IT was on a day of the last week of broiling July that Ned knocked at the door of a house in the Rue de Ragule, near the Schaerbeck Gate in Brussels, and desired to be shown into the presence of M. le Comte de Lawoestine.
Now it seemed at the outset that his mission was in vain, for monsieur was, and had been for many days, away from home, and it was impossible for one to say when he would return. And whither had he gone? Ah! that was known only to himself, and, possibly, yes, to madame la comtesse. And was madame away also? Madame? Oh! c’était une autre pair de manches. Madame, it would appear, was upstairs at that very moment.
Ned sent up his letter of introduction and—after a rather tiresome interval of waiting—was shown into a room on the first floor. Here, to his astonishment, was the mid-day meal in progress at a long polished table. Two ladies—one seated at either side—continued eating with scarcely a look askance at the stranger; a third, placid and débonnaire, rose from her place at the head of the board and, advancing a step or two, held out her hand.
“I have read maman’s letter,” she said, but speaking in French in a little drowsy voice, “and I have the pleasure to make you welcome, monsieur.”
She then returned to her seat, and bidding a servant lay a cover for monsieur, went on with her dinner. The very antichthon of the galvanic Genlis spirit seemed to slumber in her rosy cheeks. She had settled down to a lifelong “rest,” like an actress availing herself only of the art of her profession to play herself into a fortunate match.
“Monsieur le comte is away?” said Ned, as he took his seat by one of the silent ladies.
“He is gone south to join his regiment. He will be at Liége for a few days to inspect the fortifications. I do not know, I, what it all portends. They say the air is full of hidden menace. Anyhow, what does M. Lafayette purpose in bringing an army of ragamuffins to the frontier? He is a nobleman and a gentleman. I saw him once at Belle-Chasse. Ah! the dear industrious days! But I prefer a life of ease, monsieur; do not you? To gild baskets and work samplers, with the sun on one’s head in the hot white room! Mother of Christ, it is hot enough in Brussels! One may think one hears the sun drop grease upon the stones in the street, when Fanchon spits upon a flat-iron in the kitchen. Have you ever known a summer so sultry? The sky is packed with thunder like the hold of a ship. Then will come the rain one day and swell it and swell it, and the decks will burst asunder and the ribs explode apart. I do not like thunder, monsieur—do you? It is disturbing, like the play of children. Yet we are to have thunder enough soon, they say.”
So she talked on, in a tuneless soft voice; and there seemed no particular reason why she should ever come to an end. She never paused for an answer or for a word, nor often for breath, which long habit had taught her the art of nursing. She asked no questions as to her mother; did not, indeed, so much as allude to her until Ned indirectly forced a reference.
“And where is monsieur le duc?” said he, cutting in during a momentary ellipsis that was caused by her indetermination in choosing between two dishes of vegetables. She did not answer till she had decided—upon taking some of each. Then she turned her soft eyes on him in a little wonder.
“Monsieur——?” she began, as if she had not heard.
“The Duke of Orleans,” said Ned.
“Indeed, I do not know. He should be in Paris.”
“He has left here, then?”
“Here? Brussels, do you mean? He has not, to my knowledge, been in Brussels these six months—no, not since January, when he came to meet the demoiselle Théroigne on her return from the Austrian prisons, and conducted her back to the capital.”
“Théroigne!” exclaimed Ned in faint amazement.
“So she is called, I believe,” went on the placid creature, oblivious of the little emotion she had caused. “Monsieur has heard of her, no doubt. She is beautiful, and of easy virtue, they say. At her house in the Rue de Rohan the most violent propagandists assemble nightly to discuss the overthrow of the present social conditions. I wish they would leave them alone: they are very reasonable, I think—to all at least who have assured incomes. She is quite a force in Paris, this woman. They sent her some time last year en mission to these Netherlands to preach the new religion. But she was arrested by the agents of the Emperor and conveyed to Vienna, whence she was dismissed no later than last January. Monseigneur was hunting with M. de Lawoestine at the time, and he heard somehow, and came straight on to Brussels, and carried the demoiselle Théroigne away.”
“And that was the last you have seen of him? Yet your mother had no doubt but that he was in this neighbourhood.”
“Oh, maman?” cried madame, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders. “But she is as full of fancies as this mushroom is of grubs.”
“Indeed,” said Ned, quite dumfoundered, “I think you must be misinformed as to monsieur le duc.”
“Very well,” she said indifferently. “It is possible, of course. M. de Lawoestine is not communicative, nor am I curious. There is no reason why they should not be in Liége together at this very moment.”
There was every reason, however, against such a meeting; but madame had not the shadow of a diplomatic acumen.
“I must follow your husband to Liége, then,” said Ned.
“You will at least lie here for the night, monsieur?”
“A thousand pardons, madame. My business is of the most pressing; and you yourself confess an ignorance as to the movements of monsieur le comte.”
“Mon Dieu! I never trouble my head about them.”
“With madame’s permission I will bid her adieu at the end of the meal.”
“As you will, monsieur. And if you do not find monsieur le duc in Liége?”
“Then I shall go on to Paris.”
“I hope, then, monsieur’s passports are in order?”
“They take me into France by way of the Low Countries. Madame, your mother, is responsible for them.”
“She is at any rate a woman of business. Nevertheless, the borders are disturbed. I wish monsieur a very fair journey. I trust he will not be struck by the lightning; but—Mother of Christ! I think there is a storm coming such as we have never seen. I shall take some peaches and some cake, and sit in the cellars till it is over.”
* * * * * * * *
My lord reached Liége on the morning of the twenty-ninth of July—a day of sullen omen to France. The early noon hours he spent in dully strolling through the streets of the antique city, now grown so familiar to him. He had called at M. de Lawoestine’s address (as supplied him by the young madame), only to find that the count was absent on some expedition and would not return till the morrow. Of the Duke of Orleans’s presence in the town he could obtain no tittle of evidence.
Now he was dull because misgivings were beginning to oppress him, and because the weather made an atmosphere appropriate to the confusion in his brain. Certainly he did not actually face, in the moral sense, the question as to whether or no he had been intentionally committed to a fool’s errand. He could not have conceived how so elaborate a jest should be planned and carried through without suspicion awaking in his heart. Naturally, knowing the soundness of his own financial position, he was not conscious of the supposed bar to his suit. His uneasiness turned rather on his new conception of Madame de Genlis as a woman of that patchwork practicalness that leaves to chance the working out of its design. She may have intended that monsieur le duc should be in Brussels—it would, doubtless, have been convenient to her to find him there—and therefore she may have, through Ned, acted upon her desire rather than upon her information. But, if this were so, what a crazy perspective of possibilities was opened out! to what an endless wild-goose chase might he not be sworn! And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!
There was such anguish in the thought as to make him augment his pace till his forehead was wet with perspiration. He had come out to escape the intolerable oppressiveness of confinement in an inn. It was such weather as he had experienced upon his first visit to the town—good God! how many years ago was that now? Yet there seemed fewer changes in it than in himself. It was such weather, but intensified—and, with that, at least, his own condition kept pace. He had a warmer core in his breast than had been there before. But the tall, narrow streets, the cool churches, the blazing markets—these had no longer the glamour of the past. His thoughts were always in shadowy English lanes, in fragrant English rooms. A girl’s laugh in the street would make him lift his head as he paced; a jingle of bells on the harness of some sleepy Belgian horse would recall to him with a thrill the tinkle of a triangle. And, for the rest, the sweet pungency of geranium flowers he carried always in his breast, like a very garden of pleasant memories.
And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!
He looked up with a sudden start. Something—he could not describe what—like the silence that succeeds the heavy slamming of a door, seemed to have gripped the world. The heat for days had been immense and cruel. Men, roysterers and blasphemers, were come to a mean inclination to expend what little breath was left to them in prayer. A habit of stealthily examining the face of the heavens for signs significant of the approaching “black death” of the storm was common. The water seemed to steam in the kennels, the lead to crackle in the gutters. Some inhuman outcome, it was predicted, of these unnatural conditions must result. And now at last had the plague-stroke fallen?
Whatever it was—this inexplicable turn of the wheel—the tension of existence drew to near snapping-point under it. Poor souls crept for pools of shadow as if these were Bethesdas; here and there one dropped upon the pavement, and was rescued, as under fire, by a companion; the wail of half-stifled infants came through open windows; the sun was a crown of thorns to the earth.
The streets, at the flood of noon, grew almost untenable. Ned—perhaps from some vague association of ideas, the result of his dreamings upon English lanes—left the town and, with the desire for trees compelling him, took half-unconsciously the Méricourt road. It may have been instinct merely that directed him. He had thought since his coming—how could he help it?—of Théroigne, of Nicette, of all his old connection with the strange little village. But he had no desire to renew his acquaintance with the people of that ancient comedy—so, now, it seemed to him. And surely by this time a new piece must hold the stage; the old masks must be crumbled away or repainted to other expressions. It was so long ago. He had leapt the boundary-river of youth in the interval. He could have no place at last in the life of the little hamlet by the woods.
It may have been the sudden realisation of this, his grown emancipation, that tempted him all in a moment, and quite strangely, to the desire to look once more upon the scenes that, until within the last few minutes, he had had no least wish to revisit. It may have been that he was driven onward simply by the goad of his most haunting distress—that fancy of Mr Sheridan greatly profiting by a rival’s absence—and by the thought of the intolerable period of mental suspense and bodily discomfort he must suffer down there in the town, until his interview with M. de Lawoestine should give a direction one way or the other to his mission. Such considerations may have urged him; or—with a bow of deference to the necessitarians—no consideration at all, but a fatality.
For, indeed, this storm—an historical one—that was to break, seemed so inspired an invasion of order by the prophets of anarchy, as that it appeared to impress under its banner, as it advanced, all predestined agents (however individually insignificant) of that social and religious havoc of which its ruinous course was to be typical.
Ned, as he toiled on the first of the hill, looked up at the sky. It was as the wall of a nine-days’ furnace—his eyes could not endure the terror of the light. Nor, from his position, could they see how, far down on the horizon, a mighty draft of cloud was slipping over the world, like the sliding lid of a shallow box, shutting into frightful darkness a panic host of souls.
Here it was better than in the town; but the heat still was terrific. He was yet undecided as to whether to go on or rest where he had paused, when a carter, with a tilted waggon, came up the road behind him. For the weird opportuneness of it, this might have been Kühleborn himself. The man, as it appeared, was bound for the farther side of Méricourt. Ned, seeing the chance offered him to view from ambush, accepted his unconscious destiny, struck his bargain, and slipped under the canvas.
Kühleborn cried up his team. The sick day turned, moaning among its distant trees like a delirious troll.
* * * * * * * *
The lodestone to all this dark force of electricity that came up swiftly over the verge of the world, rising from the caldron of the East, where inhuman things are brewed! Was it an iron cross standing high in the roadway of a populous bridge; a cross that seemed to crane its gaunt neck looking ever over a wandering concourse of heads to the horizon, gazing, like St Geneviève, for the cloudy coming of an Attila; a cross held up, as it were, before the towers of Paris—a Retro Satanas to the menacing shapes that, emerging from chaos, threatened the ancient order, the ancient dynasty, the ancient religion;—the cross, indeed, on the bridge of Charenton? For in Charenton that day was pregnant conference, was a famous banquet to Marseillais and Jacobin, was sinister tolling of the death-knell of royal France. And what if the bell swung without a clapper! The very air it displaced, reeling from its onset like foam from a prow, caught the whisper of death in its passing, and carried it on to the cross.
The death of royalty and of religion; the desecration of the tabernacles; the spilling of the kingly chrism and trampling of the Host! As night at last shut upon the boiling day, concentrating the heat, the cross on the now lonely bridge stiffened its back and stood awaiting the storm. That must fly far before it could reach the pole of its attraction. But it was approaching. The cross could feel the very ribs of the world vibrating under the terrific trample of its march. At present inaudible; but there came by-and-by little vancouriers of sound, moaning doves of dismay that fled on the wind, as before a forest fire. These flew faster and more furious, fugitives in a moment before the distant explosion of artillery. The rain began to fall in heavy drops, like life-blood from the lungs of the heavens. The earth sighed once in its sleep ... in an instant a great glare licked the town....
Hither and thither, swayed, bent, but stubborn; now shoulder to shoulder with the hurricane; now clawing at the stones to save itself from being wrenched from its socket; now stooping a little to let a flying charge overleap it—through half the night the cross stood its ground, barring the road to Paris. Then at length a bolt struck and shivered it where it stood.
“It is gone!” shrieked the storm; “the way to Paris lies open. The last of the symbols of an ancient reverence is broken and thrown aside!”
* * * * * * * *
To Ned in the woods of Méricourt was vouchsafed a foretaste of this tempest that rose and travelled so swiftly; that, having for its siderite the pole-star of all revolution, rushed across a continent in fire so rabid as that it expended nine-tenths of its force before it might reach and charge with its remaining strength the electric city—the nerve-drawn city that had shrilled into the night that encompassed it, crying for reserves of dynamism lest at the last it should sink and succumb. But if the storm brought small grist to the actual mill, the morning, when it broke, voiceless and dripping, revealed sufficient evidence of how deadly had been its threshing throughout the fields of its advance. Over the north-eastern noon, and flying, a dull high monster, up the valley of the Meuse—from Charleroi to Maubeuge and across the border; down with a swoop upon St Quentin, and on with a shriek and crash into and through the woods of Soissons; opening out at last, from Pantin to Vitry, as if to invest the city and slash at it with a reaping-hook of fire—so the force had come and passed, like a tidal wave of flame, leaving a broad wake of ruin and desolation. On all the league-long roads converging to the central city were fragments of broken and twisted railings, of riven trees, of thatch and rick and chimney; on many was the sterner wreckage of human beings—poor Jacques and Jacqueline struck down and torn by branch or flame as they drove their slow provision carts towards the capital through the furious darkness. Not a dying Christ at a cross-track but the storm demon had found and shattered on his blazing anvil. The pitiful symbols of the old love, of the old belief—one by one he had splintered and flung them as he swept on his road. Nor only the symbols of the old faith, but of the new order. For entering in the end the very gates of the city, he had driven with a desperate rally of ferocity at certain sentinels ensconced dismally in their boxes against the railings of public buildings, and, consuming them, had committed their ashes to the consideration of the anarchy to which he had rushed to subscribe.
Such revelations were all for the morrow; and in the meantime Ned was become a little fateful waif of the first processes of the force.
The storm came upon him when alighted in the deep woods behind the chateau. Passing under cover through Méricourt a few minutes earlier, he had peeped through his tilt, scanning the familiar scenes with a strange little emotion of memory. Feeling this, he had almost regretted his venture. Perhaps the emotion was accountable, he thought, to the heat—to the re-enacting of an atmosphere that was charged with suggestion. He could—and did—recall a vision by the village fountain—the vision of a girl, all bold outline and colouring, standing with her arms crooked backwards under her lifted hair. He could recall another figure coming up the field-path hard by—a face of pearly shadows and wondering blue eyes under a great fragrant load of grasses. These blue eyes haunted him in the retrospect, even while he shut his own angrily upon the little ghostly impression. Why could he not dismiss the thought of them from his mind? Why had he submitted himself to the influence of the place at all?
It was too late now to retreat. His carter—a sleepy Liégeois, attired appropriately in a hoqueton, or smock, like a night-gown—led his team stolidly by fountain and “Landlust,” past church and smithy, and so through the village into the forest road beyond. Ned, in the darkness, felt in his breast for his talisman, his tiny packet of geranium flower; and bringing out his hand scented, kissed it. Then, restored thereby to reason, in the thick of the woods he hailed his jehu to a stop, descended, and, paying liberally for his journey, plunged amongst the trees.
At once the shadow of an impending fear took him in grip. The earth, he could have thought, lay rigid in a dry fever of terror. The shade he had so much coveted fell around him like a living shroud. He had always an unreasonable dread of what lay behind the curtain of trunks before him. He moved on purposeless and prickling with apprehension. Had it not been for very shame he would have turned and fled for the open, daring any meeting in the village rather than this nameless dead solitude. But he forced himself to proceed, mentally assigning himself for goal that old withered leviathan in the clearing that was the centre of some strange associations. He had been curious long ago, he admitted, to look upon this monster since the legend of divinity had attached to it. He would go so far now and satisfy his eyes, then turn and make for air and light.
Suddenly he fancied he heard far away the rumble of the receding waggon-wheels. A numb stillness succeeded. The earth seemed to breathe its last, and a napkin of cloud was softly flung over the dead face of it. The lungs of the day fell in; a few large bitter drops slipped from the closed lids of the heavens.
Straight, and in a moment, Ned sprang alert to a sense of peril. This ominous oppressiveness was nothing but the forereach of a swiftly advancing thunderstorm—but the trees and every green spire toppling into cloud an invitation to its own destruction! He must race for cover—and whither? The little hut beyond the clearing! It presented itself to him in a flash. He set off running.
The very enforced action was a tonic to his nerves. As he sped, the darkness gathered around him deep and deeper. He ran in a livid twilight. Then on the quicker beat of a pulse the wood was torn with fire from hem to hem. He was dazzled, half-shocked to a pause for an instant; but there had been a panic sound to drive him forward again directly—a huge tearing noise within the monstrous slam that had trodden upon the heels of the blaze. He could only guess what this portended. At the very first explosion a tree of the forest had been struck and riven.
Now he scurried so fast that the breath sobbed a little in his throat. He had a feeling that the Force was dodging him, heading him off from reach of shelter. Not a soul did he meet, but formless shadows seemed to cry him on from deep to lonelier deep of the maze. Then again a sudden glare took him in the face like a whip; and at once the Furies of the storm burst from restraint and danced upon the woods in fire and water, rehearsing the very carmagnole of the Terror.
All in a moment the fugitive broke into the clearing he sought, but had dreaded he would miss. Even as he ran—half deafened, yet relieved by the uproar that had succeeded a silence as awful as it was inhuman—he must slacken his pace in view of the towering giant that dominated his every strange memory connected with the place. Suddenly he stopped altogether, staring at the great tumorous trunk. Where had he read or heard that beech-trees were secure from stroke by lightning? Should he stand by, here under shelter of the enormous withered arms? In his trouble he might scarcely notice how the whole character of the isolated spot in which he stood was converted from that that figured in his memory. Yet he took it in vaguely by the sickly light—the blue-painted iron railings, having a locked wicket, that fenced in the sacred bole; the gleaming silver hearts hung here and there about the bark; the cropped ribbon of sward that encircled the tree. Yet upon this green, for all its cultivated trimness, he could have thought the underwood was encroached; and dimly he recalled St Denys’s prophecy: “If in years to come thou tell’st me this charmed circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.” Surely the idle prediction was strangely verified.
Even where he stood, for all the little shelter of the high branches, the tempest beat the breath out of his body. Every moment the crash and welter and uproar took a more hellish note and aspect: he felt he could not stand it much longer.
Suddenly, twisting about from a vision of fierce light, he caught a startled glimpse of something he had hitherto failed to notice. The narrow track that had once led through the heart of the thicket to the hut amongst the trees was a narrow track no longer. It had been opened out and greatly widened, so as to give passage to a tiny chapel that stood at the close of a short vista of trunks.
With a gasp of relief, Ned raced for this unexpected refuge, dashed up a step, threw himself against the door, and half stumbled into a void beyond it. The door flapped to behind him. He stood, panting, in a little crypt of scented gloom. Somewhere in front a single ruby star glowed unwavering—a core of utter peace and quiet.