Literature
I. Women — Wives or
II. "Tell Me Not
Now"
III. The Headswoman . . Kenneth
Grahame . . 25
IV. Credo . . . .
Arthur Symons . . 48
V. White Magic . . . Ella
D'Arcy . . . 59
VI. Fleurs de Feu
. José Maria de Hérédia, of the French Academy .
69
VII. Flowers of Fire, a Translation
VIII. When I am King . . Henry
Harland . . 71
IX. To a Bunch of
Lilac . Theo Marzials . . 87
X. Apple-Blossom in Brittany
XI. To Salome at St. James's
XII. Second Thoughts . . Arthur Moore . . 112
XIII. Twilight . . . Olive Custance . . 134
XIV. Tobacco Clouds . . Lionel
Johnson . . 143
XV. Reiselust . .
. Annie Macdonell . . 153
XVI. To Every Man a Damsel
XVII.
A Song and a Tale . . Nora
Hopper . . . 158
XVIII. De
Profundis . . . S. Cornish Watkins . 167
XIX. A Study in Sentimentality
XX. George Meredith . . Morton Fullerton . . 210
XXI. Jeanne-Marie . . Leila
Macdonald . . 215
XXII. Parson Herrick's
Muse . C.W. Dalmon . . 241
XXIII. A Note on George the Fourth
XXIV. The Ballad of a Nun . John Davidson . . 273
Art
I. Mantegna . . . By Philip
Broughton .
II. From a Lithograph . . George
Thomson . . 21
III. Portrait of
Himself .
IV. Lady
Gold's Escort
V. The Wagnerites .
VI. La Dame aux Camélias
VII. From a Pastel . . Albert Foschter . . 89
VIII. Collins'
Music Hall, Islington
IX. The
Lion Comique
X. Charley's Aunt .
XI. The Mirror . .P.
Wilson Steer . . 169
XII. Skirt-Dancing .
XII. A Sunset . .
. William Hyde . . 211
XIV. George the Fourth . . Max
Beerbohm . . 243
XV. Study of a
Head . . An Unknown Artist . 270
The Yellow Book
Volume III October, 1894
The Editor of THE YELLOW BOOK can in no case
hold himself responsible for
rejected manuscripts;
when, however, they are accompanied by stamped
addressed envelopes, every effort will be made to
secure their prompt
return.
LONDON & EDINBURGH
WE believe it to be well within the truth to say that most
men cherish,
hidden away in an inner pocket of conscious-
ness, their own particular
ideal of the perfect woman. Sole
sovereign she of that unseen kingdom, and
crowned and sceptred
she remains long after her faithful subject has put
aside the other
playthings of his youth. The fetish is from time to time
regarded
rapturously, though sorrowfully, by its possessor, but it is
never
brought forth for public exhibition. If to worship and adore
were the beginning and end of the pastime, no cavilling word
need be said,
for the power to worship is a great and good gift,
and, save in the
fabulous region of politics, is nowadays so rare an
one, that when
discovered in the actual world its steady encour-
agement becomes a duty.
But to this apparently innocent diver-
sion there is another side. Somewhat
grave consequences are apt
to follow, and it is to this point of view that
we wish to call
attention.
When the woman uncreate becomes the measuring rod by which
her unconscious
living rivals are judged, and are mostly found
wanting, then we are minded
to lift up our voice and put in
a plea for fair-play. To the shrined deity
are given by the acolo-
thyst, not only all the perfections of person
demanded by a severely
aesthetic sense, but all the moral qualities as well. Every grace of
every
fair woman he has ever met—the best attributes of his
mother, his sister,
and his aunt—are freely hers. None of the
slight blemishes which
occasionally tarnish the high lustre of
virtue, none of the caprices to
which sirens are constitutionally
liable, are permitted. Faultless wife and
faultless mother must she
be, faithful lover and long-suffering friend, or
he will have none
of her in his temple. Now, this is surely a wholly
unreasonable,
an utterly extravagant demand on the part of man, and if
analysed
carefully, will, we believe, be found to yield egoism and
gluttony
in about equal parts. How, we venture to inquire, would he
meet
a like claim, were it in turn presented to him ? A witty and
light-
hearted lady—a remnant yet remains, in spite of the advent of
the
leaping, bounding, new womanhood—once startled a selected
audience
by the general statement, "All men are widowers."
But even if this generous
utterance can be accepted as absolutely
accurate, it can hardly be taken as
a proof of man's fitness for
both the important roles involved.
For our own part, we are convinced that, broadly speaking,
the exception
only proving the rule—whatever that supporting
phrase may mean—woman, fresh
from Nature's moulding, is, so far
as first intention is concerned, a
predestined wife
is not both,
though doubtless by constant endeavour, art and duty
taking it turn and
turn about, the dual end may, with hardness, be
attained unto. For Nature
is not economic. Far from her is
the fatal utilitarian spirit which too
often prompts the improver
man (or—dare we confess it ?—still more
frequently woman) to
attempt to make one object do the work of two. From
all such
sorry makeshifts Nature, the great modeller in clay, turns
contemp-
tuously away. Not long ago we read in a lady's journal of a
'combination gown' which by some cunning arrangement, the
secret whereof was only known to its lucky possessor, would do
alternate day
and night duty with equal credit and despatch. We
have no desire to
disparage the varied merits of this ingenious con-
trivance, but at the
best it must remain an unlovely hybrid thing.
Probably it knew this well,
for gowns, too, have their feelings, and
before now have been seen to go
limp in a twinkling, overcome
by a sudden access of despondency. Such a
moment must certainly
have come to the omnibus garment referred to above,
when it
found itself breakfasting with a severe and one-idea'd
"tailor-made,"
or, more cruel experience still, dining skirt by skirt with
a
"mysterious miracle"—the latest label—in gossamer and satin.
We dare to go even further, and to declare that every woman
knows in her
heart—though never, never will she admit it to you—
within which fold she
was intended to pass. Is it an exaggeration
to say that many a girl marries
out of the superabundance of the
maternal instinct, though she may the
while be absolutely ignorant
of the motive power at work ? Believing
herself to be wildly
enamoured of the man of her (or her parents') choice,
she is in
reality only in love with the nursery of an after-day. Of
worship
between husband and wife, as a factor in the transaction, she
knows nothing, or likely enough she imagines it present when it
is the
sweet passion of pity, or the more subtle patronage of
bestowal, one or
both, which are urging her forward into marriage.
Gratitude, none the less
real because unrealised, towards the man
who thus enables her to fulfil her
true destiny—the saving of souls
alive—has also its share in the complex
energy. Well for the
husband of this wife if he allows himself gradually to
occupy the
position of eldest and most important of her children, to
whom
indeed a somewhat larger liberty is accorded, but from whom also
more is required. In return for this submission boundless will be
the care
and devotion bestowed upon his upbringing day by day.
He will be foolish if he utters aloud, or even says in the silence of
his
heart, that motherhood is good, but that wifehood was what he
wanted. It
would be but a bootless kicking against the pricks.
For he has chosen the
mother-woman, and it is beyond his
power, or that of any other specialist,
to effect the fundamental
change for which his soul may long. It only
remains for him to
make the best of a very good bargain, and one to which
it is very
probable his strict personal merits may hardly have entitled
him.
If such a marriage is childless, it may still be a very useful one.
Nature's
accommodations often verge on the miraculous. The
unemployed maternal
instincts of the wife easily work themselves
out in an unlimited and
universal auntdom. It must be confessed
that bad blunders are apt to ensue,
but where the intentions are
good, the pavement should not be too closely
scanned. In fiction
these are the Dinahs, the Romolas, the Dorotheas, the
Mary
Garths. Dear to the soul of the female writer is the maternal
type. With loving, if tiresome frequency, she is presented to us
again and
yet again. In truth we sometimes grow a little weary
of her saintly
monotony. But as it is given to few of us to have
the courage of our
tastes, we bear with her, as we bear with other
not altogether pleasing
appliances, presented to us by earnest
friends, with the assurance that
they are for our good, or for our
education, or some other equally
superfluous purpose.
With the male artist this female model is not nearly so popular.
It may be
that he feels himself wholly unequal to cope with her
countless
perfections. Certain it is that he makes but a sad
muddle of it when he
tries. Witness Thackeray's faded, bloodless
Lady Esmond, as set against his
glowing wayward Trix—she,
by the way, a beautifully-marked specimen of the
wife-woman—
though whether it would be pure wisdom to take her to wife
must be left an open question. Still, we have in our time loved
her well, and some of us have found it hard to forgive the black
treachery
done in bringing her back in her old age, a painted
and scolding harridan.
For these, well-loved of the gods, should, in
fiction at least, die
young.
Truth compels us to own regretfully that man in his self-indul-
gence
shrinks from both the giving and receiving of dull moments,
whilst woman,
believing devoutly in their saving grace, is altruistic
enough to devote
herself with enthusiasm to the task of their ad-
ministration. Now, dull
moments are apt to lie hidden about the
creases of the severely classic
robe, which, in the story-books at
any rate, these heroines always wear. We
must all agree that
during the last twenty years this type, with its
portentous accumu-
lation of self-conscious responsibility has increased
alarmingly.
To what is the increase to be attributed ? The too rapid
growth
of the female population stands out plainly as prime cause.
Legis-
lators are athirst for things practical. Is it beyond their power
to
devise some method of dealing with this problem ? The Chinese
plan
is painfully obvious, but only as a last and despairful resource,
when the
wise men of Westminster sitting on committees and
commissions have failed,
can it be mentioned for adoption in
Europe. We are, alas ! Science-ridden,
and are likely to remain
thus bridled and saddled for weary years to come.
Every bush
and every bug grows its own specialist, and yet we, the
patient,
the long-suffering public, are left to endure both the fogs
that
make of London one murky pit, and the redundant female birth-
rate which threatens more revolutions than all the forces of the
Anarchists
in active combination. Meanwhile these devotees of
the abstract play about
with all sorts of trifles, masquerading as
grave thinkers, hoping thus to
escape their certain judgment-day.
The identification of criminals by the
variation of thumb-prints
is a pretty conceit ; so too is the record of the
influence of the
moon on the tides, which, we are informed, employs all to itself a
whole and
highly paid professor with a yearly average of three
pupils at Cambridge.
But what are these save mere fads, on a par
with leapfrog and skittles, in
the presence of the momentous
problems about and around us ? Let these
gentlemen jockeys look
to it. The hour is not far distant when public
opinion shall
discover their uselessness and send them about their
business.
In humbler ways, too, much might be done to stem the morbid
activity of the
collective female conscience. Big sins lie at the
doors of the hosts of
good men and women who turn out year by
year tons of "books for the young"
to serve as nutriment for the
hungry nestlings of culpable, thoughtless
parents. It is hard to
overstate the pernicious effect of this class of
happy child who is to remain happy. The little girl, aged
seven,
who lately wrote in her diary before going to bed, "Of what
use am I in the world ?" had, it is certain, been denied her
Andersen, her Grimm, her Carroll, even her Blue fairy book.
Turned in to
browse on " Ministering Children," "Agatha's First
Prayer," and the fatal
"Eric"—into how many editions has this
last well-meaning but poisonous
romance not passed—the little
victim of parental stupidity is thus left
with an organ damaged for
life by over-much stimulation at the start. This
new massacre of
the innocents is of purely nineteenth-century growth. It
dates
from the era of the awakened conscience, and is coincident
with
the formation of all the societies for the regeneration of the
human
race.
with in the multitudinous pages written by women, is the well-
beloved, the chosen of the male artist. Week-days and Sundays
he paints her
portrait. Shakespeare returns to her again and again,
as though it were hard to part from her. Wicked Trix stands out
as bold
leader of one bad band. Tess belongs to the family, though
she is of
another branch ; so does Cathy of Wuthering Heights,
and Lyndall of the
African Farm ; whilst latest and slightest scamp
of the lot comes dancing
Dodo of Lambeth. Save in a strictly
specialised sense, none of this class
can be said to contrive the
greatest good of the greatest number. These are
the women to
whom the nursery is at best but an interlude, and at worst a
real
interruption of their life's strongest interests. They are not
skilled in dealing with early teething troubles, nor in the rival
merits of
Welsh and Saxony flannel stuffs. Their crass ignorance
of all this deep
lore may, it is true, go far to kill off superfluous
offspring, but, unjust
as it would appear, these are the mothers
who each succeeding year become
more and more adored of their
sons. Fribblers though they be, they sweeten
the world's corners
with the perfume of their charm. And the bit of world's
work in
which they excel is the keeping alive the tradition of woman's
witchery. Who, then, can deny them their plain uses ? When
Fate is kind and
bestows the fitting partner, the fires of their love
never die down. They
remain lovers to the end. Their husbands
need fear no rival, not even in
the person of their own superior
son. When Fate is unkind and things go
crookedly, these are the
women whose wreckage strews life's high road, and
from whom
their wiser sisters turn reprovingly away. For the good
woman
who has to "work for her living," and who pretends to enjoy the
healthful after-pains in her moral system, is rarely tolerant of the
existence of the
brook, dainty morsels without labour are cheerfully
provided by
that inconsequent raven, man. This lady goes gaily,
wearing
what she has not spun, reaping where she has not sown. Sad
reflections these for the high-souled woman whose enlightened
demand for justice turns in its present day impotency to wrath and
bitterness.
Wisdom and foresight are never the "attributes of the wife-
woman. Charm,
beguilement, fascination of sorts, form her poor
equipment for life's
selective struggle. These gifts cannot be said
to promise, save when the
stars are in happiest conjunction, long
life and useful days for her
intimates. Variations of the two types
of Primitive Woman may abound, but
the broad distinction
between them is clearly cut and readily to be made
out by
the dullest groper after truth. We can imagine a modern Daniel
addressing (quite uselessly) a modem disciple thus :
"Look to it now, O young man ! that your feet go straight, and
slip not in
search for the pearl that may be hid away for you.
For she who loveth you
best may work you all evil, and she who
loveth her own soul's travail best
will hardly fail you in the days
and the years. But Love remaineth, and the
way of return
is not."
I
IT was a bland sunny morning of a mediaeval May—an old-style
May of the most
typical quality ; and the Council of the little
town of St. Radegonde were
assembled, as was their wont at that
hour, in the picturesque upper chamber
of the Hotel de Ville, for
the dispatch of the usual municipal business.
Though the date was
early sixteenth century, the members of this particular
town-
council possessed some resemblance to those of similar
assemblies
in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even the nineteenth
centuries,
in a general absence of any characteristic at all—unless a
pervading
hopeless insignificance can be considered as such. All the
character,
indeed, in the room seemed to be concentrated in the girl
who
stood before the table, erect, yet at her ease, facing the members
in
general and Mr. Mayor in particular ; a delicate-handed, handsome
girl of some eighteen summers, whose tall, supple figure was well set
off
by the quiet, though tasteful mourning in which she was clad.
"Well, gentlemen," the Mayor was saying ; "this little business
appears to
be—er—quite in order, and it only remains for me to—
er—review the facts.
You are aware that the town has lately had
the misfortune to lose its
executioner—a gentleman who, I may
say, performed the duties of his office with neatness and dispatch,
and gave
the fullest satisfaction to all with whom he—er—came in
contact. But the
Council has already, in a vote of condolence,
expressed its sense of
the—er—striking qualities of the deceased.
You are doubtless also aware
that the office is hereditary, being
secured to a particular family in this
town, so long as any one of its
members is ready and willing to take it up.
The deed lies before
me, and appears to be—er—quite in order. It is true
that on this
occasion the Council might have been called upon to consider
and
examine the title of the claimant, the late lamented official
having
only left a daughter—she who now stands before you ; but I am
happy to say that Jeanne—the young lady in question—with what
I am bound to
call great good-feeling on her part, has saved us all
trouble in that
respect, by formally applying for the family post,
with all its—er—duties,
privileges, and emoluments ; and her
application appears to be—er—quite in
order. There is therefore,
under the circumstances, nothing left for us to
do but to declare
the said applicant duly elected. I would wish, however,
before I—
er—sit down, to make it quite clear to the—er—fair
petitioner,
that if a laudable desire to save the Council trouble in the
matter
has led her to a—er—hasty conclusion, it is quite open to her
to
reconsider her position. Should she determine not to press her
claim, the succession to the post would then apparently devolve
upon her
cousin Enguerrand, well known to you all as a practising
advocate in the
courts of this town. Though the youth has not,
I admit, up to now proved a
conspicuous success in the profession
he has chosen, still there is no
reason why a bad lawyer should
not make an excellent executioner ; and in
view of the close friend-
ship—may I even say attachment ?—existing between
the cousins,
it is possible that this young lady may, in due course,
practically
enjoy the solid emoluments of the position without the
necessity
of discharging its (to some girls) uncongenial duties. And so,
though not
the rose herself, she would still be—er—near the
rose !" And the Mayor
resumed his seat, chuckling over his little
pleasantry, which the keener
wits of the Council proceeded to
explain at length to the more obtuse.
"Permit me, Mr. Mayor," said the girl, quietly, "first to thank
you for what
was evidently the outcome of a kindly though mis-
directed feeling on your
part ; and then to set you right as to the
grounds of my application for
the post to which you admit my
hereditary claim. As to my cousin, your
conjecture as to the
feeling between us is greatly exaggerated ; and I may
further say
at once, from my knowledge of his character, that he is little
quali-
fied either to adorn or to dignify an important position such as
this.
A man who has achieved such indifferent success in a minor and
less exacting walk of life, is hardly likely to shine in an occupation
demanding punctuality, concentration, judgment—all the qualities,
in fine,
that go to make a good business man. But this is beside
the question. My
motives, gentlemen, in demanding what is my
due, are simple and (I trust)
honest, and I desire that you should
know them. It is my wish to be
dependent on no one. I am
both willing and able to work, and I only ask for
what is the
common right of humanity—admission to the labour market.
How many poor toiling women would simply jump at a chance
like this which
fortune lays open to me ! And shall I, from any
false deference to that
conventional voice which proclaims this
thing as "nice," and that thing as
"not nice," reject a handicraft
which promises me both artistic
satisfaction and a competence ?
No, gentlemen ; my claim is a small
one—only a fair day's wage
for a fair day's work. But I can accept nothing
less, nor consent
to forgo my rights, even or any contingent remainder of
possible
cousinly favour !"
There was a touch of scorn in her fine contralto voice as she
finished
speaking ; the Mayor himself beamed approval. He was
not wealthy, and had a
large family of daughters ; so Jeanne's
sentiments seemed to him entirely
right and laudable.
"Well, gentlemen," he began, briskly, "then all we've got to
do, is
to——"
"Beg pardon, your worship," put in Master Robinet, the
tanner, who had been
sitting with a petrified, Bill-the-Lizard sort
of expression during the
speechifying ; "but are we to understand
as how this here young lady is
going to be the public
executioner ?"
"Really, neighbour Robinet," said the Mayor somewhat
pettishly, "you've got
ears like the rest of us, I suppose ; and
you know the contents of the deed
; and you ve had my assurance
that it's—er—quite in order ; and as it's
getting towards lunch-
time——"
"But it's unheard-of," protested honest Robinet. "There
hasn't ever been no
such thing—leastways not as I've heard
tell."
"Well, well, well," said the Mayor, "everything must have a
beginning, I
suppose. Times are different now, you know.
There's the march of intellect,
and—er—all that sort of thing.
We must advance with the times—don't you
see, Robinet ?—
advance with the times !"
"Well I'm——" began the tanner.
But no one heard, on this occasion, the tanner's opinion as to
his
condition, physical or spiritual ; for the clear contralto cut
short his
obtestations.
"If there's really nothing more to be said, Mr. Mayor," she
remarked, "I
need not trespass longer on your valuable time. I
propose to take up the
duties of my office to-morrow morning, at
the usual hour. The salary will, I assume, be reckoned from the
same date ;
and I shall make the customary quarterly application
for such additional
emoluments as may have accrued to me during
that period. You see I am
familiar with the routine. Good
morning, gentlemen !" And as she passed
from the Council
chamber, her small head held erect, even the tanner felt
that she
took with her a large portion of the May sunshine which was
condescending that morning to gild their deliberations.
II
One evening, a few weeks later, Jeanne was taking a stroll on
the ramparts
of the town, a favourite and customary walk of hers
when business cares
were over. The pleasant expanse of country
that lay spread beneath her—the
rich sunset, the gleaming sinuous
river, and the noble old château that
dominated both town and
pasture from its adjacent height—all served to stir
and bring out
in her those poetic impulses which had lain dormant during
the
working day ; while the cool evening breeze smoothed out and
obliterated any little jars or worries which might have ensued
during the
practice of a profession in which she was still something
of a novice. This
evening she felt fairly happy and content.
True, business was rather brisk,
and her days had been fully
occupied ; but this mattered little so long as
her modest efforts
were appreciated, and she was now really beginning to
feel that,
with practice, her work was creditably and artistically done.
In
a satisfied, somewhat dreamy mood, she was drinking in the
various
sweet influences of the evening, when she perceived her
cousin
approaching.
"Good evening, Enguerrand," cried Jeanne pleasantly ; she
was thinking that
since she had begun to work for her living, she
had hardly seen him—and
they used to be such good friends.
Could anything have occurred to offend
him ?
Enguerrand drew near somewhat moodily, but could not help
relaxing his
expression at sight of her fair young face, set in its
framework of rich
brown hair, wherein the sunset seemed to have
tangled itself and to cling,
reluctant to leave it.
"Sit down, Enguerrand," continued Jeanne, "and tell me what
you've been
doing this long time. Been very busy, and winning
forensic fame and gold ?
"
"Well, not exactly," said Enguerrand, moody once more.
"The fact is, there's
so much interest required nowadays at
the courts, that unassisted talent
never gets a chance. And you,
Jeanne ?"
"Oh, I don't complain," answered Jeanne, lightly. "Of course
it's fair-time
just now, you know, and we're always busy then.
But work will be lighter
soon, and then I'll get a day off, and
we'll have a delightful ramble and
picnic in the woods, as we
used to do when we were children. What fun we
had in
those old days, Enguerrand ! Do you remember when we
were quite
little tots, and used to play at executions in the back-
garden, and you
were a bandit and a buccaneer, and all sorts of
dreadful things, and I used
to chop off your head with a paper-
knife ? How pleased dear father used to
be !"
"Jeanne," said Enguerrand, with some hesitation, "you've
touched upon the
very subject that I came to speak to you about.
Do you know, dear, I can't
help feeling—it may be unreasonable,
but still the feeling is there—that
the profession you have adopted
is not quite—is just a little——"
"Now, Enguerrand !" said Jeanne, an angry flash sparkling in
her eyes. She was a little touchy on this subject, the word she
most
affected to despise being also the one she most dreaded—the
adjective
"unladylike."
"Don't misunderstand me, Jeanne," went on Enguerrand,
imploringly : "You may
naturally think that, because I should
have succeeded to the post, with its
income and perquisites, had
you relinquished your claim, there is therefore
some personal
feeling in my remonstrances. Believe me, it is not so. My
own
interests do not weigh with me for a moment. It is on your own
account, Jeanne, and yours alone, that I ask you to consider
whether the
higher aesthetic qualities, which I know you possess,
may not become
cramped and thwarted by 'the trivial round, the
common task,' which you
have lightly undertaken. However
laudable a professional life may be, one
always feels that with a
delicate organism such as woman, some of the bloom
may possibly
get rubbed off the peach."
"Well, Enguerrand," said Jeanne, composing herself with an
effort, though
her lips were set hard, "I will do you the justice
to belive that personal
advantage does not influence you, and I will
try to reason calmly with you,
and convince you that you are
simply hide-bound by old-world prejudice.
Now, take yourself,
for instance, who come here to instruct me : what does
fession amount to, when all's said
and done ? A mass of lies,
quibbles, dodges, and tricks, that would make
any self-respecting
executioner blush ! And even with the dirty weapons at
your
command, you make but a poor show of it. There was that
wretched
fellow you defended only two days ago. (I was in
court during the trial
professional interest, you know.) Well,
he had his regular
you must needs go and mess and bungle the thing up, so that, as I
expected
all along, he was passed on to me for treatment in due
course. You may like to have his opinion—that of a shrewd,
though unlettered
person. 'It's a real pleasure, miss,' he said,
'to be handled by you. You
work—though p'raps I ses it as shouldn't. If that
blooming fool
of a mouthpiece of mine'—he was referring to you, dear, in
your
capacity of advocate—'had known his business half as well as you
do yours, I shouldn't a bin here now !' And you know,
Enguerrand, he was
perfectly right."
"Well, perhaps he was," admitted Enguerrand. "You see, I
had been working at
a sonnet the night before, and I couldn't get
the rhymes right, and they
would keep coming into my head in
court and mixing themselves up with the
Jeanne, when you saw I
was going off the track, you might have
given me a friendly hint, you
know—for old times' sake, if not
for the prisoner's !"
"I daresay," replied Jeanne, calmly : "perhaps you'll tell me
why I should
sacrifice my interests because you're unable to look
after yours. You
forget that I receive a bonus, over and above
my salary, upon each exercise
of my functions !"
"True," said Enguerrand, gloomily : "I did forget that. I
wish I had your
business aptitudes, Jeanne."
"I daresay you do," remarked Jeanne. "But you see, dear,
how all your
arguments fall to the ground. You mistake a
prepossession for a logical
base. Now if I had gone, like that
Clairette you used to dangle after, and
been waiting-woman to
some grand lady in a château—a thin-blooded compound
of drudge
and sycophant—then, I suppose, you'd have been perfectly
satisfied.
So feminine ! So genteel !"
"She's not a bad sort of girl, little Claire," said Enguerrand,
reflectively
(thereby angering Jeanne afresh) : "but putting her
aside,—of course you
could always beat me at argument, Jeanne ;
you'd have made a much better lawyer than I. But you know,
dear, how much I
care about you ; and I did hope that on that
account even a prejudice,
however unreasonable, might have some
little weight. And I'm not alone, let
me tell you, in my views.
There was a fellow in court only to-day, who was
saying that
yours was only a
talkative and hopelessly unpunctual animal,
could never be more
than a clever amateur in the profession you have
chosen."
"That will do, Enguerrand," said Jeanne, proudly ; "it seems
that when
argument fails, you can stoop so low as to insult me
through my sex. You
men are all alike—steeped in brutish
masculine prejudice. Now go away, and
don't mention the
subject to me again till you're quite reasonable and
nice."
III
Jeanne passed a somewhat restless night after her small scene
with her
cousin, waking depressed and unrefreshed. Though she
had carried matters
with so high a hand, and had scored so
distinctly all around, she had been
more agitated than she had
cared to show. She liked Enguerrand ; and more
especially did
she like his admiration for her ; and that chance allusion
to
Clairette contained possibilities that were alarming. In embracing
a professional career, she had never thought for a moment that it
could
militate against that due share of admiration to which, as a
girl, she was
justly entitled ; and Enguerrand's views seemed this
morning all the more
narrow and inexcusable. She rose languidly,
and as soon as she was dressed
sent off a little note to the Mayor,
saying that she had a nervous headache
and felt out of sorts, and
begging to be excused from attendance on that day ; and the
missive reached
the Mayor just as he was taking his usual place at
the head of the
Board.
"Dear, dear," said the kind-hearted old man, as soon as he had
read the
letter to his fellow-councilmen : "I'm very sorry. Poor
girl ! Here, one of
you fellows, just run round and tell the gaoler
there won't be any business
to-day. Jeanne's seedy. It's put off
till to-morrow. And now, gentlemen,
the agenda——"
"Really, your worship," exploded Robinet, "this is simply
ridiculous !"
"Upon my word, Robinet," said the Mayor, "I don't know
what's the matter
with you. Here's a poor girl unwell—and a
more hardworking girl isn't in
the town—and instead of sym-
pathising with her, and saying you re sorry,
you call it ridiculous !
Suppose you had a headache yourself! You wouldn't
like——"
"But it
ever heard of an executioner having a nervous headache ? There's
no precedent for it. And 'out of sorts,' too! Suppose the
criminals said
they were out of sorts, and didn't feel up to being
executed ?"
"Well, suppose they did," replied the Mayor, "we'd try and
meet them
halfway, I daresay. They'd have to be executed
some time or other, you
know. Why on earth are you so
captious about trifles ? The prisoners won't
mind, and
mind : nobody's
inconvenienced, and everybody's happy !"
"You're right there, Mr. Mayor," put in another councilman.
"This executing
business used to give the town a lot of trouble
and bother ; now it's all
as easy as kiss-your-hand. Instead of
objecting, as they used to do, and
wanting to argue the point and
kick up a row, the fellows as is told off
for execution come
skipping along in the morning, like a lot of lambs in
Maytime.
And then the fun there is on the scaffold ! The jokes, the back-
answers,
the repartees ! And never a word to shock a baby !
Why, my little girl, as
goes through the market-place every morn-
ing—on her way to school, you
know—she says to me only
yesterday, she says, 'Why, father,' she says,
'it's as good as the
play-actors,' she says."
"There again," persisted Robinet, "I object to that too.
They ought to show
a properer feeling. Playing at mummers is
one thing, and being executed is
another, and people ought to
keep 'em separate. In my father's time, that
sort of thing wasn't
thought good taste, and I don't hold with new-fangled
notions."
"Well, really, neighbour," said the Mayor, "I think you're out
of sorts
yourself to-day. You must have got out of bed the
wrong side this morning.
As for a little joke, more or less, we
all know a maiden loves a merry jest
when she's certain of having
the last word ! But I'll tell you what I'll
do, if it'll please you ;
I'll go round and see Jeanne myself on my way
home, and tell
her—quite nicely, you know—that once in a way doesn't
matter,
but that if she feels her health won't let her keep regular
business hours, she mustn't think of going on with anything that's
bad for
her. Like that, don't you see ? And now, gentlemen,
let's read the minutes
!"
Thus it came about that Jeanne took her usual walk that
evening with a
ruffled brow and a swelling heart ; and her little
hand opened and shut
angrily as she paced the ramparts. She
couldn't stand being found fault
with. How could she help
having a headache ? Those clods of citizens didn't
know what a
highly-strung sensitive organisation was. Absorbed in her
re-
flections, she had taken several turns up and down the grassy
foot-
way, before she became aware that she was not alone. A youth,
of
richer dress and more elegant bearing than the general run of
the Radegundians, was leaning in an embrasure, watching the
graceful figure
with evident interest.
"Something has vexed you, fair maiden ?" he observed, coming
forward
deferentially as soon as he perceived he was noticed ;
"and care sits but
awkwardly on that smooth young brow."
"Nay, it is nothing, kind sir," replied Jeanne ; "we girls who
work for our
living must not be too sensitive. My employers
have been somewhat exigent,
that is all. I did wrong to take it
to heart."
"Tis the way of the bloated capitalist," rejoined the young
man lightly, as
he turned to walk by her side. "They grind us,
they grind us ; perhaps some
day they will come under your hands
in turn, and then you can pay them out.
And so you toil and
spin, fair lily ! And yet methinks those delicate hands
show little
trace of labour ?"
"You wrong me, indeed, sir," replied Jeanne merrily. "These
hands of mine,
that you are so good as to admire, do great execu-
tion !"
"I can well believe that your victims are numerous," he
replied ; "may I be
permitted to rank myself among the latest of
them ?"
"I wish you a better fortune, kind sir," answered Jeanne
demurely.
"I can imagine no more delightful one," he replied; "and
where do you ply
your daily task, fair mistress ? Not entirely out
of sight and access, I
trust ?"
"Nay, sir," laughed Jeanne, "I work in the market-place most
mornings, and
there is no charge for admission ; and access is far
from difficult.
Indeed, some complain—but that is no business
of mine. And now I must be
wishing you a good evening.
Nay"—for he would have detained her—"it is not
seemly for an
unprotected maiden to tarry in converse with a stranger at this
hour.
place any morning"——And she tripped lightly away. The youth,
gazing after her retreating figure, confessed himself strangely
fascinated
by this fair unknown, whose particular employment, by
the way, he had
forgotten to ask ; while Jeanne, as she sped
homewards, could not help
reflecting that for style and distinction,
this new acquaintance threw into
the shade all the Enguerrands
and others she had met hitherto—even in the
course of business.
IV
The next morning was bright and breezy, and Jeanne was early
at her post,
feeling quite a different girl. The busy little market-
place was full of
colour and movement, and the gay patches of
flowers and fruit, the strings
of fluttering kerchiefs, and the piles
of red and yellow pottery, formed an
artistic setting to the quiet
impressive scaffold which they framed. Jeanne
was in short
sleeves, according to the etiquette of her office, and her
round
graceful arms showed snowily against her dark blue skirt and
scarlet tight-fitting bodice. Her assistant looked at her with
admiration.
"Hope you're better, miss," he said respectfully. "It was just
as well you
didn't put yourself out to come yesterday ; there was
nothing particular to
do. Only one fellow, and he said
care
; anything to oblige a lady !"
"Well, I wish he'd hurry up now, to oblige a lady," said
Jeanne, swinging
her axe carelessly to and fro : "ten minutes past
the hour ; I shall have
to talk to the Mayor about this."
"It's a pity there ain't a better show this morning," pursued
the assistant,
as he leant over the rail of the scaffold and spat
meditatively into the
busy throng below. "They do say as how
the young Seigneur arrived at the
Château yesterday—him as has
been finishing his education in Paris, you
know. He's as likely as
not to be in the market-place to-day ; and if he's
disappointed, he
may go off to Paris again, which would be a pity, seeing
the
Château's been empty so long. But he may go to Paris, or
anywheres
else he's a mind to, he won t see better workmanship
than in this here
little town !"
"Well, my good Raoul," said Jeanne, colouring slightly at the
obvious
compliment, "quality, not quantity, is what we aim at
here, you know. If a
Paris education has been properly assimi-
lated by the Seigneur, he will
not fail to make all the necessary
allowances. But see, the prison-doors
are opening at last !"
They both looked across the little square to the prison, which
fronted the
scaffold ; and sure enough, a small body of men, the
Sheriff at their head,
was issuing from the building, conveying, or
endeavouring to convey, the
tardy prisoner to the scaffold. That
gentleman, however, seemed to be in a
different and less obliging
frame of mind from that of the previous day ;
and at every pace
one or other of the guards was shot violently into the
middle of
the square, propelled by a vigorous kick or blow from the
struggling
captive. The crowd, unaccustomed of late to such
demonstrations
of feeling, and resenting the prisoner's want of taste,
hooted
loudly ; but it was not until that ingenious mediaeval
arrangement
known as
on him, that the reluctant convict could be prevailed
upon
to present himself before the young lady he had already so
unwarrantably detained.
Jeanne's profession had both accustomed her to surprises
and taught her the futility of considering her clients as drawn
from any one
particular class : yet she could hardly hel
feeling some astonishment on
recognising her new acquaintance
of the previous evening. That, with all
his evident amiability of
character, he should come to this end, was not in
itself a special
subject for wonder ; but that he should have been
conversing with
her on the ramparts at the hour when—after courteously
excusing
her attendance on the scaffold— he was cooling his heels in
prison
for another day, seemed hardly to be accounted for, at first
sight.
Jeanne, however, reflected that the reconciling of apparent
contra-
dictions was not included in her official duties.
The Sheriff, wiping his heated brow, now read the formal
"and a nice job we've had to get him here," he added
on
his own account. And the young man, who had remained
perfectly
tractable since his arrival, stepped forward and bowed
politely.
"Now that we have been properly introduced," said he
courteously, "allow me
to apologise for any inconvenience you
have been put to by my delay. The
fault was entirely mine, and
these gentlemen are in no way to blame. Had I
known whom I
was to have the pleasure of meeting, wings could not have
con-
veyed me swiftly enough."
"Do not mention, I pray, the word inconvenience," replied
Jeanne with that
timid grace which so well became her : "I only
trust that any slight
discomfort it may be my duty to cause you
before we part, will be as easily
pardoned. And now—for the
morning, alas ! advances—any little advice or
assistance that I
can offer is quite at your service ; for the situation is
possibly new,
and you may have had but little experience."
"Faith, none worth mentioning," said the prisoner, gaily.
"Treat me as a raw beginner. Though our acquaintance has been
but brief, I
have the utmost confidence in you."
"Then, sir," said Jeanne, blushing, "suppose I were to assist
you in
removing this gay doublet, so as to give both of us more
freedom and less
responsibility ?"
"A perquisite of the office ?" queried the prisoner with a smile,
as he
slipped one arm out of the sleeve.
A flush came over Jeanne's fair brow. "That was un-
generous," she said.
"Nay, pardon me, sweet one," said he, laughing : "twas but a
poor jest of
mine—in bad taste, I willingly admit."
"I was sure you did not mean to hurt me," she replied kindly,
while her
fingers were busy in turning back the collar of his shirt.
It was composed,
she noticed, of the finest point lace ; and she
could not help a feeling of
regret that some slight error—as must,
from what she knew, exist
somewhere—should compel her to take
a course so at variance with her real
feelings. Her only comfort
was that the youth himself seemed entirely
satisfied with his
situation. He hummed the last air from Paris during her
minis-
trations, and when she had quite finished, kissed the pretty
fingers
with a metropolitan grace.
"And now, sir," said Jeanne, "if you will kindly come this
way : and please
to mind the step—so. Now, if you will have
the goodness to kneel here—nay,
the sawdust is perfectly clean ;
you are my first client this morning. On
the other side of the
block you will find a nick, more or less adapted to
the human chin,
though a perfect fit cannot of course be guaranteed in
every case.
So ! Are you pretty comfortable ?"
"A bed of roses," replied the prisoner. "And what a really
admirable view
one gets of the valley and the river, from just this
particular point
!"
"Charming, is it not ?" replied Jeanne. " I'm so glad you do
justice to it.
Some of your predecessors have really quite vexed
me by their inability to
appreciate that view. It's worth coming
here to see it. And now, to return
to business for one moment,
—would you prefer to give the word yourself ?
Some people do ;
it's a mere matter of taste. Or will you leave yourself
entirely
in my hands ?"
"Oh, in your fair hands," replied her client, "which I beg you
to consider
respectfully kissed once more by your faithful servant
to command."
Jeanne, blushing rosily, stepped back a pace, moistening her
palms as she
grasped her axe, when a puffing and blowing behind
caused her to turn her
head, and she perceived the Mayor hastily
ascending the scaffold.
"Hold on a minute, Jeanne, my girl," he gasped. "Don't be
in a hurry.
There's been some little mistake."
Jeanne drew herself up with dignity. "I'm afraid I don't
quite understand
you, Mr. Mayor," she replied in freezing
accents. "There's been no little
mistake on my part that I'm
aware of."
"No, no, no," said the Mayor, apologetically ; "but on some-
body else's
there has. You see it happened in this way : this
here young fellow was
going round the town last night ; and he'd
been dining, I should say, and
he was carrying on rather free. I
will only say so much in your presence,
that he was carrying on
decidedly free. So the town-guard happened to come
across him,
and he was very high and very haughty, he was, and
wouldn't
give his name nor yet his address—as a gentleman should, you
know, when he's been dining and carrying on free. So our
fellows just ran
him in—and it took the pick of them all their
time to do it, too. Well,
then, the other chap who was in prison—
the gentleman who obliged you yesterday, you know—what does
he do but slip
out and run away in the middle of all the row
and confusion ; and very
inconsiderate and ungentlemanly it was
of him to take advantage of us in
that mean way, just when we
wanted a little sympathy and forbearance. Well,
the Sheriff
comes this morning to fetch out his man for execution, and
he
knows there's only one man to execute, and he sees there's only
one
man in prison, and it all seems as simple as A B C—he never
was much of a
mathematician, you know—so he fetches our friend
here along, quite gaily.
And—and that's how it came about, you
see ;
shall just give
this young fellow a good talking to, and discharge
him with a caution ; and
we shan't require you any more to-day,
Jeanne, my girl."
"Now, look here, Mr. Mayor," said Jeanne severely, "you
utterly fail to
grasp the situation in its true light. All these little
details may be
interesting in themselves, and doubtless the press
will take note of them ;
but they are entirely beside the point.
With the muddleheadedness of your
officials (which I have
frequently remarked upon) I have nothing whatever
to do. All I
know is, that this young gentleman has been formally handed
over
to me for execution, with all the necessary legal requirements ;
and
executed he has got to be. When my duty has been performed,
you
are at liberty to re-open the case if you like ; and any 'little
mistake'
that may have occurred through your stupidity you can
then rectify at your
leisure. Meantime, you've no
here at all ; in fact, you've no business whatever lumbering up my
scaffold. So shut up and clear out."
"Now, Jeanne, do be reasonable," implored the Mayor. "You
women are so
precise. You never will make any allowance for
the necessary margin of
error in things."
"If I were to allow the necessary margin for all
Mayor," replied Jeanne, coolly, " the edition would have to be
a
large-paper one, and even then the text would stand a poor chance.
And now, if you don t allow me the necessary margin to swing
my axe, there
may be another 'little mistake'—"
But at this point a hubbub arose at the foot of the scaffold, and
Jeanne,
leaning over, perceived sundry tall fellows, clad in the
livery of the
Seigneur, engaged in dispersing the municipal guard
by the agency of
well-directed kicks, applied with heartiness
and anatomical knowledge. A
moment later, there strode on to the
scaffold, clad in black velvet, and
adorned with his gold chain of
office, the stately old seneschal of the
Château, evidently in a
towering passion.
"Now, mark my words, you miserable little bladder-o'-lard," he
roared at the
Mayor (whose bald head certainly shone provokingly
in the morning sun),
"see if I don't take this out of your skin
presently !" And he passed on to
where the youth was still
kneeling, apparently quite absorbed in the
view.
"My lord," he said, firmly though respectfully, "your hair-
brained folly
really passes all bounds. Have you entirely lost your
head ?"
"Faith, nearly," said the young man, rising and stretching him-
self. "Is
that you, old Thibault ? Ow, what a crick I've got
in my neck ! But that
view of the valley was really de-
lightful !"
"Did you come here simply to admire the view, my lord ?"
inquired Thibault
severely.
"I came because my horse would come," replied the young
Seigneur lightly :
"that is, these gentlemen here were so pressing ;
they would not hear of
any refusal ; and besides, they forgot to
mention what my attendance was
required in such a hurry for.
And when I got here, Thibault, old fellow, and saw that divine
creature—nay,
a goddess,
anxious to acquit herself with credit—— Well, you know my
weakness ; I
never could bear to disappoint a woman. She had
evidently set her heart on
taking my head ; and as she had my
heart already——"
"I think, my lord," said Thibault with some severity, "you
had better let me
escort you back to the Château. This appears
to be hardly a safe place for
light-headed and susceptible persons !"
Jeanne, as was natural, had the last word. "Understand me,
Mr. Mayor," said
she, " these proceedings are entirely irregular.
I decline to recognise
them, and when the quarter expires I shall
claim the usual bonus !"
V
When, an hour or two later, an invitation arrived—courteously
worded, but
significantly backed by an escort of half-a-dozen tall
archers—for both
Jeanne and the Mayor to attend at the Château
without delay, Jeanne for her
part received it with neither sur-
prise nor reluctance. She had felt it
especially hard that the only
two interviews fate had granted her with the
one man who had
made some impression on her heart, should be hampered, the
one
by considerations of propriety, the other by the conflicting
claims
of her profession and its duties. On this occasion, now, she
would have an excellent chaperon in the Mayor ; and business
being over for
the day, they could meet and unbend on a common
social footing. The Mayor
was not at all surprised either, consider-
ing what had gone before ; but
he was exceedingly terrified, and
sought some consolation from Jeanne as
they proceeded together
to the Château. That young lady's remarks, however, could
hardly be called
exactly comforting.
"I always thought you'd put your foot in it some day, Mayor,"
she said. "You
are so hopelessly wanting in system and method.
Really, under the present
happy-go-lucky police arrangements, I
never know whom I may not be called
upon to execute. Between
you and my cousin Enguerrand, life is hardly safe
in this town.
And the worst of it is, that we other officials on the staff
have to
share in the discredit."
"What do you think they'll do to me, Jeanne ?" whimpered
the Mayor,
perspiring freely.
"Can't say, I'm sure," pursued the candid Jeanne. "Of course,
if it's
anything in the
intend the arrangements, and then you can feel sure you're
in
capable hands. But probably they'll only fine you pretty smartly,
give you a month or two in the dungeons, and dismiss you from
your post ;
and you will hardly grudge any slight personal incon-
venience resulting
from an arrangement so much to the advantage
of the town."
This was hardly reassuring, but the Mayor's official reprimand
of the
previous day still rankled in this unforgiving young person's
mind.
On their reaching the Château, the Mayor was conducted aside,
to be dealt
with by Thibault ; and from the sounds of agonised
protestation and lament
which shortly reached Jeanne's ears, it
was evident that he was having a
young lady was
shown respectfully into a chamber apart, where
she had hardly had time to
admire sufficiently the good taste of
the furniture and the magnificence of
the tapestry with which the
walls were hung, when the Seigneur entered and
welcomed her
with a cordial grace that put her entirely at her ease.
"Your punctuality puts me to shame, fair mistress," he said,
"considering
how unwarrantably I kept you waiting this morning,
and how I tested your
patience by my ignorance and awkward-
ness."
He had changed his dress, and the lace round his neck was even
richer than
before. Jeanne had always considered one of the
chief marks of a well-bred
man to be a fine disregard for the
amount of his washing-bill ; and then
with what good taste he
referred to recent events—putting himself in the
wrong, as a
gentleman should !
"Indeed, my lord," she replied modestly, "I was only too
anxious to hear
from your own lips that you bore me no ill-will
for the part forced on me
by circumstances in our recent interview.
Your lordship has sufficient
critical good sense, I feel sure, to
distinguish between the woman and the
official."
"True, Jeanne," he replied, drawing nearer; "and while I
shrink from
expressing, in their fulness, all the feelings that the
woman inspires in
me, I have no hesitation—for I know it will
give you pleasure—in
acquainting you with the entire artistic
satisfaction with which I watched
you at your task !"
"But, indeed" said Jeanne, "you did not see me at my best.
In fact, I can't
help wishing—it's ridiculous, I know, because the
thing is hardly
practicable—but if I could only have carried my
performance quite through,
and put the last finishing touches to
it, you would not have been judging
me now by the mere
'blocking-in' of what promised to be a masterpiece
!"
"Yes, I wish it could have been arranged somehow," said the
Seigneur
reflectively; "but perhaps it's better as it is. I am con-
tent to let the
artist remain for the present on trust, if I may only
take over, fully paid
up, the woman I adore !"
Jeanne felt strangely weak. The official seemed oozing out at
her fingers and toes, while the woman's heart beat even more dis-
tressingly.
"I have one little question to ask," he murmured (his arm
was about her
now). "Do I understand that you still claim your
bonus ?"
Jeanne felt like water in his strong embrace ; but she nerved
herself to
answer faintly but firmly : "Yes !"
"Then so do I," he replied, as his lips met hers.
*****
Executions continued to occur in St. Radegonde ; the Rade-
gundians being
conservative and very human. But much of the
innocent enjoyment that
formerly attended them departed after
the fair Chatelaine had ceased to
officiate. Enguerrand, on suc-
ceeding to the post, wedded Clairette, she
being (he was heard to
say) a more suitable match in mind and temper than
others of
whom he would name no names. Rumour had it, that he found
his match and something over ; while as for temper—and mind
(which she gave
him in bits)—— But the domestic trials of high-
placed officials have a
right to be held sacred. The profession, in
spite of his best endeavours,
languished nevertheless. Some said
that the scaffold lacked its old
attraction for criminals of spirit ;
others, more unkindly, that the
headsman was the innocent cause,
and that Enguerrand was less fatal in his
new sphere than
formerly, when practising in the criminal court as advocate
for
the defence.
I SPENT one evening last summer with my friend Mauger,
nounces his name Major, by-the-bye, it being a quaint custom of
the Islands to write proper names one way and speak them another,
thus
serving to bolster up that old, old story of the German
savant's account of
the difficulties of the English language "where
you spell a man's name
Verulam," says he reproachfully, "and
pronounce it Bacon."
Mauger and I sat in the pleasant wood-panelled parlour behind
the shop, from
whence all sorts of aromatic odours found their
way in through the closed
door to mingle with the fragrance of
figs, Ceylon tea, and hot
meal
spread before us. The large old-fashioned windows were
wide open, and I
looked straight out upon the harbour, filled with
holiday yachts, and the
wonderful azure sea.
Over against the other islands, opposite, a gleam of white
streaked the
water, white clouds hung motionless in the blue sky,
and a tiny boat with
white sails passed out round Falla Point. A
white butterfly entered the
room to flicker in gay uncertain curves
above the cloth, and a warm
reflected light played over the slender
rat-tailed forks and spoons, and
raised by a tone or two the colour
of Mauger's tanned face and yellow beard. For, in spite of a
sedentary
profession, his preferences lie with an out-of-door life,
and he takes an
afternoon off whenever practicable, as he had done
that day, to follow his
favourite pursuit over the golf-links at Les
Landes.
While he had been deep in the mysteries of teeing and putting,
with no
subtler problem to be solved than the judicious selection of
mashie and
cleek, I had explored some of the curious cromlechs or
and speech harked back irresistibly to the strange old
religions and
usages of the past.
"Science is all very well in its way," said I ; "and of course
it's an
inestimable advantage to inhabit this so-called nineteenth
century ; but
the mediaeval want of science was far more pic-
turesque. The once
universal belief in charms and portents, in
wandering saints, and fighting
fairies, must have lent an interest
to life which these prosaic days sadly
lack. Madelon then would
steal from her bed on moonlight nights in May, and
slip across the
dewy grass with naked feet, to seek the reflection of her
future
husband's face in the first running stream she passed ; now,
Miss
Mary Jones puts on her bonnet and steps round the corner, on
no
more romantic errand than the investment of her month's
wages in the
savings bank at two and a half per cent."
Mauger laughed. "I wish she did anything half so prudent !
That has not been
my experience of the Mary Joneses."
"Well, anyhow," I insisted, "the Board school has rationalised
them. It has
pulled up the innate poetry of their nature to replace
it by decimal
fractions."
To which Mauger answered "Rot !" and offered me his
cigarette-case. After
the first few silent whiffs, he went on as
follows : "The innate poetry of
Woman ! Confess now, there is
no more unpoetic creature under the sun. Offer her the sublimest
poetry
ever written and the
fashions, or a good sound murder or reliable divorce, and there's
no
betting on her choice, for it's a dead certainty. Many men have
a
love of poetry, but I'm inclined to think that a hundred women
out of
ninety-nine positively dislike it."
Which struck me as true. "We'll drop the poetry, then," I
answered ; "but my
point remains, that if the girl of to-day has no
superstitions, the girl of
to-morrow will have no beliefs. Teach
her to sit down thirteen to table, to
spill the salt, and walk under
a ladder with equanimity, and you open the
door for Spencer and
Huxley, and—and all the rest of it," said I, coming to
an impotent
conclusion.
"Oh, if superstition were the salvation of woman—but you are
thinking of
young ladies in London, I suppose ? Here, in the
Islands, I can show you as
much superstition as you please. I'm
not sure that the country-people in
their heart of hearts don't still
worship the old gods of the
course, find any
one to own up to it, or to betray the least glimmer
of an idea as to your
meaning, were you to question him, for ours is
a shrewd folk, wearing their
orthodoxy bravely ; but possibly the
old beliefs are cherished with the
more ardour for not being openly
avowed. Now you like bits of actuality.
I'll give you one, and
a proof, too, that the modern maiden is still
separated by many a
fathom of salt sea-water from these fortunate
isles.
"Some time ago, on a market morning, a girl came into
the shop, and asked
for some blood from a dragon. 'Some what ?'
said I, not catching her words.
'Well, just a little blood from a
dragon,' she answered very tremulously,
and blushing. She meant
of course, 'dragon's blood,' a resinous powder,
formerly much used
in medicine, though out of fashion now.
"She was a pretty young creature, with pink cheeks and dark
eyes, and a
forlorn expression of countenance which didn't seem at
all to fit in with
her blooming health. Not from the town, or I
should have known her face ;
evidently come from one of the
country parishes to sell her butter and
eggs. I was interested to
discover what she wanted the 'dragon's blood'
for, and after a
certain amount of hesitation she told me. 'They do say
it's good,
sir, if anything should have happened betwixt you an' your
young
man. 'Then you have a young man ?' said I. 'Yes, sir.'
'And
you've fallen out with him ?' 'Yes, sir.' And tears rose
to her eyes at the
admission, while her mouth rounded with awe
at my amazing perspicacity. And
you mean to send him some
dragon's blood as a love potion ?' 'No, sir ;
you've got to mix
it with water you ve fetched from the Three Sisters Well,
and
drink it yourself in nine sips on nine nights running, and get
into
bed without once looking in the glass, and then if you've done
everything properly, and haven't made any mistake, he'll come
back to you,
an' love you twice as much as before.' 'And la
mѐre Todevinn (Tostevin)
gave you that precious recipe, and
made you cross her hand with silver into
the bargain,' said I
severely ; on which the tears began to flow
outright.
"You know the old lady," said Mauger, breaking off his narra-
tion, " who
lives in the curious stone house at the corner of the
market-place ? A
reputed witch who learned both black and
white magic from her mother, who
was a daughter of Hélier
Mouton, the famous sorcerer of Cakeuro. I could
tell you some
funny stories relating to la Mѐre Todevinn, who numbers
more
clients among the officers and fine ladies here than in any other
class ; and very curious, too, is the history of that stone house, with
the
Brancourt arms still sculptured on the side. You can see them,
if you turn
down by the Water-gate. This old sinister-looking
building, or rather portion of a building, for more modern houses
have been
built over the greater portion of the site, and now press
upon it from
either hand, once belonged to one of the finest man-
sions in the islands,
but through a curse and a crime has been
brought down to its present
condition ; while the Brancourt
family have long since been utterly
extinct. But all this isn't the
story of Elsie Mahy, which turned out to be
the name of my little
customer.
"The Mahys are of the Vauvert parish, and Pierre Jean, the
father of this
girl, began life as a day-labourer, took to tomato-
growing on borrowed
capital, and now owns a dozen glass-houses
of his own. Mrs. Mahy does some
dairy-farming on a minute
scale, the profits of which she and Miss Elsie
share as pin-money.
The young man who is courting Elsie is a son of Toumes
the
builder. He probably had something to do with the putting up of
Mahy's greenhouses, but anyhow, he has been constantly over at
Vauvert
during the last six months, superintending the alterations
at de
Câterelle's place.
"Toumes, it would seem, is a devoted but imperious lover, and
the Persian
and Median laws are as butter compared with the
inflexibility of his
decisions. The little rift within the lute, which
has lately turned all the
music to discord, occurred last Monday
week—bank-holiday, as you may
remember. The Sunday school
to which Elsie belongs—and it's a strange
anomaly, isn't it, that
a girl going to Sunday school should still have a
rooted belief in
white magic ?—the school was to go for an outing to Prawn
Bay,
and Toumes had arranged to join his sweetheart at the starting-
point. But he had made her promise that if by any chance he
should be
delayed, she would not go with the others, but would
wait until he came to
fetch her.
"Of course, it so happened that he was detained, and, equally of
course, Elsie, like a true woman, went off without him. She did
all she knew
to make me believe she went quite against her own
wishes, that her
companions forced her to go. The beautifully
yielding nature of a woman
never comes out so conspicuously as
when she is being coerced into
following her own secret desires.
Anyhow, Toumes, arriving some time later,
found her gone. He
followed on, and under ordinary circumstances, I
suppose, a sharp
reprimand would have been considered sufficient.
Unfortunately,
the young man arrived on the scene to find his truant love
deep
in the frolics of kiss-in-the-ring. After tea in the Câterelle
Arms, the whole party had adjourned to a neighbouring meadow,
and were thus
whiling away the time to the exhilarating strains of
a French horn and a
concertina. Elsie was led into the centre of
the ring by various country
bumpkins, and kissed beneath the eyes
of heaven, of her neighbours, and of
her embittered swain.
"You may have been amongst us long enough to know that
the Toumes family are
of a higher social grade than the Mahys,
and I suppose the Misses Toumes
never in their lives stooped to
anything so ungenteel as public
kiss-in-the-ring. It was not sur-
prising, therefore, to hear that after
this incident 'me an' my
young man had words,' as Elsie put it.
"Note," said Mauger, "the descriptive truth of this expression
'having
words.' Among the unlettered, lovers only do have
words when vexed. At
other times they will sit holding hands
throughout a long summer's
afternoon, and not exchange two
remarks an hour. Love seals their tongue ;
anger alone unlooses
it, and, naturally, when unloosened, it runs on, from
sheer want of
practice, a great deal faster and farther than they
desire.
"So, life being thorny and youth being vain, they parted late
that same
evening, with the understanding that they would meet
no more ; and to be
wroth with one we love worked its usual
harrowing effects. Toumes took to billiards and brandy, Elsie to
tears and
invocations of Beelzebub ; then came Mѐre Todevinn's
recipe, my own more
powerful potion, and now once more all is
silence and balmy peace."
"Do you mean to tell me you sold the child a charm, and
didn't enlighten her
as to its futility ?"
"I sold her some bicarbonate of soda worth a couple of
said Mauger unblushingly. " A wrinkle I learned from once
over-
hearing an old lady I had treated for nothing expatiating to a
crony, 'Eh, but, my good, my good ! dat Mr. Major, I don't
t'ink much of
him. He give away his add-vice an' his meddecines
for nuddin. Dey not wort
nuddin' neider, for sure.' So I
made Elsie hand me over five British
shillings, and gave her the
powder, and told her to drink it with her
meals. But I threw
in another prescription, which, if less important, must
nevertheless
be punctiliously carried out, if the charm was to have any
effect.
'The very next time,' I told her, 'that you meet your young
man in the street, walk straight up to him without looking to the
right or
to the left, and hold out your hand, saying these words :
"Please, I so
want to be friends again !" Then if you've been a
good girl, have taken the
powder regularly, and not forgotten
one of my directions, you'll find that
all will come right.'
"Now, little as you may credit it," said Mauger, smiling, "the
charm worked,
for all that we live in the so-called nineteenth
century. Elsie came into
the shop only yesterday to tell me the
results, and to thank me very
prettily. 'I shall always come to
you now, sir,' she was good enough to
say, 'I mean, if anything
was to go wrong again. You know a great deal more
than Mѐre
Todevinn, I'm sure.' 'Yes, I'm a famous sorcerer,' said I,
'but
you had better not speak about the powder. You are wise enough
to see that it was just your own conduct in meeting your young
man rather
more than halfway, that did the trick—eh ?' She
looked at me with eyes
brimming over with wisdom. 'You
needn't be afraid, sir, I'll not speak of
it. Mѐre Todevinn
always made me promise to keep silence too. But of course
I
know it was the powder that worked the charm.'
"And to that belief the dear creature will stick to the last day
of her
life. Women are wonderful enigmas. Explain to them
that tight-lacing
displaces all the internal organs, and show them
diagrams to illustrate
your point, they smile sweetly, say, 'Oh,
how funny !' and go out to buy
their new stays half an inch
smaller than their old ones. But tell them
they must never pass
a pin in the street for luck's sake, if it lies with
its point towards
them, and they will sedulously look for and pick up every
such
confounded pin they see. Talk to a woman of the marvels of
science, and she turns a deaf ear, or refuses point-blank to believe
you ;
yet she is absolutely all ear for any old wife's tale, drinks
it greedily
in, and never loses hold of it for the rest of her
days."
"But does she ?" said I; "that's the point in dispute, and
though your story
shows there's still a commendable amount of
superstition in the Islands,
I'm afraid if you were to come to
London, you would not find sufficient to
cover a threepenny-
piece."
"Woman is woman all the world over," said Mauger senten-
tiously, "no matter
what mental garb happens to be in fashion at
the time.
if I
had said to Mademoiselle Elsie, 'Well, you were in the wrong ;
it's your
place to take the first step towards reconciliation,' she
would have
laughed in my face, or flung out of the shop in a rage.
But because I sold
her a little humbugging powder under the
guise of a charm, she submitted herself with the docility of a pet
lambkin.
No ; one need never hope to prevail through wisdom
with a woman, and if I
could have realised that ten years ago, it
would have been better for
me."
He fell silent, thinking of his past, which to me, who knew it,
seemed
almost an excuse for his cynicism. I sought a change of
idea. The splendour
of the pageant outside supplied me with
one.
The sun had set ; and all the eastern world of sky and water,
stretching
before us, was steeped in the glories of the after-glow.
The ripples seemed
painted in dabs of metallic gold upon a
surface of polished blue-grey
steel. Over the islands opposite hung
a far-reaching golden cloud, with
faint-drawn, up-curled edges, as
though thinned out upon the sky by some
monster brush ; and
while I watched it, this cloud changed from gold to
rose-colour,
and instantly the steel mirror of the sea glowed rosy too, and
was
streaked and shaded with a wonderful rosy-brown. As the colour
grew momentarily more intense in the sky above, so did the sea
appear to
pulse to a more vivid copperish-rose, until at last it was
like nothing so
much as a sea of flowing fire. And the cloud
flamed fiery too, yet all the
while its up-curled edges rested
in exquisite contrast upon a background of
most cool cerulean
blue.
The little sailing-boat, which I had noticed an hour previously,
reappeared
from behind the Point. The sail was lowered as it
entered the harbour, and
the boatman took to his oars. I watched
it creep over the glittering water
until it vanished beneath the
window-sill. I got up and went over to the
window to hold it
still in sight. It was sculled by a young man in rosy
shirt-sleeves,
and opposite to him, in the stern, sat a girl in a rosy
gown.
So long as I had observed them, not one word had either spoken.
In silence they had crossed the harbour, in silence the sculler had
brought
his craft alongside the landing-stage, and secured her to a
ring in the
stones. Still silent, he helped his companion to step
out upon the
quay.
"Here," said I, to Mauger, "is a couple confirming your
'silent' theory with
a vengeance. We must suppose that much
love has rendered them absolutely
dumb."
He came, and leaned from the window too.
"It's not
spite of cheap jesting, there are
some things more eloquent
than speech." For at this instant, finding
themselves alone upon
the jetty, the young man had taken the girl into his
arms, and she had
lifted a frank responsive mouth to return his kiss.
Five minutes later the sea had faded into dull greys and sober
browns,
starved white clouds moved dispiritedly over a vacant sky,
and by cricking
the back of my neck I was able to follow
Toumes' black coat and the white
frock of Miss Elsie until they
reached Poidevin's wine-vaults, and, turning
up the Water-gate,
were lost to view.
"Qu'y faire, mon Dieu, qu'y faire ? "
I HAD wandered into a tangle of slummy streets, and began to
think it time
to inquire my way back to the hotel ; then,
turning a corner, I came out
upon the quays. At one hand there
was the open night, with the dim forms of
many ships, and stars
hanging in a web of masts and cordage ; at the other,
the garish
illumination of a row of public-houses :
rowdy-looking shops enough,
designed for the entertainment of
the forecastle. But they seemed to
promise something in the
nature of local colour ; and I entered the
Vents.
It proved to be a
ladies, lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would
sit
with you and chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense.
The front part of the room was filled up with tables, where half a
hundred
customers, talking at the top of their voices, raised a
horrid din—sailors,
soldiers, a few who might be clerks or trades-
men, and an occasional
workman in his blouse. Beyond, there
was a cleared space, reserved for
dancing, occupied by a dozen
couples, clumsily toeing it ; and on a platform, at the far end, a
man
pounded a piano. All this in an atmosphere hot as a furnace-
blast, and
poisonous with the fumes of gas, the smells of bad
tobacco, of musk,
alcohol, and humanity.
The musician faced away from the company, so that only his
shoulders and the
back of his grey head were visible, bent over his
keyboard. It was sad to
see a grey head in that situation ; and
one wondered what had brought it
there, what story of vice or
weakness or evil fortune. Though his
instrument was harsh, and
he had to bang it violently to be heard above the
roar of conversa-
tion, the man played with a kind of cleverness, and with
certain
fugitive suggestions of good style. He had once studied an
art,
and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in his age, was come to
serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in a disreputable tavern,
where they danced with prostitutes. I don't know why, but from
the first he
drew my attention ; and I left my handmaid to count
her charms neglected,
while I sat and watched him, speculating
about him in a melancholy way,
with a sort of vicarious shame.
But presently something happened to make me forget him—
something of his own
doing. A dance had ended, and after a
breathing spell he began to play an
interlude. It was an instance
of how tunes, like perfumes, have the power
to wake sleeping
memories. The tune he was playing now, simple and
dreamy
like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the
surroundings,
whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual—ten,
fifteen
years backwards—to my student life in Paris, and set me to
thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero,
friend, and
comrade, Edmund Pair ; for it was a tune of Pair's
composition, a melody he
had written to a nursery rhyme, and
used to sing a good deal, half in fun,
half in earnest, to his lady-
love, Godelinette :
It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his
kingdom
Godelinette should be queen. The song had been
printed, but, so far as I
knew, had never had much vogue ; and it
seemed an odd chance that this
evening, in a French seaport town
where I was passing a single night, I
should stray by hazard into
a sailors pothouse and hear it again.
Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he
was no longer a
mere student. He had published a good many
songs ; articles had been
written about them in the newspapers ;
and at his rooms you would meet the
men who had "arrived"—
actors, painters, musicians, authors, and now and
then a politician
— who thus recognised him as more or less one of
themselves.
Everybody liked him ; everybody said, "He is splendidly gifted
;
he will go far." A few of us already addressed him, half-playfully
perhaps, as
He was three or four years older than I—eight or nine
and twenty to my
twenty-five—and I was still in the schools ; but for
all that we were great
chums. Quite apart from his special talent,
he was a remarkable man—amusing
in talk, good-looking, generous,
affectionate. He had read ; he had
travelled ; he had hob-and-
nobbed with all sorts and conditions of people.
He had wit,
imagination, humour, and a voice that made whatever he said
a
cordial to the ear. For myself I admired him, enjoyed him, loved
him, with equal fervour ; he had all of my hero-worship and the
lion's
share of my friendship ; perhaps I was vain as well as glad
to be
distinguished by his intimacy. We used to spend two or
three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine, or over
the table
of a café, talking till the small hours—Elysian sessions,
at which we
smoked more cigarettes and emptied more
I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take
long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Gode-
linette, go to
Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck
our hats with
wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall
and slender, with dark
waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a
clear brown skin, and grey
eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy
the Boulevard St. Michel, flooded
with sunshine, broken here and
there by long crisp shadows ; trams and
omnibuses toiling up the
hill, tooting their horns ; students and
backwards and forwards
on the
caporal tobacco ; myself one of the multitude on the terrace of a
café ;
and Edmund and Godelinette coming to join me—he with
his swinging stride, a
gesture of salutation, a laughing face ; she
in the freshest of
bright-coloured spring toilets : I fancy this, and
it seems an adventure of
the golden age. Then we would drink
our
dine together in the garden at Lavenue's.
Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done
wonders by way of
civilising her. She had learned English, and
prattled it with an accent so
quaint and sprightly as to give point
to her otherwise perhaps somewhat
commonplace observations.
She was fond of reading ; she could play a little
; she was an
excellent housewife, and generally a very good-natured and
quite
presentable little person. She was Parisian and adaptable. To
meet her, you would never have suspected her origin ; you would
have found
it hard to believe that she had been the wife of a
drunken tailor, who used
to beat her. One January night, four
or five years before, Pair had
surprised this gentleman publicly
pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remon-
strate ; and the
husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged
rights, and calling the
universe to witness that he would have the
law of the meddling stranger.
Pair picked the girl up (she was
scarcely eighteen then, and had only been
married a sixmonth), he
picked her up from where she had fallen, half
fainting, on the
pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were at hand,
and
sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered study for rather
more than nine weeks she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence
of blows,
exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well there
was no talk of her
leaving. Pair couldn't let her go back to her
tailor ; he couldn't turn her
into the streets. Besides, during the
months that he had nursed her, he had
somehow conceived a great
tenderness for her ; it made his heart burn with
grief and anger
to think of what she had suffered in the past, and he
yearned to
sustain and protect and comfort her for the future. This
perhaps
was no more than natural ; but, what rather upset the
calculations
of his friends, she, towards whom he had established himself
in the
relation of a benefactor, bore him, instead of a grudge therefor,
a
passionate gratitude and affection. So, Pair said, they were only
waiting till her tailor should drink himself to death, to get married;
and
meanwhile, he exacted for her all the respect that would have
been due to
his wife ; and everybody called her by his name. She
was a pretty little
thing, very daintily formed, with tiny hands and
feet, and big gipsyish
brown eyes ; and very delicate, very fragile—
she looked as if anything
might carry her off. Her name, Gode-
leine, seeming much too grand and
mediaeval for so small and actual
a person, Pair had turned it into
Godelinette.
We all said, "He is splendidly gifted ; he will do great things."
He had
studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to
Paris. He was learned,
enlightened, and extremely modern ; he
was a hard worker. We said he would do great things ; but I
thought in those
days, and indeed I still think—and, what is more
to the purpose, men who
were themselves musicians and composers,
men whose names are known, were
before me in thinking—that
he had already done great things, that the songs
he had already
published were achievements. They seemed to us original
in
conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment ; they were
full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises ; they had
style
and they had "go." One would have imagined they must
please at once the
cultivated and the general public. I could never
understand why they
weren't popular. They would be printed ;
they would be praised at length,
and under distinguished signatures,
in the reviews ; they would enjoy an
unusual success of appro-
bation ; but—they wouldn't
sung at concerts. If
they had been too good, if they had been
over the heads of people—but they
weren't. Plenty of work quite
as good, quite as modern, yet no whit more
tuneful or interesting,
was making its authors rich. We couldn't understand
it, we had
to conclude it was a fluke, a question of chance, of accident.
Pair
was still a very young man ; he must go on knocking, and some
day—to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day certainly—
the door of
public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile
his position was by no
means an unenviable one, goodness knows.
To have your orbit in the art
world of Paris, and to be recognised
there as a star ; to be written about
in the
Mondes
they believe in you, to hear them
prophesy, "He will do great
things"—all that is something, even if your
wares don't "take
on" in the market-place.
"It's a good job, though, that I haven't got to live by them,"
Pair said ;
and there indeed he touched a salient point. His
people were dead ; his father had been a younger son ; he had
no money of
his own. But his father's elder brother, a squire
in Hampshire, made him
rather a liberal allowance, something like
six hundred a year, I believe,
which was opulence in the Latin
Quarter. Now, the squire had been aware of
Pair's relation with
Godelinette from its inception, and had not
disapproved. On his
visits to Paris he had dined with them, given them
dinners, and
treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when, one
fine
morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced his
intention of marrying her,
protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I
remember that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of
paradox and
banter." Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I
have winked at your
mistress heretofore, because boys will be
boys ; but it is the
so much
more interesting in a false position." But he soon
became serious,
presently furious, and, when the marriage was an
accomplished fact, cut off
the funds.
"Never mind, my dear," said Pair. "We will go to London
and seek our
fortune. We will write the songs of the people,
and let who will make the
laws. We will grow rich and famous,
and
So they went to London to seek their fortune, and—that was the
last I ever
saw of them, nearly the last I heard. I had two letters
from Pair, written
within a month of their hegira—gossipy,
light-hearted letters, describing
the people they were meeting,
reporting Godelinette's quaint observations
upon England and
English things, explaining his hopes, his intentions, all
very
confidently—and then I had no more. I wrote again, and still
again, till,
getting no answer, of course I ceased to write. I
was hurt and puzzled ;
but in the spring we should meet in
London, and could have it out. When the
spring came, however,
my plans were altered : I had to go to America. I
went by way
of Havre, expecting to stay six weeks, and was gone six
years.
On my return to England I said to people, "You have a
brilliant young
composer named Pair. Can you put me in the
way of procuring his address ?"
The fortune he had come to
seek he would surely have found ; he would be a
known man.
But people looked blank, and declared they had never heard of
him.
I applied to music-publishers—with the same result. I wrote to
his uncle in Hampshire ; the squire did not reply. When I
reached Paris I
inquired of our friends there ; they were as
ignorant as I. "He must be
dead," I concluded. "If he had
lived, it is impossible we should not have
heard of him." And I
wondered what had become of Godelinette.
Then another eight or ten years passed, and now, in a water-
side public at
Bordeaux, an obscure old pianist was playing Pair's
setting of "Lavender's
blue," and stirring a hundred bitter-sweet
far-away memories of my friend.
It was as if fifteen years were
erased from my life. The face of
Godelinette was palpable before
me—pale, with its sad little smile, its
bright appealing eyes.
Edmund might have been smoking across the table—I
could hear
his voice, I could have put out my hand and touched him.
And
all round me were the streets, the lights, the smells, the busy
youthful
yearning, half joy and all despair and anguish, with which
we
think of the old days when we were young, of how real and dear
they
were, of how irrecoverable they are.
And then the music stopped, the Brasserie des Quatre Vents
became a glaring reality, and the painted female sipping
at my elbow remarked plaintively, "Tu n'es pas rigolo, toi.
Vieux-tu
faire une valse ?"
"I must speak to your musician," I said. " Excuse me."
He had played a bit of Pair's music. It was one chance in a
thousand, but I
wanted to ask him whether he could tell me
anything about the composer. So
I penetrated to the bottom
of the shop, and approached his platform. He was
bending
over some sheets of music—making his next selection, doubt-
less.
"I beg your pardon——" I began.
He turned towards me. You will not be surprised—I was
looking into Pair's
own face.
You will not be surprised, but you will imagine what it was
for me. Oh, yes,
I recognised him instantly ; there could be no
mistake. And he recognised
me, for he flushed, and winced, and
started back.
I suppose for a little while we were both of us speechless,
speechless and
motionless, while our hearts stopped beating. By-
and-by I think I
said—something had to be said to break the
situation—I think I said, "It's
you, Edmund?" I remember he
fumbled with a sheet of music, and kept his
eyes bent on it, and
muttered something inarticulate. Then there was
another speech-
less, helpless suspension. He continued to fumble his
music,
without looking up. At last I remember saying, through a sort
of sickness and giddiness, "Let us get out of here—where we
can talk."
"I can't leave yet. I've got another dance," he answered.
"Well, I'll wait," said I.
I sat down near him and waited, trying to create some kind of
order out of the chaos in my mind, and half automatically watching
and
considering him as he played his dance—Edmund Pair playing
a dance for
prostitutes and drunken sailors. He was not greatly
changed. There were the
same grey eyes, deep-set and wide
apart, under the same broad forehead ;
the same fine nose and
chin, the same sensitive mouth. The whole face was
pretty much
the same, only thinner perhaps, and with a look of apathy,
of
inanimation, that was foreign to my recollection of it. His hair
had turned quite white, but otherwise he appeared no older than
his years.
His figure, tall, slender, well-knit, retained its vigour
and its
distinction. Though he wore a shabby brown Norfolk
jacket, and his beard
was two days old, you could in no circum-
stances have taken him for
anything but a gentleman. I waited
anxiously for the time when we should be
alone—anxiously,
yet with a sort of terror. I was burning to understand,
and yet
I shrunk from doing so. If to conjecture even vaguely what
experiences could have brought him to this, what dark things
suffered or
done, had been melancholy when he was a nameless
old musician, now it was
appalling, and I dreaded the explana-
tion that I longed to hear.
At last he struck his final chord, and rose from the piano. Then
he turned
to me and said, composedly enough, "Well, I'm ready."
He, apparently, had
in some measure pulled himself together. In
the street he took my arm.
"Let's walk in this direction," he
said, leading off, "towards the
Christian quarter of the town."
And in a moment he went on : "This has been
an odd meeting.
What brings you to Bordeaux ?"
I explained that I was on my way to Biarritz, stopping for the
night between
two trains.
"Then it's all the more surprising that you should have
stumbled into the
Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You've altered
very slightly. The world wags well with you ? You look
prosperous."
I cried out some incoherent protest. Afterwards I said, "You
know what I
want to hear. What does this mean ?"
He laughed nervously. "Oh, the meaning's clear enough. It
speaks for
itself."
"I don't understand," said I.
"I'm pianist to the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You saw me
in the discharge
of my duties."
"I don't understand," I repeated helplessly.
"And yet the inference is plain. What could have brought a
man to such a
pass save drink or evil courses ?"
"Oh, don't trifle," I implored him.
"I'm not trifling. That's the worst of it. For I don't drink,
and I'm not
conscious of having pursued any especially evil courses."
"Well ?" I questioned. "Well ?"
"The fact of the matter simply is that I m what they call a
failure. I never
came off."
"I don't understand," I repeated for a third time.
"No more do I, if you come to that. It's the will of Heaven,
I suppose.
Anyhow, it can't puzzle you more than it puzzles
me. It seems contrary to
the whole logic of circumstances, but
it's the fact."
Thus far he had spoken listlessly, with a sort of bitter levity,
an
affectation of indifference ; but after a little silence his mood
appeared
to change. His hand upon my arm tightened its grasp,
and he began to speak
rapidly, feelingly.
"Do you realise that it is nearly fifteen years since we have
seen each
other ? The history of those fifteen years, so far as I
am concerned, has
been the history of a single uninterrupted
of the game, against every effort I could make to play my cards
effectively.
When I started out, one might have thought, I had
the best of chances. I
had studied hard ; I worked hard. I
surely had as much general
intelligence, as much special know-
ledge, as much apparent talent, as my
competitors. And the
stuff I produced seemed good to you, to my friends,
and not
wholly bad to me. It was musicianly, it was melodious, it was
sincere ; the critics all praised it ; but—it never took on ! The
public
wouldn't have it. What did it lack ? I don't know. At
last I couldn't even
get it published—invisible ink ! And I had a
wife to support."
He paused for a minute ; then : "You see," he said, "we made
the mistake,
when we were young, of believing, against wise
authority, that it
could
command it who deserved it. We believed that the race
would be to the
swift, the battle to the strong ; that a man was
responsible for his own
destiny, that he'd get what he merited.
We believed that honest labour
couldn t go unrewarded. An
immense mistake. Success is an affair of
temperament, like faith,
like love, like the colour of your hair. Oh, the
old story about
industry, resolution, and no vices ! I was industrious, I
was
resolute, and I had no more than the common share of vices.
But I
had the unsuccessful temperament ; and here I am. If my
motives had been
ignoble—but I can't see that they were. I
wanted to earn a decent living ;
I wanted to justify my existence
by doing something worthy of the world's
acceptance. But the
stars in their courses fought against me. I have tried
hard to con-
vince myself that the music I wrote was rubbish. It had
its
faults, no doubt. It wasn't great, it wasn't epoch-making. But,
as
music goes nowadays, it was jolly good. It was a jolly sight
better than
the average."
"Oh, that is certain, that is certain," I exclaimed, as he paused
again.
"Well, anyhow, it didn't sell, and at last I couldn't even get it
published.
So then I tried to find other work. I tried every-
thing. I tried to
teach—harmony and the theory of composition.
I couldn't get pupils. So few
people want to study that sort of
thing, and there were good masters
already in the place. If I had
known how to play, indeed ! But I was never
better than a fifth-
rate executant ; I had never gone in for that ; my
'lay' was com-
position. I couldn't give piano lessons, I couldn't play in
public—
unless in a
everything. I tried to get musical criticism to
do for the news-
papers. Surely I was competent to do musical criticism.
But
no—they wouldn't employ me. I had ill luck, ill luck, ill luck—
nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment. Was it the will of
Heaven ? I
wondered what unforgiveable sin I had committed to
be punished so. Do you
know what it is like to work and pray
and wait, day after day, and watch
day after day come and go and
bring you nothing ? Oh, I tasted the whole
heart-sickness of
hope deferred ; Giant Despair was my constant
bed-fellow."
"But—with your connections——" I began.
"Oh, my connections !" he cried. "There was the rub,
London is the cruellest
town in Europe. For sheer cold blood
and heartlessness give Londoners the
palm. I had connections
enough for the first month or so, and then people
found out
things that didn't concern them. They found out some things
that were true, and they imagined other things that were false.
They
wouldn't have my wife ; they told the most infamous lies
about her ; and I
wouldn't have
who insulted and slandered
except with the underworld. I got down to copying parts for
theatrical orchestras ; and working twelve hours a day, earned
about thirty
shillings a week."
"You might have come back to Paris."
"And fared worse. I couldn't have earned thirty pence in
Paris. Mind you,
the only trade I had learned was that of a
musical composer ; and I
couldn't compose music that people
would buy. I should have starved as a
copyist in Paris, where
copyists are more numerous and worse paid. Teach
there ? But
to one competent master of harmony in London there are ten
in
Paris. No ; it was a hopeless case."
"It is incomprehensible—incomprehensible," said I.
"But wait—wait till you've heard the end. One would think
I had had
enough—not so ? One would think my cup of bitterness
was full. No fear !
There was a stronger cup still a-brewing
for me. When Fortune takes a
grudge against a man, she never lets
up. She exacts the uttermost farthing.
I was pretty badly off,
but I had one treasure left—I had Godelinette. I
used to think
that she was my compensation. I would say to myself, 'A
fellow
can't have all blessings. How can you expect others, when
you've
got her ? And I would accuse myself of ingratitude for com-
plaining of my unsuccess. Then she fell ill. My God, how I
watched over,
prayed over her ! It seemed impossible—I could
not believe—that she would
be taken from me. Yet, Harry, do
you know what that poor child was thinking
? Do you know
what her dying thoughts were—her wishes ? Throughout her
long painful illness she was thinking that she was an obstacle in
my way, a
weight upon me ; that if it weren't for her, I should
get on, have friends,
a position ; that it would be a good thing for
me if she should die ; and
she was hoping in her poor little heart
that she wouldn't get well ! Oh, I
know it, I knew it—and you
see me here alive. She let herself die for my
sake—as if I could
care for anything without her ! That's what brought us here, to
France, to
Bordeaux—her illness. The doctors said she must pass
the spring out of
England, away from the March winds, in the
South ; and I begged and
borrowed money enough to take her.
And we were on our way to Arcachon ; but
when we reached
Bordeaux she was too ill to continue the journey, and—she
died
here."
We walked on for some distance in silence, then he added :
"That was four
years ago. You wonder why I live to tell you
of it, why I haven't cut my
throat. I don't know whether it's
cowardice or conscientious scruples. It
seems rather inconsequent
to say that I believe in a God, doesn't it ?—that
I believe one's life
is not one's own to make an end of? Anyhow, here I am,
keeping
body and soul together as musician to a
can't go back to England, I can't leave
Bordeaux—she's buried
here. I've hunted high and low for work, and found it
nowhere
save in the
now and then, I manage to pay my way."
"But your uncle ?" I asked.
"Do you think I would touch a penny of his money ?" Pair
retorted, almost
fiercely. "It was he who began it. My wife
let herself die. It was virtual
suicide. It was he who created the
situation that drove her to it."
"You are his heir, though, aren't you ?"
"No, the estates are not entailed."
We had arrived at the door of my hotel. "Well, good-night
and
"You needn't wish me
I'm not leaving Bordeaux for the present."
"Oh, yes, you are. You're going on to Biarritz to-morrow
morning, as you
intended."
And herewith began a long and most painful struggle. I could
persuade him to
accept no help of any sort from me. "What I
can't do for myself," he
declared, "I'll do without. My dear fellow,
all that you propose is
contrary to the laws of Nature. One man
can't keep another—it's an
impossible relation. And I won't be
kept ; I won't be a burden. Besides, to
tell you the truth, I've
got past caring. The situation you find me in
seems terrible to
you ; to me it's no worse than another. You see, I'm
hardened ;
I ve got past caring."
"At any rate," I insisted, "I shan't go on to Biarritz. I'll
spend my
holiday here, and we can see each other every day.
What time shall we meet
to-morrow ?"
"No, no, I can't meet you again. Don't ask me to ; you
mean it kindly, I
know, but you're mistaken. It's done me good
to talk it all out to you, but
I can't meet you again. I've got
no heart for friendship, and—you remind me
too keenly of many
things."
"But if I come to the
"Oh, if you do that, you'll oblige me to throw up my employ-
ment there, and
hide from you. You must promise not to come
again—you must respect my
wishes."
"You're cruel, you know."
"Perhaps, perhaps. But I think I'm only reasonable. Any-
how, good-bye."
He shook my hand hurriedly, and moved off. What could I
do ? I stood
looking after him till he had vanished in the night,
with a miserable
baffled recognition of my helplessness to help
him.
"Dis-moi la fleur, je te dirai la femme "
* * * *
I
IT was the feast of the Assumption in Ploumariel, at the hottest
part of the
afternoon. Benedict Campion, who had just
assisted at vespers, in the
little dove-cotted church—like every-
thing else in Ploumariel, even
vespers were said earlier than is the
usage in towns—took up his station in
the market-place to watch
the procession pass by. The head of it was just
then emerging
into the Square : a long file of men from the
neighbouring
villages, bare-headed and chaunting, followed the crucifer.
They
were all clad in the picturesque garb of the Morbihan peasantry,
and were many of them imposing, quite noble figures with their
clear-cut
Breton features, and their austere type of face. After
them a troop of
young girls, with white veils over their heads,
carrying banners—children
from the convent school of the
Ursulines ; and then, two and two in motley
assemblage (peasant
women with their white coifs walking with the wives
and
daughters of prosperous
far less pictorial) half the inhabitants of
Ploumariel—all, indeed,
who had not, with Campion, preferred to be
spectators, taking
refuge from a broiling sun under the grateful shadow of
the chest-
nuts in the market-place. Last of all a muster of clergy, four
or five
strong, a small choir of bullet-headed boys, and the Curé or
the parish
himself, Monsieur Letêtre chaunting from his book,
who brought up the
rear.
Campion, leaning against his chestnut tree, watched them
defile. Once a
smile of recognition flashed across his face, which
was answered by a girl
in the procession. She just glanced from
her book, and the smile with which
she let her eyes rest upon him
for a moment, before she dropped them, did
not seem to detract
from her devotional air. She was very young and
slight—she
might have been sixteen—and she had a singularly pretty face
;
her white dress was very simple, and her little straw hat, but both
of these she wore with an air which at once set her apart from her
companions, with their provincial finery and their rather common-
place
charms. Campion's eyes followed the little figure until it
was lost in the
distance, disappearing with the procession down a
by-street on its return
journey to the church. And after they
had all passed, the singing, the last
verse of the "Ave Maris
Stella," was borne across to him, through the still
air, the voices of
children pleasantly predominating. He put on his hat at
last, and
moved away ; every now and then he exchanged a greeting with
somebody—the communal doctor, the mayor ; while here and there
a woman
explained him to her gossip in whispers as he passed, "It
is the Englishman
of Mademoiselle Marie-Ursule—it is M. le
Curé's guest." It was to the
dwelling of M. le Curé, indeed,
that Campion now made his way. Five
minutes' walk brought
him to it ; an unpretentious white house, lying back
in its large
garden, away from the dusty road. It was an untidy
garden,
rather useful than ornamental ; a very little shade was offered
by
one incongruous plane-tree, under which a wooden table was placed
and some chairs. After
Campion and the Curé took their coffee here ; and in the evening
it was here
that they sat and talked while Mademoiselle Hortense,
the Curé's sister,
knitted, or appeared to knit, an interminable
shawl ; the young girl,
Marie-Ursule, placidly completing
the quartet with her silent, felicitous
smile of a convent-bred child,
which seemed sometimes, at least to Campion,
to be after all a
finer mode of conversation. He threw himself down now on
the
bench, wondering when his hosts would have finished their de-
votions, and drew a book from his pocket as if he would read.
But he did
not open it, but sat for a long time holding it idly in
his hand, and
gazing out at the village, at the expanse of dark pine-
covered hills, and
at the one trenchant object in the foreground,
the white façade of the
convent of the Ursuline nuns. Once and
again he smiled, as though his
thoughts, which had wandered a
long way, had fallen upon extraordinarily
pleasant things. He was
a man of barely forty, though he looked slightly
older than his
age : his little, peaked beard was grizzled, and a life
spent in
literature, and very studiously, had given him the scholar's
premature stoop. He was not handsome, but, when he smiled,
his smile was so
pleasant that people credited him with good looks.
It brought, moreover,
such a light of youth into his eyes, as to
suggest that if his avocations
had unjustly aged his body, that had
not been without its compensations—his
soul had remained re-
markably young. Altogether, he looked shrewd, kindly
and
successful, and he was all these things, while if there was also a
certain sadness in his eyes—lines of lassitude about his mouth—
this was an
idiosyncracy of his temperament, and hardly justified
by his history, which
had always been honourable and smooth.
He was sitting in the same calm and
presumably agreeable reverie,
when the garden gate opened, and a girl—the
young girl of the
procession, fluttered towards him.
"Are you quite alone?" she asked brightly, seating herself at
his side. "Has
not Aunt Hortense come back ?"
Campion shook his head, and she continued speaking in English,
very
correctly, but with a slight accent, which gave to her pretty
young voice
the last charm.
"I suppose she has gone to see
live another night they say. Ah ! what a pity," she cried,
clasping
her hands ; "to die on the Assumption—that is hard."
Campion smiled softly. "Dear child, when one's time comes,
when one is old
as that, the day does not matter much." Then
he went on : "But how is it
you are back ; were you not going to
your nuns ?"
She hesitated a moment. "It is your last day, and I wanted to
make tea for
you. You have had no tea this year. Do you think
I have forgotten how to
make it, while you have been away, as I
forget my English words ?"
"It's I who am forgetting such an English habit," he pro-
tested. "But run
away and make it, if you like. I am sure it
will be very good."
She stood for a moment looking down at him, her fingers
smoothing a little
bunch of palest blue ribbons on her white dress.
In spite of her youth, her
brightness, the expression of her face in
repose was serious and
thoughtful, full of unconscious wistfulness.
This, together with her placid
manner, the manner of a child who
has lived chiefly with old people and
quiet nuns, made her beauty
to Campion a peculiarly touching thing. Just
then her eyes fell
upon Campion's wide-awake, lying on the seat at his
side, and
travelled to his uncovered head. She uttered a protesting cry
:
"Are you not afraid of a
fit to be a guardian if you can be so foolish as that. It
is I
who have to look after you." She took up the great grey hat and
set it daintily on his head ; then with a little laugh she disappeared
into
the house.
When Campion raised his head again, his eyes were smiling,
and in the light
of a sudden flush which just died out of it, his
face looked almost
young.
II
This girl, so foreign in her education and traditions, so foreign
in the
grace of her movements, in everything except the shade of
her dark blue
eyes, was the child of an English father ; and she
was Benedict Campion's
ward. This relation, which many
persons found incongruous, had befallen
naturally enough. Her
father had been Campion's oldest and most familiar
friend ; and
when Richard Heath's romantic marriage had isolated him from
so
many others, from his family and from his native land, Campion's
attachment to him had, if possible, only been increased. From
his heart he
had approved, had prophesied nothing but good of an
alliance, which
certainly, while it lasted, had been an wholly ideal
relation. There had
seemed no cloud on the horizon—and yet
less than two years had seen the end
of it. The birth of the
child, Marie-Ursule, had been her mother's death ;
and six months
later, Richard Heath, dying less from any defined malady
than
because he lacked any longer the necessary motive to live,
was
laid by the side of his wife. The helpless child remained, in
the
guardianship of Hortense, her mother's sister, and elder by
some ten years,
who had already composed herself contentedly, as
some women do, to the
prospect of perpetual spinsterhood, and the
care of her brother's house—an
ecclesiastic just appointed curé
of Ploumariel. And here, ever since, in
this quiet corner of Brittany,
in the tranquil custody of the priest and his sister, Marie-Ursule
had grown
up.
Campion's share in her guardianship had not been onerous,
although it was
necessarily maintained ; for the child had inherited,
and what small
property would come to her was in England, and
in English funds. To
Hortense Letêtre and her brother such
responsibilities in an alien land
were not for a moment to be
entertained. And gradually, this connection, at
first formal and
impersonal, between Campion and the Breton presbytery,
had
developed into an intimacy, into a friendship singularly
satisfying
on both sides. Separate as their interests seemed, those of
the
French country-priest, and of the Englishman of letters, famous
already in his own department, they had, nevertheless, much
community of
feeling apart from their common affection for a
child. Now, for many years,
he had been established in their
good graces, so that it had become an
habit with him to spend his
holiday—it was often a very extended one—at
Ploumariel ;
while to the Letêtres, as well as to Marie-Ursule herself,
this
annual sojourn of Campion's had become the occasion of the year,
the one event which pleasantly relieved the monotony of life in
this remote
village ; though that, too, was a not unpleasant routine.
Insensibly
Campion had come to find his chief pleasure in con-
sideration of this
child of an old friend, whose gradual growth
beneath influences which
seemed to him singularly exquisite and
fine, he had watched so long ; whose
future, now that her child-
hood, her schooldays at the convent had come to
an end, threatened
to occupy him with an anxiety more intimate than any
which
hitherto he had known. Marie-Ursule's future ! They had
talked
much of it that summer, the priest and the Englishman,
who accompanied him
in his long morning walks, through green
lanes, and over white, dusty
roads, and past fields perfumed with
the pungently pleasant smell of the blood-red
paid visits to the sick who lived on the
outskirts of his scattered
parish. Campion became aware then of an
increasing difficulty
in discussing this matter impersonally, in the
impartial manner
becoming a guardian. Odd thrills of jealousy stirred
within him
when he was asked to contemplate Marie-Ursule's possible
suitors.
And yet, it was with a very genuine surprise, at least for
the
moment, that he met the Curé's sudden pressing home of a more
personal contingency—he took this freedom of an old friend with
a shrewd
twinkle in his eye, which suggested that all along this
had been chiefly in
his mind. "
not marry
her yourself ? That would please all of us so much."
And he insisted, with
kindly insistence, on the propriety of the
thing : dwelling on Campion's
established position, their long
habit of friendship, his own and his
sister's confidence and esteem,
taking for granted, with that sure insight
which is the gift of many
women and of most priests, that on the ground of
affection alone the
justification was too obvious to be pressed. And he
finished with
a smile, stopping to take a pinch of snuff with a sigh of
relief—
the relief of a man who has at least seasonably unburdened him-
self.
"Surely,
mind ?"
Campion hesitated for a moment ; then he proffered his hand,
which the other
warmly grasped. "You read me aright," he said
slowly, "only I hardly
realised it before. Even now—no, how
can I believe it possible—that she
should care for me.
dignus, non sum
dignus
the best part of
my life is behind me."
But the Curé smiled reassuringly. "The best part is before
you, Campion ;
you have the heart of a boy. Do we not know
you ? And for the child—rest tranquil there ! I have the word of
my sister,
who is a wise woman, that she is sincerely attached to
you ; not to speak
of the evidence of my own eyes. She will be
seventeen shortly, then she can
speak for herself. And to whom
else can we trust her ?"
The shadow of these confidences hung over Campion when he
next saw
Marie-Ursule, and troubled him vaguely during the
remainder of his visit,
which this year, indeed, he considerably
curtailed. Inevitably he was
thrown much with the young girl,
and if daily the charm which he found in
her presence was
sensibly increased, as he studied her from a fresh point
of view, he
was none the less disquieted at the part which he might be
called
upon to play. Diffident and scrupulous, a shy man, knowing
little of women ; and at least by temperament, a sad man, he
trembled
before felicity, as many at the palpable breath of mis-
fortune. And his
difficulty was increased by the conviction,
forced upon him irresistibly,
little as he could accuse himself of
vanity, that the decision rested with
himself. Her liking for him
was genuine and deep, her confidence implicit.
He had but to
ask her and she would place her hand in his and go forth
with
him, as trustfully as a child. And when they came to celebrate
her
before the Assumption— it was almost disinterestedly that
he had
determined upon his course. At least it was security which he
could promise her, as a younger man might not ; a constant and
single-minded kindness ; a devotion not the less valuable, because
it was
mature and reticent, lacking, perhaps, the jealous ardours of
youth.
Nevertheless, he was going back to England without
having revealed himself;
there should be no unseasonable haste in
the matter ; he would give her
another year. The Curé smiled
deprecatingly at the procrastination ; but on
this point Campion
was firm. And on this, his last evening, he spoke only of trivial
things to
Marie-Ursule, as they sat presently over the tea—a mild
and flavourless
beverage— which the young girl had prepared.
Yet he noticed later, after
their early supper, when she strolled up
with him to the hill overlooking
the village, a certain new shyness
in her manner, a shadow, half timid,
half expectant in her clear
eyes which permitted him to believe that she
was partly prepared.
When they reached the summit, stood clear of the pine
trees by
an ancient stone Calvary, Ploumariel lay below them, very
fair
in the light of the setting sun ; and they stopped to rest
themselves,
to admire.
"Ploumariel is very beautiful," said Campion after a while.
"Ah !
Marie-Ursule, you are fortunate to be here."
"Yes." She accepted his statement simply, then suddenly:
"You should not go
away." He smiled, his eyes turning from
the village in the valley to rest
upon her face : after all, she was
the daintiest picture, and Ploumariel
with its tall slate roofs, its
sleeping houses, her appropriate frame.
"I shall come back, I shall come back," he murmured. She
had gathered a
bunch of ruddy heather as they walked, and her
fingers played with it now
nervously. Campion stretched out his
hand for it. She gave it him without a
word.
"I will take it with me to London," he said ; "I will have
Morbihan in my
rooms."
"It will remind you—make you think of us sometimes ?"
For answer he could only touch her hand lightly with his lips.
"Do you think
that was necessary ?" And they resumed their
homeward way silently,
although to both of them the air seemed
heavy with unspoken words.
III
When he was in London—and it was in London that for nine
months out of the
twelve Benedict Campion was to be found—he
lived in the Temple, at the top
of Hare Court, in the very same
rooms in which he had installed himself,
years ago, when he gave
up his Oxford fellowship, electing to follow the
profession of
letters. Returning there from Ploumariel, he resumed at
once,
easily, his old avocations. He had always been a secluded man,
living chiefly in books and in the past ; but this year he seemed
less than
ever inclined to knock at the hospitable doors which were
open to him. For
in spite of his reserve, his diffidence, Campion's
success might have been
social, had he cared for it, and not purely
academic. His had come to be a
name in letters, in the higher
paths of criticism ; and he had made no
enemies. To his success
indeed, gradual and quiet as this was, he had never
grown quite
accustomed, contrasting the little he had actually achieved
with all
that he had desired to do. His original work was of the
slightest,
and a book that was in his head he had never found time to
write.
His name was known in other ways, as a man of ripe knowledge,
of impeccable taste ; as a born editor of choice reprints, of
inaccessible
classics : above all, as an authority—the greatest, upon
the literature and
the life (its flavour at once courtly, and
mystical, had to him an unique
charm) of the seventeenth century.
His heart was in that age, and from much
lingering over it, he
had come to view modern life with a curious
detachment, a sense
of remote hostility : Democracy, the Salvation Army,
the novels of
M. Zola—he disliked them all impartially. A Catholic by
long
inheritance, he held his religion for something more than an
heirloom ; he exhaled it, like an intimate quality ; his mind being
essentially of that kind to which a mystical view of things comes
easiest.
This year passed with him much as any other of the last ten years
had passed
; at least the routine of his daily existence admitted little
outward
change. And yet inwardly, he was conscious of alteration,
of a certain
quiet illumination which was a new thing to him.
Although at Ploumariel when the prospect of such a marriage
had dawned on
him, his first impression had been one of strange-
ness, he could reflect
now that it was some such possibility as this
which he had always kept
vaguely in view. He had prided himself
upon few things more than his
patience ; and now it appeared that
this was to be rewarded ; he was glad
that he had known how
to wait. This girl, Marie-Ursule, had an immense
personal charm
for him, but, beyond that, she was representative—her
traditions
were exactly those which the ideal girl of Campion's
imagination
would possess. She was not only personally adorable; she was
also
generically of the type which he admired. It was possibly because
this type was, after all, so rare, that looking back, Campion in his
middle
age, could drag out of the recesses of his memory no
spectre to compete
with her. She was his first love precisely
because the conditions, so
choice and admirable, which rendered it
inevitable for him to love her, had
never occurred before. And
he could watch the time of his probation gliding
away with a
pleased expectancy which contained no alloy of impatience.
An
illumination—a quite tranquil illumination : yes, it was under
some
such figure, without heart-burning, or adolescent fever,
that love as it
came to Campion was best expressed. Yet if
this love was lucent rather than
turbulent, that it was also deep
he could remind himself, when a letter
from the priest, while
the spring was yet young, had sent him to Brittany,
a month
or two before his accustomed time, with an anxiety that was
not solely due
to bewilderment.
yourself. But it will be good for you to
come, if it be only because of
an idea she has, that you may remove. An
idea ! Call it rather a
fancy—at least your coming will dispel it.
Petites entêtées : I have
no patience with these mystical little
girls.
His musings on the phrase, with its interpretation varying to
his mood,
lengthened his long sea-passage, and the interminable
leagues of railway
which separated him from Pontivy, whence he
had still some twenty miles to
travel by the
reached his
destination. But at Pontivy, the round, ruddy face
of M. Letêtre greeting
him on the platform dispelled any serious
misgiving. Outside the
post-office the familiar conveyance
awaited them : its yellow inscription
"Pontivy-Ploumariel,"
touched Campion electrically, as did the cheery
greeting of the
driver, which was that of an old friend. They shared the
interior
of the rusty trap—a fossil among vehicles—they chanced to be
the only travellers, and to the accompaniment of jingling harness,
and the
clattering hoofs of the brisk little Carhaix horses,
M. Letêtre explained
himself.
"A vocation,
selves with one, were to have their way, to whom would our
poor
France look for children ? They are good women,
ah, yes ; but our Marie-Ursule is a good child,
and blessed
matrimony also is a sacrament. You shall talk to her, my
Campion.
It is a little fancy, you see, such as will come to young girls;
a
convent ague, but when she sees you"... He took snuff with
emphasis,
and flipped his broad fingers suggestively. "
it is a betrothal, and a
Mademoiselle is full of. You will talk to her
?"
Campion assented silently, absently, his eyes had wandered
away, and looked
through the little square of window at the sad-
coloured Breton country, at
the rows of tall poplars, which
guarded the miles of dusty road like sombre
sentinels. And the
priest with a reassured air pulled out his breviary, and
began to
say his office in an imperceptible undertone. After a while
he
crossed himself, shut the book, and pillowing his head against the
hot, shiny leather of the carriage, sought repose ; very soon his
regular,
stertorous breathing, assured his companion that he was
asleep. Campion
closed his eyes also, not indeed in search of
slumber, though he was travel
weary ; rather the better to isolate
himself with the perplexity of his own
thoughts. An indefinable
sadness invaded him, and he could envy the
priest's simple logic,
which gave such short shrift to obstacles that
Campion, with his
subtle melancholy, which made life to him almost morbidly
an
affair of fine shades and nice distinctions, might easily
exaggerate.
Of the two, perhaps the priest had really the more secular mind,
as it
certainly excelled Campion's in that practical wisdom, or
common sense,
which may be of more avail than subtlety in the
mere economy of life. And
what to the Curé was a simple matter
enough, the removal of the idle fancy
of a girl, might be to
Campion, in his scrupulous temper, and his
overweening tender-
ness towards just those pieties and renunciations which
such a
fancy implied, a task to be undertaken hardly with relish,
perhaps
without any real conviction, deeply as his personal wishes
might
be implicated in success. And the heart had gone out of his
journey long before a turn of the road brought them in sight of
Ploumariel.
IV
Up by the great, stone Calvary, where they had climbed nearly
a year before,
Campion stood, his face deliberately averted, while
the young girl uttered
her hesitating confidences ; hesitating, yet
candid, with a candour which
seemed to separate him from the
child by more than a measurable space of
years, to set him with
an appealing trustfulness in the seat of
judgment—for him, for her.
They had wandered there insensibly, through
apple-orchards white
with the promise of a bountiful harvest, and up the
pine-clad hill,
talking of little things—trifles to beguile their
way—perhaps, in a
sort of vain procrastination. Once, Marie-Ursule had
plucked a
branch of the snowy blossom, and he had playfully chided her
that the cider would be less by a
"But the blossom is so much prettier," she protested ; "and
there
will be apples and apples—always enough apples. But I like the
blossom best—and it is so soon over."
And then, emerging clear of the trees, with Ploumariel lying in
its quietude
in the serene sunshine below them, a sudden strenuous-
ness had supervened,
and the girl had unburdened herself, speaking
tremulously, quickly, in an
undertone almost passionate ; and
Campion, perforce, had listened. ... A
fancy ? a whim ? Yes,
he reflected ; to the normal, entirely healthy mind,
any choice of
exceptional conditions, any special self-consecration or
withdrawal
from the common lot of men and women must draw down upon
it
some such reproach, seeming the mere pedantry of inexperience.
Yet, against
his reason, and what he would fain call his better
judgment, something in
his heart of hearts stirred sympathetically
with this notion of the girl.
And it was no fixed resolution, no
deliberate justification which she pleaded. She was soft, and
pliable, and
even her plea for renunciation contained pretty,
feminine inconsequences ;
and it touched Campion strangely.
Argument he could have met with argument
; an ardent con-
viction he might have assailed with pleading ; but that
note of
appeal in her pathetic young voice, for advice, for sympathy,
disarmed him.
"Yet the world," he protested at last, but half-heartedly, with
a sense of
self-imposture ; "the world, Marie-Ursule, it has its
disappointments ; but
there are compensations."
"I am afraid, afraid," she murmured.
Their eyes alike sought instinctively the Convent of the
Ursulines, white
and sequestered in the valley—a visible symbol
of security, of peace,
perhaps of happiness.
"Even there they have their bad days : do not doubt it."
"But nothing happens," she said simply; "one day is like
another. They can
never be very sad, you know."
They were silent for a time: the girl, shading her eyes with one
small white
hand, continued to regard the convent ; and Campion
considered her
fondly.
"What can I say ?" he exclaimed at last. "What would you
put on me ? Your
uncle—he is a priest—surely the most natural
adviser—you know his
wishes."
She shook her head. "With him it is different—I am one of
his family—he is
not a priest for me. And he considers me a
little girl—and yet I am old
enough to marry. Many young
girls have had a vocation before my age. Ah,
help me, decide
for me !" she pleaded ; "you are my
"And a very old friend, Marie-Ursule." He smiled rather
sadly. Last year
seemed so long ago, and the word, which he had
almost spoken then, was no
longer seasonable. A note in his
voice, inexplicable, might have touched her. She took his hand
impulsively,
but he withdrew it quickly, as though her touch had
scalded him.
"You look very tired ; you are not used to our Breton rambles
in this sun.
See, I will run down to the cottage by the chapel
and fetch you some milk.
Then you shall tell me."
When he was alone the smile faded from his face and was
succeeded by a look
of lassitude, as he sat himself beneath the
shadow of the Calvary to
wrestle with his responsibility. Perhaps
it was a vocation : the phrase,
sounding strangely on modern ears,
to him, at least, was no anachronism.
Women of his race, from
generation to generation, had heard some such voice
and had
obeyed it. That it went unheeded now was, perhaps, less a
proof that it was silent, than that people had grown hard and deaf,
in a
world that had deteriorated. Certainly the convent had to
him no vulgar,
Protestant significance, to be combated for its
intrinsic barbarism ; it
suggested nothing cold nor narrow nor
mean, was veritably a gracious
choice, a generous effort after
perfection. Then it was for his own sake,
on an egoistic impulse,
that he should dissuade her ? And it rested with
him ; he had no
doubt that he could mould her, even yet, to his purpose.
The
child ! how he loved her.... But would it ever be quite the
same
with them after that morning ? Or must there be hence-
forth a shadow
between them ; the knowledge of something
missed, of the lower end pursued,
the higher slighted ? Yet, if
she loved him ? He let his head drop on his
hands, murmured
aloud at the hard chance which made him at once judge
and
advocate in his own cause. He was not conscious of praying, but
his mind fell into that condition of aching blankness which is,
perhaps, an
extreme prayer. Presently he looked down again at
Ploumariel, with its
coronal of faint smoke ascending in the
perfectly still air, at the white convent of the Dames Ursulines,
which
seemed to dominate and protect it. How peaceful it was !
And his thought
wandered to London : to its bustle and noise, its
squalid streets, to his
life there, to its literary coteries, its politics,
its society ; vulgar
and trivial and sordid they all seemed from
this point of vantage. That was
the world he had pleaded for, and
it was into that he would bring the
child.... And suddenly,
with a strange reaction, he was seized with a sense
of the wisdom
of her choice, its pictorial fitness, its benefit for both of
them.
He felt at once and finally, that he acquiesced in it ; that any
other ending to his love had been an impossible grossness, and that
to lose
her in just that fashion was the only way in which he
could keep her
always. And his acquiescence was without bitter-
ness, and attended only by
that indefinable sadness which to a
man of his temper was but the last
refinement of pleasure. He
had renounced, but he had triumphed ; for it
seemed to him that
his renunciation would be an aegis to him always against
the
sordid facts of life, a protest against the vulgarity of instinct,
the
tyranny of institutions. And he thought of the girl's life, as it
should be, with a tender appreciation—as of something precious
laid away in
lavender. He looked up to find her waiting before
him with a basin half
full of milk, warm still, fresh from the cow ;
and she watched him in
silence while he drank. Then their eyes
met, and she gave a little cry.
"You will help me ? Ah, I see that you will ! And you
think I am right
?"
"I think you are right, Marie-Ursule."
"And you will persuade my uncle ?"
"I will persuade him."
She took his hand in silence, and they stood so for a minute,
gravely
regarding each other. Then they prepared to descend.
I
As the clock struck eight Sir Geoffrey Vincent cast aside the
dull society
journal with which he had been beguiling the
solitude of his after-dinner
coffee and cigar, and abandoned, with
an alacrity eloquent of long boredom,
his possession of one of the
capacious chairs which invited repose in the
dingy smoking-room
of an old-fashioned club. It had been reserved for him,
after
twenty monotonous years of almost unbroken exile, spent, for the
most part, amid the jungles and swamps of Lower Burma, to
realise that a
friendless man, alone in the most populous city of the
world, may encounter
among thousands of his peers a desolation
more supreme than the solitude of
the most ultimate wilderness ;
and he found himself wondering, a little
savagely, why, after all,
he had expected his home-coming to be so
different from the
reality that now confronted him. When he landed at
Brindisi, a
short ten days ago, misgivings had already assailed him vaguely
;
the fact that he was practically homeless, that, although not
altogether bereft of kith and kin, he had no family circle to
welcome him
as an addition to its circumference, had made it
inevitable that his rapid
passage across the Continent should be
haunted by forebodings to which he had not cared to assign a
shape too
definite ; phantoms which he exorcised hopefully, with
a tacit reliance on
a trick of falling on his feet which had seldom
failed his need. He
consoled himself with the thought that
London was home, England was home ;
he would meet old
comrades in the streets perhaps, assuredly at his club,
and such
encounters would be so much the more delightful if they were
fortuitous, unexpected. The plans which he had laid so carefully
pacing the
long deck of the P. and O. boat in the starlight, or,
more remotely, lying
awake through the hot night hours under a
whining punkah in his lonely
bungalow, had all implied, however
vaguely and impersonally, a certain
companionship. He was dimly
conscious that he had cousins somewhere in the
background ; he
had long since lost touch with them, but he would look them
up.
He had two nieces, still in their teens, the children of his only
sister who had died ten years ago ; he had never seen them, but
their
photographs were charming—they should be overwhelmed
with such benefactions
as a bachelor uncle with a well-lined purse
may pleasantly bestow. His
friends—the dim legion that was to
rise about his path—should take him to
see Sarah Bernhardt (a
mere name to him as yet) at the Gaiety, to the new
Gilbert and
Sullivan opera at the Savoy ; they should enlighten him as to
the
latent merits of the pictures at Burlington House ; they should
dine with him, shoot with him, be introduced to his Indian
falcons ; in a
word, he would keep open house, in town and
country too, for all good
fellows and their pretty wives. It had
even occurred to him, as a
possibility neither remote nor unattrac-
tive, that he might himself one
day possess a pretty wife to
welcome them.
His sanguine expectations encountered their first rebuff when
he found the
Piccadilly Club, which had figured so often in the
dreams of its exiled member, abandoned to a horde of workmen,
a mere
wilderness of paint and whitewash ; and it was with a
touch of resentment
that he accepted the direction of an indifferent
hall-porter to an
unfamiliar edifice in Pall Mall as its temporary
substitute. Entering the
smoking-room, a little diffidently, on
the evening of his arrival in
London, he found himself eyed, at
first with faint curiosity, by two or
three of the men upon whom
his gaze rested expectantly, but in no case was
this curiosity—
prompted doubtless by that touch of the exotic which
sometimes
clings to dwellers in the East—the precursor of the kindly
recognition, the surprised, incredulous greeting which he had
hoped for.
After a few days he was simply ignored ; his face,
rather stern, with its
distinctive Indian tan through which the
grey eyes looked almost blue, his
erect figure, and dark hair
sparsely flecked with a frosty white, had
become familiar ; he had
visited his tailor, and his garments no longer
betrayed him to the
curious by their fashion of Rangoon.
The Blue-book, which he had been quick to interrogate,
informed him that his
old friend Hibbert lived in Portman Square,
and that the old lady who was
the guardian of his nieces had a
house at Hampstead : further inquiry at
the addresses thus
obtained left him baffled by the intelligence that
Colonel
Hibbert was in Norway, his nieces at school in Switzerland.
Mackinnon, late of the Woods and Forests, whom he met at
Burlington House,
raised his hopes for an instant by a greeting
which sounded precisely the
note of cordiality that he yearned for,
only to dash them by expressing a
hope that he should see more
of his old friend in the autumn ; he was off
to Southampton to
join a friend's yacht on the morrow, and after his cruise
he had
designs on Scotland and the grouse.
Sir Geoffrey, chained to the neighbourhood of London by legal
business, already too long deferred, connected with the succession
which had
made him a rich man and brought him home, could
only rebel mutely against
the ill-fortune which left him solitary
at a time when he most longed for
fellowship, acknowledging the
while, with a touch of self-reproach, that
the position which he
resented was very largely due to his own shortcomings
; he had
always figured as a lamentably bad correspondent, and his
invete-
rate aversion to letter-writing had allowed the links of many
old
friendships to fall asunder, had operated to leave such friends as
were still in touch with him in ignorance of his home-coming.
Now, as he paused in the hall of his club to light a cigarette
before
passing out into the pleasant July twilight, he told himself
that for the
present he had done with London ; he would shake
the dust of the
inhospitable city from off his feet, and go down to
the place in Wiltshire
which was learning to call him master, to
await better days in company with
his beloved falcons. He even
found himself taking comfort from this
prospect while a hansom
bore him swiftly to the Savoy Theatre, and when he
was safely
ensconced in his stall he beguiled the interval before the
rising of
the curtain—a period which his impatience to escape from the
club
rather than any undue passion for punctuality had made somewhat
lengthy—by considering, speculatively, the chances of society
which the
Willescombe neighbourhood seemed to afford. He
enjoyed the first act of the
extravaganza with the zest of a man to
whom the work of the famous
collaborators was an entire novelty,
his pleasure unalloyed by the fact, of
which he was blissfully uncon-
scious, that one of the principal parts was
played by an understudy.
His
spend the entr'acte in
contemplation of the people who composed
the house, rather than to incur
the resentment of the placid
dowagers who were his neighbours, by passing
and repassing, like
the majority of his fellow-men, in search of the distant haven where
cigarettes and drinks, obtained with difficulty, could be hastily
appreciated. More than once his wandering eyes returned to a
box next the
stage on a dress-circle tier, and finally they rested
rather wistfully on
its occupants, or, to be more accurate, on the
younger of the two ladies
who were seated in front. It was not
simply because the girl was pretty,
though her beauty, the flower-
like charm of a young Englishwoman fresh
from the schoolroom,
a fine example of a type not particularly rare, would
have furnished
a sufficient pretext : he was struck by a resemblance, a
haunting
reminiscence, which at first exercised his curiosity, and ended
by
baffling and tantalising him. There was something vaguely
familiar,
he thought, in the manner of her smile, the inclination of
her head as she
turned now and then to address a remark to her
companion, the lady in grey,
whose face was hidden from him by
the drapery at the side of the box. When
she laughed, furling a
feathery fan, and throwing a bright glance back at
the gentleman
whose white shirt-front was dimly visible in the background,
Sir
Geoffrey felt himself on the verge of solving his riddle, but at
this
point, while a name seemed to tremble on his lips, the lights of
the
auditorium were lowered, and the rising of the curtain on the
fairyland of the second scene diverted his attention to the stage.
Later,
when he had passed into the crowded lobby, and was making
his way slowly
through a jungle of pretty dresses towards the
door, he recognised in front
of him the amber-coloured hair and
dainty, pale-blue opera cloak of the
damsel who had puzzled him.
The two ladies (her companion of the grey dress
was close at
hand) halted near the door while their cavalier passed out in
search
of their carriage ; the elder lady turned, adjusting a cloud of
soft
lace about her shoulders, and Sir Geoffrey was struck on the
instant
by a swift thrill. Here, at last, was an old friend—that face
could
belong to no one else than Margaret Addison. It was natural that
her maiden
name should first occur to him, but he remembered, as
he edged his way
laboriously towards her, that she had married just
after he sailed for
Burma ; yes, she had married that amiable scape-
grace Dick Vandeleur, who
had met his death in the hunting-field
nearly fifteen years ago.
As he drew near, Mrs. Vandeleur's gaze fell upon him for a
brief instant ;
he thought that she had not recognised him, but
before his spirits had time
to suffer any consequent depression, her
eyes returned to him, and as he
smiled in answer to the surprise
which he read in them, he saw her face
flush, and then grow a little
pale, before a responsive light of
recognition dawned upon it. She
took his hand silently when he offered it,
eyeing him with the
same faint smile, an expression in which welcome seemed
to be
gleaming through a cloud of apprehension.
"I'm not a ghost," he said, laughing ; "I'm Geoffrey Vincent.
Don't be
ashamed of owning that you had quite forgotten me !"
"I knew you at once," she said simply. "So you are home at
last : you must
come and see me as soon as you can. This is my
daughter Dorothy, and here
is my brother—of course you re-
member Philip ?—coming to tell us that the
carriage is waiting.
You will come, to-morrow—to prove that you are not a
ghost ?
We shall expect you."
II
A fortnight later Sir Geoffrey was sitting in a punt, beguiling
the
afternoon of a rainy day by luring unwary roach to their de-
struction with
a hair-line and pellets of paste, delicately kneaded
by the taper fingers
of Miss Dorothy Vandeleur. He was the
guest of Mrs. Vandeleur's brother, his school friend, Philip Addison
the
Q.C., and Mrs. Vandeleur and her daughter were also staying
at the
delighful old Elizabethan house which nestled, with such an
air of
immemorial occupation, halfway down the wooded side of
one of the Streatley
hills, its spotless lawn sloping steeply to the
margin of the fairest river
in the world. Miss Vandeleur had
enshrined herself among a pile of rugs and
cushions at the stern of
the punt, where the roof of her uncle's boat-house
afforded shelter
from the persistent rain. She was arrayed in the blue
serge dear
to the modern water-nymph ; and at intervals she relieved her
feel-
ings by shaking a small fist at the leaden vault of sky. For the
rest, her attention was divided impartially between her novel, with
which
she did not seem to make much progress, her fox-terrier
Sancho, and the
slowly decreasing lump of paste, artfully compounded
with cotton-wool for
consistency, with which, as occasion arose, she
ministered to her
companion's predatory needs. The capture of a
fish was followed inevitably
by a disarrangement of her nest of
cushions, and a pathetic petition for
its instant release and restora-
tion to the element from which it had been
untimely inveigled.
Occasionally, the rain varied the monotony of the
dolorous drizzle
by a vehement and spirited downpour, lasting for some
minutes,
prompting one of the occupants of the punt to remark, with
mis-
placed confidence, that it must clear up soon, after that. Then
Sir Geoffrey would abandon his rod, and beat a retreat to the stern
of the
punt ; and during these interludes, much desultory conver-
sation ensued.
Once, Miss Vandeleur startled her companion by
asking, suddenly, how it was
that he seemed so absurdly young ?
"I hope I am not rude ?" she added, "but really you do strike
me as almost
the youngest person I know. You are much younger
than Jack—Mr. Wilgress—for
instance, and it's only about three
years since he left Eton."
Sir Geoffrey smiled, wondering a little whether the girl was
laughing at him
; for though a man of forty-seven, who has for
twenty years successfully
resisted a trying climate, may consider
himself as very far from the burden
of old age, it was conceivable
that the views of a maiden in her teens
might be very different.
"It's because I am having such a good time," he hazarded.
"You and your
mother are responsible, you know ; before I met
you at the Savoy, on that
memorable evening, I was feeling as
blue as—as the sky ought to be if it
had any decency, and at least
as old as the river. I suppose it's true that
youth and good spirits
are contagious."
Dorothy gazed at him for a moment reflectively."How lucky
it was that Uncle
Philip took us to the theatre on that evening !
It was just a chance. And
we might never have met you."
"It was lucky for me!" declared the other simply. "But
would you have cared
?"
"Of course!" said the girl promptly, but lowering her blue
eyes. "You see, I
have never known a real live hero before.
Do tell me about your fight in
the hill-fort, or how you caught
the Dacoits ! Uncle Philip says that you
ought to have had the
V.C."
Sir Geoffrey replied by a little disparaging murmur. "Oh, it
was quite a
commonplace affair—all in the day's work. Any one
else would have done the
same."
Dorothy settled herself back among her cushions resentfully,
clasping her
hands, rather sunburned, across her knees.
"I should like to see them !" she declared contemptuously.
"That's just what
that Jack Wilgress said—at least he implied
it. It is true, he apologised
afterwards. How I despise Oxford
boys !"
"I thought he was a very good fellow," said Sir Geoffrey,
diplomatically turning the subject from his own achievements,
"I suppose it
might improve him to have something to do ; but he
strikes me as a very
good specimen of the ornamental young
man."
"Ornamental !" echoed Dorothy sarcastically. " It would do
him good to have
to work for his living."
"Poor beggar, he couldn't help being born with a silver spoon
in his
mouth—it isn't his fault."
"Spoon!" exclaimed Miss Vandeleur. "A whole dinner
service I should think. A
soup-ladle at the very least. It's quite
big enough : perhaps that accounts
for it !"
The girl laughed, swaying back, with the grace of her years,
against her
cushions ; then, observing that her companion's grave
grey eyes were fixed
upon her, she grew suddenlv demure, sighing
with a little air of
penitence.
"I am very wicked to-day," she confessed. "It's the rain, I
suppose, and
want of exercise. Do you ever feel like that, Sir
Geoffrey ? Do you ever
get into an omnibus and simply loathe
and detest every single person in it
? Do you long to swear—
real swears, like our army in Flanders—at everybody
you meet,
just because it's rainy or foggy, and because they are all so
ugly
and horrid ? I do, frequently."
"I know, I know," said the other sympathetically, while he
reeled in his
line and deftly untied the tiny hook. "Only, the
omnibus has not figured
very often in my case ; it has generally
been a hot court-house, or a dusty
dak-bungalow full of com-
mercial travellers. But I don't feel like that
now, at all. I hope
I am not responsible for your frame of mind ?"
"Oh," protested Dorothy, "don't make me feel such an
abandoned wretch ! I
should have been much worse if you had
not been here. I should have
quarrelled with Uncle Phil, or
been rude to my mother, or something dreadful. I'm perfectly
horrid to her
sometimes. And as it is, I have let her go up to
town all alone—to see my
dressmaker."
Sir Geoffrey stood up and began to take his rod to pieces.
"And are you
quite sure that you haven't been 'loathing and
detesting' me all the
afternoon ?"
Dorothy picked up her novel and smoothed its leaves reflectively.
"I—— But no. I won't make you too conceited. Look, the
sun is actually
coming out ! Don't you think we might take the
Canadian up to the weir ?
You really ought to be introduced to
the big chub under the bridge."
The rain had almost ceased, and when they had transferred
themselves into
the dainty canoe, a few strokes of the paddle
which Miss Vandeleur wielded
with such effective grace swept
them out into a full flood of delicate
evening sunlight. The sky
smiled blue through rapidly increasing breaks in
the clouds ; the
sunbeams, slanting from the west, touched with pale gold
the
quivering trees, which seemed to lift their wet branches and
spread their leaves to court the warm caress. A new radiance of
colour
crept into the landscape, as if it had been a picture from
which a smoky
glass was withdrawn ; the water grew very still—
this too was in the manner
of a picture—with the peace of a
summer evening, brimming with an unbroken
surface luminously
from bank to bank. Strange guttural cries of
water-birds
sounded from the reed-beds ; from the next reach came the
rhythmic pulse of oars, faint splashes, and the brisk rattle of row-
locks
; voices and laughter floated down from the lock, travelling
far beyond
belief in the hushed stillness of the evening. The
wake of the light canoe
trailed unbroken to the shadows of the
boathouse, and the wet paddle
gleamed as it slid through the
water. Presently Dorothy stayed her
hand.
"What an enchanting world it is !" she murmured, with wide eyes
full of the
glamour of the setting sun. "Beautiful, beautiful——!
How soon one forgets
the fogs, and rain, and cold ! I feel as if I
had lived in this fairyland
always."
Her lips trembled a little as she spoke, and Sir Geoffrey found
something in
the pathos of her youth which held him silent.
When they broke the spell of
silence, their words were trivial,
perhaps, but the language was that of
old friends, simple and
direct. Sir Geoffrey at least, for whom the charm
of the occasion
was a gift so rare that he scarcely dared to desecrate it
by mental
criticism, was far from welcoming the interruption which
presently
occurred, in the shape of a youth, arrayed in immaculate flannels
and
the colours of a popular rowing club, who hailed them cheerfully
from a light skiff, resting on his sculls and drifting alongside while
he
rolled a cigarette.
III
Dorothy sank down, rather wearily, in the low basket-chair
which stood near
the open window of her mother's bedroom—
a tall French window, with a wide
balcony overrun by climbing
roses, and a view of the river, and waited for
Mrs. Vandeleur to
dismiss her maid. As she lay there, adjusting absently
the loose
tresses of her hair, she could feel the breath of the faint
breeze as
it wandered, gathering a light burden of fragrance, through
the
dusky roses ; she could see the river, dimly, where the moonbeams
touched its ripples, and once or twice the sound of voices reached
her from
the distant smoking-room. The closing of the door as
the maid went out
disturbed her reverie, and turning a little in her
chair she found her
mother regarding her thoughtfully.
"No," said Dorothy, swiftly interpreting her mother's glance.
"You mustn't
send me away, my pretty little mother. I'll promise
not to catch cold. I
haven't been able to talk to you all day."
Mrs. Vandeleur half closed the window, and then seated herself
with an
expression of resignation on the arm of her daughter's
chair. In the dim
light shed by the two candles on the dressing-
table, one would have
thought them two sisters, plotting innocently
the discomfiture of man. The
occasion did not prove so stimu-
lating to conversation as might have been
expected. For a few
minutes both were silent ; Dorothy began to hum an air
from the
Savoy opera, rather recklessly ; she kicked off one of her
slippers,
and it fell on the polished oak floor with a little clatter.
"Little donkey !" murmured her mother sweetly. "So much
for your talking.
I'm going to bed at once." Then she added,
carelessly, "Did you see Jack
to-day ?"
The humming paused abruptly ; then it went on for a second,
and paused
again.
"Oh yes, the inevitable Mr. Wilgress was on the river, as
usual. He nearly
ran us down in that idiotic skiff of his."
Mrs. Vandeleur raised her eyebrows, gazing at her unconscious
daughter
reflectively.
"You didn't see him alone, then ?" she inquired presently.
"Who ? Mr. Wilgress ? Ye-es, I think so. When we got
back to the boathouse
he insisted on taking me out again in the
canoe, to show me the correct
Indian stroke. Much he knows
about it ! That's why I was so late for
dinner. Oh, please
don't talk about Mr. Wilgress."
"Mr. Wilgress again?" murmured Mrs. Vandeleur. "I
thought it always used to
be 'Jack.'"
"Only, only by accident, said the girl weakly. "And when
he wasn't
there."
"Well, he isn't here now. At least I hope not. You—you
haven't quarrelled,
have you Dolly ?"
"No—yes. I don't know. He—he asked me—oh, he was
ridiculous. How I hate
boys—and jealousy."
Mrs. Vandeleur shivered, then rose abruptly and closed the
window against
which she leaned, gazing down at the formless
mass of the shrubs which
cowered over their shadows on the lawn.
Her mind, vaguely troubled for some
days past, and now keenly on
the alert, travelled swiftly back, bridging a
space of nearly twenty
years, to a scene strangely like this, in which she
and her mother
had held the stage. She too, a girl then of Dorothy's
eighteen
years, had brought the halting story of her doubts and scruples
to
her natural counsellor : she could remember still how the instinct
of reticence had struggled with the yearning for sympathy, for the
comfort
of the confessional. She could recall now and appreciate
her mother's tact
and patient questioning, her own perversity, the
dumbness which seemed
independent of her own volition. A
commonplace page of life. Two men at her
feet, and the girl
unskilled to read her heart : one had spoken—that was
Dick
Vandeleur, careless, brilliant, the heir to half a county ; the
other
— her old friend ; she could not bear to think of him now.
Knowledge had come too late, and the light which made her
wonder scornfully
at her blindness. And her mother—she of
course had played the worldly part
; but her counsel had been
honest, without bias : it were cruel to blame
her now. Loyal
though she was, Margaret Vandeleur had asked herself an
hundred
times, yielding to that love of threading a labyrinth which
rules
most women, what would have been the story of her life if she
had
steeled herself to stand or fall by her own judgment, if she had
refused to allow her mother to drop into the wavering scale the
words which
had turned it, ever so slightly, in favour of the
richer man, the man whom she had married, whose name she
bore.
It seemed plain enough, to a woman's keen vision—what sense
so subtle, yet
so easily beguiled—that Dorothy's choice was
embarrassed, just as her own
had been. The girl and her two
admirers—how the old story repeated itself
!—one, Jack Wilgress,
the good-natured, good-looking idler, whose devotion
to the river
threatened to make him amphibious, and whose passion for
scribbling verse bade fair to launch him adrift among the cockle-
shell
fleet of Minor Poets ; the other—Geoffrey Vincent ! To
call upon Margaret
Vandeleur to guide her daughter's choice
between two men of whom Geoffrey
Vincent was one—surely
here was the end and crown of Fate's relentless
irony. She felt
herself blushing as she pressed her forehead against the
cool
window-pane, put to shame by the thoughts which the comparison
suggested, which would not be stifled. Right or wrong, at least
her mother
had been impartial : there was a sting in this, a
failure of her precedent.
She sighed, concluding mutely that silence
was her only course ; even if
she would, she could not follow in her
mother's footsteps—the girl must
abide by her own judgment.
When she turned, smiling faintly, the light of the flickering
candles fell
upon her face, betraying a pallor which startled
Dorothy from her reverie.
She sprang from her chair, reproaching
her selfishness.
"You poor, tired, little mother," she murmured penitently, with
a hasty
kiss. "How could I be so cruel as to keep you up after
your journey ! I'm a
wretch, but I'm really going now. Good-
night."
"Good-night," said her mother, caressing the vagrant coils of the
girl's
amber-coloured hair. "Don't worry yourself; everything
will come right
if—if you listen to your own heart."
Dorothy's answer was precluded by another kiss. "It's so full
of you that
it can't be bothered to think of any one else," she
declared plaintively,
as she turned towards the door. Then she
paused, fingering nervously a
little heap of books which lay upon
a table. "He—he isn't so very old, you
know," she murmured
softly before she made her escape.
When she was alone Mrs. Vandeleur sank into the chair which
her daughter had
just quitted, nestling among the cushions and
knitting her brows in
thought. The clock on the mantelpiece
had struck twelve before she rose,
and then she paused for an
instant in front of the looking-glass, gazing
into it half timidly
before she extinguished the candles. The face which
she saw
there was manifestly pretty, in spite of the trouble which lurked
in
the tired eyes, and when she turned away, a hovering smile was
struggling with the depression at the corners of the delicate,
mobile
lips.
IV
When Sir Geoffrey returned to Riverside, three days later,
after a brief
sojourn in London, spent for the most part at the
office of his solicitor
in Lincoln's Inn, he found Mrs. Vandeleur
presiding over a solitary
tea-table in a shady corner of the garden.
A few chairs sociably disposed
under the gnarled walnut-tree, and
a corresponding number of empty
tea-cups, suggested that her
solitude had not been of long duration, and
this impression was
confirmed when Mrs. Vandeleur told her guest that if he
had
presented himself a short quarter of an hour earlier he would have
been welcomed in a manner more worthy of his deserts.
Sir Geoffrey drew one of the low basket chairs up to the table,
protesting, as he accepted a cup of tea, that he could not have
wished for
better fortune.
"This is very delightful," he declared. "I don't regret the
tardiness of my
train in the least. The other charming people are
on the river, I suppose
?"
Mrs. Vandeleur nodded. "Yes, the Patersons have just taken
up their
quarters in that house-boat, which you must have noticed,
near the lock,
and my brother and Dorothy have gone with Jack
Wilgress and his sisters to
call upon them. You ought to have
seen Daisy Wilgress ; she is very
pretty."
Sir Geoffrey smiled gravely, sipping his tea.
"If she is prettier than your daughter, Miss Wilgress must be
very
dangerous. But I must see her with my own eyes before I
believe that."
"Oh, she is !" declared Mrs. Vandeleur, laughing lightly, but
throwing a
quick glance at him. "Ask Philip; he is more
wrapped up in her than he has
been in anything since his first
brief."
"Poor Philip !" said the other quietly, stooping to pick a fallen
leaf from
the grass at his feet. "I—I have a fellow-feeling for
him."
"You know you may smoke if you want to," interposed Mrs.
Vandeleur, rather
hurriedly. "And perhaps—if you really won't
have any more tea—you might
like to go in pursuit of the other
people ; I don't think they have taken
all the boats. But I
daresay you are tired ? London is so fatiguing—and
business."
Sir Geoffrey smiled, his white teeth showing pleasantly against
the tan of
his lean, good-humoured face.
"I
spending a great deal of time in my solicitor's waiting-room,
pretending to read
always fatiguing. If I am not in your way, I should like to stay
here."
Mrs. Vandeleur professed her satisfaction by a polite little
murmur, leaning
forward in her chair to marshal the scattered
tea-cups on the tray, while
Sir Geoffrey watched her askance,
rather timidly, with a keen appreciation
of the subtle charm of her
personality ; her face, like a perfect cameo, or
some rare pale flower,
seeming to have gained rather in beauty by the
deliberate passage
from youth ; winning, just as some pictures do, an added
grace of
refinement, a delicacy, which the slight modification of
contours
served only to intensify.
"I told you just now that I had been thinking," he said
presently, when she
had resumed her task of embroidering initials
in the corner of a
handkerchief : "would it surprise you if I said
that I had been thinking of
you ?"
Mrs. Vandeleur raised her eyebrows slightly, her gaze still intent
upon her
patient needle.
"Perhaps it was natural that you should think of us," she
hazarded.
"But I meant you," he continued ; "you, the Margaret of the
old days, before
I went away. For I used to call you 'Margaret'
then. We were great friends,
you know."
"I have always thought of you as a friend," she said simply.
"Yes, we were
great friends before—before you went away."
"It doesn't seem so long ago to me," he declared, almost plain-
tively,
struck by something in the tone of her voice. Mrs.
Vandeleur smiled
tolerantly, scrutinising her embroidery, with
her head poised on one side,
a little after the manner of a
bird.
"And now that I have found you again," he added with inten-
tion, dropping
his eyes till they rested on the river, rippling past
the wooden landing-stage below in the sunshine, "I—I don't
want to lose you,
Margaret !"
Mrs. Vandeleur met this declaration with a smile, which was
courteous rather
than cordial, merely acknowledging, as of right,
the propriety of the
aspiration, treating it as quite conventional.
The simplicity of the
gesture testified eloquently of the discipline
of twenty years ; only a
woman would have detected the shadow
of apprehension in her eyes, the
trembling of the hands which
seemed so placidly occupied. Her mind was
already anxiously on the
alert, racing rapidly over the now familiar ground
which she had
quartered of late so heedfully. For her, his words were
ominous ;
it was of Dorothy surely that he wished to speak, and yet——!
In the stress of expectation her thoughts took strange flights,
following
vague clues fantastically. The inveterate habit of retro-
spection carried
her back, in spite of her scruples; her honest desire
to think singly of
Dorothy, regarding the fortune of her own
life as irrevocably settled,
impelled her irresistibly to call to the
stage of her imagination a scene
which she had often set upon it,
a duologue, entirely fictive, which might,
but for her perversity,
have been enacted—twenty years ago.
Sir Geoffrey rose, and stood leaning with one hand on the back
of his chair.
This interruption—or perhaps it was the sound of
oars and voices which
floated in growing volume from the river—
served to recall his companion to
the present. The silence, of
brief duration actually, seemed intolerable.
She must break it,
and when she spoke it was to name her daughter,
aimlessly.
"Dorothy ?" repeated Sir Geoffrey, as she paused. "She is
extraordinarily
like you were before I went away. Not that you
are changed—it is delightful
to come back and find you the same.
It's only when she is with you that I
can realise that there is a
difference, a——"
"I was never so good as Dorothy," put in Mrs. Vandeleur
quickly ; "she will
never have the same reason to blame her-
self—— I don't think you could
imagine what she has been
to me."
"I think I can," said Sir Geoffrey simply. Then he added,
rather shyly :
"Really, we seem to be very good friends already :
it's very nice of her—it
would be so natural for her to—to resent
the intrusion of an old fellow
like me."
"You need not be afraid of that ; she looks upon you as—as a
friend
already."
"Thank you !" murmured the other. "And you think she
might grow to—to like
me, in time ?"
Mrs. Vandeleur nodded mutely. Sir Geoffrey followed for a
moment the
deliberate entry and re-entry of her needle, reflect-
ively ; then, as his
eyes wandered, he realised vaguely that a boat
had reached the
landing-stage, and that people were there : he
recognised young Wilgress
and Miss Vandeleur.
"You said just now that you always thought of me as a friend,"
he began. "I
wonder—— Oh ! it's no good," he added quickly,
with a nervous movement of
his hands, "I can't make pretty
speeches ! After all, it's simple ; why
should I play the coward ?
I can take 'no' for answer, if the worst comes
to the worst,
and—— Margaret, I know it's asking a great deal, but—I
want you to marry me."
She cast a swift, startled glance at him, turning in her chair,
and then
dropped her eyes, asking herself bewilderedly whether this
was still some
fantasy. The words which he murmured now,
pleading incoherently with her
silence, confirmed the hopes which,
in spite of her scrupulous devotion,
refused to be gainsaid, thrusting
themselves shamelessly into the
foreground of her troubled thoughts.
An inward voice, condemned by her
wavering resolution as a
whisper from the lips of treachery, suggested plausibly that after
all
Dorothy might have made a mistake ; she repelled it fiercely,
taking a
savage pleasure in her pain, accusing herself, with vehe-
ment blame, as
one who would fain stand in the way of her
daughter's happiness. Even if
she had deserved these fruits of late
harvest which seemed to dangle within
her grasp, even if her
right to garner them had not been forfeited long ago
by her
folly of the past, how could she endure to figure as a rival,
triumphing in her own daughter's discomfiture ? Womanly
pride and a
thousand scruples barred the way.
"I love you," she heard him say again ; "I believe I have
always loved you
since—— But you know how it was in the
old days."
"Don't remind me of that !" she pleaded, almost fiercely ; "I
was—I can't
bear to think of what I did ! You ought not to
forgive me ; I don't deserve
it."
"Forgive ?" he echoed, blankly.
"Oh, you are generous—but it is impossible, impossible ; it is
all a mistake
; let us forget it."
"I don't understand ! Is it that—that you don't care for me ?"
Margaret gave a despairing little sigh, dropping her hands on
the sides of
her chair.
"You don't know," she murmured. "It isn't right. No—
oh, it must be No
!"
Sir Geoffrey echoed her sigh. As he watched her silently, the
instinct of
long reticence making his forbearance natural, he saw
a new expression dawn
into her troubled face. Her eyes were
fixed intently on the river ; that
they should be fixed was not
strange, but there was a light of interest in
them which induced
Sir Geoffrey, half involuntarily, to bend his gaze in
the same
direction. He saw that Dorothy had now disembarked, and was
standing, a solitary figure, close to the edge of the landing-stage.
Something in her pose seemed to imply that she was talking, and
just at
this moment she moved to one side, revealing the head and
shoulders of Jack
Wilgress, which overtopped the river-bank in
such a manner as to suggest
that he was standing in the punt, of
which the bamboo pole rose like a
slender mast above his head.
The group was certainly pictorial : the
silhouette of Dorothy's
pretty figure telling well against the silvery
river, and the young
man's pose, too, lending itself to an effective bit of
composition ;
but Sir Geoffrey felt puzzled, and even a little hurt, by the
interest
that Margaret displayed at a moment which he at least had
found
sufficiently strenuous. He turned, stooping to pick up his hat ;
then he paused, and was about to speak, when Mrs. Vandeleur
interrupted
him, mutely, with a glance, followed swiftly by the
return of her eyes to
the river. Acquiescing patiently, Sir
Geoffrey perceived that a change had
occurred in the grouping of
the two young people. Wilgress had drawn nearer
to the girl ;
his figure stood higher against the watery background,
apparently
he had one foot on the step of the landing-stage. Dorothy
extended a hand, which he clasped and held longer than one would
have
reckoned for in the ordinary farewell. The girl shook her
head ; another
movement, and the punt began to glide reluctantly
from the shore ; then it
turned slowly, swinging round and
heading down-stream. Dorothy raised one
hand to the bosom of
her dress, and before she dropped it to her side threw
something
maladroitly towards her departing companion. Wilgress caught
the flower—it was evidently a flower—making a dash which
involved the loss
of his punt-pole ; a ripple of laughter, and
Dorothy, unconscious of the
four eyes which watched her from
the shadows of the walnut tree, turned
slowly, and began to climb
the grassy slope.
Mrs. Vandeleur's eyelids drooped, and her lips, which had been
parted for an
instant in a pensive smile, trembled a little ; she
sighed, tapping the
ground lightly with her foot, then sank back in
her chair and seemed lost
in contemplation of the needlework that
lay upon her lap. Sir Geoffrey
began to move away, but turned
suddenly, and stooping, took one of her
hands reverently in his
own, clasping it as it lay upon the arm of her
chair.
"Margaret," he said, "forgive me; but must it be good-bye,
after all these
years, or is there a chance for me ?"
Mrs. Vandeleur's reply was inaudible ; but her hand, though it
fluttered for
a moment, was not withdrawn.
Mother of the dews, dark eyelashed Twilight !
Low-lidded Twilight o'er the valley's brim.
MEREDITH.
CLOUD upon cloud : and, if I were to think that an image of
life can lie in
wreathing, blue tobacco smoke, pleasant
were the life so fancied. Its fair
changes in air, its gentle
motions, its quiet dying out and away at last,
should symbolise
something more than perfect idleness. Cloud upon cloud :
and I
will think, as I have said : it is amusing to think so.
It is that death, out and away upon the air, which charms me :
charms more
than the manner of the blown red rose, full of dew
at morning, upon the
grass at sunset. The clouds' end, their
death in air, fills me with a very
beauty of desire ; it has no
violence in it, and it is almost invisible.
Think of it ! While
the cloud lived, it was seemly and various ; and with a
graceful
change it passed away : the image of a reasonable life is
there,
hanging among tobacco clouds. An image and a test : an image,
because elaborated by fancy : a true and appealing image, and so,
to my
present way of life, a test.
That way is, to walk about the old city, with "a spirit in my
feet," as
Shelley and Catullus have it, of joyous aims and energies ;
and to speed
home to my solitary room over the steep High
Street ; in an arm-chair, to
read Milton and Lucretius, with
others. There is nothing unworthy in all
this : there is open air,
an ancient city, a lonely chamber, perfect poets. Those should
make up a
passing life well : for death ! I can watch tobacco
clouds, exploring the
secret of their beautiful conclusion. And,
indeed, I think that already
this life has something of their
manner, those wheeling clouds ! It has
their light touch upon
the world, and certainly their harmlessness. Early
morning,
when the dew sparkles red ; honey, and coffee, and eggs for a
breakfast ; the quick, eager walk between the limes, through the
Close of
fine grass, to the river fields ; then the blithe return to
my poets ; all
that, together, comes to resemble the pleasant
spheres of tobacco cloud ; I
mean, the circling hours, in their
passage, and in their change, have
something of a dreamy order
and progression. Such little incidents ! Now,
grey air and
whistling leaves : now, a marketing crowd of country folk
round the Cross : and presently, clear candles ; with Milton, in
rich
Baskervile type, or Lucretius, in the exquisite print of early
Italy.
Such little incidents, in a world of battles and of plagues : of
violent
death by sea and land ! Yet this quiet life, too, has diffi-
culties and
needs : its changes must be gone through with a
ready pleasure and a mind
unhesitating. For, trivial though they
be in aspect and amount, yet the
consecration of them, to be an
holy discipline of experience, is so much
the greater an attempt :
it is an art. Each thing, be it man, or book, or
place, should
have its rights, when it encounters me : each has its
proper
quality, its peculiar spirit, not to be misinterpreted by me in
carelessness, nor overlooked with impatience. That is clear : but
neither
must I vaunt my just view of common life. Meditation,
at twilight, by the
window looking toward the bare downs, is
very different from that anxious
examination of motives, dear to
sedulous souls. My meditation is only still
life : the clouds of
smoke go up, grey and blue ; the earlier stars come out, above
the sunset
and the melancholy downs ; and deep, mournful bells
ring slowly among the
valley trees. Then, if my day have been
successful, what peace follows, and
how profound a charm ! The
little things of the day, sudden glances of
light upon grey stone,
pleasant snatches of organ music from the church,
quaint rustic
sights in some near village : they come back upon me,
gentle
touches of happiness, airs of repose. And when the mysteries
come about me, the fearfulness of life, and the shadow of night ;
then,
have I not still the blue, grey clouds,
referam
tribulations : and I live in the strength of dreams, which
never
doubt.
Is it all a delusion ? But that is a foolish wonder : nothing is
a delusion,
except the extremes of pleasure and of pain. Take
what you will of the
world ; its crowds, or its calms : there is
nothing altogether wrong to
every one. Lucretius, upon his
watch-tower, deny it as he may, found some
exultation and
delight in the lamentable prospect below : it filled him
with a
magnificent darkness of soul, a princely compassion at heart.
And Milton, in his evil days, felt himself to be tragic and austere :
he
knew it, not as a proud boast, but as a proud fact. No ! life
is never
wrong, altogether, to every one : you and I, he and she,
priest and
penitent, master and slave : one with another, we
compose a very glory of
existence before the unseen Powers.
Therefore, I believe in my measured way
of life ; its careful
felicities, fashioned out of little things : to you,
the change of
Ministries, and the accomplishment of conquests, bring
their
wealth of rich emotion : to me, who am apart from the louder
concerns of life, the flowering of the limes, and the warm autumn
rains,
bring their pensive beauty and a store of memories.
Is it I, am indolent ? Is it you, are clamorous ? Why should
it be either ?
Let us say, I am the lover of quiet things, and
you are enamoured of mighty
events. Each, without undue
absorption in his taste, relishes the savour of
a different ex-
perience.
But I think, I am no egoist : no melancholy spectator of
things, cultivating
his intellect with old poetry, nourishing his
senses upon rural nature.
There are times, when the swarms of
men press hard upon a solitary ; he
hears the noise of the streets,
the heavy vans of merchandise, the cry of
the railway whistle :
and in a moment, his thoughts travel away, to London,
to Liver-
pool ; to great docks and to great ships ; and away, till he
is
watching the dissimilar bustle of Eastern harbours, and hearing the
discordant sounds of Chinese workmen. The blue smoke curls
and glides away,
with blue pagodas, and snowy almond bloom, and
cherry flowers, circling and
gleaming in it, like a narcotic vision.
O magic of tobacco ! Dreams are
there, and superb images, and
a somnolent paradise. Sometimes, the swarms
of humanity press
wearily and hardly ; with a cruel insistence, crushing
out my right
to happiness. I think, rather I brood, upon the fingers
that
deftly rolled the cigarette, upon the people in tobacco
plantations,
upon all the various commerce involved in its history : how
do
they all fare, those many workers ? Strolling up and down,
devouring my books through their lettered backs ; remembering
the workers
with leather, paper, ink, who toiled at them, they
frighten me from the
peace. What a full world it is ! What
endless activities there are ! And,
oh, Nicomachean Ethics !
how much conscious pleasure is in them all !
Things, mere
tangible things, have a terrible power of education : of
calling out
from the mind innumerable thoughts and sympathies. Like
childish catechisms and categories—
substances introduce me to swarms of men, before unrealised.
And they all
lived and died, and cared for their children, or not,
and led reasonable
lives, or not : and, without any alternative, had
casual thoughts and
constant passions. Did each one of them
ever stop in his work, and think
that the world revolved about
him alone ; and all was his, and for him ?
Most men may have
thought so, and shivered a little afterwards ; and worked
on
steadily. Or did each one of them ever think that he was always
beset with companions, hordes of men and women, necessary and
inevitable ?
Then, he must have struggled a little in his mind, as
a man fights for air,
and worked on steadily. It does not do :
this interrogation of mysteries,
which are also facts. Nor am I
called upon, from without or from within, to
write an Essay upon
the Problem of Economic Distribution.
Nature says to me : it is the
stir of the world, and the great play
of forces, that I am wailing, to no
end. Let the great life
continue, and the sun shine upon bright palaces ;
and geraniums,
red geraniums, glow at the windows of dingy courts ; death
and
sorrow come upon both, and upon me. And on all sides there is
infinite tenderness ; the invincible good-will, which says kind and
cheerful things to every one sometimes, by a friend's mouth ; the
humane
pieties of the world, which make glad the
and make endurable the
myself miserable.
Full night at last ; the dead of night, as dull folk have it ;
ignorant
persons, who know nothing of nocturnal beauty, of night's
lively magic. It
was a good thought, to come out of my lonely
room, to look at the cloisters
by moonlight, and to wander round
the Close, under the black shadows of the
buttresses, while the
moon is white upon their strange pinnacles. There is
no noise,
but only a silence, which seems very old ; old, as the grey
monu-
ments and the weathered arches. The wreathing, blue tobacco
clouds look thin
and pale, like breath upon a dark frosty night ;
they drift about these old
precincts, with a kind of uncertainty and
discomfort ; one would think,
they wanted a rich Mediterranean
night, heavy odours of roses, and very
fiery stars. Instead, they break
upon mouldering traceries, and doleful
cherubs of the last century;
upon sunken headstones, and black oak doors
with ironwork over
them. Perhaps the cigarette is southern and Latin,
southern and
Oriental, after all; and I am a dreamer, out of place in this
northern
grey antiquity. If it be so, I can taste the subtle pleasures of
contrast:
and, dwelling upon the singular features of this old town, I
can
make myself a place in it, as its conscious critic and adopted
alien. There is a curious apprehension of enjoyment, a genuine
touch of
luxury, in this nocturnal visit to these old northern
things ! I consider,
with satisfaction, how the Stuart king, who
spurned tobacco contumeliously,
put a devoted faith in witches,
those northern daughters of the devil ;
northern, and very different
from the dames of Thessaly ; from the crones
of Propertius, and
of Horace, and of Apuleius the Golden. Who knows, but I
may
hear strange voices in the near aisle before cockcrow ? By
night,
night in the north, happen cold and dismal things ; and
then, what a night
is this ! Chilly stars, and wild, grey clouds,
flying over a misty
moon.
At last, here comes a great and solemn sound ; the commanding
bells of the
cathedral tower, in their iron, midnight toll. Through
the sombre strokes,
and striking into their long echoes, pierce
the thin cries of bats, that
wheel in air, like lost creatures who
hate themselves ; the uncanny
flitter-mice ! They trace superb,
invisibles circles on the night ; crying
out faintly and plaintively,
with no sort of delight in their voices :
things of keen teeth, furry
bodies, and skeleton wings covered scantily in
leather. The big
moths, too : they blunder against my face, and dash red trails of
fire off
my cigarette ; so busily they spin about the darkness.
spirits awake and at some faery work ; white, as heather upon
the
Cornish cliffs is white, and all innocent, rare things in heaven
and
earth. There is nothing dreadful, it seems, about this night, and
this place ; no glorious fury of evil spirits, doing foul and ugly
things ;
only the quiet town asleep under a wild sky, and gentle
creatures of the
night moving about ancient places. And the
wind rises, with a sound of the
sea, murmuring over the earth
and sighing away to the sea : the trembling
sea, beyond the downs,
which steals into the land by great creeks and
glimmering
channels ; with swaying, taper masts along them, and
lantern
lights upon black barges. Certainly, this is no Lucretian night
:
not that tremendous
Rather, it reminds me of the Miltonic night, which is peopled
alluringly
with
a Miltonic night, and a Shakespearean dawn ; for the white
morning has just
peered along the horizon, white morning, with
dusky flames behind it ; and
the spirits, the visions, vanish away,
"following darkness, like a
dream."
The streets are very still, with that silence of sleeping cities,
which
seems ready to start into confused cries ; as though the
Smiter of the Firstborn were travelling through the households.
There is the
Catholic chapel, in its Georgian, quaint humility ;
recalling an age of
beautiful, despised simplicity ; the age of
French emigrant old priests and
vicars-apostolic, who stood for
the Supreme Pontiff, in grey wigs. The
sweet limes are swaying
against its singular, umbered windows, with their
holy saints and
prophets in last-century design ; ruffled, querulous
persons looking
very bluff and blown. I wonder, how it would be inside ;
I
suppose, night has a little weakened that lingering smell of daily
incense, which seems so immemorial and so sad. Wonderful
grace of the
mighty Roman Church ! This low square place,
where the sanctuary is poor
and open, without any mystical touch
of retirement and of loftiness, has
yet the unfailing charm, the
venerable mystery, which attend the footsteps
of the Church ; the
same air of command, the same look of pleading, fill
this homely,
comfortable shrine, which simple country gentlemen set up for
the
ministrations of harassed priests, in an age of no enthusiasm. I
like
to think that this quiet chapel, in the obedience of Rome, in
communion with that supreme apostolate, is always open to me
upon this
winding little by-street ; it fills me with perfect
memories, and it seems
to bless me.
But here is a benediction of light ! the quick sun, reddening
half the
heavens, and rising gloriously. In the valley, clusters of
elm rock and
swing with the breeze, quivering for joy : far away,
the bare uplands roll
against the sunrise, calm and pastoral;
of the morning. Surely the hours have gone well, and according
to my
preference ; one dying into another, as the tobacco clouds
die. My
meditations, too, have been peaceful enough ; and,
though solitary, I have
had fine companions. What would the
moral philosophers, those puzzled
sages, think of me ? An harm-
less hedonist ? An amateur in morals, who
means well, though
meaning very little ? Nay ! let the moralist by profession give, to
whom he
will,
is a wise shareholder and zealous vestryman. For myself,
my
limited and dreamy self, I eschew these upright businesses ;
upright
memories and meditations please me more, and to live with as
little action as may be. Action : why do they talk of action ?
Match me,
for pure activity, one evening of my dreams, when life
and death fill my
mind with their messengers, and the days of old
come back to me. And now,
homewards, for a little sleep ; that
profound and rich slumber at early
dawn which is my choice
delight. A sleep, bathed in musical impressions,
and filled with
fresh dreams, all impossible and happy ; four hours, and
five, and
six perhaps : then the cathedral matin bell will chime in with
my
fancies, and I shall wake harmoniously. I shall feel infinitely
cheerful, after the spirit of the
that I was once at Ware, and at Am well, those placid haunts
of
Walton. A conviction of beauty, and contentment in life will lay
hold on me, more than commonly ; it is probable that I shall read
I know which paper it will be : it will be about
coming up to the house, with two or three hazel twigs in his hand,
fresh cut in
Lucretius : the man, not the book, for I read him in
the Giuntine :
I will read that marvellous
of beauty. For
me by the
morning, with exquisite, bright cadences. After my
honey from the flowers
of a very rustic farm, and my coffee, from
some wonderful Eastern place ;
and my eggs, marked by the careful
housewife as she took them from her
henhouse, covered with
stonecrop over its old tiles ; after all these
delicates, now comes the
first cigarette, pungent and exhilarating. As the
grey blue
clouds go up, the ruddy sunlight glows through them, straight as
an arrow
through the gold. Away they wander, out of the window,
flung back upon the
air, against the roses, and disappear in the
buoyant morning.
My thoughts go with them, into the morning, into all the
mornings over the
world. They travel through the lands, and
across the seas, and are
everywhere at home, enjoying the presence
of life. And past things, old
histories, are turned to pleasant
recollections : a
the evil
humours and the monstrous tyrannies pass away, and leave
only the happiness
and the peace.
Call me, my dear friend, what reproachful name you please ;
but, by your
leave, the world is better for my cheerfulness. True,
should the terrible
issues come upon me, demanding high courage,
and finding but good temper,
then give me your prayers, for I
have my misdoubts. Till then, let me
cultivate my place in life,
nurturing its comelier flowers ; taking the
little things of time
with a grateful relish and a mind at rest. So hours
and years pass
into hours and years, gently, and surely, and orderly ; as
these
clouds, grey and blue clouds, of tobacco smoke, pass up to the
air, and away upon the wind ; incense of a goodly savour, cheering
the
thoughts of my heart, before passing away, to disappear at
last.
HE wandered up the carpeted steps, rather afraid all the while of
the two
tall men in uniform who opened the great doors wide
to let him into the
soft warm light and babble of voices within. At
the top he paused, and
slowly unbuttoned his overcoat, not know-
ing which way to turn ; but the
crowd swept him up, and carried
him round, until he found himself leaning
against a padded wall
of plush, looking over a sea of heads at the stage
far beneath.
He turned round, and stood watching the happy crowd,
which
laughed, and talked, and nodded ceaselessly to itself. Near him,
on a sofa, with a table before her, was a woman spreading herself
out like
some great beautiful butterfly on a bed of velvet pansies.
He stood
admiring her half unconsciously for some time, and at
last, remembering
that he was tired and sleepy, and seeing that
there was still plenty of
room, he threaded his way across and sat
down.
The butterfly began tossing a wonderful little brown satin shoe,
and tapping
it against the leg of the table. Then the parasol
slipped across him, and
fell to the ground. He hastened to pick
it up, lifting his hat as he did
so. She seemed surprised, and
glancing at a man leaning against the wall,
caught his eye, and
they both laughed. He blushed a good deal, and wondered
what
he had done wrong. She spread herself out still further in his
direction,
and cast side glances at him from under her Gains-
borough.
"What were you laughing at just now ?" he said impulsively.
"My dear boy, when ?"
"With that man."
"Which man ?"
"It doesn't matter," he said, blushing again.
She looked up, and winked at the man leaning against the
wall.
"Have I offended you by speaking to you ?" he said, looking
with much
concern into her eyes.
She put a little scented net of a handkerchief up to her mouth,
and went
into uncontrollable fits of laughter.
"What a funny boy you are !" she gasped. "Do do it again."
He looked at her in amazement, and moved a little further
away.
"I'm going to tell the waiter to bring me a port—after that
last bit of
business."
"I don't understand all this," he said desperately : "I wish I
had never
spoken to you ; I wish I had never come in here
at all."
"You're very rude all of a sudden. Now don't be troublesome
and say you're
too broke to pay for drinks," she added as the
waiter put the port down
with great deliberation opposite her, and
held out the empty tray
respectfully to him. He stared.
"Why don't you pay, you cuckoo ?"
Mechanically he put down a florin, and the waiter counted out
the
change.
There was a pause. She fingered the stem of her wine-glass,
taking little
sips, and watching him all the while.
"How often have you been here before ?" she said, suddenly
catching at his
sleeve. "You must tell me. I fancy I know your
face : surely I've met you
before somewhere ?"
"This is the first time I have ever been to a music-hall," he
said
doggedly.
She drank off her port directly.
"Come—come away at once. Yes, all right—I'm coming with
you ; so go
along."
"But I've only just paid to come in," he said hesitatingly.
"Never mind the paying," and she stamped her little satin foot,
"but do as I
tell you, and go." And taking his arm, she led him
through the doors down
to the steps, where the wind blew cold,
and the gas jets roared fitfully
above.
"Go," she said, pushing him out, "and never come here again ;
stick to the
theatres, you will like them best." And she ran up
the steps and was
gone.
He rushed after her. The two tall men in uniform stepped
before the
doors.
"No re-admission, sir," said one, bowing respectfully and
touching his
cap.
"But that lady," he said, bewildered, and looking from one to
the other.
The men laughed, and one of them, shrugging his shoulders,
pointed to the
box-office.
He turned, and walked down the steps. Was it all a dream ?
He glanced at his
coat. The flower in his buttonhole had gone.
AINAN-NA-RIGH they called him in Tir Ailella*—"Darling
of the King"—but
it was in idle sport, for Cathal the Red
hated the son of his old age
as men now have forgotten to hate ;
and once Aonan had sprung from his
sleep with a sharp skene
thrust through his arm, that had meant to
drink his life-blood ;
and once again he had found himself alone in the
heart of the
battle, and he had scarcely won out of the press with his
life—and
with the standard of the Danish enemy. Thus it was seen
that
neither did the Danish spears love the "King's Darling"; and
the sennachies made a song of this, and it was chanted before the
King
for the first time when he sat robed and crowned for the
Beltane feast,
and Aonan stood at his left hand, pouring out
honey-wine into his
father's cup. And before he drank, Cathal
the King stared hard at the
cup-bearer, and the red light that
burned in his eyes was darkened
because of the likeness in
Aonan's face to his mother Acaill (dead and
buried long since),
whom Cathal had loved better than his first wife
Eiver, who was
a king's daughter, and better than the Danish slave
Astrild, who
bore him five sons, elder and better-loved than Aonan, for
all the
base blood in their veins. And of these, two were dead in
the
battle that had spared Aonan, and there were left to Cathal
the
King only the Druid Coloman, and Toran the boaster, and
Guthbinn of the
sweet voice, who as yet was too young to fight.
"Drink, Aonan-na-Righ," shrilled Astrild from her seat at the
King's
left hand. "Drink : lest there be death in the cup."
Aonan took up the golden cup, and gave her back smile for
smile. "I
drink," he said, "to my mother, Acaill of Orgiall."
But the King snatched the cup from his fingers, and dashed it
down on
the board, so that the yellow mead spilled and stained
Astrild's cloak
; but she did not dare complain, for there was the
red light in
Cathal's eyes that was wont to make the boldest
afraid.
"Bring me another cup," he said to one that stood near.
"And now, will
none of ye do honour to the toast of Aonan-na-
Righ ? Bring ye also a
cup for the prince ; and, Guthbinn, put
your harp aside."
So in silence they drank to the memory of Acaill of Orgiall,
and
afterwards they sought to spin together the threads of their
broken
mirth, but not easily, for Astrild, who was wont to be
gayest, sat
pale, with her hand on the knife hidden in her breast ;
and the King
sat dumb and frowning, thinking, as Astrild knew,
of dead Acaill : how
he had loved and hated her, and, having slain
her father and brothers,
and brought her to Dunna Scaith a Golden
Hostage wearing a golden
chain, he had wedded her for her
beauty's sake ; and how until her
child was born she had never so
much as smiled or frowned for him ; and
how, when her babe lay
in her arms, she sent for her husband, and said
: "I thank thee,
Cathal, who hast set me free by means of this babe. I
bless thee
for this last gift of thine, who for all thine other gifts
have cursed
thee." And Cathal remembered how he had held babe and
mother to his heart, and said : "Good to hear soft words from thy
mouth
at last, O Acaill ! Speak again to me, and softly. But
she had not answered, for her first soft words to him were her
last. And
Astrild, watching him, saw his face grow black and
angry, and she
smiled softly to herself, and aloud she said :
"Oh, Guthbinn, sing again, and sing of thy brothers who fell
to-day—sing
of Oscar, the swift in battle, and Uaithne, of the
dark eyes. And will
my lord give leave that I, their mother, go
to weep for them in my own
poor house where they were born ?"
"No," said Cathal. "I bought you and your tears, girl, with
gold rings,
from Ocaill of Connaught. Sing to me now, and keep
thy tears for
to-morrow." So Astrild drove back her sorrow, and
began to sing, while
her son Guthbinn plucked slow music from his
harpstrings.
Guthbinn's hand faltered on the harpstrings, and the singer stopped
swiftly : but King Cathal stayed the tears in her heart with an
angry
word. "Have I had not always had my will ? And it is
not my will now
for you to weep." So Astrild sat still, and she
looked at her sons :
but Toran was busy boasting of the white
neck and blue eyes of the new
slave-girl he had won, and Coloman
was dreaming, as he sat with his eyes on the stars that showed
through
the open door : and only Guthbinn met her eyes and
answered them,
though he seemed to be busy with his harp. And
presently Cathal rose
up, bidding all keep their seats and finish
out the feast, but Astrild
and Aonan he bade follow him. And
so they went into the farthest
chamber of the House of Shields,
which looked upon a deep ditch. Now
the end of the chamber
was a wall of wattles, and here there was cut a
door that led out
on a high bank which overlooked the ditch. And the
King went
out upon the bank, where there was a chair placed ready for
him,
and Astrild sat at his knee, and Aonan-na-Righ stood a little
way off. And Cathal sat still for a time, holding Astrild's hand
in
his, and presently he said : "Who put the death in the cup
to-night,
Astrild, thou or Guthbinn ?" And Astrild tried to
draw her hand away
and to rise, but he held her in her place, and
asked again, "Guthbinn,
or thou ?" until she answered him
sullenly as she knelt, "King, it was
I."
"Belike, Guthbinn's hand did thy bidding," he said, in laughing
fashion.
"Was the death for me or for Aonan yonder, thou Red-
Hair ?"
And Astrild laughed as she answered, "For Aonan-na-Righ,
my lord." And
then she shrieked and sought to rise, for she saw
death in the king's
face as it bent over her.
"If thou hadst sought to slay thy master, Red-Hair, I might
have
forgiven thee," Cathal said ; "but what had my son to do
with thee, my
light-o'-love ?"
"Give me a day," Astrild said desperately, "and I will kill father
and
son, and set the light-o'-love's children on your throne, Cathal."
"I doubt it not, my wild-cat, but I will not give ye the day :"
Cathal
laughed. "Good courage, girl—and call thy Danish gods
to aid, for there
is none other to help thee, now."
"What will my lord do?" Aonan said quickly, as the Dane
turned a white
face and flaming eyes to him. "Wouldst kill
her ?"
"Ay," said Cathal the King. "But first she shall leave her
beauty behind
her, lest she meet thy mother in the Land of Youth,
and Acaill be
jealous."
"Leave her beauty and breath, lord," Aonan said, drawing
nearer. "If my
mother Acaill lived she would not have her slain.
My king, she pleased
thee once ; put her from thee if she vexes
thee now ; but leave her
life, since something thou owest
her."
"She would have slain thee to-day, Aonan, and if I have dealt
ill by
thee, I let no other deal thus. Yet if thou prayest me for
thy life,
girl, for love of Acaill I will give it thee."
And Cathal laughed, for he knew the Dane would not plead in
that name.
Astrild laughed too. "Spare thy breath, son of
Acaill," she said
scornfully. "To-morrow the cord may be round
thy neck, and thou be in
need of breath ; now lord, the cord for
mine——"
Cathal smiled grimly.
"Blackheart," he said, "thou hast no lack of courage. Now
up," and he
loosened her hands, "and fly if thou wilt—swim the
ditch, and get thee
to Drumcoll-choille—and Guthbinn shall die
in thy stead. What ! Thou
wouldst liefer die ? Back then to
yonder chamber, where my men will
deal with thee as I have
ordered, and be as patient as in thee lies. A
kiss first, Red-Hair ;
and hearken from yonder chamber if thou wilt,
while Aonan sings
a dirge for thee."
She went ; and presently there rang from within the chamber
the shrill
scream of a woman's agony, and Cathal laughed to see
Aonan's face turn
white. "She is not as patient as thou," he
said, "but she will learn. Keep thou my word to her, Aonan ;
sing a
dirge for her beauty a-dying."
"I cannot sing," Aonan-na-Righ said, shivering as there rose
another
shriek. "Let them slay her, my lord, and have done."
"My will runs otherwise," said Cathal, smiling. "Sing, if
thou lovest
thy life."
"My lord knows that I do not," Aonan answered ; and Cathal
smiled
again.
"Belike not ; but sing and lessen the Dane's punishment.
When the song
is finished she shall be released, and even tended
well."
So Aonan sang the song of the Dane-land over the water, and
the Danes
that died in the Valley of Keening—which is now called
Waterford ; of
the white skin and red hair of Astrild ; of her
grace and daring ; of
the sons that lay dead on the battle-place ;
of Coloman the dreamer
that read the stars ; and of the beautiful
boy whose breast was a nest
of nightingales. And then he sang—
more softly—of the Isle of the Noble
where Acaill dwelt, and how
she would have shadowed Astrild with her
pity if she had lived ;
and then he stopped singing and knelt before
the King, dumb for
a moment with the passion of his pity, for from the
open door
they could hear a woman moaning still.
"Lord," he said, "make an end. My life for hers—if a life
the King must
have ; or my pain for hers—if the King must needs
feed his ears with
cries."
"Graciously spoken, and like Acaill's son," King Cathal said.
"And
Astrild shall be set free. You within the chamber take
the Dane to her
son the lord Coloman's keeping ; and thou, my
son Aonan, tarry here
till I return. I may have a fancy to send
thee with a message to thy
mother before dawn. Nay, but come
with me, and we will go see Coloman,
and ask how his mother
does. Give me thine arm to lean on ; I am tired, Aonan, I am old,
and an
end has come to my pleasure in slaying .... Coloman !"
They were in Coloman's chamber now, and the Druid turned
from
star-gazing to greet the King, with a new dark look in his
gentle face.
"Coloman, how does thy mother do now ? She had
grown too bold in her
pride, but we did not slay her because of
Aonan here. How works our
medicine that we designed to
temper her beauty ?"
"Well, lord. No man will kiss my mother's beauty more."
"Good : now she will turn her feet into ways of gentleness,
perhaps.
Thou boldest me a grudge for this medicine o' mine,
my son Coloman
?"
"Lord, she is my mother," the Druid said, looking down.
"The scars will heal," Cathal said ; "but—Aonan here has only
seen her
beautiful. Coloman, wouldst thou have him see her
scarred and foul to
see ?"
"No, lord," the Druid said fiercely. Cathal laughed.
"Have a gift of me, then, O Coloman," he said. "Spare him
from sight of
a marred beauty, in what way thou canst. I give
thee his eyes for thy
mother's scars."
The two young men looked at each other steadily : then
Aonan spoke.
"Take the payment that the King offers thee,
Coloman, without fear : a
debt is a debt."
"And the debt is heavy."
Coloman said hoarsely : "Lord, wilt thou go and leave Aonan-
na-Righ to
me ? And wilt thou send to me thy cunning men,
Flathartach and Fadhar ?
I must have help."
"Aonan-na-Righ will not hinder thee, Coloman," said the
King, mockingly.
"He desires greatly to meet with his mother :
and do thou commend me
also to the Lady Eivir, whom I wedded
first, and who loved me
well."
"Call me also to thy mother's memory," Toran the boaster
cried
presently, when all was made ready, and Coloman bade draw
the irons
from the brazier—"if thou goest so far, Darling of the
King."
"I will remember," Aonan said : and then fire and flesh met.
* * * * *
At the next Beltane feast Cathal the Red slept beside Acaill in
the
burial-place of the kings at Brugh, and Guthbinn sat in the
high seat,
Toran the boaster at his right hand. But Coloman the
Druid stood on the
tower-top, reading the faces of the stars ; and
along the road that
wound its dusty way to the country of the
Golden Hostages there toiled
two dark figures : a woman and a
man. Now the woman was hooded and
masked, but under the
grey hood the moonlight found a gleam of ruddy
hair ; and the
man she led by the hand and watched over as a mother
watches
her son. Yet the woman was Danish Astrild, and the blind
man
was Aonan-na-Righ.
A PHANTOM regiment of giant mist-pillars swept silently
across the
valley ; beaded drops loaded each tuft of coarse,
dull-tinted grass ;
the peat-hags gaped like black, dripping flesh-
wounds in the earth's
side; the distance suggested rectangular fields
and wooded
slopes—vague, grey, phantasmagoric ; and down over
everything floated
the damp of fine rain.
Alec's heavy tread crunched the turfed bridle-path rhythmically,
and
from the stiff rim of his clerical hat the water dribbled on to
his
shoulders.
It was a rugged, irregular, almost uncouth face, and now the
features
were vacantly huddled in a set expression, obviously
habitual. The
cheeks were hunched up, almost concealing the
small eyes ; a wet wisp
of hair straggled over the puckered
forehead, and the ragged, fair
moustache was spangled by the
rain.
At his approach the sheep scampered up the fell-side ; then,
stood
staring through the mist in anxious stupidity. And Alec,
shaking the
water from his hat, strode forward with an almost
imperceptible gleam
on his face. It was so that he liked the valley
—all colourless and
blurred, with the sky close overhead, like a low,
leaden ceiling.
By-and-by, a cluster of cottages loomed ahead—a choppy pool
of black
slate roofs, wanly a-glimmer in the wet. As he entered
the village, a
group of hard-featured men threw him a curt
chorus of greetings, to
which he raised his stick in response,
mechanically.
He mounted the hill. Three furnace-chimneys craned their
thin necks to
grime the sky with a dribbling, smoky breath ;
high on a bank of
coal-dust, blurred silhouettes of trucks stood
waiting in forlorn
strings ; women, limp, with unkempt hair,
and loose, bedraggled skirts,
stood round the doorways in gossiping
groups.
"Which is Mrs. Matheson's ?" he stopped to ask.
"There—oop there, Mr. Burkett—by yon ash—where them
childer's standin',"
they answered, all speaking together, eagerly.
"Look ye ! that be Mrs.
Matheson herself."
Alec went up to the woman. His face clouded a little, and the
puffs from
his pipe came briskly in rapid succession.
"Mrs. Matheson, I've only just heard——Tell me, how did
it happen ?" he
asked gently.
She was a stout, red-faced woman, and her eyes were all bloodshot
with
much crying. She wiped them hastily with the corner of
her apron before
answering.
"It was there, Mr. Burkett, by them rails. He was jest playin'
aboot in
t'road wi' Arnison's childer. At half-past one, t'grand-
moother
stepped across to fetch me a jug o' fresh water an'
she see'd him
settin' in door there. Then—mabbee twenty minutes
later—t' rain coome
on an' I thought to go to fetch him in.
But I could'na see na sign of
him anywhere. We looked oop
and doon, and thought, mabbee, he'd toddled
roond to t' back.
An' then, all at once, Dan Arnison called to us that
he was leein'
in t' water, doon in beck-pool. An' Dan ran straight
doon, an'
carried him oop to me ; but t'was na use. He was quite cold
and
drownded. An' I went——" But the sobs, rising thickly,
swallowed the
rest.
Alec put his hand on her shoulder soothingly.
"Ay, I know'd ye'd be grieved, Mr. Burkett. He was the
bonniest boy in
all t' parish."
She lifted the apron to her eyes again, while he crossed to the
railings. The wood of the posts was splintered and worm-eaten,
and the
lower rail was broken away. Below, the rock shelved
down some fifteen
feet to the beck-pool, black and oily-looking.
"It's a very dangerous place," he said, half to himself.
"Ay, Mr. Burkett, you're right," interrupted a bent and
wizened old
woman, tottering forward.
"This be grandmoother, Mr. Burkett," Mrs. Matheson ex-
plained. "'Twas
grandmoother that see'd him last——"
"Ay, Mr. Burkett," the old woman began in a high, tremulous
treble.
"When I went fer to fill t' jug fer Maggie he was
a-settin' on t' steps
there playin with t' kitten, an' he called after
me, 'Nanny !' quite
happy-like ; but I took na notice, but jest
went on fer t' water. I
shawed Mr. Allison the broken rail
last month, when he was gittin' t'
rents, and I told him he
ought to put it into repair, with all them wee
childer playin' all
daytime on t' road. Didn't I, Maggie?" Mrs.
Matheson
assented incoherently. "An' he was very civil-like, was
Mr.
Allison, and he said he'd hev' it seen to. It's alus that way,
Mr. Burkett," the old woman concluded, shaking her head wisely.
"Folks
wait till some accident occurs, and then they think to
bestir
themselves."
Alec turned to the mother, and touched her thick, nerveless hand.
"There, there, Mrs. Matheson, don't take on so," he said.
At his touch her sobbing suddenly ceased, and she let her apron
fall.
"Will ye na coome inside, Mr. Burkett ?" she asked.
And they all three went in together.
The little room had been scrubbed and tidied, and a number of
chairs,
ranged round the table, blocked the floor.
"We've bin busy all marnin', gitting' things a bit smartened
oop for
t'inquest. T' coroner's cooming at twelve," the grand-
mother
explained.
"Will ye coome oopstairs, Mr. Burkett—jest—jest to tak' a
look at him ?
" Mrs. Matheson asked in a subdued voice.
Alec followed her, squeezing his burly frame up the narrow,
creaking
staircase.
The child lay on the clean, white bed. A look of still serenity
slept on
his pallid face. His tawny curls were smoothed back,
and some snowdrops
were scattered over the coverlet. All was
quite simple.
Mrs. Matheson stood in the doorway, struggling noisily with
her
sobs.
"It is God's will," Alec said quietly.
"He was turned four last week," she blurted out. "Ye'll
excuse me, Mr.
Burkett, but I'm that overdone that I jest canna'
help myself," and she
sank into a chair.
He knelt by the dead child's side and prayed, while the slow
rise and
fall of the mother's sobs rilled the room. When he rose
his eyes were
all moist.
"God will help you, if you ask Him. His ways are secret. We
cannot
understand His purpose. But have faith in Him. He has
done it for the
best," he said.
"Ay, I know, I know, Mr. Burkett. But ye see he was the
youngest, and
that bonny——"
"Let me try to comfort you," he said.
*****
When they came downstairs again, her face was calmer and her
voice
steadier. The coroner, a dapper man with a bright-red tie,
was taking
off his gloves and macintosh ; the room was fast filling
with silent
figures, and the old grandmother was hobbling to and
fro with noisy,
excited importance.
"Will ye na' stay for t' inquest ?"
Alec shook his head. "No, I can't stop now. I have a School-
board
meeting to go to. But I will come up this afternoon."
"Thank'ee, Mr. Burkett, God bless thee," said Mrs. Matheson.
He shook hands with the coroner, who was grumbling con-
cerning the
weather ; then strode out back down the valley.
Though long since he had grown familiar with the aspects of
suffering,
that scene in the cottage, by reason of its very simplicity,
had
affected him strangely. His heart was full of slow sorrow for
the
woman's trouble, and the image of the child, lying beautiful
in its
death-sleep, passed and repassed in his mind.
By-and-bye, the moaning of the wind, the whirling of lost
leaves, the
inky shingle-beds that stained the fell-sides, inclined his
thoughts to
a listless brooding.
Life seemed dull, inevitable, draped in sombre, drifting shadows,
like
the valley-head. Yet in all good he saw the hand of God, a
mysterious,
invisible force, ever imperiously at work beneath the
ravages of
suffering and of sin.
It was close upon six o' clock when he reached home. He was
drenched to
the skin, and as he sat before the fire, dense clouds of
steam rose
from his mud-stained boots and trousers.
"Now, Mr. Burkett, jest ye gang and tak off them things,
while I make
yer tea. Ye'll catch yer death one of these days—
I know ye will. I
sometimes think ye haven't more sense than
a boy, traipsin' about all t' day in t' wet, and niver takin' yer meals
proper-like."
A faint smile flickered across his face. He was used to his
landlady's
scoldings.
"A child was drowned yesterday in the beck up at Beda
Cottages. I had to
go back there this afternoon to arrange about
the funeral," he mumbled,
half-apologetically.
Mrs. Parkin snorted defiantly, bustling round the table as she
spread
the cloth. Presently she broke out again :
"An' noo, ye set there lookin' as white as a bogle. Why
don't ye go an'
git them wet clothes off. Ye're fair wringin'."
He obeyed ; though the effort to rise was great. He felt
curiously cold
: his teeth were clacking, and the warmth from the
flames seemed
delicious.
In his bedroom a dizziness caught him, and it was a moment
before he
could recognise the familiar objects. And he realised
that he was ill,
and looked at himself in the glass with a dull, scared
expression. He
struggled through his dressing however, and went
back to his tea. But,
though he had eaten nothing since the
morning, he had no appetite ; so,
from sheer force of habit, he lit
a pipe, wheeling his chair close to
the fire.
And, as the heat penetrated him, his thoughts spun aimlessly
round the
day's events, till these gradually drifted into the back-
ground of his
mind, as it were, and he and they seemed to have
become altogether
detached. His forehead was burning, and a
drowsy, delicious sense of
physical weakness was stealing over his
limbs. He was going to be ill,
he remembered ; and it was with
vague relief that he looked forward to
the prospect of long days of
monotonous inactivity, long days of repose
from the daily routine
of fatigue. The details of each day's work, the
accomplishment
of which, before, had appeared so indispensable, now, he
felt in his
lassitude, had faded to insignificance. Mrs. Parkin was right :
he had
been overdoing himself; and with a clear conscience he
would take a
forced holiday in bed. Things in the parish would
get along without him
till the end of the week. There was
only the drowned child's funeral,
and, if he could not go, Milner,
the neighbouring vicar, would take it
for him. His pipe slipped
from his hand to the hearthrug noiselessly,
and his head sank
forward. . . .
He was dreaming of the old churchyard. The trees were
rocking their
slim, bare arms ; drip, drip, drip, the drops pattered
on to the
tombstones, tight-huddled in the white, wet light of the
moon ; the
breath of the old churchyard tasted warm and moist,
like the reek of
horses after a long journey.
The child's funeral was finished. Mrs. Matheson had cried
noisily into
her apron ; the mourners were all gone now ; and
alone, he sat down on
the fresh-dug grave. By the moonlight he
tried to decipher the names
carved on the slabs ; but most of the
letters had faded away, and
moss-cushions had hidden the rest.
Then he found it—"George Matheson,
aged four years and five
days," and underneath were carved Mrs.
Matheson's words :
"He was the bonniest boy in all the parish." He sat
on, with
the dread of death upon him, the thought of that black
senseless-
ness ahead, possessing him, so sudden, so near, so intimate,
that it
seemed entirely strange to have lived on, forgetful of it.
By-
and-bye, he saw her coming towards him—Ethel, like a figure
from a picture, wearing a white dress that trailed behind her,
a red
rose pinned at the waist, and the old smile on her lips. And
she came
beside, him, and told him how her husband had gone
away for ever, and
he understood at once that he and she were
betrothed again, as it had
been five years ago. He tried to answer
her, but somehow the words
would not come ; and, as he was
striving to frame them, there came a great crash. A bough
clattered down
on the tombstones ; and with a start he awoke.
A half-burned coal was smoking in the fender. He felt as if he
had been
sleeping for many hours.
He fell to stupidly watching the red-heat, as it pulsed through
the
caves of coal, to imagining himself climbing their ashen
mountain-ridges, across dark defiles, up the face of treacherous
precipices. . . .
Hundreds of times, here, in this room, in this chair, before this
fire,
he had sat smoking, picturing the old scenes to himself,
musing of
Ethel Fulton (Ethel Winn she had been then ; but,
after her marriage,
he had forced himself to think of her as bearing
her husband's
name—that was a mortification from which he had
derived a sort of
bitter satisfaction). But now, with the long
accumulation of his
solitude—five years he had been vicar of
Scarsdale—he had grown so
unconscious of self, so indifferent to
the course of his own existence,
that every process of his mind
had, from sheer lack of external
stimulation, stagnated, till, little
by little, the growth of
mechanical habit had come to mould its
shape and determine its
limitations. And hence, not for a
moment had he ever realised the grip
that this habit of senti-
mental reminiscence had taken on him, nor the
grotesque extent
of its futile repetition. Such was the fervour of his
attitude
towards his single chapter of romance.
Five years ago, she and he had promised their lives to one
another. And
the future had beckoned them onward, gaily,
belittling every obstacle
in its suffusion of glad, alluring colour.
He was poor : he had but his
curate's stipend, and she was used to
a regular routine of ease. But he
would have tended her wants,
waiting on her, watching over her,
indefatigably ; chastening all
the best that was in him, that he might
lay it at her feet. And
together, hand in hand, they would have laboured in God's service.
At
least so it seemed to him now.
Then had come an enforced separation ; and later, after a
prolonged,
unaccountable delay, a letter from her explaining, in
trite, discursive
phrases, how it could never be—it was a mistake
—she had not known her
own mind—now she could see things
clearer—she hoped he would forgive
and forget her.
A wild determination to go at once to her, to plead with her,
gripped
him ; but for three days he was helpless, bound fast by
parish duties.
And when at last he found himself free, he had
already begun to
perceive the hopelessness of such an errand, and,
with crushed and
dogged despair, to accept his fate as irrevocable.
In his boyhood—at the local grammar-school, where his ugli-
ness had
made him the butt of his class, and later, at an insignificant
Oxford
college, where, to spare his father, whose glebe was at the
time
untenanted, he had set himself grimly to live on an impossibly
slender
allowance—at every turn of his life, he had found himself
at a
disadvantage with his fellows. Thus he had suffered much,
dumbly—meekly
many would have said—without a sign of resent-
ment, or desire for
retaliation. But all the while, in his tenacious,
long-suffering way,
he was stubbornly inuring himself to an
acceptance of his own
disqualifications. And so, once rudely
awakened from his dream of love,
he wondered with heavy
curiosity at his faith in its glamorous reality,
and, remembering
the tenour of his life, suffered bitterly like a man
befooled by his
own conceit.
Some months after the shattering of his romance, the rumour
reached him
that James Fulton, a prosperous solicitor in the town,
was courting
her. The thing was impossible, a piece of idle
gossip, he reasoned with
himself. Before long, however, he heard
it again, in a manner that left
no outlet for doubt.
It seemed utterly strange, unaccountable, that she, whose eager
echoing
of all his own spiritual fervour and enthusiasm for the
work of the
Church still rang in his ears, should have chosen a
man, whose sole
talk had seemed to be of dogs and of horses, of
guns and of game ; a
man thick-minded, unthinking, self-com-
placent ; a man whom he himself
had carelessly despised as devoid
of any spark of spirituality.
And, at this moment, when the first smartings of bitter bewil-
derment
were upon him, the little living of Scarsdale fell vacant,
and his
rector, perhaps not unmindful of his trouble, suggested
that he should
apply for it.
The valley was desolate and full of sombre beauty ; the parish,
sparsely-peopled but extensive ; the life there would be monotonous,
almost grim, with long hours of lonely brooding. The living was
offered
to him. He accepted it excitedly.
And there, busied with his new responsibilities, throwing him-
self into
the work with a suppressed, ascetic ardour, news of the
outside world
reached him vaguely, as if from afar.
He read of her wedding in the local newspaper : later, a few
trite
details of her surroundings ; and then, nothing more.
But her figure remained still resplendent in his memory, and, as
time
slipped by, grew into a sort of gleaming shrine, incarnating
for him
all the beauty of womanhood. And gradually, this incar-
nation grew
detached, as it were, from her real personality, so that,
when twice a
year he went back to spend Sunday with his old
rector, to preach a
sermon in the parish church, he felt no shrink-
ing dread lest he
should meet her. He had long ceased to bear any
resentment against her,
or to doubt that she had done what was
right. The part that had been
his in the little drama seemed
altogether of lesser importance.
*****
All night he lay feverishly tossing, turning his pillow aglow
with heat,
from side to side ; anxiously reiterating whole inco-
herent
conversations and jumbled incidents.
At intervals, he was dimly conscious of the hiss of wind-swept
leaves
outside, and of rain-gusts rattling the window-panes ; and
later, of
the sickly light of early morning streaking the ceiling
with curious
patterns. By-and-bye, he dropped into a fitful sleep,
and forgot the
stifling heat of his bed.
Then the room had grown half full of daylight, and Mrs.
Parkin was
there, fidgetting with the curtains. She said some-
thing which he did
not hear, and he mumbled that he had slept
badly, and that his head was
aching.
Some time later—how long he did not know—she appeared again,
and a man,
whom he presently understood to be a doctor, and who
put a thermometer,
the touch of which was deliciously cool, under
his armpit, and sat down
at the table to write. Mrs. Parkin
and he talked in whispers at the
foot of the bed : they went away ;
Mrs. Parkin brought him a cup of
beef-tea and some toast ; and
then he remembered only the blurred
memories of queer, un-
finished dreams.
Consciousness seemed to return to him all of a sudden ; and,
when it was
come, he understood dimly that, somehow, the fatigue of
long pain was
over, and he tasted the peaceful calm of utter lassitude.
He lay quite still, his gaze following Mrs. Parkin, as she moved
to and
fro across the room, till it fell on a basket-full of grapes
that stood
by the bedside. They were unfamiliar, inexplicable ;
they puzzled him ;
and for awhile he feebly turned the matter
over in his mind. Presently
she glanced at him, and he lifted his
hand towards the basket.
"Would ye fancy a morsel o' fruit noo ? 'Twas Mrs. Fulton
that sent
'em," she said.
She held the basket towards him, and he lifted a bunch from it.
They
were purple grapes, large and luscious-looking. Ethel had
sent them.
How strange that was ! For an instant he doubted
if he were awake, and
clutched the pillow to make sure that it was
real.
"Mrs. Fulton sent them ?" he repeated.
"Ay, her coachman came yesterday in t' forenoon to inquire
how ye were
farin', and left that fruit for ye. Ay, Mr. Burkett,
but ye've had a
mighty quantity o' callers. Most all t' parish has
been askin for news
o' ye. An' that poor woman from t' factory
cottages has been doon
forenoon and night."
"How long have I been in bed ?" he asked after a pause.
"Five days and five nights. Ye've bin nigh at death's door,
ravin' and
moanin' like a madman. But, noo, I must'na keep ye
chatterin'. Ye
should jest keep yeself quiet till t' doctor coomes.
He'll be mighty
surprised to find ye so much improved, and in
possession of yer
faculties."
And she left him alone.
He lay staring at the grapes, while excitement quickened every
pulse.
Ethel had sent them—they were from Ethel—Ethel had
sent them through
his brain, to and fro, boisterously, the thought
danced. And then, he
started to review the past, dispassionately,
critically, as if it were
another man's ; and soon, every detail, as he
lingered on it, seemed to
disentangle itself, till it all achieved a curious
simplification. The
five years at Scarsdale became all blurred : they
resembled an
eventless waste-level, through which he had been
mechanically trudging.
But the other day, it seemed, he was with
her—he and she betrothed to
one another. A dozen scenes passed
before his eyes : with a flush of
hot, intolerable shame, he saw
himself, clumsy, uncouth, devoid of
personal charm, viewing her
bluntly, selfishly through the cumbrous
medium of his own
personality. And her attitude was clear too : the glamour, woven
of
habitual, sentimental reminiscence, faded, as it were, from her
figure,
and she appeared to him simply and beautifully human ;
living,
vibrating, frail.
letter of hers—the promptings of each phrase ; the outpourings
of
his ideals, enthusiasms, aspirations—callow, blatant, crude, he
named them bitterly—had scared her : she had felt herself unequal
to
the strain of the life he had offered her : in her loveable,
womanish
frailty, she had grown to dread it ; and he realised all
that she had
suffered before she had brought herself to end it—the
long struggles
with doubt and suspense. The veil that had
clogged his view was lifted
: he knew her now : he could read
the writing on her soul : he was
securely equipped for loving her ;
and now, she had passed out of his
life, beyond recall. In his
blindness he had not recognised her, and
had driven her away.
How came it that to-day, for the first time, all these things were
made
clear ?
The clock struck ; and while he was listening to its fading
note, the
door-handle clicked briskly, and the doctor walked in.
He talked
cheerily of the crops damaged by the storm, and the
sound of his voice
seemed to vibrate harshly through the
room.
"There's a heavy shower coming up," he remarked. "By the
way, you're
quite alone here, Mr. Burkett, I believe. Have you
no relatives whom
you would like to send for ?"
"No—no one," Alec answered. "Mrs. Parkin will look after
me."
"Yes—but you see," and he came and sat down by the bedside,
"I don't say
there's any immediate danger ; but you've had a very
near touch of it.
Now isn't there any old friend ?—you ought
not to be alone like this."
He spoke the last words with emphasis.
Alec shook his head. His gaze had fallen on the basket of
grapes again :
he was incoherently musing of Ethel.
"Mind, I don't say there's any immediate danger," he heard the
man
repeating; "but I must tell you that you're not altogether
out of the
wood yet."
He paused.
"You ought to be prepared for the worst, Mr. Burkett."
The last phrase lingered in Alec's mind ; and slowly its
meaning dawned
upon him.
"You mean I might die at any moment ? " he asked.
"No, no—I don't say that," the other answered evasively.
"But you see
the fever has left you very weak ; and of course in
such cases one can
never be quite sure——"
The rest did not reach Alec's ears ; he was only vaguely aware
of the
murmur of the man's voice.
Presently he perceived that he had risen.
"I will come back in the afternoon," he was saying. "I'll tell
Mrs.—Mrs.
Parker to bring you in some breakfast."
After the doctor had gone he dozed a little . . .
Then remembered the man's words—"No immediate danger,
but you must be
prepared for the worst." The sense of it all
flashed upon him : he
understood what the man had meant : that
was the way doctors always
told such things he guessed. So the
end was near . . . He wondered, a
little curiously, if it would
come before to-night, or to-morrow ... It
was near, quite near,
he repeated to himself; and gradually, a
peacefulness permeated
his whole being, and he was vaguely glad to be
alone. . . .
A little while, and he would be near God. He felt himself
detached from
the world, and at peace with all men.
His life, as he regarded it trailing behind him, across the stretch
of
past years, seemed inadequate, useless, pitiable almost ; of his
own personality, as he now realised it, he was ashamed—petty
mortifications, groping efforts, a grotesque capacity for futile,
melancholy brooding—he rejoiced that he was to have done with
it. The
end was near, quite near, he repeated once again.
Then, afterwards, would come rest—the infinite rest of the
Saviour's
tenderness, and the strange, wonderful expectation
of the mysterious
life to come . . . A glimpse of his own serenity, of
his own
fearlessness, came to him ; and he was moved by a quick
flush of
gratitude towards God. He thought of the terror of the
atheist's
death—the world, a clod of dead matter blindly careering
through space
; humanity, a casual, senseless growth, like the
pullulating insects on
a rottening tree. . . .
A little while, only a little while, and he would be near God.
And,
softly, under his breath, he implored pardon for the countless
shortcomings of his service. . . .
The German clock on the mantel-piece ticked with methodical
fussiness :
the flames in the grate flickered lower and lower ; and one
by one
dropped, leaving dull-red cinders. Through the window,
under the
half-drawn blind, was the sky, cold with the hard, white
glare of the
winter sun, flashing above the bare, bony mountain-
backs ; and he
called to mind spots in the little, desolate parish,
which, with a
grim, clinging love, he had come to regard as his
own for always. Who
would come after him, live in this house
of his, officiate in the
square, grey-walled church, move and work
in God's service among the
people ? . . .
And, while he lay drowsily musing on the unfinished dream,
a muffled
murmur of women's voices reached his ears. By an
intuition, akin
perhaps to animal instinct, he knew all at once
that it was she,
talking with Mrs. Parkin down in the room below.
Prompted by a rush of
imperious impulse he raised himself on his
elbow to listen.
There was a rustling of skirts in the passage and the sound of
the
voices grew clearer.
"Good day, ma'am, and thank ye very kindly, I'm sure," Mrs.
Parkin was
saying.
No reply came, though he was straining every nerve to
catch it ... At
last, subdued, but altogether distinct,
voice :
"You're sure there's nothing else I can send ?"
The door of his room was ajar. He dug his nails into the
panel-edge, and
tried to swing it open. But he could scarcely
move it, and in a moment
she would be gone.
Suddenly he heard his own voice—loud and queer it sounded:
"Ethel—Ethel."
Hurried steps mounted the stairs, and Mrs. Parkin's white cap
and
spectacled face appeared.
"What be t'matter, Mr. Burkett ?" she asked breathlessly.
"Stop her—tell her."
"Dearie, dearie me, he's off wanderin' agin."
"No, no ; I'm all right—tell—ask Mrs. Fulton if she would
come up to see
me ?"
"There, there, Mr. Burkett, don't ye excite yeself. Ye're not
fit to see
any one, ye know that. Lie ye doon agin, or ye'll be
catchin' yer death
o' cauld."
"Ask her to come, please—just for a minute."
"For Heaven's sake lie doon. Ye'll be workin' yeself into a
fever next.
There, there, I'll ask her for ye, though I've na
notion what t'doctor
'ud say."
She drew down the blind and retired, closing the door quietly
behind
her.
The next thing he saw was Ethel standing by his bedside.
He lay watching her without speaking. She wore a red dress
trimmed with fur ; a gold bracelet was round her gloved wrist, and
a
veil half-hid her features.
Presently he perceived that she was very white, that her mouth
was
twitching, and that her eyes were full of tears.
"Alec—I'm so sorry you're so ill ... Are you in pain ?"
He shook his head absently. Her veil and the fur on her cloak
looked
odd, he thought, in the half-light of the room.
"You will be better soon : the worst is over."
"No," he answered, with a dreary smile. "I am going to
die."
She burst into sobs.
"No, no, Alec . . . You must not think that."
He stretched his arm over the coverlet towards her, and felt the
soft
pressure of her gloved hand.
"Forgive me, Ethel, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pain you.
But it is so ;
the doctor told me this morning."
She sat down by the bedside, still crying, pressing her handker-
chief
to her eyes.
"Ethel, how strange it seems. Do you know I haven't seen
you since I
left Cockermouth ?" The words came deliberately,
for his mind had grown
quite calm. "How the time has
flown !"
Her grasp on his hand tightened, but she made no answer.
"It was very kind of you to come all this way, Ethel, to
see me. Will
you stay a little and let me talk to you ? It's
more than five years
since we ve talked together, you know," and
he smiled faintly. "Don't
cry so, Ethel, dear. I did not mean
to make you cry. There's no cause
to cry, dear ; you've made
me so happy."
"My poor, poor Alec," she sobbed.
"You'd almost forgotten the old days, perhaps," he continued
dreamily, talking half to himself; "for it's a long while ago now.
But
to me it seems as if it had all just happened. You see I've
been
vegetating rather, here in this lonely, little place . . . Don't
go on
crying, Ethel dear ... let me tell you about things a little.
There's
no harm in it now, because you know I'm——"
"Oh ! don't—don't say that. You'll get better. I know you
will."
"No, Ethel, I sha'n't. Something within me tells me that my
course is
done. Besides, I don't want to get better. I'm so
happy . . . Stay a
little with me, Ethel ... I wanted to
explain ... I was stupid,
selfish, in the old days——"
"It was I—I who—" she protested through her tears.
"No, you were quite right to write me that letter. I've
thought that
almost from the first . . . I'm sure of it," he added,
as if convincing
himself definitely. "It could never be . . . it was
my fault ... I was
stupid and boorish and wrapped up in myself.
I did not try to
understand your nature ... I didn't understand
anything about women ...
I never had a sister ... I took
for granted that you were always
thinking and feeling just as I
was. I never tried to understand you,
Ethel ... I was not fit
to be entrusted with you."
"Alec, Alec, it is not true. You were too good, too noble-
hearted. I
felt you were far above me. Beside you I felt I
was silly and
frivolous. Your standards about everything seemed
so high——"
But he interrupted, unheeding her :
"You don't know, Ethel, how happy you've made me. ... I
have thought of
you every day. In the evenings, I used to sit
alone, remembering you
and all the happy days we had together,
and the remembrance of them has
been a great joy to me. I used
to go over them all, again and again.
The day that we all went
to Morecambe, and that walk along the seashore, when the tide
caught us,
and I carried you across the water . . . the time that
we went to those
ruins, and you wore the primroses I picked for
you. And I used to read
over all your letters, and remember all
the things you used to say.
Downstairs, under the writing-table,
there is a black, tin cash-box—the
key is on my bunch—Mrs.
Parkin will give it you. It's where I've kept
everything that has
reminded me of you, all this time. Will you take it
back with
you ? . . . You don't know how you've helped me all these
years—
I wanted to tell you that . . . When I was in difficulties, I
used to
wonder how you would have liked me to act . . . When I was
lonely and low-spirited, I used to tell myself that you were happy."
He
paused for breath, and his voice died slowly in the stillness of
the
room. "You were quite right," he murmured almost inaudibly,
"I see it
all quite clearly now."
She was bending over him, and was framing his face in her two
hands.
"Say I was wrong," she pleaded passionately. "Say I was
wicked, wrong. I
loved you, Alec ... I was promised to you. I
should have been so happy
with you, dear . . . Alec, my Alec,
do not die . . . God will not let
you die . . . He cannot be so
cruel . . . Come back, Alec ... I love
you . . . Do you hear,
my Alec ? I love you . . . Ethel loves you . . .
Before God I
love you ... I was promised to you ... I broke my word . .
.
I loved you all the time, but I did not know it ... Forgive me,
my Alec . . . forgive me ... I shall love you always."
He passed his fingers over her forehead tentatively, as if he were
in
darkness.
"Ethel, every day, every hour, all these years, you have been
with me.
And now I am going away. Kiss me—just once—
just once. There can be no
wrong in it now."
She tore her veil from her face : their lips met, and her head
rested a
moment, sobbing on his shoulder.
"Hush ! don't cry, Ethel dear, don't cry. You have made me
so glad. . .
. And you will remember to take the box . . . And
you will think of me
sometimes . . . And I shall pray God to
make you happy, and I shall
wait for you, Ethel, and be with you
in thought, and if you have
trouble, you will know that I shall be
sorrowing with you. Isn't it so,
dear ? . . . Now, good-bye,
dear one—good-bye. May God watch over
you."
She had moved away. She came back again, however, and
kissed his
forehead reverently. But he was not aware of her
return, for his mind
had begun to wander.
She brushed past Mrs. Parkin in the passage, bidding her an
incoherent
good-bye : she was instinctively impatient to escape to
the protection
of familiar surroundings. Inside the house, she felt
helpless, dizzy :
the melodrama of the whole scene had stunned
her senses, and pity for
him was rushing through her in waves of
pulsing emotion.
As she passed the various landmarks, which she had noted on
her outward
journey—a group of Scotch firs, a roofless cattle-shed,
a pile of
felled trees—each seemed to wear an altered aspect.
With what a strange
suddenness it had all happened ! Yesterday
the groom had brought back
word that he was in delirium, and
had told her of the loneliness of the
house. It had seemed so sad,
his lying ill, all alone : the thought had
preyed on her conscience,
till she had started to drive out there to
inquire if there were any-
thing she could do to help him. Now, every
corner round which
the cart swung, lengthened the stretch of road that
separated her
from that tragic scene in his room . . . Perhaps it was
not right for
her to drive home and leave him? But she couldn't bear to
stay :
it was all so dreadful. Besides, she assured herself, she could
do
no good. There was the doctor, and that old woman who nursed
him—they
would see to everything . . . Poor, poor Alec—alone in
that grey-walled
cottage, pitched at the far end of this long, bleak
valley—the
half-darkened room—his wasted, feverish face—and his
she shivered as if with cold. Death seemed hideous,
awful, almost
wicked in the cruelty of its ruthlessness. And the
homeward
drive loomed ahead, interminably—for two hours she would
have
to wait with the dreadful, flaring remembrance of it all—two
hours—for the horse was tired, and it was thirteen miles, a man by
the
roadside had told her. . . .
He was noble-hearted, saint-like . . . Her pity for him welled up
once
more, and she convinced herself that she could have loved
him,
worshipped him, been worthy of him as a husband—and now
he lay dying.
He had revealed his whole nature to her, it seemed.
No one had ever
understood, as she did now, what a fine character
he was in reality.
Her cheeks grew hot with indignation and
shame, as she remembered how
she had heard people laugh at him
behind his back, refer to him
mockingly as the 'love-sick curate.'
And all this while—for five whole
years—he had gone on caring
for her—thinking of her each day, reading
her letters, recalling
the things she used to say—yes, those were his
very words.
Before, she had never suspected that it was in his nature
to
take it so horribly tragically ; yet, somehow, directly he had
fixed his eyes on her in that excited way, she had half-guessed
it. . .
.
The horse's trot slackened to a walk, and the wheels crunched
over a bed
of newly-strewn stones . . . She was considering how
much of what had
happened she could relate to Jim. Oh ! the
awfulness of his
him : she had told him that she cared for him : she hadn't
been able to help doing that. There was no harm in it ;
she had made him
happier—he had said so himself . . . But
Jim wouldn't understand : he
would be angry with her for
having gone, perhaps. He wouldn't see that
she couldn't have
done anything else. No, she couldn't bear to tell him
: besides,
it seemed somehow like treachery to Alec . . . Oh ! it must
be
awful to
have told him. It was horrible, cruel ... In
the past how she
had been to blame—she saw that now : thoughtless,
selfish, alto-
gether beneath him.
It was like a chapter in a novel. His loving her silently all
these
years, and telling her about it on his deathbed. At the
thought of it
she thrilled with subtle pride : it illuminated the
whole ordinariness
of her life. The next moment the train of
her own thoughts shamed her.
Poor, poor Alec. . . . And to
reinforce her pity, she recalled the
tragic setting of the scene.
That woman—his landlady—could she have heard anything, she
wondered with
a twinge of dread ? No, the door was shut, and
his voice had been very
low.
The horse turned on to the main road, and pricking his ears,
quickened
his pace.
She would remember him always. Every day, she would think
of him, as he
had asked her to do—she would never forget to do
that. And, if she were
in trouble, or difficulty, she would turn
her thoughts towards him,
just as he had told her he used to do.
She would try to become
better—more religious—for his sake.
She would read her Bible each
morning, as she knew had been his
habit. These little things were all
she could do now. Her
attitude in the future she would make worthy of
his in the
past ... He would become the secret guiding-star of her life
:
would be her hidden chapter of romance. . . .
The box that box which he had asked her to take. She had
promised, and
she had forgotten it. How could she get it ? It
was too late to turn
back now. Jim would be waiting for her.
She would only just be in time
for dinner as it was . . . How
could she get it ? If she wrote to his
landlady, and asked her to
send it it was under the writing-table in
the sitting-room he
had said . . . She
It was dark before she reached home. Jim was angry with her
for being
late, and for having driven all the way without a servant.
She paid no
heed to his upbraiding ; but told him shortly that
Alec was still in
great danger. He muttered some perfunctory
expression of regret, and
went off to the stables to order a bran-
mash for the horse. His
insensibility to the importance of the
tragedy she had been witnessing,
exasperated her : she felt bitterly
mortified that he could not divine
all that she had been suffering.
*****
The last of the winter months went, and life in the valley swept
its
sluggish course onwards. The bleak, spring winds rollicked,
hooting
from hill to hill. The cattle waited for evening, huddled
under the
walls of untrimmed stone ; and before the fireside, in
every farmhouse,
new-born lambs lay helplessly bleating. On
Sundays the men would loaf
in churlish groups about the church
door, jerk curt greetings at one
another, and ask for news of
Parson Burkett. It was a curate from
Cockermouth who took
the services in his stead—one of the new-fangled
sort ; a young
gentleman from London way, who mouthed his words like a
girl,
carried company manners, and had a sight of strange clerical
practices.
Alec was slowly recovering. The fever had altogether left
him : a
straw-coloured beard now covered his chin, and his cheeks
were grown
hollow and peaky-looking. But by the hay-harvest,
the doctor reckoned, he would be as strong as ever again—so it was
commonly reported.
Mrs. Parkin declared that the illness had done him a world o'
good.
"It's rested his mind like, and kept him from frettin'.
He was alus
ower given to studyin' on his own thoughts, till he got
dazed like and
took na notice o' things. An' noo," she would
conclude, "ye should jest
see him, smilin' as free as a child."
So, day after day, floated vaguely by, and to Alec the calm of
their
unbroken regularity was delicious. He was content to lie
still for
hours, thinking of nothing, remembering nothing, tasting
the torpor of
dreamy contemplation ; watching through the
window the slow drifting of
the shadows ; listening to the cackling
of geese, and the plaintive
bleating of sheep. . . .
By-and-bye, with returning strength, his senses quickened, and
grew
sensitive to every passing impression. To eat with elaborate
deliberation his invalid meals ; to watch the myriad specks of gold
dancing across a bar of sunlight—these were sources of keen,
exciting
delight. But in the foreground of his mind, transfiguring
with its
glamour every trivial thought, flashed the memory of Ethel's
visit. He
lived through the whole scene again and again, picturing
her veiled
figure as it had stood by the bedside, wrapped in the red,
fur cloak ;
and her protesting words, her passionate tears, seemed
to form a
mystic, indissoluble bond between them, that brightened
all the future
with rainbow colours.
God had given him back to her. Whether circumstances
brought them
together frequently, or whether they were forced to
live their lives
almost wholly apart, would, he told himself, matter
but little. Their
spiritual communion would remain unbroken.
Indeed, the prospect of such
separations, proving, as it did to him,
the sureness of the bond
between them, almost elated him. There
would be unquestioning trust
between them, and, though the
world had separated them, the best that was in him belonged to
her. When
at length they met, there would be no need for
insistance on common
points of feeling, for repeated handling of
past threads, as was
customary with ordinary friendships. Since
each could read the other's
heart, that sure intuition born of
chastened, spiritual love would be
theirs. If trouble came to her,
he would be there to sacrifice all at a
moment's bidding, after the
fashion of the knights of old. Because she
knew him, she would
have faith in him. To do her service would be his
greatest
joy.
At first the immobile, isolated hours of his convalescence made
all
these things appear simple and inevitable, like the events of a
great
dream. As time went on, however, he grew to chafe
against his long
confinement, to weary of his weakness, and of the
familiar sight of
every object in the room ; and in the mornings,
when Mrs. Parkin
brought him his breakfast, he found himself
longing for a letter from
her—some brief word of joy that he was
recovering. He yearned for some
material object, the touch of
which would recall her to him, as if a
particle of her personality
had impregnated the atoms.
Sometimes, he would force himself into believing that she would
appear
again, drive out to learn the progress of his recovery . . .
After
luncheon she would leave home . . . about half-past one,
probably . . .
soon after three, he would see her . . . Now,
she was nearing the
cross-roads . . . now climbing the hill past
Longrigg's farm . . . she
would have to walk the horse there . . .
now, crossing the old bridge.
He would lie watching the clock ;
and when the suspense grew
intolerable, to cheat it, he would bury
his head in the pillow to count
up to a thousand, before glancing at
the hands again. So would slip by
the hour of her arrival ; still,
he would struggle to delude himself
with all manner of excuses
for her—she had been delayed—she had missed the turning, and
had been
compelled to retrace her steps. And, when at length
the twilight had
come, he would start to assure himself that
it was to be to-morrow, and
sink into a fitful dozing, recounting
waking dreams of her, subtly
intoxicating. . . .
*****
In April came a foretaste of summer, and, for an hour or two
every day,
he was able to hobble downstairs. He perceived the
box at once, lying
in its accustomed place, and concluded that on
learning that he was out
of danger, she had sent it back to him.
The sight of it cheered him
with indefinable hope : it seemed to
signify a fresh token of her faith
in him: it had travelled with her
back to Cockermouth on that wonderful
day which had brought
them together ; and now, in his eyes, it was
invested with a new
preciousness. He unlocked it, and, somehow, to
discover that its
contents had not been disturbed, was a keen
disappointment. He
longed for proof that she had been curious to look
into it, that she
had thus been able to realise how he had prized every
tiny object
that had been consecrated for him by her. Then it flashed
across
him that she herself might have brought the box back, and
fearing to disturb him, had gone home again without asking to
see him.
All that evening he brooded over this supposition ; yet
shrank from
putting any question to Mrs. Parkin. But the
following morning, a
sudden impulse overcame his repugnance ;
and the next moment he had
learned the truth. Untouched,
unmoved, the box had remained all the
while—she had never
taken it—she had forgotten it. And depression swept
through
him ; for it seemed that his ideal had tottered.
His prolonged isolation and his physical lassitude had quickened
his
emotions to an abnormal sensibility, and had led him to a
constant
fingering, as it were, of his successive sentimental phases.
And these, since they constituted his sole diversion, he had un-
consciously come to regard as of supreme importance. The cum-
bersome,
complex details of life in the outside world had assumed
the
simplification of an indistinct background : in his vision of
her
figure he had perceived no perspective.
But now the grain of doubt was sown : it germinated in-
sidiously ; and
soon, the whole complexion of his attitude
towards her was transformed.
All at once he saw a whole net-
work of unforeseen obstacles, besetting
each detail of the prospect
he had been planning. Swarming uncertainty
fastened on him at
every turn ; till at last, goaded to desperation, he
stripped the gilding
from the accumulated fabric of his idealised
future.
And then his passion for her flamed up—ardent, unreasoning,
human. After
all, he loved as other men loved—that was the
truth : the rest was mere
calfish meandering. Stubbornly he
vindicated to himself his right to
love her . . . He was a man—
a creature of flesh and blood, and every
fibre within him was
crying out for her—for the sight of her face ; the
sound of her
voice ; the clasp of her hand. Body and soul he loved her
; body
and soul he yearned for her . . . She had come back to him—
she was his again—with passionate tears she had told him that she
loved
him. To fight for her, he was ready to abandon all else.
At the world's
laws he jibed bitterly ; before God they were man
and wife.
The knowledge that it lay in his power to make her his for life,
to bind
her to him irrevocably, brought him intoxicating relief.
Henceforward
he would live on, but for that end. Existence
without her would be
dreary, unbearable. He would resign his
living and leave the church.
Together they would go away,
abroad : he would find some work to do in
the great cities of
Australia . . . She was another man's wife—but the
sin would
be his—
would suffer the punishment. Besides, he told himself
exultantly,
the sin was it not already committed ? "Whosoever looketh
on a
woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her
already
in his heart."
He would go to her, say to her simply that he was come for
her. It
should be done openly, honestly in the full light of day.
New strength
and deep-rooted confidence glowed within him.
The wretched vacillation
of his former self was put away like an
old garment. Once more he sent
her words of love sounding
in his ears—the words that had made them man
and wife before
God. And on, the train of his thoughts whirled :
visions
of a hundred scenes flitted before his eyes—he and she together
as
man and wife, in a new home across the seas, where the past
was
all forgotten, and the present was redolent of the sure joy of
perfect
love. . . .
*****
He was growing steadily stronger. Pacing the floor of his
room, or the
gravel-path before the house, when the sun was
shining, each day he
would methodically measure the progress of
his strength. He hinted of a
long sea voyage to the doctor : the
man declared that it would be
madness to start before ten days had
elapsed. Ten days—the stretch of
time seemed absurd, intolerable.
But a quantity of small matters
relating to the parish remained to
be set in order : he had determined
to leave no confusion behind
him. So he mapped out a daily task for
himself: thus he could
already begin to work for her : thus each day's
accomplishment
would bring him doubly nearer to her. The curate, who
had
been taking his duty, came once or twice at his request to help him
;
for he was jealously nursing his small stock of strength. He
broke
the news of his approaching departure to Mrs. Parkin, and asked
her
to accept the greater portion of his furniture, as an inadequate token
of his gratitude towards her for all she had done for him. The
good
creature wept copiously, pestered him with questions
concerning his
destination, and begged him to give her news of
him in the future. Next
he sent for a dealer from Cockermouth
to buy the remainder, and
disputed with him the price of each
object tenaciously.
One afternoon his former rector appeared, and with tremulous
cordiality
wished him God-speed, assuming that the sea voyage
was the result of
doctor's advice. And it was when the old man
was gone, and he was alone
again, that, for the first time, with a
spasm of pain, he caught a
glimpse of the deception he was prac-
tising. But some irresistible
force within him urged him forward—
he was powerless—to look back was
impossible now—there was
more yet to be done—he must go on—there was no
time to stop
to think. So to deaden the rising conscience-pangs, he
fiercely
reminded himself that now, but five days more separated her
from
him. He sat down to write to his bishop and resign his
living,
struggling with ambiguous, formal phrases, impetuously
attributing
to his physical weakness his inability to frame them.
The letter at length finished, instinctively dreading fresh
gnawings of
uneasiness, he forced himself feverishly into thinking
of plans for the
future, busying his mind with, time-tables, searching
for particulars
of steamers, turning over the leaves of his bank-
book. All the money
which his father had left to him had
remained untouched : for three
years they could live comfortably on
the capital ; meanwhile he would
have found some work.
At last, when, with the growing twilight, the hills outside were
hurriedly darkening, he sank back wearily in his chair. And all
at once
he perceived with dismay that nothing remained for him
to do, nothing
with which he could occupy his mind. For the
moment he was alone with himself, and looking backwards,
realisation of
the eager facility with which he had successively
severed each link,
and the rapidity with which he had set himself
drifting towards a
future, impenetrable, with mysterious uncertainty,
stole over him. He
had done it all, he told himself, deliberately,
unaided ; bewildered,
he tried to bring himself face to face with
his former self, to survey
himself as he had been before the fever—
that afternoon when he had
gone up to Beda Cottages—plodding
indifferently through life in the
joyless, walled-in valley, which, he
now understood, had in a measure
reflected the spirit of his own
listless broodings. Scared remorse
seized him. The prospect of
departure, now that it was close at hand,
frightened him ; left him
aching as with the burden of dead weight, so
that, for a while, he
remained inert, dully acquiescing in his
accumulating disquietude.
Then, in desperation, he invoked her figure, imagining a dozen
incoherent versions of the coming scene—the tense words of
greeting,
his passionate pleading, her impulsive yielding, and the
acknowledgment
of her trust in him. . . .
By-and-bye, Mrs. Parkin brought him his dinner. He chatted
to her with
apparent unconcern, jested regarding his appetite ; for
a curious calm,
the lucidity evoked by suppressed elation, pervaded
him.
But through the night he tossed restlessly, waking in the dark-
ness to
find himself throbbing with triumphant exhilaration ; each
time
striking matches to examine the face of his watch, and
beginning afresh
to calculate the hours that separated him from the
moment that was to
bind them together—the irrevocable starting
towards the future
years.
*****
She stood in the bow-window of her drawing-room, arranging
some cut
flowers in slender pink and blue vases, striped with enamel
of imitation gold. Behind her, the room, uncomfortably orna-
mental,
repeated the three notes of colour—gilt paper shavings
filling the
grate ; gilt-legged chairs and tables ; stiff, shiny, pink
chintzes
encasing the furniture ; on the wall a blue-patterned
paper, all
speckled with stars of gold.
Outside, the little lawn, bathed in the fresh morning sunlight,
glowed a
luscious green, and the trim flower-beds swelled with
heightened
colours. A white fox-terrier came waddling along the
garden path : she
lifted the animal inside the window, stroking his
sleek sides with an
effusive demonstration of affection. Would
Jim remember to be home in
good time, she was idly wondering ;
she had forgotten to remind him
before he went to his office, that
to-night she was to sing at a local
concert.
Suddenly, she caught sight of a man's figure crossing the lawn.
For an
instant she thought it was an old clerk, whom Jim some-
times employed
to carry messages. Then she saw that it was
Alec—coming straight
towards her. Her first impulse was to
escape from him ; but noticing
that his gaze was fixed on the
ground, she retreated behind an angle of
the window, and stood
watching him . . . Poor Alec ! He was going away
on a sea-
voyage for his health, so Jim had heard it said in the town ;
and
she formed a hasty resolve to be very kind to the poor fellow.
Yet her vanity felt a prick of pique, as she noticed that his gait
was
grown more gaunt, more ungainly than ever ; and she resented
that his
haggard face, his stubbly beard, which, when he lay ill,
had signified
tense tragedy, should now seem simply uncouth.
Still, she awaited his
appearance excitedly ; anticipating a renewed
proof of his touching,
dog-like devotion to her, and with a fresh
thrill of unconscious
gratitude to him for having supplied that
scene to which she could look
back with secret, sentimental pride.
The maid let him into the room. As he advanced towards
her, she saw him brush his forehead with his hand impatiently,
as if to
rid his brain of an importunate thought. He took her
outstretched hand
: the forced cheeriness of her phrase of
greeting died away, as she
felt his gaze searching her face.
"Let us sit down," he said abruptly.
"I'm all right again, now," he began with a brisk, level laugh ;
and it
occurred to her that perhaps the illness had affected his mind.
"I'm so glad of that," she stammered in reply ; "so very glad.
. . . And
you're going away, aren't you, for a long sea voyage ?
That will do you
ever so much good——"
But before she had finished speaking, he was kneeling on the
carpet
before her, pouring out incoherent phrases. Bewildered,
she gazed at
him, only noticing the clumsy breadth of his shoulders.
"Listen to me, Ethel, listen," he was saying. "Everything
is ready—I've
given it all up—my living—the Church. I
can't bear it any longer—life
without you, I mean . . . You are
everything to me—I only want you—I
care for nothing else
now. I am going away to Australia. You will come
with me,
Ethel—you said you loved me . . . We love one
another—come
with me—let us start life afresh. I can't go on living
without
you ... I thought it would be easy for you to come ; I see
now
that perhaps it's difficult. You have your home : I see that . .
.
But have trust in me—I will make it up to you. Together we
will
start afresh— make a new home—a new life. I will give you
every moment
; I will be your slave . . . Listen to me, Ethel ; let
us go away.
Everything is ready—I've got money—I've arranged
everything. We can go
up to London to-morrow. The steamer
starts on Thursday."
The sound of his voice ceased. She was staring at the door,
filled with
dread lest it should open, and the maid should see him
kneeling on the
carpet.
"Don't," she exclaimed, grasping his coat. "Get up, quick."
He rose, awkwardly she thought, and stood before her.
"We were so happy together once, dear—do you remember—
in the first
days, when you promised yourself to me ? And now I
know that in your
heart you still care for me. You said so. Say
you will come—say you
will trust me—you will start to-morrow.
If you can't come so soon I
will wait, wait till you can come,"
he added, and she felt the
trembling touch of his hands on hers,
and his breath beating on her
face.
"Don't, please," and she pushed back his hands. "Some one
might
see."
"What does it matter, my darling ? We are going to belong
to one another
for always. I am going to wait for you, darling—
to be your slave—to
give up every moment of my life to you . . .
It's the thought of you
that's made me live, dear . . . You
brought me back to life, that day
you came . . . I've thought of
nothing but you since. I've been
arranging it all——"
"It's impossible," she interrupted.
"No, dear, it's not impossible," he pleaded.
"You've resigned your living—left the Church?" she asked
incredulously.
"Yes, everything," he answered proudly.
"And all because you cared so for me ?"
"I can't begin to live again without you. I would suffer
eternal
punishment gladly to win you . . . You will trust yourself
to me
darling ; say you will trust me."
"Of course, Alec, I trust you. But you ve no right to——"
"Oh ! because you're married, and it's a sin, and I'm a
clergyman. But
I'm a man first. And for you I've given it
all up—everything. You don't
understand my love for you."
"Yes, yes, I do," she answered quickly, alarmed by the earnest-
ness of his passion, yet remembering vaguely that she had read of
such
things in books.
"You will come to-morrow, darling—you will have trust in
me ?"
"You are mad, Alec. You don't know what you are saying.
It would be
absurd."
"It's because you don't understand how I love you, that you
say that,"
he broke out fiercely. "You can't understand—you
can't understand.
"Yes, I can," she protested, instinctively eager to vie with his
display of emotion.
"Then say you will come—promise it promise it," he cried ;
and his
features were all distorted by suspense.
But at this climax of his insistance, she lost consciousness of
her own
attitude. She seemed suddenly to see all that clumsiness
which had made
her refuse him before.
"It's altogether ridiculous," she answered shortly.
He recoiled from her: he seemed to stiffen a little all over ;
and she
felt rising impatience at his grotesque denseness in per-
sisting.
"You say it's altogether ridiculous ?" he repeated after her
slowly.
"Yes, of course it's ridiculous," she repeated with uneasy
emphasis.
"I'm very sorry you should mind—feel it so—but it
isn't my fault."
"Why did you say than that before God you loved me,
when you came that
day ?" he burst out with concentrated
bitterness.
"Because I thought you were dying." The bald statement
of the truth
sprang to her lips—a spontaneous, irresistible
betrayal.
"I see—I see," he muttered. His hands clenched till
the knuckles showed
white.
"I'm very sorry," she added lamely. Her tone was gentler, for
his dumb
suffering moved her sensibilities. In her agitation, the
crudity of her
avowal had slipped her notice.
"That's no use," he answered wearily.
"Alec, don't be angry with me. Can't we be friends? Don't
you see
yourself now that it was mad, absurd?" she argued, eager
to reinstate
herself in his eyes. Then, as he made no answer,
"Let us be friends,
Alec, and you will go back to Scarsdale, when
you are well and strong.
You will give up nothing for my sake.
I should not wish that, you know,
Alec."
"Yes," he assented mechanically, "I shall go back."
"I shall always think of this morning," she continued,
growing
sentimentally remorseful as the sensation of rising relief pervaded
her. "And you will soon forget all about it," she added, with a
cheeriness of tone that rang false ; and pause, awaiting his answer.
"And I shall forget all about it," he repeated after her.
To mask her disappointment, she assumed a silly, nervous
gaiety.
"And I shall keep it quite secret that you were so naughty as
to ask me
to run away with you. I sha'n't even tell Jim."
He nodded stupidly.
With a thin, empty smile on her face, she was debating how best
to part
with him, when, of a sudden, he rose, and, without a word,
walked out
of the room.
He strode away across the lawn, and, as she watched his retreating
figure, she felt for him a shallow compassion, not unmingled with
contempt.
I
JEANNE-MARIE lived alone in the white cottage at the far end of
the
village street.
It was a long narrow street of tall houses, stretching each side
of the
white shining road, for two hundred yards or more. A
street that was
cool and shadeful even in the shadeless summer
days, when the sun
burned most hotly, when the broad roads
dazzled between their avenues
of plane-tree and poplar, and the
mountains disappeared from the
horizon in the blue haze of
heat.
From her little garden Jeanne-Marie liked to look at the
mountains each
morning, and, when for two or three days follow-
ing they were not to
be seen, she would shake her head reproach-
fully, as at the failing of
old friends.
"My boys, Jeanne-Marie is only thirty-seven," Bourdet the
innkeeper said
to his companions, as they sat, one May afternoon,
smoking under the
chestnut-trees in front of the café. They all
looked up as he spoke,
and watched Jeanne-Marie, as she walked
slowly past them to her
cottage.
"Bourdet has been paying court," said Leguillon, the fat, red-
faced butcher, with a chuckle, as he puffed at his long pipe.
"You see,
he is anxious we should think her of an age suitable,
before he tells
us the betrothals are arranged."
"For my part I should give many congratulations," said the
village
postman and tobacconist, gruffly. "Jeanne-Marie is worth
any of our
girls of the village, with their bright dresses and silly
giggles."
Bourdet laughed. "You shall come to the wedding, my
friends," he said,
with a wink and a nod of the head to the
retreating figure ; "and since
our friend Minaud there finds the
girls so distasteful, he shall wait
till our babies are old enough, and
be betrothed to one of them."
The postmaster laughed with the rest. "But seriously," he
said, "Bourdet
will pardon me if I tell him our Jeanne-Marie is a
good deal past the
thirties."
Laurent, the good-looking young farmer, who stood leaning
against the
tree round which their chairs were gathered, answered
him gravely.
"Wait,
coming from Mass on M. Bourdet's arm ; the cap that hides the
grey knot
of hair at the back of the head is neat and bright—oh !
so bright—pink
or blue for choice, and if M. Bourdet chances
to compliment the colour
of the stockings—he is gay, you know,
always—the yellow face turns rosy
and all the wrinkles go."
And laughing maliciously at Bourdet, the
young fellow turned
away homewards.
Bourdet looked grave. "'Tis your son-in-law that speaks like
that,
Minaud," he said, "otherwise I would say that in my day
the young
fellows found it better to amuse themselves with the
young girls than
to mock at the old ones."
"You are right, my friend," said Minaud. "Tis the regiment
that taught
Laurent this, and many other things. But it is a
good boy, though with a sharp tongue. To these young ones it
seems all
foolishness to be an old girl."
And the others nodded agreement.
So they sat, chatting, and drawing at their long pipes, while the
afternoon sun gleamed on the little gardens and on the closed
green
shutters of the houses ; and the slow, large oxen lumbered
through the
village street, their yoked heads pressed well down,
and their tails
flicking unceasingly at the swarm of flies.
Jeanne-Marie stood in her garden, blinking thoughtfully at the
flowers,
while she shaded her eyes with her hand. On her bare
head the sparse
brown hair was parted severely and neatly to each
side, and the deep
southern eyes looked steadily out of the tanned
and wrinkled face. Her
light cotton bodice fell away from the
thin lines of her neck and
shoulders, and her sabots clicked harshly
as she moved about the
garden.
"At least the good God has given me a fine crab-apple bloom
this year,"
Jeanne-Marie said, as she looked at the masses of rich
blossom. On the
wall the monthly roses were flowering thickly,
and the Guelder roses
bent their heads under the weight of their
heavy bunches. " In six days
I shall have the peonies, and the
white rose-bush in the corner is
coming soon," said Jeanne-Marie
contentedly.
II
It was four and a half years ago that Jeanne-Marie had come to
the white
cottage next to the mill, with the communal school
opposite. Till that
autumn day, when a pair of stout oxen had
brought her goods to the
door, she had lived with her brother, who
was
of a mile beyond the village. Her father had been
when he died, his son Firman—a fine-looking
young man, not
long home from his service—had taken his place. So the
change
at the
But she missed her father sorely every day at mid-day, when she
remembered that there was one less to cook for ; that the tall,
straight old figure would not come in at the door, and that the
black
pudding might remain uncooked for all Firman's noticing ;
and
Jeanne-Marie would put the bouillon by the fire, and sit down
and cry
softly to herself.
They were very kind to her at the villa, and at night, when
Firman was
at the café, she would take the stockings and the
linen and darn them
in the kitchen, while she listened to the
servants' talk, and
suppressed her
they were from the North, and would not understand.
Two years after her father's death, Jeanne-Marie began to
notice that
Firman went no more to the café in the evening,
and had always his
shirt clean, and his best black smocked
cape for the market in the town
on Mondays, and for Mass on
Sundays.
"It astonishes me," she had said, when she was helping
M. François'
cook that day the château-folk had come to
good indeed— "because, you understand, that is not his way
at
all. Now, if it were Paul Puyoo or the young André, it would
be
quite ordinary ; but with Firman, I doubt with him it is a
different
thing."
And Anna had nodded her black head sagely over the
aux fines herbes
to marry ; Jeanne-Marie, for my own part, I say it's that
little
fat blue-eyed Suzanne from the
III
Suzanne looked very pretty the day she came home to Mr.
François'
was not there to see ; she was sitting in the large chair
in the
kitchen of the white cottage, and she was sobbing with her
head
in her hands. "And indeed the blessed Virgin herself must
have
thought me crazy, to see me sitting sobbing there, with the
house
in confusion, and not a thing to cook with in the kitchen,"
she
said, shamefacedly, to Marthe Legrand from the mill, when she
came in, later, to help her. "You should have remained," Marthe
answered, nodding at her pityingly. "You should have remained,
Jeanne-Marie ; the old house is the old house, and the good God
never
meant the wedding of the young ones to drive away the old
ones from the
door."
Jeanne-Marie drew in her breath at the words "old ones."
"But the book
says I am only thirty-four!" she told herself;
and that night she
looked in the old Mass-book, to be sure if it
could be true ; and there
was the date set down very clearly, in
the handwriting of Dubois, her
father's oldest friend ; for Jeanne-
Marie's father himself could
neither read nor write—he was, as he
said with pride, of the old
school, "that kissed our sweethearts,
and found that better than
writing them long scribbles on white
paper, as the young ones do now ;
and thought a chat with a
friend on Sundays and holidays worth more
than sitting cramped
up, reading the murders and the adulteries in the
newspapers."
So it was Dubois who wrote down the children's births in
the old
Mass book. Yes, there they were. Catherine first of all ;
poor
Catherine, who was so bright and pretty, and died that rainy
winter when she was just twelve years old. Then "Jeanne-Marie,
née le 28
Novembre 1854, à minuit," and added, in the same hand-
writing, "On
nous raconte qu'à cette heure-là nous étions en
train de gagner une
grande bataille en Russie ! Que ça lui porte
bonheur !" Eight years
later; "Jacques Firman, né le 12
Fѐvrier à midi." It all came back to
Jeanne-Marie as she read ;
that scene of his birth, when she was just
eight years old. She
was sitting alone in the kitchen, crying, for they
had told her her
mother was very ill, and had been ill all the night,
and just as the
big clock was striking twelve she heard the voice of
the neighbour
who had spent the night there, calling to her ;
"Jeanne-Marie,
viens vite, ta mere veut te voir" ; and she had gone,
timid and
hesitating, into the darkened room. The first thing she
noticed
was the large fire blazing on the open hearth—she had
never
known her father and mother have a fire before—and she
wondered
much whether it was being too cold that had made her mother
ill,
as it had little Catherine. She looked towards the bed and
saw
her mother lying there, her eyes closed, and very pale—so pale
that Jeanne-Marie was frightened and ran towards her father ; but
he
was smiling where he stood by the bed, and the child was
reassured. She
saw him stoop and kiss his wife on the forehead,
and call her his
"bonne petite femme," and taking Jeanne-Marie
by the hand he showed her
the
had come the night before to make her mother
well—sitting near
the fire with a white bundle in her arms, and thanked
the good
God aloud that he had sent him a fine boy at last. Old
Dubois
had come in gently, his béret in his hand, as Jeanne-Marie's
father
was speaking, and turning to the bed had reiterated
emphatically,
"Tu as bien fait, chѐre dame, tu as bien fait."
Jeanne-Marie sat silently going over it all in her mind. "Té,"
she
murmured, "how quickly they all go ; the father, the mother,
old Dubois, even Jeanne the
and the good God knows if there will be any to cry for
me when
my turn comes to go." She shut the old Mass-book, and put
it
carefully back on the shelf, and she went to the old
looking-glass
and the tanned wrinkled face met its reflection very
calmly and
patiently. "I think it was the hard work in the fields when
I
was young," she said; "certainly Marthe was right. It is the
face of an old woman, a face more worn than hers, though she is
beyond
forty and has borne so many children."
IV
Firman had urged his sister to stay on at the
marriage. "You should not go, it is not
natural," he said one
evening a few weeks before his wedding, while
they were piling
the small wood in the shed. "The old house will not be
the old
house without you. Suzanne wishes it also.
the custom for the fathers to turn their
sons out, when they marry ?
Then, why should I let the old sister go,
now my time for
marrying has come ? Suzanne is a good girl and pretty ;
and has
never even looked at any young fellow in the village—for I, as
you
know, am particular, and I like not the manners in some
villages,
where a girl's modesty is counted nothing—but blood is worth
the
most,
think of me to see the old sister making room
even for the little
Suzanne."
But Jeanne-Marie shook her head. "I cannot well explain it,
Firman," she
said. "It's not that your Suzanne comes unwelcome
to me—no, the good
God knows it's not that—but it would be
so strange. I should see the old mother's shadow, at the table
where you
sat, and in the bed where you lay. I might get foolish,
and angry,
Firman. So let me go, and, when the little ones come,
I shall be their
grandmother, and Suzanne will forgive me."
That was four and a half years ago, and it was a very lonely
four and a
half years at the white cottage. Even the cooking,
when it was for
herself alone, became uninteresting, and the zest
went out of it.
Jeanne-Marie, in her loneliness, hungered for the
animal life that had
unconsciously formed a great part of her
existence at the
times for hours, in her garden, watching the flocks of callow
geese,
as they wandered along the road in front of the mill, pecking
at
the ground as they went, and uttering all the time their little
plaintive cries, that soothed her with its echo of the old home.
When
the boys in their bérets, with their long poles and their loud
cries of
"guà, guà," drove the cows and the oxen home from the
fields at sunset,
Jeanne-Marie would come out of her cottage, and
watch the patient,
sleek beasts, as they dawdled along. And she
would think longingly of
the evenings at the
never
missed going out to see the oxen, as they lay contentedly on
their
prickly bedding, moving their heavy jaws slowly up
and down, too lazy
even to look up as she entered.
Firman loved his oxen, for they were well trained and strong,
and did
good work ; but Jeanne-Marie would have laughed in
those days, had she
been told she loved the animals of the farm.
"I remember," she said to
Marthe of the mill one day, "how I
said to the old father years ago :
When the children of M.
François came to the
not kill that
pretty little grey hen with the feathered legs," and "Oh !
Jeanne-Marie, you must not drown so many kittens this time" :
but I say
to them always : "My children, the rich have their toys
and have the time and money to make toys of their animals ; but
to us
poor folk they are the useful creatures God has given us
for food and
work, and they are not playthings."' : So I said then ; but
now, ah,
now Marthe, it is different. Do you remember how
old Dubois for ever
quarrelled with young Baptiste, but when they
wrote from the regiment
to tell him the boy was dead of fever,
during the great manoeuvres, do
you remember how the old father
mourned, and lay on his bed for a whole
day, fasting ? So it
always is, Marthe. The cow butts the calf with her
horns, but
when the calf is gone, the mother moans for it all the
day."
Firman was too busy with his farm and his new family ties to
come much
to see his sister, or to notice how rarely she came
up to the
that was why Jeanne-Marie walked up so seldom to M. François's
Did not all the village say that it was Suzanne's doing that
Firman's
sister left the farm on his marriage ? That Suzanne's
jealousy had
driven Jeanne-Marie away ? And when this came
to the ears of Firman's
wife, and the old folks shook their heads in
her presence over the
strange doings of young couples now-a-
days, the relief that the
dreaded division of supremacy with her
husband's sister was spared her,
was lost in anger against Jeanne-
Marie, as the cause of this village
scandal. The jealousy that she
had always felt for the "chѐre soeur,"
whom Firman loved and
respected, leapt up within her. "People say he
loves his sister,
and that it is I who part them ; they shall see—yes,
they shall
see."
And bit by bit, with all a woman's subtle diplomacy, she drew
her
husband away from his sister's affection, until in a year or two
their
close intimacy had weakened to a gradually slackening
friendship.
At night-time, when Firman's passionate southern nature lay
under the
thrall of his wife's beauty, she would whisper to him in
her soft
to love ; others are jealous of my happiness, and even Jeanne-
Marie is envious of your wife, and of the babe that is to come."
And the hot Spanish blood, that his mother had given him,
would leap to
Firman's face as he took her in his arms, and swore
that all he loved,
loved her ; and those who angered her, he cared
not for.
In the first year of their marriage, when Jeanne-Marie came
almost every
day, Suzanne would show her with pride all the
changes and alterations
in the old house. "See here, my sister,"
she said to her one day, only
six months after the wedding, when
she was taking her over the house,
"this room that was yours, we
have dismantled for the time ; did it not
seem a pity to keep an
unused room all furnished, for the sun to
tarnish, and the damp to
spoil ?" And Jeanne-Marie, as she looked round
on the bare
walls and the empty corners of the little room, where she
and
Catherine had slept together in the old days, answered
quietly,
"Quite true, Suzanne, quite true ; it would be a great
pity."
That night when she and Marthe sat together in the kitchen
she told her
of the incident.
"But, Jeanne-Marie," Marthe interrupted eagerly, "how was
it you had
left your furniture there, since it was yours ?"
"How was it? But because little Catherine had slept in the
old bed, and
sat in the old chairs, and how could I take them
away from the room
?"
"Better that than let Suzanne break them up for firewood,"
Marthe
replied shortly.
When little Henri was born, a year after the marriage, Suzanne
would not
let Jeanne-Marie be at the
Firman down beforehand to tell her that she feared the excitement
of her
presence. Jeanne-Marie knew she was disliked and dis-
trusted ; but
this blow fell very heavily : though she raised her
head proudly and
looked her brother full in the face when he
stammered out his wife's
wishes.
"For the sake of our name, and what they will say in the
village, I am
sorry for this," she said ; and Firman went without a
word.
But when he was gone Jeanne-Marie's pride broke down, and
in the
darkness of the evening she gathered her shawl round her,
and crept up
to the
Hour after hour she sat there, not heeding the cold or the damp,
her
head buried in her hands, her body rocked backwards and
forwards. "I
pray for Firman's child," she muttered without
ceasing. "O dear Virgin!
O blessed Virgin! I pray for my
brother's child." And when at length an
infant's feeble cry pierced
through the darkness, Jeanne-Marie rose and
tottered home, saying
to herself contentedly, "The good God himself
tells me that all is
well."
Perhaps the pangs of maternity quickened the capabilities for
compassion
in Suzanne's peasant mind. She sent for Jeanne-
Marie two days later,
and watched her with silent wonder, but
without a sneer, as she knelt
weeping and trembling before the
small new bundle of humanity.
From that day little Henri was the idol of Jeanne-Marie's
heart. All the
sane instincts of wifehood and motherhood, shut
up irrevocably within
the prison of her maiden life, found vent in
her devotion to her
brother's child. The natural impulses, so
long denied freedom, of whose
existence and force she was not
even aware, avenged their long
suppression in this worship of
Firman's boy.
To watch the growth of the childish being, the unveiling of
his physical
comeliness, and the gradual awakening of his percep-
tions, became the
interest and fascination of her life. Every
morning at eleven o'clock,
when the cottage showed within the
open door all white and shining
after her energetic scrubbings, she
would put on a clean bodice, and a
fresh pink handkerchief for
the little coil of hair at the back of her
head, and sit ready and
impatient, knitting away the time, till one
o'clock struck, and she
could start for the farm.
She would always arrive at the same hour, when the
dinner was finished, and Suzanne's fretful complaints: "Jeanne-
Marie, you are so proud, you will not come for the dinner or stay
for
the supper," met only a smile and a deprecating shake of the
head.
On her arrival, if Suzanne were in a good temper, she would
surrender
Henri to her, and Jeanne-Marie's hour of heaven
reached her. If it were
cold, she would sit in the kitchen,
crooning snatches of old tunes, or
chattering soft nothings in
garden with him in her arms, sometimes as far as the
road, where
a chance passer's exclamation of "Oh, le beau bébé !"
would
flush her face with pleasure.
If Suzanne's temper chanced to be ruffled, if Firman had dis-
pleased
her, or if the fitful jealousy that sprang up at times against
her
Henri was tired, and must not be moved ; and
Jeanne-Marie would
sit for hours sadly watching the cot, in which the
child lay, not
daring to touch him or comfort him, even when he moaned
and
moved his arms restlessly in his sleep.
So her life went on till Henri was about a year old, when
Suzanne's
gradually increasing exasperation reached an ungovern-
able pitch. To her jealous imagination it had seemed for some
time that
the boy clung more to her sister than to her, and one
day things
reached a climax.
Jeanne-Marie had arrived with a toy bought for three sous from
a
travelling pedlar, and the child had screamed, and cried, because
his
mother, alleging that he was tired, refused to allow Jeanne-
Marie to
take him or show him the toy. The boy screamed
louder and louder, and
Jeanne-Marie sat, silent and troubled, in her
corner. Even Firman, who
was yoking his oxen in the yard,
came in hurriedly, hearing the noise,
and finding nothing wrong,
pleaded with his wife. "Mais, voyons,
Suzanne," he began,
persuasively, "if le petit wants to see his toy, la
tante may show
it him, n'est ce pas ?" And Suzanne, unable to bear it
any
longer, almost threw her child into Jeanne-Marie's lap,
bursting
out, "Take him, then, and draw my baby's love from me, as
you
please. I want no child who hates his mother." And sobbing
loudly, she rushed out. Firman followed her, his handsome face
puckered
with perplexity, and Jeanne-Marie and the baby were
left alone. She
bent low down over the deep Spanish eyes that
were so like her own,
and, while her tears dropped on his face,
she held him to her
feverishly. "Adieu," she whispered,
"adieu, petit Henri. La tante must
not come to see him any
more, and Henri must be a good boy and love his
mother."
And with one long look at the child's eyes fixed on her
so
wonderingly, Jeanne-Marie rose softly and left the farm.
From that day started the great conflict between her love and
her pride.
Though, to her simple nature, the jealousy of a woman
who seemed to her
to have in abundance everything that made life
worth living, was
utterly incomprehensible, she said to herself
over and over as she went
home, that such a scene as that should
never happen again. And as she
lay in her narrow bed that night,
and made her resolution for the future, she seemed to feel the very
fibres of her heart break within her.
Firman came down next day to beg his sister to behave as if
nothing had
happened. "You are pale and your face is all drawn,
the things like that. If poor Suzanne were herself
and well, she
would never have spoken as she did." But Jeanne-Marie
smiled
at him.
"If I am pale, Firman, it is not for worrying over Suzanne.
Tell her
from me, I have been selfish all this time. I will not be
so again.
When she can spare the little Henri, she shall send him
to play here
with me, by Anna." Anna was Suzanne's sixteen-
year-old sister, who
lived almost entirely at the
sister's marriage. "And every Sunday afternoon I will come up,
and will sit with him in the garden as I used to do. Tell this to
Suzanne, with my love."
And Firman told her ; and mingled with the relief that
Suzanne felt,
that the face and figure which had become like a
nightmare to her
strained nerves, would appear only once a week
at the farm, was
gratitude that her sister had taken things so well.
"Anna shall take
him every other day," she observed to Firman,
"she shall see I am not
jealous; it was the pain that took me
suddenly yesterday, while you
were speaking. For that matter,
in the afternoon there is always much
for me to do, and little
Henri can very well go with Anna to the
cottage."
And no doubt she meant to keep her promise, but she was
occupied mind
and body with other things. The second baby
would be born in a month,
and in the afternoons, when she sat,
languid and tired, she liked to
have her sister Anna by her, and
Henri playing by her side.
And after little Catherine was born, there was much for Anna
to do. "I could not well spare her if I would," Suzanne would
say to
herself; "what with two babies and me so long in getting
on my feet
this time."
And Jeanne-Marie put on the clean white bodice every day
before her
dinner, and sat in the little garden with her eyes fixed
on the turning
in the white road that led to M. François's
but it was not more than one day a week that Anna
would come
in sight, with little Henri in her arms. The other days
Jeanne-
Marie would sit, shading her eyes and watching, till long after
the
hour when she could expect them to appear.
At first, after the quarrel, she had believed in Suzanne's reiterated
assurances that "Anna would come every other day or so," and
many were
the wasted afternoons of disappointment that she courted
in her little
garden. Sometimes she would rise to her feet, and a
sudden impulse to
go up to the farm, not a mile away, if only to
kiss
of Suzanne's cold looks of surprise, and the "Is anything
wrong,
Jeanne-Marie ?" that would meet her, was sufficient to force
her
into her chair again with a little hopeless sigh. "When the
calf
is gone, the mother mourns for it all the day," Marthe said
grimly,
when she surprised her one day watching the white turning.
But Jeanne-Marie answered her miserably: "Ah, but I never
butt at my
calf, and they have taken it from me all the
same."
There was great rejoicing in the cottage the day that Anna's
white
blouse and large green umbrella came in sight, and the three
sat in the
kitchen together : Anna eating smilingly the cakes and
biscuits that
grateful Jeanne-Marie made specially for her, and
Henri crawling
happily on the floor. "He said 'Maman' to
Suzanne yesterday," Anna
would announce, as Jeanne-Marie
hurried to meet her at the gate ; or,
"Firman says he heard
him say 'Menou,' when the white cat ran across the yard this
morning."
And many were the attempts to induce Henri to
make these utterances
again. "Je t'aime, je t'aime," Jeanne-
Marie would murmur to him, as
she kissed him again and again,
and the little boy would look up at her
with his dark eyes, and
smile encouragingly.
All too quickly the time would go, and all too soon would come
Anna's
glance at the clock, and the dreaded words : "Suzanne
will make herself
angry ; we must go."
And as Jeanne-Marie watched them disappear along the white
road, the
clouds of her loneliness would gather round her again.
The Sunday afternoons at the farm were looked forward to
through all the
week. There was little Catherine to admire,
and in the summer days
there was the orchard, where
Henri loved to play, and where he and his
aunt would sit
together all the afternoon. If Suzanne were in a good
temper,
she would bring Catherine out in her arms, and the children
would
tumble about together in the long grass.
And so the time wore on, and as Henri grew in mind and
body, and was
able to prattle and run about the fields, Jeanne-
Marie hungered for
him with a love more absorbing than
ever.
Two years had passed since Catherine's birth, and for the last
year Anna
would often bring her, when she came down to Jeanne-
Marie's cottage.
The one day a week had dropped gradually to
every ten days ; it was
sometimes only every fortnight that one
or both children would appear,
and the days that little Henri came
were marked white days on the
simple calendar of Jeanne-Marie's
heart.
V
Now, as Jeanne-Marie stood in her garden this hot May after-
noon, and
shaded her eyes, as she gazed at the broad white road, her
face was
troubled, and there was a drawn line of apprehension round
the corners
of her mouth. For lately Suzanne's jealous temper
had flamed up again,
and this alert jealousy boded evil days for
Jeanne-Marie.
Several times within the last two months, little Henri—now
going on for
four years old—had come toddling down to the
cottage by himself, to his
aunt's unbounded amazement and delight.
"Maman is at market," he
explained with dignity the first time,
in answer to the wondering
queries. "Papa yoked the oxen to
the big cart after dinner, and they
went ; Anna is talking all the
afternoon to Pierre Puyoo in the road ;
and Henri was alone. So
Henri came ; Henri loves his aunt, and would
like some biscuits."
Great was the content of that hour in the cottage,
when Jeanne-
Marie sat in the big arm-chair, and the boy prattled and
ate his
biscuits on her knee. Anna's hard young smile, that
scorned
emotion, was always a
also, there was no need to glance anxiously
at the clock ;
for the oxen take two hours to get home from the market,
and
who leaves the town till late in the afternoon ? "Anna will miss
proudly : "She will think
the meadow ; do I not have
charge of all the geese many
afternoons ? And when I am six years old,
papa has pro-
mised I may guard the cows, and bring them home to
milk
at sundown, as André Puyoo and Georges Vidal do, each
day. Also, why cannot Henri come to see
likes ?"
But nevertheless, the second and third occasions of these happy
visits,
always on market-days, Jeanne-Marie became uneasy. Did
Suzanne know of
the boy's absences ? Were those fitful jealousies
she now displayed
almost every Sunday, the result of her know-
ledge ? And if she did not
know, would there not be a burst of
rage when she heard ? Should
Jeanne-Marie risk this joy by
telling her of its existence, and asking
her permission for its con-
tinuance ? How well the hard tones of
Suzanne's voice, framing
each plausible objection, came to her mind, as
she thought. No,
she could not do it. Let the child come, and go on
coming every
market-day, for as long as he could. She would say no word
to
encourage his keeping it secret from his mother ; he would tell
her
one day, if he had not told her already, and then, if anger
there
was, surely the simple words, "May not your child visit his
aunt
alone ?" must bring peace again.
So Jeanne-Marie reasoned away her fears. But now, as she
stood in her
garden, her lips were trembling with anxiety.
Last Sunday she had been too ill to go up to the farm. A
sudden
agonising breathlessness, together with great dizziness,
had forced her
to bed, and Marthe's boy had gone up with the
message. But neither that
day nor the next, which was market-
day, nor any following day, had
Suzanne, or Anna, or little Henri
come to see her. And to-day was
Saturday. And she realised
wearily that to-morrow she could not get to
the farm ; she felt too
ill and feeble. "My heart aches," she said to
Marthe each day,
"my heart aches."
The afternoon waned slowly, and the little group at the café
increased
in numbers, as the men sauntered through the village at
sundown. The
women stood at their doors, laughing and chatting
with one another. M. le Curé passed down the street, smiling at
the
children. From the meadows came the cows and oxen, driven
slowly along,
their bells beating low harmonies as they went.
The festive air of
evening after a hot day touched all the tiny
town. And Jeanne-Marie
stood in her garden, waiting.
Suddenly, while she watched, her heart bounded within her,
and a spasm
of sudden pain drove the colour from her face, for she
recognised the
figure that was passing from the white turning
into the broad road.
Suzanne—Suzanne, who had not been near
her cottage for a year—Suzanne,
alone. She pressed her two hands
under her left breast, and moved
forward to the gate. She felt
now she had known it for long. All the
suspense of many days
had given way to a dull certainty : little Henri
was ill, was
dying perhaps, and Suzanne had come with the news.
Jeanne-Marie had her hand on the latch to let her through ;
but she
stood outside the gate, and said hoarsely, "I will not come
in." Her
face was flushed, there was no cap over her coil of
brown hair, and she
had on the dark dress she never wore except
at the farm. All this
Jeanne-Marie noticed mechanically, while
that suffocating hurry at her
heart seemed to eat away her energy
and her power of speech.
But Suzanne was going to speak. The colour flamed into her
face, and her
teeth ground together, as if to force down the violence
of her feeling,
and then she spoke : "Jeanne-Marie, you have
done your work well. We
knew you loved our boy. You were
careful always to show us how far
greater was your love for him
than ours. And as you could not well turn
him against me
before my eyes, you waited—
waited till I was well away,
and then, you taught him to sneak
down to see you, and sneak home again
before my return.
Dieu
But it could not be, Jeanne-Marie. Your good God, you love
so well,
would not have it and so ;"—there came a sob in her voice
that she
choked down, and Jeanne-Marie's face went a shade greyer
as she
listened—"it happened that I was long at the market last
week, and you,
knowing this would be so, because it was a big
market, brought him home
late, when the fever was springing
from the marshes—it was Marguerite
Vallée saw him and came
and told me—and now these four days he has lain
with fever, and
the officier de santé tells us there grows something in
his throat
that may kill him in four days."
The hard tones left her voice in the last phrase. A shadow
of the love
she persuaded herself she felt for Henri sprang up, and
choked her
anger. She forgot Jeanne-Marie for the moment, and
saw only the little
figure tossing with fever and delirium, and
pity for her own sorrow
filled her eyes with tears. She was
surprised at the calm cruelty of
her own words. Looking up
curiously to see how her sister would take
it, she started, for
Jeanne-Marie's face seemed suddenly to have grown
old and grey.
She was struggling breathlessly to speak, and when her
voice
came, it sounded far off, and weak like the voice of a sick child
:
"You know well that in your anger you have lied to me.
Henri may be
ill—and dying ; it is not I who have made him so.
You shall listen to
me now, though I will not keep you here
long ; for the hand that struck
my mother suddenly through
the heart, struck me while you were
speaking. You have kept
me all these days in suspense, and now you have
given the
blow. Be satisfied, Suzanne."
She paused, and the sound of her heavy breathing struck
Suzanne's
frightened senses like the knell of a doom.
"Listen to me. Henri came to me of his own will, and
never did I
persuade him or suggest to him to come. Never
did he go home later than four o'clock; there was nothing done in
secret
; neither I, nor any in the village, thought it a crime he
came to
visit me. Often I have seen him keeping the geese in
the long grass of
the meadows at six, at seven o'clock. Seek
the fever there—not on the
village road before the sunset. As
the good God hears me, never have I
stood between that boy
and his mother. Gradually you took from me every
privilege
my affection knew ; but I said nothing. Ah, I loved him
dearly ; I was content to wait. But all that is over. If God
grants me
life—but He is good, and I think He knows my
suffering all these
years—I swear before Him your house shall be
to me a house of
strangers, Henri the child of strangers, and my
brother's face unknown
to me. Never shall my father's daughter
hear again what I have heard
from you to-day. All these years
you have played upon my heart. You
have watched the suffering;
you have known how each word seemed so
innocent, but stabbed
so deep. You have seen your child wind himself
round my
heart, and every day, every hour, you have struggled to
pluck
him from me. Now, I tell you I tear your children from my
heart ; you have killed not only my body, but my love. Go,
and leave me
for ever, or by my father, I will curse you where
you stand."
She tottered forward, and with one horrified look at the agony of
her
menacing face, Suzanne turned and ran.
And Jeanne-Marie fell all her length on the garden soil.
VI
The miller's boy saw her there, when he came past a few
minutes later,
and not daring to touch her, ran to the mill
for help. Marthe and her
husband came immediately and carried
her into the cottage. At first,
they thought she was dead, her
face was so grey and sunken ; but she
came to herself, as they
laid her on the bed, and shook her head
faintly when Marthe
suggested fetching the officier de santé.
As soon as she could speak she whispered : "No, Marthe, it
is the
illness of the heart that killed my mother. The doctor
told her she
might have lived to be old, with much care, and if
no great trouble or
excitement had come to her ; but, you see, I
was much troubled just
now, and so it has come earlier. Do
not send for any doctor ; he could
but call it by the long name
they called it when my mother died, and
trouble one with vain
touches and questions."
So Marthe helped her to undress, and to get to bed quickly.
The
breathlessness and the pain had gone for a time, though she
was very
feeble, and could scarcely stand on her feet. But it was
the grey look
of her face that frightened Marthe, and her strained
quietness. No
questions could get out of her the story of the
afternoon.
"Suzanne came to tell me little Henri was ill," was all she
would say ;
but Marthe only shook her head, and made her own
deductions.
Jeanne-Marie would not hear of her staying with her for the
night, and
leaving her young children alone, and so it was settled
the miller's
boy should sleep below in the kitchen, and if Jeanne-
Marie felt ill in the night, she would call to him, and he would
fetch
Marthe immediately.
Also, Marthe promised to call at the house of M. le Curé on
her way
home. He would be out late, since he had started only an
hour ago to
take the Host to old Goupé, who lay dying four
kilometres away ; but
she would leave a message, and certainly,
when he returned, however
late, he would come round. It was
nine o'clock before Marthe would
leave, and even then she
stopped reluctantly at the door, with a last
look at the thin figure
propped up on her pillows. "Let me stay,
Jeanne-Marie," she
said ; "you are so pale, and yet your eyes burn. I
do not like to
think of the long night and you sitting here."
"It is easier than when I lie down, which brings the breathless-
ness.
Do not worry yourself, Marthe, I shall sleep perhaps, and
if I need
anything, I have but to call to Jean below. Good-night,
and thank you,
Marthe."
The little house was very quiet. Jean had been asleep on his
chair this
hour past, and not a sound came from the slumbering
village. There was
no blind to the window of the bedroom, and
Jeanne-Marie watched the
moon, as it escaped slowly from the
unwilling clouds, and threw its
light on to the foot of the narrow bed.
For a long while she lay there, without moving, while through
all her
troubled, confused thoughts ran like an under-current the
dull pain
that wrenched at her heart. It seemed to take the
coherency from her
thinking, and to be the one unquiet factor in
the calm that had come
over her. She was surprised, herself, at
this strange fatigue that had
swept away even her suffering.
She thought of little Henri and his
illness without a pang. He
seemed like some far-off person she had read
about, or heard of,
long ago.
She thought to herself, vaguely, that she must be dying, since
she
seemed to have lost all feeling.
Bit by bit, various little scenes between her and Henri came to
her
mind, with an extraordinary vividness. He was sitting on her
knee in
the cottage, and his clear child's voice rang like a bell in
the silent
room—so clearly, that Jeanne-Marie started, and
wondered if she were
light-headed or had been dreaming. Then
the voice faded away, and she
saw the cool, high grass of the
orchard, and there was Henri laughing
at her, and rolling among
the flowers. How cool and fresh it looked ;
and Henri was
asking her to come and play : "Tante Jeanne-Marie, viens
jouer
avec ton petit. Tante Jeanne-Marie, tante Jeanne-Marie !"
She
must throw herself on the grass with him—on the cool, waving
grass. And she bent forward with outstretched arms ; but the
movement
brought her to herself, and as she lay back on her
pillows, suddenly
the reality of suffering rushed back upon her,
with the agonising sense
of separation and of loss. Little Henri
was dying ; was dead perhaps ;
never to hear his voice, or feel his
warm little arms round her neck.
She could do nothing for him ;
he must die without her. "Tante
Jeanne-Marie ! Tante Jeanne-
Marie !" Was he calling her, from his
feverish little bed ? If he
called, she must go to him, she could not
lie here, this suffering
was choking her. She must have air, and space
to breathe in; this
room was suffocating her. She must go to Henri.
With a
desperate effort she struggled to her feet, and stood
supporting
herself by the bed-post. The moon, that had hidden itself in
the
clouds, struggled out, the long, old-fashioned glass hanging on
the
wall opposite the bed became one streak of light, and Jeanne-
Marie, gazing at herself, met the reflection of her own face, and
knew
that no power on earth could make her reach the farm where
little Henri
lay.
She stood, as if spell-bound, marking the sunken look of the
eyes, the
grey-blue colour of the cheeks, the face that was the face
of an old
woman.
A sudden, fierce revolt against her starved life swept through
her at
the sight, and conquered even the physical pain raging at
her heart.
Still struggling for breath, she threw up her arms and
tore the cotton
nightgown from her shoulders, and stood there
beating her breast with
her hands.
"Oh, good God ! good God ! see here what I am. How old
and shrunken
before my time ! Cursed be these breasts, that no
child has ever
suckled ; cursed be this withered body, that no man
has ever embraced.
I could have loved, and lived long, and been
made beautiful by
happiness. Ah, why am I accursed ? I die,
unloved and neglected by my
own people. No children's tears,
no husband to close my eyes ; old,
worn out, before my time. A
woman only in name—not wife, not mother.
Despised and
hideous before God and men—God and men."
Her voice died away in a moan, her head fell forward on her
breast, and
she stumbled against the bed. For a long time she
lay crouched there,
insensible from mere exhaustion, until, just
as the clocks were
striking midnight, the door opened gently,
and Marthe and M. le Curé
came in. Jean, awakened by the
sounds overhead, had run quickly for
Marthe, and coming back
together, they had met M. le Curé on his
way.
They raised her gently, and laid her on the bed, and finding
she still
breathed, Marthe ran to fetch brandy, and the Curé knelt
by the bed in
prayer.
Presently, the eyes opened quietly, and M. le Curé saw her
lips move. He
bent over her, and whispered : "You are troubled,
Jeanne-Marie ; you
wish for the absolution ?"
But her voice came back to her, and she said clearly :
"To die unloved, unmourned ; a woman, but no wife ; no
mother."
She closed her eyes again. There were noises singing in her
head, louder
and louder ; but the pain at her heart had ceased,
She was conscious
only of a great loneliness, as if a curtain had
risen, and shut her off
from the room ; and again the words came,
whispered from her lips : "A
woman, accursed and wasted ; no
mother and no wife."
But some one was speaking, speaking so loudly that the sounds
in her
head seemed to die away. She opened her eyes, and saw
M. le Curé, where
he knelt, with his eyes shining on her face, and
heard his voice saying
: "And God said, 'Blessed be the virgins
above all women ; give unto
them the holy places ; let them be
exalted and praised by My church,
before all men, and before Me.
Worthy are they to sit at My feet—worthy
are they above all
women.'"
A smile of infinite happiness and of supreme relief lit up Jeanne-
Marie's face.
"Above all women," she whispered : "above all women."
And Jeanne-Marie bowed her head, and died.
THEY say that when King George was dying, a special form
of prayer for
his recovery, composed by one of the Arch-
bishops, was read aloud to
him, and that his Majesty, after saying
Amen "thrice, with great
fervour," begged that his thanks
might be conveyed to its author. To
the student of royalty in
modern times there is something rather
suggestive in this
incident. I like to think of the drug-scented room
at Windsor,
and of the King, livid and immobile among his pillows,
waiting,
in superstitious awe, for the near moment when he must stand,
a
spirit, in the presence of a perpetual King. I like to think of
him
following the futile prayer with eyes and lips, and then,
custom
resurgent in him and a touch of pride that, so long as the
blood moved ever so little in his veins, he was still a king,
expressing a desire that the dutiful feeling and admirable taste of
the
Prelate should receive a suitable acknowledgment. It would
have been
impossible for a real monarch like George, even after
the gout had
turned his thoughts heavenward, really to abase him-
self before his
Maker. But he could, so to say, treat with him,
as he might have
treated with a fellow-sovereign, long after
diplomacy was quite
useless. How strange it must be to be a king !
How delicate and
difficult a task it is to judge him ! So far
as I know, no fair attempt has been made to form an estimate
of George
the Fourth. The hundred and one eulogies and
lampoons, published
irresponsibly during and immediately after
his reign, are not worth a
wooden hoop in Hades. Mr. Percy
Fitzgerald has published a history of
George's reign, in which
he has so artistically subordinated his own
personality to his
subject, that I can scarcely find from beginning to
end of the
two bulky volumes a single opinion expressed, a single idea,
a
single deduction from the admirably arranged facts. All that
most of us know of George is from Thackeray's brilliant denun-
ciation.
Now, I yield to few in my admiration of Thackeray's
powers. He had a
charming style. We never find him searching
for the
have
looked through a certain window by the river at Croisset,
or in the
quadrangle at Brasenose, how he would have laughed !
He blew on his
pipe, and words came tripping round him, like
children, like pretty
little children who are perfectly drilled for
the dance, or came, did
he will it, treading in their precedence,
like kings, gloomily. And I
think it is to the credit of the
reading mob that, by reason of his
beautiful style, all that he
said was taken for the truth, without
questioning. But truth
after all is eternal, and style transient, and
now that Thackeray's
style is becoming, if I may say so, a trifle 1860,
it may not
be amiss that we should inquire whether his estimate of
George
is in substance and fact worth anything at all. It seems to
me
that, as in his novels, so in his history of the four Georges,
Thackeray made no attempt at psychology. He dealt simply
with types.
One George he insisted upon regarding as a buffoon,
another as a yokel.
The Fourth George he chose to hold up
for reprobation as a drunken,
vapid cad. Every action, every
phase of his life that went to disprove
this view, he either
suppressed or distorted utterly. "History," he would seem to
have
chuckled, "has nothing to do with the First Gentleman.
But I will give
him a niche in Natural History. He shall be
king of the Beasts." He
made no allowance for the extraordinary
conditions under which any
monarch finds himself, none for the
unfortunate circumstances by which
George was from the first
hampered. He judged him as he judged Barnes
Newcome and
all the scoundrels he created. Moreover, he judged him by
the
moral standard of the Victorian Age. In fact he applied to
his
subject the wrong method in the wrong manner, and at the
wrong time.
And yet every one has taken him at his word. I
feel that my essay may
be scouted as a paradox ; but I hope
that many may recognise that I am
not, out of mere boredom,
endeavouring to stop my ears against popular
platitude, but rather,
in a spirit of real earnestness, to point out to
the mob how it has
been cruel to George. I do not despair of success. I
think I
shall make converts. For the mob is notoriously fickle, and
so
occasionally cheers the truth.
None, at all events, will deny that England to-day stands other-
wise
than she stood a hundred and thirty-two years ago, when
George was
born. We to-day are living a decadent life. All
the while that we are
prating of progress, we are really so deterio-
rate ! There is nothing
but feebleness in us. Our youths who
spend their days in trying to
build up their constitutions by sport or
athletics, and their evenings
in undermining them with poisonous
and dyed drinks, our daughters who
are ever searching for some
new quack remedy for new imaginary megrim,
what strength is
there in them ? We have our societies for the
prevention of this
and the promotion of that and the propagation of the
other, because
there are no individuals among us. Our sexes are already
nearly
assimilate. Real women are becoming nearly as rare as real
ladies,
and it is only at the music halls that we are privileged to see
strong
men. We are born into a poor, weak age. We are not
strong enough to be
wicked, and the Nonconformist Conscience
makes cowards of us all.
But this was not so in the days when George was walking by
his tutor's
side in the gardens of Kew or of Windsor. London
must have been a
splendid place in those days—full of life and
colour and wrong and
revelry. There was no absurd press nor
vestry to see that everything
should be neatly ordered, nor to
protect the poor at the expense of the
rich. Every man had to
shift for himself and, in consequence, men were,
as Mr. Clement
Scott would say, manly, and women, as Mr. Clement Scott
would
say, womanly. A young man of wealth and family in that
period
found open to him a vista of such license as had been
unknown
to any since the barbatuli of the Roman Empire. To spend
the
early morning with his valet, gradually assuming the rich
apparel
that was not then tabooed by a false sumptuary standard ;
to
saunter round to White's for ale and tittle-tattle and the
making
of wagers ; to attend a "drunken déjeûner" in honour of "la
très belle Rosaline" or the Strappini ; to drive a friend out into
the
country in his pretty curricle, "followed by two well-dressed
and
well-mounted grooms, of singular elegance certainly," and stop
at every
tavern on the road to curse the host for not keeping better
ale and a
wench of more charm ; to reach St. James' in time for
a random toilet
and so off to dinner. Which of
survive a day of pleasures such as this ? Which would be
ready,
dinner done, to scamper off again to Ranelagh and dance and
skip
and sup in the rotunda there ? Yet the youth of this period
would
not dream of going to bed before he had looked in at White's
or
Crockford's for a few hours' faro.
This was the kind of life that young George found opened to
him, when, in his nineteenth year, he at length was given an estab-
lishment of his own in Buckingham House. How his young eyes
must have
sparkled, and with what glad gasps must he have taken
the air of
freedom into his lungs. Rumour had long been busy
with the confounded
surveillance under which his childhood had
been passed. A paper of the
time says significantly that "the
Prince of Wales, with a spirit which
does him honour, has three
times requested a change in that system."
For a long time King
George had postponed permission for his son to
appear at any balls,
and the year before had only given it, lest he
should offend the
Spanish Minister, who begged it as a personal favour.
I know few
pictures more pathetic than that of George, then an
overgrown
boy of fourteen, tearing the childish frill from around his
neck
and crying to one of the royal servants, "See how they treat
me !" Childhood has always seemed to me the tragic period of
life—to be
subject to the most odious espionage at the one age when
you never
dream of doing wrong, to be deceived by your parents,
thwarted of your
smallest wish, oppressed by the terrors of manhood
and of the world to
come, and to believe, as you are told, that child-
hood is the only
happiness known : all this is quite terrible. And all
Royal children,
of whom I have read, particularly George, seem to
have passed through
greater trials in childhood than do the children
of any other class.
Mr. Fitzgerald, hazarding for once an opinion,
thinks that "the stupid,
odious, German, sergeant-system of disci-
pline that had been so
rigorously applied, was, in fact, responsible for
the blemishes of the
young Prince's character." Even Thackeray,
in his essay upon George
III., asks what wonder that the son,
finding himself free at last,
should have plunged, without looking,
into the vortex of dissipation.
In Torrens's "Life of Lord Mel-
bourne" we learn that Lord Essex,
riding one day with the King,
met the young prince wearing a wig, and
that the culprit, being
sternly reprimanded by his father, replied that he had "been
ordered by
his doctor to wear a wig, for he was subject to cold."
Whereupon the
King, whether to vent the aversion he already felt
for his son or in
complacence at the satisfactory result of his
discipline, turned to
Lord Essex and remarked, "A lie is ever
ready when it is wanted."
George never lost this early-engrained
habit of lies. It is to George's
childish fear of his guardians
that we must trace that extraordinary
power of bamboozling his
courtiers, his ministry and his mistresses
that distinguished him
through his long life. It is characteristic of
the man that he
should himself have bitterly deplored his own
untruthfulness.
When, in after years, he was consulting Lady Spencer
upon the
choice of a governess for his child he made this remarkable
speech,
"Above all, she must be taught the truth. You know that I
don't speak the truth and my brothers don't, and I find it a great
defect, from which I would have my daughter free.
been brought up badly, the Queen having taught us to
equivocate
You may laugh at the picture of the little
chubby, curly-heeded
fellows learning to equivocate at their mother's
knee, but you
must remember that the wisest master of ethics himself,
in his
theory of έξεις άποϭείκτικαι, similarly raised virtues, such as
telling
the truth, to the level of regular accomplishments, and before
you
judge poor George harshly, in his entanglements of lying, re-
member the cruelly unwise education he had undergone.
However much we may deplore this exaggerated tyranny, by
reason of its
evil effect upon his moral nature, we cannot but feel
glad that it
existed, to afford a piquant contrast to the life awaiting
him. Had he
passed through the callow dissipations of Eton and
Oxford, like other
young men of his age, he would assuredly have
lacked much of that
splendid pent vigour with which he rushed
headlong into London life. He
was so young and so handsome,
and so strong, that can we wonder if all the women fell at his feet ?
"The graces of his person," says one whom he honoured by an
intrigue,
"the irresistible sweetness of his smile, the tenderness of
his
melodious, yet manly voice, will be remembered by me till every
vision
of this changing scene are forgotten. The polished and
fascinating
ingenuousness of his manners contributed not a little
to enliven our
promenade. He sang with exquisite taste, and the
tones of his voice,
breaking on the silence of the night, have often
appeared to my
entranced senses like more than mortal melody."
But besides his graces
of person, he had a most delightful wit, he
was a scholar who could
bandy quotations with Fox or Sheridan ;
and, like the young men of
to-day, he knew all about Art. He
spoke French, Italian, and German
perfectly, and Crossdill had
taught him the violoncello. At first, as
was right for one of
his age, he cared more for the pleasures of the
table and of the
ring, for cards and love. He was wont to go down to
Ranelagh
surrounded by a retinue of bruisers—rapscallions, such as used
to
follow Clodius through the streets of Rome, and he loved to
join
in the scuffles like any commoner. He learnt to box from
Angelo,
and was considered by some to be a fine performer. On one
occasion, too, at an
the
postures." In fact, in spite
of his accomplishments, he seems to
have been a thoroughly manly young
fellow. He was just the
kind of figure-head Society had long been in
need of. A certain
lack of tone had crept into the amusements of the
and this was doubtless due
to the lack of an acknowledged
leader. The King was not yet mad, but he
was always bucolic,
and socially out of the question. So at the coming
of his son
Society broke into a gallop. Balls and masquerades were
given in
his honour night after night. Good Samaritans must have
approved when they found that at these entertainments great
ladies and
courtesans brushed beautiful shoulders in utmost
familiarity, but those
who delighted in the high charm of society
doubtless shook their heads.
We need not, however, find it a
flaw in George's social bearing that he
did not check this kind of
freedom. At the first, as a young man full
of life, of course he
took everything as it came, joyfully. No one knew
better than
he did, in later life, that there is a time for laughing
with great
ladies and a time for laughing with courtesans. But as yet
it
was not possible for him to exert influence. How great that
influence became I will indicate later on.
I like to think of him as he was at this period, charging about,
in
pursuit of pleasure, like a young bull. The splendid taste for
building
had not yet come to him. His father would not hear of
him patronising
the turf. But already he was implected with a
passion for dress, and
seems to have erred somewhat on the side
of dressing up, as is the way
of young men. It is fearful to think
of him, as Cyrus Redding saw him,
"arrayed in deep-brown
velvet, silver embroidered, with cut-steel
buttons, and a gold net
thrown over all." Before that "gold net thrown
over all," all the
mistakes of his after-life seem to me to grow almost
insignificant.
Time, however, toned his too florid sense of costume,
and we
should at any rate be thankful that his imagination never
deserted
him. All the delightful munditis? that we find in the
contem-
porary "fashion-plates for gentlemen" can be traced to
George
himself. His were the much-approved "quadruple stock of
great
dimension," the "cocked grey-beaver," the pantaloons of
mauve
silk "negligently crinkled" and any number of other little
pomps
and foibles of the kind. As he grew older and was obliged to
abandon many of his more vigorous pastimes, he grew more and
more
enamoured of the pleasures of the wardrobe. He would
spend hours, it is said, in designing coats for his friends and
liveries
for his servants, and even uniforms. Nor did he ever
make the mistake
of giving away outmoded clothes to his valets,
but kept them to form
what must have been the finest collection
of clothes that has been seen
in modern times. With a sentiment-
ality that is characteristic of him
he would often, as he sat,
crippled by gout, in his room at Windsor,
direct his servant to
bring him this or that coat, which he had worn
ten or twenty or
thirty years before, and, when it was brought to him,
spend much
time in laughing or sobbing over the memories that lay in
its
folds. It is pleasant to know that George, during his long and
various life, never forgot a coat, however long ago worn, however
seldom.
But in the early days of which I speak he had not yet touched
that
self-conscious note which, in manner and mode of life, as well
as in
costume, he was to touch later. He was too violently
enamoured of all
around him to think very deeply of himself.
But he had already realised
the tragedy of the voluptuary, which
is, after a little time, not that
he must go on living, but that he
cannot live in two places at once. We
have, at this end of the
century, tempered this tragedy by the
perfection of railways,
and it is possible for that splendid exemplar
of the delectable life,
our good Prince, whom Heaven bless, to waken to
the sound of the
Braemar bagpipes, while the music of Mdlle. Guilbert's
latest song,
cooed over the footlights of the Concerts Parisiens, still
rings in his
ears. But in the time of our Prince's illustrious
great-uncle there
were not railways ; and we find George perpetually
driving, for
wagers, to Brighton and back (he had already acquired that
taste
for Brighton which was one of his most loveable qualities)
in
incredibly short periods of time. The rustics who lived along
the
road were well accustomed to the sight of a high, tremulous
phaeton, flashing past them, and the crimson face of the young
prince
bending over the horses. There is something absurd in
representing
George as, even before he came of age, a hardened
and cynical
profligate, an Elagabalus in trousers. His blood
flowed fast enough
through his veins. All his escapades were those
of a healthful young
man of the time. Need we blame him if
he sought, every day, to live
faster and more fully ?
In a brief essay like this, I cannot attempt to write, as I hope
one day
to do, in any detail a history of George's career, during
the time when
he was successively Prince of Wales and Regent
and King. Merely is it
my wish at present to examine some of the
principal accusations that
have been brought against him, and
to point out in what ways he has
been harshly and hastily judged.
Perhaps the greatest indignation
against him was, and is to this
day, felt by reason of his treatment of
his two wives, Mrs.
Fitzherbert and Queen Caroline. There are some
scandals that
never grow old, and I think the story of George's married
life is
one of them. I can feel it. It has vitality. Often have I
wondered whether the blood with which the young Prince's shirt
was
covered when Mrs. Fitzherbert first was induced to visit
him at Carlton
House, was merely red paint, or if, in a frenzy
of love, he had truly
gashed himself with a razor. Certain
it is that his passion for the
virtuous and obdurate lady was
a very real one. Lord Holland describes
how the Prince used
to visit Mrs. Fox, and there indulge in "the most
extravagant
expressions and actions—rolling on the floor, striking his
fore-
head, tearing his hair, falling into hysterics, and swearing
that
he would abandon the country, forego the crown, &c." He
was indeed still a child, for royalties, not being ever brought
inco
contact with the realities of life, remain young longer than
most
people. He had a truly royal lack of self-control, and
was unable to bear the idea of being thwarted in any wish. Every
day he
sent off couriers to Holland, whither Mrs. Fitzherbert
had retreated,
imploring her to return to him, offering her formal
marriage. At
length, as we know, she yielded to his importunity
and returned. It is
difficult indeed to realise exactly what was
Mrs. Fitzherbert's feeling
in the matter. The marriage must be,
as she knew, illegal, and would
lead, as Charles James Fox pointed
out in his powerful letter to the
Prince, to endless and intricate
difficulties. For the present she
could only live with him as his
mistress. If, when he reached the legal
age of twenty-five, he
were to apply to Parliament for permission to
marry her, how
could permission be given, when she had been living with
him
irregularly ? Doubtless, she was flattered by the attentions of
the
Heir to the Throne, but, had she really returned his passion,
she
would surely have preferred "any other species of connection
with His Royal Highness to one leading to so much misery and
mischief."
Really to understand her marriage, one must look at
the portraits of
her that are extant. That beautiful and silly face
explains much. One
can well fancy such a lady being pleased to
live after the performance
of a mock-ceremony with a prince for
whom she felt no passion. Her view
of the matter can only
have been social, for, in the eyes of the
Church, she could
only live with the Prince as his mistress. Society,
however, once
satisfied that a ceremony of some kind had been enacted,
never
regarded her as anything but his wife. The day after Fox,
inspired by the Prince, had formally denied that any ceremony
had taken
place, "the knocker of her door," to quote her own
complacent phrase,
"was never still." The Duchesses of
Portland, Devonshire, and
Cumberland were among her visitors.
Now, much pop-limbo has been talked about the Prince's
denial of the
marriage. I grant that it was highly improper
to marry Mrs. Fitzherbert at all. But George was always weak
and
wayward, and he did, in his great passion, marry her. That
he should
afterwards deny it officially seems to me to have been
utterly
inevitable. His denial did her not the faintest damage, as
I have
pointed out. It was, so to speak, an official quibble,
rendered
necessary by the circumstances of the case. Not to
have denied the
marriage in the House of Commons would have
meant ruin to both of them.
As months passed, more serious
difficulties awaited the unhappily
wedded pair. The story of the
Prince's great debts and desperation need
not be repeated. It was
clear that there was but one way of getting his
head above water,
and that was to yield to his father's wishes and
contract a real
marriage with a foreign princess. Fate was dogging his
footsteps
relentlessly. Placed as he was, George could not but offer
to
marry, as his father willed. It is well, also, to remember that
George was not ruthlessly and suddenly turning his shoulder upon
Mrs.
Fitzherbert. For some time before the British pleni-
potentiary went to
fetch him a bride from over the waters, his
name had been associated
with that of the beautiful and un-
scrupulous Countess of Jersey.
Poor George ! Half-married to a woman whom he no longer
worshipped,
compelled to marry a woman whom he was to hate at
first sight ! Surely
we should not judge a prince harshly.
"Princess Caroline very
very
by Lord Malmesbury while he was at the little German
Court.
I can conceive no scene more tragic than that of her
presentation
to the Prince, as related by the same nobleman. "I,
accordingly
to the established etiquette," so he writers, "introduced
the
Princess Caroline to him. She, very properly, in consequence
of
my saying it was the right mode of proceeding, attempted to
kneel to him. He raised her gracefully enough, and embraced
her, said
barely one word, turned round, retired to a distant part of
the
apartment, and, calling to me, said: 'Harris, I am not well :
pray get
me a glass of brandy.'" At dinner that evening, in the
presence of her
betrothed, the Princess was "flippant, rattling,
affecting wit." Poor
George, I say again ! Deportment was
his ruling passion, and his bride
did not know how to behave.
Vulgarity—hard, implacable, German
vulgarity—was in every-
thing she did to the very day of her death. The
marriage was
solemnised on Wednesday, April 8th, 1795, and the royal
bride-
groom was drunk.
So soon as they were seperated, George became implected with
a morbid
hatred for his wife, that was hardly in accord with his
light and
variant nature, and shows how bitterly he had been
mortified by his
marriage of necessity. It is sad that so much of
his life should have
been wasted in futile strainings after divorce.
Yet we can scrcely
blame him for seizing upon every scrap of
scandal that was whispered of
his wife. Besides his not unnatural
wish to be free, it was derogatory
to the dignity of a Prince and a
Regent that his wife should be living
an eccentric life at Black-
heath with a family of singers named Sapio.
Indeed, Caroline's
conduct during this time was as indiscreet as ever.
Wherever
she went she made ribald jokes about her husband, "in such
a
voice that all, by-standing, might hear." "After dinner," writes
one of her servants, "Her Royal Highness made a wax figure as
usual,
and gave it an amiable pair of large horns ; then took three
pins out
of her garment and stuck them through and through, and
put the figure
to roast and melt at the fire. What a silly piece of
spite! Yet it is
impossible not to laugh when one sees it done."
Imagine the feelings of
the First Gentleman in Europe when
such pranks were whispered to
him!
For my own part, I fancy Caroline was innocent of any in-
fidelity to
her unhappy husband. But that is neither here nor
there. Her behaviour
was certainly not above suspicion. It
fully justified him in trying to
establish a case for her divorce.
When, at length, she went abroad, her
vagaries were such that
the whole of her English suite left her, and we
hear of her
travelling about the Holy Land attended by another
family,
named Bergami. When her husband succeeded to the throne,
and her name was struck out of the liturgy, she despatched
expostulations in absurd English to Lord Liverpool. Receiving
no
answer, she decided to return and claim her right to be
crowned Queen
of England. Whatever the unhappy lady did,
she always was ridiculous.
One cannot but smile as one reads of
her posting along the French roads
in a yellow travelling-chariot
drawn by cart-horses, with a retinue
that included an alderman, a
reclaimed lady-in-waiting, an Italian
Count, the eldest son of the
alderman, and "a fine little female child,
about three years old,
whom her Majesty, in conformity with her
benevolent practices
on former occasions, had adopted." The breakdown
of her
impeachment, and her acceptance of an income, formed a
fitting
anti-climax to the terrible absurdities of her position. She
died
from the effects of a chill caught when she was trying vainly
to force a way to her husband's coronation. Unhappy woman !
Our
sympathy for her is not misplaced. Fate wrote her a most
tremendous
tragedy, and she played it in tights. Let us pity
her, but not forget
to pity her husband, the King, also. It is
another common accusation
against George that he was an
undutiful and unfeeling son. If this was
so, it is certain that not
all the blame is to be laid upon him alone.
There is more than
one anecdote which shows that King George disliked
his eldest
son, and took no trouble to conceal his dislike, long before
the
boy had been freed from his tutors. It was the coldness of his
father
and the petty restrictions he loved to enforce that first
drove George
to seek the companionship of such men as the
Duke of Cumberland and the
Duc d'Orleans, each of whom were
quick to inflame his impressionable
mind to angry resentment.
Yet when Margaret Nicholson attempted the
life of the King, the
Prince immediately posted off from Brighton that
he might wait
upon his father at Windsor—a graceful act of piety that
was
rewarded by his father's refusal to see him. Hated by the
Queen,
who at this time did all she could to keep her husband and his
son
apart, surrounded by intriguers, who did all they could to set
him
against his father, George seems to have behaved with great
discretion. In the years that follow, I can conceive no position
more
difficult than that in which he found himself every time his
father
relapsed into lunacy. That he should have by every means
opposed those
who through jealousy stood between him and the
regency was only
natural. It cannot be said that at any time did
he show anxiety to
rule, so long as there was any immediate
chance of the King's recovery.
On the contrary, all impartial
seers of that chaotic Court agreed that
the Prince bore himself
throughout the intrigues, wherein he himself
was bound to be, in
a notably filial way.
There are many things that I regret in the career of George IV.,
and
what I most of all regret is the part that he played in
the politics of
the period. Englishmen to-day have at length
decided that royalty shall
not set foot in the political arena. I do
not despair that some day we
shall place politics upon a sound
commercial basis, as they have
already done in America and
France, or leave them entirely in the hands
of the police, as they
do in Russia. It is horrible to think that under
our existing
waste their time in the sordid atmosphere of the House of
Commons,
listening for hours to nonentities talking nonsense, or
searching
enormous volumes to prove that somebody said some-
thing some years ago
that does not quite tally with something he
said the other day, or
standing tremulous before the whips in the
lobbies and the scorpions in
the constituencies. In the political
machine are crushed and lost all
our best men. That Mr. Glad-
stone did not choose to be a cardinal is a
blow under which the
Roman Catholic Church still staggers. In Mr.
Chamberlain
Scotland Yard missed its smartest detective. What a fine
volup-
tuary might Lord Rosebery have been ! It is a platitude
that
the country is ruled best by the permanent officials, and I
look
forward to the time when Mr. Keir Hardie shall hang his cap
in the hall of No. 10 Downing Street, and a Conservative
working man
shall lead her Majesty's Opposition. In the life-
time of George,
politics were not a whit finer than they are
to-day. I feel a genuine
indignation that he should have
wasted so much of tissue in mean
intrigues about ministries and
bills. That he should have been
fascinated by that splendid
fellow, Fox, is quite right. That he should
have thrown himself
with all his heart into the storm of the
Westminster election is
most natural. But it is inverideed sad to find
him, long after
he had reached man's estate, indulging in back-stair
intrigues with
Whigs and Tories. It is, of course, absurd to charge him
with
deserting his first friends, the Whigs. His love and fidelity
were
given, not to the Whigs, but to the men who led them. Even
after the death of Fox, he did, in misplaced piety, do all he could
for
Fox's party. What wonder that, when he found he was
ignored by the
Ministry that owed its existence to him, he turned
his back upon that
sombre couple, the "Lords G. and G.," whom
he had always hated, and
went over to the Tories ? Among the
Tories he hoped to find men who would faithfully perform their
duties
and leave him leisure to live his own beautiful life. I
regret
immensely that his part in politics did not cease here.
The state of
the country and of his own finances, and also, I
fear, a certain love
that he had imbibed for political manipula-
tion, prevented him from
standing aside. How useless was all the
finesse he displayed in the
long-drawn question of Catholic
Emancipation ! How lamentable his
terror of Lord Wellesley's
rude dragooning ! And is there not something
pitiable in the
thought of the Regent at a time of ministerial
complications
lying prone on his bed with a sprained ankle, and taking,
as was
whispered, in one day as many as seven hundred drops of
lauda-
num ? Some said he took these doses to deaden the pain. But
others, and among them his brother Cumberland, declared that
the sprain
was all a sham. I hope it was. The thought of a
voluptuary in pain is
very terrible. In any case, I cannot but
feel angry, for George's own
sake and that of his kingdom,
that he found it impossible to keep
further aloof from the
wearisome troubles of political life. His
wretched indecision
of character made him an easy prey to unscrupulous
ministers,
while his extraordinary diplomatic powers and almost
extrava-
gant tact made them, in their turn, an easy prey to him.
In
these two processes much of his genius was uselessly spent. I
must confess that he did not quite realise where his duties ended.
He
wished always to do too much. If you read his repeated
appeals to his
father that he might be permitted to serve actively
in the British army
against the French, you will acknowledge
that it was through no fault
of his own that he did not fight. It
touches me to think that in his
declining years he actually thought
that he had led one of the charges
at Waterloo. He would often
describe the whole scene as it appeared to
him at that supreme
moment, and refer to the Duke of Wellington, saying, "Was it
not so,
Duke ?" "I have often heard you say so, your Majesty,"
the old soldier
would reply, grimly. I am not sure that the old
soldier was at Waterloo
himself. In a room full of people he
once referred to the battle as
having been won upon the playing-
fields of Eton. This was certainly a
most unfortunate slip,
seeing that all historians are agreed that it
was fought on a
certain field situate a few miles from Brussels.
In one of his letters to the King, craving for a military appoint-
ment,
George urges that, whilst his next brother, the Duke of
York, commanded
the army, and the younger branches of the
family were either generals
or lieutenant-generals, he, who was
Prince of Wales, remained colonel
of dragoons. And herein,
could he have known it, lay the right limiting
of his life. As
royalty was and is constituted, it is for the younger
sons to take
an active part in the services, whilst the eldest son is
left as the
ruler of Society. Thousands and thousands of guineas were
given
by the nation that the Prince of Wales, the Regent, the
King,
might be, in the best sense of the word, ornamental. It is not
for
us, at this moment, to consider whether Royalty, as a wholly
Pagan
institution, is not out of place in a community of Christians.
It
is enough that we should inquire whether the god whom our
grandfathers set up and worshipped and crowned with offerings,
gave
grace to his worshippers.
That George was a moral man, in our modern sense, I do not for
one
moment pretend. When he died there were found in one of
his cabinets
more than a hundred locks of women's hair. Some of
these were still
plastered with powder and pomatum, others were
mere little golden
curls, such as grow low down upon a girl's neck,
others were streaked
with grey. The whole of this collection
subsequently passed into the
hands of Adam, the famous Scotch
henchman of the Regent, and in his family, now resident in
Glasgow, it
is treasured as an heirloom. I myself have been
privileged to look at
all these locks of hair, and I have seen a
her lithe fingers, tell of the love that each symbolised.
I have
heard her tell of long rides by night, of a boudoir hung
with
grass-green satin, and of a tryst at Windsor ; of one, the wife of
a
hussar at York, whose little lap-dog used to bark angrily
whenever
the Regent came near his mistress ; of a milk-maid who, in
her
great simpleness, thought that her child would one day be king
of
England ; of an arch-duchess with blue eyes, and a silly little
flautist from Portugal ; of women that were wantons and fought
for his
favour, great ladies that he loved dearly, girls that gave
themselves
to him humbly. If we lay all pleasures at the feet of
our prince, we
can scarcely hope he will remain virtuous. Indeed,
we do not wish our
prince to be an exemplar of godliness, but a
perfect type of happiness.
It may be foolish of us to insist upon
apolaustic happiness, but that
is the kind of happiness that we can
ourselves, most of us, best
understand, and so we offer it to our
ideal. In Royalty we find our
Bacchus, our Venus.
Certainly George was, in the practical sense of the word, a fine
king.
His wonderful physique, his wealth, his brilliant talents, he
gave them
all without stint to Society. His development from the
time when, at
Madame Cornely's, he gallivanted with rips and
demireps, to the time
when he sat, a stout and solitary old king,
fishing in the artificial
pond at Windsor, was beautifully ordered.
During his life he indulged
himself to the full in all the delights
that life could offer him. That
he should have, in his old age,
suddenly abandoned his career of
vigorous enjoyment is, I confess,
rather surprising. The royal
voluptuary generally remains young
to the last. No one ever tires of
pleasure. It is the pursuit of
pleasure, the trouble to grasp it, that makes us old. Only the
soldiers
who enter Capua with wounded feet leave it demoralised.
And yet George,
who never had to wait or fight for a pleasure,
most certainly broke up
long before his death. I can but attribute
this to the constant
persecution to which he was subjected by
duns and ministers, parents
and wives.
Not that I regret the manner in which he spent his last years.
On the
contrary, I think it was exceedingly cosy. I like to think
of the King,
at Windsor, lying a-bed all the morning in his dark-
ened room, with
all the newspapers scattered over his quilt, and a
little decanter of
the favourite cherry-brandy within easy reach.
I like to think of him
sitting by his fire in the afternoon and
hearing his ministers asking
for him at the door and piling
another log upon the fire, as he hears
them sent away by his ser-
vant. After all, he had lived his life ; he
had lived more fully than
any other man.
And it is right that we should remember him first as a
voluptuary. Only
let us note that his nature never became, as do
the natures of most
voluptuaries, corroded by a cruel indifference
to the happiness of
others. When all the town was agog for the
Sheridan sent a forged card of invitation to Romeo Coates,
the
half-witted dandy, who used at this time to walk about in
absurd
ribbons and buckles, and was the butt of all the streetsters.
When
the poor fellow arrived at the entrance of Carlton House, proud
as
a peacock, he was greeted with a tremendous cheer from the by-
standing mob, but when he came to the lacqueys he was told that
his
card was a hoax, and was sent about his business. The tears
were
rolling down his cheeks as he shambled back into the street.
The Regent
heard later in the evening of this sorry joke, and next
day despatched
a kindly-worded message, in which he prayed that
Mr. Coates would not refuse to come and "view the decorations,
nevertheless." Though he does not appear to have treated his
inferiors
with that extreme servility that is now in vogue, George
was beloved by
the whole of his household, and many are the little
tales that are told
to illustrate the kindliness and consideration
he showed to his valets
and his jockeys and his stable-boys. That
from time to time he dropped
certain of his favourites is no cause
for blaming him. Remember that a
Great Personage, like a great
genius, is dangerous to his
fellow-creatures. The favourites of
Royalty live in an intoxicant
atmosphere. They become
unaccountable for their behaviour. Either they
get beyond them-
selves, and, like Brummel, forget that the King, their
friend,
is also their master ; or they outrun the constable, and go
bankrupt,
or cheat at cards in order to keep up their position, or do
some
other foolish thing that makes it impossible for the King to
favour them more. Remember, too, that old friends are generally
the
refuge of unsociable persons, and how great must be the
temptation
besetting the head of Society to form fresh friendships,
when all the
cleverest and most charming persons in the land are
standing ready,
like supers at the wings, to come on and please
him. At Carlton House
there was a constant succession of wits.
Minds were preserved for the
Prince of Wales, as coverts are
preserved for him to-day. For him
Sheridan would say his best
bon-mot, and Theodore Hook contrive his
most practical jokes,
his swiftest chansonette. And Fox would talk, as
only he could,
of Liberty and of Patriotism, and Byron would look more
than
ever like Isidore de Lara as he recited his own bad verses, and
Sir
Walter Scott would "pour out with an endless generosity his
store of old-world learning, kindness, and humour." Of such men
George
was a splendid patron. He did not merely sit in his chair,
gaping
princely at their wit and their wisdom, but quoted with the
scholars, and argued with the statesmen, and jested with the wits.
Doctor Burney, an impartial observer, says that he was amazed by
the
knowledge of music that the Regent displayed in a half-
hour's
discussion over the wine. Croker says that "the Prince
and Scott were
the two most brilliant story-tellers, in their
several ways, he had
ever happened to meet. Both exerted them-
selves, and it was hard to
say which shone the most." The
Prince seems indeed to have been a fine
conversationalist, with a
wide range of knowledge and great humour. We,
who have
come at length to look upon stupidity as one of the most
sacred
prerogatives of Royalty, can scarcely realise that, if
George's
birth had been never so humble, he would have been known to
us
as a fine scholar and wit or as a connoisseur of the arts. It
is
pleasing to think of his love for the Flemish school of
painting,
for Wilkie and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The splendid portraits
of
foreign potentates that hang in the Banqueting Room at Windsor
bear witness to his sense of the canvas. In his later years he
exerted
himself strenuously in raising the tone of the drama.
His love of the
classics never left him. We know he was fond of
quoting those
incomparable poets, Homer, at great length, and
that he was prominent
in the "papyrus-craze." Indeed, he
inspired Society with a love of
something more than mere
pleasure, a love of the "humaner delights." He
was a giver of
tone. The bluff, disgusting ways of the Tom and Jerry
period
gave way to those florid graces that are still called
Georgian.
A pity that George's predecessor was not a man, like the Prince
Consort,
of strong chastening influence ! Then might the bright
flamboyance
which George gave to Society have made his reign
more beautiful than
any other—a real renaissance. But he found
London a wild city of
taverns and cock-pits, and the grace which
in the course of years he
gave to his subjects never really entered
into them. The cock-pits were gilded and the taverns painted
with
colour, but the heart of the city was vulgar, even as before.
The
simulation of higher things did indeed give the note of a
very
interesting period, but how shallow that simulation was, and
how merely
it was due to George's own influence, we may see in
the light of what
happened after his death. The good that he
had done died with him. The
refinement he had laid upon vul-
garity fell away, like enamel from
withered cheeks. It was only
George himself who had made the sham
endure. The Victorian
Era came soon, and the angels rushed in and drove
the nymphs
away and hung the land with reps.
I have often wondered whether it was with a feeling that his
influence
would be no more than life-long, that George allowed
Carlton House,
that dear structure, the very work of his life and
symbol of his being,
to be rased. I wish that Carlton House were
still standing. I wish we
could still walk through those corridors,
whose walls were "crusted
with ormolu," and parquet-floors were
"so glossy that, were Narcissus
to come down from heaven, he
would, I maintain, need no other mirror
for his
that we could see
the pier-glasses and the girandoles and the
twisted sofas, the fauns
foisted upon the ceiling and the rident
goddesses along the wall. These
things would make George's
memory dearer to us, help us to a fuller
knowledge of him. I am
glad that the Pavilion still stands here in
Brighton. Its trite
lawns and cheeky minarets have taught me much. As I
write
this essay, I can see them from my window. Last night I sat
there in a crowd of vulgar people, whilst a band played us tunes.
Once
I fancied I saw the shade of a swaying figure and of a wine-
red
face.
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Translated from various Languages by AN-
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THE FLAT IRON.
MAN PROPOSES.
ODDITIES OF EVERY
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LITTLE JACK HORNER.
ADVICE GRATIS.
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and Orson," "Hop o' My Thumb,"
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excellent
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