In Nicette’s little lodge, doors and windows stood all open. Even
then the languid air that entered fell fainting almost on the
threshold. The heat of many preceding days seemed accumulated in vast
bales of clouds piled up from the horizon. It scintillated, livid and
coppery, through its enormous envelopes, eating its way forth with
menace of a flood of fire.
Obviously the dairy was the nearest approach to a temperate zone, and
thither Ned bent his steps, carrying his paint-box and canvas. He
found the girl there, as he had expected. She was seated knitting near
the flung casement, wherethrough came a hot scent of geranium flowers.
In the blinding garden without silence panted like a drouthy dog. Only
the horn, high on its perch, found breath to bemoan itself, gathering
up the folds of muteness with an attenuated thread of complaint.
Mademoiselle Legrand looked cool and fragrant, for all the house was
an oven; but a little bloom of damp was on her face, like dew on a
rose. In a corner, standing with his hands behind his back and his
front to the wall, Baptiste, the sad-eyed child, did penance for some
transgression, it would appear.
“I must not lose my Madonna for a misunderstanding,” said Ned.
Nicette rose to her feet, flushing vividly to her brow. The weary
white face of the boy was turned in astonishment to the intruder.
“Monsieur,” said the _portière_, in a little agitated voice, “you
must not ask me. For one you hold so cheap to represent the stainless
mother! It cannot be, monsieur.”
Ned deposited his paraphernalia on a chair, went up to his whilom
model, and took her hands in his with gentle force.
“Nicette,” he murmured, so that the child should not hear him, “I
refuse, you know, to accept this responsibility. It is your own
consciousness of justification, or otherwise, that is in question. The
mother had a human as well as a divine side. I will use you for the
first.”
“Use me!” she whispered. “Monsieur----”
She drooped her head--tried to withdraw her hands. Her lips faltered
desperately on the word.
“Tell me the truth, little Nicette. May not a saint love guava jelly?
It is a fruit of the sweet earth--perhaps the very manna of the
Israelites.”
He held her young soft wrists in hostage for an answer--much concerned
for an exchange of confidence. The girl, making a _lac d’amour_ of her
fingers, suddenly came to her decision.
“I am very wicked,” she said in a small voice, between eagerness and
tears; “I am not a saint at all. Monsieur may do with me as he will.”
Now surely this young man had the fairy Temperance to his godmother
when he was christened. His point gained, he disposed his model with a
very pretty eye to business, and was soon at work.
“Nicette,” said he, “how has this youthful whipper-snapper
misconducted himself?”
“Baptiste, monsieur? He was dainty with his food; and--the day was
hot, and perhaps I was ever so little cross.”
She accepted the understanding, it will be seen--thrilled perhaps over
the secret ecstasy implied in this prospect of a lay confessor.
“Well, _ma chérie_,” said Ned, “you may relax discipline now, may you
not? It worries me to have this inconversable ape criticising me from
his corner.”
“Baptiste,” said Nicette, “you may go and play--in the shadow,
Baptiste.”
The child went out dully, with a lifeless step. It would seem he
recognised no enticing novelty in the form of words.
“Now we will have a comfortable coze,” said Ned.
“How, monsieur?”
“That means we will exchange confidences, girl.”
Nicette smiled.
“You do not love children, monsieur?” she asked.
“Truly, I think not. They know, I fancy, so much more than they will
tell. I feel nervous in their company, as if they might blackmail me
if they would. It is no use to be conscious of my own innocence. Vague
terrors assail me that they may be in possession of dark secrets that
I have forgotten. For them, they never forget.”
“It is so, indeed, with little doubt.”
“Is it not? They inherit the ages, one must admit. They are like eggs,
full of the concentrated meat of wisdom; and as such it is right to
sit upon them. It is a self-protective instinct thus to hurry their
development, for so their abnormal precocity distributes itself over
an ever-increasing area and weakens in its acuteness.”
“And they have cunning, monsieur.”
“Without doubt--the cunning to evoke and trade upon sympathy with
sufferings that they pretend to, but are physically incapable of
feeling.”
The girl looked up, her eyes expressive of some strangeness of
emotion.
“Are they not able to feel, then, monsieur?”
“Not as we do, Nicette. Their nervous organism has not yet come to
tyrannise over the spiritual in them. Turn thy head as before,
_babouine_. The light falls crooked on thy mouth. No; I wish never to
be burdened with a child, either my own or another’s.”
A low boom of thunder rolled up the sky. Nicette started and drove her
chair back a little distance from the window.
“That is vexatious of you, you pullet. Are you afraid of thunder?”
“Oh yes--dear mother!--when it is close.”
“But that is yet far away.”
“It will advance--it is the _diligence_ of the skies bringing inhuman
company. _Mon Dieu_! when one hears the driver crack his whip, and the
horses plunge forward, and there follows the rumbling of the wheels!”
“Talk on. I love to hear thee. But take courage first to resume thy
pose.”
“Monsieur, I am frightened.”
“What, with me for thy Quixote! I have conquered windmills before now.
There--that is to be a good child. Do you find it hard to understand
my chatter?”
“Monsieur, on the contrary, is an adept at our language.”
“This is nothing to how I speak it when I have a cold. Still, do you
know, I have never quite got over the feeling that it is very clever
of a Frenchman to talk French. ‘And so it is,’ Théroigne would say,
but you will not. Nicette, have you ever heard speak of the Club of
Nature’s Gentry? What a question, is it not? But I like to hear you
laugh like little bells.”
“Monsieur, it is a very dull club.”
“Which is the reason you are not a member?”
“A member! oh, _mon Dieu_! that is not my notion of enjoyment.”
“Great heaven! Here is an astonishing shift of the point of view.”
“How, monsieur?”
“Never mind. So, freedom of speech is not to your fancy?”
“It is not freedom, but an excuse for silly licence. Those clowns and
the grotesque small Boppard--it is to discuss wine, not politics, that
they assemble. A full mug is the only challenge they invite, and the
larger the measure, the greater that of their courage. But they talk
so much into empty pots that their voices sound very big to them.”
“Not Boppard, mademoiselle. He at least hath this justification--that
he is a poet.”
“Has monsieur discovered it, then? Monsieur is cleverer than all
Méricourt. We must make monsieur the student a crown of vine leaves.”
“Nicette, dost thou think I will suffer a pullet to cackle at me?
What, then, if not a poet?”
“But a maker of charades impossible to interpret, by monsieur’s
permission.”
“My permission, you jade! Here is the measure of _your_ courage, I
think. And have you no fear that I shall make M. de St Denys
acquainted with your opinion of his club?”
“None, monsieur.”
The thunder rolled again. The girl, starting and clasping her hands,
cried--
“Monsieur, let me come from the window! Oh, monsieur, let me, and I
will light a blest candle!”
“A little longer--just a little longer. I foresee a darkness
presently, and then, lest my Madonna be blotted from my sight, the
candle shall burn.”
The girl looked out fearfully at the advancing van of the storm. It
was still brilliant sunshine in the garden, but with an effect as if
the outposts of noon were falling back upon their centre, already
half-demoralised in prospect of an overwhelming charge. The wind, too,
beginning to move like that that precedes an avalanche, was scouting
through the shrubberies with a distant noise of innumerable tramping
feet; and the fitful moaning of the horn rose to a prolonged scream,
that drew upon the heart with a point of indescribable anguish.
“Why, however,” said Ned, “have you no apprehension that I shall tell
tales to M. de St Denys?”
“I said I had no fear, monsieur.”
“Would he not resent this so unflattering opinion of his satellites?”
“What is his own of them, does monsieur think?--that a tipsy boor
assists the cause of freedom? Monsieur, my master is not blind, save
perhaps in thinking others so. _Saint Sacrement_! the sun has gone
out! It was as if a wave of cloud extinguished it.”
“Never mind that. In thinking others blind to what, girl?”
“I must not say--indeed, I must not say.”
“Is this to be a saint--to damn with innuendo? Fie, then, Nicette!”
“Monsieur, do not be angry. Oh, I will tell you whatever you will.
This club then, it is a pretext, one cannot but assume--a veil to hide
perilous sentiments, not of politics, but of----”
“But of what?”
The girl hung her head. The increasing gloom without lent its shadow
to her face.
“Monsieur has no mercy,” she whispered.
“But of what, Nicette? Tell me.”
“Monsieur--of intrigue.”
As if the very word completed an electric circuit and discharged the
battery, a flash answered it, followed almost immediately by a
splintering shock of thunder. The girl uttered a shriek, started to
her feet, and ran to the middle of the room, holding her hands to her
eyes.
“I am blind!” she wailed--“oh, I am blind!”
Ned hurried to her--gripped her shoulder.
“Nonsense!” he cried; “it will pass in a moment. Let me look.”
He could hardly hear his own voice. The lightning might have been a
bursting shell that had rent a dam. The thunder of the rain out-roared
that of the clouds--overbore the struggling wind and pinned it to the
earth--smote upon the roof in tearing volleys, and made of all the
atmospheric envelope a crashing loom of water.
“Nicette!” cried the young man, frightened to see the girl yet hide
her face from him. He was conscious of something crouching at her
feet, and, looking down, saw that terror had driven Baptiste, the
little boy, to the refuge of their company.
In his panic, Ned impulsively seized the maid into his arms.
“You are not hurt!” he implored. “I kept you by the window. My God! if
you should be injured through my fault!”
She was not at least so stunned but that his impassioned self-reproach
could inform her cheeks with a rose of fire. The stain of it, could he
have seen, soaked to the very white nape of her neck.
“Hold me,” she whimpered. “Don’t let me go, or I shall die!”
She strained to him, patently and without any thought of
dissimulation, palpitating with terror as the rain roared and the
frequent detonations shook the house. In the first of his apprehension
he thought of nothing compromising in the situation--of nothing but
his own concern and the girl’s pitiful state.
Presently, in a lull, he heard her exclaiming--
“Mother of God! if I were to go blind!”
“Don’t suggest such a thing!” he cried in anguish.
“Would you be sorry--even for poor Nicette, monsieur?”
“Sorry, child! Look up, in God’s name!”
She raised her face. Her lids flickered and opened.
“Can you see?” he asked, distraught and eager.
“I--something--a little,” murmured the unconscionable gipsy. “I can
see monsieur’s face--far or near--which is it?”
She put up a timid hand. Her fingers fluttered like a moth against his
temple.
“I don’t think I am blind, monsieur. My eyes----”
In his jubilation he took her head between his palms, and, with a
boyish laugh, kissed each of the blue flowers--to make them open, he
said.
“No, I am not blind,” said she.