In all these three years he had not once been abroad. Following—as keenly as it was possible for him to do in those days of crippled international communication—the progress of the great Revolution (perhaps, even, contributing at its fair outset to the sinews of war), he had yet no inducement whatever further to embroil himself, an inconsiderable theorist, with a distracted people. Between a turbulent chamber of his history and the halls of tranquillity in which he now sojourned had clapped-to a very sombre door of death; and this he had not the inclination to open again.
Still, often in his day-dreams he would be back at Madame Gamelle’s, watching all that life scintillating against the curtain of the Bastille. And now this curtain had, in truth, gone up, revealing, not, as he himself had prophesied, the “blank brick wall of the theatre,” but democratic force represented in a vast perspective—a procession so endless that it seemed drawn out of the very brain of the North, where all mystery is concentrated.
That, now, was an old story. Three subsequent years of planting and levelling had changed the face of the world’s garden of conventions, and during all that time the world itself had stood round outside the railings, peering in amazed upon a ruthless grubbing up and carting away of its pinkest flowers of propriety.
That was an old story; nor less so to Ned was the tale of his little sojourn in Méricourt; and thereon, for all his rebelling, his thoughts would sometimes dwell sweetly. The very quaintness of his reception, unflattering though it had been, had still an odd thrill for him. The memory of a happy period put to long wanderings by serried dykes, of the old hamlet basking in the ferny bed of its hills, of all the ridiculous and the tragic that, blended, made of the little episode in his life a sore that it was yet ticklingly pleasant to rub over—these, the shadows of a momentary experience, would rise before him, not often, yet so persistently that he came to attach almost a superstitious significance to their visitings. For why else, he thought, should the ghost of one haunt the galleries of a thousand pictures! Some connection, not yet severed, must surely link him to that time.
Yet, during all this period of his responsibility, no whisper to suggest that to his shadows he was become other than a shadow himself reached him. It may have been breathed inaudibly, nevertheless, through the key-hole of that closed door.
Of Théroigne he had heard no word after her flight from the house of death. Nor had he desired to hear, or to do else than free himself of the dust of a scandal that, for months after his succession, had clung to him as the legitimate inheritor of a villainous reputation. And this desire he had held by no means in order to the conciliation of Mrs Grundy, but only that he might be early quit of the hampering impertinences of commiseration and criticism.
Once, it is true, he had almost persuaded himself that it was his duty to seek for either verification or disproof of the girl’s almost incredible statement about the man Lucien de St Denys. The conviction, however, that the story as related was incredible; that it was revealed to him under the stress of passion and of immeasurable grievance; that no man—least of all an astute rascal—would be likely to put into the hands of a woman—the baser sequel to whose ruin he was even then contemplating—a weapon so tipped with menace to himself,—this growing upon him, he was decided in the end to forego the resolving of all problems but those that were incidental to his own affairs. Therefore he settled down with admirable decorum to the righteous lording of his acres.
Still occasionally a restless spirit—that Harlequin bastard of Ariel and the earth-born Crasis—would whisper in his ear of vast world-tracts unexplored, of the meanness of social restrictions and of the early staleness that overtakes the daily bread of conventions, of the harmonics of phantom delights that may be heard in the under-voices of flying winds, of life as it might be lived did men serve Nature with honesty instead of deceit. Then a longing would arise in him to be up and away again; to throw off the shackles of formality and pursue his more liberal education through the fairs of the nations. Then his days would show themselves empty records, strangely fed from some darker reservoir of emptiness, the source of whose supply would be a weary enigma to him. And in such moods it was that the gardens of the past blossomed through his dreams, and figures, sweet and spectral, would be seen walking in them—Théroigne sometimes, sometimes Nicette, and again others—yet these two most persistently.
* * * * * * * *
The demesne of “Stowling” was situate a long mile from Bury St Edmunds against the Lynn Road. All about the grounds relics of an ancient grandeur were in evidence, though the house itself, a graceful Jacobean block, with projecting wings and stone eyebrows to its windows, was a structure significant of a quite moderate condition of fortune. The property, in point of fact, had been flung, at “Hazard,” into the lap of that same Hilary, Lord Brindle (own pot-companion to Steele and to Dick Savage of the “Wanderer”—with whom, indeed, he had often cast at Robinson’s coffee-house, near Charing Cross, where the broil occurred in which Lady Macclesfield’s bastard stabbed Mr Sinclair to death), who was wont to justify his own viciousness by the aphorism, “Whatever we are here for, we are not here for good.” Very few of the Murks, it must be confessed, had been here for good, though none had endeavoured to disprove one side of the mot with more pertinacity than the late viscount. Yet, at last, a successor was to the front who would inform with gravity and decorum the family seat that had been acquired, rebuilt, and maintained by the wild lord in a manner so questionable.