During the short course of his restoration to vigour, Mr Murk,
indulging that power of self-abstraction that was constitutionally at
his command, gave himself no further concern about his uncle’s
affairs, paramorous or political. His resolving of the Chevalier
d’Eon’s little riddle of intrigue was, perhaps, an achievement less
remarkable than it appeared to be. His own knowledge of my lord’s
partial boon-companionship with the Prime Minister at Putney, and the
notoriety of a particular kind that attached to the chevalier’s name,
coupled with the more or less perilous gossip he had heard abroad, had
winged the shaft that had--something to his surprise--struck so near
home. Now (having proved to his satisfaction his own percipience), in
the conviction that the artifice of this _intrigante_ was destined to
procure of itself nothing but a political abortion, he rested
tranquilly, and devoted his spare--which was all but his meal--time to
trying to play the harp.
This was a mournful misapplication of energy. He had never known but
one tune--the “Young Shepherd by love sore opprest,” which he would
intone in moments of exaltation. Now he could not reconcile it to the
practical intervals of performance, but was fain to introduce
crippling variations in his hunt for the befitting string. It was the
merest game of disharmonic spillikins, the contemplation of which
affected his landlord almost to tears, and to any such enigmatical
protest as the following:--
“You’ve no-ought to make such a noration about nothing!”
“Very well,” Ned would answer; “but the spheres, you know, wrought
harmony out of chaos.”
Nevertheless he took his characteristic place in the hearts of the
simple folk with whom he lodged.
When, by-and-by, he was in a condition to stroll out into the living
world once more, it was agreeable to him to learn that the old seaport
place had been quit for some days of all that connection that had been
the cause of his detention in it. His uncle was returned to town,
carrying presumably Mademoiselle Lambertine with him; and the
chevalier also had disappeared. He dozed out his second week,
therefore--yielding his brain to the droning story of the sea--on the
mattress of the sands; and, at last, revivified, braced up his
energies and turned his face to the London that had grown unfamiliar
to him.
* * * * * * * *
In accusing his nephew of inhabiting at some beggarly “Cock-and-Pye”
tavern, my Lord Murk had uttered a vexatious anachronism that
testified to little but his own antiquity. In the nobleman’s youth,
indeed, the fields called after this hostelry, though then occupied by
the seven recently laid-out fashionable streets that made “a star from
a Doric pillar plac’d in the middle of a circular area” (_abrégé_,
“Seven Dials,” though the capital of the column was, in fact, a
hexagon only), were a traditional byword for low-life frivolity. Their
character, however, was now long redeemed, or, at least, altered.
But, though Ned might not so far condescend to a philosophic vagrancy
as to consort with beggars and “mealmen,” it was certainly much his
humour, at this period of his life, to rove from old inn to inn,
having any historic associations, of his native city; while during
long intervals his chambers knew him not. Thus his uncle was so far
near the mark as that for months antecedent to his continental
excursion traces of him were only occasionally forthcoming from
amongst the ancient hostelries that neighboured on the St Giles
quarter of the town. The “Rose” on Holborn Hill, made memorable by the
water-poet; the “Castle” tavern, where, later, “Tom Spring” threw up
the sponge to death; the “George and Blue Boar,” ever famous in
history as the scene of Cromwell and Ireton’s interception of that
damning letter that the poor royal wren, who hovered “between hawk and
buzzard,” was sending to his mate; the venerable “Maidenhead,” with
its vast porch and ghostly attics--in all of these antique shells, and
in many others, had the young man buried himself for days or weeks,
according to his whim, until periodically his uncle would be moved to
exult over the probability of his having been knocked on the head in
some low-browed rookery, his very detested eccentricities serving for
the means to his removal. Then suddenly Ned would put in an appearance
at the house in Cavendish Square, and all the old rascal’s dreams
would be shattered at a blow.
Now, upon his return, our solemn young vagabond had no thought but to
resume this motley habit of existence. New alleys of interest he would
explore, adapting his moral eyesight to a focus that late experience
had taught him the value of; feeding his philosophy and humanity with
a single spoon.
He disappeared and, remote in his retreats, was little tempted to
emerge therefrom by the reports that were occasionally wafted to him
of his uncle’s scandalous liaison with a beautiful Belgian girl, who
had come to rule the viscounty.
Then--when he had been for some six weeks serving the interests of his
own education in the character of a sort of spiritual commercial
traveller--one day he happened upon Théroigne herself.
On this occasion chance had taken him westward, and he was walking
meditatively under the trees bordering the Piccadilly side of the
Green Park, when a voice, the low sound of which gave him an
irresistible thrill, hailed him in French from a carriage that drew up
at the moment in the road hard by. This carriage was a yellow
“tilbury,” glossy with new paint and varnish, with the Murk arms on
the panels and a foaming bright chestnut to draw it; and a very
self-conscious “tiger” held the chestnut in while a lady jumped to the
pavement.
“I congratulate you,” said Ned, doffing his hat in the calmest
astonishment; “you have made a slave of opportunity.”
Indeed she had the right selective faculty. Her schooling might have
extended through a couple of months, and here she was a queen of
inimitable charms. She had suffered no illusions of caste; but
recognising herself as to the purple of beauty born, she had simply
allowed her instincts for style to develop themselves in a congenial
atmosphere. And thereto a present air of pride and defiance lent its
grace. She made no secret to herself of what she was, and yet that was
merely the glorified accent to what she had been. The brilliant dyes
of the tiger-moth are only the hues of the caterpillar intensified.
This--the brilliancy, the bright loveliness, and the soft
consciousness of it all--had been embryo in her from the first. She
took Ned’s hands into hers in a wooing manner. A scent of heliotrope,
like an unsaintly aureola, sweetened her very neighbourhood.
“Where have you been?” she said; “and why hast thou never come near
me?”
“Why should you want me to?” he answered in genuine amazement. “You
have made your bed, Mademoiselle Lambertine.”
“I have not made it; no, it is not true.”
She looked about her hurriedly.
“It is for you to advise me--to make it yourself--to lie in it if thou
wilt. Hush, monsieur! we cannot talk here. Come and see me--come! It
will be well for you.”
“Well for me! But I have no private shame to traffic in, nothing to
accuse myself of, mademoiselle.”
“Ah, _mon Dieu_! but, by-and-by, yes, if you refuse me.”
Ned hesitated. Perhaps we may have observed that curiosity is a
constituent of philosophy.
“Well,” he said, “where, and when, do you want me to come?”
“So!” she whispered eagerly; “_j’en suis bien aise_. To the house of
the lord your uncle. Come this evening, when dinner is served and done
with. I will receive you alone.”
She gave him her hand, with a rallying smile played to the gods in the
person of the tiger, and accepted his to her carriage.
“’Ome!” she said to the boy.
“Unconscious irony,” muttered Ned to himself, as the “tilbury” sped
away; “and how the dear fool has caught the trick of it!”
Something--a rare sentiment of pride or humour--persuaded him to
appear before her in the right trappings of his station. He could look
a very pretty gentleman when he condescended to the masquerade of
frippery; and silk and embroidery, with a subscription to conventions
in the shape of a light dust of powder on the wholesome tan of his
cheeks, revealed him a desirable youth. Still Mademoiselle Théroigne,
though obviously taken aback before this presentment of an unrealised
distinction, was immediate in adapting herself to the altered
relations implied thereby. The perceptible imperiousness of her
attitude towards him showed itself finely tempered by admiration. As
to her exercise of the softer influences, she had graduated in these
(with honours) while yet a child.
She welcomed him in a little boudoir that had been fitted up for her
on the ground floor. Lace and buhl-work, crystal and dainty china,
were all about her. On the walls were sombre, amorous pictures,
winking in the glassy shine from girandoles. A decanter and goblets
stood on a gilded whisp of a table under a mirror, and hard by a tiny
brown spaniel lay asleep on a cushion. She might have been own sister
to this whelp from the curl and colour of her hair.
On this she wore no powder, but only a diamond star and loop in
emphasis of its loveliness. She was dressed without ostentation, yet
every knot and frill were disposed in a manner to suggest the liberal
beauty of her figure. But she had, in truth, no need of artifice to
show her radiant in the eyes of gods and men.
Now, looking at her, Ned thought, “How in this short time has she
renewed herself from that haunting ghost that possessed me on the
Liége road? There is something uncanny in this resurrection: I
apprehend the ‘seven devils’ must have entered into her.”
And he felt a little discomfortable, as if he were at last brought
into acute antagonism with a force that he had hitherto despised for
the vanity of its pretensions.
She took his hands and looked into his face. There was a strange
yearning inquiry in her eyes. This very licence of touch, so
inappropriate to their cold relations one with the other, put him on
his guard, though he would not at the moment resent it.
“You knew I was there, at Dover?” she said. “Ah! I sorrowed for your
wound, _mon ami_; but I could not come. Monseigneur would not let me;
the chevalier would not let me.”
“Never mind that,” said Ned, withdrawing his hands. “It only concerns
me that you have been consistent to your promise, and that my lord
attaches, in your person, another scandal to his record.”
“But that is not true,” she said, shrugging her shoulders; “and, even
though it were, will not your philosophy condone it? Little holy
Mother! is it that such as you, and he--that other of
Méricourt--would use Liberty only as your pander, disowning her when
she has served her purpose!”
She was all too young in vice as yet to play, without some real
emotion, the part she had elected to fill.
“He taught me from his devil’s gospels!” she cried; “and you saw, and
would not interfere, because your faith was the same as his.”
“I was in Méricourt--for how many days?” said Ned. “And is this all
your confidence, Mademoiselle?”
She flushed and bit her lips. The tears were in her eyes.
“You are always cold,” she said. “You do not pity me or make
allowance. To be wooed to worship an ideal; to be wooed through the
hunger in one’s soul for the truth that God seemed to withhold! When
he taught me that religion of equality, _he_ became my God. I saw the
disorder of the world resolve itself into love and innocence. How was
I, inexperienced, to know how a libertine will spend years, if need
be, in undermining a trust that he may indulge a minute’s happiness?”
She had spoken so far with self-restraint. Now, suddenly, she flashed
out superbly--
“You would not do the same--oh, _mon Dieu_, no! but you will condone
his wickedness--yes, that is it! Liberty to you all is the liberty to
act as you like; to use the State and abuse it; to use the woman and
throw her aside!”
“Hush!” said Ned, a little startled and concerned. “Your liberty, I
take it, you have committed to the keeping of my lord. He may curtail
it, if you talk so loud.”
She drew back imperiously.
“The old tipsy man!” she cried, in a pregnant voice. “I decoy, and I
repulse, and I madden him. I have learnt my lesson, monsieur. Hark,
then!”
She held up her hand. From the dining-room adjacent came a quavering
chaunt--the maudlin sing-song of ancient inebriety.
“I know,” said Ned. “He is half-way through his second bottle.”
“Is it the music,” cried the girl, “that I have bartered my honour to
listen to? There are greater voices in the air--the thunder of cannon;
the roar of an emancipated people!”
“Certainly it is true, by report,” said Ned, “that the French Bastille
is fallen into the hands of the mob--a consummation remotely
influenced, no doubt, by the Club of Nature’s Gentry.”
“Into the hands of Liberty, monsieur. The reign of falsehood is dead.
The ideal triumphs, however far its wicked apostles may have sought to
misconstrue it! And I am of the people! I am of the people--the
people!”
She gazed up--as if in a sudden inspired ecstasy--then buried her face
in her hands. Her full bosom heaved. She was beyond all control
overwrought.
“Théroigne!” exclaimed Ned, moved out of, and despite himself.
She looked up again, with flashing wet eyes.
“My love is sworn to Liberty!” she cried; “my hate to those who would
make of her a pander to their own base desires. So much of his
teaching remains; and let him abide by its consequences. It is for me
to drive the moral home, to reveal him for the thing he is--the thing
he is!”
Then Ned, holding no brief for St Denys, was tempted to an inexcusable
utterance--
“He was the father of your child, Théroigne.”
The girl started as if she had been struck. She raised her eyes and
clasped her hands; and she said, in a quivering voice--
“I thank God--oh, I thank God he is dead. The little poor infant! And
what would he have made of his baby--he, that had the heart to
disinherit and condemn to lifelong torture his own brother that he had
played with as a child!”
Ned stood amazed.
“His brother!” he cried--“the sailor that perished in the West Indies!
But monsieur himself told me of his brother’s fate.”
She gazed at him intensely. During some moments the evidences of a
hard mental struggle were in her face. Then she gave out a deep sigh.
“He lied, as always,” she said in a low voice: “Lucien is at this day
a wretched prisoner in the Salpétrière, the madman’s hospital of
Paris.”
“Théroigne! What do you say!” cried Ned.
“It is true,” she went on. “He was disfigured--driven insane by the
explosion; but he was not killed. He returned in his ship to
Cherbourg, and there Basile received him of the surgeon and conveyed
him to Paris. He was never heard of again. Basile brought to their
father the news that Lucien was dead of his wounds and buried at sea.
Monseigneur was old and childish, and Paris was far away. That was
seven years ago; but it was only recently that, sure of my loyalty,
and careless of the respect, of the right to which he had deprived me,
he boasted to me of his ancient crime, justifying it, too, on the
score that a reconstituted society must, to be effective, be pruned of
all disease, moral and physical.”
“He should have hanged himself. Such inhuman villainy! Mademoiselle
Lambertine, you have every reason to hate this man.”
“Ah! you think I colour the truth. My God, it is black enough! Why
else, himself like a reckless madman, did he squander his double
inheritance? He foresaw the redistribution of property; he was ever
prophesying it. He must drink deeply of pleasure if he would empty the
cup before flinging it into the melting-pot. Moreover, Lucien had been
the old man’s favourite; and, ah! he hated him for that.”
She stopped a moment, panting; then went on, her voice lower yet with
hoarseness:--
“Say, at the best, it was remorse made him a spendthrift, and his
conscience that salved itself with a lying pretext. Does that condone
his perfidy to me? Yet, I swear that he so blinded my eyes and my
heart that, while he was close to me I could not, despite his
confession of wickedness, see him for the wretch he was. Now----”
She came suddenly quite close up to the young man.
“Edouard!” she whispered, in a voice so wooing that it seemed to
stroke his cheek. He should have leapt away; but for the first time
the fragrant sweet sensuousness of her presence bewitched him. She put
her hands timidly up to his shoulders, and let her gaze melt into his.
The motion of her bosom communicated to his heart a soft slow
throbbing. In the pause that ensued, the voice of the old drunken
debauchee sounded fitfully from the dining-room.
“Now,” she murmured, “I see the truth stripped of all that passion
that so falsely adorned it. I see it in you, as in myself, a generous
principle that owes nothing to self-indulgence. Thou couldst use this
in me, thou cold, beautiful man--thou couldst use me to such ends, and
never fail of thy self-respect.”
She slipped her hands a thought closer about his neck.
“This evil magnificence,” she said--“so strange and so terrible to the
poor country girl. Every evening the old lord gets tipsy over his
wine; every evening he prays to me on his knees. To-night I thought he
would have died--the passion so enraged him. I swear that is all. Oh!
I have something cries in me for action; some voice, too, summons me
to that dark city where is being born, in agony and travail, the child
of our hopes--yours and mine. Not his now--Edouard, not his. I pray
only to meet him there, that I may denounce him before the Liberty he
has outraged. Take me hence. I am weary of the vile display; weary of
being sought the tool to designing men. Take me away to Paris, where
the era of the new life is beginning!”
In a paroxysm of entreaty, emboldened by her little success, she so
tightened the soft embrace of her arms as to bring her lips almost
into touch with his.
“Have I not proved myself, as I promised, a possession to covet?” she
whispered.
Now, upon that, Ned came to himself at a leap. He loosened her hands;
he repulsed and backed from her.
“What shameless thing are you,” he cried--the more violently from a
consciousness of his late peril--“that you persist in the face of such
rejection as you have already forced from me? I do not desire your
favour, madame. To offer it to me here, in this place, is nothing but
an insult. Nor, believe me, do I covet the possession of one who----”
“Hush!” she cried peremptorily. She stood away from him, panting
heavily. Her face glowed with a veritable inner fire.
“It is for the last time, monsieur--be assured, it is for the last
time,” she breathed out.
Then she blazed into uncontrollable passion:--
“Senseless, and a fool! I would have given you a soul to dare and to
do. This is not a man but a block. It is right, monsieur: you would
freeze the hot life in me--make it of your lead, this poor gold of my
humanity. That other was better than you--he was better, for after all
he could lie bravely. My God, to be so scorned and flouted! But, there
you shall learn--ah, just a little lesson! You are very proud and
high, yet I also shall be high if I choose.”
She checked herself, came up to and dared him in a rage of mockery.
“To-morrow we go to Putney. It is all arranged. And I have but to say
the word, the little word, and I am Lady Murk! You twitted me with the
child--my God, the man you are! What now, if his ghost--his
image--were to thrust itself in between you and----”
The door was flung open--pushed, that is to say, with a respectful
violence nicely significant of emergency. Jepps stood on the
threshold.
“My lord, will your lordship please to come at once?”
So said this admirable man; and what need was to say more? Ned, in a
moment, was in the dining-room.
Mademoiselle Théroigne had presumed a trifle too far on her
desirability. At least, consulting her own interest, she should have
withheld, one way or the other, from the beast of her ambition that
incitement to feed passion with fire.
The Viscount Murk lay amongst the glasses on the table, dead of a
rushing apoplexy. That is all that it is necessary to say about him.
When, later, Ned could somewhat collect his faculties, he recalled
dimly how a white face, crowned with a mass of beautiful hair, had
seemed to hang staringly--before it suddenly vanished--in the doorway
of the fatal room. But, when he came to question Jepps about
Mademoiselle Lambertine, he heard that the lady--after returning to
her own apartments for a brief while--had quitted the house without
sign or message.
Yet one other visitor disturbed that night the house of death--the
Chevalier d’Eon. She came in a chair from the theatre, and Ned, going
forth to her, saw her startled old face twisting with chagrin, as he
thought, in the light of the flambeaux. She had heard the news from a
link-boy in the square.
“I can do nothing by coming in, I suppose?” she said.
“Nothing whatever,” answered Ned passionlessly. “He is quite beyond
your influence.”
BOOK II.
CHAPTER I.
Edward, Lord Murk--now three years enjoying the viscounty--was
established, during the summer of ’92, at “Stowling,” his lordship’s
seat near Bury St Edmunds. Since his uncle’s death he had spent the
greater part of his time here--perhaps because his associations with
the place were less of the disreputable old peer than of the
traditions and the _personnel_ that had made it dear to him in his
youth. He had sold both the Cavendish Square property and the villa at
Putney; and was consequently, no doubt, very meanly equipped with
domicile for a gentleman of his position.
That, maybe, to him was a term little else than synonymous with
“opportunity.” Position at its best enabled him to realise on some
ethical speculations of his earlier educational period. His Paris
experiences had given to these their final direction; and though he
was theoretically as convinced as ever that men should be made
virtuous by Act of Parliament, the tablets of his soul, bitten into by
the acid of human suffering, were come nowadays to exhibit the
expression of a very human sympathy.
He gave with a large discriminating nobility; yet, no doubt, he was
little popular in the neighbourhood, because in his benefactions he
was discerning, and because, in indulging his liberality, he would
forego any display of the wealth that he was ever passing on to
others. Already for a peer he was poor; and, had he chosen, he might
have cited, in favour of his conception of a mechanical morality, the
fact that an emotional morality secretly despised in him that poverty
by which it profited. But he did not choose. The spirit of philosophy
still dwelt in him very sweet and sound.
In all these three years he had not once been abroad. Following--as
keenly as it was possible for him to do in those days of crippled
international communication--the progress of the great Revolution
(perhaps, even, contributing at its fair outset to the sinews of war),
he had yet no inducement whatever further to embroil himself, an
inconsiderable theorist, with a distracted people. Between a turbulent
chamber of his history and the halls of tranquillity in which he now
sojourned had clapped-to a very sombre door of death; and this he had
not the inclination to open again.
Still, often in his day-dreams he would be back at Madame Gamelle’s,
watching all that life scintillating against the curtain of the
Bastille. And now this curtain had, in truth, gone up, revealing, not,
as he himself had prophesied, the “blank brick wall of the theatre,”
but democratic force represented in a vast perspective--a procession
so endless that it seemed drawn out of the very brain of the North,
where all mystery is concentrated.
That, now, was an old story. Three subsequent years of planting and
levelling had changed the face of the world’s garden of conventions,
and during all that time the world itself had stood round outside the
railings, peering in amazed upon a ruthless grubbing up and carting
away of its pinkest flowers of propriety.
That was an old story; nor less so to Ned was the tale of his little
sojourn in Méricourt; and thereon, for all his rebelling, his
thoughts would sometimes dwell sweetly. The very quaintness of his
reception, unflattering though it had been, had still an odd thrill
for him. The memory of a happy period put to long wanderings by
serried dykes, of the old hamlet basking in the ferny bed of its
hills, of all the ridiculous and the tragic that, blended, made of the
little episode in his life a sore that it was yet ticklingly pleasant
to rub over--these, the shadows of a momentary experience, would rise
before him, not often, yet so persistently that he came to attach
almost a superstitious significance to their visitings. For why else,
he thought, should the ghost of one haunt the galleries of a thousand
pictures! Some connection, not yet severed, must surely link him to
that time.
Yet, during all this period of his responsibility, no whisper to
suggest that to _his_ shadows he was become other than a shadow
himself reached him. It may have been breathed inaudibly,
nevertheless, through the key-hole of that closed door.
Of Théroigne he had heard no word after her flight from the house of
death. Nor had he desired to hear, or to do else than free himself of
the dust of a scandal that, for months after his succession, had clung
to him as the legitimate inheritor of a villainous reputation. And
this desire he had held by no means in order to the conciliation of
Mrs Grundy, but only that he might be early quit of the hampering
impertinences of commiseration and criticism.
Once, it is true, he had almost persuaded himself that it was his duty
to seek for either verification or disproof of the girl’s almost
incredible statement about the man Lucien de St Denys. The conviction,
however, that the story as related _was_ incredible; that it was
revealed to him under the stress of passion and of immeasurable
grievance; that no man--least of all an astute rascal--would be likely
to put into the hands of a woman--the baser sequel to whose ruin he
was even then contemplating--a weapon so tipped with menace to
himself,--this growing upon him, he was decided in the end to forego
the resolving of all problems but those that were incidental to his
own affairs. Therefore he settled down with admirable decorum to the
righteous lording of his acres.
Still occasionally a restless spirit--that Harlequin bastard of Ariel
and the earth-born Crasis--would whisper in his ear of vast
world-tracts unexplored, of the meanness of social restrictions and of
the early staleness that overtakes the daily bread of conventions, of
the harmonics of phantom delights that may be heard in the
under-voices of flying winds, of life as it might be lived did men
serve Nature with honesty instead of deceit. Then a longing would
arise in him to be up and away again; to throw off the shackles of
formality and pursue his more liberal education through the fairs of
the nations. Then his days would show themselves empty records,
strangely fed from some darker reservoir of emptiness, the source of
whose supply would be a weary enigma to him. And in such moods it was
that the gardens of the past blossomed through his dreams, and
figures, sweet and spectral, would be seen walking in them--Théroigne
sometimes, sometimes Nicette, and again others--yet these two most
persistently.
* * * * * * * *
The demesne of “Stowling” was situate a long mile from Bury St Edmunds
against the Lynn Road. All about the grounds relics of an ancient
grandeur were in evidence, though the house itself, a graceful
Jacobean block, with projecting wings and stone eyebrows to its
windows, was a structure significant of a quite moderate condition of
fortune. The property, in point of fact, had been flung, at “Hazard,”
into the lap of that same Hilary, Lord Brindle (own pot-companion to
Steele and to Dick Savage of the “Wanderer”--with whom, indeed, he had
often cast at Robinson’s coffee-house, near Charing Cross, where the
broil occurred in which Lady Macclesfield’s bastard stabbed Mr
Sinclair to death), who was wont to justify his own viciousness by the
aphorism, “Whatever we are here for, we are not here for good.” Very
few of the Murks, it must be confessed, had been here for good, though
none had endeavoured to disprove one side of the _mot_ with more
pertinacity than the late viscount. Yet, at last, a successor was to
the front who would inform with gravity and decorum the family seat
that had been acquired, rebuilt, and maintained by the wild lord in a
manner so questionable.
For Ned the house was big enough; to him its grounds presented a
retreat that had all the melancholy charm of a cloister to its monks.
Nameless antiquity dreamed in its clumps of mossy ruins; in its
fragment of a Norman gateway; in its tumbled “Wodehouse”
men--sightless, crippled giants, with clubs shattered against the
skull of Time; in its wolfish gurgoyles snarling up from the grass.
Hereabouts could he wander a summer’s day and never regret the world.
Not often was he to be seen in the old town hard by; yet from time to
time he would walk over on a sunny day and loiter away an hour or so
in its venerable streets. And therein one morning (it was breathing
kind July weather) he saw a vision that seemed to typify to him the
very “sweet seventeen” of the year.
Now Ned’s knowledge of women had been mostly of the emotional side;
and a certain constitutional causticity in him had been wrought out of
all patience by the attentions to which he had been subjected in the
respect of one order of passion. It is true his innate sense of humour
rejected for himself the plea of excessive attractiveness, and,
indeed, any explanation of the pursuit, save that he had happened
coincidently into the scent-area of a couple of questing creatures of
prey. Still, built as he was, the experience was so far to his
distaste as to incline him always a little thenceforth to an
unreasonable hatred of the dulcetly sentimental in, and, indeed, to a
shyness of, the sex altogether.
Upon this, however, the little July-winged vision--which blossomed
into his sight as he turned the corner into a quiet street--he looked
with that inspired _premier coup d’œil_ that aurelians direct to a
rare living “specimen” of what they have hitherto only known in
unapproachable cabinets. He looked, and saw her spotless, as recently
emerged from some horny chrysalis of his own late incubating fancy.
(“This is _ipsa quæ_, the which--there is none but only she.”) He
looked, and the desire of acquisition gripped his heart--if only he
had had a net in his hand!
She had bright brown hair and china-blue eyes, and her hair curled
very daintily, and her eyelashes dropped little butterfly kisses--as
the children call them--on her own pretty cheeks. She was of an
appealing expression, a thought coy and _spirituelle_; and she was
indescribably French, too, in her tricks of gesture and the very
roguish tilt of her hat.
That was by the way to this travelled Cymon. Emigrants nowadays were
commoner than sign-boards in the streets of Bury. What concerned him
was that the girl appeared to be in trouble. She rested one hand on
the sill of a low window in the wall; her forehead had a pained line
in it; she sucked in her lower lip as if something hurt her; from time
to time an extraordinary little spasm seemed to waver up her frame.
At least one reprehensible suggestion as to the cause of this
convulsion might have offered itself to a vulgar intelligence--the
tyranny (to put it sweetly) of over-small shoes. My Lord Murk, leaving
his fine prudence and philosophy squabbling in the background, walked
up to and accosted the sufferer in deadly earnest and quite courtly
French--
“Mademoiselle is in distress? I am at her service and command.”
The lady gave an irrepressible start, and shuddered herself rigid.
Certainly she was abominably pretty--straight-nosed, wonder-eyed as a
mousing kitten. But she answered with unmistakable petulance, and in a
winning manner of English, “I am beholden to monsieur; but it is
nothing--nothing at all. I beg monsieur to proceed on his way.”
Ned bowed and withdrew. The dismissal was peremptory; he had no
choice. But, daring to glance back as he was about to take another
turning out of the empty street, he was moved to pause again in a
veritable little panic of curiosity. For, on the instant of his
espial, a “clearing” spasm, it seemed, was in process of bedevilling
the angelic form; and immediately the form repossessed itself of the
nerves of motion, skedaddled round a corner, and disappeared.
Now sudden inspiration came to Master Ned gossip. He perceived that
the lady had been standing upon a grating. Like a thief, in good
earnest, he stole back to the scene of the _contretemps_, and went
into a silent fit of laughter. Two little high red heels, bristling
with nails, were firmly wedged between the bars of the grille. With a
guilty round-about glance, he squatted, and dug and beat them out with
a sharp stone. Then (observe the embryonic crudeness of romance in the
shell), he put them--nails and all--into his tail-pocket.
CHAPTER II.
Had Lord Murk been of a present inclination less reserved and
withdrawing, he had months before found easy access to the presence of
the merry maid, whose little red heels seemed now, as it were, to have
taken his misogamy by the tail. For, indeed, when at last he sought,
he found this young lady’s identity established in a word. She was
neither more nor less (with a reservation in respect to the gossips)
than the adopted daughter of a very notable _gouvernante_ to a royal
family; and she happened to have already sojourned in Bury some six
months, during which he, the hermit-crab, had chosen to tuck himself
away apathetic into his shell.
Ned had, of course, heard of the not altogether peaceful invasion of
the drowsy little town by one particularly hybrid company of emigrants
that was, in fact, the travelling suite of Mademoiselle d’Orléans,
whom the Duke her father had, for safety, shipped to England towards
the latter end of the previous year. The importance of mademoiselle’s
advent was signified rather in her rank than her maturity, which
presented her as a lymphatic little body, some fifteen years of age,
with pink eye-places and a somewhat pathetic trick of expression. But,
if her title proclaimed her nominal suzerainty over the _valetaille_
that, in its habits of volubility and swagger, was to inflame the
popular sense of decorum by-and-by to a rather feverish pitch of
resentment, the very practical conduct of the expedition was in the
hands of that wonderful woman whom an irreverent virtuosity had
entitled “Rousseau’s hen.”
Ned had not in the least desired to make the acquaintance of this
Madame de Genlis. His position in the neighbourhood rather entailed
upon him the courtesy of a welcome to the royal little red-eyed
stranger at his gates; yet, adapting his unsociability to popular
rumour of the formidable _bas-bleu_ that dragoned her, he delayed a
duty until its fulfilment became an impossibility. And even a chance
report or so that had reached him of the beauty of madame’s adopted
child--the flower-faced Pamela (“_notre petit bijou_”), in praise of
whose name, abbreviated, a dozen local squireens were flogging their
tuneless brains for any rhyme less natural to the effort than
“damn!”--moved him only to some sardonic reflections on the
uncomplimentary significance of a gift that seemed designed in
principle for a stimulant to fools.
To fools had been his thought; and now here he was, having for the
first time happened upon this actual Pamela, not only awake of a
sudden to a glaring sense of the social solecism he had committed, but
awake, also, to a sentiment much less intimate (as he thought) to the
world of ordinary emotions. It was astounding, it was humiliating so
to truckle to the thrall of a couple of blue eyes that, for all
purposes of vision, were no better than his own. He stood astonished;
he rebelled--but he pursued. He felt his very _amour-propre_ giving
before the incursion of a force, stranger yet akin to it. So the big
brown rat (oh, vile analogy!) usurped the kingdom of his little black
cousin.
Why, then, did the unfortunate young man not reject and cast forth the
spell that seemed to drain him of all the ichor of independence? Why
did he wantonly stimulate in himself a fancy that his calm judgment
pronounced hysterical? How can these things be answered? How could any
sober reason analyse the motives of a person who kept in his
tail-pocket, and frequently sat upon, a charm that absolutely bristled
with spikes? It is the way of love. When the mystic bolt flies, the
philosopher apart must take his chance of a wound with the man who
lives in a street.
Anyhow, it must be recorded how Ned took to haunting--with the
persistent casualness of one whose unattainable mistress is, as
suggested by his preoccupied manner, the thing farthest from his
thoughts--the neighbourhood of a certain house in Bury St Edmunds.
This house--a dignified, two-storeyed, red-brick building, with a
stiff white porch standing out into the road, and, on the floor above
the porch, five tall windows looking arrogantly down from behind a
green balcony at the lesser lights in the barber’s and fruiterer’s
shops opposite--was situate, about the middle of the town, on a slope
known as Abbey Hill, and had for actual neighbour a chief hotel, the
Angel, then pretty newly built. It faced--across that sort of homely
_place_, or town quadrangle, that is so usual a feature in English old
market boroughs--a flaked and hoary Norman tower that had once been
the gateway to a graveyard long since passed with its dead into the
limbo of memories. Madame la gouvernante could see the solemn eyebrows
of this very doyen of antiquity bent upon her as she sat at the second
_déjeuner_, and it made her nervous. Sometimes, even, she would send
a servant to half close the blinds of the window over against her.
“One cannot evade oneself of its senile addresses,” she said on a
certain occasion to a florid gentleman in black, who had come down
from London to be her particular guest for a while. “I feel like Vesta
being made the courted of an old Time. It is always heere the mummy at
the feast.”
The gentleman laughed.
“Egad!” said he. “It is to illustrate how Time stands still with
madame the Countess of Genlis; and, as to the mummy, why, a mummy is
but dust, and dust is easy to lay”--and he took a great pull from a
bumper beside him.
He drank brandy-and-water with his meat. “’Tis this country appetite,”
he would say. “Violent diseases need violent remedies;” but by-and-by
he would take his share of the port and madeira with the rest. Now he
looked across the table to a little shy lady, and, says he, but
speaking in very bad French, “Mademoiselle the princess, as I
dissipate myself of this shadow, so may you as readily of that that
magnifies itself to the eyes of madame the countess.”
He opened his own eyes as he spoke, comically, to imply some imaginary
vision of terror. He was very proud of these orbs, that were large and
liquid. Indeed, he never allowed the well that replenished them to run
dry.
“_Est-ce bien possible_! fie, then, Mr Sherree-den!” put in a very
little voice--not of the lady addressed--from farther down the table.
“But mademoiselle takes water with her wine.”
Madame tapped on her plate with her fan, uttering an exclamation of
reproval. But the gentleman only laughed again.
“Miss Rogue, Miss Pamela,” said he, being by this time secure of his
priming, “I will compliment you and your wit on making a very pretty
couple.”
“We are twins,” said the girl saucily. “We were found together on a
doorstep.”
“_Tais-toi, coquine_!” cried madame sharply. “The pair of you had been
well committed to the Foundling.”
She treated with vast indulgence generally this pretty child of her
adoption. It seemed only that this particular subject was fraught with
alarm to her. By-and-by, when the queer meal was ended (there had been
present at it, besides the ladies and Mr Sheridan, three silent
Bœotians--_concordia discors_: practical scientists attached to the
household, and now admitted, _à l’Egalité_, to a share in its social
rites), madame conducted her guest to her boudoir over the front
porch, and opened upon him with the matter momentarily nearest her
heart.
“Does it magnify itself to my eyes, this--the shadow of the tower?”
she said. “I do not know. It was not so at Barse, where we arrive
first; but heere--heere! The place oppresses me. Its antiquity is a
rebuke to the frothy dynasties. Every whisper is from a ghost of the
past bidding us of the new mode to begone. We are hated, tracked, and
watched. I see faces behind trees; I heere mutterings through the
walls. What have we to do in this haunted town?”
“It is the burying-place of kings,” said Mr Sheridan. “It should be to
your taste.”
Madame la comtesse had no echo for levity. She seemed quite genuinely
agitated. Her trick (pronounced eternal by one that detested her) of
advertising the beauty of her hand and arm by toying, while she
conversed, with a fillet of packthread, as if it were a harp string,
was exchanged now for an incessant nervous handling of a little
miniature Bastille, carved from a fallen stone of the original, that
hung upon her bosom. Her face--pretty yet, though narrowing down to an
over-small chin--seemed even yellow, drawn, and affrayed. This
appearance was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that she wore no
rouge. She had once made a vow to quit its use at the age of thirty,
and now at forty-five she was yet true to her word. Indeed, she was
the very _dévote_ of Minerva-worship.
She sighed, “That I, whom Nature intended for the cloister, should
have to fight always against the snares and the wickedness! I sink.
Was there evaire the time when my flesh not preek to the fright? Oh
yes, once when I was vain! It is vanity that make the good _armure_. I
had no thought but levity when I marry M. de Genlis--and afterwards
during the years of Passy, of Villers-Cotterets, of the Rue de
Richelieu! Then I have no fear of the morrow; I have no fear at all
but of the too-ardent lover.”
“It must have been an ever-present fear,” said Mr Sheridan gravely.
She shook her head with hardly a laugh.
“I am an old sad woman; my _armure_ is crumbled from me. I play now
only one part--in those times it was many. From Cupid to a
_cuisinière_, I had the gift to make each character appear natural;
to present it, nevairtheless, of the most charming grace. I was adored
and adorable; but it was vanity. I would not exchange the present for
the past. I could perform on seven, eight instruments, monsieur; I
could dance to shame the unapproachable Vestris; I knew Corneille by
heart; Mirabeau himself was not cleverer in organising a comedy for
the living, than I for the artificial, stage. My _rôle_ was to
promote the healthy condition of amiability, to teach people how to be
happy though innocent. That _rôle_ yet remains to me; the rest is
gone. When vanity has taught its lesson the pupil may become teacher.
I leave since many years the theatre of emotions for the theatre of
life. It would be good for some of your countrywomen to follow my
example. When I sink of your Congreve, your Vanbrugh, and of the young
ladies at Barse that listen wisout a blush, _eh bien, on peut espérer
que l’habit ne fait pas le moine_!”
“Faith, it’s horrible!” said Mr Sheridan; and he remembered how
assiduously madame and her charges had frequented the theatres during
their two months’ stay at that questionable watering-place before they
came to Bury.
“But the morals of ‘Belle Chasse’ have not penetrated to England,”
says he, with a little roguish bow to the lady.
Madame uttered a self-indulgent sigh. She looked round on the frippery
of fancy-work--moss-baskets, appliqué embroidery, wax flowers,
illustrations of science in the shape of tiny trees formed from lead
precipitate, illustrations of art in the collections of little moony
landscapes engraved on smoked cards, illustrations of practical
mechanics in the binding of a sticky volume or so--that lay about the
room. These were all so many evidences of her system--instruction in
the pleasant gardens of manual toil. She was possessed of the little
knowledge of a hundred little crafts. She could have written a ‘Girl’s
Own Book’ without the help of one collaborator.
“I have eschewed all the frivolity,” she said. “It is only now that I
desire for others to taste sweetly of the fruits of my experience. I
am like a nun wishing to dictate the high morality from her cell. The
world passes before my window in review, and I applaud or condemn. Is
it that I am to be accused of self-interest, of intrigue, because I
would convert my hard-wrung knowledge to the profit of my fellows? Yet
they pursue me with hate and menace. My reputation is the sport of
calumny; my life hangs by a thread. I write to monseigneur, and he
aggravates, while seeking to allay, my fears. I write to M. Fox, and
he laugh politely in my face. My friends heere, that I thought, turn
against me--Sir Gage; Madame Young, also, that is prejudice of that
Mees Burrnee you all love so. And she is a tower of strength, the
little Fannee--oh yes! but steef, like the tower there. That is the
same wis you all. One must evaire conform to your tradeetions or you
look asquint.”
“I think you exaggerate the danger,” said Mr Sheridan soberly. “But
whatever it be, here am I come down from London to your counsel and
command.”
Madame rose from her seat and rested her long fingers caressingly on
the speaker’s shoulder.
“_Mon chevalier, mon très cher ami_,” she said, some real emotion in
her voice, “forrgeeve me. It would be good of you at any time; but
now, now! The pretty bird, the sweet _rossignol_, that cried into the
night and was hearkened of an angel! Ah! she has no longer of the
desolation of the song that must hush itself weeping upon the heart!”
She pressed her other hand to her bosom. Her companion leaned down a
moment, his fingers shading his eyes.
“The desolation!” he muttered. “Yes, yes; but for us now there is a
deeper silence in the woods.”
They spoke of his wife, who had died but a few months previously.
Perhaps the great man had been as faithful to her as it was the
fashion for men, great and little, to be in those days to their
partners. At any rate, he had loved her to the end--in his own way. _A
propos_ of which it may be recorded as richly characteristic of him
how, while this same wife lay a-dying, he had been known to ease his
heart of sorrow by scribbling verses to Pamela (then living in Bath),
in whose beauty he had found, or professed to find, a reflection of
his Delia’s old-time fairness.
Now, fortuitously, the little sentimental passage was put an abrupt
end to; for, as she leaned, madame all of a sudden started violently
and uttered a staccato shriek.
“_Le voilà_, the _triste_ dark stranger! He come again; he come
always! You tell me now there is no purrepus in this devilish
haunting?”
She retreated, backing into the room, shrinking without the malignant
focus of any stealthy glance directed at her from the road outside. Mr
Sheridan jumped to his feet and looked from the window. Strolling past
in the sunlight, with an air of studied preoccupation upon his face,
strolled a melancholy young man of enigmatical aspect.
Madame, withdrawn into the shade of a screen, stood panting
hysterically.
“It is evaire so. He come by morning and by noon--thus, hurrying not
at all, but watchful, watchful from the blinkers of his eyes. Why am I
so hated and pursued? Is he agent of M. de Liancourt, do you think?
Ah! but it is worthy of a runagate so to war on a woman.”
She squealed out in a sudden nerve-panic to hear her companion laugh.
He ran to the door of the room.
“Faith!” he cried jovially, “I’m in the way to resolve this riddle at
least,” and he pulled at the handle and vanished.
She cried after him to come back--not to leave her alone--that she
would lose her reason were anything to happen to him. His descending
heels clattered an only reply. Then at a thought she ran to the window
and peeped from the covert of curtains. The stranger was wheeled about
at the moment and returning as he had come. She saw Mr Sheridan run
forth bareheaded, accost, and seize him by both of his hands. He
seemed to return the greeting; he----
Madame the countess sank into a chair, as mentally paralysed as though
the end were upon her.
Her chevalier was conducting the spy to the door of the house.
CHAPTER III.
A much-stricken young gentleman--very undeservedly released from the
onus of a social embarrassment for which he was alone
responsible--stood gravely bowing before the lady of the house. His
face was quite white.
“I am vastly pleased,” said Mr Sheridan, “to be the means of
presenting to madame the Countess of Genlis a neighbour, the Lord
Viscount Murk. I have the honour of a slight acquaintance with his
lordship. I was even more intimate with his predecessor in the title.
But at least I can disabuse madame’s mind----”
Madame, who up to the moment had seemed half-amort, rose hurriedly all
at once and swept her stranger a magnificent courtsey.
“I feel already that I have known monsieur for years,” she said, hard
winter in her voice.
Mr Sheridan burst out laughing.
“Come, come,” he cried, “a mistake isn’t malice. There was never one
yet that sinned against nature. Zounds, madame, when the respite
arrives, we bear no grudge against the executioner! I can vouch for my
lord that he had no thought of offending.”
Ned looked enormously amazed.
“None whatever,” he said. “Why should I, when I have not even the
honour of madame’s acquaintance?”
This was certainly ambiguous. Mr Sheridan laughed again like a very
groundling.
“Without affront,” said he, “let me ask your lordship a question. Why
have you haunted madame, who is plaguily afeared of ghosts?”
“Haunted!” exclaimed Ned.
“Haunted,” replied the other. “Or is it, perhaps, one of madame’s
sacred charges that is the object of your visitations?”
Madame de Genlis, who included in her _répertoire_ of accomplishments
the art of reading character, here, after gazing intently at the young
man a few moments, permitted herself an immediate relaxation from
severity to the most charming indulgence.
“_Dieu du ciel_!” she cried. “What an old, old, foolish woman! It is
nussing, monsieur. I see you pass and come back, and come again one
hundred time like a ’ope-goblin, and I sink--I sink--ah! no matter
what I sink. I not know you less than nobody--not until Mr Sherree-den
come and espy you and say, ‘Do not fear thees poor eenocent.’ And now
I see it is not the old woman that attracts.”
Ned was by this up to the ears in a very slough of self-consciousness.
To stand detected before the authority he had manœuvred to
hoodwink!--so much of the innuendo he understood. For the first time,
perhaps, he realised how, in lending himself to some traditional
tactics, he had advertised himself of the common clay. He felt very
hot, and a little angry; and his anger whipped his sense of personal
dignity to a cream-like stiffness.
He was sorry, he said, he had been the cause of the least uneasiness
to madame la comtesse. He was a man of a rambling disposition--of a
peripatetic philosophy. Often, he had no doubt, absorbed in some train
of reflection, he would unconsciously haunt a locality that,
associating itself with the prolegomena of his meditations, would seem
to supply the atmosphere most conducive to their regular progression.
He----
And here the door opened, and a young lady ran into the room.
“A thousand pardons!” cried this young person. She did not know madame
was engaged other than with Mr Sheridan, and he counted for nothing.
But mademoiselle and she were learning to make artificial
birds’-nests, with painted sugarplums for the eggs, and they looked to
madame la gouvernante to advise them.
She curtseyed to my lord, with a little pert toss of her head like a
wind-blown Iceland poppy-flower, when he was made known to her. She
had no recollection of him, it was evident. All that play he had
rehearsed to himself, according to fifty different readings, of the
return of the red heels to their owner, became impossible of
performance the moment he found his audience a reality. There and then
he foresaw, and prepared himself heroically to meet, his martyrdom.
* * * * * * * *
Now all the glory and tragedy of Ned’s life came to crowd themselves
into a few months--into a few days, indeed, so far as his connection
with the strange household at Bury was concerned. Herein--no less on
account of his magnetic leaning towards a bright particular star, than
because he had made his _entrée_ under the ægis of Mr Sheridan--he
was accepted and discussed; pitied by some unsophisticated young
hearts; weighed in the balance of a maturer brain, and found, perhaps,
deficient.
“He has the grand air,” said madame; “he is noble and sedate, and of
amiable principles. But--_hélas_! _à quoi sert tout cela_--if one so
gives effect to the gospel of distribution as to deprive oneself of
the means to honourably perpetuate one’s race!”
“I have always admired madame’s little ornament of the Bastille,” said
Mr Sheridan.
“Ah!” cried the lady, smiling, “monsieur is varee arch; but beauty is
not the common property, and the little Pamela shall ask a fair return
for hers.”
“Well,” said Mr Sheridan, “’tis notorious that Damon hath squandered
his inheritance on a very virtuous hobby, and lives meanly in the
result. And that, be assured, is a pity; for he seems a young
gentleman of parts.”
It was thus he played the devil’s advocate to Ned’s beatification.
Early he began to harp upon the one string behind the poor fellow’s
back. He professed to be in love with Pamela himself, and the
intrusion of this most serious suitor interfered with his amusement.
He trifled, no doubt, in a very July mood; he loved the girl for her
prettiness and her saucy manner of speech; he was humorously flattered
by the familiar deference accorded him in a house of which he was
claimed the dear friend and protector. And on this account, and
because he was nothing if not unscrupulous in affairs of gallantry, he
condescended to acknowledge himself Ned’s rival for the favour of
Mademoiselle, _née_ Sims (that was Pamela), and to make good his suit
with arguments of wit and brilliancy that threw poor Damon’s solid
virtues into the shade.
Perhaps Madame de Genlis may have been the more inclined to besprinkle
with cold water the ardour of the young lord, in that she took the
other with a rather confounding seriousness. Mr Sheridan, indeed,
offered himself at this period a particularly desirable match for a
nameless young woman of inconsiderable fortune. He was only a little
past the zenith of his reputation, and the glamour of his best work
yet went always, an atmosphere of greatness, with him. At forty-one
years of age he was equipped with such a personality of wit,
eloquence, and riches (presumable) in proportion, as, combined, made
him a very alluring parti. In addition to this he could claim the
advantages of a tall, well-proportioned figure; of a striking, though
not handsome, face; of an education in the most liberal modishness of
the age. His expression was frank, his manner cordial and free from
arrogance. From first to last he was a formidable rival.
Now, on the very day (the little comedy was all a matter of days)
following Ned’s introduction by him to the family, he--seeing how the
wind blew, and at once regretting his complaisance--began some petty
tactics for the stultifying of a possible antagonist. He drove the
ladies, uninvited, over to lunch at “Stowling,” on the chance of
taking Master Ned unawares, and so of exposing the intrinsic poverty
of a specious wooer. Nor was his astuteness miscalculated. My Lord
Viscount, in the act of sitting down to a mutton-chop, was overwhelmed
in fathomless waters of confusion. He hastily organised--even
personally commanded--a raid on the larders; but their yield was
inadequate to the occasion.
He apologised with desperate dignity. A merry enough meal ensued; but,
throughout, hatred of his own self-sacrificing principles dwelt in him
like a jaundice, and he could have pronounced fearful anathema on all
the fools of philanthropy who omitted to stock their cellars with
nectar and ambrosia against the casual coming of angels.
Mr Sheridan supplied a feast of wit, however, and Ned was grateful to
him for it. He even revived so far at the end as to beg the honour of
providing the ladies with invitations to an Assembly ball that was to
be holden in Bury on the Thursday of that same week. Rather to his
surprise they accepted with alacrity; and so the matter was arranged.
And then, at Mr Sheridan’s request, but unwillingly, he played
cicerone to his own domain, and thought at every turn he recognised a
conscious pity for his indigent condition to underlie the fair
compliments of his guests.
When these were gone he sent straightway for his steward, and
surprised the good man by an extraordinary jeremiad on the
maladministration of a trust that fattened the dependants of a
starving lord. He himself, he said, was expected to dress like a
bagman and feed like a kennel-scraper, in order that his household
might gorge itself disgustingly in silken raiment. He would have
reforms; he would have money; he would have the house victualled as
for a siege, and grind the faces of the poor did they question his
right to drink, like Cleopatra, of dissolved pearls. And then he burst
out laughing, and shook the honest man by the hand, and turned him out
of the room; after which he sat down by the window and gnawed his
thumb-nails.
Now, it will be understood, this unfortunate youth was fairly in the
grip of that demoralising but evasive demon that is the sworn foe to
philosophy. He was entered of the amorous germ; and the procreative
atom, multiplying, was with amazing quickness to convert to misuse all
the sound humours of his constitution. He could not seek to exercise a
normal faculty, but it confused and routed what he had always
recognised for the plain logic of existence. He was ready to discount
facts; to magnify trifles; to attach an unwarranted significance to
specious vacuities; to fathom a deep meaning with the very plumb he
used for the sounding of a shallow artifice. Sometimes, in a
recrudescence of reason, he would think, like any calm-souled
rationalist, to analyse his own symptoms, to annotate the course of
his disease for the benefit of future victims to a like morbosity. It
was of no use. His moral vision was so out of focus as to distort to
him not only his present condition, but all the processes that had
conduced thereto. He was humiliated; and he writhed under, and gloried
in, his humiliation. To him, as to many in like circumstance, it
seemed preposterous that he should have come unscathed through many
battles to be outfenced by a child with a sword of lath. So feels the
warrior of a hundred fights when he is “run in” by a street constable
for brawling.
Ned dressed for the ball with particular care. He was to constitute
himself of madame’s party, and for that purpose had engaged to dine
with it before the event. The meal was a desultory one, the ladies’
toilettes serving as excuse for an unpunctuality that was generally
opposed to the principles of la gouvernante. But, one by one, all took
their places at the table--Mademoiselle d’Orléans, in a fine-powdered
head-dress, having a single feather in it like a cockade, and with her
little plaintive rabbit eyes looking from a soft mist of fur; Pamela,
sweet and roguish, wearing her own brown curls filleted with a double
ribbon of yellow; and Mademoiselle Sercey, another young relative of
madame’s, and an inconsiderable item of the household at Bury. There
were also accommodated with places three or four of the Bœotians
before referred to--silent, awkward men, painfully conscious of their
quasi-elevation, who sat below the salt and talked together in
whispers.
Mr Sheridan came in late. He had compromised with his grief so far as
to exchange his black stockings for white, and to wear a diamond
brooch in his breast linen. His hair was powdered and tied into a
black ribbon. Ned must acknowledge to himself that he looked a very
engaging gentleman.
He sparkled with fun and frolic, and he fed the sparkle liberally from
the long glass that stood beside him.
“Mademoiselle,” he said to the princess, “your hair is very pretty.
Love hath nested in it, and is hidden all but his wing. But is it not
ill-manners to keep him whispering into your ear in company?”
“He talk only of the folly of flattery, monsieur,” said the little
lady, simpering and bashful.
“A ruse,” cried the other, “that he learned when he played the monk.
Beware of him most when he preaches.”
“Mademoiselle is told to beware of you, monsieur,” said Pamela to a
gravely ecstatic young gentleman who sat next to her.
“Of me?”
“Are you not then the monk, the airmeet; and is it not mademoiselle’s
ear you seek?”
“No,” said Ned brusquely.
He looked at the pretty insolent face, at the toss of brown curls, the
little straight saucy nose, the lowered lids. He thought he had never
seen anything so wonderful and so fair as this human flower. The neck
of her frock was cut down to a point. She seemed the very bud of white
womanhood breaking from its sheath.
Did she gauge the admiration of his soul? He was not a boisterous
wooer or a talkative. For days he had purposed lightening the
conscious gravity of his suit by “springing” her lost heels upon his
inamorata. He could never, however, make up his mind as to the right
wisdom of the course. A dozen considerations kept him undecided--as to
the possibility of giving offence, of appearing a buffoon, of failing,
out of the depths of his infatuation, to introduce into the conduct of
the jest a necessary barm of gaiety. Without this, how little might
the result justify the venture? It was an anxious dilemma. The thought
of it threw into the shade all questions of a merely national
character in which he had once taken an interest; and, in the
meantime, he continued to carry the ridiculous baubles about in his
pocket.
Now, is it not one of Love’s ironies to depress a wooer by the very
circumstance that should exalt him; to make him so fearful of his own
inadequacy as that he seeks to stultify in himself the very qualities
that Nature has amiably gifted him withal? Thus Ned, naturally a quite
lovable youth when he had no thought of love, was no sooner come under
its spell than he was moved to forego that pretty, self-confident
deportment, that was his particular charm, for an uncommunicative
diffidence that appeared to present him as a hobbledehoy. He lived in
the constant dread, indeed, of procuring his own discomfiture by an
assumption of assurance.
“You know it is not,” he said--daring greatly, as it seemed to him.
“_I_ know, monsieur!”
The blue eyes were lifted a moment to his. Perhaps they recognised a
latency of meaning in the gaze they encountered. Madame de Genlis had
once summed up the character of this sweet _protégée_ of hers.
“Idle, witty, vivacious,” she called her; a person the least capable
of reflection. Idle, without doubt, she was, in the nursery-maid’s
acceptance of the term--a child full of caprice and mischief.
“Sure, sir,” she added, with a sudden thrilling demureness, “you must
know _me_ for a low-born maid?”
She was a little startled into the half-conscious naïveté by the
dumb demand of the look fastened upon her. Besides, she was certainly
moved--in despite of _mère-adoptive_ and some significant warnings
received from her--by the submission to her thrall of a seigneur whose
ancient nobility no present penury could impeach.
But she had no sooner spoken than she recollected herself.
“Do you think me like Mademoiselle d’Orléans?” she said, hurriedly
stopping one question with another. “It is some that say we might be
_sœurs consanguines_.”
What did the child mean? Had she any secret theory as to her own
origin; and, if so, was she subtly intent upon discounting her first
avowal? She may have wished to imply that no real necessity was for
her self-depreciation. She may have wished only to divert the course
of her neighbour’s thoughts. He was about to answer in some
astonishment, ridiculing the suggestion, when Mr Sheridan hailed
Pamela from his place opposite.
“A nosegay!” he cried, tapping his own flushed cheek in illustration.
“Give me a rose to wear for a favour.”
“It is easy,” said the girl. Her eyes sparkled. She turned to a
servant. “Go, fetch for Mr Sherree-den my rouge in the little box,”
she said.
“Fie, then, naughty child!” cried madame; “it merits you rather to
receive the little box on the ear.” But the great orator chuckled with
laughter.
“Pigwidgeon, pigwidgeon!” he said, nodding his head at the culprit.
“Not for youth and health are rouge and enamel, and all the vestments
of vanity.”
“Not eiser for youth or age,” said madame severely.
“But only for ugliness,” said Sheridan.
“No,” said madame--“nor for zat. It is all immoral.”
“Immoral!” he cried; “immoral to put a good face on misfortune!” He
looked only across the table, over the brim of his glass, when he had
uttered his _mot_. He delighted to make the girl laugh. His own
wonderful eyes would seem to ripple with merriment when he saw the
light of glee spring forward in hers. Pigwidgeon he called her, and
she answered to the name with all the sprightliness it expressed.
“Pigwidgeon,” says he, “when you come to the age of crow’s foot, you
shall know ’tis a lying proverb that preacheth what’s done cannot be
undone, or, as a pedantic fellow writes it, ‘what cannot be repaired
is not to be regretted.’”
“And it is vary true,” says madame stiffly--“whosoever the pedant.”
“Well,” says Sheridan, “’twas no other than him that writ ‘Rasselas’;
for which work let us hope that God by this time hath damned him--with
faint praise.”
He checked himself immediately.
“That were better left unnoticed,” says he, with great soberness;
“’tis only the fool that uses the sacred name in flippancy.”
He fell suddenly quiet, and a momentary surprised silence depressed
the company. It did not last long. All were shortly in a final bustle
of preparation for the ball. The ladies were bowed, the Bœotians
melted, from the room. The two gentlemen were left to their wine; the
elder’s eyes twinkled back the ruddy glow of the decanters.
“Come, my lord,” says he, “you are staid company, I vow. A toast or
two before we leave the table.”
“‘Here’s to the widow of fifty!’” cries Ned, adapting from the great
man himself, and raising his glass.
The other laughed.
“I drink her,” he said. “A full bumper to Mrs Sims!”
“’Twas Madame de Genlis I meant.”
“And I meant the mother of Pamela.”
“You take it so, then?”
“I take the child, at least,” said Sheridan evasively, “to be ‘the
queen of curds and cream.’”
Ned was, of course, not ignorant of the scandal attaching to this
little waif of royalty. It made no difference in his regard for her,
though perhaps the other wished it might. Mr Sheridan, maybe, had shot
a tiny bolt of jealousy--a tentative hint as to the vulgar origin of
the pigwidgeon. It missed fire, and that gave him a thrill of
annoyance. He was conscious of some actual resentment against this
solemn suitor who had come into his field of enamoured observation. He
did not fear him; but he wished him out of the way, that he might
flirt in peace. At the same time he may have possibly undervalued the
determination of his reticent adversary.
“Well,” said Ned, “here’s to the mother of Pamela, whoever she be!”
“With all my heart,” cried Sheridan, “and to the father, by the same
token.”
Ned turned his calm eyes so as to look into the injected orbs of his
companion.
“What manner of presence hath monsieur the Duke of Orleans?” said he;
“it was never my fortune to happen on him in Paris.”
“He is a friend of mine, sir,” said Sheridan. “From what point of view
am I to describe him? His enemies--of whom there are many in
England--say that the fruit of evil buds in his face. Egad! I was near
seeing it break into flower once. ’Twas at Vauxhall, when the company
turned him its back. He would have thought like a Caligula then, I
warrant. A prince, sir, something superior to the worst in him, which
is all that men will recognise.”
“But his personal appearance?” said Ned.
The other returned the young man’s gaze with a thought of insolence.
“Am I to smoke you?” he said. “Mademoiselle d’Orléans is a little
like her father in expression; but our Pamela is not at all like
Mademoiselle d’Orléans.”
Ned came to an immediate resolution.
“Mr Sheridan,” said he, “I would crave your indulgence for a word in
season. You have advantages in this house that are not mine. You are a
great person and a welcome guest, while I am only here--I know it--on
sufferance. You may turn your exceptional position to the profit of
your amusement. If it is to do no more, it is asking you little to beg
you to forego so trifling a sport. If you are serious, then let us, in
Heaven’s name, come to a candid understanding.”
He set his lips to suppress any show of emotion. But he was moved, and
it was not for the other, however dumfoundered, to put a jesting
construction on the fact.
“My lord,” said he, pretty coldly, though his words seemed to belie
the tone in which they were spoken, “it would ill beseem a feeling
heart at any juncture--mine, particularly, at the present--to refuse
its sympathy to an appeal of so nice a nature. I will not pretend to
misapprehend your lordship, nor will I fail to respond in kind to your
lordship’s frankness.”
“Then you relieve me of the awkward necessity of an explanation,” said
Ned. “Heaven knows, there is no question of any right of mine to fall
foul of your attitude towards one who may be your debtor for fifty
benefactions. Heaven knows, also, that I never intended to imply that
my most humble suit towards a certain lady was conditional on any
information I might receive as to her actual parentage. Born in honour
or out of it--I tell you, sir, so far as she is concerned, ’tis all
one to me. I speak straight to the point. You may claim priority of
acquaintance; you may be able to advance twenty reasons why my taking
you to task is an impertinence. Yet, when all is said--if you are not
serious, it is just that you should yield the situation to one who
is.”
Mr Sheridan had sat through all this, twirling his glass with a rather
lowering smile on his face.
“Yield the situation!” he said; “but you take me by the throat, sir. I
must assure you there is no situation of my contriving.”
“Indeed,” said Ned, “I am rejoiced to hear you say so, and do desire
to convince you that I find nothing more than a very engaging
playfulness in your treatment of the young lady.”
“Then, why the plague,” said Mr Sheridan, opening his eyes, “all this
exception to my attitude?”
“Because you choose--let me be plain, sir--to constitute yourself my
rival in her favour.”
Mr Sheridan exploded into irrepressible laughter.
“Zounds!” he cried; “here, if I will not be something other than
myself, I shall have my throat cut.”
“Is it,” said Ned firmly--“pardon me, sir--is it to be other than
yourself to refrain from indulging a whim that is obviously another
man’s distress?”
“My lord,” said Mr Sheridan, twinkling into sudden gravity and
replenishing his glass, “this aspect of the case is such a one as I
really had not considered. But let me assure you that you were one of
the direct causes of my coming down here at all.”
“_I_?”
“You, most certainly.” (He crossed his arms on the table and leaned
forward.) “Madame, by her own assertion, was being watched and
shadowed. She claimed the protection of our laws. She appealed to our
Government in the person of Mr Fox. The gracious office of succouring
the afflicted he deputed to me. I hurried down to Bury St Edmunds, and
the first suspicious character pointed out to me was my Lord Viscount
Murk.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Of course. But the situation, you see, is none of my handling.”
He drank down his glassful, and fell suddenly grave.
“I have no wish, _nec cupias nec metuas_, to constitute myself your
rival. This mourning suit, my lord, is of a recent cut.”
His tone was so dignified, the illusion so sorrowfully significant,
that Ned was smitten in a moment. How were his ears startled then to
hear a rallying laugh for anticlimax!
“My dear fellow, believe me, I am not of those who imagine a bond in
every light exchange of glances. My dear fellow, all we who are not
Turks are shareholders in a woman’s beauty. There may be a managing
director who has the right to a more intimate knowledge of it: what
care we who speculate in the open market, so long as it flatters us
with the soundness of our investment! We draw the interest without
responsibility, and are always ready to commit the conduct of the
business to him that hath the acknowledged right to control it.”
He got to his feet.
“Hush!” he said; “we are summoned. Elect yourself to be this managing
director if you will. I am quite content to rest, drawing my modest
dividend that you have no right to begrudge me.”
* * * * * * * *
The advent of so distinguished a party in the assembly rooms created
quite a little furore of excitement amongst the honest burgesses of
Bury. My lord, the reserved and almost inaccessible; the illustrious
parliamentarian, whose very presence seemed to secure to all in the
place a sort of reversionary interest in those glories of Carlton
House with which he was notoriously familiar; the little stranger
princess, whose sojourn in the remote English town was so eloquent of
the tragedy that even then was threatening to foreclose upon her
house--these were the nucleus of such a coruscation of stars of the
first magnitude as had never, within living memory, added its lustre
to the congregated social lights of the borough.
But when madame la comtesse, adapting her conduct of the expedition to
those principles of which she was the present representative,
permitted her royal young charge the unconventional licence of dancing
with any and all who had the high good fortune to procure themselves
an introduction to her, local opinion underwent a gradual
transformation that culminated, it is to be feared, in actual
scandalisation.
“It transcends,” was the pronunciation, in a deep voice, of Mrs
Prodmore. “Anything so unblushingly shameless I had not dreamed could
be. I protest we are threatened with a Gomorrah.”
She was so very _décolletée_ as to figure for the type of
self-renunciation offering to strip itself of all that it possessed.
That was much, and much in little, yet much in evidence. Her
bodice--what there was of it--was sewn with gems. Indeed, her judgment
of the new-comers may have been tainted by the fact that madame had
declined to be introduced to her--to her, the richest woman in the
room. She was already fat, yet she swelled with righteousness. She
suggested a little a meat pudding bulging from its basin.
“Perhaps,” said timid Mrs Lawless, whom she addressed, “the French
adhere to a standard of propriety that is only different from ours in
degree. She may not mean any harm.”
She spoke with anxious diffidence, conscious of the fact that at that
very moment her son, Squire Bob Lawless, was dancing with Pamela.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs Prodmore loftily, “but whether she means
harm or not, I prefer, with my traditions, to consider such behaviour
an outrage. Ignorance does not condone indelicacy.”
In the meanwhile, the dance having come to an end, Pamela and her
partner were strolled to within earshot of a saturnine young gentleman
who stood glowering in a corner.
“Ecod!” Mr Lawless was saying, “’twas the finest sport, miss. Two
broke collar-bones and a splintered wrist, and all for the sake of
experiment, as you might call it.”
Pamela looked up with her soft eyes.
“It is cruel,” she said. “I do not like fox-hunting at all--so many
giants riding down the one little poor pigmy.”
“Why,” said the other, in a surprised voice, “you’re wilful, miss.
Wasn’t the point of it all that ’twas nought but a _drag_ hunt?”
“_Comment_?” said Pamela.
“With a herring,” explained the squire.
“Well,” said Pamela, “that is just as cruel to the herring.”
She turned round on the instant to the sound of a little explosion of
laughter.
“My lord!” she exclaimed.
She dropped her companion’s arm; bowed graciously to him.
“I commit myself to this escort,” she said. “A thousand thanks for the
dance, monsieur.”
Poor Nimrod had no choice but to accept his dismissal. He had crowed
over his fellow-squireens. He must come down now, a humbled cockerel.
He walked away sulkily enough.
“Monsieur,” said Pamela to Ned, “I am glad to have amused you.”
“It is for the first time this evening,” said his lordship grimly.
She was beginning, in a little sputter of fire, “And pray what right
have you----” when the expression in his face stopped her. A woman, no
doubt, has some spiritual probe for testing the presence of love, as a
butterfly feels for honey in a flower.
“None whatever,” said Ned. “It is my unhappiness.”
She looked at him quite kindly. The sweetest babies of pity sat in the
blue flowers of her eyes.
“Why have you not ask me to dance?” she said. “Poor Pamela is flouted
of all of whom she had the hope to be honoured. You do not desire my
hand; no, nor Mr Sherree-den eiser. ‘I am not to lead you out, _ma
chèrie_,’ he say. ‘It is because I am ask to drop the sobstance for
the shadow.’ I request of him what he mean. ‘’Tis only the fable of
the dog and the piece of meat,’ says he. ‘And how do that concern
itself of the question?’ I ask. ‘Why,’ he answer, ‘I am the dog and
you are the piece of meat; and that is to say that Pamela is food for
reflection’--and then he laugh, and bid me ask of Monsieur Murk to
interpret me the fable.”
Her voice was full of tenderness and appeal. Ned, despite some emotion
consequent on the mention of his rival, felt as remorseful as if he
had wantonly crushed a rose in which lay a sleeping Cupid. He knew he
had not asked the girl to dance with him, for only the reason that a
morbid sensitiveness impelled him to self-martyrdom--drove his pride
and his jealousy to battle; the one ready to resent that an obvious
preference was not shown by her for him out of all the world, ready
always to fold a wing of pretended indifference over the bleeding
wound in his breast; the other ready, on the least provocation, to
make a shameless confession of the corroding secrets of its inmost
soul. Certainly Providence may be assumed to have its own reason for
constituting a disease to be its highest ethical expression. Truth and
Love! How have these inoculated one another with the virus drawn from
ages of misfaith, till each seems to have become an inextricable
constituent of the common plague of jealousy!
“And am I also the piece of meat to you,” says Mistress Pam, “that you
will have nussing to speak with me?”
“I will not drop you for the shadow, at least,” cries the other
fervently--“no, not as long as I have a tooth in my head!”
So love glorifies bathos. The two stood up together for the next set.
Thenceforth Ned moved on air, breathed all the evening the
intoxicating oxygen of idolatry. The girl alternately flattered and
flouted, wounded and caressed him. He must draw what consolation he
could from the fact that Mr Sheridan at least left him a fair field.
Now and then he would chance upon view of this gentleman, and always
it seemed to him that, as the evening progressed, the convivial face
waxed steadily more rubicund, the fine eyes more unspeculative.
Once the party came together over the refreshment trays--the
sweetmeats and negus that preceded the final break-up.
“Do not eat so much cake, child,” says madame la gouvernante to
Pamela. “It will lie heavy on your chest.”
“Happy cake!” murmurs Sheridan, so that the ladies might not hear him.
But my lord did; and he might have been moved to some resentment had
it not been for the other’s obvious condition.
Ned, after parting from the ladies, would walk his long mile home by
the solitary echoing road. He needed loneliness; he needed the
illimitable graciousness of the open world. Within those shining
walls, it seemed to him, he had not been able to think collectedly.
Whither was he hurrying, and in what perplexity of mission? At one
moment exalted, at another depressed, he could have thought himself
the waif of a destiny in which his reason had no voice.
He looked up at the sky through an overhead tracery of leaves. The
blown branches of trees made a tinsel glitter of the brilliant moon.
Some roadside aspens pattered with phantom rain. A sense of unreality
stole into his mind, half drugging it. The sound of his footsteps was
echoed back from a wall he passed. The echo appeared to double and
redouble upon itself; the footsteps to come thicker, thronging fast
and ever faster, till he fancied an army of shadows must be going by
on the opposite side of the way. His brain grew full of the whisper
and rustle of their march. The spectral noise became accented by the
far clang of voices--the shout across half a world of some vast human
force struggling upon a tide of agony.
The long wall ended. He pulled himself together and shook out the
ghost of a laugh.
Whither? he thought again, as he strode on. To the goal to which his
every desire seemed to be compelling him? But he had no will in the
matter. That had been sapped--snapped--deposed in a moment. He was
nothing but a log, the stump of a mast, in the surf--now rolled upon
the shore, now dragged back and committed to fresh voyagings. His
erect philosophy, that had helped him so long over multitudinous
waters, was become nothing but a broken wastrel of the sea for Fate to
play at pitch-and-toss with. Should he ever again be in the position
to recover and splice it, to set sail and escape from the fog and
welter of the spindrift in which he now tumbled?
As he reached his gates, he looked up once more at the sky. The moon
waded through a stream of cloud.
“She will sink,” he muttered. “Her glitter is already half quenched.
Am I in love, or only sickening for a scarlet fever?”
CHAPTER IV.
Pretty early on the morning after the ball Ned rode over to pay his
respects to, and inquire after the health of, the ladies. None,
apparently, was as yet in evidence; but Mr Sheridan, having
information of his coming, sent down a message inviting him up to his
bedroom; and thither the young gentleman bent his steps, not loath to
avail himself of any excuse for remaining.
He found the _viveur_ of the previous night propped up on his pillows,
a towel round his shaven head, a pencil and paper on the counterpane
before him. At the dressing-table stood a little common man, in a
scratch wig and with a very blue chin, who mixed some powders with
small-beer in a tumbler.
“You won’t thank me for introducing you,” said Sheridan to Ned.
“Monsieur has not _le haut rang_ (spare thy concern), nor any word of
our tongue.”
“Who is he?” said Ned.
“My physician.”
“The deuce he is!”
“Ah! I am under the influence here of a democratic atmosphere. No
hand-muffs and silver-headed canes in the economics of Egalité. In
Rome, as Rome. Monsieur is, in fact, a beast-leech attached to the
household to teach mesdemoiselles how to put Pompon’s tail in splints
when it has been caught in the parlour door. He can bleed, rowel, and
drench; shoe a horse, or salt a pig. And, egad! now I think on’t,
there is his right use to me. For, when a man has made a hog of
himself, what better physician does he need than him that hath the
knowledge how to cure bacon?”
Deprecatory of the applause that he waited a moment to secure, he
called over to the little man by the table: “_Dépêche-toi,
monsieur_! _ma gorge est en feu_!”
“_Attendez, monsieur, attendez_!” replied the leech in a thin, hoarse
voice: “_ayez encore un peu de patience, je vous prie_.”
He brought the cup over in a moment. Sheridan sent the liquid hissing
down his throat. He gave a sigh of pleasure.
“Ah!” he said, “small-beer and absolution were invented by the devil
to tempt men to sin for the sake of the ecstasy of relief they bring.”
He looked at Ned, his fevered eyes watering in the strong glare of
sunlight that shot under the half-closed blind.
“You have an enviable complexion, my lord,” said he. “Did you ever, in
all your life, experience the need to dose yourself with so much as a
mug of tar-water?”
Ned laughed.
“I refuse to lend myself to point a moral,” said he. “Palate is a
matter of temperament, and temperament is a cause, not a consequence.
Mr Sheridan may find in wine the very stimulant I borrow from country
air and exercise.”
“Oh, the country!” said the other, with a groan: “from Tweed to
Channel nothing but the market-garden to London.”
“So you think? And yet you stay on here?”
Mr Sheridan shrugged his shoulders. His face seemed to have fallen
quite sick and peevish.
“By my own wish?” said he. “But at least I scent liberty at last.
Madame (I am abusing no confidence in telling you) contemplates
changing her quarters very shortly.”
Ned was conscious that his heart gave a somersault.
“Indeed?” said he, reining-in his emotion. “And for what others?”
“I can’t say. Monseigneur is, I believe, at Brussels. That is all I
know.”
“And when is the removal to take place?” said Ned sinkingly.
“Faith! it can’t be too soon for me. Madame, the dear creature, hath
‘spy’ writ large upon her brain. Her tremors and her apprehensions
would be ridiculous, were they not tiresome. There is no listening to
reason with her. She is convinced she is surrounded by secret agents
of the royalty she hath provoked. She lives in hourly fear of
assassination for herself, and abduction for her sacred charge. One
day she will do this, another, that; bury herself and hers in the
caves of Staffa; return to the protection of her illustrious
protector. That, I warrant, will be the end o’t. But there is some
difficulty in the way--some imperative necessity, as I understand,
that forewarning of her return be conveyed to monsieur the duke; and
she hath no messenger that she can trust to the task--no prodromos to
signal her approach. So day by day she grows more distraught, until I
know not what to say for counsel or comfort.”
There was some odd quality in the stealth with which he regarded the
young man as he spoke. He saw his words had so far taken effect that
Ned was fallen into a musing fit where he sat by the bed. He was too
finished an artist in practical joking to ruin the promise of a
situation by over-haste. He would drop a suggestion on “kind” soil and
leave it to germinate. He knew that a seed thumbed in too deep is
often choked from sprouting.
So, having deposited his grain, he took means to dismiss his
subject--in the double sense. “Well,” he said, “and that is all that’s
to remark on’t. But I was to have put you twenty questions when I
asked you to come up: as to the ball, and your enjoyment of it; and as
to how far you was satisfied I had held to my share of the compact.
Sir, I claim you responsible at least for the state of my head this
morning.”
He turned over on his pillow with a moan.
“Zounds!” said he, “small-beer, I find, is like small-talk for
deadening one’s faculties. I must commit myself to good Mr Pig-curer,
if I would save my bacon.”
Ned secretly thought this a poor capping of a fairly respectable
witticism. He would have valued the joke even less as a spontaneous
effusion, could he have examined its essays scribbled over the scrap
of paper on which Mr Sheridan had been writing before he entered:
“Physicians and pork-butchers: both cure by killing: like all
butchers, they must kill to cure,” and so on, and so on.
However, he got to his feet immediately and, apologising for his
intrusion, made his adieux and left the invalid to his aching
cogitations.
These were, perhaps, more characteristic than praiseworthy. Mr
Sheridan’s social ethics would always extend a plenary indulgence to
practical joking. It was a practical joke to rid oneself of a rival by
whatever ruse. His ruse had been to grossly misrepresent to madame the
young lord’s financial condition. Quite indefinitely he had succeeded
in investing Ned with the character of a needy adventurer. Local
evidence as to the reckless philanthropy, visual proof of the inner
poverty, of “Stowling,” helped him to the fraud. Madame may have been
ambitious for the child of her adoption; she may have become cognisant
of the fact that a little _tendresse_ was beginning to show itself in
the girl’s attitude towards her grave young suitor; she may have been
anxious only to accommodate herself to the wishes of her distinguished
guest, whom she fervently admired, and upon whom at this juncture she
was greatly dependent for advice and assistance. At any rate, she lent
herself to his plans. The two devised a little plot, of which she was
to be the ingenuous agent, and my lord, the poor viscount, the victim.
Perhaps the understanding between the conspirators was sympathetic
rather than verbal. Of whatever nature it was, a certain method of
procedure was adopted by both--diplomatically to conciliate;
effectively to get rid of. Madame, it must be said, was not attracted
to his lordship. Her volatility recoiled from his solemnity. Conscious
of the most lofty principles, she could never, when in his company,
free herself of the impression that she was being “found out.” She had
a shrewd idea that Ned’s respectful subscription to her opinions was
in the nature of a moral bribe to secure her favourable consideration
of his suit--that secretly he valued her at that cheaper estimate that
_she_ secretly knew represented her real moral solvency. When one has
a grudge against the superior understanding of a person, it is a thing
dear to one’s _amour propre_ to convert that understanding to one’s
own uses.
As Ned descended the stairs, madame came suddenly upon him and,
welcoming him with quite cordial effusion, drew him into a side room.
She hoped he was not fatigued after the late festivities. As for the
members of her own household, they were one and all the victims of a
_migraine_. (She here looked forth a moment, and issued a sharp order
to some one to close a little door that led from the back hall into
the garden.) Yes, all were enervated--overcome. Mademoiselle was in
bed; Pamela was in bed; Mr Sherree-den was in bed. As for herself, no
such desirable indulgence was possible. A ceaseless vigilance was
entailed upon her. During such moments of relaxation as she permitted
herself, she was constrained to wear a mask of gaiety over the
shocking anxiety of her soul. She was surrounded by menace and
intrigue. There was scarce one she could rely upon--only Mr
Sherree-den, and he could little longer afford to be parted from his
duties. There was not a soul, even, she could entrust at this time
with a letter it was imperative should be conveyed abroad by a
confident hand. She had no hesitation in informing monsieur of its
direction. It was to monseigneur, the father of the young princess, at
present sojourning in Brussels. It was to acquaint monseigneur of the
pitiable anxiety of the refugees, and to beg him to order their return
at once. But it would be necessary for the messenger to back up the
substance of the letter by arguments deduced from a personal knowledge
of the condition of the victims; and who, in all her forlorn state,
could she find meet to so delicate a mission?
She wept; she clasped her hands convulsively; she apostrophised
Heaven. Was this the brilliant, self-confident, rather aggressive
chaperon of the night before? Ned listened in something like
amazement. He could never have misdoubted the obvious suggestion of
her lamentation. As to her sincerity, it is very possible he was
completely duped. He was not at all in the plot against himself; and
madame had been a notable actress from the days when, at eleven years
old, she played the title part in Racine’s _Iphigénie en Aulide_.
“Ah, monsieur!” cried she; “but the joy, all troubles past, of
welcoming in our land the amiable friend who should be the means to
our returning thither!”
If now the idea of offering himself to the mission first began to take
root in Ned’s mind, it was because his jealousy would not tolerate the
thought that, failing him, another might be found to serve his
mistress with a less questioning devotion. Still, he would not yet
commit himself definitely to a course that not only--in the present
state of continental ferment--entailed a certain personal risk, but
entailed a risk that in the result might effectively separate him from
that very fair lady it was his principal wish to serve in the matter.
Moreover, it was certainly in his interest to ascertain if it was this
same lady’s desire to be so served by him.
“When does madame wish this letter conveyed?” he said gravely, after
some moments of deep pondering.
“Oh, indeed!” cried madame, “but varee soon--in two-tree days.”
“And the messenger is to be a sort of outrider to your party?”
“An outrider?--but, in truth. Yet, how far an outrider, shall depend
upon his influence with monseigneur.”
Ned bowed.
“I should like to think the matter over,” said he. “It is possible, at
least, I may be able to serve madame with an _avant-coureur_.”
Madame seized his hands in an emotional grasp.
“My friend! my dear friend!” she murmured.
“And now,” said Ned, “with madame’s permission, I will take a turn in
the garden.”
Had madame again the impression that she was “found out” of this
unconscionable Joseph? She certainly flushed the little flush of
shamefulness, and for the moment had not a plausible word at her
command. For, indeed, she knew and, what was worse, believed that my
lord knew that Pamela was at that very time seated by herself in the
little box-arbour amongst the Jerusalem artichokes (the girl’s figure
had been plainly visible through the doorway which madame had ordered
over-late to be closed); and the sudden realisation of the situation
was like a cold douche to her self-confidence. To deny this cavalier,
on whatever pretext, the substance of his request, was assuredly to
convict herself of having lied as to Pamela’s whereabouts; was to
dismiss him at a critical moment; was, possibly, to deprive him of
that actual inducement to serve her which an interview with the young
lady might confirm. On the other hand, the girl herself may have
profited by some indefinite warnings as to the folly of effecting a
_mésalliance_; as to the ineffectiveness of a coronet when it is in
pledge to the Jews.
Madame, after a scarcely appreciable moment of hesitation, came to her
decision with a charming smile.
It was entirely at monsieur’s disposition, she said. There was not a
soul in it, and she would see that monsieur was not disturbed. For
herself, the contemplation of flowers resolved many problems that the
subtlest sophistries were unable to disentangle.
Ned set foot on the long box-bordered path with his mind in a
condition of strange ferment. The glamour of the previous night; the
sweet glory of this new bidding to the side of his mistress (over
which his soul laughed, as over its own humorous strategy in the
hoodwinking of a credulous guardian); the thought that it was in his
power to assist to its welfare the very dear object of his solicitude,
and, by so assisting, to convert what might otherwise seem a pursuit
into a welcome--such fancies combined made of his brain a house of
pleasant dreams. All down the bed-rows the scent of blossoming
mignonette accompanied him to the arbour at the end of the garden. To
his dying day this gentle green flower remained the asphodel of his
heaven. Great ships of cloud, carrying freightage of hidden stars,
sailed slowly across the sky to ports beyond the vision of the world.
Yet there did not seem enough wind to discrown a thistle-head. The
lark rose straight as the smoke from the town chimneys, dropping a
clew of song into the very gaping throats of his own nestlings in the
field. The rattle of a horse’s headstall, the drowsy thunder of
rolling skittle-balls, came over the wall from the neighbouring inn as
distinct in their every vibration as though the silence of night, in a
motionless atmosphere, had merged itself imperceptibly in the life of
a day but half awake. And, behold! at the end of the garden was the
crystallised expression of all this peace and beauty, the breathing
spirit of the roses and of the mignonette. Ned, as he looked down upon
her, had a thought that, if she woke, the wind would rise, the
rose-leaves scatter, and the cloud argosies dash themselves shapeless
on rocks of air.
How pretty she was! Great God, how pretty and how innocent! To him who
had fronted stubbornly the storms of passion, who had been sought a
sacrifice to the misconsecrated heats of a love whose name in
consequence he had learned to loathe, this new power of reverence was
most wonderful and most dear. He could have worshipped, had he not
loved so humanly.
Mademoiselle was sunk a little back into the leafage of the arbour.
Her eyes were closed, her lips a trifle parted. She was cuddled into a
pink _négligé_. Everything she wore seemed to caress her. An open
book lay upon her lap, one slender finger serving for listless marker
in it.
Suddenly a tiny smile, the ghostliest throb of laughter, flickered at
the corners of her mouth. Ned leapt hot all over.
“Oh, monsieur!” murmured the unconscionable witch, as if talking in
her sleep, “but are you the doctor?”
“Yes,” said Ned.
She put out a languid hand, never raising her eyelids.
“Madame-maman says it is the cake; but I think it is the Englishman
that lies heavy on me.”
“What Englishman?” said Ned.
“My lord the Englishman, monsieur. Is he not the heaviest of all in
Bury?”
Ned touched the young healthy pulse as if he handled a wax flower.
“If that is the trouble,” said he, “it is soon dealt with.”
“But how, monsieur? and would you not first see my tongue?” and she
put out the tip of a supremely pink organ.
“It is as red as a capsicum,” said Ned.
Pamela burst out laughing. She sat up, her cheeks flushed, her brown
hair ruffled on her forehead.
“Oh!” she cried, “you do not say pretty things at all; you are not
like Mr Sherree-den.”
“No,” said the young man sadly. “And because I have not his readiness,
I must lack his good fortune. Is that the moral of it? But I could be
a willing pupil if you would be my tutor.”
“Is it so? I should punish and punish till you wearied of me. Say,
then, like Mr Sherree-den, ‘Oh, _mon bonté-moi_!’ (he does not, you
know, speak varee good French); ‘but here is a poor little sick fairy
crumpled in a rose petal.’ _Hélas_! you could not have said that, you
solemn man.”
“I could not, indeed; but I should have taken the poor little sick
fairy and nursed her upon my heart.”
She looked up at him kindlily and, suddenly, pathetically--
“But I am not sick at all,” she said, “and you must not take my play
to your heart.”
Thereat, foolish Ned, reading her words literally, missed his small
chance.
“I never did,” he only answered stoutly. “I knew you were not asleep.”
Mademoiselle pouted.
“I do not act so badly, nevertheless,” she said, “when I may have an
appreciative audience.”
“And I, at least, am that.”
She shrugged her shoulders, yawned a tiny yawn.
“Well,” she said, “I must not keep monsieur from his business; and
monsieur the doctor shall not persuade me to cure too much cake with
more.”
She rose, smoothing her rumpled plumes. Ned smiled.
“I will not, since you bid me, take it to heart,” he said. “Had you
found me as heavy as you say, you would not last night have
voluntarily elected to bear so much of the weight of my company.”
“I sacrificed myself, monsieur, according to my principles, to the
good of the community.”
“Pamela,” cried my lord, suddenly pained, “my business is to go on a
journey only for the reason that I may serve you!”
She would have resented, without any real feeling of resentment, his
familiar use of her name, had not his tone found the sympathetic chord
in her that his words could not reach.
“Has madame asked you, then?” she said, with some wonder, some
gentleness, in her voice.
“I have resolved to offer myself, if you will give me the one end of a
clue of hope to bear along with me.”
“Of what hope, monsieur? Your bargain should be with madame, not with
me.”
He would not take her by storm, the aggravating noodle. No doubt that
erst fulsome experience of his had distorted his sense of proportion
in such matters.
“’Tis no bargain, of course,” he cried, in great distress. “To give me
hope is to hand me nothing but a promissory note without a signature.
But I would kiss it none the less for the sake of the name that might
be there.”
But why did he not kiss the jade herself?
“_Mon ami_,” she said very kindly, “you must not concern yourself so
of the favour of a poor foolish maid, who could return you, ah! so
little for the noble trust you place in her; who is not even the
mistress of herself.”
“Pamela!” he cried, in sudden agony, “you are not bound to another?”
“I am bound only to those who have protected and cared for me,” she
answered. “It is no time this, when danger threatens, to think of
separating myself from our common fortune.”
Her young bosom heaved; her eyes even filled with tears.
“Ah!” she murmured, “there is nothing invites me but the peace of the
cloister. To escape from the turmoil and the menace--to know no
interest of love or fortune in the company of God’s dear prisoners!”
Perhaps she only quoted from the commonplace book of _mère adoptive_.
At least the picture she conjured up seemed so real as to fetch a
little sob from her. Ned’s heart was rent by the sound.
“My dear,” he said simply, “I would not persuade you against your
conscience. God knows, in any bargain between us I should be the only
gainer. I have nothing to offer you that is worth the offer but my
love, dear. That is for you, in stress or sunshine, whenever you care
to whistle for it. Now I will say no more; but I will cross the
channel, at the very bidding of madame la comtesse, and pave the way
as I can for your return. And I shall carry hope with me, Pamela. It
is the beggar’s scrip; and what am I but a beggar!”
For the first time he forgot the little red heels that were still in
his pocket. They were often to prove a sharp reminder of themselves,
however.
Did the girl read his figurative speech in a too literal sense? Let us
hope she was never influenced by a consideration so worldly. She held
out her hand to him. Her blue eyes swam with tears.
“Perhaps, in happier times to come,” she said--and so they parted.
CHAPTER V.
Twice again only, before he started for the Continent--as he
persisted in thinking at her sole behest--was Ned vouchsafed the
partial company of his mistress. In each instance he must forego the
desire of his heart for a personal interview. Such, by accident or
design, was denied him. But he had the satisfaction of being received
by madame with an ease and a familiarity that were significant of a
quite particular confidence.
On the first occasion he happened upon the ladies out walking in a
country lane. They were botanising, under the tutorship of a Bœotian
new to him--a thin, clerical-looking individual, with a little head,
appropriately like an anther. The house at Bury was, indeed, a perfect
surprise-tub for the uncommon personalities it seemed to have an
endless capacity for turning out. Its staff was, perhaps, twenty all
told; yet this number, in view of its omniferous faculties, would
often appear as self-reproductive as a stage dozen of soldiers walking
itself round a rock into a company.
Madame, who was engaged in “receiving” from monsieur her
stick-in-waiting the names of _débutantes_ hedge-flowers presented to
her, waved a gracious end to the ceremony, and, greeting my lord as if
he were a dear friend, invited him to pace beside her.
“It is well timed,” she said. “Monsieur has received my letter? And
will Friday suit our so generous cavalier to depart?”
Ned bowed with his never-failing gravity.
“Yes,” he said simply.
The lady clasped her hands.
“_Mon Dieu_!” she exclaimed, with a quite melodramatic fervour, “it is
the passing of the cloud. After all the tempest-tossing, to see the
shore in sight!”--and she hastily lifted her skirts from contact with
a roadside puddle.
“Monsieur,” said a little voice almost at Ned’s ear, “do you know what
is a _corolle_ and what a _nectaire_?”
In some mood of impudence or mischief Pamela was come to give her
company unbidden. She would pretend not to see the warning gestures of
_la gouvernante_. She held in her hand the parts of a dismembered
flower, and she looked up at the young man as she stepped, light as
his own sudden thoughts, at his side. She felt a little warmth, a
little pity towards him. He was going far away, and to serve her. That
she knew. It was in the nature of a tiny confidence between them. Her
glance was appealing as a child’s, asking not to be left.
And as for Ned, the sight of this sweet face close to him so inflamed
his heart that his formal speech took fire.
“I know when I look at you,” he said; “they are mademoiselle’s cheek
and mouth classified.”
In the near prospect of his banishment he spoke out reckless of
consequences. Perhaps the unexpected answer took the girl herself by
surprise. She hung her head and fell back a little.
“Mademoiselle,” cried Ned, “if I might take thence a rose to wear for
a favour!”
“Oh, fie!” she answered, “that is not even original; it is to repeat
Mr Sherree-den’s foolishness. And they are not roses at all.”
“Nor rouge,” said Ned, “though you once implied it.”
“No,” she said, with a pert glance at her _gouvernante_; “madame-maman
does not approve. But sometimes to rub them with a geranium
petal--that is not immoral, is it?”
“I don’t know,” cried the young man; “but the geranium shall be my
queen of flowers from this time!”
“Pamela!” cried madame, in desperate chagrin over every word that
passed between the two, yet impotent, under existing circumstances, to
give expression to her annoyance; but she ventured to summon the child
pretty peremptorily to come and walk beside her, and only in this
order was my lord destined to enjoy for an hour a divided pleasure.
But on the second and final occasion of his meeting her, chance and
the girl were even less favourable to him. He was to start for Belgium
on the Friday morning, and on the Thursday evening he walked over to
Bury to receive his instructions. He found signs of confusion in the
house--boxes choking the passages, personal litter of all kinds
brought together as if for removal; and in the drawing-room a little
concert--such as madame loved to extemporise--was in process of
performance, with Mr Sheridan, in mighty boisterous spirits, for only
listener. He invited Ned to a seat beside him, and clapped him on the
shoulder.
“’Tis admirable,” said he; “not concert, but concertation. There is no
conductor but a lightning-conductor could direct these warring
elements.”
Madame, indeed, set the time on her harp; but it was the time that
waits for no man. A Bœotian--of whom there were a half-dozen in the
orchestra--might pant, a mere winded laggard, into his flute; another
might toilfully climb the last bars on his fiddle, as if it were a
gate; a third might pound up the long hill of his double-bass, and
cross its very bridge with a shriek like a view-holloa: the issue was
the same--none was in at the death. Pamela, in the meantime, tinkled
on a triangle; Mademoiselle Sercey shook a little panic cluster of
sledge-bells whenever madame glanced her way; Mademoiselle d’Orléans
played on the side-drum amiably, and with all the execution of a
toy-rabbit. It was all very merry, and the girls giggled famously; and
Ned closed his eyes and tried to think that the mellow ring of the
steel was from the forging by Love of his bolts on a tiny anvil.
By-and-by the piece ended amidst laughter, and madame came from her
place and conducted her cavalier into another room.
“It is to prove yourself the most disinterested,” she said. “How can I
acquit myself of gratitude to my friend--to my knight-errant?”
Ned, in the hot longing of his soul, was near stumbling upon a
suggestion as to the reward it was in her power, if not to bestow, at
least to influence. But he remembered his promise to Pamela, and was
fain to let the opportunity pass.
Then madame, to some fine play of emotion, produced a couple of
letters under seal--the first to monsieur le duc, the second to her
own son-in-law, M. Becelaer de Lawoestine. To the latter gentleman’s
address in Brussels she begged my lord to proceed in the first
instance. The Belgian nobleman would give him honourable welcome, no
less for her sake than for monsieur’s most obvious merits. Moreover,
De Lawoestine would furnish him with precise directions as to where
monseigneur was at the moment to be found; if, indeed, monseigneur was
not at the very time the other’s guest in Brussels.
These were Ned’s simple instructions. There were tender messages to
madame’s daughter; suggestions as to the attitude most effective to be
assumed towards monseigneur by madame’s plenipotentiary; references to
the agony of suspense madame must suffer until she should learn the
result of her envoy’s mission. Madame, in truth, either acted her part
so well, or lived in it so naturally, as to half convince herself, we
must believe, that she was not acting at all.
“We are ready, as you see, to start the moment monseigneur’s command
shall reach us,” she said. “We pray, monsieur, for the prosperous
termination to your voyage.”
Her eyes were moist; she impulsively extended her hand, which his
lordship less impulsively kissed. His lips, indeed, unpractised in
gallantry, were in pledge to a dream; his understanding, also. Had it
not been, he might have inclined to the question, How comes it that
madame, in direct communication with the Duke of Orleans, is unable to
acquaint me certainly as to that prince’s present address?
Ned returned to the drawing-room, prepared to repudiate any suggestion
of the glamour that might be held to attach itself to a mild form of
heroism. His modesty was not put to the test. The company accepted him
in a frolic mood. It was full of laughter and thoughtlessness. He was
rallied only on his serious mien. Pamela, wilful and radiant, would
acknowledge him for no more than the means to a jest. Her affectation
of indifference was secretly a stimulus to the spirits of two, at
least, of the party. For a household depressed by the gloom of
impending misfortune, the atmosphere was singularly volatile.
Not to the end did Ned receive one hint that his self-sacrifice was
appreciated and applauded; and at last he must make his adieux without
the comfort of even a sympathetic glance from a certain direction to
cheer him on his way.
He had put on his hat and coat, had reached the very porch on his way
forth, when a light step sounded behind him.
“Good-bye, monsieur!”
“God bless you, Pamela!”
“Monsieur, it is only the rose you asked for.”
The door slammed behind him. He held, half stupidly, in his hand a
little sweet-smelling stalk with some crushed scarlet flowers.
“My God--oh, my God!” he whispered, “it is part of herself.”
CHAPTER VI.
It was on a day of the last week of broiling July that Ned knocked
at the door of a house in the Rue de Ragule, near the Schaerbeck Gate
in Brussels, and desired to be shown into the presence of M. le Comte
de Lawoestine.
Now it seemed at the outset that his mission was in vain, for monsieur
was, and had been for many days, away from home, and it was impossible
for one to say when he would return. And whither had he gone? Ah! that
was known only to himself, and, possibly, yes, to madame la comtesse.
And was madame away also? Madame? Oh! _c’était une autre pair de
manches_. Madame, it would appear, was upstairs at that very moment.
Ned sent up his letter of introduction and--after a rather tiresome
interval of waiting--was shown into a room on the first floor. Here,
to his astonishment, was the mid-day meal in progress at a long
polished table. Two ladies--one seated at either side--continued
eating with scarcely a look askance at the stranger; a third, placid
and _débonnaire_, rose from her place at the head of the board and,
advancing a step or two, held out her hand.
“I have read maman’s letter,” she said, but speaking in French in a
little drowsy voice, “and I have the pleasure to make you welcome,
monsieur.”
She then returned to her seat, and bidding a servant lay a cover for
monsieur, went on with her dinner. The very antichthon of the galvanic
Genlis spirit seemed to slumber in her rosy cheeks. She had settled
down to a lifelong “rest,” like an actress availing herself only of
the art of her profession to play herself into a fortunate match.
“Monsieur le comte is away?” said Ned, as he took his seat by one of
the silent ladies.
“He is gone south to join his regiment. He will be at Liége for a few
days to inspect the fortifications. I do not know, I, what it all
portends. They say the air is full of hidden menace. Anyhow, what does
M. Lafayette purpose in bringing an army of ragamuffins to the
frontier? He is a nobleman and a gentleman. I saw him once at
Belle-Chasse. Ah! the dear industrious days! But I prefer a life of
ease, monsieur; do not you? To gild baskets and work samplers, with
the sun on one’s head in the hot white room! Mother of Christ, it is
hot enough in Brussels! One may think one hears the sun drop grease
upon the stones in the street, when Fanchon spits upon a flat-iron in
the kitchen. Have you ever known a summer so sultry? The sky is packed
with thunder like the hold of a ship. Then will come the rain one day
and swell it and swell it, and the decks will burst asunder and the
ribs explode apart. I do not like thunder, monsieur--do you? It is
disturbing, like the play of children. Yet we are to have thunder
enough soon, they say.”
So she talked on, in a tuneless soft voice; and there seemed no
particular reason why she should ever come to an end. She never paused
for an answer or for a word, nor often for breath, which long habit
had taught her the art of nursing. She asked no questions as to her
mother; did not, indeed, so much as allude to her until Ned indirectly
forced a reference.
“And where is monsieur le duc?” said he, cutting in during a momentary
ellipsis that was caused by her indetermination in choosing between
two dishes of vegetables. She did not answer till she had
decided--upon taking some of each. Then she turned her soft eyes on
him in a little wonder.
“Monsieur----?” she began, as if she had not heard.
“The Duke of Orleans,” said Ned.
“Indeed, I do not know. He should be in Paris.”
“He has left here, then?”
“Here? Brussels, do you mean? He has not, to my knowledge, been in
Brussels these six months--no, not since January, when he came to meet
the demoiselle Théroigne on her return from the Austrian prisons, and
conducted her back to the capital.”
“Théroigne!” exclaimed Ned in faint amazement.
“So she is called, I believe,” went on the placid creature, oblivious
of the little emotion she had caused. “Monsieur has heard of her, no
doubt. She is beautiful, and of easy virtue, they say. At her house in
the Rue de Rohan the most violent propagandists assemble nightly to
discuss the overthrow of the present social conditions. I wish they
would leave them alone: they are very reasonable, I think--to all at
least who have assured incomes. She is quite a force in Paris, this
woman. They sent her some time last year _en mission_ to these
Netherlands to preach the new religion. But she was arrested by the
agents of the Emperor and conveyed to Vienna, whence she was dismissed
no later than last January. Monseigneur was hunting with M. de
Lawoestine at the time, and he heard somehow, and came straight on to
Brussels, and carried the demoiselle Théroigne away.”
“And that was the last you have seen of him? Yet your mother had no
doubt but that he was in this neighbourhood.”
“Oh, maman?” cried madame, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders. “But
she is as full of fancies as this mushroom is of grubs.”
“Indeed,” said Ned, quite dumfoundered, “I think you must be
misinformed as to monsieur le duc.”
“Very well,” she said indifferently. “It is possible, of course. M. de
Lawoestine is not communicative, nor am I curious. There is no reason
why they should not be in Liége together at this very moment.”
There was every reason, however, against such a meeting; but madame
had not the shadow of a diplomatic acumen.
“I must follow your husband to Liége, then,” said Ned.
“You will at least lie here for the night, monsieur?”
“A thousand pardons, madame. My business is of the most pressing; and
you yourself confess an ignorance as to the movements of monsieur le
comte.”
“_Mon Dieu_! I never trouble my head about them.”
“With madame’s permission I will bid her adieu at the end of the
meal.”
“As you will, monsieur. And if you do not find monsieur le duc in
Liége?”
“Then I shall go on to Paris.”
“I hope, then, monsieur’s passports are in order?”
“They take me into France by way of the Low Countries. Madame, your
mother, is responsible for them.”