He knew, watching her face, that she would reject the condition, and that with all suitable decorum. But he saw the pupils of her eyes dilate at sight of the gold piece.
“Monsieur, it seems,” said she, “can better afford to jest than I to accept insult”—and she hurriedly caught at her charge’s hand and drew the child away.
Mr Murk, with plentiful complacency, paid for his wine and sauntered in pursuit. At a particular fruit-stall he saw his peasant Madonna linger a moment, hesitate, and then go on her way with an up-toss of her chin. He came to a stop and considered—
“Méricourt! But I have an introduction to Monsieur de St Denys of Méricourt. How far, I wonder? This Nicette would make an admirable study to an artist. I will go to Méricourt.”
CHAPTER III.
Facing an opulent sunset, Ned made his way some three or four miles out of Liége through scenery whose very luxuriance affected him like the qualmish aftermath of excess. It gave him a feeling of surfeit—of committal to a debauch of colour that it was no part of his temperament to indulge. If his soul had attached itself to any theory of beauty, it was to a theory of orderliness and sobriety, that took account of barbaric dyes but to set them to an accordant pattern. Its genius was of an adaptive rather than an imaginative bent. It desired to shape his world to man, not man to his world—to appropriate the accidents of nature to the uses of a wholesomely picturesque race—to emasculate the bull of violence by withdrawing from its very experience the hues of crimson and orange.
On any display of passion this young man looked with cool dislike. His instincts were primarily for the gratification of the understanding. The premeditated involutions of fancy did not engage his sympathies. The mystery of brooding distances peopled with irisated phantoms, of the hazy wanderings of the undefined, he was not greatly concerned to penetrate. Claude he would have preferred to Turner, and Nasmyth to either. Fuseli he already detested; and Blake was his very bête noire. Things rude, boisterous, and ugly he would wish to crush under a heel of iron, thinking to enforce the peace—rather after the fashion of his times—by breaking it. But he would raise, not level, the world to an equality—would make out of its material a very handsome model, in which the steeples should clang and the water-wheels turn and the seasons pulsate by a mechanism common to all.
Such was his creed of eventual reconstruction of a social fabric, the downfall of which was much predicted of the jeunesse politique of the day; and in the meanwhile he was very willing to acknowledge himself to be in the condition of incomplete moral ossification—to be travelling, indeed, for the sake of bone and gristle, and in order to convert the misuses of other characters to the profit of his own.
Now he advanced with a certain feeling of enforced intemperance upon a prospect of superabundant beauty. The great noontide heat was become a salt memory, to be tasted only for emphasis of the bouquet of that velvety wine of air that poured from the heights. Distant hills ran along an amber sky, like the shadows of nearer ones. Far away a jagged keep surmounting a crag stood out, deep umber, from a basin in the valley brimming with blue mist. Closer at hand a marrowy white stream, sliding noiseless over the crest of a slope silhouetted against the northern vaults, seemed the very running band drawn from the heavens to keep the earth spinning. The grasshopper shrilled in the roadside tangle; comfortable doves, drowsing amongst the chestnut leaves, exchanged sleepy confidences. Sometimes the clap of a cow-bell, sometimes the hollow call of a herdsman, thrilled the prosperous calms of light as a dropped stone scatters a water image. These were the acuter accents on a tranquillity that no thought could wound.
At last, when the sun flamed upon the horizon like a burning house of the Zodiac, the traveller came through a deep wood-path upon the village he sought, and was glad to see dusk mantling its gables and blotting out the red lights of the open valley in which it lay.