That was a sentiment for his bitterest moods. In his more reasonable, he would acknowledge to himself, with a sorrowful rapture, that no human desert could prove itself worthy of the Hebe-goddess at whose pretty feet he had worshipped.
So he waited on and on—because irresolution, also, is a necessary concomitant of extreme diffidence. He waited on, remote from his natural state, constantly on the prick of flight, yet always fearing to move, lest a vilely humorous destiny should take his sudden decision for the point to a game of cross-purposes. He waited on, shrinking ever more into his unwholesome self; avoiding company—comradeship, even; but half-conscious of the screeching barbaric world about him; hearing only distant echoes from the world over-seas. Now and again it would occur to him—upon his receipt of those periodic advices from his steward that made the almost sum of his communications with a life that had grown curiously shadowy to him—to put his own native instruments (in the person of this same steward) to the use of ascertaining and reporting upon the movements of Madame de Genlis and her charges. But always he was faced thereupon by a score ghosts of apprehension—that such confidences might beget familiarities vulgarising to the aloofness of his passion; that the necessary interval that must elapse before he could procure a reply must debar him from the independence of action that he still claimed, without enjoying; most, that the coveted news itself, when it should reach him, might do no better than confirm a haunting fear. And so he dwelt on, passing at last, it seemed, into the very winter of his discontent.
Shunning—since that September night of a tragedy that had stricken him for the time being half-demented—personal intercourse with any—even the gentle Vergniaud—whose precepts and practice of liberty seemed so grotesquely irreconcilable, he lost something of his former feeling of a moral participation in the scenes enacting about him. Of the revengeful woman, with whose destinies a joyless fatality had appeared to connect him, he had seen nothing since the hour of his agonising experience at the Salpétrière—had heard only, with a savage exultation, that her latest connection with the moderate party was undermining her popularity with that more formidable class of which the link-women on the prison steps had been prominent representatives.
“She will be devoured by her own dogs,” he would think; and “God in heaven!” he would cry in his soul, “to what an association with cutthroats and queans has Providence thought fit to condemn me—me whose heart burns always like a pure steadfast lamp before the shrine of its divinity!”
* * * * * * * *
One bitter evening Ned found himself abroad in the streets—a mere waif of destiny, hustled and jogged into the kennels by an arrogant wind. The iciness of this dulled all his faculties, blinded him as he struggled aimlessly on. “It must make the stones weep,” he thought, “or why should my eyes fill with water!” The lamps slung across the narrower gullies danced like boats at their moorings. The very shop fronts seemed to flap their sign-boards, like hands, for warmth.
He had crossed the river and penetrated the Faubourg St Germain as far as the Rue de Vaurigard. On his right, the sombre towers of the Luxembourg reeled into the night; on his left, a starry quiver of lamps shaped out the portico of the Théâtre-Français.
He was numb with cold. The glow and movement about the theatre drew him—as they often did nowadays—to a bid for temporary self-forgetfulness. He ran up the steps, entered a warm and lively vestibule, and took a box ticket for the performance.
This, when he came to view it, opened with a one-act sketch—“Allons, ça va!”—a very patriotic and warlike little piece. He had seen it before, and it did not greatly interest him. He was, in fact, sitting in the covert of his retreat watching rather the house than the players, when all in a moment his heart bounded, and he shrank back into the shadow of the wall-hangings. Opposite him he had seen a party enter a screened box, a loge grillée—nothing very significant in itself. But a minute later the grating had swung open, revealing—Pamela.
She did not at first catch sight of him. She sat to the front of the tier—she and the little pink-eyed daughter of Orleans. Her cheeks, her hair, her eyes were all a soft glory under the radiance of the lamps. He thought he had never seen her look so happy and so beautiful.