Pretty early on the morning following his arrival in Méricourt, Ned
strolled up the easy slope leading to the lodge of the chateau, and
found himself lingering over against the embowered gates with a queer
barm of humour working upon a commixture of emotions in his breast.
Now it seemed that his very neighbourhood to the Madonna of his memory
was effecting a climatic change both within and without him. For the
first, little runnels of irresponsible gaiety gushed in his veins; for
the second, the weather, that had been indifferent fine during his
journey, appeared to have broken all at once into full promise of
summer. It was not, indeed, that his sympathies enlarged in the near
presence of one who might hold herself as a little moon of desire. It
was rather, perhaps, because in the one-time surrender of her very
soul to his inspection, she had made of him a confederate in certain
unspoken secrets, the knowledge of which was to him like a sense of
proprietorship in a picturesque little country-seat. Yet here, it may
be acknowledged, he indulged something a dangerous mood.
He stood a minute before passing through the gates. The warmth of a
windless night still slept in the velvety eyes of the roadside
flowers. Morning was heaping off its bed-linen of glistening clouds.
From a chestnut-tree came the drowsy drawl of a yellow-hammer. A
robin--small fashionable idler of birds--abandoned the problem of a
fibrous seed and, flickering to a stump, discussed the stranger
impertinently and with infinite society relish. Only the swifts were
alert and busy, flashing, poising, diving under the eaves; thridding
Ned’s brain as they passed with a receding sound like that made by
pebbles hopping over ice; seeming, in their flight of warp and woof,
to be mending the pace set by the loitering day. Feeling their
activity a rebuke, the visitor passed through the open gate.
Within, all was yet more pretty orderliness than that he had once
admired. The lodge stood, sequestered trimness, between the luminous
green of its porch and the high rearward trees that spouted up into
the sky, full fountains of tumbling young leaves. The little paths
were swept; the little long beds, bordered with _trique-madame_ and
planted with lusty perennials, were combed orderly as the hair of
their mistress, and weeded to the least vulgar seedling; white
curtains hung in the cottage windows; and everywhere was an added
refinement of daintiness--a suggestion of increased prosperity.
“Now, Mademoiselle Legrand,” thought Ned, “has shown herself a little
person of resource.”
He could hear the moan of the horn coming familiarly to him from the
back garden. The sweet complaining cry woke some queer memories in
him. He went forward a few paces up the drive--walking straight into
weediness and the tangle of neglect--that he might get glimpse of the
chateau. The place, when he saw it, glowered from an encroaching
thicket. Even these few months seemed to have confirmed the ruin that
had before only threatened. Its dusty upper windows were viscous, he
could have thought, with the tracks of snails. Grass had made good its
footing on the roof. It looked a forgotten old history of the past,
with a toppling chimney, half dislodged in some gale, for dog’s-ear.
Ned turned his back on the desolate sight, and lo! there was the
bright patch of brick and flower like a garden redeemed from the
desert. It appeared to point the very moral of the times, but in its
ethical, not its savage significance. He went to seek the priestess of
this little temple of peace.
As he turned into the garden, a peasant woman was coming out at the
lodge door. She had an empty basket lined with a clean napkin on her
arm.
“_Que la sainte virge vous bénissè par sa servante_!” she murmured
as she passed by the visitor.
Nicette was nowhere visible. Ned stole into the house and along the
passage. A strip of thick matting, where had formerly been naked
flags, deadened the sound of his footfalls. Laughter, but laughter a
little thrilling, tingled in his veins. A certain apprehension, that
time might not have dealt as drastically as he had desired it would
with a misconstructive fancy, was lifted from his mind since
yesterday. He felt there could be small doubt but that his own image
had been deposed and replaced by a very idol of vanity--a
self-conscious Adaiah that must find its supremest gratification in
proving its consistency with the character assigned it. Indeed, his
moderate faith in himself as an attractive quantity inclined him,
perhaps, to underrate his moral influence. He had not yet learned that
to many women there is no chase so captivating as that of incarnate
diffidence.
He came softly upon Nicette in the dairy that was a little endeared to
him by remembrance. Perhaps he would not have ventured unannounced to
seek her in the more inner privacy of her own nest. But the cool dairy
was good for a neutral ground. She stood with her back to him. The
sunlight, reflected from vivid leafiness through the window, made a
soft luminosity of the curve of her cheek, that was like the pale
under-side of a peach. It ruffled the rebellious tendrils of hair on
her forehead into a mist of green; it stained her white chaperon with
tender vert, and discoloured the straight blue folds of her dress. Was
she, he thought, a half-converted dryad or a lapsing saint?
“Nicette!” he said aloud.
She gave a strangled gasp and faced about, her eyes scared, a hand
upon her bosom. She had been disposing on a slab a little gift of
spring chickens and some household preserves.
“Did I startle you?” said Ned. “But you knew I was returned and must
surely come and see you.”
“Monsieur, you steal upon me like a ghost,” she muttered.
“Of what, girl? Of no regret, I hope?”
Her cheek was gathering a little dawn of colour.
“All ghosts of the past are sorrowful,” she said low.
“True,” he answered, seriously and gently. “I did not mean to awaken
sad memories. And thou hast never had news of the little one?”
“Never, monsieur.”
“It is lamentable.”
Her eyes were watching him intently.
“You commiserate me, monsieur?” she said.
“How can you doubt it, Nicette?”
“Yet you do not love children?”
“Don’t I?”
“But their cunning and their vindictiveness, monsieur?”
“What of them?”
“What, indeed? It is monsieur’s own words I recall.”
“Nicette, can you think me such a brute? I hold myself abashed in the
presence of the innocents. If I have ever decried them, it was only
because their truthfulness rebuked my scepticism. They have shown me
how to die, since I saw you last, Nicette. I shall try to remember
when my hour comes.”
She passed a hand across her eyes, as though she were bewildered.
“But this inconsistency,” she began, murmuring.
Suddenly she straightened herself, and came forward.
“Truly, I knew you were arrived, monsieur; and you reintroduce
yourself to good company on your return to Méricourt.”
“And truly I do not take my cue from a scandalous world to
cold-shoulder an old friend.”
He came sternly into the dairy, and sat himself down on the slab by
the chickens, his legs dangling.
“Sit there,” he said, and dragged a chair with his foot to his near
neighbourhood.
The girl hesitated, shrugged her shoulders, and obeyed.
“Monsieur, it is evident, has not learned----” she was beginning. He
caught the sentence from her:--
“That you are a saint? No, I have not learned it in these few
minutes--unless innuendo is the prerogative of sanctity. I, a sinner,
met a fallen woman yesterday, and I pitied her.”
Mademoiselle Legrand hung her head. Ned recovered his good-humour and
laughed.
“Oh, little Sainte Nicette!” he said. “Why do you let me talk to you
like this? Because you are a saint? Then I will not take a base
advantage of your condition. But shall I finish the portrait, Madonna?
I have been brought face to face in Paris with the divine suffering of
mothers. I have discovered the secret of the eyes. Shall I finish the
portrait, Nicette?”
She shook her head.
“But think how you could instruct me, girl! The lineaments--the very
form and expression; for you have seen them!”
“Hush!” she exclaimed, in a terrified whisper. “Oh, monsieur, hush! It
is blasphemy; it is terrible. _I_ to pose for the divinity revealed to
me! Surely, you are mad!”
He leaned down to her as he sat.
“Nicette,” he murmured, “there is an old confidence between us, you
know, and I recall your fine gift of imagination. Confess that it is
all an invention.”
“That what is an invention?”
“Do you not know? This vision in the woods, then.”
She sprang to her feet. A line of red came across her forehead.
“You mock me!” she cried. “I might have known that you would; but it
is none the less hateful and cruel. Believe or not as you will.”
She was enraged as he had never seen her before.
“But these offerings,” he said, quite coolly: “the chickens and the
little pots of jam, Nicette--or is it guava jelly? One may make a good
investment of the imagination, I see.”
It was not pleasant of him; but he could be merciless to what he
considered a bad example of _escamoterie_.
For a moment the girl looked like a very harpy. Her fingers crooked on
the bosom of her dress as if she would have liked to lacerate her
heart in desperate despite of its assailant. Then, suddenly, she
dropped back upon her chair, and, covering her face with her hands,
broke into a very pitiful convulsion of weeping.
_Qui se fait brebis, le loup le mange_!
Assuredly Ned had invited his own discomfiture. He had thought to
operate upon this tender conscience without any right knowledge of the
position of its arteries of emotion. He had bungled and let loose the
flood, and straightway he was scared over the result of his own
recklessness.
He let Mademoiselle Legrand cry a little while, not knowing how to
compromise with his convictions. He loved truth, but was not competent
to cope with its erring handmaid.
At last: “Nicette!” he whispered, and put his hand timidly on the
girl’s shoulder.
She wriggled under his touch.
“No, no!” she sobbed, in a drowned voice. “It is terrible to be so
hated and despised.”
“I do not hate you, little fool,” he said. “You beg the question. For
what reason, Nicette? Are you afraid, or at a loss, to describe to me
this vision?”
She seemed to check her weeping and to listen, though her bosom was
still heavy with sobs.
“I am afraid,” she whispered.
“Of me? Nicette, shall I not finish the portrait?”
“No, no!”
“But you have seen the Mother, and know what she is like.”
“You would not believe.”
“At least put my credulity to the test.”
A long pause succeeded. The sobs died into silence. By-and-by the girl
looked up--not at her inquisitor, but vaguely apart from him and away,
as if her gaze were introspective. She clasped her hands together,
holding them thus, in reverential attitude, against her throat.
“Nicette,” murmured Ned, “tell me--what is the Mother like?”
“It was a mist, monsieur, out of which a face grew like a sweet-briar
blossom--a face, and then all down to her pink feet that trod the
wind-flowers of the wood. Within her hair were little nests of light,
glowing green and violet, that came and went, or broke and were
shattered into a rain of golden strands. They were the tears she had
shed beneath the cross. She wore the wounds, a five-pointed star, upon
her breast, and I saw the rising and falling of her heart as it were
the glowing of fire behind wood ashes. All about her, and about me,
was a low thick murmur of voices that I could not understand. But
sometimes I thought I saw the brown fearful eyes of the little people
look from under the hanging fronds of fern, imploring to put their
lips to the white buds of her feet. Then _her_ eyes gathered me to
their embrace; and I sailed on a blue sea, and was taken into the arms
of the wind and kissed so that I seemed to swoon.”
She paused, breathing softly.
“Truly,” said Ned: “this was the very pagan Queen of Love.”
“She is the Queen of Love, monsieur, else had my eyes never been
opened to see the little folk of the greenwoods. For to be Queen of
Love is to be Queen of Nature, and both titles hath she from _le Bon
Dieu_.”
Suddenly the girl edged a little nearer her companion, looked up in
his face appealingly, and put her clasped hands upon his knee as he
sat.
“God made Nature, monsieur,” she whispered. “God is Love. Oh, I read
in the sweet eyes many things that were strange to my
traditions!--even that human side of the Mother, that monsieur has
sought to disclose. God is Love, and He hath given us passion, not
forbidding us passion’s cure.”
Ned’s brows took a startled frown, and he made as if to rise. Nicette
stole her hand quickly to his.
“Monsieur, it cannot be wrong to love--it cannot be that He would lend
Himself as a subtle lure to the very sin His code denounces. It is the
code--it is the Church that has misconstrued Him.”
Something in the young man’s face gave her pause in the midst of her
panting eagerness. She drew back immediately, with a little artificial
laugh.
“_La Sainte Marie_ was all in white,” she said, “with a blue cloak the
colour of the skies. And what is the fashion with the fine ladies in
London, monsieur?”
Mr Murk had got to his feet.
“Mademoiselle Legrand,” he said, “you are all of Heloïse, I think,
without the erudition. Now, I am not orthodox; yet I think your
description of the Virgin very prettily blasphemous. And what has
become of the serpent and the globe of liquid purple? You can explain
your picture, I see, to accommodate the views of its critics. I admire
you very much, and I bid you good day.”
He was going. She leapt across his path and stayed him. A bright spot
of colour had sprung to her cheek.
“You will leave me?” she cried hoarsely. “You shall not go, thinking
me a liar!”
“No more than the author of ‘Julie,’” he said, drily and stubbornly.
“You have the fine gift of romance, but I don’t like your vision.”
“It is the truth! I give you but one of the hundred impressions it
made upon me.”
“Very well. It is a bad selection, so far as I am concerned.”
“How could I know--you, that have traded upon my confidence! You tempt
me and throw me aside. I will not be so shamed--I, that am no longer
obscure--whose every word is worth----”
“As much as one of M. Voltaire’s, no doubt. He may value his
commercially, at ten sous or fifty. What then? You have the popular
ear. Do you want to make your profit of me also?”
She twined her fingers together, and held them backwards against her
bosom.
“Whither are you going?” she panted.
“I am on my way back to England.”
She took a quick step forward.
“You shall not leave me like this! You have made me what I am.
Monsieur--monsieur----”
In a moment the storm broke. Once more she was drowned in tears. She
threw herself upon him, and her arms about his neck.
“It is love!” she cried. “You are my God and my desire. I have
followed you in my heart these long months--oh, how piteously! Do
anything with me you will. Disbelieve me, spurn me, stamp on me--only
let me love you! These months--oh, these desolate, sick months!”
She clung to him, entreating and caressing, though he muttered “For
shame!” and strove to disentangle her fingers. She would not be denied
in this first convulsive self-consciousness of her surrender.
“I will give myself the lie: invite the hatred and scorn of the world:
swear my soul to damnation by acknowledging myself an impostor, if
that will make you merciful and kind--no, not even kind, but to take
me with you. I will admit I am vile in all but my love: that you
tempted me unwittingly: that you had no thought of being cruel--of
being anything but your own gracious self, to whom a foolish maiden’s
heart fled crying because it could not help it!”
Catching glimpse in her passion of the stony impassibility of his
face, she fell upon her knees, clasping her arms about him and
sobbing--
“You must speak--you must speak, or I shall die! You don’t know what
binds me to you. Not your love, or your respect or pity: only a little
mercy--just enough, one finger held out to save me from falling into
the abyss! Look here and here! Am I not white and sweet? I have
cherished myself ever since you went and my heart nearly broke. I have
thought all day and all night, ‘What bar to his approach can I remove
if some day he shall come again?’ And when at last I saw you were
returned, I would have given all the vain months of adulation for one
glad word of welcome from your lips.”
She grovelled lower, writhing her face down into her arms.
“Only to be yours!” she moaned: “to do with as you will.”
At that at last he stooped, and dragged her forcibly to her feet. She
stood before him trembling and dishevelled, and he glared at her,
breathing heavily like one that had run a race.
“Before God, I never knew,” he said: “but you shame me and yourself. I
will believe your story if you wish it; and what does that lead
to?--that I hear you abusing the high choice of Heaven--misapplying
God’s truth to the abominable sophistries of passion. Not love, but
the foulest--there! I won’t shame you more. I think I have never heard
such subtle blasphemy. To hope to influence me by casuistry so
crooked! If you ever awakened my interest, you have lost the power for
ever. Mercy! the utmost I can show you is by passing here and now out
of your life----”
She broke in with an agonised cry--
“_Mon Dieu_! Oh, my God! Not so to stultify all I have suffered and
done for your sake!”
“What you have done!” he cried fiercely. “I am no party to the vile
chicanery. For your sufferings--they will cease when the fuel of this
passion is withdrawn. Such fires blaze up and out in a day.”
He was cruel, no doubt--crueller than he meant to be; but his heart
was wrathful over the baseness of the snare set for it.
On the echo of his voice there came the sound of approaching steps up
the road. He recovered his composure on the instant.
“You will have visitors,” he said. “You had best go and make yourself
fit to meet them. You will know where your interests lie. For me, the
most I can do is to treat all this as a mad confidence.”
He was going; but she pressed upon him, panting and desperate.
“Don’t leave me like this! There--into the bedroom, till they are
gone! Monsieur, for pity’s sake! You put too much upon me. I will
explain. For God’s sake, monsieur!”
He drove past her--hurried down the passage. As he neared the door, he
saw the light obscured by a couple of entering figures--a
complacent-smiling curé, who ushered in a fashionable pilgrim
exhaling musk and tinkling with gewgaws.
“_Exortum est in tenebris lumen rectis_,” murmured the priest as he
gave place with a slight bow.
“Exactly so,” said Ned, and made his way to the road.
There he stood a moment, blinking and gulping down the fresh spring
air.