There was around Dominique Lavirotte an air of mystery which kept the
good simple folk of Glengowra at bay. Although, theoretically,
Frenchmen have always been popular in Ireland, this applies rather to
the mass than to the individual.
There was nothing repulsive about Dominique Lavirotte. On the
contrary, he had attractive manners, and although he spoke English
with a broken accent, he spoke it fluently and faultlessly. He was
agreeable in company, well-read, and possessed a shallow
encyclop[ae]dic knowledge, by means of which he was enabled to give
great brilliancy and point to his conversation.
Yet at certain moments he was taciturn, and if one attempted to break
in upon his reserve he turned swiftly and snarled even at his best
friend.
According to his own account, he was descended from Louis Anne
Lavirotte, medical doctor, born at Nolay, in the diocese of Autun,
somewhere about a hundred years ago, who was a most skilful physician,
and one well versed in the English language. This dead doctor of a
hundred years ago had devoted much of his attention while on earth to
more or less obscure forms of mental disease, and had written a
treatise on hydrophobia.
Dominique was very proud of this learned ancestor, and paid his
relative of the last century the compliment of devoting some of his
own time to the consideration of abnormal mental developments. Indeed,
some of those who knew him best said that there was a twist in his own
mind, and that under extreme provocation, mental or physical, the
brain would give way.
Lavirotte and O'Donnell were as close friends as it is possible for
men to be; and, notwithstanding the ten miles which separated their
homes, they saw much of one another. Each was young and enthusiastic,
each sang tenor, and sang uncommonly well.
In the town of Rathclare, no young man was more popular than Eugene
O'Donnell, and the people there thought it a thousand pities that he
should select as his favourite friend a man who was not only not a
resident of Rathclare, but a foreigner, with mysterious ways and an
uncertain temper. O'Donnell laughed off all their expostulations and
warnings, and said that in so far as his friend was a stranger and
afflicted with a bad temper, there was all the more reason why someone
should do him any little kindness he could.
But the people of Rathclare shook their heads gravely at the young
man's temerity, and prophesied that no good would come to O'Donnell of
this connection. They did not like this foreigner, with his strange
ways and mysterious retirements into himself. They were free and
open-hearted themselves, and they liked free and open-hearted souls
like O'Donnell. They did not like swarthy skins; and now and then in
the newspapers they read that men with swarthy skins drew knives and
struck their dearest friends; that foreigners were treacherous, and
not to be trusted with the lives, into the homes, or with the honour
of law-abiding folk. They knew, it being a seaport, that foreigners
spoke a gibberish which they affected to understand, and which was in
reality no better than the language of Satan. Once a Greek, an
infamous Greek, had been hanged in their town for an intolerable crime
of cruelty committed on board ship; and somehow, ever since then, all
foreigners, particularly swarthy foreigners, seemed in their eyes
peculiarly prone to atrocious cruelties.
What a luxury it must have been for this swarthy man of uncertain
temper to meet and speak with Ellen Creagh, who was the very
embodiment of all that is fair in the rich, warm sense of fairness in
the North; and free in the sense of all that is open and joyous, and
full of abounding confidence, in the North!
During the fortnight in which he had been admitted to what he
considered the infinite privilege of her society, he had fallen
helplessly, hopelessly, madly in love. He had drunk in the subtle
poison of her beauty with an avidity almost intolerable to himself.
All the poetry and passion of his nature had gone forth ceaselessly
towards that girl, as only the poetry and passion of southern blood
can go forth. The violence of his feelings had astonished even
himself. These feelings had grown all the more intense by the fierce
repression in which he had kept them. For until that day in the boat
he had never seemed to take more than a passing, polite interest in
Ellen. Even then, in his dark and self-restrained nature, he had given
no indication of the struggle within. The frenzy of his worship found
no expression, and he took his dismissal with as much apparent
indifference as though he had put the question to her merely out of
regard to the wishes of others.
Yet when he said the words, "I am a ruined man," he meant the words,
or rather he meant that he was determined to take an active part in
his own destruction.
"If I die," he thought, "what is death to me? The sun is dead, the
moon is dead, the stars are dead, earth is dead, and perdition will be
a release from this valley of phantoms. When life is not worth living,
why should one live? I will not live. I have no cause against her, but
I have cause against myself, for I am a failure."
He had determined to make away with himself; he had made up his mind
that he would not survive this terrible disappointment; he would go
home that night and take some painless and swift poison, and so pass
out of this vain world to the unknown beyond; he would not declare his
intention to anyone, least of all to O'Donnell, whose voice he
recognised in the second stanza of the song; he knew where he could
get the poison--from a friendly apothecary. They would hold an inquest
on him, no doubt, and discover that he had done himself to death. Her
name might even get mixed up in the affair, but he could not help
that. He meant to do her no harm; he simply could not and would not
endure.
When that meeting took place on the beach, whereat he introduced Ellen
to O'Donnell, he had noticed the latter's start of amazed admiration.
"What," thought Lavirotte, "is he hit too; he, the invincible! he, the
adamantine man, who has hitherto withstood all the charms of her
lovely sex? It would be curious to watch this. Will he too make love,
and fail--succeed? Ah."
When this thought first occurred to Lavirotte he paused in a dim,
dazed way. Of all men living he wished best to O'Donnell, now that he
might regard himself as dead.
"If I am to die and she is to love, would it not be best that she
should love him?"
And while he was thinking thus, and as he was mentioning his friend's
name to her, he saw her, too, start and seem for a moment confused. He
could easily understand why it was O'Donnell had started. Such beauty
as hers appeared potent enough to infuse the Belvidere Apollo with
action. But why should she start? Woman is not overwhelmed by the
beauty of man, as man is by the beauty of woman. Here it was that the
demon of jealousy first entered the soul of Dominique Lavirotte; here
it was he first inhaled the mephitic breath of jealousy, destined to
poison all his life and to embitter the last moment of his existence.
As the three turned away and left the blue shingle for the yellow
road, the sun fell behind them, and almost imperceptibly the gray dusk
of twilight gathered in the east. Overhead the blue of day was
becoming fainter and fainter, making way for the intenser blue of
night.
Neither of the men seemed disposed to speak. The heart of each was
full of new emotion--one of love, the other of jealousy; one of the
first rapturous buoyancy of dearest hope, the other of degrading cark.
Nothing but the most ordinary commonplaces were uttered that night;
and after the leave-taking each went a different way--she to the
modest lodging where she spent her brief holiday with her mother;
Lavirotte to his quiet room, and O'Donnell back to Rathclare by the
latest train leaving the village that night.
When the last-mentioned got home, he astonished his father and mother
by walking into the room where they were sitting, and saying abruptly:
"Sir, you have often advised me to marry, and I have put the matter
off. Are you still of your former mind?"
"God bless my soul!" cried the father in astonishment. "God bless my
soul, Eugene, what's the matter?" He could get no further than this
with surprise, and the question he asked was put merely as a matter of
form, and not from any desire to ascertain the condition of his son's
mind.
But the mother was quicker--took in the whole situation at once,
plunged at the heart of things, and asked breathlessly: "Eugene, who
is she?"
He coloured slightly and drew back. His father was too slow, and his
mother too quick for him. He preferred his mother's mode of treating
the matter. The word "she" brought back to his enchanted eyes the
vision he had seen on the beach. He said to himself: "My mother has no
right to be so quick. For all I know to the contrary, she may be
engaged to Lavirotte." Then aloud he said: "Mother, I assure you,
there is no 'she.' I never said two civil words to any girl in all my
life."
"Eugene," she said, dropping into her lap the woollen stocking she
was knitting for him, "no young man ever yet thought of marriage until
thinking of some girl had put the thought into his head."
He felt in a way flattered and fluttered. It was pleasant even for a
moment to fancy that his mother, although she knew nothing of Miss
Creagh, had suggested the notion he might marry her. He laughed and
shook his head, and laughing and shaking his head became him.
His mother looked at him half sadly, and thought: "No girl in all the
world could refuse my boy--my handsome boy, my noble boy. And now one
of them is going to take him away from me, who reared him, and have
known him every hour since he was born."
"Eugene," said the father deliberately, "do I understand that you wish
me to give you my opinions on marriage?"
The young man burst into a loud laugh. He had got far beyond the
theoretic aspect of the affair now, and his father's opinion would
have made very little impression indeed when compared with the
impression Ellen Creagh had left upon his heart.
After this the three talked upon the subject of Eugene's possible
marriage, he telling them no more about the adventure on the beach
than that the notion of marriage had been put into his mind by the
sight of a most estimable young lady, in every way suited to him, but
of whom he had only the slightest knowledge up to this.
That night, when Ellen Creagh found herself in her own room, no
thoughts of love were in her head. A feeling of pity for the fair
young man she had met was uppermost in her head. It was not
sentimental pity, but pity of a much more substantial and worldly
kind.
She had a letter to write, and sat down to write it. It began, "My
dear Ruth," and continued to narrate certain trivial matters connected
with seaweed and shells. Then it went on to say: "I have seen young
Mr. O'Donnell, son of your father's great friend, here. I was quite
startled when I heard the name. I was introduced to him by a friend
who had told me of him before." When she had finished her letter, she
addressed it to Miss Vernon, Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin. She added a
postscript, saying: "I hope you will soon get out of Dublin. You must
be weary of it this lovely weather. I shall write again in a few
days."
Then she stood awhile at the table, musing over the events in the
boat. "He could not have been serious," she thought. "I daresay if I
had looked at his face I should have seen him smiling. Anyway, he took
it very quietly."
That night Dominique Lavirotte slept little.
"Though he were my friend over and over again," he cried passionately,
"he shall not. No! Not if I were to----" Here he covered his face with
his hands. "What a horrible thought! I can see his white face now in
the moonlight. Why is it white? Why is it moonlight? Oh, God! was
beauty ever such as hers?"