In the midst of his meditations, however, the minister did not
forget to send John out for David's supper, and when David
appeared, white, haggard, and exhausted, it was to find himself
thought for with a care like a woman's. The lad, being sick and
irritable, showed more resentment than gratitude; pushed away his
food, looking sombrely the while at the dry bread and tea which
formed the minister's invariable evening meal as though to ask when
he was to be allowed his rational freedom again to eat or fast as
he pleased. He scarcely answered Ancrum's remarks about the war,
and finally he got up heavily, saying he was going out.
'You ought to be in your bed,' said Ancrum, protesting almost for
the first time, 'and it's there you will be--tied by the leg--if you
don't take a decent care of yourself.'
David took no notice and went. He dragged himself to the German
Athenaeum, of which he had become a member in the first flush of
his inheritance. There were the telegrams from Paris, and an eager
crowd reading and discussing them. As he pushed his way in at last
and read, the whole scene rose before him as though he were
there--the summer boulevards with their trees and kiosks, the
moving crowds, the shouts, the 'Marseillaise'--the blind infectious
madness of it all. And one short fortnight ago, what man in Europe
could have guessed that such a day was already on the knees of the
gods?
Afterwards, on the way to the Parlour, he talked to Elise about
it,--placing her on the boulevards with the rest, and himself beside her
to guard her from the throng. Hour by hour, this morbid gift of his,
though it tortured him, provided an outlet for passion, saved him from
numbness and despair.
When he got to Dora's sitting-room he found Daddy sitting there,
smoking sombrely over the empty grate. He had expected a flood of
questions, and had steeled himself to meet them. Nothing of the
sort. The old man took very little notice of him and his travels.
Considering the petulant advice with which Daddy had sent him off,
David was astonished and, in the end, piqued. He recovered the
tongue which he had lost for Ancrum, and was presently discussing
the war like anybody else. Reminiscences of the talk amid which he
had lived during those Paris weeks came back to them; and he
repeated some of them which bore on the present action of Napoleon
III and his ministry, with a touch of returning fluency. He was, in
fact, playing for Daddy's attention.
Daddy watched him silently with a wild and furtive eye. At last,
looking round to see whether Dora was there, and finding that she
had gone out, he laid a lean long hand on David's knee.
'That'll do, Davy. Davy, why were you all that time away?'
The young man drew himself up suddenly, brought back to realities
from this first brief moment of something like forgetfulness. He
tried for his common excuse of illness; but it stuck in his throat.
'I can't tell you, Daddy,' he said at last, slowly. 'I might tell
you lies, but I won't. It concerns myself alone.'
Daddy still bent forward, his peaked wizard's face peering at his
companion.
'You've been in trouble, Davy?'
'Yes, Daddy. But if you ask me questions I shall go.'
He spoke with a sudden fierce resolution.
Daddy paid no attention. He threw himself back in his chair with a
long breath.
'Bedad, and I knew it, Davy! But sorrow a bit o' pity will you get
out o' me, my boy--sorrow a bit!'
He lay staring at his companion with a glittering hostile look.
'By the powers!' he said presently, 'to be a gossoon of twenty again
and throubled about a woman!'
David sprang up.
'Well, Daddy, I'll bid you good night! I wanted to hear something
about your own affairs, which don't seem to be flourishing. But
I'll wait till Miss Dora's at home.'
'Sit down, sit down again!' cried Lomax angrily, catching him by
the arm. 'I'll not meddle with you. Yes, we're in a bad way, a
deuced bad way, if you listen to Dora. If it weren't for her I'd
have walked myself off long ago and let the devil take the
creditors.'
David sat down and tried to get at the truth. But Daddy turned
restive, and now invited the traveller's talk he had before
repelled. He fell into his own recollections of the Paris streets
in '48, and his vanity enjoyed showing this slip of a fellow that
old Lomax was well acquainted with France and French politics
before he was born.
Presently Dora came in, saw that her father had been beguiled into
foregoing his usual nocturnal amusements, and looked soft gratitude
at David. But as for him, he had never realised so vividly the
queer aloofness and slipperiness of Daddy's nature, nor the
miserable insecurity of Dora's life. Such men were not meant to
have women depending on them.
He went downstairs pondering what could be done for the old
vagabond. Drink had indeed made ravages since he had seen him last.
For Dora's sake the young man recalled with eagerness some
statements and suggestions in a French treatise on 'L'Alcoolisme'
he chanced to have been turning over among his foreign scientific
stock. Dora, no doubt, had invoked the parson; he would endeavour
to bring in the doctor. And there was a young one, a frequenter of
the stall in Birmingham Street, not as yet overburdened with
practice, who occurred to him as clever and likely to help.
Nor did he forget his purpose. The very next morning he got hold of
the young man in question. Out came the French book, which
contained the record of a famous Frenchman's experiments, and the
two hung over it together in David's little back room, till the
doctor's views of booksellers and their probable minds were
somewhat enlarged, and David felt something of the old intellectual
glow which these scientific problems of mind and matter had
awakened in him during the winter. Then he walked his physician off
to Daddy during the dinner hour and boldly introduced him as a
friend. The young doctor, having been forewarned, treated the
situation admirably, took up a jaunty and jesting tone, and,
finally, putting morals entirely aside, invited Daddy to consider
himself as a scientific case, and deal with himself as such for the
benefit of knowledge.
Daddy was feeling ill and depressed; David struck him as an
'impudent varmint,' and the doctor as little better; but the lad's
solicitude nevertheless flattered the old featherbrain, and in the
end he fell into a burst of grandiloquent and self-excusing
confidence. The doctor played him; prescribed; and when he and
David left together it really seemed as though the old man from
sheer curiosity about and interest in his own symptoms would
probably make an attempt to follow the advice given him.
Dora came in while the three were still joking and discussing. Her
face clouded as she listened, and when David and the doctor left
she gave them a cool and shrinking good bye which puzzled David.
Daddy, however, after a little while, mended considerably,
developed an enthusiasm for his self-appointed doctor, and, what
was still better, a strong excitement about his own affairs. When
it came to the stage of a loan for the meeting of the more pressing
liabilities, of fresh and ingenious efforts to attract customers,
and of a certain gleam of returning prosperity, David's concern for
his old friend very much dropped again. His former vivid interest
in the human scene and the actors in it, as such, was not yet
recovered; in these weeks weariness and lassitude overtook each
reviving impulse and faculty in turn.
He was becoming more and more absorbed, too, by the news from
France. Its first effect upon him was one of irritable repulsion.
Barbier and Hugo had taught him to loathe the Empire; and had not
he and she read _Les Chatiments_ together, and mocked the
Emperor's carriage as it passed them in the streets? The French
telegrams in the English papers, with their accounts of the
vapouring populace, the wild rhetoric in the Chamber, and the
general outburst of _fanfaronnade_, seemed to make the French
nation one with the Empire in its worst aspects, and, as we can all
remember, set English teeth on edge. David devoured the papers day
by day, and his antagonism grew, partly because, in spite of that
strong gravitation of his mind towards things expansive, emotional,
and rhetorical, the essential paste of him was not French but
English--but mostly because of other and stronger reasons of which
he was hardly conscious. During that fortnight of his agony in
Paris all that sympathetic bond between the great city and himself
which had been the source of so much pleasure and excitement to him
during his early days with Elise had broken down. The glamour of
happiness torn away, he had seen, beneath the Paris of his dream, a
greedy brutal Paris from which his sick senses shrank in fear and
loathing. The grace, the spell, was gone--he was alone and
miserable!--and amid the gaiety, the materialism, the selfish vice
of the place he had moved for days, an alien and an enemy, the love
within him turning to hate.
So now his mortal pain revenged itself. They would be beaten--this
depraved and enervated people!--and his feverish heart rejoiced.
But Elise? His lips quivered. What did the war matter to her except
so far as its inconveniences were concerned? What had _la
patrie_ any more than _l'amour_ to do with art? He put the
question to her in his wild evening walks. It angered him that as
the weeks swept on, and the great thunderbolts began to
fall--Wissembourg, Forbach, Worth--his imagination would sometimes
show her to him agitated and in tears. No pity for him! why this
sorrow for France? Absurd! let her go paint while the world loved
and fought. In '48, while monarchy and republic were wrestling it
out in the streets of Paris, was not the landscape painter
Chintreuil quietly sketching all the time just outside one of the
gates of the city? There was the artist for you.
Meanwhile the growing excitement of the war, heightened and
poisoned by this reaction of his personality, combined with his
painful efforts to recover his business to make him for a time more
pale and gaunt than ever. Ancrum remonstrated in vain. He would go
his way.
One evening--it was the day after Worth--he was striding blindly up
the Oxford Road when he ran against a man at the corner of a side
street. It was Barbier, coming out for the last news.
Barbier started, swore, caught him by the arm, then fell back in
amazement.
'_C'est toi? bon Dieu!_'
David, who had hitherto avoided his old companion with the utmost
ingenuity, began hurriedly to inquire whether he was going to look
at the evening's telegram.
'Yes--no--what matter? You can tell me. David, my lad, Ancrum told
me you had been ill, but--'
The old man slipped his arm through that of the youth and looked at
him fixedly. His own face was all furrowed and drawn, the eyes red.
'_Oui; tu es change_,' he said at last with a sudden
quivering breath, almost a sob, 'like everything,--like the world!'
And hanging down his head he drew the lad on, down the little
street, towards his lodging.
'Come in! I'll ask no questions. Oh, come in! I have the French
papers; for three hours I have been reading them alone. Come in or
I shall go mad!'
And they discussed the war, the political prospect, and Barbier's
French letters till nearly midnight. All the exile's nationality
had revived, and so lost was he in weeping over France he had
scarcely breath left wherewith to curse the Empire. In the presence
of a grief so true, so poignant, wherein all the man's little
tricks and absurdities had for the moment melted out of sight,
David's own seared and bitter feeling could find no voice. He said
not a word that could jar on his old friend. And Barbier, like a
child, took his sympathy for granted and abused the 'heartless
hypocritical' English press to him with a will.
The days rushed on. David read the English papers in town, then
walked up late to Barbier's lodgings to read a French batch and
talk. Gravelotte was over, the siege was approaching. In that
strange inner life of his, David with Elise beside him looked on at
the crashing trees in the Bois de Boulogne, at the long lines of
carts laden with household stuff and fugitives from the _zone
militaire_ flocking into Paris, at the soldiers and horses
camping in the Tuileries Gardens, at the distant smoke-clouds amid
the woods of Issy and Meudon, as village after village flamed to
ruins.
One night--it was a day or two after Sedan--in a corner of the
Constitutionnel, he found a little paragraph:--
'M. Henri Regnault and M. Clairin, leaving their studio at Tangiers to
the care of the French Consul, have returned to Paris to offer
themselves for military service, from which, as holder of the _prix de
Rome_, M. Regnault is legally exempt. To praise such an act would be to
insult its authors. France--our bleeding France!--does but take stern
note that her sons are faithful.'
David threw the paper down, made an excuse to Barbier, and went
out. He could not talk to Barbier, to whom everything must be
explained from the beginning, and his heart was full. He wandered
out towards Fallowfield under a moon which gave beauty and magic
even to these low, begrimed streets, these jarring, incongruous
buildings, thinking of Regnault and that unforgotten night beside
the Seine. The young artist's passage through the Louvre, the
towering of his great head above the crowd in the 'Trois Rats,' and
that outburst under the moonlight--everything, every tone, every
detail, returned upon him.
'_The great France--the undying France--_'
And now for France--ah!--David divined the eagerness, the passion,
with which it had been done. He was nearer to the artist than he
had been two months before--nearer to all great and tragic things.
His recognition of the fact had in it the start of a strange joy.
So moved was he, and in such complex ways, that as he thought of
Regnault with that realising imagination which was his gift, the
whole set of his feeling towards France and the war wavered and
changed. The animosity, the drop of personal gall in his heart,
disappeared, conjured by Regnault's look, by Regnault's act. The
one heroic figure he had seen in France began now to stand to him
for the nation. He walked home doing penance in his heart,
passionately renewing the old love, the old homage, in this awful
presence of a stricken people at bay.
And Elise came to him, in the moonlight, leaning upon him, with
soft, approving eyes--
Ah! where was she--where--in this whirlwind of the national fate?
where was her frail life hidden? was she still in this Paris, so
soon to be 'begirt with armies'?
* * * * *
Four days later Barbier sent a note to Ancrum: 'Come and see me this
afternoon at six o'clock. Say nothing to Grieve.'
A couple of hours afterwards Ancrum came slowly home to Birmingham
Street, where he was still lodging. David had just put up the
shop-shutters, John had departed, and his employer was about to
retire to supper and his books in the back kitchen.
Ancrum went in and stood with his back to the fire which John had
just made for the kettle and the minister's tea, when David came in
with an armful of books and shut the door behind him. Ancrum let
him put down his cargo, and then walked up to him.
'David,' he said, laying his hand with a timid gesture on the
other's shoulder, 'Barbier has had some letters from Paris
to-day--the last he will get probably--and among them a letter from
his nephew.'
David started, turned sharp round, shaking off the hand.
'It contains some news which Barbier thinks you ought to know.
Mademoiselle Elise Delaunay has married suddenly--married her
cousin, Mr. Pimodan, a young doctor.'
The shock blanched every atom of colour from David's face. He tried
wildly to control himself, to brave it out with a desperate 'Why
not?' But speech failed him. He walked over to the mantelpiece and
leant against it. The room swam with him, and the only impression
of which for a moment or two he was conscious was that of the
cheerful singing of the kettle.
'She would not leave Paris,' said Ancrum in a low voice, standing
beside him. 'People tried to persuade her--nothing would induce her.
Then this young man, who is said to have been in love with her for
years, urged her to marry him--to accept his protection really, in
view of all that might come. Dubois thinks she refused several
times, but anyway two days ago they were married, civilly, with
only the legal witnesses.'
David moved about the various things on the mantelpiece with
restless fingers. Then he straightened himself.
'Is that all?' he asked, looking at the minister.
'All,' said Ancrum, who had, of course, no intention of repeating
any of Dubois' playful embroideries on the facts. 'You will be glad,
won't you, that she should have some one to protect her in such a
strait?'--he added, after a minute's pause, his eyes on the fire.
'Yes,' said the other after a moment. 'Thank you. Won't you have
your tea?'
Mr. Ancrum swallowed his emotion, and they sat down to table in
silence. David played with some food, took one thing up after
another, laid it down, and at last sprang up and seized his hat.
'Going out again?' asked the minister, trembling, he knew not why.
The lad muttered something. Instinctively the little lame fellow,
who was closest to the door, rushed to it and threw himself against
it.
'David, don't--don't go out alone--let me go with you!'
'I want to go out alone,' said David, his lips shaking. 'Why do you
interfere with me?'
'Because--' and the short figure drew itself up, the minister's
voice took a stern deep note, 'because when a man has once
contemplated the sin of self-murder, those about him have no right
to behave as though he were still like other innocent and happy
people!'
David stood silent a moment, every limb trembling. Then his mouth
set, and he made a step forward, one arm raised.
'Oh, yes!' cried Ancrum, 'you may fling me out of the way. My
weakness and deformity are no match for you. Do, if you have the
heart! Do you think I don't know that I rescued you from
despair--that I drew you out of the very jaws of death? Do you
think I don't guess that the news I have just given you wither the
heart in your breast? You imagine, I suppose, that because I am
deformed and a Sunday-school teacher, because I think something of
religion, and can't read your French books, I cannot enter into
what a _man_ is and feels. Try me! When you were a little boy
in my class, _my_ life was already crushed in me--my tragedy
was over. I have come close to passion and to sin; I'm not afraid
of yours! You are alive here to-night, David Grieve, because I went
to look for you on the mountains--lost sheep that you were--and
found you, by God's mercy. You never thanked me--I knew you
couldn't. Instead of your thanks I demand your confidence,
here--now. Break down this silence between us. Tell me what you
have done to bring your life to this pass. You have no father--I
speak in his place and I _deserve_ that you should trust and
listen to me!'
David looked at him with amazement--at the worn misshapen head
thrown haughtily back--at the arms folded across the chest. Then
his pride gave way, and that intolerable smart within could no
longer hide itself. His soul melted within him; tears began to
rain over his cheeks. He tottered to the fire and sat down,
instinctively spreading his hands to the blaze, that word 'father'
echoing in his ears; and by midnight Mr. Ancrum knew all the story,
or as much of it as man could to tell to man.
From this night of confession and of storm there emerged at least
one result--the beginnings of a true and profitable bond between
David and Ancrum. Hitherto there had been expenditure of interest
and affection on the minister's side, and a certain responsiveness
and friendly susceptibility on David's; but no true understanding
and contact, mind with mind. But in these agitated hours of such
talk as belongs only to the rare crises of life, not only did
Ancrum gain an insight into David's inmost nature, with all its
rich, unripe store of feelings and powers, deeper than any he had
possessed before, but David, breaking through the crusts of
association, getting beyond and beneath the Sunday-school teacher
and minister, came for the first time upon the real man in his
friend, apart from trappings--cast off the old sense of pupilage,
and found a brother instead of a monitor.
There came a moment when Ancrum, laying his hand on David's knee,
told his own story in a few bare sentences, each of them, as it
were, lightning on a dark background, revealing some few things
with a ghastly plainness, only to let silence and mystery close
again upon the whole. And there came another moment when the little
minister, carried out of himself, fell into incoherent sentences,
full of obscurity, yet often full of beauty, in which for the first
time David came near to the living voice of religion speaking in
its purest, intensest note. Christ was the burden of it all; the
religion of pain, sacrifice, immortality; the religion of chastity
and self-repression.
'Life goes from test to test, David; it's like any other
business--the more you know the more's put on you. And this test of
the man with the woman--there's no other cuts so deep. Aye, it
parts the sheep from the goats. A man's failed in it--lost his
footing--rolled into hell, before he knows where he is. "On this
stone if a man fall"--I often put those words to it--there's all
meanings in Scripture. Yes, you've stumbled, David--stumbled badly,
but not more. There's mercy in it! You must rise again--you can.
Accept yourself; accept the sin even; bear with yourself and go
forward. That's what the Church says. Nothing can be undone, but
break your pride, do penance, and all can be forgiven.
'But you don't admit the sin? A man has a right to the satisfaction
of his own instincts. You asked a free consent and got it. What is
law but a convention for miserable people who don't know how to
love? Who was injured?
'David, that's the question of a fool. Were you and she the first
man and woman in the world that ever loved? That's always the way;
each man imagines the matter is still for his deciding, and he can
no more decide it than he can tamper with the fact that fire burns
or water drowns. All these centuries the human animal has fought
with the human soul. And step by step the soul has registered her
victories. She has won them only by feeling for the law and finding
it--uncovering, bringing into light, the firm rocks beneath her
feet. And on these rocks she rears her landmarks--marriage, the
family, the State, the Church. Neglect them, and you sink into the
quagmire from which the soul of the race has been for generations
struggling to save you. Dispute them! overthrow them--yes, if you
can! You have about as much chance with them as you have with the
other facts and laws amid which you live--physical or chemical or
biological.
'I speak after the manner of men. If I were to speak after the
manner of a Christian, I should say other things. I should ask how
a man _dare_ pluck from the Lord's hand, for his own wild and
reckless use, a soul and body for which He died; how he, the Lord's
bondsman, _dare_ steal his joy, carrying it off by himself
into the wilderness, like an animal his prey, instead of asking
it at the hands, and under the blessing, of his Master; how he
_dare_--a man under orders, and member of the Lord's body--forget
the whole in his greed for the one--eternity in his thirst for
the present.'
'But no matter. Christ is nothing to you, nor Scripture, nor the
Church--'
The minister broke off abruptly, his lined face working with
emotion and prayer. David said nothing. In this stage of the
conversation--the stage, as it were, of judgment and estimate--he
could take no part. The time for it with him had not yet come. He
had exhausted all his force in the attempt to explain himself--an
attempt which began in fragmentary question and answer, and ended
on his part in the rush of a confidence, an 'Apologia,'
representing, in truth, that first reflex action of the mind upon
experience, whence healing and spiritual growth were ultimately to
issue. But for the moment he could carry the process no farther. He
sat crouched over the flickering fire, saying nothing, letting
Ancrum soliloquise as he pleased. His mind surged to and fro,
indeed, as Ancrum talked between the poles of repulsion and
response. His nature was not as Ancrum's, and every now and then
the quick critical intellect flashed through his misery, detecting
an assumption, probing an hypothesis. But in general his
_feeling_ gave way more and more. That moral sensitiveness in
him which in its special nature was a special inheritance, the
outcome of a long individualist development under the conditions of
English Protestantism, made him from the first the natural prey of
Ancrum's spiritual passion. As soon as a true contact between them
was set up, David began to feel the religious temper and life in
Ancrum draw him like a magnet. Not the forms of the thing, but the
thing itself. In it, or something like it, as he listened, his
heart suspected, for the first time, the only possible refuge from
the agony of passion, the only possible escape from this fever of
desire, jealousy, and love, in which he was consumed.
At the end he let Ancrum lead him up to bed and give him the
bromide the Paris doctor had prescribed. When Ancrum softly put his
head in, half an hour later, he was heavily asleep. Ancrum's face
gleamed; he stole into the room carrying a rug and a pillow; and
when David woke in the morning it was to see the twisted form of
the little minister stretched still and soldierlike beside him on
the floor.