Perhaps at first it had not been the least of the bitterness in M. De
Jussac's cup of calamity that his mere pride of name must adjust itself
to its altered conditions. That the Vicomte De Jussac should have been
expatriated because he declined when called upon to contribute his
heart's blood to the red conduit in the Faubourg St. Antoine was
certainly an infamy, but one of which the very essence was that
unquestioning acknowledgment of his rank. That the land of his adoption
should have dubbed him Mr. Jussuks--in stolid unconsciousness, too, of
the solecism--was an outrage of a totally different order--an outrage
only to be condoned on the score that an impenetrable insular
_gaucherie_, and not a malicious impertinence, was responsible for it.
Mr. Jussuks had, however, outlived his sense of the injurious
appellation; had outlived much prejudice, the wear of poverty, his memory
of many things, and, very early, his scorn of the plebeian processes that
to the impecunious are a condition of living at all. He was certainly a
man of courageous independence, inasmuch as from the hour of his setting
foot in England--and that was at the outset of the century--he had
controlled his own little fortunes without a hand to help him over the
deep places.
Of his first struggles little is known but this--that for years, turning
to account some small knowledge of draughtsmanship he had acquired, he
found employment in ladies' academies, of which there was a plenitude at
that date in King's Cobb.
That, however, which brought him eventually into a modest prominence--not
only in that same beautiful but indifferently known watering-place (upon
which he had happened, it would appear, fortuitously), but elsewhere and
amongst men of a certain mark--was a discovery--or the practical
application of one--which in its result procured him a definite object in
life, together with the means to pursue it.
Ammonites, and such small geological fry, were to be found by the
thousand in the petrified mud beds of the Cobb region; but it was left to
the ingenuity, aided by good fortune, of the foreigner to unearth from
the flaking and perishing cliffs of lias some of the earliest and finest
specimens of the ichthyo- and plesio-saurus that a past world has yielded
to the naturalists.
Out of these the _émigré_ made money, and so was enabled to pursue and
enlarge upon his researches. Presently he prospered into a competence,
married (poor Mademoiselle Belleville, of the Silver Street Academy, who
died of typhoid at the end of a couple of summers), and so grew into the
kindly old age of the absorbed and gentle naturalist, with his Plancine
budding at his side.
What in all these fifty years had he forgotten? His name, his rank, his
very origin? Much, no doubt. But that there was one haunting memory that
had dwelt with him throughout, his child and her lover were to learn--one
memory, and that dreadful recurring illusion of the guillotine.
"When Black Venn slips his apron, I shall be in a position to consider
your suit."
Surely that was an odd and enigmatical condition, entirely remote from
the subject at issue? Yet from the moment of the first impassioned
pleadings of the stricken George, De Jussac had insisted upon it as one
from which there should be no appeal.
Now the Black Venn referred to was a great mound of lias that rolled up
and inland, in the far sweep of the bay, from the giddy margin of the
lower ruin of cliffs. These--mere compressed mountains of mud, blown by
the winds and battered by the sea--were in a constant state of yawn and
collapse. Yard by yard they yielded to the scourge of Time, and
landslides were of common occurrence.
All along the middle slope of Black Venn itself, a wide, deep fissure,
dark and impenetrable, had stretched from ages unrecorded. But the
eventual opening-out of this crevasse, and the consequent subsidence of
the incline, or apron, below it, had been foretold by Mr. De Jussac; and
this, in fact, was the condition to which he had alluded.