Mr Murk was suffering from a _toujours perdrix_ of politics. He
needed, he felt, a prolonged constitutional, both to clear his brain
of a certain blood-web that confused its vision, and to enable him to
sort, in fair communion with the Republic of Nature, his own somewhat
scattered theories of government. He was really unnerved, indeed, by
what he had seen and experienced, and the prospect of quiet woods and
pastures was become dear to his soul. He would return to Méricourt,
as he had promised himself he would do, in the sweet spring
weather--to Méricourt, where the play of Machiavelism was but a
pastoral comedy after all. He would return to Méricourt and paint
into the unfinished eyes of his Madonna the fathomless living sorrow
of doubt--the Son being dead--as to their own divinity.
Of the two hundred miles to traverse he walked the greater
number--sometimes in leisurely, sometimes in hurried fashion, as the
chasing dogs of memory slept or tracked him. But, tramp as he would,
he could not regain that elasticity of heart that once so communicated
itself to the “spirit in his feet.” He had gone to Paris blithe and
curious; he was returning, as the idiom expresses it, with a foot of
nose. In eight months the spouting grass seemed to have lost its
spring. May, with all its voices, could not charm him from foul
recollections; the gloom of slumbering forests was full of murder. Now
for the first time he realised how the great peace he often paused to
wistfully look upon was Nature’s, not his; how, flatter his soul as he
might with a pretence of its partnership in all the noble restfulness
that encompassed it, it stood really an alien, isolated--a suffering,
self-conscious inessential, having no kinship with this material sweet
tranquillity--separated from it, in fact, by just the traverseless
width of that very conscious _ego_. He felt like Satan alighted for
the first time in view of Eden, only to recognise by what plumbless
moat of knowledge he was excluded from its silent lawns and orchards.
This feeling came to him in his worst moods. In his best, he could
take artistic joy of those effects of cloud and country that called
for no elaborate detail in the delineating--that were distant only
proportionately less than the distant unrealities of the stars in the
sky. For the impression of outlawry in a world that was only man’s by
conquest was bitten into his soul for all time; and never again, since
that night spent in the shambles of St Antoine, should he recover and
indulge that ancient sense of irresponsibility towards his share in
the conduct of man’s usurped estate.
“We are,” he thought, “squatters disputing with one another the
possession of land to which we have each and all no title.”
Nevertheless--therefore, rather--his soul acknowledged the opposite to
disenchantment in its review of nature unconverted to misuse. Not
before had pathos so sung to him in the warm throat-notes of birds; so
chimed to him in the tumble of weirs; so looked up into his face from
the fallen blossom on the grass. He might have found his healing of
all things at the time had Love appeared to him in sympathetic guise.
Over the last stages of his journey he took diligence to Liége, and,
at the end of a long week’s ramble, set foot once more in the old
sun-baked town.
Thence, on a gentle evening, he turned his face to Méricourt, and in
a mood half humour, half sadness, retraversed the hills and dingles of
a pleasant experience. Somehow he felt as if he were returning, a
confident prodigal, to ancient haunts of beauty and kindliness.
He had proceeded so far as to have come within a half mile of the
village, when, in thridding his way through a sombre wedge of
woodland, he was suddenly aware of a figure--a woman’s--flitting
before him round a bend in the path. There was that in his momentary
glimpse of the form that led him to double his pace so as to overtake
it. This he had no difficulty in doing, though for a minute it seemed
as if the other were anxious to elude him. But finding, no doubt, the
task beyond her, she stopped and turned of a sudden into a leafy
embrasure set in the track-edge, and stood there awaiting his coming,
her head drooped and her back to a green beech-trunk.
“Théroigne!” cried Ned, nearly breathless. “Théroigne Lambertine!”
“Why do you stop me?” she said, panting, and in a low voice. “You know
the way to Méricourt, monsieur.”
He felt some wonder over her tone.
“Don’t you wish me to speak to you, then? Have you already forgotten
me?”
She did not answer or raise her face.
“Théroigne!” he protested, pleading like an aggrieved boy. “And
little as I saw of you, I have felt, in returning to Méricourt, as if
I were coming back to old friends. I have had enough of Paris and its
horrors, Théroigne.”
At that she looked up at him for the first time. He was amazed and all
concerned. The glowing, rich, defiant beauty he had last seen. And
this--white, fallen, and desolate--the face of a haunted creature!
“What is the matter?” he whispered. “What has happened to you?”
“Paris!” she said in a febrile voice. “Ah, yes, monsieur!--you come
from Paris. And did you see there----”
She checked herself, struck her own mouth savagely with her palm, then
suddenly gripped at the young man’s wrist.
“What are they doing in Paris? Is it there, as he prophesied--the
reign of honour and reason, the reign of pleasure, the emancipation of
the wretched and oppressed? He will be a fine recruit to the cause of
so much republican virtue.”
She breathed quickly; a smouldering fire blazed up in her; her very
voice, that had seemed to Ned starved like her beauty, gathered to
something the remembered volume.
“He? Who?” said he.
She took no notice of the question, but went on in great excitement--
“What are these horrors that you speak of? Have you seen them? What
are they, I say? Do they tear aristocrats limb from limb? This truth
that he used to preach--my God! there is no hope for the world until
they massacre them each one!”
“That who used to preach?” said Ned, quite shocked and bewildered.
“Liars! liars! liars!” cried the girl, striking hand into hand.
Then suddenly she had flung herself round against the tree, and, in a
storm of tears, had buried her head in her arms.
“Go!” she cried, in a muffled voice. “Why do you come back with the
other memories? Why do you notice or speak to me? Can you not see that
I am accursed--an outcast?”
He would have essayed to comfort, to reassure her. Her wayward passion
took his breath away. Even while he hesitated, she turned upon him
once more:--
“Are _you_ not also of the _haute noblesse_? What truth or honour or
courage can be in you, then? Yes, courage, monsieur. You have fled
because you were afraid they would kill you, as _he_ fled before his
pursuing conscience. You will not tell me the truth, because you are
shamed in its revelation. My God! what cowards are you all! But only
say to me that he is dead--stabbed to the heart--and I will fall down
and kiss your feet!”
To Ned, standing there dumfoundered, came an inkling of a tragedy.
“That Suleau,” he was thinking, half mazed, “did he jockey me; and was
it St Denys after all?”
He looked at the stressed and wild-wrought creature before him in
sombre pity.
“So M. de St Denys has left Méricourt?” he said gravely.
At that Mademoiselle Lambertine broke into a shrill laugh.
“M. de St Denys? But who spoke of M. de St Denys? It was he, was it
not, that waived his privileges of honour that he might be on a level
with us that have none? And why should he leave Méricourt, where he
was ever a model and an example of all that he preached?”
“It cannot have been he, then, that I saw in Paris?”
The girl gasped, stared, and took a forward step.
“You saw him? And he was amongst the killed?”
“Théroigne!”
“Monsieur, monsieur! We have heard how the people rose; we are not
here at the bounds of the earth.”
“But it was no slaughter of aristocrats.”
She gazed at him dumbly with feverish eyes, then sighed heavily, shook
her head, and moved out into the open.
“So you come again to Méricourt?” she said. “You will find it
wonderfully changed in these few months. Now we are possessed by a
devil, and now we are under the dominion of a saint. There is an idol
deposed, and a holy image raised in its place. Will you be walking,
monsieur, or shall I go first?”
“We will go together.”
She laughed again with a shrill, mocking sound.
“Mother of God! what an admirable persuasiveness have these
aristocrats! I had thought myself beneath his notice, and, behold! he
would make me his companion--and in the face of the village, too.
Come, then, monsieur. Will you take your _paillarde_ on your arm?”
He listened to her with some compassion (for all her wild speech he
thought her heart was choked with accumulated tears), then moved
forward and walked along the woodland path by her side. To his few
questions she returned but monosyllabic answers. Presently,
however--when they were come out within view of the village fountain,
where Ned’s first meeting with her had taken place--she stayed him
with a hand upon his sleeve.
“‘As she makes her bed, so must she lie on it.’ You see I remember
your words, monsieur. And, if she has made her bed as the virtuous
disapprove, in England she may yet lie soft on it?”
“Without doubt, in England or elsewhere, so long as she lives only for
the present.”
“Ah! little Mother of God! but how natural to these aristocrats comes
the preaching-cant.”
All in a moment her eyes and her speech softened most wooingly, and
she put up her hands, in a characteristic coaxing manner, to the young
man’s breast.
“I am ill and weary now,” she said. “It is not good to suffer long the
hatred of one’s kinsfolk, the gibes of one’s familiars. But in another
atmosphere I should learn to resume myself--at least to resume all
that of me that concerns the regard of men. The result would be worth
the possessing, monsieur. Monsieur, when you return to England, will
you take me with you?”
As she spoke, a light step sounded coming up the meadow-path, before
mentioned, that ran into the head of the woodland. It approached;
Théroigne, with a conscious look, fell back a little; and
immediately, moving staid and decorous over the young grass, the white
lodge-keeper of the chateau came into view. She suffered, Ned could
see, one momentary shock of indecision as her eyes encountered his;
then she advanced, and, without a word, went on her way into the wood.
But, as she passed, she acknowledged Ned’s salutation with a grave
little inclination of her head, and with the act was not forgetful to
withdraw her skirts from contact with those of Mademoiselle
Lambertine, who, for her part, shrank back and made not the least show
of protest or resentment.
Ned, however, regarded with some twinkle of amusement the slow-pacing
figure till it was out of sight, and then he only turned to Théroigne
with a questioning look.
The girl came up to him again, but doubtfully now, it seemed, and with
a certain wide awe in her eyes.
“You must not say it, monsieur,” she whispered; “you must not say what
I can read on your lips. She has seen the Blessed Virgin since you
were last here--has seen and spoken with her.”
“God forgive me for a scoffer! And that is why she is all in blue, I
suppose, and why her blue skirt must not touch hems with your red
one?”
Théroigne hung her head.
“When does monsieur return to England?” she said only.
Ned clasped his hands behind his head and stretched vigorously.
“Very soon, I think. Mademoiselle Théroigne, I am tired of you all.
Very soon, I think.”
She made as if she would have touched him again; but he gently put her
away from him. At that she looked up in his eyes very forlorn and
pleading.
“Mademoiselle Théroigne,” said he, “I do not know or ask you your
story. Here, since I left, all flowers seem to have run to a seed that
is best not scattered abroad. I cannot, of course, prevent your going
to London if you choose. Only, for myself, I must tell you, that
myself is at present as much as I can undertake to direct and govern.
Besides, it is not at all likely that you would find _him_ there.”
In an instant she was again all scorn and passion. Her lip lifted and
showed her teeth. She humped her shoulders; her hands clinched in
front of her.
“Not to understand,” she cried, “that that is my very reason for
desiring the refuge of your barbarous land! To escape from myself and
the murder in me!”
“But why leave Méricourt at all?”
The blight of her fury was as sudden as the blast that springs from a
glacier.
“May _you_ know what it is to roll in a trough of spikes and find no
release in your agony! Cold, passionless, insolent! Lazarus, to refuse
to dip your finger in water! But I will go in spite of you: I will go,
monsieur, and laugh and snap my fingers in your face!”
“Permit me to say,” said Ned coolly, “that this is a very foolish and
unnecessary exhibition of temper.”
But she flounced round her shoulder and ran from him, storming and
crying out, and disappeared down the track leading to her home. And,
as for him--he went on to the “Landlust.”