ON the very day following that of his arrival, the pendulum of Ned’s particular destiny began its driving swing. He had taken good lodgings in a house in the Rue St Honoré, less, perhaps, as a concession to his rank than to his hypothetical prospects; and, issuing thence, after he had breakfasted, he had but a hundred yards to walk to reach a certain revolutionary centre that was become the goal to his long-drawn hopes and apprehensions.
It was a morning in early August, breathless and burning; and he turned into the gardens of the Palais Royal, that he might thus combine the opportunities to slake his thirst and to acquit himself of his commission to the royal proprietor of the adjoining palace. He had seated himself—unaccountably loath, now the moment was arrived, to put his fears to the proof—at a little café table under a tree, and was dreamily marvelling over the changed aspect of this plaisance of sedition (how in three years the temper of its habitués seemed to have altered, as it were, from that of a beleaguered to that of a triumphant garrison), when the familiar personality of one of three men who, talking together, strolled towards him, caught his immediate attention. Ugly, austere, with his Rowlandson paunch and unaffected neat clothes; with his wry jaw and crippled scuffle of speech—Ned saw here the unmistakable presentment of his whilom friend, the king’s painter. Between M. David and another—a tall, plebeian-dressed man, with a flawed, supercilious face, the blotched darkness of which (something caricaturing that of the monarch’s own) belied the mechanical amiability of its features—walked an individual of a very benignant and serene expression of countenance, the nobility of which showed in agreeable contrast with the moodiness of its neighbours’. This man—by many years the youngest of the three—was of the middle height, with dark sleepy eyes and chestnut hair. His face, slightly marked by the small-pox, was of a rather sensuous, rather wistful expression—at once pitiful and determined, with Love the modeller’s finger-marks about the mouth and, between the brows, the little long scar cut by thought. He was dressed in a very shabby and slovenly fashion, with limp tattered wristbands, and the seams of his coat burst at the shoulders; and even the lapels of his vest were dog’s-eared—altogether a display of poverty a little ostentatious, thought Ned (who, nevertheless, had reason by-and-by to correct his judgment). Yet, for all his appearance, here was the man of the three to whom the others, it seemed, paid deference; for they hung upon his words, their eyes bent to the ground, while he walked between them, frankly expounding and with a free aspect.
Now suddenly M. David glanced up and caught the Englishman’s gaze; and immediately, to Ned’s surprise (he had a vivid memory of their last rencontre), detached himself from his fellows and came forward with extended hand.
“Surely,” said the painter, “monsieur my friend the artist of the Thuilleries gardens!”
“At monsieur’s service,” said Ned, rising, with a complete lack of cordiality. “And of the Rue Beautreillis, M. David, where a poor devil of a papetier had his factory gutted.”
He drew a little away. David’s face showed villainously distorted.
“That may be,” said he, taken aback. Then he advanced again, with an air of sudden frankness. “‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ We do not, in these days of realisation, repudiate our responsibility for the acts that in those were tentative. But a generous conqueror does not dwell on the humiliation of his adversaries. The end justifies the means, monsieur; and you, at least, if I remember, were no advocate of social tyranny. But that was long ago, yet not so long but that I can recall monsieur as a promising probationer in the art that is the most admirable in the world.”
Ned, touched upon his unguarded side, was standing at a loss for an answer, when the painter’s two companions joined the group at the table.
“Citizen Egalité,” said David, addressing the supercilious-looking man, “let me have the pleasure of making known to you M. Murk, an artist who would be a patriot were he not, unfortunately for us, an Englishman.”
Ned started.
“Egalité!” he exclaimed.
“Ci-devant Duc d’Orléans,” said the tall man himself, with a little mocking bow.
“Monseigneur,” began Ned.
“Citizen,” said the other, bowing again.
His eyes were dead stones of irony. His expression was as of one hopeless of convalescence from the weary illness of life.
Ned fetched his letter from his breast.
“Citizen Egalité—if so I am to call you,” said he, “I meet you in the good hour, being on the road, indeed, to seek the citizen himself.”
“Me, sir?”
“You, monsieur—or the Duke of Orleans. I have the honour to place in the hands of the duke a packet with the delivery of which I have been entrusted by an intimate correspondent of monsieur.”
Monsieur, looking a little surprised, received the missive, and deliberately breaking the seal, deliberately read through madame la gouvernante’s letter. Ned must discipline his sick impatience the while, and the two other men conversed apart—David in some obvious wonder over the result of his introduction.
Presently the duke, carelessly returning the paper to its folds, looked up. Ned strove, but failed, to read his sentence in the impassive face. A moment’s silence succeeded. It was a test beyond his endurance.
“I undertook to acquaint monsieur le duc, from my personal knowledge,” he blurted out, “of the causes of madame’s apprehensions.”
“Madame,” said Egalité, “is very fortunate in a courier whose discretion, she informs me, is only equalled by his disinterestedness. Madame has, indeed, always the faculty to find some one to pull her her chestnuts out of the fire.”
He spoke so languidly, so suggestively, so insolently, that Ned, despite his desperate anxiety, fired up.
“I fail to read into monsieur’s implication,” said he. “But if it is meant to signify that madame’s peril——”
“Is she in any, then? This letter merely informs me that she removes at once to London.”
The confirmation of his dread had appeared somehow so foreshadowed in his reception that the blow fell upon Ned with nothing more than a little stunning shock.
“And that is all?” said he, in quite a small stiff voice.
“All that is essential, indeed, monsieur.”
“Nothing of her terror that she is being watched and followed—that she moves within the sinister ken of the royalist emigrants—that her nerve is shattered—that she begs you to recall her?”
“Nothing. But—Heaven forgive her! I recognise her style. Oh yes, yes! It is possible she has posted and dismissed you very effectively, monsieur.”
He went off, for the first time, into a real laugh—a harsh cachinnation that he checked, as in mere disdain of it, in its mid-career. Ned waited, in rather an ugly manner of patience, till he was finished. Then, said he, wishing to right himself with himself on all points—
“Has posted me, as monsieur says; and, doubtless, for all exigent purposes, it was necessary only to post the letter to monsieur.”
“How, then?”
“At least, it would appear, its delivery by a confidential messenger was not imperative?”
“À ce qu’il paraît,” said the duke, grinning again. “At least such a commission exhibited an excess of caution.”
All the bitterness of the poor young man’s soul seemed suddenly to flush his veins.
“It is thus, then,” he cried, “that you requite the hospitality lavished upon you and yours; that you take advantage of a generous sympathy extended to you, to serve your own selfish purposes at the expense of your entertainers. You deserve that no hand be put out to you but to strike you in the face, as it is in my heart to treat you, monsieur le duc!”
He spoke loudly enough, and all his muscles tightened to the prick of onset. M. David ran up—
“Ta-ta-ta!” he exclaimed; “what the devil is here?”
Egalité’s cheeks showed mottled white, like brawn.
“Be quiet,” he said. “This is M. le Vicomte Murk, who has put himself to inconvenience to deliver me a letter.”
His lips trembled a little. The wretched creature himself had a wretched nerve.
“Monsieur would seem to imply,” he said, “that I am a party to the circumstance of some discomfiture he has suffered. It needs only a little reflection to disabuse himself of so extravagant a supposition.”
Ned made a violent effort to control his passion. Convinced now, as he was, that he had been used the victim of a practical joke, he could not turn the situation effectively by adopting a tragic vein. Besides, he was conscious of an inexplicable little feeling of rebellious attraction towards this man—a sort of emotional deference such as that with which a despairing suitor courts the guardian of his inamorata. If the light of his hope had fallen very low, here was he that might, if he would, renew it—here was a possible friend at court that he could ill afford—until that moment of the certain quenching of the light—to quarrel with or insult. He did not put this to himself. It affected him, nevertheless.
“I will acknowledge I was hasty,” he said, in some miserable perplexity. “It is possible I have jumped to unjustified conclusions. I have been a disinterested courier, as monsieur suggests, faithful to the service to which I was induced—under false pretences, it appears. But I will take monsieur’s word as to his innocence of any participation in the jest that has led me dancing over half a continent in search of monsieur.”
He looked at Egalité half piteously. The latter, scenting the reaction, shrugged his shoulders, with a relieved expression.
“I am deeply sensible,” he said coolly, “of monsieur’s kindness. For the rest” (he tapped the paper in his hands) “the message that monsieur conveys to me is capable of only one construction.”
“That madame removes with her charge to London?”
“Certainly.”
“And that is all?”
“Precisely all, monsieur.”
Ned fell back a pace, and bowed frigidly. The duke, with a second shrug of his shoulders, took M. David’s arm and made as if to withdraw. Suddenly he jerked himself free and returned to the hapless young man, a much gentler look on his face.
“Ah, monsieur!” he said, in a low voice, “that is all—yes, that is all. But I can read between the lines. Am I to hold myself to blame that madame took her own way to rid herself of an embarrassment! I talk in the dark, with only my knowledge of women—of this woman, par excellence—to illuminate me. She coaxed you to a confidential mission? Well, there was no need—believe me, there was no need. We must read between the lines.”
He again made as if to go, and again returned.
“It is extremely probable, nevertheless,” he said, “that we may see the dear emigrants back in Paris before long.”
With that he went off, taking the painter with him. Ned watched the couple receding, till the crowd absorbed them; then sat himself down, feeling benumbed and demoralised, upon a chair.
So, here was the end—the mocking means adopted to the rejection of his suit. It was a vile, cruel jest, he thought; a characteristic indulgence of selfishness inhuman, for which presently he would take fierce delight in calling a certain statesman to account. A statesman! his stricken vanity yelled to itself: a diplomatic buffoon who would sacrifice principle to a pun. So he classified Mr Sheridan, to whom he would attribute this ruin of his hopes.
But deeper emotions prevailed. Had the duke been, or was he at this last, despite his protestations, a party to the fraud? It mattered nothing at all. There was a more intimate question to put to his heart—the sadder and more sombre inquiry, Was the girl herself a confederate? And here he fell all amazed and overwhelmed; plunged in a slough of the most sorrowful speculation; struggling for foothold—for some memory at which he might clutch for the righting of his moral balance. There should have been many memories—of kind looks and words and touches, all instinct with the tender humour of truth. God in heaven! It was conceivable that the elder woman, the old practised strategist, had played a consummate rôle. It was never inconsistent with the principles of such pantological professors to indulge the hypocritical as part of their universal equipment. But Pamela, with not that of roguishness in her sweet eyes to justify a belief in anything but an innately honest soul behind them! Pamela, in the sincerity of her heart, in the womanliness of her nature, in the cleanness of her lips, craftily intriguing to indict Love’s passion of trust! He could not believe it. He could not but believe that some words, some acts of hers—most haunting in the retrospect—had been designed to express her sympathy with that in him which she could only as yet recognise in herself for a mood. And it had been, then, Madame de Genlis’ private policy to dismiss him before this mood—this bud—could timely open out into a flower.
Well, she had succeeded—thanks to one self-interested, with whom the reckoning was to come—she had succeeded, and aptly, no doubt, to the sequel. For it was not to be supposed that madame’s artifice would permit her to wean its subject from a fancy and fail to find the subject other food for a stimulated appetite. My lord the viscount had possibly, indeed, but (in the vernacular) kept the place warm for another. The sun of his passion may have only a little ripened the fruit for the delectation of lips more blest than his. By this time, it was probable, the dream that had been his was a transferred rapture.
What should he do—what should he do? He sat dully, his delicious sweet world of imagination shrunk to unsightly clinkers, very mean and grotesque. Only the real world stretched about him—a shoddy, vulgarly formal affair. A laugh, a mere ironic chest-note, came from him. For to what glorified uses did not men seek to convert this intrinsically tawdry material! They were always sensitive to the befooling holiday spirit, the spirit that is persistently ready to accept specious commonplace at a fancy value. For all the essential purposes of romantic passion he, if he chose, might take his pick (he with his title, his rich competence, and his personal attributes) from the human fair that tinkled and scintillated about him. Yet he must price all this opportunity at so much less worth than that of one set of features as to value it, lying ready to his hand, at a pinch of dust compared with the unattainable. The glamour of the fair was not for him, let him elect to give his philosophy licence without limit.
He did, it will be observed, madame la gouvernante (who had been genuinely distraught) something a little less than justice. But, after all, his resentment in the first instance was against Mr Sheridan, and in that, no doubt, he was justified; for he must fail, in the nature of things, to understand what reason but a personal one could have moved that gentleman to manœuvre to circumvent a suitor so frank and so admissible as himself.
He called for wine; and, while drinking, for the first time in his life, too much of it, his mood underwent a dozen rallies and relapses. Passion, exasperation, and the most sick desire to possess what now seemed to have evaded him for ever—emotion upon emotion, these wrought in his suffering mind. More than once he was half-stirred to the decision to return immediately to England; and, instantly recalling the duke’s enigmatical suggestion anent the ladies’ return to Paris, he would resolve to remain where he was, preferring the problematical to the chances of hunting counter in the mazes of his own capital. For he must see the girl again—to that he was determined; he must see her again and, crashing at last through the reserve his own diffidence had created, must seek to carry by storm that with which he had so mistakenly temporised.
And then suddenly—a vision called up, perhaps, by the unwonted fever in his veins—the figure of Pamela, as he had last seen it, stood holding out to him in its hands the little crushed scarlet blossoms; and he could see the wilful smile and hear the sweet voice offering him the rose of his desire; and all in a moment his eyes were full of tears, and he became shamefully conscious of his surroundings, the very character of which profaned his thought.
He thrust his hand in an access of tenderness into his breast.
“Monsieur,” said a low, grave voice in his ear, “is in need of sympathy.”
He started, and turned about angrily. At his elbow was seated that third member of the late trio to whom the others had appeared to pay deference. This man had not followed his companions, it seemed, but had remained behind when they walked away.
In the very motion of resenting the interference, something in the nobility of the stranger’s manner gave Ned pause. The anger died from his features, gradually, in a little silence that succeeded.
“Very well, monsieur,” he said at length, quite gently. “You are very far from meaning impertinence, I see. I answer you, All men need sympathy.”
“Monsieur,” said the stranger, “that admission is the basis of our new religion of humanity.”
He leaned forward, smiling with a great sweetness. His air somehow conveyed to Ned the impression of a conscious strength that rather enjoyed indulging in itself a dormant condition of faculty, sure that it could summon up at will mental forces irresistible to any opposed to it.
“Is it new?” said Ned. “I seem to recall a hint of it in the Gospels.”
“The man Christ,” said the stranger, “was a virgin. His partisanship was necessarily limited. He was never blinded by, but always to, passion.”
“The passion of love?”
“Of love, in the erotic sense.”
“And what is that to signify in the present context?”
“Only that it enables me to see deeper than Christ the virgin.”
“You have more prospicience than Christ?”
“In one direction, assuredly.”
“You are confident, monsieur?”
“So far, I am confident. Christ was a divine—I, monsieur, am a human—advocate.”
“De causes perdues, in this instance, monsieur, I believe. But an advocate deals with proofs.”
“Without doubt. Monsieur is unfortunate in an attachment.”
“To himself? Christ could have taught him that.”
Nevertheless he was amazed.
“Ah!” cried the other, “but I am literally an advocate; and I heard monsieur le duc’s final words; and it is my business to read the soul’s confession in the face. I perceive, however, that monsieur resents my presumption, which is, of a truth, unwarrantable.”
He rose as if to go, his dark eyes still quick with a gentle, unrebukeful sympathy. Ned was impelled to cry hastily—
“It is my right at least, monsieur, to ask the title of my counsel!”
“I have none,” said the stranger simply. “My name is Vergniaud.”
Ned sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair.
“Vergniaud!” he cried, and stood staring at the man whose utterances—echoed latterly to the very cliffs of England—had seemed to him the first inspired interpretation of the Revolution as a real, breathing, human, emancipatory force. Now he understood why the others had shown such deference to this one of their party.
“Vergniaud!” he cried again faintly, and so rallied himself.
“Truly,” said he, “I have entertained an angel unawares. M. Vergniaud—indeed, I have a very unhappy attachment; and I need counsel at this moment, if ever man did.”