OF so wanton and inexplicable a nature had been the assault committed on him, that for some three days succeeding it Ned could have fancied himself lying rather in a stupor of amazement than in the semi-consciousness engendered of a certain degree of pain and fever. His contretemps with his uncle; the latter’s more than usually uncompromising attitude of offence towards him; most of all, the strange vision of madame, with her obvious intention to insult and disable him,—all this in the retrospect inclined him to consider himself the late victim of a delirium that was reflex to the hideous pictures painted in Paris upon his brain.
But, on the fourth morning of his retirement, finding himself awake to the humour of the situation, he knew that his distemper was retreating, and that he might claim himself for a convalescent.
“Astonishment is a good febrifuge,” he thought. “How long have I lain in it, as in a cooling bath?”
And it is indeed strange how blessed an exorcist of pain is absorbing wonder. Not knowledge of drugs for the body but of drugs for the mind shall some day perhaps redeem the world from suffering: the Theatre of Variety, not of the hospital, be the Avalon of the maimed and the smitten.
He had no memory as to who—if anybody—had visited him during the course of his fever.
“But, no doubt,” he thought, “this moderate blood-letting has very timely rectified a bad effusion to my brain, and madame is my unconscious physician.”
He got out of bed, feeling ridiculously weak and emaciated, but with a luminous blot of wonder still floating in the background of his mind. This globe of soothing radiance so made apparent the near details of his past and present as that he had no difficulty in remembering where he was or what had detained him there. He felt no uneasiness over his condition, or any present desire to have it ended. For the moment he was blissfully content to gaze out of his window—that commanded obliquely an engaging little prospect of sunny sand and strolling figures—and to pleasantly scrutinise the picture as it passed, in silent camera-obscura, over the tables of his brain. Pain, emotion, and thirst were all absorbed in an enjoying, indefinite curiosity.
But by-and-by, as he gazed, there wandered—or appeared to wander—into and across his perspective, a couple of figures whose mere presence there in company seemed to sadly shake his confidence in the assurance of his own convalescence. Apart, he might have admitted their reality. It was their conjunction that hipped his half-recovered sanity. For how should madame—that enigmatical tireuse—pair herself, out of all the little crowd, with Théroigne Lambertine, whom he had left in Belgium? Moreover, this was a transformed Théroigne—a Théroigne not of ungainly skirts and preposterous hat, but one that had at length acquired the first adventitious means to an expression of her wonderful beauty; a Théroigne of lawn and paduasoy, of waking airs and graces, of defiance still, but of the defiance that had superbly trodden persecution underfoot.
Then in a moment the vision vanished from his ken.
“I will go to bed again,” he thought. “I have something yet to sleep off.”
Presently he reached out and rang a bell that stood on a table beside him. Simultaneously with the jangle of it, Æolian sounds ceased somewhere down below, a slow step came up the stairs, and a heavy man entered the room, consciously, as if it were a confessional-box.
“Good morning,” said Ned. “I think I’m better.”
The heavy man nodded—a salutation compound of respect and satisfaction—paused an embarrassed minute, turned round, and made as if to retreat.
“Hallo!” exclaimed Ned.
The man faced about.
“What day is it?” said Ned.
“Sunday,” answered the man.
“You are my landlord?”
“Aye.”
“Your wife is out?”
“Aye.”
“At church?”
“Aye.”
“And you are keeping house?”
“Oh aye.”
“Has any one called on me during—eh?”
“The lady.”
“What lady?”
“Her wi’ the parly name.”
“What name?”
“Never cud say.”
“Well, what did she come for?”
“For to dress your arm.”
“My arm!”
Ned fell back in astonishment. The heavy man immediately made for the door.
“Here!” cried Ned.
The man slewed himself round rebellious.
“Was that you playing down below?”
“Aye.”
“Harp?”
“Aye.”
This time he got fairly outside, shut himself on to the landing, apparently dwelt there a minute, and, secure in his retreat, opened the door again and thrust in his head.
“Servant, sir,” said he.
“Oh, all right,” said Ned.
“You’ll be a-dry, belike?” said the man.
“What’s that?”
“Drythe, you’ll call it, for a glass of hale.”
“Certainly not,” answered the convalescent snappishly.
“’Tis a very good substitoot for the stomach,” said the man, and vanished.
“Hi!” shrieked Ned again.
The face reappeared.
“Why don’t you bring your harp and play up here, confound you!”
The eyes opened and withdrew like phantasmagoria. Presently the man was to be heard stumbling upstairs with a burden—in fact, he brought in his instrument and seated himself at it.
“Play?” said he; and Ned nodded.
And now the young gentleman was to read in that book of revelations that treats of the incongruous partiality of divinity in its giving moods. The man beside him was, to appearance, a dull enough fellow, a plodding, leather-palmed, labouring man of smoky intelligence. Yet, for all their horny cuticle, his fingers seemed to burn as luminous as those of the Troll in the fairy tale. They spouted music; the fire of inspiration ran out of their tips along the strings till the ceiling of the common little room vibrated deliciously as the dome of an elfin bell. And he extemporised, it would appear; he wove a web of chords about himself as it were a cocoon, out of which he should one day burst and be acknowledged glorious.
“Surely,” thought Ned, “if it isn’t necessary to be a fool to be a musician, at least the majority of born musicians are fools.”
That was his opinion, and he held it in common with a good many people. The musical, more than any other form of temperament, would appear to be self-sufficient. Its stream may flow and harp, like an Iceland river, through a woefully barren country.
The heavy man played on and on, enraptured, exalted, till his wife came home from church. Then she flew like an angry bee to the sweet twang of his instrument, and opened on him wide-eyed and -mouthed.
“Saving your honour’s presence——” she began.
“Or my life,” said Ned. “He hath built me up my constitution as Amphion built the walls of Thebes. I asked him to come and play, and he hath finished me my cure.”
“Well, now, fegs!” said the woman dubiously. “And they call him pethery John,” said she. “’Tis his fancy to confide himself to his harp once in the week. The stroke of his chisel, the taste of his bacon, the cry of the sea—every thought and act of the six days will he work into them wires on the seventh. An honest, sober man, sir, weren’t ’t for his Sabbath folly.”
“And what is his business?” asked Ned, for the husband had shouldered his harp and disappeared.
“A stonemason’s,” she answered; “and none to come anigh him.”
She added with pride, “He’s a foreman at the excavating over to the cliffs yonder.”
“Oh!” said Ned. “And what are they excavating for?”
“Lord save your honour!” she cried, “don’t ye know as we’re a-fortifying against the coming of they bloody French?”
“No,” said Ned.
“Well,” she answered, “we be.”
Then she recalled her manners.
“But I’m gansing-gay to see your honour so brave,” she said, with a curtsey.
“And I’m vastly obliged to you, ma’am,” said Ned. “And nobody has come near me in my sickness, I understand, but the lady?”
“Only the lady, sir.”
“And, now, who is the lady?”
“But Madame d’Eon, sir, at your sairveece,” said a voice at the door.
Ned fell flat on his back. A formless suspicion, that had rankled in him like an unextracted thorn ever since he had received that prick in the shoulder, suddenly revealed itself a definite shape.
After a minute or two he raised his head from the pillow and looked cautiously around.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, and dropped it again.
Husband and wife were gone, the room door was closed, and at his bed-side, monkey on wrist, sat the strange lady who had been the very active cause of his discomfiture.
“D’Eon, did you say?” he murmured.
“Veritably,” she replied serenely.
“Oh! the——”
“Exactly: the Chevalière Charlotte-Genevieve-Louise-Augusta-Andrée-Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont.”
“The chevalière!” said Ned faintly.
“Or chevalier,” she answered, with a very pleasant laugh.
He raised himself determinedly on his elbow and scrutinised his visitor. He saw beside him a comfortable, motherly looking creature, apparently some sixty years of age, with a sort of Dutch-cap on her head topped by a falling hat, and fat white curls rolled forward from the nape of her neck. Her face, sloping down from the forehead and up from the throat, came as it were to a sharpish prow at the tip of the nose. Its expression was of a rather mechanical humour, and the eyes seemed deliberately unspeculative. Only the mouth, looking lipless as a lizard’s, was a determined feature. For the rest, in dress and manner, she appeared the very antithesis of the loud and truculent trollop who had thrust a quarrel upon, and a sword into him, three nights ago.
And this was the famous chevalier, the enigma, the epicene, upon the question of whose sex the accumulated erudition of a King’s Bench had once been brought to bear—with indefinite result. This was the hermaphrodite dragoon and lady-in-waiting; the author, the plenipotentiary, and at the last, in this year of grace, the astonishing tireuse-d’armes, who had excelled, on their own ground, the Professors St George and M. Angelo, and who now replenished one pocket of her purse by giving lessons in the admirable art of fencing.
And, at this point of his cogitations, Mr Murk said—
“The chevalier is at least a wonderful actress.”
Thereat madame chirred out a little indulgent laugh.
“It is well said!” she cried. “Monsieur is un homme d’esprit.”
“And I take no shame,” said Ned, “to have let her in under my guard.”
She looked at the young man seriously.
“The shame was mine, mon petit—the shame of the necessity was mine to wound you at all.”
“You had not intended to kill me, then? It was not plotted with my lord?”
She flushed, actually—this player of many parts.
“Milord!” she cried, “his hired bravo!”
“Well,” said Ned, “you must admit I have some excuse for thinking it.”
“So!” she answered, recovering herself with a long-drawn breath. “It is true.”
She smiled upon him.
“Had I chalk-marked you at the first, mon cher, I could not have hit you nearer where I intended. When I desire to keel, I keel. When I weesh for to place one hors-de-combat—pour citer un exemple—” she touched his shoulder delicately with her finger-tips.
“You intended to put me on the shelf?” said Ned, surprised.
She nodded.
“On my uncle’s behalf?”
“Ah!” she cried, “you weesh too many answer. I will tell you it was all arrange by me. It was only when the old man smell blood he get beside of himself. You come in my way: I must remove you. That is it.”
“But I have never seen you in my life till three days ago, madame!”
“Nor I, you. What then?”
Ned lay back, thinking things over; and presently he talked aloud:—
“My lord comes to Dover, en route for Paris. He is accompanied by a friend—the Chevalier d’Eon. This chevalier is a diplomatist, and something more. He—she—has served—possibly does serve—a royal master. At this juncture it is to be conceived that her talents for espionnage are being urgently summoned to exercise themselves.”
He paused a moment, glancing askew at his companion. She did not look at nor answer him, but her face expressed some curious concern. A little covert smile twitched his mouth as he continued:—
“There are whispers (I have heard them and of them) in more than one city of the world, that a certain notable Prime Minister gives his secret endorsement to the revolutionary propaganda of the Palais Royal. Would it not be a daring thing on the part of a spy, and a thing grateful to his employers, to endeavour to prove this of the exalted Englishman? But the Englishman is self-contained—almost inaccessible. If he is to be approached, it must be with an elaborate circumspection—by starting, say, the process of under-mining so far from official centres as the very suburban quarters where he takes his little relaxation during the Parliamentary recesses.”
Pausing, consciously, in his abstract review (murmured, as if he were seeking to convince himself), Ned was aware that the chevalier had leaned herself back against the wall at the bedhead, and was softly caressing the monkey. A tight little smile was on her lips; she caught his glance and nodded to him.
“C’est bien, cela,” she whispered.
He went on, echoing her:—
“C’est bien, cela, madame; and I may be altogether a fool, and a fanciful one. But, here (recognising now the significance of reports that have reached me) is where I trace a connection between the fact of my Lord Murk and the Chevalier d’Eon becoming suddenly acquainted, and the fact that the notable Englishman and my lord are villa-neighbours at Putney, where each has his holiday establishment, and where—altogether apart from politics—both meet on the social grounds of a common appetite——”
“For gossip?”
“For port wine, madame.”
La chevalière broke out into a sudden violent laugh. For the first time her voice seemed to contradict her sex.
“Oh, mon Dieu! c’est une fine mouche!” she cried. “She think to make catspaw of our tipsy monseigneur! I undurestand. Mon Dieu, it is excellent! This contained, this inscrutable, this Machiavel, that but wash his head in the bottle as it were to cool it, to yield his confidence to a paillard, a toss-the-pot, an old, old p’tit-maître that have nevaire earn in his life one title to respect! Say no more. It is a penetration the most admirable that you reveal. Oh, mon Dieu! avec tant de finesse on nous crédit!”
Ned waited till her merriment had jangled itself into silence.
“Not to constitute my lord a spy,” said he quietly, “but to equip him with one.”
“Comment?” said madame. “I do not undurestand.”
“I don’t say you do. It is a hypothetical case I put. I assume, for instance, that the chevalier is perfectly aware of my lord’s propensities, and is even willing to act the part of his conciliatrice.”
Madame jumped to her feet, breathing heavily.
“Why did I not keel you!” she muttered. Her eyes were awake with fury. Little coal-black imps seemed to battle in them as in pools of gall. Ned sat up on his bed.
“I assume,” he went on coolly, “that the chevalier, looking about her for her instrument, marked down this dissolute nobleman with a villa at Putney, and decided to accommodate him with a French mistress—a Cressida whom she should coach to act the part of spy to a spy.”
“C’est bien ça,” whispered madame again.
“The chevalier, then, has, we will say, made my lord’s acquaintance; has excited the libidinous old man; has proposed a trip to Paris. The two travel to Dover; and here an unforeseen difficulty supervenes. My lord hears of the Reveillon riots. He refuses to proceed. The chevalier is in despair. She is, however, let us conclude, taking advantage of her position to note the disposition of the new fortifications, when chance puts into her hands the very opportunity for which she has vainly manœuvred. One day there lands from the packet a countrywoman of hers—a beautiful peasant-girl of Liége, whose seduction and abandonment by a rascal aristocrat have made her amenable to any unscrupulous design upon the class that is responsible for her ruin. To the protection of my lord the viscount, the chevalier—by whatever ruse-de-guerre—is happy to commit the demoiselle Théroigne Lambertine, who, poor fool, chances into her hands at the crucial moment.”
Madame, uttering what sounded like a blazing oath, dashed, in an uncontrollable fit of passion, the little beast she held in her arms upon the ground. The poor wretch whipped across the fender and lay screaming with its back broken. She ran and trod upon it with a heavy foot, stilling its cries.
“It is a De Querchy!” she shrieked. “It is so I crush my enemies!”
Then she came towards the bed, her mouth mumbling and mowing, as if the ghost of the departed brute were entered into her.
“You are the devil!” she hissed, “and you will tell me how you shall use your knowledge.”
“In no way,” said Ned.
His throat drummed with nausea. His whole nature rose in revolt against this exhibition of infernal cruelty; but he kept command of himself and of his cold aloofness.
“In no way?” she said thickly. Her jaw seemed to drop. She stared at him. “You will do noting?”
“No more than you,” he said. “You are welcome to your plot for me.”
Her eyes rather than her lips questioned him.
“Because,” said he, “I am convinced there is nothing to find out; and you will be occupied in hunting a chimera when you might be more mischievously engaged elsewhere.”
She nodded a great number of times. The sweat stood on her forehead.
“You had no thought to interfere?” she said. “Vous êtes à plaindre. I might have left you alone after all. But I dreaded you would stand by, and comprehend, and upset my plans, did I find a sujet fitting to my pu-repus.”
“Indeed, you had no reason to fear, madame. I am not so attached to my uncle’s company as that I should have been tempted to linger in it beyond the term prescribed by etiquette; and this time, be assured, I found in it no additional attraction.”
She made a deprecating motion with her shoulders, then seated herself again—but away from the bed—as if in exhaustion.
“At least,” she murmured, “I have been your camarade de chambre. And it seem I have nurse a viper in my bosom.”
Ned could only bow to this quite typically French example of moral obliquity.
“You think the devil hath instructed me, or that I am the devil,” he said. “It is not so, madame. I have lately been in Paris. I have kept my eyes and my ears open. Moreover, I happen to have come across Mademoiselle Lambertine—to have heard her story—to have known how she contemplated a descent on England. Add to this that, looking from the window some hours ago, I saw the girl (‘parmi d’autres paons tout fier se panada’—you know the fable, madame?) walking in your company; add that the public generally hath an interest in the Chevalier d’Eon’s reputation, and I, at least, in that of my uncle; add, perhaps, that a sick man’s brain is abnormally acute, especially when exercised over the causes predisposing to his malady; add that I have revolved these matters in my head as I lay here, and pieced them together in the manner presented to you, and upon my honour I think I have afforded you the full explanation.”
The chevalier rose. She had round her throat a thin band of black velvet that looked stretched almost to the snapping-point.
“Je crois bien,” she said; “and you have missed your vocation—you are lost to the secret sairveece, monsieur.”
“Certainly,” said Ned. “I am quite unable to lie.”
She answered, unaffected, and with recovered gaiety—
“I take, then, monsieur his word that he shall not interfere.”
She added, shaking her finger at him—
“Nevaretheless, it is not all as you say, but it is a good guess of half measures.”
“Very well,” said Ned, with entire composure. “And that being understood, perhaps madame will take up the one victim to her ardour, and leave the other to his convalescence.”
He bowed very politely, and lay down with his face to the wall.
She gazed at him a moment, with an expression compound of perplexity and lively detestation; then, reclaiming De Querchy, went from the room fondling the little broken corpse.