The Crucifix was duly saluted, the Rosary hung back upon the bed-knob.
“Embrace me now, my friend,” said de Moulny, his blue eyes shining
under a smooth forehead. Hector held out his hand.
“We will shake hands as English boys do. They ridicule our French way
of kissing, Miss Smithwick says.”
“And we die of laughter,” said de Moulny, “when we see them hand a lady
a cushion or a chair, or try to make a bow. If I had not this basket
on my stomach I would get up and show you how my cousin Robert Bertham
comports himself in a drawing-room. He is certainly handsome, but
stiff! His backbone must be a billiard-cue, _nom d’un petit bonhomme_!
Yet he can run and jump and row, for if he has not the grace of an
athlete he has the muscles of one. He was stroke of the Eton Eight
last year; they rowed against the School of Westminster in a race from
Windsor Bridge to Surly and back, and beat. They have beaten them again
this year, Bertham tells me in his last letter. He writes French with a
spade, as M. Magne would say.”
The nerves of both boys were tingling still with the recollection of
the double compact they had sealed with an oath. Now they could look at
one another without consciousness, and were glad to talk of Bertham,
his English awkwardness and his British French. For mere humanity
cannot for long together endure to respire the thin crystal air of
the Higher Emotions. It must come down, and breathe the common air
of ordinary life, and talk of everyday things, or perish. So Hector
listened while de Moulny held forth.
“Bertham will be Bertham of Wraye when he succeeds to the peerage
of his father. It is of ancient creation and highly respectable.
He is my cousin by virtue of an alliance between our houses some
eighteen years back, when my grandmother’s youngest daughter--my Aunt
Gabrielle--married Lord Bertham, then Ambassador for England here.
You know the English Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré? My
grandmother did not approve of the union at first, the Berthams are
Protestants of the English Establishment. But an agreement was arrived
at with regard to my aunt’s faith and the faith of her daughters. The
sons, Robert and the younger boy ... but that’s my grandmother’s cross,
she says, that she has heretics for grandsons.... My Aunt Gabrielle is
a charming person--I am very fond of her. She boasts of being English
to the backbone ... pleases her husband by wearing no costumes that are
not from the _atelier_ of a London _couturiére_--that must be _her_
cross, though she does not say so!” De Moulny grinned at his own joke.
“How you talk!” said Hector, flushed with admiration of his idol’s
powers of conversation.
“I like words,” said the idol, lightly taking the incense as his due.
“Terms, expressions, phrases, combinations of these, please me like
combinations in Chemistry. I do not enjoy composition with the pen; the
tongue is my preference. Perhaps I was meant for a diplomatic career.”
His face fell as his eyes rested upon the basket that humped the
bedclothes. It cleared as he added, with an afterthought:
“Diplomacy is for priests as well as statesmen. Men of acumen and
eloquence are wanted in the Church.” De Moulny folded his lean arms
behind his head, and perused the whitewashed ceiling.
“Tell me more about your cousin Bertham,” Hector begged, to lure de
Moulny from the subject that had pricks for both.
“You are more interested in him than I am,” said de Moulny. “He writes
to me, but I have not seen him since I spent an autumn month at their
_château_ of Wraye in Peakshire two years ago. Their feudal customs
were interesting, but their society.... Just Heaven, how dull! Even
my Aunt Gabrielle could not enliven us. And he--my cousin Robert--who
cannot fence, was scandalized because I do not box. Because I said:
‘If you fight with your fists, why not with the teeth and the feet?’
That I should speak of the _savate_--it made him very nearly ill....
He implored: ‘For God’s sake, never say that in the hearing of any
other Eton fellows! They’ll make my life a hell if you do!’ Say that
in English, Redskin, you who have the tongue of John Bull at your
finger-ends.”
Hector translated the words into the original English and repeated them
for de Moulny’s amusement.
“It must be a queer place, that Eton of theirs,” went on de Moulny.
“When they leave to enter their Universities they know nothing. Of
Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Arithmetic, they are in ignorance.
Their rowing and other sports--considered by all infinitely more
important than intellectual attainments--are ignored by the Directors
of the School, and yet--to these their chief efforts are addressed;
to excel in strength is the ambition above all. They are flogged for
the most trifling offenses, upon the naked person with a birch, by the
Director-in-Chief of Studies, who is a clergyman of the Established
Church. And the younger boys are servants to their elders.”
“We make them so here,” said Hector pointedly. “We subject them to the
authority that others exercised over us, and that they in their turn
will use over others.”
“Subjects are not serfs. These younger boys of Eton are worse used
than serfs. They call the system of torture ‘fagging’; it is winked at
by the Directors,” explained de Moulny. “To be kicked and tormented
and beaten--that is to be fagged. To carry coals to make your master’s
fire, to bring him buckets of water from the pump, to sweep and dust
and black his boots, make his bed and sleep on the floor without even
a blanket if he does not choose that you shall enjoy that luxury--that
is to be fagged, as Bertham knows it. They are infinitely worse off
than we, these sons of the English nobles and great landed gentlemen.
And yet one thing that we have not got, they have”; de Moulny thrust
out his underlip and wagged his big head, “and it is worth all--or
nearly all these things we have that they have not. They are loyal to
each other. There is union among them. In Chemistry we know the value
of cohesion.... Well!... there is cohesion among these Eton boys.
How much of it is there here? Not as much as--that!” He measured off
an infinitesimal space upon the bitten finger-nail, and showed it to
Hector, who nodded confirmatively, saying:
“There is no currying favor with _pions_ and tattling to masters, then?
Or lending money at usury to other pupils--_hein_?”
“No!” said de Moulny, with a frowning shake of the head. “There is
none of that sort of thing. Because--Bertham told me!--the boy who was
proved to be guilty of it would have to leave Eton. Instantly. Or--it
would come about that that boy would be found dead; and as to how he
died”--he shrugged his shoulders expressively--“it would be as possible
to gain an explanation from the corpse, Bertham says, as to wring one
from the resolute silence of the School.”
Hector knew a delicious thrill of mingled horror and admiration of
those terrible young Britons, who could maintain honor among themselves
by such stark laws, and avenge betrayal by sentence so grim.
“But there are other rules in the Code of Eton that are imbecile,
absolutely, on my honor, idiotic!” said de Moulny. “Not to button the
lower button of the waistcoat--that is one rule which must not be
broken. Nor must Lower boys turn up their trousers in muddy weather, or
wear greatcoats in cold, until their elders choose to set the example.
And unless you are of high standing in the School, you dare not roll
your umbrella up. It is a presumption the whole School would resent.
For another example, you are invariably to say and maintain that
things others can do and that you cannot, are bad form. Bertham saw me
make a fire one day, camp-fashion, in five minutes, when he had been
sweating like a porter for an hour without being able to kindle a dead
stick. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said, with his eyebrows climbing up
into his curly hair, ‘for a fellow to light fires; but to do servant’s
work well is bad form, our fellows would say.’”
“Why did you want a fire?” demanded Hector, balancing his rush-bottomed
chair on one hind-leg.
“To boil some water,” de Moulny answered, his eyes busy with the
flowery, sunshiny parterres of the Director’s garden. “Up on the
Peakshire hills,” he added, a second later, “to heat some water to
bathe a dog’s hurt leg. Oh! there’s not much of a story. Bertham and
I had been out riding; we had dismounted, tied our horses to a gate,
and climbed Overmere Hill to look at a Roman camp that is on the
top--very perfect: entrenchments, chariot-road, even sentry-shelters
to be made out under the short nibbled grass.... Sheep as black as the
gritstone of the Peakshire hills were feeding there, scattered all
about us--lower down an old white-haired shepherd was trying to collect
them; his dog, one of the shaggy, long-haired, black-and-white English
breed that drives and guards sheep, seemed not to know its business.
Bertham spoke of that, and the shepherd explained in his _patois_ that
the dog was not his, but had been borrowed of a neighbor--a misfortune
had happened to his own. It had got the worst in a desperate fight with
another dog, a _combat à outrance_, fought perhaps in defense of its
master’s sheep; it was injured past cure; he thought he would fetch
up a cord later, from the farm whose thatched roofs we could see down
in the valley below, and put the unlucky creature out of its pain. We
thought we might be able to do something to prevent that execution,
so Bertham and I went to the shed, an affair of hurdles and poles and
bunches of heather, such as our Breton shepherds of Finistère and the
Côtes du Nord build to shelter them from the weather....”
“And the dog?”
“The dog was lying in a pool of blood on the beaten earth floor. A
shoulder and the throat were terribly mangled, a fore-leg had been
bitten through; one would have said the creature had been worried by a
wolf rather than a dog of its own breed. And she was sitting on the
ground beside it, holding its bloody head in her lap....”
De Moulny’s eyes blinked as though the Director’s blazing beds of
gilliflowers and calceolarias, geraniums and mignonette, had dazzled
them. Hector asked, with awakening interest in a story which had not at
first promised much:
“Who was she?”
De Moulny stuck his chin out, and stated in his didactic way:
“She was the type of _jeune personne_ of whom my grandmother would have
approved.”
“A young girl!” grumbled Hector, who at this period esteemed the
full-blown peony of womanhood above the opening rosebud. He shrugged
one shoulder so contemptuously that de Moulny was nettled.
“One might say to you, ‘There are young girls and young girls.’”
“This one was charming, then?” Hector’s waning interest began to burn
up again.
“Certainly, no! For,” said de Moulny authoritatively, “to be charming
you must desire to charm. This young girl was innocent of any thought
of coquetry. And--if you ask me whether she was beautiful, I should
give you again the negative. Beauty--the beauty of luxuriant hair,
pale, silken brown, flowing, as a young girl’s should, loosely upon
shoulders rather meager; the beauty of an exquisite skin, fresh, clear,
burned like a nectarine on the oval cheeks where the sun had touched
it; beauty of eyes, those English eyes of blue-gray, more lustrous than
brilliant, banded about the irises with velvety black, widely opened,
thickly lashed--these she possessed, with features much too large for
beauty, with a form too undeveloped even to promise grace. But the
quality or force that marked her out, distinguished her from others of
her age and sex, I have no name for that!”
“No?” Hector, not in the least interested, tried to look so, and
apparently succeeded. De Moulny went on:
“No!--nor would you. Suppose you had met the Venerable Jeanne d’Arc
in her peasant kirtle, driving her sheep or cows to pasture in the
fields about Domremy in the days before her Voices spoke and said:
‘_Thou, Maid, art destined to deliver France!_’ Or--what if you had
seen the Virgins of the Temple at Jerusalem pass singing on their
way to the tribune surrounded with balconies, where while the Morning
Sacrifice burned upon the golden Altar to the fanfare of the silver
trumpets, they besought God Almighty, together with all Israel, for the
speedy coming of the Saviour of mankind.... Would not One among them,
draped in her simple robe of hyacinth blue, covered with the white,
plainly-girdled tunic, a veil of Syrian gauze upon her golden hair,
have brought you the conviction that She, above all the women you had
ever seen, was destined, marked out, set apart, created to serve a
peculiar purpose of her Creator, stamped with His stamp----”
The hard blue eyes, burning now, encountered Hector’s astonished gape,
and their owner barked out: “What are you opening your mouth so wide
about?”
Hector blurted out:
“Why--what for? Because you said that a raw English girl nursing a
dying sheep-dog on a mountain in Peakshire reminded you of the Maid of
Orleans and Our Blessed Lady!”
“And if I did?”
“But was she not English?... A Protestant?... a heretic?”
“Many of the Saints were heretics--until Our Lord called them,” said de
Moulny, with that fanatical spark burning in his blue eye. “But He had
chosen them before He called. They bore the seal of His choice.”
“Perhaps you are right. No doubt you know best. It is you who are to
be----” Hector broke off.
“You were going to finish: ‘It is you who are to be a priest, not
me...!’” de Moulny said, with the veins in his heavy forehead swelling,
and a twitching muscle jerking down his pouting underlip.
“I forget what I was going to say,” declared Hector mendaciously, and
piled Ossa upon Pelion by begging de Moulny to go on with his story.
“It interested hugely,” he said, even as he struggled to repress the
threatening yawn.
“What is there to tell?” grumbled de Moulny ungraciously. “She was
there, that is all--with that dog that had been hurt. A pony she had
ridden was grazing at the back of the shed, its bridle tied to the
pommel of the saddle. Bertham approached her and saluted her; he knew
her, it seems, and presented me. She spoke only of the dog--looked at
nothing but the dog! She could not bear to leave it, in case it should
be put to death by the master it could serve no more....”
Hector interrupted, for de Moulny’s voice had begun to sound as though
he were talking in his sleep:
“Tell me her name.”
“Her name is Ada Merling.”
Even on de Moulny’s French tongue the name was full of music; it came
to Hector’s ear like the sudden sweet gurgling thrill that makes the
idler straying beneath low-hanging, green hazel-branches upon a June
morning in an English wood or lane, look up and catch a glimpse of the
golden bill and the gleaming, black-plumaged head, before their owner,
with a defiant “tuck-tuck!” takes wing, with curious slanting flight.
The boy had a picture of the blackbird, not of the girl, in his mind,
as de Moulny went on:
“True, the dog seemed at the last gasp, but if it were possible to stop
the bleeding, _she_ said, there might be a chance, who knew? It had
occurred to her that cold-water applications might check the flow of
blood. ‘We will try, and see, Mademoiselle,’ said I.”
De Moulny’s tone was one of fatuous self-satisfaction.
“A rusty tin saucepan is lying in a corner of the shed. This I fill
with water from a little spring that trickles down the cliff behind
us. We contribute handkerchiefs. Bertham and I hold the dog while she
bathes the torn throat and shoulder, and bandages them. Remains the
swollen leg. It occurs to me that fomentations of hot water might be of
use there; I mention this idea. ‘Good! good!’ she cries, ‘we will make
a fire and heat some.’ She sets to collecting the dry leaves and sticks
that are scattered in a corner. Bertham makes a pile of these, and
attempts to kindle it with fusees.” A smile of ineffable conceit curved
de Moulny’s flabby pale cheeks and quirked the corners of his pouting
lips. “He burns matches and he loses his temper; there is no other
result. Then I stepped forward, bowed.... ‘_Permit me, Mademoiselle,
to show you how we arrange these things in my country._’” De Moulny’s
tone was so infinitely arrogant, his humility so evidently masked the
extreme of bumptiousness, that Hector wondered how the athletic Bertham
endured it without knocking him down?
“So I hollow a fireplace in the floor, with a pocket-knife and a piece
of slate, devise a flue at each corner, light the fire--which burns,
one can conceive, to a marvel.... She has meanwhile refilled the rusty
saucepan at the little spring; she sets it on, the water boils, when
it occurs to us that we have no more handkerchiefs. But the shepherd’s
linen blouse hangs behind the shed-door; at her bidding we tear that
into strips.... All is done that can be done; we bid Mademoiselle
Merling _au revoir_. She will ride home presently when her patient is
a little easier, she says. We volunteer to remain; she declines to
allow us. She thanks us for our aid in a voice that has the clear ring
of crystal--I can in no other way describe it! When I take my leave,
I desire to kiss her hand. She permits me very gracefully; she speaks
French, too, with elegance, as she asks where I learned to make a
fireplace so cleverly?
“‘We are taught these things,’ I say to her, ‘at the Royal School of
Technical Military Instruction, in my Paris. For we do not think one
qualified for being an officer, Mademoiselle, until he has learned
all the things that a private should know.’ Then it was that Bertham
made that celebrated _coq-à-l’âne_ about its being bad form to do
servant’s work well. You should have seen the look she gave him.
_Sapristi!_--with a surprise in it that cut to the quick. She replies:
‘Servants should respect and look up to us, and not despise us; and how
can they look up to us if we show ourselves less capable than they?
When I am older I mean to have a great house full of sick people to
comfort and care for and nurse. And _everything_ that has to be done
for them I will learn to do with my own hands!’ My sister Viviette
would have said: ‘When I grow up I shall have a _rivière_ of pearls as
big as pigeons’ eggs,’ or ‘I shall drive on the boulevards and in the
Bois in an ivory-paneled barouche.’ Then I ask a stupid question: ‘Is
it that you are to be a Sister of Charity, Mademoiselle?’ She answers,
with a look of surprise: ‘Can no one but a nun care for the sick?’ I
return: ‘In France, Mademoiselle, our sick-nurses are these holy women.
They are welcome everywhere: in private houses and in public hospitals,
in time of peace: and in the time of war you will find them in the camp
and on the battle-field. Your first patient is a soldier wounded in
war,’ I say to her, pointing to the dog. ‘Perhaps it is an augury of
the future?’
“‘War is a terrible thing,’ she answers me, and grows pale, and
her great eyes are fixed as though they look upon a corpse-strewn
battle-field. ‘I hope with all my heart that I may never see it!’ ‘But
a nurse must become inured to ugly and horrible sights, Mademoiselle,’
I remind her. She replies: ‘I shall find courage to endure them when I
become a nurse.’ Then Bertham blurts out in his brusque way: ‘But you
never will! Your people would not allow it. Wait and see if I am not
right?’ She returns to him, with a smile, half the child’s, half the
woman’s, guileless and subtle at the same time, if you can understand
that? ‘_We will wait--and you will see._’”
De Moulny’s whisper had dwindled to a mere thread of sound. He had long
forgotten Hector, secretly pining for the end of a story that appeared
to him as profoundly dull as interminably long; and, oblivious of the
other’s martyrdom, talked only to himself.
“‘_We will wait and you will see._... You have the courage of your
convictions, Mademoiselle,’ I tell her, ‘and courage always succeeds.’
She says in that crystal voice: ‘When things, stones or other
obstacles, are piled up in front of you to prevent your getting through
a gap in the dyke, you don’t push because you might topple them all
over, and kill somebody on the other side; and you don’t pull because
you might bring them all down on your own head. You lift the stones
away, one at a time; and by-and-by you see light through a little
hole ... and then the hole gets bigger, and there is more and more
light.’... There I interpose.... ‘But if the stones to be moved are too
big for such little hands, Mademoiselle?’ And she answers, looking at
them gravely: ‘My hands are not little. And if they were, there would
always be men to lift the things that are too heavy, and do the things
that are too hard.’
“‘Men or boys, Mademoiselle?’ I question. Then she gives me her hand
once more. ‘Thank you, M. de Moulny! I will not forget it was you who
built the fireplace, and helped to hold the dog.’ And Bertham was so
jealous that he would not speak to me during the whole ride home!”
Upon that note of exultation the story ended. To Hector the recital
had been of unmitigated dullness. Nothing but his loyalty to de Moulny
had kept him from wriggling on his chair; had checked the yawns that
had threatened to unhinge his youthful jaws. Now he was guilty of an
offense beside which yawning would have been pardonable. He opened his
black eyes in a stare of youthful, insufferable curiosity, and called
out in his shrill young pipe:
“Jealous, do you say! Why, was he in love with her as well as you?”
De Moulny’s muscles jerked. He almost sat up in bed. A moment he
remained glaring over the basket, speechless and livid with rage. Then
he cried out furiously:
“Go away! Leave me! Go!--do you hear?”
And as Hector rose in dismay and stood blankly gaping at the convulsed
and tragic face, de Moulny plucked the pillow from behind his head, and
hurled that missile of low comedy at the cruel eyes that stung, and
fell back upon the bolster with a cry of pain that froze the luckless
blunderer to the marrow. Hector fled then, as Sister Edouard-Antoine,
summoned from her colloquy in the passage by the sound, came hurrying
back to the bedside. Looking back as he plunged through the narrow,
black swing-doors--doors very much like two coffin-lids on hinges,
set up side by side, he saw the Sister bending over the long heaving
body on the bed, solicitude painted on the mild face framed in the
starched-white linen coif; and heard de Moulny’s muffled sobbing,
mingled with her soft, consoling tones.
* * * * *
Why should de Moulny shed tears? Did he really hate the idea of being
a priest? And if so, would he be likely to love his friend Dunoisse,
who had, with a broken foil, pointed out the way that ended in the
seminary, the cassock, and the tonsure?
The savage, livid, loathing face rose up before Hector’s mental
vision--the furious cry that had issued from the twisted lips: “Go!
Leave me! Go!--do you hear?” still rang in the boy’s ears. The look,
the cry, were full of hate. Yet Alain had, but a moment before,
solemnly sworn to be his friend.... When we are very young we believe
such oaths unbreakable.
Came Pédelaborde, and thrust a warty hand under Redskin’s elbow, as he
stood frowning and pondering still, on the wide shallow doorstep of the
Infirmary portico, brick-and-plaster Corinthian, elegant and chaste....
“_Hé bien, mon ami; nous voilà reconciliés?_ A visit of sympathy,
_hein?_ It is quite proper! absolutely in rule.... But”--Pédelaborde’s
little yellow eyes twinkled and glittered in his round brown face like
a pair of highly-polished brass buttons, his snub nose cocked itself
with an air of infinite knowingness, his bullet head of cropped black
hair sparked intelligence from every bristle--“but--all the same, to
call a spade a spade, _saisissez?_ the trick that did the job for de
Moulny is a dirty one. As an expert, I told you of it. As a gentleman,
_voyez?_--I hardly expected you to use it!”
“A trick.... Use it!” Hector stuttered, and his round horrified stare
would have added to de Moulny’s offense. “You don’t mean--you cannot
believe that I----” He choked over the words.
Pédelaborde chuckled comfortably, thrusting his warty hands deep into
the pockets of his baggy red serge breeches.
“Why, just as _he_ lunged after his feint, didn’t you--_hein?_
Plump!--in the act to riposte, and cleverly managed, too. Suppose he
believes it a pure accident. I am not the fellow to tell tales....
Honor”--Pédelaborde extracted one of the warty hands on purpose to lay
it upon his heart--“honor forbids. Now we’re on the subject of honor,
I have positively pledged mine to pay Mère Cornu a trifling sum I
owe her--a mere matter of eight francs--could you lend them until my
uncle--hang the old skin-namalinks!--forks out with my allowance that
is due?”
“I will lend you the money,” said Hector, wiping the sickly drops
from his wet forehead. “But--I swear to you _that_ was an accident--I
slipped on a slug!” he added passionately. “Never dare to believe me
capable of an act so vile!”
He had not had the heart to spend a franc of his own monthly allowance
of two louis. He pulled the cash out of his pocket now; a handful of
silver pieces, with one treasured napoleon shining amongst them, and
was picking out the eight francs from the bulk, when, with a pang, the
barbed memory of his oath drove home. Perhaps these coins were some
infinitesimal part of that accursed dowry....
“Take it all!--keep it! I do not want it back!” he stammered hurriedly,
and thrust the wealthy handful upon greedy Pédelaborde so recklessly
that the napoleon and several big silver coins escaped that worthy’s
warty clutches, and dropped, ringing and rolling and spinning, making a
temporary Tom Tiddler’s ground of the Junior’s parade.
“_Paid not to split! Saperlipopette!_... Then there was no slug! He
meant to do the thing!...”
Honest Pédelaborde, pausing even in the congenial task of picking
up gold and silver, straightened his back to stare hard after the
Redskin’s retreating figure, and whistle with indrawn breath, through a
gap in his front teeth: “_Phew-w!_”
Those little yellow eyes of the dentist’s nephew were sharp. The brain
behind them, though shallow, worked excellently in the interests of
Pédelaborde. It occurred to him that when next Madame Cornu should
clamor for the discharge of her bill for sweetstuff and pastry, the
little affair of the trick fall might advantageously be mentioned again.
X
Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules, cadet of the illustrious and ducal house of
de Moulny, recovered of his wound, much to the gratification of his
noble family, more by grace of a sound constitution and the faithful
nursing of the Infirmary Sisters than by skill of the surgeons, who
knew appallingly little in those days of the treatment of internal
wounds. He left the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction
to travel abroad under the grandmaternal care of the Duchesse, for
what the Chief Director gracefully termed the “reconstitution of his
health.” Later he was reported to have entered as a student at the
Seminary of Saint Sulpice. It was vain to ask Redskin whether this was
true. You got no information out of the fellow. He had turned sulky,
the pupils said, since the affair of the duel, which invested him in
the eyes even of the great boys of the Senior Corps, to which he was
shortly afterwards promoted, with a luridly-tinted halo of distinction.
So nobody save Hector was aware that after the first short, stiff
letter or two Alain had ceased to write. In silence the Redskin
bucklered his pride. Hitherto he had not permitted his love of study
to interfere with the more serious business of amusement. Now he
applied himself to the acquisition of knowledge with a dogged, savage
concentration his Professors had never remarked in him before.
Attending one of the stately half-yearly School receptions, arrayed
in all the obsolete but imposing splendors of his gold-encrusted,
epauletted, frogged, high-stocked uniform of ceremony, adorned with
the Cross of the Legion of Honor,--an Imperial decoration severely
ignored by the Monarchy,--Marshal Dunoisse was complimented by the
General-Commandant and the Chief Director upon the brilliant abilities
and remarkable progress of his son.
“So it seems the flea of work has bitten you?” the affectionate parent
commented a few days later, tweaking Hector’s ear in the Napoleonic
manner, and turning upon his son the fanged and gleaming smile, that
in conjunction with its owner’s superb height, fine form, boldly-cut
swarthy features, fierce black eyes, and luxuriant black whiskers, had
earned for the ex-_aide-de-camp_ of Napoleon I. the reputation of an
irresistible lady-killer.
The handsome features of the elderly dandy were thickened and inflamed
by wine and good living, the limbs in the tight-fitting white stockinet
pantaloons, for which he had reluctantly exchanged his golden-buckled
knee-breeches; the extremities more often encased in narrow-toed,
elastic-sided boots, or buckled pumps, than in the spurred Hessians,
were swollen and shapeless with rheumatic gout. The hyacinthine locks,
or the greater part of them, came from the _atelier_ of Michalon
Millière, His Majesty’s own hairdresser, in the Rue Feydeau; the
whiskers owed their jetty gloss to a patent pomade invented by the
same highly-patronized tonsorial artist. The broad black eyes were
bloodshot, and could blaze under their bushy brows at times with an
ogre-like ferocity, but were not brilliant any more.
Yet, from the three maids to the stout Bretonne who was cook, from the
cook to Miss Smithwick,--who had acted in the capacity of _dame de
compagnie_ to Madame Dunoisse; had become governess to her son when the
gates of the Convent clashed once more behind the remorse and sorrow
of that unhappy lady; and in these later years, now that Hector had
outgrown her mild capacity for instruction, fulfilled the duties of
housekeeper at No. 000, Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin,--the female staff
of the ex-military widower’s household worshiped Monsieur the Marshal.
“Do you think papa so handsome?” Hector, when a very small boy, would
pipe out boldly. “He has eyes that are always angry, even when he
smiles. He gnashes his teeth when he laughs. He kicked Moustapho” (the
poodle) “so hard in the chest with the sharp toe of his shiny boot,
when Moustapho dropped a macaroon he did not want, that Moustapho cried
out loud with pain. He bullies the menservants and swears at them.
He smells of Cognac, and is always spilling his snuff about on the
carpets, and tables, and chairs. Me, I think him ugly, for my part.”
“Your papa, my Hector, possesses in an eminent degree those personal
advantages to which the weakness of the female sex renders its members
fatally susceptible,” the gentle spinster said to her pupil; and she
had folded her tidy black mittens upon her neat stomacher as she said
it, and shaken her prim, respectable head with a sigh, adding, as her
mild eye strayed between the lace and brocade window-curtains to the
smart, high-wheeled cabriolet waiting in the courtyard below; the
glittering turnout with the showy, high-actioned mare in the shafts,
and the little top-booted, liveried, cockaded, English groom hanging to
her nose:
“I would that your dear mother had found it compatible with the
fulfillment of her religious duties to remain at home! For the
Domestic Affections, Hector, which flourish by the connubial fireside,
are potent charms to restrain the too-ardent spirit, and recall the
wandering heart.” And then Miss Smithwick had coughed and ended.
She winked at much that was scandalous in the life of her idol, that
prim, chaste, good woman; but who shall say that her unswerving
fidelity and humble devotion did not act sometimes as a martingale? The
_bon-vivant_, the gambler, the dissipated elderly buck of the First
Napoleon’s Court, the ex-Adonis of the Tuileries, who never wasted time
in resisting the blandishments of any Venus of the Court or nymph of
the Palais Royal, respected decent Smithwick, was even known, at the
pathetic stage of wine, to refer to her as the only woman who had ever
understood him.
Yet when her sister (her sole remaining relative, who lived upon a
small annuity, in the village of Hampstead, near London), sustained
a paralytic stroke, and Smithwick was recalled to nurse her, did
that poor lady’s employer dream of providing,--out of those hundreds
of thousands of thalers wrested from the coffers of the Convent of
Widinitz,--for the old age of the faithful creature? You do not know
Monsieur the Marshal if you dream he did.
He generously paid her the quarter due of her annual salary of fifteen
hundred francs, kissed her knuckly left hand with the garnet ring upon
it, placed there by a pale young English curate deceased many years
previously--for even the Smithwicks have their romances and their
tragedies--told her that his “roof” was “open” to her whenever she
desired to return; and bowed her graciously out of his library, whose
Empire bookcases were laden with costly editions of the classics,
published by the Houbigants and the Chardins, Michaud and Buére (tomes
of beauty that were fountains sealed to the illiterate master of the
house), and whose walls were hung with splendid engravings by Renard
and F. Chauveau, a few gems from the brushes of Watteau and Greuze,
Boucher and Mignard; and one or two examples of the shining art of the
young Meissonier.
The luxurious house in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin was less
wholesome for good Smithwick’s going. But I fear young Hector
regretted her departure less than he should have done. True, the meek
gentlewoman had not been able to teach her patron’s son very much. But
she had at least implanted in him the habit of truth, and the love of
soap-and-water and clean linen. Last, but not least, she had taught
him to speak the English of the educated upper classes with barely a
trace of accent, whereas the Paris-residing teachers of the tongue of
Albion were in those days, and too frequently are in these, emigrants
from the green isle adjacent; Miss Maloney’s, Misther Magee’s, and Mrs.
Maguire’s; equipped with the thinnest of skins for imagined injuries,
and the thickest of brogues for voluble speech, that ever hailed from
Dublin or Wexford, King’s County or the County Cork.
Not a servant of the household but had some parting gift for
Smithwick--from the blue handkerchief full of apples offered by the
kitchen-girl, to the housemaid’s tribute of a crocheted lace _fichu_;
from the cook’s canary-bird, a piercing songster, to the green
parasol--a sweet thing no bigger than a plate, with six-inch fringe
and an ivory handle with a hinge, to purchase which Monsieur Brousset,
the Marshal’s valet, Duchard the butler, and Auguste the coachman had
clubbed francs.
The question of a token of remembrance for faithful Smithwick was a
thorn in her ex-pupil’s pillow. You are to understand that Redskin,
in his blundering, boyish way, had been trying hard to keep inviolate
the oath imposed upon him by de Moulny. The monthly two louis of
pocket-money were scrupulously dropped each pay-day into the alms-box
of the Carmelite Church in the Rue Vaugirard, and what a hungry glare
followed the vanishing coins, and to what miserable shifts the boy
resorted in the endeavor to earn a meager pittance to supply his most
pressing needs, and what an unjust reputation for stinginess and
parsimony he earned, when it became known that he was willing to help
dull or lazy students with their papers for pay, you can conceive.
He possessed the sum of five francs, amassed with difficulty after
this fashion, and this represented the boy’s entire capital at this
juncture. A five-franc piece is a handsome coin, but you cannot buy
anything handsome with it, that is the trouble. The discovery of
the scene-painter Daguerre, first made in 1830, was not published
by the Government of France until 1839. Otherwise, how the faithful
heart of the attached Smithwick might have been gladdened by one of
those inexpensive, oily-looking, semi-iridescent, strangely elusive
portraits; into which the recipient peered, making discoveries of
familiar leading features of relatives or friends, hailing them with
joy when found, never finding them all together.
A portrait, even a pencil miniature with stumped shadows, its outlines
filled with the palest wash of water-color, was out of the question.
There was a silhouettist in the Rue de Chaillot. To this artist Hector
resorted, and obtained a black paper profile, mounted and glazed, and
enclosed in a gilt tin frame, at cost of all the boy possessed in the
world.
That the offering was a poor one never occurred to simple Smithwick.
She received it with little squeaking, mouselike cries of delight, and
grief, and admiration; she ran at the tall, awkward, blushing youth to
kiss him, unaware how he recoiled from the affectionate dab of her
cold, pink-ended nose.
You could not say that the organ in question was disproportionately
large, but its owner never managed to dispose of it inoffensively in
the act of osculation. It invariably got in the eye or the ear of the
recipient of the caress. A nose so chill in contact, say authorities,
indicates by inverse ratio the temperature of the heart.
Hector got leave from the School, and went with the poor troubled
Smithwick to the office of the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the
Boulevard des Capucines, where for ten of her scanty store of francs
she got her passport signed. Stout Auguste drove them in the shiny
barouche with the high-steppers in silver-mounted harness, to meet the
red Calais coach at the Public Posting-Office in the Rue Nôtre Dame des
Victoires, whither one of the stablelads had wheeled Miss Smithwick’s
aged, piebald hair-trunk, her carpet-bag, and her three band-boxes on a
hand-truck. And, judging by the coldness of the poor soul’s nose when,
a very Niobe for tears, she kissed the son of her lost mistress and her
adored patron good-by, the heart beneath Smithwick’s faded green velvet
mantle must have been a very furnace of maternal love and tenderness.
“Never neglect the necessity of daily ablution of the entire person, my
dearest boy!” entreated the poor gentlewoman, “or omit the exercises of
your religion at morning and night. Instruct the domestics to see that
your beloved papa’s linen is properly aired. I fear they will be only
too prone to neglect these necessary precautions when my surveillance
is withdrawn! And--though but a humble individual offers this counsel,
remember, my Hector, that there are higher aims in life than the mere
attainment of great wealth or lofty station. Self-respect, beloved
child, is worth _far more_!” She was extraordinarily earnest in saying
this, shaking her thin gray curls with emphatic nods, holding up a lean
admonitory forefinger. “Persons with gifts and capacities as great,
natures as noble and generous as your distinguished father’s, may be
blinded by the sparkling luster of a jeweled scepter, allured by the
prospect of dominion, power, influence, rule....” What could good
Smithwick possibly be driving at? “But an unstained honor, my beloved
boy, is worth more than these, and a clean conscience smooths the--way
we must all of us travel!” She blinked the tears from her scanty,
ginger-hued eyelashes, and added: “I have forfeited a confidence and
regard I deeply appreciated, by perhaps unnecessarily believing it
my duty to reiterate this.” She coughed and dabbed her poor red eyes
with the damp white handkerchief held in the thin, shaking hand in the
shabby glove; and continued: “But a day will come when the brief joys
and bitter disillusions of this life will be at an end. The bitterest
that I have ever known come late, very late indeed!” Had Smithwick met
it in the library that morning when the Marshal bade her adieu? “When I
lay my head upon my pillow to die, it will be with the conviction that
I did my duty. It has borne me fruit of sorrow. But I hope and pray
that this chastening may be for my good. And oh! my dearest child, may
God for ever bless and keep you!”
The mail-bags were stowed. The three inside passengers’ seats being
taken, poor weeping Smithwick perforce was compelled to negotiate the
ladder, must climb into the _cabriolet_ in company with the guard.
With her thin elderly ankles upon her mind, it may be judged that no
more intelligible speech came from her. She peered round the tarred
canvas hood as the bugle flourished; she waved her wet handkerchief as
the long, stinging whip-lash cracked over the bony backs of the four
high-rumped, long-necked grays.... She was gone. Something had gone out
of Hector’s life along with her; he had not loved her, yet she left a
gap behind. His heart was cold and heavy as he brought his eyes back
from the dwindling red patch made by the mail amongst the vari-colored
Paris street-traffic, but the hardening change that had begun in him
from the very hour of de Moulny’s revelation stiffened the muscles of
his face, and drove back the tears he might have shed.
“Holy blue!” gulped stout Auguste, who was sitting on his box
blubbering and mopping his eyes with a red cotton handkerchief, sadly
out of keeping with his superb mauve and yellow livery, blazing with
gold lace and buttons, and the huge cocked hat that crowned his
well-powdered wig. “There are gayer employments than seeing people
off, my faith there are! Who would have dreamed I should ever pipe
my eye for the old girl! It is a pity she is gone? She was an honest
creature!” He added huskily, tucking away the red cotton handkerchief:
“One could do uncommonly well now with two fingers of wine?”
He cocked his thirsty eye at penniless Hector, who pretended not to
hear him, and turned away abruptly; saying that he would walk back to
the School.
“That is not a chip of the old block, see you, when it comes to a
cart-wheel for drink-money,” said Auguste over his shoulder, as the
silver-harnessed blacks with much champing and high action, prepared
to return to the stables in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, and the
silkstockinged footman mounted his perch behind.
“It is a learned prig,” pronounced the footman, authoritatively,
adding: “They turn them out all of one pattern at that shop of his.”
“Yet he fought a duel,” said Auguste, deftly twirling the prancing
steeds into a by-street and pulling up outside a little, low-browed
wine-shop much frequented by gold-laced liveries and cocked-hats. “And
came off the victor,” he added, with a touch of pride.
“By a trick got up beforehand,” said the footman pithily, as he dived
under the striped awning, in at the wineshop door.
“Nothing of the sort!” denied Auguste.
“Just as you please,” said the footman, emerging with two brimming
pewter measures, “but none the less true. M. Pédelaborde’s nephew, who
taught the _coup_ to M. Hector, told M. Alain de Moulny, long after
the affair, how cleverly he had been grassed. It was at the Hôtel
de Moulny, my crony Lacroix, M. Alain’s valet, was waiting in the
ante-room and listened at the door. Money passed, Lacroix says. M.
Alain de Moulny paid Pédelaborde handsomely not to tell.”
“That is a story one doesn’t like the stink of,” said Auguste, making
a wry mouth, draining his measure, handing it back to the silk-calved
one, and spitting in the dust. “But the knowing fellow who taught M.
Hector the dirty dodge and blows the gaff for hush-money, that is a
rank polecat, my word!”
A crude pronouncement with which the reader may possibly be inclined to
agree.