So it was ever with this gruesome infant. Its presentment, or that of some part of it, haunted Ned through every course of an attenuated cuisine. The butter would exhibit a mould of its features, the milk-jug a print of its lips. The rolls appeared indented with suspicious crescents in the crusty parts; the omelettes confessed a flavour, and often an impression, of a small sticky hand. The creature itself, moreover, was a shockingly ubiquitous Puck. It was always being mislaid, as was everything portable in the house. Its shrill waking cry would issue from the depths of the lodger’s bed, into which it had burrowed with a precocious sense of the humour of appropriation; its red face rise suddenly, like an October moon, from behind a cloud of sacking on the floor. It was brought up with the fagots, and ran some narrow risks of premature cremation; it was included in the week’s washing, and its little fat stomach menaced with a flat-iron. Sometimes, when one opened a cupboard, it would fall out in company with half-a-dozen plates; sometimes madame would deposit it on a table, and, forgetting that she had done so, would heap it with casual litter as she transacted her domestic business. “No doubt,” Ned thought, “it is destined to eventual immolation in a pasty.”
Indeed, his nerves were always on the jump when there was cooking forward—a lively knowledge of which fact he could by no means evade. For the process being conducted on the floor above his head, and it being customary with madame to let everything boil over, it became a familiar experience with him to see successive samples of his menu appear and hang in sebaceous drops from a certain seasoned patch on the ceiling, whence in time they would contribute their quota of peril to a perfect little slide of grease that had formed on the boards below. Then, at such a stage, it would be not unusual for his landlady to come into view, pledge-on-arm, at the door, her borné face irradiated with some eagerness of triumph.
“But only think, monsieur!” she would begin.
“Pardon,” Ned would interpose; “but is it well for the child to be gnawing that great lump of cheese?”
“Cheese! Oh, mon Dieu! I must have put it on the trencher, thinking it was bread, and he has taken it, the thief!”
Then the lodger must discipline his impatience, while the comestible changed hands, to a shrill clamour, the infant finally being deposited outside the door like boots to be cleaned.
“Only think, monsieur!” cries the lady again; “the delicate compote I could have sworn to having prepared for monsieur’s dinner a week ago, when monsieur, nevertheless, had to go fasting for an entremet! I was right; it was made, and it was not stolen. This morning I find it thrust to the very back of the oven—baked for a week, and no more eatable than a brigadier’s wig.”
Well, all this provoked Master Ned into no desire to change his quarters. He was a genially stoic rascal, and one that could wring interest out of investments that would have repelled less imperturbable natures. So, through that autumn and winter, and deep into the spring of ’89, he stuck to his corner of the Rue Beautreillis, going little into the more fashionable centres of the town, seeking artistic adventure like a knight-errant of the pencil, and doubtless elaborately misreading, in common with many thousands about him, the signs that came and went, like a moaning wind, in the channels of the rushing life of St Antoine.
CHAPTER XII.
Looking on a certain afternoon (it was that of the 27th of November) from his high perch, Ned saw the people of the streets to be in a more than usual state of excitement and commotion. Once or twice latterly it had occurred to him that the ferment of national affairs was not subsiding, as he had expected it to do, under the tonic treatment of the national comptrollers—that the people were bent on levying on their taxmasters a tax more stringent than any they had themselves groaned under. Sometimes turning, as he rarely did, into the Palais Royal, and marking how, in that garden of public sedition, the very veil had been torn from innuendo; how furious agitators, each with his knot of eager listeners, found applause proportionate to the daring of their vituperation; how struggling hordes fought from door to counter of Desein’s book-shop, that they might feed their revolutionary hunger with any cag-mag of radicalism, provided it were dressed to look raw and bloody—he would fall curiously grave over a thought of the impotence of any known principle to precipitate passions held in such intricate solution, curiously speculative as to the drifting of a rudderless bark of state. For himself, he was conscious of having been shouldered from all his little snug standpoints of legislative philosophy; of the treading-under of his protoplasmic theories by innumerable vigorous feet; of his inadmissible claim to be allotted a portfolio in any government whatsoever of man by man. He was become, indeed, quite humble, and yet larger-souled than before, by reason of his content to act the part of insignificant unit in a drama, the goodly developments of which he was nevertheless still confident enough to foretell. And surely at this point he would have cried—and that, despite the augurs—as Mirabeau cried ecstatically at a later date: “How honourable will it be for France that this great Revolution has cost humanity neither offences nor crimes.... To see it brought about by the mere union of enlightened minds with patriotic intentions: our battles mere discussions; our enemies only prejudices that may well be forgiven; our victories, our triumphs, so far from being cruel, blessed by the very conquered themselves.”