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.