THE Viscount Murk received very gravely M. Becelaer de Lawoestine’s assurance that Monseigneur the Duke of Orleans was at the moment, and had been for months past, in Paris.
“Enfin,” said this gentleman, “if report is to be believed, it is the most timely place for him. At least he will not put himself at the head of the emigrants,” he added, with a husky little laugh.
He was plump and prosperously healthy, like his wife. They seemed admirably suited to one another—a pigeon pair, indeed. And like a pigeon was the little fat man in his white Austrian uniform. He strutted, he preened himself, he cooed. His place should have been on a roof-ridge of his own happy courts. Ned had a melancholy desire to crumble some bread for him.
“You are pale as a very ghost, monsieur,” said this same ruddy count condescendingly. “It is not to be wondered at. You have alighted upon us in stirring times; not to speak of the storm yesterday, that was enough to quell the stoutest courage. I would give up hunting a chimera, if I were you, and return to the profitable peace of my own so prudent island, without more ado—sans plus de façons.”
“If you were I, monsieur,” said Ned. “But, being myself, I run the chimera to earth in Paris.”
Monsieur le comte shrugged his shoulders.
“I will wish you success, at least. This chimera hath as many tracks as a mole. But, first, you must get to Paris.”
Ned had considered this side of the question lightly. He found, indeed, the conditions of travel curiously changed since he had last crossed the Netherlands border. Now the whole frontier, from Lille to Metz, swarmed with hostile demonstration. The Allies were in movement, Luckner and his ineffectives falling back before them. Amongst them all he hardly knew whom to claim for friends and whom for foes.
But he was wrought to a pitch of recklessness, and Providence shows the favouritism of a heathen goddess towards reckless men. His grossly enlarging doubt of the bonâ fides of the mission to which he had been committed; his terror of having been made in a moment accessory to a hideous crime, which he could neither morally condone nor effectually denounce; the feeling—sombre heir to these two—that he was losing his hold of that new sweet sense of responsibility towards life, the consciousness of which had been to him latterly like the talking in his ear of a witch of Atlas—a cicerone to the dear mysteries of the earth he had hitherto but half understood,—these emotions were a long-rowelled spur to prick him forward through difficult places. Once in Paris, there should be no more temporising. From the Duke of Orleans’s own lips he would learn whether or no he had been bidden on a fool’s errand.
Here, in fact, was the goading stab in his side—the wound that sometimes so stung and rankled that almost he was tempted to have out madame la gouvernante’s letter to her employer and resolve dishonourably his doubts. Through the anguish of these, the piercing tooth of the recent horror sprung upon him might make itself felt only as a pain within the pain—a lesser torture, the nature of which he would occasionally seek to analyse in order to a temporary forgetfulness of the greater. Then, thinking of the holy maid of Méricourt, he would cry in his soul, “What is this gift of imagination but a Promethean fire, destroying whoever is informed with it! Better my system of a mechanical world with passion all eliminated!”—and he would think of how he had been once curiously interested in a poor lodge-keeper’s dreamings, a faculty for which had been then to him so strange an anomaly. And was it so still—to him who had learned, through love, to attune his ear to the under harmonics in every wind that blew upon the earth? Perhaps, in truth, it was this very gift of imagination that, in greater or less degree, was responsible for the irregularities one and all that misconverted the plain uses of life; that made the picturesqueness of existence, and its glory and tragedy. And would he at this very last be without it? And was not its possession—a common one now to him and Nicette—the stimulus to unnatural deeds that were the outcome of supernatural thoughts? He had at least the temptation to commit an act that would be an outrage on his traditional sense of honour. He would resist the temptation, because he had the tradition. But conceive this Nicette, perhaps with no traditions, and with an imagination infinitely more vivid than his. What limit was to put to her foreseeings; how should the normal-sighted adjudge her monstrous for anticipating conclusions to which their vision could by no means penetrate?
He would catch himself away from the train of thought, the indulgence of which seemed a certain condonation of a deed that his every instinct abhorred. Yet his mind took, perhaps, something the tone of the intricate close places in which it wandered; and now and again a little thrill would run through him of half-sensuous pity for the poor misguided soul that, by offering up its honour at the very shrine at which his worshipped, had only estranged what it would have fain conciliated.
* * * * * * * *
By way of Fumay—a little pretty town situate on a river holm, and overhung by a group of stately rocks called the Ladies of the Meuse—Ned, adopting the advice of the Comte de Lawoestine, entered France. At once—as if, from easy gliding down a stream, he had been drawn into and was rushing forward in the midst of rapids—his days became mere records of anxiety and turbulence that constantly intensified throughout every league of his approach towards Paris. At the very frontier, indeed, he had taken the plunge, as exemplified in his change of postilions. To the last village on the German side he had been driven by a taciturn barbarian—a cheese-featured Westphalian, picturesque, malodorous, and imperturbably uncivil. This certificated lout was dressed in a yellow jacket, having black cuffs and cape, and carried a saffron sash about his waist and a little bugle horn slung over his shoulder—the whole signifying the imperial livery of the road, then as sacred from assault as is the uniform of a modern soldier of the Fatherland. Tobacco, trinkgeld, and the unalienable right to keep his parts of speech locked up in the beer-cellar of his stomach—these appeared to be the three conditions of his service. Ned parted from him with a league-long-elaborated anathema that sounded as ineffective in the delivery as the rap of a knuckle on a full hogshead, and so, on the farther side of the border, committed himself to a first experience of the “patriot” postboy.
From the smooth and muddy into the broken water! Here was volubility proportionate with the other’s gross reticence. Jacques was no less picturesque and malodorous than was Hans. He had his private atmosphere, like the German; only it was eloquent of pipes and garlic rather than of pipes and beer. He spat and gabbled all day; and he was dressed, like a stage pirate, in a short brown coat with brass buttons, and in striped pink and white pantaloons tucked into half-boots. A sash went round his waist also, and he wore on his head a scarlet cap having a cockade. Ned was feverishly interested in this his first introduction to a child of the new liberty; but he would fain have found him inclined to a lesser verbosity. However, he was a cheerful rascal and a good-humoured, and his easy sangfroid helped the traveller out of an occasional tangle of the red-tapeism that he found immeshing official processes rather more intricately under a republican than under an autocratic form of government.
Ned’s journey to the capital was, indeed, a race a little perilous and full of excitement. The common spirit, or suggestion, of suppressed effervescence that had been his former experience, was revealed now a spouting, tingling fountain, light yet heady, hissing with froth and bubbles. The kennels of France ran, as it were, with sparkling wine, and the very mayfly of moral intoxication was hatched from them in swarms. Thoughts, words, acts; the habits of dress, of motion, of regard—all were the characteristics of an hysteria the result of unaccustomed indulgence—the result of reckless drinking at the released spring. One could never know if a chance expression—either of speech or feature—would procure one a madly laughing or a madly resentful acknowledgment. Exultation and terror walked arm-in-arm by the ways, each trying stealthily to trip up the other. It was an insane land, and now verging on a paroxysm of mania; for it was known that at last the king—the man of shifty vision—was focussing his eyesight on the north-eastern border of his kingdom, whence loomed the shadow of foreign legions moving to his aid.
The north-eastern border! To enter the land of fury from such a direction was to invite one’s own destruction. Not even luck, recklessness, and unexceptionable passports might, perhaps, have saved Ned from the homicidal madness of a people wrought to fantastic fear, had it not been for a quick-witted post-boy’s genius in availing himself of the right occasions to apply them. This was his real good-fortune—that his own innate charm of manner, his patience and sweetness, his characteristic unaffectedness in the matter of his rank, and his healing sense of humour in everything, found their response in the heart of the garrulous Jacques, and converted that amiable horse-emmet from an indifferent employé into a very fraternal road-companion.
So, through stress and danger, Ned sped on his journey, and—following for fifty leagues from the frontier in the track of the wrecking storm—was enabled to enter Paris, by the great Flanders road, some four days after his parting with M. le Comte de Lawoestine. Then—a final difficulty at the Temple barrier surmounted—he found himself once more a mean small condition of the life of that city to whose self-emancipatory throes he had once been a deeply concerned witness. And he accepted the fact without uneasiness, not knowing that before he should turn for the last time to quit the awful place of death and resurrection, the tragedy of his own life, in the midst of the thousands there enacting, should be consummated.