EPIGRAPH.

“She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles, and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. ... And her name is Mater Tenebrarum--Our Lady of Darkness.”—De Quincey.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS

CONTENTS.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS.
BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

From two till four o’clock on any summer afternoon during the penultimate decade of the last century, the Right Honourable Gustavus Hilary George, third Viscount Murk, Baron Brindle and Knight of the Stews, with orders of demerit innumerable—and, over his quarterings, that bar-sinister which would appear to be designed for emphasis of the fact that the word rank has a double meaning—might be seen (in emulation of a more notable belswagger) ogling the ladies from the verandah of his house in Cavendish Square. That this, his lordship’s daily habit, was rather the expression of an ineradicable self-complacency than its own justification by results, the appearance of the withered old applejohn himself gave testimony. For here, in truth, was a very doyen of dandy-cocks—a last infirmity of fribbles—a macaroni with a cuticle so hardened by the paint and powder of near fourscore years as to be impervious to the shafts of ridicule. He would blow a kiss along the palm of his palsied hand, and never misdoubt the sure flight of this missive, though his unmanageable wrist should beat a tattoo on his nose the while; he would leer through quizzing-glasses of a power to exhibit in horrible accent the rheum of his eyes; he would indite musky billets-doux, like meteorological charts, to Dolly or Dorine, and, forgetting their direction when despatched, would simper over the quiddling replies as if they were archly amorous solicitations. Upon the truth that is stranger than fiction he had looked all his life as upon an outer barbarian, the measure of whose originality was merely the measure of uncouthness. Nature, in fact, was a dealer of ridiculous limitations; art, a merchant of inexhaustible surprises. Vanity! he would quote one fifty instances in support of the fact that it was the spring-head of all history. Selfishness! was it not the first condition of organic existence? Make-believe! the whole world’s system of government, from royalty to rags, was founded upon it. Therefore he constituted himself understudy to his great prototype of Queensberry; and therefore he could actually welcome the loss or deterioration of anything bodily and personal for the reason that it presented him with the opportunity to substitute mechanical perfection for natural deficiency. Perhaps at no period of his life had he so realised his ideal of existence as when, upon his seventy-seventh year, he found himself false—inside and out—from top to toe.

“Death,” he chuckled, “will be devilish put to it to stab me in a vital part.”

He said this to his grand-nephew, the orphaned heir-apparent to his title and moderate estates and to nothing else that he valued.

The young man was, indeed, his uncle’s very antithesis—his butt, his foil, his aggravation. He, the nephew, considered no doubt that he held a brief for the other side (truth to oneself, we will call it); and he was never at great pains to disguise his contempt of a certain order of licence. Cold, dry, austere, he had yet that observant faculty that, conceiving of circumstance, may fall pregnant with either justice or inhumanity. At present, from the height of his twenty-five years, he looked with a tolerant serenity into the arena of struggling passions.

“This is all vastly foolish,” was his superior reflection. “Am I destined to make a practice of turning my thumb up or down?”

Now, on a certain day of ’88, he walked into the house in Cavendish Square and joined his unvenerable elder on the balcony.

“Give me the parasol, Jepps,” said he. “I will hold it over Lord Murk’s head.”

The man obeyed, and withdrew. The uncle turned himself about, with a little feint of protest.

“Well,” he said resignedly, “your chacolate makes a pretty foil to my azure; and if you must dress like an attorney’s clerk, you hev at least the unspeakable satisfaction of posing as background to a gentleman.”

His glasses dangled from his neck by a broad black ribbon. He lifted them as he spoke, and conned a passing face.

“Egad!” said he, involuntarily extending his left hand as if to deprecate interruption, “what a form! What a ravishing and seductive elegance! Strake me, Ned, but if thou wert other than a bran-stuffed jackalent, I’d send thee thither to canvass for me.”

He scratched his chin testily with one from several little cocked-hat notes that lay on a chair at his side. His fingers were steeped to the knuckles in gems; his cheeks, plastered with chalk and rouge, looked in texture like the dinted covering of honeycomb. Now and again he would shoot at his young relative a covert glance of extreme dislike.

“Rat thee, Ned!” he exclaimed suddenly; “thou hast a devilish face!”

“’Tis no index to my character, then, sir, I can assure you.”

“You needn’t, egad! There’s a shrewd measure of reserve in these matters. Show me a face that’s an index and I’ll show you an ass. But I’d like to learn, as a mere question of curiasity, why you persist in dressing like a cit, eating at beef ordinaries, and sleeping at some demned low tavern over against the Cock and Pye ditch?”

“Sure, sir, in this connection at least, you’ll grant me the authority of fashion?”

“Fashion! Paris fashion! Franklin fashion! But it’s not for the heir to an English viscountcy to model himself on a Yankee tallow-chandler.”

“I model myself on the principles of independence, sir.”

“Principles, quotha! Why, ’od rat me, Ned, you make me sick. Principles of independence are like other principals, I presume—clamorous for high rates of interest.”

“I think not, indeed.”

“Do you, indeed? But you’re a convert to the new religion, and rabid, of course; and a mighty pretty set of priests you’ve got to expound you your gospels.”

“Who, for an instance?”

The uncle leered round viciously. When he was moved to raise his voice, old age piped in him like winter in an empty house.

“I don’t know why I call you Ned,” he protested peevishly. “I don’t feel it, and it fits you worse than your cravat. Who, for an instance, Mr Edward Murk? Why, a defaulting exciseman for one, a reskel by the name of Paine, that writ a pamphlet on Common Sense to prove himself devoid of it.”

“According to the point of view.”

“Oh, I cry you pardon, sir! I judge from a less exalted one than this patriarch of principles here.”

“But Voltaire—Diderot, my lord?”

“Gads my life! And now you hev me! A school of incontinent rakes to reform the warld! And not a man of ’em, I vow, but had drained his last glass of pleasure before he set to disparaging the feast.”

The nephew was silent. What, indeed, would it profit him to answer? He looked, with a passionless scrutiny, at the face so near his own. He could have thought that the old wood, the old block, had shrunk beneath its veneer, and he had an odd temptation to prod it with his finger and see if it would crackle.

“Oxford,” snapped his lordship, “is the very market-garden of self-sufficiency. Thou needst a power of weeding, nephew.”

“Oh, it’s possible, sir; only I would clear the ground myself.”

“Indeed! And how would you set about it?”

“By observing and selecting, that is all; by forming independent judgments uninfluenced by the respect of position; by assuming continence and sobriety to be the first conditions of happiness; by analysing impressions and restraining impulse; by studying what to chip away from the block out of which I intend to shape my own character, with the world for model.”

“I see, I see. A smug modest programme, i’ faith. I’d not have thy frog’s blood, Ned, though it meant another twenty years of life to me. And so you’ll do all this before you step into my shoes—and may the devil wedge them on thy feet!”

“You are bitter, sir. I think, perhaps, you misconstrue me. I’m no fanatic of prudery, but an earnest student of happiness. Were I to convince myself that yours was the highest expression of this, I would not hesitate to become your convert.”

“I’d not ask thee, thou chilly put. Hadst thou been my son, ’twere different. But thou’st got thine independent jointure, and thou’lt go thy ways—over the Continent, as I understand,—not making the Grand Tour like a gentleman of position, but joggling it in diligences, faugh! or stumping on thy soles like a demned brawny pedlar. And what is to be thy equipment for the adventure?”

“A fair knowledge of French, a roll of canvas, and a case of colours.”

“Cry you mercy, sir; I’d forgat you were an artist. Wilt thou paint me some naked women?”

“Ay, sir, and see no pleasant shame in it.”

“Ned, Ned—give me a hope of thee!”

“Oh, sir, believe me, ’tis only when woman begins to clothe herself that indelicacy is suggested. A hat, a pair of shoes, a shoulder-strap even, would have made a jill-flirt of Godiva.”

“H’mph! Looked at from my standpoint, that’s the first commendable thing thou’st said. But it’s a monstrous ungentlemanly occupation, Ned; and that, no doubt, is the reason that moves thee to it.”

“No, sir; but the reason that a painter, more than another, has the opportunity to arrest and record for private analysis what is of its nature fugitive and perishable. His canvases, indeed, should be his text-book, his confessor, and his mentor.”

“Oh, spare me, Parson! Thou shalt go cully my neighbour here with thy plaguey texts. They’ll fit him like a skin glove.”

“What neighbour, sir?”

“Him that sold his brush to Charlie Greville’s mistress, a grim little toad—Romney by name—that my Lord Thurlow pits against Reynolds for something better than a whore’s sign-painter.”

“Well, sir, doubtless the man will learn to read himself in his work, and to profit by the lesson.”

“Master Ned Parson, when do you go? It cannot be too soon for me.”

“I may start at any moment.”

“Heaven be praised! And whither?”

“Possibly by way of the Low Countries at the outset. Will your lordship give me some letters of introduction?”

“What! Your independence doesn’t strake at that?”

“You greatly misapprehend me, sir. I go to seek mental, not bodily discipline; chastisement, as a forcing medium, ceases of its effect with the second age of reason.”

“And that you have come to, I presume. Go to the Low Countries, i’ Gad’s name, and find your level there! I’ll give you fifty recommendations, and trust to procure you a year’s hospitality from each. Only, one word in your ear, Ned: if you bring back a prig to wife, I’ll hev the two of ye poisoned, if I hang for it.”

The nephew condescended to a smile of some amused toleration.

“My marriage, when it occurs,” said he, “will mark a simple period in the evolution of my character. That, it may be easily understood, might require a foil to its processes of development, as a hen swallows gravel to assist her digestion. You need feel no surprise, sir, if in the end I marry a properly wicked woman.”

“Egad! ’tis my devout hope you will, and that she’ll brain you with that demned Encyclopedia that you get all your gallimaufry about equality from. Call back Jepps, and I’ll dictate the letters.”

CHAPTER II.

On a supremely hot noon of August, Mr Edward Murk, walking leisurely along a road pounded and compounded of small coal, came down towards the ancient city of Liége, and paused at a vantage-point to take in the prospect. This was a fair enough one to any vision, and fair in the extreme to eyes so long drilled to the interminable perspectives of Flanders—to loveless dykes, to canals like sleek ingots of glass, to stretched ribbons of highways tapering to a flat horizon—as that a tumulus would seem as sweet a thing for them to rest on as a woman’s bosom. Now his sight, reining up against hills, gave him a certain emotion of surprise, such as he might have felt if a familiar hunter had unexpectedly shied at a hedgerow.

He stood a little above the town, looking over and beyond it. In the middle-distance of his picture—pulled into the soft arms of hills that, melting to their own embrace, became mere swimming banks of mist—floated a prismatic blot of water—the vista of the Meuse—dinted like an opal with shadowy reflections, and lit with sudden sparks in dreamy places. Thence, nearer, a greystone bridge—its arches glazed, he could have thought, with mother-of-pearl windows, like a Chinese model in ivory—bestrode the river channel, seeming to dam back, against his foreground, an accumulated litter of wall and roof and gable, that choked the town reaches, and, breaking away piecemeal, stranded its jetsam all down the valley. Here and there fair steeples stood up from the litter; here and there, in his close neighbourhood, gaunt chimney-stocks exhaled a languid smoke, like tree trunks blasted in a forest fire.

Some distance to his left a pretty lofty eminence, that broke at its summit into a fret of turret and escarpment, stood sentinel over the ages; while below this, and nearer at hand, the great block of an episcopal palace sprouted from a rocky plateau, the velvet slopes of which trailed downwards into the very hands of the city.

“The bishop and his train-bearers,” thought Mr Murk. “The town holds up the skirts of the palace. That must all be changed by-and-by. But I confess I should like to record a little of the picturesqueness of life before the roller of equality is dragged over the continents.”

He had out his tools then and there, and essayed to give some expression to his mood. The sun crackled in his brain; a pug of a child, in a scarlet linsey petticoat, came and sniffed beside him, offending his ears and his eyes; a dawdling cart mounting the hill lurched into his perspective and blotted out its details foot by foot. Down below, in his farther foreground, a cluster of buildings, lying under a church-tower in a bath of shadow, invited him as if to a plunge into cool waters. He glanced crossly at the obtrusive child, collected his traps, and strode down the hill.

At its foot, however, he seemed to come upon the actual furnace-floor of noon—a broad Place that bickered, as it were, throughout its length with iridescent embers. These were figured in crates of Russian cranberries glowing like braziers, in pomegranates bleeding fire, in burning globes of oranges, in apricots pearly-pink as balls of white-hot glass; and over all, the long looped awnings of olive and stone-blue and cinnamon served to the emphasising of such a galaxy of hot dyes as made a core of flame in the heart of the blazing city.

The close air prickled with a multitudinous patter of voices like blisters of fat breaking on a grill. Old Burgundian houses—baked to a terra-sienna, drowzing and nodding as they took the warmth about their knees—retained and multiplied the heat like the walls of an oven. The shop windows were so many burning-glasses; the market-women fried amongst their cabbages like bubble-and-squeak; the very dogs of draught, hauling their gridirons of carts, had red-hot cinders for tongues. There seemed in the whole width of the square no shadow of which a devil could have taken solace.

Exhaling some little of the breath that remained to him in an appropriately volcanic interjection, Ned mounted the steps of the church he had looked down upon, brushed past the outstretched hand of a fly-blown beggar, and dived into the sequestered obscurity of amber-scented aisles.

Here the immediate fall of temperature took him by the throat like a shower-bath. “If I shiver,” he thought, “there is a goose walking over my grave.” So he stood still and hugged himself till his blood was accommodated to the change. Then he penetrated into the heart of the place.

He had visited many churches in the course of his travels, dispassionately, but with no irreverence. It interested him no less to note the expressions of faith than of faces. Generally, it seemed to him, religious ideals were not transmissible. There was seldom evidence that the spirit that had conceived and executed some noble monument yet informed its own work through tradition. The builders of cathedrals wrought, it was obvious, for little clans that, through all the ages, had never learned the respect of soul. They, the latter, had stuffed their heritages with trash, because their religion must come home to them in the homely sense. They could not think but that the God of their understanding must be gratified to have His houses adorned after the fashion of the best parlour.

Now, to see a fine interior vulgarised by the introduction of barbaric images, of artificial flowers, and of pictures hung in incongruous places, offended Mr Murk as a fooling elephant in a circus offended him. He recognised and condemned the solecism in the present instance, yet at the same time was conscious of an atmosphere foreign to his accustomed experience—an atmosphere so like the faint breath of a revived paganism that he looked about him in wonder to see whence it emanated.

There could be, however, no doubt as to its source. The whole church was a grove of orange, oleander, and myrtle trees. They stood in tubs, filling the intercolumniations of the stone avenues, climbing the steps of the altar, thronging about the pulpit. The quiet air held their fragrance like smoke. They could fatten and bloom unvexed of any wind but the sweet gales blown from the organ.

And even as Ned looked, this wind rose and wooed them. Some one was at the keys, and the soft diapasons flowed forth and rolled in thunder along the roof.

The young man strolled down the nave. Music of itself held no particular charms for him. Its value here was in its subscription to other influences—to the cool perfume of flowers, to the sense of serene isolation, to the feeling of mysticism engendered of foggy vastness traversed by the soft moted dazzle of sunbeams. Such, spanning gulfs of shadow, propping the gross mechanism of the organ itself, seemed the very fabric of which the floating harmonies were compound. There needed only a living expression of this poem of mingled scent and sound and colour, and to Ned this was vouchsafed of a sudden, in a luminous corner he came upon, where a painted statue of the Virgin standing sentry in a niche looked down upon a figure prostrate before it in devotion.

A little lamp, burning with a motionless light like a carbuncle, was laid at the Mother’s feet. About her shoulders, suspended from the neighbouring walls, were a half-dozen certificates of miracles approuvés—decorated placards recording the processes and dates, some of them quite recent, of extraordinary recoveries. One of these related how to a Marie Cornelis was restored the sight of an eye that had been skewered by a thorn. Faith here had at least made its appeal in a sure direction. Who could forget how that other woman had worn a crown of thorns about her heart?

Now the gazer would have liked to know what manifestation of the supernatural was craved by the young girl, fair and quiet as the image itself, who knelt before the shrine. She, this dévote, reverencing, with her mouth pressed to the clasped knuckles of her hands, had so much of the Madonna in her own appearance as to suggest that she might perform, rather than demand, miracles. Her eyes—Ned fancied, but could not convince himself—were closed, as in a rapture of piety. She was very pure and colourless, apart from an accidentalism of tinted rays; for over her soft brown hair, from which a folded chaperon of white linen had slipped backwards, wings of parti-coloured light, entering through a stained window, played like butterflies. Lower down, the violet haze that slept upon her cheek gave her something of a phantasmal character; but her fingers were steeped in crimson as if they were bloody.

At her side knelt a little lad, five or six years of age, with a most wistful small face expressive of as great a humility of weariness as the girl’s was of worship. He looked at the stranger with curiosity, and with the dumb appeal of the petty to the great and independent; and as he looked he lifted, one after the other, his poor chafed knees and rubbed them. His round, pale eyes were underscored for emphasis of this appeal, but without effect on Mr Murk, who had indeed no fondness for children.

Presently the girl rose. With the action the wings of light fled from her hair; her passionless face revealed itself a sunless white fruit. There was no consciousness of the observant stranger under her lowered lids.

“Viens, donc, Baptiste!” she whispered; and the little boy, gazing up at her in a breathless manner, got to his feet.

The two genuflected to the High Altar, and stole reverently from the building. Mr Murk followed immediately. He had a desire to win into the confidence of this butterfly Madonna.

Outside he saw the girl and child go down into the blazing market as into a lake of fire. Giving them fair law, he started in pursuit.

Arrived at the level, he found he had for the moment lost sight of his quarry. He strolled up and down, gathering what shade he could from the awnings. Voluble market-women, waxing tropically gross in their vegetable hotbeds, rallied him on his insensibility to their cajolery. Stolid Flemish farmers, with great pipes pendulous from their mouths, like tongues lolling and smoking with drought, winked to one another as he passed in appreciation of the rich joke that here was a foreigner.

The gentler classes, it seemed, were all in siesta. Low life, vehement, motley, and picturesque, held the square as if it were a fortress under fire.

Now, whether as a consequence or, in spite of, this gregal plebeianism, a strange unusual atmosphere, Ned fancied, was abroad in the town. He had been conscious of a similar atmosphere in other cities he had visited en route, and of an increase in its density in steady ratio with his march southwards. It was not to be defined. It might have been called an inflection rather than any expression, like the change of note in the respiration of a sleeper who is near waking. It only seemed to him that he moved in an element compounded of shadows—the shadow of watchfulness; the shadow of insolence; the shadow of an evil humour cursing its own century-long blindness; the shadow of a more wickedly merry humour, rallying itself upon that old desperate screwing-up of its courage to attack a boggart Blunderbore that had fallen to pieces at the first stroke; the shadow, embracing all others, of a certain Freemasonry that was deadlily exclusive in the opposite to a conventional sense.

“And this is for no dispassionate soul to resent,” thought Mr Murk, who as a child had set his feet square upon the basis of an independent impartiality, and, at the first age of reason, had pledged himself to forego impulse as being the above-proof of ardent spirits and fatal to sobriety.

“Now,” he admitted to himself, “Jacques Bonhomme is simply awaking to knowledge of the fact that he may boast a family-tree as thick-hung as his lord’s with evil fruit, and that he was not spawned of the mud because no record exists of his grandfather.”

By-and-by, strolling down a little court, he turned into a wine-shop for a draught to his dusty throat. He drank his maçon, mixing it with water, in a tiny room off the tap of the auberge; and, while he was drinking, the sound of a low vehement voice in the street brought him to the window.

He looked out. It was his very Madonna of the butterflies, and presented under a new aspect. Her hands were at the neck of the child; she was rating him in voluble viraginian. The poor rogue sobbed and protested; but he would not loose his grip of something of which she strove to possess herself.

“P’tit démon!” she gabbled—“but I will have it, I say! It is no use to weep and struggle. Give it me, Baptiste—ah! but I will!”

“No, no!” cried the boy; “it is mine—it has always been mine. Thou shalt not, Nicette!”

She so far secured the bone of contention as to enable Ned for a moment to recognise its nature. It was a silver medal—a poor devotional charm strung round the infant’s neck. The child by an adroit movement recovered possession. She looked about her, unconscious of the observer, as if, safe from interruption, she would have dared torture and maltreatment. Then suddenly she fell to wheedling.

“Babouin, little babouin, wilt thou not make this sacrifice for thine own loving Nicette, who is so poor, so poor, little babouin, because of the small brother she keeps and feeds and clothes?—wilt thou not?”

“No!” cried the child again, half hysterical. “It is mine—it was blessed by the Holy Father!”

“But the guava, Baptiste! the sweet red jelly in the little box! I have eaten of it once before, and oh! Baptiste, it is like the fruit that tempted the first mother. And it so seldom comes to market, and I have not a sou; and before next wage-day all may be appropriated. Wilt thou not then, mon poulet, mon p’tit poulet?”

But the poulet only repeated his tearful pipe.

“Thou shalt have thy share!” pleaded the girl. “I swear it.”

“I should not,” sobbed Baptiste. “Thou wouldst eat up all my medal, and it was blessed by le Saint Père.”

Ned, peering forth, saw his Madonna jerk erect, her eyelids snapping.

“Give me thy hand, then,” she said, in a cold little voice. “Thou shalt walk back to Méricourt all the way, and have thy medal to supper at the end. Give me thy hand!”

The child cried out when she took it. Ned showed himself at the window.

“Nicette,” he said, with particular softness, “I will exchange thee a louis-d’or for one single little confidence of thine.”

The girl started, looked round, and stared at the speaker in breathless consternation. A bright spot of colour, like pink light caught from an opal, waxed and waned on her cheek.

“How, monsieur?” she muttered.

Ned held out the coin.

“Here is a surfeit of guava jelly,” said he, “if thou wilt tell me what was the miracle thou cravedst of the Holy Mother yonder.”

He knew, watching her face, that she would reject the condition, and that with all suitable decorum. But he saw the pupils of her eyes dilate at sight of the gold piece.

“Monsieur, it seems,” said she, “can better afford to jest than I to accept insult”—and she hurriedly caught at her charge’s hand and drew the child away.

Mr Murk, with plentiful complacency, paid for his wine and sauntered in pursuit. At a particular fruit-stall he saw his peasant Madonna linger a moment, hesitate, and then go on her way with an up-toss of her chin. He came to a stop and considered—

“Méricourt! But I have an introduction to Monsieur de St Denys of Méricourt. How far, I wonder? This Nicette would make an admirable study to an artist. I will go to Méricourt.”

CHAPTER III.

Facing an opulent sunset, Ned made his way some three or four miles out of Liége through scenery whose very luxuriance affected him like the qualmish aftermath of excess. It gave him a feeling of surfeit—of committal to a debauch of colour that it was no part of his temperament to indulge. If his soul had attached itself to any theory of beauty, it was to a theory of orderliness and sobriety, that took account of barbaric dyes but to set them to an accordant pattern. Its genius was of an adaptive rather than an imaginative bent. It desired to shape his world to man, not man to his world—to appropriate the accidents of nature to the uses of a wholesomely picturesque race—to emasculate the bull of violence by withdrawing from its very experience the hues of crimson and orange.

On any display of passion this young man looked with cool dislike. His instincts were primarily for the gratification of the understanding. The premeditated involutions of fancy did not engage his sympathies. The mystery of brooding distances peopled with irisated phantoms, of the hazy wanderings of the undefined, he was not greatly concerned to penetrate. Claude he would have preferred to Turner, and Nasmyth to either. Fuseli he already detested; and Blake was his very bête noire. Things rude, boisterous, and ugly he would wish to crush under a heel of iron, thinking to enforce the peace—rather after the fashion of his times—by breaking it. But he would raise, not level, the world to an equality—would make out of its material a very handsome model, in which the steeples should clang and the water-wheels turn and the seasons pulsate by a mechanism common to all.

Such was his creed of eventual reconstruction of a social fabric, the downfall of which was much predicted of the jeunesse politique of the day; and in the meanwhile he was very willing to acknowledge himself to be in the condition of incomplete moral ossification—to be travelling, indeed, for the sake of bone and gristle, and in order to convert the misuses of other characters to the profit of his own.

Now he advanced with a certain feeling of enforced intemperance upon a prospect of superabundant beauty. The great noontide heat was become a salt memory, to be tasted only for emphasis of the bouquet of that velvety wine of air that poured from the heights. Distant hills ran along an amber sky, like the shadows of nearer ones. Far away a jagged keep surmounting a crag stood out, deep umber, from a basin in the valley brimming with blue mist. Closer at hand a marrowy white stream, sliding noiseless over the crest of a slope silhouetted against the northern vaults, seemed the very running band drawn from the heavens to keep the earth spinning. The grasshopper shrilled in the roadside tangle; comfortable doves, drowsing amongst the chestnut leaves, exchanged sleepy confidences. Sometimes the clap of a cow-bell, sometimes the hollow call of a herdsman, thrilled the prosperous calms of light as a dropped stone scatters a water image. These were the acuter accents on a tranquillity that no thought could wound.

At last, when the sun flamed upon the horizon like a burning house of the Zodiac, the traveller came through a deep wood-path upon the village he sought, and was glad to see dusk mantling its gables and blotting out the red lights of the open valley in which it lay.

If Madame van Roon, keeper of the hostel Landlust, cut her coat according to her cloth, she should have been in affluent circumstances. Daniel Lambert might have furnished her his vest, a couple of dragoons their cloaks for skirt. This, proceeding from a mighty roll of padding—a veritable stuffed bolster—that circled her unnamable waist, swayed in one piece, like a diving-bell in a current, with her every movement. Her stays, hooped with steel after the Dutch mode, would have hung slack on a kilderkin. The lobes of her fat ears stretched under the weight of a pair of positive little censers. But the finished pride of her was her cap, a wonder of stiff goffering, against the erect border of which her red face lay like a ham on a dish-paper. With so full a presence, she had only to stand in a doorway, if inclined to argument, and not so much as a minor postulate could evade her.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est doncg cette manière de moogsieur là!” she gasped at our gentleman with a choking shrillness. “Mais où est vôgtre valetaille, vôgtre équipage?”

She quarrelled gutturally, like an envious stepmother, with the speech of her adoption.

“I am in my own service, madame,” said Ned, in no small wonder; “and that is to own the best master a man can have.”

She slapped the three-partitioned money-pouch that hung at her middle.

“Oo, ay,” she gurgled truculently; “and a fine master of economy, I’ll be bound.”

Ned, for short argument, fished out a palmful of pieces. She admitted him grudgingly even then; but the young man was completely satisfied.

“This is excellent tonic,” he thought, “after an enervating experience. In Méricourt, it seems, there is food for study.”

He appeared to have struck a sort of Franco-Flemish neutral ground. He was put to wait in a little kitchen like a bright toy. The floor was ruddy brick, the walls were white tiles. Outside the window a shallow awning tinkled sleepily, in spasms of draught, with the stirring of innumerable small bells. The stove or range, a shining cold example of continence, seemed innocent of the least tradition of heat. On the polished dark dresser vessels of copper, of pewter, and of brass—stewpans, lidded flagons, and the narrow-necked, wood-stoppered, resonant jugs, in which it was the Dutch fashion to bring milk from the fields—shone with a demure sobriety of tone in the falling light.

But the meal, when it came, was served in the French manner and without stint. The traveller, seeing no preparations toward in the spick room he inhabited, was falling into a mood of gentle depression before his fears were dissipated. Then he ventured an inquiry of the solemn wench who brought in his tray. She almost dropped the load in her amazement.

“Holy Saints! Cook here! in the show kitchen!”

She put down, with crushing emphasis, a fresh table-napkin, a small blunt knife, a silver fork, and a silver spoon—all à la française. This was luxury as compared with recent experiences. Ned looked serious over the knife. He did not know that French meat stewed to the melting-point dismembers itself at a touch.

He had a very succulent salmis; and no fewer than four hot eggs, cuddled in a white clout, were served to him.

“Am I to devour them all?” he asked of the girl.

“With the help of God,” she answered ambiguously, in her soft Picardian.

By-and-by madame l’hôtesse condescended to come and talk with him while he ate. She was veritably chargée de cuisine; she seemed to fill the place, width and height.

“What is your condition in your own country?” she asked, with fat asperity.

“I am grand-nephew to a monseigneur, to whose title and estates I shall succeed.”

“Vraigment!” she clucked incredulously. “How arrives it, then, that you ‘pad the hoof’ like a colporteur?”

“I travel for discipline and for experience, madame. Wisdom is not an heirloom.”

She nodded her head.

“Truly, it must be bought. I myself am a merchant of it.”

“Doubtless,” said Mr Murk. “Witness your politeness to one who can afford to pay for politeness.”

She seemed an atom disconcerted.

“Well,” she said, “there is no accounting for the vagaries of the quality. And is his meal to moogsieur’s liking?”

“It is very well, indeed.”

“Tout va biend! I was in the half mind that you would wish your meat raw à l’anglaise.”

“That is not the English fashion.”

“Oh, pardon! they tear it with their hands and teeth, for I know. And sometimes it is worse.”

“How worse, then?”

She nodded again pregnantly.

“Vampires! They will prey on the lowly of their kind. Oh, it is infamous! My cousin, le bon Gaspard, saw a dish of theirs once in Barbade—le Maure dans le bain, they called it—a slave’s head served in sauce. This will be unknown to moogsieur?”

“Unquestionably.”

“It is possible. It is possible, also, that gentlemen who travel incognito may learn some vulgar truths. I accept your ignorance in proof of your aristocracy. Those who sit in high places look only at the stars.”

“You alarm me, madame. Indeed, I remember now that in my country it is possible to procure for eating ‘ladies’ fingers.’”

“Oh, the barbarians! Is it not as I said?”

Ned rose.

“May I suggest to madame that I have not yet seen my bedroom?”

“Plaît-il, doncg? if it will give you any gratification. But there is company there at present.”

The gentleman stared. Madame van Roon backed from the doorway, gave an inaudible direction, and disappeared. The solemn girl took her place.

“By permission of monsieur,” she said; and Ned followed her out of the room. She led him down one short passage straight into the practicable kitchen. A rather melodious sound of singing greeted him on the threshold. He stopped in considerable wonder, postponing his entrance while he listened.

“Little Lady Dormette,

Hark to my crying!

Would not you come to me

Though I were dying?

Little Lady Dormette,

Kiss my hot eyes,

Make me forget!

Little Lady Dormette,

Why have you left me?

Sure not to lie with him

That hath bereft me?

Little Lady Dormette,

Oh, do not kiss him,

Lest he forget!

Little Lady Dormette,

Thee I so grieve for;

If thou forsakest me,

What shall I live for!

Little Lady Dormette,

Crush thy heart to mine,

Make it forget!”

The voice was small, sweet, emotional, but a man’s; the soft throb of a guitar accompanied it. All bespoke a certain melting effeminacy that was disagreeable to Ned. He pushed open the door however, made his salutation, and stood to take stock of his surroundings.

Here, in truth, was revealed the working heart of the model—the stokehole of that vessel of which the outer room exhibited but the polished bearings. The fat air was heavy with the smell of lately cooked food; the pots, the trenchers, the waste parings that had served to the preparation of the latter were even now in huddled process of removal by a panting cuisinière, with whom the company present did not hesitate to exchange a dropping-fire of badinage. A foul litter of vegetable and other rubbish disgraced the white deal of the table—cabbage leaves and broken egg-shells and a clump of smoking bones. In the scuttle was a mess of turnip peelings, on the hearth an iron pail brimming with gobbets of grease and coffee-grounds and the severed head of a cock.

“A Dutchman’s cleanliness,” thought Ned (and he had some experience of it), “is like the elf maid’s face, a particularly hollow mask. He reeks fustian while he washes his windows three times a-day.”

The room was long and low, with black beams to its ceiling, from which hung bushes of herbs. A steaming scullery opened from it on the fire side; on the other, against the distempered wall, stood a row of curtained cupboards, half-a-dozen of them like confessional-boxes; and in the intervals of these were, perched on brackets, five or six absurd little figures—saints and Virgins, the latter with smaller dolls, to represent the Christ, pinned to their stomachers. There was but a single window to this kitchen, at its far end; and a couple of lamps burning rancid oil seemed the very smoking nucleus of an atmosphere as stifling as that of a ship’s caboose in the tropics.

A figure seated on the table struck a tinkling cord as Ned advanced, and sang up a little impertinent stave of welcome.

“Behold, Endymion wakes from Latmus!” said he, and flourishing a great flagon of wine to his mouth, he tilted it and drank.

He was a smooth-cut young fellow, with features modelled like a girl’s. His hair, his brows, the shade on his upper lip toned from brown to rough gold. His eyes were soft umber, his cheeks flushed sombrely like autumn leaves. He was as assured of himself as a gillian, and a little theatrical withal in his pose and the cock of his hat.

There were two others in company—a serene large man, with deliberate lids to his eyes and straight long hair, and a round-faced sizar from the University of Liége. These latter smoked, and all three drank according to their degree of wine, hollands, or brandy-and-water.

“You flatter me, monsieur,” said Ned a trifle grimly, and he sat himself down by the table and returned with a pretty hardihood the glances directed at him.

For some moments no one spoke. The placid man—a prosperous farmer by token of his button-bestrewed jacket and substantial small-cloths—put a piece of sugar-candy in his mouth and drank down his glass of hollands over it in serial sips. The student, looking to him on the table for his cue, sat with the expression of a chorister whom a comrade secretly tickles. Mr Murk felt himself master of the situation so long as he resisted the temptation to be the first to break the silence.

Suddenly the young man with the guitar unbonneted himself, kicked his hat up to the ceiling, gave an insane laugh on a melodious note, and turned to the new-comer.

“I surrender,” said he; “I would rather lack wine than speech.”

“Both are good in moderation,” said Ned.

“Bah! a monk’s aphorism, monsieur; moderation makes no history. It is to grow fat under one’s fig-tree—like Lambertine here” (he signified the contented farmer, who chuckled and shut his eyes).

“And what of the wise Ulysses?” quoth Ned.

“He saved himself for the orgy,” cried the stranger. “He was moderate only that he might taste the full of enjoyment. I go with you there.”

“Not with me, indeed.”

“No, of course. There are blind-worms amongst men. For me I swear that human life has an infinite capacity for pleasure.”

He took another great pull at his pot and laughed foolishly. His face was ruddy and his eyes glazed with drink.

“You were singing when I came in,” said Ned. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”

The student sniggered, the cuisinière sniggered, the farmer waved a tolerant hand.

“You see?” said the musician. “We make no business here of any man’s convenience but our own. I shall sing if I want to.”

He twitched the strings with some loose defiance, and swerved into a little vacant amorous song.

“Does that please you?” he asked at the finish.

“It neither pleases nor disgusts me,” said Ned. “It is simply not worth considering.”

“You must not say that,” said the round-faced student.

Mr Murk turned upon him gravely.

“I am a foreigner, sir, as you see,” said he. “I come amongst you to enlarge my experience and to correct a certain insular habit of prejudice. To this end I use a sketch-book, and sometimes I paint portraits. I shall have the honour of depicting you as a starling.”

“Oh, eh!” said the student. “That is funny. And why?”

“It feeds on the leavings of my lord the rook,” said Ned.

The farmer chuckled heartily, and the musician burst into a wobble of laughter.

“I am the rook!” he cried—“I am milord the rook! You are a man of penetration, monsieur, and I take you to my heart.”

He endeavoured to do so literally, and fell flat off the table on the top of his guitar, which he smashed to pieces. And then he composed himself to slumber on the floor, and in a minute was snoring.

“He acts up to his creed,” said the farmer, in a tone of unruffled admiration. “You must not misjudge him, monsieur the artist. M. de St Denys is generous to a fault.”

“St Denys! Is that M. de St Denys?”

The other swang his large head.

“It is so. His reputation extends itself, it would appear. He makes himself a name beyond Méricourt for the most liberal principles.”

“Liberal to excess, indeed.”

The student ventured again.

“He illustrates what he professes.”

“An infinite capacity for piggishness?”

“No, monsieur; but to extend the prerogatives of pleasure; to set the example of a cultivated licence that the canaille may learn to elevate itself to the higher hedonism.”

Ned had nothing to say to this boozy ethology. The other two chorused crapulous praise of the fallen musician.

“He is the soul of honour,” said the farmer, who seemed a man of simple ideas.

“He devotes himself, his oratory, his purse, to the cause of intellectual emancipation,” cried the student.

“And what does his father, M. de St Denys, say to all this?” asked Ned.

Lambertine shook his perplexed head. The student humoured a little snigger of deprecation.

“There is no father,” said he. “M. de St Denys the younger reigns at the Château Méricourt. I see you sneer, monsieur. It is natural for a victim of insular despotism. Here the prospect widens—the atmosphere grows fresh. You will not have heard of it, no; but it is true that there is a sound in the air. Monsieur, I will not be sneered at!”

“And what is to be the upshot of it all?” inquired Ned, ignoring the protest.

“According to M. de St Denys, a universe of gentlemen.”

“He is, at the same time, the soul of honour,” said Lambertine.

“Well,” said Mr Murk, “I think I will go to bed.”

He appealed to the cook, who still fussed among her pans, with a look of puzzled inquiry. She answered sourly—

“You can take your pick. There are plenty to choose from.”

It was then he discovered, to his profound astonishment, that the confessional-boxes were sleeping-places, to the use of one of which he was unblushingly invited in the very face of his company.

“Well,” thought he, “I am travelling for experience;” and he took his knapsack, chose that cupboard nearest the window and farthest from the table, and, withdrawing himself behind the curtains, undressed, folded and laid his clothes aside, and philosophically composed himself to slumber on a little bed that smelt of onions.

Conditions were not favourable to rest. The heat was suffocating; the atmosphere unspeakable. In the distance the voices of his late companions droned like hornets in a bottle—sometimes swelled, it seemed, into a thick passion of tearfulness. Without brooded an apoplectic silence, broken only by a spasmodic rumbling sound that might have signified dogs or cattle, or, indeed, nothing more than the earth turning in its sleep, or the rolling heavenwards of the wheel of the moon. Now and then some winged creature would boom past the window, its vibrant note dying like the voice of a far-off multitude; now and again the seething rush of a bat would seem to stir up the very grounds of stagnation. Suddenly a heart-wrung voice spoke up outside his curtain—

“Monsieur! I am not to be laughed at. Bear that in mind!”

There followed a sound of sobbing—of footsteps unsteadily receding; and thereafter a weary peace was vouchsafed the traveller, and he dreamed that he was put to bake in the selfsame oven that had provided his supper.

“That is a fine economy,” he heard the cook say—“to roast the rooster!”

The words troubled him excessively. He thought them instinct with a dreadful humour—too diabolically witty to admit of repartee; and so, lapped in despondency, oblivion overtook him.

CHAPTER IV.

Writhing, as it were, from the edges to a central core of heat, Ned woke to find himself wriggling like an eel in a bath of dripping. He sat up in his dingy cupboard, and feeling and seeing a slant of sunlight blazing through its curtains, plunged for the open and breathed out a fainting sigh of relief.

Shrill murmur of voices from a distance came to him; but the kitchen, stalely redolent of wash-houses, was deserted of all save himself.

A pudding-basin on a magnified milking-stool—presumably a washhand-stand—was placed in a corner; and thereat he fretted out an ablution that was a mere aggravation of drought. Then he dressed himself with a sort of fierce and defiant daring, rather hoping to be taken to task for some intolerable solecism in his rendering of local customs.

He was disappointed. The solemn girl came into the kitchen when he was but half-way through his toilet, and, without exhibiting the least interest in his condition, set to preparing and serving his breakfast.

By-and-by he seated himself at the table.

“I am sorry to have kept you out of the room,” he said, with superfluous sarcasm.

“I do not understand,” she said indifferently.

“At least you will know now how a gentleman dresses.”

“It is possible,” she said. “But, if I were one, I should put on my shirt first.”

“Well,” said he, “where is M. de St Denys?”

She stared at him like a cow; but it was the provoking part of her that she would not avert her gaze when he returned it.

“Where,” said she, “if not at the chateau?”

“He recovered his feet then, it would seem?”

“His feet? Oh, mon Dieu! they were not lost! What questions, monsieur!”

“Are they not? And who now is this Lambertine?”

“He is Lambertine—a farmer very prosperous, of Méricourt.”

“With whom the lord of the manor consorts? M. de St Denys, then, is not fastidious in his choice of company?”

“Truly, even you need not hesitate to address him, if that is what you mean. He listens to all alike; he holds himself a human being like the rest of us. When he walks in the sun he will not think his shadow longer than that of another man of his height.”

“And he is the soul of honour?”

“Essentially, monsieur. He would extend the right of an equal indulgence in pleasure to all.”

“Ah, ma chérie!” said Ned calmly, “how you must love him!”

“That is of necessity,” said the girl. “He has lowered himself to make us do so.”

Ned ate a very large and deliberate breakfast, and then issued forth into the village, carrying his letter of introduction with him.

“This St Denys,” he thought, “has been reading Diderot and the Encyclopedia. Has he also theories of reconstruction? My uncle would not think it amusing that his letter should so miscarry.”

A little breeze had risen, blowing from the south. It made the heat more tolerable, and it was the begetter of a pretty tableau by the village fountain. For there, with her pitcher set on the well-rim, stood a bright Hebe of the sun, ripe, warm, and glowing as the very fruit of desire. Now she had put her hands back under her free-falling hair—that was thick and pheasant brown and wavy like a spaniel’s—and had lifted it, sagging, that the cool air might blow under and comfort the roots. She was a full-bosomed wench, and the pose threw her figure into energetic and very graceful relief. Ned, who was really passionless, and responsive only to the artistic provocation, went up to her at once.

“I should like to draw you like that,” said he.

She twitched involuntarily; but, with immediate intuition, maintained her posture, and conned him from under languorous lids.

“How, monsieur?” said she.

“Exactly as you are. I have my tools with me. I beg you to do nothing but just breathe and enjoy life.”

Actually, before she could deny him, he was sketching her. Then, suddenly—watching first the quick travelling of his pencil—she lowered her arms and, like a foolish virgin, extinguished the light of inspiration.

“I think you are very impertinent,” she said.

“If beauty,” said he calmly—for he had secured the essentials of his picture—“will distribute largesse, it must not be surprised to see it scrambled for.”

The girl’s lips parted, as if the fairy bee were probing there for honey.

“What insolence!” she murmured. “Am I then beautiful? But perhaps monsieur sees his own image reflected in my eyes, and falls in love with it like the damoiseau Narcisse.”

She showed the slightest rim of white teeth. It was as if the bow of her mouth revealed itself strung with silver. Her eyes, when open, floated with deep amber lights; her cheeks were sweet warm beds dimpled by Love’s elbow; she was full of bold rich contrasts of colour—a young vestal flaming into the lust of life.

Ned was a little surprised to hear a peasant girl, as he thought her, imaging from mythology.

“I never fall in love,” he said gravely; “not even with myself.”

The girl laughed out, putting her arms defiantly akimbo.

“Then I would not be a suitor there,” she said.

“To me? And why not?”

“Because no man ever loved a woman well that did not love himself better.”

She took her sun-bonnet and pitcher from the low wall.

“I have heard of such as you,” she said. “It is to make your art your mistress, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Ned. “Come and see why.”

He held the sketch out to her. He had been working at it all the time he talked.

“Little Holy Mother!” she murmured, after a vain attempt to repress her curiosity, “is that I?”

“Is it not?” he said; “and would not you love an art that enabled you so to record impressions of beauty?”

“It is an impression, my faith! Am I black and white like a spectre? Where are my brown hair and my red cheeks?”

Ned tapped his breast-pocket.

“In your heart, monsieur?”

“In my paint-box, mademoiselle.”

“Well,” she said, “they may remain there, for me. I shall never come to claim them.”

“You had best not,” he said. “It is full of ghosts that might frighten or repel you.”

She was moving away, when she stopped suddenly.

“Look who comes!” she cried low. “There is the pretty subject for your pencil!”

The fountain stood at the village head, on ground somewhat raised above the wide street, or Place, round which the hamlet was gathered. Not a soul seemed to be abroad in the hot sleepy morning. The jalousies of twenty small houses were closed; the ground-haze boiled up a fair man’s height as seen against any dark background; the tower of the little white church looked as if its very peaked cap of lead were melting and sinking over its eyes—an illusion grotesquely accented by the exclamatory expression of the arrow-slit of a window underneath. There was scarce a sound, even, to emphasise the stillness—the tinkle of a running gutter, the drowsy weak ring of iron on a distant anvil—these were all. Méricourt lay sunk in panting slumber in the lap of its woods, its chimney-pots gasping at an inexorable sky.

But now there came towards and past the fountain, from a hidden meadow path, a second girl, who bore upon her head, gracefully poising it, a fragrant bundle of clover, young forest shoots and tufted grasses, under the shadow of which her face was blurred as soft and luminous as a face in tender crayons.

“It is a picture,” said Ned.

“It is half a saint,” said the girl.

Then she cried, in her flexible rich voice—

“Holà, Nicette! I shiver here in a colder shadow than thine.”

“Nicette!” muttered Ned, and he scrutinised the passing figure more closely.

“How, Théroigne?” answered back the other, without slackening her pace or turning her head.

“There runs a new spring in Méricourt!” cried the girl, with an impudent glance at the young man.

“But a new spring! and how dost thou know?”

“My little finger told me. It has veins of ice, Nicette. Thou needst not scruple to bathe in it, for all thy modesty.”

The clover-bearer passed on, with a little ambiguous laugh.

“And she is a saint?” said Ned.

“Half a saint, by monsieur’s permission—a sweet bon-chrétien with one cheek to the sun and one to the convent wall.”

“And presently to fall of her own sweetness, no doubt.”

To his surprise the girl drew herself up haughtily at his words.

“You exceed the bounds of insolence, monsieur,” she said frigidly. “It is like blasphemy so to speak of Nicette Legrand. And what authority has monsieur for his statement?”

“How can I have any, Théroigne, but your own show of levity towards me?”

She seemed about to retort angrily, changed her mind, shouldered the pitcher, and turned to go.

“At least,” said Ned, “have the goodness to first direct me to the Château Méricourt.”

She twisted about sharply.

“The chateau! What do you seek there?”

“Only my friend, M. de St Denys.”

“Your friend!”

She conned his face seriously; then suddenly her own lightened once more.

“Of a truth,” she said, “I would rather be your friend than your lover.”

“Love is much on your lips, mademoiselle.”

“You should say he shows his pretty judgment. But Nicette has the mouth of austerity. Follow her, then. She will have no need to rebuke you, I’ll warrant.”

“There is some contempt in your voice, mademoiselle. Is not that to give yourself a little the lie?”

“How, monsieur?”

“But now you chid me for speaking lightly of this very Nicette.”

“She has a better grace than I, perhaps, to care for herself. I mean only she will lead you whither you desire.”

“To the chateau?”

“She keeps the lodge at its gates.”

She frowned, nodded her head, and went off with a little mocking song on her lips, turning down a side track that led to farm buildings. She was a lithe voluptuous animal, breathing a lavish generosity of life. Ned watched her in a sort of rigor of admiration as she retreated. A high stone wall, pierced at regular intervals with loopholes, enclosed the steading she made for. Above the coping showed the roofs of the house, and of numerous substantial barns that backed upon the wall; and, at a point in the latter, frowned a huge studded gateway, strong enough to withstand the shock of anything less than artillery.

By this gate the girl paused a moment, looked back, and seeing the stranger still observant of her, whisked about resentfully enough to bring down upon her head a sleet of acacia petals from a bush that stood hard by. Then she vanished, and Ned turned him to his pursuit of the other.

She had already reached the farther end of the Place, and he followed rapidly, lest she should disappear from his ken. But he came up with her as she was leaving the village by a road that mounted on a slight gradient amongst trees. At the wrought-iron gates of the chateau, set but a few hundred yards farther in a thicket of evergreens, he addressed her, as she was shifting from her head the great burden it had borne.

“That is much for a girl, Nicette. I will help you with it.”

She looked at him, he could see, with some abashed recognition. Her lips, that were a little parted in breathlessness, trembled perceptibly. Without a protest she let him receive and drop upon the road the truss of clover. Some strands of the bundle that were yet entangled in the disorder of her rabbit-brown hair gave her an unlicensed strangeness of aspect; but for the rest it was the Madonna of the old church of Liége—the colourless, pure dévote with the Greek profile and round blue eyes small-pupiled.

“Nicette,” said the young man, who, if cold, had an admirable assurance, “to pass from Théroigne to you is to go to sleep in the sun and wake to the twilight.”

She gave a little gasp.

“Does monsieur come to visit the chateau?” she murmured.

“Or its master?—yes. But first I will help you in with this.”

“No, no!” she protested faintly.

“But, yes, I say. Open the gate, Nicette. And for what is this great heap of fodder?”

“It is for my beautiful génisse—Madeleine of the white star.”

She pushed open the gate. Within, to one side, was a low trellised lodge, set within the forward apex of an elliptical patch of garden. Farther back was a byre, and behind all a lofty bank of trees. A fine avenue of Spanish chestnuts led on to the house, which was here hidden from view.

“Whither?” said Ned.

She intimated the rearward shed, with a half-audible note of deprecation. He shouldered and carried the truss to its destination. A liquid-eyed cow, with a rayed splash of white on its forehead, blew a sweet breath of wonder as he entered. Within, all was daintily clean and fragrant.

“Now,” said he, “I must go on to the chateau. But I shall come again, Nicette, and paint you into a picture.”

The girl stood among the phloxes utterly embarrassed. He made her a grave salutation and pursued his way to the house. At a turn of the drive he came in view of the latter—a sombre grey building, sparely windowed, and with a peak-roofed tower—emblem of nobility—caught into one of its many angles. A weed-cumbered moat, with a little decrepit stream of water slinking through the tangle of its bed, surrounded the walls; and in front of the moat, as he encountered it, a neglected garden fell away in half-obliterated terraces. Here and there, placed in odd coigns of leafiness, decayed wooden statues of fauns and dryads, once painted “proper”—or otherwise—in flesh tints, had yielded their complexions piecemeal to the rasp of Time; and, indeed, the whole place seemed withdrawn from the considerations of order.

Much wondering, Ned crossed an indifferent bridge—long ceased, it would appear, from its uses of draught—and found himself facing the massive stone portal of the chateau.

“There is a canker hath gnawed here since my uncle’s day,” thought he, and laid hold of a long iron bell-pull. The thing came down reluctant, and leapt sullenly from his grasp, and the clank of its answer called up a whole mob of echoes.

The door was opened by an unliveried young fellow—a mere peasant of the fields by his appearance.

“M. de St Denys? But, yes; monsieur would be at home to receive—unless, indeed, he were not yet out of bed.”

Ned recalled a figure prostrate on the wreck of a guitar.

“Convey this letter to your master,” said he; “and show me where I may wait.”

He entered a high, resounding hall. A boar’s head set at him from above a door in a petrified snarl. Opposite, a great dark picture—fruit, flowers, game—by Jan de Heem, made a slumberous core of richness in the gloom. These, with a heavy chair or two, were the only furniture.

The man conducted him to a waiting-room near as desert and ill-appointed as the vestibule. The whole house seemed a vast and melancholy barrow—an imprisoned vacancy containing only the personal harness and appointments of some lordly dead. Its equipments would appear to have conformed themselves to its service, and that was reduced to a minimum.

Ned heard the sound of a listed footfall, and turned to meet the master of Méricourt.

M. de St Denys came in with the visitor’s letter in his hand. He was in a yellow morning wrapper that was in cheerful contrast with his sombre surroundings, and a tentative small smile was on his lips. He wore his own hair, bright brown and unpowdered, and tied into a neck ribbon. A little artificial bloom, like the meal on a butterfly’s wing, was laid upon his cheeks to hide the ravages of dissipation, but the injected eyes above were significant of fever. He was, nevertheless, a pretty creature of his inches (and they might have run to seventy or so)—exhilarating, forcible, convincing as a man. Only, as to that, his mouth was the hyperbolic expression, justifying his sex rather by force of appetite than of combativeness.

“M. le Vicomte Murk?” said he, raising his eyebrows.

“Prospective, monsieur,” said Ned; “but as yet——”

“Ah, ha!” broke in the other, showing his teeth liberally, “you wait to step into old shoes. It was my case once—five years ago. I had not the pleasure to know your uncle, M. le Vicomte.”

“Pardon, monsieur. I am a plain gentleman.”

“Truly? We order things otherwise here—for the present, monsieur—for the present.”

Obviously he had no least recollection of the contretemps of the previous evening.

“And you are travelling for experience?” (He referred lightly to the letter in his hand, and lightly laughed.) “Possibly you shall acquire that, of a kind, in little rustic Méricourt. We are in advance of our times here—locusts of the Apocalypse, monsieur, having orders to respect only the seal of God.”

“We, generically, monsieur would say?”

“Oh! I include myself.” (He made a comprehensive gesture with his hand.) “Behold the monastic earnest of my renunciation. I am vowed to a religion of socialism that takes no account of superfluous frippery. I devote my pen and” (he laughed again) “dissipate my fortune to the cause of universal happiness.”

“Yourself thereby, I presume, securing the lion’s share.”

“Of happiness? Truly, I think, I have hit upon the right creed for a spendthrift. But my conscience is the real motive power, monsieur, though you may be cynical of its methods.”

He spoke with an undernote of some ambiguity. It might have signified deprecation, or the merest suggestion of mockery.

“And how shall the sacrifice of your fortune promote the common happiness?” said Ned.

“Plainly, monsieur,” answered St Denys, “by scattering one at least of the world’s heaps of accumulated corruption. Wealth is like a stack of manure, a festering load that is the magnet to any wandering fly of disease. Distribute it and it becomes a blessing that, in fertilising the soil, loses its own noxious properties. But I would go further and ask what advantages have accrued from that system of barter that turns upon a medium of exchange? Has it not cumbered the free earth with these stacks till there has come to be no outlook save through aisles and alleys of abomination?”

“That may be true,” said the other, curiously wondering that so much disputation should be launched upon him at this outset of his introduction; “but civilisation, during some thousands of years, has evolved none better.”

M. de St Denys shrugged his shoulders.

“Civilisation!” he cried. “But you retain no faith in that exposed fetish? Is not civilisation, indeed, one voice of lamentation over its own disenchantment? Can any condition be worse than that of to-day, when the ultimate expression of the social code reveals itself a shameless despotism? Do you ever quite realise—you, monsieur, that through all this compound multiplication of the world’s figures, its destinies remain the monopoly of a little clique of private families? One seems to awaken suddenly to a comical amazement over man’s age-long subscription to so stupendous a paradox. Let us soothe our amour propre by submitting that it was an experiment that has proved itself a failure.”

“Nevertheless, monsieur,” said Ned gravely, “I think that in rejecting this civilisation by which you profit—in encouraging rebellion against the established forms that necessity has evolved out of chaos and wisdom included in its codex—you, to say the least of it, are moved to drop the substance for the shadow.”

He spoke with some unconscious asperity. He could not bring himself to admit the entire earnestness of one, of whose self-indulgent character he had had such recent proof. This metal, he fancied, was plated.

“I cannot believe,” he added, “that so complex a fabric could have triumphed over the ages had it not been founded upon truth.”

“But successive architects,” cried St Denys, “may have deviated from the original plan.”

“Still, it holds and it rises; and I for one am content to go up with it—to re-order its chambers, perhaps, but never to quarrel with the main design.”

“And I for one would descend and leave it. Ah, bah! one may mount to the topmost branch of a tree, and yet be no nearer escaping from the forest. I find myself here in interminable thickets, monsieur. I see the poor, leaf-blinded denizens of them nosing passionlessly for roots and acorns in a loveless gloom; and I know the long green fields of light and pleasure to stretch all round this core of melancholy, if only these could find the way to win to them. Is self-discipline necessary to existence? Surely our very butterflies of fashion prove the contrary.”

“Now what,” thought Ned, “is the goad to this inexplicable character?”

“Does monsieur, then,” said he, “advocate a creed of hedonism?”

“Why not?” cried the other. “Shall not man enlarge, develop, and become more habitually one with his amiable instincts under the influence of pleasure, than he ever has done in his bondage to a religion of self-denial? To deny oneself is to deny God, after whose image one is made.”

“A pretty conceit,” said Ned; “but it spells degeneracy.”

“Ay, monsieur; and to the very foundations—as far back as the garden of Paradise.”

“What! You would revert to primitive conditions?”

“To the very ‘naked and unashamed’—but applying to that state the influence of long traditions of gentle manners. We will admit the happiness of the community to be the first consideration, and reconstruct upon a basis of nature.”

A spot of colour came to his cheek. His eyes kindled with a light of febrile enthusiasm.

“To be free to enjoy, in a world of yielding generosities,” he cried; “to be cast from restrictions designed to the selfish aggrandisement of infinitely less than a moiety of our race; to strip indulgence of the shamefulness that century-long cant has credited it withal—that is the El Dorado I give my efforts and my substance to attain.”

“There,” thought Ned, “is confessed the animalism to which the other is but a blind. But this is half-effeminate vapouring.”

He had no sympathy, indeed, with theories so untenable. This lickerish, unconstructive paganism was far from being the lodestar to his own revolutionary cock-boat. Yet he could not but marvel over M. de St Denys’ extremely practical expression of extremely frothy sentiments. Involuntarily he glanced round the room.

“Yes,” cried the other, observant of the look. “I am not one of those doctors who refuse their own medicine.”

A thought of surprise seemed to strike him.

“But I run ahead of my manners,” cried he, with a quick laugh. “You charge me with a letter, and I return you a volley of exposition. I have not even offered you a seat. Pray accommodate yourself with one. And you knew my father, sir?”

“I had not the honour. He was a friend of my lord viscount.”

“Who gave you a letter to him. There is figured out the value of the social relations. He has been dead, sir, since five years. He left two sons, of whom I am the younger. My brother, Lucien, a sailor, who held his commission to the West Indies under De Grasse, perished there in ’81 in an explosion of powder. The estate devolved upon me. We have not your laws of primogeniture, and had poor Lucien returned, we should have shared the burden and the joy of inheritance——”

He had been leaning carelessly back against a table while he talked. He now came erect, and added, with a queer look on his face—

“—and the pleasure of welcoming to Méricourt the nephew of our father’s friend.”

“You are very good, sir,” said Ned.

“I would fain believe it, monsieur. I have the pleasure to offer you the use of the chateau as an hotel for just so long as you care to stay.”

Ned, taken momentarily aback, hesitated over the right construction of so enigmatical an offer.

“Ah!” said the other, “it is to be considered literally.”

“In the business aspect, monsieur?”

“Assuredly. You must understand I have waived the privileges of my class, amongst which is to be numbered the right to acquit the wealthy of taxation. The ponds must feed the rivulets, monsieur.”

Seeing his visitor lost in introspection, “Enfin,” he cried, with a musical laugh, “that is the practical side. It is not based, believe me, upon a system of profits. For the social, I take you to my heart, monsieur, with all enthusiasm.”

And so Ned became a guest at the chateau at cost price.

CHAPTER V.

Monsieur the master of Méricourt would seal that queer compact of entertainment with the nephew of his father’s friend over a bottle of Niersteiner, which he had up from the cellar there and then.

“’Tis a rare brand,” quoth he, his eyes responding with a flick to the drawing of the cork; “and we will share both bottle and expense like sworn brothers!”

Ned sipped a single glass reluctant. So much the better for the other.

“I am your debtor!” he cried, as he drained the flask. “Draw upon me for the balance when you will.”

His face was flushed. He talked a good deal, and not in an intelligent vein. The visitor accepted him as an enigma that time should solve. There seemed so much firmness of purpose, so wanton an infirmity of performance, in his composition. Certainly, having the courage of his convictions in one way, and the consequent right to expound them literally in another, he might lay claim to consistency in flooding himself with wine before eleven o’clock in the morning. Still, to Ned, this implied a certain contradiction, inasmuch as no creed of right hedonism could include excess with its penalties.

“Monsieur, mon ami,” cried St Denys, on a wavering, jovial key, “you will oblige me by indulging, while here, your easiest caprices. Come and go as you will; I desire to put no restraint on you. You shall pay only for your clean linen, and for your food and drink. The first two you will find at least wholesome. For the last, behold the proof! If you want luxury, you must seek elsewhere. My socialism is eminently practical. The free expression of nature—that is the creed we seek to give effect to in this little corner of the world. But we are no Sybarites.”

“Nor I,” said Ned; “but, for you—you are a man of strong convictions, monsieur?”

St Denys laughed, sprawling back in his chair, and waved his hand significantly to the empty walls.

“Just so,” said Ned. “But I am a very chiffonnier for raking in the dust for hidden motives.”

The Frenchman cocked a sleepy lid, scrutinising his guest with a little arrogance of humour.

“They are here, no doubt, these motives,” said he. “Perhaps I am astute, perhaps I have the seer’s eye. If I foretold you a deluge, what would you do?”

“Invest my money in an ark.”

“A floating capital, to be sure. But you could never realise on it if you weathered the storm.”

“And you, monsieur?”

“And I, monsieur?—I should endeavour, very likely, to extract the essence of twenty years from one; I should at least spare no expense to that end. Were I foredoomed to founder, I would make myself a wreck that I might sink the more easily.”

He came scrambling to his feet.

“Do you like music?” he cried. “I will canvass you in the prophetic vein. I see the rising of the waters.”

He was looking about vaguely as he spoke.

“What the devil is become of it?” he muttered.

“Are you hunting for your guitar? You will find it flat beyond tuning, I am afraid.”

“How, do you say?”

“M. de St Denys, you fell asleep, literally, on it last night in the ‘Landlust.’”

“‘Landlust!’ Oh! Dieu du ciel! I am beginning to remember.”

“Why,” he chuckled, with hazy inspiration, “your veritable figure, monsieur, stands out of the fog.”

“Indeed, it was thick enough to stand on.”

“And little Boppard, and the gross old Lambertine, who is father to our village Aspasia, the fat old man. But I must introduce you to Théroigne Lambertine, monsieur, to add one beat a minute to your politic pulses.”

“Indeed, I think I have already introduced myself.”

“The deuce you have!”

“And is she your Aspasia? And who is her Pericles?”

“Harkee, monsieur!” said St Denys, with a fall to particular gravity, “that will never do.”

Then he broke into a great laugh.

“The father,” he cried, “is the bulwark of paradox. See that you never strive to take him by storm. He is of those who would undermine the Church while confessing to the priest. He clings to the old formulæ of honour that, in others, he pronounces out of date. He advocates free thought as a eunuch might advocate free love, without an idea of what it implies. His advance is all within his own ring-fence—round and round like a squirrel in its cage. He will go any distance you like there, only he must not be ousted from his patrimony. The world for all men thinks he, but his farm for Jack Lambertine. Popped into his pet seed-crusher, he would bleed a vat of oil. But he is an estimable husbandman; oh yes, he is that, certainly.”

“He gives you a better character, it seems, than you him.”

“Why, what have I said to his discredit? He has made the whole human race his debtor in one respect.”

“What, for example?”

“M. Murk, mon ami, he has produced a Théroigne.”

Ned, paint-box in hand, presented himself at the lodge-door. A sound of low singing led him through a very lavender-blown passage to the rear of the cottage. Here he came upon Nicette in a little bricked dairy dashed cool with recent water. She was skimming cream from a broad pan with her fingers. The tips of these budded through the white, like nibs of rhubarb through melting snow.

“Behold her as she stands!” said the intruder. “Here is the milk-washed Madonna for my picture.”

He put down his box and approached the maid. She stood startled, her hands poised above their work. Ned took her by the wrists, and, conducting his captive with speechless decorum to a sink, pumped water over the sheathed buds till they flushed pink with the cold.

“Now,” said he, “dry your hands on that jack-towel, Nicette, and we will get to work.”

The girl’s eyes floated in a little backwater of tears. Crescents of hot colour showed under them on her cheek-bones.

“Monsieur will make a jest of me,” she said, in a rather drowned whisper.

“I will make a Madonna of you, Nicette, if you will pose yourself as I wish.”

Her lips quivered. She looked down, twiddling her wet thumbs.

“I am established at the chateau, Nicette. I am a friend of M. de St Denys, who would have me dispose of my time to my best entertainment.”

“And that monsieur seeks of the poor lodge-keeper?”

“Truly, for I am an artist above all things.”

This cold fellow had a coaxing way with him. After not so long an interval he was busily at work, with the girl seated to his satisfaction. The sweet coolness of the dairy received, through a wide-flung window, the scent of innumerable flowers that thronged the little garden without. To look thereon was like gazing on the blazing square of a stage from the sequestered gloom of an auditorium. There was an orchestra, moreover, all made up of queer Æolian harmonics.

“What is that voice, Nicette, that never ceases to moan and quarrel?”

“It tells the wind, monsieur.”

“What does it tell? A story without an end, I think.”

He rose and looked through the window. A little complaining horn, pivoted on the top of a long pole, swung to the lightest breeze and caught and passed it on in waves of protest. Upon a slack wire or two that, like tent ropes, held the pole secure, lower currents of air fluttered with the sound of a knife sharpening on a tinker’s grindstone.

Ned grunted and resumed his seat.

“It would drive me silly to have that for ever in my ears. How can you stand it, Nicette?”

“It speaks to me of many things, monsieur.”

“What, for instance?”

“Monsieur will laugh.”

“No, I will not.”

“The whispering of the flower spirits, then; the steps and the low voices that come from beyond the dawn before even the shepherds are awake; sometimes the noise of the sea.”

“You have travelled?”

“Ah! no, monsieur. But I have heard how the great waters mutter all their secrets to their shells; and I like to think that my air-shell up there is in the confidence of the strange people one cannot see.”

Ned paused in his work, and dwelt musingly on his companion’s face.

“So,” said he, “you are a half-saint on the strength of these little odd ecstasies.”

“Indeed I am no part of a saint.”

“Now, Nicette, you must put no restraint on your speech whenever I am with you. You interest me more, I think, than anybody I have ever seen. Do you know, I have no imaginative faculty like this of yours. I am too inquisitive to dream nicely. I like to get to the bottom of things.”

Obviously there was some lure about him that drew the girl, in tentative advances, from her reserve.

“I do not think there is a bottom to things,” she said, looking up, a little breathless at her own daring. “Some day, perhaps, when monsieur thinks he has reached it, he will fall through and find himself flying.”

“Shall I?” said Ned abstractedly, for he was wrestling with a difficulty. Then he went on, with a quick change of subject,—“are you very fond of your cow?”

Nicette’s eyes opened in wonder.

“Of Madeleine? Oh yes, monsieur.”

“How often do you feed her?”

“But twice in the day.”

“Of green meat that you gather?”

“It is the fashion with us. Is it not so to stall the cattle in the country of monsieur?”

“Only at night. And how often do you feed your little brother?”

The unexpected question completely dumfounded the girl. Ned laughed, put his brush in his mouth, and fetched a louis-d’or from his pocket.

“Will you take this now, Nicette?”

Something to his consternation, she rose hurriedly from her seat, made as if to leave the room, and broke into a little fit of weeping. He went up and spoke to her soothingly—

“Silly, pretty child! are you ashamed? You are none the worse in my eyes for showing some inconsistency. Think only you are in the confidence of one of your strange people. Here, take it, Nicette.”

She threw his hand away. The coin rang on the floor.

“I will not, I will not!” she cried. “Oh, please to go, monsieur. How can I sit for the Madonna any more when you make me out so wicked!”

CHAPTER VI.

“M. de St Denys,” said Ned, “are you not here the children, so to speak, of an ecclesiastical benefice?”

“We are in the circle of Westphalia, monsieur—children, certainly, of the Duc de Bouillon, who is suffragan of the Archbishop of Cologne.”

“And how does his lordship accept this moral emancipation of little rustic Méricourt?”

The other laughed carelessly.

“As he would accept the antics of children, perhaps. It does not trouble me. In a few years all livings will be in the gift of the people.”

“You are serious in thinking so?”

“Why not?”

“Because I cannot interpret you, or comprehend for what reason you run riot on a road of self-abnegation.”

“Perhaps it is the war of the spirit with the flesh, monsieur. Who knows, were a man of vigour not to reasonably indulge his senses, if his senses would not maliciously lead his judgment astray? Shall an anchorite prescribe for the hot fevers of life? I like to test the passions I would legislate on.”

“And you foresee the triumph of the races over their rulers?”

“I foresee the bursting of the dam of humour—the mad earth-wide guffaw in the sudden realisation of a preposterous anachronism. I see all the old landmarks swept away in a roar of laughter—the idols, the frippery, the traditions of respect for what is essentially mean and false, the egregious monkeys of convention solemnly dictating the laws of society to their own reflections in looking-glasses.”

“And what then?”

“The reign of reason, monsieur: the earth, with its flowers, for the children of its soil; the commonage of pastures, of woods, and of valleys; the adjustment of the relations of love and increase to the developments of nature; the death of shame, of artificiality, of ignoble sophistries.”

Ned shook his head. Was the man sincere in all this? Did he seek to adapt himself, with and in spite of his weaknesses, to what he considered the inevitably right? or were his repudiation of caste, his sacrifice of fortune, a mere wholesale bid for the notoriety that is so frantically sought of melodramatic souls? His voice was vibrant with enthusiasm; he seemed to lash himself into great utterances, to feel conviction through force of sound; and then in a moment he would (figuratively) swagger to the wings, cock his hat, and bury his face in a foaming tankard.

The two young men were strolling through a twilight of woodland. They had dined at four o’clock, had sat an hour or so over their bottle, and were then, by arrangement of St Denys, to present themselves at a certain rendezvous of local esprits forts.

“Thou shalt handle Promethean fire,” said the lord of Méricourt, “and shalt kindle in the glance of a goddess.”

“Very well,” answered Ned. “I will come, by all means; but she will not find me touchwood.”

They had mounted from the back of the village at the turning into the road of the chateau. A few hundreds of yards had brought them to the fringe of the dense forest that rolled in terraces of high green down to the very outskirts of the hamlet. Thence they had passed, by tracks of huddled leafiness, into deeps and profounder deeps of stillness.

The silence about them was as the silence of a peopled self-consciousness—as the under-clang of voices to a dreamer whose heart works in his breast like a mole. Every bird’s song was an echo; the germ of new life under every pine-cone seemed stirring audibly in its little womb. If a squirrel scampered unseen, if a rush of wings went by unidentified, the sound became a memory before it was past. Nothing of all beauty was material. The thurible of the sun, trailing clouds of smoke, was withdrawn into the sacristy of the hills; the music of the vesper hour fled in receding harmonics under a roof of boughs; long aisles of arborescence, dim with slow-drifting incense, held solitude close as a returned prodigal. Here was the neutral ground of soul and body; thronged with unrealities to either; full of secret expectancies that massed or withdrew to the shutting and opening of one’s eyes.

The dusk formed like troops in the bushy hollows. Still M. de St Denys led his companion on. Suddenly he stayed him, with a hand on his sleeve.

A sound, like the rubbing cheep of a polishing-cloth on wood, came to their ears from somewhere hard by. Stepping very softly, the two men stole into a clearing dominated by a single huge beech-tree—an old shorn Lear of the forest. At its roots a young boar was engaged whetting its tushes, that curled up like the mustachios of a swinge-buckler. The muscular sides of the beast palpitated as it swung to and fro.

Now St Denys, with meaningless bravado, left his friend and walked up to the brute, that cocked its ears and was still in a moment. Ned caught the porcelain glint of its eye slewed backwards,—and then St Denys flogged out at the bristling flanks with a little riding-switch he carried in his hand. The pig fetched round; the young man uttered a shrill whoop and lashed it in the face; and at that the animal plunged for the thicket and disappeared.

Ned went on to the tree. He thought all this a particularly thrasonical display, and would not appear to subscribe, by so much as referring, to it.

“A mammoth in its day,” said he, looking up at the vast wreck of timber that writhed enormous arms against the darkening sky.

“Ay,” said St Denys, assuming indifference of the slight. “That has been a long one, too. I can scarce remember it but as it is now, and I am rising twenty-seven. It held itself royal and unapproachable, you see; defined the commonalty of the forest its limits of approximation to it like a celestial Mogul. The girth of this clearing in which it stands is the girth of its former greatness. No sapling even now dare set foot in the sanctum sanctorum. These forests have their traditions as men have.”

“Perhaps modelled on ours.”

“Perhaps. We shall see. Come here again in a year—two years; and if thou tell’st me this charmed circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.”

Again there seemed the theatrical posing. The speaker put a hand on the trunk of the great tree.

“Here is the very bienséance of vanity,” he said—“the archetype of society. Withered, denuded, worm-eaten to a shell, it yet decks its cap with a plume of green, wraps its palsy in a cloak of stars, and stands aloof like something desirable but not to be attained.”

“A shell, you say? It looks solid as marble.”

“It is a king, monsieur, without a heart. Some day when the storm rises it shall fall in upon itself. I know its hollowness from a boy. I have climbed fifty times this drooping bough here—which you may do now, if you will. Up there, where the branches strike from the main stem, one may look down into a deep well of decay.”

He caught his hand away with a repelling exclamation.

“Bah! it sprouts fungus at less than a man’s height; it is rotting to the roots. It shall take but a little heave of the tempest’s shoulder to send it sprawling.”

Ned humoured the allegory with some contempt.

“Thrones do not crash down so easily,” said he. “Their roots extend over the continents.”

St Denys came from the tree, slid his arm under his guest’s, and drew his gentleman down an obscure track that ran into the thicket.

“So you love kings?” said he.

“I neither love nor decry them. I wish to walk independent, like a visitor from another star, availing myself of every opportunity of observation. I shall not swerve from my convictions when they are formed.”

“And as far as you have got at present?”

“I see more evil rising from the depths than descending from the heights. I see the peaks of volcanoes held responsible for the eruptions that are hatched by turbulent forces far down below—compelled to be their mouthpiece, indeed. Kings are what their people make them. Let the forces subside, and the very cones in time will come to pasture quiet flocks.”

“Or let the lava overflow, overwhelm, and obliterate—distribute itself and grow cool. So shall the pasturage be infinitely more extended. Oh, inglorious conclusion! to justify individual evil on the score that it has no choice!”

“I do not,” said Ned calmly. “I recognise only the right of the individual to an independent expression of self. To secure this he must conform to a social code that excludes the processes of tyranny.”

“And that code must read equality.”

“No; for men are not equal. The world must always exhibit a sliding-scale of intellect and capacity; the unit, a perpetual aspiration. Materially, there must be a desideratum—an ultima ratio to ambition. Call it king, consul, dictator. Whatever its name, it is merely the crystallisation of a people’s character and energy—the highest effect given to a national tendency.”

“But all this, my friend, is not compatible with hereditary titles.”

“No; and there I pause.”

“It is gracious of you. A little further, and you will recognise the impossibility of patching up old fustian to wear like new cloth. Better to commit all to the fire than to spare the sorry stuff because a bit here and there is less decayed than the rest.”

As he spoke a square of mellow radiance met them at a turning of their path. The light proceeded from the window of a wooden hut or shanty—a tool-shed it might have been, or at the best a little disused hunters’ lodge. It was sunk in a bosket of evergreens; built of luffer-boards that gaped in many places; and its roof of flaking tiles was all sown with buttons of moss.

“The headquarters of the brotherhood,” said St Denys, with a laugh; and he pushed open a creaking door and drew his visitor within.

“Holà, Basile!” came in a triple note of greeting.

Ned found himself—wondering somewhat—in a bare, small room, furnished only with a table and plain benches of chestnutwood. At this table were seated the exiguous sizar of the “Landlust,” and a couple of rather truculent-looking gentry—farmers of small holdings, by reasonable surmise. An oil-lamp burned against the wall, and its light swayed wooingly on the face of the fourth member of the company—Théroigne Lambertine, whom the young man had foreguessed to be the goddess. She sat, raised a little above the others, at the head of the board, a smile on her lips, her eyes awake with daring. Her hair was loosely caught under a scarlet handkerchief; about her bosom a white fichu was only too slackly knotted. Ned had never seen a living creature so richly secure in the defensive and aggressive qualities of beauty. She looked at him with a little defiance of recognition.

“Mes amis,” said St Denys, “I have the pleasure to introduce to you a visitor whom you will know as Edouard. He is all, I may tell you, for reforming society.”

“That is a discipline thou shalt not wield here, Edouard,” cried one of the loobies, with an insolent laugh.

Ned faced the speaker gravely.

“Not even for the whipping of a jackass?” said he.

There answered a cackle of derision. St Denys caught his friend by the arm.

“It is unfair, it is unfair!” he cried merrily. “I have brought him hither without a word of explanation.”

Then he took his captive by the lapels of his coat.

“Monsieur, or Edouard,” said he, “this is the one spot within the compass of the nations where a man is entirely welcome for himself so long as he is it. Here we throw off every unnatural restriction, say what we will, do what we will—provided no evil consequence is entailed thereby. We are the club of ‘Nature’s Gentry,’ founded upon and governed by that solitary comprehensive rule. We neither give nor take offence, for where absolute freedom of speech is permitted all may be said that there is to say. Cast from the prohibitions of conventions, truthful beyond conceits, we restrain ourselves in nothing that is of happy impulse, deny ourselves no indulgence but that of doing hurt to our neighbour.”

“Basile has spoken,” said Théroigne in her full voice; “Basile is very great! And thou, thou tall staidness, come and pay thy homage to Nature’s queen.”

Ned turned swiftly, walked up to the girl, and kissed her cheek.

“What the devil!” cried St Denys hoarsely.

“Have I done hurt to my neighbour?” said Ned, facing round.

The Belgian laughed on a false note.

“You are immense,” said he. “The brotherhood takes you to its heart. See that you, on your part, resent nothing.”

He turned, with rather a frowning brow, to the table. Théroigne, flushed but unabashed by the Englishman’s boldness, watched her predial lord covertly.

“A small gathering to-night,” he said; “but what of that when the Queen presides?”

He fancied himself conscious of a new startled intelligence in the eyes of two, at least, of his company. This stranger (the look expressed), how had he appropriated to himself what they had never dreamed but to respect as unattainable? Truly it had been for him to rightly interpret to them their own law.

St Denys stamped his foot impatiently.

“Why do you blink here like moping owls?” he said. “The air is balm; the moon walks up the sky; there is not a bank but breathes out a sweet invitation.”

They bustled to their feet at his words. One man pulled from under the table a hamper loaded with wine-flasks and horns.

“We revel in the open,” said St Denys to Ned. “We give our words flight, like fairies, under the stars. Nothing remains to rankle, or to generate mischief, as in the close atmosphere of rooms.”

“Very well,” said Ned, “the open for me;” and he stepped out, accompanied by three others, into the sweet-blown wood.

The moment he found himself alone with her, St Denys turned upon Théroigne.

“Mademoiselle coquette,” said he, showing his teeth, “I could very easily strike you on the face!”

“And why?” she said quietly, her eyes glittering at him.

“Oh! do you not understand?”

“Little mother of God!” she cried low, her nostrils dilating, “but here is a consistent president! Did not the stranger conform to rule? Would you have had me give you the lie by repulsing him?”

“To the devil with the rule!” cried the other in suppressed passion. “You know it for a blind—not as an excuse for licence. This folly, this ridiculous club! is it not designed but to enable us to indulge a passion of romance—under the very ægis of M. Lambertine, too, when he chooses to leave his tavern and his pipe?”

The girl in a swift transition of mood came from her seat and put up her hands caressingly to the young man’s shoulders.

“Basile, mon ami,” she murmured; “it is ridiculous, I know; but it is an excitement in this little dull world of ours. Thou sport’st with professions of opinion that are not the truth of thy soul. Thou knowest, as I know, dearest, that these wild theories spell disaster; that through all the waste of the ages honour is the pilot star that it is never but safe to steer by. Oh, do you not, Basile?”

“Surely,” said St Denys impatiently. “What have I said to disprove it? But honour will not dispel the fog through which these ships of state are driving to their doom. I who prophesy the crash—God of heaven, Théroigne! dost thou think my ambition surfeits on this scurvy junto of clodhoppers? It is play, my beautiful—just play to pass away the time.”

“And I too play, soul of my soul—but I will no more. This Englishman, if he dares again, he shall suffer. Thy honour shall be mine, as thou hast sworn to save me from myself—oh, Basile, darling, remember how thou hast sworn it!”

CHAPTER VII.

Mr Murk sat on a bank, solemnly preparing for an idyll.

“But I cannot subscribe to it in one respect,” thought he; “for, if I persist in being myself, I shall look upon all this as the most idiotic fooling.”

“Little Boppard,” said he, “what will society do now you have severed yourself from it?”

“Monsieur,” said the student angrily, “I am not to be laughed at.”

“How, then, of this freedom of speech?”

“You are an interloper. You do not understand.”

“But I am eager to learn; oh, little Boppard, I am so eager to learn!”

“I will not be called so. It is infamous!”

“But it was thus M. de St Denys named you to me.”

“It is different. I am nothing to you.”

“Oh, mon pauvret! it is not so bad. You are at least a little man to me.”

One of the hobnails broke into a guffaw.

“Listen to him! this stranger is a droll! Good! It is much noise about nothing, Boppard.”

“You most happily cap me, sir,” said Ned, with great gravity. “May I have the pleasure of taking wine with you?”

“But a bucketful, Edouard!” cried the fellow boisterously. He brimmed the horns as he spoke. A vinous pigment already freckled his cheeks.

“I see here nothing but an excuse for an orgy,” thought the visitor.

The company sprawled over a bank to one side of the clearing where the great tree stood. The wine-flasks lay cool in moss. The two countrymen had thrown off their coats and bared their shaggy chests to the night. Overhead the moon was already of a power to strew the forest lanes with travelling blots of shadow, like dead leaves moving on a languid stream. A cricket chirruped here and there in spasms, as if irresistibly tickled by the recollection of some pleasantry. From time to time, across the dim perspective of a glade, a momentary indiscernible shape would steal and vanish.

Ned pondered over the enchantment—as moving less prosaic souls—of moonlit haunted woods.

“Now, I wonder,” thought he, “if I could put myself en rapport with the undefinable in less Philistine company!”

As if in reply, “What would not Nicette interpret of these fairy solitudes?” said a dreamy voice at his back.

He turned his head. Théroigne had come softly, and was seated with St Denys a little above him on the bank.

“She is not of the club, then?” said Ned.

The student laughed truculently, throwing back his head with a noise as if he were gargling.

“Little Boppard is beyond himself,” said Ned. “We shall make a man of him yet.”

The two potwallopers hooted richly at that.

“Monsieur is quick to launch insults,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine frigidly.

“Why, what have I said?”

The young man looked piously bewildered. St Denys sniggered—even, Ned could have thought, with a little note of vexation.

“Friend Edouard,” said he, “in Méricourt the portière Legrand stands pre-canonised.”

“Understand!” chuckled a bumpkin. “She is portière and a virgin—save that she bears the sins of the community.”

“Beast!” cried Théroigne. Then she went on sarcastically—“To belong to us! Oh yes! but it is likely, is it not? She who communes with the Blessed Virgin like a dear familiar.”

“It is so,” said St Denys. “That is her reputation.”

He was himself, for all his Jean-Jacques Pyrrhonism, an evident subscriber to a local superstition.

“Now,” said the perplexed Englishman, “I perceive that to be oneself is to invite resentment.”

“Not to give or take offence,” said Théroigne, with fine impartiality.

“Both of which have been done, mademoiselle. So, let us cry quits. And what would Mademoiselle Legrand make of all this?”

“How can I tell? She is the saint of dear conceits. She has the inward eye for things invisible to us. ‘Where do the threads of rain disappear to, Théroigne?’ says she. ‘Oh, mon Dieu, Nicette! Am I a Cagliostro?’ ‘I think,’ she says, ‘they are pulled into the earth by goblins working at great looms of water. Each thread draws like spun glass from the crucible of the clouds, and so underfoot is woven the network of springs and channels.’ Ciel! the quaint sweet child! Whither come her fancies? They are there in the morning like drops of dew.”

St Denys broke in with a rippling snatch of song:—

“‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,

Qui ce matin avoit desclose

Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,

A point perdu, ceste vesprée,

Les plis de sa robe pourprée,

Et son teint au vostre pareil.’”

He stopped.

“Sing on, my heart,” whispered Théroigne.

“Monsieur the Englishman does not approve my music.”

“Monsieur!” began the girl, in great scorn; but, to stay her, St Denys lifted up his voice a second time:—

“When Clœlia proved obdurate

To Phædon’s fond advances,

Repaid with scorn his woful state,

With flout his utterances,

‘Forego,’ he cried, ‘this acrid strain,

From such sweet lips a schism,

And dumbly quit me of my pain

By posy symbolism!

‘For hope, a white rose; for despair,

A red, pluck to thy bosom!’—

He turned; then looked—the wilful fair

Had donned a crimson blossom.

But, so it chanced, within the cup

A cupid, honey-tipsy,

In rage at being woken up,

Thrust out and stung the gipsy.

Then, all compunction for his deed,

For cap to the disaster,

Rubbed Phædon’s lips with honey-mead,

To serve the wound for plaster.”

“Is it pretty or not, monsieur?” asked Théroigne mockingly, advancing her foot and giving Ned a little peck in the back with it.

“It suits the occasion, mademoiselle, and, no doubt, the company.”

St Denys laughed out.

“Hear the grudging ascetic!” he cried. “It is martial music that shall fire this temperate blood! Ho, Boppard, mon petit chiffon! give him a taste of thy quality.”

“He will laugh at me, Basile.”

Nevertheless, the sizar got upon his legs. It brought him three feet nearer the stars. His voice was a protesting little organ; but the spirit that inspired it was many degrees above proof.

He sang:—

“Decorous ways,

Though Mammon praise

With self-protective art—

We’ve learnt through ruth,

The damnèd truth,

Why he affects the part.

Courage, then! Courage, my children!

Virtue is all gammon,

Imposed on us by Mammon,

Not to spoil the fashion.

Giving him monopoly—hatefully, improperly—

Of the sweets of passion.

—Monsieur, I will not be laughed at.”

“A thousand pardons,” said Ned. “I thought from your expression you were going to be sick. But, never mind. Go on!”

“I will go on or not as I please. I protest, at least, I can crow as well as monsieur.”

“Like a bantam cock on a dunghill, little Boppard. You hail the awaking of the proletariat. And are the verses your own?”

“I will not tell you. I will not tell you anything. I have never been so insulted.”

He seemed to sob, plumped down, and drank off a horn of wine in resounding gulps. The two rustics rolled to their feet and began to fling an uncouth dance together. They had canvassed the bottle freely, and were grown very true to themselves. They spun, they hooted, their moonlit shadows writhed on the ground like wounded snakes. Wilder and more abandoned waxed their congyrations, till at length one flung the other upon the bank at the very feet of Théroigne.

Now this fellow, potulent and pot-valiant, and taking his cue from sobriety, scrambled to his knees, threw himself upon the girl, and crying, “No hurt to my neighbour!” endeavoured to salute her after an example set him.

His reception was something more than damning. Théroigne, with a cry of rage, met the impact tooth and nail, and following on the rebound, became in her turn the furious aggressor. A devil possessed her fierce mouth and vigorous young arms. Her victim, wailing with terror, tried to protect his face, from which the blood ran in rivulets. For a moment or two she had everything to herself. The others stood paralysed about her where they had got to their feet. Then St Denys seized and struggled to draw her away. Even at that she resisted, worrying her prey and gabbling like a thing demented.

“Leave the brute his life!” cried M. le Président. “It is not he, after all, that is most to blame. Do you hear, Théroigne? I will twist your arm out of its socket, but you shall come!”

She uttered a shriek of physical pain, and, releasing her hold, stood panting. On the grass the wretched creature nursed his wounds, and sobbed and wriggled. His comrade, sobered beyond belief, dumbly glowered in the background.

Ned took off his hat in a shameless manner of politeness.

“These fraternal orgies,” said he, “are a little difficult of digestion to a stomach prescriptive. On the whole, I think, I prefer the despotism of savoir-vivre. With monsieur’s permission I will e’en back to Méricourt.”

“We must bear in mind that he is an Englishman,” said the sizar. “His traditions are not of the licence of good-fellowship.”

CHAPTER VIII.

It was characteristic enough of M. de St Denys to bear his guest no grudge for the fiasco, chiefly brought about, it must be admitted, by that guest’s malfeasance. With no man was the evil of the day more sufficient to itself; and he would be the last to insist upon that discipline of conscience that burdens each successive dawn with a new heritage of regrets. Moreover, the dog had the right humour, when he was restored to it, to properly appreciate Ned’s immediate comprehension of rule one and only of the Brotherhood; and on his way home with Théroigne, the comedy of the situation did gradually so slake the turmoil of his soul as that he must try to win over his companion to regard the matter from anything but a tragic standpoint. In this he was but partly successful; for woman has a cast in her humorous perceptives that deprives her of the sense of proportion.

“Is it so little a thing?” she said hotly. “But it was thy honour I fought to maintain. And no wonder, then, that men will take sport of that in us which they hold so cheap in themselves.”

However, his mended view of the affair impressed her so far as that, meeting with the Englishman by the village fountain on the morning following the orgy, she condescended to some distant notice of, and speech with, him. For, indeed, with her sex, to punish with silence is to wield a scourge of hand-stinging adders.

Ned, serenely undisturbed by, if not unconscious of, a certain toneless hauteur, greeted Mademoiselle Lambertine with his usual politeness. He was not, in truth, greatly interested in this fine animal. He recognised in her no original quality that set her apart from her fellows. Beauty of an astonishing order was hers indeed—beauty as much of promise as of fulfilment. The little remaining gaucherie of the hoyden dwelt with her only like a lingering brogue on the tongue of an expatriated Irishman. It was rough-and-tumble budding into a manner of caress. But beauty, save as it might contribute to the motif of a picture, was no fire to raise this young man’s temperature, and in Théroigne’s presence he seemed only to breathe an opulent atmosphere of commonplace. She was glowing passion interpreted through colour—siennas and leafy browns, and golds like the reflection of sunsets; a dryad, a pagan, a liberal-limbed tetonnière. If she were ever to find herself a soul, he could imagine her standing out richly as a Rembrandt portrait against torn dark backgrounds. But at present she seemed to lack the setting that occasion might procure her.

“Why do you toil this long way for water?” said he.

“For the reason that monsieur travels,” she answered coldly.

“Do I comprehend? I loiter up the channels of life seeking the spring-heads.”

“Whence the waters gush sweet and clear. Down in the dull homesteads one draws only stagnation from the ground.”

“Or from the barrels underground. Méricourt would do well, I think, to make this fountain its rendezvous.”

“Oh, monsieur! one need not drink much wine, I see, to yield oneself to insolence.”

“Well, you are angry over that kiss. But it was a jest, Théroigne. My heart was as cold as this basin.”

Did this improve matters?

“No doubt,” she said, flushing up, “you only lack the opportunity to be a Judas. And is it so they treat women in your barbarous island?”

“They treat them as they elect to be treated. We have a saying that as one makes one’s bed, so one must lie on it.”

“It is a noble creed!” cried the girl derisively. “It is the Pharisee speaking in English.”

“Nay, mademoiselle. It is to be vertebrate, that is all. To condone evil on the score of provocation to evil, to excuse it on the ground of constitutional tendency—that is the first infirmity of declining races.”

She looked at him mockingly, then fell into a little musing fit.

“Perhaps it is the right point of view,” she murmured; “but for us—mon Dieu! our eyes will get bloodshot and our vision obscured, and—yes, I would rather die of fire than of frost.”

She turned upon him, still pondering.

“It is strange. They say you are a great lord in your own country.”

“I am nephew to one, and his heir.”

“And is he like you?”

Ned permitted himself a snigger.

“He is very unlike me. He is the doyen, perhaps, of Lotharios.”

“An old man?”

“Yes, old.”

“And you travel like a commis voyageur—for experience, says the gross Van Roon! There must be something of courage in you Englishmen, after all, though you will run before us where you are fewer than ten to one.”

Ned changed the subject.

“Why were you so hurt last night by my reference to Nicette?”

“She is a saint.”

“How do you know?”

“How does a blind man know when some one sits at an open window by which he passes? He feels the presence—that is all.”

“That is all, then?”

“No; but this—Nicette cried lustily till the waters of baptism redeemed her, and thereafter never again: so early was the devil expelled from that sweet shrine.”

“And the little brother—is he a saint too?”

Théroigne laughed contemptuously.

“Baptiste? Oh, to be sure! the little unregenerate! He is the devil’s imp rather.”

“They are orphans?”

“Since three years. The girl mothers him, the graceless rogue.”

“I wronged her in ignorance, you see. That club of good-fellowship—it was all so concordant, so much in harmony with its own laws of frolic give-and-take. Why should a very saint be superior to so genial a fraternity?”

“We are a fraternity, as monsieur says, extending the hand of brotherhood to——”

She broke off, uttering a sharp exclamation as of terror or disgust, and shrunk back against the well rim. A figure had come into view—by way of the meadow path, up which Nicette had borne her load of fodder—and had paused over against the fountain, where it stood obsequiously bowing and gesticulating. It was that of a tall, large-boned man, fair-haired, apple-faced, with a mild, deprecating expression in its big blue eyes. Its head was crowned with a greasy cloth cap, shaped like the half of a tomato; its shirt, of undesirable fustian, was strangely decorated over the left breast with a yellow badge cut into something the shape of a duck’s foot; its full small-clothes—that came pretty high to the waist and were braced over the shoulders with leather bands, yoked to others running horizontally across chest and back—seemed in their every stereotyped crease the worn expression of humility.

“What is it, my friend?” said Ned.

Théroigne put a hand on his arm.

“Do not speak to him, save to bid him return whither he came. God in heaven! I can see the grass withering under his feet! Monsieur, monsieur” (for Ned was walking towards the man), “it is one of the accursed race!”

The creature fawned like a Celestial as the young man approached.

“Monseigneur, for the love of God, a drink of water!” said he.

His dry, thick lips seemed to grate on the words.

“Why not?” said Ned. “You have only to help yourself.”

“Let him dare!” shrieked Théroigne. “Monsieur, do you hear! it is a Cagot, a Cagot, I say!”

The man looked up, with a despairing forlorn gesture, and drooped again like one to whom long experience had taught the hopelessness of self-vindication.

“Is that so?” asked Ned.

“Alas! monseigneur, it is so.”

“What do you do it for, then; and what the deuce is it? Here—have you a cup or vessel of your own?”

With a hurried manner, compound of supplication and triumph, the creature, fumbling in its shirt, brought forth an iron mug. Ned received and carried it to the well. Théroigne sprang from him.

“You are not to be warned? It will poison the blessed spring.”

“Nonsense,” said Ned; but recognising her real agitation and alarm, he offered her a compromise. He would carry the mug to a little distance, and there she, standing back from it, should drop in water from her pitcher. To this she consented, after some demur; and the Cagot had his drink.

“That makes a man of you,” said Ned, watching the poor fellow take all down in reviving gulps.

The other shrugged his shoulders despondingly.

“Monseigneur, I can never be that. It is forbidden to us to stand apart from the beasts. We had hoped in these days of——” he broke off, shook his head, and only repeated, “I can never be that, monseigneur.”

“Then I would not come among men to be so treated.”

“Nor should I, but that my one pig had strayed and I dared to seek it. Monseigneur—if monseigneur would soil his tongue with the word—has he——”

“I have seen no pig. No doubt it will be returned to you, if found.”

“Returned! Hélas! but a poor return, indeed.”

“It will not be?”

“The lights, the entrails—a little of the coarser meat, perhaps.”

“How is that, then?”

“Where we squat, monseigneur, thither come the authorised of the pure blood. ‘These are your bounds,’ say they; and they signify, arbitrarily, any limit that occurs. Woe, then, to the Cagot sheep or pig that strays without the visionary cordon! Whoever finds it may kill, reserving to himself the good, and returning to the unhappy owner the inferior parts only of the meat.”

“It is of a piece with all I see, here more than elsewhere—the grossest inconsistency where the senses seek gratification. Truly, I think, the emancipation of the race is to be from self-denial.”

He gave the man a piece of money—rather peremptorily checking the fulsome benedictions his act called forth—and saw him slink off the way he had come. For all its show of servility, there had appeared something indescribably noble in the poor creature’s rendering of an ignoble part. It was as if, on the stage of life, he were willing to sacrifice his individuality to the success of the piece. Not all scapegoats could so triumph physically through long traditions and experiences of suffering. These Cagots—they might have come from the loins of the wandering Jew.

He walked back to Théroigne, his heart even a little less than before inclined to her. She held away from him somewhat, as if he were contaminated.

“A fraternity, extending the hand of brotherhood,” he said—repeating some words of hers uttered before the Cagot had intervened—“to whom was mademoiselle about to say? to all, without exception?”

She looked at him, half fearful, half defiant.

“This man is of the accursed race,” she cried low.

“A Jew?”

“A Cagot.”

“And what is that?”

“You do not know? They come from France, where she sits with her feet in the mountains—outcasts, pariahs, with blood so hot that an apple will wrinkle in their hands as if it had been roasted.”

“I should have fancied that a recommendation to you of Méricourt.”

“Ah, grace of God! With them it is nothing but the emitting of a pestilent miasma. These people are brutes. They would even have tails, but that their mothers are cunning to bite them off when they are newly born.”

Ned went into a fit of laughter.

“It is true, monsieur.”

“It is at least easily proved. And they come from the south?”

“From the south and from the west. It is not often we see them here; but this new spirit that is in the air—mon Dieu!—it stirs in them, I suppose, with a hope of better times—of release from the restrictions imposed upon them for the safety of the community; and now they will sometimes wander far afield.”

“And what are these restrictions?”

“They are many—as to the isolation of their camps; as to their tenure of land or carrying of weapons; as to buying or selling food; as to their right to enter a church by the common door, to take the middle of the street, to touch a passer-by, to remain in any village of the pure after sundown. They must grow their own flesh, find their own springs, wear, each man, woman, and child the duck-foot badge, that they may be known and shunned. Indeed, I cannot tell a tithe of the laws that control them.”

“But for what reason are they set apart?”

“Little mother of God! how can I say? They are Cagots, they are accursed—that is all I know.”

Even as she spoke an angry brabble of voices came to them from the direction of the path by which the outcast had retreated; and in a moment the man himself reappeared, scuttling along in a stooping posture, and hauling by the ear his recovered pig, that squeaked passionately as it was urged forward. But now in his wake came a posse of louts—young chawbacons drawn from the fields—who pelted the poor wretch with clods of clay, and were for baiting him, it seemed, in a crueller manner.

Ned ran down and placed himself between victim and pursuers. The former, bruised and breathless, pattered out a hurried fire of explanation and entreaty.

The young gentleman faced the little mob—half-a-dozen or so—that had closed upon itself—compact claypolism.

“What do you want with this man?” he said.

His demand evoked a clamour of vituperation.

“What is that to you? It is the law! The mongrel is accursed—l’âme damnée—le tison d’enfer! Down with this insolent the stranger! he is a Cagot himself!”

Ned waited calmly for the tumult to subside.

“I ask you what this man has done?” said he.

“Cannot you tell the heretic by his smell? Oh-a-eh! here is a fine Catholic nose! Out of our way—the pig is forfeit!”

They hissed and yelped, and raised a shrill chorus of “baas” at the unfortunate. Curiously, he seemed to feel this last form of insult more acutely than any. Suddenly a clod of earth, aimed presumably at the poor creature, hurtled through the air and struck Ned’s shoulder in passing. It might have rebounded on the assailant, so immediate was the retribution that followed. The erst-calm paladin went for the vermin like a terrier, and like a terrier repaid his own punishment with interest.

The great chuff howled and blubbered and wriggled under the blows that rained upon him. Presently Ned, exhausted, swung his victim in a hysteric heap upon the ground, and stood to breathe himself. Then it was that the reserve, withdrawn in affright, seeing his momentary fatigue, gathered heart of numbers, and came down upon him in phalanx. He received them, nothing dismayed, and accounted for the first with a “give-upon-the-nose,” and for another with a “poached eye.” He was patently tired, however—enervated by the heat of the day—and his adversaries, recognising this, were encouraging one another to annihilate him, when all in a moment a volume of water slapped into their faces and quenched their ardour for ever.

A new champion had come upon the field, and that was no other than Mademoiselle Théroigne with her pitcher. She laughed volubly, on a menacing note, in the washed and streaming countenances.

“Beasts, pigs, cowards!” she shrilled. “For one Englishman—name of God!—for one trumpery Englishman to lay you out flat as linen on a bleaching-green! Get back—hide yourselves in your furrows, or play bully to the little rabbits in the field corners! Not to the bucks—that were too bold.”

She made as if to follow up the water with the vessel. Ned cried out: “You will break the earthenware sooner than their heads, mademoiselle!” in agony lest she should blaze beyond self-extinguishment, as on the previous evening; but she only stiffened her claws like a cat and prepared to spring. It was enough. The swamped and demoralised crew gathered up its wreckage and fled incontinent, and was in a moment out of sight round the curve.

Ned took off his hat to his tutelary divinity—this Athena to his Achilles.

“Your weapons were better than mine,” he said; “but your task was harder: for you had to fight against prejudice as well.”

The Cagot, still holding his pig by the ear, crept up to the young man and caught and ravenously kissed his hand. Then he looked wistfully at a brown-haired goddess.

“Oh, mon Dieu, no!” said Théroigne. “You must not touch me or come near me.”

She turned and addressed Ned, almost with an entreating sound in her voice:—

“You have courage of every sort, monsieur. But for me—yes, it is as you say. My heart warms to such valour; but I cannot forget in a moment these long traditions—this fear and this abhorrence. Do not let him approach me.”

She stepped back, as if to escape a very radiated influence. But she spoke softly to the Englishman, and with the manner of one who in giving help has wrought a little conscious bond of sympathy.

“Bid the man go hence by the Liége road,” she said. “So will he evade his persecutors. But a few toises out he can enter the woods and work round to his lair.”

“I will see him on his way, mademoiselle.”

He bade her good morning quite respectfully, and drove the Cagot before him from the village. It was slow progress, for the recalcitrant pig must be humoured. The man looked back from time to time, his face full of the most human gratitude. A little way on he paused by an outlying cottage until his benefactor was come up with him. Then, smiling brightly, he stayed Ned with a significant gesture, and went on tiptoe to the door that stood open. A loaf lay on a table within. This the Cagot seized with a muttered word, and so came forth again, hugging his prize.

“What, the devil!” cried Ned.

He had seen a woman within the hut. She had shrunk, crying out, from the intruder, but had made no effort to defend her property.

“A thief!” exclaimed the Englishman.

“Nenni!” said the man in a deprecatory voice. “It is one of our poor little privileges. I appropriated the bread that monseigneur might see.”

“The deuce, you did!”

“We may take it—but, yes, we may enter and take, wherever we see it, a cut loaf turned upside-down, with the sliced part to the door. I will return it if monseigneur wills.”

“No,” said Ned. “This privilege is on a par with all the rest. Let the fool pay toll to his own inconsequence. Lead on, my friend.”

Very shortly they turned into a forest track, plunging amongst trees for a half mile or more. Here Ned pushed up to his humble wayfellow.

“Why are you accursed?” said he.

“God help us, monseigneur! I know not. Thus they hold and keep us. Wheresoever in our wanderings we alight, we must report our names and habitations to the bailli of the nearest jurisdiction, that no loophole may be left us to escape from ourselves; for it is forbidden to us to intermarry with the pure of blood, lest we thereby, merging into the community, lose our unhappy distinction.”

“But, whence come you, and what have you done to merit this—this——?”

“Monseigneur, we are accursed. It is not given to us to know more than that.”

Was there a faint note of stubbornness, a suggestion of some conscious secret withheld, in this abject reiteration of abasement? Ned was in doubt; but at least it seemed these strange people carried horror with them like a hidden plague-spot.

“Tell me,” said he, “why did you cower when the louts cried ‘Baa’ to you?”

The man looked up furtively.

“It is our ears,” he muttered. “They will call them sheep’s ears, monseigneur.”

“Certainly, it would appear, they are not designed for rings. That is a progressive evolution, my friend.”

The Cagot did not answer. A few steps farther brought them into a little dell traversed by a brook. Here, by the water-side, was stretched a single tent of tattered brown canvas.

“Alone!” said Ned, surprised.

“Alone, monseigneur, save for the woman and the little bien fils de son père. In these days the tribes are much broken up. They wander piecemeal. There are rumours abroad—hopes, prospects, as if it were prelude to the advent of a Messiah. I think, perhaps, I have seen to-day a harbinger—an angel bearing tidings.”

He gazed at the young man with large solemn eyes. His face was full of a wistful patience—not brutalised, but mild and intelligent.

“Oh, truly, I am the devil of an angel!” said Ned; and he waved his hand and turned.

“Monseigneur, I will never forget,” said the Cagot.

CHAPTER IX.

In Nicette’s little lodge, doors and windows stood all open. Even then the languid air that entered fell fainting almost on the threshold. The heat of many preceding days seemed accumulated in vast bales of clouds piled up from the horizon. It scintillated, livid and coppery, through its enormous envelopes, eating its way forth with menace of a flood of fire.

Obviously the dairy was the nearest approach to a temperate zone, and thither Ned bent his steps, carrying his paint-box and canvas. He found the girl there, as he had expected. She was seated knitting near the flung casement, wherethrough came a hot scent of geranium flowers. In the blinding garden without silence panted like a drouthy dog. Only the horn, high on its perch, found breath to bemoan itself, gathering up the folds of muteness with an attenuated thread of complaint.

Mademoiselle Legrand looked cool and fragrant, for all the house was an oven; but a little bloom of damp was on her face, like dew on a rose. In a corner, standing with his hands behind his back and his front to the wall, Baptiste, the sad-eyed child, did penance for some transgression, it would appear.

“I must not lose my Madonna for a misunderstanding,” said Ned.

Nicette rose to her feet, flushing vividly to her brow. The weary white face of the boy was turned in astonishment to the intruder.

“Monsieur,” said the portière, in a little agitated voice, “you must not ask me. For one you hold so cheap to represent the stainless mother! It cannot be, monsieur.”

Ned deposited his paraphernalia on a chair, went up to his whilom model, and took her hands in his with gentle force.

“Nicette,” he murmured, so that the child should not hear him, “I refuse, you know, to accept this responsibility. It is your own consciousness of justification, or otherwise, that is in question. The mother had a human as well as a divine side. I will use you for the first.”

“Use me!” she whispered. “Monsieur——”

She drooped her head—tried to withdraw her hands. Her lips faltered desperately on the word.

“Tell me the truth, little Nicette. May not a saint love guava jelly? It is a fruit of the sweet earth—perhaps the very manna of the Israelites.”

He held her young soft wrists in hostage for an answer—much concerned for an exchange of confidence. The girl, making a lac d’amour of her fingers, suddenly came to her decision.

“I am very wicked,” she said in a small voice, between eagerness and tears; “I am not a saint at all. Monsieur may do with me as he will.”

Now surely this young man had the fairy Temperance to his godmother when he was christened. His point gained, he disposed his model with a very pretty eye to business, and was soon at work.

“Nicette,” said he, “how has this youthful whipper-snapper misconducted himself?”

“Baptiste, monsieur? He was dainty with his food; and—the day was hot, and perhaps I was ever so little cross.”

She accepted the understanding, it will be seen—thrilled perhaps over the secret ecstasy implied in this prospect of a lay confessor.

“Well, ma chérie,” said Ned, “you may relax discipline now, may you not? It worries me to have this inconversable ape criticising me from his corner.”

“Baptiste,” said Nicette, “you may go and play—in the shadow, Baptiste.”

The child went out dully, with a lifeless step. It would seem he recognised no enticing novelty in the form of words.

“Now we will have a comfortable coze,” said Ned.

“How, monsieur?”

“That means we will exchange confidences, girl.”

Nicette smiled.

“You do not love children, monsieur?” she asked.

“Truly, I think not. They know, I fancy, so much more than they will tell. I feel nervous in their company, as if they might blackmail me if they would. It is no use to be conscious of my own innocence. Vague terrors assail me that they may be in possession of dark secrets that I have forgotten. For them, they never forget.”

“It is so, indeed, with little doubt.”

“Is it not? They inherit the ages, one must admit. They are like eggs, full of the concentrated meat of wisdom; and as such it is right to sit upon them. It is a self-protective instinct thus to hurry their development, for so their abnormal precocity distributes itself over an ever-increasing area and weakens in its acuteness.”

“And they have cunning, monsieur.”

“Without doubt—the cunning to evoke and trade upon sympathy with sufferings that they pretend to, but are physically incapable of feeling.”

The girl looked up, her eyes expressive of some strangeness of emotion.

“Are they not able to feel, then, monsieur?”

“Not as we do, Nicette. Their nervous organism has not yet come to tyrannise over the spiritual in them. Turn thy head as before, babouine. The light falls crooked on thy mouth. No; I wish never to be burdened with a child, either my own or another’s.”

A low boom of thunder rolled up the sky. Nicette started and drove her chair back a little distance from the window.

“That is vexatious of you, you pullet. Are you afraid of thunder?”

“Oh yes—dear mother!—when it is close.”

“But that is yet far away.”

“It will advance—it is the diligence of the skies bringing inhuman company. Mon Dieu! when one hears the driver crack his whip, and the horses plunge forward, and there follows the rumbling of the wheels!”

“Talk on. I love to hear thee. But take courage first to resume thy pose.”

“Monsieur, I am frightened.”

“What, with me for thy Quixote! I have conquered windmills before now. There—that is to be a good child. Do you find it hard to understand my chatter?”

“Monsieur, on the contrary, is an adept at our language.”

“This is nothing to how I speak it when I have a cold. Still, do you know, I have never quite got over the feeling that it is very clever of a Frenchman to talk French. ‘And so it is,’ Théroigne would say, but you will not. Nicette, have you ever heard speak of the Club of Nature’s Gentry? What a question, is it not? But I like to hear you laugh like little bells.”

“Monsieur, it is a very dull club.”

“Which is the reason you are not a member?”

“A member! oh, mon Dieu! that is not my notion of enjoyment.”

“Great heaven! Here is an astonishing shift of the point of view.”

“How, monsieur?”

“Never mind. So, freedom of speech is not to your fancy?”

“It is not freedom, but an excuse for silly licence. Those clowns and the grotesque small Boppard—it is to discuss wine, not politics, that they assemble. A full mug is the only challenge they invite, and the larger the measure, the greater that of their courage. But they talk so much into empty pots that their voices sound very big to them.”

“Not Boppard, mademoiselle. He at least hath this justification—that he is a poet.”

“Has monsieur discovered it, then? Monsieur is cleverer than all Méricourt. We must make monsieur the student a crown of vine leaves.”

“Nicette, dost thou think I will suffer a pullet to cackle at me? What, then, if not a poet?”

“But a maker of charades impossible to interpret, by monsieur’s permission.”

“My permission, you jade! Here is the measure of your courage, I think. And have you no fear that I shall make M. de St Denys acquainted with your opinion of his club?”

“None, monsieur.”

The thunder rolled again. The girl, starting and clasping her hands, cried—

“Monsieur, let me come from the window! Oh, monsieur, let me, and I will light a blest candle!”

“A little longer—just a little longer. I foresee a darkness presently, and then, lest my Madonna be blotted from my sight, the candle shall burn.”

The girl looked out fearfully at the advancing van of the storm. It was still brilliant sunshine in the garden, but with an effect as if the outposts of noon were falling back upon their centre, already half-demoralised in prospect of an overwhelming charge. The wind, too, beginning to move like that that precedes an avalanche, was scouting through the shrubberies with a distant noise of innumerable tramping feet; and the fitful moaning of the horn rose to a prolonged scream, that drew upon the heart with a point of indescribable anguish.

“Why, however,” said Ned, “have you no apprehension that I shall tell tales to M. de St Denys?”

“I said I had no fear, monsieur.”

“Would he not resent this so unflattering opinion of his satellites?”

“What is his own of them, does monsieur think?—that a tipsy boor assists the cause of freedom? Monsieur, my master is not blind, save perhaps in thinking others so. Saint Sacrement! the sun has gone out! It was as if a wave of cloud extinguished it.”

“Never mind that. In thinking others blind to what, girl?”

“I must not say—indeed, I must not say.”

“Is this to be a saint—to damn with innuendo? Fie, then, Nicette!”

“Monsieur, do not be angry. Oh, I will tell you whatever you will. This club then, it is a pretext, one cannot but assume—a veil to hide perilous sentiments, not of politics, but of——”

“But of what?”

The girl hung her head. The increasing gloom without lent its shadow to her face.

“Monsieur has no mercy,” she whispered.

“But of what, Nicette? Tell me.”

“Monsieur—of intrigue.”

As if the very word completed an electric circuit and discharged the battery, a flash answered it, followed almost immediately by a splintering shock of thunder. The girl uttered a shriek, started to her feet, and ran to the middle of the room, holding her hands to her eyes.

“I am blind!” she wailed—“oh, I am blind!”

Ned hurried to her—gripped her shoulder.

“Nonsense!” he cried; “it will pass in a moment. Let me look.”

He could hardly hear his own voice. The lightning might have been a bursting shell that had rent a dam. The thunder of the rain out-roared that of the clouds—overbore the struggling wind and pinned it to the earth—smote upon the roof in tearing volleys, and made of all the atmospheric envelope a crashing loom of water.

“Nicette!” cried the young man, frightened to see the girl yet hide her face from him. He was conscious of something crouching at her feet, and, looking down, saw that terror had driven Baptiste, the little boy, to the refuge of their company.

In his panic, Ned impulsively seized the maid into his arms.

“You are not hurt!” he implored. “I kept you by the window. My God! if you should be injured through my fault!”

She was not at least so stunned but that his impassioned self-reproach could inform her cheeks with a rose of fire. The stain of it, could he have seen, soaked to the very white nape of her neck.

“Hold me,” she whimpered. “Don’t let me go, or I shall die!”

She strained to him, patently and without any thought of dissimulation, palpitating with terror as the rain roared and the frequent detonations shook the house. In the first of his apprehension he thought of nothing compromising in the situation—of nothing but his own concern and the girl’s pitiful state.

Presently, in a lull, he heard her exclaiming—

“Mother of God! if I were to go blind!”

“Don’t suggest such a thing!” he cried in anguish.

“Would you be sorry—even for poor Nicette, monsieur?”

“Sorry, child! Look up, in God’s name!”

She raised her face. Her lids flickered and opened.

“Can you see?” he asked, distraught and eager.

“I—something—a little,” murmured the unconscionable gipsy. “I can see monsieur’s face—far or near—which is it?”

She put up a timid hand. Her fingers fluttered like a moth against his temple.

“I don’t think I am blind, monsieur. My eyes——”

In his jubilation he took her head between his palms, and, with a boyish laugh, kissed each of the blue flowers—to make them open, he said.

“No, I am not blind,” said she.

CHAPTER X.

Mr Murk, recalling, on the morning after the storm, certain ultra-fervid expressions of remorse into which, during it, he had been betrayed, and realising, possibly, how of a saint and a sinner the latter had proved the blinder, turned the search-light of his recovered vision inwards, and examined his conscience like the most ruthlessly introspective Catholic. He worked out the sum of argument very coolly and carefully; and the result, condensed from many germinant postulates, showed itself arithmetically inevitable.

“If I intrigue, I sacrifice my independence, my free outlook, my peace of mind, my position in relation to my art—comprehensively, my principles.

“Enfin—on the other hand, I gain a very stomachy little white powder in a spoonful of jam.

“Taking one from four, therefore, I find myself debited with three charges that it is ridiculous to incur. Love, in short, is a creditor I have no desire to be called upon to compound with. I will cut my visit a little finer than I had intended, and go on to Paris at once. Perhaps—for I have not finished my Madonna, and the model curiously interests me—I will return to Méricourt by-and-by, when this shadow of a romance has drifted away with the cloud that threw it.”

Thus far only he temporised with his inclinations. For the rest, it appeared, he likened that which most men feel as a flame to an amorphous blot of darkness travelling across his sunlight. The point of view of the girl did not enter into his calculations. Possibly—most probably, indeed—he could not conceive himself inspiring a devouring passion. He knew innately, he thought, his limits—the length of his tether, moral, intellectual, and physical—and had never the least wish to affect, for the sake of self-glorification, a condition of mind or body that he was unable to recognise as his own. This led him to that serene appreciation of his personal capabilities that passes, in the eye of the world, for insufferable conceit. For to boast of knowing oneself is to assume a social importance on the strength of an indifferent introduction. Public opinion will never take one at one’s own valuation. It must be educated up to the point of one’s highest achievement. To say out, “I know I can do this thing,” is to deprive it (public opinion) of the right to exercise and justify itself.

Ned, however, would not over-estimate, nor would he (even nominally) cheapen himself as a bid to any man’s favour; and that, no doubt, would be sound equity in the impossible absence of inherent prejudice. But a judgment—in any world but a world of definite aurelian transitions—that holds itself infallible may err in the face of fifty precedents; and Ned’s, founded in this instance upon the self-precedent of sobriety, took no account of emotions that were completely foreign to his nature. In short, very honestly repudiating for himself any power of attraction, he failed to see that this very artlessness of repudiation was per se an attractive quality.

Now he put his resolution into force without compromise, and informed his host, during the second déjeuner, that he was on the prick of departure.

St Denys expressed no surprise, no concern, very little interest.

“Most certainly,” said he, “I applaud your attitude towards life. It exhibits what one may call an admirable cold cleanness. Probably, at this point, you are putting to your visit that period that most strictly conforms to the rules of moral punctuation. I have too complete a belief in the rectitude of your judgment to question that of your withdrawing yourself from Méricourt without superfluous ceremony. I envy you, indeed, your power of applying, without offence, to the oblique turns of circumstance that simple directness which is your very engaging characteristic. We, less fortunately endowed by nature, are for ever seeking those short cuts to a goal that delay us unconscionably, in everything but theory. You, monsieur, recognise instinctively that to fly straight for your mark is to reach your destination by the nearest route.”

“I am conscious of no particular coldness in my manner of regard,” said Ned good-humouredly. (He did not resent the implied sarcasm, nor did he allow it to affect his point of view. If he had given offence, it was simply by his literal construction of views he had been invited to share, and he could not admit the right of the dispenser of such views to put any arbitrary limit to another’s application of them.) “Unless, indeed,” he went on, “it argues a constitutional sang-froid to have decided, at the thinking outset of life, against the despotism of passion, and for a republic of senses, material, ethical, and intellectual.”

“Assuredly not. But even a republic must have a president.”

“I elect my heart, monsieur, to the honour, and give it a casting vote. There, at least, is a little core of fire in all this frost.”

“Dieu du ciel! thou shouldst command a future, if thou wouldst, in this Paris to which thou journeyest. It is such as thou that have their way and keep it; while we poor hot-headed impressionables take wrong turnings, and fetch up, struggling and sweating and trampling our friends under, in villainous blind alleys. To discipline your senses and keep your heart! God of heaven! that is a state to be envied of angels, who sometimes fall—even they.”

“I understand you to speak ironically.”

“I protest I do not, monsieur. I covet your power of unswerving fidelity to truth. What would it not be worth to me in the hot days that are coming! I shall go under—I shall go under, I feel it and know it—because I must fight with the crooked creese of dissimulation if a straighter weapon fails me.”

He spoke obviously with considerable emotion—with a sincerity, moreover, that, rather than the other, appealed to the Englishman.

“It appears, monsieur,” said the latter, “that you predict a very serious disruption of the social order.”

“It appears, indeed. There is a caldron always kept seething in that unlovely kitchen of the Isle de France—a stock-pot that for long ages has boiled down the blood and bones of the people into the thick soup affected of the beau monde. But, at last, other things go to feed it—this reeking kettle. Monseigneur in his fine palace will pull a face over the flavour; yet he must sup of it or starve. There makes itself recognised something metallic to the taste, perhaps; as if the latest victims had been dropped in with their knives and pistols unremoved from their pockets. Maybe, also, there precipitates itself a thick sediment of coins, to which I may claim to have contributed—as also, possibly, I have added my mite to the combustible material—the inflammatory pages with which a waking generation of agitators fuels this kitchen fire. Monsieur may live to see the pot boil.”

“May live to see it boil over, even, and scald the toes of the cooks. But I do not believe in this pass, monsieur, and regret only that you should, from whatever motives, seek to give a sinister turn to reforms that could be more effectively compassed by a bloodless revolution.”

“Monsieur, were a senate of Edward Murks an electoral possibility, I would hope to accomplish the Millennium while the world slept.”

Ned looked at his host with some instinct of repulsion. So here, in the guise of a scatterling aristocrat, was one of those seedling firebrands that were beginning to sprout all over the soil of Europe like the little bickering flames that patch the high slopes of Vesuvius: advocates holding briefs in the indictment of society; licentious pamphleteers; unscrupulous journalistic hacks seizing their opportunity in the fashion for heterodox—subordinate contributors, some of them, to the contumacious Encyclopedia; irresponsible agents, all, to a force they could not measure or justify to themselves by any scheme of after-reconstruction.

But what, in heaven’s name, induced this man to a mutinous attitude towards a social system of which, by reason of his position, he need take nothing but profit? His opportunities of selfish gratification would not be multiplied by the sacrifice of caste and fortune. He was not, Ned felt convinced, a reformer by conviction. Unless the itch for cheap notoriety was the tap-root of his character, what was to account for this astonishing paradox?

What, indeed? Yet a motiveless losel is no uncommon sight. To be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth is to be endowed with what it is obviously difficult to retain. It is to be awarded the prize before the race is run, and that is no encouragement to sound morality or healthy effort. Easily acquired is soon dissipated. What wonder, then, if Fortunatus, shedding wealth as naturally as he sheds his milk-teeth, looks to Nature for a renewal of all in kind.

“Well,” said St Denys, “you are going to Paris. It is the beacon-light about which the storm birds circle. If you seek experience, you will there gain it; if novelty—mon Dieu!—you will have the opportunity to see some strange puppets dance by-and-by.”

“And doubtless those who would hold the strings are in the clouds.”

“Not so, monsieur. These marionettes—they will move on a different principle, by trackers, like an organ. It may even be possible to make one or two skip, touching a note here in this quiet corner of Liége. But I do not know. When the time comes for the performance, this puppet-man himself may be in Paris.”

“You allude to M. de St Denys?”

“Do I? But, after all, he is very small beer.”

Nicette sang like a bee in a flower. Her cot was the veritable summer-house to a garden-village—luxuriously cool as an evening-primrose blossom with a ladybird and a crystal of dew in the heart of it. She was always self-contained, always tranquil, always fragrant. Her reputation, like that of some other saints, was founded, perhaps, upon her constitutional insensibility to small irritations. Cause and effect in her were temperament and digestion—read either way—influencing one another serenely. That sensitiveness of the moral cuticle that, with the most of us, finds intentional aggravations in habits and opinions that are not ours, she would appear to be innocent of. She never complained of nail-points in her shoes or crumbs in her bed; and that was to be bird of rare enough feather to merit distinction. Indifference to pain is considered none the less worshipful because it proceeds from insusceptibility to it: the name of sanctity may attach itself to the most self-enjoying impassibility. The moral is objective; for how many dyspeptics—sufferers—are there, turning an habitual brave face to their colourless world, who would be other than damned incontinent by a whole posse of devil’s-advocates were a claim advanced to dub them so much as Blessed?

This refreshing maid, however, was not of cloisteral aloofness all compact. She had a wit for merry days; and, no doubt, a calid spot in her heart that needed only to be blown upon by sympathetic lips to raise a heat in her that should make an intolerable burden of the very veil of modesty. For such Heloïses an Abelard is generally on the road.

Now she was busy in her sequestered cot, touching, rather than putting, things into order. She had a gift for cleanliness. Her hands winnowed the dust like the fluttering wings of butterflies. Baptiste, ostensibly occupied with his catechism-book, watched her from his corner, unwinking like a squatting toad.

He saw her pause once, with her fingers stroking the back of the chair on which the stranger artist had sat yesterday. A smile was on her lips. Then she moved into the little closet that was her sleeping-place and made her bed, patting the sheets caressingly, as if some child of her fancy lay underneath.

“She will punish me if she sees me looking at her now,” thought the sad, sharp child; and he bent over his task.

“Tiens! little monkey! Here is a biscotin for thee,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine at the door.

The child caught and began to devour the cake ravenously.

“That will give thee a better relish for the food of the soul,” said Théroigne.

She came in languorous and flushed, fanning herself with a spray of large-flowered syringa. The heavy scent of it floated over the room, penetrating to Nicette in her retreat.

“Oh, the sweet orange-blossom!” cried the portière. “Is it a bride to visit me?”

Théroigne stopped the action of her hand. Her teeth bit upon her under lip.

“Orange-blossom!” she exclaimed.

She passed into the closet; dropped listlessly upon a joint stool.

“That is not for me—not yet,” she said. “It is only syringa. See, little minette.”

“I see, Théroigne.”

“Why do thine eyes appear to rebuke me, thou little cold woman? Yet, I think, I come to visit thee for coolness’ sake: I am so hot and dull. This lodge, it is like a woodland chapel; and here where we sit is the confessional.”

“And art thou come into it to confess?”

“To thee? to la sainte Nicette! I should expect her to shrink and close, like a sensitive leaf, to my mere approach. Tell me—What is the utmost wickedness thou hast confided to thy pillow here? I wager my littlest peccadillo would overcrow it.”

“It is for me to confess, then, it seems?”

“Only thine own sweetness, child. This bed of thine—it is planted in a ‘Garden of the Soul.’ And what grows in it, little saint?—white lilies, gentle pansies, stainless ladysmocks? Not Love-lies-bleeding, I’ll warrant.”

“Fie, Théroigne! what nonsense thou talkest.”

“Do I? My head is light and my heart heavy. Mortality weighs upon me this morning—oh, Nicette, it weighs—it weighs!”

“Hast thou done wrong?”

“Much; and every day of my life.”

“Confess to me, and I will give thee absolution.”

“Absolution! to a woman from a woman! Never, I think; or at least saddled with such a penance as would take all savour from the grace. Well, as thou hast made thy bed——”

“So must I lie on it.”

“What! thou know’st the stranger’s motto? Little holy mother, but it is true; and I have made my bed, Nicette; and it is not a bed of flowers at all. Aïe! how the world swarms with pitfalls! Yet, at least, there is to-day an evil the less in Méricourt.”

“What evil?”

“The Englishman.”

“He is gone?”

“He is gone. I met him yesternoon on the Liége road. He had a staff in his hand and a knapsack on his shoulders.”

Nicette was at the tiny casement, delicately coaxing its curtains into folds that pleased her. She was too fastidious with her task to speak for a moment.

“Well,” she said at length, “it is an evil, I suppose, that only withdraws itself for a day or two?”

“Better than that, little saint. He goes all the way to Paris. ‘But Mademoiselle Théroigne,’ says he, ‘I leave my heart behind me. I will come back to reclaim it in the spring. In the meantime, do me the favour to keep it on ice; for I think Méricourt is very near the tropics.’ Bah! is he not an imbecile? We are well quit of him.”

“In the spring!”

Nicette came round with a face like hard ivory.

“Théroigne—why did he speak to you like that? It is not wise or good of you to court so insolent a familiarity.”

“I did not court it, and I am not wise or good.”

Mademoiselle Lambertine looked startled and displeased.

“What has come to thee, Nicette? It is not like thee to rebuke poor sinners save by thy better example.”

“And that is a negative virtue, is it not? Now were time, perhaps, that you give me the pretext, to end a struggle that my heart has long maintained with my conscience.”

Théroigne rose, breathing a little quickly, her bent forefinger to her lips.

“Nicette!” she cried faintly.

“I must say it, Théroigne. This club—this thin dust thrown into the eyes of Méricourt——”

The other went hurriedly to the door.

“I had better go,” she said; “I cannot listen and not cry. Not now, Nicette, not now! I have no strength—I think the Englishman has left a blight upon the place!”

Her footsteps retreated down the garden path—died away. Nicette, listening, with a line sprung between her eyes, came swiftly from her bedroom. Close by the door of it—crept from his stool—Baptiste, his mouth agape, had been eavesdropping, it seemed. She seized him with a raging clinch of her fingers.

“Little detestable coward!” she cried, in a suppressed voice—“little sneak mouchard, to spy like a woman! How have I deserved to be for ever burdened with this millstone?”

“You hurt me!” whimpered the child, struggling to escape.

“Not so much as the black dogs will, when they come out of the well in the yard to carry you to the fire. Little beast, I have a mind to call them now.”

“They might take you instead. I will assure them you are wicked too—that I heard you say so to monsieur the Englishman.”

She shook him so that his heels knocked on the floor. For the moment she was beside herself.

“The Englishman!” she hissed—and choked. “Est-ce bien possible! Sang Dieu!—O, sang Dieu! and if it were not for thee—he hates children—he might be now——!”

She checked herself with a desperate effort. She tightened her grip. The boy screamed with pain.

“Be quiet!” she cried furiously. “If some one should hear thee!”

“I want them to. I want them all to come in, that I may tell how you pretended to be blind that monsieur might kiss you.”

She recognised in a moment that he was goaded at last to terrible revolt. She cried “Hush!” in a panic, and without avail. The child continued to shriek and to revile her—repeating himself hysterically in the lack of a sufficient vocabulary. Changing front, it was only after long and frantic effort that she could coax and bribe him into silence. And, when at length she had induced him to a reasonable mood, and could trust herself away from him, she went and threw herself upon her bed and, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, cried empty the fountains of her wrath and her terror.

CHAPTER XI.

Consistent in his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a little shop of semi-circular frontage that, standing like a river promontory at the north-west corner of the Rue Beautreillis—where that tributary ditch of humanity ran into and fed the muddy channel of the Rue St Antoine—seemed to have rounded from sharper outline in the age-long wash of traffic wheeling by its walls. From his window on the second floor the Englishman thus commanded a view of two streets, and, indeed, of three; for across the main thoroughfare the Rue Beautreillis, become now the Rue Royale, was continued until it discharged itself into a great house-enclosed place, as into a mighty reservoir of decorum built for the defecation of neighbouring vulgarities. Looking east, moreover, between the belfry towers of the convents of St Marie and La Croix, Ned’s vision might reach, without strain, the very twilight mass of the Bastille; so that, as he congratulated himself, his situation was such as—barring adventitious and unprofitable luxuries—a blood prince with any imagination might have envied him.

For thence, often watching, speculative, he would see the scene-shifters of the early Revolution—come out in front of the high, mute screen of the prison, that closed his vista eastwards as if it were a stage-curtain—busy as bees on the alighting-board of a hive. Thence he would mark, in real ignorance of the plot of the forthcoming piece, or cycle of pieces, the motley companies gathering for rehearsal—the barn-stormers; the heavy “leads;” the slighted tragedians foreseeing their opportunity for the fiftieth time; the inflated supers canvassing the favour of phantom houses with imagined gems of inspiration, with new lamps for old in the shape of misenlightened renderings of traditional rôles; he would mark the gas, so to speak, the artificial light that informed the garish scene with spurious vitality. But the prompter he could never as yet find in his place, nor could he gather the true import of the play to which, it must be presumed, all this pretentious gallimaufry was a prelude. Theorists, agitators, pamphleteers—the open, clamorous expression of that that had been suggested only to him during his hitherto wanderings—all these and all this were present to his eyes and his ears, passionlessly alert at their vantage-point on the second floor of the corner house in the Rue Beautreillis. Daily he sought to piece, from the struttings and the disconnected vapourings, the puzzle of present circumstance, the political significance of so much apparently aimless rhetoric. Daily he listened for the prompter’s bell; daily looked for the appearance of the confident author who should discipline all this swagger and rhodomontade.

Then, by-and-by, the fancy did so master him as that he would see a veritable curtain, rounding into slumberous folds, in this silent west wall of the Bastille; a curtain—with sky-arched convent buildings for proscenium—whose every sombre crease he seemed to watch with a curious moved expectancy of the unnameable that should be revealed in its lifting. For so an impression deepened in him unaccountably that beyond that voiceless veil was shaping itself the real drama, of which this outer ranting was but as the wind that precedes an avalanche; that suddenly, and all in a moment, the screen would be rent, like a sullen cloud by lightning, and the import of an ominous foregathering find expression in some withering organisation to which the surface turmoil had been but a blind. He thought himself prophetic—en rapport with the imps of a national destiny; but nevertheless the curtain delayed to rise while he waited, though it was to go up presently to a roar that shook the world.