THE CHAMBER-WINDOW.
At that very time Shan Healy was speeding on a bicycle (having missed
a train) from Paris to Versailles, with perspiration raining over his
face and swear-words vented when racing through those villages paved
with old pavers, which mercilessly jerked him. It was not until six
o’clock that he got to Versailles and the Villa des Medicis there,
a house of the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, where, having scorched
down to the house-front through a great avenue of yews, he craved to
interview Miss Ruth Vickery.
He was taken to the door of a chamber in the middle of which stood
three ladies talking warmly, though in low tones—two elderly ladies and
Miss Ruth Vickery; and a whirl of words was being uttered among them,
sometimes all the three trying to make their opinions heard at once,
all looking as exhausted and haggard as if they had been going on all
the day long, while in the gloom of a far corner of the room lay Miss
Eve Vickery asleep, with an appearance of exhaustion, even of swoon.
Shan Healy stood on the threshold, and he could just hear the Comtesse
de Pichegru-Picard, whom he knew very well, cry with a casting up of
her hands and eyes, “Ah, my dear Lina, you can persuade an angel or the
good God himself to change their mind, but you cannot persuade a saint
who is English too.”
This lady, although English herself, spoke English in quite a halt
way, with effort, was tall and fair, resembling Miss Eve, her niece, in
stand and being.
“But, Aunt,” wooed Miss Ruth, “bear with me, since I do mean well,
as in my God’s sight. Ask yourself—how can I, how could I, try to
induce Eve to marry a man who, it appears, is without even morality,
whose mood is pagan, whose aim is Cæsarian, whose God is arrogance?...
And Eve never would, I think, if I know her! You have heard her say
yourself——”
“Ah, then, why in the good God’s name did the girl go and kiss him with
all Paris gazing at it?” exclaimed the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard.
“Aunt,” breathed Miss Ruth, all ruby-red, with drooped lids, “you know
that Eve did not—‘kiss’— him; he—‘kissed’—her.”
“Ah, my good Ruth,” observed the third lady, one Madame Lina Grammont,
“the world does not draw these exquisite distinctions, believe me: it
knows that in a kiss it is generally the gentleman who both begins
against the lady’s will and ends against her will.”
“Exactly,” remarked the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard; “but then, we all
know our English: it is always their little mannerism to regard the
lady as made of anything but of flesh and blood. The fact, however,
that stares one in the face is that Eve is now bound to be married
immediately; and I repeat that the scandal will be less if of the two
gentlemen she chooses the one who has kissed her.”
“Truly, the scandal will be less,” Miss Ruth answered; “and you do
not say, if you think it, that the worldly grandeurs will be greater;
but, happily for her peace, Aunt, Eve would rather choose, I think, to
live in a hovel with a Christian gentleman like the Comte de Courcy
than with one whose bosom was never vaccinated with the stigmata of
compassion and abnegation, though he were five times a Mogul.”
“So I hear you say, my dear,” replied the countess, “though Eve herself
no doubt most accurately knows her own secret; but if it be a fact that
her stomach is such as to like the Comte de Courcy better, why will she
not send for him, since he is every hour expecting her reply?”
“She will send, I think,” replied Miss Ruth. “What, however, was the
use of summoning papa from London unless she is to hold out for his
presence before pronouncing her decision? He should by now have arrived
in Paris, and within an hour will be in Versailles; then, I think, she
will speak, she will send, for she feels, I am sure, the nobleness of
Monsieur de Courcy’s renewed offer, and will not, I think, grieve him
by any longer——”
But at that moment Healy at the door sneezed, and, the ladies noticing
him, two of them, still speaking eagerly together, went away through
another door, Miss Ruth going to meet Healy. She was just beginning
to say, “I am so glad——” when Healy put his lips to her ear with “Not
in here, miss! every word breathed in here all day has been heard in
the palace at Paris”—whereon he showed her the telephone over the sofa
on which Miss Eve lay asleep, whispering deeply afresh, “He’s this
minute lying on his face, hearing her very breathing, I believe”; and
when Miss Ruth, as they now moved out of the room into a vestibule,
asked how that was possible, Healy replied that it was by means of a
whispering-gallery, as at St. Paul’s in London, where anyone stationed
at the part of a circular wall farthest from a telephone in the wall
heard greatly augmented any sounds thrown out of the telephone-mouth,
being in a focus of the sound-waves. “The telephone-number of that
gallery has been plugged on to yours the whole day, miss,” Healy said,
“someone here is in his pay, and he has been lying on the ground in the
gallery with a crowd of tools strewn round about, modelling something
and listening, smiling with himself the while. I know that he knows at
what moment your papa was summoned to you, and at what moment Mr. de
Courcy’s proposal reached here; so, as soon as I could slip away when
he went out, I made paces to answer your letter in person, so as to
impress upon you that he is really in earnest in this, miss: for he has
lost time and given up other things to see to this, seeing that he had
arranged to go to the Chamber to-night, but isn’t going any more; so he
is serious, miss, oh, he means business, believe me, miss, in this, and
it will be a bitter pity if Miss Eve isn’t whipped off secretly this
hour right out of his way somehow, though, as his spies are all about——”
“You do not believe, Healy, I see, that such a union could be good?”
said Miss Ruth, her gaze on his face.
“Well, to be frank, no, miss, marriage wouldn’t hardly suit him,”
said the voluble Healy. “No, no; he’d be that miserable, you wouldn’t
believe; and the fonder he was of the lady, the more he’d hate and
hiss at her for making him waste time. Time’s his wife; the clock, the
clock, miss. Believe me, only to be near him, people feel in a prickly
heat themselves, as if they were breathing fever from some fierce
atmosphere—the very Orientals in the palace, miss, only that slothful
old story-teller, Nundcumar.... No, no, miss, do now, he’ll be that
miserable——”
“And his lady, too, I think, Healy?” suggested Miss Ruth, with her
smile.
“Well, and the lady, too, now you mention it, miss,” Healy agreed;
“true enough—the lady too; she’d be like a dog tied behind a railway
train, couldn’t keep up the pace anyhow; try now, miss, try, try;
he’ll be that wretched, you wouldn’t believe, and everything’ll be
changed, and instead of me it’ll be the lady may be, and I nowhere with
him; try, try. From that night in the forest round the ruined town of
Anuradhapura, he has been good friends with me—till two days ago when
the doctor came to France. I have told you about that night before,
miss. Oh, that’s a forest, if you like, boundless, miss, I can tell
you, and the men and brutes of that country move about in a brown,
brown day, miss—big black brutes looming upon you out of the gloom with
their stupid gazing, and thousands upon thousands of gods and ogres of
stone broken to bits in those groves a thousand centuries ago, they
say. He left me one nightfall at the top of one of the big dagabas
to go all by himself into the dark of the timber, I to watch each
nightfall there till he should come back with the piece of a stele; and
there on the dagaba I watched and waited fifteen weeks, miss, night by
night, till I began to fancy that he was gone for good. Eh, but he did
come back to me all right, miss, one darksome night, under the large
stars which look upon those parts, almost starved and stark naked he
was, bearing forty old stone boxes on top of a buffalo-cart; and in
his hand was that little gold thing made in the shape of a pear which
he never lets go of, and even in his sleep keeps with him.... Do you
know what’s in that little thing, miss? A little key, they say; and
that old story-teller, Nundcumar, who fancies he knows everything,
says that this little key opens a certain casket in which there’s a
second key; and that second key opens a certain safe in which there’s
a third key; and that third key opens a certain turret at Serapis, the
Brittany palace, in which there’s a fourth key; and that fourth key
opens a certain chamber in which there’s a fifth key; and that fifth
key—I can’t quite call to mind what the fifth key opens; any way, it
goes on till you get to the twelfth key, which opens the room in which
all his jewels and riches are strewn—so says that Nundcumar, miss, and
whereabouts under the ground that room may be no human being has yet
got scent of, though that Nundcumar swears that _he_ knows where; and
the key to the whole is within that little gold thing made in the shape
of a pear which he never lets go of, miss.”
At this Miss Vickery, with her stare of child-wonder, stared at Healy,
muttering, “How very much lighter and kinder would he feel, now, if he
had no keys, nor any jewels to lay up for himself!”
“Doubtless, miss,” said the other; “but that’s how it stands—what would
you have? What was I saying? Oh, about that night in the forest round
about the ruined town of Anuradhapura; yes, that’s a forest, miss, if
you like—boundless; but I think I’ve told you about that night before,
miss, often; and from that night he has been good friends with me, till
two days ago, when the doctor came——”
“Does he still avoid a meeting with his father?” asked Miss Vickery in
a voice of secrecy.
“Rather, miss; his treatment of that old man is so shocking——” Healy
commenced to answer, but was checked by a “_sh-h-h_” breathed by
Miss Ruth, who through the doorway had noticed Miss Eve moving in
her sleep; and they two stood peeping at the unfolding of Miss Eve’s
eyes, saw Miss Eve notice a Bible which lay open by her nose on the
sofa-cushion—a Bible which had been placed there by Miss Ruth with one
phrase in it underlined in blue—saw her take the Book to gloat closely
over the phrase in the gloaming’s dusk, saw her laugh, and, after
laughing, suddenly press her lips upon the phrase with ravishment, to
drop suddenly afresh on the cushion with a covering up of the face; the
phrase which she had read and kissed being this, “Be ye not unequally
yoked with unbelievers.”
“Steal softly in,” breathed Miss Ruth to Healy; and softly she herself,
having moved into the room, stole on tip-toe quite to the telephone,
the opening of which she shut off and stuffed up, Miss Eve meanwhile
seeming still asleep; and to Healy Miss Ruth now said aloud, “Continue
now, Healy, to speak of your master’s treatment of his poor father.”
Healy looked at her, and, discerning her meaning, whispered to himself,
“Why, if she isn’t as wise as a serpent!”
“No, miss,” he added aloud, “he won’t see the doctor not on no account:
never once seen him willingly since the day he left the island in your
yacht; flies him like death, he does. Fact is, he is nervous of the
doctor; nothing on earth below, nor in heaven above, is he nervous of,
but of the doctor he is. Can’t get over his youth, you see, can’t get
over all those years in which he used to believe the doctor a god,
not a human being—shuns him as death, he does. And partly it’s the
doctor’s own fault, I must say, for that’s only the truth, you know,
miss, seeing that the doctor is going all dead against him, taking part
with his political enemies, and he well aware of it, for there’s an eye
spying for him behind every blind, so to say; and he’s afraid of the
doctor, oh, he’s afraid, miss, that the doctor’s big brains may be
digging his grave for him. So that’s his excuse, look; but still, when
all’s said, his conduct to the doctor has been just shocking—shocking
it has. Again and again has the old soul’s nose pressed against his
gates, and begged and prayed to be let in, but no go; and that time
at Lyons when the old man tried to spring into the carriage, just as
Master Hanni stepped down out of the town-hall, that was a bit beyond:
for as the father made to spring in, the son darted to the reins, the
horses pranced and started off, leaving a father prostrate and bleeding
on the street—oh no, that was a bit beyond, that was.”
Miss Vickery, with her face averted from the narrator, held her eyes
bent skyward with a steadfast gaze, begging for God’s forgiveness of
men; but from Miss Eve, who must have heard, who was meant to hear,
neither word was uttered, nor a stir seen.
After a silence the talkative Healy proceeded to remark, “Well, I can
understand him, miss. I recollect that when I was a little lad ten
years of age, one day a great big girl of thirteen meets me in a lane,
miss, and begins to kiss and hug me—couldn’t make out anyhow what it
was about, so I got pretty scared, I did, and from that day for years,
if I but spied that lass a league off, my hair’d go creepy, I’d take
to my heels like a long-dog, and I do believe if I caught sight of
her even now, I’d be bound to do a dart for it. It’s the same with
Master Hanni—shy, shy; the doctor’s a great big bogey to him—thinks the
doctor’ll be digging his grave, though he knows that the doctor can’t.
And who suffers for it, miss? _I_ do. Thinks I am secretly on the
doctor’s side against him, can’t believe I’m on his side against all
comers, thinks I’m always going to ‘betray’ him to the doctor, trusts
no one, trusts no one, it’s hard, because——”
Now, however, that stream of Healy’s speech was checked by the
appearance in the doorway of a gentleman neatly dressed in grey, with a
grey top-hat on his head, a neat umbrella, and side-whiskers, with him
being the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard and Madame Grammont; and Healy,
seeing him, murmured, “Your pa, miss,” and now bowed himself out; while
Mr. Vickery, darting his eyes all about the room, and discerning in the
gloom his younger girl on the couch, rushed by Miss Ruth without any
greeting, his eyes brimming with tears, his mouth trembling, and on his
knees garnering Miss Eve in his arms, gave way now to weeping, again
and again darting down his lips at her mouth, with pausings to gaze at
her face, then again darting down at her mouth, with mania.
Miss Eve sat up, breathing “papa,” and laughed a little, casting back
some hairs from her brow with a gesture which, undoubtedly, was not
without something of hectic and hare-brained. Indeed, she appeared that
day to be dwelling in a region so infected with fever, that through the
day she had been treated as a patient, and on the sick list.
“Well, here I am,” Mr. Vickery said to her, “just arrived by God’s
help—in time, I hope.... Got a headache, have you? my soul? my love?”
Miss Eve smiled triumphantly in her parent’s face, replying, “No, papa;
why should I?”
“That’s all right, don’t say a word,” muttered the father, fast patting
her arm, “don’t say a word.... Well, here I am, you see; arrived,
arrived, by God’s help. And—I have telegraphed to Monsieur de Courcy
to come. Have I done well? I thought I would, and—I did. All the way
from London to Paris I was praying to be guided, and the moment I got
to Paris the thought was given me to telegraph at once to Monsieur de
Courcy, and—I did.”
“Did you, papa?” asked Miss Eve, smiling with her father.
“Yes. Eve, have I done well?”
“Why, papa, I think so,” replied Miss Eve, smiling that defiance which
is amused, that triumph which is secure. “Monsieur de Courcy is a most
estimable man.”
“He is; but still, Eve, tell me, tell me, dear—have I done well?”
“Oh, I quite think so, papa.... Have you had a pleasant trip across?”
“No, no, let us be frank now; let us make use of plain terms, let’s not
mince matters, Eve; come now, tell your papa—my own, my sweet—will you
have de Courcy?”
“Oh, as to that, why, I think so, papa,” replied Miss Eve with some
appearance of surprise about the eye-brows. “I thought that that was
rather understood as a settled thing: ask Ruth, ask aunt: they’ll tell
you that Monsieur de Courcy, that model of morals, high at the head of
my list, hasn’t a rival to dread.”
Upon this the father turned with an opening of the arms toward the
other ladies, saying, “Why, this is well.... You didn’t tell me!”
No reply was made to him; only the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard
exchanged half a smile with Madame Grammont, who just shrugged, while
Miss Ruth remained with her eyelids drooped.
“Why, that’s all right, then!” cried Mr. Vickery to Miss Eve: “I knew,
I knew, that my dear’s instincts would strike true. Well, de Courcy
should have nearly reached Versailles by this, and—you’ll be sending
him away a happy man, will you? Is that settled?”
The young lady, contemplating her father’s face with a calm smile,
replied, “Quite settled, papa—for _my_ share. If it _can_ be, it shall
be.”
“‘_Can_ be?’ What does she mean?”—Mr. Vickery threw this whisper at
the other ladies behind him; but before anything further could be
uttered, a bomb was hurled into the _salon_ by the words of a servant
who entered, saying “Monsieur Lepsius to talk with Mr. Vickery”—and he
handed a card.
Straight sprang Mr. Vickery up, Miss Eve also raising herself by
degrees, and all with blanched cheeks gaped in silence at the menial,
till Mr. Vickery, his visage rushing into crimson, cried in a high and
hysteric kind of cry, “Say to that gentleman that Mr. Vickery, being
engaged, begs him to state his business by letter!”
The menial bowed and backed out, and immediately now there reigned a
gale of breaths among the ladies, Madame Grammont and the countess
making a thousand gesticulations together, Mr. Vickery standing again
pale-faced by a reaction, Miss Ruth at him instigating him to be grim,
Miss Eve moving about from place to place, reading the titles of books,
glancing at trees outside, glancing at looking-glasses.
It lasted four minutes, which seemed much more, after which the menial
was once more there, bearing a note scribbled in pencil, whose folds
Mr. Vickery tremblingly opened. Miss Ruth meantime breathing in his
ear, “Pray, papa, do not read it aloud!”—words which Miss Eve either
heard or surmised, for now immediately she muttered with some huff,
“Oh, I have no wish to hear anything,” and went away.
The rest then, laying their heads over the note, read the words: “Dear
sir,—I, a suitor for your daughter’s hand, having run a race with
another suitor to your door, and having won the race, am amazed at your
want of fairness and also of forethought in refusing me an audience.
Why do you? Pray question yourself. Can any king with a rope restrain
the rolling of rivers or the drift of fate? I warn you that you waste
your time in this, causing me also the woe of wasting mine; nor could
that be just to another suitor to permit Miss Eve Vickery in a freakish
humour to promise him marriage, since she has no such intention,
knowing that such a nonsense is not on the files of life.—LEPSIUS.”
It was Madame Grammont who, gifted with the strongest eyesight, read
the note aloud in a monotone, the gloaming in the room having now
grown very heavy; and as she finished, and all raised their eyes, all
started, for there afresh was Miss Eve, who had been seen to leave the
chamber, hovering anew near to hear.
“I am not to be browbeaten!” suddenly cried Mr. Vickery in a high kind
of cry.
“Ah, papa, no agitation, papa!” Miss Ruth called through a throat whose
music broke.
“I say I am not to be browbeaten, I am not to be threatened!” screamed
Mr. Vickery querulously afresh in an ecstasy, for the atmosphere was
all electric, and each one present caught from all the rest a hectic
cheek and a lip of quivering.
“My God, I foresaw all! and my advice was not followed,” cried the
Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, with a casting up of the hands.
“‘The files of life,’ ‘the drift of fate’!” Madame Grammont muttered in
a maze.
“Get my daughter’s trunks packed!” cried the father; “am I an
Englishman? Are there no laws?”
“Calm, papa, calm!” called out Miss Ruth anew: “ah, how disastrous!
papa, I warn you, this agitation is fatal to the welfare of the soul!”
“Oh, Ruth, let one alone!” now said the countess in an irritation
without restraint; “it is you who are the cause of all, at the end of
the tale.”
“Aunt, I?” asked Miss Ruth, with reproach lodged in the soul of her
eyes.
“But no, Margaret, but no,” protested Madame Grammont: “it is not the
fault of Ruth, it is not the fault of Ruth.”
“Let me get my girl out of this infernal country!” now cried out the
high-strung Mr. Vickery; “it is France that has done this!”
“Oh, but be reasonable, Matthieu, at the end of the tale!” the countess
mouthed, with intolerance.
“Quite right, papa,” now cried out Miss Eve in a spirit of rollicking
and recklessness, “let us clearly prove to everyone that we act in no
‘humour of freak,’ having a will of our own!”
“My love!” cried Mr. Vickery.
“‘The files of life,’” mused Madame Grammont anew; “‘humour of
freakishness’!”
“Ah, but he is right, believe me!” cried the Comtesse de
Pichegru-Picard; “he has his meaning! he knows Eve better than she
knows herself.”
“You and others may _think_ so, Aunt,” called Miss Eve, snapping her
thumb and finger daintily up in the air, with a wheel on her feet.
“But he may still be there!” said Madame Grammont; “is he still there
at the door, Gabriel?”
“Monsieur Lepsius has departed, madame,” the gaudy Gabriel gave answer,
who through all this had stood there with a bowed brow.
“What happened in the hall?” asked the countess. “Did Monsieur Lepsius
make any attempt to enter?”
“Monsieur Lepsius desired to enter, madame,” answered Gabriel, “when I
gave him Mr. Vickery’s reply that it might be better for him to state
his business by letter; but on his attempt to force an entrance, both
Baptiste and myself barred his advance with our arms outspread, and
he then, after staring a moment into our faces, broke into a laugh,
hastily wrote the note that has been handed you, and drove very quickly
away.”
“Did Monsieur Lepsius utter any remark at all?” Madame Grammont began
to ask, but before the words were well uttered, there had entered
another flunky, who came to proclaim the presence of Monsieur de Courcy
at the door; whereupon—a renewed flutter and flurry of consultation!
until the ladies rushed from the room, leaving Mr. Vickery to receive
the visitor; and immediately in came the Minister of the Interior
with his brisk and breezy air, but about his brow now a shade of
deliberation.
They two then conversed together until the hour when the dinner-gong
began to sing out, whereupon the ladies in their bravery came sailing
in, smirking as superbly now as personalities translated beyond the
concerns of earth; and after a little small-talk the visitor stepped
away with them to dinner.
However, they had not well moved out of the room when now the
telephone-rattle in the alcove started to prattle, upon which Mr.
Vickery with passion in his heart darted back to it, and Miss Eve also
doubled back to be near, though remaining far from her father in the
centre of the apartment, staring.
“Who are you?” called Mr. Vickery, the receiver at his ear.
The answer was “Lepsius,” and even Miss Eve, though hovering away off
in the middle of the room, could hear it in thunder, for the speaker
now no doubt lay in his whispering-gallery, where the sound-waves from
his mouth, focusing themselves upon his telephone, struck monstrous
rough, their grumble trumpeting unease upon Mr. Vickery’s ear-drum with
the gutturalness of some grum god thundering; and, “I want to speak
with Miss Eve Vickery,” grumbled the thunder.
“It is Mr. Vickery who hears you!”
“I know; allow one to speak with Miss Eve, Mr. Vickery!”
Now with wide eyes hied Miss Eve on tip-toe nigh, hissing, “_Say I am
at dinner, papa!_”
“Miss Eve Vickery is about to sit down to dinner,” Mr. Vickery cried,
with stricter accuracy.
“She will not eat much!... But as for you, Mr. Vickery, will you have
me for a son-in-law?”
“The proposal sounds abrupt, Monsieur Lepsius!”
“Why so? How much waste of time is necessary? And what is your
complaint against me? I quite fail to gather this.”
“It cannot be discussed over the telephone!”
“Why can it not? Is it that you are offended with me for kissing your
daughter?”
“_S-s-s-s-s, sir!_... But I am being awaited at dinner, Monsieur
Lepsius!”
“It was not I who wished to kiss her, it was she who wished to kiss me!”
“Eve, go! go!” screamed Mr. Vickery, warding his daughter away with one
arm.
“Say, papa,” Miss Eve hissed, reaching far forward to her father’s
ear with her cheeks afire, “that I am affianced to a good and gallant
gentleman!”
“My daughter——” Mr. Vickery commenced to call.
“Tell Miss Eve, sir,” the thunderer rumbled, “that I can hear each word
that she utters, and that I know she does not mean one syllable of any
one of them.”
“I have to wish you good evening, Monsieur Lepsius!” cried Mr. Vickery
with a high-pitched cry.
“Go, if you choose; but you prove yourself a feeble and foolish old
pantaloon, you know.”
“And you, sir, a courteous young gentleman!” upon which Mr. Vickery put
up the receiver, and went with one cheek-bone branded rosy, and one
blanched, Miss Eve smiling, with her eyes alight, by his side.
The meal was then eaten serenely by all, after which, in the midst of
Parisian chat in the salon, it was found not impossible to bring about,
without intention, a _tête-à-tête_ between Miss Eve and the Minister
of the Interior; and Monsieur de Courcy, having come through this with
success, remained still on, the merriest of ministers and men, until
close on eleven o’clock, when, hunted down by a mounted officer with a
cipher, he made his bows, and went away.
And now anew the family sat in council to discuss the situation of
affairs, though Miss Eve now took no share in it, seated far aloof,
with her cheek on her palm, looking out into the dark of the park.
At midnight she bid good-night; and, having gone up to her chamber,
having been prepared for her bed, and having prayed by her bedside, was
soon lying in the semi-gloom of a big bedroom, with her will bent upon
slumber. But sleep she could not, though two hours went by. One of her
jalousie-windows lying open, through this she could perceive trees,
mountains, and in the sky a moon moving in and out among mounds of
cloud, now drowning the countryside in shine, and now shrouding it in
shadow; until this growing into a grievance and a weariness, at last
she got up, swathed all that elongation of her form in a great drapery,
got her violin and bow, and in an arm-chair by the jalousie played. So
that she might not be heard, she had first shut the shutter and fixed
the bar, though, as her apartments were in a rather remote part of the
château, this was hardly very necessary, since it was Mendelssohn’s
Andante which she chose to utter in a low tone; and there during many
minutes she remained in a mood of drooping, moving the air of the room
with the mazes of the music, roaming over and over anew through the
same old moon-realms of melancholy, feeling even sleepy now, her ear
wearied out with sweetness; until on a sudden she had sprung upon her
feet, her cheeks struck white like a sheet, and her eyes wide with
affright.
“Who is it?” she hoarsely hissed, for outside the shutter a tap had
sounded.
“I! Open!” some chest panted to her, and she knew him, yet anew she
hissed with all her wild heart in her windpipe, “_Who is it? What is
it?_”
“The staple to which I hang is giving to my weight,” the chest gasped:
“forty seconds and I fall a corpse.”
In ten Lepsius had leapt within the window....
And now were boundless breaths! and the rough sirocco broken free,
flights for life, puffs, pantings, runnings to and fro, momentary
manias, aimless aims! “Help!” hissed her hoarse heart’s breath,
“this wardrobe, help!” whereat he, quite carried away by her rage of
agitation, hardly knowing why, caught hold of one side of a wardrobe,
while she bent and laboured at the other side, bearing it somewhither.
But it was a huge mass Henri Quatre, which, being moved, naturally
made some hubbub, so he threw the whisper across to her, “It makes a
racket!” whereto her pant replied “Never mind, help!” and finally by
tugs and effort they got one narrow side of it against a wall, one
broad side against the bed-foot; and now anew she flew, with “This
couch, help!” and he helped her to place the couch against the wall and
against the bed-head; and now it was “Now, this chair!” and he helped
her to heap an easy-chair upon the couch, feet up: which done, she
scrambled quick across the bed’s breadth, and now stood in the place
betwixt bed and wall, barricaded now from him in front by the bed, to
the left by the wardrobe, to the right by the couch and the chair. And
then immediately all that to-do was seen to be needless when her hand
happened to hit upon a key in the wall behind her, for there was a door
there in the wall, and a small window also by it above, and behind
the door some steps leading up to another chamber a little above the
bed-chamber; so immediately she scuttled through the door, locked it
within, skipped up the four steps, appeared at the window, threw the
key from her down upon the bed before him, and now succumbed to the
floor, panting, safe at any rate from herself.
He, looking up to the window, threw out to her the whisper, “You are
wise! You are witty!” upon which she sprang up to throw out to him the
whisper, “Do not come across the bed!” for he stood now with one knee
on it, and she could see him in a ray of the moon as she had first
beheld him at The Towers in a red shirt loose about the neck and belt,
without any jacket or hat; and he, too, could see her in shadow at the
window.
“Did I not help you to escape?” he asked her; and then disjointedly,
“Do you wear the half-coin which I sent you?”
Miss Eve gave no reply, getting by degrees her breath again in silence.
“Did you know in your heart,” he asked her, “that I would come
to-night? You were waiting up for me, playing the fiddle; it was that
Andante of Mendelssohn; you played it four times over.”
“Lepsius, you must go,” Miss Eve said.
“I will go near the peep of day, and you with me!”
“No, now; and without me, I think.”
“Oh, you are cold,” he replied, “and I hate your stone’s heart: cold
by nature, and colder by hypocrisy that penetrates your texture to
the core of you. Oh, I know and foreknow you to my agony, negative,
null, enigmatic, like a watch which won’t go, though one goads it,
and finally one crushes it under a rock; as frigid as that water of a
mortal quality which drips from a rock in the territory of Nonacris; or
like that bag——”
But she stopped him with, “Lepsius, you should go!” whereat he leaned
keenly across to whisper her, “Cold! I am told that your mother was a
patrician of a most ancient race, so from her you have that faintness
of air, your rarity of blood, which makes you resemble lilies too
super-cultivated and rare to transparency, or resemble that aroma that
you exhale, or hoary old ages of Asia gone that give no answer to the
historian’s gaze. No, the mortal heart can’t hold you all, you are far
too large for me.... That superciliousness, all but Chinese somehow, in
the heave of your eyebrow’s arch, that rather-too-much of the eyewhites
shown below the irises ... though I admire, mind, the faintness of
it, the faint disdain, the dieaway disdain, so confirmed and hoary,
reposed and at home in the universe, with which you look out askance
upon the world; and now dark circles will be under them, for I vow you
shan’t sleep, and that will please me to be conscious that you are
marked with dark underlids because of me.”
“I did not think,” Miss Eve rejoined, leaning both her elbows on the
window’s sill, “that you were such a silly boy.”
He during some seconds did not answer this, drew back a bit from the
bed with a bent head, reflecting, and then said, “Well, it is silly, it
is self-sacrifice; and yet—curious! while I fought against you, since
it is silly, I thought it sillier than after I gave in to you. Silly,
indeed, I still see it, for these feelings of love make the blood to
flow from the front of the brain to other caves of the frame—ruinously!
so that loving is a reverting to lower-animal natures whose brains are
less largely furnished with blood, the sense of romance and poetry in
loving being due to some umbra of remembrance in us of old brutes,
moons, and moods, of the geologic ooze, the deluge, the roll in the
Jurassic morass, the rufous Vesuvius, the gloomy lagoon, when the
moon glowed more big and close to this globe. Love is thus a fall and
relapse; and yet—curiously——”
When he paused, she asked, “Well?” upon which he said, “My
consciousness has been enlarged by it. I see, in fact, that though it
is a fall toward the past, and silly, it is the one silliness that one
may partly pardon oneself in view of its use to the future, because man
will not always be man, and ages forward I see the sons’ sons of you
and me a multitude, shining like stars in the sky, vaunting John to
George in voices of joy. No other children instead of ours, if ours
are preordained to be born, will do for this evolution: for, since we
observe that the perfection which is purposed by the earth can never be
accomplished but by a preordained marshalling of atoms, we know that,
if this or that atom fails of its place, nothing can be done: far less
if this or that baby fated to be born fails anon to be born.”
Miss Eve, her face half concealed with her palm, asked, “But _what_ is
fated? that is the question. We imagine that what we wish is fated.”
“Love is apparently an instinct of fate,” Lepsius replied: “the lover
prophesies in a kind of trance of triumphs to come. True, he is
silly, since he sacrifices his time and life, but when he succumbs
in his fight with the world-typhoon which whirls him to the moon,
he can excuse his infirmity with a sense that this time it is worth
while. I find that I have a tendency to reflect upon you in reveries
extravagant to grotesqueness, comparing you with galaxies, fragrances,
graces, fairies, lilies, with Dewildé, and Helen of Troy, and the boy
Crobylus of Corinth, and that purple of Hermione whose wool was combed
with poison-honey and oil of lotus; and though this is not strictly a
truth at present of you, it is strictly a true instinct and prophecy
of princes to spring through you. The line of your profile has a hint
of hollowness to the eye, owing only to a most slight jutting of your
chin’s point, a nothing which has overjoyed me with emotions the most
poignant, with a sense of brotherhood for you, with a sense of the
earth from her furnace-birth to her furthest sunsets, when the sun
shall shine much nigher her, and the moon loom hugely: and I have
compared you with ages, and with the Lady in the Chair of Cassiopeia.
Or, looking sideways at you with your legs crossed, I have been
struck by the great prolongation of your thigh-bones—so great that you
could hardly run on your toes and palms, as I and apes may, since your
kneecaps would doubtless graze the ground—so evolved, patrician: and
I have cried extravagantly that, at their greatest stretch, the very
galaxy would find space and to spare ’twixt their gaping gateway—an
extravagance merely in appearance, since it is in a trance-dream of
graces great even to _infinity_ in types fated to grow from you that
I thus exclaim; it is my subconsciousness, nay, my consciousness
somewhat, all bewildered with a blaze of the world-wonder, and how,
darling, but in boundless words may the mortal heart blurt out a little
that burden of the Eternal? Or when I think of my love’s upper-shape,
so _élancé_, like the racer’s stretch of waist and neck, like one
escaping, dodging, eluding upward—dodging, eluding the ape-shape—the
very revelation of evolution——”
Here Miss Eve smiled, remarking dryly, “Lepsius, you are full of apes.”
“Aren’t you? Isn’t the world?” he asked; upon which she said, “Yes,
I know your low view of men—and of women, I suppose, still more; but
beside my _élancé_ upper-shape, my thigh-bone, my chin, my faded old
air and hoary disdain of iris, I have a mind, which is jealous of your
omission to mention it.”
“I meant to mention it!”
“Oh?” says she, “that was too sweet of you. Last but not least?”
“By no means least!” he answered earnestly: “a mind, I am certain,
better than mine.”
“Ah, now you are insincere,” she said.
“I to you? As if I could be!” Lepsius replied with reproach; “I only,
of course, mean a mind better than mine in possibility, since yours is
uneducated, and mine more or less educated.”
“Mine un——! But what, then, is ‘education’ in your view?” she wished to
know.
“Education,” he told her, “is a waking of one’s subconsciousness to
consciousness. I, for instance, know nothing that you do not—or not
much; but I am much more conscious of what we both know. Tell me,
now—whereabouts were you twenty-four hours since?”
“Where?” repeated Miss Eve: “I was—here,” whereto he replied, “You see,
that answer and its tone shows that your education was never initiated.
You know, no doubt—are subconscious—that you were a thousand thousand,
and half a thousand thousand, miles from here, flying at the speed of
fifteen times a rifle-bullet’s rabies: subconscious, but not conscious
of it. I, now, could never say ‘_here_’ in that fashion, without
compunction, as though a million miles or two were of no account,
Eve, since now and at each instant I can hardly but be conscious of
this horse that jaunts us, and his ardour.... Oh, this race of man
suppurates in dullness, you know, and I am sometimes most—lonely: I
mention this to you that you may compassionate and come to me. I ride a
star, inhabiting the unbounded as my house, and the rest, more drowsing
than the dormouse, Tortoni’s; their glance of a morning darts no
surprise of gladness at this romance of time, space and game of balls,
the Grand Boulevard their galaxy, pigmies grey, phlegmatic, unflushed,
unconscious of their contemporaries in a myriad realms of the creation,
among whom are at this moment taking place great crises, hegiras,
revolutions, doomsdays, moonfalls, vast marches, everlasting partings;
they little know that Venus is uneven and severe in scenery, nor does
the thundering of even the nearest sun stun their ear-drum; uneducated;
not polite citizens of time and space.”
“But you remember——” Miss Eve started to say, but now, startled by some
sound, breathed eagerly to him, “_did you hear something_?”
“It is a mouse going down the right sound-hole of your violin,” he
replied; and now Miss Eve anew leaned her elbow on her window-sill to
continue saying, “But you remember that all this you started to utter
of _me_, then continued with ‘they,’ ‘they’; since then, as ‘they’ are
so _I_, why are you there by my bed?”
“But are you not in all things far above me?” he asked, “save in this
of a wakeful consciousness?”
“But this of a wakeful consciousness,” said she, “is everything, is it
not? It is this which makes the difference between a genius and an ape,
a god and a dog, you believe, do you not? And you have it, and not I.
Only a thigh-bone I own, let me be thrown to a dog.”
Upon this Lepsius bent well across the bed to throw to her the whisper,
“Hypocrite! Colder than the coldest Kydnus! It is your mind that I
esteem, and in speaking of your thigh, implied it.... You should
shun the mood of the modern woman of the West, ever touchy as to her
footing, as to the spirit of the marriage-law, and men’s estimate of
her mentality. Men _must_ admire the mind of woman, for since we know
that we all get our wit from our mother, as our grit from our father,
therefore I, having my mind from a female, must needs love the female
mind with home-longing, as you, having your grit from a male, must love
the male grit with home-longing; so it is not for my wit that you love
me, but because you are instinctive that I am gritty and good; nor is
it for your grit that I love you, but because I am instinctive that,
if educated, you would be witty, and will make witty babies. Give up,
then, I beg you, for ever, the idea that I despise your mind, since I
do so idolise it; and believe, too, that, for each one of these reasons
which I can discover for my love of you, myriads of other reasons
exist, ineffable, unknowable to us, but in some manner known to that
Man to whose behests men may at no moment but submit.”
“What Man is that?” Miss Eve asked, frowning, her wits rather winded
now and flustered at the speed of her speaker’s thoughts.
“I mean, do I not,” said he, “the genius of our species? In every crowd
of a thousand there are present, are there not? not a thousand, but
a thousand and One, which One we can speak of as the ‘genius of the
crowd,’ since it leads each of the thousand by the nose, making him
behave in a totally different way than when alone—especially in such
crowds as French crowds, which rush into action like one individual, as
in ’92. So in _séances_ where those gathered believe that a ghost tilts
their table, there is indeed a species of ghost-Man there, an eighth
in a meeting of seven, a ‘genius of the crowd,’ compounded, no doubt,
of the brain-rays radiated out from the seven. So, too, of the crowd
who make up our human race: a Genius-of-the-species, his escutcheon
and escheats mentioned on no census-sheet, leads us at each moment,
teaching me to know and adore you, and none below the sun but you: to
know you well: the very mood of the tune which, if you could be turned
into a rhapsody of music, you would produce, a tune with some alto
undertone, more old-eternal than the world. Beloved. But I fail to
utter half, beloved, my heart faints....”
“Do you love me?” Miss Eve asked him in a whisper, leaning now far out
of her window to him, who leaned near to her.
“Beloved,” Lepsius groaned, and again, “beloved.... When I came home
from the Quai d’Orsay last night, I dropped down in a drowse, and,
with the feast of your kiss still warm in my mouth, I thought in my
dream that your feet walked with mine athwart fields of asphodel in
future far, far off under a forlorn and morphia moon—I could not tell
you. Then in the dark of the morning I awaked, and you were not there
in my arms. I passed my palm thrice across my bed of straws, but you
were nowhere there; so I had the thought that my darling might be in
the garden, among the lilies by the lake, gazing up at my casement, a
thought half-crazy, half-drowsy; but up I bounded and raced all round
the palace-walls, gazing down into the gardens in order to spy you out
and call you up, and you were nowhere there. If one of the spokes of
the kite-contrivance on which I fly had not been broken, I should have
flown to you. But I ran down, got out, and began to run to you; and
the _sergents de ville_ must have asked themselves where Lepsius was
rushing to under the morning stars, with half a thought, perhaps, in
their heart’s heart of a _coup d’état_.”
“You didn’t come,” Miss Eve observed.
“No,” he answered, “I turned back; four leagues to Versailles, and I
had already lost a good deal of time on your account.... Eve, I have
lost hours.”
This he avowed with a bowed brow, and “Dear me,” breathed Miss Eve with
irony; then, suddenly, like one whose will arises and triumphs, added,
“It would have been so fruitless, too.... Lepsius, you should, perhaps,
be given to know—can you see? this one is the ring: I am engaged.”
“Bomb of _poudre Rachel_,” Lepsius mumbled with a chuckle; “so you came
to an arrangement with de Courcy this evening?”
“Yes, then,” Miss Eve said, _her_ left shoulder, too, shaken a second
by a chuckle.
“And the same night you admit another lover to your bed-chamber!” he
said, chuckling.
“Oh, well,” she muttered with lowered lids, chuckling within one
shoulder, and they chuckled one with the other.
“Are ladies, then, restrained by no scruples as to justice?” Lepsius
asked. “Delighter in lies! enigma! through what abstruse movement
of your bosom did you get yourself into this embroglio? Not that it
matters; but you will inflict a sense of injury upon this man, who
has done you no injury,” a speech at which in one instant Miss Eve
flew into a passion, and, leaning forth, thrice struck the window-sill
imperiously, crying through a gruff throat, “As God is my witness——”
“Sh-h-h,” Lepsius went.
“Let me speak!” she imperiously hissed: “I mean to marry him, do you
hear it? Heaven be my witness!” and up she threw her eyes, trembling as
she held them bent on high.
“Eve, no,” said Lepsius gently: “you do not mean to do that; you
believe that you do, but meantime in your subconsciousness you firmly
confide in me never to permit such an absurdity, and so can afford to
boast and be wayward.... Dear, would it not certainly kill us both?”
“If it kills a host I will do it!” Miss Eve heatedly replied; “never
through life have I broken a promise, nor now shall begin with a vow;
given and pledged is my troth; God be my witness in this.”
“But _why_ did you give it and pledge it? I can’t guess!”
“Because I chose!”
“Cogent waste of three words!”
“I shall never have _you_, anyway!” she said with a nod and threat of
the head.
“And why?” he asked in a bewilderment.
“Because you despise my mind!” she sharply replied.
“I have already explained why that is quite impossible,” he made answer.
“Oh, woman knows her own secret, and people’s explanations make no
impression upon her intuitions. You despise my mind; and there’s this
still deeper reason against any getting together of you and me, that I
despise yours.”
“I despise it, too; yet I endure it.”
“Oh!” she sighed, “that untrue humility of yours, it irritates me
to the soul, till I hate! ... doubly untrue because insincere, and
because, if it were sincere, it would be true to facts: for whereas you
regard yourself as far greater than all, all as as far greater than you
as you fancy them smaller, since your greatness is bedraggled rags that
prevents you from being good. Oh, why are you not some ordinary wight,
a young workman, Lepsius, a mason, a sailor, who has never learned to
spell? Then some girl would so gleefully desert all her father’s—— But
now, ah, _il desir vive, e la speranza è morta_!... Do you, by the way,
still believe it fine to steal?”
“Successfully, you mean?” he said quickly; “stealing seldom needs much
show of wit, but _swindling_ is very frequently fine. You, I know, do
not appreciate its fineness, but to me it is evident; it is lying in
deed as you frequently do in speech.”
That this would give the profoundest offence Lepsius had no grounds to
think, lying being to his philosophy no crime; but with that chastity
of the swan, which, being but brushed in her array of whiteness, frills
and ruffles awhile, then with majesty swims away, so she ruffled.
“Not ‘frequently,’ I think,” Miss Eve repeated; “if I ‘lie,’ it is to
myself, unwittingly; and in every event differ from you in fancying it
‘fine.’ Anyhow, now you can see how what you have wanted is out of the
question.”
At this Lepsius, looking at her under his eyes, said, “Eve, be sincere
with me!”
“I mean to be sincere,” Miss Eve told him; “I do hope I am; yes, I
_am_. We hate each other, Lepsius, shockingly, like cat and dog, oh,
we _do_, do not gainsay it. _I_ lack a culture you have, _you_ lack
a culture I have—in my very marrow. Oh, I know that you are awfully
clever and all that, and you fancy that because you can deck me with
queenship I shall be dashing myself feverish and shivering upon your
breast, little dreaming that the more thrones you throw before my
feet, the more bitterly I’ll spurn and keep you groaning in purgatory
eternally. They say that just before the Exhibition you will be
shooting into the sky a kind of sun infused with stored-up moonlight,
which will make private lights at night useless through Europe, and
France the richest of the nations; and that then, during the business
of the Exhibition, you mean in a _coup d’état_ to seize the throne, so
as to sweep France off to overrun Providence knows what. It sounds
mighty grand—I don’t know if it is true; I only know—forgive my
outspokenness—that it is howlingly vulgar, that it is not Christian,
and that I should have far greater joy of a young mason or sailor-boy
who behaves graciously to his father—one with a belt, may be, and your
figure—that is——”
She stopped, and he said, “I listen,” but as she added nothing, he then
said, “‘Vulgar,’ ‘not Christian’; your criticism, of course, interests
one, though it is curious.”
“Tell me,” Miss Eve said, “for whose weal do you purpose all that
slaughter and upheaval—for the world’s?”
“For my own,” he said: “the weal of the world is in the management of
the Genius-of-the-world, Who ceaselessly sees to it. I personally am
not concerned in it.”
“Then,” replied Miss Eve, “that is what I mean by ‘vulgar’ and ‘not
Christian.’”
“One idea or two?” he asked.
“No, one.”
Lepsius sat slowly aside on the bed, puzzling to understand her mind;
and he said that he should have called Japan a far less ‘vulgar’ land
than England, to which Miss Eve replied that if Japan was really the
less vulgar, that could only signify that Japan was the more Christian.
“Clearly, then,” said Lepsius, “‘Christian’ bears in your mind some
meaning of which I am not yet aware, since Japan does not pretend to
be Christian. I will see one day in the month following the Exhibition
just what Christianity is; but, as I knew that religions have all so
far been infant fancies, and as the religion of Europe is so slightly
in the minds of the peoples whom I mean to govern, I have never given
myself the pains to investigate it. And you do not say for what reason
I ought to cease from my schemes because they are ‘vulgar’ and ‘not
Christian.’ Vulgar they are, since I am a man, and man is a temporary
and trumpery little race, ingrained, whatsoever it attempts, with
vulgarity. But put yourself, beloved, in my place: what can I find to
do with my life? I am sequestered in the world; and it has occurred
to me that that would entertain me to make a world-state. True, I
might have turned my life to the delights of research, with the idea
of laying the foundations of knowledge in the world: it is, however,
such a work! since I should have to begin quite at the beginning, and I
shirked it. You may have no idea what a mess your little knowledge or
‘science,’ as you say, is in! Without foundation, top-heavy, like the
education of a child who has been made to learn the Babylonish Talmud
by rote, but can write not one word of his own tongue. The so-called
‘scientists’ know the stars of the night, and talk in millions of
millions; but as to the elements of knowledge, as to, say, the nature
of gravitation, and what is the ground-reason why their candle-grease
dribbles downward instead of bounding skyward, or why it is that the
atoms in a twig or anything cling together, though when one breaks the
twig, and then again puts the broken ends together, the atoms won’t
any longer cling, they possess no more notion than the chimpanzee.
Knowledge without foundation; vague, then, foggy, gappy: so that one
may say, man knows nothing, and of that little which he knows he is
but subconscious, hardly at all conscious. However, when these schemes
of mine which you have called ‘vulgar’ are accomplished, I mean to
turn almost the whole vigour of the world toward research and the
gaining of some little ground-knowledge of the nature of things: for
undoubtedly the want of this knowledge is what is now chiefly unwell
with our species. But I mustn’t say to you, beloved, that men’s good is
my aim, my only aim being to bustle and bluff a little as the governor
of a globe in space.”
“But if a million men are killed by it?” Miss Eve remarked.
“Dear, it will not matter,” Lepsius replied.
“Will it matter if you are killed?”
“It will to you, to no one else, since everyone dislikes me.”
“But _one_ will clamour and cry out, you think? One will bleat and beat
the breast?”
“Dear, it will not happen; I am so easily the king of men.”
“Better, may be, if it did.... No, it is all awfully low, Lepsius, I
say, even lower than Cæsar, as low as Napoleon, and proves how many
a thousand miles divide you from me and from men: for far at fault,
I can see, is what you said just now that Christ’s religion is but
‘slightly in the mind’ of the crowd! Deeply the world has breathed of
its atmosphere, yes, and the murderer Burke, guillotined in the week
gone, deep in its stream was immersed, everywhere save at his heel.
One sees that, when one hears _you_ speak. Do you know those words of
Julian as to that Jew workman, ‘thou hast conquered, O Galilean’?—so
scarcely true then, how greatly true now! You who can see, don’t you
notice how pity prevails like the flood, and how charity roars like an
ocean? Christs on the ’bus, at the ball, martyrs that saunter in clubs?
Firemen, nurses, the Red Cross; the blind boy pampered and spoiled;
the sweater and swindler inwardly worked with a qualm for the world’s
weal; the moon on her throne still ruling, seducing the rudeness which
roars in the tides with her mild smile, still by the touch of a Robe
virtue disbursed through the world; and with that hem of his vesture
encrimsoned, treading the wine-press of history, the white Christ
travels, or, riding his triumph, rides on the foal of an ass over
dominions and thrones. When you said, Lepsius, that self-sacrifice is
silly——”
But here Lepsius stopped her with the whisper, “someone is coming!” on
which the lips of Miss Eve, going at once quite sheet-white, breathed,
“God! it must be my sister! Lepsius! go!”
“Why should I?” Lepsius said.
“Lepsius!”—she was beside herself—“would you compromise me? Lepsius?
For ever? Would you?” for she herself could now catch the sound of
something, a door moving open in an outer room.
“If I go,” Lepsius whispered, “may I come every night?”
“Every——” Even in that storm of her eagerness for his going Miss Eve
paused; but she breathed, “Yes, every night—the key!”
In an instant the key was handed her, and he out of the outer window:
on which she, too, in some seconds was down, was across the bed and at
the outer window, all her breath breathing down to him fifteen feet
below, “Every night! But I shan’t ever be here!”
She could just catch his ejaculation of “Wretch!” and as she snatched
her fiddle, dashed herself into the chair at the casement, and arranged
her drapery, soft footfalls came on the carpet, the elder sister
breathing, “Eve! not in bed. Oh, Eve!”
“Dear,” said Miss Eve with languor, “I couldn’t get to sleep; I was
playing the fiddle....”
“Well, I knew it.... I had a feeling that you were not asleep, so I got
up and came to you, and here you are. Poor Evie! Cast your care upon
God, will you, Eve?... But playing at this hour! And—where’s the bow?”
“I put the bow over there.... Oh, Ruth, put your hand on my brow,
I have a headache,” upon which, her head now lying back on the
chair-back, she shut down her eyelids, and Miss Ruth, stooping, held
her hand over the brow of trouble, groaning now and again a little in
her soul, her cheek pressed against Miss Eve’s cheek, till presently
she breathed, “That better now?”
“Yes, sweet, that’s sweet,” Miss Eve breathed.... “Sweet, Lepsius was
here.”
“Eve, here?”
And now, under the compulsion of that touch upon her brow, Miss Eve
breathed out the whole story.
The sandals of Lepsius, meanwhile, were speeding away, till they
arrived at his phaeton awaiting him beneath trees at Viroflay by the
forest of Meudon, where, throwing himself in, under the setting moon he
went tearing by way of Sèvres, Boulogne, Passy, to the palace. There,
at the top of a stair, he was awaited by a man in robes of the Orient
with a scraggy grey beard, hollow cheeks, and a nose mostly nostrils
which gaped, who, with ever a wagging and nodding of his head, stood
gossiping and gassing to Shan Healy: his name, Nundcumar. And these
two, Shan Healy and Nundcumar, when Lepsius had mounted the stair,
hastened without speech after their master’s speed.
It was when they three were in the midst of a corridor whose two rows
of cressets seemed to meet at its remoter end, that Lepsius suddenly
peered ahead, stopped, and murmured very low in Urdu to Nundcumar,
“Anyone new in the palace to-day?”
Perhaps a second lapsed before Nundcumar answered, “One: a person who
can spangle silk-muslin with gold of Dacca for the women-folk.”
“Tell! Man or woman?”
“It was a woman. She——”
“Name.”
“I cannot at this moment remember her——”
“Tell! European?”
“Yes. She——”
Lepsius walked on; but after some steps, without stopping, went slower,
and now beckoning Nundcumar to him, said low, “_You_ walk before.”
Nundcumar’s eyes opened with some apprehension as he began to walk on
ahead, and immediately Lepsius brought forth from the bag of his shirt
a species of pigmy weapon which one fired off by pressure upon a button.
The walls here had hangings of tinsel at intervals, between these being
daubs on the walls themselves by Hindoo artists in hues as warmly
gaudy to the eye as water flooded with the sun’s after-glow. And it
was when Nundcumar, having reached the middle of the corridor, was at
the extremity of a hanging, that on a sudden he cast up his arms, all
shivering, with shrieks which pierced the ear, vitriol eating now that
doughy nose-tip, streaming down his beard. Meantime, Lepsius had swung
forth by the elbow a woman who had been hidden behind the hanging,
and in the quickest demisemiquavers fired two pairs of bullets, one
into her right wrist, one into the left, one into her right foot, one
into the left. Then during a few seconds he peered with a curiosity
of disgust into the disfigurement of the squealing Hindoo, and was
gone, throwing behind him to Shan Healy, who was kneeling over Jeanne
Auvache, the order, “Call in the police.”
He then made his way to the place where he slept: an apartment as broad
as the palace in that part, resembling a barn, but possessing no walls
on three of its faces, only processions of columns of marble which bore
up three architraves. Within this chamber a hound—a mastiff all but as
large as Lepsius himself—was pacing about; and when Lepsius had well
bolted four doors, had again loaded his weapon, had placed it on some
straw strewn over one angle of the plain of floor, had let his gaze
muse some moments upon the moon going down within a couch of clouds
which she flushed, and now had thrown himself down upon the bed of
straw, the hound moved to lie down by his side, and both soon dozed.