Madame de Genlis, who included in her répertoire of accomplishments the art of reading character, here, after gazing intently at the young man a few moments, permitted herself an immediate relaxation from severity to the most charming indulgence.
“Dieu du ciel!” she cried. “What an old, old, foolish woman! It is nussing, monsieur. I see you pass and come back, and come again one hundred time like a ’ope-goblin, and I sink—I sink—ah! no matter what I sink. I not know you less than nobody—not until Mr Sherree-den come and espy you and say, ‘Do not fear thees poor eenocent.’ And now I see it is not the old woman that attracts.”
Ned was by this up to the ears in a very slough of self-consciousness. To stand detected before the authority he had manœuvred to hoodwink!—so much of the innuendo he understood. For the first time, perhaps, he realised how, in lending himself to some traditional tactics, he had advertised himself of the common clay. He felt very hot, and a little angry; and his anger whipped his sense of personal dignity to a cream-like stiffness.
He was sorry, he said, he had been the cause of the least uneasiness to madame la comtesse. He was a man of a rambling disposition—of a peripatetic philosophy. Often, he had no doubt, absorbed in some train of reflection, he would unconsciously haunt a locality that, associating itself with the prolegomena of his meditations, would seem to supply the atmosphere most conducive to their regular progression. He——
And here the door opened, and a young lady ran into the room.
“A thousand pardons!” cried this young person. She did not know madame was engaged other than with Mr Sheridan, and he counted for nothing. But mademoiselle and she were learning to make artificial birds’-nests, with painted sugarplums for the eggs, and they looked to madame la gouvernante to advise them.
She curtseyed to my lord, with a little pert toss of her head like a wind-blown Iceland poppy-flower, when he was made known to her. She had no recollection of him, it was evident. All that play he had rehearsed to himself, according to fifty different readings, of the return of the red heels to their owner, became impossible of performance the moment he found his audience a reality. There and then he foresaw, and prepared himself heroically to meet, his martyrdom.
* * * * * * * *
Now all the glory and tragedy of Ned’s life came to crowd themselves into a few months—into a few days, indeed, so far as his connection with the strange household at Bury was concerned. Herein—no less on account of his magnetic leaning towards a bright particular star, than because he had made his entrée under the ægis of Mr Sheridan—he was accepted and discussed; pitied by some unsophisticated young hearts; weighed in the balance of a maturer brain, and found, perhaps, deficient.
“He has the grand air,” said madame; “he is noble and sedate, and of amiable principles. But—hélas! à quoi sert tout cela—if one so gives effect to the gospel of distribution as to deprive oneself of the means to honourably perpetuate one’s race!”