BEFORE—hurrying like a weaponless man through sinister thickets—Ned had come to within a mile of Liége, the memory of the rather grim comedy he had been forced to play a part in was tickling him under the ribs in provocative fashion. That his vanity—no unreasonable quantity—should have received, as it were, in a breath a kiss so resounding, a buffet so swingeing, set his very soul of risibility bubbling and dancing like champagne.
“And ought I to be gratified or offended,” he thought, “that I am chosen the flame about which these moths circle? But it is all one to such insects whether it be wax or rushlight, so long as it burns. That’s where I missed fire, so to speak. The flutter of their poor little feverish wings put me out. I am a cold taper, I fancy. I have never yet felt the draught that would blow me into a roar. What breath is wasted upon me, in good truth!”
Some detail of his path gave him pause. He sat down on a knoll, had out his book and pencil, and began to sketch. Now his blood ran temperately again. If he had been ever momentarily agitated in thought as to his ideals of conduct, the little disturbed silt of animalism was precipitated very soon, and the waters of his soul ran clear as heretofore. He laughed to himself as he sat.
“I believe if I had stayed another day the Van Roon would have made overtures to me.”
By-and-by he fell into a pondering fit. He rested his chin upon his clenched hand and, gazing into the distance, dreamed abstractedly.
“Have I a constitutional frost in my blood, as my uncle believes? Is my every relation with my fellows to be for ever unimpulsive and coldly analytical? That should lead me at least to a nice selection in pairing-time: and to what else?—a career stately, sober, colourless; a faultless reputation; all the virtues ranked upon my tombstone by-and-by for gaping cits to spell over, and perhaps, if I am very good, for a verger to expound. And my widow that is to be—my fair decent relict that shall have never known me condescend to a weakness or perpetrate an injustice, that shall never have felt the frost melt in her arms!”
He jumped suddenly to his feet, his teeth—very even and white ones—showing in a queer little smile. He stretched; he took off his rather battered hat and passed a hand through the crisp umber stubble of his hair. His solemn eyes shone out as blue as lazulite from the sun-burn of his face. He seemed, indeed, from his appearance no fitting catechumen in a religion of everlasting continence. There must be underwarmth somewhere for the surface so to flower into colour.
“She would marry within six months of my death,” he cried; “probably a libertine who would dissipate her estates, and break her heart, and die, and be mourned by her long after my memory was drier than a pinch of dust to all who had known me.”
He laughed again on a note that sighed a little in the fall.
“Am I like that? Do I build all this time with dry dust for mortar? Am I a loveless anchorite because my sympathies will not answer to the coarseness of an appeal that my taste rejects? Is it quite human to be very fastidious in so warm a respect? Or do I only wait the instant of divine inspiration to recognise that other self that seems hidden from me by an impenetrable veil?”
He shook his head despondently, collected his traps, and went on his way to Liége.
There he remained no longer than was necessary to a settlement in the matter of certain bills of credit and to the chartering of a vehicle for his onward stages. He was to return to the coast by way of Namur, Lille, and Calais. For the time he was all out of humour with a nomadic philosophy, and desired only to reach England by as short a route as possible.
He set sail in the Fanny Crowther packet, and had a taste of Channel weather that was as good as a “constitutional” after a debauch. He was two days at sea, beating forth and back at the caprice of squabbling winds; and when at last he landed in Dover it was with the drenched whitewashed feeling of a convalescent from fever.
He was setting foot on the jetty, discomfortable in the conviction that his present demoralisation was offering itself the target to a hail of local wit, when a thin neigh of a laugh that issued from a yellow curricle drawn up near at hand drew his peevish attention. Immediately he fetched his nausea under control, and stepped towards the carriage with a fine assumption of coolness. There may have appeared that in his attitude to induce a respectable manservant to jump from the dickey and offer to bar his progress.
“All right, Jepps,” said he. “I’m not one of ‘Peg Nicholson’s knights’ with a petition.”
The man bowed and made way for him.
“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Edward,” said he, and added in an accommodating voice, “I’d little call to know you, sir.”
“Eh, what? Ned!” gasped one of the occupants of the curricle, no other than the Right Honourable the Viscount Murk indeed.
His lordship sat on and forward of a great cloak lined with silver fox-skin (a luxurious cave into which he could withdraw whenever a draught nosed his old sapless limbs), the neck-clasp of which he had unhooked for the display of a diamond brooch that gathered voluminous lawn about the sagging of his throat. In every detail of his condition he was the bowelless and mummified coxcomb, packed prematurely into exquisite cerements, predestined to a corner in the museums of limbo; and topping his finished refinements of costume, his beaver was tilted like an acute accent to so distinguished an expression of hyperdynamic foppery.
“You are surprised to see me, sir,” said Ned (he glanced as he spoke with something like astonishment at my lord’s companion); “nor I much less to find you here. As for myself, I have gleaned such a harvest of experience in a few months that I must needs come home to store it.”
His uncle stared at him, but with a rallying expression of implacable distaste.
“Rat me!” he said candidly; “I’d hoped to hear of you a martyr to your theories, and that manstrous Encyclopedia set up for your tombstone.”
He turned indolently to his companion.
“This is the heir to ‘Stowling’ and the viscounty and all the rest of the beggarly show, if he can be induced to candescend to it,” he said viciously, and gathered up the reins in his lemon-gloved hands.
The other nodded, with a pretty display of white teeth and a shifting affectation that was extravagantly feminine. A dainty three-cornered hat was perched on her powdered hair, that was pulled up plainly and rolled over each temple in a silken ringlet. She had on a richly embroidered jacket with wide lapels; a rug was over her knees; and seated on it, fastened to her left wrist by a tiny golden chain, was a red monkey that chattered at the new-comer.
“Monsieur Edouard,” said she, caressing the insular barbarity of speech with her tongue, and her pet with fluttering finger-tips, “who have sold himself the birtheright to a dish of potage. Oh que si! mais si jeunesse savait! But I have heard of Monsieur Edouard; and also I have heard of Monsieur Paine.”
Her voice was as artificial as her manner. Playing on the alto, it would squeak occasionally like a greasy fiddle-bow. And her age, despite the smooth and rather expressionless contour of her features, might have been anything from thirty-five to sixty.
“But she has not wrinkles to cement and overlay,” thought Ned, “else would she never dare to laugh so boldly.”
He did not like the truculence of her eyes; nor, indeed, the whole air of rather professional effrontery that characterised her. Nevertheless there was that about her, about the atmosphere she seemed to exhale, that curiously confounded him.
“I have not the honour of an introduction,” he said, a little perplexed, “nor the right to return madame’s compliment—if, indeed, it was meant for one.”
“Not in the least,” she said, with an insolent laugh. “I have no applause for the héritier légitime that is a traitor to his trust.”
She sank back, toying with her little red-furred beast. My lord laughed acidly, but made no offer to enlighten or question his nephew.
“So you have returned,” he said only. “All the devil of it lies in that, and” (he scanned his young relative affrontingly) “in your unconverted vanity of blackguardism. Get up, Jepps.”
Ned laughed in perfect good-humour, as the curricle sped away.
“After all,” thought he, “perhaps it is hard to be claimed for uncle by a rag-picker. I will resume my decorative self, find out where my lord lodges, and wait upon him in form and civility.”
He had his insignificant baggage removed to temporary quarters, ransacked the mean little town for what moderately becoming outfit it could yield, shaved, rested, and refreshed himself, and issued forth once more on duty’s quest.
“And what is the old man doing here?” he thought; “and who is the enigmatical Cyprian?”—whereby, it will be observed, he jumped to baseless conclusions. But he gave himself no great concern about the matter, admitting that the probable explanation of his uncle’s presence in the sea-port town lay in that flotsam and jetsam of the Palais Royal bagnios that many tides washed up on the coast.
“He may be acting the part of a noble and unvenerable wrecker,” thought he—it must be confessed, consistently with the common estimate of his kinsman.
My lord had rooms in one of the fine mansions then first beginning to sprout over against the harbour for the accommodation of wealthy sea-bathers. He was dressed—with all the force of the expression as applied to him—for dinner, and received his nephew in a fine withdrawing-room overlooking the bay. He snarled out an ungracious welcome. He was, as ever, wrapped and embalmed in costly linen smelling of amber-seed, and was with all—so it seemed to the nephew—a touch nearer actual comminution than when he had last seen him. To strip him of cartonage and bandages would be, it appeared, to commit him to dust. But the maggot of vanity still found sustenance in the old wood of his brain.
“I am honoured,” he said, “that you give my table the preference over a tavern ordinary. Have you learned to equip yourself with a palate in these months?”
“At least I’ll promise to do justice to your fare, sir.”
“Will you? You shall be made Lord Chancellor if you do. No, no, Ned! To know beef from matton is the measure of your gastranamy. Ain’t you hungry, now?”
“Ravenous, sir.”
“Il n’y en a pas de doute. You dress like a chairman (I’m your humble debtor, egad! that you’ve recommitted the rags you landed in to the dunghill), and you’ll eat like one. A gentleman’s never hungry. He appraises his viands, sir. ’Tis for flunkeys to devour. One must not yield oneself to a condition of emptiness. That implies a dozen of little disadvantages that are inimical to bon-ton. But you know me hopeless of ever convincing you in these matters.”
He rose with a slight yawn, and walking to the window, looked out into the darkening evening. The old limbs might have creaked but for their perpetual lubrications. Not an inquiry as to the course of his travels did he address to his undesirable heir. It was more than enough for him that he had returned at all.
“If not that you have discovered a palate,” said he, with a sour grin, “then I suppose I am to attribute this visit to your high sense of duty.”
A carriage drew up on the stones below as he spoke.
“Enfin! mon cher—mon aimable chevalier!” he muttered to himself with relief.
“You have company, sir?” said Ned.
“You can stop for all that,” said the uncle tartly. “Madame, as you have seen, knows how to take her entertainment of a monkey.”
Madame was ushered in as he spoke. Ned’s only wonder, upon identifying her as the lady of the curricle, was over the fact of her separate lodging. He had expected to find her in my lord’s suite. She came into the candle-light, an amazing figure of elegance, rouged, plastered, and befeathered, but even surprisingly decorous in attire. She wore long mittens on her arms, the upper exposed inches of which flickered with a curious muscularity when she fanned herself.
“So,” she said, making exaggerated play with her eyes over the rim of the toy, “we shall have the fatted calf to dinner. And did you find the husks of democracy to your liking, sir?”
“I found them tough,” said Ned.
She laughed like an actress. She shook her finger at him archly.
“Of a truth,” she replied, “they cannot have been to your stomach at all. You asked for bread, was it not, and they gave you a shower of stones? One does not desire one’s high convictions to be set up for a mark to violence. And so you turned the tail and came home to our dear monseigneur.”
“I have come home to England,” said Ned. “As to this, my happening on my lord, it is a simple accident.”
He spoke with some coldness of reserve. He had no idea whom he addressed. His kinsman had disdained to introduce him or to give him the least clue to madame’s identity.
The lady laughed again.
“But do not call it a contretemps!” she cried. “It is a dispensation of Providence that milord, though a very Bayard of courage, is detained by sentiments of chivalry. We were to have journeyed to Paris together had news of the riots not reached us; and hence arrives this so amiable meeting.”
“I was there,” said Ned shortly. “I saw M. Reveillon’s factory gutted.”
She paused in her fanning. She looked strangely at the young man a moment.
“You were there?” Then she resumed her bantering tone: “and found what bad bed-fellows are theory and practice. Perhaps it shall reconcile you to milord here, whose rôle of orthodox muscadin you shall for the henceforth make your own.”
“Egad!” cried the viscount, who, it seemed, accepted the revolutionary muscadin for better than it was worth. “But I had my fill of riots in ’80, when the cursed rabble took me for a papist and singed my coat-tails.”
Madame nodded her head brightly. Her dark eyes contrasted as startlingly with her overlaid cheeks as might the eyes in a face of wax.
“So you were wise and came away,” she said, still addressing the young man. “But milord was wiser. He would not help to inflame a popular prejudice. The majesty of the people must be respected—when it takes to singeing one’s coat-tails.”
“Well,” thought Ned, “I must be right. This is Madame Cocotte from the Palais Royal. Or else—I wonder if she is in the pay of a very neighbouring government?”
A thought or two—of madame’s manner of presenting her little sarcasms—quickened his curiosity. To countermine the supposed agencies of Pitt, the inflexible and reserved, the bottomless Pitt—was it unreasonable to suppose that France was employing some very engaging decoy-ducks to the corruption of an aristocracy that might be fifth-cousins to State secrets? True, Monseigneur the Viscount’s confidence was of little worth but to his valet; yet the first rung of the ladder may be used for the secondary purpose of scraping one’s boots on before climbing.
Madame was the only guest. She had brought her monkey with her, and the little brute was carried screeching to a chair by her side at the dinner-table, where it sat sucking its thumb like a vindictive baby and snatching at the dishes of fruit.
“Fi, donc! fi, donc! De Querchy!” she would cry to it. (She had named the beast, it presently appeared, after an enemy of hers, M. le Comte of that title.) “C’est ainsi que tu donnes une leçon de politesse à ces barbares, nos amis?”
My Lord Murk laughed at all her insolence—especially when her sallies were directed at his nephew. She spared the young man no more than she did her host’s wine, to which, Ned was confounded to observe, she resorted with a freedom that was entirely shameless. Indeed, she drank glass for glass with the elder of the gentlemen, and indulged herself with a corresponding licence of speech that quite confirmed the younger in his estimate of her character. But he was hardly prepared for the upshot of it all as directed against himself.
“Monsieur Edouard,” she once said (it was after the servants had left the room), “have I not your language in perfection?”
“Indeed, madame,” he answered stiffly, “even to a peculiar choice in words.”
She laughed arrogantly.
“I accept your insult!” she said—and flung the glass she was drinking from full at him.
“Là, là, là!” she shrieked. “You threw up your arm: it is only the coward that has the instinct to throw up his arm to a woman!”
My lord laughed like an old demon. Ned was on his feet, white and furious.
“You are a woman!” he cried, “and the more shame to you!”
She jumped from her chair. As she did so the monkey sprang to her left shoulder, on which it seated itself, gibbering and quarrelling.
“I claim for the only privilege of my sex to despise the Joseph!” she cried. “For the rest, I can fight for my honour, monsieur, as you shall see!”
She skipped, for accent to the paradox, in great apparent excitement; hurried to a window embrasure, stooped, and faced about with a naked rapier in her hand.
“Draw!” she cried; and, running over to the door, turned the key in the lock and feinted at the amazed young man. All the while the monkey clung to her, adapting its position to her every movement.
“Is this a snare?” said Ned coldly. He looked at his uncle, his hand clenched at his hip. But he wore no weapon but his recovered composure.
The old villain drew his own blade and flung it across the table to his nephew.
“Fight, you dog!” he sputtered and mumbled. He was deplorably drunk. “Fight!” he shrieked, “and take a lesson to your cursed self-importance!”
He threw his glass in a frenzy into the fireplace, and screeched out, “Two to one in ponies on madame!”
The lady cried “Ah-bah! He tink me of the ‘fancy.’” For all her assumed heat she was really self-possessed. Ned understood her to be playing a part; but he could not yet comprehend how he was concerned in it. He took up his uncle’s sword.
“These,” he said coolly, “are dangerous toys. But, if madame will play with them, I must prevent her from doing harm to herself or me.”
She gave a little staccato shriek of mockery, and attacked him without hesitation. The monkey still perched on her shoulder. With her third pass, Ned felt that his life was in the hands of a consummate tireuse; her fourth took him clean through the fleshy part of the right shoulder.
Madame withdrew and lowered the red lance, that dropped a little crimson on the carpet, like an overcharged pen. The tipsy old lord had scrambled to his feet. His inflamed eyes seemed to gutter like expiring dips. He yelled out oaths and blasphemy.
“Kill him!” he shrieked: “I hate him—do you hear! kill him!”
Ned, reeling a little, and clutching at a chair-back, dimly wondered if this were indeed but a villainous plot to rid his kinsman of a detested incubus. He felt powerless and sick, but madame’s voice reassured him.
“Bah!” she cried gruffly, “you are very tipsy indeed. Hold your tongue, and drink some more wine!”
He was conscious, then, of her near neighbourhood; of the fact that she was binding up his arm.
“It is leetle—but enough,” he heard her mutter.
Then she looked over to where my lord sat glowering and collapsed.
“A coach, if you please!” she said peremptorily. “It must not arrive that he pass the night heere in your house.”
The uncle laughed inanely.
“What!” he said, “d’ye think I should finish him and put the blame on—on another? Take him to the devil, if you will.”
“No,” said she, “but I weel convey’a heem to his lodgings out of the devil’s way.”