THE GARDEN HOUSE.
From coming home so late, and dropping off to sleep so soon and
heavily, Gilbert forgot to hang up the linen cloth which served as
curtain to the garret window. The unintercepted sunbeam struck his eyes
at five and speedily woke him. He rose, vexed at having overslept.
Brought up in the country, he could exactly tell the time by the sun's
inclination and the amount of heat it emitted. He hastened to consult
this clock. The pallor of the dawn, scarcely clearing the high trees,
set him at ease; he was rising too early, not too late.
He made his ablutions at the skylight, thinking over what had happened
over night, and gladly baring his burning and burdened forehead to the
fresh morning breeze. Then it came to his mind that Andrea was housed
next door to Armenonville House, in an adjoining street. He wanted to
distinguish this residence.
The sight of shade-trees reminded him of her question to her
brother,--Was there a garden where they were going?
"Why may it not be just such a house in the back garden as we have
yonder?" he asked himself.
By a strange coincidence with his thought, a sound and a movement
quite unusual drew his attention where it was turning; one of the long
fastened up windows of a house built at the rear of the one on the
other street shook under a rough or clumsy hand. The frame gave way at
the top; but it stuck probably with damp swelling it at the bottom. A
still rougher push started the two folds of the sash, which opened like
a door, and the gap showed a girl, red with the exertion she had to
make and shaking her dusty hands.
Gilbert uttered an outcry in astonishment and quickly drew back, for
this sleepy and yawning girl was Nicole.
He could harbor no doubt now. Philip Taverney had told his father that
he had sent on Labrie and their maid servant to get a lodging ready in
Paris. Hence this was the one. The house in Coq-Heron Street, where the
travelers had disappeared--was this with the extra building in the rear.
Gilbert's withdrawal had been so marked that Nicole must have noticed
it only for her being absorbed in that idle fit seizing one just
arisen. But he had retired swiftly, not to be caught by her while
looking out of a garret window. Perhaps if he had lived on the first
floor, and his window had given a view within of a richly furnished
apartment, he would have called her attention on it. But the fifth flat
still classed him among social inferiors, so that he wanted to keep in
the background.
Besides, it is always an advantage to see without being seen.
Again, if Andrea saw him, might she not consider that enough to induce
her to move away, or at least not to stroll about the garden?
Alas, for Gilbert's conceit! it enlarged him in his own eyes; but what
mattered Gilbert to the patrician, and what would make her move a step
nearer or further from him? Was she not of the class of women who would
come out from a bath with a peasant or a footman by, and not regard
them as men?
But Nicole was not of this degree, and she had to be avoided.
But Gilbert did not keep away from the window. He returned to peep out
at the corner.
A second window, exactly beneath the other, opened also, and the
white figure appearing there was Andrea's. In a morning gown, she was
stooping to look after her slipper fallen under a chair.
In vain did Gilbert, every time he saw his beloved, make a vow to
resist his passion within a rampart of hate; the same effect followed
the cause. He was obliged to lean on the wall, with his heart throbbing
as if to burst and the blood boiling all over his body.
As the arteries cooled gradually, he reflected. The main point was to
spy without being seen. He took one of Madame Rousseau's old dresses
off the clothesline, and fastened it with a pin on a string across his
window so that he might watch Andrea under the improvised screen.
Andrea imitated Nicole in stretching her lovely arms, which, by this
extension, parted the gown an instant; then she leaned out to examine
the neighboring grounds at her leisure. Her face expressed rare
satisfaction, for while she seldom smiled on men, she made up for it by
often smiling on things.
On all sides the rear house was shaded by fine trees.
Rousseau's house attracted her gaze like all the other buildings, but
no more. From her point, the upper part alone could be espied, but what
concern had she in the servants' quarters in a house?
Andrea therefore came to the conclusion that she was unseen and alone,
with no curious or joking face of Parisians on the edge of this
tranquil retreat, so dreaded by country ladies.
Leaving her window wide open for the sunshine to flush the remotest
corners, the young lady went to pull the bellrope at the fire-place
side and began to dress in the twilight. Nicole ran in and opening the
straps of a shagreen dressing-case dating from a previous reign, took a
tortoise-shell comb and disentangled her mistress' tresses.
Gilbert smothered a sigh. He could hardly be said to recognize the
hair, for Andrea followed the fashion in powdering it, but he knew her
a hundred times fairer without the frippery than in the most pompous
decorations. His mouth dried up, his fingers scorched with fever, and
his eye ceased to see from his staring too hard.
Chance ruled that Andrea's gaze, idle as it was from her sitting still
to have her hair brushed, fell on Rousseau's attic.
"Yes, yes, keep on staring," uttered the youth, "but you will see
nothing and I shall see all."
But he was wrong, for she descried the novel screen of the old dress
which floated round the man's head as a kind of turban. She pointed out
this odd curtain to her maid. Nicole stopped and pointed with the comb
to the object to ask whether that were the reason for her mistress'
amusement.
Without his suspecting it, this had a fourth spectator.
He suddenly felt a hasty hand snatch Madame Rousseau's dress from his
brow, and he fell back thunderstricken at recognizing the master.
"What the deuse are you up to?" queried the philosopher, with a
frowning brow and a sour grin as he examined the gown.
"Nothing," stammered the other, trying to divert the intruder's sight
from the window.
"Then why hide up in this dress?"
"The sun was too bright for me."
"The sun is at the back of us, and I think it is you who are too bright
for me. You have very weak eyes, young man."
Rousseau walked straight up to the window. By a very natural feeling to
be a veil to his beauty, Gilbert, who had shrunk away, now rushed in
between.
"Bless me, the rear house is lived in now!" The tone froze the blood in
Gilbert's veins, and he could not get out a word. "And by people who
know my house, for they are pointing up to it," added the suspicious
author.
Gilbert, fearful now that he was too forward, retreated. Neither the
movement nor its cause escaped Rousseau, who saw that his employee
trembled to be seen.
"No, you don't, young man!" he said, grasping him by the wrist; "there
is some plot afoot, for they are pointing out your garret. Stand here,
pray."
He placed him before the window, in the uncovered glare.
Gilbert would have had to struggle with his idol, and respect
restrained him from thus being free.
"You know those women, and they know you," continued Rosseau, "or, why
do you shrink from showing yourself?"
"Monsieur Rousseau, you have had secrets in your life. Pity for mine!"
"Traitor!" cried the writer; "I know your sort of secret. You are the
tool of my enemies, the Grimms and Holbachs. They taught you a part
to captivate my benevolence, and, sneaking into my house, you are
betraying me. Threefold fool that I am, stupid lover of nature, to
think I was helping one of my kind, and to nourish a spy!"
"A spy?" repeated the other in revolt.
"When are you to deliver me to my murderers, O Judas?" demanded
Rousseau, draping himself in Therese's dress, which he had mechanically
kept in hand, and looking droll when he fancied he was sublime with
sorrow.
"You calumniate me, sir," said Gilbert.
"Calumniate this little viper!" said the philosopher, "when I catch you
corresponding in dumb show with my enemies--I daresay acquainting them
in signs with my latest work."
"Had I come to steal your story, sir, I should better have made a copy
of the manuscript, lying on your desk, than to convey it in signs."
This was true, and Rousseau felt that he had made one of those blunders
which escaped him in his moments of fear, and he became angry.
"I am sorry for you, but experience makes me stern," he said. "My life
has passed amid deceit. I have been betrayed by everybody, denied, sold
and martyrized. You know I am one of those illustrious unfortunates
whom governments outlaw. Under such circumstances, I may be allowed
to be suspicious. As you are a suspicious character, you must take
yourself out of this house."
Gilbert had not expected this conclusion. He was to be driven forth!
He clenched his fists, and a flash in his eyes made Rousseau start.
Gilbert reflected that in going he would lose the mild pleasure of
seeing his loved one during the day, and lose Rousseau's affection--it
was shame as well as misfortune.
Dropping from his fierce pride, he clasped his hands and implored:
"Listen to me, if only one word!"
"I am merciless," replied the author: "man's injustice has made me
more ferocious than a tiger. Go and join my enemies with whom you
correspond. League yourself with them, which I do not hinder, but do
all this beyond my domicile."
"Those young women are no enemies of yours--they are Mademoiselle
Andrea of Taverney, the young lady I told you of, on whose estate I was
born, and her maid Nicole. Excuse me troubling you with such matters,
but you drive me to it. This is the lady whom I love more than you ever
loved all your flames. It is she whom I followed afoot, penniless and
wanting bread, until I fell exhausted on the highway and racked with
pain. It is she whom I saw once more yesterday at St. Denis, and behind
whose coach I came till I housed her in the place yonder. In short, it
is she for whom I wish one of these days to be a great man--a Rousseau!"
His hearer knew the human heart, and the gamut of its exclamations. The
best actor could hardly have Gilbert's tearful voice and the feverish
gesture accompanying the effusion.
"So this is your lady love?"
"My foster-sister, yes."
"Then you lied a while ago when you said you knew her not, and you are
a liar, if not a traitor."
"You are racking my heart and you would hurt me less were you to slay
me on the spot."
"Pooh! that is a mere piece of fustian out of the Diderot or Marmontel
books. You are a liar, sir."
"Have it so, and the worse for you that you do not understand such
white lies!" retorted Gilbert. "I shall go, heartbroken, and you will
have my despair on your conscience."
Rousseau smoothed his chin and regarded the youth whose case had so
much analogy with his own.
"He is either a great rogue or a lad with a big heart," he mused; "but
after all, if he is in a plot against me, it will be best to have the
wires of the puppets in my hand."
Gilbert strode to the door, but he paused with his hand on the knob,
waiting for the last word to recall or banish him.
"Enough on this head, my son," said the man of letters. "It is hard
enough for you to be in love, to this degree. But it is getting on, and
we have thirty pages of music to copy this day. Look alive, Gilbert,
look alive!"
Gilbert grasped the speaker's hand and pressed it to his lips as he
would not a king's. While Gilbert leaned up against the doorjamb with
emotion, Rousseau took a last peep out of the window. This was the
moment when Andrea stood up to put on her dress, but seeing a person up
at the attic window, she darted back and bade Nicole shut the sashes.
"My old head frightened her," mumbled the philosopher; "his youthful
one would not have done that. Oh, youth, lovely youth!" he broke forth,
sighing, "'Spring is the love-time of the year! love is the springtime
of life!'"
Hanging up the dress, he melancholically descended the stairs at the
heels of Gilbert, for whose youth he would at that time have bartered
his reputation, at that juncture counterbalancing Voltaire's and with
it sharing the admiration of the entire world.