Writhing, as it were, from the edges to a central core of heat, Ned
woke to find himself wriggling like an eel in a bath of dripping. He
sat up in his dingy cupboard, and feeling and seeing a slant of
sunlight blazing through its curtains, plunged for the open and
breathed out a fainting sigh of relief.
Shrill murmur of voices from a distance came to him; but the kitchen,
stalely redolent of wash-houses, was deserted of all save himself.
A pudding-basin on a magnified milking-stool--presumably a
washhand-stand--was placed in a corner; and thereat he fretted out an
ablution that was a mere aggravation of drought. Then he dressed
himself with a sort of fierce and defiant daring, rather hoping to be
taken to task for some intolerable solecism in his rendering of local
customs.
He was disappointed. The solemn girl came into the kitchen when he was
but half-way through his toilet, and, without exhibiting the least
interest in his condition, set to preparing and serving his breakfast.
By-and-by he seated himself at the table.
“I am sorry to have kept you out of the room,” he said, with
superfluous sarcasm.
“I do not understand,” she said indifferently.
“At least you will know now how a gentleman dresses.”
“It is possible,” she said. “But, if I were one, I should put on my
shirt first.”
“Well,” said he, “where is M. de St Denys?”
She stared at him like a cow; but it was the provoking part of her
that she would not avert her gaze when he returned it.
“Where,” said she, “if not at the chateau?”
“He recovered his feet then, it would seem?”
“His feet? Oh, _mon Dieu_! they were not lost! What questions,
monsieur!”
“Are they not? And who now is this Lambertine?”
“He is Lambertine--a farmer very prosperous, of Méricourt.”
“With whom the lord of the manor consorts? M. de St Denys, then, is
not fastidious in his choice of company?”
“Truly, even you need not hesitate to address him, if that is what you
mean. He listens to all alike; he holds himself a human being like the
rest of us. When he walks in the sun he will not think his shadow
longer than that of another man of his height.”
“And he is the soul of honour?”
“Essentially, monsieur. He would extend the right of an equal
indulgence in pleasure to all.”
“Ah, _ma chérie_!” said Ned calmly, “how you must love him!”
“That is of necessity,” said the girl. “He has lowered himself to make
us do so.”
Ned ate a very large and deliberate breakfast, and then issued forth
into the village, carrying his letter of introduction with him.
“This St Denys,” he thought, “has been reading Diderot and the
Encyclopedia. Has he also theories of reconstruction? My uncle would
not think it amusing that his letter should so miscarry.”
A little breeze had risen, blowing from the south. It made the heat
more tolerable, and it was the begetter of a pretty tableau by the
village fountain. For there, with her pitcher set on the well-rim,
stood a bright Hebe of the sun, ripe, warm, and glowing as the very
fruit of desire. Now she had put her hands back under her free-falling
hair--that was thick and pheasant brown and wavy like a spaniel’s--and
had lifted it, sagging, that the cool air might blow under and comfort
the roots. She was a full-bosomed wench, and the pose threw her figure
into energetic and very graceful relief. Ned, who was really
passionless, and responsive only to the artistic provocation, went up
to her at once.
“I should like to draw you like that,” said he.
She twitched involuntarily; but, with immediate intuition, maintained
her posture, and conned him from under languorous lids.
“How, monsieur?” said she.
“Exactly as you are. I have my tools with me. I beg you to do nothing
but just breathe and enjoy life.”
Actually, before she could deny him, he was sketching her. Then,
suddenly--watching first the quick travelling of his pencil--she
lowered her arms and, like a foolish virgin, extinguished the light of
inspiration.
“I think you are very impertinent,” she said.
“If beauty,” said he calmly--for he had secured the essentials of his
picture--“_will_ distribute largesse, it must not be surprised to see
it scrambled for.”
The girl’s lips parted, as if the fairy bee were probing there for
honey.
“What insolence!” she murmured. “Am I then beautiful? But perhaps
monsieur sees his own image reflected in my eyes, and falls in love
with it like the _damoiseau_ Narcisse.”
She showed the slightest rim of white teeth. It was as if the bow of
her mouth revealed itself strung with silver. Her eyes, when open,
floated with deep amber lights; her cheeks were sweet warm beds
dimpled by Love’s elbow; she was full of bold rich contrasts of
colour--a young vestal flaming into the lust of life.
Ned was a little surprised to hear a peasant girl, as he thought her,
imaging from mythology.
“I never fall in love,” he said gravely; “not even with myself.”
The girl laughed out, putting her arms defiantly akimbo.
“Then I would not be a suitor there,” she said.
“To me? And why not?”
“Because no man ever loved a woman well that did not love himself
better.”
She took her sun-bonnet and pitcher from the low wall.
“I have heard of such as you,” she said. “It is to make your art your
mistress, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Ned. “Come and see why.”
He held the sketch out to her. He had been working at it all the time
he talked.
“Little Holy Mother!” she murmured, after a vain attempt to repress
her curiosity, “is that I?”
“Is it not?” he said; “and would not _you_ love an art that enabled
you so to record impressions of beauty?”
“It is an impression, my faith! Am I black and white like a spectre?
Where are my brown hair and my red cheeks?”
Ned tapped his breast-pocket.
“In your heart, monsieur?”
“In my paint-box, mademoiselle.”
“Well,” she said, “they may remain there, for me. I shall never come
to claim them.”
“You had best not,” he said. “It is full of ghosts that might frighten
or repel you.”
She was moving away, when she stopped suddenly.
“Look who comes!” she cried low. “There is the pretty subject for your
pencil!”
The fountain stood at the village head, on ground somewhat raised
above the wide street, or _Place_, round which the hamlet was
gathered. Not a soul seemed to be abroad in the hot sleepy morning.
The jalousies of twenty small houses were closed; the ground-haze
boiled up a fair man’s height as seen against any dark background; the
tower of the little white church looked as if its very peaked cap of
lead were melting and sinking over its eyes--an illusion grotesquely
accented by the exclamatory expression of the arrow-slit of a window
underneath. There was scarce a sound, even, to emphasise the
stillness--the tinkle of a running gutter, the drowsy weak ring of
iron on a distant anvil--these were all. Méricourt lay sunk in
panting slumber in the lap of its woods, its chimney-pots gasping at
an inexorable sky.
But now there came towards and past the fountain, from a hidden meadow
path, a second girl, who bore upon her head, gracefully poising it, a
fragrant bundle of clover, young forest shoots and tufted grasses,
under the shadow of which her face was blurred as soft and luminous as
a face in tender crayons.
“It is a picture,” said Ned.
“It is half a saint,” said the girl.
Then she cried, in her flexible rich voice--
“_Holà_, Nicette! I shiver here in a colder shadow than thine.”
“Nicette!” muttered Ned, and he scrutinised the passing figure more
closely.
“How, Théroigne?” answered back the other, without slackening her
pace or turning her head.
“There runs a new spring in Méricourt!” cried the girl, with an
impudent glance at the young man.
“But a new spring! and how dost thou know?”
“My little finger told me. It has veins of ice, Nicette. Thou needst
not scruple to bathe in it, for all thy modesty.”
The clover-bearer passed on, with a little ambiguous laugh.
“And she is a saint?” said Ned.
“Half a saint, by monsieur’s permission--a sweet _bon-chrétien_ with
one cheek to the sun and one to the convent wall.”
“And presently to fall of her own sweetness, no doubt.”
To his surprise the girl drew herself up haughtily at his words.
“You exceed the bounds of insolence, monsieur,” she said frigidly. “It
is like blasphemy so to speak of Nicette Legrand. And what authority
has monsieur for his statement?”
“How can I have any, Théroigne, but your own show of levity towards
me?”
She seemed about to retort angrily, changed her mind, shouldered the
pitcher, and turned to go.
“At least,” said Ned, “have the goodness to first direct me to the
Château Méricourt.”
She twisted about sharply.
“The chateau! What do you seek there?”
“Only my friend, M. de St Denys.”
“Your friend!”
She conned his face seriously; then suddenly her own lightened once
more.
“Of a truth,” she said, “I would rather be your friend than your
lover.”
“Love is much on your lips, mademoiselle.”
“You should say he shows his pretty judgment. But Nicette has the
mouth of austerity. Follow her, then. She will have no need to rebuke
you, I’ll warrant.”
“There is some contempt in your voice, mademoiselle. Is not that to
give yourself a little the lie?”
“How, monsieur?”
“But now you chid me for speaking lightly of this very Nicette.”
“She has a better grace than I, perhaps, to care for herself. I mean
only she will lead you whither you desire.”
“To the chateau?”
“She keeps the lodge at its gates.”
She frowned, nodded her head, and went off with a little mocking song
on her lips, turning down a side track that led to farm buildings. She
was a lithe voluptuous animal, breathing a lavish generosity of life.
Ned watched her in a sort of rigor of admiration as she retreated. A
high stone wall, pierced at regular intervals with loopholes, enclosed
the steading she made for. Above the coping showed the roofs of the
house, and of numerous substantial barns that backed upon the wall;
and, at a point in the latter, frowned a huge studded gateway, strong
enough to withstand the shock of anything less than artillery.
By this gate the girl paused a moment, looked back, and seeing the
stranger still observant of her, whisked about resentfully enough to
bring down upon her head a sleet of acacia petals from a bush that
stood hard by. Then she vanished, and Ned turned him to his pursuit of
the other.
She had already reached the farther end of the _Place_, and he
followed rapidly, lest she should disappear from his ken. But he came
up with her as she was leaving the village by a road that mounted on a
slight gradient amongst trees. At the wrought-iron gates of the
chateau, set but a few hundred yards farther in a thicket of
evergreens, he addressed her, as she was shifting from her head the
great burden it had borne.
“That is much for a girl, Nicette. I will help you with it.”
She looked at him, he could see, with some abashed recognition. Her
lips, that were a little parted in breathlessness, trembled
perceptibly. Without a protest she let him receive and drop upon the
road the truss of clover. Some strands of the bundle that were yet
entangled in the disorder of her rabbit-brown hair gave her an
unlicensed strangeness of aspect; but for the rest it was the Madonna
of the old church of Liége--the colourless, pure _dévote_ with the
Greek profile and round blue eyes small-pupiled.
“Nicette,” said the young man, who, if cold, had an admirable
assurance, “to pass from Théroigne to you is to go to sleep in the
sun and wake to the twilight.”
She gave a little gasp.
“Does monsieur come to visit the chateau?” she murmured.
“Or its master?--yes. But first I will help you in with this.”
“No, no!” she protested faintly.
“But, yes, I say. Open the gate, Nicette. And for what is this great
heap of fodder?”
“It is for my beautiful _génisse_--Madeleine of the white star.”
She pushed open the gate. Within, to one side, was a low trellised
lodge, set within the forward apex of an elliptical patch of garden.
Farther back was a byre, and behind all a lofty bank of trees. A fine
avenue of Spanish chestnuts led on to the house, which was here hidden
from view.
“Whither?” said Ned.
She intimated the rearward shed, with a half-audible note of
deprecation. He shouldered and carried the truss to its destination.
A liquid-eyed cow, with a rayed splash of white on its forehead, blew
a sweet breath of wonder as he entered. Within, all was daintily clean
and fragrant.
“Now,” said he, “I must go on to the chateau. But I shall come again,
Nicette, and paint you into a picture.”
The girl stood among the phloxes utterly embarrassed. He made her a
grave salutation and pursued his way to the house. At a turn of the
drive he came in view of the latter--a sombre grey building, sparely
windowed, and with a peak-roofed tower--emblem of nobility--caught
into one of its many angles. A weed-cumbered moat, with a little
decrepit stream of water slinking through the tangle of its bed,
surrounded the walls; and in front of the moat, as he encountered it,
a neglected garden fell away in half-obliterated terraces. Here and
there, placed in odd coigns of leafiness, decayed wooden statues of
fauns and dryads, once painted “proper”--or otherwise--in flesh tints,
had yielded their complexions piecemeal to the rasp of Time; and,
indeed, the whole place seemed withdrawn from the considerations of
order.
Much wondering, Ned crossed an indifferent bridge--long ceased, it
would appear, from its uses of draught--and found himself facing the
massive stone portal of the chateau.
“There is a canker hath gnawed here since my uncle’s day,” thought he,
and laid hold of a long iron bell-pull. The thing came down reluctant,
and leapt sullenly from his grasp, and the clank of its answer called
up a whole mob of echoes.
The door was opened by an unliveried young fellow--a mere peasant of
the fields by his appearance.
“M. de St Denys? But, yes; monsieur would be at home to
receive--unless, indeed, he were not yet out of bed.”
Ned recalled a figure prostrate on the wreck of a guitar.
“Convey this letter to your master,” said he; “and show me where I may
wait.”
He entered a high, resounding hall. A boar’s head set at him from
above a door in a petrified snarl. Opposite, a great dark
picture--fruit, flowers, game--by Jan de Heem, made a slumberous core
of richness in the gloom. These, with a heavy chair or two, were the
only furniture.
The man conducted him to a waiting-room near as desert and
ill-appointed as the vestibule. The whole house seemed a vast and
melancholy barrow--an imprisoned vacancy containing only the personal
harness and appointments of some lordly dead. Its equipments would
appear to have conformed themselves to its service, and that was
reduced to a minimum.
Ned heard the sound of a listed footfall, and turned to meet the
master of Méricourt.
M. de St Denys came in with the visitor’s letter in his hand. He was
in a yellow morning wrapper that was in cheerful contrast with his
sombre surroundings, and a tentative small smile was on his lips. He
wore his own hair, bright brown and unpowdered, and tied into a neck
ribbon. A little artificial bloom, like the meal on a butterfly’s
wing, was laid upon his cheeks to hide the ravages of dissipation, but
the injected eyes above were significant of fever. He was,
nevertheless, a pretty creature of his inches (and they might have run
to seventy or so)--exhilarating, forcible, convincing as a man. Only,
as to that, his mouth was the hyperbolic expression, justifying his
sex rather by force of appetite than of combativeness.
“M. le Vicomte Murk?” said he, raising his eyebrows.
“Prospective, monsieur,” said Ned; “but as yet----”
“Ah, ha!” broke in the other, showing his teeth liberally, “you wait
to step into old shoes. It was my case once--five years ago. I had not
the pleasure to know your uncle, M. le Vicomte.”
“Pardon, monsieur. I am a plain gentleman.”
“Truly? We order things otherwise here--for the present, monsieur--for
the present.”
Obviously he had no least recollection of the _contretemps_ of the
previous evening.
“And you are travelling for experience?” (He referred lightly to the
letter in his hand, and lightly laughed.) “Possibly you shall acquire
that, of a kind, in little rustic Méricourt. We are in advance of our
times here--locusts of the Apocalypse, monsieur, having orders to
respect only the seal of God.”
“_We_, generically, monsieur would say?”
“Oh! I include myself.” (He made a comprehensive gesture with his
hand.) “Behold the monastic earnest of my renunciation. I am vowed to
a religion of socialism that takes no account of superfluous frippery.
I devote my pen and” (he laughed again) “dissipate my fortune to the
cause of universal happiness.”
“Yourself thereby, I presume, securing the lion’s share.”
“Of happiness? Truly, I think, I have hit upon the right creed for a
spendthrift. But my conscience is the real motive power, monsieur,
though you may be cynical of its methods.”
He spoke with an undernote of some ambiguity. It might have signified
deprecation, or the merest suggestion of mockery.
“And how shall the sacrifice of your fortune promote the common
happiness?” said Ned.
“Plainly, monsieur,” answered St Denys, “by scattering one at least of
the world’s heaps of accumulated corruption. Wealth is like a stack of
manure, a festering load that is the magnet to any wandering fly of
disease. Distribute it and it becomes a blessing that, in fertilising
the soil, loses its own noxious properties. But I would go further and
ask what advantages have accrued from that system of barter that turns
upon a medium of exchange? Has it not cumbered the free earth with
these stacks till there has come to be no outlook save through aisles
and alleys of abomination?”
“That may be true,” said the other, curiously wondering that so much
disputation should be launched upon him at this outset of his
introduction; “but civilisation, during some thousands of years, has
evolved none better.”
M. de St Denys shrugged his shoulders.
“Civilisation!” he cried. “But you retain no faith in that exposed
fetish? Is not civilisation, indeed, one voice of lamentation over its
own disenchantment? Can any condition be worse than that of to-day,
when the ultimate expression of the social code reveals itself a
shameless despotism? Do you ever quite realise--you, monsieur, that
through all this compound multiplication of the world’s figures, its
destinies remain the monopoly of a little clique of private families?
One seems to awaken suddenly to a comical amazement over man’s
age-long subscription to so stupendous a paradox. Let us soothe our
_amour propre_ by submitting that it was an experiment that has proved
itself a failure.”
“Nevertheless, monsieur,” said Ned gravely, “I think that in rejecting
this civilisation by which you profit--in encouraging rebellion
against the established forms that necessity has evolved out of chaos
and wisdom included in its codex--you, to say the least of it, are
moved to drop the substance for the shadow.”
He spoke with some unconscious asperity. He could not bring himself to
admit the entire earnestness of one, of whose self-indulgent character
he had had such recent proof. This metal, he fancied, was plated.
“I cannot believe,” he added, “that so complex a fabric could have
triumphed over the ages had it not been founded upon truth.”
“But successive architects,” cried St Denys, “may have deviated from
the original plan.”
“Still, it holds and it rises; and I for one am content to go up with
it--to re-order its chambers, perhaps, but never to quarrel with the
main design.”
“And I for one would descend and leave it. Ah, bah! one may mount to
the topmost branch of a tree, and yet be no nearer escaping from the
forest. I find myself here in interminable thickets, monsieur. I see
the poor, leaf-blinded denizens of them nosing passionlessly for roots
and acorns in a loveless gloom; and I know the long green fields of
light and pleasure to stretch all round this core of melancholy, if
only these could find the way to win to them. Is self-discipline
necessary to existence? Surely our very butterflies of fashion prove
the contrary.”
“Now what,” thought Ned, “is the goad to this inexplicable character?”
“Does monsieur, then,” said he, “advocate a creed of hedonism?”
“Why not?” cried the other. “Shall not man enlarge, develop, and
become more habitually one with his amiable instincts under the
influence of pleasure, than he ever has done in his bondage to a
religion of self-denial? To deny oneself is to deny God, after whose
image one is made.”
“A pretty conceit,” said Ned; “but it spells degeneracy.”
“Ay, monsieur; and to the very foundations--as far back as the garden
of Paradise.”
“What! You would revert to primitive conditions?”
“To the very ‘naked and unashamed’--but applying to that state the
influence of long traditions of gentle manners. We will admit the
happiness of the community to be the first consideration, and
reconstruct upon a basis of nature.”
A spot of colour came to his cheek. His eyes kindled with a light of
febrile enthusiasm.
“To be free to enjoy, in a world of yielding generosities,” he cried;
“to be cast from restrictions designed to the selfish aggrandisement
of infinitely less than a moiety of our race; to strip indulgence of
the shamefulness that century-long cant has credited it withal--that
is the El Dorado I give my efforts and my substance to attain.”
“There,” thought Ned, “is confessed the animalism to which the other
is but a blind. But this is half-effeminate vapouring.”
He had no sympathy, indeed, with theories so untenable. This
lickerish, unconstructive paganism was far from being the lodestar to
his own revolutionary cock-boat. Yet he could not but marvel over M.
de St Denys’ extremely practical expression of extremely frothy
sentiments. Involuntarily he glanced round the room.
“Yes,” cried the other, observant of the look. “I am not one of those
doctors who refuse their own medicine.”
A thought of surprise seemed to strike him.
“But I run ahead of my manners,” cried he, with a quick laugh. “You
charge me with a letter, and I return you a volley of exposition. I
have not even offered you a seat. Pray accommodate yourself with one.
And you knew my father, sir?”
“I had not the honour. He was a friend of my lord viscount.”
“Who gave you a letter to him. There is figured out the value of the
social relations. He has been dead, sir, since five years. He left two
sons, of whom I am the younger. My brother, Lucien, a sailor, who held
his commission to the West Indies under De Grasse, perished there in
’81 in an explosion of powder. The estate devolved upon me. We have
not your laws of primogeniture, and had poor Lucien returned, we
should have shared the burden and the joy of inheritance----”
He had been leaning carelessly back against a table while he talked.
He now came erect, and added, with a queer look on his face--
“--and the pleasure of welcoming to Méricourt the nephew of our
father’s friend.”
“You are very good, sir,” said Ned.
“I would fain believe it, monsieur. I have the pleasure to offer you
the use of the chateau as an hotel for just so long as you care to
stay.”
Ned, taken momentarily aback, hesitated over the right construction of
so enigmatical an offer.
“Ah!” said the other, “it is to be considered literally.”
“In the business aspect, monsieur?”
“Assuredly. You must understand I have waived the privileges of my
class, amongst which is to be numbered the right to acquit the wealthy
of taxation. The ponds must feed the rivulets, monsieur.”
Seeing his visitor lost in introspection, “_Enfin_,” he cried, with a
musical laugh, “that is the practical side. It is not based, believe
me, upon a system of profits. For the social, I take you to my heart,
monsieur, with all enthusiasm.”
And so Ned became a guest at the chateau at cost price.