IN front of the fire a girl lay on the floor asleep. She had placed herself on her side, facing the glow and cuddled into it; but in the relaxation of profound slumber her head had fallen back, so that the light from a lamp on the wall illuminated her features. These looked curiously, pathetically child-like under the seal of a rest so deep that her bosom hardly rose and fell to accent it. Her lips were a little parted; her cheeks a little hollow, and quite colourless. From every ruffle of her hair—fine and pale golden as a rabbit’s fur—that lay spilt about her head, to the toe-tips of her white bare feet (that nestled into one another despite some inflammatory wounds that scarred them as cruelly as if they had been bastinadoed), she was so almost motionless as to seem like a figure in tinted porcelain—King Cophetua’s beggar-maid, it might have been; for, indeed, her clothes were very stained and ragged.
The door opened, and a woman came swiftly to her side and gazed down upon her—a woman, under the fierce glow and lust of whose beauty she seemed to shrink into the mere semblance of a doll thrown down by a passionate child.
The woman looked, then suddenly fell upon her knees and stooped her lips to the ear of the sleeper.
“Nicette,” she cried low, “Nicette!”
The girl on the floor started; then she stirred, moaned, put her hand restlessly to her forehead, and again, with a sigh, dropped back into the pit of slumber. But the moment of half-consciousness seemed to have robbed her of the perfect weanling innocence. Now her respirations came harder; every breath she exhaled proclaimed her woman. Still, she dreamt happily; and a smile trembled on her lips.
Seeing it, Théroigne turned and beckoned to the man to come close. He approached from the door and stood behind her, away from the sleeper’s range of vision. The woman pointed down at the dreaming face.
“Dost thou still accuse it?”
“Awake—yes,” he said.
She frowned, and again bent to call into the girl’s ear.
“Nicette! where is thy brother Baptiste?”
A shadow, like that of a cloud that ruffles water, went over the quiet face. The regular breathing hitched and wavered; some broken soft ejaculations came from the lips. Suddenly the lids flickered—the eyes opened, unspeculative for a moment, then snatching the soul of them from unearthly sweet pastures, in whose fragrance it had lovelily nested. Still they were full of the glamour of holiday, remote in their vision, coy of things material.
“Théroigne!” she murmured, happy and confident, her half-recovered self only the core of a little atmosphere of the most loving warmth of emotion and feeling.
The woman bent and lifted the other—up, into her arms.
“Didst thou hear me call?” she said caressingly. “And what wert thou dreaming of, dearest?”
“Great God!” thought Ned, “is this Théroigne, in actual truth, a fiend!”
“Dreaming!” said the girl softly; “of what am I always dreaming, Théroigne?”
“Of what, indeed! Of things lost and longed for? Perhaps, sometimes of the little poor brother that was murdered and hidden in a tree?”
A voice shrieked at her back.
“Damnation seize thee!”
She let fall her burden and, scrambling to her feet, turned upon the voice.
“What, then!”
“So wanton!” cried Ned—“so wanton and so cruel!”
His fury leapt in a moment, like a boiling spring. He could not have explained or controlled it—could not even have traced its source to a deep incorruptible chivalry that was instinctive to his sex and beyond the understanding of the other.
“Cruel?” she exclaimed madly. “And am I not thy delegate—thy informer?”
“Not, so to take advantage, like a cursed mouchard, of this poor drugged wretch!” he cried. “Why, God in heaven! are you so much less foul——?”
“You devil!” she cut in—“you dog! Didst thou not thyself, a minute ago, slander her behind her back?”
“I accused her openly,” cried Ned—“as I accuse her now!”
A stifled scream of agony answered him. He looked into a corner of the room, whence, from shadow, the sound had come. The dreamer—momentarily half stupefied by her fall—had risen, while they raged, and stood shrunk into an angle of the wall.
Théroigne leapt upon her—seized her by a wrist.
“Look!” she screeched, “upon him that thou wouldst give thy life to see, not being seen; to prevail with whom thou wouldst sacrifice thy honour and thy fame with heaven. Hear him now—how he regards thy devotion. Tell him—tell me, rather—he lies. Tell me thou art not a murderess; and I will crush the slander back upon him till it tears like a splintered rib into his heart!”
She stood quivering—glaring—worrying the arm she held.
“Speak!” she panted brokenly, “and leave the rest to me.”
A moment’s silence succeeded the terrible outcry.
“It is true what he says,” then whispered Nicette. “I murdered Baptiste.”
Théroigne dropped the wrist she clutched, and swung back heavily against the wall.
“My God!” she muttered, “my God!”
Then she mastered herself faintly, like a weary creature.
“It was my last hope—the queen, the gentle mother. To justify, through her handmaid, the passion of woman for man. It is ended. There is no good in the world—no truth—no virtue. Oh, my heart, my heart!”
She caught herself from the cry, in a rally of quiet fury; pointed to the door, her arm extended along the wall.
“You have killed my faith,” she said.
Her gesture was crowningly significant. Without a word, the girl stole fearfully from her shadowy covert—hurried across the room—passed from it, and was gone.
* * * * * * * *
Into the street she fled, ran a few paces, stopped, and looked wildly about her. Snow had begun to fall. The wind whipped her thin tattered skirts about her ankles. In all the mad night there was no beacon towards which she might make, for the little lightening of her despair. She glanced once about her; then crouched, with a dying moan, upon a doorstep.
Her face was buried in her hands when, an instant later, Ned silently came upon her. He stood, looking down.
Once, earlier in the evening, he had thought “She” (not the wretched girl at his feet) “might have dismissed me as effectually by gentler methods.” Yet, had he, for his part, shown more compassion towards this unhappy outcast—stained though she was—who lay here so committed to his mercy?
He bent suddenly, and put his hand upon her shoulder. She did not even start now, but she uncoiled herself, with a shiver, and gazed up at him, without recognition, it seemed.
“What do you intend to do?” he said. “Where will you go?”
She only shook her head weakly and amazedly.
He stepped back, looked up into a blinding gloom of darkness and spinning flakes. The patterns these wrought seemed the very moral of Heaven’s enactments—hieroglyphics drawn upon a slate of night. He was not theologian enough to interpret them. For him—with a sense of being enclosed and shut down within a very confined vault of human suffering (with God, maybe, walking serene and unwitting high up on the sunny lifts of ether above the earth)—the issues of life were become brutally restricted. He had had aspirations. They had been crushed under by the heavy night that had dropped upon his world. Now, in a moment, he could feel only that he was alone with a woman who loved him without one thought of the meaning of the hieroglyphics; that it lay with him, unsupported, to direct the destinies of two souls—his own and another’s—that Fortune had isolated in tragic companionship.
And contrasted with the human piteousness of this other—this soul that had claimed him in the darkness into which his own had fallen—how did not the shibboleth of convention suddenly confess itself a ridiculous fetish of strings and patches—a block for a fashion-plate?
He had no plan of conduct at last but to drift—and, if by way of sunny pastures, so much the less troubled would he be.
His heart was moved to a dull aching passion in this first realising of its emancipation from a wounding thrall.
“Get up!” he cried violently. “Do you hear? Get up, and come with me!”
He turned away, and going a few paces, looked round to see if she were following. Ay, like a dog. She had risen and jumped to his order before it was well issued.
He strode on, the fall already making a soft cold mat to his feet. It was no great distance to his rooms; the Rue St Honoré was near deserted, and he went down it swiftly. Once again only he turned to see that the girl was not lagging. Then he cursed himself and came to a stop under a lamp. She was hobbling towards him as fast as her bleeding feet would permit her. He had never given a thought to this—that she had been driven half naked into the night. As she came up, she dumbly begged of him with a little pathetic smile, timid and conciliatory, not to be angry with her for halting. He saw a trickle of blood flow into the white carpet where she waited.
Now he stood to the struggle between his pride and his humanity. She was slight and thinly clad. He might have carried her in his arms the little remaining distance. But a hard devil rasped his heart—that particular Belial that tempts consciences to very wanton self-mutilations.
“I had not thought,” he said coldly. “I should have been more considerate. I will walk slowly the rest of the way.”
“I hardly feel it—indeed, monsieur, indeed,” she answered, brokenly and eagerly. “I will come faster.”
He went on again, and she crept behind him. Arrived at last at his door, he rapped on it, and stood away, signing to her to enter.
The citizen Theophilus, although he was a good patriot, bowed the gentleman and his companion into the sadly lit hall with a conscious elaboration of the bel air. He was at different times cook and concierge, and always proprietor—a man of admirable tact. Now he smiled, and informed monsieur the Englishman that there was a grateful hot fire in his room; that the night was a disgrace to Paris; that a steaming potage could be served to the citoyenne in a moment, did monsieur desire it.
He did not shrug his shoulders, or appear to notice the bare raw feet set upon the mat, or anything strange in this apparition of a dazed young woman standing there with the snow in her hair. That was his delicacy. For the rest, reputations were not marred nowadays by any refusal to subscribe to such old-fashioned codes of propriety as were only practised, if at all, in the prisons, where the remnants of a social hypocrisy awaited consignment to the rag-tearing machine in the Place Louis XV. Citizen Theophilus would have as little thought of bestowing a suggestive wink on the mating of a couple of swallows as on the foregathering of a young man and maid under his eaves.
“I will do myself the honour,” he said, “to conduct monsieur’s dear young friend to monsieur’s apartments.”
He skipped up the stairs in advance, candle in hand, like an ignis fatuus. He was a little man—always dancingly restless—with a lean face, and iron-grey corkscrew curls that he would keep well oiled, as though they were the actual springs of his movements.
Arrived in Ned’s apartments (they were in one suite, sitting- and bed-rooms, with a folding-door between), he lit the candles, poked the logs into a blaze, and stood for orders.
“The potage, monsieur?”
Ned transmitted the inquiry with a look.
“No, pray, monsieur—not for me,” murmured the girl.
“Very well,” said Ned frigidly. “It will not be needed, my Théophile.”
The landlord protested, bowed, and flirted himself from the room. The two were left alone.
Ned walked to the window, lifted the blind a moment, and looked out upon the dumb white whirling of the snow. Then suddenly he spoke over his shoulder—
“Go and warm yourself at the fire.”
She crept to the hearth immediately and sat herself before the glow, putting out to it her stiff frozen hands in token of obedience.
He took to pacing up and down the room, not removing from his shoulders the thick redingote in which he was wrapped. Presently he came and stood near her, his elbow resting upon the mantel-shelf.
“I want you to listen to me,” he said.
She uttered no sound, but only looked up at him, pathetically pliant to his will. Her prince, for all her sins, had come to her with the glass slipper. Would her poor swollen foot ever go into it? Her blue eyes, like a child’s, sought his pity and forgiveness.
But he was resolute to blind his heart to the appeal.
“An hour ago,” he said—slowly, as if weighing his every word to himself—“I could not have done this. The interval has proved a fruitful one to us both.”
She clasped her hands as she gazed at him; a film seemed to come over her eyes. She murmured in a tranced, half-fearful voice. The warmth it seemed had drugged her brain.
“What happened! It was misty and shining. But, to be with you!—yes, thou art here, and the fire, and Nicette. That was always in the deep heart of my visions.”
He took no notice of her half-audible wanderings.
“I would not have you suppose,” he went on tonelessly, steadily, “that I shall allow any conversion by you of this accident into opportunity. I brought you to shelter for only the reason that I decline to burden myself with any shadow of compunction for what share my duty forced me to take in your punishment. For the rest, we remain, as always, wide poles apart.”
In the pause he made she dropped her head—crept a little nearer to him—crouched at his feet. Not to be haunted by the wistful eyes, by the look, like a dog’s, that was so full of the silent struggle to comprehend, made his task easier.
“You may stop here,” he said, “until I am able to procure you other quarters, and the means, if possible, to a living. That will not be later than to-morrow, I hope. For to-night, at least, you are to sleep in my room yonder, and I will make shift to lie out here. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Very well,” he said, “but I saddle the agreement with one fixed condition. As long as you remain here—whether it is for one day, or two, or more—you are to hold no communication with me—are never to speak to me, unless I first address you.”
She rose to her knees, clasping her hands again to him. Her hair was fallen over her cheeks; she looked a very small forlorn subject for extreme measures.
“I shall be near you,” she said, half-choking.
He took her arm and motioned her to her feet.
“It is understood, then. You had better go to bed now and rest and recover and get warm.”
He put a candle into her hand, led her to the door of the bedroom, thrust her gently within, and clicked the latch upon her. Then he went and stood over the fire.
What had he done? What was he doing? Even as he had spoken, making his condition, he had known that that was a wild absurdity, impossible of fulfilment. What had moved him to it but a sudden recrudescence of that self-mutilating spirit? He had had no deliberate thought to goad a willing jade, or to return, in kind, to love, the humiliation he had suffered from it. Yet he knew that he was doing so, and it was a perilous lust to indulge.
His heart was full of ache, his brain of phantoms. These were reflected, coming and going, in the still red logs of the fire. They represented, in a thousand aspects, the three ghosts that would haunt his life for evermore. All women—all fair and fateful shapes; and, of the three, the vilest, because she had figured for the purest, was the one that had come to claim him at the last. It was a fierce satire upon the lesson of ennobling ideals.
Pamela, and Théroigne, and Nicette. He felt it no sacrilege now to name this trinity in a breath. Indeed, which alone of the three had made it her sport to coquet with hearts, holding their suffering as nothing to the gratification of her vanity? Not either of those peasant girls of Méricourt—whose passionate blood would always rather flame to the ecstasy of pursuit than to the selfish rapture of being hunted for the sake of their own beautiful skins.
His thoughts swerved from one figure to another. This Lord Edward Fitzgerald—how had he come to usurp the very throne of desire? He knew a little of him by repute—had heard of the ardent young soldier and apostle of the new liberty, melancholy and something wild, breathing the spirit of romance. He had no grudge against him, at least. And what of Mr Sheridan, whose influence alone he had apprehended? Ghosts they were to him now. What profit was it to seek to analyse their bodiless significance?
Sweeping and shadowy, the smoke of all such phantoms reeled up the chimney. Only one face remained with him.
He glanced at the bedroom door, lay down on the rug before the fire, and, wrapping his cloak about his haggard face, committed himself to the hopelessness of slumber.