journalism has become no whit less vulgar and personal. Vulgarity,
ostentation, fraud, rapacious advertisement--these are all the symptoms
of the great moral disease of the century. Were a Lycurgus to rise
up for each state, I doubt if the nations of the earth would have
the wisdom to return to frugality, courage, and simplicity--so much
have we lost by the long race of civilisation, so much our superiors
were the old Pagan Spartans, and so dead are we to all promptings of
delicacy,--without moral or physical value, without even valour.’
The Doctor spoke dejectedly, as if the hope of all good had died within
him. The young men suddenly remembered that they, too, were weighted
with a like lassitude and unbelief, and finished their punch in silence.
‘I expect we shall see the century out in a lugubrious spirit,’ sighed
Anatole, when, upon a sign from Dr. Vermont, the waiter had replenished
their glasses.
‘Where’s the use of facing a new one?’ asked the Doctor, with a vague,
dull glance into space. ‘The same chatter, the same humbug, the same
vulgarity and fraud. Always the same, and inevitably the same. New
idols, new theories, new habits start up to prove more monotonous than
the old ones----’
‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ interrupted Gaston Favre.
‘Exactly, and Alphonse Karr was not the first to find it out. I have a
better plan, lads, for saluting the new century than your Scotchman’s
tod-dy and _Les Temps Jadis_,--than even the insipid shake-hands of
Albion.’
The punch had gone to the young heads, and gave them a craving for
excitement. Each one leant forward over his glass, with shining eyes
and flushed cheeks, eager and expectant. It was not often that Dr.
Vermont condescended to plan for their amusement.
‘Let us suppose ourselves singing _Les Neiges d’Antan_, and toasting
our old acquaintances. We shall awaken into a new century, just the
same as the old. The more it changes, the more it will be the same. Are
you not prospectively tired of it already?’
He looked round gravely upon the young men, and excitement died out of
each glance under the sad indifference of his. They felt upon their
honour to be no less weary and cynical than he. A nod of emphatic
agreement from the three young pessimists was supplemented to the
Doctor’s monologue, as he continued--
‘Suppose we salute the twentieth century--already worn before birth--by
a single pistol-shot, the mouth of each man’s to his brains. As we
are none of us likely to do anything with our brains, more than the
hundreds of other young men I have seen vanish from these tables into
nothingness, there can be no patriotic objection to our blowing them
out in company.’
The young men sat back in their chairs, and drew a long, deep breath.
They were almost sobered for the moment, and profoundly troubled by
their leader’s extraordinary proposition. However firmly we may be
convinced of the nothingness of life, such a method of toasting the
new year is calculated to give the stoutest courage pause. Not that
they held any squeamish objections to suicide--quite the contrary,
they professed to regard it as the natural and legitimate remedy for a
broken heart, damaged honour, or a ruined life. But, _tudieu!_ they all
sat there drinking their punch in freedom and security, with pockets
not inconveniently full, it is true, but with sound hearts and sounder
appetites. The prison was not before them: then, why the deuce should
they be offered the grave?
‘I thought, like Solomon, you were disposed to complain of the sameness
of all things under the sun,’ sneered the Doctor.
‘That is true, Doctor,’ assented Anatole. ‘But suppose we were to find
things just as same beyond the sun--or a good deal worse? For, after
all, we may flatter ourselves with being sceptics, but what security
have we that the pistol-shot will be the end of it all? and what if it
happened to be infernally disagreeable somewhere else, and there was no
getting back?’
‘Bah, another glass of punch will put you all right,’ laughed Julien.
‘On reflection, I find the Doctor’s proposal an excellent one. We are
sick of everything here--wine, women, and song, such as Paris now
furnishes. Then, let us go and see for ourselves what is going on among
the stars. There’s this comfort, Anatole, we go in a body, if there
is anything ugly to face. That’s the difficulty about suicide,--its
lugubrious solitude. In company, one may snap his fingers at fear.
To see three friendly faces round you, all ready to plunge at once
into the same boat, and exchange jokes simultaneously with old Father
Charon! When you lift your own cocked pistol to your forehead, to see
three other hands and all four be shot together out of the mystery,
either into eternity or--_le néant_.’
‘Ah, there, you’re not sure either, Gaston,’ Anatole protested,
reproachfully.
‘That’s just it, boy; I know nothing now, but with the dawn of the new
century I should know everything.’
‘My humble contribution to the Doctor’s plan is the proposal that we
blow our brains out together--I mean in the same room,’ suggested
Julien.
‘Precisely; I have just been thinking the matter out. Now here in
Paris, we should excite excessive attention. But it might better be
managed in some quiet place--near the sea, or close to a river bank,
where our bodies might disappear easily, without giving rise to
immediate alarm. I know of a half deserted island down near Beaufort,
my native town. You will hardly believe that a place so near a busy
factory town--one of the largest provincial cities of France--could
be so forsaken and desolate. I doubt if any one lives on it now. My
father-in-law had a big gloomy house on that island. I don’t think
there was another inhabitant but himself. We might go down there, and
toast the new century in among the dark rocks above the river.’
‘Beaufort! a commonplace train with such an end in view,’ sighed
Anatole.
‘Not necessarily a train. What is to prevent us from taking horse, as
your favourite heroes of Dumas did?’ said the Doctor, smiling a little
at him.
‘With all my heart, if we are going to ride to Beaufort,’ cried
Anatole. ‘I don’t care if I am shot then.’
_PART SECOND_
DR. VERMONT
(_Told by the author_)
DR. VERMONT AND HIS GUESTS UPON THE ISLAND
IT wanted three days to the end of the year. The afternoon had been
so exceptionally mild, that Mademoiselle Lenormant and her foreign
friend were still sitting out on the gallery enjoying the sunset. The
air was very clear, and the heavens beautifully coloured, though the
winter dusk was beginning to drop. But it was as yet a mere suggestion
of dimness that did not hide, while it accentuated, the edge of bleak
and empty road along the sky-line. It sharpened the outlines of the
bridge and its castellated points below. The river was smooth like dark
glass, and rosy clouds made a blood-red margin along its outer bank.
No wind blew among the trees of the melancholy garden, visible from
the other side of the gallery, and so still was it, that the farthest
sounds sent back their travelling echoes. The footfall of a solitary
peasant crossing the bridge made a martial clatter, so clear and strong
and self-assertive was it upon the pavements that seemed to sleep since
feudal times.
Little Gabrielle sat in a corner of the gallery in jacket and hood,
hugging Minette, who bore the discomfort bravely, while she spelled out
a story from a large picture-book on her knee. It was satisfactory to
see that the kitten took as much interest in the story as the reader,
and enlivened the study by occasional lunges at the brown finger
following each line. The child’s pretty voice hardly interrupted the
low conversation of the two ladies, who faced the view of Beaufort, and
watched the road, while they discoursed upon the philosophy of life.
Mademoiselle Lenormant always watched that road, whether she sat in the
gallery or upstairs in her own room. It was the rival of Gabrielle and
her books, for she would willingly leave either at any moment to look
at it.
Joséphine came down to carry Gabrielle inside, out of the chill air,
and the child was still protesting loudly, and calling imperiously on
her aunt to rescue her from private tyranny, when Mademoiselle bent
forward with an excited gesture, her eyes riveted upon the point where
the road seemed to issue from the sky.
‘Do you not see something down there--something dark that moves?’ she
breathed, without looking at her companion.
‘Effectively. It appears to be a group of men on horseback. Yes,
Mademoiselle, it is a party of riders, and they are coming straight
towards the bridge.’
Mademoiselle shook from head to foot, and went and caught the
balustrade to steady herself, while she continued to examine the blot
of moving shadow upon the landscape, that increased with each wink of
eyelid, until soon it was a visible invasion of males on horseback. A
dull thud of hoofs was borne upon the air, and near the bridge, one of
the party, apparently the leader, drew up, and seemed to address the
others. These at once fell behind, three in number, and the foremost
turned his face to the island, and galloped ahead.
‘Joséphine, viens, viens vite,’ shrieked Mademoiselle, her whole face
dyed pink, and her grey eyes dark and luminous with emotion.
Joséphine hurried out, cap-strings flying, all in a state of wild
concern. What was it, but what on earth was it? What did Mademoiselle
see?
Mademoiselle began in a thick voice--
‘Je crois, Joséphine, que c’est le docteur’--and then stopped, and drew
her hand slowly across her eyes, like one awakened from a moment’s
stupor. ‘C’est Monsieur le docteur qui nous arrive enfin,’ she added,
in her usual voice, and with a full return to her old self.
Joséphine peered over the balustrade, but she only saw three moving
shapes upon the bridge, the outlines of horse and man intermelted to
her vision.
‘The foremost rider must now be half way up the street,’ cried
Mademoiselle’s companion, glad yet ashamed that she should be there at
such a moment.
‘Take Gabrielle, Joséphine, and put on her pretty grey dress and her
laces. Marie will open the door for Dr. Vermont.’
Joséphine carried off the startled child, too frightened to ask
questions or demur, and at that moment the bell rang loudly, with
violent emphasis.
‘I will leave you now, dear Mademoiselle,’ said her friend, with
sympathetic pressure of her fingers. ‘Monsieur will doubtless require
this _appartement_, in which case I can return to Beaufort this
evening.’
‘No, no, there is a bedroom upstairs. You will not leave me so
abruptly, not now, when perhaps I may most need a friend. Stay yet a
while.’
A heavy step was crossing the hall, and came through the dining-room
towards the gallery. The foreigner, on her way to her own room, caught
sight of a lean, youngish-looking gentleman, with a fair beard and
thin brown hair worn off temples, deeply marked by life. He glanced at
her keenly, as he stood for her to pass, and she had time to note the
social polish of his manners, and the melancholy dignity of his aspect,
and then he crossed the floor and stepped out through the window,
searching with mild brown eyes for the woman who had waited for his
coming for ten long years.
His face lit up with a soft smile when he saw her, and he went
forward, upon the pleasant exclamation--‘Ma sœur!’ His intention was to
bestow upon her a formal embrace. His hand was stretched out, and when
her cold slim fingers touched it, and lay in his palm, and he saw the
lustre of unshed tears in the sad grey eyes that met his own steadily,
and a rosy flame tremble like confession over the cheeks’ pallor, a new
impulse came to him, and he simply lifted her hand to his lips.
‘Henriette,’ he murmured, in a troubled voice.
‘The silence has been long, François,’ she said, and smiled.
He still held her hand, and gazed at her curiously. She was not so
changed as he, and if the years had thinned, they had not lined her
face. At thirty-three, he even found her more attractive than at
twenty. There was that about her which compelled interest, and gave an
odd charm to the simplest speech.
‘Henriette, you have much to pardon me, and your indulgence will have
to go still further than you dream. Ah, how vividly a forgotten past
may bear down upon a man at the first sight of a familiar place! All
my life down here had clean gone from my mind. This queer old house,
your father, you, even Adèle, have been for me years past, not even a
memory, much less a link with all that is gone. It is incredible how
completely a man may forget. No regret, no remembrance pursued me in
Paris, and the instant I crossed the bridge it all surged back on me,
not as remembered days, but as the actual present. Verily, we are droll
rascals, Henriette, and mercilessly tyrannised by experience.’
He had dropped her hand now, and was leaning against a pillar, staring
across at Beaufort. Mademoiselle’s brows twitched sharply, but she
uttered no word of reproach, partly from pride, and partly from
surprise.
‘It will be good news for Gabrielle, and for me, if such a change
decided you to remain here now,’ she said.
‘Gabrielle?’ he interrogated softly.
‘Your child, François!’
Oh, this he understood as a reproach, though it touched him but
slightly. He made a step forward, still questioning her with movement
of brow and eyelid.
‘_Tiens!_ It is true. Is it credible I could forget I had a child? Oh!
I know what you must think of me, Henriette; and the worst of it is,
you cannot think badly enough of me;’ he said, laughing drearily.
‘It would be a poor satisfaction for me to think badly of you,
François. I am not your judge. It is enough for me that you have come
back--at last.’
‘What a sweet woman!’ cried Dr. Vermont, in amazement. ‘My sister,
your kindness confounds me. Life has not taught me to expect anything
like it, and I begin to believe I am not the sage I have lately loved
to contemplate. What, indeed, if these steadfast, silent creatures be
the sages after all, and we, the philosophers and seekers after light,
but the fools, who wear cap and bells, and mistake them for badges of
sovereignty.’
‘Here comes Gabrielle, François,’ said Mademoiselle, interrupting his
reflections.
The little girl lingered shyly upon the edge of the gallery, which
Joséphine endeavoured to make her cross by whispered entreaty and
pushes. She did not know this man who was her father, and her small
brains were busy contriving a way to greet him. She made a pretty
picture thus, in grey silk and white lace, with a broad crimson sash,
and a big bow of red ribbon on the top of her curly brown head. Dr.
Vermont stared at her as an object of natural curiosity rather than a
charming little girl, his own daughter.
‘She is very like you, Henriette,’ he said, and held out his hand with
an ingratiating smile.
Gabrielle came slowly forward, and took it; then looked up into his
face in grave and silent deliberation. She decided suddenly to offer
her cheek for the paternal kiss, which she did, with much conscious
dignity and no sense of pleasure whatever.
‘Let me see,’ said Dr. Vermont, when he had perfunctorily kissed her,
‘she is now about ten. The very age her mother was when I first beheld
her. Poor pretty Adèle! She does not in any way resemble her.’
He sighed deeply, and Henriette’s eyes, fixed on Gabrielle, filled with
tears.
‘What rooms does Monsieur wish me to prepare for him?’ Joséphine asked
in the pause.
The Doctor started, and remembered, with a quick disagreeable
sensation, the nearness of his friends, and its extraordinary
significance. If that good soul Joséphine but knew! If Henriette
suspected!
‘That reminds me, Henriette--I have left three friends outside. I
suppose you can put us up down here, or upstairs, for a couple of
nights?’
‘Only a couple of nights?’ Mademoiselle exclaimed.
‘Yes. By the dawn of New Year’s Day we shall be far from Beaufort, so
we will leave you on New Year’s Eve after dinner. What accommodation
have you here?’
‘You have forgotten that, too! There is your old room--the large one
opposite, which a friend of mine has been using. There is a canapé,
which one of the gentlemen can sleep on. And then there is my sister’s
room, and in the little dressing-room off it, another bed could be put
up. I think you can manage.’
‘Capitally. We shall be lodged like kings. Gaston and Julien in my old
room--yes, I quite remember it now. Yellow hangings, and an engraving
of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and a picture of Madame Lebrun. Not so?
Anatole will sleep in the dressing-room, and I in the blue room. Is it
still so blue? There used to be a photograph of my favourite Del Sarto,
“The Madonna with St John.” Poor Adèle! What would I not give to be
the same enamoured young fellow of ten years ago, violently combating
death? But I have lived twenty years since, and everything is dead for
me.’
He thrust his hands into his pockets, and went toward the door in
search of his friends, without troubling to note the effect of his
heartless words upon Henriette.
These he found trotting unconcernedly up and down the broken pavement.
With all eternity before them, a few minutes more or less outside a
particular door could not affect them. And when they were ushered into
the house by the Doctor, and presented to his sister-in-law, they
cast a glance of pity upon her that she should be at so much pains
to welcome doomed, indifferent men. They listened politely to her
apologies for the insufficiencies of their installation, and to her
prayers for indulgence in the matter of _cuisine_; and shook their
heads in despondent wonder. As for Anatole, he was as lugubrious as a
funeral mute, and the Doctor’s cynical animation at table completely
mystified him.
When once the fumes of punch had abated, poor Anatole saw his mad
engagement in quite a novel light. The thought of that pistol held
by his own hand to his own brains drove him to panic. He looked wan
with fear, and fierce from desire to conceal his fear. He was a
coward in both senses: without courage to stand out against a foolish
engagement, and equally without courage to face death. Despite his
boasted conviction that one death is as good as another, and any
possibly better than life, he entertained a very private notion that
suicide is a social as well as a moral crime, hardly justifiable by the
most abject blunder and excesses--and by nothing less than absolute
dishonour.
Besides, at heart he loved life, and he only played at pessimism not
to look less jaded and cynical than the rest of the century. It was
the fashion not to be gay, to have no belief, to have exhausted all
emotions, and reached the end of all things. Now what would those
around him say if it were known that Anatole Buzeval relished in the
privacy of his own chamber Alexandre Dumas, and shed tears at the death
of Porthos? What self-respecting Parisian of his day would associate
with a youth, whose favourite hero was D’Artugnan, and who loved
the great optimist Scott, whose novels he studied stealthily in an
indifferent translation, and knew by heart.
He was abashed by contemplation of his own spuriousness as member of
an effete circle, where death was regarded as the best of all things;
and Mademoiselle Lenormant was seriously distressed by the wretchedness
of his appetite and the misery of his boyish face. She forgot herself
in another, and left the Doctor to entertain her friend, who had
been invited to join them at dinner, while she set herself the task
of rescuing the poor lad from his own reflections. Anatole was an
affectionate and grateful young fellow, and the way to his heart was
inconveniently easy of access. When he went to bed that night, to his
other woes was added the delightful misfortune of being head and ears
in love with the Doctor’s sister-in-law.
This was a complication not unnoted by Dr. Vermont or his companions.
The Doctor calmly stroked his beard, and watched Anatole between the
pauses of his conversation on matters English with the foreign lady.
The foreigner, he was pleased afterwards to describe, as intelligent,
but as she had already touched the rim of the arid plain of middle-age,
with equal dulness, far from the hills of youth and from the valley of
old age, he saw no reason to pursue her thoughts or shades of speech
upon her face--by the way, he did not like English women; they lacked
_atmosphere_, and were born without any natural grace, or coquetry, or
any desire to please--and hence he had the more leisure to devote to
inspection of Mademoiselle Lenormant and his susceptible comrade. He
understood all the boy thought hidden of the struggle within him. He
contemplated a magnanimous turn at the last moment, and caressed it
in all its dramatic details. Meanwhile, it amused him to follow the
conflict, and watch the childish eagerness with which Anatole, thinking
his last hour at hand, abandoned himself to this new fancy, with a
volume of eloquent declaration on the edge of his eyelids.
And yet the Doctor’s calm inspection was not without a twinge of anger,
as at a kind of infringement of his personal rights. As he sat in the
old salon, where in his youth he used to chat with Monsieur Lenormant,
he was in the grip of the past, softened, almost sentimental. Nothing
was changed about the place, which wore the same homely aspect of
shabbiness and comfortable untidiness. But three of the personages
of that little drama were dead: Monsieur Lenormant, Adèle, and young
Dr. Vermont. For he, too, had been young and bright and pleasant.
Once he had thrilled from head to foot when Adèle, with a charming
movement, took one of his long fingers, and helped him to vamp the
_Marseillaise_, and their eyes met in a foolish fluttering glance, and
_tudieu!_ his own were wet!
These were extraordinary things to remember, perhaps, but not so
extraordinary as the persistence with which his backward glance rested,
not on the image of his lovely young wife evoked from the past--but
upon Henriette as she then was. That picture of grave, silent girlhood
haunted him in a singular and unexpected way. The forgotten drama rose
up, and confronted him with its ruthless _dénouement_. And if he were
not too proud and wilful ever to acknowledge regret, he might know
that it was there the sting lay, as he remembered: that he should have
played an ignoble trick upon poor old Monsieur Lenormant, and have
looked at Adèle instead of at Henriette--on one memorable occasion.
He had played for his happiness, and happiness had passed him by.
Perchance, had he played a more honourable game, happiness would have
been with him all these years, and the noble woman, whose suffering
in his choice he now knew he had then divined, would have brought
him finer and more delicate enjoyment than that which he had found
elsewhere.
‘Yet who knows?’ he added, as a sound lash upon sentimental musing.
‘There is no such thing as happiness, and I should have tired of her
goodness as I have tired of the badness of others.’
But he smiled indulgently, when Anatole droned a melancholy melody upon
her charms that night.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
WHILE the young men were still sitting over their coffee and rolls in
uncheerful converse, Dr. Vermont stole upstairs--not to see Gabrielle,
but to talk to Henriette. His thoughts had been with her all night, and
he was eager for sight of her by day.
When he entered, a spot of insufferable radiance burnt into the hollow
of her thin cheek; but this confession was counteracted by the extreme
sadness of her greeting. She, too, had thought during the night, and
thought had cruelly struck at her life-long idol. For had he not
forgotten Adèle? and was Adèle’s child anything more than his by name?
To have found him indifferent to her because of the dead! But to find
him indifferent to both! There was the point of pain, and with it the
wrench of a wounded faith, which could never more uphold her in her
solitude.
She looked at him anxiously, to see if a night spent in the blue room
had stamped his cynical, handsome face with a trace of suffering, of
revived feeling. The poor lady could not be expected to interpret any
such sign except as homage to her dead sister. So she lifted up her
heart in honest gratitude for the touch of humanity in his manner as he
held Gabrielle to his knee, and stroked her brown hair gently. Such is
the guileness and simplicity to be found on a forsaken island, where
gossip is not, and society revelations are unknown.
‘And you have lived here the old quiet life, Henriette, with no thought
of marriage or change,’ the Doctor said musingly, and noted with
pleasure the charming habit of blushing she had retained, like a very
young girl.
‘Surely, François, you would have expected to be apprised of my
marriage, or of any other change?’