turn the handle of Armand’s door without troubling to knock. ‘Good
Lord!’ thought the watcher, ‘it is fortunate friend Armand has broken
with that little devil Yvette, or the old bear might have had the
chance of putting a fine spoke in his wheel with cousin Marguerite.’
Armand in his linen blouse was standing in front of his easel, with
his back to the door. He was certainly working, but his mind was not
so fixed upon his labour but that he had more than an odd thought for
his cousin. Pretty phrases, gestures, and expressions of hers kept
running through his thoughts, as an under-melody sometimes runs through
a piece of music, unaggressively but soothingly claiming the ear. They
brought her presence about him, to cheer him in the midst of his solemn
preoccupations upon their mutual destiny. While his reason said no, and
he regarded himself as a fine fellow for listening to reason at such
a moment, her lips curved and smiled and bent to his in imagination’s
first spontaneous kiss. And then he told himself pretty emphatically
that he was growing too sentimental, and that it behoves a man to take
his pleasure and his pains heartily and bravely, and not go abroad
whimpering for the moon. Just when he had made up his mind to shoulder
his moral baggage and, whistling merrily, face the solitary roads, he
was made to jump and fall back into perplexity by a crusty, well-known
voice.
‘Well, young man! So this is where you waste your time?’
Armand swung round in great alarm, and reddened painfully.
‘You look astounded, and no wonder. ’Tis an honour I don’t often pay
young idiots like you. Ouf, man! Look at his dirty jacket. Your father
was a rock of sense in comparison. At least, he did not get himself
up like a baker’s boy, and go roystering in company with a band of
worthless rascals.’
‘I presume, uncle, you have come here for something else besides the
pleasure of abusing my father to me.’
‘There he is now, off in a rage. Can’t you keep cool for five minutes,
you hot-headed young knave? What concern is it of mine if you choose
to die in the workhouse? But there’s your mother. It frets her, and I
esteem your mother, young sir.’
Armand lifted his brows discontentedly. He held his tongue, for there
was nothing to be said, as he had long ago beaten the weary ground of
protest and explanation.
‘The rascal says nothing, thinks himself a great fellow, I’ve no doubt.
The Almighty made nothing more contrary and mischievous than boys. They
have you by the ears when you want to sit comfortably by your fireside.
Finds he’s got a heart too, I hear. Mayhap that will sober him, though
I’m doubtful.’
Armand stared, and changed colour like a girl. He eyed his uncle
apprehensively, and began to fiddle with his brushes. ‘I--I don’t
understand you, sir,’ he said tentatively.
‘Yes, you do, but you think it well to play discretion with me. I’m the
girl’s father, and there’s no knowing how I may take it, eh, you young
villain?’
The old man pulled his nephew’s ear, and laughed in a low chuckling
way peculiar to crusty old gentlemen.
‘Has my mother spoken to you about,--about----?’
‘Suppose she hasn’t, eh? What then?’
‘I am completely in the dark,’ Armand gasped. ‘How could you guess such
a thing, uncle?’
‘Suppose I haven’t guessed it either, eh? What then?’
Armand’s look was clearly an interrogation, almost a prayer. He
blinked his lids at the vivid flash of conjecture, and shook his head
dejectedly against it. ‘You can’t mean--no, it cannot be that----’
The old man waggled a very sagacious head.
‘Marguerite!’ shouted the astounded youth, and there was a feeling of
suffocation about his throat.
‘Suppose one foolish young person liked to believe she had a partner in
her folly, eh, young man? What then?’
‘My cousin, too!’
‘And if it were so, eh? What then?’
‘Good God! uncle, why do you come and tell me this?’ The dazed lad
began to walk about distractedly, and was not quite sure that it was
not the room that was walking about instead of his own legs.
‘I think we may burn the sticks and daubs and brushes now, eh, young
man?’ laughed the old man, waggling his stick instead of his head in
the direction of Armand’s easel, and giving a contented vent to his
peculiar chuckle. ‘Burn the baker’s blouse, and dress yourself like
a Christian. When you are used to the novelty of a coat and a decent
dinner, you may come down to Marly and see that giddy-pated girl
of mine. But a week of steady work at the bank first, and mind, no
paint-boxes or dirty daubers about the place. If I catch sight of any
long-haired fellow smelling of paint, I’ll call the police.’
Armand gazed regretfully round his little studio. He picked out each
familiar object with a sudden sense of separation and a wish to bear
them ever with him in that long farewell glance. But the sadness was
a pleasant sadness, for was not happy love the beacon that lured him
forth, and when the heart is young what lamp shines so radiantly and
invites so winningly? Still, it was a sacrifice, though beyond lay the
prospect of a lover’s meeting, in which the thought of stuff so common
as gold would lie buried in the first pressure of a girl’s lips.
‘You are not decided, I daresay?’ sneered his uncle.
Armand met his eyes unflinchingly, and held out his hand. ‘A man who is
worth the name can’t regret love and happiness. For Marguerite’s sake I
will do my best in the new life you offer, and I thank you, uncle, for
the gift.’
‘That young fop from Vienna will feel mighty crestfallen,’ was the
reflection of the head of the Ulrich Bank, as he hobbled downstairs.
He disliked the elegant Bernard, and was himself glad to have back
his favourite nephew, though the means he had employed to secure that
result might not be of unimpeachable honesty.
The banker’s departure was the signal for Maurice, on the look-out
upstairs. He bounded down the stairs, three steps at a time, and shot
in upon the meditative youth. Armand glanced up, and smiled luminously.
‘The besieged has capitulated, Maurice.’
‘So I should think. For some time back you have worn the air of a man
on the road to bondage.’
Brodeau had never for an instant doubted that this would be the end of
it. He mildly approved the conventional conclusion, though not without
private regrets of his own.
‘A girl’s eyes have done it,’ sighed Armand sentimentally.
‘Of course, of course, the old temptation. But she would have inveigled
Anthony out of his hermitage. A sorry time you’ll have of it, I
foresee, though I honestly congratulate you. It is a thing we must
come to sooner or later, and the escapades of youth have their natural
end, like all things else. Only lovers believe in eternity, until they
have realised the fragility of love itself. It was absurd to imagine
you could go on flouting fortune for ever, and living in a shanty like
this, with a palace ready for you on the other side of the river. But
there is consolation for me in the thought that you will give me a big
order in commemoration of your marriage--eh, old man?’
When it came to parting the young men wrung hands with a sense of more
than ordinary separation. For two years had they shared fair and
foul weather, and camped together out of doors and under this shabby
roof, upon which one was now about to turn his back. The days of merry
vagabondage were at an end for Armand, and his face was now towards
civilisation and respectable responsibilities. He might revisit this
scene of pleasant Bohemia, and find things unchanged, but the old
spirit would not be with him, and the zest of old enjoyments would be
his no more.
‘Many a merry tramp we’ve had together, Armand,’ said Maurice, and
he felt an odd sensation about his throat, while his eyelids pricked
queerly. ‘We’ve got drunk together on devilish bad wine, and pledged
ourselves eternally to many a worthless jade. We’ve smoked a pipe we
neither of us shall forget, and walked beneath the midnight stars in
many a curious place. And now we part, you for gilded halls and wedding
chimes, I to seek a new comrade, and make a fresh start across the
beaten track of Bohemia.’
Maurice crammed his knuckles furiously into his eyes. His eloquence had
mounted to his head, and flung him impetuously into his friend’s arms
with tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘You’ll come back again, won’t
you, Armand?’
‘Come back? Yes,’ Armand replied sadly; ‘but I shall feel something
like Marius among the ruins of Carthage.’
‘I’ll keep your velvet jacket, and when you are tired of grandeur
and lords and dukes, you can drop in here and put it on, and smoke a
comfortable pipe in your old arm-chair.’
Maurice went straightway to the nearest café, and spent a dismal
evening, consuming bock after bock, until he felt sufficiently
stupefied to face his solitary studio, where he shed furtive tears
in contemplation of all his friend’s property made over to him as an
artist’s legacy.
Though brimming over with happiness and excitement, Armand himself was
not quite free of regret for the relinquished velvet jacket and brushes
and boxes, as he made his farewell to wandering by a journey on the
top of an omnibus from the Étoile to the Rue de Grenelle, and solaced
himself with a cheap cigarette.
For one long week did he work dutifully at the bank, inspected books
with his uncle, and repressed an inclination to yawn over the dreary
discussion of shares and bonds and funds, of vast European projects
and policies in jeopardy, and he felt the while a smart of homesickness
for the little studio in the Avenue Victor Hugo. In the evening he
dined with his mother, and found consolation for the irksomeness of
etiquette in the excellence of the fare. He thought of Marguerite
incessantly, and spoke of her whenever he could, but he did not forget
Maurice or the cooking-stove, on which their dinners in the olden days
had so often come to grief. He might sip Burgundy now, yet he relished
not the less the memory of the big draughts of beer which he and
Maurice had found so delicious.
III
But all these pinings and idle regrets were silenced, and gave place to
rapturous content the first afternoon on which he walked up the long
avenue of his uncle’s country house at Marly. The week of trial was at
an end, and he was now to claim his reward from dear lips. Everything
under the sun seemed to him perfect, and even banks had their own
charm, discernible to the happy eye. There was a beauty in gold he
had hitherto failed to perceive, and crusty old gentlemen were the
appropriate guardians of lovely nymphs. In such a mood, there is melody
in all things, and warmth lies even in frosted starlight. Nothing
but the sweetness of life is felt: its turbidness and accidents, its
disappointments, pains, and stumbles, lie peacefully forgotten in the
well of memory; and we wish somebody could have told us in some past
trouble that the future contained for us a moment so good as this.
‘Mademoiselle is in the garden,’ a servant informed him, and led the
way through halls and salons, down steps running from the long window
into a shaded green paradise. And then he heard a fresh voice that
he seemed not to have heard for so long, and on hearing it only was
his heart made aware how much he had missed it during the past age of
privation.
‘Ah, my cousin Armand!’
There was a young man dawdling at her feet in an attitude that sent
the red blood to Armand’s forehead. This was Bernard Francillon,
his other and less sympathetic cousin. The young man jumped up, and
measured him in a stare of insolent interrogation, and Marguerite,
with a look of divine self-consciousness and a lovely blush, said,
very softly: ‘So, Armand, you have let yourself be tamed, and you
have actually forsaken your delightful den, I hear. How could you, my
cousin? The cooking-stove, the fishing-rod, the easel, blouse, and
velvet jacket,--all abandoned for the less interesting resources of our
everyday existence!’
Her eyes and voice were full of arch protest, and her smile went to the
troubled lad’s head, more captivating than wine. ‘It was for your sake,
Marguerite,’ he answered timidly, in tones dropped to an unquiet murmur.
‘Permit me, cousin, to retire for the moment,’ said Bernard, turning
his back deliberately upon his disconcerted relative.
What was it in their exchanged looks, in their clasped hands, in
Bernard’s unconscious air of fond proprietorship, in Marguerite’s
half droop towards him of shy surrender, that carried to Armand the
conviction of fatal error? He watched his rival departing, and turned
a blank face upon the radiant girl, whose delicious smile had all the
eloquence and trouble of maiden’s relinquished freedom. She met his
white empty gaze with a glance more full and frank than the one she
had just lifted so tenderly to Bernard Francillon. ‘I don’t understand
you, Armand. Why for my sake?’
‘It was your father’s error. He thought you loved me, and I, heaven
help me! till now I thought so too,’ he breathed in a despairing
undertone, not able to remove his eyes from her surprised and
delicately concerned face.
‘Poor Armand! I am very sorry,’ was all she said, but the way in which
she held her hand out to him was a mute admission of his miserable
error. He lifted the little hand to his lips, and turned from her in
silence.
The sun that had shone so brightly a moment ago was blotted from the
earth, and the music of the birds was harsh discordance, as he wandered
among the evening shadows of the woods. All things jarred upon his
nerves, until night dropped a veil upon the horrible nakedness of his
sorrow. He felt he wore it upon his face for all eyes to see, and
he thanked the darkness, as it sped over the starry heavens. Beyond
the beautiful valley, where the river flowed, the spires and domes
and bridges of Paris showed through the reddish glimmer of sunset as
through a dusty light. Soon there would be noise and laughter upon the
crowded boulevards, and a flow of carriages making for the theatres
through the flaunting gas-flames; and happy lovers in defiant file
would be driving towards the Bois. How often had he and Maurice watched
them on foot, as they smoked their evening cigarette, and sighed or
laughed as might be their mood. Would he ever have the heart to laugh
at lovers again, or laugh at anything, he wondered drearily! And there
was no one here to remind him that sorrow, like joy, is evanescent, and
that all wounds are healed. _Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe,_--even
pain and broken hearts.
Here silence was almost palpable to the touch, like the darkness of
Nature dropping into sleep. He turned his back upon Paris, and faced
the dim country.
MR. MALCOLM FITZROY
_A Don José Maria de Pereda
de la Academía Real_
MR. MALCOLM FITZROY
I
IT is all very well and worthy to devote a lifetime, or part of it, to
the study of foreign architecture. But a friend reproachfully reminded
Fred Luffington that English minsters are worth a glance. Fred did not
dispute it. There was a certain charm in the novelty of the idea. So he
packed his portmanteau, and took the boat to Dover, to assure himself a
pleasant surprise.
At York he bethought himself of an amiable old Flemish priest, in
whose company he had studied a good deal of Antwerp at a time when
Antwerp wore for him the colours and glory and other attendant joys
of paradise. The priest, he remembered, was settled hard by, as the
chaplain of a Catholic earl. He would take the opportunity of studying
village life as well as the minsters of England; and smoke a pipe of
memory, and drink big draughts of the beer of other days, with his
friend, the Flemish priest.
Fendon was as comfortable a little village as any to be dreamed of out
of Arcadia. Its warm red roofs made a cosy circle under the queerest of
rural walls, round a delightful green. A real green, a goose common,
with an umbrella tree in the middle, and a village pump under an odd
grey dome of stone supported by rough pillars. All the houses were
buried in trees, and all the palings overgrown with honeysuckles.
Fred Luffington sniffed delightedly. Though it was June, there was
plenty of damp in the air, and lovely moist smells came from the hedges
and fields. Yes; this was enchantment, a whiff of pure sixteenth
century, the very thing described by old-fashioned writers as ‘Merrie
England.’ It did not look very merry, to be sure; rather sleepy and
still. But it was not difficult to swing back upon imagination into the
days of Good Queen Bess.
Fred’s glance grew vague, and the lyrical mood was upon him. He mused
upon may-poles, foaming tankards, and the rosy maids and swains of
the centuries when there was ‘love in a village.’ There were no rosy
maids or sighing swains about, but he imagined them along with the rest
of Elizabethan decorations, evoked confusedly by remembrance of past
readings.
Everything combined to keep him in good humour. The name of his inn,
the only inn, was ‘St. George and the Dragon.’ Who but a scoffer or
a heathen could fail to sleep well at an inn so gloriously named? As
an archæologist, Fred was neither, so naturally he slept the sound
sleep of the believer, somebody infinitely superior to the merely
just man. Anybody may be just, but it takes a special constitution to
believe, in the proper manner. Fred Luffington was all that is most
special in the way of constitutions, so after a charmed inspection
of the sign-board--a rude picture of the saint in faded colours on a
semi-effaced horse with a remarkable dragon at his feet--he sauntered
in through the porch to be confronted with a perfectly ideal buxom
landlady. This was more than heaven, he devoutly felt, and said his
prayers on the spot to the god of chance, who so benevolently watches
over the humours of romantic young men.
Mrs. Matcham, spick and span and respectable, beamed him welcome of a
mediæval cordiality. He felt at once it was good to be with her, and
took shame to himself for having been so long enamoured of foreign
parts, and unacquainted with the pleasant aspects of English country
life. She deposited his bag on a table at the bottom of a red-curtained
four-poster, and remarked that she was granting him the privilege
of occupying the room of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. There was such a full
accompaniment of condescension and favour in her smile, and so complete
a signification of the importance and fame of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, that
Luffington felt abashed by his own ignorance of the personality of the
local great man, and kept a discreet silence.
When he descended to the dining-room, his delightful landlady, entering
with the tray, paused in critical survey of the table.
‘I have placed your seat before the fireplace, sir. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy
always prefers it so. But perhaps you would like to sit in front of the
window.’
Luffington seized the fact that any taste but that of the mysterious
great man’s would be evidence of inferiority. But it was necessary to
make a stand for originality. The expected docility fired revolt in
his veins. At the price of consideration, he decided for the window in
front, instead of the fireplace behind. The pleasures and pangs of our
life depend upon little things, and the little thing in question gave
a silly satisfaction to Luffington, and disproportionately pained the
good landlady.
After his late lunch, Luffington strolled forth to pick up rural
sensations on his way to the Flemish priest’s. He encountered glances
of dull interest, but nowhere the rosy village maid and her pursuant
swain that his studies in pastoral literature had taught him to expect
as the obvious decoration of a quiet rustic scene.
‘There is nothing so misleading as literature, unless, perhaps,
history,’ he observed, in a fond retrospect of the centuries. ‘The
disappointments of the present build for us the illusions of the
future,’ he added incoherently.
The Flemish priest was tending his bees, with a thick blue veil tied
over his felt hat, when he heard the garden gate swing upon its hinges.
He looked up and saw an elegant young man pointing, as he came along,
a meditative cane in the neighbourhood of his dearest treasures, a row
of white and blue irises.
‘_Santa Purissima!_ Can these sons of perdition not learn to keep their
shticks and their long limbs from ze borders if they must invade our
gardens?’
He slipped off his veil and showed a fat yellow face streaked with the
red of anger. Luffington held out his hand, laughing.
‘By all that’s holy! My young friend of Antwerp. Welcome, welcome!
Ah, my boy! how many, six, eight years ago! What a lad you were then
with your dreams of love and fame! And how have they fared, those
dreams--eh? Gone ahead, or dropped behind, as ’tis the way with young
dreams? _Hein!_’
Luffington nodded sentimentally, like one rocked upon sudden waves of
regret. The dreams had dropped behind with the years, and it was an
effort to recall them to vivider shape than a cloud with a sunny ray
upon it.
‘Have you any of the old tobacco?’ he asked. ‘A pipe might lead us over
the forgotten ground again, and revive the dead persons of that little
Antwerp drama. You’ve added bees to botany, I see. Could you get up
a massacre of the drones while I am here? I’ve never been able to put
full faith in all the astounding stories we have of the bees, and might
be converted by a practical demonstration.’
‘Come along inside, and leave my bees alone, you insolent sceptic of
the world. That’s your French air--the very worst to breathe. I suppose
you take brandy and mud in your literature, too. I heard you talk of
Dumas once, and thought it bad, but now, of course, you’re down with
the naturalists, the symbolists, and the philosophers of insanity.’
‘Not a bit. I haven’t got beyond dear old Dumas, where you left me.
And here I am, anchored momentarily in Arcadia, among the bees and the
flowers, under the protection of St. George, with a mighty minster near
at hand.’
Under the congenial influences of Pilsener and a certain French tobacco
affected by the pair, they sat in a book-lined study and talked of many
things. It was only at table, later, that Luffington, over his soup,
remembered to mention the name of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy.
‘An old friend of the family,’ the priest explained, meaning the earl
and his wife. Upon the Harborough estates there could, of course, be
only one family in all conversation.
The priest walked back to the inn with Luffington, and accepted a glass
of rum punch from the hand of Mrs. Matcham.
‘Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy always says that nobody can make rum punch like
me,’ she remarked, not without the hue of modesty upon her cheek at
sounding her own praises; and her glance sparkled to Luffington’s upon
his acknowledgment of the truth.
‘There are drawbacks to a sojourn upon the vacant hearth of a god,’
he said, when the door closed upon her exit. ‘His worshippers are
invidiously reminiscent, and you court unfavourable comparison whether
you sit, sleep, eat, or drink.’
But the punch was good, the bed excellent, the quiet conducive to
dreamless sleep. Luffington was abroad early next morning, indifferent
to the thought of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, as he sipped the dew with a
shower of song in his face, and the light at his feet ran along the
grass and through the trees in dimpled rivers of gold. The priest had
told him that the earl loved his trees like children. Fred did not
wonder, as he hailed them ‘magnificent,’ and went his way among them in
full-eyed admiration.