When he had finished, she did that which a woman never does unless moved by the very highest excitement. She rose up and paced the floor thrice. Without speaking, she walked the length of the room, then she turned to Adams.
“But this must cease.”
“This shall cease,” said he, “if I can only make myself heard. To-day—to-night—just before you came in, I was trying to put the thing on paper—trying to put down what I have seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, but the ink seems ice. What I write seems nothing, nothing beside what I have seen. The mere statement that so many were killed, so many were tortured, conveys nothing of the reality. The thing is too big for me. God made it, I suppose; but I wish to God I had never seen it.”
Maxine was standing now with her hands resting on the back of an armchair. She seemed scarcely listening to what her companion was saying. She was listening, but she was thinking as well.
“You cannot do everything yourself,” said she, at last. “You must get others to help, and in this I can, perhaps, assist you. Will you go to-morrow and see Monsieur Pugin? I do not know him personally, but I know a friend of his. I will send him a note early to-morrow morning, and the servant can bring back the letter of introduction. You could call upon him to-morrow afternoon.”
“Who is Monsieur Pugin?”
This question, showing such a boundless ignorance of every-day French life and literature, rather shocked Maxine. She explained that Ary Pugin, the author of “Absolution” and twenty other works equally beautiful, was above all other men fitted to bring home to France the story of this great sin. “Absolution,” that masterpiece, had shown France her cruelty in the expulsion of the religious orders. France had read it weeping, drying her tears with one hand and continuing the expulsion of the religious orders with the other.
That, however, was not Pugin’s fault; he had done his best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment are so largely constituent of the French nature, making between them that paradox, the French mind.
“I will go and see him,” said Adams, when the girl had explained what Pugin was, what Pugin did, and what Pugin had written. “A man like that could do more with a stroke of his pen, than I with weary years of blundering attempts to write. I can never thank you enough for listening to me. It is strange, but half the weight of the thing seems to have passed from my mind.”
“To mine,” she replied. Then, with charming naïveté, she held out both hands to him.