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.