She shook him so that his heels knocked on the floor. For the moment she was beside herself.
“The Englishman!” she hissed—and choked. “Est-ce bien possible! Sang Dieu!—O, sang Dieu! and if it were not for thee—he hates children—he might be now——!”
She checked herself with a desperate effort. She tightened her grip. The boy screamed with pain.
“Be quiet!” she cried furiously. “If some one should hear thee!”
“I want them to. I want them all to come in, that I may tell how you pretended to be blind that monsieur might kiss you.”
She recognised in a moment that he was goaded at last to terrible revolt. She cried “Hush!” in a panic, and without avail. The child continued to shriek and to revile her—repeating himself hysterically in the lack of a sufficient vocabulary. Changing front, it was only after long and frantic effort that she could coax and bribe him into silence. And, when at length she had induced him to a reasonable mood, and could trust herself away from him, she went and threw herself upon her bed and, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, cried empty the fountains of her wrath and her terror.
CHAPTER XI.
Consistent in his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a little shop of semi-circular frontage that, standing like a river promontory at the north-west corner of the Rue Beautreillis—where that tributary ditch of humanity ran into and fed the muddy channel of the Rue St Antoine—seemed to have rounded from sharper outline in the age-long wash of traffic wheeling by its walls. From his window on the second floor the Englishman thus commanded a view of two streets, and, indeed, of three; for across the main thoroughfare the Rue Beautreillis, become now the Rue Royale, was continued until it discharged itself into a great house-enclosed place, as into a mighty reservoir of decorum built for the defecation of neighbouring vulgarities. Looking east, moreover, between the belfry towers of the convents of St Marie and La Croix, Ned’s vision might reach, without strain, the very twilight mass of the Bastille; so that, as he congratulated himself, his situation was such as—barring adventitious and unprofitable luxuries—a blood prince with any imagination might have envied him.
For thence, often watching, speculative, he would see the scene-shifters of the early Revolution—come out in front of the high, mute screen of the prison, that closed his vista eastwards as if it were a stage-curtain—busy as bees on the alighting-board of a hive. Thence he would mark, in real ignorance of the plot of the forthcoming piece, or cycle of pieces, the motley companies gathering for rehearsal—the barn-stormers; the heavy “leads;” the slighted tragedians foreseeing their opportunity for the fiftieth time; the inflated supers canvassing the favour of phantom houses with imagined gems of inspiration, with new lamps for old in the shape of misenlightened renderings of traditional rôles; he would mark the gas, so to speak, the artificial light that informed the garish scene with spurious vitality. But the prompter he could never as yet find in his place, nor could he gather the true import of the play to which, it must be presumed, all this pretentious gallimaufry was a prelude. Theorists, agitators, pamphleteers—the open, clamorous expression of that that had been suggested only to him during his hitherto wanderings—all these and all this were present to his eyes and his ears, passionlessly alert at their vantage-point on the second floor of the corner house in the Rue Beautreillis. Daily he sought to piece, from the struttings and the disconnected vapourings, the puzzle of present circumstance, the political significance of so much apparently aimless rhetoric. Daily he listened for the prompter’s bell; daily looked for the appearance of the confident author who should discipline all this swagger and rhodomontade.
Then, by-and-by, the fancy did so master him as that he would see a veritable curtain, rounding into slumberous folds, in this silent west wall of the Bastille; a curtain—with sky-arched convent buildings for proscenium—whose every sombre crease he seemed to watch with a curious moved expectancy of the unnameable that should be revealed in its lifting. For so an impression deepened in him unaccountably that beyond that voiceless veil was shaping itself the real drama, of which this outer ranting was but as the wind that precedes an avalanche; that suddenly, and all in a moment, the screen would be rent, like a sullen cloud by lightning, and the import of an ominous foregathering find expression in some withering organisation to which the surface turmoil had been but a blind. He thought himself prophetic—en rapport with the imps of a national destiny; but nevertheless the curtain delayed to rise while he waited, though it was to go up presently to a roar that shook the world.