MONSIEUR the master of Méricourt would seal that queer compact of entertainment with the nephew of his father’s friend over a bottle of Niersteiner, which he had up from the cellar there and then.
“’Tis a rare brand,” quoth he, his eyes responding with a flick to the drawing of the cork; “and we will share both bottle and expense like sworn brothers!”
Ned sipped a single glass reluctant. So much the better for the other.
“I am your debtor!” he cried, as he drained the flask. “Draw upon me for the balance when you will.”
His face was flushed. He talked a good deal, and not in an intelligent vein. The visitor accepted him as an enigma that time should solve. There seemed so much firmness of purpose, so wanton an infirmity of performance, in his composition. Certainly, having the courage of his convictions in one way, and the consequent right to expound them literally in another, he might lay claim to consistency in flooding himself with wine before eleven o’clock in the morning. Still, to Ned, this implied a certain contradiction, inasmuch as no creed of right hedonism could include excess with its penalties.
“Monsieur, mon ami,” cried St Denys, on a wavering, jovial key, “you will oblige me by indulging, while here, your easiest caprices. Come and go as you will; I desire to put no restraint on you. You shall pay only for your clean linen, and for your food and drink. The first two you will find at least wholesome. For the last, behold the proof! If you want luxury, you must seek elsewhere. My socialism is eminently practical. The free expression of nature—that is the creed we seek to give effect to in this little corner of the world. But we are no Sybarites.”
“Nor I,” said Ned; “but, for you—you are a man of strong convictions, monsieur?”
St Denys laughed, sprawling back in his chair, and waved his hand significantly to the empty walls.
“Just so,” said Ned. “But I am a very chiffonnier for raking in the dust for hidden motives.”
The Frenchman cocked a sleepy lid, scrutinising his guest with a little arrogance of humour.
“They are here, no doubt, these motives,” said he. “Perhaps I am astute, perhaps I have the seer’s eye. If I foretold you a deluge, what would you do?”
“Invest my money in an ark.”
“A floating capital, to be sure. But you could never realise on it if you weathered the storm.”
“And you, monsieur?”
“And I, monsieur?—I should endeavour, very likely, to extract the essence of twenty years from one; I should at least spare no expense to that end. Were I foredoomed to founder, I would make myself a wreck that I might sink the more easily.”
He came scrambling to his feet.
“Do you like music?” he cried. “I will canvass you in the prophetic vein. I see the rising of the waters.”
He was looking about vaguely as he spoke.
“What the devil is become of it?” he muttered.
“Are you hunting for your guitar? You will find it flat beyond tuning, I am afraid.”
“How, do you say?”
“M. de St Denys, you fell asleep, literally, on it last night in the ‘Landlust.’”
“‘Landlust!’ Oh! Dieu du ciel! I am beginning to remember.”
“Why,” he chuckled, with hazy inspiration, “your veritable figure, monsieur, stands out of the fog.”
“Indeed, it was thick enough to stand on.”
“And little Boppard, and the gross old Lambertine, who is father to our village Aspasia, the fat old man. But I must introduce you to Théroigne Lambertine, monsieur, to add one beat a minute to your politic pulses.”
“Indeed, I think I have already introduced myself.”
“The deuce you have!”
“And is she your Aspasia? And who is her Pericles?”
“Harkee, monsieur!” said St Denys, with a fall to particular gravity, “that will never do.”
Then he broke into a great laugh.
“The father,” he cried, “is the bulwark of paradox. See that you never strive to take him by storm. He is of those who would undermine the Church while confessing to the priest. He clings to the old formulæ of honour that, in others, he pronounces out of date. He advocates free thought as a eunuch might advocate free love, without an idea of what it implies. His advance is all within his own ring-fence—round and round like a squirrel in its cage. He will go any distance you like there, only he must not be ousted from his patrimony. The world for all men thinks he, but his farm for Jack Lambertine. Popped into his pet seed-crusher, he would bleed a vat of oil. But he is an estimable husbandman; oh yes, he is that, certainly.”
“He gives you a better character, it seems, than you him.”
“Why, what have I said to his discredit? He has made the whole human race his debtor in one respect.”
“What, for example?”
“M. Murk, mon ami, he has produced a Théroigne.”
Ned, paint-box in hand, presented himself at the lodge-door. A sound of low singing led him through a very lavender-blown passage to the rear of the cottage. Here he came upon Nicette in a little bricked dairy dashed cool with recent water. She was skimming cream from a broad pan with her fingers. The tips of these budded through the white, like nibs of rhubarb through melting snow.
“Behold her as she stands!” said the intruder. “Here is the milk-washed Madonna for my picture.”
He put down his box and approached the maid. She stood startled, her hands poised above their work. Ned took her by the wrists, and, conducting his captive with speechless decorum to a sink, pumped water over the sheathed buds till they flushed pink with the cold.
“Now,” said he, “dry your hands on that jack-towel, Nicette, and we will get to work.”
The girl’s eyes floated in a little backwater of tears. Crescents of hot colour showed under them on her cheek-bones.
“Monsieur will make a jest of me,” she said, in a rather drowned whisper.
“I will make a Madonna of you, Nicette, if you will pose yourself as I wish.”
Her lips quivered. She looked down, twiddling her wet thumbs.
“I am established at the chateau, Nicette. I am a friend of M. de St Denys, who would have me dispose of my time to my best entertainment.”
“And that monsieur seeks of the poor lodge-keeper?”
“Truly, for I am an artist above all things.”
This cold fellow had a coaxing way with him. After not so long an interval he was busily at work, with the girl seated to his satisfaction. The sweet coolness of the dairy received, through a wide-flung window, the scent of innumerable flowers that thronged the little garden without. To look thereon was like gazing on the blazing square of a stage from the sequestered gloom of an auditorium. There was an orchestra, moreover, all made up of queer Æolian harmonics.
“What is that voice, Nicette, that never ceases to moan and quarrel?”
“It tells the wind, monsieur.”
“What does it tell? A story without an end, I think.”
He rose and looked through the window. A little complaining horn, pivoted on the top of a long pole, swung to the lightest breeze and caught and passed it on in waves of protest. Upon a slack wire or two that, like tent ropes, held the pole secure, lower currents of air fluttered with the sound of a knife sharpening on a tinker’s grindstone.
Ned grunted and resumed his seat.
“It would drive me silly to have that for ever in my ears. How can you stand it, Nicette?”
“It speaks to me of many things, monsieur.”
“What, for instance?”
“Monsieur will laugh.”
“No, I will not.”
“The whispering of the flower spirits, then; the steps and the low voices that come from beyond the dawn before even the shepherds are awake; sometimes the noise of the sea.”
“You have travelled?”
“Ah! no, monsieur. But I have heard how the great waters mutter all their secrets to their shells; and I like to think that my air-shell up there is in the confidence of the strange people one cannot see.”
Ned paused in his work, and dwelt musingly on his companion’s face.
“So,” said he, “you are a half-saint on the strength of these little odd ecstasies.”
“Indeed I am no part of a saint.”
“Now, Nicette, you must put no restraint on your speech whenever I am with you. You interest me more, I think, than anybody I have ever seen. Do you know, I have no imaginative faculty like this of yours. I am too inquisitive to dream nicely. I like to get to the bottom of things.”
Obviously there was some lure about him that drew the girl, in tentative advances, from her reserve.
“I do not think there is a bottom to things,” she said, looking up, a little breathless at her own daring. “Some day, perhaps, when monsieur thinks he has reached it, he will fall through and find himself flying.”
“Shall I?” said Ned abstractedly, for he was wrestling with a difficulty. Then he went on, with a quick change of subject,—“are you very fond of your cow?”
Nicette’s eyes opened in wonder.
“Of Madeleine? Oh yes, monsieur.”
“How often do you feed her?”
“But twice in the day.”
“Of green meat that you gather?”
“It is the fashion with us. Is it not so to stall the cattle in the country of monsieur?”
“Only at night. And how often do you feed your little brother?”
The unexpected question completely dumfounded the girl. Ned laughed, put his brush in his mouth, and fetched a louis-d’or from his pocket.
“Will you take this now, Nicette?”
Something to his consternation, she rose hurriedly from her seat, made as if to leave the room, and broke into a little fit of weeping. He went up and spoke to her soothingly—
“Silly, pretty child! are you ashamed? You are none the worse in my eyes for showing some inconsistency. Think only you are in the confidence of one of your strange people. Here, take it, Nicette.”
She threw his hand away. The coin rang on the floor.
“I will not, I will not!” she cried. “Oh, please to go, monsieur. How can I sit for the Madonna any more when you make me out so wicked!”