DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY
To Frederick Greenwood
PART FIRST
MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT
(Told by the traveller)
THE ISLAND
IT was a warm autumn that year—a luminous exception upon which the last summer of the century was borne somewhat oppressively to the very verge of winter. The middle hours of the afternoon could be intolerable enough in a big, busy city well upon the confines of the South. The rush and whirr of looms was carried far upon the air, and even into the quietest streets wandered the noisy echoes of the boulevards.
Yet it was dull and flat for the solitary stranger, without interest in factories, or provincial entertainment in friendship. It was doubly dull for a woman past youth and all its personal excitements to be extracted from fleeting curiosity and thrills of anticipation; denied by reason of sex the stale delights of café lounges, and by reason of station the healthier and livelier hospitalities of cabaret and peasant reunions.
Travelling-bag and portmanteau lay strapped in the hotel hall. The train for Paris would not leave until late that night, and to while away the intervening hours I went forth beyond the town. I chose the farther end of the long boulevard, the middle of which I had not yet passed. Down there the brilliant air lost its clearness in a yellow mist, as if flung from the sky in a fine dust of powdered gold. Upon its edge hung the last visible arms of the trees on either side, lucidly, of unwonted greenness, the green we note in painted French landscapes, brightly touched with yellow. I felt that something fresh, cool, and soft must lie behind that golden veil. It led my imagination as a child is led out of the real, by the illusive promises of fairyland.
Here sound was deadened, and city movements seemed to faint away upon the weariness of the long hot day. I glanced back at the town. Behind me stretched the dusty boulevard, and sharpened above it, against the tremulous pellucid blue of the heaven, the profile of quaint church-spires and heavy masses of buildings. Ahead, my way was blocked by the wide grey river, black where the shadows touched it, silver where the full light shone upon it. A bridge of grey stone spanned it from the end of the boulevard to the other side, the unexplored:—a bridge so old, so worn, so silent and empty, that it might appropriately be the path to the city cemetery.
This bridge I crossed in all its glamour of sad enchantment. One of its arches was broken, and made a dangerous gap above the broad, quiet waters. There were no lamps, no visible indication of life about. I saw that it led to an island encircled by a battered and decayed dark wall, with little castellated ornaments that gave it the look of a feudal fortress of unusual extent and dimensions. Midway I stood upon the bridge, and wondered what sort of land might be before me. At first I believed it to be uninhabited, until much gazing discovered a thin curl of blue smoke far away, beyond a square tower. It was nearing sunset now, and the island lying west, showed out more darkly from a broad band of reddish glory. It wore all the more dead and desolate air because of the floating and quickened light above it.
Have you ever, in some quaint French town washed by a wide river, watched these lovely sunset contrasts on the blackened greyness of stone masses and on the sombre placidity of water? The best effects you will find upon the Loire, and if you can recall them, you will see, better than words of mine can paint, the salient features of that river-view set with towers and a decayed, old grey wall.
I was saturated with the sadness of it, and my glance was still wedded to its dead charm, when a bloused peasant came out of the under shadows and luminous red upper sphere, like a cheerful commonplace note in the picturesque mystery of the imagination. Very real he looked, and not in the least like a ghost from other centuries. Prosperous, too, as befits a peasant who has earned his right to nod to his betters, and mayhap clink free and fraternal glasses with them through an ocean of blood. He came along, whistling a patriotic tune, with his hands in his pockets, and his hat in villainous emphasis cocked over one ear.
‘Can it be,’ I asked myself, in a pang of disappointment, ‘that this enchanted island contains the ubiquitous cabaret, and that the impossible legend of liberty, equality, and fraternity has penetrated, with its attendant train of horrid evils, into this home of silence and poetic decay?’
I interrupted my gloomy moralising, for which, like all persons naturally gay, I flatter myself I have a decided turn, and hat, metaphorically, in hand, sued this roadside rascal for information.
‘Yes, people lived upon the island, not many—mostly women: laundresses upon the side that ran unprotected down to the water edge. I might see their sheds if I made the round of the wall. There was a large Benedictine convent at one end, and a cemetery eastward—but no hotel accommodation, no shops, no vehicles of any sort, and but one miserable little wine-shop, where they sold the worst brandy in all France.’
Of this liquid I concluded the fellow had been drinking somewhat copiously, and left him to push inquiries for myself.
I know not why, but the moment I set foot upon the island, and heard the slow swish of the eddying river against its projecting base, thought was checked upon mild and pleasurable suspense. Something unexpected must surely happen, I believed, and step by step destiny seemed to impel me forward in its pursuit. My footfall rang sharply upon the empty path, and I felt it would be ignominy to leave this strange spot until fate had spoken, and its voice been interpreted adequately for me by circumstance.
How still everything was, and how softly the day’s heat was stealing out of the atmosphere! One bright star shone like a lamp over a noble ruin, and for this I made. No sound of living voice, no clang of wooden shoe or beat of hoofs broke the heavy silence, and by this fact I knew that I must still be remote from the washerwomen’s quarter. There was a fearful look about the low rocks that reached behind the ruins down to the black water, whose perilous stillness was unwholesomely revealed by the margin of quivering light shed from the rosy sky.
A few yards farther brought me to the open cemetery gate. Here I entered with a shuddering sense of the romantic appropriateness of its aspect. Did ever churchyard wear so solemn, so forsaken an air of death? Death was breathed in the profuseness and dankness of the weeds that sprawled over and almost enveloped the tombstones; in the grassy walks unworn by tread of foot; in the graves that showed no sacred care of hand, no symbol of fond remembrance or bereaved heart. Who were these dead so forgotten and so alone? So near a busy city, and so remote from living man?
Suddenly my wondering fancy was visibly answered by sight of a slim old woman in black, who slowly came toward me by a narrow side-path. I stopped her with an elaborate apology, and we speedily fell into talk. She had been born on this island sixty years before, when the century was entering into middle life, and now at its close these had been the permanent limits of her vision. About a dozen times she may have crossed the bridge, or walked the streets of the city yonder, and only once had she gone down the river in a barge to have a peep at the real South—the ardent, rose and lavender-smelling South!
‘I pray you, Madame, tell me, who am a restless vagabond, never three months happy in the same place, how life looks to one like you, who have never left the boundary marks of birth, who have grown and lived amid unchanged scenes, and have been satisfied to look for sixty years upon these low grey walls and the spires and chimneys of that distant city?’ I asked, profoundly astonished.
In the old dame’s wrinkled parchment face gleamed a pair of singularly vivid brown eyes that held, I suspect, more wisdom than my dissatisfied and travelled glance. She eyed me curiously one long eloquent moment, and then remarked, with some astuteness and much benevolence, that change brought idle misery, and monotony its own reward of ignorance and content. Further questions about the island led to an offer from her to show me where she lived—an offer I accepted eagerly, and together we left the cemetery, now revealing all its melancholy charm in the last flushed smile of a lovely autumn sunset.
Save for the glimmer of gold upon an upper casement, the grey street was already cast into twilit gloom, and a faint ray here and there seemed to make its own pathway through the dim troubled blue of the atmosphere. Unmistakably evening was upon us, and the ghosts of the imagination would surely soon be abroad among these haunted scenes.
But nobody could be less spectral than my companion, both in speech and in looks. She was communicative to rashness, and when I asked where I could obtain lodging upon the island, for a week or a month, as long as the caprice pleased me—she fixed me in a mild interrogative way, and paused, as if equally in doubt of my discretion and of her own.
There was no hotel, no lodgings that she knew of, but if Madame really desired it—if, in fact, she could trust Madame to be discreet and reserved, she did not know that it might not be managed somehow. But she would not engage herself.
I pressed for an explanation, and so aflame was I with sharp interest and curiosity, that I know not what wild pledges of reserve and discretion and prudent behaviour I proffered. Willingly at that moment would I have undertaken to deny my whole past, and give the lie direct to nature. What more potent than passionate sympathy? and the old woman, I think, must have felt some desperate need for a willing ear in which to pour her pent-up confidences. The cup of silence to which experience had condemned her was full to overflowing, and my voice it seems shook the brim.
She told me then that she was the confidential servant and sole companion of a maiden lady who lived alone with a little niece in a big barrack of a house below the Benedictine monastery. There was a story, of course, which perhaps one day I should hear, if matters could be so arranged that I might sojourn a while beneath their roof. But this also was a promise withheld. Nothing depended on her, though she had influence—naturally, she added, with a look of meaning that set my heart in a flutter. I declare it made me feel young again, and full of thrilling alarm, on the heels of romance, in the quest of breathless adventure. I cannot explain how this old peasant had the knack of accentuating commonplace words, and of lending them a significance far beyond that with which we are accustomed to associate them. But she did so, and there was a nameless charm and tremor conveyed in her added ‘naturally,’ with its accompanying suppressed intimation of glance.
The Benedictine monastery lay in massive gloom below, reaching an aerial coldness of sharp point and spire along its jagged tops. Feudal gashes in the arches let in large slips of green sky and glimmering stars, and its rough stone wall along one side was the division between the convent and the garden of my companion’s mistress. No, not even the cemetery I had left could, in the dreariest hour, look more inexpressibly dark, and lifeless, and forsaken than that old garden. Its beauty was the beauty of death and sadness and neglect. There were rotten arbours and stone seats, and mossy, weed-grown paths. The underwood was impenetrably thick, and only the fine old trees lifted a calm front, indifferent to man’s unkindness. They needed no human hand to care them, and so they throve, and willingly gave grateful shade, and the splendour of their foliage, and the majesty of their form to the dead scene. But of flowers there were none. A coating of moss, bleached and faded, had grown over the old sun-dial, which now was hidden under the branching trees. Not a bird sang, nor did any live thing skurry into hiding upon sound of my footstep, as I wandered through the dusky alleys, while my guide went inside to consult her mistress.
The quiet of an empty garden, showing no sign of care or an active presence about it, while within view of smoke and fierce city activities, is surely not comparable with any other quiet in nature. Restriction adds to its intensity. The silence becomes almost palpable from the hum of existence afar, and the spirit of the place seems more vividly personal by reason of the narrowness of vision. You may walk along the loneliest beach man ever trod, and feel less alone than I did in that garden. The dimness of the biggest forest would be comforting after the intolerable motionlessness of its leaves and plumy weeds.
I was beginning to wonder if it would be possible for me to fulfil my contract should the lady of the house consent to share her roof with me, when I heard a child’s clear, joyous laugh. It was a sound of heavenly music to me just then, and effectually dispersed the gruesome mist which was fast enveloping my reason. The desolation of the place, and the ghastly images which threatened nightmare, could only be accidental, I wisely concluded, if such laughter—fresh, untroubled, and sweet—might be heard unrebuked. When the old woman reappeared, alarm was already soothed, and I was back in the grip of fascinating excitement.
‘Mademoiselle gives me permission to dispose of the lower appartement, which we never occupy now,’ she said, with a smile so human and inviting that I could have embraced her on the spot.
We walked toward the house, which, though gloomy enough, showed nothing to match the mystery of the dark garden. Three broad discoloured steps led to the hall of the lower story, which was offered for my occupation, and inside the large stone hall I noted a little carriage and two wooden horses worked by springs.
‘The sound of Gabrielle’s carriage will not, I hope, disturb Madame? She generally plays here, as there is not space enough upstairs.’
I expressed myself delighted to be in close neighbourhood with the child’s playground.
‘These used to be poor Madame’s rooms,’ she added, with a big sigh, as she opened the door of a fine, chill salon.
‘The mother of Mademoiselle,’ I conjectured.
‘Oh, no; Mademoiselle’s mother always preferred the rooms upstairs—those which Mademoiselle now lives in. These were her sister’s—young Madame, Gabrielle’s mother.’
‘She is dead?’
‘Alas! yes. It is unlucky to be too much loved—unlucky for loved one and for lovers. Dr. Vermont has never been here since his wife’s death—has never even seen little Gabrielle since she was born, and Mademoiselle has never once smiled.’
I was content to reserve my curiosity for another moment, and applied my attention exclusively to the question of my installation. My vanity, I will own, was something flattered by its magnificence. There were two handsome salons, a bed- and dressing-room, and a dining-room, all richly furnished in Empire style. The best taste may not have prevailed, but there could be no question of substantial effectiveness, and already an air of other days hung round it, and made a pathetic appeal to the judgment.
As my companion showed me over the kitchen and pantries and other domestic offices, I noted on the farther side of the narrow passage, beyond my bedroom, a closed door which she did not offer to open. My sympathy with Bluebeard’s wife was instantly awakened, and that door became an object of burning interest to me.
From the kitchen she conducted me through the dining-room window into a long glass-roofed gallery, jutting out beyond the house and seeming to hang over the river, so completely hidden were the rocks below. The city lights along the opposite bank were visible, and the heavy masses of boats and barges made moving shadows through the dusk.
‘How lovely!’ I exclaimed, sniffing the soft air delightedly. ‘Here will I sit and walk and read and muse. A month, did I say! I could cheerfully end my days here.’
‘We have no servant at your disposal, Madame,’ the old woman said, phlegmatically checking my enthusiasm by a reminder of the trials of existence. ‘But until you have procured one, I shall be glad to give you any assistance in my power.’
I thanked her heartily, and inquired if I could find a fiacre to drive at once for my luggage to town. There was no such thing on the island, she calmly informed me. Nothing in the shape of a wheeled object ever crossed the bridge from the city except the morning vans and the weekly butcher’s cart. Once a week the laundresses wheeled their barrows of linen into town and returned on the same day with the supply for the week’s washing. She could recommend a little maid, whose mother would, no doubt, be glad to undertake to market for me for a consideration, and her I could engage on my way to the hotel.
I left the amiable old dame to prepare for my reception that night, and set forth in the dropping twilight in search of the maid and my portmanteau. I had the wisdom, however, to dine at the hotel before returning to the gloomy island.
A MIDNIGHT VISION
IT was late when I drove across the bridge from the town. The noise of rumbling wheels upon the pavement, as the cab clattered past the arches, was of such unearthly volume as to arouse the soundest sleeper. In one or two casements lights and alarmed faces showed; but for the rest, the islanders turned upon their pillows, scarcely vexed by idle speculation upon the disturbance.
The darkness of the house chilled my heart, as the cab drove up the grassy pathway, and when the door opened, and the old dame stood in the hall in the uncertain illumination of a single candle, the solitude of the place looked so insufferably strange, that I rubbed my eyes to ascertain if I were really awake and not dreaming. But a substantial cabman was waiting for his fare, and the woman’s thin yellow hand was holding mine in a cordial clasp. I believe the honest creature had already begun to miss me, and had been counting the minutes until my reappearance.
She led me into the dining-room, where a supper of pâté, fruit, and burgundy was prepared for me, and though I protested that I was not hungry, she compelled me to make a pretence of eating, for the excuse of lingering to talk to me. Mademoiselle had long since retired. She herself had slept a little in order to be fresh for the excitement of my return.
We sat till far into the night, chatting about the great world, about Paris, which to her meant all the sin and misery and gaiety of the entire universe; and about the big town of Beaufort across the river. This impelled me to stand up and draw the curtain, that I might have a peep at it from the gallery. The old woman followed me, and stood leaning beside me against the flat stone balustrade. The lights now along the water were few and widely spread—but in the heaven they had multiplied and twinkled, variously-hued, upon their dark ground.
‘Down there lies the road to Beaufort—the road to Paris,’ my companion murmured wistfully. ‘It is now ten years since Mademoiselle has been watching it, but never a soul comes by it—never a soul.’
‘Whom is she watching for?’ I asked, in a tone insensibly lowered by her whisper.
‘For Dr. Vermont—little Gabrielle’s father.’
‘Is he the only relative she has?’
‘The only one. It is a sad story. The poor lady is eating her heart out with sorrow for the dead, and idle sorrowing for the living. The dead at least loved her—but the living! Ah, there is nothing harder in nature than the heart of a man turned from a loving woman.’
‘Does Dr. Vermont know that Mademoiselle loves him?’
‘Know!’ she cried indignantly. ‘Mademoiselle is a proud woman. I know because I divine it. He too might divine it, if feeling could touch him. But he was always a hard man. He stays away, and he does not write. He cares no more for his child than he does for Mademoiselle.’
She dropped into silence, and I did not want to scare her by appearing in any way to force her confidence. I was poignantly wakeful from interest and the atmosphere of mystery I breathed; nevertheless, I yielded at once to suggestion that the hours were lengthening towards morning, and was glad enough to find myself shuddering among the cold sheets that had lain long in lavender presses, while I listened to the echo of the old woman’s footsteps upon the stairs and the sound of key in lock and bolt drawn.
I was sleeping soundly when Joséphine brought me my morning chocolate and drew up the blind. She informed me that Mademoiselle hoped I had slept well, and would do me the honour of calling on me in the afternoon. This courtesy both astonished and gratified me. I had understood that Joséphine had half smuggled me into the house, and that her mistress had only given a grudging consent to my admittance.
The morning I devoted to examination of my quarters. I found the door of the mysterious chamber locked, but as the key was on the outside, I had the indiscretion to turn it and look in. It was a luxurious bedroom, and was as blue as one of Lesueur’s paintings. Young Madame Vermont must indeed have adored the colour to suffer it in such monotonous excess. The bed, of black polished wood, was hung with blue silk curtains; the carpet was of blue cloth, and blue prevailed in the handsome rugs that relieved it. The couches, the chairs, were covered with blue silk, and blue muslin even draped the long looking-glass. The bed looked ready for use; the blue embroidered coverlet was turned down, and across the lace-edged sheet was flung an unrolled night-dress, as if somebody were momently expected to lift it. On the dressing-table several dainty objects of feminine toilette lay ready to hand—even a little crushed lace handkerchief was thrown hastily against a silver hand-mirror. Beside the bed was a pair of black velvet slippers, and across a chair a frilled and expensive wrapper. Even the water in the carafe on the table was fresh, and there were matches beside the silver-wrought candle-stick. A beautiful jar on an inlaid table in the window recess contained hot-house flowers that were only beginning to fade, but their untainted perfume told of water daily renewed.
It was easy to divine the secret story of that woman’s chamber. Mademoiselle cherished the delusion, as unsubstantial food for her hungry heart, that its occupant was merely absent, and might be expected any day—any hour. She refused to accept the irrevocableness of death, and kept the chamber ready for the wandering spirit when the ties of earth should recall it. This was the meaning of the turned-down bed and unfolded night-dress; of the flowers in the jar sent from the city and carefully watered each evening; of the little handkerchief eloquently wisped against the silver mirror. I retreated softly, and closed the door as if of some sacred place.
After an interview with the maid who came to wait upon me, I lounged in the gallery until the midday breakfast. The aspects and surroundings enchanted me still more by day than they had done the night before. I felt alone—solemnly alone between large spaces of sky and water. Underneath, the river flowed broadly, and upon its bosom the big barges travelled southward, and lighter vessels glided swiftly by to drop behind the bridge, whence the eye could follow their path no more. Below the broken arches and towered points of the bridge went the road to Beaufort and the wide world, a white dust-blown band along the grey horizon. Under a blazing sun showed the outlines of the city, and the strained ear might detect the far-off murmur of looms by help of the factory chimneys. But this needed an effort of imagination in so heavy and dense a silence.
After breakfast I bethought myself of a visit to the melancholy garden by way of change. On the stairs I caught the pleasant patter of small feet and the shrill, sweet notes of a child’s voice. I stepped into the hall, where Gabrielle was at play. She was not pretty, but so lively and spirited and quaint, that she gave a fuller notion of the charm of childhood than any pretty child I have known. She knew neither shyness nor fear. When she saw me, she stopped her play, and approached me boldly.
‘You are the strange lady Joséphine says I am not to bore,’ she said gravely, without any resentment or surprise that she should be asked to consider me.
‘I hope you will bore me a good deal, little one,’ I replied. ‘I love children, and am delighted when they take notice of me and chatter to me.’
‘I like chattering, too, but my aunt is very silent. She is always learning lessons and reading books. Do you learn lessons still?’
‘Sometimes, when I am not too lazy. But I am like you, I don’t like lessons and work,—I prefer play.’
‘If you like, I will play with you,’ she offered, with a serious condescension that was captivating. ‘I have no one to play with except Minette and Monsieur Con. Wouldn’t you like to see Minette? She is a little fluffy, white kitten. Monsieur Con is my rabbit. Come and I will show them to you.’
This was the start of a friendship delightful enough to have moored my barque to those island shores for an indefinite period, if even there had been no irresistible interest of environment and personality to enthral me. But Mademoiselle Lenormant’s character was a character of unusual fascination—not in the sense of sexual attraction but from the point of view of study. She came and sat with me for half an hour late that afternoon. I could not fitly describe her as formal, for she breathed of austere sadness and study. Her pretensions to beauty, in the accepted form, can never have been great, but defective features found an abundant apology in the extreme delicacy of the pallid face and a certain wistful eagerness and suppressed tenderness of expression. It was a face to haunt you into the silent watches of the night, in its mute eloquence of suggestion—like a spirit or a picture. Having looked once upon it, it dwelt for ever apart in the memory, constantly provoking thought, conjecture, and raking the fanciful waters of romance by gliding dreams of sorrow and solitude, and the tragedy that finds no voice or fraternal sympathy upon the noisy surface of life.
Silence I should say had been the great feature of her existence. Even upon the odd impersonal subjects that sprang up for discussion in our conversations, her talk was scant and weighted with an unusual intonation, as if speech came to her amiss. She pondered each commonplace I uttered, and gazed steadfastly into space or down upon the river before replying, which she did very seriously after a long pause. At first this eccentricity of hers much disconcerted me. To exclaim in soft rapture, ‘How lovely the stillness here is!’ and a few minutes later, when you had quite lost sight of the trite observation, to have it cast back upon the wavering plain of dialogue in some such manner, and in tones of musing gravity:
‘You think such stillness as this lovely? It is perhaps the novelty of it alone that enchants you’—
Or, in response to a previous half-forgotten remark received in absolute silence, that the way the boats and barges dropped suddenly out of view as they passed under the bridge was strangely attractive, to find the idea caught by the heels, and gently forced into earnest discussion by a word of imperious invitation. For there was an air of extremely winning command about her, that from the first I found impossible to resist. Her neck was long, and the head upon it beautifully set, and her movements, her gestures and looks, were those of a princess in disguise. An over-wrought imagination might of course—possibly did—exaggerate this air of command and these sovereign attitudes, but I came afterwards to see that I was not alone in my delusion, and that upon ardent youth of the other sex, her quiescent influence could be potential to salvation.
Of the nature of her occupations and ideas I remained quite in the dark for some days to come. Regularly, of an afternoon, she would visit me in the gallery, where we sat and discussed the ‘eternal verities’ in an abrupt, unenthusiastic way. I could see that she purposely withheld herself, her real self, from intrusion or impertinent survey. Seclusion had taught her prudence, and reticence was a natural gift. But how in the name of the marvellous, upon an empty island, where social intercourse is undreamed of, had she come by knowledge of the hollowness of casual expansion and the nothingness of ready sympathy?
This is a lesson the cynical society deity teaches us after harsh and prolonged experiences of considerable variety, and except to its votaries, could only be known to those hermits who went into the desert to rest from the vanity of experiment and pleasure.
Joséphine’s garrulity, however, made instructive Mademoiselle’s reserve. From her I learnt, by meagre instalments, this enigmatic lady’s story. But not much until a little scene had pushed me upon the other side of discretion, and driven me to sue for enlightenment.
It happened thus. In the grip of wakefulness I had gone out to walk about the gallery. There was no moon, and upon the turn of the season, the night was chill and starless. Across the smoke-coloured heaven odd masses wandered, pursued by the wind that blew down from the North. The river below made a stain of exceeding blackness in the dark picture, and beat the rocks in angry protest against the whining uneasiness of the air. For it whined dismally round the island, and blew among the trees of the garden like an army of dreary banshees. A sense of horror of the place grew upon me, and I began to hunger for the big bright world beyond; for gas-lit streets and the sordid aspects of city life. I yearned to jostle my fellows along the highways once more, and listen to the sound of vocal dispute upon the public place. I saw in vision streams of people emerging from illuminated theatres, heard the cheerful roll of carriages, and the noisy murmur of laughter and speech. I longed for it all again—all that I had despised, and told myself in the midst of its enjoyment that I hated. After all, I was but a poor mountebank of a hermit. Town born, I could never hope to free myself permanently from the influences of birth, and I knew that sooner or later nostalgia for city sounds and sights—for the multitudinous accompaniments of its existence, must find me and pursue me into the heart of the most congenial solitude, into the most heavenly of rural retreats.
The gallery ran round the angles of the house, and on the other side looked down into the garden and in upon the window of Madame Vermont’s blue room. I went round it in a thirst for movement, but, fearful of disturbing the sleep of others, I walked very softly. To my complete surprise, and I will not aver without a momentary qualm of terror, I saw the reflection of a stream of light upon the near window of the blue chamber. I hardly believe in ghosts; but it would indeed be rash to hint that it was no vague dread of the supernatural that started my unequal heart-beats just then. I felt the blood gush and swell to bursting the arteries about my temples and throat, and at the back of my ears. Fright was not a check upon curiosity, but rather a strong impetus. Though I might approach in a conflict of emotions, I did not hesitate for one moment to approach, and was confronted with sharp disappointment when I saw that the stream of light upon the floor fell from an earthly candle-stick, and that Mademoiselle was leaning over the polished foot of the bed and gazing steadfastly at the empty pillow.
It did not take me an instant to recover my balance and watch the scene with revived interest. This was my second glimpse of the blue chamber, and a poignant note was now added to its fascination. There was a more speaking look about the turned-down sheet, the unrolled night-dress across it, and the hastily flung wrapper. Not of death—but of an unwonted disparition and a watched-for return it spoke. Not of anguish and bereavement was it eloquent, but of the fruitless and undying hunger of expectation. At such an hour, so sanctified by pervading sorrow and silence, the blue of the room was no longer garish, but an appropriate setting for imprisoned regret. Its very uniformity and depth of colour suggested the solemnity, the profundity of a rich sky unstained by cloud, and, enveloped in this mystic hue, Mademoiselle seemed to be the spirit of sorrow resting upon the grave of all joy—mute, placidly unhopeful, visibly unafraid. For surely such solitude as hers was calculated to bend the proudest head and break the strongest heart, and in presence of her indomitable courage I felt abashed and mean by confrontation with my recent idle terror.
I knew well that it was my duty to turn away my eyes and leave so sacred a vigil unwatched, but when duty and curiosity, strongly roused, come into mortal conflict, it is not often that the former conquers. I waited to see how long Mademoiselle would linger in that room, what her movements might be, and how she would depart for the upper house. And as I waited, I saw her come round by the side of the bed with a quick, sudden step, and gently smooth the pillow. In doing so, her hand rested heavily in the middle, and made a distinct impression. She started back, and I could see that desperate emotion stiffened her thin white face, and the large grey eyes she lifted, in the full light of the candle upon the table beside her, were full of pain. By a gesture so slight, it appeared she had startled memory into wakeful protest, and now she hastened to quiet it, and trod feverishly upon the living embers to still their fires by giving to the bed its proper aspect of emptiness. She turned the pillow, gathered up the ruffled sheet, crushed the night-dress into careless folds, and thrust it beneath the blue coverlet. As white was hidden under the blue, resignation seemed to have banished expectation angrily, and brought the curtain down ruthlessly upon the poor pathetic comedy weakness played for its own diversion.
She took the candle up, stood near the door, and gazed slowly around her. The little handkerchief wisped against the silver mirror caught her eye. She jerked forward and grasped it eagerly; so flimsy was it that it almost melted in her slight palm. I remembered there was a faint, subtle odour of violets about the room, which seemed to emanate from that handkerchief. I can imagine how it must have risen and tyrannised her senses, can measure the strength of its appeal and its delicate charm. No women are so astute and penetrative in their use of scent as Frenchwomen. It is their study to spread their essence with refined cruelty, and leave an imperishably perfumed trace to check the wandering imagination, and keep tenanted by a personal odour the sanctuaries of the heart they have forsaken.
The effect of the faded sweetness of the handkerchief was to irritate her to what I concluded to be a resolution to have done with this miserable comedy of expectation. She held it from her fiercely, and threw back her head to get further away from its insidious appeal, and then approached it to the flame of the candle. It needed but a flutter of light against it, and the flimsy thing was a brief yellow flare. She watched until the flame had burnt itself out, and then threw the charred rag upon the marble top of the night-table, and swayed unsteadily towards the door. By the way she grasped her throat with one frail, nervous hand, I could divine how the thick sobs shook her, and I wondered more and more upon the mystery of her life, and what elements combined to form the mimic tragedy of that midnight solitude.
Outside the breath of winter was upon us, and the wind bit and stung with the sharpness of ice. It was December now, and vigils upon the terrace, once the sun was gone down and the stars were out, were a forbidden pleasure in careful middle-age.
THE STORY OF MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT
THE month of December ran itself out with a more ruffled mildness than November had done. For one thing, it was cold, blustering weather, and for days together ice sheeted the broad river. The boats and barges plied less frequently, and foot-passengers now rarely threaded the long boulevard from the city to the island bridge. Only the morning vans relieved us of a complete sense of separation from our fellows, and at odd intervals, the postman came, and carried a whiff of the outer world into our retreat. On Saturday we had the excitement of watching the laundresses wheel their barrows of linen across the bridge, and diminish with the distance upon the chill, bleak road, sometimes brightened by rays of winter sunshine. But for the rest we shared such desert stillness as might be found in the heart of an empty forest, instead of upon the edge of a busy and populous town.
Within the walls, life went pleasantly enough. My presence downstairs had served to tame Mademoiselle somewhat. She stood less impenetrably apart, and her discourse grew daily less impersonal. When walks upon the terrace and musing under the roof of the gallery meant perilous exposure, she would invite me upstairs to her own appartement. This I enjoyed. It gave me a sense of fraternity in silence as well as companionable speech at discretion.
Her rooms were less spacious than those I occupied, but more comfortable, and not without a surprising effort at cosiness. In her salon a wood fire burned brightly, and the deep worn arm-chairs had an inviting aspect. Everything was faded, often frayed and rent, but the pictures were old and of some value, and books bulged out beyond their natural shelves, and overflowed upon the floor, and crowded the tables. Books, books everywhere,—old books, tattered books, dog-eared, dusty, and moth-eaten; wearing all a heavy, learned look, and suggestive of historical research. I laughingly remarked this to her one day, as I removed a big tome from the low chair I wished to sit upon. She blushed that soft pink flush belonging to faces habitually pallid. It made her look delightfully young and interesting, and conveyed the hope to me that the last barrier of her glacial reserve was about to break down.
‘I have been for many years engaged upon research among these volumes,’ she admitted slowly, after a pause; ‘I am writing an important book.’
‘An important book?’ I cried interrogatively.
‘Yes: the life of the Emperor Julian. I regard him as the great Misunderstood of the Christian world, and I wish to rehabilitate him,’ she said; and there was such a touching and simple prayer for sympathy and encouragement in the glance she fixed on mine, that I had not the heart to remember that others had attempted the same task, and that no amount of learned eloquence and indignation would teach the Christian world to regard as desirable a better understanding of him they call the great Apostate.
‘Would it be an indiscretion to solicit information upon your plan of defence?’ I asked insidiously, with intent to force her into self-exposure. To me the character of the Emperor Julian was of comparative insignificance beside her own, but this fact I naturally kept to myself.
‘I shall bring him into noble relief by means of Frederick the Great as a background—Frederick, that other famous and less reputable disciple of Marcus Aurelius. Have you ever remarked how alike and how unlike they were—one so sincere and the other so cynically insincere?’
Upon a dead island, without new books, or newspapers, or theatres, and but little out-door life, because of the ferocity of the weather, the Emperor Julian and Frederick the Great were as good subjects of discussion as any others, and I entered the lists in combative mood, fully equipped in argument and opinion, and captivated by the grim earnestness and complete guilelessness of the Imperial Pagan’s defender. Of modern literature she was, perhaps not unwisely, ignorant, and knew not of a man named Ibsen who, some years earlier, had also strayed upon this ground. She had been chiefly inspired by an abominable novel of a French Jesuit, over which she waxed exceedingly hot. Her anger was splendid, and I should have rejoiced to see the Jesuit, Julian’s traducer, confronted with this thin spiritual-looking lady, who thrilled from head to foot with generous hatred of all meanness and unfairness.
‘As a Christian, my defence will have more weight than if I were imbued with the cold agnosticism of the day,’ she added naïvely.
‘Surely,’ I assented, full of admiration, and more pleased to think of her as a Catholic eager to make atonement to an ancient enemy of her faith, than ‘the cold agnostic’ she dismissed in a tone of implied disapproval.
‘You wonder, perhaps, at the serious nature of my studies and labour,’ she observed. And then, upon a little explanatory nod and arch of delicate brow, ‘You see my father was a scholar, and as we lived here quite alone and rarely received visitors, it was impossible for him to avoid taking me into his confidence. And then, when his health began to fail him, it naturally devolved upon me to help him, as far as I could, and spare his eyes.’
Her glance travelled wistfully round the room, and a ray of mild recognition fell upon each big volume. It was not difficult to understand how vividly of the past they spoke to her, how eloquent of association was their wild disorder. In the high embrasure of the back window, which looked down upon the river, and showed a glimpse of the chimney-tops and tall spires of Beaufort, there was a dainty, blue-lined work-table, and near it a revolving book-stand and a rocking-chair. From where I sat, I could note that the books were modern—some of them were bound coquettishly, but the greater number were paper-covered. I was not wrong in supposing this to have been the favourite recess of the late Madame Vermont. The blue satin of the work-table betrayed her, and a hurried inspection of the backs of the books convinced me that her taste in literature was all that is most correct and elegant. No ancient tomes these. No bramble-strewn paths to historic research. Nothing whatever about the Emperor Julian; still less about Marcus Aurelius. Bourget, Feuillet, Gyp, Loti, Marcel Prévost, Anatole France and company: these were the friends of pretty Madame Vermont’s solitude, the entertainers of her frugal leisure. From the start, without description, word, or hint, I had understood Madame Vermont to be uncommonly pretty. I pictured her small, blonde, charmingly coquettish, and self-conscious. I endowed her with every conventional fascination, and felt sure that if I had been a man I should have adored her, like the rest. As a matter of fact, my imagined picture of her came very near reality. Only instead of fair hair, she had the loveliest brown that made a flossy network round a little rosebud of a face; her eyes were bewitchingly blue, limpid like a child’s, and her cheek was adorably hued. Just the conventional angelic being to turn male heads, and set their hearts in a flutter; just the sort of home idol to keep nurses and sisters—especially elder, grave, and sensible sisters—perpetually on their knees, and the domestic incensor perpetually filled with the freshest of perfumed flattery swung by the most abject adorers.
Now that the icy winds prevented us from sitting out in my gallery, Mademoiselle had grown accustomed to receive me upstairs. For there was no conquering her repugnance to my rooms. She found it less hard to walk with Joséphine to the cemetery than to sit and talk of other matters with a stranger in her dead sister’s house. Of me, however, she had grown fond:—at first in a furtive way, as if not quite sure that she was right in yielding to the weakness. Gradually she emerged from this quaint and insular uncertainty; saw that there was no shame attached to the discovery that a new face could delight her, and graciously abandoned herself to the influence of a full-blown affection.
Every morning Joséphine came down with Mademoiselle’s compliments, and her desire to be informed if I had slept well. Every afternoon I mounted to drink a cup of English tea with her, and listen to her last pages on the great Misunderstood, and sometimes maliciously spur her into passion by some sceptical raillery, which always brought pained reproach to her sad eyes and a slight flush to her pale face. She took everything in earnest, even my feeble jokes, which after a while, when she began to understand them, she would proceed to discuss in her own quaint, slow way.
‘I suppose it must be a matter of temperament, or perhaps it is an Irish peculiarity,’ she would say, and inspect me very seriously.
I assured her that the Irishman was not born who could not change his opinion at a moment’s notice for the fun of the thing, and in the midst of comedy fall foul upon tragedy for pure diversion’s sake. She shook her head despondently, and decided at once that there could be found no earnest scholars, no born leaders of men, in a band of amiable buffoons.
My moments of recreation and distraction were enjoyed with Gabrielle, when we walked round the desert island in search of adventures, or with elaborate care, tried to make each other understand the caprices of our wandering fancies in the alleys of the sad, mysterious garden. It was pure joy to feel the little hand clinging to my arm or lost in my palm like a soft, small bird, and hear the pretty patter of running steps alongside of my brisk strides. For, to atone for its late appearance, the winter was mortally cold, and there was no dallying with frozen toes and frost-bitten ears. But to make up for this foolish superiority of mine in the matter of steps, Gabrielle was indulgence itself to my decided inferiority upon imaginative ground. I certainly could not imagine so many things out of nothing, and it was clear that I could not make up so many charming adventures for Minette and Monsieur Con. But in my gross grown-up way, I was not an unsympathetic confidante for the grievances and perplexities of solitary childhood. Indeed, Gabrielle admitted, with off-hand majesty of look and deportment, that I was rather a nice and entertaining person for a little girl to talk to, not above the simple pleasures of play, and not beneath the romantic joys of story-telling. Now she loved her aunt; oh, yes, she certainly loved her aunt above and beyond all the world. But her aunt, you see, was so very solemn, and then she read so many books, she was quite entichée of those big, hard-looking books. Entichée, she admitted, in answer to my amused and not altogether edified surprise, was an expression she had caught from my servant Marie. It was Marie, she repeated imperiously, who said her aunt was entichée of books, and she was pleased to find it a very good word. She was the quaintest and drollest little philosopher and playmate melancholy middle-age could desire, and I am not without shrewd suspicion that I learnt more from her than she from me.
Of an evening, as I sat alone downstairs over my coffee, and snoozed comfortably over one of Mademoiselle’s books, or puffed a meditative cigarette in front of the bright wood fire, Joséphine would come down for a chat on her own account. It amused me to draw her out upon the subject of Mademoiselle, and bit by bit I pieced her story together.
Monsieur Lenormant, the father of two girls, had had a serious political difference with his family, who were all staunch Bonapartists, while he stood by the republic, and flung his hat into the air whenever they played the Marseillaise. With no desire to parade this difference, and being a shy and sensitive man, despite his republican sympathies, he chose evasion by the road of retreat. He left Beaufort, where his family were an influence, and bought the old house on the island. Here few were likely to disturb him, and political temptation could not be expected to pursue him.
His ostensible excuse was the possession of scholarly tastes and indifference to the present. The death of his wife upon the birth of a second girl, Adèle, was seemingly a further inducement to seek the soothing shade of solitude. So the widower, accompanied by his wife’s confidential servant, Joséphine, and an old gardener, Marcel, drove out of Beaufort, with his children, his books, and his cats. In a little while he was settled and hard at work among the ancients, and the current world of republicans and Bonapartists alike forgot him.
There was a difference of five years between the children, and soon, too soon, little Henriette was established upon the semi-maternal, wholly self-sacrificing pedestal of la grande sœur. All she had known of spontaneous childhood was before her mother’s death. Henceforth she was ‘mother’ herself, with Adèle for an adored and adorable small tyrant. While still in short frocks, her father, too, had got to rely on her, and cling to her as to a grown-up woman. He would gravely debate with her upon matters it was but humane to suppose she could understand nothing of. This may be an excellent school for training in abnegation and patient endurance, but it is a hard one. Henriette slipped into maturity without any of the sunshine of childhood across her backward path. She was an uncomplaining, studious little girl, and it is not surprising that Monsieur Lenormant should have gone to the grave without the remotest suspicion of the wrong he had done her. Did she not love her father devotedly? Did she not worship the pretty Adèle? And what more can any sane and reasonable young woman demand of life than ample opportunities for the practice of self-abnegation and the worshipping of others?
When Henriette was a slip of a girl and Adèle a child of ten, young Dr. Vermont, the only son of Monsieur Lenormant’s comrade of youth, came down to Beaufort from Paris, in the full blaze of university honours, and not without promise of future scientific renown, backed by a substantial income and solid provincial influence. This young man looked surprisingly well upon horseback, and found it good exercise to ride frequently from the town to the house of his father’s old friend upon the island. Arrived there, it amused him to notice Adèle, who was free of anything like bashfulness, and in return, thought him the nicest person she had ever seen. Meanwhile, a grave, tall girl, too thin for her ungraceful age, looked on with very different eyes. To her Dr. Vermont was the traditional Phœbus Apollo of girlhood. She knew nothing of romance, or novels, or poetry, but she felt the dawn of womanhood upon sight of him, and blushed in divine self-consciousness. She was a plain girl then—unfinished, unformed, and painfully reserved; and it was not to be expected that such an elegant article of semi-Parisian make, as Dr. Vermont, should have an eye for material so crude and undeveloped. Had Dr. Vermont been thirty instead of twenty, he might have thought differently, but we all know how grandly exacting and dramatic twenty is. Whereas his conquest was not in the least astonishing. He was a fine-looking lad, with plenty of pluck and grace and worldly wisdom. He carried himself with a noble self-consciousness, was sufficiently attentive to his moustache to convince mankind of its supreme importance, and already his handsome dark eyes wore that look of mild scrutiny that never left them. Altogether a youth with justifiable pretensions and fascinations of an intellectual and bodily nature, and one by no means likely to learn to abate them by experience.
As the years went by, and the little women of the dark house by the river grew with them, the wealth of Monsieur Lenormant declined, and when Dr. Vermont, now a distinctive somebody in his profession, came down one summer, and rode out from Beaufort to see him, matters were so bad that he found it his duty to come every day during the rest of his vacation. Adèle was now sixteen, a lovely flower opening in the sun of romantic dreams. Can we wonder if Dr. Vermont’s glance rested on her in amazed admiration? Dr. Vermont said nothing, but he looked. He looked constantly, and his glances were not without eloquence for the maiden blushing vividly beneath them. All this Henriette saw, and loved her sister none the less, wished not the less heartily both her dear ones happiness and success, though her own misery came of it. Only Monsieur Lenormant understood nothing of the situation. His dream always had been to marry his favourite Henriette to his young friend Vermont, but death overtook him before he could accomplish it.
One evening, as Dr. Vermont sat beside him with his hand upon his pulse, the poor gentleman looked up at him anxiously.
‘I have written for a relative, a lady, to come and look after my girls, but you, François, I expect to be their real protector. I like to think of you as my daughter’s husband. She is a good girl, François, an excellent girl. She has been a devoted daughter, and an adoring sister. She will make the best of wives.’
‘I am sure of it,’ said Dr. Vermont musingly, as he glanced down to where the two girls were silently embroidering in the deep recess of a window above the river. He knew perfectly well which daughter he was expected to marry and which he intended to marry, but he kept his counsel, and gazed in soft approbation upon the charming profile of Adèle.
When he came next day, Monsieur Lenormant had departed from this world of marriage and giving in marriage, and the lady relative had arrived. A formal engagement with Adèle was speedily entered upon, and the Doctor took the train for Paris, a happy prospective bridegroom, with the advantage of being in no hurry to jump into domestic responsibilities. His betrothed was somewhat young, and meanwhile he would have leisure to pursue pleasure elsewhere, and nourish her placid love upon the most expensive boxes of sweets direct from Boissier, and instalments of light and elegant literature to teach her what to respect of life and from mankind.
The bride was eighteen and the groom twenty-eight, when they were married one spring morning in the Mairie and in the Cathedral of Beaufort. That marriage still brought tears to Joséphine’s old eyes, and tempted her to unhabitual eloquence. How lovely the bride had looked!—too lovely, too delicate for health and long life. Eyes limpid like an angel’s, so sweetly blue and soft, a face upon which the tenderest breath would bring a stain of deepened colour, form slim and curved and dainty in every detail. The groom was proud, radiantly proud, perhaps not tender enough and unapprehensive of the rough winds of life for a creature so fragile and for bloom so evanescent. But he looked distinguished, well-bred, and eminently Parisian; and what more could provincial spectators desire?
A more interesting figure far was the grave, sad young lady, who smiled upon her happy sister through her tears, and could find words above the pain of a breaking heart to remind the groom that Adèle had always been petted and spoiled and cared, and fervently implore him to do the same by her, and treat her more like a child than a wife. The scene was clear before me. Mademoiselle, as she must have been at twenty-three, not pretty, but captivating enough for eyes not blinded by mere animal beauty, as the Doctor’s were. And he, fatuous, sure of himself, at heart indifferent to others, and intoxicated with foolish marital satisfaction. Did he know that tragedy brushed his happiness that moment—softly, benignantly, with blessing instead of prayer, with gaze of hope instead of reproach?
Joséphine could tell me nothing, and it pleased me to believe that he understood, and some day might remember.
After some months in Paris, the little bride was brought back to the dark house by the river by an anxious husband, there to linger in the warmth of two loves, two devotions, waited upon, worshipped in vain. The opening of her baby’s eyes was the signal for the closing of her own. Not then, not then could Dr. Vermont be expected to understand. As far as I could gather from Joséphine’s account, he passionately loved his young wife. Her death crushed him for a while, and he walked the earth like one blind to the changes of seasons, blind to surrounding faces, and fronting a future that would remain for ever a blank. Mademoiselle came, and gently touched his hand to remind him that he was not alone in his sorrow. He neither felt the fraternity nor the unspoken tenderness. The paleness of her cheek held no eloquence of suffering for him; the sadness of her eyes left his heart untouched. As for the child, far from feeling a thrill of paternity upon sight of it, he desired never to behold it more. He would regard it henceforth as the cause of his moral ruin, the beginning of a broken and joyless life.
In this hard and sullen mood he returned to Paris, and Gabrielle grew up with Mademoiselle, without any knowledge of her father, who apparently had forgotten the existence of both.
AN INTERLUDE
A DECISION FIN DE SIÈCLE AT THE CAFÉ LANDER
IN the middle of the rue Taitbout, there is a little café, which was not so well known twenty years ago as it is now, at the end of the nineteenth century. Then it was only beginning to emerge from the inferior position of crémerie. Came one day, from the unconventional region of the Latin Quarter, somewhere in the seventies, an enterprising proprietor; and in his wake followed a train of noble youths, enthusiastic in the praises of Lander, wishful for the further enjoyments of his hospitalities, and with kindly memory of his generosity in the matter of credit.
Lander brought the pleasant ways of the Quarter across the town with him, and the band of noble youths stood by him, encouraged and sustained him. In consequence, the Café Lander flourished exceedingly, and its circle of clients daily increased, until it was known, far and wide, as the resort of embryo genius. For all the boisterous and good-tempered young fellows who crowded round its tables, and emptied bocks and consumed coffee (fifty centimes a cup with fine champagne), were coming great men. They were the future lights in literature, art, philosophy, and politics. The real living great man they professed to regard with respectful admiration, but they wanted none of him in their midst. In the slang of the day, he had made his pile, and reposed on velvet and laurels among the Immortals. When he would have become a part of the past, and the future was their present, they could afford to be on more intimate terms with him. But for the present, they belonged exclusively to the future.
These young fools had their place a while, and expectation dwelt indulgently upon them. They chatted loudly of isms and ologies and oxies, with refreshing crudeness: upheld the realistic, the romantic, the psychological, and Heaven knows what other schools of literature. They prated of form, and matter, and art, and style, as only Frenchmen, bitten by love of these things, can prate. And then, one by one, they dropped out of the ranks of embryo genius, having accomplished nothing, with the great epic unwritten, unwritten the drama, the psychological novel that was to teach M. Bourget something new about women; unwritten the important History of the Franks, that was to throw into relief hitherto unrevealed aspects of the character of their conquerors; unsolved the problems of metaphysics under discussion, undiscovered the great political panacea of the age, unpainted the grand masterpiece. With the first stone of their reputation still to be laid, they went, and the café saw them no more.
Some of them became commonplace advocates, and made uninteresting citizens and fairly reputable fathers of families: or sordid notaries, or humdrum bourgeois. Romance shook its bridle rein with a regretful backward glance: ‘Farewell for evermore,’ and the converted fool turned upon his heel to enter into the ignoble strife with his fellows in quest of daily bread. Others there were who had a troublesome way of right-about-facing upon fond expectation. They jilted the muse for historical research, or discarded art for literature, or drifted from sonnets to the stage. One youth of philosophic tastes was known, with inexcusable fickleness, to shake off the secular garb, and array himself in the white of the cloister. He was the only one who made a serious reputation; he became a fashionable preacher, and wrote a History of the Church which brought upon him the wrath of Rome.
But if they were mostly crude, ineffectual youths, they had bright faces, and eager glances, and hearts full of hope and enthusiasm. They were each confident of his own powers, inapprehensive of defeat or failure, bound upon a fiery race for experience and new sensations, contemptuous of the past, and looked gaily toward a future of glorious achievement. Not a city but furnishes the type, and in no other city is it so persistent as in Paris. Paint one such, and you paint all her young men, nourished upon vivid imagination, upon inexhaustible hope and unconquerable self-faith.
Into this circle of frank and amiable egotists, Dr. Vermont dropped accidentally some ten years ago. Being of an experimental turn of mind, and apt to fall upon mild curiosity in his casual scrutiny of impetuous youth, he stayed. It is a mistake to assume that an interest in youth, and a tolerance of its nonsense, is an indication of lingering kindness of heart Dr. Vermont liked youth as a vivisectionist likes animals. It taught him much that he desired to know, and where it did not teach him precisely, it helped him along the path of observation. Men are grown-up children; boys are rude philosophers, artists, poets, what you will.
A cold, passionless man was Dr. Vermont, the one feeble flame of human feeling he had thrilled to having faded out of memory almost upon the death of his just buried young wife. She, too, had interested him, only differently, being of a less calculable and possibly less shallow order of being than the embryo great men of Lander’s. Widowhood had sundered him sharply from all personal ties, and left him all the freer to indulge his passion for experimental psychology.
As he sat evening after evening, and drank his coffee and little glass, and smoked a meditative cigar, it amused him to encourage the vivacious contentment around him, and lead the unborn reputations to reveal their bent. His influence upon young men was a thing to make older and saner persons gape. It was, perhaps, all the stronger and more subtle because it was unrecognised. He was feared, and yet admired, to an incredible degree. His mild, sarcastic face, with its finished features and wholly effaced humanity of expression, put a point upon emulation and goaded to rash display. But none were made to feel the rashness of their flights, or the absurdity of their theories. Dr. Vermont was too clever a man to scare expansion, or cow ambition. This was how he kept his hold upon the fresh-moustached lads around him. This was how they spoke of him among themselves as a good fellow—un bon garçon, malgré—well, in spite of a great many things.
Thus he sat, and smoked, and listened, while the years passed, and out of the circle familiar faces went and new ones came. It must be admitted there was not much variety in the entertainment. Always the same questions of form and expression, of style and matter; always the same comparison of international literatures and the relative virtues of different forms of government; above and beyond all, sex and its unexplained and stinging problems. They never tired, and each batch came up, fresh and eager for the old discussions. Names may vary, fashions may alter, but the rough, broad facts of life are there, immutable like nature, ever recurrent like the ebb and flow of the tide.
A sense of weariness was upon Dr. Vermont the December night I write of, as he walked toward the Café Lander. Most of the lads were dispersed by the Christmas vacation. But he knew precisely those who were expecting him. Anatole Buzeval, his favourite, a charming young fellow, with healthy Norman blood in his veins, and in spite of the disastrous environment of Paris fin de siècle, with something throbbing under his coat that suspiciously resembled a boy’s free heart. He came from a Norman fishing town, near the beat of the channel, washed by a friendly old river and wooded by still friendlier trees. In boyhood, he had walked in the woods, he had fished in the river, he had known the delights of amateur seafaring, and rode, and shot live things, and was first awakened by love to the melody of the birds, and to heroism by the genial spirit of endurance of the fishermen. These influences kept him partially sheltered from the century-worn cynicism and exhausted emotions prevailing. It accounted for the ring of sincerity in his laughter, for the zest of his ephemeral enthusiasms and the courageous freedom of his blue eyes. But he was nevertheless bitten by the disease of the hour, and his speech was tainted with the cheap fin de siècle indifference and dejection. He was the youngest of the party, the most intelligent and the brightest. Beside him sat Gaston Favre, a youth who would have been an artist if the death-throes of the century left him any room to believe in art. Nothing any longer interested him, but he was still capable of remarking upon sight of a bad picture—
‘Now, if it were worth the trouble, or really mattered, there is food for indignation in that picture.’
Whereupon he would survey it in the spirit of ostentatious tolerance, without a wince or a critical flash of eye.
The third, Julien Renaud, was a little older than these two, and professed a dead interest in politics. Time was when Lander’s echoed with the noble flow of his eloquence. Time was when it was confidently believed that he was destined, not only in his own imagination, to reach the tribune, and thunder effectively against the abuses of government. But that was in M. Constans’ hour, and M. Constans was notoriously Julien’s pet aversion. In those remote days, he was antagonistic toward what he called ‘the whole shop of the Elysian Fields,’ and relished M. Carnot as little as he had ever relished ‘old Father Grévy.’ But these were now half-forgotten ebullitions of youth, and like his beloved France, he was battered and bruised by the defeats of life into complete indifference. Nothing mattered. In reply to everything, he had but one response, a quiet shrug, a weariedly lifted eyebrow, and a murmured cui bono upon a long-drawn sigh. On this evening the chosen drink was punch, which resulted in more boisterous converse, and showed Anatole in almost a lyric mood. The first mention of the insipidly recurrent phrase of the hour—‘end of the century’—inspired him to fall upon mirthful reminiscences, just as Dr. Vermont entered the café.
‘M. le docteur désire?’ said the waiter, helping him off with his overcoat.
The doctor named his drink as he took a seat, and blandly scrutinised each flushed and smiling face.
‘We were talking, Doctor,’ Anatole cried, ‘of ways of ending the year. Do you remember, two years ago, when I first joined you, coming straight from Barbizon, where I chummed with a queer and amusing Scotch artist? how I taught you all to sing what I conceived to be a Scotch melody—Les Temps Jadis—and we drank at midnight an execrable decoction called in Scotland a tod-dy, standing, and gave an English shake-hands all round, which I am told is the way in Scotland of toasting the departing year?’
The Doctor paused in the act of lifting his glass, and nodded, as he threw out a couple of absent names in signification of his keen remembrance of the evening.
Followed good-natured and regretful words for each absent face. Les temps jadis were not such bad times after all, though the melancholy Scotch might chant them with more melody than the vivacious sons of Gaul. Jean this was an excellent heart; Henri that, a capital good fellow, the pity was he stuttered so. Frédéric, poor fool, had settled down, and married a dot and a squint, and the squint, alas! was so marked, that the dowry was a totally inadequate compensation. Upon which, Julien made cynical mention of the greater security of marital rights when backed by aid so powerful as a squint.
‘But, since women are only happy in virtue of their lovers and not in virtue of their husbands,’ shouted Anatole, with a charming look of rouerie, ‘what a dismal future for Frédéric’s wife! I declare I could find it in my heart to rush off and console her. I should be so blinded by my own burning eloquence, as I flung myself at her feet, that I would have no eyes left for the squint.’
‘Not until you came to yourself in a revulsion of feeling, my friend,’ sneered Julien Renaud.
‘Has any one seen Henri Lemaître since the night we drank our Scotch tod-dy, Anatole, and sang, or tried to sing, Les Temps Jadis?’ asked Dr. Vermont.
‘No. He was last heard of in Japan, studying the gentle art of self-defence, as practised by the gentle Japanese. He derided the duel, and loathed European pugilism, and he thought something might be done towards a more civilised settlement of disputes by borrowing of the remoter civilisation of the land of the chrysanthemum. What will you? Did he not study the washy water-colours of the immortal Monsieur Loti?’
‘Oh, an affection for Pierre Loti would explain any absurdity!’ said Gaston Favre, with a grim smile. ‘If we could hope to sit here a hundred years hence, and make a summary of the gods of the coming century, I wonder what sort of intellectual company should we have under discussion.’
‘Finished humbugs, I dare swear,’ shouted Anatole. ‘Already, from force of mere good writing, we have fallen upon intellectual inanition. The last century wound up by unveiling the goddess of reason; we’ve unveiled the goddess of form, and the devil swallow me, if there is anything to be found behind our excellent style. Each light of a new school sounds a loud trumpet to inform the world that he has at last discovered truth. So does a silly hen who lays an ordinary egg, the counterpart of her fellow-hen’s. You can’t convince her of the fatuous impertinence of her cackle, nor prove to her that there is nothing particularly great in the laying of eggs. I declare, nowadays, every trumpery artist and scribbler takes himself as seriously as the hen, and divides his time between laying and cackling.’
‘Each one has his theory, and it is more important that he should reveal that theory to the public than even paint his picture, write his play, or novel, or story upon it. So much has America taught him by means of that strange institution, the interviewer.’
‘Ah,’ cried Anatole, in a burst of exaggerated despair, ‘I gave up France when she took the American interviewer to her bosom, and the best papers were not ashamed to give us the opinions of the latest Minister, and expose the lack of taste and modesty in the youngest Master.’
‘Not France alone, mon cher,’ interposed Dr. Vermont; ‘English journalism has become no whit less vulgar and personal. Vulgarity, ostentation, fraud, rapacious advertisement—these are all the symptoms of the great moral disease of the century. Were a Lycurgus to rise up for each state, I doubt if the nations of the earth would have the wisdom to return to frugality, courage, and simplicity—so much have we lost by the long race of civilisation, so much our superiors were the old Pagan Spartans, and so dead are we to all promptings of delicacy,—without moral or physical value, without even valour.’
The Doctor spoke dejectedly, as if the hope of all good had died within him. The young men suddenly remembered that they, too, were weighted with a like lassitude and unbelief, and finished their punch in silence.
‘I expect we shall see the century out in a lugubrious spirit,’ sighed Anatole, when, upon a sign from Dr. Vermont, the waiter had replenished their glasses.
‘Where’s the use of facing a new one?’ asked the Doctor, with a vague, dull glance into space. ‘The same chatter, the same humbug, the same vulgarity and fraud. Always the same, and inevitably the same. New idols, new theories, new habits start up to prove more monotonous than the old ones——’
‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ interrupted Gaston Favre.
‘Exactly, and Alphonse Karr was not the first to find it out. I have a better plan, lads, for saluting the new century than your Scotchman’s tod-dy and Les Temps Jadis,—than even the insipid shake-hands of Albion.’
The punch had gone to the young heads, and gave them a craving for excitement. Each one leant forward over his glass, with shining eyes and flushed cheeks, eager and expectant. It was not often that Dr. Vermont condescended to plan for their amusement.
‘Let us suppose ourselves singing Les Neiges d’Antan, and toasting our old acquaintances. We shall awaken into a new century, just the same as the old. The more it changes, the more it will be the same. Are you not prospectively tired of it already?’
He looked round gravely upon the young men, and excitement died out of each glance under the sad indifference of his. They felt upon their honour to be no less weary and cynical than he. A nod of emphatic agreement from the three young pessimists was supplemented to the Doctor’s monologue, as he continued—
‘Suppose we salute the twentieth century—already worn before birth—by a single pistol-shot, the mouth of each man’s to his brains. As we are none of us likely to do anything with our brains, more than the hundreds of other young men I have seen vanish from these tables into nothingness, there can be no patriotic objection to our blowing them out in company.’
The young men sat back in their chairs, and drew a long, deep breath. They were almost sobered for the moment, and profoundly troubled by their leader’s extraordinary proposition. However firmly we may be convinced of the nothingness of life, such a method of toasting the new year is calculated to give the stoutest courage pause. Not that they held any squeamish objections to suicide—quite the contrary, they professed to regard it as the natural and legitimate remedy for a broken heart, damaged honour, or a ruined life. But, tudieu! they all sat there drinking their punch in freedom and security, with pockets not inconveniently full, it is true, but with sound hearts and sounder appetites. The prison was not before them: then, why the deuce should they be offered the grave?
‘I thought, like Solomon, you were disposed to complain of the sameness of all things under the sun,’ sneered the Doctor.
‘That is true, Doctor,’ assented Anatole. ‘But suppose we were to find things just as same beyond the sun—or a good deal worse? For, after all, we may flatter ourselves with being sceptics, but what security have we that the pistol-shot will be the end of it all? and what if it happened to be infernally disagreeable somewhere else, and there was no getting back?’
‘Bah, another glass of punch will put you all right,’ laughed Julien. ‘On reflection, I find the Doctor’s proposal an excellent one. We are sick of everything here—wine, women, and song, such as Paris now furnishes. Then, let us go and see for ourselves what is going on among the stars. There’s this comfort, Anatole, we go in a body, if there is anything ugly to face. That’s the difficulty about suicide,—its lugubrious solitude. In company, one may snap his fingers at fear. To see three friendly faces round you, all ready to plunge at once into the same boat, and exchange jokes simultaneously with old Father Charon! When you lift your own cocked pistol to your forehead, to see three other hands and all four be shot together out of the mystery, either into eternity or—le néant.’
‘Ah, there, you’re not sure either, Gaston,’ Anatole protested, reproachfully.
‘That’s just it, boy; I know nothing now, but with the dawn of the new century I should know everything.’
‘My humble contribution to the Doctor’s plan is the proposal that we blow our brains out together—I mean in the same room,’ suggested Julien.
‘Precisely; I have just been thinking the matter out. Now here in Paris, we should excite excessive attention. But it might better be managed in some quiet place—near the sea, or close to a river bank, where our bodies might disappear easily, without giving rise to immediate alarm. I know of a half deserted island down near Beaufort, my native town. You will hardly believe that a place so near a busy factory town—one of the largest provincial cities of France—could be so forsaken and desolate. I doubt if any one lives on it now. My father-in-law had a big gloomy house on that island. I don’t think there was another inhabitant but himself. We might go down there, and toast the new century in among the dark rocks above the river.’
‘Beaufort! a commonplace train with such an end in view,’ sighed Anatole.
‘Not necessarily a train. What is to prevent us from taking horse, as your favourite heroes of Dumas did?’ said the Doctor, smiling a little at him.
‘With all my heart, if we are going to ride to Beaufort,’ cried Anatole. ‘I don’t care if I am shot then.’
PART SECOND
DR. VERMONT
(Told by the author)
DR. VERMONT AND HIS GUESTS UPON THE ISLAND
IT wanted three days to the end of the year. The afternoon had been so exceptionally mild, that Mademoiselle Lenormant and her foreign friend were still sitting out on the gallery enjoying the sunset. The air was very clear, and the heavens beautifully coloured, though the winter dusk was beginning to drop. But it was as yet a mere suggestion of dimness that did not hide, while it accentuated, the edge of bleak and empty road along the sky-line. It sharpened the outlines of the bridge and its castellated points below. The river was smooth like dark glass, and rosy clouds made a blood-red margin along its outer bank. No wind blew among the trees of the melancholy garden, visible from the other side of the gallery, and so still was it, that the farthest sounds sent back their travelling echoes. The footfall of a solitary peasant crossing the bridge made a martial clatter, so clear and strong and self-assertive was it upon the pavements that seemed to sleep since feudal times.
Little Gabrielle sat in a corner of the gallery in jacket and hood, hugging Minette, who bore the discomfort bravely, while she spelled out a story from a large picture-book on her knee. It was satisfactory to see that the kitten took as much interest in the story as the reader, and enlivened the study by occasional lunges at the brown finger following each line. The child’s pretty voice hardly interrupted the low conversation of the two ladies, who faced the view of Beaufort, and watched the road, while they discoursed upon the philosophy of life. Mademoiselle Lenormant always watched that road, whether she sat in the gallery or upstairs in her own room. It was the rival of Gabrielle and her books, for she would willingly leave either at any moment to look at it.
Joséphine came down to carry Gabrielle inside, out of the chill air, and the child was still protesting loudly, and calling imperiously on her aunt to rescue her from private tyranny, when Mademoiselle bent forward with an excited gesture, her eyes riveted upon the point where the road seemed to issue from the sky.
‘Do you not see something down there—something dark that moves?’ she breathed, without looking at her companion.
‘Effectively. It appears to be a group of men on horseback. Yes, Mademoiselle, it is a party of riders, and they are coming straight towards the bridge.’
Mademoiselle shook from head to foot, and went and caught the balustrade to steady herself, while she continued to examine the blot of moving shadow upon the landscape, that increased with each wink of eyelid, until soon it was a visible invasion of males on horseback. A dull thud of hoofs was borne upon the air, and near the bridge, one of the party, apparently the leader, drew up, and seemed to address the others. These at once fell behind, three in number, and the foremost turned his face to the island, and galloped ahead.
‘Joséphine, viens, viens vite,’ shrieked Mademoiselle, her whole face dyed pink, and her grey eyes dark and luminous with emotion.
Joséphine hurried out, cap-strings flying, all in a state of wild concern. What was it, but what on earth was it? What did Mademoiselle see?
Mademoiselle began in a thick voice—
‘Je crois, Joséphine, que c’est le docteur’—and then stopped, and drew her hand slowly across her eyes, like one awakened from a moment’s stupor. ‘C’est Monsieur le docteur qui nous arrive enfin,’ she added, in her usual voice, and with a full return to her old self.
Joséphine peered over the balustrade, but she only saw three moving shapes upon the bridge, the outlines of horse and man intermelted to her vision.
‘The foremost rider must now be half way up the street,’ cried Mademoiselle’s companion, glad yet ashamed that she should be there at such a moment.
‘Take Gabrielle, Joséphine, and put on her pretty grey dress and her laces. Marie will open the door for Dr. Vermont.’
Joséphine carried off the startled child, too frightened to ask questions or demur, and at that moment the bell rang loudly, with violent emphasis.
‘I will leave you now, dear Mademoiselle,’ said her friend, with sympathetic pressure of her fingers. ‘Monsieur will doubtless require this appartement, in which case I can return to Beaufort this evening.’
‘No, no, there is a bedroom upstairs. You will not leave me so abruptly, not now, when perhaps I may most need a friend. Stay yet a while.’
A heavy step was crossing the hall, and came through the dining-room towards the gallery. The foreigner, on her way to her own room, caught sight of a lean, youngish-looking gentleman, with a fair beard and thin brown hair worn off temples, deeply marked by life. He glanced at her keenly, as he stood for her to pass, and she had time to note the social polish of his manners, and the melancholy dignity of his aspect, and then he crossed the floor and stepped out through the window, searching with mild brown eyes for the woman who had waited for his coming for ten long years.
His face lit up with a soft smile when he saw her, and he went forward, upon the pleasant exclamation—‘Ma sœur!’ His intention was to bestow upon her a formal embrace. His hand was stretched out, and when her cold slim fingers touched it, and lay in his palm, and he saw the lustre of unshed tears in the sad grey eyes that met his own steadily, and a rosy flame tremble like confession over the cheeks’ pallor, a new impulse came to him, and he simply lifted her hand to his lips.
‘Henriette,’ he murmured, in a troubled voice.
‘The silence has been long, François,’ she said, and smiled.
He still held her hand, and gazed at her curiously. She was not so changed as he, and if the years had thinned, they had not lined her face. At thirty-three, he even found her more attractive than at twenty. There was that about her which compelled interest, and gave an odd charm to the simplest speech.
‘Henriette, you have much to pardon me, and your indulgence will have to go still further than you dream. Ah, how vividly a forgotten past may bear down upon a man at the first sight of a familiar place! All my life down here had clean gone from my mind. This queer old house, your father, you, even Adèle, have been for me years past, not even a memory, much less a link with all that is gone. It is incredible how completely a man may forget. No regret, no remembrance pursued me in Paris, and the instant I crossed the bridge it all surged back on me, not as remembered days, but as the actual present. Verily, we are droll rascals, Henriette, and mercilessly tyrannised by experience.’
He had dropped her hand now, and was leaning against a pillar, staring across at Beaufort. Mademoiselle’s brows twitched sharply, but she uttered no word of reproach, partly from pride, and partly from surprise.
‘It will be good news for Gabrielle, and for me, if such a change decided you to remain here now,’ she said.
‘Gabrielle?’ he interrogated softly.
‘Your child, François!’
Oh, this he understood as a reproach, though it touched him but slightly. He made a step forward, still questioning her with movement of brow and eyelid.
‘Tiens! It is true. Is it credible I could forget I had a child? Oh! I know what you must think of me, Henriette; and the worst of it is, you cannot think badly enough of me;’ he said, laughing drearily.
‘It would be a poor satisfaction for me to think badly of you, François. I am not your judge. It is enough for me that you have come back—at last.’
‘What a sweet woman!’ cried Dr. Vermont, in amazement. ‘My sister, your kindness confounds me. Life has not taught me to expect anything like it, and I begin to believe I am not the sage I have lately loved to contemplate. What, indeed, if these steadfast, silent creatures be the sages after all, and we, the philosophers and seekers after light, but the fools, who wear cap and bells, and mistake them for badges of sovereignty.’
‘Here comes Gabrielle, François,’ said Mademoiselle, interrupting his reflections.
The little girl lingered shyly upon the edge of the gallery, which Joséphine endeavoured to make her cross by whispered entreaty and pushes. She did not know this man who was her father, and her small brains were busy contriving a way to greet him. She made a pretty picture thus, in grey silk and white lace, with a broad crimson sash, and a big bow of red ribbon on the top of her curly brown head. Dr. Vermont stared at her as an object of natural curiosity rather than a charming little girl, his own daughter.
‘She is very like you, Henriette,’ he said, and held out his hand with an ingratiating smile.
Gabrielle came slowly forward, and took it; then looked up into his face in grave and silent deliberation. She decided suddenly to offer her cheek for the paternal kiss, which she did, with much conscious dignity and no sense of pleasure whatever.
‘Let me see,’ said Dr. Vermont, when he had perfunctorily kissed her, ‘she is now about ten. The very age her mother was when I first beheld her. Poor pretty Adèle! She does not in any way resemble her.’
He sighed deeply, and Henriette’s eyes, fixed on Gabrielle, filled with tears.
‘What rooms does Monsieur wish me to prepare for him?’ Joséphine asked in the pause.
The Doctor started, and remembered, with a quick disagreeable sensation, the nearness of his friends, and its extraordinary significance. If that good soul Joséphine but knew! If Henriette suspected!
‘That reminds me, Henriette—I have left three friends outside. I suppose you can put us up down here, or upstairs, for a couple of nights?’
‘Only a couple of nights?’ Mademoiselle exclaimed.
‘Yes. By the dawn of New Year’s Day we shall be far from Beaufort, so we will leave you on New Year’s Eve after dinner. What accommodation have you here?’
‘You have forgotten that, too! There is your old room—the large one opposite, which a friend of mine has been using. There is a canapé, which one of the gentlemen can sleep on. And then there is my sister’s room, and in the little dressing-room off it, another bed could be put up. I think you can manage.’
‘Capitally. We shall be lodged like kings. Gaston and Julien in my old room—yes, I quite remember it now. Yellow hangings, and an engraving of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and a picture of Madame Lebrun. Not so? Anatole will sleep in the dressing-room, and I in the blue room. Is it still so blue? There used to be a photograph of my favourite Del Sarto, “The Madonna with St John.” Poor Adèle! What would I not give to be the same enamoured young fellow of ten years ago, violently combating death? But I have lived twenty years since, and everything is dead for me.’
He thrust his hands into his pockets, and went toward the door in search of his friends, without troubling to note the effect of his heartless words upon Henriette.
These he found trotting unconcernedly up and down the broken pavement. With all eternity before them, a few minutes more or less outside a particular door could not affect them. And when they were ushered into the house by the Doctor, and presented to his sister-in-law, they cast a glance of pity upon her that she should be at so much pains to welcome doomed, indifferent men. They listened politely to her apologies for the insufficiencies of their installation, and to her prayers for indulgence in the matter of cuisine; and shook their heads in despondent wonder. As for Anatole, he was as lugubrious as a funeral mute, and the Doctor’s cynical animation at table completely mystified him.
When once the fumes of punch had abated, poor Anatole saw his mad engagement in quite a novel light. The thought of that pistol held by his own hand to his own brains drove him to panic. He looked wan with fear, and fierce from desire to conceal his fear. He was a coward in both senses: without courage to stand out against a foolish engagement, and equally without courage to face death. Despite his boasted conviction that one death is as good as another, and any possibly better than life, he entertained a very private notion that suicide is a social as well as a moral crime, hardly justifiable by the most abject blunder and excesses—and by nothing less than absolute dishonour.
Besides, at heart he loved life, and he only played at pessimism not to look less jaded and cynical than the rest of the century. It was the fashion not to be gay, to have no belief, to have exhausted all emotions, and reached the end of all things. Now what would those around him say if it were known that Anatole Buzeval relished in the privacy of his own chamber Alexandre Dumas, and shed tears at the death of Porthos? What self-respecting Parisian of his day would associate with a youth, whose favourite hero was D’Artugnan, and who loved the great optimist Scott, whose novels he studied stealthily in an indifferent translation, and knew by heart.
He was abashed by contemplation of his own spuriousness as member of an effete circle, where death was regarded as the best of all things; and Mademoiselle Lenormant was seriously distressed by the wretchedness of his appetite and the misery of his boyish face. She forgot herself in another, and left the Doctor to entertain her friend, who had been invited to join them at dinner, while she set herself the task of rescuing the poor lad from his own reflections. Anatole was an affectionate and grateful young fellow, and the way to his heart was inconveniently easy of access. When he went to bed that night, to his other woes was added the delightful misfortune of being head and ears in love with the Doctor’s sister-in-law.
This was a complication not unnoted by Dr. Vermont or his companions. The Doctor calmly stroked his beard, and watched Anatole between the pauses of his conversation on matters English with the foreign lady. The foreigner, he was pleased afterwards to describe, as intelligent, but as she had already touched the rim of the arid plain of middle-age, with equal dulness, far from the hills of youth and from the valley of old age, he saw no reason to pursue her thoughts or shades of speech upon her face—by the way, he did not like English women; they lacked atmosphere, and were born without any natural grace, or coquetry, or any desire to please—and hence he had the more leisure to devote to inspection of Mademoiselle Lenormant and his susceptible comrade. He understood all the boy thought hidden of the struggle within him. He contemplated a magnanimous turn at the last moment, and caressed it in all its dramatic details. Meanwhile, it amused him to follow the conflict, and watch the childish eagerness with which Anatole, thinking his last hour at hand, abandoned himself to this new fancy, with a volume of eloquent declaration on the edge of his eyelids.
And yet the Doctor’s calm inspection was not without a twinge of anger, as at a kind of infringement of his personal rights. As he sat in the old salon, where in his youth he used to chat with Monsieur Lenormant, he was in the grip of the past, softened, almost sentimental. Nothing was changed about the place, which wore the same homely aspect of shabbiness and comfortable untidiness. But three of the personages of that little drama were dead: Monsieur Lenormant, Adèle, and young Dr. Vermont. For he, too, had been young and bright and pleasant. Once he had thrilled from head to foot when Adèle, with a charming movement, took one of his long fingers, and helped him to vamp the Marseillaise, and their eyes met in a foolish fluttering glance, and tudieu! his own were wet!
These were extraordinary things to remember, perhaps, but not so extraordinary as the persistence with which his backward glance rested, not on the image of his lovely young wife evoked from the past—but upon Henriette as she then was. That picture of grave, silent girlhood haunted him in a singular and unexpected way. The forgotten drama rose up, and confronted him with its ruthless dénouement. And if he were not too proud and wilful ever to acknowledge regret, he might know that it was there the sting lay, as he remembered: that he should have played an ignoble trick upon poor old Monsieur Lenormant, and have looked at Adèle instead of at Henriette—on one memorable occasion. He had played for his happiness, and happiness had passed him by. Perchance, had he played a more honourable game, happiness would have been with him all these years, and the noble woman, whose suffering in his choice he now knew he had then divined, would have brought him finer and more delicate enjoyment than that which he had found elsewhere.
‘Yet who knows?’ he added, as a sound lash upon sentimental musing. ‘There is no such thing as happiness, and I should have tired of her goodness as I have tired of the badness of others.’
But he smiled indulgently, when Anatole droned a melancholy melody upon her charms that night.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
WHILE the young men were still sitting over their coffee and rolls in uncheerful converse, Dr. Vermont stole upstairs—not to see Gabrielle, but to talk to Henriette. His thoughts had been with her all night, and he was eager for sight of her by day.
When he entered, a spot of insufferable radiance burnt into the hollow of her thin cheek; but this confession was counteracted by the extreme sadness of her greeting. She, too, had thought during the night, and thought had cruelly struck at her life-long idol. For had he not forgotten Adèle? and was Adèle’s child anything more than his by name? To have found him indifferent to her because of the dead! But to find him indifferent to both! There was the point of pain, and with it the wrench of a wounded faith, which could never more uphold her in her solitude.
She looked at him anxiously, to see if a night spent in the blue room had stamped his cynical, handsome face with a trace of suffering, of revived feeling. The poor lady could not be expected to interpret any such sign except as homage to her dead sister. So she lifted up her heart in honest gratitude for the touch of humanity in his manner as he held Gabrielle to his knee, and stroked her brown hair gently. Such is the guileness and simplicity to be found on a forsaken island, where gossip is not, and society revelations are unknown.
‘And you have lived here the old quiet life, Henriette, with no thought of marriage or change,’ the Doctor said musingly, and noted with pleasure the charming habit of blushing she had retained, like a very young girl.
‘Surely, François, you would have expected to be apprised of my marriage, or of any other change?’
‘I? Why should I? Had I not of my own will dropped out of your existence? If I chose to forget our relationship, what claim on your courtesy could I urge? You are too sensitive, too loyal, too good, Henriette. You were always that. Your father used to say so, and so used Adèle. Ah! they loved you well—those two. I wish now for your sake—I honestly wish you had dealt me the measure I deserved, and my neglect would have stung you less.’
‘It did not sting me, François. I have no pride of that kind. Life is too full of pain. But I was sorry and grieved for Gabrielle’s sake.’
Had she not the right to hide the rest from him—simple-minded lady? who believed she had succeeded—since she so honourably strove to hide it from herself? Dr. Vermont pushed the child away, and came and stood before his sister-in-law. His imperious glance compelled hers, which she lifted timidly, apprehensively.
‘You are an angel, Henriette—oh, I don’t mean in the hackneyed conventional sense, but as a man means it when the goodness of another forces him to face right and wrong, and he feels he cannot undo the wrong and cannot choose the right. It is a miserable position. Ah! if it were not so late? But my tongue is tied. My first mistake was here, in this very room, years ago—twenty, thirty, a lifetime may be. Your father lay on the canapé dying, and I was sitting beside him. He spoke of you; I knew well that he spoke of you, though he did not mention your name. It was you he wished me to marry, and I, following his glance, looked at Adèle instead. Happiness seemed to woo me from that flower-like face, and I believed in happiness then. Now!’ he shrugged in his expressive way, and added, in a softer voice, drooping humbly to her: ‘God forgive me, Henriette, but now I question the wisdom of that choice.’
‘It was a natural choice, François, and it would be anguish for me to think that you could regret it. Spare me that sorrow. Surely I have suffered enough, and have not reproached you. But this indignity would indeed give voice to the pain of silent years, and bid me utter words neither you nor I could forget. I gave her to you,’ she went on, in a dull tone of protest. ‘It was the best I had, my dearest and sole one on earth. But what did it matter if I was the lonelier, so that you and she were happy together? I have asked so little of life. Leave me that remembrance, François. No man had a sweeter wife than my Adèle, and for her I can be satisfied with a loyalty no less from her husband than that which I have given her.’
She glided from the room without another look for him. He stood and stared after her, with a fantastic, almost amused movement of eyebrow, though the heart within him felt heavy to bursting with an odd assortment of sensations.
When they met again, it was at the luncheon table, with his companions and Mademoiselle’s foreign friend.
‘Anatole devours her with his eyes,’ he said to himself. ‘Poor moth! he is sadly burnt, and the fact that she is eight or nine years his senior makes his hurt the graver. There are compensations in a hopeless love when the ages are reversed.’
But his mild sarcastic face wore no look of dejection or dismay as he sat and discoursed upon Shakespeare and Molière with the foreigner, only of intelligent survey and an amiable satisfaction in all things, including the clowns of Shakespeare, from whom most Frenchmen instinctively shrink. After lunch they played chess and discussed, in the usual way, the school of realists, décadents, symbolists, and the recent revival of romanticism in a gentleman, said to combine the melodious style of George Sand with the adventurous spirit of the great Dumas. It was only when the foreigner retired, and the young men went upstairs to study the stars in the friendly odour of tobacco, that the Doctor ventured again to address Henriette.
‘He is an interesting lad, Anatole—eh?’
‘Very. But it distresses me to see him so sad and worried at his age. He appears to have some trouble on his mind,’ said Mademoiselle, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin upon her folded hands.
‘He has fallen in love with you—that’s his trouble, Henriette. I assure you, up in Paris, he is the reverse of sad or worried. He is the life of Lander’s.’
Dr. Vermont achieved his purpose: he made her blush from neck to forehead.
‘You forget, François, that you are talking to a middle-aged woman of a very young man,’ she said, in surprise.
‘Not so middle-aged as that,’ laughed Dr. Vermont, unjoyously. ‘And the others,—do they appear to have any trouble on their minds?’
‘It has not struck me. I should say they are rather futile men, who would probably fail in any undertaking in an abject way,’ she said, dismissing them.
But she did not dismiss Anatole from her mind, and when he came to say ‘Good-night’ to her, she greeted him with so much direct and personal sympathy in her smile, in her glance, and in the slight pressure of her fingers, that I declare the poor fellow was only restrained by the presence of Dr. Vermont from bursting into tears then and there, and confessing all to her. Instead, he choked an inclination to sob, and turned despairingly on his heel.
It rained heavily all next day—the fatal New Year’s Eve. With an instinct for dramatic fitness, Anatole spent the first half in a state of suppressed tearfulness, as an appropriate ending of his young life. He was unrecognisable to himself even, for never before had he dropped into the elegiac mood. With the lyric, with the martial, with the bacchanalian, he was familiar enough. He tried to recover his self-esteem by imagining what his state would be on the battle-field. But the satisfaction he might feel in shooting a German, or bayoneting an insolent Englishman, was wanting to take from the horror of contemplated death; and the candid wretchedness of his face provoked sympathetic misery in the glance of all who beheld him. What would he not give for one more sight of the old fishing town in Normandy, for a chat with the genial honest fishermen who had never heard that accursed phrase, Fin de siècle, and little cared whether they were at the beginning or the end of the century. No, if his mother were alive, he was convinced he never would have entered into that wicked jest upon matter so solemn as death. He would have known better, had he even a sister, like that sweet and noble-looking lady, Mademoiselle Lenormant.
It was too late now, and this was his last day. Thank God it rained! It rained so darkly and so dismally that the regrets of life were mitigated by the mournfulness of nature. It was relieved thereby of much of its attraction and of all its enchantment. Had a single ray of sunlight fallen upon the damp earth, it would have shaken him to the depth of his being. This fact he jealously kept to himself, dreading the sneer of those two superior young men, Julien and Gaston, who thought themselves such very fine fellows because they persisted in their indifference to eternity, and cared not a rush for the poor old world they were going from. But Anatole knew better than to envy them. He held that it requires but a bad heart, or none at all, and feeble brains atrophied by the cheap philosophy of the hour, to reach this stage. So, while they smoked and joked downstairs in dismal hilarity, he sat upstairs with the ladies, and drank tea, and made a gallant effort to play with little Gabrielle. How happy he might be if this were to be permanent reality, and Paris, with its unrest, its bitterness, its noise and glitter, an ugly dream!
Dr. Vermont showed himself neither upstairs nor downstairs. Before lunch he walked to Beaufort, and on his return, he slowly made the tour of the island. It had been mentioned that upon one side of the island, as you stepped from the bridge beyond a broken arch and a dangerous reach of rocks down to the inky waters, there was an old tower. Monsieur Lenormant’s house was lower down on the opposite side, facing the cemetery. This tower had been an ancient fort when the entire isle was the fortified retreat of an illustrious and rebel house. It had sustained sieges, and known the roar of musketry, and it still stood nobly upon its martial memories, albeit a ruin of centuries. All was silence and desolation on this side of the island. No one walked its pavements, and the laundresses wheeling their barrows to town from the lower end, instinctively chose the inhabited quarter to pass.
‘A man might rot to carrion here,’ said Dr. Vermont, as he stood between the battered walls of the tower, and looked up at the weeping heavens, and then down at the sullen and swollen river. ‘None would know, and a few days’ persistent rain would rush the river beyond the rocks in among these ruins, and carry our bodies away to the sea.’
And then he walked with his hands in his pockets, unmindful of the rain, to the neglected cemetery. He stood a while against the white tomb of his young wife, upon which some flowers lay, a lifeless pulp in a pool of water. Thirty-nine only, and two days ago he believed he had tasted all life had to offer, and wanted no more of its bitterness or its sweetness? But he would not humble himself to admit that he had erred two days ago, and that there still remained at the bottom of the cup a draught he would willingly drink. He put the present from him, and the stirring voice of a troubled consciousness, and leaned there in the rain to dream a while of youth, and hope, and all things good that have been and are no more.
It was late in the afternoon when he returned and shut himself in the blue-room to write letters. This done, he examined a pair of pistols, loaded one which he laid upon the table, and with his odd, hard smile, carried the other into the dressing-room where Anatole slept, and placed it on the bed. There was still half an hour to dispose of before dinner—his last half hour of solitude. He took up the candle, and walked slowly round the room, inspecting each object, pricking by association, memory, that just then needed no pricking. The pity was that the man’s sharp face never lost its calm irony of expression, and his shapely mouth never lost its trick of quiet smiling. For him absurdity lay at the bottom of all things—if not absurdity, something so much worse as to be beyond toleration.
Man in all his moods, he insisted, was a mixture of grossness and absurdity, and it mattered little which of the two elements prevailed. The one excess worked mischief for himself, and the other mischief for his neighbours.
When the dinner-bell rang, Dr. Vermont appeared still smiling and humorously observant. He it was who spoke most, and most coherently, at table. Julien and Gaston swaggered a little, and their faces were pale and excited. Anybody with an eye in his head might have guessed they were morally perturbed, and Mademoiselle, mindful of the hurried departure that night, questioned her foreign friend, sitting below with Dr. Vermont, in a swift, apprehensive glance. But the Doctor was so cool and steady, and discoursed so blandly with his neighbour, that she dismissed her fears, and set herself to cheer and encourage poor Anatole. If his depression were really due to a violent fancy for herself, then she was in duty bound to act the part of mother, or at least of elder affectionate sister,—which she did with consummate ability, and drove the unhappy lad to despair.
After dinner the Doctor, instead of rising, said, laughing—
‘Henriette, to-night we men will follow the example of our barbarous brothers of England, and will remain over our wine after the ladies. To borrow a habit from your countrymen, Madame, cannot offend your taste, though I am afraid I should not find a Frenchwoman tolerant of it.’
‘I believe Englishmen sit at wine and the ladies retire,’ said Mademoiselle, hesitating. She did not like the innovation, and frankly showed it.
‘Your pardon, Henriette, we have our plans to discuss. You, Madame, too, will hold us excused?’
‘Certainly, Monsieur, I think it a commendable custom which keeps men and women so much apart. They meet then with greater zest and novelty.’
Dr. Vermont held the door for the ladies and bowed. He stooped and kissed little Gabrielle, and held her head a moment against him. And then when the door closed, he shrugged his shoulders, and sighed.
‘That’s the Englishwoman for you—a creature without tact or charm. The British matron is only fitted to be a mother of a family. She can neither hold us back, nor encourage us with dignity. Ah! lucky we are, gentlemen, to be the slaves and masters of that adorable bundle of perversities—la femme française!’
While he spoke he uncorked a bottle of Monsieur Lenormant’s fine old Burgundy, and filled each glass to the brim.
‘Allons, Messieurs. Let us drink the last hours away. I give you a toast to begin with—the delicious Frenchwoman.’
The young men half emptied their glasses at a draught, and then cast haggard glances at the sarcastic Doctor. He slowly drained his glass, and lifted the bottle again.
‘And since our delightful torment would never consent to go unmated, even in a toast, let us drink, gentlemen, to her inadequate, but sympathetic partner—the gallant Frenchman.’
The first bottle of Burgundy loosened their tongues again, and inspired them to a febrile gaiety. They laughed loudly, broke into snatches of song, and by the time the second bottle was empty, one and all had fallen upon sentimental reminiscences. They thought themselves back at Lander’s, and the discretion of the ladies’ retreat could not be questioned. Anatole thundered roughly upon the perfidy of a certain Susanne, and Gaston vowed that none of her crimes could equal the trick one Blanche played him—the men used to call her ‘Blanche of Castille,’ in recognition of the many virtues she seemed to have inherited from her illustrious namesakes, doubtless; and Julien interposed dryly, with a droll anecdote of a lady once known in Paris as ‘La Perle Noire’.
Dr. Vermont said nothing, but listened and attacked the third bottle. He reached across, and filled Anatole’s glass, and smiled upon him almost pleasantly.
‘Never mind Susanne, or any other perfidious fair, my lad. It comes to the same at the end, whether they have been faithful or not. They die, and we die, and sleep “a long, an endless, unawakeable sleep”. It’s half-past nine now,’ he added, looking at his watch. ‘In two more hours, we shall be starting out upon the road that has no ending, leads nowhither, unless it be to dark, bottomless space.’
‘Why so?’ asked Julien. ‘May we not be shooting through the stars? Anatole in his present mood will make straight for Venus, but I, seeking compensation for the dulness of a peaceful life, will rather choose Mars. One ought to fall in for some good fighting there, eh?’
Anatole stood up, and went over to the window. The melancholy flow of water from the drooping eaves could be heard, and the sky was as black as the river and the landscape. No light in the heavens, no light below nearer than Beaufort, no sound but the splash of rain. The susceptible fellow shivered visibly, and went back to the table to comfort himself with another draught of Burgundy.
‘There is not a star to be shot into,’ he said gloomily; ‘and it is raining as if the whole universe were melted.’
‘We have a couple more toasts to drink, gentlemen,’ said the Doctor, standing. ‘Are your glasses filled?’
Well, if they could do nothing else, they could at least get drunk before they went on a voyage among the stars, or fell asleep like dogs for eternity.
‘An Englishman, when he is tired of life, takes to drink; a Frenchman blows his brains out,’ Julien observed, as he helped his neighbour to the bottle.
‘Upon my conscience, I do not know that the Englishman has not the best of it.’
‘He is of hardier build, my friend, and can take his drinking and pessimism in equal doses. We are the slaves of our nerves, and can stand neither pessimism nor drink.’
‘Are you ready? The toast is the downfall of France.’
The young men stolidly laid down their untasted wine, and looked at the Doctor for explanation. They themselves might go to the dogs, and the mischief take them there, or elsewhere. The universe might melt away into nothingness, but France, beloved France, must ever stand fast, proud and honoured and beautiful. Drink to her downfall? Was Doctor Vermont mad?
‘Why not?’ said Doctor Vermont imperturbably. ‘We shall be no more. And what can it matter to us? France has had her day, as Egypt, Greece, and Rome had theirs. I would have her spared the misery of a slow decline. It is now the turn of Russia, which will be the civilisation of the future. If you prefer it, we will drink then to Russia.’
So they drank to Russia, long and deeply; and Anatole, who had a pretty tenor voice, intoned the Russian Hymn, which the others listened to on their feet. And then to keep up the musical glow, and the golden moment of unconsciousness, he burst into the Marseillaise, knowing well that few can resist that most thrilling and spirited of national songs.
When he had finished the last verse, and the last chorus was sung, his companions sat silently gazing into their empty glasses. They had finished six bottles of Burgundy between them, and were now passably drunk, though not incapable of presenting themselves before the ladies to say good-bye. The Doctor went first, and waited for Anatole outside the salon door.
‘Remember, boy, it is “Good-night”—not “Good-bye,”’ he said sadly, as he pressed his friend’s shoulder.
Mademoiselle and her companion sat before a low wood fire, chatting quietly. They heard the songs from the dining-room, and smiled and shook their heads. Mademoiselle remarked that the young men were discourteous enough to carry the habits of the Latin Quarter into private houses, but since her brother-in-law tolerated such behaviour, it was not for her to object, since they were his guests.
When the door opened, both ladies looked blankly round at the invasion. The Doctor stood a moment on the threshold and arched his brows in smiling signification. The foreigner felt she would give a good deal to get behind that smile, and understand that queer lifting of the eyebrow. That the man wore his smile as a mask, she had no doubt, and she was not without suspicion that behind it lay concealed a different personage from the actor on view. He advanced, and came and stood in front of his sister-in-law, looking down on her with a new gravity on his reckless handsome face. The flush under his eyes gave a brilliance to his wistful gaze that justified the fascinated flutter of the poor lady’s heart. For she had never seen him look in the least like that, though she had seen his eyes melt to another.
‘Henriette, good-night,’ he said softly.
She gave him her hand, with a glance of sharp inquiry.
‘Is it good-bye, François?’
‘Good-bye? Why good-bye? It’s a lugubrious word. Au revoir, ma sœur.’
His lips touched her fingers an instant, and already he had turned to shake hands with her companion. Gaston and Julien came behind him, and bent their bodies in two in a dignified salute, but Anatole held out his hand, and clung feverishly to hers when she took it, while his eyes held hers in dismayed conjecture. Was it despair she read in them, or terror, or simply the pain of young love? But his speech was lagging and broken, not that, she decided, of a sober man, and she withdrew her hand abruptly, with a curt movement of dismissal of her head.
The boy turned to follow his companions, and felt his heart break within him as he went downstairs. While they passed through the blue-room, the Doctor again leant in affectionate pressure upon his shoulder.
‘Courage, Anatole. No woman is worth a pang.’
‘Ah, Monsieur le Docteur, you cannot think that of her. She is worth the best man could offer, and all he might suffer. You know it, Doctor. Deny if you admire her.’
‘I don’t deny it, if that will console you.’
‘And you can fling away such a chance,’ moaned Anatole.
‘I fling away nothing, for the simple reason, I have nothing to fling away. It is not chance any of us lack, chances of making fools of ourselves, of others. Chance, my friend, is generally another word for blunder. Some philosophers call the world chance, and is not that the biggest blunder of all?’
‘You mystify me, Vermont. I call perversity the worst of all blunders. And is it not perversity, if you love Mademoiselle Lenormant, to——’
‘Who says I love Mademoiselle Lenormant? I loved her sister, in a way, and she is dead. You’ll find your pistol all ready there on the bed. Put it into your pocket. It is half-past eleven. Tell the others I will join them instantly.’
Before crossing the passage to the other bedroom, Anatole stole softly upstairs, and knocked at the salon door. Mademoiselle Lenormant opened the door, and surveyed him in disapproving surprise.
‘In what way can I serve you, Monsieur?’ she asked. He slipped into the room under her arm. There was an empty chair near, and into it he dropped, glancing up at her prayerfully.
‘Mademoiselle, I am about to face a long, perhaps a perilous voyage,’ he said, and the slight break in his voice and the wet lustre of his boyish blue eyes captivated her judgment, and melted her into all heart as she listened and looked down upon him.
‘I have come back to you, to ask you before I set out for the unknown, just one moment, to place your hand on my forehead and say, “God bless you, Anatole.” Do you pardon the presumption?’
She bent forward, brushed the tossed hair off his forehead, kissed it tenderly, and said, ‘God bless you, Anatole.’
Silently and sobered the four men went out into the wet night. They walked round the island first to make sure that every house slept. There was not a light anywhere, not a sound. They trod the ground as quietly as booted men can tread, and came round by the cemetery and the low broken wall to the tower. Here they entered, and the Doctor struck a match that through the blurred illumination they might see the advantages of the spot he had chosen to salute the new century. It was certainly better than the sensation they should create anywhere near Paris. I doubt not that each one privately regretted the rash engagement they had made over their punch at Lander’s a week ago. But none had the courage to give the first voice to regret. False shame and fear of ridicule held them tongue-tied, and resolved to make the best of their bargain.
When they had selected a spot near the hollow of the encroaching rocks, where, if they fell, they might be washed unnoted down into the river when the flood came high, Julien separated himself from the group, and walked over to the lower wall, whence the lights of Beaufort could be seen. These lights were rare and dim, but they cheered him inexpressibly. They were eloquent of life in the monotony of darkness.
He sat on the edge of the wall, and stared past the shadow of the bridge, out into the terrible loneliness of night, and shuddered at the roar of the eddying river below. Upon the breast of that river one might float into the beautiful South—a word made up of the sense of sweetness, and flowers, and sunshine, and blue waters, and clear skies. When he was a youngster he used to tell himself that he would save up his money, and go to Italy. And now he was no longer young, had not saved up his money, had not seen Italy, and was going to die—and leave it all behind.
At that moment a peal of bells was heard from over the water, and Gaston Favre announced in a cold, dull voice that the cathedral of Beaufort was pealing the midnight chimes. Had there been light, each man would have been seen to quiver from head to foot, and then grow rigid upon his feet.
‘My friends, is it agreed that we salute the dying century upon the last stroke of the cathedral bell?’ asked Dr. Vermont, in a hushed, muffled voice.
‘It is agreed,’ said Gaston, after an imperceptible pause. The four men gathered together, and took their pistols out of their breast-pocket. Dr. Vermont lifted his face up to the cold wet wind. His lips parted to the heavens’ moisture, and he felt refreshed. Since there could be pleasure in the fall of raindrops upon heated lips, why not even then admit that life may be worth living? Why not see the bright background to present pain as well as the dark contrast of evil behind joy? We have said the Doctor was a proud and wilful man, and he would accept no sensation as admonishment of error,—but this gave him some pause.
In one swift backward glance, he saw the long roll of travelled years—years misspent, possibly, but not without their baggage of unearned joys; saw the start of resplendent youth ringing him onward to a manhood of renown: remembered friends he had once regarded with other than mere cynical interest: moments that had throbbed with light, and all the loveliness of untainted freshness—perfumed, dewy like a May orchard in blossom, swathed in youth’s eternal purple. While the lads around him faced the inevitable, as they thought, and though shrinking, white-lipped, and frozen with horror, from his cold acquiescence, endeavoured to warm themselves to the last act in the spirit of bravado and contemplation of the deluged earth, he had taken a sudden rebound from his old attitude. It was no longer the dislike of life and the weariness of experience that held him in chill imprisonment The old desire for boyish blisses, and the cordial of laughter mantled and burst in his brain like a riot of song. It was a revelation, with all the meaning of prayer first understood. A pulsing regret for all he was leaving, for what he had known, and, above all, for that which was yet unknown, swept him instantly upon a fiery wave. It shot his arm down nervelessly. The pallid, spiritual face of Henriette seemed to hang in the sullen space of black sky and wet black earth. It glowed like a lamp, and shed a faint illumination upon the dusk. The faded monotone of her voice murmured prayerfully above the weighted splash upon the stones, and awoke the essential impulse of existence. While such women lived and prayed for men, could the deeps of life be said to have closed? ’Tis an old-fashioned notion, but, like most old-fashioned things, ’tis the simplest and the best. It softened the hard retrospection of Dr. Vermont’s glance, and lent a wavering tenderness to his peculiar smile.
Upon the sixth stroke of the cathedral bell, he offered his hand in silence to Julien Renaud, who squeezed it roughly, in assurance of undiminished courage. Poor lad! He needed the assurance sadly. Upon the eighth stroke, Dr. Vermont sought Gaston’s hand, but the limp moist fingers he grasped made no effort to respond to his pressure.
‘Courage, Gaston,’ he cried, in a friendly, animated voice, and upon the tenth stroke he turned to Anatole, and had there been a ray of light above or around, Dr. Vermont’s face would have been seen to undergo a wonderful and beautiful change. Honest affection that makes no pretence of concealment, humanised it, and a magnanimous resolve filled its expression with cheering purport. The worst of us, you see, have our heroic moments, only it often happens that, like Dr. Vermont’s, they pass unnoticed in the dark.
‘There is happiness ahead for you yet, Anatole,’ he breathed quickly through his teeth, while he swung the unhappy young fellow’s arm once up and down, in warm emphasis to communicate the reassuring fluid to him.
‘Gentlemen, ’twas an excellent joke, and as might be expected of such excellent lads as you, carried out with uncommon spirit and dash. I’m proud of you, gentlemen, and shall feel honoured in the privilege of saluting the new century in your midst. We fire heavenward—a good omen—and then we shake hands again, in cordial assent that humanity is not so worn but it may still be relied upon for entertainment. You will say there are higher things. I’m not so sure there are not. Anyway, ’tis not an excessive claim that youthful pessimists may without shame start a fresh century as cheerful philosophers. The heavens are not always weeping, and most of us are the better for the sun’s shining.’
He spoke rapidly, and a muffled shout dying away upon a thick sob, broke from each troubled breast. The first throb of emotion spent itself in obedience.
When the last stroke of the cathedral bell had fallen upon the silence with a prolonged thin echo, a loud simultaneous report was heard to startle the night, and travel above the roar of the river, far across the empty country.
Gaston and Julien Renaud, utterly unnerved by the reaction, fell sobbing into each other’s arms, but Anatole, bewildered past understanding, thought he was shot, and fell in a heap at Dr. Vermont’s feet.