MR MURK was suffering from a toujours perdrix of politics. He needed, he felt, a prolonged constitutional, both to clear his brain of a certain blood-web that confused its vision, and to enable him to sort, in fair communion with the Republic of Nature, his own somewhat scattered theories of government. He was really unnerved, indeed, by what he had seen and experienced, and the prospect of quiet woods and pastures was become dear to his soul. He would return to Méricourt, as he had promised himself he would do, in the sweet spring weather—to Méricourt, where the play of Machiavelism was but a pastoral comedy after all. He would return to Méricourt and paint into the unfinished eyes of his Madonna the fathomless living sorrow of doubt—the Son being dead—as to their own divinity.
Of the two hundred miles to traverse he walked the greater number—sometimes in leisurely, sometimes in hurried fashion, as the chasing dogs of memory slept or tracked him. But, tramp as he would, he could not regain that elasticity of heart that once so communicated itself to the “spirit in his feet.” He had gone to Paris blithe and curious; he was returning, as the idiom expresses it, with a foot of nose. In eight months the spouting grass seemed to have lost its spring. May, with all its voices, could not charm him from foul recollections; the gloom of slumbering forests was full of murder. Now for the first time he realised how the great peace he often paused to wistfully look upon was Nature’s, not his; how, flatter his soul as he might with a pretence of its partnership in all the noble restfulness that encompassed it, it stood really an alien, isolated—a suffering, self-conscious inessential, having no kinship with this material sweet tranquillity—separated from it, in fact, by just the traverseless width of that very conscious ego. He felt like Satan alighted for the first time in view of Eden, only to recognise by what plumbless moat of knowledge he was excluded from its silent lawns and orchards.
This feeling came to him in his worst moods. In his best, he could take artistic joy of those effects of cloud and country that called for no elaborate detail in the delineating—that were distant only proportionately less than the distant unrealities of the stars in the sky. For the impression of outlawry in a world that was only man’s by conquest was bitten into his soul for all time; and never again, since that night spent in the shambles of St Antoine, should he recover and indulge that ancient sense of irresponsibility towards his share in the conduct of man’s usurped estate.
“We are,” he thought, “squatters disputing with one another the possession of land to which we have each and all no title.”
Nevertheless—therefore, rather—his soul acknowledged the opposite to disenchantment in its review of nature unconverted to misuse. Not before had pathos so sung to him in the warm throat-notes of birds; so chimed to him in the tumble of weirs; so looked up into his face from the fallen blossom on the grass. He might have found his healing of all things at the time had Love appeared to him in sympathetic guise.
Over the last stages of his journey he took diligence to Liége, and, at the end of a long week’s ramble, set foot once more in the old sun-baked town.
Thence, on a gentle evening, he turned his face to Méricourt, and in a mood half humour, half sadness, retraversed the hills and dingles of a pleasant experience. Somehow he felt as if he were returning, a confident prodigal, to ancient haunts of beauty and kindliness.
He had proceeded so far as to have come within a half mile of the village, when, in thridding his way through a sombre wedge of woodland, he was suddenly aware of a figure—a woman’s—flitting before him round a bend in the path. There was that in his momentary glimpse of the form that led him to double his pace so as to overtake it. This he had no difficulty in doing, though for a minute it seemed as if the other were anxious to elude him. But finding, no doubt, the task beyond her, she stopped and turned of a sudden into a leafy embrasure set in the track-edge, and stood there awaiting his coming, her head drooped and her back to a green beech-trunk.
“Théroigne!” cried Ned, nearly breathless. “Théroigne Lambertine!”
“Why do you stop me?” she said, panting, and in a low voice. “You know the way to Méricourt, monsieur.”
He felt some wonder over her tone.
“Don’t you wish me to speak to you, then? Have you already forgotten me?”
She did not answer or raise her face.
“Théroigne!” he protested, pleading like an aggrieved boy. “And little as I saw of you, I have felt, in returning to Méricourt, as if I were coming back to old friends. I have had enough of Paris and its horrors, Théroigne.”
At that she looked up at him for the first time. He was amazed and all concerned. The glowing, rich, defiant beauty he had last seen. And this—white, fallen, and desolate—the face of a haunted creature!
“What is the matter?” he whispered. “What has happened to you?”
“Paris!” she said in a febrile voice. “Ah, yes, monsieur!—you come from Paris. And did you see there——”
She checked herself, struck her own mouth savagely with her palm, then suddenly gripped at the young man’s wrist.
“What are they doing in Paris? Is it there, as he prophesied—the reign of honour and reason, the reign of pleasure, the emancipation of the wretched and oppressed? He will be a fine recruit to the cause of so much republican virtue.”
She breathed quickly; a smouldering fire blazed up in her; her very voice, that had seemed to Ned starved like her beauty, gathered to something the remembered volume.
“He? Who?” said he.
She took no notice of the question, but went on in great excitement—
“What are these horrors that you speak of? Have you seen them? What are they, I say? Do they tear aristocrats limb from limb? This truth that he used to preach—my God! there is no hope for the world until they massacre them each one!”
“That who used to preach?” said Ned, quite shocked and bewildered.
“Liars! liars! liars!” cried the girl, striking hand into hand.
Then suddenly she had flung herself round against the tree, and, in a storm of tears, had buried her head in her arms.
“Go!” she cried, in a muffled voice. “Why do you come back with the other memories? Why do you notice or speak to me? Can you not see that I am accursed—an outcast?”
He would have essayed to comfort, to reassure her. Her wayward passion took his breath away. Even while he hesitated, she turned upon him once more:—
“Are you not also of the haute noblesse? What truth or honour or courage can be in you, then? Yes, courage, monsieur. You have fled because you were afraid they would kill you, as he fled before his pursuing conscience. You will not tell me the truth, because you are shamed in its revelation. My God! what cowards are you all! But only say to me that he is dead—stabbed to the heart—and I will fall down and kiss your feet!”
To Ned, standing there dumfoundered, came an inkling of a tragedy.
“That Suleau,” he was thinking, half mazed, “did he jockey me; and was it St Denys after all?”
He looked at the stressed and wild-wrought creature before him in sombre pity.
“So M. de St Denys has left Méricourt?” he said gravely.
At that Mademoiselle Lambertine broke into a shrill laugh.
“M. de St Denys? But who spoke of M. de St Denys? It was he, was it not, that waived his privileges of honour that he might be on a level with us that have none? And why should he leave Méricourt, where he was ever a model and an example of all that he preached?”
“It cannot have been he, then, that I saw in Paris?”
The girl gasped, stared, and took a forward step.
“You saw him? And he was amongst the killed?”
“Théroigne!”
“Monsieur, monsieur! We have heard how the people rose; we are not here at the bounds of the earth.”
“But it was no slaughter of aristocrats.”
She gazed at him dumbly with feverish eyes, then sighed heavily, shook her head, and moved out into the open.
“So you come again to Méricourt?” she said. “You will find it wonderfully changed in these few months. Now we are possessed by a devil, and now we are under the dominion of a saint. There is an idol deposed, and a holy image raised in its place. Will you be walking, monsieur, or shall I go first?”
“We will go together.”
She laughed again with a shrill, mocking sound.
“Mother of God! what an admirable persuasiveness have these aristocrats! I had thought myself beneath his notice, and, behold! he would make me his companion—and in the face of the village, too. Come, then, monsieur. Will you take your paillarde on your arm?”
He listened to her with some compassion (for all her wild speech he thought her heart was choked with accumulated tears), then moved forward and walked along the woodland path by her side. To his few questions she returned but monosyllabic answers. Presently, however—when they were come out within view of the village fountain, where Ned’s first meeting with her had taken place—she stayed him with a hand upon his sleeve.
“‘As she makes her bed, so must she lie on it.’ You see I remember your words, monsieur. And, if she has made her bed as the virtuous disapprove, in England she may yet lie soft on it?”
“Without doubt, in England or elsewhere, so long as she lives only for the present.”
“Ah! little Mother of God! but how natural to these aristocrats comes the preaching-cant.”
All in a moment her eyes and her speech softened most wooingly, and she put up her hands, in a characteristic coaxing manner, to the young man’s breast.
“I am ill and weary now,” she said. “It is not good to suffer long the hatred of one’s kinsfolk, the gibes of one’s familiars. But in another atmosphere I should learn to resume myself—at least to resume all that of me that concerns the regard of men. The result would be worth the possessing, monsieur. Monsieur, when you return to England, will you take me with you?”
As she spoke, a light step sounded coming up the meadow-path, before mentioned, that ran into the head of the woodland. It approached; Théroigne, with a conscious look, fell back a little; and immediately, moving staid and decorous over the young grass, the white lodge-keeper of the chateau came into view. She suffered, Ned could see, one momentary shock of indecision as her eyes encountered his; then she advanced, and, without a word, went on her way into the wood. But, as she passed, she acknowledged Ned’s salutation with a grave little inclination of her head, and with the act was not forgetful to withdraw her skirts from contact with those of Mademoiselle Lambertine, who, for her part, shrank back and made not the least show of protest or resentment.
Ned, however, regarded with some twinkle of amusement the slow-pacing figure till it was out of sight, and then he only turned to Théroigne with a questioning look.
The girl came up to him again, but doubtfully now, it seemed, and with a certain wide awe in her eyes.
“You must not say it, monsieur,” she whispered; “you must not say what I can read on your lips. She has seen the Blessed Virgin since you were last here—has seen and spoken with her.”
“God forgive me for a scoffer! And that is why she is all in blue, I suppose, and why her blue skirt must not touch hems with your red one?”
Théroigne hung her head.
“When does monsieur return to England?” she said only.
Ned clasped his hands behind his head and stretched vigorously.
“Very soon, I think. Mademoiselle Théroigne, I am tired of you all. Very soon, I think.”
She made as if she would have touched him again; but he gently put her away from him. At that she looked up in his eyes very forlorn and pleading.
“Mademoiselle Théroigne,” said he, “I do not know or ask you your story. Here, since I left, all flowers seem to have run to a seed that is best not scattered abroad. I cannot, of course, prevent your going to London if you choose. Only, for myself, I must tell you, that myself is at present as much as I can undertake to direct and govern. Besides, it is not at all likely that you would find him there.”
In an instant she was again all scorn and passion. Her lip lifted and showed her teeth. She humped her shoulders; her hands clinched in front of her.
“Not to understand,” she cried, “that that is my very reason for desiring the refuge of your barbarous land! To escape from myself and the murder in me!”
“But why leave Méricourt at all?”
The blight of her fury was as sudden as the blast that springs from a glacier.
“May you know what it is to roll in a trough of spikes and find no release in your agony! Cold, passionless, insolent! Lazarus, to refuse to dip your finger in water! But I will go in spite of you: I will go, monsieur, and laugh and snap my fingers in your face!”
“Permit me to say,” said Ned coolly, “that this is a very foolish and unnecessary exhibition of temper.”
But she flounced round her shoulder and ran from him, storming and crying out, and disappeared down the track leading to her home. And, as for him—he went on to the “Landlust.”