“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!”