MR MURK walked straight from the lodge of the chateau out of the village, stopping only on his way to take up his knapsack at the “Landlust.” He moved, very haughty and inflexible, with a high soul of offence at the attempt manifested to subject him to the charge of collusion in what he considered a particularly unpleasant species of fraud. It was that, more than the outrage to his continent self-respect, that angered and insulted him—that he could under any circumstances be deemed approachable by imposture, even though it should solicit in ravishing guise. He had never as yet, indeed, through any phases of fortune, regarded himself as other than a philosophic alien to his race; a disinterested spectator of its wars of creeds and senses, perched out of the battle on a little cloudy eminence of spiritual reserve, whence it was his humour to analyse the details of the contest for the gratifying of a curious intellectual cosmopolitanism. And even when for nearer view of some party struggle he had descended—or condescended—so far as that he had felt upon his face the very bloody sprinkle of the strife, he had chosen to read, in the emotions excited in his breast, an instinctive revolt against the injustice of pain, rather than a sympathy with the sufferings of which he was witness.
Now, however, he seemed to have realised in a moment by what common means Nature is able to impeach this treason of aloofness. He had held himself a thing altogether apart in that conflict of blurred, indefinite forms. He had been like a spectator watching an illuminated sheet at an entertainment, when (to adopt a modern image) there had sounded in an instant the click of the cinematograph snapping the blur into focus, and, lo! he beheld his own figure active amongst the crowd, a constituent atom travelling through or with it, a mean, small condition of its gregariousness—repellent, attractive, infinitesimally influential, according to the common degree of his kind. Holding his soul, as he fancied, veracious and remote, he had seen it magnetic, in its supposed isolation, to another that, in its essential guile, in its infirmity and untruth, would seem to be his spirit’s actual antithesis, yet whose destinies, rebel as he might, must henceforth for evermore be associated with his. He was no amateur counsel to a recording angel, in fact, but just a human organism subject to the influences of neighbour temperaments.
Now, the considerable but lesser pang in this shock to his pride of solitariness was felt in the realisation of his impotence to claim exemption from the ordinary vulgar taxes imposed by the gods upon vulgar animal instincts. He must be sought if he would not seek; nor could he by any means escape the penalties of his manly attributes. He was a thing of desire; therefore he represented the one moiety of the race to which he would have fain considered himself an alien.
But he did not regard with any present sentiment but that of anger the woman who had thus been the means to his proper understanding of his own personal insignificance. For her sex, indeed, he had no natural liking but that negatively conveyed in a sort of chivalrous contempt for its inconsequence (whereby—though he did not know it—he may have offered himself an unconscious Bertram to a score of Helenas). Now, to find his austere particular self made the object of a sacrifice of utter truth and decency, both alarmed and disgusted him. The very jar of the discovery tumbled him from cloud to earth. Yet, be it said, if it brought him with a run from his removed heights, he was to fall into that garden of the world where the loves, their thighs yellow with pollen, flutter from flower to flower.
For by-and-by, in the very glow and fever of his indignation, he startled to sudden consciousness of the fact that it was the implied insult to his honesty, rather than that actual one to his sense of modesty, that most offended him; that his heart was indulging a little rebellious memory of a late dream, it appeared, that was full of a strange pressure of tenderness. He caught himself sharply from the weakness; yet it would recur. He began to question the propriety of his attitude towards women generally. Serenely self-centred, perhaps he had never realised the necessity of being, in a world of artificiality, other than himself. Now he faintly gathered how poor a policy of virtue might be implied thereby—how, under certain conditions, Virtue might be held its own justification for assuming an alias.
And thereat came the first reaction in a pretty series of moral rallies and relapses.
“Bah!” he muttered, “the girl is a little lying cocotte—a Lamia from whose snares I am fortunate to have escaped without a wound.”
In the meantime his heart turned towards home with a strange heat of yearning—towards his England of stolid factions and sober, unemotional sympathies; of regulated hate and the liberal schooling of love. He had submitted himself to much physical and mental suffering in order to the acquirement of a right understanding of men; and at the last a woman had upset and scattered his classified collection of principles with a whisk of her skirt. He felt it was useless to attempt to rearrange his specimens unless in an atmosphere not inimical to sobriety.
“I will go home,” he thought, as he stepped rapidly forward. “And at any rate I am here at length out of the wood;” and straightway, poor rogue, he fell into a second ambush by the roadside.
For, coming to a sudden turn in his path when he was breaking from the copses a half mile out of the village, he was suddenly aware of a shrill cackle of vituperation, of such particular import to him at the present crisis as to constrain him to stop where he was and listen.
“Oh, çà, Valentin—çà-çà-çà!” hooted a booby voice. “A twist, and thou hast secured it! Oh, çà! bring it away and we will look.”
“Let go!” panted another voice, in a heat of jeering violence. “I will have it, I say!”
Then Ned heard Théroigne, pleading and tearful—
“Valentin, thou shalt not! It is mine! What right hast thou to rob and insult me?”
“The right that thou art a putain—a snake in the grass of a virgin community. Give it me, or I will break thy arm. Right, indeed! but every well-doer has a right to act the executive.”
“Thou shalt not take it!”
“You will prevent me? Oh, the strength of this conscious virtue! And does not thy refusal damn thee? Pull across, Charlot! I will wrench her arms out. It is another accursed whelp that she has strangled and would bury in the wood.”
“You vile, cruel beast!” cried the girl.
“Oh, hé—scream, then!” panted the other, while Charlot sniggered throatily. “There is no riggish lord now to justify thee in thy assaults on decent landholders. I will look, if only for the sake of that memory. Thou wert the prospective fine lady, wert thou? Oh, mon Dieu! and what ploughboy has ministered to thee for this in the bundle?”
Mr Murk, indignant but embarrassed, had stood so far uncertain as to his wise course of action. Now, however, a shriek of obvious pain that came from the girl decided him. He hurried round the intercepting corner and saw Mademoiselle Lambertine, blowsed and weeping, flung amongst the roots of a tree. Hard by, where the trunks opened out to the road-track, a couple of clowns, bent eagerly over a bundle they had torn from their victim, were discussing the contents of their prize—a few poor toilet affairs, some bright trinketry of lace and ribbons, a dozen apples, and a loaf of white cocket-bread.
All three lifted their heads, startled at the sound of his approach. Théroigne sat up; the boors got clumsily to their feet. In one of these loobies Ned had a sure thought that he recognised the fellow whose face had once been scored by those very feminine fingers that were now so desperately clutching and pulling at the grass amongst the tree-roots. He could see the red cheeks, he fancied, still chased with the marks of that reprehensible onset. The other rogue, he was equally certain, was of those that had baited a wretched Cagot on a morning nine months ago.
Here, then, was the right irony of event—a huntress Actæon torn by her own hounds. Ned stepped forward deliberately, but with every muscle of his body screwed tight as a fiddle-string.
Come over against the clodpoles: “You are pigs and cowards!” said he, and he gave the farmer an explosive smack on the jaw.
The assault was so violent and unexpected, the will that inspired it was so obviously set in the prologue of vicious possibilities, that the victim collapsed where he stood, bellowing like a bull-frog. It is true that he lacked a familiar stimulus to his courage.
“Now,” said Ned, “return those goods to the bundle and fasten them in; or, by the holy Virgin of Méricourt, I’ll lay an information against you for brigands before M. le Maire.”
There was an ominous stress in his very chords of speech. They may have recognised him or not. In any case this change of fortune might unsheathe the terrific claws of a hitherto unallied enemy. Charlot dropped upon his knees and with shaking fingers began to manipulate the bundle.
“It is enough,” said Ned between his teeth. “Now, go!”
The two scurried off amongst the trees, glancing over their shoulders as they went, with scared faces. The next moment Ned was aware that Mademoiselle Lambertine had crept up to him, and was holding out her hands in an entreating manner.
“Monsieur!” she whispered.
He faced about. The girl was arrayed for a journey, it seemed. A cloak was clasped about her neck; from her brown hair hung over her shoulders, like the targe of a Highlander, a round straw hat with an ungainly width of brim; stout shoes and a foot of homespun stocking showed under her short skirt. Nevertheless the glowing ardour of her face and form triumphed over all disabilities.
“They are brutes and cowards,” said Ned gravely. “I don’t think they will trouble you again. Here is your property.”
She did not take it at once. He shrugged his shoulders and laid it on the ground at her feet.
“Monsieur!” pleaded the girl. Something seemed to choke her from proceeding.
At length: “I have been waiting in the woods since dawn,” said she, in a sudden soft outburst, “hoping for you to pass.”
“For me?”
“I came out into the track now and again, dreading that you had gone by while I watched elsewhere, and once these discovered me, and—and— Ah, monsieur! You see now what I have to endure.”
“Truly I see—more than I would wish to. You are leaving Méricourt, then?”
She looked at him, defiant and imploring at once.
“You would not condemn me to it? You would not even say it is possible for me to stay here?”
The young man did, for him, an unaccustomed thing. He swore—under his breath. It might have been the devil of a particular little crisis essaying to speak for him; it might have been the cry of a momentary conflict between sense and spirit.
The appeal addressed to either was, indeed, as mournful and seductive as the minor play of a pathetic voice could make it. If he gazed irritably at the woman facing him, still he gazed at all because he was stirred to some emotion. The sadness of wet, unhappy eyes, of parted lips, of hands clasped upon the dumb utterance of an impassioned bosom—all, in their single offer and plea to him, were, no doubt, such a temptation to an abuse of that consistency with his theories that his temperament so encouraged him to cherish, as he had never before felt. But he was still so little sensitive to one form of witchery that it needed only a tickle of humour to restore his moral balance.
He laughed on a certain note of aggravation.
“Méricourt is all moonstruck, I believe,” said he. “This is too absurdly flattering to my vanity. First—but there! Mademoiselle Lambertine, I will not pretend to misread you. Yet you do not love me, I think?”
She shook her head, drooping her eyes to him. Patently she had elected to stake her chances on white candour as the better policy with this Joseph.
“Well,” said he, “it is as it should be. And you are equally convinced I am indifferent to you?”
But at that she came forward—so close to him, indeed, as to make her every word an invitation.
“Now,” thought Ned, inured to such appeals, “she will throw her arms round my neck in a minute.”
But he did Théroigne indifferent justice.
“You think yourself so,” she murmured. “It will be only a little while. Already, in the prospect of freedom, I begin to renew myself since yesterday. What if my soul is torn and crippled! The blood will glow in my veins no less hotly than before—a fire to melt even this cold iron of thy resolve. Oh, look on me—look on me! I can feel all power and beauty moving within me like a child. That I should be scorned of clowns! And yet the chance gives me to you, monsieur, if you but put out your hand. It is not love. That thou hast not, nor I; nor is the power longer to me or the gift to you. But I am grateful, for that thou hast helped me under sore insult. Ah! it avails nothing to plead accident—to say, ‘It was the outrage I avenged for manliness’, not the woman’s, sake.’ What, then? Thou hast wrought the bond of sympathy, and thou canst never forge it apart. Perhaps, even, didst thou strike hard, thou mightst some day hit out the spark of love. Take me, and thou wilt desire to: I swear it. Do I not breathe and live? Am I not one to vindicate in prosperity the choice of her protector? Thou hast a nobility of manliness that is higher than any rank. But, if in thine own country thou art great, thou shalt be greater through me. I will minister to thy ambition no less than to thy senses. I will——”
She paused, breathing quickly, and watchful of the steady immobility of his face.
“Monsieur,” she whispered, most movingly, “if you see in me now only a lost unhappy girl, who in her misery would seem to seek the confirmation of her dishonour, believe—oh, monsieur, believe that it is only to escape the worser degradation that threatens her through the relentless persecution she suffers on account of her trust in one that was monsieur’s friend.”
“No friend of mine,” muttered Ned, and stopped. He must collect his thoughts—endeavour to answer this séductrice according to her guile. Instinctively he stepped back a pace, as though to elude the enchantment of a very low sweet voice.
“Listen to me,” he said distinctly. “Mademoiselle Lambertine, I pity you profoundly; and, if I have anything more to say, it is only, upon my honour, to marvel that one of such intelligence as yourself should ever have submitted her honour to the handling of so exceedingly meretricious a gentleman as M. de St Denys. You see I repay your confidence with plain-speaking. For the rest I can assure you it is not my ambition to be beholden for whatever the future may have in store for me to a——”
She stayed him, with a soft hand put upon his mouth.
“Do not say it,” she said quite quietly. “It is enough that you reject my offer. That you may repent when you find your fiercer manhood—when you realise what you have lost. Well, you have been good to me; though, if I have suffered here in the wood while I waited for you, it was not because my heart was other than a stone.”
“Then, for shame!” cried Ned, “so to sell yourself!”
“Ah!” said Théroigne, in the same quiet voice; “but I have made my bed according to monsieur’s proverb, and it is a double one—that is all. And is it not gallant when a woman falls to help her to her feet?”
“It is not gallant to help her, the victim of one lie, to enact another.”
“Surely; and monsieur is the soul of truth.”
She adjusted her cloak and hat, stooped and took up her bundle.
“I am distasteful to monsieur,” she said. “Very well.”
For some reason Ned was moved to immediate anger.
“Your hat is, anyhow,” he snapped. “I think it quite preposterously ugly.”
But she only laughed and waved her hand.
“You will think better of me in England,” she cried.
He was moving away. He stopped abruptly and faced about.
“You are still determined to go, then?”
She nodded her head. Without another word he turned on his heel and strode off down the road.