On a supremely hot noon of August, Mr Edward Murk, walking leisurely
along a road pounded and compounded of small coal, came down towards
the ancient city of Liége, and paused at a vantage-point to take in
the prospect. This was a fair enough one to any vision, and fair in
the extreme to eyes so long drilled to the interminable perspectives
of Flanders--to loveless dykes, to canals like sleek ingots of glass,
to stretched ribbons of highways tapering to a flat horizon--as that a
tumulus would seem as sweet a thing for them to rest on as a woman’s
bosom. Now his sight, reining up against hills, gave him a certain
emotion of surprise, such as he might have felt if a familiar hunter
had unexpectedly shied at a hedgerow.
He stood a little above the town, looking over and beyond it. In the
middle-distance of his picture--pulled into the soft arms of hills
that, melting to their own embrace, became mere swimming banks of
mist--floated a prismatic blot of water--the vista of the
Meuse--dinted like an opal with shadowy reflections, and lit with
sudden sparks in dreamy places. Thence, nearer, a greystone
bridge--its arches glazed, he could have thought, with mother-of-pearl
windows, like a Chinese model in ivory--bestrode the river channel,
seeming to dam back, against his foreground, an accumulated litter of
wall and roof and gable, that choked the town reaches, and, breaking
away piecemeal, stranded its jetsam all down the valley. Here and
there fair steeples stood up from the litter; here and there, in his
close neighbourhood, gaunt chimney-stocks exhaled a languid smoke,
like tree trunks blasted in a forest fire.
Some distance to his left a pretty lofty eminence, that broke at its
summit into a fret of turret and escarpment, stood sentinel over the
ages; while below this, and nearer at hand, the great block of an
episcopal palace sprouted from a rocky plateau, the velvet slopes of
which trailed downwards into the very hands of the city.
“The bishop and his train-bearers,” thought Mr Murk. “The town holds
up the skirts of the palace. That must all be changed by-and-by. But I
confess I should like to record a little of the picturesqueness of
life before the roller of equality is dragged over the continents.”
He had out his tools then and there, and essayed to give some
expression to his mood. The sun crackled in his brain; a pug of a
child, in a scarlet linsey petticoat, came and sniffed beside him,
offending his ears and his eyes; a dawdling cart mounting the hill
lurched into his perspective and blotted out its details foot by foot.
Down below, in his farther foreground, a cluster of buildings, lying
under a church-tower in a bath of shadow, invited him as if to a
plunge into cool waters. He glanced crossly at the obtrusive child,
collected his traps, and strode down the hill.
At its foot, however, he seemed to come upon the actual furnace-floor
of noon--a broad _Place_ that bickered, as it were, throughout its
length with iridescent embers. These were figured in crates of Russian
cranberries glowing like braziers, in pomegranates bleeding fire, in
burning globes of oranges, in apricots pearly-pink as balls of
white-hot glass; and over all, the long looped awnings of olive and
stone-blue and cinnamon served to the emphasising of such a galaxy of
hot dyes as made a core of flame in the heart of the blazing city.
The close air prickled with a multitudinous patter of voices like
blisters of fat breaking on a grill. Old Burgundian houses--baked to a
terra-sienna, drowzing and nodding as they took the warmth about their
knees--retained and multiplied the heat like the walls of an oven. The
shop windows were so many burning-glasses; the market-women fried
amongst their cabbages like bubble-and-squeak; the very dogs of
draught, hauling their gridirons of carts, had red-hot cinders for
tongues. There seemed in the whole width of the square no shadow of
which a devil could have taken solace.
Exhaling some little of the breath that remained to him in an
appropriately volcanic interjection, Ned mounted the steps of the
church he had looked down upon, brushed past the outstretched hand of
a fly-blown beggar, and dived into the sequestered obscurity of
amber-scented aisles.
Here the immediate fall of temperature took him by the throat like a
shower-bath. “If I shiver,” he thought, “there is a goose walking over
my grave.” So he stood still and hugged himself till his blood was
accommodated to the change. Then he penetrated into the heart of the
place.
He had visited many churches in the course of his travels,
dispassionately, but with no irreverence. It interested him no less to
note the expressions of faith than of faces. Generally, it seemed to
him, religious ideals were not transmissible. There was seldom
evidence that the spirit that had conceived and executed some noble
monument yet informed its own work through tradition. The builders of
cathedrals wrought, it was obvious, for little clans that, through all
the ages, had never learned the respect of soul. They, the latter, had
stuffed their heritages with trash, because their religion must come
home to them in the homely sense. They could not think but that the
God of their understanding must be gratified to have His houses
adorned after the fashion of the best parlour.
Now, to see a fine interior vulgarised by the introduction of barbaric
images, of artificial flowers, and of pictures hung in incongruous
places, offended Mr Murk as a fooling elephant in a circus offended
him. He recognised and condemned the solecism in the present instance,
yet at the same time was conscious of an atmosphere foreign to his
accustomed experience--an atmosphere so like the faint breath of a
revived paganism that he looked about him in wonder to see whence it
emanated.
There could be, however, no doubt as to its source. The whole church
was a grove of orange, oleander, and myrtle trees. They stood in tubs,
filling the intercolumniations of the stone avenues, climbing the
steps of the altar, thronging about the pulpit. The quiet air held
their fragrance like smoke. They could fatten and bloom unvexed of any
wind but the sweet gales blown from the organ.
And even as Ned looked, this wind rose and wooed them. Some one was at
the keys, and the soft diapasons flowed forth and rolled in thunder
along the roof.
The young man strolled down the nave. Music of itself held no
particular charms for him. Its value here was in its subscription to
other influences--to the cool perfume of flowers, to the sense of
serene isolation, to the feeling of mysticism engendered of foggy
vastness traversed by the soft moted dazzle of sunbeams. Such,
spanning gulfs of shadow, propping the gross mechanism of the organ
itself, seemed the very fabric of which the floating harmonies were
compound. There needed only a living expression of this poem of
mingled scent and sound and colour, and to Ned this was vouchsafed of
a sudden, in a luminous corner he came upon, where a painted statue of
the Virgin standing sentry in a niche looked down upon a figure
prostrate before it in devotion.
A little lamp, burning with a motionless light like a carbuncle, was
laid at the Mother’s feet. About her shoulders, suspended from the
neighbouring walls, were a half-dozen certificates of _miracles
approuvés_--decorated placards recording the processes and dates,
some of them quite recent, of extraordinary recoveries. One of these
related how to a Marie Cornelis was restored the sight of an eye that
had been skewered by a thorn. Faith here had at least made its appeal
in a sure direction. Who could forget how that other woman had worn a
crown of thorns about her heart?
Now the gazer would have liked to know what manifestation of the
supernatural was craved by the young girl, fair and quiet as the image
itself, who knelt before the shrine. She, this _dévote_, reverencing,
with her mouth pressed to the clasped knuckles of her hands, had so
much of the Madonna in her own appearance as to suggest that she might
perform, rather than demand, miracles. Her eyes--Ned fancied, but
could not convince himself--were closed, as in a rapture of piety. She
was very pure and colourless, apart from an accidentalism of tinted
rays; for over her soft brown hair, from which a folded chaperon of
white linen had slipped backwards, wings of parti-coloured light,
entering through a stained window, played like butterflies. Lower
down, the violet haze that slept upon her cheek gave her something of
a phantasmal character; but her fingers were steeped in crimson as if
they were bloody.
At her side knelt a little lad, five or six years of age, with a most
wistful small face expressive of as great a humility of weariness as
the girl’s was of worship. He looked at the stranger with curiosity,
and with the dumb appeal of the petty to the great and independent;
and as he looked he lifted, one after the other, his poor chafed knees
and rubbed them. His round, pale eyes were underscored for emphasis of
this appeal, but without effect on Mr Murk, who had indeed no fondness
for children.
Presently the girl rose. With the action the wings of light fled from
her hair; her passionless face revealed itself a sunless white fruit.
There was no consciousness of the observant stranger under her lowered
lids.
“_Viens, donc, Baptiste_!” she whispered; and the little boy, gazing
up at her in a breathless manner, got to his feet.
The two genuflected to the High Altar, and stole reverently from the
building. Mr Murk followed immediately. He had a desire to win into
the confidence of this butterfly Madonna.
Outside he saw the girl and child go down into the blazing market as
into a lake of fire. Giving them fair law, he started in pursuit.
Arrived at the level, he found he had for the moment lost sight of his
quarry. He strolled up and down, gathering what shade he could from
the awnings. Voluble market-women, waxing tropically gross in their
vegetable hotbeds, rallied him on his insensibility to their cajolery.
Stolid Flemish farmers, with great pipes pendulous from their mouths,
like tongues lolling and smoking with drought, winked to one another
as he passed in appreciation of the rich joke that here was a
foreigner.
The gentler classes, it seemed, were all in siesta. Low life,
vehement, motley, and picturesque, held the square as if it were a
fortress under fire.
Now, whether as a consequence or, in spite of, this gregal
plebeianism, a strange unusual atmosphere, Ned fancied, was abroad in
the town. He had been conscious of a similar atmosphere in other
cities he had visited _en route_, and of an increase in its density in
steady ratio with his march southwards. It was not to be defined. It
might have been called an inflection rather than any expression, like
the change of note in the respiration of a sleeper who is near waking.
It only seemed to him that he moved in an element compounded of
shadows--the shadow of watchfulness; the shadow of insolence; the
shadow of an evil humour cursing its own century-long blindness; the
shadow of a more wickedly merry humour, rallying itself upon that old
desperate screwing-up of its courage to attack a boggart Blunderbore
that had fallen to pieces at the first stroke; the shadow, embracing
all others, of a certain Freemasonry that was deadlily exclusive in
the opposite to a conventional sense.
“And this is for no dispassionate soul to resent,” thought Mr Murk,
who as a child had set his feet square upon the basis of an
independent impartiality, and, at the first age of reason, had pledged
himself to forego impulse as being the above-proof of ardent spirits
and fatal to sobriety.
“Now,” he admitted to himself, “Jacques Bonhomme is simply awaking to
knowledge of the fact that he may boast a family-tree as thick-hung as
his lord’s with evil fruit, and that he was not spawned of the mud
because no record exists of his grandfather.”
By-and-by, strolling down a little court, he turned into a wine-shop
for a draught to his dusty throat. He drank his _maçon_, mixing it
with water, in a tiny room off the tap of the auberge; and, while he
was drinking, the sound of a low vehement voice in the street brought
him to the window.
He looked out. It was his very Madonna of the butterflies, and
presented under a new aspect. Her hands were at the neck of the child;
she was rating him in voluble viraginian. The poor rogue sobbed and
protested; but he would not loose his grip of something of which she
strove to possess herself.
“_P’tit démon_!” she gabbled--“but I will have it, I say! It is no
use to weep and struggle. Give it me, Baptiste--ah! but I will!”
“No, no!” cried the boy; “it is mine--it has always been mine. Thou
shalt not, Nicette!”
She so far secured the bone of contention as to enable Ned for a
moment to recognise its nature. It was a silver medal--a poor
devotional charm strung round the infant’s neck. The child by an
adroit movement recovered possession. She looked about her,
unconscious of the observer, as if, safe from interruption, she would
have dared torture and maltreatment. Then suddenly she fell to
wheedling.
“_Babouin_, little _babouin_, wilt thou not make this sacrifice for
thine own loving Nicette, who is so poor, so poor, little _babouin_,
because of the small brother she keeps and feeds and clothes?--wilt
thou not?”
“No!” cried the child again, half hysterical. “It is mine--it was
blessed by the Holy Father!”
“But the guava, Baptiste! the sweet red jelly in the little box! I
have eaten of it once before, and oh! Baptiste, it is like the fruit
that tempted the first mother. And it so seldom comes to market, and I
have not a sou; and before next wage-day all may be appropriated. Wilt
thou not then, _mon poulet, mon p’tit poulet_?”
But the _poulet_ only repeated his tearful pipe.
“Thou shalt have thy share!” pleaded the girl. “I swear it.”
“I should not,” sobbed Baptiste. “Thou wouldst eat up all my medal,
and it was blessed by _le Saint Père_.”
Ned, peering forth, saw his Madonna jerk erect, her eyelids snapping.
“Give me thy hand, then,” she said, in a cold little voice. “Thou
shalt walk back to Méricourt all the way, and have thy medal to
supper at the end. Give me thy hand!”
The child cried out when she took it. Ned showed himself at the
window.
“Nicette,” he said, with particular softness, “I will exchange thee a
louis-d’or for one single little confidence of thine.”
The girl started, looked round, and stared at the speaker in
breathless consternation. A bright spot of colour, like pink light
caught from an opal, waxed and waned on her cheek.
“How, monsieur?” she muttered.
Ned held out the coin.
“Here is a surfeit of guava jelly,” said he, “if thou wilt tell me
what was the miracle thou cravedst of the Holy Mother yonder.”
He knew, watching her face, that she would reject the condition, and
that with all suitable decorum. But he saw the pupils of her eyes
dilate at sight of the gold piece.
“Monsieur, it seems,” said she, “can better afford to jest than I to
accept insult”--and she hurriedly caught at her charge’s hand and drew
the child away.
Mr Murk, with plentiful complacency, paid for his wine and sauntered
in pursuit. At a particular fruit-stall he saw his peasant Madonna
linger a moment, hesitate, and then go on her way with an up-toss of
her chin. He came to a stop and considered--
“Méricourt! But I have an introduction to Monsieur de St Denys of
Méricourt. How far, I wonder? This Nicette would make an admirable
study to an artist. I will go to Méricourt.”