AT the end of November the young Viscount Murk was still a sojourner in Paris. Always reserved and self-contained, he was become by then a creature of wilful and habitual loneliness, with something, indeed, of the moral dyspepsia that is induced of the morbid appetite that leads one to feed upon one’s own heart. And when the heart is so inflamed of love as to be sensitive to the least imaginary slight, assuredly the dyspepsia, as in Ned’s case, shall be acute.
Men of few or no friendships have a very undivided passion to bestow when at last the call comes to them. At the same time such are wont to signalise the early stages of their complaint by a diffidence so exaggerated as that, in the nature of nature, it must degenerate in course into a desperately injured vanity. It is to be feared that, at this period of his ailing, Ned was horribly big with a sense of grievance generally against the social order, that seemed so parsimonious of the favours (as represented by one only favour, in fact) that his position entitled him to draw upon. What was the good, in short, of being possessed of acres, a lordship, an agreeable personality, if all could not procure him the single modest gift he had ever asked of Fortune?
That was a sentiment for his bitterest moods. In his more reasonable, he would acknowledge to himself, with a sorrowful rapture, that no human desert could prove itself worthy of the Hebe-goddess at whose pretty feet he had worshipped.
So he waited on and on—because irresolution, also, is a necessary concomitant of extreme diffidence. He waited on, remote from his natural state, constantly on the prick of flight, yet always fearing to move, lest a vilely humorous destiny should take his sudden decision for the point to a game of cross-purposes. He waited on, shrinking ever more into his unwholesome self; avoiding company—comradeship, even; but half-conscious of the screeching barbaric world about him; hearing only distant echoes from the world over-seas. Now and again it would occur to him—upon his receipt of those periodic advices from his steward that made the almost sum of his communications with a life that had grown curiously shadowy to him—to put his own native instruments (in the person of this same steward) to the use of ascertaining and reporting upon the movements of Madame de Genlis and her charges. But always he was faced thereupon by a score ghosts of apprehension—that such confidences might beget familiarities vulgarising to the aloofness of his passion; that the necessary interval that must elapse before he could procure a reply must debar him from the independence of action that he still claimed, without enjoying; most, that the coveted news itself, when it should reach him, might do no better than confirm a haunting fear. And so he dwelt on, passing at last, it seemed, into the very winter of his discontent.
Shunning—since that September night of a tragedy that had stricken him for the time being half-demented—personal intercourse with any—even the gentle Vergniaud—whose precepts and practice of liberty seemed so grotesquely irreconcilable, he lost something of his former feeling of a moral participation in the scenes enacting about him. Of the revengeful woman, with whose destinies a joyless fatality had appeared to connect him, he had seen nothing since the hour of his agonising experience at the Salpétrière—had heard only, with a savage exultation, that her latest connection with the moderate party was undermining her popularity with that more formidable class of which the link-women on the prison steps had been prominent representatives.
“She will be devoured by her own dogs,” he would think; and “God in heaven!” he would cry in his soul, “to what an association with cutthroats and queans has Providence thought fit to condemn me—me whose heart burns always like a pure steadfast lamp before the shrine of its divinity!”
* * * * * * * *
One bitter evening Ned found himself abroad in the streets—a mere waif of destiny, hustled and jogged into the kennels by an arrogant wind. The iciness of this dulled all his faculties, blinded him as he struggled aimlessly on. “It must make the stones weep,” he thought, “or why should my eyes fill with water!” The lamps slung across the narrower gullies danced like boats at their moorings. The very shop fronts seemed to flap their sign-boards, like hands, for warmth.
He had crossed the river and penetrated the Faubourg St Germain as far as the Rue de Vaurigard. On his right, the sombre towers of the Luxembourg reeled into the night; on his left, a starry quiver of lamps shaped out the portico of the Théâtre-Français.
He was numb with cold. The glow and movement about the theatre drew him—as they often did nowadays—to a bid for temporary self-forgetfulness. He ran up the steps, entered a warm and lively vestibule, and took a box ticket for the performance.
This, when he came to view it, opened with a one-act sketch—“Allons, ça va!”—a very patriotic and warlike little piece. He had seen it before, and it did not greatly interest him. He was, in fact, sitting in the covert of his retreat watching rather the house than the players, when all in a moment his heart bounded, and he shrank back into the shadow of the wall-hangings. Opposite him he had seen a party enter a screened box, a loge grillée—nothing very significant in itself. But a minute later the grating had swung open, revealing—Pamela.
She did not at first catch sight of him. She sat to the front of the tier—she and the little pink-eyed daughter of Orleans. Her cheeks, her hair, her eyes were all a soft glory under the radiance of the lamps. He thought he had never seen her look so happy and so beautiful.
There were figures, the indistinct forms of men, standing behind the ladies; but these he could not identify.
A great sigh of ecstasy, half anguish, escaped him. He leaned forward, and at that instant the girl raised her face and saw him.
Under the shock of recognition, he was conscious of nothing but that he had bowed across the house—that he had immediately leaned back in his seat, his pulses drumming, his eyes blinded with emotion.
When he dared to look again—the grille was closed.
A swerve of actual vertigo seemed to send him reeling. The next moment, thinking—though, indeed, he had done, had looked, nothing to attract observation—that his condition must be patent to the audience, to the stage, he brought his reason by a huge effort under command.
The grille was shut. The door of heaven had been slammed in his face.
Now, he must fight to ignore the fiends of wicked alarm that swarmed about his brain. He would close all his avenues of intelligence—render himself a thing mute and dumb, his faculties in abeyance, until the moment of resolution should arrive. There might be any explanation, other than one personal to himself, of the shutting of the grating. Should he flog his reason for a wherefore, it would be like brutally coercing an innocent witness. He must not, in the name of sanity, allow his soul to be drawn into profitless speculations. Upon the supreme ecstasy of knowing that here, after all these sick months of waiting, was the period to be put at last to his uncertainty, he must concentrate his thoughts, permitting none to side issues.
He triumphed by sheer force of will—sitting out the end of the little play. But the instant the curtain fell he rose to his feet, swept the frost from his brain, and—without giving himself stay or pause in which to think—left his box and made his way round to the opposite side of the house. His head now seemed full of heat and light; he was not conscious of his lower limbs.
Almost immediately he came upon two men stepping from the rear of a box into the passage. One of these was the Duke of Orleans. The other was a tallish young man, a little older than himself, of a fine intelligent expression. Both gentlemen were dressed to the prevailing taste in clothes that were something an ostentatious advertisement of bourgeoisie. But the extravagance was vindicated in the younger of the two by the mournful spirit of romance that seemed to inhabit behind a pair of very soft grey eyes.
Ned addressed Egalité at once, and in a manner, unwittingly, almost imperious; for in this tender present sensitiveness of his condition he imagined he foreread in that person’s stony regard a repudiation of his acquaintanceship, and he was desperate to preoccupy the situation. He had not, indeed, forgotten the confidential words uttered by the duke at the moment of their first and latest parting; and now his heart went sick in the fear of what might be implied by Egalité’s obvious intention to stultify, by avoidance of him, any significance such confidence might have been held to express.
“I have the honour to reintroduce myself to monsieur le duc,” he said. “I congratulate monsieur le duc upon the safe return of those, with the delivery of a letter referring to whose movements in England I some months ago had the pleasure to charge myself.”
The prince’s eyes opened and shut like an owl’s. His bilious face seemed to deprecate a peevish derision it could not withhold.
“I do not recognise,” he began, looking through mere slits between lids, “whom I have——” then suddenly he checked himself impatiently and turned to his companion with a shrug of his shoulders.
“My lord,” he said, “let me make known to you M. le Vicomte Murk, who once was good enough to constitute himself Hermes to your adorable Pamela.”
Ned stood rigid under the shock of all that was implied in the insolence. The duke’s young companion stepped forward and shook him by the hand. Did this stranger know, or intuitively guess, something of the silent tragedy that was enacting before him? His soft eyes were at least full of generosity and sympathy.
“I know your lordship by name,” he said. “I am Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and I am sure Pamela will like to thank you in person for your disinterested service.”
Ned drew himself up, like a martial hero giving the signal for his own execution.
“I will take my sentence from her lips,” he said to the kind eyes, and passed into the box.
He was close to her at last—and for the last time. She turned to glance at him, and instantly away again, with a pert tilt of her chin. He saw her stealthily advance a hand in the shadow, and twitch her companion by the skirt. The little lady gave a start.
“What is the matter, coquine?” she exclaimed. Then she saw Ned, flushed pink, and dropped the gentleman a shy bow.
She was happy to renew monsieur’s acquaintance, she said. And had monsieur been in Paris all these months since they last had the pleasure of seeing him in “nôtre cher Bury”?
Yes, monsieur had been in Paris the whole time: that was to say, ever since, in pursuit of monsieur le duc, he had left Belgium, whither, it would appear, he had been despatched on a fool’s errand.
Mademoiselle gave a little deprecating shrug of her shoulders.
“And monsieur, no doubt, has justified us in our choice of a messenger?” murmured Pamela, from ambush of the box curtains.
Ned turned upon the young voice. His tongue was dry; his very features seemed stiffened into a mechanical expression of suffering.
“Yes,” he said. “I have been as great a fool as Uriah.”
The girl gave a little laugh. Probably she understood only the vague inference. She drew aside the curtain and looked upon the house. Her head budded from dusk into light, standing out like an angel’s seen in a dream. The soft moulding of her face and neck was painted in dim sweet eclipse—violet, where it intensified in the deeper curves. In her shadowy hair—like a dryad’s curled by moonlight—a single diamond—a very star of morning—burned. It was Ned’s fate—the common irony of love—to find the prize figure never so desirable in his sight as at the moment of its bestowal on another. His heart was sick with a very hunger as he looked down on her.
“O Dieu—quelle horreur!” she exclaimed, referring to some one of the audience. She tapped her foot, drew back her head, suppressed a tiny yawn.
“What has become of Edward?” said she, as if she were unconscious that their visitor were not withdrawn.
“It is my name,” said Ned.
She glanced at him disdainfully, with the ghost of an insolent laugh.
“You here still, monsieur? Will you please go and tell the fiddles to begin?”
“And shall I dance to them to entertain you?” he said.
Her attitude robbed his passion even of a redeeming dignity. His devotion seemed comparable with the sick devotion of a schoolboy towards a holiday coquette.
“Mon Dieu!” she cried. “You would at least entertain us more than now.”
The catgut gave its first screech as she spoke.
“I will go,” he said hurriedly; but he yet lingered out the final anguish.
“Have I not already entertained you enough? And I have not yet congratulated the prospective Lady Fitzgerald. And what shall I do with the flower you gave me, Pamela, when I accepted madame’s service because I loved you?”
For the first time she flushed angrily.
“You have no right to say it,” she cried. “And do you suppose I constitute myself the fairy godmother to every little weed I bestow!”
Mademoiselle d’Orléans half rose from her seat.
“Nay,” said Pamela, gently coaxing her to resume it: “for monsieur will see the wisdom, I am sure, of not further enlarging upon an error of his own.”
He uttered a deep sigh.
“An error!” he said—“My God—yes, an error!”—and he bowed low and left the box. The little kind royalty uttered a sob as he vanished.
And such was the manner of the end—no renunciation ennobled of chivalry on his part; no compassion, no sympathy on hers. And he could blame no one but himself. His imagination, it seemed, had clothed a skeleton with flesh. Unlike dreaming Adam, he had awakened and found his imagination a lie. He walked from the tawdry gates of his fool’s paradise, and felt the wind rattle in his bones.
Outside, he found the two men withdrawn. He made his way into the street, a strange numbness in his brain. It was like exaltation—the mere mad ecstasy of self-obliteration. For the time it seemed to carry him forward—a spirit disembodied, shorn of every instinct but that of flight. The wind thrust at, the dust choked, the jumping lamps mocked him. He paid no heed to a malice that was powerless any longer to influence his movements.
Pressing forward aimlessly, he came out on the Pont Neuf. Few passengers were now abroad; and these, butting with a sense of personal grievance against the blast, took no notice of the significant attitude of one who, upon such a night, could stop to dwell upon the river. But presently a single pedestrian—a woman—going by, uttered a stifled exclamation, checked herself, slunk into the angle of a buttress, and stood watching him.
He was gazing upon the black swing of water below. Suddenly he rose, returned a few paces the way he had come, and went down into the gloom of the quay where it stooped under the bridge’s shadow. The woman followed stealthily.
The wind had long ago taken his hat. He unbuttoned and flung open his coat. She came swiftly to him and seized him by the arm. He turned upon her—dragged himself free with a start of repulsion. His face underwent a change—flashing into an expression of mad fury.
“Again!” he shrieked. “Why do you pursue and haunt me! I think you are my genius for all devilry!”
For a moment it looked as if he would strike her—her, Théroigne. She stood, where he had thrust her, without the shadow thrown by the bridge, a dim glow falling upon her face from a far lamp above. Even in this tumult of his rage he was conscious of an inexplicable new meaning in her eyes. They were like caves of darkness alive with a suggestive inner movement.
“I called to find you,” she said stilly, without emotion. “The citoyen propriétaire told me you were abroad—probably at the theatre. I followed on the chance; and destiny, it seems, was my guide.”
“Why did you call? Why did you follow?—we have nothing of a common interest. I loathe you—do you hear! I curse the day on which you came into my life!”
She never moved.
“Is it not our common interest,” she said, “to wish to die?”
He gasped, and stood staring at her.
“Ah!” she went on; “but I had heard, and wondered for the result. They were betrothed no further back than yesterday; they are to be man and wife in a few weeks. He is an impatient lover—this handsome chasseur. In a few weeks she will lie in his arms—the pretty, loving babouine.”
He lifted his hand again with a furious gesture; and at that she cast back the hooded cloak which she had held clutched about her face and breast, and, coming swiftly to him, dared him with her brilliant eyes.
“Strike!” she cried; “it is what I ask. Only thou shalt strike thyself through me. What! thou know’st now what it is to be trampled under by the feet thou worship’dst! And thou shalt be haunted evermore by the shadow of another man’s happiness. Strike, I say, and kill, like me, thy spectre of unfulfilment with despair!”
She tore at her dress, baring her white bosom to him.
“Strike!” she cried again; then suddenly her hands dropped limp, and she moaned to herself.
“I dare not think. I cannot sleep. He is always there, weeping and imploring. But there is something between—a deep red pool, with an under-motion. If I were to wade in—my God!” she cried—“I am afraid even to die!”
She held up her hands to the man before her, as if in prayer.
“Take me with thee—there, into the water. I will not struggle, if thou hold’st me tight. Thou wert his friend for a little while, and thou also hast suffered. Thou wilt plead for me, monsieur, wilt thou not?—thou wilt plead?”
Her voice broke in a shiver. For all its wretchedness, the heart of her hearer was stricken anew.
“Thou Théroigne,” he said; “thou poor twice-abandoned fool. Wouldst thou urge upon me that a first error is to be atoned by a second! Oh, thou woman—not to understand how cheap that love must be held that would disprove itself to spite its object!”
God knows what angel of light or darkness had been at his elbow a moment earlier. Now, he put his hand into his breast as he spoke.
She looked at him, lost and wild.
“Thou didst not come to throw thyself into the river?” she muttered.
“No,” he said—“but only this.”
He cast it from him with the words—something he had taken from his pocket—a little spiked and scented parcel, so ridiculous and so tender. It had fulfilled its mission at last. That was “writ in water.” And the poor cherished heels, stuck with a sprig of withered geranium, went down to the sea—or, perhaps, into the maw of some sentimental pike that would swallow it all, as we mortals swallow any absurd love-story.
Now, if the action was inspired by a despairing man’s intuitive altruism on behalf of a despairing harlot, we may not call it bathos.
Suddenly the woman broke into a shrill laugh.
“Was it an unfruitful token? Better thou and I!” she cried. “And so thou still hold’st love inviolable?”
He answered with his eyes. She came quite close to him—looked up into his face.
“That is well. Come with me, then, now the madness is past.”
“With you!” he exclaimed scornfully. All his repulsion of her was returning before the reclaimed devil in her eyes.
“With me, murderess and courtesan. Oh! it is not for myself,” she said. “It is for another—whose confession to me an hour ago sent me to seek thee out—that I would carry thee.”
He stared, dumfounded, muttering “Another? what other?”
“One,” she said, “that hath pursued thee long months with bleeding feet and a broken heart. One, that I came upon to-day, lost and wandering in the cold streets, and that I, being no man, took home with me and comforted.”
“What other?” he murmured again, but with a dreadful intuition of the truth.
“Nay,” she said, “love hath not done with thee. Only thou must run with the hare instead of hunting with the dogs.”
“What other?” he repeated dully.
“A saint, monsieur; yet one that, for all her chastity, hath caught the infection of these liberal times.”
She gazed into his face piercingly.
“I swear I never guessed,” she murmured. “I swear I hold her the dearer and the purer that she is revealed human in the end. The handmaid of God! Ah! but so to testify to His choice by this long discipline of her heart! And now, directing her in this pursuit of thee, He ratifies the new licence; and she shall not be less the saint because her passion is sanctified of a human love.”
“It is a vile blasphemy,” said the man. “You speak of Nicette Legrand.”
She clapped her hands.
“But, yes,” she cried in shrill triumph; “I speak of Nicette Legrand, whose heart, it seems, thou stolest—one of the common things that thou, and such as thou, would use to the profit of an idle hour, whilst thy honour was pledged elsewhere. But who enlists Love in his service shall engage a parasite to devour him.”
“Nicette!” he only murmured once more.
“Take thy fill of her name,” said the girl scornfully. “I tell thee, Love presumes upon his hire. Didst thou think he had discarded thee? He shall prove a tyrant whom thou thought’st to make thy servant.”
He fell, suddenly, quite calm and cold.
“Well,” he said, “so Nicette is in Paris?”
She answered—
“In Paris—a month’s long journey, by rock and briar, for those poor, patient feet. Oh,” she cried, “that I should ever have unwittingly wronged her by seeking to convert this block—this stone—to my own passionate uses!”
“And so she hath explained it to you?” he said, in the same even tone. “Well, she is a liar, from first to last; and at least it is fitting that a murderess should give sanctuary to a murderess.”
She stared at him, breathing softly.
“Am I to kill you?” she said.
He laughed without merriment.
“Listen to me, Théroigne. I never desired this woman, or gave her one pretext for asserting that I did. If she says otherwise, she lies. If she tells you that she left Méricourt to follow me, she lies. She has fled because she has been discovered in a deception as vile, a crime as inhuman, as any that have blackened the world since the race began.”
She still stared at him, her lips moving, but she did not speak.
“I have been in Méricourt since you,” he went on, without a change of intonation, “and I was witness to what I say. The bubble is burst—the superstition, by this time, a black memory. The tree that she haunted, she haunted because it contained in its hollow heart the dead body of Baptiste, her little brother, whom she had murdered—morally, before God, whom she had murdered, I say—out of her hatred of him. She haunted the scene of her crime, and, when that was threatened with detection, she invented the legend of the vision to cover it. But retribution abided, and, when that threatened, she fled.”
For a moment silence fell between the two. The wind shrilled in their ears; the hollow wash and sweep of the river came up to them.
“If it is true,” whispered Théroigne at last—“if it is true!”
“It is true.”
She seemed to gaze at without seeing him.
“So worn and so pitiful!” she muttered; “and I took her in, and clung to her, and found my own religion justified in hers.”
Suddenly she was hurrying from him, speeding upwards towards the bridge. He stood paralysed an instant; then sprang and overtook her, walking by her side.
“Where are you going?” he cried.
“To hurl her into hell!” she shrieked, “if it is as you say.”
They drove on together, across the river, through the blown darkness.
Presently she stopped, and turned upon him once more.
“Why do you follow me?”
“To see that you do nothing that shall enable you before God to testify against me.”
“Ah!” she cried, with a most bitter derision. “You are not desperate. You have never loved, as I read it—as Nicette reads it. You have never staked your soul against your heart. And this is what she hath done for the sake of one little glimpse of her heaven—of seeing you without being seen.”
“She sent you to tell me so?”
“You lie!” said the woman quietly. “I took her secret from her because she was worn and despairing; and then she implored me only to show her where she might, hidden, look upon you once again, and so die and rest forgotten.”
She struck her palms together.
“And now—now!” she muttered.
She fled on her way. The man had some ado to keep up with her. He went, indeed, at length, with loaded steps, on this wild, sorrowful night. To love and lose, and to be so loved! It was a stab of poignant anguish to his heart that what he had held so sacred in himself should be claimed of a vileness with which he had no sentiment in common. But this—surely this: the love that can exonerate even wickedness done for its sake. The wretched woman loved him—perhaps with a love as intrinsically pure as that he had given to Pamela. He groaned as he sped on.
They crossed the quays, and hurried by the Place of the Three Marys. A frowzy tricoteuse, coming from a wine-shop, recognised Théroigne, and stood barring their path.
“Ame traîtresse! Modératrice!” cried the creature, in guttural fury, and broke into a torrent of oaths.
The girl shrank against the wall, proffering no retort, her eyes wide with fear. Ned took her arm, put the woman on one side, and they scurried on their way, pursued by a blatter of expletives.
The wind cut into their faces with blades of ice as they turned into the Rue de Rohan.