‘An important book?’ I cried interrogatively.
‘Yes: the life of the Emperor Julian. I regard him as the great Misunderstood of the Christian world, and I wish to rehabilitate him,’ she said; and there was such a touching and simple prayer for sympathy and encouragement in the glance she fixed on mine, that I had not the heart to remember that others had attempted the same task, and that no amount of learned eloquence and indignation would teach the Christian world to regard as desirable a better understanding of him they call the great Apostate.
‘Would it be an indiscretion to solicit information upon your plan of defence?’ I asked insidiously, with intent to force her into self-exposure. To me the character of the Emperor Julian was of comparative insignificance beside her own, but this fact I naturally kept to myself.
‘I shall bring him into noble relief by means of Frederick the Great as a background—Frederick, that other famous and less reputable disciple of Marcus Aurelius. Have you ever remarked how alike and how unlike they were—one so sincere and the other so cynically insincere?’
Upon a dead island, without new books, or newspapers, or theatres, and but little out-door life, because of the ferocity of the weather, the Emperor Julian and Frederick the Great were as good subjects of discussion as any others, and I entered the lists in combative mood, fully equipped in argument and opinion, and captivated by the grim earnestness and complete guilelessness of the Imperial Pagan’s defender. Of modern literature she was, perhaps not unwisely, ignorant, and knew not of a man named Ibsen who, some years earlier, had also strayed upon this ground. She had been chiefly inspired by an abominable novel of a French Jesuit, over which she waxed exceedingly hot. Her anger was splendid, and I should have rejoiced to see the Jesuit, Julian’s traducer, confronted with this thin spiritual-looking lady, who thrilled from head to foot with generous hatred of all meanness and unfairness.
‘As a Christian, my defence will have more weight than if I were imbued with the cold agnosticism of the day,’ she added naïvely.
‘Surely,’ I assented, full of admiration, and more pleased to think of her as a Catholic eager to make atonement to an ancient enemy of her faith, than ‘the cold agnostic’ she dismissed in a tone of implied disapproval.
‘You wonder, perhaps, at the serious nature of my studies and labour,’ she observed. And then, upon a little explanatory nod and arch of delicate brow, ‘You see my father was a scholar, and as we lived here quite alone and rarely received visitors, it was impossible for him to avoid taking me into his confidence. And then, when his health began to fail him, it naturally devolved upon me to help him, as far as I could, and spare his eyes.’
Her glance travelled wistfully round the room, and a ray of mild recognition fell upon each big volume. It was not difficult to understand how vividly of the past they spoke to her, how eloquent of association was their wild disorder. In the high embrasure of the back window, which looked down upon the river, and showed a glimpse of the chimney-tops and tall spires of Beaufort, there was a dainty, blue-lined work-table, and near it a revolving book-stand and a rocking-chair. From where I sat, I could note that the books were modern—some of them were bound coquettishly, but the greater number were paper-covered. I was not wrong in supposing this to have been the favourite recess of the late Madame Vermont. The blue satin of the work-table betrayed her, and a hurried inspection of the backs of the books convinced me that her taste in literature was all that is most correct and elegant. No ancient tomes these. No bramble-strewn paths to historic research. Nothing whatever about the Emperor Julian; still less about Marcus Aurelius. Bourget, Feuillet, Gyp, Loti, Marcel Prévost, Anatole France and company: these were the friends of pretty Madame Vermont’s solitude, the entertainers of her frugal leisure. From the start, without description, word, or hint, I had understood Madame Vermont to be uncommonly pretty. I pictured her small, blonde, charmingly coquettish, and self-conscious. I endowed her with every conventional fascination, and felt sure that if I had been a man I should have adored her, like the rest. As a matter of fact, my imagined picture of her came very near reality. Only instead of fair hair, she had the loveliest brown that made a flossy network round a little rosebud of a face; her eyes were bewitchingly blue, limpid like a child’s, and her cheek was adorably hued. Just the conventional angelic being to turn male heads, and set their hearts in a flutter; just the sort of home idol to keep nurses and sisters—especially elder, grave, and sensible sisters—perpetually on their knees, and the domestic incensor perpetually filled with the freshest of perfumed flattery swung by the most abject adorers.
Now that the icy winds prevented us from sitting out in my gallery, Mademoiselle had grown accustomed to receive me upstairs. For there was no conquering her repugnance to my rooms. She found it less hard to walk with Joséphine to the cemetery than to sit and talk of other matters with a stranger in her dead sister’s house. Of me, however, she had grown fond:—at first in a furtive way, as if not quite sure that she was right in yielding to the weakness. Gradually she emerged from this quaint and insular uncertainty; saw that there was no shame attached to the discovery that a new face could delight her, and graciously abandoned herself to the influence of a full-blown affection.