CHAPTER XVI

THE VICOMTE

I had fallen into a disused gravel-pit, treacherously hidden by the

bushes, so they told me afterwards. When I recovered from my stunned

condition, my cries for help had attracted the attention of Fauchard's

eldest son, who, fortunately, had been passing. I do not remember

calling for help; I remember nothing distinctly till I found myself on

my bed, and old Dr. Perichaud of Etiolles bending over me. Then I became

keenly alive to my position, for my right thigh was broken in two

places, and the doctor was setting it. When the thing was over, the

doctor retired with Joubert to the next room, and there they talked.

When will people learn that the sick have ears to hear with, and a sense

of hearing doubly acute?

This conversation came to my ears. The speakers spoke in a muted voice,

it is true, but this only made the matter worse.

"You have sent for the General, you say?"

"Oui, monsieur. A man on horseback has started to fetch him. He will be

here in an hour, unless----"

"Unless?"

"Monsieur does not know. The General has an affair of honour on hand.

This morning, in the Bois de Boulogne, he was to meet Baron Imhoff."

"Aha!" said Perichaud, with appreciation. He was an old army surgeon,

who had tasted smoke, and seen men carved with other things than

scalpels. He was also a gossip, as most old army men are. "Aha! And what

was the cause of the affair? Do you know?"

"Oh, mon Dieu!" said Joubert, "it was all that cursed business at the

Schloss Lichtenberg, of which everyone is speaking. Baron Imhoff was

cousin"--mark the "was"--"of the Baron von Lichtenberg, Baron Imhoff

picked a quarrel at the Grand Club yesterday with the General. That's

all. It is a bad affair."

"And the Lichtenberg affair--the cause of all this?" said Perichaud.

"Ah, that beats the Moscow campaign," said Joubert, "for blackness and

treachery. Mark you: this is between ourselves. You will never breathe a

word of it to anyone?"

"No, no; not a word!"

"Well, the Baron Carl von Lichtenberg was mad."

"Mad?"

"Mad. What else can you call a man who brings his little daughter up as

a boy?"

"A boy?"

"It is true. He fancied she was some old dead-and-gone Lichtenberg

returned, and that she was doomed to be killed by the child in there

with the broken leg, whom he thought was some old dead-and-gone Saluce

returned. Then-- Listen to me; and I trust monsieur's honour never to

let these words go further. He, or at least one of his damned jägers,

tried to smother the child. The night before, they tried to stab

him--as he lay asleep in bed--with my couteau de chasse, and would have

done it only the Blessed Virgin interposed."

"Great Heaven!" said the old doctor.

"Oh, yes," said Joubert; "that's the story. I saw it all with my own

eyes, or I wouldn't believe my own tongue with my own ears. And now

monsieur, what do you think of him?"

"Of him?" said Perichaud.

"Of the child. Is there danger?"

"Not a bit; but he'll be lame for life."

"Lame for life!"

"The femur is broken in two places, and splintered. The right leg will

be two inches shorter than the left. All the surgeons in Paris could not

do him any good."

"Then he will be useless for the army!" said Joubert. And I could hear

the catching of his breath.

"He will never see service," replied Perichaud.

A loud smash of crockery came as a reply to the doctor's pronouncement.

It was Joubert kicking a great Japanese jar on to the floor.

As for me, I had heard the death-sentence of my hopes. I would never

wear a sword or lead a company into action. I would be a thing with a

lame leg--a cripple. Fortunately, an opiate which the doctor had given

me began to take effect. It did not make me sleepy, but it dulled my

thoughts--some of them; others it made more bright. I lay listening to

the doctor departing, and watching the red sunset which was dyeing

Etiolles, and the woods, and the walls of my bedroom.

Then Joubert's words came into my head about Lichtenberg, and the duel

the General had fought that morning with Baron Imhoff. I did not feel in

the least uneasy about my father, and I was picturing the duel in the

woods of Lichtenberg, when a sound through the open window came to my

ears.

It was a carriage rapidly driving up the distant avenue to the château.

It was my father, I felt sure. A long time passed, and then I heard

steps on the drawbridge; voices sounded from below. Then came a step on

the stairs; my door opened, and a gentleman stood framed in the doorway.

I shall never forget my first sight of the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan,

my father's cousin on the Saluces' side, and my future guardian.

I had never seen him before. He was not, indeed, a sight to come often

in a child's way, this flower of the boulevards, seventy if a day,

scented, exquisite, with a large impassive, evenly coloured red face,

the face of a Roman consul, in which were set the blue eyes of a

good-tempered child.

This great gentleman, who left the pavements of Paris only once a year

for a three weeks' visit to his estates in Auvergne, had travelled

express from Paris to tell a child that its father was lying dead, shot

through the heart by the Baron Imhoff. And this is how he did it: He

made a kindly little bow to me, and indicated Joubert to place a chair

by the bedside.

"And how are we this evening?" asked he, taking my wrist as a physician

might have done to feel my pulse.

I did not know who he was. I had vague suspicions that he was another

doctor. Never for a moment did I dream he was the bearer of evil

tidings. I said I was better--that old reply of the sick child--and he

talked on various subjects: the airiness of the room, the beauty of the

woods, and so forth. Then, to Joubert: "Distinctly feverish. Must not be

disturbed to-night. Ah, yes, in the morning; that will be different. And

no more tumbling into gravel pits," finished this astute old gentleman

as he glanced back at me before leaving the room.

Then the opiate closed its lid on me, and I did not even hear the

departure of the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan, my future guardian, who

shuffled out of the unpleasant business of grieving my heart on the same

evening that he shuffled into my life, he and his grand, queer, quaint,

and sometimes despicable personality, perfumed with vervain and the

cigars of the Café de Paris.

PART II

CHAPTER XVII

A DÉJEÛNER AT THE CAFÉ DE PARIS

The death of my father cast me into an entirely new life. Anyone less

fitting than the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan to be the guardian of a

child of nine it would be hard to imagine at first sight. But my father

was no fool.

This gorgeous old night-moth of the Second Empire, this frequenter of

Tortoni's and the Café de Paris--always hard up, with an income of two

hundred thousand francs a year--was a man of rigid honour in his way.

Left sole and irresponsible guardian of me and my money, he shuffled out

of his difficulties and bothers by placing the latter in the funds and

the former in the Bourdaloue College--that same college of the Jesuit

fathers where the Comte de Coigny was receiving his education.

Here nine years of my life were spent--nine dull but not unhappy years.

Lame and unfit for the army, completely cut off from the only profession

fit for a gentleman--to use the Vicomte's expression--I saw the others

go off to join the Military College, and I would not have felt it so

bitterly had not De Coigny been amongst them. He was my natural enemy.

All the time we spent together at the Bourdaloue, we scarcely spoke a

word one to the other. Speechless enmity: there can scarcely be a worse

condition between boys or men.

Once a month or so the Vicomte came to see me. Joubert came often. He

was installed as caretaker in the Château de Saluce, and he would bring

me presents of game and plovers' eggs, huge Jaronel pears from the

orchard, and cakes baked by Fauchard's wife.

During the first few months at the college, I had got leave from the

Father Superior to visit the Felicianis. A young priest accompanied me.

But the Felicianis were not at the Hôtel de Mayence; no one knew

anything about them; the hotel itself had changed hands after the

fashion of these small hotels, the short chapters of whose histories

have for heading "Bankruptcy."

Then I forgot.

Little by little the beautiful Countess and the sprightly Eloise faded

from my mind. Never entirely, but they passed to the region of ghosts,

the limbo of things half remembered.

I was not a diligent student. Good for nothing much except drawing. I

was an artist born, I believe, and had the artistic temperament, which

takes a delight in all things brilliant and beautiful, and tuneful and

grand, and holds in abhorrence all things dull and most things useful.

Smuggled novels and the poems of De Musset were the literature of my

heart. D'Artagnan and Bussey were my heroes, and Esmeralda, that

brilliant and gemlike creation, was my mistress.

Life is a love-story, a story that Nature alone can teach you to read.

And what are the poets and the great writers of prose but Nature's

priests, who repeat her litanies? Yet love-stories were banned at the

Bourdaloue, and Dumas was accounted a child of Satan. Which statement is

a preface to the comedy of my eighteenth birthday, or, in other words,

the twelfth of May, 1869.

I was to leave school on that day. The Vicomte de Chatellan was to

entertain me at déjeûner. I was to have rooms at his house in the Place

Vendôme; I was, in fact, to burst my sheath and become a dragon-fly. I

was to have an allowance of four hundred a year, to teach me, as the

Vicomte said, the value of money. Joubert was to be unearthed from the

Château de Saluce, and constituted my valet. Blacquerie, the Viscount's

tailor, and Champardy, his bootmaker, had already called and taken the

measurements for my new wardrobe. I can tell you I was elated; and no

debutante ever looked forward more eagerly to the day of her debut than

I to the twelfth of May.

At ten o'clock the Vicomte called for me. He was received in the salon

by the Principal and two of the Fathers. They liked me, these men, and I

liked them; and though I had imbibed Jesuitism as little as a rock

imbibes the sea-water in which it is immersed, I respected Père

Hyacinthe, and I loved, without any reserve, Father Ambrose, a

bull-necked Arlesian, who, incapable of hurting a fly in practice, burnt

heretics in theory, for ever, and for ever, and for ever in hell.

As we got into the Vicomte's carriage, this same Father Ambrose came

running out, and, just as we drove off, popped into my hand a little

green-covered book on the seven deadly sins.

"What's that?" asked the Vicomte, as I turned the leaves.

I showed it to him. "Pshaw!" said he, and flung it out of the window.

"All that stuff you have learned," said this worthy man, "is excellent

for children; but when we become men we put away childish things, as M.

de Voltaire or some other scoundrel of a philosopher, I think it was,

once remarked. Mark you, I say nothing against religion. Religion is a

most excellent institution; but in the world, my dear Patrique, we are

brought face to face with men. Religion is a fixed institution; and the

nones, or complines, whatever you call it that they say to-day, were

what they said two hundred years ago. But men are very shifty, and, as a

matter of fact, damned rogues. It is very easy to be a saint in the

College Bourdaloue; but it is very difficult to be a gentleman in the

Boulevard des Italiens, especially in this bourgeois age" (he was a

Royalist, with one foot in the Tuileries and the other in the Faubourg

St. Germain), "when we have a what-do-you-call-it as President of the

Council and a thingumbob on the throne of France."

So he went on as he sat, erect as a man of thirty, gazing at the passing

streets with those blue tranquil eyes of a child, out of which youth

still looked; and turning to me the pro-consular profile of which he was

secretly so proud, and which was the thing, I believe, up to which this

strange old gentleman lived.

To live up to your profile is not a bad rule of life, if you have a

face like that possessed by the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan.

When we drew up at the Place Vendôme, I put my hand to open the door,

and received my first lesson in the convenances from the Vicomte, who

laid his gloved hand on my arm without a word. The footman opened the

door, and the grand old gentleman descended. M. le Vicomte did not get

out of a carriage--he descended. And with what a grace! He waited

courteously for me on the pavement; and then, with a little wave of his

clouded cane, shepherded me into the house.

At the door, Beril, the Vicomte's personal servant, a man older than his

master, received us; and Joubert was in the hall with my luggage.

"And now," said the Vicomte, when I had been shown my suite of rooms,

and very sumptuous they were, "déjeûner."

We got into the carriage which was waiting, the footman closed the door,

and we started for the Café de Paris.

Fourteen people were invited to the repast, besides myself. It took

place in the Amber Room overlooking the Boulevard; and six of the guests

were ladies. Very great ladies--duchesses, in my simple eyes. Had I

known more of breakfast-parties and the world, I might have wondered at

the disposition of the guests; for the Duc d'Harmonville, an old

gentleman with a white imperial and the exact expression of a

billy-goat, sat between two of the duchesses; and the rest of the female

illuminati sat, three of them altogether in one cluster, and the sixth

at the right of my guardian.

There was Pélisson of the "Moniteur," the only Press man present;

Carvalho of the Opéra Comique; the Duc de Cadore; Prince Metternich,

with his long Dundreary whiskers now lightly streaked with grey; and, as

for the rest, I did not catch their names, and I have all but forgotten

their faces.

One thing especially struck me in the male guests. With the exception of

Pélisson and Prince Metternich, their manner and their voices recalled

something or somebody to my mind, yet what thing or person I could not

remember, till Memory suddenly chalked on the vacant space before her:

De Morny.

The languid air, the half-lisp, the attentive inattention of manner, all

were here, the very voice.

What a triumph! De Morny had been dead and buried nearly four years, yet

his reflection still lingered on the faces of these apes; his voice had

been silent since the orations and muffled drums of that dramatic

funeral, which outvied in splendour the funeral of Germanicus, and which

I had witnessed in company with Père Hyacinthe and the pupils of the

Bourdaloue; yet his voice still was heard in the supper-rooms of Paris,

discussing the length of ballet-girls' skirts and the scandals of

Plon-Plon.

With the fish the conversation became more general, and with the iced

champagne--served from jeroboams that took two waiters to lift--decency

and the ghost of De Morny rose to take their departure.

It was strange to me, a water-drinker, and therefore an observer of the

others, to see these men forgetting themselves, to see languid faces

become flushed, to hear soft voices become harsh, tongues become ribald;

to watch brutal lines asserting themselves in countenances unveiled by

alcohol. And it was surpassingly funny to see the evanescence of the De

Morny air.

At the head of the table, a tint more ruddy than usual, sat my guardian,

enjoying it all.

We had all, like the lunatic guests at the dinner-party of Dr. Tar and

Professor Feather, sat down to table apparently staid and respectable

people, and by degrees, just as lunacy set off the Doctor's guests

crowing like cocks and braying like asses, the spirit of the Second

Empire in its last and rottenest stages invaded the Amber Room of the

Café de Paris. Furious discussions, fumes of spilt wines, wreaths of

cigar and cigarette smoke, the cracked and cruel laughter of women,

filled the air.

* * * * *

And in the midst of it all sat my guardian, in his element, enjoying the

enjoyment of his guests, paternal, and with those childish blue eyes

through which youth looked so frankly, and that voice, so courtly and

well modulated, infecting the others with I know not what. I only know

that from him seemed to emanate the diablerie of the party. Sober as

myself, self-contained and courtly, he seemed like the negative pole of

some diabolical battery, of which the others were the positive.

In the midst of the smoke and chatter he rose, and with a glass of

champagne between two fingers, as a lady holds a lily, he proposed my

health and my success in the world of Paris; and I rose and said

something--foolish, no doubt, but it did not matter, for Amy Féraud, of

the Théâtre Montparnasse, whilst she pelted Prince Metternich with

bonbons, lost her balance, fell smash on her back, pulling the

tablecloth with her, and in the confusion I sat down.

Half an hour later, arm-in-arm with my guardian, I was taking a

digestion walk down the Boulevard des Italiens. The old gentleman was

pleased, very pleased, for it seems I had conducted myself in a modest

and becoming manner, and the few words I had said had been well said;

and you might have thought that he was discussing a children's party as

he strolled by my side, saluting every person of distinction that he

met, and being saluted in return.

I really believe that this man was as innocent at heart as any child,

yet he was an old roué, a duellist, a gambler, all that a bad man could

be. Yet, though always hard up, he had jealously guarded my patrimony,

which he could have plundered if he had chosen with impunity. His

charity was boundless if you tapped it; and though he spoke of women in

a light way, _I never heard him speak a bad word of any man_. And he

loved animals, stopping to stroke a cat in the Rue de Rivoli, and

pausing, as he led me across to the Tuileries, to admire the sparrows

taking their dust-baths in the Royal precincts.

"Where are we going?" I asked, with a sudden apprehension.

"It is your eighteenth birthday," replied the Vicomte. And, still with

his arm in mine, he led me past the Cent-Gardes, up the steps, and into

the hall of the Palace.

One might have thought that the Palace of the Tuileries belonged to the

Vicomte de Chatellan, so perfectly at home did he seem. That he was a

well-known and respected visitor was evident from the manner of the

ushers. I was left in an anteroom, whilst the old gentleman, led by the

usher, disappeared for a moment; then he came back, and, motioning me to

follow him, he led the way into a room, where, at a desk-table, with a

cigarette between his lips and a pen in his hand, sat Napoleon.

He threw the pen down and rose to greet us.

How wrinkled he looked! And how different, seen close and familiarly,

from what he appeared in his carriage, amidst a cloud of dust, a glitter

of sabres, and surrounded by his guards and gentlemen!

Quite an unfearful person; old, and rather shuffling, easy-going, and

putting you at your ease, rather dreamy, and speaking with a slightly

nasal voice, rolling an armchair for you to sit in with his own august

hands, offering cigarettes with a little shake of the box to loosen them

and make your acceptance of one more easy, searching for a matchbox

amidst the papers on the desk: a true gentleman, though an unfortunate

Emperor.

Though I was eighteen, I was still very much of a child, and that is

perhaps why I felt an affection for the old gentleman at almost first

sight. He remembered my father perfectly well; and, with a shade of

sadness and wreathed in his cigarette smoke, he fell into a little

reverie. We talked--he, my guardian, and I. My lameness was explained

and commiserated, and, when our audience was ended and M. Ollivier was

announced as waiting, he pushed us out of his cabinet, holding our hands

affectionately, patting my shoulder, and all with such a grace and

goodness of heart as to make me for ever his admirer and friend.

Ah, that was a good man lost in an Emperor!

CHAPTER XVIII

MY FIRST NIGHT IN PARIS

"I am due to dine at the Duc de Bassano's," said my guardian as I parted

with him outside the Tuileries. "So, if we do not see one another till

to-morrow morning, au revoir. You have plenty of money in your pocket,

Paris is before you, you are young: amuse yourself."

Then the old gentleman marched off, and left me standing on the

pavement.

I could not help recalling my father's words in the room of the Duc de

Morny, years ago, when he dismissed me:

"Go and play."

I had five hundred francs in my pocket, I possessed rooms in the Place

Vendôme, a princely fortune lay at my back, I had a guardian, everything

that a guardian ought to be from a young man's point of view, I had just

shaken hands with the Emperor, I had the entrée of the very best of

society in France, yet I doubt if you could have found a more forlorn

creature than myself if you had searched the whole of Paris.

I did not know where to go or what to do, so I went back to the Place

Vendôme, superintended the unpacking of my things, looked at my new

clothes, and at seven o'clock, called by the lovely evening, I went out

again, proposing to myself to dine somewhere and see life.

Over the western sky, brilliant and liquid as a topaz, hung the evening

star. Paris was preparing for the festival of the night, wrapping

herself in the dark gauze of shadows and spangling herself with lights.

I hung on the Pont des Arts, looking at the dark lilac of the Seine,

looking at the drifting barges, listening to the sounds of the city.

Then I walked on.

Oh, there is no doubt that we are led in this world when we seem to

lead, and that when we take a direction that brings us to fate it is not

by our own volition. This I was soon to prove.

I walked on--walked in the blindness of reverie--and opened my eyes to

find myself in a new world.

A broad boulevard, a blaze of lights, cafés thronged to the pavement,

the music of barrel-organs, laughter, and a crowd.

Such a crowd! Men with long hair, gentlemen in pegtop trousers, wearing

smoking-caps with tassels, smoking long pipes; men in rags, hawkers

yelling their wares, blind men tapping their way with their sticks, deaf

men blowing penny whistles, grisettes, gamins, poets, painters, gnomes

from the Rue du Truand, goblins from Montmartre, Thénard and Claquesons,

Fleur de Marie and Mimi Pinson, Bouchardy and Bruyon; skull-like faces,

ghost-like faces, faces like roses, paint, satin, squalor, beauty; and

all drifting as if blown by the wind of the summer night, drifting under

the stars, here in shadow, here in the blaze of the roaring cafés,

drifting, drifting, in a double current from and towards the voiceless

and gas-spangled Seine.

Not in the bazaars of Bagdad, or on the Bardo of Tunis, could you see so

fantastic a sight as the Boulevard St. Michel in the year 1869.

It fascinated me, and, mixing with the crowd, I drifted half the length

of the boulevard, till suddenly I was brought up as if by the blast of a

trumpet in my face. By the pavement a man had placed a little carpet,

six inches square; on this carpet, lit by the light of a bullseye

lantern, two tiny dolls, manipulated by an invisible thread, were

wrestling and tumbling, to the edification of a small crowd of

interested onlookers. One of these--a man with a violin under his arm, a

man with a round, fresh-coloured childish face--I knew at sight. He had

not altered in nine years. He was the good angel, the violinist of that

troupe of wandering musicians, whose music had held me in the gallery of

the Schloss Lichtenberg.

I laughed to myself with pleasure as I watched him watching the dolls,

all his simple soul absorbed in the sight, his violin under his arm, and

a hand in the pocket of his shabby coat, feeling for a coin to pay for

the entertainment.

He did not know me in the least. How could he connect the child in its

nightgown, looking down from the gallery of the castle, with the young

dandy who was raising his hat to him in the Boulevard St. Michel?

"Excuse me, monsieur," said I, "but I believe I have the pleasure of

your acquaintance, though we have never spoken one word to each other."

He smiled dubiously and plucked nervously at a violin-string, evidently

ransacking memories of beer-gardens and café-chantants to find my face.

"You will not remember me," I went on, "but I remember you. Over nine

years ago, it was, in Germany, in the Schloss Lichtenberg. You remember

the Hunting-Song, the horn----"

"Ach Gott!" he cried, slapping himself on the forehead. "The child in

the gallery, the one in white----"

"Yes," said I; "that was me. You see, I don't forget my friends."

He was too astounded to say anything for a moment; the wretched

difference our clothes made in us confused his simple mind.

Then he wiped his hand with fingers outspread across his broad face. It

was just as if he had wiped away his amazement like a veil, exposing the

beneficent smile that was his true expression.

"Wunderschön!" said he.

"Wunderschön indeed," replied I, laughing. "But I have much more to tell

you. Come, let us walk down the Boulevard together, if you have a moment

to spare. You saved my life that night--you and those friends of

yours--and I must tell you about it."

I knew this man quite well, though I had never spoken to him before. A

really good man is the friend of all the world; you speak to him, and

you know him as though you had known him all your life, for the soul and

essence of his goodness is simplicity, and instinct tells you he has no

dark corners in his soul. In his greatness he does not dream of dark

corners in yours, and so at a word you become friends.

I told him my story, and then he told me his.

He had belonged to a band of wandering musicians, long since dispersed;

and on that eventful day in September, nine years ago, he and the rest

of the band had been playing at Homburg. They had done badly; and, after

a long day's tramp, making for Friedrichsdorff, they saw before them,

just at sunset, the towers of Lichtenberg in the distance.

He, Franzius, pointed them out to the others, and proposed that they

should try their luck there, but Marx, the leader of the band, demurred.

A coin was tossed, and the answer of Fate was "Go," so they went.

"Ah, yes," said Franzius, as he finished. "And well it was we did so.

And the child who was with you in the gallery--the little boy--how is

he?"

"What child?" said I.

"He in the gallery standing beside you, dressed as a soldier, with

cross-belt like the grenadiers of Pomerania."

A cold hand seemed laid on my heart, for no child had been with me in

the gallery on that night; and the description given by Franzius was the

description of little Carl.

"Franzius," said I, stopping and facing him, "there was no one in the

gallery but myself. Of that I am positive."

There we stood facing each other in the glare of a café, with the roar

of the Boul' Miche around us, each equally astonished.

Then Franzius laughed at the absurdity of the notion that he was wrong.

"With these two eyes I saw him," said he. "And, more: once, when you

made a movement as if to go, he plucked you by the sleeve of your little

nightshirt--so--"--and he plucked my coat--"as if to hold you back, to

keep you there listening to the music."

"He did that?"

"Mais oui."

"Ah, well," I said, with a laugh that was rather forced, "I suppose I

was so taken up with the music that I did not see him. Let us walk on."

We walked on. I was perturbed. This, and the occurrence that day when I

had seen little Carl in the forest of Sénart, my father's death and all

that had gone before, made me feel that there was something working in

my life that I but dimly understood.

For the first time, fully, Von Lichtenberg's mad attempt at my

destruction rose before me, and demanded an explanation on another basis

than that of madness. He had brought up his daughter as a boy, for it

had been prophesied that she would be slain as a girl--slain by a

Saluce; and I was the last descendant of that family. Then the picture

of Margaret von Lichtenberg rose before me, and its likeness to little

Carl, and the fact of my own likeness to Philippe de Saluce, who had

murdered Margaret so many years ago; and it was just then, walking down

the Boulevard St. Michel, amidst the crush and turmoil, jostled by

students and grisettes, beggars and thieves, that the question came

before me: "Can the dead return? Has Margaret von Lichtenberg come back

to this sad old world again as little Carl? Am I Philippe de Saluce?"

And then like a pang through my heart came the recollection, the _fact_,

that I had recognised the park of Lichtenberg as a thing I had seen once

before. I had not recognised the Schloss, but even that fact was an

indirect confirmation of my fantastic idea, for the Schloss had been

rebuilt in 1703, and the murder of Margaret had occurred many years

before that.

All these questions and ideas assailing my mind at once brought terror

to my heart for a moment. Only for a moment. "Well?" said I to myself,

"suppose this is true, what then? What is the world around me, dull and

commonplace and sordid, even under its gold and glitter? I have seen the

highest pleasures that life can give men in exchange for gold to-day in

the Amber Salon of the Café de Paris. I have seen an Emperor who has

attained his ambition, and the futility and weariness of it all in his

face. I have lost and left behind the only country where dreams are real

and life worth living--childhood. I love the past; and should it come to

me and surround me with its romance, should some mysterious fate call it

up to me, should the end be tragedy even, then welcome, for one can only

die; and what care I about death if I am given one draught from the

water of romance in this arid desert of commonplace things which they

call the world?"

I walked beside Franzius intoxicated: the woods of Lichtenberg were

around me, the winds of some far-distant day were rocking the trees.

Romance had touched me with her wand. I heard the Hunting-Song, the

horn, the cries of the jägers; and now I was in the gallery of the

Schloss, the sound of the violins was in my ears, the music that was

holding me from death, the ghostly child was plucking at my sleeve. Ah,

God! whoever has tasted the waters of romance like that will never want

wine again.

And then the wand was withdrawn, and I was walking in the Boulevard St.

Michel with Franzius.

CHAPTER XIX

MY FIRST NIGHT IN PARIS (_continued_)

He was holding out his hand timidly, as if to bid me good-bye.

"Oh, but," said I, "we must not part so soon. Can you not come and have

some dinner with me? What are you doing?"

He looked at a big clock over a café on the opposite side of the way,

and sighed. It pointed to a quarter to nine. He was due at La Closerie

de Lilas at ten; he was a member of the band; there was a students'

fancy-dress ball that night, and he evidently hated the business, though

he said no word of complaint. Poor Franzius! Simple soul, poet and

peasant, child of a woodcutter in Hartz, condemned to live by the gift

that God had given him, just as one might imagine some child condemned

to live by the sale of some lovely toy, the present of an Emperor--what

a fate his was, forever surrounded by the flare of gas, the clatter of

beer-mugs, and the foetid life of music-hall and café-chantant!

"Come," I said. And, taking him by the arm, I led him into the nearest

café.

You could dine here sumptuously for 1 franc 50, wine included. We found

a vacant table; and as we waited for our soup the heart in me was

touched at the way the world and the years had treated this friend who

was part of the romance of my life; for the pitiless gaslight showed up

all--the coat so old and frayed, yet still, somehow, respectable; the

face showing lines that ought never to have been there. I hugged myself

at the thought of my money, and what I could do for him. But in this I

reckoned without Franzius.

He was hungry, and he enjoyed his dinner frankly, and like a child. He

had the whole bottle of wine to himself. He had not had such a dinner

for a long time, and he said so. Then I gave him the best cigar the café

could supply, a black affair that smelt like burning rags, and we

wandered out of the café, he, at least in outward appearance, the

happiest man in Paris.

"And the Closerie de Lilas?" said I, when we were on the pavement.

"Ah, oui!" sighed Franzius, coming back from the paradise of digestion.

"It is true that I should be getting there, and we must say good-bye."

"You said it was a fancy-dress ball?"

"Yes."

"I'd have gone with you only for that."

"But you will do as you are!" cried he, his face lighting up with

pleasure at the thought of bringing me along with him. "Ma foi! it is

not altogether fancy-dress, for Messieurs les Étudiants have not always

the money to spend on dress. People go as they like."

"Very well," I replied. "Allons!" And we started.

When we reached our destination people were arriving fast, and there

was a good deal of noise. A Japanese lantern was going in, and a cabinet

was being put out by two grave-faced gendarmes. The cabinet was

shouting, laughing, and protesting; at least, the head was that was

stuck out of the top of it, and belonged presumably to the two legs that

appeared below. It was very funny and fantastic, the gravity of the

officers of the law contrasting so quaintly with the business they were

about. Inside the big saloon all was light and colour and laughter, the

band was tuning up, and Franzius rushed to the orchestra, promising to

see me before I went.

I leaned against the wall and looked around me.

What a scene! Monkeys, goats, cabbages, pierrots, pierrettes, men in

everyday clothes, girls in dominoes--and very little else--and then,

boom, boom! the band broke into a waltz, and set the whole fantastic

scene whirling. A girl, dressed as a bonbon, danced up to me, nearly

kicked me in the face, and danced off again, seizing a carrot by the

waist and whirling around with him. Too lame to join in the revelry, I

watched, leaning against the wall and feeling horribly alone amidst all

this gaiety.

I was standing like this when a fresh eruption of guests burst into the

room--two men and three girls, all friends evidently, and linked

together arm-in-arm.

It was well I had the wall behind me to lean against, for one of the

girls, a lovely blonde, dressed as a shepherdess, was the Countess

Feliciani!

The woman I had lost my heart to as a child, the woman I had seen

touched by premature old age in the little sitting-room of the Hôtel de

Mayence, the same woman rejuvenated, and turned by some magic wand into

a girl of eighteen, laughing and joyous.

I gazed at this prodigy; and the prodigy, who had unlinked herself from

her companions, was now whirling before me in the waltz, in the arms of

a grenadier with a cock's feather stuck in his hat, and totally

unconscious of the commotion she had raised in my breast.

"You aren't dancing?"

"No," I said. "I'm lame."

She looked at me to see if I were serious or not; then she made a

grimace, and linked her arm in mine. It was the bonbon girl. The dance

was over, and the carrot had vanished to the bar, without, it seems,

offering her refreshment. She had beady, black eyes, a low forehead, and

rather thick lips.

"That's bad," said she, "to be lame. Let us take a stroll." And she led

me towards the bar.

How many times I led that damsel, or rather was led by her towards the

bar during the evening, I can't tell. After every dance she came to me

and commiserated me on my lameness. She was not in great request, it

seems, as a partner, dancing with anybody she could seize upon, and

coming to me, as to a drinking fountain, to allay her thirst. I did not

care. I scarcely heeded. All my mind was absorbed by the girl, the

marvellous girl with the golden hair, who was the Countess Feliciani

reborn.

"Do you know her name?" I asked the bonbon on one of our strolls in

search of refreshment.

"Whose? Oh, that doll with the yellow hair? Know her name? Why, the

whole quarter knows her name. Marie--what's this it is? She's a model at

Cardillac's. A brandy for me, with some ice in it. Hurry up! There's the

band beginning again."

The ball had now become infected by the element of riot. Scarcely had

the music struck up than it ceased. Shrill screams, shouts, and sounds

of scuffling came from the saloon, and, leaving the bonbon, who seemed

quite unconcerned, to finish her brandy, I ran out and nearly into the

arms of two gendarmes, who were making for the centre of the floor,

where the carrot and the grenadier with the cock's feather were engaged

in mortal combat. A ring of shouting spectators surrounded the

combatants, and amidst them stood the shepherdess, weeping.

She had been dancing with the grenadier, it seems, when they had

cannoned against the carrot and his partner. Hence the blows. Scarcely

had the gendarmes seized upon the combatants than someone struck a

chandelier. The crash and the shower of glass were like a signal.

Shouts, shrieks, the crowing of cocks, the blowing of horns seized from

the orchestra, the smash of glass, the crash of benches overthrown,

filled the air.

The lights went out; someone hit me a blow on the head that made me see

a thousand stars; and then I was in the street, with someone on my arm,

someone I had seized and rescued; and the great white moon of May was

lighting us, and the street, and the entry to the Closerie de Lilas,

that beer-garden that the police had now seized upon and bottled. We had

only just escaped in time. More and more gendarmes were hurrying up; and

speechless, like deer who scent the hunters on the tracks, we ran, our

shadows running before us, as if leading the way.

"We are safe here," I said, glad to pull up, for my lameness did not

lend grace to my running. "We are safe here. Those gendarmes are so busy

with the others, they have no time to run after us."

She had been crying when I pulled her out of the turmoil. She was

laughing now.

"Oh, mon Dieu!" said she. "That Changarnier! Never will I dance with him

again."

"Who is Changarnier?" I asked, looking at the lock of golden hair that

had fallen loose on her shoulder, and which the moonlight was silvering,

just as sorrow had silvered the hair of the once beautiful Countess

Feliciani.

"He is a beast!" replied she. "Is my dress torn?" She held out her dress

by a finger and thumb on either side, and rotated before me solemnly in

the moonlight, so that I might examine it back and front.

"No," I said; "it is not torn, but you have lost your crook."

"Yes," replied the shepherdess; "but I have found my sheep. Oh, I saw

you looking at me. You followed me with your eyes the whole evening. You

made Changarnier furious; he said you were an aristocrat. Who are you,

M. l'Aristocrat?"

"And you?"

"I am a shepherdess. And you?"

"I am an aristocrat."

She laughed, put her arm in mine, and we walked, the great moon casting

our shadows before us.

"If we go this way," said she, "we can get something to eat. This is the

Rue Petit Thouars. Are you hungry?"

"Are you?"

"Famished. Have you any money?"

"Lots."

"Good. Ah, yes; I saw you watching me. And, do you know, my friend, I

have seen you before, or someone like you--and you look so friendly.

Indeed, I would have spoken to you but for Changarnier. He is so

jealous! You are lame?"

"Yes, I am lame."

"Then," said she, "I can never have met you before, for I have never

known a lame man. But here we are."

She led the way into a small café. The place was crowded enough, but we

managed to get a seat. The people at the supper were mostly the remnants

of the fancy-dress ball that had escaped from the police.

I ordered everything that the place could supply, and I watched her as

she ate.

She was very beautiful; quite the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,

with the exception of the Countess Feliciani.

"You are not drinking. Why, you are not eating! What is the matter with

you, M. l'Aristocrat?"

"I am in love," replied I.

She laughed.

A Red Indian, who was supping at the next table with a grizzly bear who

had taken his head off to eat more conveniently, spoke to her

occasionally over his shoulder, giving details of their escape; and I

was glad enough when the bill was presented, and we wandered out again

into the street.

The supper had put her in the highest spirits. She laughed at our

fantastic shadows as we walked arm-in-arm down the silent Rue Petit

Thouars. She chatted, not noticing my silence: told me of Cardillac's

studio, and the "rapins," and the rules, and the life, and what her

dress cost. "Thirty-five francs the material alone, for I made it

myself. Do you admire it?"

"Yes."

"Oh, how dull you are! Yes! You ought to have said: 'Mademoiselle, your

toilet is charming.' Now, repeat it after me."

"Mademoiselle, your toilet is charming."

"Good heavens! If a hearse could speak, it would speak like that. You

are not gay. Never mind; you are all the nicer. Ah!" And she fell into a

sentimental and despondent fit, drawing closer to me, so that our

shadows made one.

Then, at a door in a side street, down which we had turned, she stopped,

and drew a key from her pocket.

"I must see you again," I said. "It is absolutely necessary. When can I

see you, and where?"

The door was open now. She drew me close to her, as if to whisper

something, but she whispered nothing. Our lips had met in the darkness.

Then I was in the hall; the door was closed, and, following her, I was

led up a steep staircase, past a landing, up another staircase to a

door. She opened the door, and the moonlight struck us in the face. The

great moon was framed in the lattice window, and against its face the

fronds of a plant growing on the sill in a flower pot were silhouetted.

The bare, poorly furnished room was filled with light, pure as driven

snow.

She shut the door, with a little laugh, and I took her in my arms.

"Eloise!" I said.

She pushed me away, and stared at me with the laugh withered on her

lips. Never shall I forget her face.

"Have you forgotten Toto?"

"Toto! Who--where----" Recollections were rushing upon her, but she did

not yet understand. She seemed straining to catch some distant voice.

"The Castle of Lichtenberg, the pine forests, little Carl. I tried to

find you, but you were gone--years ago. I was only a child, and I could

not find you. But I have found you now!"

She was clinging to me, sobbing wildly; and I made her sit down on the

side of the little bed. Then I sat by her, holding her whilst the sobs

seemed to tear her to pieces.

"I knew you," she said at last. "I knew you, but I did not

recollect--little Toto! How could I tell?"

Ah, yes, how could she tell? Through the miserable veils that lay

between her and that happy time, the past seemed vague to her as a dream

of earliest childhood.

Then, bit by bit, with her head on my shoulder, the miserable tale

unfolded itself. The Countess Feliciani had died when Eloise was

fifteen. They were in the greatest poverty, living in the Rue St.

Lazare. It was the old, old, wicked, weary story that makes us doubt at

times the existence of a God.

A model at Cardillac's and this wretched room. That was the story.

We had entered that room a man and woman, the woman with a laugh on her

lips. We sat on the side of the bed together--two children. Children

just as we were that day sitting by the pond in the woods of

Lichtenberg, with little Carl and his drum.

For Eloise had never grown up. The thing she was then in heart and

spirit she was now.

Then, as the moon drew away slowly, and the room grew darker, we talked:

and I can fancy how the evil ones who are for ever about us covered

their faces and cowered as they listened and watched.

"And little Carl?" asked Eloise. "Where is he?"

The question, spoken in the semi-darkness, caused a shiver to run

through me.

"Who knows?" I said. "Or what he is doing? Eloise, I am half afraid. I

met a man to-night, a musician; he saw me at the Schloss that time which

seems so long ago. He spoke about Carl, and then I came with him to the

ball. Only for him, I would not have met you, and it all seems like

fate. Let us talk of ourselves. You can't stay here in this house: you

must leave it to-morrow. I will arrange everything. I am rich. Think of

it!"

She laughed and clung closer to me. Despite her bitter experiences, she

had no more real knowledge of the world than myself. Money was a thing

to amuse oneself with--a thing very hard to obtain.

"You will leave this place and live in the country. You will never go to

Cardillac's again. Think, Eloise; it is May! You never see the country

here in Paris. The hawthorn is out, and the woods at Etiolles are more

beautiful than the forest was at Lichtenberg. Why, you are crying!"

"I am crying because I am happy," said she, whispering the words against

my shoulder.

Then I left her.

I cannot tell you my feelings. I cannot put them into words. It was as

if I had seen Moloch face to face, seen the brazen monster in the Square

of Carthage, seen the officiating priests and the little veiled children

seized by the brazen arms and plunged in the burning stomach.

I had seen that day Eloise Feliciani, the living child, and Amy Feraud,

the cinder remnants of a child consumed; and God in His mercy had given

me power to seize Eloise from the monster, scorched, indeed, but living.

I found the Boulevard St. Michel almost deserted now, and took my way

along it to the Seine.

"What are you to do with her?"

That is the question I would have asked myself had I been a man of the

world. But I knew nothing of the world or the convenances. I was not in

love with her. Had I met her for the first time that night it might have

been different; but for me she was just the child of Lichtenberg, the

little figure I had last seen standing at the door of the Hôtel de

Mayence, holding in her arms the black cat with the amber eyes.

What was I to do with her? I had already made up my mind. I would put

her to live in the Pavilion of Saluce. I had not a real friend in the

world except old Joubert, or a thing to love. I would be no longer

lonely. What good times we would have!

I leaned over the parapet of the Pont des Arts, looking at the river,

all lilac in the dawn, thinking of the woods at Saluce, and watching

myself in fancy wandering there with Eloise.

Then I returned to the Place Vendôme. It was very late, or, rather, very

early; and before our house a carriage was drawn up, and from it M. le

Vicomte Armand de Chatellan was being assisted.

He had only just returned from the Duc de Bassano's, and he was very

tipsy. He was an object lesson to vulgar tipplers. Severe and stately,

assisted by Beril on one side and the footman on the other, the grand

old aristocrat marched towards the door he could not see.

I watched the pro-consular silhouette vanish. One could almost hear the

murmur of the togaed crowd and the "Consul Romanus" of the lictors.

CHAPTER XX

WHEN IT IS MAY

The meeting with Eloise so disturbed my mind that I had quite forgotten

one thing--Franzius. I had promised to see him after the ball--an

impossible promise to fulfil considering the way the affair ended.

When I awoke at six of this bright May morning, which was the herald of

a new chapter of my life, Franzius and his old fiddle, one under the arm

of the other, entered my mind directly the door of consciousness was

opened by Joubert's knock at the door of my room.

I had told him to waken me at six. So, though I had fallen asleep

directly my head touched the pillow, I had slept only two hours when the

summons came to get up.

But I did not care. I was as fresh as a lark. Youth, good health, the

absence of any earthly trouble, and the spirit of May, which peeped with

the sun into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Chatellan, made life a thing

worth waking up to.

But it was different with Joubert. He was yawning, and as sulky as any

old servant could possibly be, as he put out my clothes and drew up the

blind.

"Joubert," said I, sitting up in bed, "do you remember, nine years ago,

when we were staying at the Schloss Lichtenberg, a little girl in a

white dress and a blue scarf, and white pantalettes with frills to

them?"

"Mordieu!" grumbled Joubert, putting out my razors. "Do I remember?

Well, what about her?"

"I met her last night."

Joubert, who, with a towel over his arm, was just on the point of going

into the bathroom adjoining, wheeled round.

"Met her! And where?"

"At a students' ball." Then I told him the whole business; told him of

the ruin of the Felicianis, of the death of the Countess, of Eloise's

forlorn position, and of the plans I had half made for her future; to

all of which he listened without enthusiasm. "But that is not all," said

I. And told him of my meeting with Franzius, the wandering musician

whose music had held me in the gallery of the Schloss, whilst the

assassin had been at work plunging his dagger into the pillow of my bed.

"You met him, and he brought you to the place where you met her," said

Joubert when I had finished. "Mark me, something evil will come of this.

Mon Dieu! the Lichtenbergs have not done with us yet. On the night

before the General fought with Baron Imhoff he came to the Pavilion--you

remember that night? He took me outside in the dark--you remember he

took me out? And what said he? Ah, he said a lot. He said: 'Joubert,

even if I fall to-morrow the Lichtenbergs will not have done with us.

Fate, like an old damned mole'--those were his words--'has been working

underground in the families of the Saluces and Lichtenbergs for three

hundred years and more. She's showing her nose, and what will be the end

of it the Virgin in heaven only can tell. If I fall, Joubert,' said he,

'I trust you to keep my boy apart from that child of Von Lichtenberg's

they call Carl. Keep him apart from anyone who has ever had anything to

do with the Lichtenbergs.' And look you," continued Joubert, "the first

night you have liberty to go and amuse yourself, what happens? You meet

two of the lot that were at the Schloss: one leads you to the other, and

now you are going to set the girl up in the Pavilion. Think you I would

mind if you filled the Pavilion with your girls, filled the chateau,

stuffed the moat with them? Not I, but there you are: wagon-loads, army

corps of girls to choose from, and you strike the one of all others----

Peste! and what's the use of my talking? You were ever the same,

self-willed, just the same as when you were a child you would have your

box of tin soldiers beside you in the carriage instead of packed safely

in the baggage--just the same!" And so forth and so on, flinging my

childish vagaries in my teeth just as a mother or an old nurse might

have done.

"All right, Joubert," said I, dressing; "there is no use in arguing with

you. I am going to offer the Pavilion as a home to Mademoiselle

Feliciani. That is settled. No evil can come to me for helping the

unfortunate."

"Yes; that's what those sort of people call themselves," grumbled

Joubert. "Good name, too, for her."

"So," I finished, "order a carriage to the door as quick as it can be

got, and come with me to Etiolles, for I want to get the Pavilion in

order."

"Monsieur's orders as to the carriage shall be attended to," said the

old man with fine sarcasm, considering that he had turned "Monsieur"

over his knee and spanked him with a slipper often enough in the past.

"But as for me, I will not go; no, I will not go!"

He vanished into the bathroom to prepare my bath.

When I was dressed I ordered Potirin, the concierge, to send a man to

the Closerie de Lilas, and, if the place was still standing after the

riots of last night, to obtain Franzius' address. Then, when the front

door was opened for me, I found the carriage waiting, and on the box,

beside the coachman--Joubert!

I smiled as I got in, and we started.

It was an open carriage; and in the superb May morning Paris lay white

and almost silent; the Rue St. Honoré was deserted, and a weak wind,

warm and lilac perfumed, blew from the west under a sky of palest

sapphire. We passed Bercy, we passed through Charenton and Villeneuve

St. George's, the poplars whitening to the west wind, the villages

wakening, the cocks crowing, and the sun flooding all the holiday-world

of May with tender tints. The white houses, the vineyards, the

greenswards embanking the sparkling Seine: how beautiful they were, and

how good life was! How good life was that morning in May, effaced now by

so many weary years, effaced from time but not from my recollection

where it lies vivid as then, with the Seine sparkling, and the wind

blowing the poplar-trees that have never lost a leaf!

The road took us by the skirt of the forest ringing with the laughter

and the chatter of the birds.

Old Fauchard's married daughter was in charge of the Pavilion. I

had not seen the place for a long time; it had been redecorated by

order of my guardian, and the old gentleman used it occasionally for

luncheon-parties; a charming rural retreat where the Amy Férauds and

Francine Volnays of the Théâtre Montparnasse enjoyed themselves,

plucking bulrushes from the ponds in the forest, and chasing with shrill

laughter the echoes of the Pompadour-haunted groves.

The little dining-room had a painted ceiling--a flock of doves circling

in a blue sky. The kitchen was red tiled, and clean as a Dutch dairy.

The bedrooms--bright and spotless, and simply furnished--were perfumed

with the breath of the forest coming through the always open windows;

the hangings were of chintz, flower-sprinkled, and light in tone. If May

herself had chosen to build and furnish a little house to live in, she

could not have improved on the Pavilion of Saluce, furnished as it was

by a Parisian upholsterer at the direction of a Parisian boulevardier.

I had breakfasted in the kitchen--there was nothing to be done, the

place was in perfect order--and, telling Fauchard's daughter (Madame

Ancelot) that I would return that afternoon with a lady who would take

up her abode at the Pavilion for an indefinite time, I returned to

Paris, dropping Joubert in the Rue St. Honoré, and telling the coachman

to take me to the Rue du Petit Thouars.

CHAPTER XXI

"O YOUTH, WHAT A STAR THOU ART!"

In the Rue du Petit Thouars I sent the carriage home. The horses had

done over forty miles. I would take Eloise down to Etiolles by rail, or

we would hire a carriage. It did not matter in the least; it was only

twelve o'clock, and we had the whole day before us.

It would be hard for the worldly minded to understand my happiness as I

walked down the Rue du Petit Thouars towards the street where she lived.

I had found something to love and cherish, but I was not in the least in

love with Eloise after the fashion of what men call love. You must

remember that ever since my earliest childhood I had been very much

alone in the world. Drilled and dragooned by old Joubert, and treated

kindly enough by my father, I had missed, without knowing it, the love

of a mother or a sister. Little Eloise had been the only girl-child with

whom I had ever played; and, though our acquaintance had been short

enough, that fact had made her influence upon me doubly potent. I had

found her again. She was now a woman, but, for me, she was still the

child of the gardens of Lichtenberg. And the strange psychological fact

remains that, though I had loved the beautiful Countess Feliciani with

my childish heart, loved her almost as a man loves a woman, not a bit

of that sort of love had I for Eloise, who was the Countess's facsimile.

The very fact of the extraordinary likeness would have been sufficient

to annul passion.

Perhaps it was because I had seen the Countess suddenly turned old and

grey, sitting in that wretched room in the Hôtel de Mayence, the ruin of

herself, a parable on the vanity of beauty and earthly things.

I do not know. I only can say that my love for Eloise was as pure as the

love of a brother for a sister; and that my heart as I came along the

sunlit Rue du Petit Thouars, rejoiced exceedingly and was glad.

I turned down the dingy little Rue Soufflot, and there, at the door,

going into the dingy old house where she lived, poised like a white

butterfly on the step, was Eloise.

"Eloise!" I cried, and she turned.

My hat flew off to salute her, as she stood there in the full afternoon

sunshine like a little bit of the vanished May morning trapped and held

in some wizard's filmy net.

"Toto!" cried Eloise, in a voice of glad surprise. And, as our hands

met, I heard from one of the lower windows of the house a metallic

laugh.

Glancing at the window, I saw the face of the grenadier of the night

before, the one who had worn a cock's feather in his hat--Changarnier

the student--who, according to the bonbon girl, was so jealous of my

new-found friend.

He had a cap with a tassel on his head, a long pipe between his lips,

his linen was not over-clean. A typical student of the Latin Quarter,

confrère of Schaunard and Gustave Colline, he laughed again, showing his

yellow teeth. I looked at him, and he did not laugh thrice.

"Come," I said, taking the hand of Eloise, whose brightness had suddenly

dimmed, as though the sound from the house had cast a spell upon it.

"Come." And I led her towards the Rue du Petit Thouars.

She came hesitatingly, downcast, as if fearful of being followed; and I

felt like a knight leading some lady of old-time from the den of the

wizard who had held her long years in bondage.

In the Rue du Petit Thouars she seemed to breathe more freely.

"I had forgotten Changarnier," said she, in a broken voice. "How

horrible of him to laugh at us!"

"Beast!" said I, fury rising up in my heart at the fate that had

compelled her to such a life and such surroundings.

"Ah, but," sighed Eloise, "he can be kind, too--it is his way."

"Well, let us forget him," I replied. "Eloise, you are mine now. You

will be just the same as you were long ago. Do you remember, when we

were all together at Lichtenberg, and the King that morning put his hand

on your head? You remember when we met him in the corridor, and the Graf

von Bismarck? You were holding his hand when I saw you first, and he was

talking to my father and General Hahn and Major von der Goltz. Then you

saw me----"

"Ah, yes!" cried Eloise, her dismal fit vanishing; "and you made such a

funny little bow. And--do you remember my dress?"

"Oui, mademoiselle."

"Oui, mademoiselle! Oh, how stupid you are!" cried she, catching up the

old refrain from years ago. She laughed deliciously. Childhood had

caught us back, or, rather, had flung back the world from around us, for

we were still children in heart and soul.

"And now," said I, "what are you to do for clothes?"

"For clothes?"

"You are not going back to that place; you are never going near it

again. You must buy everything you want. I have plenty of money, and it

is yours. See!" And I pulled out a handful of gold.

"O ciel!" sighed Eloise. "How delightful! But, Toto----"

"No 'buts.' What is the use of money if you do not spend it? I have a

little house for you, all prepared, in the country. Oh, wait till you

see it--wait till you see it. We will take the train, but you must buy

yourself what you want first, and I can only give you an hour. Will an

hour be enough?"

She would have kissed me, I believe, there and then, only that we were

now in the Boul' Miche. Her butterfly mind was entirely fascinated by

the idea of new clothes and the country. The dress she was in, of some

white material, though old enough perhaps, was new-washed and speckless,

and graceful as a woman's dress of that day could be. Her hat, in my

eyes, was daintier far than any hat I had seen in my life. Women, no

doubt, could have picked holes in her poor attire, but no man. Just as

she was that day I always see her now, beyond the fashions and the

years, a figure garbed in the old, old fashion of spring, sweet as the

perfume of lilac-branches and the songs of birds. At the Maison Dorée,

152 Boulevard St. Michel, within the space of an hour, and for the

modest sum of a hundred francs or so, she bought--I do not know what;

but the purchases filled four huge cardboard boxes covered with golden

bees--the true luggage of a butterfly. When they were packed in and

about a cabriolet I proposed food.

"I am too happy to eat," said Eloise; so, at the fruiterer's a little

way down, I bought oranges and a great bunch of Bordighera violets, and

we started.

It was late afternoon when we reached the little station at Evry. Ah,

what a delightful journey that was, and what an extraordinary one! Happy

as lovers, yet without a thought of love; good comrades, irresponsible

as birds, laughing at everything and nothing; eating our oranges, and

criticising the folk at the stations we passed.

"Listen!" said Eloise, as we stood on the platform of Evry and the train

drew off into the sunlit distance. I listened. The wind was blowing in

the trees by the station; from some field beyond the poplar trees came

the faint and far-off bleating of lambs; behind and beyond these sweet

yet trivial sounds lay the great silence of the country; the silence

that encompasses the leagues of growing wheat, the pasture lands all

gemmed with buttercups and cowslips, the blue, song-less rivers and the

green, whispering rushes; the silence of spring, which is made up of a

million voices unheard but guessed, and presided over by the skylark

hanging in the sparkling blue, a star of song.

Men, I think, never knew the true beauty of the country till the

railway, like a grimy magician, enabled them to stand at some little

wayside station and, with the sounds of the city still ringing in their

ears, to listen to the voices of the trees and the birds.

I sent a porter to the inn for a fly; and when it arrived, and the

luggage was packed on and about it, we started.

CHAPTER XXII

A POLITICAL RECEPTION

"It is like a cage," said Eloise, "with all the birds outside."

We were sitting in the little room of the Pavilion that served as

dining-room and drawing-room combined; the windows were open, the sun

had set, and the birds in the wood were going to bed. Liquid calls from

the depths of the trees, chatterings in the near branches, and

occasional sounds like the flirting of a fan came with the warm breeze

that stirred the chintz curtains and the curls of Eloise's golden hair

as she sat on the broad window-seat, her busy hands in her lap, like

white butterflies come to rest, listening, listening, with eyes fixed on

the gently waving branches, listening, and entranced by the voices of

the birds.

Through the conversation of the blackbird and the thrush came what the

sparrows had to say, and the "tweet-tweet" of the swallows under the

eaves.

All a summer's day, if you listened at the Pavilion, you could hear the

wood-dove's mournful recitative, "Don't _cry_ so, Susie--don't _cry_ so,

Susie--don't _cry_ so, Susie--_don't_," at intervals, now near, now far.

The wood-doves had ceased their monotonous advice, and now the swallows

took flight for the pyramids of dreamland, and Silence took the little,

chattering sparrows in her apron, and then the greater birds. Branch by

branch she robbed, reaching here, reaching there, till at last one alone

was left, a thrush on some topmost bough, where the light of day still

lingered. Then she found him, too; and you could hear the wind drawing

over the forest, and the trees folding their hands in sleep.

Then, from away where the dark pools were, came the "jug-jug-jug" of a

nightingale asking the time of her mate, and the liquid, thrilling

reply: "Too early." Then silence, and the whisper of ten thousand trees

saying "Hush!--let us sleep."

"Would monsieur like the lamp?"

It was Fauchard's daughter, lamp in hand, at the door. Her rough-hewn

peasant's face lit by the upcast light, was turned towards us with a

pleasant expression. I suppose we were both so young and so innocent in

appearance that she could not look sourly upon us, though our

proceedings must have seemed irregular enough to her honest mind. She

looked upon us, doubtless, as lovers. We were good to look upon, though

I say it, who am now old. We were young; and everything, it seems to me

in these later days, is forgivable to youth.

"Oh, youth, what a star thou art!"

* * * * *

Then I rose and took my hat from the table near by.

"But you are not going?" said Eloise, one white hand seizing my

coat-sleeve, and a tremble of surprise in her voice.

"But I must," replied I. "I must get back to Paris. I will come

to-morrow morning. Madame Ancelot here will look after you. There are

books. You will be happy, and I will come back in the morning, and we

will have a long day in the forest. We will take our luncheon in a

basket, and have a picnic."

"Ah, well!" sighed Eloise, looking timidly from me to Madame Ancelot,

who, having placed the lamp on the table, stood, with all a peasant's

horror of fresh air in the house, waiting to shut the windows, "if you

_must_ go---- But you will come back?"

"To-morrow; and you will look after her, Madame Ancelot, will you not?"

"Mais oui," said the good woman with a smile and as if she were talking

to two children. "Mademoiselle need not be afraid; there are no robbers

here; nothing more dangerous than the rabbits and the birds; and if

there were, why, Ancelot has his gun."

Eloise tripped over to the woman and gave her a kiss; then, glancing

back at me, she laughed and ran out into the tiny hall to get her hat.

"I will go with you as far as--a little way," she said, as she tied the

strings of her hat, craning up on her toe-tips to see herself in a high

mirror on the wall.

On the drawbridge she hung for a moment, peeping over at the still water

of the moat, in which the stars were beginning to cast reflections.

"How dark, and still, and secret it looks!" murmured she. "Toto, has it

ever drowned anyone?"

"Why do you ask?" replied I to the question that I myself had put to

Joubert years ago.

"I don't know," said Eloise, "but it looks as if it had."

Ah, the evil moat! The water lilies blossomed there in summer; all the

length of a summer's day the darting dragon-flies cast their blue-gauze

reflections upon the water; Amy Féraud and Francine Volnay might cast

their laughter and cigarette-ends for ever on its surface, leaning over

the bridge-rail and seeing nothing. It was left for the heart of a child

to question its secret and divine its treason.

The path from the Pavilion cut through the trees and opened on the

carriage-drive to the château. When we reached the drive, Eloise,

terrified by the dark and the unaccustomed trees, was afraid to return

alone. So I had to go back with her to the drawbridge.

"To-morrow!" said she.

"To-morrow!" replied I.

She gave me a moist kiss--just as children give; then, as if that was

not enough, she flung her arms around my neck, squeezed me, and then ran

across the drawbridge, laughing.

"Good-night!" I cried; and "Good-night!" followed me through the trees

as I ran, for, even running most of the way, I had scarcely time to

catch the last train at Evry.

It was late when I reached Paris; and as I drove through the blazing

streets I felt as though I had taken a deep breath of some intoxicating

air. The vision of Eloise in her new home pursued me. I felt as though I

had taken a child from the jaws of a dragon. I had done a good act, and

God repaid me, for Eloise had brought me a gift far better than pearls.

She had brought me all that old freshness of long ago; she had brought

me fresh in her hands the flowers of childhood; she had given me back

the warmth of heart, the clearness of sight, the joy in little things,

the joy without cause, which the war of sex and the world robs from a

man.

A breath from my earliest youth--that was Eloise.

At the Place Vendôme, the servant whom I had commissioned to find out

Franzius' address handed me a paper on which he had written it. It was

in the Rue Dijon, Boulevard Montparnasse.

I put the paper in my pocket, ran upstairs, and, hearing voices and

laughter through the partly opened door of the great salon on the first

floor, I burst into the room.

Great Heavens!

The child who gets into a shower bath, and, not knowing, pulls the

string, could not receive a greater shock than I.

The room was filled with gentlemen in correct evening attire. It was, in

fact, one of what my guardian was pleased to call his "political

receptions."

I was dressed in a morning frock-coat, the dust of Etiolles was on my

boots, my hair was in disorder, my face flushed. If I had entered

rolling-drunk, in evening clothes, I would not have committed so great a

crime against the convenances.

And it was too late to back out, simply because my impetuosity had

carried me into the room too far.

My guardian gazed at the spectacle before him, but not by as much as

the lifting of an eyebrow did that fine old gentleman betray his

discomfiture.

He turned from the Spanish ambassador, to whom he was talking, came

forward and took my hand; inquired, in a voice raised slightly so as to

be distinct, about my _journey_; apologised for not having informed me

that it was one of his political evenings, and introduced me to the Duc

de Cadore.

Then--and this was his punishment--he totally ignored me for the

remainder of the evening.

I cannot remember what the Duc de Cadore said to me, or I to him; but we

talked, and I ate ices which I could not taste. I would have frankly

beaten a retreat, now that I had made my entry and faced the fire, but

for a young man who, engaged in a conversation with two of the attachés

of the Austrian Embassy, looked in my direction every now and then. It

was my evil genius, the Comte de Coigny.

The same who, as a boy in the garden of the Hôtel de Moray, had told me

of the ruin of the Felicianis. I had not come across him since he left

the Bourdaloue College. He was now, it seems, an attaché of the

Emperor's, and he was just the same as of old, though bigger. A stout

young man, with a stolid, insolent face; and I guessed, by his

side-glances, that his conversation with the Austrians was about me, and

that I was being discussed critically and sarcastically.

God! how I hated that young man at that moment; and how I longed to

cross the room, and, flinging the convenances to the winds, smack him

in the face! But that pleasure was to be reserved for another hand than

mine.

When the unhappy political reception was over, and the last of the

guests departed, I sought my guardian in the smoking-room, to make my

apologies.

"My dear sir," said my guardian, with a little, kindly laugh that took

the stiffness from the formality of his address and turned it into a

little joke, "on my heart, I did not perceive what you were attired in.

A host is oblivious of all things but the face and the hand of his

guest. Were the Duc de Bassano or M. le Duc de Cadore to turn up at a

reception of mine attired as a rag-picker, I would only be conscious

that I was receiving the Duc de Cadore or the Duc de Bassano. They would

be for me themselves, _however their fellow-guests might sneer_!

"And how have we enjoyed ourselves in Paris?" asked the kindly old

gentleman, turning from the subject of dress, and lighting a fresh

cigar.

"Oh, very well," I said. "And, by the way, I have met an old

acquaintance."

"Ah!"

"Mademoiselle Feliciani, a daughter of Count Feliciani."

"Count Feliciani, the--er--defaulter?"

"I don't know what he may have done," said I, "but I met them years ago,

at the Schloss Lichtenberg. Then they were entirely ruined. I met

Mademoiselle Feliciani last night in a most curious way; and she has

been living in great poverty. In fact, I"--and here I blushed, I

believe--"I have taken her under my protection."

Protection! Oh, hideous word, uttered in the simplicity of youth!

Beautiful word, that men have debased--men who would debase the angels,

could they with their foul hands touch those immaculate wings.

"I hope, sir, you don't object?"

"Object!"

"I have given her the Pavilion to live in," continued I, encouraged by

my guardian's smile of frank approval. "The only thing that grieves me

is," I went on, "that her mother is dead, and that I cannot offer her my

protection, too."

My guardian opened his eyes at this; and I blundering along, blushing,

surprised into one of those charming confidences of youth which youth so

rarely betrays, told him of the beauty of the Countess Feliciani, and of

how much I had admired her as a child, and how I had visited her and

seen her, prematurely aged, ruined, the gold of her beautiful hair

turned to snow, her face lined with the wrinkles of age; and then it

was, I think, that M. le Vicomte began to perceive that my relationship

with Eloise was other than what he had imagined.

"A pure love!" I can imagine him saying to himself. "Why, mon Dieu! that

might lead to marriage--marriage with a Feliciani--an outcast, a beggar!

We must arrange all this; it is a question of diplomacy."

But by no sign did he betray these thoughts. He listened to the woes of

the Felicianis, the picture of sympathetic benevolence; and, when I had

finished, he said: "Ah, poor things!" And then, after a moment's

reverie, as though he were recalling the love affairs of his own youth:

"It is sad. Tell me, are you very much enamoured of this Mademoiselle

Feliciani?"

"Good heavens!" I said. "No. I care for her only--only--that is to say,

I only care for herself."

A confused statement apparently, yet an unconscious and profound

criticism on Love.

The Vicomte raised his eyebrows. He was I think, frankly puzzled. He saw

my meaning--that I cared for Eloise as a child or a sister. His profound

experience of life had never, perhaps, brought a similar case to the bar

of his reason; his profound knowledge of men and women told him of the

danger of the thing.

"How has Mademoiselle Feliciani been living since the death of her

mother?" asked he.

"She has been a model at Cardillac's studio," I replied.

"Indeed? Poor girl! And now, may I ask, what do you propose to do with

this protégée of yours?"

"I? Just give her a home and what money she requires."

"In fact," said the Vicomte, "you, a young man of nineteen, are going to

adopt a beautiful young girl of the same age, or younger, out of pure

charity, give her a house to live in, pay her expenses----"

"Yes," I replied. "God has given me money; and I thank God that He has

given me the means of rescuing the sweetest and the purest woman living

from a life that could lead her nowhere but to the morgue. Monsieur,

what is the matter?"

The Vicomte was crimson, and making movements with his hands as though

to wave away a gauzy veil. At least, that was the impression the

outspread fingers gave me.

Then he laughed out aloud, the first time I had ever heard him laugh so.

"Forgive me," he said. "I am not, indeed, laughing at you. I am amused

at no thing or person: it is the imbroglio. What you have told me is

interesting, and I take it as a profound secret. Say nothing of it to

anyone; for if it were known----"

"Yes?"

"Why, the whole of Paris would be laughing!"

I arose, very much affronted and huffed. And I was a fool, for what my

guardian said was perfectly correct. The situation to a French mind was

as amusing as a Palais Royal farce. But I knew little of the world, and,

as I say, I arose very much affronted and huffed.

"Good-night, sir."

My guardian rose up and bowed kindly and courteously, but with the

faintest film of ice veiling his manner.

"Good-night."

CHAPTER XXIII

FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE

"Good-morning."

"Ah! there you are. Toto--see!"

Eloise, without a hat, working in the little garden of the Pavilion,

held up a huge spade for my inspection. The moat divided us, and I had

my foot on the drawbridge, preparing to cross.

Up at six, I had come to Evry by an early train, and walked from the

station. It was now after ten, and great was the beauty of the morning.

"I have dug up quite a lot," said Eloise. "Look!--all that. Madame

Ancelot says I will make a gardener by and by--by and by--by and by,"

she sang, tossing the spade amidst some weeds; and then, hanging on my

arm, she drew me into the house.

A perfume of violets filled the sitting-room. The place was changed. The

subtle hand of a woman had rearranged the chairs, looped back the

curtains and arranged them in folds of grace, peopled with violets empty

bowls, wrought wonders with a touch.

On the sofa lay a heap of white material, which she swept away.

"That will be a dress to-morrow or the next day," said Eloise. "You will

laugh when you see it, it will be so beautiful. And I have packed a

basket for our picnic. Wait!" She ran from the room, and I waited.

Looking back, now, one of my pleasantest recollections is how she took

my money, took the new life I had given her, thanking me indeed, full of

gratitude, but as a thing quite natural and between friends. If we had

wandered out of the gardens of Lichtenberg together, children, hand in

hand, and passed straight through the years as one passes through a

moment of time, to find ourselves at Etiolles still hand in hand, our

relationship--as regards money affairs--could not have been less

unstrained. I had bonbons; she had none; I shared with her. Nothing

could be more natural.

She returned with the basket packed, and her hat, which she put on

before the mirror. Then we started on our picnic in the woods, I

carrying the basket.

"What part of the woods are you going to?" inquired Madame Ancelot as we

crossed the drawbridge.

"The grand pool," replied I, "if it is still there, and I can find it."

Then, a footstep, and the world of the woods surrounded us, its silence

and its music.

The place was full of leaping lights and liquid shadows. Here, where the

trees were not so dense, the sunlight came through the waving branches

in dazzling, quivering shafts; twilit alleys led the eye to open spaces,

golden glimmers, and the misty white of the hawthorn trees.

The place was a treasure-house of beauty, and we trampled the violets

under foot.

"Run!" cried Eloise.

I chased her, lost her, found her again. I forgot my lameness, I forgot

my guardian, the convenances, and the fact that I was come to man's

estate and carrying a heavy basket. The trees echoed with our laughter,

till, tired out, panting, flushed, with her hat flung back and held to

her neck only by the ribbon, Eloise sat down on a little carpet of

violets and folded her hands in her lap.

"Listen!" said she, casting her eyes up to the trembling leaves above.

A squirrel, clinging to the bark of a tree near by, watched us with his

bright eyes.

"Chuck, chuck." A bird on a branch overhead broke the silence, and, with

a flutter of his wings, was gone. And now from far away, like the voice

of Summer herself, filled with unutterable drowsiness and laziness and

content, came the wood-dove's song to the mysterious Susie:

"Don't _cry_ so, Susie--don't _cry_ so, Susie--don't _cry_ so, Susie.

_Don't!_"

"And listen!" said Eloise, when the wood-dove's song had been wiped away

by silence and replaced by a "tap, tap, tap," far off, reiterated and

decided, curiously contrasting with the less businesslike sounds of the

wood.

"That's a woodpecker," I said. "Isn't he going it? And listen! That's a

jay."

Then the whole wood sang to the breeze that had suddenly freshened, the

light flashed and danced through the dancing leaves, the trees for a

moment seemed to shake off the indolence of summer, and the forest of

Sénart spoke--spoke from its cavernous bosom, where the pine-trees

spread the hollow ground, from the pools where the bulrushes whispered,

from the beech-glades and the nut-groves. The oaks, old as the time of

Charles IX., the willows of yesterday, the elms all a-drone with bees,

and the poplars paling to the trumpet-call of the wind, all joined their

voices in one divine chorus:

"I am the forest of Sénart, old as the history of France, yet young as

the last green leaf that April has pinned to my robe. Rejoice with me,

for the skies are blue again, the hawthorn blooms, the birds have found

their nests, the old, old world is young once more. For it is May."

"It is May; it is May!" came the carol of the birds, freshening to life

with the dying wind.

Then we went on our road, Eloise with her hands filled with freshly

gathered violets.

I thought I knew the forest and the direction to take for the great

pool; but we had not gone far when our path branched, and for my life I

could not tell which to take.

The path to the left being the most alluring, we took it; and lo! before

we had gone very far, recollection woke up. This narrow path, twisting,

turning, sometimes half obscured by the luxuriance of the undergrowth,

was the path I had taken years ago--the path leading by the

old-forgotten gravel-pit into which I had fallen, maiming myself for

life; the path along which I had followed the mysterious child so like

little Carl.

Perhaps it was the old recollection, but the path for me had a sinister

appearance; something that was not good hung about it. Unconsciously I

quickened my steps. I was walking in front; and as we passed the spot

where I had seen the child standing and looking back at me from amidst

the bushes, Eloise laid her hand on my arm, as if for closer

companionship.

"I do not like it here," said she. "And I saw something--something

moving in those bushes."

"Never mind," I replied; "we will soon reach the open."

When we did, and when we found ourselves in a broad drive which I

remembered, and which led to the place I wanted, the sweat was thick on

my brow; and I determined that, go back how we might, I would never

enter that path again. It had for me the charm and yet the horror that

we only find associated in dreamland.

"There was a child amidst the bushes," said Eloise. "I just saw its

head; and--I don't know why--it frightened me, and----"

"Don't," said I. "I believe that place is haunted. Let us forget it."

The grand pool at last broke before us through the trees--a great space

of sapphire-coloured water, where the herons had their home, and the

dragon-flies.

It was past noon. We were hungry, so we sat down on a grassy bank by the

water, opened the basket, and, spreading the food on the grass between

us, fell to.

CHAPTER XXIV

LA PEROUSE

We had finished our meal--simple enough, goodness knows. Our drink had

been milk carried in one of those clear glass bottles used for vin de

Grave, and the bottle lay on the grass beside us, an innocent witness of

our temperance. We had finished, I say, and we were watching a moorhen

with her convoy of chicks paddling on the deep-blue surface of the pond,

when voices from amidst the trees drew our attention; and two stout men

in undress livery, bearing a basket between them, came from beneath the

shade of the elms, and straight towards us. After the men, and led by

Madame Ancelot's little boy, came a party of ladies and gentlemen,

amidst whom I recognised my guardian. The old gentleman, as though May

had touched him with her magic wand, had discarded his ordinary sober

attire, and was dressed in a suit of some light-coloured material, very

elegant, and harmonising strangely well with the exquisite toilets of

his companions. He wore a flower in his buttonhole, and he was walking

beside a girl whom I recognised at once as Amy Féraud. The two other

women I did not then know; but one of them, dark and beautiful, I

afterwards discovered to be the famous model La Perouse. The two men who

made up the party were peers of France; and if Beelzebub himself had

suddenly broken from the trees I could not have been more disturbed than

by this eruption of Paris into our innocent paradise.

In a flash I saw the whole thing. This was some move of my guardian's. I

had told Madame Ancelot that we would be by the grand pool, and Madame

Ancelot's boy had led them.

But M. le Vicomte was much too astute an old gentleman for subterfuge,

whatever his plan might be.

"Welcome!" he cried, when we were within speaking distance. "I have been

searching for you. Ah, what a day! We have just come down from Paris on

M. le Comte de ----'s drag. My ward, M. Patrique Mahon; M. le Comte de

----."

I bowed stiffly as he introduced me to the men.

"And mademoiselle?" asked the old gentleman, raising his hat and

standing uncovered before Eloise.

But I had no need to introduce my companion. La Perouse (oh, what a

voice she had! Hard, metallic, shallow, low)--La Perouse, with a little

shriek of recognition, cried out: "Marie! Why, it is Marie!"

Then she kissed her, and I could have struck her on the beautiful mouth,

whose voice was a voice of brass, for innocence told me she was bad, and

part of Eloise's wretched past.

Ah, me! If an eclipse had come over the sun, the beauty of the day could

not have been more spoilt, the loveliness of spring more ruined.

The stout servant-men, with the dexterity of conjurers, unpacked the

great basket, spread a wide cloth, and, in a trice, a luncheon was

spread out to which the Emperor himself might have sat down.

There was no resisting M. le Vicomte. We had to sit down with the rest,

and make a pretence to eat.

But Eloise refused wine, as did I.

"Ma foi!" said La Perouse. "What airs! Good champagne, too. Come,

taste."

"Mademoiselle prefers water," I put in; and then, unwisely: "She is not

accustomed to wine."

La Perouse stared at me, champagne-glass in hand, and then broke out

laughing. She was about to say something, but checked herself, and

turned to the chicken on her plate.

But La Perouse, as the champagne worked in her wits, returned to the

subject of Eloise's abstinence.

In that dull brain was moving a resentment which the vulgar mind had not

the power to repress.

"What! not drink champagne?" said the fool for the twentieth time. "Ah,

well! It was different in the days of Changarnier. How is he, by the

way, the brave Changarnier?"

I rose to my feet; and Eloise, as if moved by the same impulse, rose

also.

"Mademoiselle," said I, as I offered Eloise my arm, "does not drink

champagne. It is a matter of taste with her. Did she do so, however, I

am very well assured that the evil spirit in it would never prompt her

to talk and act like a fool!"

There was dead silence, as, with Eloise on my arm, I walked towards the

trees. Then I heard the shrill laughter of the women; but I did not

heed, for Eloise was weeping.

"Come," I said; "forget them."

"It is not they," replied Eloise. "I do not care about _them_."

I knew quite well what she meant. It was the Past.

Do not for a moment confuse that word "past" with conscience. Whatever

sin might have been committed by the world against Eloise Feliciani,

she, at heart, was sinless. No; it was just the Past, a blur of miasma

from Paris, a breath of winter.

"Come," I said; "forget it! All that is a bad dream that you have

dreamt; all those people, those women, those men, are not real: they are

things in a nightmare; they have no souls, and when they die they go

nowhere--they are just ugly pictures that God wipes off a slate. This is

the real thing: these trees, these birds; and they are yours for ever. I

give you them; they are the best gift that money can buy."

I wiped her eyes with my handkerchief. She smiled through her tears; and

we pursued our way to the Pavilion, followed by the rustle of the wind

in the leaves, and the song of the wood-doves--lazy, languorous,

soothing--filled with the warmth and the softness of summer.

When I returned to Paris that night I sought for my guardian, and found

him in the smoking-room.

Angry though I was with the trick he had played me, his manner was so

bland and kind that I was at a loss how to begin.

He it was, indeed, who began by complimenting the beauty of Eloise, her

grace and her modesty.

In fact, he had so much to say for her that I could not get in a word.

"All the same," finished he, "I do not quite see the future of this

business. You offer Mademoiselle Feliciani a home, you provide for her,

your intentions are absolutely honourable, yet you do not love her. That

is all very well, mind you. It is somewhat strange in the eyes of the

world, but I understand the position. You are a man of heart and honour,

and she is, so to speak, an old friend; but what is to be the end of

it?"

"I don't know," replied I.

"Just so. She is not a child. It is the nature of a woman to love, to

enter into life. Picking daisies in the woods of Sénart may fill a

summer morning, but not a woman's life. I am not entirely destitute of

the gift of appreciation, the poetry of things is not yet dead for me,

and I can see, my dear Patrique, the poetry of two young people, each

half a child, playing at childhood. But the garment of a child,

beautiful in itself, becomes ridiculous when you dress a man in it.

Impossible, in fact. In fact," finished the old gentleman, suddenly

dropping metaphor and using his stabbing spear, "you are getting

yourself into a position that you cannot escape from with honour; for

even if you wish you cannot marry this girl, for the simple reason that

Paris would not receive her as your wife."