He was plump and prosperously healthy, like his wife. They seemed admirably suited to one another—a pigeon pair, indeed. And like a pigeon was the little fat man in his white Austrian uniform. He strutted, he preened himself, he cooed. His place should have been on a roof-ridge of his own happy courts. Ned had a melancholy desire to crumble some bread for him.
“You are pale as a very ghost, monsieur,” said this same ruddy count condescendingly. “It is not to be wondered at. You have alighted upon us in stirring times; not to speak of the storm yesterday, that was enough to quell the stoutest courage. I would give up hunting a chimera, if I were you, and return to the profitable peace of my own so prudent island, without more ado—sans plus de façons.”
“If you were I, monsieur,” said Ned. “But, being myself, I run the chimera to earth in Paris.”
Monsieur le comte shrugged his shoulders.
“I will wish you success, at least. This chimera hath as many tracks as a mole. But, first, you must get to Paris.”
Ned had considered this side of the question lightly. He found, indeed, the conditions of travel curiously changed since he had last crossed the Netherlands border. Now the whole frontier, from Lille to Metz, swarmed with hostile demonstration. The Allies were in movement, Luckner and his ineffectives falling back before them. Amongst them all he hardly knew whom to claim for friends and whom for foes.
But he was wrought to a pitch of recklessness, and Providence shows the favouritism of a heathen goddess towards reckless men. His grossly enlarging doubt of the bonâ fides of the mission to which he had been committed; his terror of having been made in a moment accessory to a hideous crime, which he could neither morally condone nor effectually denounce; the feeling—sombre heir to these two—that he was losing his hold of that new sweet sense of responsibility towards life, the consciousness of which had been to him latterly like the talking in his ear of a witch of Atlas—a cicerone to the dear mysteries of the earth he had hitherto but half understood,—these emotions were a long-rowelled spur to prick him forward through difficult places. Once in Paris, there should be no more temporising. From the Duke of Orleans’s own lips he would learn whether or no he had been bidden on a fool’s errand.
Here, in fact, was the goading stab in his side—the wound that sometimes so stung and rankled that almost he was tempted to have out madame la gouvernante’s letter to her employer and resolve dishonourably his doubts. Through the anguish of these, the piercing tooth of the recent horror sprung upon him might make itself felt only as a pain within the pain—a lesser torture, the nature of which he would occasionally seek to analyse in order to a temporary forgetfulness of the greater. Then, thinking of the holy maid of Méricourt, he would cry in his soul, “What is this gift of imagination but a Promethean fire, destroying whoever is informed with it! Better my system of a mechanical world with passion all eliminated!”—and he would think of how he had been once curiously interested in a poor lodge-keeper’s dreamings, a faculty for which had been then to him so strange an anomaly. And was it so still—to him who had learned, through love, to attune his ear to the under harmonics in every wind that blew upon the earth? Perhaps, in truth, it was this very gift of imagination that, in greater or less degree, was responsible for the irregularities one and all that misconverted the plain uses of life; that made the picturesqueness of existence, and its glory and tragedy. And would he at this very last be without it? And was not its possession—a common one now to him and Nicette—the stimulus to unnatural deeds that were the outcome of supernatural thoughts? He had at least the temptation to commit an act that would be an outrage on his traditional sense of honour. He would resist the temptation, because he had the tradition. But conceive this Nicette, perhaps with no traditions, and with an imagination infinitely more vivid than his. What limit was to put to her foreseeings; how should the normal-sighted adjudge her monstrous for anticipating conclusions to which their vision could by no means penetrate?
He would catch himself away from the train of thought, the indulgence of which seemed a certain condonation of a deed that his every instinct abhorred. Yet his mind took, perhaps, something the tone of the intricate close places in which it wandered; and now and again a little thrill would run through him of half-sensuous pity for the poor misguided soul that, by offering up its honour at the very shrine at which his worshipped, had only estranged what it would have fain conciliated.
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