| DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY— | ||
| PART FIRST—MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT | PAGE | |
| The Island, | [3] | |
| A Midnight Vision, | [19] | |
| The Story of Mademoiselle Lenormant, | [36] | |
| AN INTERLUDE, | [55] | |
| PART SECOND—DR. VERMONT | ||
| Dr. Vermont and his Guests upon the Island, | [74] | |
| New Year’s Eve, | [90] | |
| EPILOGUE, | [118] | |
| BRASES— | ||
| I., | [131] | |
| II., | [152] | |
| III., | [167] | |
| A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY, | [187] | |
| ARMAND’S MISTAKE— | ||
| I., | [227] | |
| II., | [246] | |
| III., | [261] | |
| MR. MALCOLM FITZROY— | ||
| I., | [269] | |
| II., | [292] | |
| THE LITTLE MARQUIS, | [305] | |
DR. VERMONT’S FANTASY
To Frederick Greenwood
PART FIRST
MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT
(Told by the traveller)
THE ISLAND
IT was a warm autumn that year—a luminous exception upon which the last summer of the century was borne somewhat oppressively to the very verge of winter. The middle hours of the afternoon could be intolerable enough in a big, busy city well upon the confines of the South. The rush and whirr of looms was carried far upon the air, and even into the quietest streets wandered the noisy echoes of the boulevards.
Yet it was dull and flat for the solitary stranger, without interest in factories, or provincial entertainment in friendship. It was doubly dull for a woman past youth and all its personal excitements to be extracted from fleeting curiosity and thrills of anticipation; denied by reason of sex the stale delights of café lounges, and by reason of station the healthier and livelier hospitalities of cabaret and peasant reunions.
Travelling-bag and portmanteau lay strapped in the hotel hall. The train for Paris would not leave until late that night, and to while away the intervening hours I went forth beyond the town. I chose the farther end of the long boulevard, the middle of which I had not yet passed. Down there the brilliant air lost its clearness in a yellow mist, as if flung from the sky in a fine dust of powdered gold. Upon its edge hung the last visible arms of the trees on either side, lucidly, of unwonted greenness, the green we note in painted French landscapes, brightly touched with yellow. I felt that something fresh, cool, and soft must lie behind that golden veil. It led my imagination as a child is led out of the real, by the illusive promises of fairyland.
Here sound was deadened, and city movements seemed to faint away upon the weariness of the long hot day. I glanced back at the town. Behind me stretched the dusty boulevard, and sharpened above it, against the tremulous pellucid blue of the heaven, the profile of quaint church-spires and heavy masses of buildings. Ahead, my way was blocked by the wide grey river, black where the shadows touched it, silver where the full light shone upon it. A bridge of grey stone spanned it from the end of the boulevard to the other side, the unexplored:—a bridge so old, so worn, so silent and empty, that it might appropriately be the path to the city cemetery.