EDWARD, LORD MURK—now three years enjoying the viscounty—was established, during the summer of ’92, at “Stowling,” his lordship’s seat near Bury St Edmunds. Since his uncle’s death he had spent the greater part of his time here—perhaps because his associations with the place were less of the disreputable old peer than of the traditions and the personnel that had made it dear to him in his youth. He had sold both the Cavendish Square property and the villa at Putney; and was consequently, no doubt, very meanly equipped with domicile for a gentleman of his position.
That, maybe, to him was a term little else than synonymous with “opportunity.” Position at its best enabled him to realise on some ethical speculations of his earlier educational period. His Paris experiences had given to these their final direction; and though he was theoretically as convinced as ever that men should be made virtuous by Act of Parliament, the tablets of his soul, bitten into by the acid of human suffering, were come nowadays to exhibit the expression of a very human sympathy.
He gave with a large discriminating nobility; yet, no doubt, he was little popular in the neighbourhood, because in his benefactions he was discerning, and because, in indulging his liberality, he would forego any display of the wealth that he was ever passing on to others. Already for a peer he was poor; and, had he chosen, he might have cited, in favour of his conception of a mechanical morality, the fact that an emotional morality secretly despised in him that poverty by which it profited. But he did not choose. The spirit of philosophy still dwelt in him very sweet and sound.
In all these three years he had not once been abroad. Following—as keenly as it was possible for him to do in those days of crippled international communication—the progress of the great Revolution (perhaps, even, contributing at its fair outset to the sinews of war), he had yet no inducement whatever further to embroil himself, an inconsiderable theorist, with a distracted people. Between a turbulent chamber of his history and the halls of tranquillity in which he now sojourned had clapped-to a very sombre door of death; and this he had not the inclination to open again.
Still, often in his day-dreams he would be back at Madame Gamelle’s, watching all that life scintillating against the curtain of the Bastille. And now this curtain had, in truth, gone up, revealing, not, as he himself had prophesied, the “blank brick wall of the theatre,” but democratic force represented in a vast perspective—a procession so endless that it seemed drawn out of the very brain of the North, where all mystery is concentrated.
That, now, was an old story. Three subsequent years of planting and levelling had changed the face of the world’s garden of conventions, and during all that time the world itself had stood round outside the railings, peering in amazed upon a ruthless grubbing up and carting away of its pinkest flowers of propriety.
That was an old story; nor less so to Ned was the tale of his little sojourn in Méricourt; and thereon, for all his rebelling, his thoughts would sometimes dwell sweetly. The very quaintness of his reception, unflattering though it had been, had still an odd thrill for him. The memory of a happy period put to long wanderings by serried dykes, of the old hamlet basking in the ferny bed of its hills, of all the ridiculous and the tragic that, blended, made of the little episode in his life a sore that it was yet ticklingly pleasant to rub over—these, the shadows of a momentary experience, would rise before him, not often, yet so persistently that he came to attach almost a superstitious significance to their visitings. For why else, he thought, should the ghost of one haunt the galleries of a thousand pictures! Some connection, not yet severed, must surely link him to that time.
Yet, during all this period of his responsibility, no whisper to suggest that to his shadows he was become other than a shadow himself reached him. It may have been breathed inaudibly, nevertheless, through the key-hole of that closed door.
Of Théroigne he had heard no word after her flight from the house of death. Nor had he desired to hear, or to do else than free himself of the dust of a scandal that, for months after his succession, had clung to him as the legitimate inheritor of a villainous reputation. And this desire he had held by no means in order to the conciliation of Mrs Grundy, but only that he might be early quit of the hampering impertinences of commiseration and criticism.
Once, it is true, he had almost persuaded himself that it was his duty to seek for either verification or disproof of the girl’s almost incredible statement about the man Lucien de St Denys. The conviction, however, that the story as related was incredible; that it was revealed to him under the stress of passion and of immeasurable grievance; that no man—least of all an astute rascal—would be likely to put into the hands of a woman—the baser sequel to whose ruin he was even then contemplating—a weapon so tipped with menace to himself,—this growing upon him, he was decided in the end to forego the resolving of all problems but those that were incidental to his own affairs. Therefore he settled down with admirable decorum to the righteous lording of his acres.
Still occasionally a restless spirit—that Harlequin bastard of Ariel and the earth-born Crasis—would whisper in his ear of vast world-tracts unexplored, of the meanness of social restrictions and of the early staleness that overtakes the daily bread of conventions, of the harmonics of phantom delights that may be heard in the under-voices of flying winds, of life as it might be lived did men serve Nature with honesty instead of deceit. Then a longing would arise in him to be up and away again; to throw off the shackles of formality and pursue his more liberal education through the fairs of the nations. Then his days would show themselves empty records, strangely fed from some darker reservoir of emptiness, the source of whose supply would be a weary enigma to him. And in such moods it was that the gardens of the past blossomed through his dreams, and figures, sweet and spectral, would be seen walking in them—Théroigne sometimes, sometimes Nicette, and again others—yet these two most persistently.
* * * * * * * *
The demesne of “Stowling” was situate a long mile from Bury St Edmunds against the Lynn Road. All about the grounds relics of an ancient grandeur were in evidence, though the house itself, a graceful Jacobean block, with projecting wings and stone eyebrows to its windows, was a structure significant of a quite moderate condition of fortune. The property, in point of fact, had been flung, at “Hazard,” into the lap of that same Hilary, Lord Brindle (own pot-companion to Steele and to Dick Savage of the “Wanderer”—with whom, indeed, he had often cast at Robinson’s coffee-house, near Charing Cross, where the broil occurred in which Lady Macclesfield’s bastard stabbed Mr Sinclair to death), who was wont to justify his own viciousness by the aphorism, “Whatever we are here for, we are not here for good.” Very few of the Murks, it must be confessed, had been here for good, though none had endeavoured to disprove one side of the mot with more pertinacity than the late viscount. Yet, at last, a successor was to the front who would inform with gravity and decorum the family seat that had been acquired, rebuilt, and maintained by the wild lord in a manner so questionable.
For Ned the house was big enough; to him its grounds presented a retreat that had all the melancholy charm of a cloister to its monks. Nameless antiquity dreamed in its clumps of mossy ruins; in its fragment of a Norman gateway; in its tumbled “Wodehouse” men—sightless, crippled giants, with clubs shattered against the skull of Time; in its wolfish gurgoyles snarling up from the grass. Hereabouts could he wander a summer’s day and never regret the world.
Not often was he to be seen in the old town hard by; yet from time to time he would walk over on a sunny day and loiter away an hour or so in its venerable streets. And therein one morning (it was breathing kind July weather) he saw a vision that seemed to typify to him the very “sweet seventeen” of the year.
Now Ned’s knowledge of women had been mostly of the emotional side; and a certain constitutional causticity in him had been wrought out of all patience by the attentions to which he had been subjected in the respect of one order of passion. It is true his innate sense of humour rejected for himself the plea of excessive attractiveness, and, indeed, any explanation of the pursuit, save that he had happened coincidently into the scent-area of a couple of questing creatures of prey. Still, built as he was, the experience was so far to his distaste as to incline him always a little thenceforth to an unreasonable hatred of the dulcetly sentimental in, and, indeed, to a shyness of, the sex altogether.
Upon this, however, the little July-winged vision—which blossomed into his sight as he turned the corner into a quiet street—he looked with that inspired premier coup d’œil that aurelians direct to a rare living “specimen” of what they have hitherto only known in unapproachable cabinets. He looked, and saw her spotless, as recently emerged from some horny chrysalis of his own late incubating fancy. (“This is ipsa quæ, the which—there is none but only she.”) He looked, and the desire of acquisition gripped his heart—if only he had had a net in his hand!
She had bright brown hair and china-blue eyes, and her hair curled very daintily, and her eyelashes dropped little butterfly kisses—as the children call them—on her own pretty cheeks. She was of an appealing expression, a thought coy and spirituelle; and she was indescribably French, too, in her tricks of gesture and the very roguish tilt of her hat.
That was by the way to this travelled Cymon. Emigrants nowadays were commoner than sign-boards in the streets of Bury. What concerned him was that the girl appeared to be in trouble. She rested one hand on the sill of a low window in the wall; her forehead had a pained line in it; she sucked in her lower lip as if something hurt her; from time to time an extraordinary little spasm seemed to waver up her frame.
At least one reprehensible suggestion as to the cause of this convulsion might have offered itself to a vulgar intelligence—the tyranny (to put it sweetly) of over-small shoes. My Lord Murk, leaving his fine prudence and philosophy squabbling in the background, walked up to and accosted the sufferer in deadly earnest and quite courtly French—
“Mademoiselle is in distress? I am at her service and command.”
The lady gave an irrepressible start, and shuddered herself rigid. Certainly she was abominably pretty—straight-nosed, wonder-eyed as a mousing kitten. But she answered with unmistakable petulance, and in a winning manner of English, “I am beholden to monsieur; but it is nothing—nothing at all. I beg monsieur to proceed on his way.”
Ned bowed and withdrew. The dismissal was peremptory; he had no choice. But, daring to glance back as he was about to take another turning out of the empty street, he was moved to pause again in a veritable little panic of curiosity. For, on the instant of his espial, a “clearing” spasm, it seemed, was in process of bedevilling the angelic form; and immediately the form repossessed itself of the nerves of motion, skedaddled round a corner, and disappeared.
Now sudden inspiration came to Master Ned gossip. He perceived that the lady had been standing upon a grating. Like a thief, in good earnest, he stole back to the scene of the contretemps, and went into a silent fit of laughter. Two little high red heels, bristling with nails, were firmly wedged between the bars of the grille. With a guilty round-about glance, he squatted, and dug and beat them out with a sharp stone. Then (observe the embryonic crudeness of romance in the shell), he put them—nails and all—into his tail-pocket.