PRETTY early on the morning following his arrival in Méricourt, Ned strolled up the easy slope leading to the lodge of the chateau, and found himself lingering over against the embowered gates with a queer barm of humour working upon a commixture of emotions in his breast. Now it seemed that his very neighbourhood to the Madonna of his memory was effecting a climatic change both within and without him. For the first, little runnels of irresponsible gaiety gushed in his veins; for the second, the weather, that had been indifferent fine during his journey, appeared to have broken all at once into full promise of summer. It was not, indeed, that his sympathies enlarged in the near presence of one who might hold herself as a little moon of desire. It was rather, perhaps, because in the one-time surrender of her very soul to his inspection, she had made of him a confederate in certain unspoken secrets, the knowledge of which was to him like a sense of proprietorship in a picturesque little country-seat. Yet here, it may be acknowledged, he indulged something a dangerous mood.
He stood a minute before passing through the gates. The warmth of a windless night still slept in the velvety eyes of the roadside flowers. Morning was heaping off its bed-linen of glistening clouds. From a chestnut-tree came the drowsy drawl of a yellow-hammer. A robin—small fashionable idler of birds—abandoned the problem of a fibrous seed and, flickering to a stump, discussed the stranger impertinently and with infinite society relish. Only the swifts were alert and busy, flashing, poising, diving under the eaves; thridding Ned’s brain as they passed with a receding sound like that made by pebbles hopping over ice; seeming, in their flight of warp and woof, to be mending the pace set by the loitering day. Feeling their activity a rebuke, the visitor passed through the open gate.
Within, all was yet more pretty orderliness than that he had once admired. The lodge stood, sequestered trimness, between the luminous green of its porch and the high rearward trees that spouted up into the sky, full fountains of tumbling young leaves. The little paths were swept; the little long beds, bordered with trique-madame and planted with lusty perennials, were combed orderly as the hair of their mistress, and weeded to the least vulgar seedling; white curtains hung in the cottage windows; and everywhere was an added refinement of daintiness—a suggestion of increased prosperity.
“Now, Mademoiselle Legrand,” thought Ned, “has shown herself a little person of resource.”
He could hear the moan of the horn coming familiarly to him from the back garden. The sweet complaining cry woke some queer memories in him. He went forward a few paces up the drive—walking straight into weediness and the tangle of neglect—that he might get glimpse of the chateau. The place, when he saw it, glowered from an encroaching thicket. Even these few months seemed to have confirmed the ruin that had before only threatened. Its dusty upper windows were viscous, he could have thought, with the tracks of snails. Grass had made good its footing on the roof. It looked a forgotten old history of the past, with a toppling chimney, half dislodged in some gale, for dog’s-ear.
Ned turned his back on the desolate sight, and lo! there was the bright patch of brick and flower like a garden redeemed from the desert. It appeared to point the very moral of the times, but in its ethical, not its savage significance. He went to seek the priestess of this little temple of peace.
As he turned into the garden, a peasant woman was coming out at the lodge door. She had an empty basket lined with a clean napkin on her arm.
“Que la sainte virge vous bénissè par sa servante!” she murmured as she passed by the visitor.
Nicette was nowhere visible. Ned stole into the house and along the passage. A strip of thick matting, where had formerly been naked flags, deadened the sound of his footfalls. Laughter, but laughter a little thrilling, tingled in his veins. A certain apprehension, that time might not have dealt as drastically as he had desired it would with a misconstructive fancy, was lifted from his mind since yesterday. He felt there could be small doubt but that his own image had been deposed and replaced by a very idol of vanity—a self-conscious Adaiah that must find its supremest gratification in proving its consistency with the character assigned it. Indeed, his moderate faith in himself as an attractive quantity inclined him, perhaps, to underrate his moral influence. He had not yet learned that to many women there is no chase so captivating as that of incarnate diffidence.
He came softly upon Nicette in the dairy that was a little endeared to him by remembrance. Perhaps he would not have ventured unannounced to seek her in the more inner privacy of her own nest. But the cool dairy was good for a neutral ground. She stood with her back to him. The sunlight, reflected from vivid leafiness through the window, made a soft luminosity of the curve of her cheek, that was like the pale under-side of a peach. It ruffled the rebellious tendrils of hair on her forehead into a mist of green; it stained her white chaperon with tender vert, and discoloured the straight blue folds of her dress. Was she, he thought, a half-converted dryad or a lapsing saint?
“Nicette!” he said aloud.
She gave a strangled gasp and faced about, her eyes scared, a hand upon her bosom. She had been disposing on a slab a little gift of spring chickens and some household preserves.
“Did I startle you?” said Ned. “But you knew I was returned and must surely come and see you.”
“Monsieur, you steal upon me like a ghost,” she muttered.
“Of what, girl? Of no regret, I hope?”
Her cheek was gathering a little dawn of colour.
“All ghosts of the past are sorrowful,” she said low.
“True,” he answered, seriously and gently. “I did not mean to awaken sad memories. And thou hast never had news of the little one?”
“Never, monsieur.”
“It is lamentable.”
Her eyes were watching him intently.
“You commiserate me, monsieur?” she said.
“How can you doubt it, Nicette?”
“Yet you do not love children?”
“Don’t I?”
“But their cunning and their vindictiveness, monsieur?”
“What of them?”
“What, indeed? It is monsieur’s own words I recall.”
“Nicette, can you think me such a brute? I hold myself abashed in the presence of the innocents. If I have ever decried them, it was only because their truthfulness rebuked my scepticism. They have shown me how to die, since I saw you last, Nicette. I shall try to remember when my hour comes.”
She passed a hand across her eyes, as though she were bewildered.
“But this inconsistency,” she began, murmuring.
Suddenly she straightened herself, and came forward.
“Truly, I knew you were arrived, monsieur; and you reintroduce yourself to good company on your return to Méricourt.”
“And truly I do not take my cue from a scandalous world to cold-shoulder an old friend.”
He came sternly into the dairy, and sat himself down on the slab by the chickens, his legs dangling.
“Sit there,” he said, and dragged a chair with his foot to his near neighbourhood.
The girl hesitated, shrugged her shoulders, and obeyed.
“Monsieur, it is evident, has not learned——” she was beginning. He caught the sentence from her:—
“That you are a saint? No, I have not learned it in these few minutes—unless innuendo is the prerogative of sanctity. I, a sinner, met a fallen woman yesterday, and I pitied her.”
Mademoiselle Legrand hung her head. Ned recovered his good-humour and laughed.
“Oh, little Sainte Nicette!” he said. “Why do you let me talk to you like this? Because you are a saint? Then I will not take a base advantage of your condition. But shall I finish the portrait, Madonna? I have been brought face to face in Paris with the divine suffering of mothers. I have discovered the secret of the eyes. Shall I finish the portrait, Nicette?”
She shook her head.
“But think how you could instruct me, girl! The lineaments—the very form and expression; for you have seen them!”
“Hush!” she exclaimed, in a terrified whisper. “Oh, monsieur, hush! It is blasphemy; it is terrible. I to pose for the divinity revealed to me! Surely, you are mad!”
He leaned down to her as he sat.
“Nicette,” he murmured, “there is an old confidence between us, you know, and I recall your fine gift of imagination. Confess that it is all an invention.”
“That what is an invention?”
“Do you not know? This vision in the woods, then.”
She sprang to her feet. A line of red came across her forehead.
“You mock me!” she cried. “I might have known that you would; but it is none the less hateful and cruel. Believe or not as you will.”
She was enraged as he had never seen her before.
“But these offerings,” he said, quite coolly: “the chickens and the little pots of jam, Nicette—or is it guava jelly? One may make a good investment of the imagination, I see.”
It was not pleasant of him; but he could be merciless to what he considered a bad example of escamoterie.
For a moment the girl looked like a very harpy. Her fingers crooked on the bosom of her dress as if she would have liked to lacerate her heart in desperate despite of its assailant. Then, suddenly, she dropped back upon her chair, and, covering her face with her hands, broke into a very pitiful convulsion of weeping.
Qui se fait brebis, le loup le mange!
Assuredly Ned had invited his own discomfiture. He had thought to operate upon this tender conscience without any right knowledge of the position of its arteries of emotion. He had bungled and let loose the flood, and straightway he was scared over the result of his own recklessness.
He let Mademoiselle Legrand cry a little while, not knowing how to compromise with his convictions. He loved truth, but was not competent to cope with its erring handmaid.
At last: “Nicette!” he whispered, and put his hand timidly on the girl’s shoulder.
She wriggled under his touch.
“No, no!” she sobbed, in a drowned voice. “It is terrible to be so hated and despised.”
“I do not hate you, little fool,” he said. “You beg the question. For what reason, Nicette? Are you afraid, or at a loss, to describe to me this vision?”
She seemed to check her weeping and to listen, though her bosom was still heavy with sobs.
“I am afraid,” she whispered.
“Of me? Nicette, shall I not finish the portrait?”
“No, no!”
“But you have seen the Mother, and know what she is like.”
“You would not believe.”
“At least put my credulity to the test.”
A long pause succeeded. The sobs died into silence. By-and-by the girl looked up—not at her inquisitor, but vaguely apart from him and away, as if her gaze were introspective. She clasped her hands together, holding them thus, in reverential attitude, against her throat.
“Nicette,” murmured Ned, “tell me—what is the Mother like?”
“It was a mist, monsieur, out of which a face grew like a sweet-briar blossom—a face, and then all down to her pink feet that trod the wind-flowers of the wood. Within her hair were little nests of light, glowing green and violet, that came and went, or broke and were shattered into a rain of golden strands. They were the tears she had shed beneath the cross. She wore the wounds, a five-pointed star, upon her breast, and I saw the rising and falling of her heart as it were the glowing of fire behind wood ashes. All about her, and about me, was a low thick murmur of voices that I could not understand. But sometimes I thought I saw the brown fearful eyes of the little people look from under the hanging fronds of fern, imploring to put their lips to the white buds of her feet. Then her eyes gathered me to their embrace; and I sailed on a blue sea, and was taken into the arms of the wind and kissed so that I seemed to swoon.”
She paused, breathing softly.
“Truly,” said Ned: “this was the very pagan Queen of Love.”
“She is the Queen of Love, monsieur, else had my eyes never been opened to see the little folk of the greenwoods. For to be Queen of Love is to be Queen of Nature, and both titles hath she from le Bon Dieu.”
Suddenly the girl edged a little nearer her companion, looked up in his face appealingly, and put her clasped hands upon his knee as he sat.
“God made Nature, monsieur,” she whispered. “God is Love. Oh, I read in the sweet eyes many things that were strange to my traditions!—even that human side of the Mother, that monsieur has sought to disclose. God is Love, and He hath given us passion, not forbidding us passion’s cure.”
Ned’s brows took a startled frown, and he made as if to rise. Nicette stole her hand quickly to his.
“Monsieur, it cannot be wrong to love—it cannot be that He would lend Himself as a subtle lure to the very sin His code denounces. It is the code—it is the Church that has misconstrued Him.”
Something in the young man’s face gave her pause in the midst of her panting eagerness. She drew back immediately, with a little artificial laugh.
“La Sainte Marie was all in white,” she said, “with a blue cloak the colour of the skies. And what is the fashion with the fine ladies in London, monsieur?”
Mr Murk had got to his feet.
“Mademoiselle Legrand,” he said, “you are all of Heloïse, I think, without the erudition. Now, I am not orthodox; yet I think your description of the Virgin very prettily blasphemous. And what has become of the serpent and the globe of liquid purple? You can explain your picture, I see, to accommodate the views of its critics. I admire you very much, and I bid you good day.”
He was going. She leapt across his path and stayed him. A bright spot of colour had sprung to her cheek.
“You will leave me?” she cried hoarsely. “You shall not go, thinking me a liar!”
“No more than the author of ‘Julie,’” he said, drily and stubbornly. “You have the fine gift of romance, but I don’t like your vision.”
“It is the truth! I give you but one of the hundred impressions it made upon me.”
“Very well. It is a bad selection, so far as I am concerned.”
“How could I know—you, that have traded upon my confidence! You tempt me and throw me aside. I will not be so shamed—I, that am no longer obscure—whose every word is worth——”
“As much as one of M. Voltaire’s, no doubt. He may value his commercially, at ten sous or fifty. What then? You have the popular ear. Do you want to make your profit of me also?”
She twined her fingers together, and held them backwards against her bosom.
“Whither are you going?” she panted.
“I am on my way back to England.”
She took a quick step forward.
“You shall not leave me like this! You have made me what I am. Monsieur—monsieur——”
In a moment the storm broke. Once more she was drowned in tears. She threw herself upon him, and her arms about his neck.
“It is love!” she cried. “You are my God and my desire. I have followed you in my heart these long months—oh, how piteously! Do anything with me you will. Disbelieve me, spurn me, stamp on me—only let me love you! These months—oh, these desolate, sick months!”
She clung to him, entreating and caressing, though he muttered “For shame!” and strove to disentangle her fingers. She would not be denied in this first convulsive self-consciousness of her surrender.
“I will give myself the lie: invite the hatred and scorn of the world: swear my soul to damnation by acknowledging myself an impostor, if that will make you merciful and kind—no, not even kind, but to take me with you. I will admit I am vile in all but my love: that you tempted me unwittingly: that you had no thought of being cruel—of being anything but your own gracious self, to whom a foolish maiden’s heart fled crying because it could not help it!”
Catching glimpse in her passion of the stony impassibility of his face, she fell upon her knees, clasping her arms about him and sobbing—
“You must speak—you must speak, or I shall die! You don’t know what binds me to you. Not your love, or your respect or pity: only a little mercy—just enough, one finger held out to save me from falling into the abyss! Look here and here! Am I not white and sweet? I have cherished myself ever since you went and my heart nearly broke. I have thought all day and all night, ‘What bar to his approach can I remove if some day he shall come again?’ And when at last I saw you were returned, I would have given all the vain months of adulation for one glad word of welcome from your lips.”
She grovelled lower, writhing her face down into her arms.
“Only to be yours!” she moaned: “to do with as you will.”
At that at last he stooped, and dragged her forcibly to her feet. She stood before him trembling and dishevelled, and he glared at her, breathing heavily like one that had run a race.
“Before God, I never knew,” he said: “but you shame me and yourself. I will believe your story if you wish it; and what does that lead to?—that I hear you abusing the high choice of Heaven—misapplying God’s truth to the abominable sophistries of passion. Not love, but the foulest—there! I won’t shame you more. I think I have never heard such subtle blasphemy. To hope to influence me by casuistry so crooked! If you ever awakened my interest, you have lost the power for ever. Mercy! the utmost I can show you is by passing here and now out of your life——”
She broke in with an agonised cry—
“Mon Dieu! Oh, my God! Not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for your sake!”
“What you have done!” he cried fiercely. “I am no party to the vile chicanery. For your sufferings—they will cease when the fuel of this passion is withdrawn. Such fires blaze up and out in a day.”
He was cruel, no doubt—crueller than he meant to be; but his heart was wrathful over the baseness of the snare set for it.
On the echo of his voice there came the sound of approaching steps up the road. He recovered his composure on the instant.
“You will have visitors,” he said. “You had best go and make yourself fit to meet them. You will know where your interests lie. For me, the most I can do is to treat all this as a mad confidence.”
He was going; but she pressed upon him, panting and desperate.
“Don’t leave me like this! There—into the bedroom, till they are gone! Monsieur, for pity’s sake! You put too much upon me. I will explain. For God’s sake, monsieur!”
He drove past her—hurried down the passage. As he neared the door, he saw the light obscured by a couple of entering figures—a complacent-smiling curé, who ushered in a fashionable pilgrim exhaling musk and tinkling with gewgaws.
“Exortum est in tenebris lumen rectis,” murmured the priest as he gave place with a slight bow.
“Exactly so,” said Ned, and made his way to the road.
There he stood a moment, blinking and gulping down the fresh spring air.