HAD Lord Murk been of a present inclination less reserved and withdrawing, he had months before found easy access to the presence of the merry maid, whose little red heels seemed now, as it were, to have taken his misogamy by the tail. For, indeed, when at last he sought, he found this young lady’s identity established in a word. She was neither more nor less (with a reservation in respect to the gossips) than the adopted daughter of a very notable gouvernante to a royal family; and she happened to have already sojourned in Bury some six months, during which he, the hermit-crab, had chosen to tuck himself away apathetic into his shell.
Ned had, of course, heard of the not altogether peaceful invasion of the drowsy little town by one particularly hybrid company of emigrants that was, in fact, the travelling suite of Mademoiselle d’Orléans, whom the Duke her father had, for safety, shipped to England towards the latter end of the previous year. The importance of mademoiselle’s advent was signified rather in her rank than her maturity, which presented her as a lymphatic little body, some fifteen years of age, with pink eye-places and a somewhat pathetic trick of expression. But, if her title proclaimed her nominal suzerainty over the valetaille that, in its habits of volubility and swagger, was to inflame the popular sense of decorum by-and-by to a rather feverish pitch of resentment, the very practical conduct of the expedition was in the hands of that wonderful woman whom an irreverent virtuosity had entitled “Rousseau’s hen.”
Ned had not in the least desired to make the acquaintance of this Madame de Genlis. His position in the neighbourhood rather entailed upon him the courtesy of a welcome to the royal little red-eyed stranger at his gates; yet, adapting his unsociability to popular rumour of the formidable bas-bleu that dragoned her, he delayed a duty until its fulfilment became an impossibility. And even a chance report or so that had reached him of the beauty of madame’s adopted child—the flower-faced Pamela (“notre petit bijou”), in praise of whose name, abbreviated, a dozen local squireens were flogging their tuneless brains for any rhyme less natural to the effort than “damn!”—moved him only to some sardonic reflections on the uncomplimentary significance of a gift that seemed designed in principle for a stimulant to fools.
To fools had been his thought; and now here he was, having for the first time happened upon this actual Pamela, not only awake of a sudden to a glaring sense of the social solecism he had committed, but awake, also, to a sentiment much less intimate (as he thought) to the world of ordinary emotions. It was astounding, it was humiliating so to truckle to the thrall of a couple of blue eyes that, for all purposes of vision, were no better than his own. He stood astonished; he rebelled—but he pursued. He felt his very amour-propre giving before the incursion of a force, stranger yet akin to it. So the big brown rat (oh, vile analogy!) usurped the kingdom of his little black cousin.
Why, then, did the unfortunate young man not reject and cast forth the spell that seemed to drain him of all the ichor of independence? Why did he wantonly stimulate in himself a fancy that his calm judgment pronounced hysterical? How can these things be answered? How could any sober reason analyse the motives of a person who kept in his tail-pocket, and frequently sat upon, a charm that absolutely bristled with spikes? It is the way of love. When the mystic bolt flies, the philosopher apart must take his chance of a wound with the man who lives in a street.
Anyhow, it must be recorded how Ned took to haunting—with the persistent casualness of one whose unattainable mistress is, as suggested by his preoccupied manner, the thing farthest from his thoughts—the neighbourhood of a certain house in Bury St Edmunds.
This house—a dignified, two-storeyed, red-brick building, with a stiff white porch standing out into the road, and, on the floor above the porch, five tall windows looking arrogantly down from behind a green balcony at the lesser lights in the barber’s and fruiterer’s shops opposite—was situate, about the middle of the town, on a slope known as Abbey Hill, and had for actual neighbour a chief hotel, the Angel, then pretty newly built. It faced—across that sort of homely place, or town quadrangle, that is so usual a feature in English old market boroughs—a flaked and hoary Norman tower that had once been the gateway to a graveyard long since passed with its dead into the limbo of memories. Madame la gouvernante could see the solemn eyebrows of this very doyen of antiquity bent upon her as she sat at the second déjeuner, and it made her nervous. Sometimes, even, she would send a servant to half close the blinds of the window over against her.
“One cannot evade oneself of its senile addresses,” she said on a certain occasion to a florid gentleman in black, who had come down from London to be her particular guest for a while. “I feel like Vesta being made the courted of an old Time. It is always heere the mummy at the feast.”
The gentleman laughed.
“Egad!” said he. “It is to illustrate how Time stands still with madame the Countess of Genlis; and, as to the mummy, why, a mummy is but dust, and dust is easy to lay”—and he took a great pull from a bumper beside him.
He drank brandy-and-water with his meat. “’Tis this country appetite,” he would say. “Violent diseases need violent remedies;” but by-and-by he would take his share of the port and madeira with the rest. Now he looked across the table to a little shy lady, and, says he, but speaking in very bad French, “Mademoiselle the princess, as I dissipate myself of this shadow, so may you as readily of that that magnifies itself to the eyes of madame the countess.”
He opened his own eyes as he spoke, comically, to imply some imaginary vision of terror. He was very proud of these orbs, that were large and liquid. Indeed, he never allowed the well that replenished them to run dry.
“Est-ce bien possible! fie, then, Mr Sherree-den!” put in a very little voice—not of the lady addressed—from farther down the table. “But mademoiselle takes water with her wine.”
Madame tapped on her plate with her fan, uttering an exclamation of reproval. But the gentleman only laughed again.
“Miss Rogue, Miss Pamela,” said he, being by this time secure of his priming, “I will compliment you and your wit on making a very pretty couple.”
“We are twins,” said the girl saucily. “We were found together on a doorstep.”
“Tais-toi, coquine!” cried madame sharply. “The pair of you had been well committed to the Foundling.”
She treated with vast indulgence generally this pretty child of her adoption. It seemed only that this particular subject was fraught with alarm to her. By-and-by, when the queer meal was ended (there had been present at it, besides the ladies and Mr Sheridan, three silent Bœotians—concordia discors: practical scientists attached to the household, and now admitted, à l’Egalité, to a share in its social rites), madame conducted her guest to her boudoir over the front porch, and opened upon him with the matter momentarily nearest her heart.
“Does it magnify itself to my eyes, this—the shadow of the tower?” she said. “I do not know. It was not so at Barse, where we arrive first; but heere—heere! The place oppresses me. Its antiquity is a rebuke to the frothy dynasties. Every whisper is from a ghost of the past bidding us of the new mode to begone. We are hated, tracked, and watched. I see faces behind trees; I heere mutterings through the walls. What have we to do in this haunted town?”
“It is the burying-place of kings,” said Mr Sheridan. “It should be to your taste.”
Madame la comtesse had no echo for levity. She seemed quite genuinely agitated. Her trick (pronounced eternal by one that detested her) of advertising the beauty of her hand and arm by toying, while she conversed, with a fillet of packthread, as if it were a harp string, was exchanged now for an incessant nervous handling of a little miniature Bastille, carved from a fallen stone of the original, that hung upon her bosom. Her face—pretty yet, though narrowing down to an over-small chin—seemed even yellow, drawn, and affrayed. This appearance was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that she wore no rouge. She had once made a vow to quit its use at the age of thirty, and now at forty-five she was yet true to her word. Indeed, she was the very dévote of Minerva-worship.
She sighed, “That I, whom Nature intended for the cloister, should have to fight always against the snares and the wickedness! I sink. Was there evaire the time when my flesh not preek to the fright? Oh yes, once when I was vain! It is vanity that make the good armure. I had no thought but levity when I marry M. de Genlis—and afterwards during the years of Passy, of Villers-Cotterets, of the Rue de Richelieu! Then I have no fear of the morrow; I have no fear at all but of the too-ardent lover.”
“It must have been an ever-present fear,” said Mr Sheridan gravely.
She shook her head with hardly a laugh.
“I am an old sad woman; my armure is crumbled from me. I play now only one part—in those times it was many. From Cupid to a cuisinière, I had the gift to make each character appear natural; to present it, nevairtheless, of the most charming grace. I was adored and adorable; but it was vanity. I would not exchange the present for the past. I could perform on seven, eight instruments, monsieur; I could dance to shame the unapproachable Vestris; I knew Corneille by heart; Mirabeau himself was not cleverer in organising a comedy for the living, than I for the artificial, stage. My rôle was to promote the healthy condition of amiability, to teach people how to be happy though innocent. That rôle yet remains to me; the rest is gone. When vanity has taught its lesson the pupil may become teacher. I leave since many years the theatre of emotions for the theatre of life. It would be good for some of your countrywomen to follow my example. When I sink of your Congreve, your Vanbrugh, and of the young ladies at Barse that listen wisout a blush, eh bien, on peut espérer que l’habit ne fait pas le moine!”
“Faith, it’s horrible!” said Mr Sheridan; and he remembered how assiduously madame and her charges had frequented the theatres during their two months’ stay at that questionable watering-place before they came to Bury.
“But the morals of ‘Belle Chasse’ have not penetrated to England,” says he, with a little roguish bow to the lady.
Madame uttered a self-indulgent sigh. She looked round on the frippery of fancy-work—moss-baskets, appliqué embroidery, wax flowers, illustrations of science in the shape of tiny trees formed from lead precipitate, illustrations of art in the collections of little moony landscapes engraved on smoked cards, illustrations of practical mechanics in the binding of a sticky volume or so—that lay about the room. These were all so many evidences of her system—instruction in the pleasant gardens of manual toil. She was possessed of the little knowledge of a hundred little crafts. She could have written a ‘Girl’s Own Book’ without the help of one collaborator.
“I have eschewed all the frivolity,” she said. “It is only now that I desire for others to taste sweetly of the fruits of my experience. I am like a nun wishing to dictate the high morality from her cell. The world passes before my window in review, and I applaud or condemn. Is it that I am to be accused of self-interest, of intrigue, because I would convert my hard-wrung knowledge to the profit of my fellows? Yet they pursue me with hate and menace. My reputation is the sport of calumny; my life hangs by a thread. I write to monseigneur, and he aggravates, while seeking to allay, my fears. I write to M. Fox, and he laugh politely in my face. My friends heere, that I thought, turn against me—Sir Gage; Madame Young, also, that is prejudice of that Mees Burrnee you all love so. And she is a tower of strength, the little Fannee—oh yes! but steef, like the tower there. That is the same wis you all. One must evaire conform to your tradeetions or you look asquint.”
“I think you exaggerate the danger,” said Mr Sheridan soberly. “But whatever it be, here am I come down from London to your counsel and command.”
Madame rose from her seat and rested her long fingers caressingly on the speaker’s shoulder.
“Mon chevalier, mon très cher ami,” she said, some real emotion in her voice, “forrgeeve me. It would be good of you at any time; but now, now! The pretty bird, the sweet rossignol, that cried into the night and was hearkened of an angel! Ah! she has no longer of the desolation of the song that must hush itself weeping upon the heart!”
She pressed her other hand to her bosom. Her companion leaned down a moment, his fingers shading his eyes.
“The desolation!” he muttered. “Yes, yes; but for us now there is a deeper silence in the woods.”
They spoke of his wife, who had died but a few months previously. Perhaps the great man had been as faithful to her as it was the fashion for men, great and little, to be in those days to their partners. At any rate, he had loved her to the end—in his own way. A propos of which it may be recorded as richly characteristic of him how, while this same wife lay a-dying, he had been known to ease his heart of sorrow by scribbling verses to Pamela (then living in Bath), in whose beauty he had found, or professed to find, a reflection of his Delia’s old-time fairness.
Now, fortuitously, the little sentimental passage was put an abrupt end to; for, as she leaned, madame all of a sudden started violently and uttered a staccato shriek.
“Le voilà, the triste dark stranger! He come again; he come always! You tell me now there is no purrepus in this devilish haunting?”
She retreated, backing into the room, shrinking without the malignant focus of any stealthy glance directed at her from the road outside. Mr Sheridan jumped to his feet and looked from the window. Strolling past in the sunlight, with an air of studied preoccupation upon his face, strolled a melancholy young man of enigmatical aspect.
Madame, withdrawn into the shade of a screen, stood panting hysterically.
“It is evaire so. He come by morning and by noon—thus, hurrying not at all, but watchful, watchful from the blinkers of his eyes. Why am I so hated and pursued? Is he agent of M. de Liancourt, do you think? Ah! but it is worthy of a runagate so to war on a woman.”
She squealed out in a sudden nerve-panic to hear her companion laugh. He ran to the door of the room.
“Faith!” he cried jovially, “I’m in the way to resolve this riddle at least,” and he pulled at the handle and vanished.
She cried after him to come back—not to leave her alone—that she would lose her reason were anything to happen to him. His descending heels clattered an only reply. Then at a thought she ran to the window and peeped from the covert of curtains. The stranger was wheeled about at the moment and returning as he had come. She saw Mr Sheridan run forth bareheaded, accost, and seize him by both of his hands. He seemed to return the greeting; he——
Madame the countess sank into a chair, as mentally paralysed as though the end were upon her.
Her chevalier was conducting the spy to the door of the house.