Mr Murk walked straight from the lodge of the chateau out of the
village, stopping only on his way to take up his knapsack at the
“Landlust.” He moved, very haughty and inflexible, with a high soul of
offence at the attempt manifested to subject him to the charge of
collusion in what he considered a particularly unpleasant species of
fraud. It was that, more than the outrage to his continent
self-respect, that angered and insulted him--that he could under any
circumstances be deemed approachable by imposture, even though it
should solicit in ravishing guise. He had never as yet, indeed,
through any phases of fortune, regarded himself as other than a
philosophic alien to his race; a disinterested spectator of its wars
of creeds and senses, perched out of the battle on a little cloudy
eminence of spiritual reserve, whence it was his humour to analyse the
details of the contest for the gratifying of a curious intellectual
cosmopolitanism. And even when for nearer view of some party struggle
he had descended--or condescended--so far as that he had felt upon his
face the very bloody sprinkle of the strife, he had chosen to read, in
the emotions excited in his breast, an instinctive revolt against the
injustice of pain, rather than a sympathy with the sufferings of which
he was witness.
Now, however, he seemed to have realised in a moment by what common
means Nature is able to impeach this treason of aloofness. He had held
himself a thing altogether apart in that conflict of blurred,
indefinite forms. He had been like a spectator watching an illuminated
sheet at an entertainment, when (to adopt a modern image) there had
sounded in an instant the click of the cinematograph snapping the blur
into focus, and, lo! he beheld his own figure active amongst the
crowd, a constituent atom travelling through or with it, a mean, small
condition of its gregariousness--repellent, attractive,
infinitesimally influential, according to the common degree of his
kind. Holding his soul, as he fancied, veracious and remote, he had
seen it magnetic, in its supposed isolation, to another that, in its
essential guile, in its infirmity and untruth, would seem to be his
spirit’s actual antithesis, yet whose destinies, rebel as he might,
must henceforth for evermore be associated with his. He was no amateur
counsel to a recording angel, in fact, but just a human organism
subject to the influences of neighbour temperaments.
Now, the considerable but lesser pang in this shock to his pride of
solitariness was felt in the realisation of his impotence to claim
exemption from the ordinary vulgar taxes imposed by the gods upon
vulgar animal instincts. He must be sought if he would not seek; nor
could he by any means escape the penalties of his manly attributes. He
was a thing of desire; therefore he represented the one moiety of the
race to which he would have fain considered himself an alien.
But he did not regard with any present sentiment but that of anger the
woman who had thus been the means to his proper understanding of his
own personal insignificance. For her sex, indeed, he had no natural
liking but that negatively conveyed in a sort of chivalrous contempt
for its inconsequence (whereby--though he did not know it--he may have
offered himself an unconscious Bertram to a score of Helenas). Now, to
find his austere particular self made the object of a sacrifice of
utter truth and decency, both alarmed and disgusted him. The very jar
of the discovery tumbled him from cloud to earth. Yet, be it said, if
it brought him with a run from his removed heights, he was to fall
into that garden of the world where the loves, their thighs yellow
with pollen, flutter from flower to flower.
For by-and-by, in the very glow and fever of his indignation, he
startled to sudden consciousness of the fact that it was the implied
insult to his honesty, rather than that actual one to his sense of
modesty, that most offended him; that his heart was indulging a little
rebellious memory of a late dream, it appeared, that was full of a
strange pressure of tenderness. He caught himself sharply from the
weakness; yet it would recur. He began to question the propriety of
his attitude towards women generally. Serenely self-centred, perhaps
he had never realised the necessity of being, in a world of
artificiality, other than himself. Now he faintly gathered how poor a
policy of virtue might be implied thereby--how, under certain
conditions, Virtue might be held its own justification for assuming an
_alias_.
And thereat came the first reaction in a pretty series of moral
rallies and relapses.
“Bah!” he muttered, “the girl is a little lying _cocotte_--a Lamia
from whose snares I am fortunate to have escaped without a wound.”
In the meantime his heart turned towards home with a strange heat of
yearning--towards his England of stolid factions and sober,
unemotional sympathies; of regulated hate and the liberal schooling of
love. He had submitted himself to much physical and mental suffering
in order to the acquirement of a right understanding of men; and at
the last a woman had upset and scattered his classified collection of
principles with a whisk of her skirt. He felt it was useless to
attempt to rearrange his specimens unless in an atmosphere not
inimical to sobriety.
“I will go home,” he thought, as he stepped rapidly forward. “And at
any rate I am here at length out of the wood;” and straightway, poor
rogue, he fell into a second ambush by the roadside.
For, coming to a sudden turn in his path when he was breaking from the
copses a half mile out of the village, he was suddenly aware of a
shrill cackle of vituperation, of such particular import to him at the
present crisis as to constrain him to stop where he was and listen.
“_Oh, çà, Valentin--çà-çà-çà_!” hooted a booby voice. “A
twist, and thou hast secured it! _Oh, çà_! bring it away and we will
look.”
“Let go!” panted another voice, in a heat of jeering violence. “I will
have it, I say!”
Then Ned heard Théroigne, pleading and tearful--
“Valentin, thou shalt not! It is mine! What right hast thou to rob and
insult me?”
“The right that thou art a _putain_--a snake in the grass of a virgin
community. Give it me, or I will break thy arm. Right, indeed! but
every well-doer has a right to act the executive.”
“Thou shalt not take it!”
“You will prevent me? Oh, the strength of this conscious virtue! And
does not thy refusal damn thee? Pull across, Charlot! I will wrench
her arms out. It is another accursed whelp that she has strangled and
would bury in the wood.”
“You vile, cruel beast!” cried the girl.
“_Oh, hé_--scream, then!” panted the other, while Charlot sniggered
throatily. “There is no riggish lord now to justify thee in thy
assaults on decent landholders. I will look, if only for the sake of
that memory. Thou wert the prospective fine lady, wert thou? _Oh, mon
Dieu_! and what ploughboy has ministered to thee for this in the
bundle?”
Mr Murk, indignant but embarrassed, had stood so far uncertain as to
his wise course of action. Now, however, a shriek of obvious pain that
came from the girl decided him. He hurried round the intercepting
corner and saw Mademoiselle Lambertine, blowsed and weeping, flung
amongst the roots of a tree. Hard by, where the trunks opened out to
the road-track, a couple of clowns, bent eagerly over a bundle they
had torn from their victim, were discussing the contents of their
prize--a few poor toilet affairs, some bright trinketry of lace and
ribbons, a dozen apples, and a loaf of white cocket-bread.
All three lifted their heads, startled at the sound of his approach.
Théroigne sat up; the boors got clumsily to their feet. In one of
these loobies Ned had a sure thought that he recognised the fellow
whose face had once been scored by those very feminine fingers that
were now so desperately clutching and pulling at the grass amongst the
tree-roots. He could see the red cheeks, he fancied, still chased with
the marks of that reprehensible onset. The other rogue, he was equally
certain, was of those that had baited a wretched Cagot on a morning
nine months ago.
Here, then, was the right irony of event--a huntress Actæon torn by
her own hounds. Ned stepped forward deliberately, but with every
muscle of his body screwed tight as a fiddle-string.
Come over against the clodpoles: “You are pigs and cowards!” said he,
and he gave the farmer an explosive smack on the jaw.
The assault was so violent and unexpected, the will that inspired it
was so obviously set in the prologue of vicious possibilities, that
the victim collapsed where he stood, bellowing like a bull-frog. It is
true that he lacked a familiar stimulus to his courage.
“Now,” said Ned, “return those goods to the bundle and fasten them in;
or, by the holy Virgin of Méricourt, I’ll lay an information against
you for brigands before M. le Maire.”
There was an ominous stress in his very chords of speech. They may
have recognised him or not. In any case this change of fortune might
unsheathe the terrific claws of a hitherto unallied enemy. Charlot
dropped upon his knees and with shaking fingers began to manipulate
the bundle.
“It is enough,” said Ned between his teeth. “Now, go!”
The two scurried off amongst the trees, glancing over their shoulders
as they went, with scared faces. The next moment Ned was aware that
Mademoiselle Lambertine had crept up to him, and was holding out her
hands in an entreating manner.
“Monsieur!” she whispered.
He faced about. The girl was arrayed for a journey, it seemed. A cloak
was clasped about her neck; from her brown hair hung over her
shoulders, like the targe of a Highlander, a round straw hat with an
ungainly width of brim; stout shoes and a foot of homespun stocking
showed under her short skirt. Nevertheless the glowing ardour of her
face and form triumphed over all disabilities.
“They are brutes and cowards,” said Ned gravely. “I don’t think they
will trouble you again. Here is your property.”
She did not take it at once. He shrugged his shoulders and laid it on
the ground at her feet.
“Monsieur!” pleaded the girl. Something seemed to choke her from
proceeding.
At length: “I have been waiting in the woods since dawn,” said she, in
a sudden soft outburst, “hoping for you to pass.”
“For me?”
“I came out into the track now and again, dreading that you had gone
by while I watched elsewhere, and once these discovered me, and--and--
Ah, monsieur! You see now what I have to endure.”
“Truly I see--more than I would wish to. You are leaving Méricourt,
then?”
She looked at him, defiant and imploring at once.
“You would not condemn me to it? You would not even say it is possible
for me to stay here?”
The young man did, for him, an unaccustomed thing. He swore--under his
breath. It might have been the devil of a particular little crisis
essaying to speak for him; it might have been the cry of a momentary
conflict between sense and spirit.
The appeal addressed to either was, indeed, as mournful and seductive
as the minor play of a pathetic voice could make it. If he gazed
irritably at the woman facing him, still he gazed at all because he
was stirred to some emotion. The sadness of wet, unhappy eyes, of
parted lips, of hands clasped upon the dumb utterance of an
impassioned bosom--all, in their single offer and plea to him, were,
no doubt, such a temptation to an abuse of that consistency with his
theories that his temperament so encouraged him to cherish, as he had
never before felt. But he was still so little sensitive to one form of
witchery that it needed only a tickle of humour to restore his moral
balance.
He laughed on a certain note of aggravation.
“Méricourt is all moonstruck, I believe,” said he. “This is too
absurdly flattering to my vanity. First--but there! Mademoiselle
Lambertine, I will not pretend to misread you. Yet you do not love me,
I think?”
She shook her head, drooping her eyes to him. Patently she had elected
to stake her chances on white candour as the better policy with this
Joseph.
“Well,” said he, “it is as it should be. And you are equally convinced
I am indifferent to you?”
But at that she came forward--so close to him, indeed, as to make her
every word an invitation.
“Now,” thought Ned, inured to such appeals, “she will throw her arms
round my neck in a minute.”
But he did Théroigne indifferent justice.
“You think yourself so,” she murmured. “It will be only a little
while. Already, in the prospect of freedom, I begin to renew myself
since yesterday. What if my soul is torn and crippled! The blood will
glow in my veins no less hotly than before--a fire to melt even this
cold iron of thy resolve. Oh, look on me--look on me! I can feel all
power and beauty moving within me like a child. That _I_ should be
scorned of clowns! And yet the chance gives me to you, monsieur, if
you but put out your hand. It is not love. That thou hast not, nor I;
nor is the power longer to me or the gift to you. But I am grateful,
for that thou hast helped me under sore insult. Ah! it avails nothing
to plead accident--to say, ‘It was the outrage I avenged for
manliness’, not the woman’s, sake.’ What, then? Thou hast wrought the
bond of sympathy, and thou canst never forge it apart. Perhaps, even,
didst thou strike hard, thou mightst some day hit out the spark of
love. Take me, and thou wilt desire to: I swear it. Do I not breathe
and live? Am I not one to vindicate in prosperity the choice of her
protector? Thou hast a nobility of manliness that is higher than any
rank. But, if in thine own country thou art great, thou shalt be
greater through me. I will minister to thy ambition no less than to
thy senses. I will----”
She paused, breathing quickly, and watchful of the steady immobility
of his face.
“Monsieur,” she whispered, most movingly, “if you see in me now only a
lost unhappy girl, who in her misery would seem to seek the
confirmation of her dishonour, believe--oh, monsieur, believe that it
is only to escape the worser degradation that threatens her through
the relentless persecution she suffers on account of her trust in one
that was monsieur’s friend.”
“No friend of mine,” muttered Ned, and stopped. He must collect his
thoughts--endeavour to answer this _séductrice_ according to her
guile. Instinctively he stepped back a pace, as though to elude the
enchantment of a very low sweet voice.
“Listen to me,” he said distinctly. “Mademoiselle Lambertine, I pity
you profoundly; and, if I have anything more to say, it is only, upon
my honour, to marvel that one of such intelligence as yourself should
ever have submitted her honour to the handling of so exceedingly
meretricious a gentleman as M. de St Denys. You see I repay your
confidence with plain-speaking. For the rest I can assure you it is
not my ambition to be beholden for whatever the future may have in
store for me to a----”
She stayed him, with a soft hand put upon his mouth.
“Do not say it,” she said quite quietly. “It is enough that you reject
my offer. That you may repent when you find your fiercer manhood--when
you realise what you have lost. Well, you have been good to me;
though, if I have suffered here in the wood while I waited for you, it
was not because my heart was other than a stone.”
“Then, for shame!” cried Ned, “so to sell yourself!”
“Ah!” said Théroigne, in the same quiet voice; “but I have made my
bed according to monsieur’s proverb, and it is a double one--that is
all. And is it not gallant when a woman falls to help her to her
feet?”
“It is not gallant to help her, the victim of one lie, to enact
another.”
“Surely; and monsieur is the soul of truth.”
She adjusted her cloak and hat, stooped and took up her bundle.
“I am distasteful to monsieur,” she said. “Very well.”
For some reason Ned was moved to immediate anger.
“Your hat is, anyhow,” he snapped. “I think it quite preposterously
ugly.”
But she only laughed and waved her hand.
“You will think better of me in England,” she cried.
He was moving away. He stopped abruptly and faced about.
“You are still determined to go, then?”
She nodded her head. Without another word he turned on his heel and
strode off down the road.