip. But he wore no weapon but his recovered composure.

The old villain drew his own blade and flung it across the table to his nephew.

“Fight, you dog!” he sputtered and mumbled. He was deplorably drunk. “Fight!” he shrieked, “and take a lesson to your cursed self-importance!”

He threw his glass in a frenzy into the fireplace, and screeched out, “Two to one in ponies on madame!”

The lady cried “Ah-bah! He tink me of the ‘fancy.’” For all her assumed heat she was really self-possessed. Ned understood her to be playing a part; but he could not yet comprehend how he was concerned in it. He took up his uncle’s sword.

“These,” he said coolly, “are dangerous toys. But, if madame will play with them, I must prevent her from doing harm to herself or me.”

She gave a little staccato shriek of mockery, and attacked him without hesitation. The monkey still perched on her shoulder. With her third pass, Ned felt that his life was in the hands of a consummate tireuse; her fourth took him clean through the fleshy part of the right shoulder.

Madame withdrew and lowered the red lance, that dropped a little crimson on the carpet, like an overcharged pen. The tipsy old lord had scrambled to his feet. His inflamed eyes seemed to gutter like expiring dips. He yelled out oaths and blasphemy.

“Kill him!” he shrieked: “I hate him—do you hear! kill him!”

Ned, reeling a little, and clutching at a chair-back, dimly wondered if this were indeed but a villainous plot to rid his kinsman of a detested incubus. He felt powerless and sick, but madame’s voice reassured him.

“Bah!” she cried gruffly, “you are very tipsy indeed. Hold your tongue, and drink some more wine!”

He was conscious, then, of her near neighbourhood; of the fact that she was binding up his arm.

“It is leetle—but enough,” he heard her mutter.

Then she looked over to where my lord sat glowering and collapsed.

“A coach, if you please!” she said peremptorily. “It must not arrive that he pass the night heere in your house.”

The uncle laughed inanely.

“What!” he said, “d’ye think I should finish him and put the blame on—on another? Take him to the devil, if you will.”

“No,” said she, “but I weel convey’a heem to his lodgings out of the devil’s way.”

CHAPTER XIX.

Of so wanton and inexplicable a nature had been the assault committed on him, that for some three days succeeding it Ned could have fancied himself lying rather in a stupor of amazement than in the semi-consciousness engendered of a certain degree of pain and fever. His contretemps with his uncle; the latter’s more than usually uncompromising attitude of offence towards him; most of all, the strange vision of madame, with her obvious intention to insult and disable him,—all this in the retrospect inclined him to consider himself the late victim of a delirium that was reflex to the hideous pictures painted in Paris upon his brain.

But, on the fourth morning of his retirement, finding himself awake to the humour of the situation, he knew that his distemper was retreating, and that he might claim himself for a convalescent.

“Astonishment is a good febrifuge,” he thought. “How long have I lain in it, as in a cooling bath?”

And it is indeed strange how blessed an exorcist of pain is absorbing wonder. Not knowledge of drugs for the body but of drugs for the mind shall some day perhaps redeem the world from suffering: the Theatre of Variety, not of the hospital, be the Avalon of the maimed and the smitten.

He had no memory as to who—if anybody—had visited him during the course of his fever.

“But, no doubt,” he thought, “this moderate blood-letting has very timely rectified a bad effusion to my brain, and madame is my unconscious physician.”

He got out of bed, feeling ridiculously weak and emaciated, but with a luminous blot of wonder still floating in the background of his mind. This globe of soothing radiance so made apparent the near details of his past and present as that he had no difficulty in remembering where he was or what had detained him there. He felt no uneasiness over his condition, or any present desire to have it ended. For the moment he was blissfully content to gaze out of his window—that commanded obliquely an engaging little prospect of sunny sand and strolling figures—and to pleasantly scrutinise the picture as it passed, in silent camera-obscura, over the tables of his brain. Pain, emotion, and thirst were all absorbed in an enjoying, indefinite curiosity.

But by-and-by, as he gazed, there wandered—or appeared to wander—into and across his perspective, a couple of figures whose mere presence there in company seemed to sadly shake his confidence in the assurance of his own convalescence. Apart, he might have admitted their reality. It was their conjunction that hipped his half-recovered sanity. For how should madame—that enigmatical tireuse—pair herself, out of all the little crowd, with Théroigne Lambertine, whom he had left in Belgium? Moreover, this was a transformed Théroigne—a Théroigne not of ungainly skirts and preposterous hat, but one that had at length acquired the first adventitious means to an expression of her wonderful beauty; a Théroigne of lawn and paduasoy, of waking airs and graces, of defiance still, but of the defiance that had superbly trodden persecution underfoot.

Then in a moment the vision vanished from his ken.

“I will go to bed again,” he thought. “I have something yet to sleep off.”

Presently he reached out and rang a bell that stood on a table beside him. Simultaneously with the jangle of it, Æolian sounds ceased somewhere down below, a slow step came up the stairs, and a heavy man entered the room, consciously, as if it were a confessional-box.

“Good morning,” said Ned. “I think I’m better.”

The heavy man nodded—a salutation compound of respect and satisfaction—paused an embarrassed minute, turned round, and made as if to retreat.

“Hallo!” exclaimed Ned.

The man faced about.

“What day is it?” said Ned.

“Sunday,” answered the man.

“You are my landlord?”

“Aye.”

“Your wife is out?”

“Aye.”

“At church?”

“Aye.”

“And you are keeping house?”

“Oh aye.”

“Has any one called on me during—eh?”

“The lady.”

“What lady?”

“Her wi’ the parly name.”

“What name?”

“Never cud say.”

“Well, what did she come for?”

“For to dress your arm.”

“My arm!”

Ned fell back in astonishment. The heavy man immediately made for the door.

“Here!” cried Ned.

The man slewed himself round rebellious.

“Was that you playing down below?”

“Aye.”

“Harp?”

“Aye.”

This time he got fairly outside, shut himself on to the landing, apparently dwelt there a minute, and, secure in his retreat, opened the door again and thrust in his head.

“Servant, sir,” said he.

“Oh, all right,” said Ned.

“You’ll be a-dry, belike?” said the man.

“What’s that?”

“Drythe, you’ll call it, for a glass of hale.”

“Certainly not,” answered the convalescent snappishly.

“’Tis a very good substitoot for the stomach,” said the man, and vanished.

“Hi!” shrieked Ned again.

The face reappeared.

“Why don’t you bring your harp and play up here, confound you!”

The eyes opened and withdrew like phantasmagoria. Presently the man was to be heard stumbling upstairs with a burden—in fact, he brought in his instrument and seated himself at it.

“Play?” said he; and Ned nodded.

And now the young gentleman was to read in that book of revelations that treats of the incongruous partiality of divinity in its giving moods. The man beside him was, to appearance, a dull enough fellow, a plodding, leather-palmed, labouring man of smoky intelligence. Yet, for all their horny cuticle, his fingers seemed to burn as luminous as those of the Troll in the fairy tale. They spouted music; the fire of inspiration ran out of their tips along the strings till the ceiling of the common little room vibrated deliciously as the dome of an elfin bell. And he extemporised, it would appear; he wove a web of chords about himself as it were a cocoon, out of which he should one day burst and be acknowledged glorious.

“Surely,” thought Ned, “if it isn’t necessary to be a fool to be a musician, at least the majority of born musicians are fools.”

That was his opinion, and he held it in common with a good many people. The musical, more than any other form of temperament, would appear to be self-sufficient. Its stream may flow and harp, like an Iceland river, through a woefully barren country.

The heavy man played on and on, enraptured, exalted, till his wife came home from church. Then she flew like an angry bee to the sweet twang of his instrument, and opened on him wide-eyed and -mouthed.

“Saving your honour’s presence——” she began.

“Or my life,” said Ned. “He hath built me up my constitution as Amphion built the walls of Thebes. I asked him to come and play, and he hath finished me my cure.”

“Well, now, fegs!” said the woman dubiously. “And they call him pethery John,” said she. “’Tis his fancy to confide himself to his harp once in the week. The stroke of his chisel, the taste of his bacon, the cry of the sea—every thought and act of the six days will he work into them wires on the seventh. An honest, sober man, sir, weren’t ’t for his Sabbath folly.”

“And what is his business?” asked Ned, for the husband had shouldered his harp and disappeared.

“A stonemason’s,” she answered; “and none to come anigh him.”

She added with pride, “He’s a foreman at the excavating over to the cliffs yonder.”

“Oh!” said Ned. “And what are they excavating for?”

“Lord save your honour!” she cried, “don’t ye know as we’re a-fortifying against the coming of they bloody French?”

“No,” said Ned.

“Well,” she answered, “we be.”

Then she recalled her manners.

“But I’m gansing-gay to see your honour so brave,” she said, with a curtsey.

“And I’m vastly obliged to you, ma’am,” said Ned. “And nobody has come near me in my sickness, I understand, but the lady?”

“Only the lady, sir.”

“And, now, who is the lady?”

“But Madame d’Eon, sir, at your sairveece,” said a voice at the door.

Ned fell flat on his back. A formless suspicion, that had rankled in him like an unextracted thorn ever since he had received that prick in the shoulder, suddenly revealed itself a definite shape.

After a minute or two he raised his head from the pillow and looked cautiously around.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, and dropped it again.

Husband and wife were gone, the room door was closed, and at his bed-side, monkey on wrist, sat the strange lady who had been the very active cause of his discomfiture.

“D’Eon, did you say?” he murmured.

“Veritably,” she replied serenely.

“Oh! the——”

“Exactly: the Chevalière Charlotte-Genevieve-Louise-Augusta-Andrée-Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont.”

“The chevalière!” said Ned faintly.

“Or chevalier,” she answered, with a very pleasant laugh.

He raised himself determinedly on his elbow and scrutinised his visitor. He saw beside him a comfortable, motherly looking creature, apparently some sixty years of age, with a sort of Dutch-cap on her head topped by a falling hat, and fat white curls rolled forward from the nape of her neck. Her face, sloping down from the forehead and up from the throat, came as it were to a sharpish prow at the tip of the nose. Its expression was of a rather mechanical humour, and the eyes seemed deliberately unspeculative. Only the mouth, looking lipless as a lizard’s, was a determined feature. For the rest, in dress and manner, she appeared the very antithesis of the loud and truculent trollop who had thrust a quarrel upon, and a sword into him, three nights ago.

And this was the famous chevalier, the enigma, the epicene, upon the question of whose sex the accumulated erudition of a King’s Bench had once been brought to bear—with indefinite result. This was the hermaphrodite dragoon and lady-in-waiting; the author, the plenipotentiary, and at the last, in this year of grace, the astonishing tireuse-d’armes, who had excelled, on their own ground, the Professors St George and M. Angelo, and who now replenished one pocket of her purse by giving lessons in the admirable art of fencing.

And, at this point of his cogitations, Mr Murk said—

“The chevalier is at least a wonderful actress.”

Thereat madame chirred out a little indulgent laugh.

“It is well said!” she cried. “Monsieur is un homme d’esprit.”

“And I take no shame,” said Ned, “to have let her in under my guard.”

She looked at the young man seriously.

“The shame was mine, mon petit—the shame of the necessity was mine to wound you at all.”

“You had not intended to kill me, then? It was not plotted with my lord?”

She flushed, actually—this player of many parts.

“Milord!” she cried, “his hired bravo!”

“Well,” said Ned, “you must admit I have some excuse for thinking it.”

“So!” she answered, recovering herself with a long-drawn breath. “It is true.”

She smiled upon him.

“Had I chalk-marked you at the first, mon cher, I could not have hit you nearer where I intended. When I desire to keel, I keel. When I weesh for to place one hors-de-combat—pour citer un exemple—” she touched his shoulder delicately with her finger-tips.

“You intended to put me on the shelf?” said Ned, surprised.

She nodded.

“On my uncle’s behalf?”

“Ah!” she cried, “you weesh too many answer. I will tell you it was all arrange by me. It was only when the old man smell blood he get beside of himself. You come in my way: I must remove you. That is it.”

“But I have never seen you in my life till three days ago, madame!”

“Nor I, you. What then?”

Ned lay back, thinking things over; and presently he talked aloud:—

“My lord comes to Dover, en route for Paris. He is accompanied by a friend—the Chevalier d’Eon. This chevalier is a diplomatist, and something more. He—she—has served—possibly does serve—a royal master. At this juncture it is to be conceived that her talents for espionnage are being urgently summoned to exercise themselves.”

He paused a moment, glancing askew at his companion. She did not look at nor answer him, but her face expressed some curious concern. A little covert smile twitched his mouth as he continued:—

“There are whispers (I have heard them and of them) in more than one city of the world, that a certain notable Prime Minister gives his secret endorsement to the revolutionary propaganda of the Palais Royal. Would it not be a daring thing on the part of a spy, and a thing grateful to his employers, to endeavour to prove this of the exalted Englishman? But the Englishman is self-contained—almost inaccessible. If he is to be approached, it must be with an elaborate circumspection—by starting, say, the process of under-mining so far from official centres as the very suburban quarters where he takes his little relaxation during the Parliamentary recesses.”

Pausing, consciously, in his abstract review (murmured, as if he were seeking to convince himself), Ned was aware that the chevalier had leaned herself back against the wall at the bedhead, and was softly caressing the monkey. A tight little smile was on her lips; she caught his glance and nodded to him.

“C’est bien, cela,” she whispered.

He went on, echoing her:—

“C’est bien, cela, madame; and I may be altogether a fool, and a fanciful one. But, here (recognising now the significance of reports that have reached me) is where I trace a connection between the fact of my Lord Murk and the Chevalier d’Eon becoming suddenly acquainted, and the fact that the notable Englishman and my lord are villa-neighbours at Putney, where each has his holiday establishment, and where—altogether apart from politics—both meet on the social grounds of a common appetite——”

“For gossip?”

“For port wine, madame.”

La chevalière broke out into a sudden violent laugh. For the first time her voice seemed to contradict her sex.

“Oh, mon Dieu! c’est une fine mouche!” she cried. “She think to make catspaw of our tipsy monseigneur! I undurestand. Mon Dieu, it is excellent! This contained, this inscrutable, this Machiavel, that but wash his head in the bottle as it were to cool it, to yield his confidence to a paillard, a toss-the-pot, an old, old p’tit-maître that have nevaire earn in his life one title to respect! Say no more. It is a penetration the most admirable that you reveal. Oh, mon Dieu! avec tant de finesse on nous crédit!”

Ned waited till her merriment had jangled itself into silence.

“Not to constitute my lord a spy,” said he quietly, “but to equip him with one.”

“Comment?” said madame. “I do not undurestand.”

“I don’t say you do. It is a hypothetical case I put. I assume, for instance, that the chevalier is perfectly aware of my lord’s propensities, and is even willing to act the part of his conciliatrice.”

Madame jumped to her feet, breathing heavily.

“Why did I not keel you!” she muttered. Her eyes were awake with fury. Little coal-black imps seemed to battle in them as in pools of gall. Ned sat up on his bed.

“I assume,” he went on coolly, “that the chevalier, looking about her for her instrument, marked down this dissolute nobleman with a villa at Putney, and decided to accommodate him with a French mistress—a Cressida whom she should coach to act the part of spy to a spy.”

“C’est bien ça,” whispered madame again.

“The chevalier, then, has, we will say, made my lord’s acquaintance; has excited the libidinous old man; has proposed a trip to Paris. The two travel to Dover; and here an unforeseen difficulty supervenes. My lord hears of the Reveillon riots. He refuses to proceed. The chevalier is in despair. She is, however, let us conclude, taking advantage of her position to note the disposition of the new fortifications, when chance puts into her hands the very opportunity for which she has vainly manœuvred. One day there lands from the packet a countrywoman of hers—a beautiful peasant-girl of Liége, whose seduction and abandonment by a rascal aristocrat have made her amenable to any unscrupulous design upon the class that is responsible for her ruin. To the protection of my lord the viscount, the chevalier—by whatever ruse-de-guerre—is happy to commit the demoiselle Théroigne Lambertine, who, poor fool, chances into her hands at the crucial moment.”

Madame, uttering what sounded like a blazing oath, dashed, in an uncontrollable fit of passion, the little beast she held in her arms upon the ground. The poor wretch whipped across the fender and lay screaming with its back broken. She ran and trod upon it with a heavy foot, stilling its cries.

“It is a De Querchy!” she shrieked. “It is so I crush my enemies!”

Then she came towards the bed, her mouth mumbling and mowing, as if the ghost of the departed brute were entered into her.

“You are the devil!” she hissed, “and you will tell me how you shall use your knowledge.”

“In no way,” said Ned.

His throat drummed with nausea. His whole nature rose in revolt against this exhibition of infernal cruelty; but he kept command of himself and of his cold aloofness.

“In no way?” she said thickly. Her jaw seemed to drop. She stared at him. “You will do noting?”

“No more than you,” he said. “You are welcome to your plot for me.”

Her eyes rather than her lips questioned him.

“Because,” said he, “I am convinced there is nothing to find out; and you will be occupied in hunting a chimera when you might be more mischievously engaged elsewhere.”

She nodded a great number of times. The sweat stood on her forehead.

“You had no thought to interfere?” she said. “Vous êtes à plaindre. I might have left you alone after all. But I dreaded you would stand by, and comprehend, and upset my plans, did I find a sujet fitting to my pu-repus.”

“Indeed, you had no reason to fear, madame. I am not so attached to my uncle’s company as that I should have been tempted to linger in it beyond the term prescribed by etiquette; and this time, be assured, I found in it no additional attraction.”

She made a deprecating motion with her shoulders, then seated herself again—but away from the bed—as if in exhaustion.

“At least,” she murmured, “I have been your camarade de chambre. And it seem I have nurse a viper in my bosom.”

Ned could only bow to this quite typically French example of moral obliquity.

“You think the devil hath instructed me, or that I am the devil,” he said. “It is not so, madame. I have lately been in Paris. I have kept my eyes and my ears open. Moreover, I happen to have come across Mademoiselle Lambertine—to have heard her story—to have known how she contemplated a descent on England. Add to this that, looking from the window some hours ago, I saw the girl (‘parmi d’autres paons tout fier se panada’—you know the fable, madame?) walking in your company; add that the public generally hath an interest in the Chevalier d’Eon’s reputation, and I, at least, in that of my uncle; add, perhaps, that a sick man’s brain is abnormally acute, especially when exercised over the causes predisposing to his malady; add that I have revolved these matters in my head as I lay here, and pieced them together in the manner presented to you, and upon my honour I think I have afforded you the full explanation.”

The chevalier rose. She had round her throat a thin band of black velvet that looked stretched almost to the snapping-point.

“Je crois bien,” she said; “and you have missed your vocation—you are lost to the secret sairveece, monsieur.”

“Certainly,” said Ned. “I am quite unable to lie.”

She answered, unaffected, and with recovered gaiety—

“I take, then, monsieur his word that he shall not interfere.”

She added, shaking her finger at him—

“Nevaretheless, it is not all as you say, but it is a good guess of half measures.”

“Very well,” said Ned, with entire composure. “And that being understood, perhaps madame will take up the one victim to her ardour, and leave the other to his convalescence.”

He bowed very politely, and lay down with his face to the wall.

She gazed at him a moment, with an expression compound of perplexity and lively detestation; then, reclaiming De Querchy, went from the room fondling the little broken corpse.

CHAPTER XX.

During the short course of his restoration to vigour, Mr Murk, indulging that power of self-abstraction that was constitutionally at his command, gave himself no further concern about his uncle’s affairs, paramorous or political. His resolving of the Chevalier d’Eon’s little riddle of intrigue was, perhaps, an achievement less remarkable than it appeared to be. His own knowledge of my lord’s partial boon-companionship with the Prime Minister at Putney, and the notoriety of a particular kind that attached to the chevalier’s name, coupled with the more or less perilous gossip he had heard abroad, had winged the shaft that had—something to his surprise—struck so near home. Now (having proved to his satisfaction his own percipience), in the conviction that the artifice of this intrigante was destined to procure of itself nothing but a political abortion, he rested tranquilly, and devoted his spare—which was all but his meal—time to trying to play the harp.

This was a mournful misapplication of energy. He had never known but one tune—the “Young Shepherd by love sore opprest,” which he would intone in moments of exaltation. Now he could not reconcile it to the practical intervals of performance, but was fain to introduce crippling variations in his hunt for the befitting string. It was the merest game of disharmonic spillikins, the contemplation of which affected his landlord almost to tears, and to any such enigmatical protest as the following:—

“You’ve no-ought to make such a noration about nothing!”

“Very well,” Ned would answer; “but the spheres, you know, wrought harmony out of chaos.”

Nevertheless he took his characteristic place in the hearts of the simple folk with whom he lodged.

When, by-and-by, he was in a condition to stroll out into the living world once more, it was agreeable to him to learn that the old seaport place had been quit for some days of all that connection that had been the cause of his detention in it. His uncle was returned to town, carrying presumably Mademoiselle Lambertine with him; and the chevalier also had disappeared. He dozed out his second week, therefore—yielding his brain to the droning story of the sea—on the mattress of the sands; and, at last, revivified, braced up his energies and turned his face to the London that had grown unfamiliar to him.

* * * * * * * *

In accusing his nephew of inhabiting at some beggarly “Cock-and-Pye” tavern, my Lord Murk had uttered a vexatious anachronism that testified to little but his own antiquity. In the nobleman’s youth, indeed, the fields called after this hostelry, though then occupied by the seven recently laid-out fashionable streets that made “a star from a Doric pillar plac’d in the middle of a circular area” (abrégé, “Seven Dials,” though the capital of the column was, in fact, a hexagon only), were a traditional byword for low-life frivolity. Their character, however, was now long redeemed, or, at least, altered.

But, though Ned might not so far condescend to a philosophic vagrancy as to consort with beggars and “mealmen,” it was certainly much his humour, at this period of his life, to rove from old inn to inn, having any historic associations, of his native city; while during long intervals his chambers knew him not. Thus his uncle was so far near the mark as that for months antecedent to his continental excursion traces of him were only occasionally forthcoming from amongst the ancient hostelries that neighboured on the St Giles quarter of the town. The “Rose” on Holborn Hill, made memorable by the water-poet; the “Castle” tavern, where, later, “Tom Spring” threw up the sponge to death; the “George and Blue Boar,” ever famous in history as the scene of Cromwell and Ireton’s interception of that damning letter that the poor royal wren, who hovered “between hawk and buzzard,” was sending to his mate; the venerable “Maidenhead,” with its vast porch and ghostly attics—in all of these antique shells, and in many others, had the young man buried himself for days or weeks, according to his whim, until periodically his uncle would be moved to exult over the probability of his having been knocked on the head in some low-browed rookery, his very detested eccentricities serving for the means to his removal. Then suddenly Ned would put in an appearance at the house in Cavendish Square, and all the old rascal’s dreams would be shattered at a blow.

Now, upon his return, our solemn young vagabond had no thought but to resume this motley habit of existence. New alleys of interest he would explore, adapting his moral eyesight to a focus that late experience had taught him the value of; feeding his philosophy and humanity with a single spoon.

He disappeared and, remote in his retreats, was little tempted to emerge therefrom by the reports that were occasionally wafted to him of his uncle’s scandalous liaison with a beautiful Belgian girl, who had come to rule the viscounty.

Then—when he had been for some six weeks serving the interests of his own education in the character of a sort of spiritual commercial traveller—one day he happened upon Théroigne herself.

On this occasion chance had taken him westward, and he was walking meditatively under the trees bordering the Piccadilly side of the Green Park, when a voice, the low sound of which gave him an irresistible thrill, hailed him in French from a carriage that drew up at the moment in the road hard by. This carriage was a yellow “tilbury,” glossy with new paint and varnish, with the Murk arms on the panels and a foaming bright chestnut to draw it; and a very self-conscious “tiger” held the chestnut in while a lady jumped to the pavement.

“I congratulate you,” said Ned, doffing his hat in the calmest astonishment; “you have made a slave of opportunity.”

Indeed she had the right selective faculty. Her schooling might have extended through a couple of months, and here she was a queen of inimitable charms. She had suffered no illusions of caste; but recognising herself as to the purple of beauty born, she had simply allowed her instincts for style to develop themselves in a congenial atmosphere. And thereto a present air of pride and defiance lent its grace. She made no secret to herself of what she was, and yet that was merely the glorified accent to what she had been. The brilliant dyes of the tiger-moth are only the hues of the caterpillar intensified. This—the brilliancy, the bright loveliness, and the soft consciousness of it all—had been embryo in her from the first. She took Ned’s hands into hers in a wooing manner. A scent of heliotrope, like an unsaintly aureola, sweetened her very neighbourhood.

“Where have you been?” she said; “and why hast thou never come near me?”

“Why should you want me to?” he answered in genuine amazement. “You have made your bed, Mademoiselle Lambertine.”

“I have not made it; no, it is not true.”

She looked about her hurriedly.

“It is for you to advise me—to make it yourself—to lie in it if thou wilt. Hush, monsieur! we cannot talk here. Come and see me—come! It will be well for you.”

“Well for me! But I have no private shame to traffic in, nothing to accuse myself of, mademoiselle.”

“Ah, mon Dieu! but, by-and-by, yes, if you refuse me.”

Ned hesitated. Perhaps we may have observed that curiosity is a constituent of philosophy.

“Well,” he said, “where, and when, do you want me to come?”

“So!” she whispered eagerly; “j’en suis bien aise. To the house of the lord your uncle. Come this evening, when dinner is served and done with. I will receive you alone.”

She gave him her hand, with a rallying smile played to the gods in the person of the tiger, and accepted his to her carriage.

“’Ome!” she said to the boy.

“Unconscious irony,” muttered Ned to himself, as the “tilbury” sped away; “and how the dear fool has caught the trick of it!”

Something—a rare sentiment of pride or humour—persuaded him to appear before her in the right trappings of his station. He could look a very pretty gentleman when he condescended to the masquerade of frippery; and silk and embroidery, with a subscription to conventions in the shape of a light dust of powder on the wholesome tan of his cheeks, revealed him a desirable youth. Still Mademoiselle Théroigne, though obviously taken aback before this presentment of an unrealised distinction, was immediate in adapting herself to the altered relations implied thereby. The perceptible imperiousness of her attitude towards him showed itself finely tempered by admiration. As to her exercise of the softer influences, she had graduated in these (with honours) while yet a child.

She welcomed him in a little boudoir that had been fitted up for her on the ground floor. Lace and buhl-work, crystal and dainty china, were all about her. On the walls were sombre, amorous pictures, winking in the glassy shine from girandoles. A decanter and goblets stood on a gilded whisp of a table under a mirror, and hard by a tiny brown spaniel lay asleep on a cushion. She might have been own sister to this whelp from the curl and colour of her hair.

On this she wore no powder, but only a diamond star and loop in emphasis of its loveliness. She was dressed without ostentation, yet every knot and frill were disposed in a manner to suggest the liberal beauty of her figure. But she had, in truth, no need of artifice to show her radiant in the eyes of gods and men.

Now, looking at her, Ned thought, “How in this short time has she renewed herself from that haunting ghost that possessed me on the Liége road? There is something uncanny in this resurrection: I apprehend the ‘seven devils’ must have entered into her.”

And he felt a little discomfortable, as if he were at last brought into acute antagonism with a force that he had hitherto despised for the vanity of its pretensions.

She took his hands and looked into his face. There was a strange yearning inquiry in her eyes. This very licence of touch, so inappropriate to their cold relations one with the other, put him on his guard, though he would not at the moment resent it.

“You knew I was there, at Dover?” she said. “Ah! I sorrowed for your wound, mon ami; but I could not come. Monseigneur would not let me; the chevalier would not let me.”

“Never mind that,” said Ned, withdrawing his hands. “It only concerns me that you have been consistent to your promise, and that my lord attaches, in your person, another scandal to his record.”

“But that is not true,” she said, shrugging her shoulders; “and, even though it were, will not your philosophy condone it? Little holy Mother! is it that such as you, and he—that other of Méricourt—would use Liberty only as your pander, disowning her when she has served her purpose!”

She was all too young in vice as yet to play, without some real emotion, the part she had elected to fill.

“He taught me from his devil’s gospels!” she cried; “and you saw, and would not interfere, because your faith was the same as his.”

“I was in Méricourt—for how many days?” said Ned. “And is this all your confidence, Mademoiselle?”

She flushed and bit her lips. The tears were in her eyes.

“You are always cold,” she said. “You do not pity me or make allowance. To be wooed to worship an ideal; to be wooed through the hunger in one’s soul for the truth that God seemed to withhold! When he taught me that religion of equality, he became my God. I saw the disorder of the world resolve itself into love and innocence. How was I, inexperienced, to know how a libertine will spend years, if need be, in undermining a trust that he may indulge a minute’s happiness?”

She had spoken so far with self-restraint. Now, suddenly, she flashed out superbly—

“You would not do the same—oh, mon Dieu, no! but you will condone his wickedness—yes, that is it! Liberty to you all is the liberty to act as you like; to use the State and abuse it; to use the woman and throw her aside!”

“Hush!” said Ned, a little startled and concerned. “Your liberty, I take it, you have committed to the keeping of my lord. He may curtail it, if you talk so loud.”

She drew back imperiously.

“The old tipsy man!” she cried, in a pregnant voice. “I decoy, and I repulse, and I madden him. I have learnt my lesson, monsieur. Hark, then!”

She held up her hand. From the dining-room adjacent came a quavering chaunt—the maudlin sing-song of ancient inebriety.

“I know,” said Ned. “He is half-way through his second bottle.”

“Is it the music,” cried the girl, “that I have bartered my honour to listen to? There are greater voices in the air—the thunder of cannon; the roar of an emancipated people!”

“Certainly it is true, by report,” said Ned, “that the French Bastille is fallen into the hands of the mob—a consummation remotely influenced, no doubt, by the Club of Nature’s Gentry.”

“Into the hands of Liberty, monsieur. The reign of falsehood is dead. The ideal triumphs, however far its wicked apostles may have sought to misconstrue it! And I am of the people! I am of the people—the people!”

She gazed up—as if in a sudden inspired ecstasy—then buried her face in her hands. Her full bosom heaved. She was beyond all control overwrought.

“Théroigne!” exclaimed Ned, moved out of, and despite himself.

She looked up again, with flashing wet eyes.

“My love is sworn to Liberty!” she cried; “my hate to those who would make of her a pander to their own base desires. So much of his teaching remains; and let him abide by its consequences. It is for me to drive the moral home, to reveal him for the thing he is—the thing he is!”

Then Ned, holding no brief for St Denys, was tempted to an inexcusable utterance—

“He was the father of your child, Théroigne.”

The girl started as if she had been struck. She raised her eyes and clasped her hands; and she said, in a quivering voice—

“I thank God—oh, I thank God he is dead. The little poor infant! And what would he have made of his baby—he, that had the heart to disinherit and condemn to lifelong torture his own brother that he had played with as a child!”

Ned stood amazed.

“His brother!” he cried—“the sailor that perished in the West Indies! But monsieur himself told me of his brother’s fate.”

She gazed at him intensely. During some moments the evidences of a hard mental struggle were in her face. Then she gave out a deep sigh.

“He lied, as always,” she said in a low voice: “Lucien is at this day a wretched prisoner in the Salpétrière, the madman’s hospital of Paris.”

“Théroigne! What do you say!” cried Ned.

“It is true,” she went on. “He was disfigured—driven insane by the explosion; but he was not killed. He returned in his ship to Cherbourg, and there Basile received him of the surgeon and conveyed him to Paris. He was never heard of again. Basile brought to their father the news that Lucien was dead of his wounds and buried at sea. Monseigneur was old and childish, and Paris was far away. That was seven years ago; but it was only recently that, sure of my loyalty, and careless of the respect, of the right to which he had deprived me, he boasted to me of his ancient crime, justifying it, too, on the score that a reconstituted society must, to be effective, be pruned of all disease, moral and physical.”

“He should have hanged himself. Such inhuman villainy! Mademoiselle Lambertine, you have every reason to hate this man.”

“Ah! you think I colour the truth. My God, it is black enough! Why else, himself like a reckless madman, did he squander his double inheritance? He foresaw the redistribution of property; he was ever prophesying it. He must drink deeply of pleasure if he would empty the cup before flinging it into the melting-pot. Moreover, Lucien had been the old man’s favourite; and, ah! he hated him for that.”

She stopped a moment, panting; then went on, her voice lower yet with hoarseness:—

“Say, at the best, it was remorse made him a spendthrift, and his conscience that salved itself with a lying pretext. Does that condone his perfidy to me? Yet, I swear that he so blinded my eyes and my heart that, while he was close to me I could not, despite his confession of wickedness, see him for the wretch he was. Now——”

She came suddenly quite close up to the young man.

“Edouard!” she whispered, in a voice so wooing that it seemed to stroke his cheek. He should have leapt away; but for the first time the fragrant sweet sensuousness of her presence bewitched him. She put her hands timidly up to his shoulders, and let her gaze melt into his. The motion of her bosom communicated to his heart a soft slow throbbing. In the pause that ensued, the voice of the old drunken debauchee sounded fitfully from the dining-room.

“Now,” she murmured, “I see the truth stripped of all that passion that so falsely adorned it. I see it in you, as in myself, a generous principle that owes nothing to self-indulgence. Thou couldst use this in me, thou cold, beautiful man—thou couldst use me to such ends, and never fail of thy self-respect.”

She slipped her hands a thought closer about his neck.

“This evil magnificence,” she said—“so strange and so terrible to the poor country girl. Every evening the old lord gets tipsy over his wine; every evening he prays to me on his knees. To-night I thought he would have died—the passion so enraged him. I swear that is all. Oh! I have something cries in me for action; some voice, too, summons me to that dark city where is being born, in agony and travail, the child of our hopes—yours and mine. Not his now—Edouard, not his. I pray only to meet him there, that I may denounce him before the Liberty he has outraged. Take me hence. I am weary of the vile display; weary of being sought the tool to designing men. Take me away to Paris, where the era of the new life is beginning!”

In a paroxysm of entreaty, emboldened by her little success, she so tightened the soft embrace of her arms as to bring her lips almost into touch with his.

“Have I not proved myself, as I promised, a possession to covet?” she whispered.

Now, upon that, Ned came to himself at a leap. He loosened her hands; he repulsed and backed from her.

“What shameless thing are you,” he cried—the more violently from a consciousness of his late peril—“that you persist in the face of such rejection as you have already forced from me? I do not desire your favour, madame. To offer it to me here, in this place, is nothing but an insult. Nor, believe me, do I covet the possession of one who——”

“Hush!” she cried peremptorily. She stood away from him, panting heavily. Her face glowed with a veritable inner fire.

“It is for the last time, monsieur—be assured, it is for the last time,” she breathed out.

Then she blazed into uncontrollable passion:—

“Senseless, and a fool! I would have given you a soul to dare and to do. This is not a man but a block. It is right, monsieur: you would freeze the hot life in me—make it of your lead, this poor gold of my humanity. That other was better than you—he was better, for after all he could lie bravely. My God, to be so scorned and flouted! But, there you shall learn—ah, just a little lesson! You are very proud and high, yet I also shall be high if I choose.”

She checked herself, came up to and dared him in a rage of mockery.

“To-morrow we go to Putney. It is all arranged. And I have but to say the word, the little word, and I am Lady Murk! You twitted me with the child—my God, the man you are! What now, if his ghost—his image—were to thrust itself in between you and——”

The door was flung open—pushed, that is to say, with a respectful violence nicely significant of emergency. Jepps stood on the threshold.

“My lord, will your lordship please to come at once?”

So said this admirable man; and what need was to say more? Ned, in a moment, was in the dining-room.

Mademoiselle Théroigne had presumed a trifle too far on her desirability. At least, consulting her own interest, she should have withheld, one way or the other, from the beast of her ambition that incitement to feed passion with fire.

The Viscount Murk lay amongst the glasses on the table, dead of a rushing apoplexy. That is all that it is necessary to say about him.

When, later, Ned could somewhat collect his faculties, he recalled dimly how a white face, crowned with a mass of beautiful hair, had seemed to hang staringly—before it suddenly vanished—in the doorway of the fatal room. But, when he came to question Jepps about Mademoiselle Lambertine, he heard that the lady—after returning to her own apartments for a brief while—had quitted the house without sign or message.

Yet one other visitor disturbed that night the house of death—the Chevalier d’Eon. She came in a chair from the theatre, and Ned, going forth to her, saw her startled old face twisting with chagrin, as he thought, in the light of the flambeaux. She had heard the news from a link-boy in the square.

“I can do nothing by coming in, I suppose?” she said.

“Nothing whatever,” answered Ned passionlessly. “He is quite beyond your influence.”

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

Edward, Lord Murk—now three years enjoying the viscounty—was established, during the summer of ’92, at “Stowling,” his lordship’s seat near Bury St Edmunds. Since his uncle’s death he had spent the greater part of his time here—perhaps because his associations with the place were less of the disreputable old peer than of the traditions and the personnel that had made it dear to him in his youth. He had sold both the Cavendish Square property and the villa at Putney; and was consequently, no doubt, very meanly equipped with domicile for a gentleman of his position.

That, maybe, to him was a term little else than synonymous with “opportunity.” Position at its best enabled him to realise on some ethical speculations of his earlier educational period. His Paris experiences had given to these their final direction; and though he was theoretically as convinced as ever that men should be made virtuous by Act of Parliament, the tablets of his soul, bitten into by the acid of human suffering, were come nowadays to exhibit the expression of a very human sympathy.

He gave with a large discriminating nobility; yet, no doubt, he was little popular in the neighbourhood, because in his benefactions he was discerning, and because, in indulging his liberality, he would forego any display of the wealth that he was ever passing on to others. Already for a peer he was poor; and, had he chosen, he might have cited, in favour of his conception of a mechanical morality, the fact that an emotional morality secretly despised in him that poverty by which it profited. But he did not choose. The spirit of philosophy still dwelt in him very sweet and sound.

In all these three years he had not once been abroad. Following—as keenly as it was possible for him to do in those days of crippled international communication—the progress of the great Revolution (perhaps, even, contributing at its fair outset to the sinews of war), he had yet no inducement whatever further to embroil himself, an inconsiderable theorist, with a distracted people. Between a turbulent chamber of his history and the halls of tranquillity in which he now sojourned had clapped-to a very sombre door of death; and this he had not the inclination to open again.

Still, often in his day-dreams he would be back at Madame Gamelle’s, watching all that life scintillating against the curtain of the Bastille. And now this curtain had, in truth, gone up, revealing, not, as he himself had prophesied, the “blank brick wall of the theatre,” but democratic force represented in a vast perspective—a procession so endless that it seemed drawn out of the very brain of the North, where all mystery is concentrated.

That, now, was an old story. Three subsequent years of planting and levelling had changed the face of the world’s garden of conventions, and during all that time the world itself had stood round outside the railings, peering in amazed upon a ruthless grubbing up and carting away of its pinkest flowers of propriety.

That was an old story; nor less so to Ned was the tale of his little sojourn in Méricourt; and thereon, for all his rebelling, his thoughts would sometimes dwell sweetly. The very quaintness of his reception, unflattering though it had been, had still an odd thrill for him. The memory of a happy period put to long wanderings by serried dykes, of the old hamlet basking in the ferny bed of its hills, of all the ridiculous and the tragic that, blended, made of the little episode in his life a sore that it was yet ticklingly pleasant to rub over—these, the shadows of a momentary experience, would rise before him, not often, yet so persistently that he came to attach almost a superstitious significance to their visitings. For why else, he thought, should the ghost of one haunt the galleries of a thousand pictures! Some connection, not yet severed, must surely link him to that time.

Yet, during all this period of his responsibility, no whisper to suggest that to his shadows he was become other than a shadow himself reached him. It may have been breathed inaudibly, nevertheless, through the key-hole of that closed door.

Of Théroigne he had heard no word after her flight from the house of death. Nor had he desired to hear, or to do else than free himself of the dust of a scandal that, for months after his succession, had clung to him as the legitimate inheritor of a villainous reputation. And this desire he had held by no means in order to the conciliation of Mrs Grundy, but only that he might be early quit of the hampering impertinences of commiseration and criticism.

Once, it is true, he had almost persuaded himself that it was his duty to seek for either verification or disproof of the girl’s almost incredible statement about the man Lucien de St Denys. The conviction, however, that the story as related was incredible; that it was revealed to him under the stress of passion and of immeasurable grievance; that no man—least of all an astute rascal—would be likely to put into the hands of a woman—the baser sequel to whose ruin he was even then contemplating—a weapon so tipped with menace to himself,—this growing upon him, he was decided in the end to forego the resolving of all problems but those that were incidental to his own affairs. Therefore he settled down with admirable decorum to the righteous lording of his acres.

Still occasionally a restless spirit—that Harlequin bastard of Ariel and the earth-born Crasis—would whisper in his ear of vast world-tracts unexplored, of the meanness of social restrictions and of the early staleness that overtakes the daily bread of conventions, of the harmonics of phantom delights that may be heard in the under-voices of flying winds, of life as it might be lived did men serve Nature with honesty instead of deceit. Then a longing would arise in him to be up and away again; to throw off the shackles of formality and pursue his more liberal education through the fairs of the nations. Then his days would show themselves empty records, strangely fed from some darker reservoir of emptiness, the source of whose supply would be a weary enigma to him. And in such moods it was that the gardens of the past blossomed through his dreams, and figures, sweet and spectral, would be seen walking in them—Théroigne sometimes, sometimes Nicette, and again others—yet these two most persistently.

* * * * * * * *

The demesne of “Stowling” was situate a long mile from Bury St Edmunds against the Lynn Road. All about the grounds relics of an ancient grandeur were in evidence, though the house itself, a graceful Jacobean block, with projecting wings and stone eyebrows to its windows, was a structure significant of a quite moderate condition of fortune. The property, in point of fact, had been flung, at “Hazard,” into the lap of that same Hilary, Lord Brindle (own pot-companion to Steele and to Dick Savage of the “Wanderer”—with whom, indeed, he had often cast at Robinson’s coffee-house, near Charing Cross, where the broil occurred in which Lady Macclesfield’s bastard stabbed Mr Sinclair to death), who was wont to justify his own viciousness by the aphorism, “Whatever we are here for, we are not here for good.” Very few of the Murks, it must be confessed, had been here for good, though none had endeavoured to disprove one side of the mot with more pertinacity than the late viscount. Yet, at last, a successor was to the front who would inform with gravity and decorum the family seat that had been acquired, rebuilt, and maintained by the wild lord in a manner so questionable.

For Ned the house was big enough; to him its grounds presented a retreat that had all the melancholy charm of a cloister to its monks. Nameless antiquity dreamed in its clumps of mossy ruins; in its fragment of a Norman gateway; in its tumbled “Wodehouse” men—sightless, crippled giants, with clubs shattered against the skull of Time; in its wolfish gurgoyles snarling up from the grass. Hereabouts could he wander a summer’s day and never regret the world.

Not often was he to be seen in the old town hard by; yet from time to time he would walk over on a sunny day and loiter away an hour or so in its venerable streets. And therein one morning (it was breathing kind July weather) he saw a vision that seemed to typify to him the very “sweet seventeen” of the year.

Now Ned’s knowledge of women had been mostly of the emotional side; and a certain constitutional causticity in him had been wrought out of all patience by the attentions to which he had been subjected in the respect of one order of passion. It is true his innate sense of humour rejected for himself the plea of excessive attractiveness, and, indeed, any explanation of the pursuit, save that he had happened coincidently into the scent-area of a couple of questing creatures of prey. Still, built as he was, the experience was so far to his distaste as to incline him always a little thenceforth to an unreasonable hatred of the dulcetly sentimental in, and, indeed, to a shyness of, the sex altogether.

Upon this, however, the little July-winged vision—which blossomed into his sight as he turned the corner into a quiet street—he looked with that inspired premier coup d’œil that aurelians direct to a rare living “specimen” of what they have hitherto only known in unapproachable cabinets. He looked, and saw her spotless, as recently emerged from some horny chrysalis of his own late incubating fancy. (“This is ipsa quæ, the which—there is none but only she.”) He looked, and the desire of acquisition gripped his heart—if only he had had a net in his hand!

She had bright brown hair and china-blue eyes, and her hair curled very daintily, and her eyelashes dropped little butterfly kisses—as the children call them—on her own pretty cheeks. She was of an appealing expression, a thought coy and spirituelle; and she was indescribably French, too, in her tricks of gesture and the very roguish tilt of her hat.

That was by the way to this travelled Cymon. Emigrants nowadays were commoner than sign-boards in the streets of Bury. What concerned him was that the girl appeared to be in trouble. She rested one hand on the sill of a low window in the wall; her forehead had a pained line in it; she sucked in her lower lip as if something hurt her; from time to time an extraordinary little spasm seemed to waver up her frame.

At least one reprehensible suggestion as to the cause of this convulsion might have offered itself to a vulgar intelligence—the tyranny (to put it sweetly) of over-small shoes. My Lord Murk, leaving his fine prudence and philosophy squabbling in the background, walked up to and accosted the sufferer in deadly earnest and quite courtly French—

“Mademoiselle is in distress? I am at her service and command.”

The lady gave an irrepressible start, and shuddered herself rigid. Certainly she was abominably pretty—straight-nosed, wonder-eyed as a mousing kitten. But she answered with unmistakable petulance, and in a winning manner of English, “I am beholden to monsieur; but it is nothing—nothing at all. I beg monsieur to proceed on his way.”

Ned bowed and withdrew. The dismissal was peremptory; he had no choice. But, daring to glance back as he was about to take another turning out of the empty street, he was moved to pause again in a veritable little panic of curiosity. For, on the instant of his espial, a “clearing” spasm, it seemed, was in process of bedevilling the angelic form; and immediately the form repossessed itself of the nerves of motion, skedaddled round a corner, and disappeared.

Now sudden inspiration came to Master Ned gossip. He perceived that the lady had been standing upon a grating. Like a thief, in good earnest, he stole back to the scene of the contretemps, and went into a silent fit of laughter. Two little high red heels, bristling with nails, were firmly wedged between the bars of the grille. With a guilty round-about glance, he squatted, and dug and beat them out with a sharp stone. Then (observe the embryonic crudeness of romance in the shell), he put them—nails and all—into his tail-pocket.

CHAPTER II.

Had Lord Murk been of a present inclination less reserved and withdrawing, he had months before found easy access to the presence of the merry maid, whose little red heels seemed now, as it were, to have taken his misogamy by the tail. For, indeed, when at last he sought, he found this young lady’s identity established in a word. She was neither more nor less (with a reservation in respect to the gossips) than the adopted daughter of a very notable gouvernante to a royal family; and she happened to have already sojourned in Bury some six months, during which he, the hermit-crab, had chosen to tuck himself away apathetic into his shell.

Ned had, of course, heard of the not altogether peaceful invasion of the drowsy little town by one particularly hybrid company of emigrants that was, in fact, the travelling suite of Mademoiselle d’Orléans, whom the Duke her father had, for safety, shipped to England towards the latter end of the previous year. The importance of mademoiselle’s advent was signified rather in her rank than her maturity, which presented her as a lymphatic little body, some fifteen years of age, with pink eye-places and a somewhat pathetic trick of expression. But, if her title proclaimed her nominal suzerainty over the valetaille that, in its habits of volubility and swagger, was to inflame the popular sense of decorum by-and-by to a rather feverish pitch of resentment, the very practical conduct of the expedition was in the hands of that wonderful woman whom an irreverent virtuosity had entitled “Rousseau’s hen.”

Ned had not in the least desired to make the acquaintance of this Madame de Genlis. His position in the neighbourhood rather entailed upon him the courtesy of a welcome to the royal little red-eyed stranger at his gates; yet, adapting his unsociability to popular rumour of the formidable bas-bleu that dragoned her, he delayed a duty until its fulfilment became an impossibility. And even a chance report or so that had reached him of the beauty of madame’s adopted child—the flower-faced Pamela (“notre petit bijou”), in praise of whose name, abbreviated, a dozen local squireens were flogging their tuneless brains for any rhyme less natural to the effort than “damn!”—moved him only to some sardonic reflections on the uncomplimentary significance of a gift that seemed designed in principle for a stimulant to fools.

To fools had been his thought; and now here he was, having for the first time happened upon this actual Pamela, not only awake of a sudden to a glaring sense of the social solecism he had committed, but awake, also, to a sentiment much less intimate (as he thought) to the world of ordinary emotions. It was astounding, it was humiliating so to truckle to the thrall of a couple of blue eyes that, for all purposes of vision, were no better than his own. He stood astonished; he rebelled—but he pursued. He felt his very amour-propre giving before the incursion of a force, stranger yet akin to it. So the big brown rat (oh, vile analogy!) usurped the kingdom of his little black cousin.

Why, then, did the unfortunate young man not reject and cast forth the spell that seemed to drain him of all the ichor of independence? Why did he wantonly stimulate in himself a fancy that his calm judgment pronounced hysterical? How can these things be answered? How could any sober reason analyse the motives of a person who kept in his tail-pocket, and frequently sat upon, a charm that absolutely bristled with spikes? It is the way of love. When the mystic bolt flies, the philosopher apart must take his chance of a wound with the man who lives in a street.

Anyhow, it must be recorded how Ned took to haunting—with the persistent casualness of one whose unattainable mistress is, as suggested by his preoccupied manner, the thing farthest from his thoughts—the neighbourhood of a certain house in Bury St Edmunds.

This house—a dignified, two-storeyed, red-brick building, with a stiff white porch standing out into the road, and, on the floor above the porch, five tall windows looking arrogantly down from behind a green balcony at the lesser lights in the barber’s and fruiterer’s shops opposite—was situate, about the middle of the town, on a slope known as Abbey Hill, and had for actual neighbour a chief hotel, the Angel, then pretty newly built. It faced—across that sort of homely place, or town quadrangle, that is so usual a feature in English old market boroughs—a flaked and hoary Norman tower that had once been the gateway to a graveyard long since passed with its dead into the limbo of memories. Madame la gouvernante could see the solemn eyebrows of this very doyen of antiquity bent upon her as she sat at the second déjeuner, and it made her nervous. Sometimes, even, she would send a servant to half close the blinds of the window over against her.

“One cannot evade oneself of its senile addresses,” she said on a certain occasion to a florid gentleman in black, who had come down from London to be her particular guest for a while. “I feel like Vesta being made the courted of an old Time. It is always heere the mummy at the feast.”

The gentleman laughed.

“Egad!” said he. “It is to illustrate how Time stands still with madame the Countess of Genlis; and, as to the mummy, why, a mummy is but dust, and dust is easy to lay”—and he took a great pull from a bumper beside him.

He drank brandy-and-water with his meat. “’Tis this country appetite,” he would say. “Violent diseases need violent remedies;” but by-and-by he would take his share of the port and madeira with the rest. Now he looked across the table to a little shy lady, and, says he, but speaking in very bad French, “Mademoiselle the princess, as I dissipate myself of this shadow, so may you as readily of that that magnifies itself to the eyes of madame the countess.”

He opened his own eyes as he spoke, comically, to imply some imaginary vision of terror. He was very proud of these orbs, that were large and liquid. Indeed, he never allowed the well that replenished them to run dry.

“Est-ce bien possible! fie, then, Mr Sherree-den!” put in a very little voice—not of the lady addressed—from farther down the table. “But mademoiselle takes water with her wine.”

Madame tapped on her plate with her fan, uttering an exclamation of reproval. But the gentleman only laughed again.

“Miss Rogue, Miss Pamela,” said he, being by this time secure of his priming, “I will compliment you and your wit on making a very pretty couple.”

“We are twins,” said the girl saucily. “We were found together on a doorstep.”

“Tais-toi, coquine!” cried madame sharply. “The pair of you had been well committed to the Foundling.”

She treated with vast indulgence generally this pretty child of her adoption. It seemed only that this particular subject was fraught with alarm to her. By-and-by, when the queer meal was ended (there had been present at it, besides the ladies and Mr Sheridan, three silent Bœotians—concordia discors: practical scientists attached to the household, and now admitted, à l’Egalité, to a share in its social rites), madame conducted her guest to her boudoir over the front porch, and opened upon him with the matter momentarily nearest her heart.

“Does it magnify itself to my eyes, this—the shadow of the tower?” she said. “I do not know. It was not so at Barse, where we arrive first; but heere—heere! The place oppresses me. Its antiquity is a rebuke to the frothy dynasties. Every whisper is from a ghost of the past bidding us of the new mode to begone. We are hated, tracked, and watched. I see faces behind trees; I heere mutterings through the walls. What have we to do in this haunted town?”

“It is the burying-place of kings,” said Mr Sheridan. “It should be to your taste.”

Madame la comtesse had no echo for levity. She seemed quite genuinely agitated. Her trick (pronounced eternal by one that detested her) of advertising the beauty of her hand and arm by toying, while she conversed, with a fillet of packthread, as if it were a harp string, was exchanged now for an incessant nervous handling of a little miniature Bastille, carved from a fallen stone of the original, that hung upon her bosom. Her face—pretty yet, though narrowing down to an over-small chin—seemed even yellow, drawn, and affrayed. This appearance was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that she wore no rouge. She had once made a vow to quit its use at the age of thirty, and now at forty-five she was yet true to her word. Indeed, she was the very dévote of Minerva-worship.

She sighed, “That I, whom Nature intended for the cloister, should have to fight always against the snares and the wickedness! I sink. Was there evaire the time when my flesh not preek to the fright? Oh yes, once when I was vain! It is vanity that make the good armure. I had no thought but levity when I marry M. de Genlis—and afterwards during the years of Passy, of Villers-Cotterets, of the Rue de Richelieu! Then I have no fear of the morrow; I have no fear at all but of the too-ardent lover.”

“It must have been an ever-present fear,” said Mr Sheridan gravely.

She shook her head with hardly a laugh.

“I am an old sad woman; my armure is crumbled from me. I play now only one part—in those times it was many. From Cupid to a cuisinière, I had the gift to make each character appear natural; to present it, nevairtheless, of the most charming grace. I was adored and adorable; but it was vanity. I would not exchange the present for the past. I could perform on seven, eight instruments, monsieur; I could dance to shame the unapproachable Vestris; I knew Corneille by heart; Mirabeau himself was not cleverer in organising a comedy for the living, than I for the artificial, stage. My rôle was to promote the healthy condition of amiability, to teach people how to be happy though innocent. That rôle yet remains to me; the rest is gone. When vanity has taught its lesson the pupil may become teacher. I leave since many years the theatre of emotions for the theatre of life. It would be good for some of your countrywomen to follow my example. When I sink of your Congreve, your Vanbrugh, and of the young ladies at Barse that listen wisout a blush, eh bien, on peut espérer que l’habit ne fait pas le moine!”

“Faith, it’s horrible!” said Mr Sheridan; and he remembered how assiduously madame and her charges had frequented the theatres during their two months’ stay at that questionable watering-place before they came to Bury.

“But the morals of ‘Belle Chasse’ have not penetrated to England,” says he, with a little roguish bow to the lady.

Madame uttered a self-indulgent sigh. She looked round on the frippery of fancy-work—moss-baskets, appliqué embroidery, wax flowers, illustrations of science in the shape of tiny trees formed from lead precipitate, illustrations of art in the collections of little moony landscapes engraved on smoked cards, illustrations of practical mechanics in the binding of a sticky volume or so—that lay about the room. These were all so many evidences of her system—instruction in the pleasant gardens of manual toil. She was possessed of the little knowledge of a hundred little crafts. She could have written a ‘Girl’s Own Book’ without the help of one collaborator.

“I have eschewed all the frivolity,” she said. “It is only now that I desire for others to taste sweetly of the fruits of my experience. I am like a nun wishing to dictate the high morality from her cell. The world passes before my window in review, and I applaud or condemn. Is it that I am to be accused of self-interest, of intrigue, because I would convert my hard-wrung knowledge to the profit of my fellows? Yet they pursue me with hate and menace. My reputation is the sport of calumny; my life hangs by a thread. I write to monseigneur, and he aggravates, while seeking to allay, my fears. I write to M. Fox, and he laugh politely in my face. My friends heere, that I thought, turn against me—Sir Gage; Madame Young, also, that is prejudice of that Mees Burrnee you all love so. And she is a tower of strength, the little Fannee—oh yes! but steef, like the tower there. That is the same wis you all. One must evaire conform to your tradeetions or you look asquint.”

“I think you exaggerate the danger,” said Mr Sheridan soberly. “But whatever it be, here am I come down from London to your counsel and command.”

Madame rose from her seat and rested her long fingers caressingly on the speaker’s shoulder.

“Mon chevalier, mon très cher ami,” she said, some real emotion in her voice, “forrgeeve me. It would be good of you at any time; but now, now! The pretty bird, the sweet rossignol, that cried into the night and was hearkened of an angel! Ah! she has no longer of the desolation of the song that must hush itself weeping upon the heart!”

She pressed her other hand to her bosom. Her companion leaned down a moment, his fingers shading his eyes.

“The desolation!” he muttered. “Yes, yes; but for us now there is a deeper silence in the woods.”

They spoke of his wife, who had died but a few months previously. Perhaps the great man had been as faithful to her as it was the fashion for men, great and little, to be in those days to their partners. At any rate, he had loved her to the end—in his own way. A propos of which it may be recorded as richly characteristic of him how, while this same wife lay a-dying, he had been known to ease his heart of sorrow by scribbling verses to Pamela (then living in Bath), in whose beauty he had found, or professed to find, a reflection of his Delia’s old-time fairness.

Now, fortuitously, the little sentimental passage was put an abrupt end to; for, as she leaned, madame all of a sudden started violently and uttered a staccato shriek.

“Le voilà, the triste dark stranger! He come again; he come always! You tell me now there is no purrepus in this devilish haunting?”

She retreated, backing into the room, shrinking without the malignant focus of any stealthy glance directed at her from the road outside. Mr Sheridan jumped to his feet and looked from the window. Strolling past in the sunlight, with an air of studied preoccupation upon his face, strolled a melancholy young man of enigmatical aspect.

Madame, withdrawn into the shade of a screen, stood panting hysterically.

“It is evaire so. He come by morning and by noon—thus, hurrying not at all, but watchful, watchful from the blinkers of his eyes. Why am I so hated and pursued? Is he agent of M. de Liancourt, do you think? Ah! but it is worthy of a runagate so to war on a woman.”

She squealed out in a sudden nerve-panic to hear her companion laugh. He ran to the door of the room.

“Faith!” he cried jovially, “I’m in the way to resolve this riddle at least,” and he pulled at the handle and vanished.

She cried after him to come back—not to leave her alone—that she would lose her reason were anything to happen to him. His descending heels clattered an only reply. Then at a thought she ran to the window and peeped from the covert of curtains. The stranger was wheeled about at the moment and returning as he had come. She saw Mr Sheridan run forth bareheaded, accost, and seize him by both of his hands. He seemed to return the greeting; he——

Madame the countess sank into a chair, as mentally paralysed as though the end were upon her.

Her chevalier was conducting the spy to the door of the house.

CHAPTER III.

A much-stricken young gentleman—very undeservedly released from the onus of a social embarrassment for which he was alone responsible—stood gravely bowing before the lady of the house. His face was quite white.

“I am vastly pleased,” said Mr Sheridan, “to be the means of presenting to madame the Countess of Genlis a neighbour, the Lord Viscount Murk. I have the honour of a slight acquaintance with his lordship. I was even more intimate with his predecessor in the title. But at least I can disabuse madame’s mind——”

Madame, who up to the moment had seemed half-amort, rose hurriedly all at once and swept her stranger a magnificent courtsey.

“I feel already that I have known monsieur for years,” she said, hard winter in her voice.

Mr Sheridan burst out laughing.

“Come, come,” he cried, “a mistake isn’t malice. There was never one yet that sinned against nature. Zounds, madame, when the respite arrives, we bear no grudge against the executioner! I can vouch for my lord that he had no thought of offending.”

Ned looked enormously amazed.

“None whatever,” he said. “Why should I, when I have not even the honour of madame’s acquaintance?”

This was certainly ambiguous. Mr Sheridan laughed again like a very groundling.

“Without affront,” said he, “let me ask your lordship a question. Why have you haunted madame, who is plaguily afeared of ghosts?”

“Haunted!” exclaimed Ned.

“Haunted,” replied the other. “Or is it, perhaps, one of madame’s sacred charges that is the object of your visitations?”

Madame de Genlis, who included in her répertoire of accomplishments the art of reading character, here, after gazing intently at the young man a few moments, permitted herself an immediate relaxation from severity to the most charming indulgence.

“Dieu du ciel!” she cried. “What an old, old, foolish woman! It is nussing, monsieur. I see you pass and come back, and come again one hundred time like a ’ope-goblin, and I sink—I sink—ah! no matter what I sink. I not know you less than nobody—not until Mr Sherree-den come and espy you and say, ‘Do not fear thees poor eenocent.’ And now I see it is not the old woman that attracts.”

Ned was by this up to the ears in a very slough of self-consciousness. To stand detected before the authority he had manœuvred to hoodwink!—so much of the innuendo he understood. For the first time, perhaps, he realised how, in lending himself to some traditional tactics, he had advertised himself of the common clay. He felt very hot, and a little angry; and his anger whipped his sense of personal dignity to a cream-like stiffness.

He was sorry, he said, he had been the cause of the least uneasiness to madame la comtesse. He was a man of a rambling disposition—of a peripatetic philosophy. Often, he had no doubt, absorbed in some train of reflection, he would unconsciously haunt a locality that, associating itself with the prolegomena of his meditations, would seem to supply the atmosphere most conducive to their regular progression. He——

And here the door opened, and a young lady ran into the room.

“A thousand pardons!” cried this young person. She did not know madame was engaged other than with Mr Sheridan, and he counted for nothing. But mademoiselle and she were learning to make artificial birds’-nests, with painted sugarplums for the eggs, and they looked to madame la gouvernante to advise them.

She curtseyed to my lord, with a little pert toss of her head like a wind-blown Iceland poppy-flower, when he was made known to her. She had no recollection of him, it was evident. All that play he had rehearsed to himself, according to fifty different readings, of the return of the red heels to their owner, became impossible of performance the moment he found his audience a reality. There and then he foresaw, and prepared himself heroically to meet, his martyrdom.

* * * * * * * *

Now all the glory and tragedy of Ned’s life came to crowd themselves into a few months—into a few days, indeed, so far as his connection with the strange household at Bury was concerned. Herein—no less on account of his magnetic leaning towards a bright particular star, than because he had made his entrée under the ægis of Mr Sheridan—he was accepted and discussed; pitied by some unsophisticated young hearts; weighed in the balance of a maturer brain, and found, perhaps, deficient.

“He has the grand air,” said madame; “he is noble and sedate, and of amiable principles. But—hélas! à quoi sert tout cela—if one so gives effect to the gospel of distribution as to deprive oneself of the means to honourably perpetuate one’s race!”

“I have always admired madame’s little ornament of the Bastille,” said Mr Sheridan.

“Ah!” cried the lady, smiling, “monsieur is varee arch; but beauty is not the common property, and the little Pamela shall ask a fair return for hers.”

“Well,” said Mr Sheridan, “’tis notorious that Damon hath squandered his inheritance on a very virtuous hobby, and lives meanly in the result. And that, be assured, is a pity; for he seems a young gentleman of parts.”

It was thus he played the devil’s advocate to Ned’s beatification. Early he began to harp upon the one string behind the poor fellow’s back. He professed to be in love with Pamela himself, and the intrusion of this most serious suitor interfered with his amusement. He trifled, no doubt, in a very July mood; he loved the girl for her prettiness and her saucy manner of speech; he was humorously flattered by the familiar deference accorded him in a house of which he was claimed the dear friend and protector. And on this account, and because he was nothing if not unscrupulous in affairs of gallantry, he condescended to acknowledge himself Ned’s rival for the favour of Mademoiselle, née Sims (that was Pamela), and to make good his suit with arguments of wit and brilliancy that threw poor Damon’s solid virtues into the shade.

Perhaps Madame de Genlis may have been the more inclined to besprinkle with cold water the ardour of the young lord, in that she took the other with a rather confounding seriousness. Mr Sheridan, indeed, offered himself at this period a particularly desirable match for a nameless young woman of inconsiderable fortune. He was only a little past the zenith of his reputation, and the glamour of his best work yet went always, an atmosphere of greatness, with him. At forty-one years of age he was equipped with such a personality of wit, eloquence, and riches (presumable) in proportion, as, combined, made him a very alluring parti. In addition to this he could claim the advantages of a tall, well-proportioned figure; of a striking, though not handsome, face; of an education in the most liberal modishness of the age. His expression was frank, his manner cordial and free from arrogance. From first to last he was a formidable rival.

Now, on the very day (the little comedy was all a matter of days) following Ned’s introduction by him to the family, he—seeing how the wind blew, and at once regretting his complaisance—began some petty tactics for the stultifying of a possible antagonist. He drove the ladies, uninvited, over to lunch at “Stowling,” on the chance of taking Master Ned unawares, and so of exposing the intrinsic poverty of a specious wooer. Nor was his astuteness miscalculated. My Lord Viscount, in the act of sitting down to a mutton-chop, was overwhelmed in fathomless waters of confusion. He hastily organised—even personally commanded—a raid on the larders; but their yield was inadequate to the occasion.

He apologised with desperate dignity. A merry enough meal ensued; but, throughout, hatred of his own self-sacrificing principles dwelt in him like a jaundice, and he could have pronounced fearful anathema on all the fools of philanthropy who omitted to stock their cellars with nectar and ambrosia against the casual coming of angels.

Mr Sheridan supplied a feast of wit, however, and Ned was grateful to him for it. He even revived so far at the end as to beg the honour of providing the ladies with invitations to an Assembly ball that was to be holden in Bury on the Thursday of that same week. Rather to his surprise they accepted with alacrity; and so the matter was arranged. And then, at Mr Sheridan’s request, but unwillingly, he played cicerone to his own domain, and thought at every turn he recognised a conscious pity for his indigent condition to underlie the fair compliments of his guests.

When these were gone he sent straightway for his steward, and surprised the good man by an extraordinary jeremiad on the maladministration of a trust that fattened the dependants of a starving lord. He himself, he said, was expected to dress like a bagman and feed like a kennel-scraper, in order that his household might gorge itself disgustingly in silken raiment. He would have reforms; he would have money; he would have the house victualled as for a siege, and grind the faces of the poor did they question his right to drink, like Cleopatra, of dissolved pearls. And then he burst out laughing, and shook the honest man by the hand, and turned him out of the room; after which he sat down by the window and gnawed his thumb-nails.

Now, it will be understood, this unfortunate youth was fairly in the grip of that demoralising but evasive demon that is the sworn foe to philosophy. He was entered of the amorous germ; and the procreative atom, multiplying, was with amazing quickness to convert to misuse all the sound humours of his constitution. He could not seek to exercise a normal faculty, but it confused and routed what he had always recognised for the plain logic of existence. He was ready to discount facts; to magnify trifles; to attach an unwarranted significance to specious vacuities; to fathom a deep meaning with the very plumb he used for the sounding of a shallow artifice. Sometimes, in a recrudescence of reason, he would think, like any calm-souled rationalist, to analyse his own symptoms, to annotate the course of his disease for the benefit of future victims to a like morbosity. It was of no use. His moral vision was so out of focus as to distort to him not only his present condition, but all the processes that had conduced thereto. He was humiliated; and he writhed under, and gloried in, his humiliation. To him, as to many in like circumstance, it seemed preposterous that he should have come unscathed through many battles to be outfenced by a child with a sword of lath. So feels the warrior of a hundred fights when he is “run in” by a street constable for brawling.

Ned dressed for the ball with particular care. He was to constitute himself of madame’s party, and for that purpose had engaged to dine with it before the event. The meal was a desultory one, the ladies’ toilettes serving as excuse for an unpunctuality that was generally opposed to the principles of la gouvernante. But, one by one, all took their places at the table—Mademoiselle d’Orléans, in a fine-powdered head-dress, having a single feather in it like a cockade, and with her little plaintive rabbit eyes looking from a soft mist of fur; Pamela, sweet and roguish, wearing her own brown curls filleted with a double ribbon of yellow; and Mademoiselle Sercey, another young relative of madame’s, and an inconsiderable item of the household at Bury. There were also accommodated with places three or four of the Bœotians before referred to—silent, awkward men, painfully conscious of their quasi-elevation, who sat below the salt and talked together in whispers.

Mr Sheridan came in late. He had compromised with his grief so far as to exchange his black stockings for white, and to wear a diamond brooch in his breast linen. His hair was powdered and tied into a black ribbon. Ned must acknowledge to himself that he looked a very engaging gentleman.

He sparkled with fun and frolic, and he fed the sparkle liberally from the long glass that stood beside him.

“Mademoiselle,” he said to the princess, “your hair is very pretty. Love hath nested in it, and is hidden all but his wing. But is it not ill-manners to keep him whispering into your ear in company?”

“He talk only of the folly of flattery, monsieur,” said the little lady, simpering and bashful.

“A ruse,” cried the other, “that he learned when he played the monk. Beware of him most when he preaches.”

“Mademoiselle is told to beware of you, monsieur,” said Pamela to a gravely ecstatic young gentleman who sat next to her.

“Of me?”

“Are you not then the monk, the airmeet; and is it not mademoiselle’s ear you seek?”

“No,” said Ned brusquely.

He looked at the pretty insolent face, at the toss of brown curls, the little straight saucy nose, the lowered lids. He thought he had never seen anything so wonderful and so fair as this human flower. The neck of her frock was cut down to a point. She seemed the very bud of white womanhood breaking from its sheath.

Did she gauge the admiration of his soul? He was not a boisterous wooer or a talkative. For days he had purposed lightening the conscious gravity of his suit by “springing” her lost heels upon his inamorata. He could never, however, make up his mind as to the right wisdom of the course. A dozen considerations kept him undecided—as to the possibility of giving offence, of appearing a buffoon, of failing, out of the depths of his infatuation, to introduce into the conduct of the jest a necessary barm of gaiety. Without this, how little might the result justify the venture? It was an anxious dilemma. The thought of it threw into the shade all questions of a merely national character in which he had once taken an interest; and, in the meantime, he continued to carry the ridiculous baubles about in his pocket.

Now, is it not one of Love’s ironies to depress a wooer by the very circumstance that should exalt him; to make him so fearful of his own inadequacy as that he seeks to stultify in himself the very qualities that Nature has amiably gifted him withal? Thus Ned, naturally a quite lovable youth when he had no thought of love, was no sooner come under its spell than he was moved to forego that pretty, self-confident deportment, that was his particular charm, for an uncommunicative diffidence that appeared to present him as a hobbledehoy. He lived in the constant dread, indeed, of procuring his own discomfiture by an assumption of assurance.

“You know it is not,” he said—daring greatly, as it seemed to him.

“I know, monsieur!”

The blue eyes were lifted a moment to his. Perhaps they recognised a latency of meaning in the gaze they encountered. Madame de Genlis had once summed up the character of this sweet protégée of hers. “Idle, witty, vivacious,” she called her; a person the least capable of reflection. Idle, without doubt, she was, in the nursery-maid’s acceptance of the term—a child full of caprice and mischief.

“Sure, sir,” she added, with a sudden thrilling demureness, “you must know me for a low-born maid?”

She was a little startled into the half-conscious naïveté by the dumb demand of the look fastened upon her. Besides, she was certainly moved—in despite of mère-adoptive and some significant warnings received from her—by the submission to her thrall of a seigneur whose ancient nobility no present penury could impeach.

But she had no sooner spoken than she recollected herself.

“Do you think me like Mademoiselle d’Orléans?” she said, hurriedly stopping one question with another. “It is some that say we might be sœurs consanguines.”

What did the child mean? Had she any secret theory as to her own origin; and, if so, was she subtly intent upon discounting her first avowal? She may have wished to imply that no real necessity was for her self-depreciation. She may have wished only to divert the course of her neighbour’s thoughts. He was about to answer in some astonishment, ridiculing the suggestion, when Mr Sheridan hailed Pamela from his place opposite.

“A nosegay!” he cried, tapping his own flushed cheek in illustration. “Give me a rose to wear for a favour.”

“It is easy,” said the girl. Her eyes sparkled. She turned to a servant. “Go, fetch for Mr Sherree-den my rouge in the little box,” she said.

“Fie, then, naughty child!” cried madame; “it merits you rather to receive the little box on the ear.” But the great orator chuckled with laughter.

“Pigwidgeon, pigwidgeon!” he said, nodding his head at the culprit. “Not for youth and health are rouge and enamel, and all the vestments of vanity.”

“Not eiser for youth or age,” said madame severely.

“But only for ugliness,” said Sheridan.

“No,” said madame—“nor for zat. It is all immoral.”

“Immoral!” he cried; “immoral to put a good face on misfortune!” He looked only across the table, over the brim of his glass, when he had uttered his mot. He delighted to make the girl laugh. His own wonderful eyes would seem to ripple with merriment when he saw the light of glee spring forward in hers. Pigwidgeon he called her, and she answered to the name with all the sprightliness it expressed.

“Pigwidgeon,” says he, “when you come to the age of crow’s foot, you shall know ’tis a lying proverb that preacheth what’s done cannot be undone, or, as a pedantic fellow writes it, ‘what cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.’”

“And it is vary true,” says madame stiffly—“whosoever the pedant.”

“Well,” says Sheridan, “’twas no other than him that writ ‘Rasselas’; for which work let us hope that God by this time hath damned him—with faint praise.”

He checked himself immediately.

“That were better left unnoticed,” says he, with great soberness; “’tis only the fool that uses the sacred name in flippancy.”

He fell suddenly quiet, and a momentary surprised silence depressed the company. It did not last long. All were shortly in a final bustle of preparation for the ball. The ladies were bowed, the Bœotians melted, from the room. The two gentlemen were left to their wine; the elder’s eyes twinkled back the ruddy glow of the decanters.

“Come, my lord,” says he, “you are staid company, I vow. A toast or two before we leave the table.”

“‘Here’s to the widow of fifty!’” cries Ned, adapting from the great man himself, and raising his glass.

The other laughed.

“I drink her,” he said. “A full bumper to Mrs Sims!”

“’Twas Madame de Genlis I meant.”

“And I meant the mother of Pamela.”

“You take it so, then?”

“I take the child, at least,” said Sheridan evasively, “to be ‘the queen of curds and cream.’”

Ned was, of course, not ignorant of the scandal attaching to this little waif of royalty. It made no difference in his regard for her, though perhaps the other wished it might. Mr Sheridan, maybe, had shot a tiny bolt of jealousy—a tentative hint as to the vulgar origin of the pigwidgeon. It missed fire, and that gave him a thrill of annoyance. He was conscious of some actual resentment against this solemn suitor who had come into his field of enamoured observation. He did not fear him; but he wished him out of the way, that he might flirt in peace. At the same time he may have possibly undervalued the determination of his reticent adversary.

“Well,” said Ned, “here’s to the mother of Pamela, whoever she be!”

“With all my heart,” cried Sheridan, “and to the father, by the same token.”

Ned turned his calm eyes so as to look into the injected orbs of his companion.

“What manner of presence hath monsieur the Duke of Orleans?” said he; “it was never my fortune to happen on him in Paris.”

“He is a friend of mine, sir,” said Sheridan. “From what point of view am I to describe him? His enemies—of whom there are many in England—say that the fruit of evil buds in his face. Egad! I was near seeing it break into flower once. ’Twas at Vauxhall, when the company turned him its back. He would have thought like a Caligula then, I warrant. A prince, sir, something superior to the worst in him, which is all that men will recognise.”

“But his personal appearance?” said Ned.

The other returned the young man’s gaze with a thought of insolence.

“Am I to smoke you?” he said. “Mademoiselle d’Orléans is a little like her father in expression; but our Pamela is not at all like Mademoiselle d’Orléans.”

Ned came to an immediate resolution.

“Mr Sheridan,” said he, “I would crave your indulgence for a word in season. You have advantages in this house that are not mine. You are a great person and a welcome guest, while I am only here—I know it—on sufferance. You may turn your exceptional position to the profit of your amusement. If it is to do no more, it is asking you little to beg you to forego so trifling a sport. If you are serious, then let us, in Heaven’s name, come to a candid understanding.”

He set his lips to suppress any show of emotion. But he was moved, and it was not for the other, however dumfoundered, to put a jesting construction on the fact.

“My lord,” said he, pretty coldly, though his words seemed to belie the tone in which they were spoken, “it would ill beseem a feeling heart at any juncture—mine, particularly, at the present—to refuse its sympathy to an appeal of so nice a nature. I will not pretend to misapprehend your lordship, nor will I fail to respond in kind to your lordship’s frankness.”

“Then you relieve me of the awkward necessity of an explanation,” said Ned. “Heaven knows, there is no question of any right of mine to fall foul of your attitude towards one who may be your debtor for fifty benefactions. Heaven knows, also, that I never intended to imply that my most humble suit towards a certain lady was conditional on any information I might receive as to her actual parentage. Born in honour or out of it—I tell you, sir, so far as she is concerned, ’tis all one to me. I speak straight to the point. You may claim priority of acquaintance; you may be able to advance twenty reasons why my taking you to task is an impertinence. Yet, when all is said—if you are not serious, it is just that you should yield the situation to one who is.”

Mr Sheridan had sat through all this, twirling his glass with a rather lowering smile on his face.

“Yield the situation!” he said; “but you take me by the throat, sir. I must assure you there is no situation of my contriving.”

“Indeed,” said Ned, “I am rejoiced to hear you say so, and do desire to convince you that I find nothing more than a very engaging playfulness in your treatment of the young lady.”

“Then, why the plague,” said Mr Sheridan, opening his eyes, “all this exception to my attitude?”

“Because you choose—let me be plain, sir—to constitute yourself my rival in her favour.”

Mr Sheridan exploded into irrepressible laughter.

“Zounds!” he cried; “here, if I will not be something other than myself, I shall have my throat cut.”

“Is it,” said Ned firmly—“pardon me, sir—is it to be other than yourself to refrain from indulging a whim that is obviously another man’s distress?”

“My lord,” said Mr Sheridan, twinkling into sudden gravity and replenishing his glass, “this aspect of the case is such a one as I really had not considered. But let me assure you that you were one of the direct causes of my coming down here at all.”

“I?”

“You, most certainly.” (He crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward.) “Madame, by her own assertion, was being watched and shadowed. She claimed the protection of our laws. She appealed to our Government in the person of Mr Fox. The gracious office of succouring the afflicted he deputed to me. I hurried down to Bury St Edmunds, and the first suspicious character pointed out to me was my Lord Viscount Murk.”

“Ridiculous!”

“Of course. But the situation, you see, is none of my handling.”

He drank down his glassful, and fell suddenly grave.

“I have no wish, nec cupias nec metuas, to constitute myself your rival. This mourning suit, my lord, is of a recent cut.”

His tone was so dignified, the illusion so sorrowfully significant, that Ned was smitten in a moment. How were his ears startled then to hear a rallying laugh for anticlimax!

“My dear fellow, believe me, I am not of those who imagine a bond in every light exchange of glances. My dear fellow, all we who are not Turks are shareholders in a woman’s beauty. There may be a managing director who has the right to a more intimate knowledge of it: what care we who speculate in the open market, so long as it flatters us with the soundness of our investment! We draw the interest without responsibility, and are always ready to commit the conduct of the business to him that hath the acknowledged right to control it.”

He got to his feet.

“Hush!” he said; “we are summoned. Elect yourself to be this managing director if you will. I am quite content to rest, drawing my modest dividend that you have no right to begrudge me.”

* * * * * * * *

The advent of so distinguished a party in the assembly rooms created quite a little furore of excitement amongst the honest burgesses of Bury. My lord, the reserved and almost inaccessible; the illustrious parliamentarian, whose very presence seemed to secure to all in the place a sort of reversionary interest in those glories of Carlton House with which he was notoriously familiar; the little stranger princess, whose sojourn in the remote English town was so eloquent of the tragedy that even then was threatening to foreclose upon her house—these were the nucleus of such a coruscation of stars of the first magnitude as had never, within living memory, added its lustre to the congregated social lights of the borough.

But when madame la comtesse, adapting her conduct of the expedition to those principles of which she was the present representative, permitted her royal young charge the unconventional licence of dancing with any and all who had the high good fortune to procure themselves an introduction to her, local opinion underwent a gradual transformation that culminated, it is to be feared, in actual scandalisation.

“It transcends,” was the pronunciation, in a deep voice, of Mrs Prodmore. “Anything so unblushingly shameless I had not dreamed could be. I protest we are threatened with a Gomorrah.”

She was so very décolletée as to figure for the type of self-renunciation offering to strip itself of all that it possessed. That was much, and much in little, yet much in evidence. Her bodice—what there was of it—was sewn with gems. Indeed, her judgment of the new-comers may have been tainted by the fact that madame had declined to be introduced to her—to her, the richest woman in the room. She was already fat, yet she swelled with righteousness. She suggested a little a meat pudding bulging from its basin.

“Perhaps,” said timid Mrs Lawless, whom she addressed, “the French adhere to a standard of propriety that is only different from ours in degree. She may not mean any harm.”

She spoke with anxious diffidence, conscious of the fact that at that very moment her son, Squire Bob Lawless, was dancing with Pamela.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs Prodmore loftily, “but whether she means harm or not, I prefer, with my traditions, to consider such behaviour an outrage. Ignorance does not condone indelicacy.”

In the meanwhile, the dance having come to an end, Pamela and her partner were strolled to within earshot of a saturnine young gentleman who stood glowering in a corner.

“Ecod!” Mr Lawless was saying, “’twas the finest sport, miss. Two broke collar-bones and a splintered wrist, and all for the sake of experiment, as you might call it.”

Pamela looked up with her soft eyes.

“It is cruel,” she said. “I do not like fox-hunting at all—so many giants riding down the one little poor pigmy.”

“Why,” said the other, in a surprised voice, “you’re wilful, miss. Wasn’t the point of it all that ’twas nought but a drag hunt?”

“Comment?” said Pamela.

“With a herring,” explained the squire.

“Well,” said Pamela, “that is just as cruel to the herring.”

She turned round on the instant to the sound of a little explosion of laughter.

“My lord!” she exclaimed.

She dropped her companion’s arm; bowed graciously to him.

“I commit myself to this escort,” she said. “A thousand thanks for the dance, monsieur.”

Poor Nimrod had no choice but to accept his dismissal. He had crowed over his fellow-squireens. He must come down now, a humbled cockerel. He walked away sulkily enough.

“Monsieur,” said Pamela to Ned, “I am glad to have amused you.”

“It is for the first time this evening,” said his lordship grimly.

She was beginning, in a little sputter of fire, “And pray what right have you——” when the expression in his face stopped her. A woman, no doubt, has some spiritual probe for testing the presence of love, as a butterfly feels for honey in a flower.

“None whatever,” said Ned. “It is my unhappiness.”

She looked at him quite kindly. The sweetest babies of pity sat in the blue flowers of her eyes.

“Why have you not ask me to dance?” she said. “Poor Pamela is flouted of all of whom she had the hope to be honoured. You do not desire my hand; no, nor Mr Sherree-den eiser. ‘I am not to lead you out, ma chèrie,’ he say. ‘It is because I am ask to drop the sobstance for the shadow.’ I request of him what he mean. ‘’Tis only the fable of the dog and the piece of meat,’ says he. ‘And how do that concern itself of the question?’ I ask. ‘Why,’ he answer, ‘I am the dog and you are the piece of meat; and that is to say that Pamela is food for reflection’—and then he laugh, and bid me ask of Monsieur Murk to interpret me the fable.”

Her voice was full of tenderness and appeal. Ned, despite some emotion consequent on the mention of his rival, felt as remorseful as if he had wantonly crushed a rose in which lay a sleeping Cupid. He knew he had not asked the girl to dance with him, for only the reason that a morbid sensitiveness impelled him to self-martyrdom—drove his pride and his jealousy to battle; the one ready to resent that an obvious preference was not shown by her for him out of all the world, ready always to fold a wing of pretended indifference over the bleeding wound in his breast; the other ready, on the least provocation, to make a shameless confession of the corroding secrets of its inmost soul. Certainly Providence may be assumed to have its own reason for constituting a disease to be its highest ethical expression. Truth and Love! How have these inoculated one another with the virus drawn from ages of misfaith, till each seems to have become an inextricable constituent of the common plague of jealousy!

“And am I also the piece of meat to you,” says Mistress Pam, “that you will have nussing to speak with me?”

“I will not drop you for the shadow, at least,” cries the other fervently—“no, not as long as I have a tooth in my head!”

So love glorifies bathos. The two stood up together for the next set. Thenceforth Ned moved on air, breathed all the evening the intoxicating oxygen of idolatry. The girl alternately flattered and flouted, wounded and caressed him. He must draw what consolation he could from the fact that Mr Sheridan at least left him a fair field. Now and then he would chance upon view of this gentleman, and always it seemed to him that, as the evening progressed, the convivial face waxed steadily more rubicund, the fine eyes more unspeculative.

Once the party came together over the refreshment trays—the sweetmeats and negus that preceded the final break-up.

“Do not eat so much cake, child,” says madame la gouvernante to Pamela. “It will lie heavy on your chest.”

“Happy cake!” murmurs Sheridan, so that the ladies might not hear him.

But my lord did; and he might have been moved to some resentment had it not been for the other’s obvious condition.

Ned, after parting from the ladies, would walk his long mile home by the solitary echoing road. He needed loneliness; he needed the illimitable graciousness of the open world. Within those shining walls, it seemed to him, he had not been able to think collectedly.

Whither was he hurrying, and in what perplexity of mission? At one moment exalted, at another depressed, he could have thought himself the waif of a destiny in which his reason had no voice.

He looked up at the sky through an overhead tracery of leaves. The blown branches of trees made a tinsel glitter of the brilliant moon. Some roadside aspens pattered with phantom rain. A sense of unreality stole into his mind, half drugging it. The sound of his footsteps was echoed back from a wall he passed. The echo appeared to double and redouble upon itself; the footsteps to come thicker, thronging fast and ever faster, till he fancied an army of shadows must be going by on the opposite side of the way. His brain grew full of the whisper and rustle of their march. The spectral noise became accented by the far clang of voices—the shout across half a world of some vast human force struggling upon a tide of agony.

The long wall ended. He pulled himself together and shook out the ghost of a laugh.

Whither? he thought again, as he strode on. To the goal to which his every desire seemed to be compelling him? But he had no will in the matter. That had been sapped—snapped—deposed in a moment. He was nothing but a log, the stump of a mast, in the surf—now rolled upon the shore, now dragged back and committed to fresh voyagings. His erect philosophy, that had helped him so long over multitudinous waters, was become nothing but a broken wastrel of the sea for Fate to play at pitch-and-toss with. Should he ever again be in the position to recover and splice it, to set sail and escape from the fog and welter of the spindrift in which he now tumbled?

As he reached his gates, he looked up once more at the sky. The moon waded through a stream of cloud.

“She will sink,” he muttered. “Her glitter is already half quenched. Am I in love, or only sickening for a scarlet fever?”

CHAPTER IV.

Pretty early on the morning after the ball Ned rode over to pay his respects to, and inquire after the health of, the ladies. None, apparently, was as yet in evidence; but Mr Sheridan, having information of his coming, sent down a message inviting him up to his bedroom; and thither the young gentleman bent his steps, not loath to avail himself of any excuse for remaining.

He found the viveur of the previous night propped up on his pillows, a towel round his shaven head, a pencil and paper on the counterpane before him. At the dressing-table stood a little common man, in a scratch wig and with a very blue chin, who mixed some powders with small-beer in a tumbler.

“You won’t thank me for introducing you,” said Sheridan to Ned. “Monsieur has not le haut rang (spare thy concern), nor any word of our tongue.”

“Who is he?” said Ned.

“My physician.”

“The deuce he is!”

“Ah! I am under the influence here of a democratic atmosphere. No hand-muffs and silver-headed canes in the economics of Egalité. In Rome, as Rome. Monsieur is, in fact, a beast-leech attached to the household to teach mesdemoiselles how to put Pompon’s tail in splints when it has been caught in the parlour door. He can bleed, rowel, and drench; shoe a horse, or salt a pig. And, egad! now I think on’t, there is his right use to me. For, when a man has made a hog of himself, what better physician does he need than him that hath the knowledge how to cure bacon?”

Deprecatory of the applause that he waited a moment to secure, he called over to the little man by the table: “Dépêche-toi, monsieur! ma gorge est en feu!”

“Attendez, monsieur, attendez!” replied the leech in a thin, hoarse voice: “ayez encore un peu de patience, je vous prie.”

He brought the cup over in a moment. Sheridan sent the liquid hissing down his throat. He gave a sigh of pleasure.

“Ah!” he said, “small-beer and absolution were invented by the devil to tempt men to sin for the sake of the ecstasy of relief they bring.”

He looked at Ned, his fevered eyes watering in the strong glare of sunlight that shot under the half-closed blind.

“You have an enviable complexion, my lord,” said he. “Did you ever, in all your life, experience the need to dose yourself with so much as a mug of tar-water?”

Ned laughed.

“I refuse to lend myself to point a moral,” said he. “Palate is a matter of temperament, and temperament is a cause, not a consequence. Mr Sheridan may find in wine the very stimulant I borrow from country air and exercise.”

“Oh, the country!” said the other, with a groan: “from Tweed to Channel nothing but the market-garden to London.”

“So you think? And yet you stay on here?”

Mr Sheridan shrugged his shoulders. His face seemed to have fallen quite sick and peevish.

“By my own wish?” said he. “But at least I scent liberty at last. Madame (I am abusing no confidence in telling you) contemplates changing her quarters very shortly.”

Ned was conscious that his heart gave a somersault.

“Indeed?” said he, reining-in his emotion. “And for what others?”

“I can’t say. Monseigneur is, I believe, at Brussels. That is all I know.”

“And when is the removal to take place?” said Ned sinkingly.

“Faith! it can’t be too soon for me. Madame, the dear creature, hath ‘spy’ writ large upon her brain. Her tremors and her apprehensions would be ridiculous, were they not tiresome. There is no listening to reason with her. She is convinced she is surrounded by secret agents of the royalty she hath provoked. She lives in hourly fear of assassination for herself, and abduction for her sacred charge. One day she will do this, another, that; bury herself and hers in the caves of Staffa; return to the protection of her illustrious protector. That, I warrant, will be the end o’t. But there is some difficulty in the way—some imperative necessity, as I understand, that forewarning of her return be conveyed to monsieur the duke; and she hath no messenger that she can trust to the task—no prodromos to signal her approach. So day by day she grows more distraught, until I know not what to say for counsel or comfort.”

There was some odd quality in the stealth with which he regarded the young man as he spoke. He saw his words had so far taken effect that Ned was fallen into a musing fit where he sat by the bed. He was too finished an artist in practical joking to ruin the promise of a situation by over-haste. He would drop a suggestion on “kind” soil and leave it to germinate. He knew that a seed thumbed in too deep is often choked from sprouting.

So, having deposited his grain, he took means to dismiss his subject—in the double sense. “Well,” he said, “and that is all that’s to remark on’t. But I was to have put you twenty questions when I asked you to come up: as to the ball, and your enjoyment of it; and as to how far you was satisfied I had held to my share of the compact. Sir, I claim you responsible at least for the state of my head this morning.”

He turned over on his pillow with a moan.

“Zounds!” said he, “small-beer, I find, is like small-talk for deadening one’s faculties. I must commit myself to good Mr Pig-curer, if I would save my bacon.”

Ned secretly thought this a poor capping of a fairly respectable witticism. He would have valued the joke even less as a spontaneous effusion, could he have examined its essays scribbled over the scrap of paper on which Mr Sheridan had been writing before he entered: “Physicians and pork-butchers: both cure by killing: like all butchers, they must kill to cure,” and so on, and so on.

However, he got to his feet immediately and, apologising for his intrusion, made his adieux and left the invalid to his aching cogitations.

These were, perhaps, more characteristic than praiseworthy. Mr Sheridan’s social ethics would always extend a plenary indulgence to practical joking. It was a practical joke to rid oneself of a rival by whatever ruse. His ruse had been to grossly misrepresent to madame the young lord’s financial condition. Quite indefinitely he had succeeded in investing Ned with the character of a needy adventurer. Local evidence as to the reckless philanthropy, visual proof of the inner poverty, of “Stowling,” helped him to the fraud. Madame may have been ambitious for the child of her adoption; she may have become cognisant of the fact that a little tendresse was beginning to show itself in the girl’s attitude towards her grave young suitor; she may have been anxious only to accommodate herself to the wishes of her distinguished guest, whom she fervently admired, and upon whom at this juncture she was greatly dependent for advice and assistance. At any rate, she lent herself to his plans. The two devised a little plot, of which she was to be the ingenuous agent, and my lord, the poor viscount, the victim. Perhaps the understanding between the conspirators was sympathetic rather than verbal. Of whatever nature it was, a certain method of procedure was adopted by both—diplomatically to conciliate; effectively to get rid of. Madame, it must be said, was not attracted to his lordship. Her volatility recoiled from his solemnity. Conscious of the most lofty principles, she could never, when in his company, free herself of the impression that she was being “found out.” She had a shrewd idea that Ned’s respectful subscription to her opinions was in the nature of a moral bribe to secure her favourable consideration of his suit—that secretly he valued her at that cheaper estimate that she secretly knew represented her real moral solvency. When one has a grudge against the superior understanding of a person, it is a thing dear to one’s amour propre to convert that understanding to one’s own uses.

As Ned descended the stairs, madame came suddenly upon him and, welcoming him with quite cordial effusion, drew him into a side room.

She hoped he was not fatigued after the late festivities. As for the members of her own household, they were one and all the victims of a migraine. (She here looked forth a moment, and issued a sharp order to some one to close a little door that led from the back hall into the garden.) Yes, all were enervated—overcome. Mademoiselle was in bed; Pamela was in bed; Mr Sherree-den was in bed. As for herself, no such desirable indulgence was possible. A ceaseless vigilance was entailed upon her. During such moments of relaxation as she permitted herself, she was constrained to wear a mask of gaiety over the shocking anxiety of her soul. She was surrounded by menace and intrigue. There was scarce one she could rely upon—only Mr Sherree-den, and he could little longer afford to be parted from his duties. There was not a soul, even, she could entrust at this time with a letter it was imperative should be conveyed abroad by a confident hand. She had no hesitation in informing monsieur of its direction. It was to monseigneur, the father of the young princess, at present sojourning in Brussels. It was to acquaint monseigneur of the pitiable anxiety of the refugees, and to beg him to order their return at once. But it would be necessary for the messenger to back up the substance of the letter by arguments deduced from a personal knowledge of the condition of the victims; and who, in all her forlorn state, could she find meet to so delicate a mission?

She wept; she clasped her hands convulsively; she apostrophised Heaven. Was this the brilliant, self-confident, rather aggressive chaperon of the night before? Ned listened in something like amazement. He could never have misdoubted the obvious suggestion of her lamentation. As to her sincerity, it is very possible he was completely duped. He was not at all in the plot against himself; and madame had been a notable actress from the days when, at eleven years old, she played the title part in Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide.

“Ah, monsieur!” cried she; “but the joy, all troubles past, of welcoming in our land the amiable friend who should be the means to our returning thither!”

If now the idea of offering himself to the mission first began to take root in Ned’s mind, it was because his jealousy would not tolerate the thought that, failing him, another might be found to serve his mistress with a less questioning devotion. Still, he would not yet commit himself definitely to a course that not only—in the present state of continental ferment—entailed a certain personal risk, but entailed a risk that in the result might effectively separate him from that very fair lady it was his principal wish to serve in the matter. Moreover, it was certainly in his interest to ascertain if it was this same lady’s desire to be so served by him.

“When does madame wish this letter conveyed?” he said gravely, after some moments of deep pondering.

“Oh, indeed!” cried madame, “but varee soon—in two-tree days.”

“And the messenger is to be a sort of outrider to your party?”

“An outrider?—but, in truth. Yet, how far an outrider, shall depend upon his influence with monseigneur.”

Ned bowed.

“I should like to think the matter over,” said he. “It is possible, at least, I may be able to serve madame with an avant-coureur.”

Madame seized his hands in an emotional grasp.

“My friend! my dear friend!” she murmured.

“And now,” said Ned, “with madame’s permission, I will take a turn in the garden.”

Had madame again the impression that she was “found out” of this unconscionable Joseph? She certainly flushed the little flush of shamefulness, and for the moment had not a plausible word at her command. For, indeed, she knew and, what was worse, believed that my lord knew that Pamela was at that very time seated by herself in the little box-arbour amongst the Jerusalem artichokes (the girl’s figure had been plainly visible through the doorway which madame had ordered over-late to be closed); and the sudden realisation of the situation was like a cold douche to her self-confidence. To deny this cavalier, on whatever pretext, the substance of his request, was assuredly to convict herself of having lied as to Pamela’s whereabouts; was to dismiss him at a critical moment; was, possibly, to deprive him of that actual inducement to serve her which an interview with the young lady might confirm. On the other hand, the girl herself may have profited by some indefinite warnings as to the folly of effecting a mésalliance; as to the ineffectiveness of a coronet when it is in pledge to the Jews.

Madame, after a scarcely appreciable moment of hesitation, came to her decision with a charming smile.

It was entirely at monsieur’s disposition, she said. There was not a soul in it, and she would see that monsieur was not disturbed. For herself, the contemplation of flowers resolved many problems that the subtlest sophistries were unable to disentangle.

Ned set foot on the long box-bordered path with his mind in a condition of strange ferment. The glamour of the previous night; the sweet glory of this new bidding to the side of his mistress (over which his soul laughed, as over its own humorous strategy in the hoodwinking of a credulous guardian); the thought that it was in his power to assist to its welfare the very dear object of his solicitude, and, by so assisting, to convert what might otherwise seem a pursuit into a welcome—such fancies combined made of his brain a house of pleasant dreams. All down the bed-rows the scent of blossoming mignonette accompanied him to the arbour at the end of the garden. To his dying day this gentle green flower remained the asphodel of his heaven. Great ships of cloud, carrying freightage of hidden stars, sailed slowly across the sky to ports beyond the vision of the world. Yet there did not seem enough wind to discrown a thistle-head. The lark rose straight as the smoke from the town chimneys, dropping a clew of song into the very gaping throats of his own nestlings in the field. The rattle of a horse’s headstall, the drowsy thunder of rolling skittle-balls, came over the wall from the neighbouring inn as distinct in their every vibration as though the silence of night, in a motionless atmosphere, had merged itself imperceptibly in the life of a day but half awake. And, behold! at the end of the garden was the crystallised expression of all this peace and beauty, the breathing spirit of the roses and of the mignonette. Ned, as he looked down upon her, had a thought that, if she woke, the wind would rise, the rose-leaves scatter, and the cloud argosies dash themselves shapeless on rocks of air.

How pretty she was! Great God, how pretty and how innocent! To him who had fronted stubbornly the storms of passion, who had been sought a sacrifice to the misconsecrated heats of a love whose name in consequence he had learned to loathe, this new power of reverence was most wonderful and most dear. He could have worshipped, had he not loved so humanly.

Mademoiselle was sunk a little back into the leafage of the arbour. Her eyes were closed, her lips a trifle parted. She was cuddled into a pink négligé. Everything she wore seemed to caress her. An open book lay upon her lap, one slender finger serving for listless marker in it.

Suddenly a tiny smile, the ghostliest throb of laughter, flickered at the corners of her mouth. Ned leapt hot all over.

“Oh, monsieur!” murmured the unconscionable witch, as if talking in her sleep, “but are you the doctor?”

“Yes,” said Ned.

She put out a languid hand, never raising her eyelids.

“Madame-maman says it is the cake; but I think it is the Englishman that lies heavy on me.”

“What Englishman?” said Ned.

“My lord the Englishman, monsieur. Is he not the heaviest of all in Bury?”

Ned touched the young healthy pulse as if he handled a wax flower.

“If that is the trouble,” said he, “it is soon dealt with.”

“But how, monsieur? and would you not first see my tongue?” and she put out the tip of a supremely pink organ.

“It is as red as a capsicum,” said Ned.

Pamela burst out laughing. She sat up, her cheeks flushed, her brown hair ruffled on her forehead.

“Oh!” she cried, “you do not say pretty things at all; you are not like Mr Sherree-den.”

“No,” said the young man sadly. “And because I have not his readiness, I must lack his good fortune. Is that the moral of it? But I could be a willing pupil if you would be my tutor.”

“Is it so? I should punish and punish till you wearied of me. Say, then, like Mr Sherree-den, ‘Oh, mon bonté-moi!’ (he does not, you know, speak varee good French); ‘but here is a poor little sick fairy crumpled in a rose petal.’ Hélas! you could not have said that, you solemn man.”

“I could not, indeed; but I should have taken the poor little sick fairy and nursed her upon my heart.”

She looked up at him kindlily and, suddenly, pathetically—

“But I am not sick at all,” she said, “and you must not take my play to your heart.”

Thereat, foolish Ned, reading her words literally, missed his small chance.

“I never did,” he only answered stoutly. “I knew you were not asleep.”

Mademoiselle pouted.

“I do not act so badly, nevertheless,” she said, “when I may have an appreciative audience.”

“And I, at least, am that.”

She shrugged her shoulders, yawned a tiny yawn.

“Well,” she said, “I must not keep monsieur from his business; and monsieur the doctor shall not persuade me to cure too much cake with more.”

She rose, smoothing her rumpled plumes. Ned smiled.

“I will not, since you bid me, take it to heart,” he said. “Had you found me as heavy as you say, you would not last night have voluntarily elected to bear so much of the weight of my company.”

“I sacrificed myself, monsieur, according to my principles, to the good of the community.”

“Pamela,” cried my lord, suddenly pained, “my business is to go on a journey only for the reason that I may serve you!”

She would have resented, without any real feeling of resentment, his familiar use of her name, had not his tone found the sympathetic chord in her that his words could not reach.

“Has madame asked you, then?” she said, with some wonder, some gentleness, in her voice.

“I have resolved to offer myself, if you will give me the one end of a clue of hope to bear along with me.”

“Of what hope, monsieur? Your bargain should be with madame, not with me.”

He would not take her by storm, the aggravating noodle. No doubt that erst fulsome experience of his had distorted his sense of proportion in such matters.

“’Tis no bargain, of course,” he cried, in great distress. “To give me hope is to hand me nothing but a promissory note without a signature. But I would kiss it none the less for the sake of the name that might be there.”

But why did he not kiss the jade herself?

“Mon ami,” she said very kindly, “you must not concern yourself so of the favour of a poor foolish maid, who could return you, ah! so little for the noble trust you place in her; who is not even the mistress of herself.”

“Pamela!” he cried, in sudden agony, “you are not bound to another?”

“I am bound only to those who have protected and cared for me,” she answered. “It is no time this, when danger threatens, to think of separating myself from our common fortune.”

Her young bosom heaved; her eyes even filled with tears.

“Ah!” she murmured, “there is nothing invites me but the peace of the cloister. To escape from the turmoil and the menace—to know no interest of love or fortune in the company of God’s dear prisoners!”

Perhaps she only quoted from the commonplace book of mère adoptive. At least the picture she conjured up seemed so real as to fetch a little sob from her. Ned’s heart was rent by the sound.

“My dear,” he said simply, “I would not persuade you against your conscience. God knows, in any bargain between us I should be the only gainer. I have nothing to offer you that is worth the offer but my love, dear. That is for you, in stress or sunshine, whenever you care to whistle for it. Now I will say no more; but I will cross the channel, at the very bidding of madame la comtesse, and pave the way as I can for your return. And I shall carry hope with me, Pamela. It is the beggar’s scrip; and what am I but a beggar!”

For the first time he forgot the little red heels that were still in his pocket. They were often to prove a sharp reminder of themselves, however.

Did the girl read his figurative speech in a too literal sense? Let us hope she was never influenced by a consideration so worldly. She held out her hand to him. Her blue eyes swam with tears.

“Perhaps, in happier times to come,” she said—and so they parted.

CHAPTER V.

Twice again only, before he started for the Continent—as he persisted in thinking at her sole behest—was Ned vouchsafed the partial company of his mistress. In each instance he must forego the desire of his heart for a personal interview. Such, by accident or design, was denied him. But he had the satisfaction of being received by madame with an ease and a familiarity that were significant of a quite particular confidence.

On the first occasion he happened upon the ladies out walking in a country lane. They were botanising, under the tutorship of a Bœotian new to him—a thin, clerical-looking individual, with a little head, appropriately like an anther. The house at Bury was, indeed, a perfect surprise-tub for the uncommon personalities it seemed to have an endless capacity for turning out. Its staff was, perhaps, twenty all told; yet this number, in view of its omniferous faculties, would often appear as self-reproductive as a stage dozen of soldiers walking itself round a rock into a company.

Madame, who was engaged in “receiving” from monsieur her stick-in-waiting the names of débutantes hedge-flowers presented to her, waved a gracious end to the ceremony, and, greeting my lord as if he were a dear friend, invited him to pace beside her.

“It is well timed,” she said. “Monsieur has received my letter? And will Friday suit our so generous cavalier to depart?”

Ned bowed with his never-failing gravity.

“Yes,” he said simply.

The lady clasped her hands.

“Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed, with a quite melodramatic fervour, “it is the passing of the cloud. After all the tempest-tossing, to see the shore in sight!”—and she hastily lifted her skirts from contact with a roadside puddle.

“Monsieur,” said a little voice almost at Ned’s ear, “do you know what is a corolle and what a nectaire?”

In some mood of impudence or mischief Pamela was come to give her company unbidden. She would pretend not to see the warning gestures of la gouvernante. She held in her hand the parts of a dismembered flower, and she looked up at the young man as she stepped, light as his own sudden thoughts, at his side. She felt a little warmth, a little pity towards him. He was going far away, and to serve her. That she knew. It was in the nature of a tiny confidence between them. Her glance was appealing as a child’s, asking not to be left.

And as for Ned, the sight of this sweet face close to him so inflamed his heart that his formal speech took fire.

“I know when I look at you,” he said; “they are mademoiselle’s cheek and mouth classified.”

In the near prospect of his banishment he spoke out reckless of consequences. Perhaps the unexpected answer took the girl herself by surprise. She hung her head and fell back a little.

“Mademoiselle,” cried Ned, “if I might take thence a rose to wear for a favour!”

“Oh, fie!” she answered, “that is not even original; it is to repeat Mr Sherree-den’s foolishness. And they are not roses at all.”

“Nor rouge,” said Ned, “though you once implied it.”

“No,” she said, with a pert glance at her gouvernante; “madame-maman does not approve. But sometimes to rub them with a geranium petal—that is not immoral, is it?”

“I don’t know,” cried the young man; “but the geranium shall be my queen of flowers from this time!”

“Pamela!” cried madame, in desperate chagrin over every word that passed between the two, yet impotent, under existing circumstances, to give expression to her annoyance; but she ventured to summon the child pretty peremptorily to come and walk beside her, and only in this order was my lord destined to enjoy for an hour a divided pleasure.

But on the second and final occasion of his meeting her, chance and the girl were even less favourable to him. He was to start for Belgium on the Friday morning, and on the Thursday evening he walked over to Bury to receive his instructions. He found signs of confusion in the house—boxes choking the passages, personal litter of all kinds brought together as if for removal; and in the drawing-room a little concert—such as madame loved to extemporise—was in process of performance, with Mr Sheridan, in mighty boisterous spirits, for only listener. He invited Ned to a seat beside him, and clapped him on the shoulder.

“’Tis admirable,” said he; “not concert, but concertation. There is no conductor but a lightning-conductor could direct these warring elements.”

Madame, indeed, set the time on her harp; but it was the time that waits for no man. A Bœotian—of whom there were a half-dozen in the orchestra—might pant, a mere winded laggard, into his flute; another might toilfully climb the last bars on his fiddle, as if it were a gate; a third might pound up the long hill of his double-bass, and cross its very bridge with a shriek like a view-holloa: the issue was the same—none was in at the death. Pamela, in the meantime, tinkled on a triangle; Mademoiselle Sercey shook a little panic cluster of sledge-bells whenever madame glanced her way; Mademoiselle d’Orléans played on the side-drum amiably, and with all the execution of a toy-rabbit. It was all very merry, and the girls giggled famously; and Ned closed his eyes and tried to think that the mellow ring of the steel was from the forging by Love of his bolts on a tiny anvil.

By-and-by the piece ended amidst laughter, and madame came from her place and conducted her cavalier into another room.

“It is to prove yourself the most disinterested,” she said. “How can I acquit myself of gratitude to my friend—to my knight-errant?”

Ned, in the hot longing of his soul, was near stumbling upon a suggestion as to the reward it was in her power, if not to bestow, at least to influence. But he remembered his promise to Pamela, and was fain to let the opportunity pass.

Then madame, to some fine play of emotion, produced a couple of letters under seal—the first to monsieur le duc, the second to her own son-in-law, M. Becelaer de Lawoestine. To the latter gentleman’s address in Brussels she begged my lord to proceed in the first instance. The Belgian nobleman would give him honourable welcome, no less for her sake than for monsieur’s most obvious merits. Moreover, De Lawoestine would furnish him with precise directions as to where monseigneur was at the moment to be found; if, indeed, monseigneur was not at the very time the other’s guest in Brussels.

These were Ned’s simple instructions. There were tender messages to madame’s daughter; suggestions as to the attitude most effective to be assumed towards monseigneur by madame’s plenipotentiary; references to the agony of suspense madame must suffer until she should learn the result of her envoy’s mission. Madame, in truth, either acted her part so well, or lived in it so naturally, as to half convince herself, we must believe, that she was not acting at all.

“We are ready, as you see, to start the moment monseigneur’s command shall reach us,” she said. “We pray, monsieur, for the prosperous termination to your voyage.”

Her eyes were moist; she impulsively extended her hand, which his lordship less impulsively kissed. His lips, indeed, unpractised in gallantry, were in pledge to a dream; his understanding, also. Had it not been, he might have inclined to the question, How comes it that madame, in direct communication with the Duke of Orleans, is unable to acquaint me certainly as to that prince’s present address?

Ned returned to the drawing-room, prepared to repudiate any suggestion of the glamour that might be held to attach itself to a mild form of heroism. His modesty was not put to the test. The company accepted him in a frolic mood. It was full of laughter and thoughtlessness. He was rallied only on his serious mien. Pamela, wilful and radiant, would acknowledge him for no more than the means to a jest. Her affectation of indifference was secretly a stimulus to the spirits of two, at least, of the party. For a household depressed by the gloom of impending misfortune, the atmosphere was singularly volatile.

Not to the end did Ned receive one hint that his self-sacrifice was appreciated and applauded; and at last he must make his adieux without the comfort of even a sympathetic glance from a certain direction to cheer him on his way.

He had put on his hat and coat, had reached the very porch on his way forth, when a light step sounded behind him.

“Good-bye, monsieur!”

“God bless you, Pamela!”

“Monsieur, it is only the rose you asked for.”

The door slammed behind him. He held, half stupidly, in his hand a little sweet-smelling stalk with some crushed scarlet flowers.

“My God—oh, my God!” he whispered, “it is part of herself.”

CHAPTER VI.

It was on a day of the last week of broiling July that Ned knocked at the door of a house in the Rue de Ragule, near the Schaerbeck Gate in Brussels, and desired to be shown into the presence of M. le Comte de Lawoestine.

Now it seemed at the outset that his mission was in vain, for monsieur was, and had been for many days, away from home, and it was impossible for one to say when he would return. And whither had he gone? Ah! that was known only to himself, and, possibly, yes, to madame la comtesse. And was madame away also? Madame? Oh! c’était une autre pair de manches. Madame, it would appear, was upstairs at that very moment.

Ned sent up his letter of introduction and—after a rather tiresome interval of waiting—was shown into a room on the first floor. Here, to his astonishment, was the mid-day meal in progress at a long polished table. Two ladies—one seated at either side—continued eating with scarcely a look askance at the stranger; a third, placid and débonnaire, rose from her place at the head of the board and, advancing a step or two, held out her hand.

“I have read maman’s letter,” she said, but speaking in French in a little drowsy voice, “and I have the pleasure to make you welcome, monsieur.”

She then returned to her seat, and bidding a servant lay a cover for monsieur, went on with her dinner. The very antichthon of the galvanic Genlis spirit seemed to slumber in her rosy cheeks. She had settled down to a lifelong “rest,” like an actress availing herself only of the art of her profession to play herself into a fortunate match.

“Monsieur le comte is away?” said Ned, as he took his seat by one of the silent ladies.

“He is gone south to join his regiment. He will be at Liége for a few days to inspect the fortifications. I do not know, I, what it all portends. They say the air is full of hidden menace. Anyhow, what does M. Lafayette purpose in bringing an army of ragamuffins to the frontier? He is a nobleman and a gentleman. I saw him once at Belle-Chasse. Ah! the dear industrious days! But I prefer a life of ease, monsieur; do not you? To gild baskets and work samplers, with the sun on one’s head in the hot white room! Mother of Christ, it is hot enough in Brussels! One may think one hears the sun drop grease upon the stones in the street, when Fanchon spits upon a flat-iron in the kitchen. Have you ever known a summer so sultry? The sky is packed with thunder like the hold of a ship. Then will come the rain one day and swell it and swell it, and the decks will burst asunder and the ribs explode apart. I do not like thunder, monsieur—do you? It is disturbing, like the play of children. Yet we are to have thunder enough soon, they say.”

So she talked on, in a tuneless soft voice; and there seemed no particular reason why she should ever come to an end. She never paused for an answer or for a word, nor often for breath, which long habit had taught her the art of nursing. She asked no questions as to her mother; did not, indeed, so much as allude to her until Ned indirectly forced a reference.

“And where is monsieur le duc?” said he, cutting in during a momentary ellipsis that was caused by her indetermination in choosing between two dishes of vegetables. She did not answer till she had decided—upon taking some of each. Then she turned her soft eyes on him in a little wonder.

“Monsieur——?” she began, as if she had not heard.

“The Duke of Orleans,” said Ned.

“Indeed, I do not know. He should be in Paris.”

“He has left here, then?”

“Here? Brussels, do you mean? He has not, to my knowledge, been in Brussels these six months—no, not since January, when he came to meet the demoiselle Théroigne on her return from the Austrian prisons, and conducted her back to the capital.”

“Théroigne!” exclaimed Ned in faint amazement.

“So she is called, I believe,” went on the placid creature, oblivious of the little emotion she had caused. “Monsieur has heard of her, no doubt. She is beautiful, and of easy virtue, they say. At her house in the Rue de Rohan the most violent propagandists assemble nightly to discuss the overthrow of the present social conditions. I wish they would leave them alone: they are very reasonable, I think—to all at least who have assured incomes. She is quite a force in Paris, this woman. They sent her some time last year en mission to these Netherlands to preach the new religion. But she was arrested by the agents of the Emperor and conveyed to Vienna, whence she was dismissed no later than last January. Monseigneur was hunting with M. de Lawoestine at the time, and he heard somehow, and came straight on to Brussels, and carried the demoiselle Théroigne away.”

“And that was the last you have seen of him? Yet your mother had no doubt but that he was in this neighbourhood.”

“Oh, maman?” cried madame, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders. “But she is as full of fancies as this mushroom is of grubs.”

“Indeed,” said Ned, quite dumfoundered, “I think you must be misinformed as to monsieur le duc.”

“Very well,” she said indifferently. “It is possible, of course. M. de Lawoestine is not communicative, nor am I curious. There is no reason why they should not be in Liége together at this very moment.”

There was every reason, however, against such a meeting; but madame had not the shadow of a diplomatic acumen.

“I must follow your husband to Liége, then,” said Ned.

“You will at least lie here for the night, monsieur?”

“A thousand pardons, madame. My business is of the most pressing; and you yourself confess an ignorance as to the movements of monsieur le comte.”

“Mon Dieu! I never trouble my head about them.”

“With madame’s permission I will bid her adieu at the end of the meal.”

“As you will, monsieur. And if you do not find monsieur le duc in Liége?”

“Then I shall go on to Paris.”

“I hope, then, monsieur’s passports are in order?”

“They take me into France by way of the Low Countries. Madame, your mother, is responsible for them.”

“She is at any rate a woman of business. Nevertheless, the borders are disturbed. I wish monsieur a very fair journey. I trust he will not be struck by the lightning; but—Mother of Christ! I think there is a storm coming such as we have never seen. I shall take some peaches and some cake, and sit in the cellars till it is over.”

* * * * * * * *

My lord reached Liége on the morning of the twenty-ninth of July—a day of sullen omen to France. The early noon hours he spent in dully strolling through the streets of the antique city, now grown so familiar to him. He had called at M. de Lawoestine’s address (as supplied him by the young madame), only to find that the count was absent on some expedition and would not return till the morrow. Of the Duke of Orleans’s presence in the town he could obtain no tittle of evidence.

Now he was dull because misgivings were beginning to oppress him, and because the weather made an atmosphere appropriate to the confusion in his brain. Certainly he did not actually face, in the moral sense, the question as to whether or no he had been intentionally committed to a fool’s errand. He could not have conceived how so elaborate a jest should be planned and carried through without suspicion awaking in his heart. Naturally, knowing the soundness of his own financial position, he was not conscious of the supposed bar to his suit. His uneasiness turned rather on his new conception of Madame de Genlis as a woman of that patchwork practicalness that leaves to chance the working out of its design. She may have intended that monsieur le duc should be in Brussels—it would, doubtless, have been convenient to her to find him there—and therefore she may have, through Ned, acted upon her desire rather than upon her information. But, if this were so, what a crazy perspective of possibilities was opened out! to what an endless wild-goose chase might he not be sworn! And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!

There was such anguish in the thought as to make him augment his pace till his forehead was wet with perspiration. He had come out to escape the intolerable oppressiveness of confinement in an inn. It was such weather as he had experienced upon his first visit to the town—good God! how many years ago was that now? Yet there seemed fewer changes in it than in himself. It was such weather, but intensified—and, with that, at least, his own condition kept pace. He had a warmer core in his breast than had been there before. But the tall, narrow streets, the cool churches, the blazing markets—these had no longer the glamour of the past. His thoughts were always in shadowy English lanes, in fragrant English rooms. A girl’s laugh in the street would make him lift his head as he paced; a jingle of bells on the harness of some sleepy Belgian horse would recall to him with a thrill the tinkle of a triangle. And, for the rest, the sweet pungency of geranium flowers he carried always in his breast, like a very garden of pleasant memories.

And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!

He looked up with a sudden start. Something—he could not describe what—like the silence that succeeds the heavy slamming of a door, seemed to have gripped the world. The heat for days had been immense and cruel. Men, roysterers and blasphemers, were come to a mean inclination to expend what little breath was left to them in prayer. A habit of stealthily examining the face of the heavens for signs significant of the approaching “black death” of the storm was common. The water seemed to steam in the kennels, the lead to crackle in the gutters. Some inhuman outcome, it was predicted, of these unnatural conditions must result. And now at last had the plague-stroke fallen?

Whatever it was—this inexplicable turn of the wheel—the tension of existence drew to near snapping-point under it. Poor souls crept for pools of shadow as if these were Bethesdas; here and there one dropped upon the pavement, and was rescued, as under fire, by a companion; the wail of half-stifled infants came through open windows; the sun was a crown of thorns to the earth.

The streets, at the flood of noon, grew almost untenable. Ned—perhaps from some vague association of ideas, the result of his dreamings upon English lanes—left the town and, with the desire for trees compelling him, took half-unconsciously the Méricourt road. It may have been instinct merely that directed him. He had thought since his coming—how could he help it?—of Théroigne, of Nicette, of all his old connection with the strange little village. But he had no desire to renew his acquaintance with the people of that ancient comedy—so, now, it seemed to him. And surely by this time a new piece must hold the stage; the old masks must be crumbled away or repainted to other expressions. It was so long ago. He had leapt the boundary-river of youth in the interval. He could have no place at last in the life of the little hamlet by the woods.

It may have been the sudden realisation of this, his grown emancipation, that tempted him all in a moment, and quite strangely, to the desire to look once more upon the scenes that, until within the last few minutes, he had had no least wish to revisit. It may have been that he was driven onward simply by the goad of his most haunting distress—that fancy of Mr Sheridan greatly profiting by a rival’s absence—and by the thought of the intolerable period of mental suspense and bodily discomfort he must suffer down there in the town, until his interview with M. de Lawoestine should give a direction one way or the other to his mission. Such considerations may have urged him; or—with a bow of deference to the necessitarians—no consideration at all, but a fatality.

For, indeed, this storm—an historical one—that was to break, seemed so inspired an invasion of order by the prophets of anarchy, as that it appeared to impress under its banner, as it advanced, all predestined agents (however individually insignificant) of that social and religious havoc of which its ruinous course was to be typical.

Ned, as he toiled on the first of the hill, looked up at the sky. It was as the wall of a nine-days’ furnace—his eyes could not endure the terror of the light. Nor, from his position, could they see how, far down on the horizon, a mighty draft of cloud was slipping over the world, like the sliding lid of a shallow box, shutting into frightful darkness a panic host of souls.

Here it was better than in the town; but the heat still was terrific. He was yet undecided as to whether to go on or rest where he had paused, when a carter, with a tilted waggon, came up the road behind him. For the weird opportuneness of it, this might have been Kühleborn himself. The man, as it appeared, was bound for the farther side of Méricourt. Ned, seeing the chance offered him to view from ambush, accepted his unconscious destiny, struck his bargain, and slipped under the canvas.

Kühleborn cried up his team. The sick day turned, moaning among its distant trees like a delirious troll.

* * * * * * * *

The lodestone to all this dark force of electricity that came up swiftly over the verge of the world, rising from the caldron of the East, where inhuman things are brewed! Was it an iron cross standing high in the roadway of a populous bridge; a cross that seemed to crane its gaunt neck looking ever over a wandering concourse of heads to the horizon, gazing, like St Geneviève, for the cloudy coming of an Attila; a cross held up, as it were, before the towers of Paris—a Retro Satanas to the menacing shapes that, emerging from chaos, threatened the ancient order, the ancient dynasty, the ancient religion;—the cross, indeed, on the bridge of Charenton? For in Charenton that day was pregnant conference, was a famous banquet to Marseillais and Jacobin, was sinister tolling of the death-knell of royal France. And what if the bell swung without a clapper! The very air it displaced, reeling from its onset like foam from a prow, caught the whisper of death in its passing, and carried it on to the cross.

The death of royalty and of religion; the desecration of the tabernacles; the spilling of the kingly chrism and trampling of the Host! As night at last shut upon the boiling day, concentrating the heat, the cross on the now lonely bridge stiffened its back and stood awaiting the storm. That must fly far before it could reach the pole of its attraction. But it was approaching. The cross could feel the very ribs of the world vibrating under the terrific trample of its march. At present inaudible; but there came by-and-by little vancouriers of sound, moaning doves of dismay that fled on the wind, as before a forest fire. These flew faster and more furious, fugitives in a moment before the distant explosion of artillery. The rain began to fall in heavy drops, like life-blood from the lungs of the heavens. The earth sighed once in its sleep ... in an instant a great glare licked the town....

Hither and thither, swayed, bent, but stubborn; now shoulder to shoulder with the hurricane; now clawing at the stones to save itself from being wrenched from its socket; now stooping a little to let a flying charge overleap it—through half the night the cross stood its ground, barring the road to Paris. Then at length a bolt struck and shivered it where it stood.

“It is gone!” shrieked the storm; “the way to Paris lies open. The last of the symbols of an ancient reverence is broken and thrown aside!”

* * * * * * * *

To Ned in the woods of Méricourt was vouchsafed a foretaste of this tempest that rose and travelled so swiftly; that, having for its siderite the pole-star of all revolution, rushed across a continent in fire so rabid as that it expended nine-tenths of its force before it might reach and charge with its remaining strength the electric city—the nerve-drawn city that had shrilled into the night that encompassed it, crying for reserves of dynamism lest at the last it should sink and succumb. But if the storm brought small grist to the actual mill, the morning, when it broke, voiceless and dripping, revealed sufficient evidence of how deadly had been its threshing throughout the fields of its advance. Over the north-eastern noon, and flying, a dull high monster, up the valley of the Meuse—from Charleroi to Maubeuge and across the border; down with a swoop upon St Quentin, and on with a shriek and crash into and through the woods of Soissons; opening out at last, from Pantin to Vitry, as if to invest the city and slash at it with a reaping-hook of fire—so the force had come and passed, like a tidal wave of flame, leaving a broad wake of ruin and desolation. On all the league-long roads converging to the central city were fragments of broken and twisted railings, of riven trees, of thatch and rick and chimney; on many was the sterner wreckage of human beings—poor Jacques and Jacqueline struck down and torn by branch or flame as they drove their slow provision carts towards the capital through the furious darkness. Not a dying Christ at a cross-track but the storm demon had found and shattered on his blazing anvil. The pitiful symbols of the old love, of the old belief—one by one he had splintered and flung them as he swept on his road. Nor only the symbols of the old faith, but of the new order. For entering in the end the very gates of the city, he had driven with a desperate rally of ferocity at certain sentinels ensconced dismally in their boxes against the railings of public buildings, and, consuming them, had committed their ashes to the consideration of the anarchy to which he had rushed to subscribe.

Such revelations were all for the morrow; and in the meantime Ned was become a little fateful waif of the first processes of the force.

The storm came upon him when alighted in the deep woods behind the chateau. Passing under cover through Méricourt a few minutes earlier, he had peeped through his tilt, scanning the familiar scenes with a strange little emotion of memory. Feeling this, he had almost regretted his venture. Perhaps the emotion was accountable, he thought, to the heat—to the re-enacting of an atmosphere that was charged with suggestion. He could—and did—recall a vision by the village fountain—the vision of a girl, all bold outline and colouring, standing with her arms crooked backwards under her lifted hair. He could recall another figure coming up the field-path hard by—a face of pearly shadows and wondering blue eyes under a great fragrant load of grasses. These blue eyes haunted him in the retrospect, even while he shut his own angrily upon the little ghostly impression. Why could he not dismiss the thought of them from his mind? Why had he submitted himself to the influence of the place at all?

It was too late now to retreat. His carter—a sleepy Liégeois, attired appropriately in a hoqueton, or smock, like a night-gown—led his team stolidly by fountain and “Landlust,” past church and smithy, and so through the village into the forest road beyond. Ned, in the darkness, felt in his breast for his talisman, his tiny packet of geranium flower; and bringing out his hand scented, kissed it. Then, restored thereby to reason, in the thick of the woods he hailed his jehu to a stop, descended, and, paying liberally for his journey, plunged amongst the trees.

At once the shadow of an impending fear took him in grip. The earth, he could have thought, lay rigid in a dry fever of terror. The shade he had so much coveted fell around him like a living shroud. He had always an unreasonable dread of what lay behind the curtain of trunks before him. He moved on purposeless and prickling with apprehension. Had it not been for very shame he would have turned and fled for the open, daring any meeting in the village rather than this nameless dead solitude. But he forced himself to proceed, mentally assigning himself for goal that old withered leviathan in the clearing that was the centre of some strange associations. He had been curious long ago, he admitted, to look upon this monster since the legend of divinity had attached to it. He would go so far now and satisfy his eyes, then turn and make for air and light.

Suddenly he fancied he heard far away the rumble of the receding waggon-wheels. A numb stillness succeeded. The earth seemed to breathe its last, and a napkin of cloud was softly flung over the dead face of it. The lungs of the day fell in; a few large bitter drops slipped from the closed lids of the heavens.

Straight, and in a moment, Ned sprang alert to a sense of peril. This ominous oppressiveness was nothing but the forereach of a swiftly advancing thunderstorm—but the trees and every green spire toppling into cloud an invitation to its own destruction! He must race for cover—and whither? The little hut beyond the clearing! It presented itself to him in a flash. He set off running.

The very enforced action was a tonic to his nerves. As he sped, the darkness gathered around him deep and deeper. He ran in a livid twilight. Then on the quicker beat of a pulse the wood was torn with fire from hem to hem. He was dazzled, half-shocked to a pause for an instant; but there had been a panic sound to drive him forward again directly—a huge tearing noise within the monstrous slam that had trodden upon the heels of the blaze. He could only guess what this portended. At the very first explosion a tree of the forest had been struck and riven.

Now he scurried so fast that the breath sobbed a little in his throat. He had a feeling that the Force was dodging him, heading him off from reach of shelter. Not a soul did he meet, but formless shadows seemed to cry him on from deep to lonelier deep of the maze. Then again a sudden glare took him in the face like a whip; and at once the Furies of the storm burst from restraint and danced upon the woods in fire and water, rehearsing the very carmagnole of the Terror.

All in a moment the fugitive broke into the clearing he sought, but had dreaded he would miss. Even as he ran—half deafened, yet relieved by the uproar that had succeeded a silence as awful as it was inhuman—he must slacken his pace in view of the towering giant that dominated his every strange memory connected with the place. Suddenly he stopped altogether, staring at the great tumorous trunk. Where had he read or heard that beech-trees were secure from stroke by lightning? Should he stand by, here under shelter of the enormous withered arms? In his trouble he might scarcely notice how the whole character of the isolated spot in which he stood was converted from that that figured in his memory. Yet he took it in vaguely by the sickly light—the blue-painted iron railings, having a locked wicket, that fenced in the sacred bole; the gleaming silver hearts hung here and there about the bark; the cropped ribbon of sward that encircled the tree. Yet upon this green, for all its cultivated trimness, he could have thought the underwood was encroached; and dimly he recalled St Denys’s prophecy: “If in years to come thou tell’st me this charmed circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.” Surely the idle prediction was strangely verified.

Even where he stood, for all the little shelter of the high branches, the tempest beat the breath out of his body. Every moment the crash and welter and uproar took a more hellish note and aspect: he felt he could not stand it much longer.

Suddenly, twisting about from a vision of fierce light, he caught a startled glimpse of something he had hitherto failed to notice. The narrow track that had once led through the heart of the thicket to the hut amongst the trees was a narrow track no longer. It had been opened out and greatly widened, so as to give passage to a tiny chapel that stood at the close of a short vista of trunks.

With a gasp of relief, Ned raced for this unexpected refuge, dashed up a step, threw himself against the door, and half stumbled into a void beyond it. The door flapped to behind him. He stood, panting, in a little crypt of scented gloom. Somewhere in front a single ruby star glowed unwavering—a core of utter peace and quiet.

CHAPTER VII.

The thunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It burned without a flutter, diffusing, even, the slightest, gentlest radiance throughout the tiny building. Ned, from his position near the door, could make out the whitewashed walls and ceiling; the wee square windows glazed with twilight as sleek and dusky as oxydised silver; the little litter of chairs about the floor; the altar overhung by some indistinguishable dark picture; most suggestively, most spectrally, the very painted statue at whose feet the star itself was glowing.

He stepped softly towards the shrine. A dozen paces brought him almost within touch of it—and of something else. A woman was crouched against the pedestal of the image, her hands clasped high on the stone, her face buried in the curve of her left arm. In the incessant throb and flash of the lightning through the little windows, he could see the soft heave of her shoulders, the shredded glints of light running up and down her hair as she drew quick breaths like one in terror. Something, in the same moment, convinced him that she was aware of his entrance; that, in the insane relief engendered of company, she was struggling to present as spiritual preoccupation the appearances of extreme fear. If this were so, she fought in vain to save her self-respect. Her collapse, it was evident, had been too abject; to rally from it on the mere prick of pride was an impossibility. Here to her, lost and foundered in hell, had come a first presence of human sympathy.

It was sympathy. In the dusk, in the endless flash and roll, and in the heavy roaring of the rain on the roof, Ned’s spirit, reaching across a reeling abyss, felt that this fellow-creature was in mortal terror. Too diffident, nevertheless, to make a first advance, he compromised with his pity by seizing a chair and dragging it towards him, that the very rough jar of its legs on the boards should be sound assurance to the other of a human neighbourhood. The little instinctive act, fraught with kindliness, touched off the nerve of endurance. As he dropped into the seat he had pulled forward, the prostrate figure, detaching itself from the pedestal, came suddenly writhing and crouching over the few yards of floor that separated them, and, throwing itself at his feet, put up a mad groping hand.

“I am dying of fear!” it whispered.

Ned caught the hand in a succouring grip. He could see only the glimmer of a white face raised to his. He was bending down to give it words of assurance, when to a hellish crash the whole building seemed to leap into liquid fire—to sink, weltering, into a black and humming void. The shock, the noise, had been thickly stunning rather than ear-splitting. Here, in the chapel, they were too close to the cause to suffer the sound perspective that shatters the brain. They might have been the stone, the kernel, from which the force itself had burst on all sides.

By slow degrees Ned’s eyes recovered their focus, until he could make out once more the ghostly blotch of a face looking up into his. Neither of these two, beyond an involuntary jerk of response to the enormous flame and detonation, had stirred from the attitude into which, it would almost appear, they had been stricken. The actual terror of the one, the sympathy of the other, seemed welded by the flash into a single expression of fatality. In the lonely chapel, amidst wrack and storm, to each the spectre of a memory had suddenly materialised, revealing itself amazingly significant.

“I must go,” muttered Ned, all in a moment. He spoke confusedly, trying to withdraw his hand. But the other soft clutch resisted: the other half-deafened ears could yet essay to catch the import of the murmur.

“You won’t leave me—here alone?” she said. “Oh, I shall die of the fear!”

She could waive before him all pretence of her possessing the divine favour or protection. It was her rapture that this man—who had again stepped across the years of darkness into her life—knew her soul; her rapture to woo him by the seduction of her surrender to his nobler understanding. His spirit darkened; yet, knowing her fearfulness of old, he could not in common humanity forsake her till the terror was past.

So they sat on in silence, she flung at his feet, holding his hand, while the flame and fury expended themselves overhead. Once or twice he was conscious that her lips were helping the office of her fingers; and he flushed shamefully in the darkness, yet would not seem to condone her offence—her terrible sacrilege, even, under the circumstances—by so much as noticing it. But he thought of the little flower-packet in his breast; and he cursed his bitter folly that, after such a warning as he had already had, he should have ventured himself wantonly within the charmed influence of this silken-skinned witch.

Suddenly, it might almost be said, the tempest fled by. It passed as rapidly as it had come, travelling westwards on a flooded current of wind. The noise, the glare, ceased; light grew on the dim-washed walls; the dark picture above the altar revealed itself a pious representation of the very subject that had founded the chapel. There the saint stood in effigy for all the world to worship: here she knelt self-confessed at the feet of the one man for whose hot reprobation she yearned, so long as it would kiss in pity where it had struck. Ned glanced down at the lifted face. It may have suggested in its expression some secret, half-unconscious triumph. He tore away his hand—sprang to his feet, as the clouds broke outside and sunshine came into the place.

“You must let me go,” he said. “Your saints will be enough to protect you now.”

She rose hurriedly, and stood beside him. There was something new and indescribable in her air and appearance—it might have been the mere maturity of self-love. Whatever her stress of mind during these three years, its effect had not been to warp and wither her physical beauty. Even the little angles of the past were rounded off. She was developed—a riper, more perilous Lamia.

“Hush!” she whispered, pointing to the altar, “the tabernacle!”

He gave a low little laugh.

“What!” he said, dropping his voice nevertheless, “is the presence more real to you than to me? Will you still pretend? We are alone, Nicette.”

Alone! the word was soft music to her.

“No,” she said, coming after him as he strode towards the door, “I will pretend to nothing—nothing, with you.”

She put out a hand and gently detained him.

“Oh!” she said, a very hunger in her voice and eyes, “to see you again—to see you again! Why are you here? You did not follow me? No one knew I was in the wood; and I was caught by the storm. My God, my God! to be near it all—in the midst—and the curse of heaven awake! It is folly, is it not, that talk of retribution—the folly of sinners and the opportunity of priests? Here was I alone, for all hell to torture; and, instead, you come upon me unawares!”

He stood dumfoundered that she could thus bare her soul to him. She had no shame, it seemed, but the sweet exalted shame of the seductress: her eyes dwelt upon him in ecstasy.

“Whence do you come?” she went on, in a soft panting voice. “But what does it matter, since you are here! I knew in the end you would return. This—this” (she put her hand upon her bosom)—“Oh, it is a fierce magnet that would have drawn you across the world!”

He pulled at the door—let in a lance of brilliant light that struck full upon his face. Something in its expression appeared to startle her. She leaned forward and uttered a sudden miserable cry.

“Where have you been—what have you done! My God, let me look!”

The next instant she backed from him a little, throwing her hands to her eyes as if she were blinded.

“It is there,” she cried, “what I have longed and prayed for; but it is not for me!”

He recovered his voice in a fury.

“Prayed!” he cried. “Are such prayers, from such a source, answered? Stand off, for shame! This meeting is all an accident. I have neither sought, nor desired, to see you. It is an accident—do you hear?”

He tore open the door, jumped the step, ran a few paces, and stopped, with an exclamation of sheer astonishment. A huge ruin of trunk and branch closed his vista. The old woodland monarch, the type of stately quincentennial growth and decline, was shattered where it stood. At the last, facing its thousandth tempest, it had been wounded to death in the forefront of the battle. The brand had struck its mightiest branch, tearing it from its socket; and the crashing limb in its downfall had wrenched apart the trunk, revealing a great hollow heart of decay.

The quiet drip and fall from loaded leaves; the faint rumble of the retreating storm; the steam from the hot-soaked grass—Ned was conscious of them all as he stood a moment in awe. Then he hurried forward again—up to the very scene of the disaster.

The ruin was complete; the silver hearts were fused or vanished; the sacred fence was whirled abroad, in twisted, fantastic shapes. So much for the immunity of beech-trees. He could hardly dare to face the moral of his escape.

But he must face another as terrible, if more impersonal. It presented itself to him on the instant—a little heart within the heart—a poor decayed fragment of humanity sunk deep in the vegetable decay of the exposed hollow. At first, mentally stunned, and confused, moreover, by this arabesque of ruin, he failed to realise that what he looked upon was other than some accident of rubbish. It rested down near the ground upon what had once been the bottom of a deep well of eaten timber. It had, strangely enough, the appearance of a sleeping child.

He took a quick step forward. His very heart seemed to gasp. God in heaven! it was a child—not sleeping, but dead and mummified!

A sound—something awful, like the breath-struggle of one who had been winded by a blow—fluttered in his ear. He leapt aside from it, staring behind him. Nicette was there, gazing—gazing, but at him no longer. Her eyes were like stones in a hewn grey mask; youth had shuddered from her cheeks.

Suddenly she turned upon him stiffly. Her soul instinctively recognised the whole that was implied by his scarce voluntarily expressed terror of her neighbourhood.

“I did not kill him,” she whispered.

“It is Baptiste, then?”

He was familiar at once with the stupendous horror of it all. That was such, and so appalling in the light or blackness of a construction that her immediate surrender of the situation made inevitable, that his brain reeled under the shock. He was an accessory to something namelessly hideous.

Then, in a moment, she was prostrate at his feet, clinging to him, imploring his mercy, his kindness; urging him by his pity, by her agony, to withdraw her from vision of the terror, to listen to and believe her.

“Take me away!” she screamed; “it was his own doing! I did not kill him!”

He repulsed her with a raging force, still staring silently over and beyond her. It seemed to him that some ghastly sacristan was lighting up a sacrificial altar in his memory. Candle by candle it flamed into dreadful illumination, revealing the abominations that in the darkness he had been only innocently condoning. He thought he understood now what had impelled her to that strange haunting of the neighbourhood of the tree; what remorse had driven her to the prayers and prostrations that had aroused the curiosity of the village; why, panic-stricken under that threat of search, she had wrought in a moment, of her imagination, a fable that should serve her secret evermore for an ark double-cased. He recalled, in the ghastly light of a new interpretation, almost the last words she had spoken to him in a time that he had thought was dead and forgotten: “Oh, my God, not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for thy sake!” For his sake—for his sake! Was he so vile as this, then—he who had dared in dreams to mate with a purity like an angel’s—that the incense of any noisome sacrifice, if only offered up to himself, he must be held to find grateful! He broke, without meaning it, into a horrible laugh.

“Did she—the mother—not promise,” he shrieked, “to restore the little brother to you—the poor little murdered wretch! She has kept to her word. And you—you? Don’t forget you are sworn under damnation to dedicate yourself, a maid, to her service! Can you do it? God in heaven, it is not your fault if you can!”

She fell before him, as he spurned her, writhing and moaning amongst the sodden grass.

“Won’t you listen to me—oh, won’t you listen? If you would only kill me, and not speak!”

He stood immediately rigid as justice’s own sentry.

“Yes, I will listen,” he said, “and you shall condemn yourself.”

She crept a thought nearer and, feeling him keep aloof, sat bowed upon the ground, her fingers locked together in her lap.

“I will tell you the truth,” she said, low and broken. “After that first time he, my brother, was changed. He became, when you were gone, a little devil, insulting and defying me. It was terrible—his precocity. He held over my head ever a threat—monsieur, it was that he would make exposure of the liaison between his sister and the Englishman.”

Ned uttered an exclamation. She entreated him with raised hands.

“Ah! it is not always the truth one fears. One day in the woods—oh, my God, monsieur, hide me!—in the woods—what was I saying! Mother of God! it was here—we quarrelled, and I was desperate. He ran to escape me, climbed the great branch that stooped to the grass. He stood high up, reviling me. I made as if to fling a stone: he threw up his arm, stumbled, and disappeared.”

She crept towards him again, yet another agonised appeal for the tiniest assurance that he had ceased to loathe her. At least this time he stood his ground.

“At first I was stunned,” she said. “He may have been killed at once, for no sound reached me. Then all at once the wicked spirit put it into my head that here, by doing nothing, was a sure way out of my difficulties—was safety from that impish slanderer, was the bar removed to my favour in the eyes of one who had confided to me his detestation of children.”

Ned sprang back, almost striking at the crouching figure.

“Not me!” he raged; “I will have no responsibility—not any, for the inhuman deed, thrust upon me! And so you left him to his fate, and went home and ate and drank, feeding your beastly lusts and desires, while he—oh, devil, devil!”

She scrambled to her feet and made as if she would run from this new terror of a hate more ghastly than all she had suffered hitherto.

“Don’t kill me!” she whimpered. “Did you not tell me you hated children? and you said they could not feel as we do.”

He glared at her like a maniac.

“You left him; what is the need to say more?”

“I did not,” she moaned, wringing her hands as if to cleanse them of blood; “I came again on the third day, and I called to him, I prayed to him, but he never cried back one word. Then I thought, Perhaps he has climbed out and fled away.”

“Liar! you are a liar! Why, then, did you seek to hide your crime by a blasphemous lie?”

“I have suffered,” she answered only, like one before the judgment-seat.

He mastered himself by a wrenching effort. He stood aside, peremptorily motioning her to pass on her way. Not a word would he speak. She went forward a few steps—a numb, haggard spectre of beauty, a soul paralysed under the immediate terror of its sentence. Suddenly she turned upon him, awful in the last expression of despair.

“They will tear me to pieces when they know!”

“Let your Virgin protect you,” he said.

Without another word she left him, going off amongst the trees. The sunbeams, peering through the leaves, touched and fled from contact with her; woodland things scurried from her path; the cleansing rain, even, stringing the branches, withheld itself from falling till she had gone. Something that he drove under forcibly struggled to rise and give voice from the watcher’s heart. She looked so small, so pitifully frail and small a vessel to carry that great load of sin. The next moment she disappeared from his sight.

He turned, with a groan, to scrutinise the horror. It was yet so far undecayed as that he was able, for all his little memory of the living child, to identify the poor remains. But, for a certain reason, he would compel himself to a nauseous task—even to touch the thing if necessary. It was not. There was actual evidence, to his unaccustomed eyes, that the boy’s neck had been dislocated by the fall.

He moved away, giving out a sigh of fearful relief. At least he would not be haunted by that anguish. And should he follow and tell her?

“No,” he thought sternly—for love makes men cruel; “as she meant, so shall she suffer the worst.”

CHAPTER VIII.

The Viscount Murk received very gravely M. Becelaer de Lawoestine’s assurance that Monseigneur the Duke of Orleans was at the moment, and had been for months past, in Paris.

“Enfin,” said this gentleman, “if report is to be believed, it is the most timely place for him. At least he will not put himself at the head of the emigrants,” he added, with a husky little laugh.

He was plump and prosperously healthy, like his wife. They seemed admirably suited to one another—a pigeon pair, indeed. And like a pigeon was the little fat man in his white Austrian uniform. He strutted, he preened himself, he cooed. His place should have been on a roof-ridge of his own happy courts. Ned had a melancholy desire to crumble some bread for him.

“You are pale as a very ghost, monsieur,” said this same ruddy count condescendingly. “It is not to be wondered at. You have alighted upon us in stirring times; not to speak of the storm yesterday, that was enough to quell the stoutest courage. I would give up hunting a chimera, if I were you, and return to the profitable peace of my own so prudent island, without more ado—sans plus de façons.”

“If you were I, monsieur,” said Ned. “But, being myself, I run the chimera to earth in Paris.”

Monsieur le comte shrugged his shoulders.

“I will wish you success, at least. This chimera hath as many tracks as a mole. But, first, you must get to Paris.”

Ned had considered this side of the question lightly. He found, indeed, the conditions of travel curiously changed since he had last crossed the Netherlands border. Now the whole frontier, from Lille to Metz, swarmed with hostile demonstration. The Allies were in movement, Luckner and his ineffectives falling back before them. Amongst them all he hardly knew whom to claim for friends and whom for foes.

But he was wrought to a pitch of recklessness, and Providence shows the favouritism of a heathen goddess towards reckless men. His grossly enlarging doubt of the bonâ fides of the mission to which he had been committed; his terror of having been made in a moment accessory to a hideous crime, which he could neither morally condone nor effectually denounce; the feeling—sombre heir to these two—that he was losing his hold of that new sweet sense of responsibility towards life, the consciousness of which had been to him latterly like the talking in his ear of a witch of Atlas—a cicerone to the dear mysteries of the earth he had hitherto but half understood,—these emotions were a long-rowelled spur to prick him forward through difficult places. Once in Paris, there should be no more temporising. From the Duke of Orleans’s own lips he would learn whether or no he had been bidden on a fool’s errand.

Here, in fact, was the goading stab in his side—the wound that sometimes so stung and rankled that almost he was tempted to have out madame la gouvernante’s letter to her employer and resolve dishonourably his doubts. Through the anguish of these, the piercing tooth of the recent horror sprung upon him might make itself felt only as a pain within the pain—a lesser torture, the nature of which he would occasionally seek to analyse in order to a temporary forgetfulness of the greater. Then, thinking of the holy maid of Méricourt, he would cry in his soul, “What is this gift of imagination but a Promethean fire, destroying whoever is informed with it! Better my system of a mechanical world with passion all eliminated!”—and he would think of how he had been once curiously interested in a poor lodge-keeper’s dreamings, a faculty for which had been then to him so strange an anomaly. And was it so still—to him who had learned, through love, to attune his ear to the under harmonics in every wind that blew upon the earth? Perhaps, in truth, it was this very gift of imagination that, in greater or less degree, was responsible for the irregularities one and all that misconverted the plain uses of life; that made the picturesqueness of existence, and its glory and tragedy. And would he at this very last be without it? And was not its possession—a common one now to him and Nicette—the stimulus to unnatural deeds that were the outcome of supernatural thoughts? He had at least the temptation to commit an act that would be an outrage on his traditional sense of honour. He would resist the temptation, because he had the tradition. But conceive this Nicette, perhaps with no traditions, and with an imagination infinitely more vivid than his. What limit was to put to her foreseeings; how should the normal-sighted adjudge her monstrous for anticipating conclusions to which their vision could by no means penetrate?

He would catch himself away from the train of thought, the indulgence of which seemed a certain condonation of a deed that his every instinct abhorred. Yet his mind took, perhaps, something the tone of the intricate close places in which it wandered; and now and again a little thrill would run through him of half-sensuous pity for the poor misguided soul that, by offering up its honour at the very shrine at which his worshipped, had only estranged what it would have fain conciliated.

* * * * * * * *

By way of Fumay—a little pretty town situate on a river holm, and overhung by a group of stately rocks called the Ladies of the Meuse—Ned, adopting the advice of the Comte de Lawoestine, entered France. At once—as if, from easy gliding down a stream, he had been drawn into and was rushing forward in the midst of rapids—his days became mere records of anxiety and turbulence that constantly intensified throughout every league of his approach towards Paris. At the very frontier, indeed, he had taken the plunge, as exemplified in his change of postilions. To the last village on the German side he had been driven by a taciturn barbarian—a cheese-featured Westphalian, picturesque, malodorous, and imperturbably uncivil. This certificated lout was dressed in a yellow jacket, having black cuffs and cape, and carried a saffron sash about his waist and a little bugle horn slung over his shoulder—the whole signifying the imperial livery of the road, then as sacred from assault as is the uniform of a modern soldier of the Fatherland. Tobacco, trinkgeld, and the unalienable right to keep his parts of speech locked up in the beer-cellar of his stomach—these appeared to be the three conditions of his service. Ned parted from him with a league-long-elaborated anathema that sounded as ineffective in the delivery as the rap of a knuckle on a full hogshead, and so, on the farther side of the border, committed himself to a first experience of the “patriot” postboy.

From the smooth and muddy into the broken water! Here was volubility proportionate with the other’s gross reticence. Jacques was no less picturesque and malodorous than was Hans. He had his private atmosphere, like the German; only it was eloquent of pipes and garlic rather than of pipes and beer. He spat and gabbled all day; and he was dressed, like a stage pirate, in a short brown coat with brass buttons, and in striped pink and white pantaloons tucked into half-boots. A sash went round his waist also, and he wore on his head a scarlet cap having a cockade. Ned was feverishly interested in this his first introduction to a child of the new liberty; but he would fain have found him inclined to a lesser verbosity. However, he was a cheerful rascal and a good-humoured, and his easy sangfroid helped the traveller out of an occasional tangle of the red-tapeism that he found immeshing official processes rather more intricately under a republican than under an autocratic form of government.

Ned’s journey to the capital was, indeed, a race a little perilous and full of excitement. The common spirit, or suggestion, of suppressed effervescence that had been his former experience, was revealed now a spouting, tingling fountain, light yet heady, hissing with froth and bubbles. The kennels of France ran, as it were, with sparkling wine, and the very mayfly of moral intoxication was hatched from them in swarms. Thoughts, words, acts; the habits of dress, of motion, of regard—all were the characteristics of an hysteria the result of unaccustomed indulgence—the result of reckless drinking at the released spring. One could never know if a chance expression—either of speech or feature—would procure one a madly laughing or a madly resentful acknowledgment. Exultation and terror walked arm-in-arm by the ways, each trying stealthily to trip up the other. It was an insane land, and now verging on a paroxysm of mania; for it was known that at last the king—the man of shifty vision—was focussing his eyesight on the north-eastern border of his kingdom, whence loomed the shadow of foreign legions moving to his aid.

The north-eastern border! To enter the land of fury from such a direction was to invite one’s own destruction. Not even luck, recklessness, and unexceptionable passports might, perhaps, have saved Ned from the homicidal madness of a people wrought to fantastic fear, had it not been for a quick-witted post-boy’s genius in availing himself of the right occasions to apply them. This was his real good-fortune—that his own innate charm of manner, his patience and sweetness, his characteristic unaffectedness in the matter of his rank, and his healing sense of humour in everything, found their response in the heart of the garrulous Jacques, and converted that amiable horse-emmet from an indifferent employé into a very fraternal road-companion.

So, through stress and danger, Ned sped on his journey, and—following for fifty leagues from the frontier in the track of the wrecking storm—was enabled to enter Paris, by the great Flanders road, some four days after his parting with M. le Comte de Lawoestine. Then—a final difficulty at the Temple barrier surmounted—he found himself once more a mean small condition of the life of that city to whose self-emancipatory throes he had once been a deeply concerned witness. And he accepted the fact without uneasiness, not knowing that before he should turn for the last time to quit the awful place of death and resurrection, the tragedy of his own life, in the midst of the thousands there enacting, should be consummated.

CHAPTER IX.

On the very day following that of his arrival, the pendulum of Ned’s particular destiny began its driving swing. He had taken good lodgings in a house in the Rue St Honoré, less, perhaps, as a concession to his rank than to his hypothetical prospects; and, issuing thence, after he had breakfasted, he had but a hundred yards to walk to reach a certain revolutionary centre that was become the goal to his long-drawn hopes and apprehensions.

It was a morning in early August, breathless and burning; and he turned into the gardens of the Palais Royal, that he might thus combine the opportunities to slake his thirst and to acquit himself of his commission to the royal proprietor of the adjoining palace. He had seated himself—unaccountably loath, now the moment was arrived, to put his fears to the proof—at a little café table under a tree, and was dreamily marvelling over the changed aspect of this plaisance of sedition (how in three years the temper of its habitués seemed to have altered, as it were, from that of a beleaguered to that of a triumphant garrison), when the familiar personality of one of three men who, talking together, strolled towards him, caught his immediate attention. Ugly, austere, with his Rowlandson paunch and unaffected neat clothes; with his wry jaw and crippled scuffle of speech—Ned saw here the unmistakable presentment of his whilom friend, the king’s painter. Between M. David and another—a tall, plebeian-dressed man, with a flawed, supercilious face, the blotched darkness of which (something caricaturing that of the monarch’s own) belied the mechanical amiability of its features—walked an individual of a very benignant and serene expression of countenance, the nobility of which showed in agreeable contrast with the moodiness of its neighbours’. This man—by many years the youngest of the three—was of the middle height, with dark sleepy eyes and chestnut hair. His face, slightly marked by the small-pox, was of a rather sensuous, rather wistful expression—at once pitiful and determined, with Love the modeller’s finger-marks about the mouth and, between the brows, the little long scar cut by thought. He was dressed in a very shabby and slovenly fashion, with limp tattered wristbands, and the seams of his coat burst at the shoulders; and even the lapels of his vest were dog’s-eared—altogether a display of poverty a little ostentatious, thought Ned (who, nevertheless, had reason by-and-by to correct his judgment). Yet, for all his appearance, here was the man of the three to whom the others, it seemed, paid deference; for they hung upon his words, their eyes bent to the ground, while he walked between them, frankly expounding and with a free aspect.

Now suddenly M. David glanced up and caught the Englishman’s gaze; and immediately, to Ned’s surprise (he had a vivid memory of their last rencontre), detached himself from his fellows and came forward with extended hand.

“Surely,” said the painter, “monsieur my friend the artist of the Thuilleries gardens!”

“At monsieur’s service,” said Ned, rising, with a complete lack of cordiality. “And of the Rue Beautreillis, M. David, where a poor devil of a papetier had his factory gutted.”

He drew a little away. David’s face showed villainously distorted.

“That may be,” said he, taken aback. Then he advanced again, with an air of sudden frankness. “‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ We do not, in these days of realisation, repudiate our responsibility for the acts that in those were tentative. But a generous conqueror does not dwell on the humiliation of his adversaries. The end justifies the means, monsieur; and you, at least, if I remember, were no advocate of social tyranny. But that was long ago, yet not so long but that I can recall monsieur as a promising probationer in the art that is the most admirable in the world.”

Ned, touched upon his unguarded side, was standing at a loss for an answer, when the painter’s two companions joined the group at the table.

“Citizen Egalité,” said David, addressing the supercilious-looking man, “let me have the pleasure of making known to you M. Murk, an artist who would be a patriot were he not, unfortunately for us, an Englishman.”

Ned started.

“Egalité!” he exclaimed.

“Ci-devant Duc d’Orléans,” said the tall man himself, with a little mocking bow.

“Monseigneur,” began Ned.

“Citizen,” said the other, bowing again.

His eyes were dead stones of irony. His expression was as of one hopeless of convalescence from the weary illness of life.

Ned fetched his letter from his breast.

“Citizen Egalité—if so I am to call you,” said he, “I meet you in the good hour, being on the road, indeed, to seek the citizen himself.”

“Me, sir?”

“You, monsieur—or the Duke of Orleans. I have the honour to place in the hands of the duke a packet with the delivery of which I have been entrusted by an intimate correspondent of monsieur.”

Monsieur, looking a little surprised, received the missive, and deliberately breaking the seal, deliberately read through madame la gouvernante’s letter. Ned must discipline his sick impatience the while, and the two other men conversed apart—David in some obvious wonder over the result of his introduction.

Presently the duke, carelessly returning the paper to its folds, looked up. Ned strove, but failed, to read his sentence in the impassive face. A moment’s silence succeeded. It was a test beyond his endurance.

“I undertook to acquaint monsieur le duc, from my personal knowledge,” he blurted out, “of the causes of madame’s apprehensions.”

“Madame,” said Egalité, “is very fortunate in a courier whose discretion, she informs me, is only equalled by his disinterestedness. Madame has, indeed, always the faculty to find some one to pull her her chestnuts out of the fire.”

He spoke so languidly, so suggestively, so insolently, that Ned, despite his desperate anxiety, fired up.

“I fail to read into monsieur’s implication,” said he. “But if it is meant to signify that madame’s peril——”

“Is she in any, then? This letter merely informs me that she removes at once to London.”

The confirmation of his dread had appeared somehow so foreshadowed in his reception that the blow fell upon Ned with nothing more than a little stunning shock.

“And that is all?” said he, in quite a small stiff voice.

“All that is essential, indeed, monsieur.”

“Nothing of her terror that she is being watched and followed—that she moves within the sinister ken of the royalist emigrants—that her nerve is shattered—that she begs you to recall her?”

“Nothing. But—Heaven forgive her! I recognise her style. Oh yes, yes! It is possible she has posted and dismissed you very effectively, monsieur.”

He went off, for the first time, into a real laugh—a harsh cachinnation that he checked, as in mere disdain of it, in its mid-career. Ned waited, in rather an ugly manner of patience, till he was finished. Then, said he, wishing to right himself with himself on all points—

“Has posted me, as monsieur says; and, doubtless, for all exigent purposes, it was necessary only to post the letter to monsieur.”

“How, then?”

“At least, it would appear, its delivery by a confidential messenger was not imperative?”

“À ce qu’il paraît,” said the duke, grinning again. “At least such a commission exhibited an excess of caution.”

All the bitterness of the poor young man’s soul seemed suddenly to flush his veins.

“It is thus, then,” he cried, “that you requite the hospitality lavished upon you and yours; that you take advantage of a generous sympathy extended to you, to serve your own selfish purposes at the expense of your entertainers. You deserve that no hand be put out to you but to strike you in the face, as it is in my heart to treat you, monsieur le duc!”

He spoke loudly enough, and all his muscles tightened to the prick of onset. M. David ran up—

“Ta-ta-ta!” he exclaimed; “what the devil is here?”

Egalité’s cheeks showed mottled white, like brawn.

“Be quiet,” he said. “This is M. le Vicomte Murk, who has put himself to inconvenience to deliver me a letter.”

His lips trembled a little. The wretched creature himself had a wretched nerve.

“Monsieur would seem to imply,” he said, “that I am a party to the circumstance of some discomfiture he has suffered. It needs only a little reflection to disabuse himself of so extravagant a supposition.”

Ned made a violent effort to control his passion. Convinced now, as he was, that he had been used the victim of a practical joke, he could not turn the situation effectively by adopting a tragic vein. Besides, he was conscious of an inexplicable little feeling of rebellious attraction towards this man—a sort of emotional deference such as that with which a despairing suitor courts the guardian of his inamorata. If the light of his hope had fallen very low, here was he that might, if he would, renew it—here was a possible friend at court that he could ill afford—until that moment of the certain quenching of the light—to quarrel with or insult. He did not put this to himself. It affected him, nevertheless.

“I will acknowledge I was hasty,” he said, in some miserable perplexity. “It is possible I have jumped to unjustified conclusions. I have been a disinterested courier, as monsieur suggests, faithful to the service to which I was induced—under false pretences, it appears. But I will take monsieur’s word as to his innocence of any participation in the jest that has led me dancing over half a continent in search of monsieur.”

He looked at Egalité half piteously. The latter, scenting the reaction, shrugged his shoulders, with a relieved expression.

“I am deeply sensible,” he said coolly, “of monsieur’s kindness. For the rest” (he tapped the paper in his hands) “the message that monsieur conveys to me is capable of only one construction.”

“That madame removes with her charge to London?”

“Certainly.”

“And that is all?”

“Precisely all, monsieur.”

Ned fell back a pace, and bowed frigidly. The duke, with a second shrug of his shoulders, took M. David’s arm and made as if to withdraw. Suddenly he jerked himself free and returned to the hapless young man, a much gentler look on his face.

“Ah, monsieur!” he said, in a low voice, “that is all—yes, that is all. But I can read between the lines. Am I to hold myself to blame that madame took her own way to rid herself of an embarrassment! I talk in the dark, with only my knowledge of women—of this woman, par excellence—to illuminate me. She coaxed you to a confidential mission? Well, there was no need—believe me, there was no need. We must read between the lines.”

He again made as if to go, and again returned.

“It is extremely probable, nevertheless,” he said, “that we may see the dear emigrants back in Paris before long.”

With that he went off, taking the painter with him. Ned watched the couple receding, till the crowd absorbed them; then sat himself down, feeling benumbed and demoralised, upon a chair.

So, here was the end—the mocking means adopted to the rejection of his suit. It was a vile, cruel jest, he thought; a characteristic indulgence of selfishness inhuman, for which presently he would take fierce delight in calling a certain statesman to account. A statesman! his stricken vanity yelled to itself: a diplomatic buffoon who would sacrifice principle to a pun. So he classified Mr Sheridan, to whom he would attribute this ruin of his hopes.

But deeper emotions prevailed. Had the duke been, or was he at this last, despite his protestations, a party to the fraud? It mattered nothing at all. There was a more intimate question to put to his heart—the sadder and more sombre inquiry, Was the girl herself a confederate? And here he fell all amazed and overwhelmed; plunged in a slough of the most sorrowful speculation; struggling for foothold—for some memory at which he might clutch for the righting of his moral balance. There should have been many memories—of kind looks and words and touches, all instinct with the tender humour of truth. God in heaven! It was conceivable that the elder woman, the old practised strategist, had played a consummate rôle. It was never inconsistent with the principles of such pantological professors to indulge the hypocritical as part of their universal equipment. But Pamela, with not that of roguishness in her sweet eyes to justify a belief in anything but an innately honest soul behind them! Pamela, in the sincerity of her heart, in the womanliness of her nature, in the cleanness of her lips, craftily intriguing to indict Love’s passion of trust! He could not believe it. He could not but believe that some words, some acts of hers—most haunting in the retrospect—had been designed to express her sympathy with that in him which she could only as yet recognise in herself for a mood. And it had been, then, Madame de Genlis’ private policy to dismiss him before this mood—this bud—could timely open out into a flower.

Well, she had succeeded—thanks to one self-interested, with whom the reckoning was to come—she had succeeded, and aptly, no doubt, to the sequel. For it was not to be supposed that madame’s artifice would permit her to wean its subject from a fancy and fail to find the subject other food for a stimulated appetite. My lord the viscount had possibly, indeed, but (in the vernacular) kept the place warm for another. The sun of his passion may have only a little ripened the fruit for the delectation of lips more blest than his. By this time, it was probable, the dream that had been his was a transferred rapture.

What should he do—what should he do? He sat dully, his delicious sweet world of imagination shrunk to unsightly clinkers, very mean and grotesque. Only the real world stretched about him—a shoddy, vulgarly formal affair. A laugh, a mere ironic chest-note, came from him. For to what glorified uses did not men seek to convert this intrinsically tawdry material! They were always sensitive to the befooling holiday spirit, the spirit that is persistently ready to accept specious commonplace at a fancy value. For all the essential purposes of romantic passion he, if he chose, might take his pick (he with his title, his rich competence, and his personal attributes) from the human fair that tinkled and scintillated about him. Yet he must price all this opportunity at so much less worth than that of one set of features as to value it, lying ready to his hand, at a pinch of dust compared with the unattainable. The glamour of the fair was not for him, let him elect to give his philosophy licence without limit.

He did, it will be observed, madame la gouvernante (who had been genuinely distraught) something a little less than justice. But, after all, his resentment in the first instance was against Mr Sheridan, and in that, no doubt, he was justified; for he must fail, in the nature of things, to understand what reason but a personal one could have moved that gentleman to manœuvre to circumvent a suitor so frank and so admissible as himself.

He called for wine; and, while drinking, for the first time in his life, too much of it, his mood underwent a dozen rallies and relapses. Passion, exasperation, and the most sick desire to possess what now seemed to have evaded him for ever—emotion upon emotion, these wrought in his suffering mind. More than once he was half-stirred to the decision to return immediately to England; and, instantly recalling the duke’s enigmatical suggestion anent the ladies’ return to Paris, he would resolve to remain where he was, preferring the problematical to the chances of hunting counter in the mazes of his own capital. For he must see the girl again—to that he was determined; he must see her again and, crashing at last through the reserve his own diffidence had created, must seek to carry by storm that with which he had so mistakenly temporised.

And then suddenly—a vision called up, perhaps, by the unwonted fever in his veins—the figure of Pamela, as he had last seen it, stood holding out to him in its hands the little crushed scarlet blossoms; and he could see the wilful smile and hear the sweet voice offering him the rose of his desire; and all in a moment his eyes were full of tears, and he became shamefully conscious of his surroundings, the very character of which profaned his thought.

He thrust his hand in an access of tenderness into his breast.

“Monsieur,” said a low, grave voice in his ear, “is in need of sympathy.”

He started, and turned about angrily. At his elbow was seated that third member of the late trio to whom the others had appeared to pay deference. This man had not followed his companions, it seemed, but had remained behind when they walked away.

In the very motion of resenting the interference, something in the nobility of the stranger’s manner gave Ned pause. The anger died from his features, gradually, in a little silence that succeeded.

“Very well, monsieur,” he said at length, quite gently. “You are very far from meaning impertinence, I see. I answer you, All men need sympathy.”

“Monsieur,” said the stranger, “that admission is the basis of our new religion of humanity.”

He leaned forward, smiling with a great sweetness. His air somehow conveyed to Ned the impression of a conscious strength that rather enjoyed indulging in itself a dormant condition of faculty, sure that it could summon up at will mental forces irresistible to any opposed to it.

“Is it new?” said Ned. “I seem to recall a hint of it in the Gospels.”

“The man Christ,” said the stranger, “was a virgin. His partisanship was necessarily limited. He was never blinded by, but always to, passion.”

“The passion of love?”

“Of love, in the erotic sense.”

“And what is that to signify in the present context?”

“Only that it enables me to see deeper than Christ the virgin.”

“You have more prospicience than Christ?”

“In one direction, assuredly.”

“You are confident, monsieur?”

“So far, I am confident. Christ was a divine—I, monsieur, am a human—advocate.”

“De causes perdues, in this instance, monsieur, I believe. But an advocate deals with proofs.”

“Without doubt. Monsieur is unfortunate in an attachment.”

“To himself? Christ could have taught him that.”

Nevertheless he was amazed.

“Ah!” cried the other, “but I am literally an advocate; and I heard monsieur le duc’s final words; and it is my business to read the soul’s confession in the face. I perceive, however, that monsieur resents my presumption, which is, of a truth, unwarrantable.”

He rose as if to go, his dark eyes still quick with a gentle, unrebukeful sympathy. Ned was impelled to cry hastily—

“It is my right at least, monsieur, to ask the title of my counsel!”

“I have none,” said the stranger simply. “My name is Vergniaud.”

Ned sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair.

“Vergniaud!” he cried, and stood staring at the man whose utterances—echoed latterly to the very cliffs of England—had seemed to him the first inspired interpretation of the Revolution as a real, breathing, human, emancipatory force. Now he understood why the others had shown such deference to this one of their party.

“Vergniaud!” he cried again faintly, and so rallied himself.

“Truly,” said he, “I have entertained an angel unawares. M. Vergniaud—indeed, I have a very unhappy attachment; and I need counsel at this moment, if ever man did.”

CHAPTER X.

Pierre-Victorin Vergniaud, the source of much present enthusiasm, the full fountain-head of the Gironde river of eloquence, was already—though but a few months a citizen of Paris—the director of a popular force having an admirable tendency. In him it seemed possible to hail that political architect of the new era who should have the genius to reconcile warring creeds, and shape of men’s profound but formless aspirations an enduring temple of the ideal commonwealth. Poor, yet never conceding a thought to the shame of poverty; simple-minded to the extent that he could not err in justice; hating corruption and loving truth; a moving orator, a large humanitarian, he might have led a world, undissenting, to the worship of the right Liberty, had not his great gifts, his large ideals, been always subject to eclipse by an extreme constitutional indolence. Utterly ingenuous, utterly impressionable; depending upon the moment for inspiration, and so little warped by self-consciousness as never to know the moment to fail him—it was yet often impossible to spur this Vergniaud to necessary action. Madame Roland, the superior being, to whom he was introduced by enthusiastic friends, had no belief in his capacity as a leader; distrusted, and perhaps despised him. Ned—the poor degenerate to a very human type—learned, on the other hand, to love and admire him. For in this mind—as in the mirror of sweet clear water—he found his own chastened theories shaping themselves, taking such form and gentle significance as he had never hitherto but more than conceived to be theirs. Nor this only, or chiefly. He was able to forget something of his own hard unhappiness, of his bitter sense of grievance, in the familiar contemplation of a nature so serene, so noble, so unsolicitous of its self-aggrandisement. From these closing days of darkness, the little friendship that so queerly came to him to tide him opportunely over a period of wretched indecision remained an abiding pathetic memory.

Citizen Vergniaud lived in a shabby lodging near the Tivoli Gardens. Thither Ned accompanied him on the morning of their meeting, and thither many times he found his way again. The little beggarly room became a haven of rest to his tormented spirit—a confessional-box wherein he could always leave some part of his great weight of oppression. And, now and again, even, moved to waive his personal interest in that fine spirit, and to repay some part of the healing advice so disinterestedly lavished upon himself, he would play the père spirituel in his turn, and whip his penitent with a cobweb lash of rebuke.

“My Peter,” he would complain, “you dwell too long on the overture to your career. It may be rich in all the suggested harmonies, but it is time you set to work on the opera.”

“Time!” would cry Vergniaud, with a smile. (He might be, perhaps, unpacking a very little parcel of cheap linen that had just reached him from his family, his dear simpletons, of Bordeaux.) “But time is no arbitrary measure to the man who hath studied to make his own.”

Says Ned, “You may make it, but you will always give it away to the first specious beggar that asks.”

“Then I am only liberal with that that I do not value. ’Tis a poor habit of charity, I admit. But I could never keep it; hark! little Edward—I could never keep time, even when I danced!”

“So foolish heirs mortgage their reversions.”

“So alchemists squander their inexhaustible treasures, you mean. When time has done with me, I shall be past caring. Maybe the spendthrift will have gilded a poor home or two in his world.”

“And, had he economised, he might have gilded the temples of an epoch.”

“Oh, thou art an elegant moraliser! But I am more modest for myself—a Fabian by sentiment, not policy. I tell thee, an age so rich in opportunities invites to procrastination. A multiplicity of choice is the last inducement to choose. I loiter, like a child, in the fair, with my silver livre-tournois in my pocket, and, until I spend it, I am lord of a hundred prospective delights. Let me wait till the lights are burning low, and then I will make my selection—the crown to a pyramid of enjoyments.”

“And find that others before you have taken the pick of the fair while you ecstatically considered, and that you have at the last paid full price for a discarded residue.”

“What, then, my friend! I shall be richer than the prudent by measure of a whole feast of anticipation—more satisfied, if less gorged. The early bird eats his chicken in the egg. (Corne de Dieu! there is a fine marriage of proverbs!) He has nothing to look forward to but a day of blank satiety. I cannot at once have the dreams of youth and the sober retrospections of age.”

So he would talk ex curia, a dilatory, lovable vagabond, with a rare power of enchantment drawn from some hidden depths, as from a fern-curtained well. Perhaps this sensuous personal charm—whereby he would appear to flatter with signal affectionate regard each in turn of his numerous acquaintances—would of itself have failed after the first to win a poor love-stricken from prolonged contemplation of any but his own interests. It was the man’s spasmodic revelations of unexpected virile forces held in reserve that would suddenly convert in another a little growing sentiment of tolerant disdain to an eager desire to be acclaimed friend by this subject of his condescension. So, may be, the force operated upon Ned. For succeeding his first gratification over an introduction to one in whom he had latterly prefigured the regenerator of France, came a thought of désagrément in his soul’s nominee, a feeling of disillusionment in which he was prepared to recognise another example of Fortune’s wanton baiting of his personal cherished ideals. Then one day he heard this seeming waiter on Providence, this almost coatless landholder of Utopia, speak in the Assembly; and thenceforth he had nothing but reverence for the ardent soul, whose misfortune only it was to be bounded by a love more human in its essence than divine. He had seen the familiar figure sitting with its hand over its face; he had next seen the face revealed from the tribune, inspired, transformed, as if the hand itself, consecrate as a priest’s, had touched and wrought the priestly sacrament of confirmation; and the sermon of high government that followed had taken wings of fire from the burning spirit that informed it; and the hearts of men had kindled and glowed, flaring at length—alas, too self-consumingly!—into roaring flame.

Well, such moments were for Ned’s holiday moods. This present friendship and admiration saved him, perhaps, from hobnobbing with more harmfully potent spirits. Yet the one enthusiasm could galvanise him only fitfully into an interest in the passionate scenes amongst which he moved. So negative a pole is love—when turned from the north-star of its hopes—to all that in less misconverted circumstances would attract it. Here was he a spectator at last of the stupendous drama in the early rehearsals of which he had been so profoundly interested; and he had nothing for it all but a lack-lustre eye, which he must always keep from turning inwards by an effort. He lived, in fact, in a little miserable tub of his own choosing, while the Alexanders of a political renaissance made history around, and unregarded of, him.

Much time he spent moodily gazing from the windows of his lodgings in the Rue St Honoré. Thence looking, his life seemed to become a dream of motley crowds always drifting by. Stolid, tight-buttoned guards, with brigand moustaches like dolls’; frowzy revolutionary conscripts, swaggering to glory; tattered deputations, exhibiting the seals of their memorials in the shape of old blood-stains dried upon arms and faces, and headed, perhaps, by some trimly arrogant sectional president, with his sleek hair and tricolour sash—vociferous or intent, in noisome clouds they floated by; and Ned could seldom rescue so much curiosity from the heart of his self-centred indifference as to inquire what was their destination or significance. A shoddy Paris—a Paris of gaudy fustian. So far a certain general impression seemed bitten into him; and, desultorily moved by it, he would rarely wake to a little rhapsodical song of lamentation over yet another shattered ideal. This city and this people that he had loved, and of which and whom he had expected and prophesied so noble a triumph of self-emancipation! Now the tangled mazes of “party” differences seemed designed only to render the central cause unattainable. Now, he would think, the history of their municipal government was always to be likened to the story of an iceberg—a story of top-heaviness periodically recurring—of base and summit exchanging positions again and again, the depths replacing the head, the head the depths. And did it signify, as in the iceberg, a steady attenuation, a bulk of force and grandeur constantly lessening? God save France, and exorcise the sluggard demon in Pierre-Victorin!

By-and-by, sick at last of inaction, the poor fellow took to the streets, restlessly traversing all quarters of the city—its bye-lanes, its loaded thoroughfares—both by day and lamp-light. Once he made his way to the now ancient ruins of the Bastille, and dully leaving them after a dull inspection—or rather retrospection—looked half curiously up at his old lodgings, yet had not the spirit to visit them and Madame Gamelle. Once a languid thrill penetrated his torpor upon his chancing upon view of an old acquaintance, the Chevalier d’Eon, so queerly associated with a certain episode in his vanished life. He passed the strange creature in the Thuilleries gardens, whither he had come years ago to see a balloon ascend. She stared him full in the face, but without recognition, as she went by. Her eyes bagged in their sockets; she looked old and shabby—an improvident actress retired upon scant savings. Already her gaze had grown unspeculative; the first menace of senility suggested itself in the drooping of her fat old jaw. She had come over from England, Ned learned, a year ago, to petition the National Assembly—in the days before its dissolution—for leave to resume her helmet and her sabre and to serve in the army. Her request had received the double honour of applause and of relegation to the official minutes—where it slept forgotten. The poor chevalier must consign herself gracefully to oblivion—which no actor or actress ever did. She lived on at Paris a few months longer—a decaying old body with a grievance; then returned for the last time to England, where, dying by-and-by in poverty, and being handed over to the final merciless inquisition of the mortuary, she was adjudged—a male impostor, and so committed to a dishonoured grave.

Upon Egalité (but recently so designated) Ned happened from time to time, yet only to understand that this would-be popular constituent was resolved upon “cutting” him, a titled aristocrat, from popular motives. Therefore, despite the gnawing of the fox of anxiety at his ribs, the young Englishman, in his pride, would make no appeal to the man who alone could ease his torment; but he endeavoured to ascertain, through indirect report, what were the chances of an early return to Paris on the part of certain notable emigrants; and in the meantime he must settle himself down, with what remnants of philosophy he could command, to a life of miserable inaction and irresolution.

Then, once upon a day, behold! into his field of vision, the spectrum of a ghost more remotely haunting than any familiar to his recenter experience, flashed Théroigne, “Our Lady of Darkness,” the realised presentment of a destiny long foreshadowed. And henceforth it was as if he had been hurled into one of those red arteries of fatality (of which the just-erected guillotine was as the throbbing heart) that laced the city in all directions.

He was strolling with Vergniaud, again in the Thuilleries gardens. It was a day of lazy sunshine, and the walks and grass-plots were crowded. Paris must laugh and breathe, though in the committee rooms yonder the whirring machinery of election to the new National Convention was shaking the whole town; though forty-seven out of the forty-eight sections, with their tag-rag and bob-tail, were howling for the king’s abdication through all the courts of the city; though the shadow of the Brunswicker and his emigrants was already projecting itself, like a devil’s search-light, from a contracting horizon; though hate, and terror, and fanaticism were crouching in every corner with smouldering linstocks in their hands. The babble was not less, or less animated, for this. Children sailed their boats on the ponds, or played ball about the grass. It was a scene of light and good-humour.

Against the terrace of the Feuillans, to the north of the gardens, the strollers came upon the first sign of a serpent in this Eden—a long, broad, tricolour ribbon stretched from tree to tree, and bearing the inscription, “Tyran, notre colère tient à un ruban; ta couronne tient à un fil.”

“It shall be excused, or blamed, for its wit,” said Vergniaud, and as he spoke there came uproar from a distance, where some victim to mob-resentment was being trailed through a horsepond. A cloud shut out the sun. The two men, fallen suddenly moody, made their way to a gate that led from the gardens into the Rue du Dauphin, that was a tributary of the Rue St Honoré. Vergniaud glanced up at the name of the former. “Tient à un fil,” he murmured, and shook his head, with a sigh.

On the moment of their emerging into the greater thoroughfare, a discordant rabble came upon them—a mouthing, sweltering throng of patriots, with a woman at their head banging a drum.

“Voilà la prêtresse habituée, Théroigne de Méricourt!” said Vergniaud, with a soft chuckle.

Ned gasped and stared. He had not alighted on this woman—had recalled her only fitfully—since the night when she fled from his uncle’s house. Even Madame de Lawoestine’s reference to her had affected him but indifferently. If, during his present sojourn in Paris, he, absorbed in more introspective searchings, had heard casual mention of the “Liége courtesan,” the “coryphée of the Orleanists,” the beloved (according to the wits of Les Actes des Apôtres) of the Deputy Populus (who did not so much as know her), a least desire to identify this reputation with the one of his experience had not overtaken him. Théroigne—were it, indeed, the Théroigne of his knowledge—had only followed the course he might have predicted for her. To drain the rich for the benefit of the needy—that were a noble form of solicitation. To feed starving patriots and their cause with the fruits of her dishonour was a rendering of the theme that scarcely commended itself to other than Parisian morals. Yet he had lost sight, no doubt, of the motive that induced her to wage war, by whatever means, upon the order patrician. It was to be recalled to his memory.

For now, suddenly, he was face to face with the embodiment of a passion to whose early processes he had unwittingly contributed. The girl saw, halted her vociferous troupe, and the next instant came towards him. A fantastic figure, a thing of shreds and gaudy tatters, detached itself from the throng and followed at her heels.

“Corne de Dieu!” muttered Vergniaud, “the dog too?”

Théroigne stopped in front of the Englishman—a presentment, in flesh and clothing, of vivid, barbaric licence. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed. For four years the “Defier of God,” she had walked with her face to the sun. She was, and was to be, “Mater Tenebrarum—the mother of lunacies, the suggestress of suicides”—a flaming evolution from the scorned and abandoned village beauty.

She had on a little military jacket of dark-blue, over a white chemisette cut low to her swelling figure; a tricolour sash, in which was stuck a pistol, went round her waist, and from this fell to her ankles a short skirt of scarlet. Cocked daintily on her head was an elfin hat with feathers à la Henri IV., and suspended from her shoulder by a red ribbon a little smart drum bobbed and tinkled at her side as she walked.

She clinched a hand upon her bosom, scorning and daring, in the fierce exultation of her beauty, this possible critic of it.

“We are well met,” she said. “Dost thou know me, citizen Englishman?”

“I know you, Théroigne.”

“Thou liest, thou! Thou takest me, I can see it, for some past poor victim of thy use and abuse, or, if not of thine, of another’s. I never was in Méricourt—dost thou hear?—unless it is a province of hell! I never appealed to the honour of a class that knows no honour but in name.”

Vergniaud, in some serene astonishment, came forward.

“Citizeness,” he said, “you surely amaze my friend, who is a child of the land of freedom.”

She laughed in one breath.

“Do I amaze him? I thought his looks claimed knowledge of me.”

Then she turned upon Ned once more, her furious disdain giving to the woman in her.

“I heard thou wert in Paris, monsieur le vicomte. Believe me, it is an evil place at this present for such as thou.”

“And from whom did you hear it, Mademoiselle Lambertine of Méricourt?” said Ned, with perfect coolness.

Her eyes flashed, her lips set at him.

“Ah,” she cried, rage overmastering the scorn in her voice, “but it is pitiful, is it not, for one so particular in his reputation to be jilted by the bastard of Orleans!”

Hearing her laugh, the grotesque creature, who stood still at her elbow, began to chuckle and caper.

“But yes,” he babbled in a wryed, indistinct voice, “Pamela—yes, yes—the bastard of Orleans!”

Ned, gone pale as a sheet, took a fierce step forwards, and at that the woman sprang and intercepted him, putting her hand on her vile henchman’s shoulder.

“Thou shalt not touch him!” she cried. Her fingers caught at the pistol-stock in her belt. Menacing oaths came from the ragged group that awaited her return.

“Tell him, Lucien,” she said to the wretched creature, “who it is we are ever seeking through the streets of Paris.”

“My brother Basile,” answered the man.

His face was a fearful sight—melted featureless it seemed, and with tangs of rusty hair dropping stiff from it in the unscarred patches. For the rest he was nothing but a foul-clad cripple—idiotic, distorted.

She turned upon Ned again.

“Dost thou know me now?” she cried; “or am I still to thee the simple fool that could be wronged and insulted with impunity?”

She bent forward and dropped her voice, so that every word came from it distinct.

“Listen to me. All these years I have sought and found him not. Now, at last, word comes to me that he is here in Paris, that he is identical with one that insults, through the faction she represents, the woman he has outraged beyond endurance.”

She paused and drew herself up, then raised her hand in a threatening attitude.

“My star brightens! First one, and again one! Out of the past they are drawn—drawn like night birds into a charcoal-burner’s fire, and they shall fall before me and my foot trample their necks!”

She turned and struck her dog roughly on the shoulder.

“Is thy tooth sharp, Lucien? are thy claws like a devil’s rake to rend and to scorch? Courage, my friend! the moment arrives—for you and for me, Lucien, the moment arrives!”

She had fetched drumsticks from her sash, and now brought them down with a little snapping roll and break.

“Forward!” she cried (and she looked back significantly over her shoulder). “The crown of martyrdom to the devotee that would rather wed than make a bastard!”

Again the sticks alighted with a crash and roll.

“C’est nous qu’on ose méditer de rendre à l’antique esclavage!” she sang out shrilly; and all the throaty mob took up the chorus, “Aux armes, citoyens!”

So, reeling and howling, and drifting backwards a black smoke of menace towards the stranger whose name, for any or no particular reason, seemed to be written in the dark book of its café-chantant Hippolyté, the procession passed on its way. The stragglers, who had been drawn by curiosity to the neighbourhood of the interview, dispersed, and the two men were left alone.

Vergniaud, with a shrug of his shoulders, looked at Ned, who seemed to be muttering to himself.

“A very précieuse-ridicule,” murmured the Frenchman. “I would not have you take the little pretty rogue seriously.”

Ned seized him by the wrist.

“Did you hear her?” he exclaimed in a concentrated agony of voice.

Vergniaud nodded his head.

“About monsieur le duc’s protégée?” he answered uneasily.

“How did she know of her—of me?”

“Mon ami, cannot you tell?” was the compassionate, evasive reply.

“Yes,” cried Ned violently, “I can tell. He lied about the letter. The woman told him in it why she had wished to get rid of me, and he lied about it.”

“Come,” said Vergniaud, “if it is so, the lie acquitted him, at least, of a cruel discourtesy towards you.”

Ned laughed like a devil.

“Acquitted him!” he shrieked; “and while he reserved the jest to retail it to his brazen drab here! Oh, I know that no road is too common for Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans! And my—and this that I have hugged to my soul and cherished as almost too sacred for my own thoughts to prey upon! To be used to the foul purposes of a harlot and her lecher! Oh, my God!—I will kill him!”

Vergniaud essayed a manner of soothing.

“The shrine of love can only be desecrated from within. These may storm at the closed windows of thy soul, and the draught but make the sacred lamp of thy heart burn brighter. Hold up thy head, my dear friend.”

“I have never lowered it,” muttered Ned; but he seemed hardly to hear what the other said.

“’Tis a specious theatrical jade,” went on Vergniaud, “and always alert for situations. Witness her babbling reunions in the Rue de Rohan, where enough gas is brewed in a night to float ten balloons. Witness her habit of attire, her drum, her dog—the misbegotten maniac that she rescued months ago from the Salpétrière, and hath devoted to some mission of devilry that is the crowning infirmity of his brain. Bah! It is all affectation, I believe. She will certainly pose by-and-by before the judgment-seat.”

CHAPTER XI.

In the early morning of the 10th of August a young man, wearing the uniform of the National Guards, was arrested in the Champs Elysées by a patrol of the very corps to which he presumably belonged. This young man—of a bright, confident complexion, crisp gold hair, and a rather girlish turn of feature—took his mishap with an admirable sang-froid.

“Very well, my friends,” he said. “And I am arrested on suspicion—of what?”

“Of being an accursed Royalist in disguise,” answered the corporal gruffly.

The stranger nodded to the soldier.

“When the good cause triumphs,” said he, “it shall be remembered to your credit that you could recognise a gentleman through the trappings of a brigand.”

“Ah-hé s’il ne tient qu’à ça!” replied the corporal briefly, with a sniff. “Before this sun sets there will be, perhaps, some hundreds of you gentry the fewer.”

“My faith!” said the other, “and what a shortsighted policy: to post a cloud of educated witnesses to the skies, to testify in advance to your moral inefficiency!”

They took him to the Cour des Feuillans—a yard neighbouring on that very spot where Ned, a day or two earlier, had had his contretemps with Théroigne and her satellites. Here, thrust into an outbuilding that had been temporarily converted into a guard-room, he alighted upon many acquaintances in a like predicament.

“Does it all read failure?” he whispered to a colossal creature beside him. This—also, presumably, a grenadier of the nation—was, in fact, the Abbé Bougon, an ecclesiastic of the Court, who wrote plays, yet had never conceived a situation one-half so dramatic as this in which he now found himself.

“Hush!” murmured the giant. “Yes; the worst is to be feared.”

By-and-by the prisoners were summoned, in order, to examination in an adjoining room. Long, however, before it came to the cool young stranger’s turn, a sound of growing uproar without the building had swelled to a thunder harsh and violent enough to ominously interfere, one might have thought, with the procès-verbal within. The deep diapason of massed voices, the crisp clash of pikes, the flying of furious ejaculations—startling accents to the whole context of menace—assured him that here was evidence of such a counterbuff to palace intrigue as palace fatuity had never conceived might threaten it.

Suddenly, in the midst of the tumult, he thought he heard his own name cried.

“Suleau!” And again, “Scélérat! Imposteur!”

He got upon a bench by a window that commanded a view of the court. This, he saw,—a wide, enclosed space,—was full of blue-coated soldiers. A posse of them made a present show of keeping the gates of the yard; but the gates themselves, significant to the true character of their defence, they had neglected to close. Beyond, in the road, and extending at least so far over the Thuilleries gardens as his view could compass, a packed congregation of patriots—quite typical savages—rested for a moment on its weapons. It listened, it appeared, to a commissary of the section, who, mounted on a tub by the gates, counselled methods judicial. A little space had been left about the orator, and now into this in an instant broke a woman—a wild vivandière, she seemed, of the new religious service of blood and wine—of the transubstantiation of Liberty. Without a moment’s hesitation she caught the commissary by a leg, and, hurling him to the ground, usurped his place. An exultant roar of applause shook the air. The poor deposed tribune, rubbing his bones, rose, and bolted for shelter. Suleau chuckled.

Now he did not know Théroigne; but he had laughed consumedly at her and her pseudo-classical pretensions in more than one Royalist print. He laughed at many things, did this Suleau—not sparing the gloom-distilling Jacobins, nor, in particular, Citizen Philip Egalité and his faction, of whom was Citizeness Lambertine; and he was so breezily headstrong, so romantically sworn to a picturesque cause, that he would not calculate the cost of pitting his wit against the vanity of a coryphée whose nod, in this height of her popularity, often confirmed a wavering sentence, whose smile rarely franked an acquittal. Besides, women—even the most foolish of them—like to be taken seriously.

This woman, it would seem, spoke vigorously, and entirely to the humour of her auditors. Only there appeared to prevail something rankly personal against himself, of all the twenty-two arrested, in her diatribe. He caught the sound of his own name uttered again and again to an accompaniment of oaths and execrations. This, at least, flattered him with the assurance that he had done something to earn the transcendent animosity of the many-headed.

“I present myself with an order of merit,” he murmured, gratified; and immediately he was summoned to his examination.

He was conducted between guards to the room of inquisition. In it he recognised many of his pre-indicted comrades in misfortune—twenty-one in all—huddled into a corner by a window. The room was otherwise crammed with soldiers, commissaries, and a few of the breechless. A thin man, in a state of palpable nervous excitement, sat behind a table. This was the Sieur Bonjour, first clerk of the Marines and President of the Section of the Feuillans. He opened upon the prisoner at once.

“It is useless to deny that you are Suleau, the Royalist pamphleteer.”

“Indeed,” replied the captive, with equal promptitude, “I would not so stultify monsieur’s fine perspicacity in discovering what I have never concealed.”

“Yet you disguise yourself in the garb of liberty.”

“No more than monsieur, surely.”

The president struck his hand on the table.

“It is not for me to bandy words with you. You were arrested when patrolling the Champs Elysées, at an hour when all respectable men are in bed.”

“If,” said Suleau, “at an hour when all respectable men are in bed, where was monsieur?”

“Enough!” cried Bonjour angrily. “You are accused of conspiring with these to resist the will of the people—by innuendo, by direct insult to the people’s representatives—finally, by banding yourself with others to inquire secretly into, that you might successfully out-manœuvre, the processes of the movement having forfeiture for its object.”

“I congratulate monsieur,” said Suleau irrelevantly, “upon his admirable manœuvring for election to the Ministership of Marines.”

The president scrambled to his feet with an oath. The room broke into ferment.

“I beg to inform monsieur,” cried the prisoner, raising his voice, “that I am in possession of a municipal pass to the chateau of the Thuilleries!”

“Yes, yes—and we!” cried the huddle of captives by the window.

With the very echo of their words there came tumult in the vestibule, a trample of feet, and the head of a frowzy deputation burst into the room. The young Royalist turned about and, folding his arms, quietly faced the inrush. A woman was to its front—she he had seen mount the rough tribune in the yard to denounce him. He saw her now marking him down with a triumphant fury in her eyes—a strange, beautiful creature—his own enigmatical Nemesis, it seemed.

“Citizen president,” she cried in a full bold voice, “while St Antoine awaits your decision St Antoine is paralysed. Its cannon yawn in the faubourg; its pikes stab only at the air. To clear the ground of these outposts—bah! here needs not the interminable civil processes. Mouchards all, arrested armed in a state of belligerency, they shall be subject to martial law. In the name of the national fraternity, that to-day shall be confirmed and cemented, I demand that these prisoners be handed over to the people.”

A murmur succeeded her outcry. The president, white to the ears, stilled it with uplifted hand. He looked a moment at the young Royalist, a bitter stiff smile on his lips.

“It is just!” he cried in a sudden thin voice. “This is no time to dally, as the demoiselle Théroigne informs us. Conduct all the prisoners into the yard.”

The order had not passed his lips when there came a splintering crash, and in an instant the whole room was in roaring racket and confusion. Some half of the prisoners, forereading their certain doom, had made a desperate plunge for escape through the rearward window by which they stood. They got clear away. Their less prompt, or fortunate, companions were in the same moment surrounded and isolated each from each.

Suleau lifted his voice above the din.

“Commit me, my friends, to the sacrifice. Perhaps my blood, which, it seems, they most desire, will appease their fury!”

He struggled to throw himself towards the door. His motive misunderstood, a half-dozen sans-culottes flung themselves upon and pinioned him in their arms. At the same instant Théroigne leapt like a cat and seized him by his collar.

“At last!” she hissed in his ear. “Dost thou know me?”

“Thou art Théroigne!” he panted. He had caught the president’s words. He understood now something of the reason of this woman’s violence.

“Ah!” she cried in a hurried fury of speech, “and has not my time come, thou dog with a false name, thou nameless cur, so to slander and revile the woman thou drovest to ruin?”

They were slowly edging him towards the door. He could only shake his head at her.

“Why dost thou not speak?” she urged. “Why dost thou not implore my mercy? I could save thee if I would.”

He still did not answer.

“Ah!” she sighed, with a cruel feint of tenderness, “for the sake of the old days, Basile! Ask me, by the memory of our embraces, of thy child that I bore in my womb, to pity and protect thee!”

“You are mad,” he cried. “I have never seen you in my life.”

She struck him across the mouth. The blow, the sight of the little blood that sprang from the wound, were a double provocation to the beasts of prey. They bore him with a rush to the outer door, through it, into the yard beyond. Torn, bleeding, fighting every foot of his way, but never protesting, he would sell his life dearly to these mongrels. The yelling crowd surged and rocked before him. Suddenly—with that exaltation of the perceptions that often seems to signify the first flight-essay of the soul—he saw far back in the thick of the press of inhuman faces one face that he recognised as that of a man who, years before, on the morning of the Reveillon riots, had spoken to him, mistaking him for another. Now, from the expression of this one face, he educed a desperate hope. He gathered it from the anguish of its features, from the conviction that its owner was frantically endeavouring to thrust and beat a passage towards him through the throng. God! he thought; if he could only reach the face, he would somehow be saved.

With a furious effort he tore himself free, and snatched at and wrenched a sabre from a hand that threatened him.

“Here!” he shrieked to the face; “to meet me, monsieur—to meet me!”

He had actually cut his way a half-dozen yards before a hand—the woman’s—seized him from the back and dragged him to the ground. With a groan he fell, trampled into a forest of tattered legs.

“Cry to me for mercy!” screamed the harlot.

“No,” he answered faintly.

She yelled then, beating a space about her with her hands. “Lucien, it is the moment that has come!”

Snarling and dribbling, a hideous thing broke through the press and flung itself upon the fallen man.

* * * * * * * *

Torn and breathless, Ned shouldered his way at last into the little bloody arena. A woman—her foot upon the neck of something, some bespattered creature that whimpered and prayed to her—looked stupidly down upon the dead and mangled body of the man she had destroyed.

“Accursed! oh, thou accursed!” panted the new-comer in terrible emotion. “It is not he, St Denys, that thou hast murdered.”

CHAPTER XII.

From the day of the massacre in the Cour des Feuillans, when—a casual and involuntary witness of the opening deed of blood—he had made a desperate attempt to save the life of the man who, as he supposed, was being sacrificed to a misconception, Ned had no thought but that he was fallen, a second time and inextricably, under the deadly spell of the city that was at once his horror and his attraction. That he had not paid the penalty with his own life of so quixotic an interposition rather confirmed him in the sense of fatality that had overtaken him. He could afterwards only recall vaguely the expression of terror with which Théroigne had accepted his furious impeachment of her barbarity; the resentful rage of the mob over his denunciation of its idol; his imminent peril, and the immunity from personal harm suddenly and unexpectedly secured him at the hands of the very loathed object of his execration. He had given her no thanks for her advocacy. It had condemned him merely to prolonged struggle with an existence that had grown hateful to him. Defrauded of his love, disenchanted with life, his residue of the latter was not, he felt, worth the devil’s purchase.

And yet this sentiment carried with it a certain wild passion of personal irresponsibility that was not without its charm. Into the being of the people that had waived for the present, it seemed, all thought of consistent conduct, he was absorbed without effort of his own—absorbed so helplessly, that even the wounding stab of a certain question, once engrossingly poignant to himself, dulled of its pain and could be borne. It was as difficult to think collectedly, indeed, in the Paris of those days as it is while rushing through a strong wind.

Now, in the thick of the events that followed fast and irresistible upon the heels of an overture to what was, in truth, a disguised anarchy, he could not but feel himself something renewing that state of mind, curious and fiercely pitiful, that had been induced in him years before by his contemplation of the first scenes of a tragedy that was now labouring in its penultimate act. And here the emotion of the moment seemed always significant of the trend of the plot, until—puff! the dramatic weathercock would go round, and the wind of applause blow from another quarter, freezing or wet according to a rule that was just the regular absence of any. But the food of excited conjecture never failed to save his heart from feeding upon its own tissues, and was the sustenance to his starving hopes. Indeed, at this last, it seldom occurred to him, a temporary sojourner in the city of doom, that he was other than an unalienable minute condition of the city’s life; and he would no more than his friend Pierre-Victorin desire to repudiate his liabilities thereto.

The 10th of August had passed like a death-cloud—“a ragged bastion fringed with fire”—sweeping the streets with a storm of blood. The king, dethroned, was a prisoner in the Temple; the mob occupied itself in the violent erasing of all symbols of royalty. Vergniaud and the Gironde were in perilous, protesting power; the prisons were glutting; the guillotine had begun to rise and fall like a force-pump, draining the human marshes. Of Théroigne, the militant priestess of St Antoine, Ned heard only, vaguely rumoured, that—sated, perhaps, with her share in the events of the Thuilleries massacre—she was inclining to the moderate policy of Brissot and his following, and was temporarily, at least, withdrawn from the influence of her earlier colleagues. That she was moved to this course by any self-loathing for the deed of which he had been witness he, detesting her, would not believe. But he had no wish to entertain one further thought of her in his mind.

So the month sped by—its every succeeding hour fresh fuel to the popular wrath and terror over the rumoured advance of the Allies upon the city,—and on the last day of it a strange little rencontre took place between two of the minor actors in a very extraneous branch of the general tragedy.

Ned, aimlessly strolling through the Faubourg of St Marcel in the south-east quarter of the city, had turned, on the evening of this day, into the boulevard that ran straight northward, by the ancient city wall, from the Place Mouffetard to the Seine. His way took him past the horse-market, and—inevitably, therefore, to the context—past an adjacent house of correction for blacklegs. This ironically named hospital—an iron-cased lazaretto, in truth, the prison of the Salpétrière—was situate upon a dismal wedge of waste land between the new and old enceintes of the city. It was a brutal, gloomy pile, its walls exuding, one might have thought, the ichor of a thousand diseases, moral and physical. Sooty, unlovely as a factory—as indeed it was, of the devil’s wares—its noisome towers, blotted on the sky, decharmed the soft reflected burning of the sunset, and made a vulgarity of their whole leafy neighbourhood. From its grated windows, high up in the foul air of its own exhaling, behind which the gallows-tree birds built their nests, caws and screams issuing were evidences of a very swarming rookery. Here and there, the white, hair-draggled face of a strumpet stared from behind bars; here and there an inward light—like a wandering fen candle—could be seen travelling from story to story.

Ned, as he approached the building, quickened in his walk; for he was aware of a batch of fresh prisoners, under escort, being driven across the boulevard towards the central gate; and with the instinct to spare misfortune the impertinence of unofficial inquest, he would hurry to put himself beyond suspicion of prying. In this good motive, however, he was baulked; for a subsequent party—a solitary culprit walking between guards—issued from the same direction, and cut across and encountered him just as he approached the entrance.

He started, and strangled an immediate inclination to exclaim aloud. For in the lonely malefactor, going by him with bent head and lowering, preoccupied face, he recognised—he was sure of it—Basile de St Denys.

Degraded, vitiated—a shameful, ravaged personality, as unlike, in his existing condition, the bright soul who had served, unconsciously to them both, for his scapegoat—here was, without question, the unlicensed once-lord of Méricourt. And the woman, his victim, had erred only, it seemed, as to the direction of his presence in the city—had erred, perhaps, because she could not realise that, consistent to his nature, he must be sought, after all these years, along the lower levels of existence.

The felons and their escort disappeared; Ned, dwelling where he had paused, came to himself presently with a shock, as if out of a dream. On an immediate impulse he turned into the prison yard, and mounted a shallow flight of steps leading up to a great studded door that was pierced by an open wicket. Looking through this, he saw the figure he sought receding down a dim, long vestibule; and at the moment he was faced by a turnkey.

“What do you here?” exclaimed the man harshly. “That Jules is a fine porter!”

“I thought I saw one I knew pass in.”

“It is like enough. They have many of them a large acquaintance”—and he offered to slam the wicket in the intruder’s face. Ned jingled, and produced his “tip.”

“That is another question,” said the man.

“Now,” said Ned, “is the name of that last prisoner that entered Basile de St Denys?”

“I know nothing of the de. What sort of citizen art thou? But, otherwise—yes.”

“And what is he accused of?”

“A common enough matter: forging assignats.”

CHAPTER XIII.

Citoyenne Théroigne had not, it is to be supposed, the wit of a Mohl, or the tact of a Recamier; but her sensuous and long-practised beauty so vindicated her sins of omission in these respects as to procure her reunions a social distinction than which none more catholic was accorded the salons of a later period. At her rooms in the Rue de Rohan she held, and had long held, weekly Sunday séances, of a quasi-political character, at which revolutionary propagandists of such opposed principles as Mirabeau, Brissot, Pétion were in turn, or out of it, to be met. Thither sometimes came Philip of Orleans, with his sick, affable smile; thither Desmoulins, galvanic and stuttering, the “attorney-general to the lantern”; thither the poet Joseph Chénier; thither the younger Sieyes, eager to sniff the incense exhaled to his less accessible brother, to whose exalted virtues Théroigne, by some queer freak of contrariety, consistently and reverently testified. To what earlier condescensions on her part were due her present political intimacies it need not here be questioned. One form of sympathetic largesse is part of the necessary equipment of women of a naturally assimilative character.

She had adaptability; for four years her face and figure had brought her a succession of ardent ministers to it. Thus, nourished on the unconsidered mental pabulum of manifold intellects, she was become an omniparous vessel, brazen and beautiful—emitting such a medley of discordant sounds as had once the window bells, to Ned, in the “landlust” of her native village. Yet, through all, whatever her inconsequent show of principles, detestation of a social system to the abuse of which she attributed her early downfall abided within her unwaveringly, and induced her to those deeds of violence that, in the end, alienated from her all those of her once familiars to whom Reason figured as something higher than the goddess of licence.

But still she had a store of reflected light with which to illuminate her Sunday reunions.

* * * * * * * *

“Citoyenne,” said an acrid young patriot, whose eyes were just cut apart by the mere blade of a nose, and who wore a little silver guillotine for a seal, “whither wilt thou fly when the Brunswicker enters to make good his manifesto?”

“At his throat, Pollio,” (the company clapped its hands).

“To hang round his neck?”

“Ay, like a millstone.”

“But, indeed,” said the young man, affecting to show trouble, “thou wilt surely be included amongst the proscribed.”

“There will be none!” cried the girl: “the capitol is saved! the geese have begun to cackle!”

Pollio, amidst the laughter, shook his head in pretended distress.

“It is all very well. Yet not Paris but the world were lost to see our Judith under a wall, the mark to a platoon of dirty jägers.”

Théroigne came to her feet. Her cheeks were flushed; her thick brown curls were slumbrous shadows upon the pale slopes of her shoulders. She was dressed quite simply, in the suggestiveness (something misread) of virgin white.

But she was not at her ease. Radiant, glowing, voluptuous (she always looked, this woman, as if she were but just risen from a warm bed), there had yet been all the evening an unwonted rigidity in her manner, a distraught expression in her face, such as that with which one vouchsafes to another the shadow of an attention whose substance is given elsewhere. She would break into feverish fits of merriment. She would start and seem to listen, as if to some tiny voice making itself heard within the compass of many voices. It may have passed unregarded, this spasmodic manner of distraction; it may have been observed and accepted as a new accent to charms so many-humoured. The times took little note, little surprise, of unaccustomed tricks of speech or feature. It was because men and women had so lost sight of what were their true selves that moods passed for convictions.

Now she stood like a Pythoness, the light from above falling upon her head, rounding and sleepily caressing all the fair curves of her figure, of the smooth naked arm she raised as in inspiration.

“It is not the Brunswicker I fear,” she cried. “It is the enemy from within—from within!”

She dropped her hand to her heart, as if that were her secret foe.

“Citoyenne,” whispered a voice in her ear, “there is one waiting in the foyer that is peremptory to see thee.”

She stared a moment, with a lost expression; then looked aside, half in anger, to see her country Grisel regarding her appealingly.

“What one, little fool—little Bona?”

“Indeed, I do not know. He implored me by the love of God.”

Théroigne laughed uneasily.

“Rather by the love that is gratuitous, thou little grand’-bêta. Hush! Go before, and I will follow.”

Some one drew aside the portière; she passed out, with a smile that fled from her face as she descended the stairs. Under the dim oil-lamp in the hall a cloaked figure was standing. As she came upon it, she saw it was the English lord. The warmth and fragrance of a remoter atmosphere that she brought with her shivered into frost on the instant. That was inevitable; yet she would always have foregone many plenary indulgences to draw this man into sin on her account.

He took a quick step forward, made as if to seize her by the arm—but checked the impulse.

“You must come with me!” he whispered.

She exclaimed, incredulous, “Come with you!” then quickly bent forward, and looked intensely into his face.

“Why does your voice break? Is it some trouble of your own, and you seek me—me out of all the world?”

“It is not of my own.”

“Whose, then?”

“Yours.”

“Mon Dieu!” she cried, with a little sharp laugh of mockery. “I know of none—of no trouble or pleasure—that is our mutual concern.”

He clapped his hand roughly at that on her naked shoulder. His fingers clawed angry marks in the flesh.

“Ah!” she cried, “you hurt me!”

“Hurt!” he echoed. “Do you know what they are doing to-night in this devil’s city of yours?”

He caught only a faint protesting murmur from her lips.

“God wither you if you do!” he said hoarsely. “They are murdering the prisoners. Do you hear?—in all the prisons they are murdering the prisoners; and Basile de St Denys is one of them!”

She sprang back from him. Her face was like a face seen in moonlight—white, round a black glare of eyes.

“You lie!” she cried. “He at least is dead already!”

He came at her again—seized her in a very fiend’s grip.

“Is it a time to equivocate? You know, as I, how your wicked hand miscarried on that day. The man is in prison. I myself saw him borne thither three days ago. You must come, and quickly, to be of use. There is no question but that.”

She shook herself free, standing back so that her face seemed to twitch and palpitate in the gusty sway of the lamp-light.

“You are imperious,” she muttered.

“It must not be,” he cried violently, “this horrible thing. You can save him if you will.”

“And can you so master your loathing of me as to ask it?” she said.

“I swear—deny yourself this gratification of a lust so inhuman, and I will think better of you than ever before.”

“That will be compensation for all I have suffered,” she said.

Her voice seemed too toneless, too passionless even for irony. She stood without a movement before him, the marks of his clutch slowly fading from her shoulder.

“Théroigne,” he cried, “you have the chance to a little atone. You will not so clinch your damnation! In the name of God, Théroigne! This man was the father of your child.”

“True,” she said, “of my dead child. I will come, monsieur.”

He gave a gasp of terrible relief.

“Hurry!” he said, “or it will be too late.”

She had already seized a cloak from a recess: in a moment they were speeding on their way together.

He talked to her as they hurried on—half unconsciously, almost hysterically. He told of his chance encounter, of Basile’s degradation, of anything or nothing. It was such emotional gabble as even reserved men vent during the first moments of respite from intolerable anguish. His voice echoed back from the silent houses. He did not even notice that the girl returned him never an answer, so assured was he now of her sympathy.

The streets were curiously still and deserted, the familiar life of them all shrunk and cowering behind a thousand lightless blinds. Now and again phantom cries seemed wafted to them from remote quarters; now and again a glimmer of torches would flash from far perspectives, and travel a moment on the blackness and vanish.

It was a weary way by which they must go. The man led his companion through the Place du Carousel down to the river, along the endless line of quays by the wash of night-bound waters, over the Isle St-Louis and the street of the two bridges; again, along the gloomy quay of St-Bernard, and so into the dark leafy boulevard that ran southwards to the thieves’ prison. And here, for the first time, a spectral suggestion, an attenuated wind of sounds, began to take shape and body; and here suddenly the girl gave a quick gasp, and jerked to a stop.

“The Salpétrière!” she muttered, clutching her cloak to her throat.

“The Salpétrière, Théroigne.”

She seemed to turn her head and look at him. Then on again she went, and he followed.

The noise increased to their every onward step. Ambiguous sounds resolved themselves into sounds unnamable. Dim light, seen phantomly ahead, flared out in a moment across their path, as if some hellish furnace were refuelling. And then, in an instant—as it were stokers labouring at the mouth of flame—a scurry of fantastic shapes, grotesquely busy about the entrance to a lighted yard, grew into their vision.

Ned turned upon his companion.

“Take my arm,” he said, in a ghastly voice.

She shrank from him.

“Not unless it is thou needst support,” she whispered.

He seized her hand, and reached and drove into the thick of the bestial throng, dragging her after him. A horrible reek seemed to fasten upon his brain.

“Malédiction!” shrieked a filthy Alsatian, whom he had sent reeling with his elbow; “but I will teach thee the answer to that!”

He swung up a bloody cleaver, clearing a space about him. The girl, on the thought, ran under his guard.

“Théroigne!” screamed a woman’s voice across the yard. “It is la belle Liégeoise—our little amazon!”

Her cloak had fallen apart. She was revealed to these her friends. At the word, a roar went up from the mob; the offending patriot was struck down, trampled upon; the girl herself stamped upon his face.

“Hither!” screamed the voice again, “to the best seats in all the theatre!”

Then at once Ned felt himself urged forward. He went, dazed. His feet slid on the stones—plashed once or twice. He saw a great light—light jumping from the brands held high by a lurid row of women stationed on the topmost step of the shallow flight that led to the great door. He saw Théroigne seized and embraced by these harpies. Her skirt, that had been all white, bore a clownish fringe of crimson.

“I cannot stay here,” she cried. “I have business within.”

They answered, clattering: “Get it over and return, little badine, for the sight is good.”

The next moment he and the girl were at the door. A group of four, issuing, scrambled past, almost upsetting them. A patriot to each shoulder and one fastened on like a dog at the back! It seemed an extravagant guard to one sick collapsed thing borne in the midst. They ran it down the steps; the torches fluttered and poised steady. Ned flung himself through the doorway, crushing his hands against his ears. Somebody touched and led him forward.

As his brain cleared, he saw that he was standing—somewhat apart from any other—in a large, dimly lighted room. A man of a fierce and sensual mould of feature was seated hard by at a table, a great open register before him, a tin box of tobacco and some bottles within his ready reach. Round about lolled on benches pulled away from the walls, perhaps a dozen, more or less tipsy, judges (saving the mark!) subordinate to the president. A couple of men with red-stained arms and in steaming shirts stood by the closed door. An old dumb-faced turnkey held his hand to the lock.

A voice—a name lately uttered, still rang confusedly in his memory. What did it signify? He caught at his reeling faculties.

“Behold, citizeness, the man!”

All in an instant, it seemed, the room sank into profound stillness. He struck the film from his eyes, and saw St Denys.

The wretched creature stood before the table, between guards. He appeared utterly amazed and demoralised. Even in the moment of terror, Ned shrunk to see how the brute had come to predominate in that handsome debauched face.

Then, suddenly, the harsh voice of the president shattered the silence.

“Your name—your profession?”

“St Denys, by principle and practice a demagogue,” faltered the prisoner.

“Dost know of what thou art accused?”

“I am innocent, M. le président—before God, I am innocent!”

Something white moved forward—struck him on the shoulder.

“And before me, Basile de St Denys?”

He whipped about, and uttered a cry like a trapped hare.

“It is enough,” said the judge, with admirable intuition. He was by this time so far sated with his feast of blood that a nicely balanced “situation” was like an olive to his wine. He would not cheapen the flavour by unduly extending it.

“The citoyenne Théroigne pronounces sentence,” he said. “I wash my hands of the matter. Let the prisoner be enlarged.”

He took a gulp from a glass at his side, and bent to write in his book. His guards laid hands on their victim. With a shriek, St Denys tore himself free, and fell at the feet of the woman.

“Théroigne!” he cried, abasing himself before her—clutching at her skirt, “don’t let them take me—me, that have lain in your arms!”

Grovelling on the floor, he turned his agonised face to the president.

“She did not denounce me, monsieur! your generosity misinterpreted her motive.” (He caught again at the dress, writhing in his dreadful shame.) “Say you did not mean it! Give me a little time to repent. I have wronged you, Théroigne; but I never ceased to love you in my heart. Give me time, in mercy, and I will explain. You have not seen. You don’t know the foulness and the horror of it!—Théroigne!”

Looking up, he saw the stony impassibility of her face, and sank upon the boards, moaning “Pardon—pardon!”

She stood gazing down upon this poor revealed baseness—this idol self-deposed.

“Pardon!” she said at last, in a quiet, even passionless voice. “And do you conceive, monsieur, the exorbitance of your demand? But I will put the case to these citizens, and take their verdict.”

She raised her beautiful hard face, addressing the board—

“What price, messieurs, for an innocence ravished under pretext of a union of free-wills—a union that was to be more indissoluble than marriage, yet that lasted only a summer’s day? What price for a broken contract when the shame threatened; for the dastardly desertion of a wounded comrade; for the bitter desolation of a heart doubly widowed and slandered through its trust? What price for the ruined honour of a family, for the curse of a father? What price for exile from all the peace of life; for—my God! what price for a faith, that was so beautiful, destroyed; for a name that necessity has made infamous amongst men?”

She paused, and a loud murmur from her listeners eddied through the room. She caught at her skirt, seeking to release it from the clutch of him that held it. It was doubtful if the dying wretch took in much of the significance of her words. He crouched there, only whimpering and swaying and entreating her half articulately.

“Thou wouldst always teach me the immortality of such a faith,” she cried in quick passionateness, “whilst thou wert giving me to an immortality of shame.”

Suddenly she threw her hands to her face.

“Oh me! oh me!” she wailed in a broken voice.

For the first time some core of anguish in Ned seemed to melt and weep itself away.

“It is come at last,” his heart exulted. “She will pardon him.”

As swiftly as it had seized her the emotion fled. She held out her open palms, as if in a devil’s blessing, above the prostrate man.

“They are soiled with blood!” she cried. “Let the victims, when my name is execrated, testify against you, not me!”

She seemed to listen to the moaning entreaty that never ceased at her feet. The president shifted in his chair and was restless with some papers. This situation—it was interesting, tragic, spiced with unexpected revelation; but the occasion, apart from it, was peremptory; the killers were clamorous outside over the unaccountable break in the programme.

“My honour,” cried Théroigne, “my early innocence, my faith and peace of mind! If I name the return to me of these as the price of blood, what is thy answer?”

His moaning rose only like a wind of despair. She drew herself erect and turned to the judges.

“Messieurs—the price?”

The whole company seemed to spring to its feet. A roar went up from it—and subsided.

“It is answered,” said the president. “Take M. St Denys away.”

There was a scurrying forward of men—a sudden stooping—a struggle. Shriek after shriek came from the ground. Ned leapt into the fray like a madman.

“To subscribe,” he screamed, “to the revengeful fury of a wanton! It is not liberty or justice. Why, look at her, look at her. The beast that would murder twenty innocents to secure the destruction of one that had wounded her vanity. Gentlemen! to be so governed by a harlot—to be——!”

He choked as he fought. There were savage hands at his throat.

“Do not harm him. I would not have him harmed.”

It was Théroigne that spoke. She stood apart, white and chill as a figure of ice.

He spat curses at her, that mingled with the deadlier tumult. Monsieur le président made his voice heard above the din.

“Eject this person, without hurt, from the rear of the prison.”

Seized, then, despite his frantic struggles; protesting; striving for foothold; conscious always of the desperate outcry—faint, and fainter—of the unhappy man he had sought to befriend, Ned felt himself hurried along corridors, borne down steps and by way of echoing dank vaults—thrust violently into a world of spacious silence.

A door shut with a steely clang behind him. Before, stretched a desolate waste tract of fields. The moon was at its full-flood light, and the whole world seemed to float quietly on a sea of peace.

He threw himself, face-downwards, amongst the tufts of coarse grass, and cried upon the flood to overwhelm him.

CHAPTER XIV.

At the end of November the young Viscount Murk was still a sojourner in Paris. Always reserved and self-contained, he was become by then a creature of wilful and habitual loneliness, with something, indeed, of the moral dyspepsia that is induced of the morbid appetite that leads one to feed upon one’s own heart. And when the heart is so inflamed of love as to be sensitive to the least imaginary slight, assuredly the dyspepsia, as in Ned’s case, shall be acute.

Men of few or no friendships have a very undivided passion to bestow when at last the call comes to them. At the same time such are wont to signalise the early stages of their complaint by a diffidence so exaggerated as that, in the nature of nature, it must degenerate in course into a desperately injured vanity. It is to be feared that, at this period of his ailing, Ned was horribly big with a sense of grievance generally against the social order, that seemed so parsimonious of the favours (as represented by one only favour, in fact) that his position entitled him to draw upon. What was the good, in short, of being possessed of acres, a lordship, an agreeable personality, if all could not procure him the single modest gift he had ever asked of Fortune?

That was a sentiment for his bitterest moods. In his more reasonable, he would acknowledge to himself, with a sorrowful rapture, that no human desert could prove itself worthy of the Hebe-goddess at whose pretty feet he had worshipped.

So he waited on and on—because irresolution, also, is a necessary concomitant of extreme diffidence. He waited on, remote from his natural state, constantly on the prick of flight, yet always fearing to move, lest a vilely humorous destiny should take his sudden decision for the point to a game of cross-purposes. He waited on, shrinking ever more into his unwholesome self; avoiding company—comradeship, even; but half-conscious of the screeching barbaric world about him; hearing only distant echoes from the world over-seas. Now and again it would occur to him—upon his receipt of those periodic advices from his steward that made the almost sum of his communications with a life that had grown curiously shadowy to him—to put his own native instruments (in the person of this same steward) to the use of ascertaining and reporting upon the movements of Madame de Genlis and her charges. But always he was faced thereupon by a score ghosts of apprehension—that such confidences might beget familiarities vulgarising to the aloofness of his passion; that the necessary interval that must elapse before he could procure a reply must debar him from the independence of action that he still claimed, without enjoying; most, that the coveted news itself, when it should reach him, might do no better than confirm a haunting fear. And so he dwelt on, passing at last, it seemed, into the very winter of his discontent.

Shunning—since that September night of a tragedy that had stricken him for the time being half-demented—personal intercourse with any—even the gentle Vergniaud—whose precepts and practice of liberty seemed so grotesquely irreconcilable, he lost something of his former feeling of a moral participation in the scenes enacting about him. Of the revengeful woman, with whose destinies a joyless fatality had appeared to connect him, he had seen nothing since the hour of his agonising experience at the Salpétrière—had heard only, with a savage exultation, that her latest connection with the moderate party was undermining her popularity with that more formidable class of which the link-women on the prison steps had been prominent representatives.

“She will be devoured by her own dogs,” he would think; and “God in heaven!” he would cry in his soul, “to what an association with cutthroats and queans has Providence thought fit to condemn me—me whose heart burns always like a pure steadfast lamp before the shrine of its divinity!”

* * * * * * * *

One bitter evening Ned found himself abroad in the streets—a mere waif of destiny, hustled and jogged into the kennels by an arrogant wind. The iciness of this dulled all his faculties, blinded him as he struggled aimlessly on. “It must make the stones weep,” he thought, “or why should my eyes fill with water!” The lamps slung across the narrower gullies danced like boats at their moorings. The very shop fronts seemed to flap their sign-boards, like hands, for warmth.

He had crossed the river and penetrated the Faubourg St Germain as far as the Rue de Vaurigard. On his right, the sombre towers of the Luxembourg reeled into the night; on his left, a starry quiver of lamps shaped out the portico of the Théâtre-Français.

He was numb with cold. The glow and movement about the theatre drew him—as they often did nowadays—to a bid for temporary self-forgetfulness. He ran up the steps, entered a warm and lively vestibule, and took a box ticket for the performance.

This, when he came to view it, opened with a one-act sketch—“Allons, ça va!”—a very patriotic and warlike little piece. He had seen it before, and it did not greatly interest him. He was, in fact, sitting in the covert of his retreat watching rather the house than the players, when all in a moment his heart bounded, and he shrank back into the shadow of the wall-hangings. Opposite him he had seen a party enter a screened box, a loge grillée—nothing very significant in itself. But a minute later the grating had swung open, revealing—Pamela.

She did not at first catch sight of him. She sat to the front of the tier—she and the little pink-eyed daughter of Orleans. Her cheeks, her hair, her eyes were all a soft glory under the radiance of the lamps. He thought he had never seen her look so happy and so beautiful.

There were figures, the indistinct forms of men, standing behind the ladies; but these he could not identify.

A great sigh of ecstasy, half anguish, escaped him. He leaned forward, and at that instant the girl raised her face and saw him.

Under the shock of recognition, he was conscious of nothing but that he had bowed across the house—that he had immediately leaned back in his seat, his pulses drumming, his eyes blinded with emotion.

When he dared to look again—the grille was closed.

A swerve of actual vertigo seemed to send him reeling. The next moment, thinking—though, indeed, he had done, had looked, nothing to attract observation—that his condition must be patent to the audience, to the stage, he brought his reason by a huge effort under command.

The grille was shut. The door of heaven had been slammed in his face.

Now, he must fight to ignore the fiends of wicked alarm that swarmed about his brain. He would close all his avenues of intelligence—render himself a thing mute and dumb, his faculties in abeyance, until the moment of resolution should arrive. There might be any explanation, other than one personal to himself, of the shutting of the grating. Should he flog his reason for a wherefore, it would be like brutally coercing an innocent witness. He must not, in the name of sanity, allow his soul to be drawn into profitless speculations. Upon the supreme ecstasy of knowing that here, after all these sick months of waiting, was the period to be put at last to his uncertainty, he must concentrate his thoughts, permitting none to side issues.

He triumphed by sheer force of will—sitting out the end of the little play. But the instant the curtain fell he rose to his feet, swept the frost from his brain, and—without giving himself stay or pause in which to think—left his box and made his way round to the opposite side of the house. His head now seemed full of heat and light; he was not conscious of his lower limbs.

Almost immediately he came upon two men stepping from the rear of a box into the passage. One of these was the Duke of Orleans. The other was a tallish young man, a little older than himself, of a fine intelligent expression. Both gentlemen were dressed to the prevailing taste in clothes that were something an ostentatious advertisement of bourgeoisie. But the extravagance was vindicated in the younger of the two by the mournful spirit of romance that seemed to inhabit behind a pair of very soft grey eyes.

Ned addressed Egalité at once, and in a manner, unwittingly, almost imperious; for in this tender present sensitiveness of his condition he imagined he foreread in that person’s stony regard a repudiation of his acquaintanceship, and he was desperate to preoccupy the situation. He had not, indeed, forgotten the confidential words uttered by the duke at the moment of their first and latest parting; and now his heart went sick in the fear of what might be implied by Egalité’s obvious intention to stultify, by avoidance of him, any significance such confidence might have been held to express.

“I have the honour to reintroduce myself to monsieur le duc,” he said. “I congratulate monsieur le duc upon the safe return of those, with the delivery of a letter referring to whose movements in England I some months ago had the pleasure to charge myself.”

The prince’s eyes opened and shut like an owl’s. His bilious face seemed to deprecate a peevish derision it could not withhold.

“I do not recognise,” he began, looking through mere slits between lids, “whom I have——” then suddenly he checked himself impatiently and turned to his companion with a shrug of his shoulders.

“My lord,” he said, “let me make known to you M. le Vicomte Murk, who once was good enough to constitute himself Hermes to your adorable Pamela.”

Ned stood rigid under the shock of all that was implied in the insolence. The duke’s young companion stepped forward and shook him by the hand. Did this stranger know, or intuitively guess, something of the silent tragedy that was enacting before him? His soft eyes were at least full of generosity and sympathy.

“I know your lordship by name,” he said. “I am Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and I am sure Pamela will like to thank you in person for your disinterested service.”

Ned drew himself up, like a martial hero giving the signal for his own execution.

“I will take my sentence from her lips,” he said to the kind eyes, and passed into the box.

He was close to her at last—and for the last time. She turned to glance at him, and instantly away again, with a pert tilt of her chin. He saw her stealthily advance a hand in the shadow, and twitch her companion by the skirt. The little lady gave a start.

“What is the matter, coquine?” she exclaimed. Then she saw Ned, flushed pink, and dropped the gentleman a shy bow.

She was happy to renew monsieur’s acquaintance, she said. And had monsieur been in Paris all these months since they last had the pleasure of seeing him in “nôtre cher Bury”?

Yes, monsieur had been in Paris the whole time: that was to say, ever since, in pursuit of monsieur le duc, he had left Belgium, whither, it would appear, he had been despatched on a fool’s errand.

Mademoiselle gave a little deprecating shrug of her shoulders.

“And monsieur, no doubt, has justified us in our choice of a messenger?” murmured Pamela, from ambush of the box curtains.

Ned turned upon the young voice. His tongue was dry; his very features seemed stiffened into a mechanical expression of suffering.

“Yes,” he said. “I have been as great a fool as Uriah.”

The girl gave a little laugh. Probably she understood only the vague inference. She drew aside the curtain and looked upon the house. Her head budded from dusk into light, standing out like an angel’s seen in a dream. The soft moulding of her face and neck was painted in dim sweet eclipse—violet, where it intensified in the deeper curves. In her shadowy hair—like a dryad’s curled by moonlight—a single diamond—a very star of morning—burned. It was Ned’s fate—the common irony of love—to find the prize figure never so desirable in his sight as at the moment of its bestowal on another. His heart was sick with a very hunger as he looked down on her.

“O Dieu—quelle horreur!” she exclaimed, referring to some one of the audience. She tapped her foot, drew back her head, suppressed a tiny yawn.

“What has become of Edward?” said she, as if she were unconscious that their visitor were not withdrawn.

“It is my name,” said Ned.

She glanced at him disdainfully, with the ghost of an insolent laugh.

“You here still, monsieur? Will you please go and tell the fiddles to begin?”

“And shall I dance to them to entertain you?” he said.

Her attitude robbed his passion even of a redeeming dignity. His devotion seemed comparable with the sick devotion of a schoolboy towards a holiday coquette.

“Mon Dieu!” she cried. “You would at least entertain us more than now.”

The catgut gave its first screech as she spoke.

“I will go,” he said hurriedly; but he yet lingered out the final anguish.

“Have I not already entertained you enough? And I have not yet congratulated the prospective Lady Fitzgerald. And what shall I do with the flower you gave me, Pamela, when I accepted madame’s service because I loved you?”

For the first time she flushed angrily.

“You have no right to say it,” she cried. “And do you suppose I constitute myself the fairy godmother to every little weed I bestow!”

Mademoiselle d’Orléans half rose from her seat.

“Nay,” said Pamela, gently coaxing her to resume it: “for monsieur will see the wisdom, I am sure, of not further enlarging upon an error of his own.”

He uttered a deep sigh.

“An error!” he said—“My God—yes, an error!”—and he bowed low and left the box. The little kind royalty uttered a sob as he vanished.

And such was the manner of the end—no renunciation ennobled of chivalry on his part; no compassion, no sympathy on hers. And he could blame no one but himself. His imagination, it seemed, had clothed a skeleton with flesh. Unlike dreaming Adam, he had awakened and found his imagination a lie. He walked from the tawdry gates of his fool’s paradise, and felt the wind rattle in his bones.

Outside, he found the two men withdrawn. He made his way into the street, a strange numbness in his brain. It was like exaltation—the mere mad ecstasy of self-obliteration. For the time it seemed to carry him forward—a spirit disembodied, shorn of every instinct but that of flight. The wind thrust at, the dust choked, the jumping lamps mocked him. He paid no heed to a malice that was powerless any longer to influence his movements.

Pressing forward aimlessly, he came out on the Pont Neuf. Few passengers were now abroad; and these, butting with a sense of personal grievance against the blast, took no notice of the significant attitude of one who, upon such a night, could stop to dwell upon the river. But presently a single pedestrian—a woman—going by, uttered a stifled exclamation, checked herself, slunk into the angle of a buttress, and stood watching him.

He was gazing upon the black swing of water below. Suddenly he rose, returned a few paces the way he had come, and went down into the gloom of the quay where it stooped under the bridge’s shadow. The woman followed stealthily.

The wind had long ago taken his hat. He unbuttoned and flung open his coat. She came swiftly to him and seized him by the arm. He turned upon her—dragged himself free with a start of repulsion. His face underwent a change—flashing into an expression of mad fury.

“Again!” he shrieked. “Why do you pursue and haunt me! I think you are my genius for all devilry!”

For a moment it looked as if he would strike her—her, Théroigne. She stood, where he had thrust her, without the shadow thrown by the bridge, a dim glow falling upon her face from a far lamp above. Even in this tumult of his rage he was conscious of an inexplicable new meaning in her eyes. They were like caves of darkness alive with a suggestive inner movement.

“I called to find you,” she said stilly, without emotion. “The citoyen propriétaire told me you were abroad—probably at the theatre. I followed on the chance; and destiny, it seems, was my guide.”

“Why did you call? Why did you follow?—we have nothing of a common interest. I loathe you—do you hear! I curse the day on which you came into my life!”

She never moved.

“Is it not our common interest,” she said, “to wish to die?”

He gasped, and stood staring at her.

“Ah!” she went on; “but I had heard, and wondered for the result. They were betrothed no further back than yesterday; they are to be man and wife in a few weeks. He is an impatient lover—this handsome chasseur. In a few weeks she will lie in his arms—the pretty, loving babouine.”

He lifted his hand again with a furious gesture; and at that she cast back the hooded cloak which she had held clutched about her face and breast, and, coming swiftly to him, dared him with her brilliant eyes.

“Strike!” she cried; “it is what I ask. Only thou shalt strike thyself through me. What! thou know’st now what it is to be trampled under by the feet thou worship’dst! And thou shalt be haunted evermore by the shadow of another man’s happiness. Strike, I say, and kill, like me, thy spectre of unfulfilment with despair!”

She tore at her dress, baring her white bosom to him.

“Strike!” she cried again; then suddenly her hands dropped limp, and she moaned to herself.

“I dare not think. I cannot sleep. He is always there, weeping and imploring. But there is something between—a deep red pool, with an under-motion. If I were to wade in—my God!” she cried—“I am afraid even to die!”

She held up her hands to the man before her, as if in prayer.

“Take me with thee—there, into the water. I will not struggle, if thou hold’st me tight. Thou wert his friend for a little while, and thou also hast suffered. Thou wilt plead for me, monsieur, wilt thou not?—thou wilt plead?”

Her voice broke in a shiver. For all its wretchedness, the heart of her hearer was stricken anew.

“Thou Théroigne,” he said; “thou poor twice-abandoned fool. Wouldst thou urge upon me that a first error is to be atoned by a second! Oh, thou woman—not to understand how cheap that love must be held that would disprove itself to spite its object!”

God knows what angel of light or darkness had been at his elbow a moment earlier. Now, he put his hand into his breast as he spoke.

She looked at him, lost and wild.

“Thou didst not come to throw thyself into the river?” she muttered.

“No,” he said—“but only this.”

He cast it from him with the words—something he had taken from his pocket—a little spiked and scented parcel, so ridiculous and so tender. It had fulfilled its mission at last. That was “writ in water.” And the poor cherished heels, stuck with a sprig of withered geranium, went down to the sea—or, perhaps, into the maw of some sentimental pike that would swallow it all, as we mortals swallow any absurd love-story.

Now, if the action was inspired by a despairing man’s intuitive altruism on behalf of a despairing harlot, we may not call it bathos.

Suddenly the woman broke into a shrill laugh.

“Was it an unfruitful token? Better thou and I!” she cried. “And so thou still hold’st love inviolable?”

He answered with his eyes. She came quite close to him—looked up into his face.

“That is well. Come with me, then, now the madness is past.”

“With you!” he exclaimed scornfully. All his repulsion of her was returning before the reclaimed devil in her eyes.

“With me, murderess and courtesan. Oh! it is not for myself,” she said. “It is for another—whose confession to me an hour ago sent me to seek thee out—that I would carry thee.”

He stared, dumfounded, muttering “Another? what other?”

“One,” she said, “that hath pursued thee long months with bleeding feet and a broken heart. One, that I came upon to-day, lost and wandering in the cold streets, and that I, being no man, took home with me and comforted.”

“What other?” he murmured again, but with a dreadful intuition of the truth.

“Nay,” she said, “love hath not done with thee. Only thou must run with the hare instead of hunting with the dogs.”

“What other?” he repeated dully.

“A saint, monsieur; yet one that, for all her chastity, hath caught the infection of these liberal times.”

She gazed into his face piercingly.

“I swear I never guessed,” she murmured. “I swear I hold her the dearer and the purer that she is revealed human in the end. The handmaid of God! Ah! but so to testify to His choice by this long discipline of her heart! And now, directing her in this pursuit of thee, He ratifies the new licence; and she shall not be less the saint because her passion is sanctified of a human love.”

“It is a vile blasphemy,” said the man. “You speak of Nicette Legrand.”

She clapped her hands.

“But, yes,” she cried in shrill triumph; “I speak of Nicette Legrand, whose heart, it seems, thou stolest—one of the common things that thou, and such as thou, would use to the profit of an idle hour, whilst thy honour was pledged elsewhere. But who enlists Love in his service shall engage a parasite to devour him.”

“Nicette!” he only murmured once more.

“Take thy fill of her name,” said the girl scornfully. “I tell thee, Love presumes upon his hire. Didst thou think he had discarded thee? He shall prove a tyrant whom thou thought’st to make thy servant.”

He fell, suddenly, quite calm and cold.

“Well,” he said, “so Nicette is in Paris?”

She answered—

“In Paris—a month’s long journey, by rock and briar, for those poor, patient feet. Oh,” she cried, “that I should ever have unwittingly wronged her by seeking to convert this block—this stone—to my own passionate uses!”

“And so she hath explained it to you?” he said, in the same even tone. “Well, she is a liar, from first to last; and at least it is fitting that a murderess should give sanctuary to a murderess.”

She stared at him, breathing softly.

“Am I to kill you?” she said.

He laughed without merriment.

“Listen to me, Théroigne. I never desired this woman, or gave her one pretext for asserting that I did. If she says otherwise, she lies. If she tells you that she left Méricourt to follow me, she lies. She has fled because she has been discovered in a deception as vile, a crime as inhuman, as any that have blackened the world since the race began.”

She still stared at him, her lips moving, but she did not speak.

“I have been in Méricourt since you,” he went on, without a change of intonation, “and I was witness to what I say. The bubble is burst—the superstition, by this time, a black memory. The tree that she haunted, she haunted because it contained in its hollow heart the dead body of Baptiste, her little brother, whom she had murdered—morally, before God, whom she had murdered, I say—out of her hatred of him. She haunted the scene of her crime, and, when that was threatened with detection, she invented the legend of the vision to cover it. But retribution abided, and, when that threatened, she fled.”

For a moment silence fell between the two. The wind shrilled in their ears; the hollow wash and sweep of the river came up to them.

“If it is true,” whispered Théroigne at last—“if it is true!”

“It is true.”

She seemed to gaze at without seeing him.

“So worn and so pitiful!” she muttered; “and I took her in, and clung to her, and found my own religion justified in hers.”

Suddenly she was hurrying from him, speeding upwards towards the bridge. He stood paralysed an instant; then sprang and overtook her, walking by her side.

“Where are you going?” he cried.

“To hurl her into hell!” she shrieked, “if it is as you say.”

They drove on together, across the river, through the blown darkness.

Presently she stopped, and turned upon him once more.

“Why do you follow me?”

“To see that you do nothing that shall enable you before God to testify against me.”

“Ah!” she cried, with a most bitter derision. “You are not desperate. You have never loved, as I read it—as Nicette reads it. You have never staked your soul against your heart. And this is what she hath done for the sake of one little glimpse of her heaven—of seeing you without being seen.”

“She sent you to tell me so?”

“You lie!” said the woman quietly. “I took her secret from her because she was worn and despairing; and then she implored me only to show her where she might, hidden, look upon you once again, and so die and rest forgotten.”

She struck her palms together.

“And now—now!” she muttered.

She fled on her way. The man had some ado to keep up with her. He went, indeed, at length, with loaded steps, on this wild, sorrowful night. To love and lose, and to be so loved! It was a stab of poignant anguish to his heart that what he had held so sacred in himself should be claimed of a vileness with which he had no sentiment in common. But this—surely this: the love that can exonerate even wickedness done for its sake. The wretched woman loved him—perhaps with a love as intrinsically pure as that he had given to Pamela. He groaned as he sped on.

They crossed the quays, and hurried by the Place of the Three Marys. A frowzy tricoteuse, coming from a wine-shop, recognised Théroigne, and stood barring their path.

“Ame traîtresse! Modératrice!” cried the creature, in guttural fury, and broke into a torrent of oaths.

The girl shrank against the wall, proffering no retort, her eyes wide with fear. Ned took her arm, put the woman on one side, and they scurried on their way, pursued by a blatter of expletives.

The wind cut into their faces with blades of ice as they turned into the Rue de Rohan.

CHAPTER XV.

In front of the fire a girl lay on the floor asleep. She had placed herself on her side, facing the glow and cuddled into it; but in the relaxation of profound slumber her head had fallen back, so that the light from a lamp on the wall illuminated her features. These looked curiously, pathetically child-like under the seal of a rest so deep that her bosom hardly rose and fell to accent it. Her lips were a little parted; her cheeks a little hollow, and quite colourless. From every ruffle of her hair—fine and pale golden as a rabbit’s fur—that lay spilt about her head, to the toe-tips of her white bare feet (that nestled into one another despite some inflammatory wounds that scarred them as cruelly as if they had been bastinadoed), she was so almost motionless as to seem like a figure in tinted porcelain—King Cophetua’s beggar-maid, it might have been; for, indeed, her clothes were very stained and ragged.

The door opened, and a woman came swiftly to her side and gazed down upon her—a woman, under the fierce glow and lust of whose beauty she seemed to shrink into the mere semblance of a doll thrown down by a passionate child.

The woman looked, then suddenly fell upon her knees and stooped her lips to the ear of the sleeper.

“Nicette,” she cried low, “Nicette!”

The girl on the floor started; then she stirred, moaned, put her hand restlessly to her forehead, and again, with a sigh, dropped back into the pit of slumber. But the moment of half-consciousness seemed to have robbed her of the perfect weanling innocence. Now her respirations came harder; every breath she exhaled proclaimed her woman. Still, she dreamt happily; and a smile trembled on her lips.

Seeing it, Théroigne turned and beckoned to the man to come close. He approached from the door and stood behind her, away from the sleeper’s range of vision. The woman pointed down at the dreaming face.

“Dost thou still accuse it?”

“Awake—yes,” he said.

She frowned, and again bent to call into the girl’s ear.

“Nicette! where is thy brother Baptiste?”

A shadow, like that of a cloud that ruffles water, went over the quiet face. The regular breathing hitched and wavered; some broken soft ejaculations came from the lips. Suddenly the lids flickered—the eyes opened, unspeculative for a moment, then snatching the soul of them from unearthly sweet pastures, in whose fragrance it had lovelily nested. Still they were full of the glamour of holiday, remote in their vision, coy of things material.

“Théroigne!” she murmured, happy and confident, her half-recovered self only the core of a little atmosphere of the most loving warmth of emotion and feeling.

The woman bent and lifted the other—up, into her arms.

“Didst thou hear me call?” she said caressingly. “And what wert thou dreaming of, dearest?”

“Great God!” thought Ned, “is this Théroigne, in actual truth, a fiend!”

“Dreaming!” said the girl softly; “of what am I always dreaming, Théroigne?”

“Of what, indeed! Of things lost and longed for? Perhaps, sometimes of the little poor brother that was murdered and hidden in a tree?”

A voice shrieked at her back.

“Damnation seize thee!”

She let fall her burden and, scrambling to her feet, turned upon the voice.

“What, then!”

“So wanton!” cried Ned—“so wanton and so cruel!”

His fury leapt in a moment, like a boiling spring. He could not have explained or controlled it—could not even have traced its source to a deep incorruptible chivalry that was instinctive to his sex and beyond the understanding of the other.

“Cruel?” she exclaimed madly. “And am I not thy delegate—thy informer?”

“Not, so to take advantage, like a cursed mouchard, of this poor drugged wretch!” he cried. “Why, God in heaven! are you so much less foul——?”

“You devil!” she cut in—“you dog! Didst thou not thyself, a minute ago, slander her behind her back?”

“I accused her openly,” cried Ned—“as I accuse her now!”

A stifled scream of agony answered him. He looked into a corner of the room, whence, from shadow, the sound had come. The dreamer—momentarily half stupefied by her fall—had risen, while they raged, and stood shrunk into an angle of the wall.

Théroigne leapt upon her—seized her by a wrist.

“Look!” she screeched, “upon him that thou wouldst give thy life to see, not being seen; to prevail with whom thou wouldst sacrifice thy honour and thy fame with heaven. Hear him now—how he regards thy devotion. Tell him—tell me, rather—he lies. Tell me thou art not a murderess; and I will crush the slander back upon him till it tears like a splintered rib into his heart!”

She stood quivering—glaring—worrying the arm she held.

“Speak!” she panted brokenly, “and leave the rest to me.”

A moment’s silence succeeded the terrible outcry.

“It is true what he says,” then whispered Nicette. “I murdered Baptiste.”

Théroigne dropped the wrist she clutched, and swung back heavily against the wall.

“My God!” she muttered, “my God!”

Then she mastered herself faintly, like a weary creature.

“It was my last hope—the queen, the gentle mother. To justify, through her handmaid, the passion of woman for man. It is ended. There is no good in the world—no truth—no virtue. Oh, my heart, my heart!”

She caught herself from the cry, in a rally of quiet fury; pointed to the door, her arm extended along the wall.

“You have killed my faith,” she said.

Her gesture was crowningly significant. Without a word, the girl stole fearfully from her shadowy covert—hurried across the room—passed from it, and was gone.

* * * * * * * *

Into the street she fled, ran a few paces, stopped, and looked wildly about her. Snow had begun to fall. The wind whipped her thin tattered skirts about her ankles. In all the mad night there was no beacon towards which she might make, for the little lightening of her despair. She glanced once about her; then crouched, with a dying moan, upon a doorstep.

Her face was buried in her hands when, an instant later, Ned silently came upon her. He stood, looking down.

Once, earlier in the evening, he had thought “She” (not the wretched girl at his feet) “might have dismissed me as effectually by gentler methods.” Yet, had he, for his part, shown more compassion towards this unhappy outcast—stained though she was—who lay here so committed to his mercy?

He bent suddenly, and put his hand upon her shoulder. She did not even start now, but she uncoiled herself, with a shiver, and gazed up at him, without recognition, it seemed.

“What do you intend to do?” he said. “Where will you go?”

She only shook her head weakly and amazedly.

He stepped back, looked up into a blinding gloom of darkness and spinning flakes. The patterns these wrought seemed the very moral of Heaven’s enactments—hieroglyphics drawn upon a slate of night. He was not theologian enough to interpret them. For him—with a sense of being enclosed and shut down within a very confined vault of human suffering (with God, maybe, walking serene and unwitting high up on the sunny lifts of ether above the earth)—the issues of life were become brutally restricted. He had had aspirations. They had been crushed under by the heavy night that had dropped upon his world. Now, in a moment, he could feel only that he was alone with a woman who loved him without one thought of the meaning of the hieroglyphics; that it lay with him, unsupported, to direct the destinies of two souls—his own and another’s—that Fortune had isolated in tragic companionship.

And contrasted with the human piteousness of this other—this soul that had claimed him in the darkness into which his own had fallen—how did not the shibboleth of convention suddenly confess itself a ridiculous fetish of strings and patches—a block for a fashion-plate?

He had no plan of conduct at last but to drift—and, if by way of sunny pastures, so much the less troubled would he be.

His heart was moved to a dull aching passion in this first realising of its emancipation from a wounding thrall.

“Get up!” he cried violently. “Do you hear? Get up, and come with me!”

He turned away, and going a few paces, looked round to see if she were following. Ay, like a dog. She had risen and jumped to his order before it was well issued.

He strode on, the fall already making a soft cold mat to his feet. It was no great distance to his rooms; the Rue St Honoré was near deserted, and he went down it swiftly. Once again only he turned to see that the girl was not lagging. Then he cursed himself and came to a stop under a lamp. She was hobbling towards him as fast as her bleeding feet would permit her. He had never given a thought to this—that she had been driven half naked into the night. As she came up, she dumbly begged of him with a little pathetic smile, timid and conciliatory, not to be angry with her for halting. He saw a trickle of blood flow into the white carpet where she waited.

Now he stood to the struggle between his pride and his humanity. She was slight and thinly clad. He might have carried her in his arms the little remaining distance. But a hard devil rasped his heart—that particular Belial that tempts consciences to very wanton self-mutilations.

“I had not thought,” he said coldly. “I should have been more considerate. I will walk slowly the rest of the way.”

“I hardly feel it—indeed, monsieur, indeed,” she answered, brokenly and eagerly. “I will come faster.”

He went on again, and she crept behind him. Arrived at last at his door, he rapped on it, and stood away, signing to her to enter.

The citizen Theophilus, although he was a good patriot, bowed the gentleman and his companion into the sadly lit hall with a conscious elaboration of the bel air. He was at different times cook and concierge, and always proprietor—a man of admirable tact. Now he smiled, and informed monsieur the Englishman that there was a grateful hot fire in his room; that the night was a disgrace to Paris; that a steaming potage could be served to the citoyenne in a moment, did monsieur desire it.

He did not shrug his shoulders, or appear to notice the bare raw feet set upon the mat, or anything strange in this apparition of a dazed young woman standing there with the snow in her hair. That was his delicacy. For the rest, reputations were not marred nowadays by any refusal to subscribe to such old-fashioned codes of propriety as were only practised, if at all, in the prisons, where the remnants of a social hypocrisy awaited consignment to the rag-tearing machine in the Place Louis XV. Citizen Theophilus would have as little thought of bestowing a suggestive wink on the mating of a couple of swallows as on the foregathering of a young man and maid under his eaves.

“I will do myself the honour,” he said, “to conduct monsieur’s dear young friend to monsieur’s apartments.”

He skipped up the stairs in advance, candle in hand, like an ignis fatuus. He was a little man—always dancingly restless—with a lean face, and iron-grey corkscrew curls that he would keep well oiled, as though they were the actual springs of his movements.

Arrived in Ned’s apartments (they were in one suite, sitting- and bed-rooms, with a folding-door between), he lit the candles, poked the logs into a blaze, and stood for orders.

“The potage, monsieur?”

Ned transmitted the inquiry with a look.

“No, pray, monsieur—not for me,” murmured the girl.

“Very well,” said Ned frigidly. “It will not be needed, my Théophile.”

The landlord protested, bowed, and flirted himself from the room. The two were left alone.

Ned walked to the window, lifted the blind a moment, and looked out upon the dumb white whirling of the snow. Then suddenly he spoke over his shoulder—

“Go and warm yourself at the fire.”

She crept to the hearth immediately and sat herself before the glow, putting out to it her stiff frozen hands in token of obedience.

He took to pacing up and down the room, not removing from his shoulders the thick redingote in which he was wrapped. Presently he came and stood near her, his elbow resting upon the mantel-shelf.

“I want you to listen to me,” he said.

She uttered no sound, but only looked up at him, pathetically pliant to his will. Her prince, for all her sins, had come to her with the glass slipper. Would her poor swollen foot ever go into it? Her blue eyes, like a child’s, sought his pity and forgiveness.

But he was resolute to blind his heart to the appeal.

“An hour ago,” he said—slowly, as if weighing his every word to himself—“I could not have done this. The interval has proved a fruitful one to us both.”

She clasped her hands as she gazed at him; a film seemed to come over her eyes. She murmured in a tranced, half-fearful voice. The warmth it seemed had drugged her brain.

“What happened! It was misty and shining. But, to be with you!—yes, thou art here, and the fire, and Nicette. That was always in the deep heart of my visions.”

He took no notice of her half-audible wanderings.

“I would not have you suppose,” he went on tonelessly, steadily, “that I shall allow any conversion by you of this accident into opportunity. I brought you to shelter for only the reason that I decline to burden myself with any shadow of compunction for what share my duty forced me to take in your punishment. For the rest, we remain, as always, wide poles apart.”

In the pause he made she dropped her head—crept a little nearer to him—crouched at his feet. Not to be haunted by the wistful eyes, by the look, like a dog’s, that was so full of the silent struggle to comprehend, made his task easier.

“You may stop here,” he said, “until I am able to procure you other quarters, and the means, if possible, to a living. That will not be later than to-morrow, I hope. For to-night, at least, you are to sleep in my room yonder, and I will make shift to lie out here. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Very well,” he said, “but I saddle the agreement with one fixed condition. As long as you remain here—whether it is for one day, or two, or more—you are to hold no communication with me—are never to speak to me, unless I first address you.”

She rose to her knees, clasping her hands again to him. Her hair was fallen over her cheeks; she looked a very small forlorn subject for extreme measures.

“I shall be near you,” she said, half-choking.

He took her arm and motioned her to her feet.

“It is understood, then. You had better go to bed now and rest and recover and get warm.”

He put a candle into her hand, led her to the door of the bedroom, thrust her gently within, and clicked the latch upon her. Then he went and stood over the fire.

What had he done? What was he doing? Even as he had spoken, making his condition, he had known that that was a wild absurdity, impossible of fulfilment. What had moved him to it but a sudden recrudescence of that self-mutilating spirit? He had had no deliberate thought to goad a willing jade, or to return, in kind, to love, the humiliation he had suffered from it. Yet he knew that he was doing so, and it was a perilous lust to indulge.

His heart was full of ache, his brain of phantoms. These were reflected, coming and going, in the still red logs of the fire. They represented, in a thousand aspects, the three ghosts that would haunt his life for evermore. All women—all fair and fateful shapes; and, of the three, the vilest, because she had figured for the purest, was the one that had come to claim him at the last. It was a fierce satire upon the lesson of ennobling ideals.

Pamela, and Théroigne, and Nicette. He felt it no sacrilege now to name this trinity in a breath. Indeed, which alone of the three had made it her sport to coquet with hearts, holding their suffering as nothing to the gratification of her vanity? Not either of those peasant girls of Méricourt—whose passionate blood would always rather flame to the ecstasy of pursuit than to the selfish rapture of being hunted for the sake of their own beautiful skins.

His thoughts swerved from one figure to another. This Lord Edward Fitzgerald—how had he come to usurp the very throne of desire? He knew a little of him by repute—had heard of the ardent young soldier and apostle of the new liberty, melancholy and something wild, breathing the spirit of romance. He had no grudge against him, at least. And what of Mr Sheridan, whose influence alone he had apprehended? Ghosts they were to him now. What profit was it to seek to analyse their bodiless significance?

Sweeping and shadowy, the smoke of all such phantoms reeled up the chimney. Only one face remained with him.

He glanced at the bedroom door, lay down on the rug before the fire, and, wrapping his cloak about his haggard face, committed himself to the hopelessness of slumber.

CHAPTER XVI.

The citizen Theophilus was at points of discussion with a rather dissipated-looking phantom of respectability that had descended upon him at an extremely early hour.

“Let the citizen—and, moreover, monsieur the Englishman—rest assured,” he said, “that I accept his commission with a high sense of the compliment implied. But it is not specific: oh, mon Dieu Jésus! that is all I complain—it is not specific.”

“In what way?”

“For example, there is, for consideration, the toilette of Vesta, as well as that of Aurora.”

“Why, deuce take it, man; you don’t suppose I expect the girl to go to bed in her petticoats, if that’s what you mean?”

“C’est bien, monsieur. Je sais la carte du pays.” (He bridged his fingers, tapping the tips together to accent every item.) “I am to procure, then, the citoyenne a wardrobe, plain in character and of modest proportions. It is for the reason that the citoyenne may possess such attire as will not militate against her chance of obtaining respectable employment. Scrupulously so, monsieur. This wardrobe is to be for both day and night. Also, scrupulously so. Moreover, it is to be of the limitations that will not tend to encourage the idea of a prolonged sojourn in a present sanctuary, offered (I have monsieur’s word for it) on grounds of the most disinterested platonism. Finally, so long as mademoiselle remains under monsieur’s protection—I crave one thousand pardons!—under monsieur’s guardianship—she is to receive every ordinary consideration as to service and meals.”

He flourished his hands outwards, and bowed, his curls bobbing like wood shavings.

“I shall have the honour to punctually acquit myself of these commissions. Monsieur need give himself no further concern in the matter.”

“You are a treasure, my Théophile,” said Ned; and he stepped out into the morning.

It was very cold and bright and beautiful, for wind and cloud had dropped behind the horizon. The pavements, the roofs, the steeples were wrapped in white that looked as soft as swan’s-down. The whole city, it seemed, had put on its furs against the opening frost.

Ned stepped, without sound, over the flags. The hour was still so early that hardly a soul was abroad. His tired eyes felt the restfulness of the rounded beds of snow; his throat took in the stinging wine of the morning in grateful draughts. He had had but a little troubled sleep, and his wits seemed plugged and his brain sore. He wanted to think. He wanted to understand why it was that his thoughts—that should have been all of the tragic quenching of a flame that had for so long been his beacon in waste places—were unable to rescue themselves from a weary toing-and-froing before the closed door of his own bedroom. He wanted to understand, and he could not. Only it dully presented itself to him as a monstrous thing that the later image should dominate his mind. If he could recover but a little clearness of moral vision, he was sure he would see what a foul wrong to his own loyal heart he was being led into committing.

So he tried to reason—in the lack, as he felt, of reason itself. And still the cold air would not cleanse his brain of the impurity; and still the figure that haunted him as he walked was not Pamela’s.

Then he whispered aloud—as if to see whether spoken words would not prevail with him: “She is a murderess. I have given her scarcely a thought but of loathing. And now—because of a specious dumb appeal—Damnation! For all she has gone through, she is as sound of wind and limb as a pagan Circe—a perfect animal still. I think she cannot suffer without a soul.”

He strode on more rapidly.

“I must find her another lodging—at once, without delay.”

Walking preoccupied, unregarding his direction, he had made down one of the side streets that led into the Place Louis XV. Suddenly the sound of shrill jolly voices startled him. He looked up in amazement, to see close before him something, the fact of whose existence he had hitherto most shrinkingly ignored. Sanson and his satellites were engaged in washing down the guillotine. They were as voluble as grooms over a carriage—and, indeed, the machine had its wheels and shafts and splashboard—even its luggage-basket—all complete.

Now, committed involuntarily to view of it, Ned inspected the horrible engine with some curiosity.

“Hullo, then, my jackadandy!” cried one of the grooms boisterously. “Art thou seeking a barber?”

“No,” said Ned; “but the answer to a riddle.”

The man fondled a beam, grimacing.

“It is all one,” said he. “Here is the oracle.”

“I believe it is,” said Ned; “only I am not yet sure of the question;” and he turned away.

He breakfasted at a café, made a particular little purchase to which he was whimsically attracted, and returned about mid-day to his chambers.

They struck very cold and quiet. There did not seem a sound in the house. He entered his sitting-room and closed the door. The girl was crouched in her old place upon the rug. She looked up at him mutely as he went by her, without a word, to the fire.

He let a minute pass while he warmed himself. Then he said, not turning his head—

“You want to speak to me?”

“Oh yes, yes!” she answered at once and eagerly; “to thank you for these.”

“The clothes? You needn’t thank me. It was my own interests I consulted in giving them to you. Your rags would have been no recommendation to a possible employer.”

“An employer?—monsieur—an employer?”

“Certainly. Did you imagine I intended to keep you on here indefinitely?”

She made no reply.

“Have you breakfasted?” he said.

She answered “Yes” gratefully, in a low voice.

He twisted about then, and regarded her. The wise Theophilus had, he saw, acquitted himself sensibly of his order. The girl was clothed freshly and simply. Her own instinctive niceness of touch, her kitten-like cleanliness, had ministered daintily to the result.

The young man’s brain swam for a moment. He could have thought he was back again in the lodge at Méricourt, the unsullied, fragrant presentment of a little jelly-loving Madonna charming the luminous shade of the dairy in which she sat; the sun, blazing upon the garden phloxes without, touching this his natural child’s head softly with a single beam.

In the same moment he dashed his hand, so to speak, upon the struggling fancy. He would not have it rise further to confront him. It was undeserved of its subject at the least. The promise it had once suggested had never been vindicated, and he would insist upon that now as an actual aggravation of the girl’s demerits, seeing that, at this late hour of her practical punishment for a wickedness confessed, she could still so far look her old self as to inspire—and demoralise—a certain emotion of regard. Even the very hollows in her cheeks seemed filled since yesterday; and she wore her new shoes and stockings without a hint of their discomforting her wounded feet.

Was it then that a constitution could be so flawless as to be debarred, by ignorance of suffering, from suffering’s prerogative of moral exaltation—that the nerves of emotion inherited from the nerves of physical feeling? If it were so, it were idle in this case to be considerate of the former.

He put his hand into his coat pocket and, producing a small parcel, held it out to her.

“You have breakfasted,” he said; “but doubtless you will yet have an appetite for this?”

She took it from him wonderingly. If he had designed it as a grimly ironical test of her disposition, he had reason to be discomfited by her reception of the pleasantry.

She glanced at the superscription—it was a little box of guava jelly,—then suddenly let the packet fall, and threw herself on her face upon the rug.

She lay so long and so still without sound or movement that presently he grew uneasy.

“Get up!” he cried at last, touching her—and hating himself for doing so—with his foot.

She stirred—rose to a sitting posture. Her eyes had a dazed, stunned look in them.

“Nicette!” he exclaimed, a little troubled by the fixity of her gaze. He saw then that she was gulping, as though trying to speak.

“What is it?” he asked, mutinous against the gentler spirit that was possessing him. He had to bend his head to hear her.

“While they lived—it was always he—that received—the praise, the tit-bit, the love.”

“Who received?”

“Baptiste.”

He drew himself up with an astonished expression. What answer was to make here—what course pursue with a soul so inadequate? She spoke of her parents, it seemed; was pleading their favouritism in vindication of her crime. It was a confession of moral obliquity so ingenuous as to baffle argument. For the first time a shock of conscious pity for a thing so handicapped in the pursuit of the living principle shook him. He bent down, seized the box of sweetmeat, and flung it into the fire. The girl gave a strange little cry, and gazed up at him, her mouth breathless, her eyes glazed with the floating of sudden tears.

“What now?” said Ned.

Her voice broke in a quick sob.

“I thought there was no hope or forgiveness, that you meant to hate me for evermore.”

He turned away. How could he be other than moved and stricken? She had not, after all, so much sought to extenuate her crime as to plead for herself against the hatred she had thought his act was meant to express.

There was silence for a time; then he sat down in a chair apart from her, and spoke, gazing into the fire.

“How can you think it mine either to hate or to forgive? How—” (he struck his hand to his forehead—turned upon her in utter desperation). “Nicette! do you ever feel remorse for your deed?”

“I dare not think of it,” she whispered. Then suddenly she cried out, “I think the people of my dreams are often more real than the living about me. They come and go, sweet or terrible. Was it one of them left Baptiste to die in the tree! Oh, monsieur, monsieur! if I could learn it—that I was not guilty of his death! Or if I could die myself and atone!”

She buried her face in her hands.

“Now,” thought Ned, “shall I tell her the truth—that, practically, she is not guilty?”

“No,” muttered the little Belial voice in his ear; “what value lies in the practical significance? The moral is the truth. Besides, are you so sure that her imagination is not at this moment calculating its probable effects on you? Think of her consummate and enduring art in affecting a character, in playing a part.”

The frost of scepticism nipped his pretty burgeon of pity. He hardened his heart and drew back again.

“Die!” he said, with a little caustic laugh; “well, for one of your imagination, it should be easy in these days to devise a quite lawful means of introduction to Monsieur Sanson.”

She glanced up at him quickly, with a look of agony; then drooped her head and said no more. A second long silence fell between them. But by-and-by Ned found himself restlessly driven to open upon her again.

“What happened after I had left you that time?”

She seemed to wake to his voice, shuddering out of some scaring dream.

“My God! they sought for me; they burned my lodge; they killed my poor génisse. They would have crucified me like the thieves; but I hid, and escaped in the night.”

She paused. “Go on,” he said.

“I fled into the woods. There, when I was lost and near starving, I fell, by God’s blessing, upon the Cagots who had once before visited our parts. They were returned, making their way towards Paris because of the cry of equality. They had lost their child; it had been hunted by boys, and had died of the ill-treatment. They were alone, those two, and they took me in and fed me; and by-and-by, when it was safe for me to move, I went with them on their journey to the great city.”

“Great God!” cried Ned, striking in in sheer amazement. “And these were they upon whom you allowed suspicion of the murder to rest, whom the merest chance saved from suffering the consequences of a crime of which you alone were guilty!”

“But, monsieur—oh, monsieur, I knew, when the cry rose, that they were gone from the neighbourhood. And, indeed, they are always so execrated that it could make no difference.”

Ned sank back in his chair.

“Well?” he said, with a veritable groan.

“I went with them; and we were long, long by the way; and on the way the woman also died. I think it was of nothing less than starvation. Then the man and I came on alone to Paris, and Théroigne met us, and took me from him.”

“And the woman died of want, and it never occurred to you that you were a burden on those whom you had—oh, God, how to unravel this warp! Hold your tongue, Nicette! Let there be silence between us, in pity’s name!”

She shrunk down as if she had been struck. Her confidences, it seemed, were of no avail to move him.

But presently he spoke again—

“Why, last night—when I accused you before the woman, your friend—did you not give me the lie? She would have taken your word before mine.”

And she answered, in the very voice of desolation—

“Because, if I had lied, I should have lost you.”

He leapt to his feet.

“I cannot breathe or think!” he cried. “I must leave you—I must go out!”

As he hurried from the room, she dragged herself to his empty chair, and threw her arms about it with a moan of agony.

* * * * * * * *

All day he wandered through the streets, and only returned home when darkness had closed many hours upon the city. “She will be in bed by now,” he thought.

The firelight made a glow about the room, revealing it untenanted. He sat himself down before the hearth, feeling utterly weary and vanquished. He had done nothing, planned nothing as to the girl’s removal. His brain seemed incapable of concentrated thought.

“I should have lost you—should have lost you.” The cry had been drawn into his very veins. It adapted itself to his pulses—to the knocking of his heart. What was to be the answer?

This, it seemed—a white figure that stole from the bedroom—crept into the firelight—crouched down on the floor beside him and took his unresisting hand. He felt the tremulous clutch, and dared not move. He felt his hand kissed, pressed against warm, bare flesh—felt a hot trickle lace it.

The paroxysm of emotion ceased, and then suddenly she spoke, whispering—

“It can never be?”

“Never,” he said low.

He knew, through the utmost conviction of his stricken soul, that it was all wrong and impossible—that he must answer as he had done.

He felt a quiver pass through her frame. She spoke again in a moment.

“My sin—I know it—holds us apart. I have not atoned, and, until I have, it holds us apart. Do you think, monsieur, Baptiste has forgiven me?”

“I think he has, Nicette.”

“But you cannot—not yet, though I love you so dearly. Perhaps I should not love you so well if you could. Yet it seems a strange thing to me why you helped me at all.”

He half rose from his chair; but she gently detained him, and he sank down again.

“You must go back to bed, Nicette. We will talk it all over to-morrow.”

“To-morrow?” she said. “Shall we be any nearer one another to-morrow?”

He shook his head. A very little sigh escaped her.

“You will be kind and generous to me, I know; but you will give me no moment again such as this I have stolen. And I have stolen your bed too, monsieur; but you must take it from me now, and lie in the warm nest I have made for you—it is such a little of myself, it will not matter to you—and I will sleep here before the fire.”

He got now resolutely to his feet.

“Nicette, it is folly. You must return to bed, I tell you. I am going out again for the night. To-morrow, I say, we will try to settle matters for the best.”

She clung to him yet as he moved, letting him even pull her a step forward on her knees.

“One thing—just one last thing. I shall like you to know, when I am gone—some day, when I am gone—that I died a maid.”

Her face, in the shadow, was turned up to him. The firelight made an aureole of her hair. He could feel her whole body heaving against his hand.

“Will you kiss me once?” she said.

He was conscious of a choking in his throat, and beat down the emotion fiercely.

“No,” he muttered; “it would imply something that must not be.”

She sank back away from him. Without another word he turned and left her.

In the street the frost snapped at him like the very watchdog of desolation. He huddled his cloak about him with a shudder as he faced it.

“It is for the best,” he thought. “To be away—from the terror of my own weakness! Any auberge will serve for the night.”

He strode a few paces, crunching over the snow, and stopped.

“I might, at least, have quitted her of the worst of her remorse. It would have been a little return for such love—my God, such love!”

Should he go back at once and tell her that she was guiltless of the little brother’s actual death?

“Fool!” whispered Belial, still reasoning with him. “Does her love for you alter the moral? And will you, an emotional bearer of forgiveness, escape so easily a second time? The warm nest in the bed, fool!”

He turned, and refaced the chill emptiness of the night.

“I must not,” he thought. “She shall know the truth to-morrow.”

CHAPTER XVII.

The morrow—that is always, by some alchemistic process, to convert the drossy problems of the night into liquid gold—greeted Ned with leaden untransmutable skies, that were only too representative of the irresolvable heaviness of his own thoughts. He looked out of his grimy window of the little tavern on which he had quartered himself, and saw the yellow of an almost substantial atmosphere sandwiched between a sagged grey welkin and a world of livid snow; and he saw no prospect, in that before him, of any illumination of his dull perplexity.

He dressed, breakfasted, and presently went out into the streets. The desire to postpone that hour of inevitable struggle with an allurement which, he dreaded, in his present condition of emotional bewilderment, he would be unable to resist, drove him to take a rambling course to his lodgings.

He had gone down to the Quay of the Thuilleries, and was turning into the gardens, when his attention was drawn to a man who rose from a bench at the moment, and greeted him with a timid ejaculation of delight.

He stopped, somewhat impatiently—started, stared, and uttered an exclamation in his turn. For, in the ragged, large-boned stranger, who was looking at him from eyes that held the very spirit of patient deprecation, he recognised all at once the poor pariah of a long-past experience—the Cagot whom he had befriended in the woods of Méricourt.

He held out his hand in a sudden rush of emotion. The man advanced, bent down, and touched it reverently.

“Monsieur!” murmured the poor creature, “it is the sunshine breaking.”

Ned regarded him with infinite humble pity. The thought of the charity so large; of the humanity so rare and so remote from that proclaimed in the windy casuistries of liberators, who would use its name rather as a war-cry than as a message of peace; the thought of how this outcast, reflecting in his selfless chivalry the very altruism of the Man of Sorrow, had recently helped and protected a member of the race that had made him so, was like a cool breath on his troubled brain.

“I think it is—I hope it is,” he said gently.

He put his hand on the shoulder of the gaunt figure. The man was buttoned against the bitter cold into the mere scarecrow of a jacket. His feet were bare and scarred with blood; his cheeks, his flesh wherever seen—and that was in more places than custom prescribes—were fallen in upon a frame accordant with the strong soul that inhabited there.

“And so,” said Ned, “you are alone at last in the world.”

The man looked up, an expression of wonder on his face.

“How did monsieur know? Aïe, it is true! I am alone. We were on our way hither in quest of the new liberty; and God, pitying her weary feet, gave it her when but half the journey was done.”

“And the little child? Oh, my friend—perhaps she heard the little child crying for her in the night?”

“It is true, monsieur. But they will never be able to play birds’-fly or shadow-buff in the moonlight up there without me. The rogue and the little mother! And I hear them talking all the night through, wondering when I shall come.”

“And you do not complain?”

“Why should I complain? They are so safe at last. Think what it would have meant to them had God called me first.”

“Yes, yes. And—what is your name? You have never told me your name.”

“It is Laurent, monsieur. One is enough for us Cagots.”

“Laurent; what has become of the woman you brought, of your charity, to Paris?”

“Merciful God! Monsieur is a wizard. Indeed, she found her reward in the meeting with an old friend, who took her away from me.”

“Her reward!”

“Ah, monsieur! She was an angel of light to the dying mother. She prayed with and she sang to her; and sometimes she would, with her voice, earn a silver livre by the way—enough, in the end, to buy the little place of rest in the churchyard.”

“Laurent, you are starved and frozen. Laurent—do you hear? I also am alone in the world. You shall come with me, and be my servant and companion; and we will travel, always travel; until at last, wayworn and tired, we shall come back, we, too, to the little place of rest.”

He turned, greatly moved, through the gate into the gardens.

“Come!” he whispered—then he checked himself, and faced suddenly on the astonished Cagot.

“Tell me!” he cried. “What would the Cagot think of him that wilfully withheld her soul’s cure from a poor shameful woman that loved him?”

“That he feared—that he feared, monsieur.”

“Feared what?”

“To discharge his enemy from her thrall.”

“I said she loved him.”

“Yes, women love their oppressors; but it is a love that in its hour of retaliation will ask a return in kindness for every blow given. What shall be the fate of the man, then, when he kisses each bruise?”

Ned dwelt on the patient face in some astonishment.

“Philosopher,” he said, “wilt thou take service with me?”

“Monsieur takes my breath away. It is too wonderful to be true.”

“The truth, I think, Laurent, is always wonderful. Come—hurry thou! I, at least, will profit by this lesson to go and tell it.”

“And to kiss the bruises, monsieur?”

Ned did not answer, but turned once more and entered the gardens, the Cagot following at his heels.

A clamour of voices that had come distantly wafted to them as they passed through the gate took volume with every step they advanced. Suddenly, breaking from a little park of trees into one of the long, snow-covered walks that enfiladed the gardens east and west, the cause of the tumult was revealed to them in the vision of a dozen or so infuriate tricoteuses, priestesses of St Antoine, who were hurrying in their direction, driving a single woman, like a scapegoat, in their front.

At first Ned, distinguishing nothing definitely, saw only exemplified in this throng of vicious wives, with its rabble of inhuman brats hooting and pervading it, one of those exacerbated paroxysms of the mania of Fraternity that were of such frequent occurrence nowadays as to confound the very heart of autonomy. But, as the horde came into focus, and he paused to gather the import of its vehemence—all in a moment the truth leapt upon him, and he uttered a cry and sprang into the road.

For he had recognised, in the subject of all this raging ferment, no less a person than the erst-Amazon, Théroigne herself.

Her black hair floated loose; her eyes were alight with shame and terror; her bodice hung in strips from her waist. She hurried towards him, maddening and moaning, and, as she ran, the harpies scourged her bare shoulders with the leathern belts they had torn from their waists.

He rushed to intercept her flight. She saw—tried to evade him; then instantly she leapt to recognition, clutched, and fell prone at his feet.

He stood over her, while she shrieked and wailed incoherently; he warded off the rain of lashes, receiving much of it on his own arms and body.

“Beasts!” he yelled; “how has she deserved this infernal treatment?”

The air blattered with their imprecations.

“The traitress! the reactionary! the putain of Brissot!”

The thongs whistled; the mob circumgyrated; the uproar waxed murderous. In the heat and menace of it a sudden new ally appeared in the midst.

“Courage, master!” he cried; and seizing off his ragged jacket, he flung it over the victim’s bleeding shoulders, and turned upon the rabble.

“See here!” he shouted, and struck his left breast with his hand.

Upon the echo the nearest of the pack fell away, shouldering into the throng behind them.

“The duck’s foot!” went up a shriek: “it is a Cagot—a Cagot!”

Ned, in his fury, could actually laugh.

“It is a brother, sisters of the confraternity!” he cried.

They were baffled only for the moment. If they dared not touch, they could fling. There were heavy stones in plenty under the snow. They were already stooping to gather them, when a fresh diversion occurred. A patrol of the national guard broke into the rabble and disintegrated it.

At once arose a clamour of demands, retorts and counter-retorts, shrieking denunciations. Ned awaited the issue in perfect coolness. Suddenly a couple of gens-d’armes approached and collared him.

“You arrest me, messieurs?”

“Certainly, citizen.”

“But I am an Englishman, and have done nothing but help a woman in distress.”

“That is well, then. It will serve thee, no doubt, before the commissary.”

“What commissary?”

“We are of the section of the Croix Blanche. Forward, citizen!”

He was marched off to a volley of execrations. The Cagot was driven, in likewise, amidst pointing bayonets. A party of soldiers then lifted the prostrate woman, surrounded and urged her forward. She went, babbling and dancing. She was the virgin to whom the vision of Méricourt had been vouchsafed. She was the Mother of God herself. The guard chuckled coarse jests over her ravings; the mob surrounded all, going with them and spitting fury at the accursed.

Ned resigned himself to the inevitable. Only it distressed him, whenever he thought of it, to picture the lonely figure in his chambers awaiting its reprieve. The moment he was released he must hurry to it and acquit it of its trouble.

Once he called over his shoulder to the Cagot, “Thou shalt not lack a new coat, and without a badge, presently. Courage, my friend! Remember that thou art reborn into the year one of liberty and equality, sacred and indivisible.”

“Hold thy tongue!” growled a sergeant.

“I have spoken,” said the Englishman.

Their progress, by way of the Quays, and so round, by the Place de Grève, into the Rue St Antoine, made small stir amongst the few passengers abroad in the bitter weather. They were hurried, traversing a medley of little streets, into one—the Rue Pavée—very gloomy and noisome; and from this they were suddenly wheeled, leaving the crowd stranded without, into the courtyard of a sinister dark building—the Hôtel de la Force.

Ned’s heart sickened before the recent associations of the place. Involuntarily he drew back.

“Up, then!” cried the sergeant, shouldering him on. “It is sometimes safer to enter than to leave here.”

He pulled himself together and mounted a flight of steps leading to a narrow door. The woman passed in before him—passed there and then out of his life. He never saw her again. From that hour, to the day of her death twenty years later, she raved and rotted in a maniac’s cell. She had become, indeed, Mater Tenebrarum. Blood-guilt and vanity had undermined a reason that was already shaken, before the humiliation of that public chastisement came to finally overthrow it. She died in the Salpétrière—in the very prison that had witnessed the triumph of her vengeance. And the spirit of her victim, blown in the moonlit nights against the bars of her cell, might cling to them like a bat, and peer in, and take its evil rapture of the retribution that had consigned her to that one haunted spot out of all the haunted city.

Ned—carried into a dusky vestibule, and thence into a little side office where he must await, under guard, the commissary’s pleasure—was ushered, after no great interval, into the presence of that tremendous functionary. He found him a young man—rather a revolutionary blondin—military and fastidious, with a nose as high-bridged as the fifth proposition in Euclid, and an under-jaw like a griffin’s. He was seated in an elbow-chair in the front of his men. The Cagot, under care of a turnkey, stood before and well away from him; and between him and the Cagot a soldier held out a burning pastile on the point of a bayonet. He made a little gesture to the new-comer, almost as if he were kissing his finger-tips, and addressed him at once in a lisping voice.

“Your name, if you please?”

Ned satisfied him.

“Citizen Edward Murk,” he said, waving away the superfluous title with a scented hand, “thou art accused of interfering with the processes of the law and inciting to a riot.”

Ned exploded immediately.

“The law, monsieur! But I interfered in vindication of it.”

“How, then? Didst thou not oppose thyself to the people’s will?”

“To their violence, rather.”

“It was their will, nevertheless; and the people’s will is the law. Therefore thou opposedst the law.”

“It is a new law, that, monsieur.”

“Truly. It dates from the year one.”

“Of Fraternity? And what has the law one of Fraternity to say to my servant here?”

He indicated the dazed Laurent. The commissary lifted his passionless eyebrows.

“This man is, I understand, a Cagot—(another pastile, Benoît)—a Cagot, sir; and yet he will venture into the public ways, gloveless and without shoes.”

“Thus poisoning what he touches, you will say. Monsieur, it is a superstition. This year one is surely no better than other years the first—than other opening pages to our periodic new ledgers of reform—if we carry forward into it a tyrannical superstition.”

“What has that to do with the matter? This is a man——”

“It is indeed, monsieur,” answered Ned sharply. He was growing impatient of this meaningless arraignment. He had other and more important business to attend to. He looked into the vacuous young face.

“Is not this all inapplicable?” he said. “I tell monsieur that the man is my servant; that we saw a woman suffering ill-treatment; that we went to her assistance humanely and without violence. We are guilty of no assault, no resistance to or outrage against any law, either of the year one or of the year one thousand and one; and I must ask monsieur to discharge us on the simple facts of the case.”

He took, it is to be acknowledged, the wrong way with a fool.

“I know nothing of the year one thousand and one,” said the officer, with feeble irony. “It was before my time.”

“Doubtless,” snapped in Ned, “monsieur was born yesterday.”

The commissary, supporting his right elbow with his left hand, sank back in his chair, pinched his callow throat into a bag, and closed his eyes.

“The simple facts,” he said—as if reasoning with himself, as the one most needing the lesson of reason—“are that you have defied the authority of the plebiscite.”

“Good heavens!” cried Ned.

The officer coming upright again, his lids, in the act, seemed to open mechanically, like those of a doll.

“I must tell you plainly,” he said, “that, to my mind, your interference was questionable and suspicious.”

“Believe me, sir,” said Ned politely, “that, in quoting your own mind, you use an empty argument.”

“You state,” continued the commissary, “that this man is your servant. Who ever heard of a respectable person taking a Cagot for a servant!”

There rose murmured acclamations from the bystanders. This was the first really apposite thing uttered by the officer. He seemed greatly stimulated by the applause, and moved thereby to clinch a fine situation.

“I shall remand you,” he said quite briskly, “for inquiries to be made into the truth of your statements.”

Ned stared, then burst out in a fury—

“It is monstrous, monsieur; it is ridiculous! You have only to listen a moment to what I say—to accept my references to a dozen of the first standing in the city, to assure yourself of my identity.”

The commissary waved his hand. Obedient to the gesture, a couple of Guards closed upon their captive.

“I take nothing from you,” he said. “In accepting your references I might constitute myself a receiver of stolen goods.”

It was an inspiration. He looked up, with a gasp, into the faces of those about him, to read in their expressions if it were possible that he himself could have said this thing. It was true he had. There must be no anticlimax.

“Take the prisoner away!” he said, smilingly self-conscious, as if he were ordering a table to be cleared for a fresh surprise-course.

Ned, protesting, threatening, fulminating, was forced from the room, hurried down a passage, and thrust into a little dark chamber that led therefrom. The sound of a key grating in its lock fell disagreeably upon his ears. Only a thin wash of light reached him from a single barred window high up under the ceiling. A couple of crippled chairs—together, it might be said, with an almost palpable smell of drains—formed the only furniture of the room. The wall-paper moulted its gaudy dyes, or hung in strips from the plaster; the floor was littered with perished rags of parchment. Evidently the closet had been at one time some office connected with the prison records—a dreary mad reflection to any one remembering to what recent use those records had been put.

Ned sank down upon one of the chairs, and, for the moment, looked about him quite stunned and aghast.

* * * * * * * *

Up and down, up and down, by the hour together. The morning had drawn to noon, the noon to evening; and still he was confined, with only an indefinite prospect of release. It was hideous, it was outrageous; yet the humour of it all might have buoyed him up against the moment of his liberation, had not his soul—in its present condition, introspective and self-torturing—so writhed in exquisite anguish over a never-ceasing fear, or foreboding, of something—some vague disaster that, it seemed to him, his prolonged absence from home must precipitate. To this something he would, or could, give no name; but his thoughts circled round the shadow of it, feigning a self-assurance that there was no core of significance therein to terrify them—yet terrified nevertheless.

At the first he had flattered himself that mid-day, or thereabouts, would bring him his deliverance. The whole incident was so preposterous that, under the burden of his more private affairs, he would not consider it seriously. But, as the morning passed, and the chill dark day drew on, his anger and anxiety increased upon him to such an extent that he might hardly restrain himself from giving them childish expression in a furious onslaught on the panels of his door.

He refrained, however, and, listening at the keyhole instead, was presently aware of the regular tramp of a sentry in the passage. By-and-by, when the footsteps came opposite him, he kicked out and hailed—

“Hullo, there!”

The man stopped.

“Qu’as-tu?” he growled. “Ne t’emporte pas, citoyen.”

“My temper!” shouted Ned; “but I shall likely lose my senses if I am left longer without food.”

“As to that,” said the sentry—and broke off and retreated.

In a very little while the key turned once more, and a jailer entered with a platter of uninviting scraps.

“Take the filth away!” cried Ned furiously. “Thou canst procure me something fit to eat, I suppose?”

“Surely, for the paying, citizen.”

“Go, then!”

He commissioned the man, and then must drag out another half-hour, awaiting the fellow’s reappearance. At length the latter returned, bearing a basket containing a cold fowl, bread, and a bottle of red wine.

“Now, monsieur jaquemart,” said Ned, as he tackled the provender, “how long is permitted to this farce in the playing?”

“I do not understand you.”

“Why, a joke is a joke; but I would have you go and explain to our pleasant commissary, of the Section Croix Blanche, that brevity is the soul of wit.”

“Again, I do not understand.”

Ned wagged his finger at the man.

“I have submitted to this outrage very patiently; but, I warn you, there will be reprisals by-and-by.”

“That is all one to me.”

“Wilt thou take a message from me to the commissary?”

“He has left the prison these many hours.”

“And, when to return?”

The jailer shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps to-morrow—at any time, or not at all.”

Ned jumped to his feet, upsetting the basket.

“What!” he shrieked. Then, in a moment, realising the practical fact of his isolation—realising all that was implied by it—he fell upon his agitation and smothered it.

“My friend,” he said, “wilt thou convey a letter for me?”

“That depends.”

“Naturally. See, then” (he fetched out a pencil; tore a square from the white paper that lined his basket of provisions)—“I write to the citizen Vergniaud—dating my billet, ‘Prison of La Force’—these words: ‘I am detained here on a ridiculous charge. In the name of sanity, come at once and release me—Murk.’ I put the paper in your hands; as I will put a louis-d’or when you stand before me with the answer.”

The jailer’s eyes twinkled. Said he—

“I go off duty after the ‘Evening Gazette’ is issued. The citizen may depend upon me.”

Ned groaned.

“Well,” he said, “what can’t be cured must be endured. But, the earlier the respite, the more generous my acknowledgment.”

He was locked in again; the sentry resumed his tramp; the little window under the ceiling dusked like a drowsing eyelid.

Presently, drugged by utter weariness of brain and nerve, he dozed on one of the rickety chairs, and woke to the glare of a candle, and the presence of his friendly jailer in the room.

“Behold my despatch, citizen!”

He seized the scrap of paper (that bearing his own message), and read, scribbled on the back of it, “I fly to the succour of my dear friend the very moment I may quit myself of a little present business of urgency.”

“Here are thy vails,” said Ned, in a tone of glad relief; “and leave me the candle, my friend. I shall not need it long.”

* * * * * * * *

Up and down—up and down. The shape of the window under the ceiling became intimate to the desolate character of the room, rather than to that segment of the free sky without which it had once appropriated to itself. It was like a regard turned inwards—an eye glazing in the trance of self-inquisition; and as such it was illustrative of the vision of the tormented soul it imprisoned from light.

Up and down. The candle had long guttered and fallen upon itself; his only ray of comfort from the outer world came in a stretched thread of lamp-shine under the door. Dark night had crept upon him, with the screak and thunder of slamming oak and iron, and an increased emotion, rather than a sense, of muffled deep confinement; and still the respite delayed, and must now delay, he was sick to think, until the morrow.

For, at last the voices of introspection, that all day he had striven, yet feared, to interpret, were become soul-audible sounds in the tenseness of black silence; and at last his brain was clearing, throwing truth, like a precipitate, into his heart.

How in two days had the flood of destiny burst, obliterating all his ancient landmarks! He was carried down like a dead thing. Should he drift, then?—or, if not, where strand and crawl ashore, a fragment of human wreck? “I clutch and stop myself,” he thought; “scramble out; lie half blind upon a little island of rest. The flood still washes my feet; but I will not yield to it. Then slowly it subsides; the old beautiful landmarks reveal themselves—soiled and stained, perhaps; but, they are dear to me, and I would not have my retrospect without them.”

He paced wildly to and fro again.

“I have been in the flood. What madness has it wrought in me!”

“Pamela!” he whispered aloud in great emotion—“Pamela!”

Yet his soul—though he believed it steadfast to its allegiance through all the numbing thunder of the race on which it had been borne—was rent by conflicting devils; for must not his sympathies at least extend to one who nursed a hopeless passion?

“Oh!” he groaned in his heart, “if, upon my release, I could only find her gone, on her own initiative, out of my life!”

“And so to leave you a heritage of everlasting remorse,” the fiends would cry.

One moment he would be the brutal tyrant, another the slave to his own nature of kindness. He was, indeed, in a pitiable state of indetermination. And always, marking off the crawling hours, that sense of inner foreboding pattered loud or soft like the ticking of a death-watch.

Pamela and Théroigne and Nicette! Vanity and vanity and vanity. And one Love had claimed, and one the hell of passion, and one——

He threw himself upon the floor, blaspheming, hugging himself in the ecstasy of this protracted torment.

At last, completely worn out, he fell asleep.

He awoke, having slumbered, despite the hardness of his couch, far into the morning. He could only recollect himself and his circumstances with a mastering effort. Sitting up, he saw his jailer standing by a little table that he had brought into the room.

“What is that for?” he said.

“The citizen’s meals.”

“Meals! Good God! And has not the commissary yet touched his acme of folly? Has not M. Vergniaud yet called to effect my release?”

The man shook his head.

“Where did you overtake him?” said Ned desperately. “What was he doing that was so urgent when you delivered to him my note?”

“He was conducting the actress Simon-Candeille to the theatre. I heard madame engage him to a p’tit-souper when the play was over.”

Ned turned away, sick at heart; then flashed round upon the man again in a fury.

“The beast! the philosophic egoist! Thou must carry him another message from me.”

“Truly, when I can,” said the jailer.

It must be when he could. In the meantime the distracted captive was faced by the prospect of fresh long hours of cold, gloom, and anxiety. Again the morning dawdled on to mid-day, to the desolate turn from noon. His lunch was brought in by a stranger turnkey, taciturn and unapproachable. Ned let him go without a commission. His agitation could not stomach food.

At last, when, about four o’clock in the afternoon, he was feeling that, unless soon relieved, he must pay with his reason for that little act of humane interference, steps sounded coming hurriedly down the corridor, the key turned in the lock, the door was flung open, and there entered the room—the young lord, Pamela’s betrothed.

He was full of quick manliness and pity.

“My dear lord!” he cried—“my dear lord!”

He took Ned’s hand; wrung it with hard, sympathetic fervour.

“I was with Vergniaud and Tommy Paine last night, after your note had been received by the minister. It is the vilest piece of official insolence! Vergniaud will make hell about it; I will make hell. He was frantically engaged at the time, and begged me to represent him in this release of his dear friend. A certain lady was deeply concerned this morning to hear about it. She would drive me down by-and-by on the way to her dressmaker. I have come the moment I was able; have made inquiries, learnt the truth, procured the release of your servant, and given these scoundrels a foretaste of what they are to expect.”

He was amazingly frank and cordial. For a moment Ned was stupefied from any thought of response. He looked into the handsome, intelligent face, and a dull realisation of his own inefficiency as a suitor possessed him. “Would this romantic Fortunatus,” might have been his fancy, “have ever committed himself to a situation so ridiculous as this of mine?” His lordship was of the soldierly type, very upright and spruce. He wore at his neck a kerchief of the green that was later to bring him into trouble. And the unhappy prisoner, for a contrast, was haggard, unshorn, unkempt—his coat dusted with litter from the floor.

“I can’t find words to thank you,” muttered Ned at last.

“Faith,” cried the other cheerily, “ye’ve scattered your vocabulary, I shouldn’t wonder. Come, then, to the rogues at the gate, and I’ll help ye out with a loan.”

Ned drew back from the proffered grasp.

“No,” he said—“no!”

Then he passed his hand before his eyes.

“Your lordship must excuse me. This suspense—it hath driven me half mad. I am just a caged rat, flying the instant the spring is raised. Mistress Pamela, and my prompt, affectionate Vergniaud! Their disinterested consideration for me—and yours, my lord, yours—they touch me to the quick. I have such friends—Madame Simon-Candeille, possibly, among the number. But I am at the last stage of anxiety and agitation. I have no thought for the moment but to escape, and alone. I beg your lordship to forgive my apparent discourtesy, and to let me pass. God knows, it may be too late even now.”

The other, looking very much surprised and offended, bowed and drew away.

“As your lordship pleases,” said he.

And at that, Ned, without another word, his face as stiff as a mask, staggered past him, hurried out into the corridor, sped down it, and made unaccosted for the street.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Snow, soft, dazzling, bewildering, was again falling in the streets as Ned, a spectre of desperation, hurried along them. The city was all one strung movement of flakes—cloud materialising, phantoms blocking the widest and the least avenues of hope. The soulless persistency of them numbed his heart, blinded his eyes. He stumbled as he went, feeling like one who, in a nightmare, frantically strives forward without advancing.

Pamela, and Théroigne, and Nicette! The one on the way to her dressmaker’s; the one buried—naked, and buried alive; the third——!

He moaned as he struggled onward. People passing him looked back with eyes askew in butting heads, and grimaced, and went on their way with pharisaic self-congratulations.

At length, uttering a breathing sigh of relief, he stood before the door of his lodgings, paused a moment, mounted the steps, and entered. Instantly he knew, before a word had been spoken, that he was come upon the something, the real presence of the dread that had haunted him so long. It was in the atmosphere—behind him, overhead, to one side or the other—never confronting him—a ghost, sibilant with babble, diabolic with tickling laughter. He went up the stairs, swiftly, panic-stricken, and so, softly, into his sitting-room. It was quiet as death; yet a bodiless rustle, he could have thought, preceded him as he passed into the room beyond. All there was neat, formal, accustomed. Only a little heap of girl’s clothes lay on the bed—a neatly disposed small pile of stuffs and linen, with a pair of buckled shoes at the top.

He gasped, as if he had been struck over the heart. There was something here so intimate to the story of a pitifully misdirected life. The shoes seemed to have taken the shape of the feet that had pursued him so far and at last, it seemed, so despairingly. The linen—he bent and pressed his cheek to it. It was fragrant—as was everything personal to Nicette—but it was cold. How long had she been gone? He had his wish, then. She had taken the initiative. He was free to nurse his memories unvexed of a regard so misplaced. He could raise his head and stand acquitted before his ancient ideals.

He drooped his head, rather. He was weak and overwrought. The strain upon him during the last three days had been so extreme that perhaps his moral vision was impaired.

A sound coming from the adjoining room startled him. Was it she returned? He winked down fiercely something that had gathered unaccountably in his eyes, cleared his throat, and strode forth.

The landlord, Theophilus—that was all. But the little man’s face was smock-white, his curls hung limp, his eye-places were grey with fear.

He had closed the door behind him.

“Monsieur!” he whispered. “My God, where hast thou been?”

“What is the matter?”

“Monsieur’s young friend! Has he not heard of her?”

“Well; she is gone, I suppose?”

“Ay—mon Dieu Jésus!—to the guillotine.”

Ned fell back. There seemed to rise a roaring in his ears.

“Hush!” he said—“listen! They are shrieking for her. I must go!”

His face was ghastly. But the thundering voice sank and ceased, and he knew that he had been dreaming.

“What was that you said, my Théophile?” he asked, with a little insane chuckle over his own fancifulness.

“It was yesterday morning, monsieur. You had gone out the previous night, and had not returned. I heard her leave the house after breakfast. I looked forth. Pitiful Mother! she was clad in the rags of her arrival. Her feet were bare. They budded from the snow, the very frosted flowers of a too-trustful spring. She stood a moment, then went off. Hélas! it was not for me to speak, but——”

“Well?” said Ned, in a gripping voice of iron. He was himself again, but with death at his heart.

“I can speak only from the evidence. In the afternoon I looked into the Salle de la Liberté, as I sometimes will, to hear the cases that were on. There was a little excitement about a girl who had been seized that morning in one of the passages of the Palais de Justice with a long knife in her hand. She had made no secret of the fact that it was her intention to assassinate one or other of the judges as they came forth at mid-day. She was brought in for trial while I was there. I swear—my God, monsieur! I swear I had no shadowy thought of the truth. It was monsieur’s young friend. I shrank into an angle of the court, in agony lest she should see and endeavour to implicate me.”

“Thou needst not have feared, I think—thou needst not have feared.”

“Monsieur, she made no defence. ‘Vive la tyrannie!’ she cried, ‘I love the aristocrats!’ (Ah, praise to heaven, monsieur, that she put it in the plural!) ‘I would sooner be spurned by one,’ she said, ‘than exalted by an upstart chicaneur.’ That was a stroke at the Public Accuser. ‘Maybe thou shalt be exalted, nevertheless,’ said he, ‘to a prominent place. And which of us was it, lover of aristocrats, that thou design’dst to murder?’ ‘What needs to specify?’ she cried. ‘When one wants to die, any poisonous snake will serve for one to handle!’”

A little terrible groan broke from the listener.

“Monsieur—monsieur!” cried Théophile in emotion. “But they condemned her—they condemned her. Oh, the poor child! And she revealed nothing; refused to answer any questions as to her associates, her place of abode, her manner of life. To-day she was to be taken to the scaffold. If she has kept silence, we are safe.”

Ned looked upon the speaker with a shocking expression.

“If she has kept silence?” he muttered.

“Monsieur,” said the little man (the tears were trickling down his lean cheeks), “the carts passed but ten minutes ago. I hurried forth, and ran till I could get glimpse of them down a side-street. She was there. She sat with her arms bound, looking up and smiling; and the snow fell upon her blue eyes, like feathers from the wings of the angels that fluttered overhead awaiting her.”

He uttered a little cry, staggered, recovered himself, and clutched feebly at the figure that drove by him.

“Monsieur! It is too late—it is useless! In God’s name do nothing to compromise us!—monsieur!”

He followed, sobbing and piping, down the stairs. The rush passed from him; the door slammed back in his face.

“Mon Dieu!” he wailed to himself, “he will ruin all!”

Ned tore upon his way. To see—to gain speech with her, if only at the foot of the scaffold—“Oh, merciful Christ! not so to make this agony everlasting!”

He sobbed and panted as he ran: “You didn’t kill him! You didn’t kill him!” He kept crying it, as if he thought his hurrying voice might reach her before ever his feet could cover the distance. Once he pictured her—the soft sinning child that had whispered to him, kissing his hand that night in the hot still secrecy of the room—under the hands of the callous ruffian who had spoken with him from the guillotine, and his wild prayers swung into frightful blasphemies. Some of the few he met in his headlong rush shrunk from him, leaving him the road. Others, who appeared likely to obstruct his passage, he cursed as he fled by. They were all ghosts to him, glimmering, impalpable—flashing past in a white foam of flakes.

At length he broke into the place of the guillotine, and, without pausing in his mad race, beat the snow from his eyes—and saw.

Here at least, by reason of the bitter cold, was no gala-day, and the crowd stood not so thick about the scaffold but that he might charge into and penetrate it.

He had reached at last—so his whirling brain interpreted it—the very congress of all the spectres that had haunted him of late. The silent dull air was thick with silent threads—busy stitches in a shroud whose hem was the enceinte of the city. Here a silent white pack stood looking up at a white yoke. There was no terror in all the scene, save where, on the platform itself, the boots of the executioners slipped in a red thaw.

Then, in a moment, he was aware of her. She rose from the cloud of white shapes—herself a statue of whiteness—pure at last—and other white shapes stooped and lifted her.

He burst through the intervening whiteness—tore his way into the shroud.

“Nicette!” he screamed.

She struggled free for an instant—turned, looked down, and saw him. Through the rain of flakes the rapture of a deathless passion was revealed to him.

The next moment she was fallen prostrate. A whirring silvery wing swooped upon her. She seemed to break in half, like a woman of snow.

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

The 1899 Dodd, Mead & Co. edition was consulted for many of the following corrections.

Alterations to the text:

Add TOC.

A few punctuation corrections: missing commas/periods, quotation mark pairing, etc.

Note: minor spelling and hyphenization inconsistencies (e.g. unnamable/unnameable, seaport/sea-port, meadow-path/meadow path, etc.) have been preserved.

[Book I/Chapter XIII]

Change “his innate migivings must once more gather” to misgivings.

[Book I/Chapter XX]

“and accepted his to her carrriage” to carriage.

[Book II/Chapter II]

“I sink, Was there evaire the time when” change comma to period.

“this same wife lay adying” to a-dying.

[Book II/Chapter XV]

“committed himself to the hoplessness of slumber” to hopelessness.

[Book II/Chapter XVI]

“turned upon her in uttter desperation” to utter.

“Oh, monsier, monsieur! if I could learn it” to monsieur.

[End of Text]

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Table of Contents

- EPIGRAPH.

- OUR LADY OF DARKNESS

- CONTENTS.

- OUR LADY OF DARKNESS. BOOK I.

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- CHAPTER XIII.

- CHAPTER XIV.

- CHAPTER XV.

- CHAPTER XVI.

- CHAPTER XVII.

- CHAPTER XVIII.

- CHAPTER XIX.

- CHAPTER XX.

- BOOK II.

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- CHAPTER XIII.

- CHAPTER XIV.

- CHAPTER XV.

- CHAPTER XVI.

- CHAPTER XVII.

- CHAPTER XVIII.

- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE