“She is at any rate a woman of business. Nevertheless, the borders are

disturbed. I wish monsieur a very fair journey. I trust he will not be

struck by the lightning; but--Mother of Christ! I think there is a

storm coming such as we have never seen. I shall take some peaches and

some cake, and sit in the cellars till it is over.”

* * * * * * * *

My lord reached Liége on the morning of the twenty-ninth of July--a

day of sullen omen to France. The early noon hours he spent in dully

strolling through the streets of the antique city, now grown so

familiar to him. He had called at M. de Lawoestine’s address (as

supplied him by the young madame), only to find that the count was

absent on some expedition and would not return till the morrow. Of the

Duke of Orleans’s presence in the town he could obtain no tittle of

evidence.

Now he was dull because misgivings were beginning to oppress him, and

because the weather made an atmosphere appropriate to the confusion in

his brain. Certainly he did not actually face, in the moral sense, the

question as to whether or no he had been intentionally committed to a

fool’s errand. He could not have conceived how so elaborate a jest

should be planned and carried through without suspicion awaking in his

heart. Naturally, knowing the soundness of his own financial position,

he was not conscious of the supposed bar to his suit. His uneasiness

turned rather on his new conception of Madame de Genlis as a woman of

that patchwork practicalness that leaves to chance the working out of

its design. She may have _intended_ that monsieur le duc should be in

Brussels--it would, doubtless, have been convenient to her to find him

there--and therefore she may have, through Ned, acted upon her desire

rather than upon her information. But, if this were so, what a crazy

perspective of possibilities was opened out! to what an endless

wild-goose chase might he not be sworn! And, in the meantime, Pamela

and Mr Sheridan!

There was such anguish in the thought as to make him augment his pace

till his forehead was wet with perspiration. He had come out to escape

the intolerable oppressiveness of confinement in an inn. It was such

weather as he had experienced upon his first visit to the town--good

God! how many years ago was that now? Yet there seemed fewer changes

in it than in himself. It was such weather, but intensified--and, with

that, at least, his own condition kept pace. He had a warmer core in

his breast than had been there before. But the tall, narrow streets,

the cool churches, the blazing markets--these had no longer the

glamour of the past. His thoughts were always in shadowy English

lanes, in fragrant English rooms. A girl’s laugh in the street would

make him lift his head as he paced; a jingle of bells on the harness

of some sleepy Belgian horse would recall to him with a thrill the

tinkle of a triangle. And, for the rest, the sweet pungency of

geranium flowers he carried always in his breast, like a very garden

of pleasant memories.

And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!

He looked up with a sudden start. Something--he could not describe

what--like the silence that succeeds the heavy slamming of a door,

seemed to have gripped the world. The heat for days had been immense

and cruel. Men, roysterers and blasphemers, were come to a mean

inclination to expend what little breath was left to them in prayer. A

habit of stealthily examining the face of the heavens for signs

significant of the approaching “black death” of the storm was common.

The water seemed to steam in the kennels, the lead to crackle in the

gutters. Some inhuman outcome, it was predicted, of these unnatural

conditions must result. And now at last had the plague-stroke fallen?

Whatever it was--this inexplicable turn of the wheel--the tension of

existence drew to near snapping-point under it. Poor souls crept for

pools of shadow as if these were Bethesdas; here and there one dropped

upon the pavement, and was rescued, as under fire, by a companion; the

wail of half-stifled infants came through open windows; the sun was a

crown of thorns to the earth.

The streets, at the flood of noon, grew almost untenable. Ned--perhaps

from some vague association of ideas, the result of his dreamings upon

English lanes--left the town and, with the desire for trees compelling

him, took half-unconsciously the Méricourt road. It may have been

instinct merely that directed him. He had thought since his

coming--how could he help it?--of Théroigne, of Nicette, of all his

old connection with the strange little village. But he had no desire

to renew his acquaintance with the people of that ancient comedy--so,

now, it seemed to him. And surely by this time a new piece must hold

the stage; the old masks must be crumbled away or repainted to other

expressions. It was so long ago. He had leapt the boundary-river of

youth in the interval. He could have no place at last in the life of

the little hamlet by the woods.

It may have been the sudden realisation of this, his grown

emancipation, that tempted him all in a moment, and quite strangely,

to the desire to look once more upon the scenes that, until within the

last few minutes, he had had no least wish to revisit. It may have

been that he was driven onward simply by the goad of his most haunting

distress--that fancy of Mr Sheridan greatly profiting by a rival’s

absence--and by the thought of the intolerable period of mental

suspense and bodily discomfort he must suffer down there in the town,

until his interview with M. de Lawoestine should give a direction one

way or the other to his mission. Such considerations may have urged

him; or--with a bow of deference to the necessitarians--no

consideration at all, but a fatality.

For, indeed, this storm--an historical one--that was to break, seemed

so inspired an invasion of order by the prophets of anarchy, as that

it appeared to impress under its banner, as it advanced, all

predestined agents (however individually insignificant) of that social

and religious havoc of which its ruinous course was to be typical.

Ned, as he toiled on the first of the hill, looked up at the sky. It

was as the wall of a nine-days’ furnace--his eyes could not endure the

terror of the light. Nor, from his position, could they see how, far

down on the horizon, a mighty draft of cloud was slipping over the

world, like the sliding lid of a shallow box, shutting into frightful

darkness a panic host of souls.

Here it was better than in the town; but the heat still was terrific.

He was yet undecided as to whether to go on or rest where he had

paused, when a carter, with a tilted waggon, came up the road behind

him. For the weird opportuneness of it, this might have been

Kühleborn himself. The man, as it appeared, was bound for the farther

side of Méricourt. Ned, seeing the chance offered him to view from

ambush, accepted his unconscious destiny, struck his bargain, and

slipped under the canvas.

Kühleborn cried up his team. The sick day turned, moaning among its

distant trees like a delirious troll.

* * * * * * * *

The lodestone to all this dark force of electricity that came up

swiftly over the verge of the world, rising from the caldron of the

East, where inhuman things are brewed! Was it an iron cross standing

high in the roadway of a populous bridge; a cross that seemed to crane

its gaunt neck looking ever over a wandering concourse of heads to the

horizon, gazing, like St Geneviève, for the cloudy coming of an

Attila; a cross held up, as it were, before the towers of Paris--a

Retro Satanas to the menacing shapes that, emerging from chaos,

threatened the ancient order, the ancient dynasty, the ancient

religion;--the cross, indeed, on the bridge of Charenton? For in

Charenton that day was pregnant conference, was a famous banquet to

Marseillais and Jacobin, was sinister tolling of the death-knell of

royal France. And what if the bell swung without a clapper! The very

air it displaced, reeling from its onset like foam from a prow, caught

the whisper of death in its passing, and carried it on to the cross.

The death of royalty and of religion; the desecration of the

tabernacles; the spilling of the kingly chrism and trampling of the

Host! As night at last shut upon the boiling day, concentrating the

heat, the cross on the now lonely bridge stiffened its back and stood

awaiting the storm. That must fly far before it could reach the pole

of its attraction. But it was approaching. The cross could feel the

very ribs of the world vibrating under the terrific trample of its

march. At present inaudible; but there came by-and-by little

vancouriers of sound, moaning doves of dismay that fled on the wind,

as before a forest fire. These flew faster and more furious, fugitives

in a moment before the distant explosion of artillery. The rain began

to fall in heavy drops, like life-blood from the lungs of the heavens.

The earth sighed once in its sleep ... in an instant a great glare

licked the town....

Hither and thither, swayed, bent, but stubborn; now shoulder to

shoulder with the hurricane; now clawing at the stones to save itself

from being wrenched from its socket; now stooping a little to let a

flying charge overleap it--through half the night the cross stood its

ground, barring the road to Paris. Then at length a bolt struck and

shivered it where it stood.

“It is gone!” shrieked the storm; “the way to Paris lies open. The

last of the symbols of an ancient reverence is broken and thrown

aside!”

* * * * * * * *

To Ned in the woods of Méricourt was vouchsafed a foretaste of this

tempest that rose and travelled so swiftly; that, having for its

siderite the pole-star of all revolution, rushed across a continent in

fire so rabid as that it expended nine-tenths of its force before it

might reach and charge with its remaining strength the electric

city--the nerve-drawn city that had shrilled into the night that

encompassed it, crying for reserves of dynamism lest at the last it

should sink and succumb. But if the storm brought small grist to the

actual mill, the morning, when it broke, voiceless and dripping,

revealed sufficient evidence of how deadly had been its threshing

throughout the fields of its advance. Over the north-eastern noon, and

flying, a dull high monster, up the valley of the Meuse--from

Charleroi to Maubeuge and across the border; down with a swoop upon St

Quentin, and on with a shriek and crash into and through the woods of

Soissons; opening out at last, from Pantin to Vitry, as if to invest

the city and slash at it with a reaping-hook of fire--so the force had

come and passed, like a tidal wave of flame, leaving a broad wake of

ruin and desolation. On all the league-long roads converging to the

central city were fragments of broken and twisted railings, of riven

trees, of thatch and rick and chimney; on many was the sterner

wreckage of human beings--poor Jacques and Jacqueline struck down and

torn by branch or flame as they drove their slow provision carts

towards the capital through the furious darkness. Not a dying Christ

at a cross-track but the storm demon had found and shattered on his

blazing anvil. The pitiful symbols of the old love, of the old

belief--one by one he had splintered and flung them as he swept on his

road. Nor only the symbols of the old faith, but of the new order. For

entering in the end the very gates of the city, he had driven with a

desperate rally of ferocity at certain sentinels ensconced dismally in

their boxes against the railings of public buildings, and, consuming

them, had committed their ashes to the consideration of the anarchy to

which he had rushed to subscribe.

Such revelations were all for the morrow; and in the meantime Ned was

become a little fateful waif of the first processes of the force.

The storm came upon him when alighted in the deep woods behind the

chateau. Passing under cover through Méricourt a few minutes earlier,

he had peeped through his tilt, scanning the familiar scenes with a

strange little emotion of memory. Feeling this, he had almost

regretted his venture. Perhaps the emotion was accountable, he

thought, to the heat--to the re-enacting of an atmosphere that was

charged with suggestion. He could--and did--recall a vision by the

village fountain--the vision of a girl, all bold outline and

colouring, standing with her arms crooked backwards under her lifted

hair. He could recall another figure coming up the field-path hard

by--a face of pearly shadows and wondering blue eyes under a great

fragrant load of grasses. These blue eyes haunted him in the

retrospect, even while he shut his own angrily upon the little ghostly

impression. Why could he not dismiss the thought of them from his

mind? Why had he submitted himself to the influence of the place at

all?

It was too late now to retreat. His carter--a sleepy Liégeois,

attired appropriately in a hoqueton, or smock, like a night-gown--led

his team stolidly by fountain and “Landlust,” past church and smithy,

and so through the village into the forest road beyond. Ned, in the

darkness, felt in his breast for his talisman, his tiny packet of

geranium flower; and bringing out his hand scented, kissed it. Then,

restored thereby to reason, in the thick of the woods he hailed his

jehu to a stop, descended, and, paying liberally for his journey,

plunged amongst the trees.

At once the shadow of an impending fear took him in grip. The earth,

he could have thought, lay rigid in a dry fever of terror. The shade

he had so much coveted fell around him like a living shroud. He had

always an unreasonable dread of what lay behind the curtain of trunks

before him. He moved on purposeless and prickling with apprehension.

Had it not been for very shame he would have turned and fled for the

open, daring any meeting in the village rather than this nameless dead

solitude. But he forced himself to proceed, mentally assigning himself

for goal that old withered leviathan in the clearing that was the

centre of some strange associations. He had been curious long ago, he

admitted, to look upon this monster since the legend of divinity had

attached to it. He would go so far now and satisfy his eyes, then turn

and make for air and light.

Suddenly he fancied he heard far away the rumble of the receding

waggon-wheels. A numb stillness succeeded. The earth seemed to breathe

its last, and a napkin of cloud was softly flung over the dead face of

it. The lungs of the day fell in; a few large bitter drops slipped

from the closed lids of the heavens.

Straight, and in a moment, Ned sprang alert to a sense of peril. This

ominous oppressiveness was nothing but the forereach of a swiftly

advancing thunderstorm--but the trees and every green spire toppling

into cloud an invitation to its own destruction! He must race for

cover--and whither? The little hut beyond the clearing! It presented

itself to him in a flash. He set off running.

The very enforced action was a tonic to his nerves. As he sped, the

darkness gathered around him deep and deeper. He ran in a livid

twilight. Then on the quicker beat of a pulse the wood was torn with

fire from hem to hem. He was dazzled, half-shocked to a pause for an

instant; but there had been a panic sound to drive him forward again

directly--a huge tearing noise within the monstrous slam that had

trodden upon the heels of the blaze. He could only guess what this

portended. At the very first explosion a tree of the forest had been

struck and riven.

Now he scurried so fast that the breath sobbed a little in his throat.

He had a feeling that the Force was dodging him, heading him off from

reach of shelter. Not a soul did he meet, but formless shadows seemed

to cry him on from deep to lonelier deep of the maze. Then again a

sudden glare took him in the face like a whip; and at once the Furies

of the storm burst from restraint and danced upon the woods in fire

and water, rehearsing the very carmagnole of the Terror.

All in a moment the fugitive broke into the clearing he sought, but

had dreaded he would miss. Even as he ran--half deafened, yet relieved

by the uproar that had succeeded a silence as awful as it was

inhuman--he must slacken his pace in view of the towering giant that

dominated his every strange memory connected with the place. Suddenly

he stopped altogether, staring at the great tumorous trunk. Where had

he read or heard that beech-trees were secure from stroke by

lightning? Should he stand by, here under shelter of the enormous

withered arms? In his trouble he might scarcely notice how the whole

character of the isolated spot in which he stood was converted from

that that figured in his memory. Yet he took it in vaguely by the

sickly light--the blue-painted iron railings, having a locked wicket,

that fenced in the sacred bole; the gleaming silver hearts hung here

and there about the bark; the cropped ribbon of sward that encircled

the tree. Yet upon this green, for all its cultivated trimness, he

could have thought the underwood was encroached; and dimly he recalled

St Denys’s prophecy: “If in years to come thou tell’st me this charmed

circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that

elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.” Surely the idle

prediction was strangely verified.

Even where he stood, for all the little shelter of the high branches,

the tempest beat the breath out of his body. Every moment the crash

and welter and uproar took a more hellish note and aspect: he felt he

could not stand it much longer.

Suddenly, twisting about from a vision of fierce light, he caught a

startled glimpse of something he had hitherto failed to notice. The

narrow track that had once led through the heart of the thicket to the

hut amongst the trees was a narrow track no longer. It had been opened

out and greatly widened, so as to give passage to a tiny chapel that

stood at the close of a short vista of trunks.

With a gasp of relief, Ned raced for this unexpected refuge, dashed up

a step, threw himself against the door, and half stumbled into a void

beyond it. The door flapped to behind him. He stood, panting, in a

little crypt of scented gloom. Somewhere in front a single ruby star

glowed unwavering--a core of utter peace and quiet.

CHAPTER VII.

The thunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not

a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It

burned without a flutter, diffusing, even, the slightest, gentlest

radiance throughout the tiny building. Ned, from his position near the

door, could make out the whitewashed walls and ceiling; the wee square

windows glazed with twilight as sleek and dusky as oxydised silver;

the little litter of chairs about the floor; the altar overhung by

some indistinguishable dark picture; most suggestively, most

spectrally, the very painted statue at whose feet the star itself was

glowing.

He stepped softly towards the shrine. A dozen paces brought him almost

within touch of it--and of something else. A woman was crouched

against the pedestal of the image, her hands clasped high on the

stone, her face buried in the curve of her left arm. In the incessant

throb and flash of the lightning through the little windows, he could

see the soft heave of her shoulders, the shredded glints of light

running up and down her hair as she drew quick breaths like one in

terror. Something, in the same moment, convinced him that she was

aware of his entrance; that, in the insane relief engendered of

company, she was struggling to present as spiritual preoccupation the

appearances of extreme fear. If this were so, she fought in vain to

save her self-respect. Her collapse, it was evident, had been too

abject; to rally from it on the mere prick of pride was an

impossibility. Here to her, lost and foundered in hell, had come a

first presence of human sympathy.

It was sympathy. In the dusk, in the endless flash and roll, and in

the heavy roaring of the rain on the roof, Ned’s spirit, reaching

across a reeling abyss, felt that this fellow-creature was in mortal

terror. Too diffident, nevertheless, to make a first advance, he

compromised with his pity by seizing a chair and dragging it towards

him, that the very rough jar of its legs on the boards should be sound

assurance to the other of a human neighbourhood. The little

instinctive act, fraught with kindliness, touched off the nerve of

endurance. As he dropped into the seat he had pulled forward, the

prostrate figure, detaching itself from the pedestal, came suddenly

writhing and crouching over the few yards of floor that separated

them, and, throwing itself at his feet, put up a mad groping hand.

“I am dying of fear!” it whispered.

Ned caught the hand in a succouring grip. He could see only the

glimmer of a white face raised to his. He was bending down to give it

words of assurance, when to a hellish crash the whole building seemed

to leap into liquid fire--to sink, weltering, into a black and humming

void. The shock, the noise, had been thickly stunning rather than

ear-splitting. Here, in the chapel, they were too close to the cause

to suffer the sound perspective that shatters the brain. They might

have been the stone, the kernel, from which the force itself had burst

on all sides.

By slow degrees Ned’s eyes recovered their focus, until he could make

out once more the ghostly blotch of a face looking up into his.

Neither of these two, beyond an involuntary jerk of response to the

enormous flame and detonation, had stirred from the attitude into

which, it would almost appear, they had been stricken. The actual

terror of the one, the sympathy of the other, seemed welded by the

flash into a single expression of fatality. In the lonely chapel,

amidst wrack and storm, to each the spectre of a memory had suddenly

materialised, revealing itself amazingly significant.

“I must go,” muttered Ned, all in a moment. He spoke confusedly,

trying to withdraw his hand. But the other soft clutch resisted: the

other half-deafened ears could yet essay to catch the import of the

murmur.

“You won’t leave me--here alone?” she said. “Oh, I shall die of the

fear!”

She could waive before him all pretence of her possessing the divine

favour or protection. It was her rapture that this man--who had again

stepped across the years of darkness into her life--knew her soul; her

rapture to woo him by the seduction of her surrender to his nobler

understanding. His spirit darkened; yet, knowing her fearfulness of

old, he could not in common humanity forsake her till the terror was

past.

So they sat on in silence, she flung at his feet, holding his hand,

while the flame and fury expended themselves overhead. Once or twice

he was conscious that her lips were helping the office of her fingers;

and he flushed shamefully in the darkness, yet would not seem to

condone her offence--her terrible sacrilege, even, under the

circumstances--by so much as noticing it. But he thought of the little

flower-packet in his breast; and he cursed his bitter folly that,

after such a warning as he had already had, he should have ventured

himself wantonly within the charmed influence of this silken-skinned

witch.

Suddenly, it might almost be said, the tempest fled by. It passed as

rapidly as it had come, travelling westwards on a flooded current of

wind. The noise, the glare, ceased; light grew on the dim-washed

walls; the dark picture above the altar revealed itself a pious

representation of the very subject that had founded the chapel. There

the saint stood in effigy for all the world to worship: here she knelt

self-confessed at the feet of the one man for whose hot reprobation

she yearned, so long as it would kiss in pity where it had struck. Ned

glanced down at the lifted face. It may have suggested in its

expression some secret, half-unconscious triumph. He tore away his

hand--sprang to his feet, as the clouds broke outside and sunshine

came into the place.

“You must let me go,” he said. “Your saints will be enough to protect

you now.”

She rose hurriedly, and stood beside him. There was something new and

indescribable in her air and appearance--it might have been the mere

maturity of self-love. Whatever her stress of mind during these three

years, its effect had not been to warp and wither her physical beauty.

Even the little angles of the past were rounded off. She was

developed--a riper, more perilous Lamia.

“Hush!” she whispered, pointing to the altar, “the tabernacle!”

He gave a low little laugh.

“What!” he said, dropping his voice nevertheless, “is the presence

more real to you than to me? Will you still pretend? We are alone,

Nicette.”

Alone! the word was soft music to her.

“No,” she said, coming after him as he strode towards the door, “I

will pretend to nothing--nothing, with you.”

She put out a hand and gently detained him.

“Oh!” she said, a very hunger in her voice and eyes, “to see you

again--to see you again! Why are you here? You did not follow me? No

one knew I was in the wood; and I was caught by the storm. My God, my

God! to be near it all--in the midst--and the curse of heaven awake!

It is folly, is it not, that talk of retribution--the folly of sinners

and the opportunity of priests? Here was I alone, for all hell to

torture; and, instead, _you_ come upon me unawares!”

He stood dumfoundered that she could thus bare her soul to him. She

had no shame, it seemed, but the sweet exalted shame of the

seductress: her eyes dwelt upon him in ecstasy.

“Whence do you come?” she went on, in a soft panting voice. “But what

does it matter, since you are here! I knew in the end you would

return. This--this” (she put her hand upon her bosom)--“Oh, it is a

fierce magnet that would have drawn you across the world!”

He pulled at the door--let in a lance of brilliant light that struck

full upon his face. Something in its expression appeared to startle

her. She leaned forward and uttered a sudden miserable cry.

“Where have you been--what have you done! My God, let me look!”

The next instant she backed from him a little, throwing her hands to

her eyes as if she were blinded.

“It is there,” she cried, “what I have longed and prayed for; but it

is not for me!”

He recovered his voice in a fury.

“Prayed!” he cried. “Are such prayers, from such a source, answered?

Stand off, for shame! This meeting is all an accident. I have neither

sought, nor desired, to see you. It is an accident--do you hear?”

He tore open the door, jumped the step, ran a few paces, and stopped,

with an exclamation of sheer astonishment. A huge ruin of trunk and

branch closed his vista. The old woodland monarch, the type of stately

quincentennial growth and decline, was shattered where it stood. At

the last, facing its thousandth tempest, it had been wounded to death

in the forefront of the battle. The brand had struck its mightiest

branch, tearing it from its socket; and the crashing limb in its

downfall had wrenched apart the trunk, revealing a great hollow heart

of decay.

The quiet drip and fall from loaded leaves; the faint rumble of the

retreating storm; the steam from the hot-soaked grass--Ned was

conscious of them all as he stood a moment in awe. Then he hurried

forward again--up to the very scene of the disaster.

The ruin was complete; the silver hearts were fused or vanished; the

sacred fence was whirled abroad, in twisted, fantastic shapes. So much

for the immunity of beech-trees. He could hardly dare to face the

moral of his escape.

But he must face another as terrible, if more impersonal. It presented

itself to him on the instant--a little heart within the heart--a poor

decayed fragment of humanity sunk deep in the vegetable decay of the

exposed hollow. At first, mentally stunned, and confused, moreover, by

this arabesque of ruin, he failed to realise that what he looked upon

was other than some accident of rubbish. It rested down near the

ground upon what had once been the bottom of a deep well of eaten

timber. It had, strangely enough, the appearance of a sleeping child.

He took a quick step forward. His very heart seemed to gasp. God in

heaven! it _was_ a child--not sleeping, but dead and mummified!

A sound--something awful, like the breath-struggle of one who had been

winded by a blow--fluttered in his ear. He leapt aside from it,

staring behind him. Nicette was there, gazing--gazing, but at him no

longer. Her eyes were like stones in a hewn grey mask; youth had

shuddered from her cheeks.

Suddenly she turned upon him stiffly. Her soul instinctively

recognised the whole that was implied by his scarce voluntarily

expressed terror of her neighbourhood.

“I did not kill him,” she whispered.

“It _is_ Baptiste, then?”

He was familiar at once with the stupendous horror of it all. That was

such, and so appalling in the light or blackness of a construction

that her immediate surrender of the situation made inevitable, that

his brain reeled under the shock. He was an accessory to something

namelessly hideous.

Then, in a moment, she was prostrate at his feet, clinging to him,

imploring his mercy, his kindness; urging him by his pity, by her

agony, to withdraw her from vision of the terror, to listen to and

believe her.

“Take me away!” she screamed; “it was his own doing! I did not kill

him!”

He repulsed her with a raging force, still staring silently over and

beyond her. It seemed to him that some ghastly sacristan was lighting

up a sacrificial altar in his memory. Candle by candle it flamed into

dreadful illumination, revealing the abominations that in the darkness

he had been only innocently condoning. He thought he understood now

what had impelled her to that strange haunting of the neighbourhood of

the tree; what remorse had driven her to the prayers and prostrations

that had aroused the curiosity of the village; why, panic-stricken

under that threat of search, she had wrought in a moment, of her

imagination, a fable that should serve her secret evermore for an ark

double-cased. He recalled, in the ghastly light of a new

interpretation, almost the last words she had spoken to him in a time

that he had thought was dead and forgotten: “Oh, my God, not so to

stultify all I have suffered and done for thy sake!” For his sake--for

his sake! Was he so vile as this, then--he who had dared in dreams to

mate with a purity like an angel’s--that the incense of any noisome

sacrifice, if only offered up to himself, he must be held to find

grateful! He broke, without meaning it, into a horrible laugh.

“Did she--the mother--not promise,” he shrieked, “to restore the

little brother to you--the poor little murdered wretch! She has kept

to her word. And you--you? Don’t forget you are sworn under damnation

to dedicate yourself, a maid, to her service! Can you do it? God in

heaven, it is not your fault if you can!”

She fell before him, as he spurned her, writhing and moaning amongst

the sodden grass.

“Won’t you listen to me--oh, won’t you listen? If you would only kill

me, and not speak!”

He stood immediately rigid as justice’s own sentry.

“Yes, I will listen,” he said, “and you shall condemn yourself.”

She crept a thought nearer and, feeling him keep aloof, sat bowed upon

the ground, her fingers locked together in her lap.

“I will tell you the truth,” she said, low and broken. “After that

first time he, my brother, was changed. He became, when you were gone,

a little devil, insulting and defying me. It was terrible--his

precocity. He held over my head ever a threat--monsieur, it was that

he would make exposure of the _liaison_ between his sister and the

Englishman.”

Ned uttered an exclamation. She entreated him with raised hands.

“Ah! it is not always the truth one fears. One day in the woods--oh,

my God, monsieur, hide me!--in the woods--what was I saying! Mother of

God! it was here--we quarrelled, and I was desperate. He ran to escape

me, climbed the great branch that stooped to the grass. He stood high

up, reviling me. I made as if to fling a stone: he threw up his arm,

stumbled, and disappeared.”

She crept towards him again, yet another agonised appeal for the

tiniest assurance that he had ceased to loathe her. At least this time

he stood his ground.

“At first I was stunned,” she said. “He may have been killed at once,

for no sound reached me. Then all at once the wicked spirit put it

into my head that here, by doing nothing, was a sure way out of my

difficulties--was safety from that impish slanderer, was the bar

removed to my favour in the eyes of one who had confided to me his

detestation of children.”

Ned sprang back, almost striking at the crouching figure.

“Not me!” he raged; “I will have no responsibility--not any, for the

inhuman deed, thrust upon me! And so you left him to his fate, and

went home and ate and drank, feeding your beastly lusts and desires,

while he--oh, devil, devil!”

She scrambled to her feet and made as if she would run from this new

terror of a hate more ghastly than all she had suffered hitherto.

“Don’t kill me!” she whimpered. “Did you not tell me you hated

children? and you said they could not feel as we do.”

He glared at her like a maniac.

“You left him; what is the need to say more?”

“I did not,” she moaned, wringing her hands as if to cleanse them of

blood; “I came again on the third day, and I called to him, I prayed

to him, but he never cried back one word. Then I thought, Perhaps he

has climbed out and fled away.”

“Liar! you are a liar! Why, then, did you seek to hide your crime by a

blasphemous lie?”

“I have suffered,” she answered only, like one before the

judgment-seat.

He mastered himself by a wrenching effort. He stood aside,

peremptorily motioning her to pass on her way. Not a word would he

speak. She went forward a few steps--a numb, haggard spectre of

beauty, a soul paralysed under the immediate terror of its sentence.

Suddenly she turned upon him, awful in the last expression of despair.

“They will tear me to pieces when they know!”

“Let your Virgin protect you,” he said.

Without another word she left him, going off amongst the trees. The

sunbeams, peering through the leaves, touched and fled from contact

with her; woodland things scurried from her path; the cleansing rain,

even, stringing the branches, withheld itself from falling till she

had gone. Something that he drove under forcibly struggled to rise and

give voice from the watcher’s heart. She looked so small, so pitifully

frail and small a vessel to carry that great load of sin. The next

moment she disappeared from his sight.

He turned, with a groan, to scrutinise the horror. It was yet so far

undecayed as that he was able, for all his little memory of the living

child, to identify the poor remains. But, for a certain reason, he

would compel himself to a nauseous task--even to touch the thing if

necessary. It was not. There was actual evidence, to his unaccustomed

eyes, that the boy’s neck had been dislocated by the fall.

He moved away, giving out a sigh of fearful relief. At least he would

not be haunted by that anguish. And should he follow and tell her?

“No,” he thought sternly--for love makes men cruel; “as she meant, so

shall she suffer the worst.”

CHAPTER VIII.

The Viscount Murk received very gravely M. Becelaer de Lawoestine’s

assurance that Monseigneur the Duke of Orleans was at the moment, and

had been for months past, in Paris.

“_Enfin_,” said this gentleman, “if report is to be believed, it is

the most timely place for him. At least he will not put himself at the

head of the emigrants,” he added, with a husky little laugh.

He was plump and prosperously healthy, like his wife. They seemed

admirably suited to one another--a pigeon pair, indeed. And like a

pigeon was the little fat man in his white Austrian uniform. He

strutted, he preened himself, he cooed. His place should have been on

a roof-ridge of his own happy courts. Ned had a melancholy desire to

crumble some bread for him.

“You are pale as a very ghost, monsieur,” said this same ruddy count

condescendingly. “It is not to be wondered at. You have alighted upon

us in stirring times; not to speak of the storm yesterday, that was

enough to quell the stoutest courage. I would give up hunting a

chimera, if I were you, and return to the profitable peace of my own

so prudent island, without more ado--_sans plus de façons_.”

“If you were I, monsieur,” said Ned. “But, being myself, I run the

chimera to earth in Paris.”

Monsieur le comte shrugged his shoulders.

“I will wish you success, at least. This chimera hath as many tracks

as a mole. But, first, you must get to Paris.”

Ned had considered this side of the question lightly. He found,

indeed, the conditions of travel curiously changed since he had last

crossed the Netherlands border. Now the whole frontier, from Lille to

Metz, swarmed with hostile demonstration. The Allies were in movement,

Luckner and his ineffectives falling back before them. Amongst them

all he hardly knew whom to claim for friends and whom for foes.

But he was wrought to a pitch of recklessness, and Providence shows

the favouritism of a heathen goddess towards reckless men. His grossly

enlarging doubt of the _bonâ fides_ of the mission to which he had

been committed; his terror of having been made in a moment accessory

to a hideous crime, which he could neither morally condone nor

effectually denounce; the feeling--sombre heir to these two--that he

was losing his hold of that new sweet sense of responsibility towards

life, the consciousness of which had been to him latterly like the

talking in his ear of a witch of Atlas--a cicerone to the dear

mysteries of the earth he had hitherto but half understood,--these

emotions were a long-rowelled spur to prick him forward through

difficult places. Once in Paris, there should be no more temporising.

From the Duke of Orleans’s own lips he would learn whether or no he

had been bidden on a fool’s errand.

Here, in fact, was the goading stab in his side--the wound that

sometimes so stung and rankled that almost he was tempted to have out

madame la gouvernante’s letter to her employer and resolve

dishonourably his doubts. Through the anguish of these, the piercing

tooth of the recent horror sprung upon him might make itself felt only

as a pain within the pain--a lesser torture, the nature of which he

would occasionally seek to analyse in order to a temporary

forgetfulness of the greater. Then, thinking of the holy maid of

Méricourt, he would cry in his soul, “What is this gift of

imagination but a Promethean fire, destroying whoever is informed with

it! Better my system of a mechanical world with passion all

eliminated!”--and he would think of how he had been once curiously

interested in a poor lodge-keeper’s dreamings, a faculty for which had

been then to him so strange an anomaly. And was it so still--to him

who had learned, through love, to attune his ear to the under

harmonics in every wind that blew upon the earth? Perhaps, in truth,

it was this very gift of imagination that, in greater or less degree,

was responsible for the irregularities one and all that misconverted

the plain uses of life; that made the picturesqueness of existence,

and its glory and tragedy. And would he at this very last be without

it? And was not its possession--a common one now to him and

Nicette--the stimulus to unnatural deeds that were the outcome of

supernatural thoughts? He had at least the temptation to commit an act

that would be an outrage on his traditional sense of honour. He would

resist the temptation, because he _had_ the tradition. But conceive

this Nicette, perhaps with no traditions, and with an imagination

infinitely more vivid than his. What limit was to put to her

foreseeings; how should the normal-sighted adjudge her monstrous for

anticipating conclusions to which their vision could by no means

penetrate?

He would catch himself away from the train of thought, the indulgence

of which seemed a certain condonation of a deed that his every

instinct abhorred. Yet his mind took, perhaps, something the tone of

the intricate close places in which it wandered; and now and again a

little thrill would run through him of half-sensuous pity for the poor

misguided soul that, by offering up its honour at the very shrine at

which his worshipped, had only estranged what it would have fain

conciliated.

* * * * * * * *

By way of Fumay--a little pretty town situate on a river holm, and

overhung by a group of stately rocks called the Ladies of the

Meuse--Ned, adopting the advice of the Comte de Lawoestine, entered

France. At once--as if, from easy gliding down a stream, he had been

drawn into and was rushing forward in the midst of rapids--his days

became mere records of anxiety and turbulence that constantly

intensified throughout every league of his approach towards Paris. At

the very frontier, indeed, he had taken the plunge, as exemplified in

his change of postilions. To the last village on the German side he

had been driven by a taciturn barbarian--a cheese-featured

Westphalian, picturesque, malodorous, and imperturbably uncivil. This

certificated lout was dressed in a yellow jacket, having black cuffs

and cape, and carried a saffron sash about his waist and a little

bugle horn slung over his shoulder--the whole signifying the imperial

livery of the road, then as sacred from assault as is the uniform of a

modern soldier of the Fatherland. Tobacco, _trinkgeld_, and the

unalienable right to keep his parts of speech locked up in the

beer-cellar of his stomach--these appeared to be the three conditions

of his service. Ned parted from him with a league-long-elaborated

anathema that sounded as ineffective in the delivery as the rap of a

knuckle on a full hogshead, and so, on the farther side of the border,

committed himself to a first experience of the “patriot” postboy.

From the smooth and muddy into the broken water! Here was volubility

proportionate with the other’s gross reticence. Jacques was no less

picturesque and malodorous than was Hans. He had his private

atmosphere, like the German; only it was eloquent of pipes and garlic

rather than of pipes and beer. He spat and gabbled all day; and he was

dressed, like a stage pirate, in a short brown coat with brass

buttons, and in striped pink and white pantaloons tucked into

half-boots. A sash went round his waist also, and he wore on his head

a scarlet cap having a cockade. Ned was feverishly interested in this

his first introduction to a child of the new liberty; but he would

fain have found him inclined to a lesser verbosity. However, he was a

cheerful rascal and a good-humoured, and his easy sangfroid helped the

traveller out of an occasional tangle of the red-tapeism that he found

immeshing official processes rather more intricately under a

republican than under an autocratic form of government.

Ned’s journey to the capital was, indeed, a race a little perilous and

full of excitement. The common spirit, or suggestion, of suppressed

effervescence that had been his former experience, was revealed now a

spouting, tingling fountain, light yet heady, hissing with froth and

bubbles. The kennels of France ran, as it were, with sparkling wine,

and the very mayfly of moral intoxication was hatched from them in

swarms. Thoughts, words, acts; the habits of dress, of motion, of

regard--all were the characteristics of an hysteria the result of

unaccustomed indulgence--the result of reckless drinking at the

released spring. One could never know if a chance expression--either

of speech or feature--would procure one a madly laughing or a madly

resentful acknowledgment. Exultation and terror walked arm-in-arm by

the ways, each trying stealthily to trip up the other. It was an

insane land, and now verging on a paroxysm of mania; for it was known

that at last the king--the man of shifty vision--was focussing his

eyesight on the north-eastern border of his kingdom, whence loomed the

shadow of foreign legions moving to his aid.

The north-eastern border! To enter the land of fury from such a

direction was to invite one’s own destruction. Not even luck,

recklessness, and unexceptionable passports might, perhaps, have saved

Ned from the homicidal madness of a people wrought to fantastic fear,

had it not been for a quick-witted post-boy’s genius in availing

himself of the right occasions to apply them. This was his real

good-fortune--that his own innate charm of manner, his patience and

sweetness, his characteristic unaffectedness in the matter of his

rank, and his healing sense of humour in everything, found their

response in the heart of the garrulous Jacques, and converted that

amiable horse-emmet from an indifferent employé into a very fraternal

road-companion.

So, through stress and danger, Ned sped on his journey, and--following

for fifty leagues from the frontier in the track of the wrecking

storm--was enabled to enter Paris, by the great Flanders road, some

four days after his parting with M. le Comte de Lawoestine. Then--a

final difficulty at the Temple barrier surmounted--he found himself

once more a mean small condition of the life of that city to whose

self-emancipatory throes he had once been a deeply concerned witness.

And he accepted the fact without uneasiness, not knowing that before

he should turn for the last time to quit the awful place of death and

resurrection, the tragedy of his own life, in the midst of the

thousands there enacting, should be consummated.

CHAPTER IX.

On the very day following that of his arrival, the pendulum of Ned’s

particular destiny began its driving swing. He had taken good lodgings

in a house in the Rue St Honoré, less, perhaps, as a concession to

his rank than to his hypothetical prospects; and, issuing thence,

after he had breakfasted, he had but a hundred yards to walk to reach

a certain revolutionary centre that was become the goal to his

long-drawn hopes and apprehensions.

It was a morning in early August, breathless and burning; and he

turned into the gardens of the Palais Royal, that he might thus

combine the opportunities to slake his thirst and to acquit himself of

his commission to the royal proprietor of the adjoining palace. He had

seated himself--unaccountably loath, now the moment was arrived, to

put his fears to the proof--at a little café table under a tree, and

was dreamily marvelling over the changed aspect of this _plaisance_ of

sedition (how in three years the temper of its _habitués_ seemed to

have altered, as it were, from that of a beleaguered to that of a

triumphant garrison), when the familiar personality of one of three

men who, talking together, strolled towards him, caught his immediate

attention. Ugly, austere, with his Rowlandson paunch and unaffected

neat clothes; with his wry jaw and crippled scuffle of speech--Ned saw

here the unmistakable presentment of his whilom friend, the king’s

painter. Between M. David and another--a tall, plebeian-dressed man,

with a flawed, supercilious face, the blotched darkness of which

(something caricaturing that of the monarch’s own) belied the

mechanical amiability of its features--walked an individual of a very

benignant and serene expression of countenance, the nobility of which

showed in agreeable contrast with the moodiness of its neighbours’.

This man--by many years the youngest of the three--was of the middle

height, with dark sleepy eyes and chestnut hair. His face, slightly

marked by the small-pox, was of a rather sensuous, rather wistful

expression--at once pitiful and determined, with Love the modeller’s

finger-marks about the mouth and, between the brows, the little long

scar cut by thought. He was dressed in a very shabby and slovenly

fashion, with limp tattered wristbands, and the seams of his coat

burst at the shoulders; and even the lapels of his vest were

dog’s-eared--altogether a display of poverty a little ostentatious,

thought Ned (who, nevertheless, had reason by-and-by to correct his

judgment). Yet, for all his appearance, here was the man of the three

to whom the others, it seemed, paid deference; for they hung upon his

words, their eyes bent to the ground, while he walked between them,

frankly expounding and with a free aspect.

Now suddenly M. David glanced up and caught the Englishman’s gaze; and

immediately, to Ned’s surprise (he had a vivid memory of their last

rencontre), detached himself from his fellows and came forward with

extended hand.

“Surely,” said the painter, “monsieur my friend the artist of the

Thuilleries gardens!”

“At monsieur’s service,” said Ned, rising, with a complete lack of

cordiality. “And of the Rue Beautreillis, M. David, where a poor devil

of a papetier had his factory gutted.”

He drew a little away. David’s face showed villainously distorted.

“That may be,” said he, taken aback. Then he advanced again, with an

air of sudden frankness. “‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ We do not, in these

days of realisation, repudiate our responsibility for the acts that in

those were tentative. But a generous conqueror does not dwell on the

humiliation of his adversaries. The end justifies the means, monsieur;

and you, at least, if I remember, were no advocate of social tyranny.

But that was long ago, yet not so long but that I can recall monsieur

as a promising probationer in the art that is the most admirable in

the world.”

Ned, touched upon his unguarded side, was standing at a loss for an

answer, when the painter’s two companions joined the group at the

table.

“Citizen Egalité,” said David, addressing the supercilious-looking

man, “let me have the pleasure of making known to you M. Murk, an

artist who would be a patriot were he not, unfortunately for us, an

Englishman.”

Ned started.

“Egalité!” he exclaimed.

“Ci-devant Duc d’Orléans,” said the tall man himself, with a little

mocking bow.

“Monseigneur,” began Ned.

“Citizen,” said the other, bowing again.

His eyes were dead stones of irony. His expression was as of one

hopeless of convalescence from the weary illness of life.

Ned fetched his letter from his breast.

“Citizen Egalité--if so I am to call you,” said he, “I meet you in

the good hour, being on the road, indeed, to seek the citizen

himself.”

“Me, sir?”

“You, monsieur--or the Duke of Orleans. I have the honour to place in

the hands of the duke a packet with the delivery of which I have been

entrusted by an intimate correspondent of monsieur.”

Monsieur, looking a little surprised, received the missive, and

deliberately breaking the seal, deliberately read through madame la

gouvernante’s letter. Ned must discipline his sick impatience the

while, and the two other men conversed apart--David in some obvious

wonder over the result of his introduction.

Presently the duke, carelessly returning the paper to its folds,

looked up. Ned strove, but failed, to read his sentence in the

impassive face. A moment’s silence succeeded. It was a test beyond his

endurance.

“I undertook to acquaint monsieur le duc, from my personal knowledge,”

he blurted out, “of the causes of madame’s apprehensions.”

“Madame,” said Egalité, “is very fortunate in a courier whose

discretion, she informs me, is only equalled by his disinterestedness.

Madame has, indeed, always the faculty to find some one to pull her

her chestnuts out of the fire.”

He spoke so languidly, so suggestively, so insolently, that Ned,

despite his desperate anxiety, fired up.

“I fail to read into monsieur’s implication,” said he. “But if it is

meant to signify that madame’s peril----”

“Is she in any, then? This letter merely informs me that she removes

at once to London.”

The confirmation of his dread had appeared somehow so foreshadowed in

his reception that the blow fell upon Ned with nothing more than a

little stunning shock.

“And that is all?” said he, in quite a small stiff voice.

“All that is essential, indeed, monsieur.”

“Nothing of her terror that she is being watched and followed--that

she moves within the sinister ken of the royalist emigrants--that her

nerve is shattered--that she begs you to recall her?”

“Nothing. But--Heaven forgive her! I recognise her style. Oh yes, yes!

It is possible she has posted and dismissed you very effectively,

monsieur.”

He went off, for the first time, into a real laugh--a harsh

cachinnation that he checked, as in mere disdain of it, in its

mid-career. Ned waited, in rather an ugly manner of patience, till he

was finished. Then, said he, wishing to right himself with himself on

all points--

“Has posted me, as monsieur says; and, doubtless, for all exigent

purposes, it was necessary only to post the letter to monsieur.”

“How, then?”

“At least, it would appear, its delivery by a confidential messenger

was not imperative?”

“_À ce qu’il paraît_,” said the duke, grinning again. “At least such

a commission exhibited an excess of caution.”

All the bitterness of the poor young man’s soul seemed suddenly to

flush his veins.

“It is thus, then,” he cried, “that you requite the hospitality

lavished upon you and yours; that you take advantage of a generous

sympathy extended to you, to serve your own selfish purposes at the

expense of your entertainers. You deserve that no hand be put out to

you but to strike you in the face, as it is in my heart to treat you,

monsieur le duc!”

He spoke loudly enough, and all his muscles tightened to the prick of

onset. M. David ran up--

“Ta-ta-ta!” he exclaimed; “what the devil is here?”

Egalité’s cheeks showed mottled white, like brawn.

“Be quiet,” he said. “This is M. le Vicomte Murk, who has put himself

to inconvenience to deliver me a letter.”

His lips trembled a little. The wretched creature himself had a

wretched nerve.

“Monsieur would seem to imply,” he said, “that I am a party to the

circumstance of some discomfiture he has suffered. It needs only a

little reflection to disabuse himself of so extravagant a

supposition.”

Ned made a violent effort to control his passion. Convinced now, as he

was, that he had been used the victim of a practical joke, he could

not turn the situation effectively by adopting a tragic vein. Besides,

he was conscious of an inexplicable little feeling of rebellious

attraction towards this man--a sort of emotional deference such as

that with which a despairing suitor courts the guardian of his

inamorata. If the light of his hope had fallen very low, here was he

that might, if he would, renew it--here was a possible friend at court

that he could ill afford--until that moment of the certain quenching

of the light--to quarrel with or insult. He did not put this to

himself. It affected him, nevertheless.

“I will acknowledge I was hasty,” he said, in some miserable

perplexity. “It is possible I have jumped to unjustified conclusions.

I have been a disinterested courier, as monsieur suggests, faithful to

the service to which I was induced--under false pretences, it appears.

But I will take monsieur’s word as to his innocence of any

participation in the jest that has led me dancing over half a

continent in search of monsieur.”

He looked at Egalité half piteously. The latter, scenting the

reaction, shrugged his shoulders, with a relieved expression.

“I am deeply sensible,” he said coolly, “of monsieur’s kindness. For

the rest” (he tapped the paper in his hands) “the message that

monsieur conveys to me is capable of only one construction.”

“That madame removes with her charge to London?”

“Certainly.”

“And that is all?”

“Precisely all, monsieur.”

Ned fell back a pace, and bowed frigidly. The duke, with a second

shrug of his shoulders, took M. David’s arm and made as if to

withdraw. Suddenly he jerked himself free and returned to the hapless

young man, a much gentler look on his face.

“Ah, monsieur!” he said, in a low voice, “that is all--yes, that is

all. But I can read between the lines. Am I to hold myself to blame

that madame took her own way to rid herself of an embarrassment! I

talk in the dark, with only my knowledge of women--of this woman, _par

excellence_--to illuminate me. She coaxed you to a confidential

mission? Well, there was no need--believe me, there was no need. We

must read between the lines.”

He again made as if to go, and again returned.

“It is extremely probable, nevertheless,” he said, “that we may see

the dear emigrants back in Paris before long.”

With that he went off, taking the painter with him. Ned watched the

couple receding, till the crowd absorbed them; then sat himself down,

feeling benumbed and demoralised, upon a chair.

So, here was the end--the mocking means adopted to the rejection of

his suit. It was a vile, cruel jest, he thought; a characteristic

indulgence of selfishness inhuman, for which presently he would take

fierce delight in calling a certain statesman to account. A statesman!

his stricken vanity yelled to itself: a diplomatic buffoon who would

sacrifice principle to a pun. So he classified Mr Sheridan, to whom he

would attribute this ruin of his hopes.

But deeper emotions prevailed. Had the duke been, or was he at this

last, despite his protestations, a party to the fraud? It mattered

nothing at all. There was a more intimate question to put to his

heart--the sadder and more sombre inquiry, Was the girl herself a

confederate? And here he fell all amazed and overwhelmed; plunged in a

slough of the most sorrowful speculation; struggling for foothold--for

some memory at which he might clutch for the righting of his moral

balance. There should have been many memories--of kind looks and words

and touches, all instinct with the tender humour of truth. God in

heaven! It was conceivable that the elder woman, the old practised

strategist, had played a consummate _rôle_. It was never inconsistent

with the principles of such pantological professors to indulge the

hypocritical as part of their universal equipment. But Pamela, with

not that of roguishness in her sweet eyes to justify a belief in

anything but an innately honest soul behind them! Pamela, in the

sincerity of her heart, in the womanliness of her nature, in the

cleanness of her lips, craftily intriguing to indict Love’s passion of

trust! He could not believe it. He could not but believe that some

words, some acts of hers--most haunting in the retrospect--had been

designed to express her sympathy with that in him which she could only

as yet recognise in herself for a mood. And it had been, then, Madame

de Genlis’ private policy to dismiss him before this mood--this

bud--could timely open out into a flower.

Well, she had succeeded--thanks to one self-interested, with whom the

reckoning was to come--she had succeeded, and aptly, no doubt, to the

sequel. For it was not to be supposed that madame’s artifice would

permit her to wean its subject from a fancy and fail to find the

subject other food for a stimulated appetite. My lord the viscount had

possibly, indeed, but (in the vernacular) kept the place warm for

another. The sun of his passion may have only a little ripened the

fruit for the delectation of lips more blest than his. By this time,

it was probable, the dream that had been his was a transferred

rapture.

What should he do--what should he do? He sat dully, his delicious

sweet world of imagination shrunk to unsightly clinkers, very mean and

grotesque. Only the real world stretched about him--a shoddy, vulgarly

formal affair. A laugh, a mere ironic chest-note, came from him. For

to what glorified uses did not men seek to convert this intrinsically

tawdry material! They were always sensitive to the befooling holiday

spirit, the spirit that is persistently ready to accept specious

commonplace at a fancy value. For all the essential purposes of

romantic passion he, if he chose, might take his pick (_he_ with his

title, his rich competence, and his personal attributes) from the

human fair that tinkled and scintillated about him. Yet he must price

all this opportunity at so much less worth than that of one set of

features as to value it, lying ready to his hand, at a pinch of dust

compared with the unattainable. The glamour of the fair was not for

him, let him elect to give his philosophy licence without limit.

He did, it will be observed, madame la gouvernante (who had been

genuinely distraught) something a little less than justice. But, after

all, his resentment in the first instance was against Mr Sheridan, and

in that, no doubt, he was justified; for he must fail, in the nature

of things, to understand what reason but a personal one could have

moved that gentleman to manœuvre to circumvent a suitor so frank and

so admissible as himself.

He called for wine; and, while drinking, for the first time in his

life, too much of it, his mood underwent a dozen rallies and relapses.

Passion, exasperation, and the most sick desire to possess what now

seemed to have evaded him for ever--emotion upon emotion, these

wrought in his suffering mind. More than once he was half-stirred to

the decision to return immediately to England; and, instantly

recalling the duke’s enigmatical suggestion anent the ladies’ return

to Paris, he would resolve to remain where he was, preferring the

problematical to the chances of hunting counter in the mazes of his

own capital. For he must see the girl again--to that he was

determined; he must see her again and, crashing at last through the

reserve his own diffidence had created, must seek to carry by storm

that with which he had so mistakenly temporised.

And then suddenly--a vision called up, perhaps, by the unwonted fever

in his veins--the figure of Pamela, as he had last seen it, stood

holding out to him in its hands the little crushed scarlet blossoms;

and he could see the wilful smile and hear the sweet voice offering

him the rose of his desire; and all in a moment his eyes were full of

tears, and he became shamefully conscious of his surroundings, the

very character of which profaned his thought.

He thrust his hand in an access of tenderness into his breast.

“Monsieur,” said a low, grave voice in his ear, “is in need of

sympathy.”

He started, and turned about angrily. At his elbow was seated that

third member of the late trio to whom the others had appeared to pay

deference. This man had not followed his companions, it seemed, but

had remained behind when they walked away.

In the very motion of resenting the interference, something in the

nobility of the stranger’s manner gave Ned pause. The anger died from

his features, gradually, in a little silence that succeeded.

“Very well, monsieur,” he said at length, quite gently. “You are very

far from meaning impertinence, I see. I answer you, All men need

sympathy.”

“Monsieur,” said the stranger, “that admission is the basis of our new

religion of humanity.”

He leaned forward, smiling with a great sweetness. His air somehow

conveyed to Ned the impression of a conscious strength that rather

enjoyed indulging in itself a dormant condition of faculty, sure that

it could summon up at will mental forces irresistible to any opposed

to it.

“Is it new?” said Ned. “I seem to recall a hint of it in the Gospels.”

“The man Christ,” said the stranger, “was a virgin. His partisanship

was necessarily limited. He was never blinded by, but always to,

passion.”

“The passion of love?”

“Of love, in the erotic sense.”

“And what is that to signify in the present context?”

“Only that it enables me to see deeper than Christ the virgin.”

“You have more prospicience than Christ?”

“In one direction, assuredly.”

“You are confident, monsieur?”

“So far, I am confident. Christ was a divine--I, monsieur, am a

human--advocate.”

“_De causes perdues_, in this instance, monsieur, I believe. But an

advocate deals with proofs.”

“Without doubt. Monsieur is unfortunate in an attachment.”

“To himself? Christ could have taught him that.”

Nevertheless he was amazed.

“Ah!” cried the other, “but I am literally an advocate; and I heard

monsieur le duc’s final words; and it is my business to read the

soul’s confession in the face. I perceive, however, that monsieur

resents my presumption, which is, of a truth, unwarrantable.”

He rose as if to go, his dark eyes still quick with a gentle,

unrebukeful sympathy. Ned was impelled to cry hastily--

“It is my right at least, monsieur, to ask the title of my counsel!”

“I have none,” said the stranger simply. “My name is Vergniaud.”

Ned sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair.

“Vergniaud!” he cried, and stood staring at the man whose

utterances--echoed latterly to the very cliffs of England--had seemed

to him the first inspired interpretation of the Revolution as a real,

breathing, human, emancipatory force. Now he understood why the others

had shown such deference to this one of their party.

“Vergniaud!” he cried again faintly, and so rallied himself.

“Truly,” said he, “I have entertained an angel unawares. M.

Vergniaud--indeed, I have a very unhappy attachment; and I need

counsel at this moment, if ever man did.”

CHAPTER X.

Pierre-Victorin Vergniaud, the source of much present enthusiasm,

the full fountain-head of the Gironde river of eloquence, was

already--though but a few months a citizen of Paris--the director of a

popular force having an admirable tendency. In him it seemed possible

to hail that political architect of the new era who should have the

genius to reconcile warring creeds, and shape of men’s profound but

formless aspirations an enduring temple of the ideal commonwealth.

Poor, yet never conceding a thought to the shame of poverty;

simple-minded to the extent that he could not err in justice; hating

corruption and loving truth; a moving orator, a large humanitarian, he

might have led a world, undissenting, to the worship of the right

Liberty, had not his great gifts, his large ideals, been always

subject to eclipse by an extreme constitutional indolence. Utterly

ingenuous, utterly impressionable; depending upon the moment for

inspiration, and so little warped by self-consciousness as never to

know the moment to fail him--it was yet often impossible to spur this

Vergniaud to necessary action. Madame Roland, the superior being, to

whom he was introduced by enthusiastic friends, had no belief in his

capacity as a leader; distrusted, and perhaps despised him. Ned--the

poor degenerate to a very human type--learned, on the other hand, to

love and admire him. For in this mind--as in the mirror of sweet clear

water--he found his own chastened theories shaping themselves, taking

such form and gentle significance as he had never hitherto but more

than conceived to be theirs. Nor this only, or chiefly. He was able to

forget something of his own hard unhappiness, of his bitter sense of

grievance, in the familiar contemplation of a nature so serene, so

noble, so unsolicitous of its self-aggrandisement. From these closing

days of darkness, the little friendship that so queerly came to him to

tide him opportunely over a period of wretched indecision remained an

abiding pathetic memory.

Citizen Vergniaud lived in a shabby lodging near the Tivoli Gardens.

Thither Ned accompanied him on the morning of their meeting, and

thither many times he found his way again. The little beggarly room

became a haven of rest to his tormented spirit--a confessional-box

wherein he could always leave some part of his great weight of

oppression. And, now and again, even, moved to waive his personal

interest in that fine spirit, and to repay some part of the healing

advice so disinterestedly lavished upon himself, he would play the

_père spirituel_ in his turn, and whip his penitent with a cobweb

lash of rebuke.

“My Peter,” he would complain, “you dwell too long on the overture to

your career. It may be rich in all the suggested harmonies, but it is

time you set to work on the opera.”

“Time!” would cry Vergniaud, with a smile. (He might be, perhaps,

unpacking a very little parcel of cheap linen that had just reached

him from his family, his dear simpletons, of Bordeaux.) “But time is

no arbitrary measure to the man who hath studied to make his own.”

Says Ned, “You may make it, but you will always give it away to the

first specious beggar that asks.”

“Then I am only liberal with that that I do not value. ’Tis a poor

habit of charity, I admit. But I could never keep it; hark! little

Edward--I could never keep time, even when I danced!”

“So foolish heirs mortgage their reversions.”

“So alchemists squander their inexhaustible treasures, you mean. When

time has done with me, I shall be past caring. Maybe the spendthrift

will have gilded a poor home or two in his world.”

“And, had he economised, he might have gilded the temples of an

epoch.”

“Oh, thou art an elegant moraliser! But I am more modest for myself--a

Fabian by sentiment, not policy. I tell thee, an age so rich in

opportunities invites to procrastination. A multiplicity of choice is

the last inducement to choose. I loiter, like a child, in the fair,

with my silver _livre-tournois_ in my pocket, and, until I spend it, I

am lord of a hundred prospective delights. Let me wait till the lights

are burning low, and then I will make my selection--the crown to a

pyramid of enjoyments.”

“And find that others before you have taken the pick of the fair while

you ecstatically considered, and that you have at the last paid full

price for a discarded residue.”

“What, then, my friend! I shall be richer than the prudent by measure

of a whole feast of anticipation--more satisfied, if less gorged. The

early bird eats his chicken in the egg. (_Corne de Dieu_! there is a

fine marriage of proverbs!) He has nothing to look forward to but a

day of blank satiety. I cannot at once have the dreams of youth and

the sober retrospections of age.”

So he would talk _ex curia_, a dilatory, lovable vagabond, with a rare

power of enchantment drawn from some hidden depths, as from a

fern-curtained well. Perhaps this sensuous personal charm--whereby he

would appear to flatter with signal affectionate regard each in turn

of his numerous acquaintances--would of itself have failed after the

first to win a poor love-stricken from prolonged contemplation of any

but his own interests. It was the man’s spasmodic revelations of

unexpected virile forces held in reserve that would suddenly convert

in another a little growing sentiment of tolerant disdain to an eager

desire to be acclaimed friend by this subject of his condescension.

So, may be, the force operated upon Ned. For succeeding his first

gratification over an introduction to one in whom he had latterly

prefigured the regenerator of France, came a thought of

_désagrément_ in his soul’s nominee, a feeling of disillusionment in

which he was prepared to recognise another example of Fortune’s wanton

baiting of his personal cherished ideals. Then one day he heard this

seeming waiter on Providence, this almost coatless landholder of

Utopia, speak in the Assembly; and thenceforth he had nothing but

reverence for the ardent soul, whose misfortune only it was to be

bounded by a love more human in its essence than divine. He had seen

the familiar figure sitting with its hand over its face; he had next

seen the face revealed from the tribune, inspired, transformed, as if

the hand itself, consecrate as a priest’s, had touched and wrought the

priestly sacrament of confirmation; and the sermon of high government

that followed had taken wings of fire from the burning spirit that

informed it; and the hearts of men had kindled and glowed, flaring at

length--alas, too self-consumingly!--into roaring flame.

Well, such moments were for Ned’s holiday moods. This present

friendship and admiration saved him, perhaps, from hobnobbing with

more harmfully potent spirits. Yet the one enthusiasm could galvanise

him only fitfully into an interest in the passionate scenes amongst

which he moved. So negative a pole is love--when turned from the

north-star of its hopes--to all that in less misconverted

circumstances would attract it. Here was he a spectator at last of the

stupendous drama in the early rehearsals of which he had been so

profoundly interested; and he had nothing for it all but a lack-lustre

eye, which he must always keep from turning inwards by an effort. He

lived, in fact, in a little miserable tub of his own choosing, while

the Alexanders of a political renaissance made history around, and

unregarded of, him.

Much time he spent moodily gazing from the windows of his lodgings in

the Rue St Honoré. Thence looking, his life seemed to become a dream

of motley crowds always drifting by. Stolid, tight-buttoned guards,

with brigand moustaches like dolls’; frowzy revolutionary conscripts,

swaggering to glory; tattered deputations, exhibiting the seals of

their memorials in the shape of old blood-stains dried upon arms and

faces, and headed, perhaps, by some trimly arrogant sectional

president, with his sleek hair and tricolour sash--vociferous or

intent, in noisome clouds they floated by; and Ned could seldom rescue

so much curiosity from the heart of his self-centred indifference as

to inquire what was their destination or significance. A shoddy

Paris--a Paris of gaudy fustian. So far a certain general impression

seemed bitten into him; and, desultorily moved by it, he would rarely

wake to a little rhapsodical song of lamentation over yet another

shattered ideal. This city and this people that he had loved, and of

which and whom he had expected and prophesied so noble a triumph of

self-emancipation! Now the tangled mazes of “party” differences seemed

designed only to render the central cause unattainable. Now, he would

think, the history of their municipal government was always to be

likened to the story of an iceberg--a story of top-heaviness

periodically recurring--of base and summit exchanging positions again

and again, the depths replacing the head, the head the depths. And did

it signify, as in the iceberg, a steady attenuation, a bulk of force

and grandeur constantly lessening? God save France, and exorcise the

sluggard demon in Pierre-Victorin!

By-and-by, sick at last of inaction, the poor fellow took to the

streets, restlessly traversing all quarters of the city--its

bye-lanes, its loaded thoroughfares--both by day and lamp-light. Once

he made his way to the now ancient ruins of the Bastille, and dully

leaving them after a dull inspection--or rather retrospection--looked

half curiously up at his old lodgings, yet had not the spirit to visit

them and Madame Gamelle. Once a languid thrill penetrated his torpor

upon his chancing upon view of an old acquaintance, the Chevalier

d’Eon, so queerly associated with a certain episode in his vanished

life. He passed the strange creature in the Thuilleries gardens,

whither he had come years ago to see a balloon ascend. She stared him

full in the face, but without recognition, as she went by. Her eyes

bagged in their sockets; she looked old and shabby--an improvident

actress retired upon scant savings. Already her gaze had grown

unspeculative; the first menace of senility suggested itself in the

drooping of her fat old jaw. She had come over from England, Ned

learned, a year ago, to petition the National Assembly--in the days

before its dissolution--for leave to resume her helmet and her sabre

and to serve in the army. Her request had received the double honour

of applause and of relegation to the official minutes--where it slept

forgotten. The poor chevalier must consign herself gracefully to

oblivion--which no actor or actress ever did. She lived on at Paris a

few months longer--a decaying old body with a grievance; then returned

for the last time to England, where, dying by-and-by in poverty, and

being handed over to the final merciless inquisition of the mortuary,

she was adjudged--a male impostor, and so committed to a dishonoured

grave.

Upon Egalité (but recently so designated) Ned happened from time to

time, yet only to understand that this would-be popular constituent

was resolved upon “cutting” him, a titled aristocrat, from popular

motives. Therefore, despite the gnawing of the fox of anxiety at his

ribs, the young Englishman, in his pride, would make no appeal to the

man who alone could ease his torment; but he endeavoured to ascertain,

through indirect report, what were the chances of an early return to

Paris on the part of certain notable emigrants; and in the meantime he

must settle himself down, with what remnants of philosophy he could

command, to a life of miserable inaction and irresolution.

Then, once upon a day, behold! into his field of vision, the spectrum

of a ghost more remotely haunting than any familiar to his recenter

experience, flashed Théroigne, “Our Lady of Darkness,” the realised

presentment of a destiny long foreshadowed. And henceforth it was as

if he had been hurled into one of those red arteries of fatality (of

which the just-erected guillotine was as the throbbing heart) that

laced the city in all directions.

He was strolling with Vergniaud, again in the Thuilleries gardens. It

was a day of lazy sunshine, and the walks and grass-plots were

crowded. Paris must laugh and breathe, though in the committee rooms

yonder the whirring machinery of election to the new National

Convention was shaking the whole town; though forty-seven out of the

forty-eight sections, with their tag-rag and bob-tail, were howling

for the king’s abdication through all the courts of the city; though

the shadow of the Brunswicker and his emigrants was already projecting

itself, like a devil’s search-light, from a contracting horizon;

though hate, and terror, and fanaticism were crouching in every corner

with smouldering linstocks in their hands. The babble was not less, or

less animated, for this. Children sailed their boats on the ponds, or

played ball about the grass. It was a scene of light and good-humour.

Against the terrace of the Feuillans, to the north of the gardens, the

strollers came upon the first sign of a serpent in this Eden--a long,

broad, tricolour ribbon stretched from tree to tree, and bearing the

inscription, “_Tyran, notre colère tient à un ruban; ta couronne

tient à un fil_.”

“It shall be excused, or blamed, for its wit,” said Vergniaud, and as

he spoke there came uproar from a distance, where some victim to

mob-resentment was being trailed through a horsepond. A cloud shut out

the sun. The two men, fallen suddenly moody, made their way to a gate

that led from the gardens into the Rue du Dauphin, that was a

tributary of the Rue St Honoré. Vergniaud glanced up at the name of

the former. “_Tient à un fil_,” he murmured, and shook his head, with

a sigh.

On the moment of their emerging into the greater thoroughfare, a

discordant rabble came upon them--a mouthing, sweltering throng of

patriots, with a woman at their head banging a drum.

“_Voilà la prêtresse habituée_, Théroigne de Méricourt!” said

Vergniaud, with a soft chuckle.

Ned gasped and stared. He had not alighted on this woman--had recalled

her only fitfully--since the night when she fled from his uncle’s

house. Even Madame de Lawoestine’s reference to her had affected him

but indifferently. If, during his present sojourn in Paris, he,

absorbed in more introspective searchings, had heard casual mention of

the “Liége courtesan,” the “_coryphée_ of the Orleanists,” the

beloved (according to the wits of _Les Actes des Apôtres_) of the

Deputy Populus (who did not so much as know her), a least desire to

identify this reputation with the one of his experience had not

overtaken him. Théroigne--were it, indeed, the Théroigne of his

knowledge--had only followed the course he might have predicted for

her. To drain the rich for the benefit of the needy--that were a noble

form of solicitation. To feed starving patriots and their cause with

the fruits of her dishonour was a rendering of the theme that scarcely

commended itself to other than Parisian morals. Yet he had lost sight,

no doubt, of the motive that induced her to wage war, by whatever

means, upon the order patrician. It was to be recalled to his memory.

For now, suddenly, he was face to face with the embodiment of a

passion to whose early processes he had unwittingly contributed. The

girl saw, halted her vociferous troupe, and the next instant came

towards him. A fantastic figure, a thing of shreds and gaudy tatters,

detached itself from the throng and followed at her heels.

“_Corne de Dieu_!” muttered Vergniaud, “the dog too?”

Théroigne stopped in front of the Englishman--a presentment, in flesh

and clothing, of vivid, barbaric licence. Her eyes sparkled; her

cheeks glowed. For four years the “Defier of God,” she had walked with

her face to the sun. She was, and was to be, “Mater Tenebrarum--the

mother of lunacies, the suggestress of suicides”--a flaming evolution

from the scorned and abandoned village beauty.

She had on a little military jacket of dark-blue, over a white

chemisette cut low to her swelling figure; a tricolour sash, in which

was stuck a pistol, went round her waist, and from this fell to her

ankles a short skirt of scarlet. Cocked daintily on her head was an

elfin hat with feathers _à la Henri IV._, and suspended from her

shoulder by a red ribbon a little smart drum bobbed and tinkled at her

side as she walked.

She clinched a hand upon her bosom, scorning and daring, in the fierce

exultation of her beauty, this possible critic of it.

“We are well met,” she said. “Dost thou know me, citizen Englishman?”

“I know you, Théroigne.”

“Thou liest, thou! Thou takest me, I can see it, for some past poor

victim of thy use and abuse, or, if not of thine, of another’s. I

never was in Méricourt--dost thou hear?--unless it is a province of

hell! I never appealed to the honour of a class that knows no honour

but in name.”

Vergniaud, in some serene astonishment, came forward.

“Citizeness,” he said, “you surely amaze my friend, who is a child of

the land of freedom.”

She laughed in one breath.

“Do I amaze him? I thought his looks claimed knowledge of me.”

Then she turned upon Ned once more, her furious disdain giving to the

woman in her.

“I heard thou wert in Paris, monsieur le vicomte. Believe me, it is an

evil place at this present for such as thou.”

“And from whom did you hear it, Mademoiselle Lambertine of

Méricourt?” said Ned, with perfect coolness.

Her eyes flashed, her lips set at him.

“Ah,” she cried, rage overmastering the scorn in her voice, “but it is

pitiful, is it not, for one so particular in his reputation to be

jilted by the bastard of Orleans!”

Hearing her laugh, the grotesque creature, who stood still at her

elbow, began to chuckle and caper.

“But yes,” he babbled in a wryed, indistinct voice, “Pamela--yes,

yes--the bastard of Orleans!”

Ned, gone pale as a sheet, took a fierce step forwards, and at that

the woman sprang and intercepted him, putting her hand on her vile

henchman’s shoulder.

“Thou shalt not touch him!” she cried. Her fingers caught at the

pistol-stock in her belt. Menacing oaths came from the ragged group

that awaited her return.

“Tell him, Lucien,” she said to the wretched creature, “who it is we

are ever seeking through the streets of Paris.”

“My brother Basile,” answered the man.

His face was a fearful sight--melted featureless it seemed, and with

tangs of rusty hair dropping stiff from it in the unscarred patches.

For the rest he was nothing but a foul-clad cripple--idiotic,

distorted.

She turned upon Ned again.

“Dost thou know me now?” she cried; “or am I still to thee the simple

fool that could be wronged and insulted with impunity?”

She bent forward and dropped her voice, so that every word came from

it distinct.

“Listen to me. All these years I have sought and found him not. Now,

at last, word comes to me that he is here in Paris, that he is

identical with one that insults, through the faction she represents,

the woman he has outraged beyond endurance.”

She paused and drew herself up, then raised her hand in a threatening

attitude.

“My star brightens! First one, and again one! Out of the past they are

drawn--drawn like night birds into a charcoal-burner’s fire, and they

shall fall before me and my foot trample their necks!”

She turned and struck her dog roughly on the shoulder.

“Is thy tooth sharp, Lucien? are thy claws like a devil’s rake to rend

and to scorch? Courage, my friend! the moment arrives--for you and for

me, Lucien, the moment arrives!”

She had fetched drumsticks from her sash, and now brought them down

with a little snapping roll and break.

“Forward!” she cried (and she looked back significantly over her

shoulder). “The crown of martyrdom to the devotee that would rather

wed than make a bastard!”

Again the sticks alighted with a crash and roll.

“_C’est nous qu’on ose méditer de rendre à l’antique esclavage_!”

she sang out shrilly; and all the throaty mob took up the chorus,

“_Aux armes, citoyens_!”

So, reeling and howling, and drifting backwards a black smoke of

menace towards the stranger whose name, for any or no particular

reason, seemed to be written in the dark book of its _café-chantant_

Hippolyté, the procession passed on its way. The stragglers, who had

been drawn by curiosity to the neighbourhood of the interview,

dispersed, and the two men were left alone.

Vergniaud, with a shrug of his shoulders, looked at Ned, who seemed to

be muttering to himself.

“A very _précieuse-ridicule_,” murmured the Frenchman. “I would not

have you take the little pretty rogue seriously.”

Ned seized him by the wrist.

“Did you hear her?” he exclaimed in a concentrated agony of voice.

Vergniaud nodded his head.

“About monsieur le duc’s _protégée_?” he answered uneasily.

“How did she know of her--of me?”

“_Mon ami_, cannot you tell?” was the compassionate, evasive reply.

“Yes,” cried Ned violently, “I can tell. He lied about the letter. The

woman told him in it why she had wished to get rid of me, and he lied

about it.”

“Come,” said Vergniaud, “if it is so, the lie acquitted him, at least,

of a cruel discourtesy towards you.”

Ned laughed like a devil.

“Acquitted him!” he shrieked; “and while he reserved the jest to

retail it to his brazen drab here! Oh, I know that no road is too

common for Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans! And my--and this that I have

hugged to my soul and cherished as almost too sacred for my own

thoughts to prey upon! To be used to the foul purposes of a harlot and

her lecher! Oh, my God!--I will kill him!”

Vergniaud essayed a manner of soothing.

“The shrine of love can only be desecrated from within. These may

storm at the closed windows of thy soul, and the draught but make the

sacred lamp of thy heart burn brighter. Hold up thy head, my dear

friend.”

“I have never lowered it,” muttered Ned; but he seemed hardly to hear

what the other said.

“’Tis a specious theatrical jade,” went on Vergniaud, “and always

alert for situations. Witness her babbling reunions in the Rue de

Rohan, where enough gas is brewed in a night to float ten balloons.

Witness her habit of attire, her drum, her dog--the misbegotten maniac

that she rescued months ago from the Salpétrière, and hath devoted

to some mission of devilry that is the crowning infirmity of his

brain. Bah! It is all affectation, I believe. She will certainly pose

by-and-by before the judgment-seat.”

CHAPTER XI.

In the early morning of the 10th of August a young man, wearing the

uniform of the National Guards, was arrested in the Champs Elysées by

a patrol of the very corps to which he presumably belonged. This young

man--of a bright, confident complexion, crisp gold hair, and a rather

girlish turn of feature--took his mishap with an admirable

_sang-froid_.

“Very well, my friends,” he said. “And I am arrested on suspicion--of

what?”

“Of being an accursed Royalist in disguise,” answered the corporal

gruffly.

The stranger nodded to the soldier.

“When the good cause triumphs,” said he, “it shall be remembered to

your credit that you could recognise a gentleman through the trappings

of a brigand.”

“_Ah-hé s’il ne tient qu’à ça_!” replied the corporal briefly, with

a sniff. “Before this sun sets there will be, perhaps, some hundreds

of you gentry the fewer.”

“My faith!” said the other, “and what a shortsighted policy: to post a

cloud of educated witnesses to the skies, to testify in advance to

your moral inefficiency!”

They took him to the Cour des Feuillans--a yard neighbouring on that

very spot where Ned, a day or two earlier, had had his _contretemps_

with Théroigne and her satellites. Here, thrust into an outbuilding

that had been temporarily converted into a guard-room, he alighted

upon many acquaintances in a like predicament.

“Does it all read failure?” he whispered to a colossal creature beside

him. This--also, presumably, a grenadier of the nation--was, in fact,

the Abbé Bougon, an ecclesiastic of the Court, who wrote plays, yet

had never conceived a situation one-half so dramatic as this in which

he now found himself.

“Hush!” murmured the giant. “Yes; the worst is to be feared.”

By-and-by the prisoners were summoned, in order, to examination in an

adjoining room. Long, however, before it came to the cool young

stranger’s turn, a sound of growing uproar without the building had

swelled to a thunder harsh and violent enough to ominously interfere,

one might have thought, with the _procès-verbal_ within. The deep

diapason of massed voices, the crisp clash of pikes, the flying of

furious ejaculations--startling accents to the whole context of

menace--assured him that here was evidence of such a counterbuff to

palace intrigue as palace fatuity had never conceived might threaten

it.

Suddenly, in the midst of the tumult, he thought he heard his own name

cried.

“Suleau!” And again, “Scélérat! Imposteur!”

He got upon a bench by a window that commanded a view of the court.

This, he saw,--a wide, enclosed space,--was full of blue-coated

soldiers. A posse of them made a present show of keeping the gates of

the yard; but the gates themselves, significant to the true character

of their defence, they had neglected to close. Beyond, in the road,

and extending at least so far over the Thuilleries gardens as his view

could compass, a packed congregation of patriots--quite typical

savages--rested for a moment on its weapons. It listened, it appeared,

to a commissary of the section, who, mounted on a tub by the gates,

counselled methods judicial. A little space had been left about the

orator, and now into this in an instant broke a woman--a wild

_vivandière_, she seemed, of the new religious service of blood and

wine--of the transubstantiation of Liberty. Without a moment’s

hesitation she caught the commissary by a leg, and, hurling him to the

ground, usurped his place. An exultant roar of applause shook the air.

The poor deposed tribune, rubbing his bones, rose, and bolted for

shelter. Suleau chuckled.

Now he did not know Théroigne; but he had laughed consumedly at her

and her pseudo-classical pretensions in more than one Royalist print.

He laughed at many things, did this Suleau--not sparing the

gloom-distilling Jacobins, nor, in particular, Citizen Philip Egalité

and his faction, of whom was Citizeness Lambertine; and he was so

breezily headstrong, so romantically sworn to a picturesque cause,

that he would not calculate the cost of pitting his wit against the

vanity of a _coryphée_ whose nod, in this height of her popularity,

often confirmed a wavering sentence, whose smile rarely franked an

acquittal. Besides, women--even the most foolish of them--like to be

taken seriously.

This woman, it would seem, spoke vigorously, and entirely to the

humour of her auditors. Only there appeared to prevail something

rankly personal against himself, of all the twenty-two arrested, in

her diatribe. He caught the sound of his own name uttered again and

again to an accompaniment of oaths and execrations. This, at least,

flattered him with the assurance that he had done something to earn

the transcendent animosity of the many-headed.

“I present myself with an order of merit,” he murmured, gratified; and

immediately he was summoned to his examination.

He was conducted between guards to the room of inquisition. In it he

recognised many of his pre-indicted comrades in misfortune--twenty-one

in all--huddled into a corner by a window. The room was otherwise

crammed with soldiers, commissaries, and a few of the breechless. A

thin man, in a state of palpable nervous excitement, sat behind a

table. This was the Sieur Bonjour, first clerk of the Marines and

President of the Section of the Feuillans. He opened upon the prisoner

at once.

“It is useless to deny that you are Suleau, the Royalist pamphleteer.”

“Indeed,” replied the captive, with equal promptitude, “I would not so

stultify monsieur’s fine perspicacity in discovering what I have never

concealed.”

“Yet you disguise yourself in the garb of liberty.”

“No more than monsieur, surely.”

The president struck his hand on the table.

“It is not for me to bandy words with you. You were arrested when

patrolling the Champs Elysées, at an hour when all respectable men

are in bed.”

“If,” said Suleau, “at an hour when all respectable men are in bed,

where was monsieur?”

“Enough!” cried Bonjour angrily. “You are accused of conspiring with

these to resist the will of the people--by innuendo, by direct insult

to the people’s representatives--finally, by banding yourself with

others to inquire secretly into, that you might successfully

out-manœuvre, the processes of the movement having forfeiture for its

object.”

“I congratulate monsieur,” said Suleau irrelevantly, “upon _his_

admirable manœuvring for election to the Ministership of Marines.”

The president scrambled to his feet with an oath. The room broke into

ferment.

“I beg to inform monsieur,” cried the prisoner, raising his voice,

“that I am in possession of a municipal pass to the chateau of the

Thuilleries!”

“Yes, yes--and we!” cried the huddle of captives by the window.

With the very echo of their words there came tumult in the vestibule,

a trample of feet, and the head of a frowzy deputation burst into the

room. The young Royalist turned about and, folding his arms, quietly

faced the inrush. A woman was to its front--she he had seen mount the

rough tribune in the yard to denounce him. He saw her now marking him

down with a triumphant fury in her eyes--a strange, beautiful

creature--his own enigmatical Nemesis, it seemed.

“Citizen president,” she cried in a full bold voice, “while St Antoine

awaits your decision St Antoine is paralysed. Its cannon yawn in the

faubourg; its pikes stab only at the air. To clear the ground of these

outposts--bah! here needs not the interminable civil processes.

Mouchards all, arrested armed in a state of belligerency, they shall

be subject to martial law. In the name of the national fraternity,

that to-day shall be confirmed and cemented, I demand that these

prisoners be handed over to the people.”

A murmur succeeded her outcry. The president, white to the ears,

stilled it with uplifted hand. He looked a moment at the young

Royalist, a bitter stiff smile on his lips.

“It is just!” he cried in a sudden thin voice. “This is no time to

dally, as the demoiselle Théroigne informs us. Conduct all the

prisoners into the yard.”

The order had not passed his lips when there came a splintering crash,

and in an instant the whole room was in roaring racket and confusion.

Some half of the prisoners, forereading their certain doom, had made a

desperate plunge for escape through the rearward window by which they

stood. They got clear away. Their less prompt, or fortunate,

companions were in the same moment surrounded and isolated each from

each.

Suleau lifted his voice above the din.

“Commit me, my friends, to the sacrifice. Perhaps my blood, which, it

seems, they most desire, will appease their fury!”

He struggled to throw himself towards the door. His motive

misunderstood, a half-dozen _sans-culottes_ flung themselves upon and

pinioned him in their arms. At the same instant Théroigne leapt like

a cat and seized him by his collar.

“At last!” she hissed in his ear. “Dost thou know me?”

“Thou art Théroigne!” he panted. He had caught the president’s words.

He understood now something of the reason of this woman’s violence.

“Ah!” she cried in a hurried fury of speech, “and has not _my_ time

come, thou dog with a false name, thou nameless cur, so to slander and

revile the woman thou drovest to ruin?”

They were slowly edging him towards the door. He could only shake his

head at her.

“Why dost thou not speak?” she urged. “Why dost thou not implore my

mercy? I could save thee if I would.”

He still did not answer.

“Ah!” she sighed, with a cruel feint of tenderness, “for the sake of

the old days, Basile! Ask me, by the memory of our embraces, of thy

child that I bore in my womb, to pity and protect thee!”

“You are mad,” he cried. “I have never seen you in my life.”

She struck him across the mouth. The blow, the sight of the little

blood that sprang from the wound, were a double provocation to the

beasts of prey. They bore him with a rush to the outer door, through

it, into the yard beyond. Torn, bleeding, fighting every foot of his

way, but never protesting, he would sell his life dearly to these

mongrels. The yelling crowd surged and rocked before him.

Suddenly--with that exaltation of the perceptions that often seems to

signify the first flight-essay of the soul--he saw far back in the

thick of the press of inhuman faces one face that he recognised as

that of a man who, years before, on the morning of the Reveillon

riots, had spoken to him, mistaking him for another. Now, from the

expression of this one face, he educed a desperate hope. He gathered

it from the anguish of its features, from the conviction that its

owner was frantically endeavouring to thrust and beat a passage

towards him through the throng. God! he thought; if he could only

reach the face, he would somehow be saved.

With a furious effort he tore himself free, and snatched at and

wrenched a sabre from a hand that threatened him.

“Here!” he shrieked to the face; “to meet me, monsieur--to meet me!”

He had actually cut his way a half-dozen yards before a hand--the

woman’s--seized him from the back and dragged him to the ground. With

a groan he fell, trampled into a forest of tattered legs.

“Cry to me for mercy!” screamed the harlot.

“No,” he answered faintly.

She yelled then, beating a space about her with her hands. “Lucien, it

is the moment that has come!”

Snarling and dribbling, a hideous thing broke through the press and

flung itself upon the fallen man.

* * * * * * * *

Torn and breathless, Ned shouldered his way at last into the little

bloody arena. A woman--her foot upon the neck of something, some

bespattered creature that whimpered and prayed to her--looked stupidly

down upon the dead and mangled body of the man she had destroyed.

“Accursed! oh, thou accursed!” panted the new-comer in terrible

emotion. “It is not he, St Denys, that thou hast murdered.”

CHAPTER XII.

From the day of the massacre in the Cour des Feuillans, when--a

casual and involuntary witness of the opening deed of blood--he had

made a desperate attempt to save the life of the man who, as he

supposed, was being sacrificed to a misconception, Ned had no thought

but that he was fallen, a second time and inextricably, under the

deadly spell of the city that was at once his horror and his

attraction. That he had not paid the penalty with his own life of so

quixotic an interposition rather confirmed him in the sense of

fatality that had overtaken him. He could afterwards only recall

vaguely the expression of terror with which Théroigne had accepted

his furious impeachment of her barbarity; the resentful rage of the

mob over his denunciation of its idol; his imminent peril, and the

immunity from personal harm suddenly and unexpectedly secured him at

the hands of the very loathed object of his execration. He had given

her no thanks for her advocacy. It had condemned him merely to

prolonged struggle with an existence that had grown hateful to him.

Defrauded of his love, disenchanted with life, his residue of the

latter was not, he felt, worth the devil’s purchase.

And yet this sentiment carried with it a certain wild passion of

personal irresponsibility that was not without its charm. Into the

being of the people that had waived for the present, it seemed, all

thought of consistent conduct, he was absorbed without effort of his

own--absorbed so helplessly, that even the wounding stab of a certain

question, once engrossingly poignant to himself, dulled of its pain

and could be borne. It was as difficult to think collectedly, indeed,

in the Paris of those days as it is while rushing through a strong

wind.

Now, in the thick of the events that followed fast and irresistible

upon the heels of an overture to what was, in truth, a disguised

anarchy, he could not but feel himself something renewing that state

of mind, curious and fiercely pitiful, that had been induced in him

years before by his contemplation of the first scenes of a tragedy

that was now labouring in its penultimate act. And here the emotion of

the moment seemed always significant of the trend of the plot,

until--puff! the dramatic weathercock would go round, and the wind of

applause blow from another quarter, freezing or wet according to a

rule that was just the regular absence of any. But the food of excited

conjecture never failed to save his heart from feeding upon its own

tissues, and was the sustenance to his starving hopes. Indeed, at this

last, it seldom occurred to him, a temporary sojourner in the city of

doom, that he was other than an unalienable minute condition of the

city’s life; and he would no more than his friend Pierre-Victorin

desire to repudiate his liabilities thereto.

The 10th of August had passed like a death-cloud--“a ragged bastion

fringed with fire”--sweeping the streets with a storm of blood. The

king, dethroned, was a prisoner in the Temple; the mob occupied itself

in the violent erasing of all symbols of royalty. Vergniaud and the

Gironde were in perilous, protesting power; the prisons were glutting;

the guillotine had begun to rise and fall like a force-pump, draining

the human marshes. Of Théroigne, the militant priestess of St

Antoine, Ned heard only, vaguely rumoured, that--sated, perhaps, with

her share in the events of the Thuilleries massacre--she was inclining

to the moderate policy of Brissot and his following, and was

temporarily, at least, withdrawn from the influence of her earlier

colleagues. That she was moved to this course by any self-loathing for

the deed of which he had been witness he, detesting her, would not

believe. But he had no wish to entertain one further thought of her in

his mind.

So the month sped by--its every succeeding hour fresh fuel to the

popular wrath and terror over the rumoured advance of the Allies upon

the city,--and on the last day of it a strange little rencontre took

place between two of the minor actors in a very extraneous branch of

the general tragedy.

Ned, aimlessly strolling through the Faubourg of St Marcel in the

south-east quarter of the city, had turned, on the evening of this

day, into the boulevard that ran straight northward, by the ancient

city wall, from the Place Mouffetard to the Seine. His way took him

past the horse-market, and--inevitably, therefore, to the

context--past an adjacent house of correction for blacklegs. This

ironically named hospital--an iron-cased lazaretto, in truth, the

prison of the Salpétrière--was situate upon a dismal wedge of waste

land between the new and old enceintes of the city. It was a brutal,

gloomy pile, its walls exuding, one might have thought, the ichor of a

thousand diseases, moral and physical. Sooty, unlovely as a

factory--as indeed it was, of the devil’s wares--its noisome towers,

blotted on the sky, decharmed the soft reflected burning of the

sunset, and made a vulgarity of their whole leafy neighbourhood. From

its grated windows, high up in the foul air of its own exhaling,

behind which the gallows-tree birds built their nests, caws and

screams issuing were evidences of a very swarming rookery. Here and

there, the white, hair-draggled face of a strumpet stared from behind

bars; here and there an inward light--like a wandering fen

candle--could be seen travelling from story to story.

Ned, as he approached the building, quickened in his walk; for he was

aware of a batch of fresh prisoners, under escort, being driven across

the boulevard towards the central gate; and with the instinct to spare

misfortune the impertinence of unofficial inquest, he would hurry to

put himself beyond suspicion of prying. In this good motive, however,

he was baulked; for a subsequent party--a solitary culprit walking

between guards--issued from the same direction, and cut across and

encountered him just as he approached the entrance.

He started, and strangled an immediate inclination to exclaim aloud.

For in the lonely malefactor, going by him with bent head and

lowering, preoccupied face, he recognised--he was sure of it--Basile

de St Denys.

Degraded, vitiated--a shameful, ravaged personality, as unlike, in his

existing condition, the bright soul who had served, unconsciously to

them both, for his scapegoat--here was, without question, the

unlicensed once-lord of Méricourt. And the woman, his victim, had

erred only, it seemed, as to the direction of his presence in the

city--had erred, perhaps, because she could not realise that,

consistent to his nature, he must be sought, after all these years,

along the lower levels of existence.

The felons and their escort disappeared; Ned, dwelling where he had

paused, came to himself presently with a shock, as if out of a dream.

On an immediate impulse he turned into the prison yard, and mounted a

shallow flight of steps leading up to a great studded door that was

pierced by an open wicket. Looking through this, he saw the figure he

sought receding down a dim, long vestibule; and at the moment he was

faced by a turnkey.

“What do you here?” exclaimed the man harshly. “That Jules is a fine

porter!”

“I thought I saw one I knew pass in.”

“It is like enough. They have many of them a large acquaintance”--and

he offered to slam the wicket in the intruder’s face. Ned jingled, and

produced his “tip.”

“That is another question,” said the man.

“Now,” said Ned, “is the name of that last prisoner that entered

Basile de St Denys?”

“I know nothing of the _de_. What sort of citizen art thou? But,

otherwise--yes.”

“And what is he accused of?”

“A common enough matter: forging assignats.”

CHAPTER XIII.

Citoyenne Théroigne had not, it is to be supposed, the wit of a

Mohl, or the tact of a Recamier; but her sensuous and long-practised

beauty so vindicated her sins of omission in these respects as to

procure her reunions a social distinction than which none more

catholic was accorded the _salons_ of a later period. At her rooms in

the Rue de Rohan she held, and had long held, weekly Sunday

_séances_, of a quasi-political character, at which revolutionary

propagandists of such opposed principles as Mirabeau, Brissot, Pétion

were in turn, or out of it, to be met. Thither sometimes came Philip

of Orleans, with his sick, affable smile; thither Desmoulins, galvanic

and stuttering, the “attorney-general to the lantern”; thither the

poet Joseph Chénier; thither the younger Sieyes, eager to sniff the

incense exhaled to his less accessible brother, to whose exalted

virtues Théroigne, by some queer freak of contrariety, consistently

and reverently testified. To what earlier condescensions on her part

were due her present political intimacies it need not here be

questioned. One form of sympathetic largesse is part of the necessary

equipment of women of a naturally assimilative character.

She had adaptability; for four years her face and figure had brought

her a succession of ardent ministers to it. Thus, nourished on the

unconsidered mental pabulum of manifold intellects, she was become an

omniparous vessel, brazen and beautiful--emitting such a medley of

discordant sounds as had once the window bells, to Ned, in the

“landlust” of her native village. Yet, through all, whatever her

inconsequent show of principles, detestation of a social system to the

abuse of which she attributed her early downfall abided within her

unwaveringly, and induced her to those deeds of violence that, in the

end, alienated from her all those of her once familiars to whom Reason

figured as something higher than the goddess of licence.

But still she had a store of reflected light with which to illuminate

her Sunday reunions.

* * * * * * * *

“Citoyenne,” said an acrid young patriot, whose eyes were just cut

apart by the mere blade of a nose, and who wore a little silver

guillotine for a seal, “whither wilt thou fly when the Brunswicker

enters to make good his manifesto?”

“At his throat, Pollio,” (the company clapped its hands).

“To hang round his neck?”

“Ay, like a millstone.”

“But, indeed,” said the young man, affecting to show trouble, “thou

wilt surely be included amongst the proscribed.”

“There will be none!” cried the girl: “the capitol is saved! the geese

have begun to cackle!”

Pollio, amidst the laughter, shook his head in pretended distress.

“It is all very well. Yet not Paris but the world were lost to see our

Judith under a wall, the mark to a platoon of dirty jägers.”

Théroigne came to her feet. Her cheeks were flushed; her thick brown

curls were slumbrous shadows upon the pale slopes of her shoulders.

She was dressed quite simply, in the suggestiveness (something

misread) of virgin white.

But she was not at her ease. Radiant, glowing, voluptuous (she always

looked, this woman, as if she were but just risen from a warm bed),

there had yet been all the evening an unwonted rigidity in her manner,

a distraught expression in her face, such as that with which one

vouchsafes to another the shadow of an attention whose substance is

given elsewhere. She would break into feverish fits of merriment. She

would start and seem to listen, as if to some tiny voice making itself

heard within the compass of many voices. It may have passed

unregarded, this spasmodic manner of distraction; it may have been

observed and accepted as a new accent to charms so many-humoured. The

times took little note, little surprise, of unaccustomed tricks of

speech or feature. It was because men and women had so lost sight of

what were their true selves that moods passed for convictions.

Now she stood like a Pythoness, the light from above falling upon her

head, rounding and sleepily caressing all the fair curves of her

figure, of the smooth naked arm she raised as in inspiration.

“It is not the Brunswicker I fear,” she cried. “It is the enemy from

within--from within!”

She dropped her hand to her heart, as if that were her secret foe.

“Citoyenne,” whispered a voice in her ear, “there is one waiting in

the _foyer_ that is peremptory to see thee.”

She stared a moment, with a lost expression; then looked aside, half

in anger, to see her country Grisel regarding her appealingly.

“What one, little fool--little Bona?”

“Indeed, I do not know. He implored me by the love of God.”

Théroigne laughed uneasily.

“Rather by the love that is gratuitous, thou little _grand’-bêta_.

Hush! Go before, and I will follow.”

Some one drew aside the _portière_; she passed out, with a smile that

fled from her face as she descended the stairs. Under the dim oil-lamp

in the hall a cloaked figure was standing. As she came upon it, she

saw it was the English lord. The warmth and fragrance of a remoter

atmosphere that she brought with her shivered into frost on the

instant. That was inevitable; yet she would always have foregone many

plenary indulgences to draw this man into sin on her account.

He took a quick step forward, made as if to seize her by the arm--but

checked the impulse.

“You must come with me!” he whispered.

She exclaimed, incredulous, “Come with you!” then quickly bent

forward, and looked intensely into his face.

“Why does your voice break? Is it some trouble of your own, and you

seek me--_me_ out of all the world?”

“It is not of my own.”

“Whose, then?”

“Yours.”

“_Mon Dieu_!” she cried, with a little sharp laugh of mockery. “I know

of none--of no trouble or pleasure--that is our mutual concern.”

He clapped his hand roughly at that on her naked shoulder. His fingers

clawed angry marks in the flesh.

“Ah!” she cried, “you hurt me!”

“Hurt!” he echoed. “Do you know what they are doing to-night in this

devil’s city of yours?”

He caught only a faint protesting murmur from her lips.

“God wither you if you do!” he said hoarsely. “They are murdering the

prisoners. Do you hear?--in all the prisons they are murdering the

prisoners; and Basile de St Denys is one of them!”

She sprang back from him. Her face was like a face seen in

moonlight--white, round a black glare of eyes.

“You lie!” she cried. “He at least is dead already!”

He came at her again--seized her in a very fiend’s grip.

“Is it a time to equivocate? You know, as I, how your wicked hand

miscarried on that day. The man is in prison. I myself saw him borne

thither three days ago. You must come, and quickly, to be of use.

There is no question but that.”

She shook herself free, standing back so that her face seemed to

twitch and palpitate in the gusty sway of the lamp-light.

“You are imperious,” she muttered.

“It must not be,” he cried violently, “this horrible thing. You can

save him if you will.”

“And can you so master your loathing of me as to ask it?” she said.

“I swear--deny yourself this gratification of a lust so inhuman, and I

will think better of you than ever before.”

“That will be compensation for all I have suffered,” she said.

Her voice seemed too toneless, too passionless even for irony. She

stood without a movement before him, the marks of his clutch slowly

fading from her shoulder.

“Théroigne,” he cried, “you have the chance to a little atone. You

will not so clinch your damnation! In the name of God, Théroigne!

This man was the father of your child.”

“True,” she said, “of my dead child. I will come, monsieur.”

He gave a gasp of terrible relief.

“Hurry!” he said, “or it will be too late.”

She had already seized a cloak from a recess: in a moment they were

speeding on their way together.

He talked to her as they hurried on--half unconsciously, almost

hysterically. He told of his chance encounter, of Basile’s

degradation, of anything or nothing. It was such emotional gabble as

even reserved men vent during the first moments of respite from

intolerable anguish. His voice echoed back from the silent houses. He

did not even notice that the girl returned him never an answer, so

assured was he now of her sympathy.

The streets were curiously still and deserted, the familiar life of

them all shrunk and cowering behind a thousand lightless blinds. Now

and again phantom cries seemed wafted to them from remote quarters;

now and again a glimmer of torches would flash from far perspectives,

and travel a moment on the blackness and vanish.

It was a weary way by which they must go. The man led his companion

through the Place du Carousel down to the river, along the endless

line of quays by the wash of night-bound waters, over the Isle

St-Louis and the street of the two bridges; again, along the gloomy

quay of St-Bernard, and so into the dark leafy boulevard that ran

southwards to the thieves’ prison. And here, for the first time, a

spectral suggestion, an attenuated wind of sounds, began to take shape

and body; and here suddenly the girl gave a quick gasp, and jerked to

a stop.

“The Salpétrière!” she muttered, clutching her cloak to her throat.

“The Salpétrière, Théroigne.”

She seemed to turn her head and look at him. Then on again she went,

and he followed.

The noise increased to their every onward step. Ambiguous sounds

resolved themselves into sounds unnamable. Dim light, seen phantomly

ahead, flared out in a moment across their path, as if some hellish

furnace were refuelling. And then, in an instant--as it were stokers

labouring at the mouth of flame--a scurry of fantastic shapes,

grotesquely busy about the entrance to a lighted yard, grew into their

vision.

Ned turned upon his companion.

“Take my arm,” he said, in a ghastly voice.

She shrank from him.

“Not unless it is thou needst support,” she whispered.

He seized her hand, and reached and drove into the thick of the

bestial throng, dragging her after him. A horrible reek seemed to

fasten upon his brain.

“_Malédiction_!” shrieked a filthy Alsatian, whom he had sent reeling

with his elbow; “but I will teach thee the answer to that!”

He swung up a bloody cleaver, clearing a space about him. The girl, on

the thought, ran under his guard.

“Théroigne!” screamed a woman’s voice across the yard. “It is la

belle Liégeoise--our little amazon!”

Her cloak had fallen apart. She was revealed to these her friends. At

the word, a roar went up from the mob; the offending patriot was

struck down, trampled upon; the girl herself stamped upon his face.

“Hither!” screamed the voice again, “to the best seats in all the

theatre!”

Then at once Ned felt himself urged forward. He went, dazed. His feet

slid on the stones--plashed once or twice. He saw a great light--light

jumping from the brands held high by a lurid row of women stationed on

the topmost step of the shallow flight that led to the great door. He

saw Théroigne seized and embraced by these harpies. Her skirt, that

had been all white, bore a clownish fringe of crimson.

“I cannot stay here,” she cried. “I have business within.”

They answered, clattering: “Get it over and return, little badine, for

the sight is good.”

The next moment he and the girl were at the door. A group of four,

issuing, scrambled past, almost upsetting them. A patriot to each

shoulder and one fastened on like a dog at the back! It seemed an

extravagant guard to one sick collapsed thing borne in the midst. They

ran it down the steps; the torches fluttered and poised steady. Ned

flung himself through the doorway, crushing his hands against his

ears. Somebody touched and led him forward.

As his brain cleared, he saw that he was standing--somewhat apart from

any other--in a large, dimly lighted room. A man of a fierce and

sensual mould of feature was seated hard by at a table, a great open

register before him, a tin box of tobacco and some bottles within his

ready reach. Round about lolled on benches pulled away from the walls,

perhaps a dozen, more or less tipsy, judges (saving the mark!)

subordinate to the president. A couple of men with red-stained arms

and in steaming shirts stood by the closed door. An old dumb-faced

turnkey held his hand to the lock.

A voice--a name lately uttered, still rang confusedly in his memory.

What did it signify? He caught at his reeling faculties.

“Behold, citizeness, the man!”

All in an instant, it seemed, the room sank into profound stillness.

He struck the film from his eyes, and saw St Denys.

The wretched creature stood before the table, between guards. He

appeared utterly amazed and demoralised. Even in the moment of terror,

Ned shrunk to see how the brute had come to predominate in that

handsome debauched face.

Then, suddenly, the harsh voice of the president shattered the

silence.

“Your name--your profession?”

“St Denys, by principle and practice a demagogue,” faltered the

prisoner.

“Dost know of what thou art accused?”

“I am innocent, M. le président--before God, I am innocent!”

Something white moved forward--struck him on the shoulder.

“And before _me_, Basile de St Denys?”

He whipped about, and uttered a cry like a trapped hare.