Mr Murk was suffering from a toujours perdrix of politics. He needed, he felt, a prolonged constitutional, both to clear his brain of a certain blood-web that confused its vision, and to enable him to sort, in fair communion with the Republic of Nature, his own somewhat scattered theories of government. He was really unnerved, indeed, by what he had seen and experienced, and the prospect of quiet woods and pastures was become dear to his soul. He would return to Méricourt, as he had promised himself he would do, in the sweet spring weather—to Méricourt, where the play of Machiavelism was but a pastoral comedy after all. He would return to Méricourt and paint into the unfinished eyes of his Madonna the fathomless living sorrow of doubt—the Son being dead—as to their own divinity.
Of the two hundred miles to traverse he walked the greater number—sometimes in leisurely, sometimes in hurried fashion, as the chasing dogs of memory slept or tracked him. But, tramp as he would, he could not regain that elasticity of heart that once so communicated itself to the “spirit in his feet.” He had gone to Paris blithe and curious; he was returning, as the idiom expresses it, with a foot of nose. In eight months the spouting grass seemed to have lost its spring. May, with all its voices, could not charm him from foul recollections; the gloom of slumbering forests was full of murder. Now for the first time he realised how the great peace he often paused to wistfully look upon was Nature’s, not his; how, flatter his soul as he might with a pretence of its partnership in all the noble restfulness that encompassed it, it stood really an alien, isolated—a suffering, self-conscious inessential, having no kinship with this material sweet tranquillity—separated from it, in fact, by just the traverseless width of that very conscious ego. He felt like Satan alighted for the first time in view of Eden, only to recognise by what plumbless moat of knowledge he was excluded from its silent lawns and orchards.
This feeling came to him in his worst moods. In his best, he could take artistic joy of those effects of cloud and country that called for no elaborate detail in the delineating—that were distant only proportionately less than the distant unrealities of the stars in the sky. For the impression of outlawry in a world that was only man’s by conquest was bitten into his soul for all time; and never again, since that night spent in the shambles of St Antoine, should he recover and indulge that ancient sense of irresponsibility towards his share in the conduct of man’s usurped estate.
“We are,” he thought, “squatters disputing with one another the possession of land to which we have each and all no title.”
Nevertheless—therefore, rather—his soul acknowledged the opposite to disenchantment in its review of nature unconverted to misuse. Not before had pathos so sung to him in the warm throat-notes of birds; so chimed to him in the tumble of weirs; so looked up into his face from the fallen blossom on the grass. He might have found his healing of all things at the time had Love appeared to him in sympathetic guise.
Over the last stages of his journey he took diligence to Liége, and, at the end of a long week’s ramble, set foot once more in the old sun-baked town.
Thence, on a gentle evening, he turned his face to Méricourt, and in a mood half humour, half sadness, retraversed the hills and dingles of a pleasant experience. Somehow he felt as if he were returning, a confident prodigal, to ancient haunts of beauty and kindliness.
He had proceeded so far as to have come within a half mile of the village, when, in thridding his way through a sombre wedge of woodland, he was suddenly aware of a figure—a woman’s—flitting before him round a bend in the path. There was that in his momentary glimpse of the form that led him to double his pace so as to overtake it. This he had no difficulty in doing, though for a minute it seemed as if the other were anxious to elude him. But finding, no doubt, the task beyond her, she stopped and turned of a sudden into a leafy embrasure set in the track-edge, and stood there awaiting his coming, her head drooped and her back to a green beech-trunk.
“Théroigne!” cried Ned, nearly breathless. “Théroigne Lambertine!”
“Why do you stop me?” she said, panting, and in a low voice. “You know the way to Méricourt, monsieur.”