On inquiry of the concierge at No. 15 Avenue de Passy, Cuthbert was
informed that Madame Michaud lived on the third floor. On ascending and
ringing the bell the door was opened by an elderly servant.
"I have called to see Mademoiselle Brander, is she at home?"
"She is, sir."
"Would you give her my card, if you please?"
"Mademoiselle is expecting you," the servant said, and led the way at
once into a sitting-room.
It was of the usual type of such room--of good size but bare, with
bee's-waxed flooring, plainly frescoed walls, and a ceiling colored gray
and bordered with painted arabesques. Two or three small rugs relieved
the bareness of the floor. An oval table on very thin legs stood in the
middle; the chairs and couch seemed to have been made to match it, and
had an eminently bare and uncomfortable appearance; a vase of flowers
stood on a spindle-legged little table in front of one of the windows
which opened down to the ground. Some colored prints in frames of
stained wood hung on the walls, and some skimpy curtains draped the
windows.
Mary Brander was seated with a writing-pad on her knee at the window
unoccupied by the vase and its support. She put the writing-pad and a
book, evidently a large diary, down on the floor.
"You are punctual to the minute, Mr. Hartington. I should never have
credited you with that virtue."
"Nor with any other virtue, I imagine, Miss Brander," he said, with a
smile.
"Oh, yes, I do. I credit you with numbers of them. Now draw that chair
up to the window--it is not comfortable, but it is the best of them--and
let us talk. Now, in the first place you don't know how sorry, how
dreadfully sorry I have been about what has happened at home. I was
shocked, indeed, at the news of the sudden death of your dear father. He
was always so kind when he came to see us, and I liked him so much, I
felt for you deeply. It must have been an awful shock for you. I heard
it a few days after I got to Dresden. Then came the other news about
that terrible failure and its consequences. It seemed too shocking
altogether that you should have lost the dear old place, but I do think
I was most shocked of all when I heard that my father had bought it.
Somehow it did not seem to be right. Of course it must have been, but it
did not seem so to me. Did it to you, Cuthbert?" and she looked at him
wistfully.
"I have no doubt it was all right," he said, "and as it was to be sold,
I think I preferred it should be to your father rather than anybody
else. I believe I rather liked the thought that as it was not to be my
home it would be yours."
She shook her head.
"It does not seem to me to be natural at all, and I was miserable all
the time I was there the other day."
"Your father respected my wishes in all respects, Mary. I believe he
kept on all the old servants who chose to stay. He promised me that he
would not sell my father's hunters, and that no one should ride them,
but that they should be pensioners as long as they lived; and the same
with the dogs, and that at any time, if I moved into quarters where I
could keep a dog or two, he would send up my two favorites to me."
"Yes, they are all there. I went out and gave cakes to the dogs and
sugar to the horses every day, and talked to them, and I think regularly
had a cry over them. It was very foolish, but I could not help it. It
did all seem so wrong and so pitiful. I could not learn much about you
from father. He said that you had only written once to him on business
since things were finally settled; but that you had mentioned that you
were going to Paris, and he said, too--" and she hesitated for a moment,
"that although you had lost Fairclose and all the property, you had
enough to live upon in a way--a very poor way--but still enough for
that."
"Not such a very poor way," he said. "There is no secret about it. I had
five thousand pounds that had been settled on my mother, and fortunately
that was not affected by the smash, so I have two hundred a year, which
is amply sufficient for my wants."
"It is enough, of course, to live upon in a way, Cuthbert, but so
different from what you were accustomed to."
"I don't suppose you spend two hundred a year," he said, with a smile.
"Oh, no, but a woman is so different. That is just what I have, and of
course I don't spend anything like all of it; but as I said, it is so
different with you, who have been accustomed to spend ever so much
more."
"I don't find myself in any way pinched. I can assure you my lodgings in
the Quartier Latin are not what you would call sumptuous, but they are
comfortable enough, and they do not stand me in a quarter of what I paid
for my chambers in London. I can dine sumptuously on a franc and a half.
Another franc covers my breakfast, which is generally _café au lait_ and
two eggs; another franc suffices for supper. So you see that my
necessaries of life, including lodgings and fuel, do not come to
anything like half my income, and I can spend the rest in riotous living
if I choose."
The girl looked at him earnestly.
"You are not growing cynical, I hope, Cuthbert?"
"I hope not. I am certainly not conscious of it. I don't look cynical,
do I?"
"No," she said, doubtfully. "I do not see any change in you, but what do
you do with yourself?"
"I paint," he said.
"Really!"
"Really and truly, I have become what you wanted me to become, a very
earnest person indeed, and some day people may even take to buying my
pictures."
"I never quite know when you are in earnest, Cuthbert; but if it is true
it is very good news. Do you mean that you are really studying?"
"I am indeed. I work at the studio of one M. Goudé, and if you choose to
inquire, you will find he is perhaps the best master in Paris. I am
afraid the Prussians are going to interrupt my studies a good deal. This
has made me angry and I have enlisted--that is to say, been sworn in as
a member of the Chasseurs des Écoles, which most of the students at
Goudé's have joined."
"What! You are going to fight against the Germans!" she exclaimed,
indignantly. "You never can mean it, Cuthbert."
"I mean it, I can assure you," he said, amused at her indignation. "I
suppose you are almost Germanized, and regard their war against the
French as a just and holy cause."
"Certainly I do," she said, "though of course, I should not say so here.
I am in France and living in a French family, and naturally I would say
nothing that would hurt the feelings of the people round me, but there
can be no doubt that the French deserve all the misfortunes that have
fallen upon them. They would have invaded Germany, and all these poor
young Germans have been torn away from their friends and families to
fight."
"So have these young Frenchmen. To my mind the war was deliberately
forced upon France, but I think we had better agree to differ on this
subject. You have been among Germans and it is not unnatural that you
should have accepted their version. I have been living among Frenchmen,
and although I do not say that it would not have been much wiser if they
had avoided falling into the pit dug for them, my sympathies are wholly
with them, except in this outburst of folly that has resulted in the
establishment, for a time at any rate, of a Republic. Now, I have no
sympathy whatever with Republics, still less for a Republic controlled
by political adventurers, and like many Frenchmen I am going to fight
for France, and in no way for the Republic. At any rate let us agree to
avoid the subject altogether. We shall never convince each other however
much we might argue it over."
The girl was silent for two or three minutes, and then said--
"Well, we will agree not to quarrel over it. I don't know how it is that
we always see things so differently, Cuthbert. However, we may talk
about your doings without arguing over the cause. Of course you do not
suppose there will be much fighting--a week or two will see the end of
it all."
"Again we differ," he said. "I believe that there will be some sharp
fighting, and I believe that Paris will hold out for months."
She looked at him incredulously.
"I should have thought," she said, after a pause, "you were the last
person who would take this noisy shouting mob seriously."
"I don't think anything of the mob one way or the other," he said. "I
despise them utterly; but the troops and the mobiles are sufficient to
man the forts and the walls, and I believe that middle-class corps, like
the one I have entered, will fight manfully; and the history of Paris
has shown over and over again that the mob of Paris, fickle,
vain-headed, noisy braggadocios as they are, and always have been, can
at least starve well. They held out against Henry of Navarre till
numbers dropped dead in the streets, and until the Spaniards came at
last from the Netherlands and raised the siege, and I believe they will
hold out now. They have courage enough, as has been shown over and over
again at the barricades, but they will be useless for fighting because
they will submit to no discipline. Still, as I said, they can starve,
and it will be a long time indeed before the suffering will become
intense enough to drive them to surrender. I fear that you have
altogether underrated the gravity of the situation, and that you will
have very severe privations to go through before the siege is over."
"I suppose I can stand it as well as others," she laughed, "but I think
you are altogether wrong. However, if it should come it will be very
interesting."
"Very," he said, shortly, "but I doubt if you will see it quite in the
same light when it comes to eating rats."
"I should not eat them," she said, decidedly.
"Well, when it comes to that or nothing, I own that I myself shall eat
rats if I can get them. I have heard that the country rat, the fellow
that lives in ricks, is by no means bad eating, but I own to having a
doubt as to the Paris rat."
"It is disgusting to think of such a thing," she said, indignantly, "the
idea is altogether ridiculous."
"I do not know whether you consider that betting is among the things
that woman has as much right to do as man; but if you do, I am ready to
wager it will come to rats before Paris surrenders."
"I never made a bet in my life," she said, "but I will wager five francs
with you that there will be nothing of the sort. I do not say that rats
may not be eaten in the poor quarters. I do not know what they eat
there. I hear they eat horse-flesh, and for anything I know they may eat
rats; but I will wager that rats will never be openly sold as an article
of food before Paris surrenders."
"It is a bet," he said, "and I will book it at once," and he gravely
took out a pocket-book and made an entry. "And now," he said, as he
replaced the book in his pocket, "how do you pass your time?"
"I spend some hours every day at the Bibliothêque. Then I take a walk in
this quarter and all round the Boulevards. One can walk just as freely
there as one could in Germany, but I find that I cannot venture off them
into the poorer quarters; the people stare, and it is not pleasant."
"I certainly should not recommend you to make experiments that way. In
the great thoroughfares a lady walking by herself passes unnoticed,
especially if she looks English or American. They are coming to
understand that young women in those countries are permitted an amount
of freedom that is shocking to the French mind, but the idea has not
permeated to the lower strata of society.
"If you are really desirous of investigating the ways of the female
population of the poorer quarters, I shall be happy to escort you
whenever you like, but I do not think you will be altogether gratified
with the result of your researches, and I think that you would obtain a
much closer insight into French lower class life by studying Balzac and
some of the modern writers--they are not always savory, but at least
they are realistic."
"Balzac is terrible," she said, "and some of the others I have read a
little of are detestable. I don't think you can be serious in advising
me to read them."
"I certainly should not advise you to read any of them, Miss Brander, if
you were a young lady of the ordinary type; but as you take up the cause
of woman in general it is distinctly necessary that you should study all
the phases of female life. How else can you grapple with the question?"
"You are laughing at me again, Mr. Hartington," she said, somewhat
indignantly.
"I can assure you that I am not. If your crusade is in favor only of
girls of the upper and middle classes, you are touching but the fringe
of the subject, for they are outnumbered by twenty to one by those of
other classes, and those in far greater need of higher life than the
others."
"It seems rather hopeless," Mary Brander said, despondently, after a
pause, "one is so unable to influence them."
"Exactly so. You are setting yourself to move a mountain. When the time
comes there may be an upheaval, and the mountain may move of its own
accord; but the efforts of a thousand or ten thousand women as earnest
as yourself would be no more use in proportion, than those of a colony
of ants working to level the mountain."
"Don't discourage me, Cuthbert," she said, pitifully. "I do believe with
all my heart in my principles, but I do often feel discouraged. The task
seems to grow larger and more difficult the more I see of it, and I own
that living a year among German women was rather crushing to me."
"That I can quite understand," he said, with a smile, "the average
German woman differs as widely in her ideas--I do not say aspirations,
for she has none--from your little group of theorists at Girton as the
poles are apart."
"But do not think," she replied, rallying, "that I am in the least
shaken because I see that the difficulty is greater than I have looked
for. Your simile of ants is not correct. Great things can be done by
individuals. Voltaire and Rousseau revolutionized French thought from
the top to the bottom. Why should not a great woman some day rise and
exercise as great influence over her sex as these two Frenchmen did? But
do not let us talk about that any more. I want to hear more about what
you are doing. I have thought of you so much during the past year--it
has all seemed so strange and so sad. Are you really working hard--I
mean steadily and regularly?"
"You evidently think that impossible," he laughed, "but I can assure you
it is true. If you doubt me I will give you Goudé's address, and if you
call upon him and say that you have an interest in me--you can assign
any reason you like, say that you are an aunt of mine and intend to
make me your heir--and beg him to inform you frankly of his opinion of
my work and progress, I feel sure that he will give you an account that
will satisfy your doubts."
"I don't think I could do that," she said, seriously. "There, you are
laughing at me again," she broke off as she looked up at him. "Of course
I could not do such a thing, but I should very greatly like to know
about you."
"I do think, Miss Brander, I am working hard enough and steady enough to
satisfy even you. I did so for six months in England with a fellow named
Terrier. He was just the master I wanted. He had not a shadow of
imagination, but was up in all the technical details of painting, and in
six months' hard work I really learnt to paint; previous to that I knew
nothing of painting. I could make a colored sketch, but that was all,
now I am on the highway to becoming an artist. Goudé will only receive
pupils whom he considers likely to do him credit, and on seeing two of
the things I had done after I had been working with Terrier, he accepted
me at once. He is a splendid master--out and away the best in Paris, and
is really a great artist himself. He is a peppery little man and will
tolerate no nonsense, and I can assure you that he is well satisfied
with me. I am going to set to work to do a couple of pictures on my own
account for next year's Salon. I should have waited another year before
trying my wings, if he had not encouraged me to venture at once, and as
he is very much opposed to his pupils painting for exhibition until they
are sufficiently advanced to begin with a success, it is proof that he
has at least some hopes of me."
"I am glad indeed, Cuthbert. I shan't be quite so sorry now as I have
been about your losing Fairclose. It is so much nobler to work than it
is to fritter away a life doing nothing. How tiresome it is," she said,
"that you have taken this unfortunate idea in your head of joining a
French corps. It will unsettle you altogether."
"Really," he broke in with a laugh, "I must protest against being
considered so weak and unstable. You had a perfect right in thinking me
lazy, but I don't think you have any right in considering me a reed to
be shaken by every passing wind. I can assure you that I am very fixed
in my resolves. I was content to be lazy before simply because there was
no particular reason for my being otherwise, and I admit that
constitutionally I may incline that way; but when a cataclysm occurred,
and, as I may say, the foundations were shaken, it became necessary for
me to work, and I took a resolution to do so, and have stuck to it.
Possibly I should have done so in any case. You see when a man is told
by a young lady he is a useless idler, who does but cumber the earth, it
wakes him up a little."
"I am sure I didn't say that," Mary said, indignantly, but with a hot
flush on her cheeks.
"Not in those precise words, but you spoke to that effect, and my
conscience told me you were not far wrong in your opinion. I had begun
to meditate whether I ought not to turn over a new leaf when I came in
suddenly for Fairclose; that of course seemed to knock it all on the
head. Then came what we may call the smash. This was so manifestly an
interposition of Providence in the direction of my bestirring myself
that I took the heroic resolution to work."
Mary felt that it was desirable to avoid continuing the subject. She had
long since come to regard that interview in the garden as a sort of
temporary aberration on his part, and that although, perhaps, sincere at
the moment, he had very speedily come to laugh at his own folly, and had
recognized that the idea was altogether ridiculous. Upon her it had made
so little impression that it had scarcely occurred to her when they met,
that any passage of the sort had taken place, and had welcomed him as
the lad she had known as a child, rather than as the man who had, under
a passing impulse, asked her to marry him.
"I think," she said suddenly, "I will fetch Madame Michaud in. It will
be nice for you to come here in the evening sometimes, and it would be
better for her to ask you to do so than for me. These French people have
such funny ideas."
"It would certainly be more pleasant," he agreed, "and evening will be
the time that I have most leisure--that is to say, when we do not happen
to be on duty, as to which I am very vague at present. They say the
sailors will garrison the forts and the army take the outpost duty; but
I fancy, when the Germans really surround us, it will be necessary to
keep so strong a force outside the walls, that they will have to call
out some of us in addition. The arrangement at present is, we are to
drill in the morning and we shall paint in the afternoon; so the evening
will be the only time when we shall be free."
"What do you do in the evening generally? You must find it very lonely."
"Not at all. I have an American who is in our school, and who lodges in
the same house as I do. Then there are the students, a light-hearted,
merry set of young fellows. We have little supper-parties and go to each
other's rooms to chatter and smoke. Then, occasionally, I drop into the
theatre. It is very much like the life I had in London, only a good deal
more lively and amusing, and with a great deal less luxury and a very
much smaller expenditure; and--this is very serious I can assure
you--very much worse tobacco."
The girl laughed merrily.
"What will you do about smoking when you are reduced to the extremity
you prophesy?"
"That point is, I confess, troubling me seriously. I look forward with
very much greater dread to the prospect of having to smoke dried leaves
and the sweepings of tobacco warehouses, than I do to the eating of
rats. I have been making inquiries of all sorts as to the state of the
stock of tobacco, and I intend this evening to invest five pounds in
laying in a store; and mean to take up a plank and hide it under the
floor, and to maintain the most profound secrecy as to its existence.
There is no saying whether, as time goes on, it may not be declared an
offence of the gravest character for any one to have a private store of
any necessary. If you have any special weaknesses, such as chocolate or
tea, or anything of that sort, I should advise you not to lose a moment
in laying in a good stock. You will see in another week, when people
begin to recognize generally what a siege means, that everything
eatable will double in price, and in a month only millionaires will be
able to purchase them."
"I really will buy some tea and chocolate," she said.
"Get in a good stock," he said. "Especially of chocolate. I am quite
serious, I can assure you. Unfortunately, you have no place for keeping
a sheep or two, or a bullock; and bread, at the end of a couple of
months, could scarcely be eaten; but, really, I should advise you to
invest in a dozen of those big square boxes of biscuits, and a ham or
two may come in as a welcome addition some day."
Mary laughed incredulously, but she was much more inclined than before
to look at matters seriously, when, on fetching Madame Michaud in, that
lady, in the course of conversation, mentioned that her husband had that
morning bought three sacks of flour and a hundred tins of preserved
meats.
"He is going to get some boxes," she said, "and to have the flour
emptied into them, then the baker will bring them round in a cart, so
that no one will guess it is flour. He says it is likely that there will
be an order issued that everything of that sort is to be given into a
public store for general distribution, so it must be brought here
quietly. He tells me that every one he knows is doing the same thing. My
servant has been out this morning eight times and has been buying eggs.
She has brought a hundred each time, and we are putting them in a cask
in salt."
"Do you really think all that is necessary, madame?" Mary asked,
doubtfully.
"Most certainly I do. They say everything will go up to such prices as
never were heard of before. Of course, in a month or two the country
will come to our rescue and destroy the Prussians, but till then we have
got to live. Already eggs are fetching four times as much as they did
last week. It is frightful to think of it, is it not, monsieur?"
"If I were in your place, madame, I would not reckon too surely on
relief in a month. I think that there is no doubt that, as you say,
there will be a prohibition of anyone keeping provisions of any sort,
and everything will be thrown into the public magazines. Likely enough
every house will be searched, and you cannot hide your things too
carefully."
"But why should they insist on everything being put in public
magazines?" Mary asked. "It will not go further that way than if people
keep their own stocks and eat them."
"It will be necessary, if for nothing else, to prevent rioting when the
pinch comes, and people are starving in the poorer quarters. You may be
sure if they have a suspicion that the middle and upper classes have
food concealed in their houses, they will break in and sack them. That
would only be human nature, and therefore in the interest of order alone
a decree forbidding anyone to have private stores would have to be
passed; besides it would make the food go much further, for you may be
sure that everything will be doled out in the smallest quantities
sufficient to keep life together, and before the end of the siege comes
each person may only get two or three ounces of bread a day."
Madame Michaud nodded as if prepared to be reduced even to that
extremity.
"You are right, monsieur, I am going to get stuff and to make a great
number of small bags to hold the flour; then we shall hide it away under
the boards in many places, so that if they find some they may not find
it all."
"The idea is a good one, madame, but it has its disadvantages. If they
find one parcel they will search so closely everywhere that they will
find the rest. For that reason one good hiding-place, if you could
invent one, would be better than many."
"One does not know what is best to do," Madame Michaud said, with a
gesture of tragic despair. "Who could have thought that such a thing
could happen to Paris!"
"It is unexpected, certainly," Cuthbert agreed, "but it has been
foreseen, otherwise they would never have taken the trouble to build
this circle of forts round Paris. They are useful now not only in
protecting the city but in covering a wide area, where the cattle and
sheep may feed under the protection of the guns. I don't think we are
as likely to be as badly off for meat as for bread, for after the flocks
and herds are all eaten up there are the horses, and of these there must
be tens of thousands in Paris."
"That is a comfort, certainly," the Frenchwoman said, calmly, while Mary
Brander made a little gesture of disgust.
"I have never tried horseflesh myself, at least that I know of, but they
say it is not so bad; but I cannot think that they will have to kill the
horses for food. The country will not wait until we are reduced to that
extremity."
"Mr. Hartington has joined one of the regiments of volunteers, Madame
Michaud."
"That is good of you, monsieur; my husband is in the National Guard, and
they say every one will have to take up a musket; but as you are a
foreigner, of course this would not apply to you."
"Well, for the time being I consider myself a Parisian, and as a German
shell is just as likely to fall on the roof of the house where I live as
on any other, I consider myself to be perfectly justified in doing my
best in self-defence."
"I trust that you will call whenever you are disposed in the evening,
monsieur," Madame Michaud said, cordially; "it will give my husband
pleasure to meet an English gentleman who is voluntarily going to fight
in the cause of France."
"Thank you, madame. I shall be very glad to do so. Mademoiselle's father
is a very old friend of our family, and I have known her ever since she
was a little child. It will be pleasant to me to make the acquaintance
of monsieur. And now, Miss Brander, I must be going."