In two or three days the English doctor who was attending David
strongly advised Mr. Ancrum to get his charge home. The fierce
strain his youth had sustained acting through the nervous system
had disordered almost every bodily function, and the collapse which
followed Mr. Ancrum's appearance was severe. He would lie in his
bed motionless and speechless, volunteered no confidence, and
showed hardly any rallying power.
'Get him out of this furnace and that doghole of a room,' said the
doctor. 'He has come to grief here somehow--that's plain. You won't
make anything of him till you move him.'
When the lad was at last stretched on the deck of a Channel steamer
speeding to the English coast, and the sea breeze had brought a
faint touch of returning colour to his cheek, he asked the question
he had never yet had the physical energy to ask.
'Why did you come, and how did you find me?'
Then it appeared that the old cashier at Heywood's bank, who had
taken a friendly interest in the young bookseller since the opening
of his account, had dropped a private word to John in the course of
conversation, which had alarmed that youth not a little. His own
last scrawl from David had puzzled and disquieted him, and he
straightway marched off to Mr. Ancrum to consult. Whereupon the
minister wrote cautiously and affectionately to David asking for
some prompt and full explanation of things for his friends' sake.
The letter was, as we know, never opened, and therefore never
answered. Whereupon John's jealous misery on Louie's account and
Mr. Ancrum's love for David had so worked that the minister had
broken in upon his scanty savings and started for Paris at a few
hours' notice. Once in the Rue Chantal he had come easily on
David's track.
Naturally he had inquired after Louie as soon as David was in a
condition to be questioned at all. The young man hesitated a
moment, then he said resolutely, 'She is married,' and would say no
more. Mr. Ancrum pressed the matter a little, but his patient
merely shook his head, and the sight of him as he lay there on the
pillow was soon enough to silence the minister.
On the evening before they left Paris he called for a telegraph
form, wrote a message and paid the reply, but Mr. Ancrum saw
nothing of either. When the reply arrived David crushed it in his
hand with a strange look, half bitterness, half relief, and flung
it behind a piece of furniture standing near.
Now, on the cool, wind-swept deck, he seemed more inclined to talk
than he had been yet. He asked questions about John and the
Lomaxes--he even inquired after Lucy, as to whom the minister who
had lately improved an acquaintance with Dora and her father, begun
through David, could only answer vaguely that he believed she was
still in the south. But he volunteered nothing about his own
affairs or the cause of the state in which Mr. Ancrum had found
him.
Every now and then, indeed, as they stood together at the side of
the vessel, David leaning heavily against it, his words would fail
him altogether, and he would be left staring stupidly, the great
black eyes widening, the lower lip falling--over the shifting
brilliance of the sea.
Ancrum was almost sure too that in the darkness of their last night
in Paris there had been, hour after hour, a sound of hard and
stifled weeping, mingled with the noises from the street and from
the station; and to-day the youth in the face was more quenched
than ever, in spite of the signs of reviving health. There had been
a woman in the case, of course: Louie might have misbehaved
herself; but after all the world is so made that no sister can make
a brother suffer as David had evidently suffered--and then there
was the revolver! About this last, after one or two restless
movements of search, which Mr. Ancrum interpreted, David had never
asked, and the minister, timid man of peace that he was, had resold
it before leaving.
Well, it was a problem, and it must be left to time. Meanwhile Mr.
Ancrum was certainly astonished that _any_ love affair should
have had such a destructive volcanic power with the lad. For it was
no mere raw and sensuous nature, no idle and morbid brain. One
would have thought that so many different aptitudes and capacities
would have kept each other in check.
As they neared Manchester, David grew plainly restless and ill at
ease. He looked out sharply for the name of each succeeding town,
half turning afterwards, as though to speak to his companion; but
it was not till they were within ten minutes of the Central Station
that he said--
'John will want to know about Louie. She is married,--as I told
you,--to a French sculptor. I have handed over to her all my
father's money--that is why I drew it out.'
Mr. Ancrum edged up closer to him--all ears--waiting for more. But
there was nothing more.
'And you are satisfied?' he said at last.
David nodded and looked out of window intently.
'What is the man's name?'
David either did not or would not hear, and Mr. Ancrum let him
alone. But the news was startling. So the boy had stripped himself,
and must begin the world again as before! What had that minx been
after?
Manchester again. David looked out eagerly from the cab, his hand
trembling on his knee, beads of perspiration on his face.
They turned up the narrow street, and there in the distance to the
right was the stall and the shop, and a figure on the steps. Mr.
Ancrum had sent a card before them, and John was on the watch.
The instant the cab stopped, and before the driver could dismount,
John had opened the door. Putting his head in he peered at the pair
inside, and at the opposite seat, with his small short-sighted
eyes.
'Where is she?' he said hoarsely, barring the way.
Mr. Ancrum looked at his companion. David had shrunk back into the
corner, with a white hangdog look, and said nothing. The minister
interposed.
'David will tell you all,' he said gently. 'First help me in with
him, and the bags. He is a sick man.'
With a huge effort John controlled himself, and they got inside.
Then he shut the shop door and put his back against it.
'Tell me where she is,' he repeated shortly.
'She is married,' David said in a low voice, but looking up from
the chair on which he had sunk.' By now--she is married. I heard by
telegram last night that all was arranged for to-day.'
The lad opposite made a sharp, inarticulate sound which startled
the minister's ear. Then clutching the handle of the door, he
resumed sharply--
'Who has she married?'
The assumption of the right to question was arrogance
itself--strange in the dumb, retiring creature whom the minister
had hitherto known only as David's slave and shadow!
'A French sculptor,' said David steadily, but propping his head and
hand against the counter, so as to avoid John's stare--'a man
called Montjoie. I was a brute--I neglected her. She got into his
hands. Then I sent for all my money to bribe him to marry her. And
he has.'
'You--you _blackguard!_' cried John.
David straightened instinctively under the blow, and his eyes met
John's for one fierce moment. Then Mr. Ancrum thought he would have
fainted. The minister took rough hold of John by the shoulders.
'If you can't stay and hold your tongue,' he said, 'you must go. He
is worn out with the journey, and I shall get him to bed. Here's
some money: suppose you run to the house round the corner, in
Prince's Street; ask if they've got some strong soup, and, if they
have, hurry back with it. Come--look sharp. And--one moment--you've
been sleeping here, I suppose? Well, I shall take your room for a
bit, if that'll suit you. This fellow'll have to be looked after.'
The little lame creature spoke like one who meant to have his way.
John took the coin, hesitated, and stumbled out.
For days afterwards there was silence between him and David, except
for business directions. He avoided being in the shop with his
employer, and would stand for hours on the step, ostensibly
watching the stall, but in reality doing no business that he could
help. Whenever Mr. Ancrum caught sight of him he was leaning
against the wall, his hat slouched over his eyes, his hands in his
pockets, utterly inert and listless, more like a log than a human
being. Still he was no less stout, lumpish, and pink-faced than
before. His fate might have all the tragic quality; nature had none
the less inexorably endowed him with the externals of farce.
Meanwhile David dragged himself from his bed to the shop and set to
work to pick up dropped threads. The customers, who had been
formerly interested in him, discovered his return, and came in to
inquire why he had been so long away, or, in the case of one or
two, whether he had executed certain commissions in Paris. The
explanation of illness, however, circulated from the first moment
by Mr. Ancrum, and perforce adopted--though with an inward rage and
rebellion--by David himself, was amply sufficient to cover his
omissions and inattentions, and to ease his resumption of his old
place. His appearance indeed was still ghastly. The skin of the
face had the tightened, transparent look of weakness; the eyes,
reddened and sunk, showed but little of their old splendour between
the blue circles beneath and the heavy brows above; even the hair
seemed to have lost its boyish curl, and fell in harsh, troublesome
waves over the forehead, whence its owner was perpetually and
impatiently thrusting it back. All the bony structure of the face
had been emphasised at the expense of its young grace and bloom,
and the new indications of moustache and beard did but add to its
striking and painful black and white. And the whole impression of
change was completed by the melancholy aloofness, the shrinking
distrust with which eyes once overflowing with the frankness and
eagerness of one of the most accessible of human souls now looked
out upon the world.
'Was it fever?' said a young Owens College professor who had taken
a lively interest from the beginning in the clever lad's venture.
'Upon my word! you do look pulled down. Paris may be the first city
in the world--it is an insanitary hole all the same. So you never
found time to inquire after those Moliere editions for me?'
David racked his brains. What was it he had been asked to do? He
remembered half an hour's talk on one of those early days with a
bookseller on the Quai Voltaire--was it about this commission? He
could not recall.
'No, sir,' he said, stammering and flushing. 'I believe I did ask
somewhere, but I can't remember.'
'It's very natural, very natural,' said the professor kindly.
'Never mind. I'll send you the particulars again, and you can keep
your eyes open for me. And, look here, take your business easy for
a while. You'll get on--you're sure to get on--if you only recover
your health.'
David opened the door for him in silence.
The reawakening of his old life in him was strange and slow. When
he first found himself back among his books and catalogues, his
ledgers and business memoranda, he was bewildered and impatient.
What did these elaborate notes, with their cabalistic signs and
abbreviations--whether as to the needs of customers, or the
whereabouts of books, or the history of prices--mean or matter? He
was like a man who has lost a sense. Then the pressure of certain
debts which should have been met out of the money in the bank first
put some life into him. He looked into his financial situation and
found it grave, though not desperate. All hope of a large and easy
expansion of business was, of course, gone. The loss of his capital
had reduced him to the daily shifts and small laborious
accumulations with which he had begun. But this factor in his state
was morally of more profit to him at the moment than any other.
With such homely medicines nature and life can often do most for
us.
Such was Ancrum's belief, and in consequence he showed a very
remarkable wisdom during these early days of David's return.
'As far as I can judge, there has been a bad shake to the heart in
more senses than one,' had been the dry remark of the Paris doctor;
'and as for nervous system, it's a mercy he's got any left. Take
care of him, but for Heaven's sake don't make an invalid of
him--that would be the finish.'
So that Ancrum offered no fussy opposition to the resumption of the
young man's daily work, though at first it produced a constant
battle with exhaustion and depression. But never day or night did
the minister forget his charge. He saw that he ate and drank; he
enforced a few common sense remedies for the nervous ills which the
moral convulsion had left behind it, ills which the lad in his
irritable humiliation would fain have hidden even from him; above
all he knew how to say a word which kept Dora and Daddy and other
friends away for a time, and how to stand between David and that
choked and miserable John.
He had the strength of mind also to press for no confidence and to
expect no thanks. He had little fear of any further attempts at
suicide, though he would have found it difficult perhaps to explain
why. But instinctively he felt that for all practical purposes
David had been mad when he found him, and that he was mad no
longer. He was wretched, and only a fraction of his mind was in
Manchester and in his business--that was plain. But, in however
imperfect a way, he was again master of himself; and the minister
bided his time, putting his ultimate trust in one of the finest
mental and physical constitutions he had ever known.
In about ten days David took up his hat one afternoon and, for the
first time, ventured into the streets. On his return he was walking
down Potter Street in a storm of wind and rain, when he ran against
some one who was holding an umbrella right in front of her and
battling with the weather. In his recoil he saw that it was Dora.
Dora too looked up, a sudden radiant pleasure in her face
overflowing her soft eyes and lips.
'Oh, Mr. Grieve! And are you really better?'
'Yes,' he said briefly. 'May I walk with you a bit?'
'Oh no!--I don't believe you ought to be out in such weather. I'll
just come the length of the street with you.'
And she turned and walked with him, chattering fast, and of course,
from the point of view of an omniscience which could not have been
hers, foolishly. Had he liked Paris?--what he saw of it at least
before he had been ill?--and how long had he been ill? Why had he
not let Mr. Ancrum or some one know sooner? And would he tell her
more about Louie? She heard that she was married, but there was so
much she, Dora, wanted to hear.
To his first scanty answers she paid in truth but small heed, for
the joy of seeing him again was soon effaced by the painful
impression of his altered aspect. The more she looked at him, the
more her heart went out to him; her whole being became an effusion
of pity and tenderness, and her simplest words, maidenly and
self-restrained as she was, were in fact charged with something
electric, ineffable. His suffering, his neighbourhood, her own
sympathy--she was taken up, overwhelmed by these general
impressions. Inferences, details escaped her.
But as she touched on the matter of Louie, and they were now at his
own steps, he said to her hurriedly--
'Walk a little further, and I'll tell you. John's in there.'
She opened her eyes, not understanding, and then demurred a little
on the ground of his health and the rain.
'Oh, I'm all right,' he said impatiently. 'Look here, will you walk
to Chetham's Library? There'll be a quiet place there, in the
reading room--sure to be--where we can talk.'
She assented, and very soon they were mounting the black oak stairs
leading to this old corner of Manchester. At the top of the stairs
they saw in the distance, at the end of the passage on to which
open the readers' studies, each with its lining of folios and its
oaken lattice, a librarian, who nodded to David, and took a look at
Dora. Further on they stumbled over a small boy from the charity
school who wished to lionise them over the whole building. But when
he had been routed, they found the beautiful panelled and painted
reading-room quite empty, and took possession of it in peace. David
led the way to an oriel window he had become familiar with in the
off-times of his first years at Manchester, and they seated
themselves there with a low sloping desk between them, looking out
on the wide rain-swept yard outside, the buildings of the
grammar-school, and the black mass of the cathedral.
Manchester had never been more truly Manchester than on this dark
July afternoon, with its low shapeless clouds, its darkness, wind,
and pelting rain. David, staring out through the lozenge panes at
the familiar gloom beyond, was suddenly carried by repulsion into
the midst of a vision which was an agony--of a spring forest cut by
threadlike paths; of a shadeless sun; of a white city steeped in
charm, in gaiety.
Dora watched him timidly, new perceptions and alarms dawning in
her.
'You were going to tell me about Louie,' she said.
He returned to himself, and abruptly turned with his back to the
window, so that he saw the outer world no more.
'You heard that she was married?'
'Yes.'
'She has married a brute. It was partly my fault. I wanted to be
rid of her; she got in my way. This man was in the same house; I
left her to herself, and partly, I believe, to spite me, she went
off with him. Then at the last when she wouldn't leave him I made
her marry him. I bribed him to marry her. And he did. I had just
enough money to make it worth his while. But he will ill-treat her;
and she won't stay with him. She will go from bad to worse.'
Dora drew back, with her hand on the desk, staring at him with
incredulous horror.
'But you were ill?' she stammered.
He shook his head.
'Never mind my being ill. I wanted you to know, because you were
good to her, and I'm not going to be a hypocrite to you. Nobody
else need know anything but that she's married, which is true. If
I'd looked after her it mightn't have happened--perhaps. But I
didn't look after her--I couldn't.'
His face, propped in his hands, was hidden from her. She was in a
whirl of excitement and tragic impression--understanding something,
divining more.
'Louie was always so self-willed,' she said trembling.
'Aye. That don't make it any better. You remember all I told you
about her before? You know we didn't get on; she wasn't nice to me,
and I didn't suit her, I suppose. But all this year, I don't know
why, she's been on my mind from morning till night; I've always
felt sure, somehow, that she would come to harm; and the worrying
oneself about her--well! it has seemed _to grow into one's very
bones_. '--He threw out the last words after a pause, in which he
had seemed to search for some phrase wherewith to fit the energy of
his feeling. 'I took her to Paris to keep her out of mischief. I had
much rather have gone alone; but she would not ask you to take her
in, and I couldn't leave her with John. Well, then, she got in my
way--I told you--and I let her go to the dogs. There--it's
done--_done!_'
He turned on his seat, one hand drumming the desk, while his eyes
fixed themselves apparently on the portrait of Sir Humphry Chetham
over the carved mantelpiece. His manner was hard and rapid; neither
voice nor expression had any of the simplicity or directness of
remorse.
Dora remained silent looking at him; her slender hands were pressed
tight against either cheek; the tears rose slowly till they filled
her grey eyes.
'It is very sad,' she said in a low voice.
There was a pause.
'Yes--it's sad. So are most things in this world, perhaps. All
natural wants seem just to lead us to misery sooner or later. And
who gave them to us--who put us here--with no choice but just to go
on blundering from one muddle into another?'
Their eyes met. It was as though he had remembered her religion,
and could not, in his bitterness, refrain from an indirect fling at
it.
As for her, what he said was strange and repellent to her. But her
forlorn passion, so long trampled on, cried within her; her pure
heart was one prayer, one exquisite throb of pain and pity.
'Did some one deceive you?' she asked, so low that the words seemed
just breathed into the air.
'No,--I deceived myself.'
Then as he looked at her an impulse of confession crossed his mind.
Sympathy, sincerity, womanly sweetness, these things he had always
associated with Dora Lomax. Instinctively he had chosen her for a
friend long ago as soon as their first foolish spars were over.
But the impulse passed away. He thought of her severity, her
religion, her middle-class canons and judgments, which perhaps were
all the stricter because of Daddy's laxities. What common ground
between her and his passion, between her and Elise? No! if he must
speak--if, in the end, he proved too weak to forbear wholly from
speech--let it be to ears more practised, and more human!
So he choked back his words, and Dora felt instinctively that he
would tell her no more. Her consciousness of this was a mingled
humiliation and relief; it wounded her to feel that she had so
little command of him; yet she dreaded what he might say. Paris was
a wicked place--so the world reported. Her imagination, sensitive,
Christianised, ascetic, shrank from what he might have done.
Perhaps the woman shrank too. Instead, she threw herself upon the
thought, the bliss, that he was there again beside her, restored,
rescued from the gulf, if gulf there had been.
He went back to the subject of Louie, and told her as much as a
girl of Dora's kind could be told of what he himself knew of
Louie's husband. In the course of his two days' search for them,
which had included an interview with Madame Cervin, he had become
tolerably well acquainted with Montjoie's public character and
career. Incidentally parts of the story of Louie's behaviour came
in, and for one who knew her as Dora did, her madness and
wilfulness emerged, could be guessed at, little as the brother
intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse
himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on
by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself
for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora
perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she
forgave him--for she knew not what!--became his champion. There was
a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming
ill in all he said which wrung her heart. And how blanched he was
by that unknown misery! How should she not pity, not forgive? It
was the impotence of her own feeling to express itself that swelled
her throat. And poor Lucy, too--ah! poor Lucy.
Suddenly, as he was speaking, he noticed his companion more
closely, the shabbiness of the little black hat and jacket, the new
lines round the eyes and mouth.
'_You_ have not been well,' he said abruptly.' How has your
father been going on?'
She started and tried to answer quietly. But her nerves had been
shaken by their talk, and by that inward play of emotion which had
gone on out of his sight. Quite unexpectedly she broke down, and
covering her eyes with one hand, began to sob gently.
'I can't do anything with him now, poor father,' she said, when she
could control herself. 'He won't listen to me at all. The debts are
beginning to be dreadful, and the business is going down fast. I
don't know what we shall do. And it all makes him worse--drives him
to drink.'
David thought a minute, lifted out of himself for the first time.
'Shall I come to-night to see him?'
'Oh do!' she said eagerly; 'come about nine o'clock. I will tell
him--perhaps that will keep him in.'
Then she went into more details than she had yet done; named the
creditors who were pressing; told how her church-work, though she
worked herself blind night and day, could do but little for them;
how both the restaurant and the reading-room were emptying, and she
could now get no servants to stay, but Sarah, because of her
father's temper.
It seemed to him as he listened that the story, with its sickened
hope and on-coming fate, was all in some strange way familiar; it
or something like it was to have been expected; for him the strange
and jarring thing now would have been to find a happy person. He
was in that young morbid state when the mind hangs its own cloud
over the universe.
But Dora got up to go, tying on her veil with shaking hands. She
was so humbly grateful to him that he was sorry for her--that he
could spare a thought from his own griefs for her.
As they went down the dark stairs together, he asked after Lucy.
She was now staying with some relations at Wakely, a cotton town in
the valley of the Irwell, Dora said; but she would probably go back
to Hastings for the winter. It was now settled that she and her
father could not get on; and the stepmother that was to
be--Purcell, however, was taking his time--as determined not to be
bothered with her.
David listened with a certain discomfort. 'It was what she did for
me,' he thought, 'that set him against her for good and all. Old
brute!'
Aloud he said: 'I wrote to her, you know, and sent her that book.
She did write me a queer letter back--it was all dashes and
splashes--about the street-preachings on the beach, and a blind man
who sang hymns. I can't remember why she hated him so particularly!'
She answered his faint smile. Lucy was a child for both of them.
Then he took her to the door of the Parlour, noticing, as he parted
from her, how dingy and neglected the place looked.
Afterwards--directly he had left her--the weight of his pain which
had been lightened for an hour descended upon him again, shutting
the doors of the senses, leaving him alone within, face to face
with the little figure which haunted him day and night. During the
days since his return from Paris the faculty of projective
imagination, which had endowed his childhood with a second world,
and peopled it with the incidents and creatures of his books, had
grown to an abnormal strength. Behind the stage on which he was now
painfully gathering together the fragments of his old life, it
created for him another, where, amid scenes richly set and lit with
perpetual summer, he lived with Elise, walked with her, watched
her, lay at her feet, quarrelled with her, forgave her. His drama
did not depend on memory alone, or rather it was memory passing
into creation. Within its bounds he was himself and not himself;
his part was loftier than any he had ever played in reality; his
eloquence was no longer tongue-tied--it flowed and penetrated. His
love might be cruel, but he was on her level, nay, her master; he
could reproach, wrestle with, command her; and at the end evoke the
pardoning flight into each other's arms--confession--rapture.
Till suddenly, poor fool! a little bolt shot from the bow
of memory--the image of a _diligence_ rattling along a white
road--or of black rain-beaten quays, with their lines of
wavering lamps--or of a hideous upper room with blue rep
furniture where one could neither move nor breathe--would
strike his dream to fragments, and as it fell to ruins within
him, his whole being would become one tumult of inarticulate
cries--delirium--anguish--with which the self at the heart of
all seemed to be wrestling for life.
It was so to-day after he left Dora. First the vision, the
enchantment--then the agony, the sob of desolation which could
hardly be kept down. He saw nothing in the streets. He walked on
past the Exchange, where an unusual crowd was gathered, elbowing
his way through it mechanically, but not in truth knowing that it
was there.
When he reached the shop he ran past John, who was reading a
newspaper, up to his room and locked the door.
About an hour afterwards Mr. Ancrum came in, all excitement, a
batch of papers under his arm.
'It is going to be war, John! _War_--I tell you! and such a
war. They'll be beaten, those braggarts, if there's justice in
heaven. The streets are all full; I could hardly get here;
everybody talking of how it will affect Manchester. Time enough to
think about that! What a set of selfish beasts we all are! Where's
David?'
'Come in an hour ago!' said John sullenly; 'he went upstairs.'
'Ah, he will have heard--the placards are all over the place.'
The minister went upstairs and knocked at David's door.
'David!'
'All right,' said a voice from inside.
'David, what do you think of the news?'
'What news?' after a pause.
'Why, the war, man! Haven't you seen the evening paper?'
No answer. The minister stood listening at the door. Then a tender
look dawned in his odd grey face.
'David, look here, I'll push you the paper under the door. You're
tired, I suppose--done yourself up with your walk?'
'I'll be down to supper,' said the voice from inside, shortly.
'Will you push in the paper?'
The minister descended, and sat by himself in the kitchen thinking.
He was a wiser man now than when he had gone out, and not only as
to that reply of the King of Prussia to the French ultimatum on the
subject of the Hohenzollern candidature.
For he had met Barbier in the street. How to keep the voluble
Frenchman from bombarding David in his shattered state had been one
of Mr. Ancrum's most anxious occupations since his return. It had
been done, but it had been difficult. For to whom did David owe his
first reports of Paris if not to the old comrade who had sent him
there, found him a lodging, and taught him to speak French so as
not to disgrace himself and his country? However, Ancrum had found
means to intercept Barbier's first visit, and had checkmated his
attempts ever since. As a natural result, Barbier was extremely
irritable. Illness--stuff! The lad had been getting into
scrapes--that he would swear.
On this occasion, when Ancrum stumbled across him, he found
Barbier, at first bubbling over with the war news; torn different
ways; now abusing the Emperor for a cochon and a _fou_,
prophesying unlimited disaster for France, and sneering at the
ranting crowds on the boulevards; the next moment spouting the same
anti-Prussian madness with which his whole unfortunate country was
at the moment infected. In the midst of his gallop of talk,
however, the old man suddenly stopped, took off his hat, and
running one excited hand through his bristling tufts of grey hair
pointed to Ancrum with the other.
'_Halte là_!' he said, 'I know what your young rascal has been
after. I know, and I'll be bound you don't. Trust a lover for
hoodwinking a priest. Come along here.'
And putting his arm through Ancrum's, he swept him away, repeating,
as they walked, the substance of a letter from his precious nephew,
in which the Barbizon episode as it appeared to the inhabitants of
No. 7 Rue Chantal and to the students of Taranne's _atelier de
femmes_ was related, with every embellishment of witticism and
_blague_ that the imagination of a French _rapin_ could
suggest. Mademoiselle Delaunay was not yet restored, according to
the writer, to the _atelier_ which she adorned. '_On criait
au scandale_,' mainly because she was such a clever little
animal, and the others envied and hated her. She had removed to a
studio near the Luxembourg, and Taranne was said to be teaching her
privately. Meanwhile Dubois requested his dear uncle to supply him
with information as to _l'autre;_ it would be gratefully
received by an appreciative circle. As for _la soeur de
l'autre_, the dear uncle no doubt knew that she had migrated
to the studio of Monsieur Montjoie, an artist whose little
affairs in the _genre_ had already, before her advent, attained
a high degree of interest and variety. On a review of all the
circumstances, the dear uncle would perhaps pardon the writer if he
were less disposed than before to accept those estimable views of
the superiority of the English _morale_ to the French, which
had been so ably impressed upon him during his visit to Manchester.
For after a very short stay at Brussels the nephew had boldly and
suddenly pushed over to England, and had spent a fortnight in
Barbier's lodgings reconnoitering his uncle. As to the uncle,
Xavier had struck him, on closer inspection, as one of the most
dissolute young reprobates he had ever beheld. He had preached to
him like a father, holding up to him the image of his own absent
favourite, David Grieve, as a brilliant illustration of what could
be achieved even in this wicked world by morals and capacity. And
in the intervals he had supplied the creature with money and amused
himself with his _gaminerie_ from morning till night. On their
parting the uncle had with great frankness confessed to the nephew
the general opinion he had formed of his character; all the same
they were now embarked on a tolerably frequent correspondence; and
Dubois' ultimate chance of obtaining his uncle's savings, on the
_chasse_ of which he had come to England, would have seemed to
the cool observer by no means small.
'But now, look here,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles to
wipe away the 'merry tear' which dimmed them, after the
recapitulation of Xavier's last letter, 'no more nonsense! I come
and have it out with that young man. I sent him to Paris, and I'll
know what he did there. _He's_ not made of burnt sugar. Of
course he's broken his heart--we all do. Serve him right.'
'It's easy to laugh,' said Ancrum dryly, 'only these young fellows
have sometimes an uncomfortable way of vindicating their dignity by
shooting themselves.'
Barbier started and looked interrogative.
'Now suppose you listen to me,' said the minister.
And the two men resumed their patrol of Albert Square while Ancrum
described his rescue of David. The story was simply told but
impressive. Barbier whistled, stared, and surrendered. Nay, he went
to the other extreme. He loved the absurd, but he loved the
romantic more. An hour before, David's adventures had been to him a
subject of comic opera. As Ancrum talked, they took on 'the grand
style,' and at the end he could no more have taken liberties with
his old pupil than with the hero of the _Nuit de Mai._ He
became excited, sympathetic, declamatory, tore open old sores, and
Mr. Ancrum had great difficulty in getting rid of him.
So now the minister was sitting at home meditating. Through the
atmosphere of mockery with which Dubois had invested the story he
saw the outlines of it with some clearness.