Our Lady of Darkness

by Bernard Capes

In the meanwhile autumn stole footsore, like a loveless wife, in the track of summer. She was swart and powdered, not à la mode de Versailles; drouthy too, yet with a cry to shrill piercingly in every street of every town of France.

The dust of her going rose and penetrated through chinks and doorways. It overlay the pavements so thickly that one might have thought it the accumulation of that that age-long ministers had thrown in the eyes of the people, the very precipitate of tyranny. It clung, hot and acrid, to the walls of all living palaces, of all princely monuments to the dead, as if it were the expression of that proletariat censorship that would obliterate the very records of a hateful past. It was the condensed breath of destruction settling in a stringent dew, and it might have been exhaled from the ten thousand brassy throats that made clamour in the highways ten thousandfold great because they were the resonant throats of starved and empty vessels.

For the elections were on; and what if bread were dearer than money if his chosen representative was in every man’s mouth? So, through broil and famine the city of Paris echoed to its blazing roofs with jangle jubilant and acclamatory, inasmuch as the no-property qualification gave every honest man a chance of being governed by a rogue. And what prospect in a nation of contrarieties could be more humorously enticing?

Then upon this drouth and this uproar Ned saw the steel glaive of winter smite with a clang that brought ironic echoes from the hollow granaries. It fell swift and sudden; and the clamour, under the lashing of the blade, took a new tone of terror, the wail of despairing souls defrauded of their right atmosphere of hope. For who could look beyond the present with the thermometer below zero; with the prospect blotted out by freezing mists; with the thin shadows of pining women and children always coming between one and the light; with one’s own brain clouded with the fumes of dearth? Yet the elections went on; but now in a sterner spirit of desperation—of insistent watchfulness, too, that no hard-wrung concession should be juggled to misuses under cover of mistifying skies.

Of much misery that neighboured on the wretchedest quarters of a wretched city Ned was, from his position, cognisant. The sight shook his stoicism, and greatly contributed to the disruption (St Denys and M. David negatively helping) of a certain baseless little house of toy bricks that his boyish vanity had conceived to be an endurable system builded by himself. “I have been a philosophe, not a wise man,” he thought. “Life is not a chess-board, its each next step plain to the clean thinker.”

Now it was the sight of the children that secretly wrung his heart: these poor sad babies, disciplined on a primary code of naughtiness and retribution, merit and reward, marvelling from sunken eyes that they should be so punished for no conscious misbehaviour; patiently, nevertheless, retaining their faith in God and man, and making a play-ball of the bitter earth that stung their hands and shrivelled under their feet.

Well, they died, perhaps by hundreds, when the snow was in the streets. “And let them go,” said M. David. “There shall be others to follow by-and-by. As to these, warped and demoralised, they would not prosper the regeneration of the earth. We want a clean race and no encumbrances.”

That was his philosophy—admirably Roman, as he intended it to be. It did not suit Ned.

“There is more to be learnt from a cripple than an athlete,” said that person boldly. “I would sooner, for my own sake, study in this school of St Antoine than in yours of the Louvre, M. David.”

“Truly, every artist to his taste,” said the Academician, with an unsightly grin; and it was Ned’s taste to give of his substance royally and pityingly when a voice cried in his ear of cold and famine.