The Project Gutenberg eBook of The isle of lies
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The isle of lies
Author: M. P. Shiel
Release date: December 17, 2025 [eBook #77484]
Language: English
Original publication: London: T. Werner Laurie, 1908
Credits: Tim Lindell, Les Galloway and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ISLE OF LIES ***
THE ISLE OF LIES
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation have been standardised where appropriate but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
NEW NOVELS
Betty Brent, Typist.
By “RITA.”
Red Love.
By the Author of “The Wild Widow.”
The Soul of Crœsus.
By GERALD VILLIERS-STUART.
A Gentleman from Portland.
By RANGER GULL.
The Methods of Mr. Ames.
By the Author of “The Adventures of John Johns.”
A Laughing Matter.
By SHAN F. BULLOCK.
The Loser Pays. A Story of the French Revolution.
By MARY OPENSHAW.
The Silent Ones.
By MARY GAUNT and J. RIDGWELL ESSEX.
The Adventures of Louis Blake.
By LOUIS BECKE.
Side Stepping with Shorty.
By SEWELL FORD. Author of “Shorty McCabe.”
Illustrated.
The Wild Widow.
By GERTIE DE S. WENTWORTH-JAMES.
Cousins and Others.
By KATHARINE TYNAN.
Lil of the Slums.
By DICK DONOVAN.
THE ISLE OF
LIES
BY
M. P. SHIEL
Author of
“The White Wedding”
“The Last Miracle”
“The sounding again of the
mountains.”—_Ezekiel._
Published at Clifford’s Inn, London
By T. WERNER LAURIE
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE STELE 1
II. MOLLY O’HARA 17
III. THE ISLE OF LIES 29
IV. THE SHIP 43
V. “MISS EVE” 52
VI. THE TOWERS 62
VII. THE TERRACES 68
VIII. IN THE GARDEN 79
IX. “VITRIOLISERAI” 93
X. “THE MOON” 111
XI. THE CHAMBER-WINDOW 135
XII. THE WEDDING-PLACE 171
XIII. AT EGMOND 190
XIV. AT SERAPIS 208
XV. TO SHUNTER 226
THE ISLE OF LIES
CHAPTER I.
THE STELE.
Perhaps one’s happiest manner to begin the history of the remarkable
boy whose moral we have to point is to give, as we can, that part of
Professor S. S. Reid’s diary which has to do with the matter. The
professor writes:
* * * * *
I have this morning the tidings that a son is born to Dr. Lepsius, and
as the fact may possibly come to prove momentous in the history of
experiment, I am about now to jot down just what I was in the way to
know of the story.
In the dog-days of ’68, close on two years gone now, our bout-at-arms
with Theodore III. of Abyssinia came to a close with the capture of
Magdala by Napier: and the victory was still in everyone’s mouth, when
Lepsius one afternoon strolls into my study to notify me that the
British Government was about to send out a mission to that country,
and that he, Lepsius, was to accompany it in some rôle or other. I
was quite surprised, in spite of my familiarity with the manifold
activities of this man.
“_You_ going to Abyssinia?” I exclaimed.
“I am,” says he.
“But what for?” I asked.
“There are the Jurassic limestones for one thing,” he answered, “and
you surely know that some more or less valuable MSS., especially Bible
MSS., already derive from Abyssinia.”
He then proceeded to tell me that in the rage of the Mohammedan
invasion of that region in the sixteenth century, the Abyssinians
heaped most of their Ethiopian and other manuscripts into a certain
museum on Debra-Seena (an island of Lake Sana), where they remain
guarded by clerics, who regard them as idol relics. “Abyssinia, then,”
said he, “might not be a bad four-months’ abode for a bloke like me; at
all events, I am off.”
And off, in some weeks, Lepsius was.... Never let it be said that the
doctor was any shade of a scatter-brains! for in my lifetime never
did I meet so essential a sage; all the same, I do admit that to some
of the heats of Lepsius the word “flighty” has been applied with some
meaning, he was ever so fevered, seeming always to keep vastly too many
irons in the fire—“Jack of all trades!” I don’t say master of none.
The man was tinged with both physics and biology like a Janus-head,
was an educationist and an Egyptologist, all in the ardour of the same
day. Modern learning—he made that his domain. Of course, his thumping
fortune had much to do with such a mental posture and manner of life,
for, like the free-lance that he ever was, his relation with the mill
of science was mainly honorary. I never met him steaming along the
streets, mopping his pink brow, but he was eager to drag me to the
meeting-of-council of some society, or to drop at my ear some spanking
scientific tidings. Old Lepsius! I fancy that I behold him anew, not a
beauty assuredly, with his shortish form, bold nose, and thin lips,
his burning straight hair brushed back flat from the forehead, and
curled up a bit at the nape! At the time when he started for Abyssinia
he was a man of perhaps forty-five, of established fame in the western
world, and a hardened old bachelor—I almost said old maid!
What surprises me is that a man like Lepsius, a tender wight at bottom
surely, should have let himself become the excuse for bloodshed during
this exuberance of his, and should have been led into committing an act
which the common man might well consider wonderfully like pilfering—at
the spur of a whim! Learning, may be, has a claim to make its own code
of morals, but I am convinced that in, say, Madrid, Lepsius would have
shrunk with dismay from doing what in that savage country he did with
the coolest self-assurance.
The mission reached the town of Gondar at the end of August—a world of
mountains now, after a camel-journey of some weeks across the lowlands
from Somaliland. By September, Dr. Lepsius had won sufficient favour
for his purposes with the viceroy, or _ras_, and, with his usual
rashness, ventured out with only one Choan servant on an ass for Lake
Sana, twenty miles south, to examine the MSS., etc.
It appears that in these regions the rainy season is from June to
the tail-end of September, so that now it was pouring without pity.
However, one forenoon Lepsius comes to the lake, and is rowed, as he
related it to me, in a buffalo-hide boat to one of the islets.
On this island was a kind of double monastery, half occupied by
sisters, and half by brothers, to which latter Lepsius had a letter
of introduction given him by the _abuna_ (or father) of Gondar, the
head of the Christian-Coptic Church of Abyssinia; but the scientist’s
welcome at the monastery was hardly hearty, since, having landed on
the island, he had to hang about a whole hour without beholding his
hosts. This, however, as it turned out, was owing to no cursedness
of the monks, since it appears that, the prior of the monastery
having recently died, the monks were even then intent upon the rite
of electing his successor. This once over, Lepsius was fairly well
received, and soon thereupon was rowed through the rain to the library
by two of the monks: those monks, he told me, being dark-skinned carles
with crinkled hair all in plaits, and the library being a kind of
mosque on another island half a mile from the monastery-island.
Here, then, on this second island, Lepsius abode most of the day,
ferreting and feasting his curiosity. Onwards from the sixth century
of our era Abyssinia, he has told me, was a bold and expansive power,
having dealings with India, with Ceylon, with the Greek Empire,
and overflowing by far the greater part of Arabia: so that this
mosque place was crammed with all the gimcrackery and dust of the
ages—scriptures, urns, relics, cartouches, taliput-books, mostly modern
and of small importance, but still of interest; and the only thing
which badgered Lepsius’ peace of mind at being turned loose into these
pastures was the continual presence of the two monks who had rowed him
over, seeing that they did not leave his side a moment. One of them,
he says, was a particularly swagger chap who carried over his cotton
garment two falchions in scarlet-morocco scabbards, and his aspect
appears to have smacked nastily of the fact that in Abyssinia the
Church is burningly militant. Ever and anon he would grumble something
to his mate in Amharic—a kind of Arabic lingo with which Lepsius was
pretty well acquainted, though his ear lacked ease in striking quite
what was said.
Toward sunset he went down some steps to an underground corridor
into which a series of grilles and doors opened, having in his brisk
fashion already made a survey of the treasures above, and wishing to
run over those below while there was still some twilight. Midway in
the corridor, at a moment when, as it happened, the two monks were
whispering together, he noticed a half-open grille, and passed in,
whereat the grimmer of the two fellows stepped sharply up and tapped
him on the shoulder, saying, “Not in there!” But Lepsius was already
in, and making out that he didn’t understand, took another step, and
looked about him.
Three sides of this apartment were piled with papyri and many book-like
objects dark with dust, together with pictures of saints all painted
full-face, whatever the posture of the body, and with idols, weapons,
beads, and other suchlike gems and curios. One wall of it, however,
was almost bare, and there, in the centre of that wall, hung a little
basalt stele, about as thick as one’s wrist, and about six inches long;
it had a copper cap with an old hole in it, through which passed the
banyan string with which it was hung up. Lepsius could see that it was
covered with a singular enough mixture of hieroglyphic, hieratic, and
demotic figures; and his curiosity seems to have been at once fired
to a high degree by this sight, especially when he saw marked on the
wall over the stele in the Geez jargon the curious runes, “Riches of
Jerusalem.”
Meantime, while peering at the little stele, Lepsius with half an eye
had observed on the floor, immediately under the stele, a coffin only
half covered by its lid, so that he could spy the body of a very old
man who looked lost within it—the coffin was so large, and the corpse
so small—and at the coffin’s foot sat on the floor a gigantic Galla,
armed to the teeth, his shield garnished with human hair, these Gallas
being, in fact, the blackest and most malignant of the Abyssinian clans.
“Well,” Lepsius said, “may I look about?” addressing himself to the
milder of the two monks. The answer was, “No, it is the prior’s room.”
“And who is the dead man?” Lepsius asked.
“The prior,” was the answer.
“Who died yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“He died here, then?”
“Yes, in this chamber, where he mainly passed his time.”
“Why did he pass his time here?” Lepsius wished to know.
“Because,” was the answer, “he wanted to contemplate the sacred stele.
For fifty years he was poring upon it, and dropped dead before it.”
“Oho,” says Lepsius, “and what is the history of the stele, my friend?”
“It fell from heaven,” replied the monk; “the prior found it here when
he was a very young monk, and hung it there under that picture of the
Virgin, who was looking when he found it.”
“Oho,” says Lepsius, “but can’t I approach a little and examine it?”
The answer was, “No, the irreligious could not approach it.”
But the irreligious _had_ approached it. Lepsius could already make
out two or three of the phrases, could tell that it was mainly an
imitation of the hieratic of the nineteenth dynasty, mixed with some
intentionally secret writing; and, as he stared at it, he mumbled on
absently, saying, “Oho, one can see, one can see, its date; and what is
the meaning of those marks on it, then?”
“No one knows,” was the answer.
“And yet you write over it, ‘Riches of Jerusalem’?”
“Yes, for the prior discovered this much, that it tells of the riches
of the City of God.”
“He was a learned man, I see.”
“We shall not have another like him! a learned and a saintly man.
He made the stele the study of his life, and mined out much of its
meaning, for which reason it is to be buried with him.”
“Buried with him?” cries Lepsius.
“Yes, by his own instructions.”
“And when?”
“To-night.”
“Ah! At what hour?”
“At eleven.”
“And where?”
“In the monastery.”
But at this the more truculent of the two monks stepped offensively
before Lepsius, blocking his view. The Galla warrior, too, who kept
guard over the corpse was eyeing him disagreeably, so Lepsius moved
off, and after sauntering through another room or two, started off for
the monastery-island, to be at once afresh drenched through by the
rain. Darkness had suddenly come.
As he now passed up the steps towards the monastery, he made
minute note of everything: a number of boats lay close about the
landing-place, with some monks baling them out; from a chapel some way
off he was aware of the chaunted vesper-psalm of the nuns.
After a repast with the new prior, a portly man of middle age, he was
conducted for the night to his chamber, where for a while he waited,
sitting on a bed made of rushes mixed with raw cotton; but at ten
o’clock he got up and stole through his door. Lepsius by this time had
fully informed himself of the minutiæ of the dead prior’s funeral, and
had resolved to pilfer the little stele.
I think that I never knew quite so insolently plucky a nut as this of
Lepsius. His impetuosity is extreme, and his tenacity is extreme; so
that whatever happens at any time to fascinate his mind fascinates it
in a quite unbalanced manner, to the banning of every other concern in
the world. When this blessed stele had once seized upon his fancy as
a thing likely to prove a scientific find, his subsequent action was
so very in character, that I shouldn’t wonder if he went stealing the
thing, about to be buried and lost as it was, with an overweening sense
of propriety, and perhaps, in setting about it, whispered to himself
the word “Science,” or perhaps only the word “Lepsius”: I don’t know.
But no man surely ever rushed into a job bristling with dangers more
horrid, for he was alone among all those martial fanatics, and, save
for a razor and a penknife, if I am right, quite unarmed.
He crept out of his room into a corridor and down some steps, there
being no light apparently in that part of the building, though the
place was full of the sounds of busy footfalls and people passing
about with lime-torches; and when one of these approached him at a
rapid walk, Lepsius had to snatch himself into a kind of carrel, only
to find a monk praying in it in the dark, who, at the sound of his
entrance, looked round and addressed him: Lepsius droned some mutter in
Amharic, and slipped out into an alcove opposite.
He knew very well that he had only to be noticed prowling about in this
way to set the whole place in a hullabaloo, and no doubt bring on his
instant death; but the floors, covered with cocoanut-fibre, facilitated
his flights and escapes, and he contrived to run the blockade to the
landing-place. There his ears were aware of a priest baling rain-water
from the boat meant to bring over the body of the prior, but so deep
was the darkness of the night, that nothing could be seen a yard beyond
one’s eyes. With elaborate stealths Lepsius stepped down into a boat
almost swamped with rain-water, put out the oar, and paddled off for
the library-island.
His hope, derived from certain answers already given to his inquiries,
was that the corpse might by this time be less closely guarded, that he
might thus perchance be able to stretch a clandestine arm to the stele,
and then, hastening back with it, steal into his chamber. But when with
bare feet he had got down into the underground corridor of the stele
and corpse, and had peeped into the prior’s room, there still lingered,
brooding, the armed Galla. Lepsius was the last man alive to be
baffled! He simply said to himself, “Well, the other way, then,” went
up afresh, towed his boat away from the landing-stage, sat down on a
rock, and waited, his ear cocked to hear a sound through the showering
of the rain.
Presently over the surface of the lake appeared three throngs of lights
approaching—torches made of lime-wood saturated in spirits, borne by
the priests; and amid the splash of their oars there floated forth
the burden of a Coptic dirge. One by one, however, these torches were
seen to cower out, quenched by the shower, and by the time the boats
had reached the library-island where Lepsius lurked, not one remained
burning. Upon this Lepsius had counted.
The monks landed and entered the mosque.
After some twenty minutes they returned to the quay with rekindled
torches, carrying the coffin: and though the largest of the boats
was a craft as big as a Red Sea lugger, so overgrown was the size
of the coffin, that they were obliged to lay it crosswise over
the gunwales aft. Lepsius, himself unseen, could, by means of the
flickering torch-lights, see all. He stole along the shore closer to
the landing-stage. The placing of the coffin was a longish task; and
out into darkness, one by one, cowered the lights, so that no more than
two remained burning when the first of the boats pushed off, and the
dirge was afresh lifted; and when at last all the boats were abroad on
the water, the priests intoned in a complete darkness. Lepsius was then
hanging to the transom of the boat which bore the coffin, she towing
his length in her track.
He knew that in the monastery a rite had yet to be performed over the
prior; he had been told that the corpse would then be exposed for
the last time to the looks of the assembled fathers; he was certain,
then, that the lid was not so far fastened to the coffin. All he had
to do was to lift his weight up on the transom, raise the lid, whip
the little stele from the dead bosom, where he had been told that it
would be, and bolt with it into the building, to his bed. They couldn’t
see him; the chaunting should drown any chance sound which he might
make: and he felt secure, save for one vital fact—he could not swim;
he would have to hang on to the boat till it came to the monastery
landing-place before he could attempt to make his escape.
Midway across, judging the moment come, he raised himself cautiously
up; one stiff arm held up his weight on the transom, while with the
other hand he groped, grasped the lid, tried to lift it. Lid wouldn’t
stir: it was fastened.
Another man might now, perhaps, have renounced the attempt, not knowing
what string next to pull; it was in just such a plight that Lepsius was
likely to show fight.
The man’s a born theorist: would never dream of abandoning a conclusion
based upon reasoning, because, perhaps, appearances should happen to
combat it; and he had already reasoned that the lid was unnailed. He
raised himself still further, felt with his hand over the surface of
the lid, and was soon reassured, seeing that the priests, in order to
keep the two pieces together during the passage, had tied two cords of
banyan-twine bodily about lid and coffin; finding which, Lepsius dived
into his pocket, took out a penknife, and cut the cords, deeming that
the monks, when they saw the cords cut, the stele gone, would set it
all down to a miracle of God. By this time the boats had floated the
funeral-hymn pretty close up to the monks’ home.
Lepsius could now easily insert his fingers between lid and coffin,
and, on doing so, found what he had opined, that the stele had been
slung round the dead neck by its string; so, manœuvring with the
fingers of his left hand, he managed to urge and win this string upward
from under the dead head: and he had begun to draw forth string and
stele, his fingers being still within the coffin, when the poor man’s
stiff right arm, weary of his weight, gave way under him with a shock,
whereat he, in an involuntary movement to check his fall, caught the
coffin-rim. It was a disastrous business: the blessed coffin tilted,
and slid with a sideward dive into the water, while Lepsius, having
clean lost his hold, found himself adrown in the deep, as an outcry
arose among the crowd of monks.
Lepsius splashed about, catching at the vacant air; but even in the
very plight and fix of his death his reasoning mind was not drowned.
He judged that he must now be very near the monastery, so that if he
could find even a minute’s support in the water, he might by such means
manage some way to come at safety; but the boats had forged on well
away beyond him, and there was no making out anything in that thickness
of blackness. There was, however, one hope—the coffin: for, though he
could not see, he knew perfectly the course of its sideward dive, and
it was assuredly only the coffin, or the coffin-lid, which, if he was
to find salvation, could save him. He quite well knew the science of
swimming, though no master of the art: so, taking care to keep his lips
closed, he made a few strokes, sinking and rising indeed, but moving,
and his strokes proved in the duly right course, for very soon now he
found himself on the coffin-lid, the little basalt stele hanging still
to his forefinger by its string.
Still awash and struggling, he began to urge the board toward the
shore. The hubbub of monkish tongues had now come to land, while a
number of them had rushed out of the monastery, all carrying torches,
with outcries, so that the landing-stage was now in a nice state of
commotion. Lepsius, in the gloomy deep, steered his struggles in a
changed direction, making for another spot of the shore, though he
does not seem to have known what he was to do when he got there; but
his feet touched bottom in a minute, and at the same time he entered
the region of the off-shine of the lights, which showed up his white
visage, whereat at once a perfect hullabaloo of howls broke out from
the priests, and they all dashed forward to catch him, foremost among
them being the fierce monk of the day-time, with his sword flashing,
and the new prior, and the huge black fellow.
Lepsius scrambled up some rocks, and started slantways away from the
throng of lights toward a wing of the building; and as the priests
appear to have had no firearms, it became an affair of darting,
Lepsius being a fairly nimble fellow, though, I fancy, without any
wind to speak of, and already very weary. However, he reached the
monastery-wall, and hastening along it, happened upon a small doorway,
into which he darted, slammed the door, and was away anew through
darkness; whereat the monks ran round to the front, and scattering
there, rushed with rekindled torches in all directions through the
monastery, scouring it for the fugitive.
Well, a scene of sufficient wildness seems to have ensued. Lepsius,
divining that the monks would leave the door which he had slammed in
their faces to fly to the front, ran back to the door; but his slam
had locked, he could not open, it. So back afresh he turned, ran to
the bottom of the corridor in which he found himself, and now heard
the sound of the onrush of many runners. Happily, it was no longer a
question of legs and lungs alone, but of eager, quick wit as well,
and here Lepsius was in his element. He saw that he could only rescue
himself by hiding, and that he could only hide by continual wise
movement. On hieing thievishly up some steps he heard more pelting feet
behind him, but he had the advantage of being in shadow, while his
hunters were well lit up, and away he went again, choosing his way with
good instinct; only, the priests had split up into such an intricacy
of pickets, that he should have possessed six sets of wits to elude
them. Still, he did for no little while elude them, guided not only by
their lights, but by the sounds of the groups, their faint footsteps
and outcries: till on a sudden one of those aids was cut off—that of
sound—when out roared the abbey-bells, drowning everything else. Just
afterwards, he was running down a corridor when behind him he saw
coming a bunch of torches; there was no harking back this time; so,
hoping to hit upon some door or side-passage somewhere ahead, forward
he sped, his wind about done for now, and his wits all bewildered and
badgered by the loud bedlam and brabblement of the bells throughout the
building. At the corridor’s end his course was stopped by a wall with
what he took to be a door in it, and a cocoanut tapestry hung before
it; there was no side-passage anywhere; the door was fixed, and his
hand, feeling behind the tapestry, could find no handle; the throng of
torches, too, were now trooping down the corridor towards him, and he
thought himself dished and taken. However, he found by touch that the
door, too, as well as the tapestry, was of cocoanut-fibre, not a door
at all, but a mass of matting fastened over an opening; and inasmuch
as the corridor was long, he had time to snatch his shaving-razor and
slash a rent in the tough stuff, so that when the monks arrived at the
spot they must have been astonished (if they had spied him) to find
their man vanished. Lepsius says that he next hastened over a species
of bridge or hanging gallery, at the end of which he hacked a hole in
another door, got himself through that as well, and was away ardently
again, no more caring whither, through darkness, when all at once he
was in the very midst of a lot of people, of a flood of light, for he
had pitched through the doorway of a chamber before ever he could check
his flight. This chamber was full of beds, for which the people in it
must have been making ready when the pealing of the bells had flurried
them; they were all women, as Lepsius saw at once, all half-undressed,
with their hair floating loose; the two door-mattings through which
he had slashed his way were manifestly the doors which separated the
monastery from the nunnery; and at the apparition of this white man
among them, that multitude of women whooped out one unanimous yowl,
which Lepsius tells me he is not going to forget. Out they rushed
pell-mell, clutching their garments about them, he after them—with
the grave consciousness meantime in his eye-corner of a big floor-bed
on fire, for one of the calabash-lamps had been dashed to the floor
in the out-rush, and how the whole show, built mostly of touch-wood,
was not burnt to the deuce was, he asserts, a wonder. After a little
Lepsius pulled up and listened: all was still—for the simple reason
that the priests would not at once enter upon the part of the place
sacred to the nuns, and presently coming to a staircase, he sped down,
and soon found himself out in the open, unpursued. Running now round
the rim of the islet in search of a boat, he heard all round about the
shores a buzzing sound on the lake, the cause of which he was unable
to imagine, and when, having found a boat, he paddled away, this sound
swelled upon him, until he was all in the thick of it—a host of
tongues hubbubooing, not in Amharic, but in Ethiopic; not monks, then,
but chiefs, or _dejamatshs_, with their troops, who, at the call of the
bells, had come to beset the islet with a cordon of boats; and Lepsius
declares that he passed through the thick of them, thanks to the
darkness and the rain, by something of a miracle. After this the banks
of the lake were not far off; and there, having made rapid paces for
the deeps of a forest, and presently feeling himself safer, he dropped
to the ground, giving out.
Toward morning, it being still pitch dark, the Englishmen at Gondar
who composed the mission were startled by the bombardment of the
place set apart for their abode: for the priests and natives, failing
to find Lepsius, had posted northward to seek vengeance upon the
mission; whereat the British, in danger of their lives, were obliged
to barricade their doors and defend themselves; and before the
intervention of the _ras_ was able to reach the residence, three
Abyssinians were shot, so that this matter of the basalt stele had
something of a grim beginning.
Not till six days later did Lepsius succeed in coming up secretly
with his comrades, after seeing the lion and the hyrax, and a score
of escapades; and on the sixteenth morning they all started eastward
and coastward under an escort of the _ras_. The terror of the anger
of England was, of course, extreme at the moment in the mind of the
Negus and his Court, or it might have gone ill with Lepsius and his
companions. However, all’s well that ends well; nothing graver than
threats came about, and Lepsius, having his basalt stele, could afford,
I suppose, to grin his grin.
CHAPTER II.
MOLLY O’HARA.
Professor S. S. Reid’s history thus continues:
Well, I saw old Lepsius very shortly after his return, when he showed
me the little cylinder of basalt, and related to me for the first time,
not the last, the details of his adventures. He was blithe and fit, if
a bit bothered in mind about the three shot Abyssinians, and about the
drowning of the aged prior’s body, due to his rage of research.
“And how about the stele,” said I to him; “have you made out the
meaning?”
“I am going to,” was his answer.
“I suppose it is worth the pains?” said I.
“Reid,” says he, “it would be worth the pains, if all the Orientalists
in the world applied their wits to nothing else than that one thing.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“Well, but haven’t I already read part of the thing?” says he.
“True, it is no cartouche of Darius, nor Rosetta-stone; its date
can’t be earlier than the thirteenth century, and not only is it
the oddest mix of Memphitic with hieroglyphs, but, what is really
remarkable, this Coptic stone is the record of an Indian incident. Its
comparative-philological value will hardly be high, perhaps, but I am
convinced that, once deciphered, it will prove a priceless document
from the historian’s point of view.”
Well, I wished him joy of his new toy, and we said adieu for that time.
Then for some few months I did not see much of Lepsius, nor, I imagine,
did anyone else of his world, till his seclusion began to be remarked
upon by one and another of the gossips. “Where was Lepsius, what was
he pottering at at present, why the father of lies...?” and so on. On
three or four of the occasions when I called upon him at his Hanover
Square house, I found him looking far from so well and sprightly as
usual, nor did the good fellow give himself the pains to hide from me
that I was somewhat heavy upon him. I understood that he was in the
grip of a fit of study—a certain grimness of his looks and gauntness
of his face informed one of so much—and that in that same little stele
lay the secret of this too great zeal. By this time the blessed stele
had been reproduced and distributed among the savants everywhere, and
it may be that a race was being run in its deciphering, I don’t know;
but one thing was obvious, it made Lepsius lean many days, so that
says Matthews to me, “serves him right for picking and _steling_,
there’s some black spook in the basalt thing that’s paying him back,
and making him its victim”; and, in truth, I never saw such a thing,
for one by one Lepsius threw every social, every scientific obligation
to the winds to give himself day and night to this one object. Such,
however, was the man: whatsoever his hands found to do, he did it with
a fraction more than all his might or right. Then all at once I learned
that he had fallen ill and had gone off to his castle in Galway, from
which region, after some weeks, he once only wrote me a few words.
On a sudden one morning, say ten months after his coming back from
Abyssinia, Lepsius presents his old phiz before me, looking as brisk
and light as you like, with a smile on the thin lips. He had got back
from Ireland only the day before, and, after some gossip, said I to
him, “Come now, one can really see that we have laid bare at last the
secret of our basalt stele.”
“Do I look like it?” he asked rather sorrowfully.
“So I thought,” said I.
“Just failed, sir! just failed!” sighs he, tossing up his hand.
“Tell me about it,” said I.
“That’s all I’ve got to say,” says he; “I’ve only just failed. The
epigraph, as you know, consists of signs of very diverse dates, with a
quite hierogrammatic vowelling, but Memphitic aspirations, and a jumble
of true idiographs and true rebuses. Well, within five months I had
deciphered it all—every syllable—save fifteen signs, making, I think,
three words at the very finish, which are purposely ‘secret’; but, as
it chances, those three are the important ones.”
“That’s hard luck, certainly,” said I; “but why, then, are these three
of such particular importance?”
“You know,” said he, “that the stele is the record of an accumulation
of riches heaped up somewhere by a host of Hindu princes during the
period of the Mohammedan deluge—this where and when is exactly what
remains dark. Fix place and date, and you have sextupled the value of
your stele as a piece of history, quite apart from the pile of lucre in
question, supposing it still to exist.”
“Well, that’s tantalising,” I said. “Of course, Thibaut has seen it?”
“You may bet,” was his answer. “Who hasn’t seen it? They have all seen
it. But the fellows _can’t make it out_! I question if any one of them
has read as much of it as I have. Reid, there’s not one single living
man who can do it!”
“So much for stolen goods, then,” said I. “Still, you seemed to me a
good deal more like your old self just as you came in, quite a youthful
step and jaunty air, I thought! so I made sure....”
He laughed, saying, “Well, perhaps you are right, for I _am_ relieved,
and I have reason.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Look you,” says he, “I am going to read every syllable of the writing
on that stele.”
“You said just now that you couldn’t,” said I.
“I am going to, though,” says he, “for it can be done, if not by me, if
not by any living man, still it can be done; and if I look relieved it
is because I know the means of doing it, and because, two nights since,
lying in my bed, I suddenly decided to use them.”
“Very good,” said I, swallowing my puzzlement; “and what _are_ the
means?”
“I am going, Reid,” says Lepsius, “to make a man who will read the
secret.”
Quite at a loss to make out what the deuce he would be at, no doubt I
smiled, for he added quickly, “No, don’t smile in that fashion, as if
you hadn’t known me until to-day, since I assure you quite seriously
that I can and will successfully accomplish this job.”
“The making of a man?” said I: “those are your words.”
“The making of a man,” says he, “who will not merely read the rebus,
but do it without difficulty—without effort.”
“Quite so, Lepsius,” said I, “for though you choose to express
yourself in terms of x, I am quite sure that in due course some
explanation will be offered by you of the matter which you meditate,
and of your meaning when you speak of ‘making a man’ to read this
stele.”
“Lord,” exclaims Lepsius, “what a speech! How sweet the smile, but
how icy the meaning! as if I were some rash, fantastic talker. No! at
present I haven’t the time to go into prolonged explanations, moreover
doubting Thomas ought to be tortured; but in about four days I shall
probably lay my plan fully before you, when I shall have seen the
initial stages of it well under way: and meanwhile, I invite you to
take part with me in watching the accomplishment of these stages.”
“Where?” said I.
“You come,” said he.
“To the end of the world,” said I, “if you are serious and scientific.”
“I am quite serious and strictly scientific,” says he.
Well, I went with him. First we drove to his club in Piccadilly,
where we took two seats at a window to look down upon the passers on
the pavement beneath, as to whom Lepsius remarked that we might have
to keep an eye on them for two, three, four hours, and—did I mind?
“No, didn’t mind,” I replied, feebly chewing my foolish feeling.
However, after half an hour of this watch, he changed his mind, said
that that was hardly the proper place for his object, and suggested
that we should drive to Westminster Bridge, if I would. I should, I
said: so thither we drove, and there by the parapet of the bridge we
stood, under the July blaze of the sun, two hours. I was at first
simply amused by this open-air sentry of two venerable persons like
ourselves, then I became a little vexed. However, I stuck to my task,
while of the river of people that passed by every one stared at us
two standing stupidly there, Lepsius speaking of everything except of
what had brought us into this exhibition, mainly, I remember, of the
necessity, by a law of probability, that every variety of human type
should move past us within a number of time-units equal to the number
of type-varieties which exist in the city. At last, when it was close
on two o’clock, he stopped suddenly in his talk, and pointed.
“There, I think,” he says, “comes the right age, the right race, the
right trade, the right body and being—the very lady.”
It was a passing woman at whom he pointed, a woman of the lower orders,
with black hair, black eyes, high cheek-bones, very cheaply dressed,
but not unclean, long in the leg, lean and fit, some twenty-five years
old. Her nose was not red, her teeth were regular. She was going, under
a heap of soiled clothes, toward the Surrey side, and one could make
quite sure that she was an Irish washerwoman.
Well, Lepsius stepped out and addressed the woman. She was startled! I
heard her say, “Sure, then, it isn’t me that has the time to be showing
your worship around the town this day.”
I remained waiting at the parapet, absolutely astonished, much amused,
while Lepsius walked on with the woman, talking pressingly, quite
a confab, one could see, taking place between them, he all suave
insistence, the woman curtseying, till, presently turning, he beckons
me to come. So I ran and overtook them, to find them already fast
friends; and Lepsius effusively introduced me to “Miss Molly O’Hara.”
This woman turned out to be the heartiest, best soul in the world, and
in some half-hour we had won from her the whole simple history of one
who was orphaned and friendless, save for a sister, a fruit-seller,
who lived at Ballihooly. In the course of our discourse it was
discovered that she had never visited the Tower, the Crown Jewels,
nor the whispering-gallery at St. Paul’s, so we soon got from her an
engagement to meet us on the Bridge the next day, in order to go with
us to inspect these glories. She showed us the slum and the house in
Southwark in which she occupied a room, and we parted.
Well then, the next day, at one o’clock, behold Molly standing in
holiday garb with her landlady for guardian, and the pair of professors
before them with doffed hats, like characters in an opera! We had
lunch in a restaurant, and I spent a pestilent day in the “chamber
of horrors” and other suchlike places, winding up with a play in the
evening; after which, at about midnight, we sent our ladies home in a
cab, and Lepsius, coming back to my house with me, disclosed to me that
night the design that underlay his conduct during the last two days,
so that we were still talking in my study when the dawn stole in. When
I said to him that I had well earned his secret, and asked what in the
world he meant to do with this Molly O’Hara, his answer was, “I mean to
make her read my stele for me.” “Quite so,” said I, “but then, Lepsius,
you persist in speaking to me in riddles.” “I mean to marry her,” says
Lepsius.
I was so startled, I couldn’t help crying out a “No!”
“And why not?” says the doctor coldly.
“Oh, Lepsius,” I couldn’t help saying, half laughing, and half
shrinking with reproach, “this is ridiculous, this is absurd.”
“Ridiculous enough, certainly,” says he, “but very far from absurd. We
differ there.”
“But, Lepsius,” said I.
“Pooh, man,” says he, “don’t be excessive; there’s no law to prevent
me taking a female to the altar, if I like, and, as to the particular
lass in question, if it isn’t the right of men like you and me to look
at facts in their true light, where’s the use of us? Molly O’Hara is
a better human being than I, you may bet, with all my learning, sound
from her top-knot to her toes; I don’t doubt she will make a pretty
fairish wife—and a most splendid mother.”
“Well, I never was so astonished,” I said.
“That,” he answered, “is due to the fact that you have not yet acquired
a scientific interest in my motive, for as soon as ever you have, your
interest will quite quash your astonishment.”
“Well, I am all ears,” says I: “what _is_ your motive?”
“You know, Reid,” was his answer, “that whatever else I may or may not
be, I am by nature an educationist; the world calls me educationist,
and with justice, if a lifetime’s work and warmth are worth ought;
and you know, too, my notion that no son of Adam so far has ever been
educated, or been half educated—that education is an affair of the
future. Well, my thought, cherished for many years, and now brought to
a head by this stele, is to turn out by certain quite sure modes of
education, a man, or why not a woman? who shall be not so much a man as
a kind of—god. The methods, however, have to be such, that I should not
venture to employ them upon another man’s boy, nor, unless the child
were in my absolute power from a very early age, would they be of any
use. You now observe where my Molly comes nicely in: the first needful
work for a man who would build a mansion or a fane is to make sure that
his marble and beams are at least good.”
“I see,” said I: “given fair materials to start with, you undertake
what you say.”
“Aye,” says he, “and without so much as the shadow of a doubt as to the
result.”
“What an enterprise!” I cried. “But as to the means.”
“The means,” says he, “will be simple enough, being based purely upon
the known fact that human beings are what their environment makes of
them. We know that an English child, abandoned by its guardians in
China, will grow up, hardly a mental Englishman, but a mental Chinaman:
never by any effort will he be able to row like a Cambridge-man, or
do business like a jobber; but he will, without effort, make finer
porcelain than could be turned out by the life’s devotion of ten
thousand Cambridge-men or jobbers; it is a question of environment,
of the mental hue and house about you. Be sure that every brat born
into ancient Athens was straightway an artist, and if children to-day
were born into a world in which everybody as a matter of course played
violins with perfect skill, then _every_ average child would without
conscious effort be a pretty perfect fiddle-player—and, indeed, _is_ so
in some regions of the Bas-Pyrennees. It is a question of environment.”
“Quite so,” said I, “and, if you add heredity——”
“No,” says he, “let one get on; what I am trying to tell you is that
the faculties of a human child’s mind and body can be made to stretch
_a hundred miles_—almost indefinitely—I half said infinitely—according
to the ideal, the standard and life-idea, that he finds about him; and
I should doubt almost any limit which you chose to lay down to the
possible activity, exactness, and acumen of the human mind and senses;
we here are limited merely by habit, by the iron rod of mean ideals.
Primitive man in his atmosphere of reindeer could run very like a deer;
he had his hound’s scent, could speed his spear with the sureness of a
machine—and without toil, that’s the point, without dreaming that he
did anything astounding. A modern British child, abandoned in Africa
to that same atmosphere and life-ideal, would also run like the devil,
shoot like a machine, track like a dog; born into a world of gods or
godlike beings, he, too, would in general be stretched into a god or
godlike being; if he believed that everybody about him could read
rebuses without effort, then he, too, would read them without effort.
It is an affair of environment.”
“Quite so,” said I; “one has no difficulty in following you so far,
for even monkeys that have lived long in an environment of men become
manlike, and get to do many things; so, given your ‘environment of
gods,’ your undertaking looks all in bloom. But where, then, do you
mean to find this environment of gods? On the moon? In Venus?”
“Oh, as to that,” says Lepsius, “surely that much is simplicity itself.
The environment may be real or it may be merely imagined. A child
placed in isolation may be made to believe in an environment, a world,
which does not exist, and so long as he never comes into actual contact
with the imperfect world, and has no suspicion that it is not a perfect
one, you will have all the elements of success: his life-ideal and
standard, his idea and atmosphere, will remain quite unaffected by the
actual world round about him; and having been made to conceive man as a
god, he will not himself be vastly inferior to his conception.”
“By George,” I cried, “I see what you are at!... But, my friend, aren’t
you preparing a nice little shock for some poor devil of a child,
supposing he ever does come into contact with his actual, as distinct
from his fancied, environment?”
“May be,” says Lepsius, with a shrug; “or may be the shock will be to
the environment, not to the child—‘so much the worse for the coo,’ as
old Stephenson said; but really, Reid, that’s looking too far forward
for me; the practical point for us is to make out the meaning of our
stele.... Lord! it is broad day, I’m away.”
Such is something of the gist of my talk with this radical mind that
morning. I can’t recall a hundredth part of his ratiocinations, but
when he had finished I was convinced. I made him stay till with our own
hands we had found and cooked some coffee on my tripod, whereupon the
doctor went home.
As to the end of this business, I have already, under September 13th,
1869, recorded the doctor’s marriage with Molly O’Hara in the church at
Lambeth. As usual with him, Lepsius has given himself up heart and soul
to the grip of his caprice, the married pair going off at once to his
Galway castle, where, for the past twelvemonth, they have lived. Some
months since I received tidings that Lepsius was in a fair way to be a
parent, and that he had then leased the island of Shunter (one of the
uninhabited islands of the Hebrides), which he was busily preparing at
a crazy cost for the habitation of the child shortly to be born. Now
this morning comes the joyful news that a boy was actually born about
two weeks ago, and with it the gloomy news that our poor good Molly is
no more. She died of milk-fever five days ago, and it had been better
for the good woman not to have passed over Westminster Bridge just
at that particular hour of that day twelve months ago. However, so it
was to be. The fellow who is to read the famous stele is to be named
Hannibal ... etc., etc.
CHAPTER III.
THE ISLE OF LIES.
If what has so far been given by Professor Reid be read as a sort of
prologue, nearly nineteen years may well be passed over in silence,
till, patching artfully into one a number of letters of Dr. Lepsius to
the professor, we watch what then befell. The doctor writes:
The bubble’s burst then. We two, Shan Healy and I, have passed over to
the island of Barra in the boat, this being the first time for over
seven years that I have left the shores of Shunter; and at Barra we
now are, my head bound in a handkerchief, aching, and this same fond
Shan Healy looking as sad-hearted as a man handed over to be hanged. We
really lack the grit for the moment to go to the mainland, or to take
any course to get the matter looked into. But you, Reid, will do what
you can at once. I am sure the police should be disposed to take an
interest in it, if you can make them know the peril implied both to the
public and to the poor fellow himself. And there can be no mistaking
him! Middle-sized, swarthy, kind of dusky sallow, blackened over cheek,
chin and lip by a bluish shade of hair which he would oftentimes shave
twice a day—he’s so mighty hairy; and by the smile you should know the
beggar—that cruel smile which hardly departs from his lips, and those
dark eyes, with a glance, Reid, just so wild and sharp, I assure you,
as the glance of the rupicapra gazelle. For the rest, no jacket, rough
shirt of bauge-like stuff—but where’s the good? No police could ever
get nigh him, I suppose. He’s gone, perhaps he’s drowned—he may be, I
doubt it; but God knows. On the sands of the little bay at the north
_a lady’s handkerchief_ has been found; can’t tell how it or she came
there.
My friend, it was just on his nineteenth birthday, the 21st of July,
that, strange to say, it was to happen; the day which I had long
determined in my own mind as that on which I should present him the
little stele to read.
All was as usual the evening before; we ran the usual race. For the
past two years, you know, his highest ambition in life has been to be
able to beat me at running—I, a poor old wreck of sixty-four years!
I believe that this was his great dream and hope of glory. For four
years an almost daily race has taken place, and Mr. Hannibal has once
or twice come gallantly nigh victory, but has never won. Well, at
7.30 p.m. this eve of his birthday, down he bounds from his study,
and stands in the castle courtyard, waiting for me to come, with
the impulse, I dare say, to dart away pricking in his high health.
The climate of these Outer Hebrides is a great deal too humid to be
ideal; the ground is mostly of gneiss, too shallow for much culture,
so drammach, with some barley, potatoes, and buckies, have formed the
main part of our maintenance, apart from what provisions Shan Healy has
brought over in the boat from Barra once every four months. But on this
thin gruel my man has greatly thrived; is fully grown now, having the
shoulders of a man, but a shape as limber as a Grace, sir, and about as
supple as any greyhound pup.
Well then, aware that he is below waiting, I pull myself together now,
put a bit of go into my gait and glance, and down I go to him; together
we stand at the gate of our little home—alas, for the last time—my grey
head reaching little higher than his shoulder, Reid, for the old spine
bows a bit now, you know; and from the kitchen Shan Healy looks up to
watch the race for the thousandth time, while away in the west the sun
is going down all in a wild of clouds and glories, as often in this wet
place. The sea is dead, just lapping the beach in a weary way; the sky
grey, with a curlew or two skirling under it. It gives a little relief
to live it over again....
There then, we stand, ready to renew the old, old trial of thews. You
know that it has ever been my policy to speak as few words as possible
to this creature, so now I only say to him, “Well, ready?”
“Ready, sir,” answers my man.
“Then one, two—_Three!_”
We are away, he to the left, I to the right, the goal of the race being
a little flag-staff standing on the sands to the north of the island,
two miles off, and so placed that the boy going over the east shore,
and I over the west, we should run about equally far, the castle, our
starting-point, being right at the rim of a bluff of rock at the south
of the island. A very few instants after we start, we are quite hidden
from each other behind the saddle of the hill, which, being all hard
rock just by there, makes hardly any record of the foot-prints of this
part of the race. So now, no sooner has my man lost sight of me than
I pull up, and pant, and wipe my old brow, and turn back, just in
time to catch a glimpse of the flying heels of Asahel going thirteen
to the dozen round a corner—a sight, Reid, fit to make soft the eyes
of an artist at so much charm of form, and such a pelting puissance
of swiftness. Well, I imagine that you have already heard the rest of
the business, how I climb back at my leisure to the ridge of the hill,
where Shan Healy makes me the wink which means that the mare is ready,
and how I descend to the bush in which she is trained to await me
without budging, and take her quietly in my hand to the entrance of the
tunnel, where I mount and am away. You may be aware that what we call
the tunnel is a sort of gut or gorge, which, half natural, and half due
to my re-organisation of the features of the island during the fellow’s
first youth, was specially arranged for the purposes of this race. It
runs pretty straight across the island, from south-west to north-east;
is thick with peat-moss, so that hardly a sound of the mare’s hoofs is
to be made out in it, and is fairly shut in by bushes at both ends. So,
having galloped straight across to the north-east end, I get off, give
the mare her hint to go back to Shan Healy, dive sharply and quietly
through the growth of leaves, and am off like the devil afoot for the
goal, only some seventy feet distant, but still hidden from me behind a
bluff of rock: and as my right hand claps the flag-staff, with the wild
eyes of a hart Hannibal darts into view, to fling his flying impetus at
the post—a good half-minute or so too late.
No change in the smile, but a shadow now in the eyes, and I know just
how my man is meditating in his head, thinking in himself, “It is so,
then, that ‘Man’ can run, and how far beneath Him must _I_ be, when
this old being, who is one of ‘Man’ can beat me, a youth, can beat me
always and completely at running and at all else”: for it was never so
much with _me_, I’m sure, that the fellow fought for victory as with
“Man,” those angels and giants inhabiting the sunset of whose existence
he knew, whom eye of his had never viewed, at the idea of whom in their
lurid rule over nature his soul swooned with self-disdain.
Darkness was beginning to fall rapidly, the winds to pipe up a bit,
as he and I together strolled back homeward in silence all over the
western shores, upon which the waters were just moving themselves to
moan and spume. I willed it so always, for along the eastern shores,
where I was believed to have passed, there was ever a certain absence
of foot-prints! And Mr. Hannibal often seemed to have the knack of
seeing in the dark.
Have I done well? Have I done right? Never did a question of that sort
arise in my mind till within the twelve months gone, when I have had to
ask myself, “Have I, who forgot nothing, forgotten one thing—one thing
needful?” God Almighty forgive His faulty ones. I am an old man now,
with the back bowing down, and a head of white hairs, meekly aware of
my own weaknesses and achings....
You know, my friend, something of the kind of life that during eighteen
years nearly has whiled itself away on that island of delusion: like
the shadow of a vapour it is vanished now. Not without the sacrifice
of my career did I tackle it, Reid: but because of the thousand
eyes and the acrobat activities of mind by which alone it could be
accomplished, the years have been so packed with interest, and have
passed so far from unhappily, that though the task has too soon done
for me, yet when I look back over them they look to me more like two
years than like eighteen; and, if after all one’s travail, one could
only be certain that the work has been truly good, that one has not
somewhere mishandled and bungled, then one could go to bed. Indeed, in
some points, there need be no fear as to the meeds of my toils, for in
his intellectual and physical features at least there breathes on the
earth to-day (if he still breathes!) the highest human feat, a peerless
being, at whose feet all the peoples of this planet may very well
kneel, and wail because of him, crying, “Here is what we might have
been.”
But oh, the web of imposture to which this being owes his soul! He
is the child of lies—and I am his father. At _every_ moment of his
life, from the age of four and before, the fellow has known my mould.
Nothing was left undone, nothing for me was a bore, or more than I
could afford. You know that his books alone cost me a sum of more than
£14,000: for, owing to my purpose that his notions of the soul of
“Man” should grow from his study of only the most glorious of human
works, and owing to the fact that even those works as they stood would
never do for those pure eyes, his whole library was formed solely of
purged volumes, specially prepared for him, almost before he opened
his eyes upon this world; and when he was old enough to study them,
it was sown into his skull that only men made of very poor stuff ever
wrote books. And so in everything; everywhere the same whip of deceit:
the mass of principles, for instance, which we call mathematics, due
to the shrewdness of fifty thinkers, adding and adding, each of them,
to the achievements of the past, was for Hannibal, his books were so
doctored, the discovery of a single ordinary wit, a certain “Peter
Pitt,” who, as I had to give the lad to believe, lived in the ancient
ages. His study of history, above all, was minutely nursed: wide, yet
much pruned. The story of the ingenuity, zeal, and success of masterly
adventurers like Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, he knew by heart: but he
had no suspicion of their chutes; doesn’t even now know that Cæsar
was assassinated, nor that Napoleon was plucked down at last, so that
their victoriousness and force remain measureless in his imagination.
He knew well the proportions of the pyramids of Shufu and Shafra, but
he was not allowed to know how many multitudes, nor how many moons,
were used to build them. And so on. It was dropped into his ear at a
very early age that among men some few may be born with feeble bodies
and wits, that these are called “idiots,” and that poor Shan Healy, who
in reality is a rather sharp chap, is one of the feeblest of these: so
Shan has always passed with us under the name of “The Idiot.” As to
myself, Hannibal now at the age of nineteen cherishes, if he lives, a
belief, ploughed into his brain by ten thousand stratagems, that I can
shoot like doom, can swim like a fish, can run like a roe, can watch
like a dog, can see like an eagle; and that this skull is the dome of
all skill and of all wisdom.
Frauds. But the outcome, I say, is (or was!) without doubt a success,
something of a success. What the father feigned to be, that the lad
was led to be. I fancy that an average acrobat, after regarding some
of the pranks of this young man, would be asking from what moon the
beggar had gadded; he has a damnable habit of chucking about little
dynamite or other bombs, which he turns out himself, and carries in
his pocket—five, ten times a day for years have the curlews heard the
burstings of this turbulent being’s play—and I am pretty sure that any
other runner than he would long since have been shattered to the deuce
by it. As to his mere knowledge, it is of a vastness which you would
certainly call marvellous, though to me, who know the cause of it,
it is hardly so: for if, for instance, he knows a good deal of most
languages from Japanese and the Dravidic dialects to Portuguese, it
is because he never, I think, forgets a word or thing which has once
come within his consciousness, and so has learned a language within
some weeks. I remember to have heard it said that Lord Macaulay could
repeat word for word a book once read, a statement the truth of which I
beg leave to disbelieve: but, even if true, his lordship differed from
Hannibal here, that Hannibal, I imagine, is not quite clear with regard
to the meaning of “forgetting”; I never heard him utter such a word;
certainly, he never heard such a word escape _my_ lips. _Forgetting_
is, in fact, mainly a loose habit into which humanity has lapsed,
for to observe vividly is to retain rigidly; and Hannibal, with his
over-manly mental habit, observes each fact presented to him with a
vividness which seems to be pretty absolute.
You will say, then, to yourself, my friend, that it was a strange pair
of men that paced by the seashore in silence that evening, the eve of
the young man’s nineteenth birthday—old Jack and his young giant; the
giant in the meekest subjection to his Jack because of delusion, as all
a world will sometimes meekly lie in shackles under the will of the
weakest lie. My thoughts as I walked were of the morrow, of that dawn
toward which for long years I had looked forward, when I should hand
over to Hannibal my old problem of the stele to conquer for me, and I
wondered in what manner the young man would manage it. Little doubt,
however, had I as to the outcome, seeing that I am even now about to
compile into a book quite a crowd of new scientific principles dropped
from the mouth of my man in the course of his studies, with a thousand
little observations about things in general, most of them bound, I
should imagine, to astound you. So, then, that my man would read the
stele I could readily believe; but indeed, Reid, I was no longer deeply
interested in this miserable bit of a stele; I’m afraid it is too true
that my interest had all shifted from the lifeless thing to the living
fellow, all too much so, all too much for my peace....
Sometimes lately, Reid, I may avow to you, I have stolen out of my
room in the dead of night and stood before his door, stood for hours,
hearkening for a sound; couldn’t at all tell you why—bound there
somehow—and I have shaken my poor head, saying to myself, “No, surely,
I have to cure myself of this folly: a purely scientific interest in
this savage, nothing more”; but still I have stuck at his door.
Do you understand that this boy is in some points an idiot? It is
only lately that the amazingness of it all has struck and made me a
wrecked man! To a thousand throes and heartburns, learned in a thousand
social niceties by men who dwell with men, he remains a stranger. The
different ways in which one should bend the mind toward one’s brother,
toward one’s mother, one’s friend, and so on, seem to be unknown to
him; I don’t know who is to blame. Never a little tenderness, never
a sign. I _couldn’t_, of course, bring his mind into contact with
the Christian faith from the very nature of the case, the Man of
Christianity being a sorrowful type, while the Man of his fancy was
bound to be a type of power; so that the name of Christ he has never
heard; but his mind was presented with such naïve nature-worship as
that of the Rig-Vedas, Genesis and Job: I thought that it was well....
But to return to this birthday-eve of his. We two had made our way back
together in silence, nearly to the castle-gate, when out darts Shan
Healy, wringing hands and crying, “Oh, Master Hannibal, do forgive me,
sir, the glass pot has boiled all over, while I was attending to the
dinner”; whereat Master Hannibal, without waiting to hear another word,
threw Shan out of his way, and rushed into the house, no doubt to see
for himself how the matter stood, for he seems to have left some mess
simmering in his laboratory, had bid Shan look to it, and the thing had
had some mischance.
“Now, here’s a go for a poor chap, doctor,” says Shan to me, in great
distress; “believe me, I couldn’t avoid it, the thing boiled over so
quick, and what’ll Master Hannibal say now?”
“Say?” said I, for I was angry, “what can he dare say? Let him go
to the devil, you couldn’t help it, and I order you not to distress
yourself in the slightest.”
“Ah, doctor, it’s all very well for you to talk,” says he.
Well, we went into the house, and Shan went down to his kitchen; but
I still hung about the bottom of the stair, being a bit anxious as to
what this being might take it into his nut to do now about his blessed
chemical. All was still during some time, so presently I called sharply
up to him, “What are you at, Hannibal?” No answer, no sound; only the
faint sounds of Shan’s preparations for dinner downstairs. So now I
ran very thievishly up the stairs, and peeped into the laboratory,
but he wasn’t there, and I can only think now that at the sounds of my
steps on the stair, faint as they were, the monkey must have passed
out of the laboratory window, and slipped down the turret by the ivy;
anyway, the next thing that I heard were Shan’s howls coming up out of
the kitchen, upon which I ran down, to find myself locked out, and to
hear within the kitchen the sounds of a head being beaten against the
ground, mingled with Shan Healy’s exclaimings.
Beside myself with anger, I pounded upon the door, and now at once the
row stopped, and in a moment Shan opened, saying despondently to me,
poor chap, “Oh, doctor, he do use me cruel, sir, cruel, cruel, cruel.
Oh, my poor head—what does he think anybody is made of?”
My own head was hung with shame; I could do nothing but silently pat my
old companion on his shoulder.
“Where is he now?” said I.
“Gone like a shadow through the window, doctor, and down to the shore,
the minute he heard you pounding,” says Shan. “He held me down on the
floor with one hand, and with the other he banged my poor head ...
cruel, cruel. I shouldn’t mind if it was done in a rage, but smiling
as cool as a cucumber, as if anybody’s head was a block of wood he was
playing with.”
“Well,” I said bitterly, “all your own fault, Shan Healy; you’re too
faithful and good.” And I left him there and went up.
Well, I dined by myself, my fellow keeping culpably aloof perhaps; and
during the rest of the evening I saw or heard nothing of him till, near
ten in the night, I heard some long way off the bursting of one of
his bombs. A gale was then raging, and it had grown coldish, with that
wet chill which marks this part. So I went to seek a little sleep, but
at about three in the morning rose and went softly to stand outside
the observatory door, to see if I could detect a sound of his through
the row of the storm; and as I so stood, to my surprise, he called to
me, praying me to enter. I did so, to find him sitting at a window,
looking out at all the dark strife of the winds and waters, and at the
bethundered bluff down there below: whereat, without the least mention
of Shan Healy, my man began to blab about the moon, which just then
struggled through into a channel between two cloud-bogs, saying that
our globe, as it seemed to him, might have been made a more suitable
place for living beings, if provided with two moons instead of one.
Being grum and out of sorts at the moment, I told him not to trouble
his small head about that, that things were well as they were, and I
quoted dogmatically to him that “God made two great lights, the greater
light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.” At this
my chap turns up at me a gaze of the greatest astonishment, asking if
I did really think that some purpose of providing a lamp to the night
had anything to do with the birth and being of the moon. I said yes, I
did think so; on which he anew turns at me a certain searching look of
astonishment, and murmurs something about not daring to question the
truth of my words, but that as a lamp the moon undoubtedly appeared to
be a failure, since she did not shine most nights; sometimes shone for
a short hour only; sometimes shone uselessly during the day, but left
the night orbless—a rather mad sort of lamp—whereas _two_ moons with
such and such parallaxes, of such and such masses.... “Well, never
you mind that,” said I shortly to him, for I thought that I’d better
be mum as to the moon. But he was moon-struck that night, and after
saying that just as she then was, near her full, but not quite, she
reminded him of “The Idiot’s” face when he had gum-boil and swollen-jaw
some years ago—for he’s as simple as a baby in some respects, mind you,
and many things said by the boy that you might think said in fun, are,
in fact, quite grave statements, devoid of any grain of humour on his
part; for though he smiles ever, he hardly ever laughs, so that one’s
cheeks are apt to puff out on a sudden with laughter at his words, as
at the artless freaks of a child’s remarks. Anyhow, after likening the
moon to Shan’s gum-boil face, my boy goes on now to wonder for the
thousandth time how it is that his “Man” never managed to range so
high into space as the moon, for I had soon found myself compelled to
confess to him that man had never yet landed on the satellite, nor did
all the reasons which I could adduce for this fact, such as the absence
of an atmosphere on the moon, and so on, ever suffice to abate his
wonder that the moon should remain unvisited: for little did the man
dream that even the north and south poles of our own planet remain even
now all unknown, let alone the moon!
Well, sir, he was thus droning to himself as to the moon, and
specifying the modes by which her surface appeared to him attainable,
when in a foolish heat of tenderness I, standing behind him, let my
hand fall on the flesh of his neck, inside the broad flap of his
shirt-collar, and I allowed myself to murmur the word “Boy,” about to
say, “Boy, I am fond of you,” or some such futility, when my fellow
gave me such a gaze of Arctic-cold astonishment—for sheet-lightning
and the strangled moonshine both beshone the darkness of the room, so
that one could see anon—such a gaze, that I was glad to slip away to
conceal the wet in my poor eyes, and I went to sleep.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SHIP.
The morning after, his birthday, on meeting him at the breakfast-table
as the clock struck eight, I observed to him that he couldn’t have had
much sleep: to which, glancing up from his book, he answered, “Enough
for the needs of my nature, sir, I think, though I was at work at four
minutes before five. The old have greater need of repose, it appears,
while, as to the young, the demagogue Cataline, it is written, could
dispense with sleep almost altogether.”
“Oho,” said I; “well, let us be eating,” and we sat to the old jug of
porridge and oaten loaf.
Presently, as we ate, I said to him, “By the way, I want you now to
understand that you are not to knock my servant’s head about any more.”
His answer was that he had discovered that such occasional visitations
had the effect of slightly heightening the functioning of the idiot’s
wit.
“Never mind your discoveries,” said I: “you are not to do it, sir.”
“I will not, sir,” says he with his formal bow, and buries his brow
anew in his volume.
I for my part could hardly eat, for I was uneasy and excited, and my
fingers kept on going to feel the old stele, which I had in my pocket;
so, fidgeted by his cool reading and feeding, said I to him, “Didn’t
I beg you some time since not to be for ever eating and reading
together, since it is injurious to the digestion, and there’s a time
for everything, as the mightiest minds among men well know.”
“True, sir,” says my man, “you did speak to me on this subject on
the third of June two years ago, but your words did not give me an
impression of great urgency, so I have dared to disregard them, since,
after all, the digestion of the young is hearty and strong, and the
days are hardly born but they are fled, and it is hard to the foot
to race after the fastness of the horses of time; hence the greater
masters, the minds of white-hot ardour, like Cæsar, always delighted
themselves in the most entangled exercises, like the dictating of a
vast host of letters at once, so as to harbour in their mood a habit of
keeping pace with the fleetness of the passing days.”
“So true,” said I, “so true; still, it is as well not to eat and read
together; nor are you any longer so ‘young’ as you have been; you know,
of course, that to-day is your birthday.”
“So I calculate, sir,” says he: “I have now existed apart from the womb
nineteen times as many as three hundred and sixty-five days, less four;
that is to say, six thousand nine hundred and thirty-one days, without
counting some odd hours.”
“Oho,” said I; “and how are you going to spend the day?”
“I am engaged in a chemical investigation, sir,” says he, leaning back
now, and balancing a plate on the edge of his forefinger nail, for he
always speedily devoured his food, though with complete mastication, I
believe, and was generally done before I was nearly through.
“Ah, and what is the investigation?” I asked.
“You must have noticed, sir,” says he, “the agitation I call it, with
which bismuth acts——”
“I know exactly what you are going to say,” said I—God forgive
us—“quite so; but look here, before you go I want to show you
something, something that will amuse you; just read me that.”
On a sudden now, Reid, the moment long waited for had come, for I now
caught the old basalt stele out of my pocket, and laid it before him;
whereat immediately the fellow seemed to feel an interest in the mere
sight of this object, took it up, looked it up and down and round
about, smiling his smile, his brow twitching into momentary frowns.
“Why, sir,” says he suddenly, “where did you come upon this stone?”
“That’s not the point,” said I; “I got it in Abyssinia, but that’s not
the point; just read it.”
“It is mainly enchorial and alphabetic,” he breathes aloud, peering
into the thing, “but with a great number of syllabary signs, and vowel
matres lectionis——”
“Yes, I know; read it,” said I, painfully conscious within myself of
being pale in the face.
“Strange,” says he to himself: “both Sahidic and Memphitic, but mainly
Memphitic——”
“Yes, I tell you, I know,” said I; “read it, read it, boy.”
He hesitated, sir, and I felt growing within me an agitation almost too
great to be any more restrained.
“Have _you_ read it, sir?” he suddenly asks, raising his eyes to my
face; and I was foolishly conscious that my eyes drooped before his,
even as in a tone of protest I answered, “Why, naturally! I only give
it to you as a little exercise to amuse you; just read the whole thing
right off.”
Now, sir, he puts the bit of a stele on the table, and he bends his
brow studiously over it, supporting his head between his hands.
“Seven of the words are purposely secret,” says he to himself; “it is
not an easy cypher....”
“Well, I know, I know that,” said I, deadly anxious now, “that’s why
I give it to you—for a little fun on your birthday; just read it off,
boy, to please me.”
“Ah, I see,” says he all at once: “this whole half-line is a long rebus
or pun; the sound of each ideograph combines with the third following
to form a word: that is clearly the idea of the inventor; I can trace
his thought; I see. Oh, it is not difficult, sir!”
“Good—very good,” said I; “then just read it right off, and go up to
your science, boy,” for I felt my face growing white with excitement,
seeing that, in spite of his brave words, the man’s manner showed some
hesitation, and lower and lower bent his head over the thing.
“A moment, sir,” he murmurs, “one moment; your servant is slow and
dull, but”—something; and another minute went by in a silence that
was most bitter to me to bear, till, all in a scare, I called to him,
“Well, but haven’t you done it _yet_?”
“Yes, sir, I think——” he falters.
“Then read it!”
“In Coptic?”
“In English.”
Now, very deliberately, my man begins to utter syllables, his brow
between his hands bent low down over the symbols, and, syllable by
syllable, says he, “It is graved on a golden brick within the grave of
Arunzebe, that when the white strangers from over the Great Hill came
with fire and warfare, then did eighty princes bear together their
braveries for safety, and they heaped them into the grave of Arunzebe.
Even a spirit (_nat_) could scarce penetrate to their secret place, nor
could a rain of men, straining through many days, attain to them. There
is the Silence that annihilates. Let no man strive to visit them at——”
There my man stopped short. “At,” he repeated, but couldn’t go on, and
there in the shameful silence he sat now frowning into the thing with a
sort of haughty, excruciated self-surprise, but without progress.
“Well?” said I, and my looks, I know, were ghastly, for all that he had
read of the thing I, too, long ago had read, though I admit that it had
cost me some few months of effort.
“At, sir,” says he, more to himself than to me, “at—something; fifteen
other ideographs remain, making three words, I am certain. But they are
without determinatives, and their outlines are so blurred, they bring
no meaning, no meaning—to my mind; they seem to belong....”
“Better say at once, Hannibal, that you can’t read the epigraph!” I
cried out.
“_You_ have read it, sir, no doubt?” says he for the second time with,
I fancied now, just a touch of scepticism somewhere.
“Why, naturally, boy!” I cried, with such a noise that, at the moment,
I almost believed it myself. “Can’t _you_, then?”
“It is strange, sir,” says he, “it seems to contain _htar_, and the old
verb _secha_, to write.... Pray, bear with your servant a little, sir,
I shall read the words, I see clearly that I _can_, if you will only
vouchsafe me a little time—down by the seashore.”
“Time,” said I, with some disdain; “why _time_? The human mind should
strike and divide like the very scythe of the lightning!... And how
much time?”
“If I may have half an hour on the shore, sir,” says he, rather
down-heartedly, and as I knew that his mind usually rose to the height
of any problem which bothered him with a lighter spring down there amid
the droning of the waves, I said nothing when he took up the little
stone, and passed out through the door. And so, Reid, we parted without
one last clasp of the hand after nineteen years, for that was four
days ago, and neither Shan nor I have since seen him. He is gone, he
is no longer on Shunter, that is our one certainty: he may be drowned,
or he may be living, but on Shunter he no longer is, I’ll vow. After
waiting in suspense an hour, nearly two hours, for him to return with
the basalt stele, I despatched Shan Healy from the castle to seek him
over the shore, and to command him to come back to me. When Shan was
gone on this errand, I took my stand at a window, looking anxiously out
over the eastern shores and over the rolling ground of the sea: and
while there I chanced to catch sight of a schooner, about the size of
a dove, some two leagues to eastward, breasting southward through that
gaudy kind of haze that shrowds with a gauze of azure the bridal and
gala glances of the brighter days on these islands. But little did I
heed her then, nor to this moment do I know that she had anything to
do with the vanishing of the young man. Meantime, Shan did not come
back, Hannibal did not come back, and at last, angry and anxious, I
ran out of the castle, and had got some half a mile over the western
shore before I encountered Shan Healy dashing back to the castle in
a white heat, with a wild countenance, hardly able to gasp out the
words, “Found this, doctor,” as he paraded before my marvelling gaze
a paltry square of cloth and lace, a lady’s handkerchief, marked with
the initials “R. V.,” and tainted with some effluvium of stale perfume.
That thing on Shunter shore! My heart failed me, Reid: for the young
man’s notions of female man had so far been gathered only from certain
Greek and Egyptian urn-traceries, meagre things; and I thought that
if eye of his had indeed fallen that morning upon the carnal fact of
womanhood, then it would be small wonder if all were lost, and his
parting from me an everlasting parting. For fourteen years, so far as
we know, no human foot but those of us three has passed over those
peats and marshes of Shunter; no spar nor oar has approached within
even half a league of its shores; but when Shan and I had run together
to the little harbour at the north, where the bit of a flag-staff
stands, we found the boat empty of the two pairs of half-tame
_motacillæ lugubres_ which had made nests in her, and half-way down
to the edge of the low tide I found the sands much trampled. Unknown
to us, some craft had put in there, had anchored, and had departed,
perhaps taking with her what far surpassed the understanding of those
on her. Shan and I, having separated, searched each of us one of the
promontories which enclose the harbour like claws, since, being dark
with growths of bush, they seemed worth the searching: and on the east
side I found, far out toward the last rocks, a track of footsteps going
down to the sea, going, alas, without return: and they seemed to me,
though I could hardly be certain, rather like the track of sandals
than of boots, in which case he may have chosen that place to swim
off to the craft in the harbour, so as to stow himself away below—I
don’t know. If so, it is remarkable that he should have acted in that
fashion. At first we fancied that, maddened by the sight of man and
woman, the boy might have started to swim to Barra, and have been
destroyed by a shark or a narwhal _en route_. But we are still quite
in the dark as to the actual truth. Shan afterwards discovered half a
bon-bon—a bitten bit of chocolate—amid the kelp on the shore, and no
more know we of it....
Such, then, is the close of our eighteen years of the cloister on
Shunter. Without a message of good-bye to his father the boy is gone.
But, after all, I should have known beforehand, I should have guessed:
for latterly he has been most museful, given to porings over the ocean
through half a night, with more, perhaps, going on in the soul of him
than I had any notion of, for we least of all see and know those that
are nearest us, Reid; we see their faces and only fancy that we see
themselves. Anyhow, it is all passed and over now; the little castle
that was our home, that I had grown to love, and hoped that he, too,
had grown to love, stands now lone through grey days, and darkling
through nightlongs of thunderous weather without us: for, as I have
told you, we have passed over to Barra in the boat, we two and the dog,
and the poor mare and cows and goats will go hungry now, no doubt, or
will soon grow to the humour of the guillemots and herring-gulls on the
crags, and become sea-things, goblin of eye, like the tangles of kelp
on the shore, or the stench of the ocean’s throat, or the pools remote
from the foot of men with little bleaks brooding in their green glooms,
or the inclemency of gales that gather over this sea. I tell you truth,
man, I am sad, for nineteen years of life is not nothing, Reid. The
young man’s gone, and how he is going to adjust himself to the world,
and how the world is going to manage to adjust itself to _him_—God
only knows. His books will become covered with particles of peat now;
our little garth, with its darg of peat heaped in one corner for our
fire next winter, will hearken now no more, alas, to the echoes of our
passing; our little garden will grow wild; and Shunter will forget
the unlasting foot of man and boy, to go back anew with joy to the
largeness and boisterous ocean-mood of her past, and the charm of her
harsh old solitude. To-morrow, I hope, we shall be able to take boat to
Uist, and so to the mainland, but I’m not sure, this poor Shan Healy is
so beastly seedy and down in the mouth ... etc., etc.
CHAPTER V.
“MISS EVE.”
At this point the statement of Dr. Lepsius becoming devoid of interest
for us, we may next take up that of one Jeanne Auvache, where she
writes (in French, with no eye to _us_, but quite for her own behoof):
* * * * *
... The next (Tuesday) morning, near nine, the yacht anew dropped her
anchor within the claws of a creek in an island called Shunter: for the
weather was fine and the sea smooth, so Miss Ruth and Miss Eve, each
wishing to seek for more dolomites, weeds, and other suchlike things of
the sea, and to place their feet on still a new shore, were pleased to
land. I had already massaged, bathed, and coiffured Miss Eve, brought
the two ladies their chocolate, and now had sat to costume yet another
doll for Miss Ruth, when Miss Ruth comes to give me to know that she is
about to go to land, and suggests that that should amuse me to come too
with her: for she is ever good, as befits one who has the reputation
of a saint, and who feels bound, no doubt, to keep it up. As for me, I
little believe in saints, since all beings are as alike as two drops
of water, the one to the other, at bottom—all save one, perhaps; and
though it is a thing hardly to be questioned that, if a true saint
does live, then it is this Ruth Vickery, still, I little believe in
saints, I. Nor is it such a great matter that Miss Ruth should do me
these little graces and goodnesses, inasmuch as I am not really her
maid—I am the maid of Miss Eve—and not bound to be for ever sitting
down dressing dolls for the brats in the hospitals of London; and if
it were merely Miss Eve, I should have very little to do through some
hours of the day: but Miss Ruth finds ever some charitable work to
which to bind me down, and if thou wert now so young as thou once wast,
it is not thou, Jeanne, my cherished one, I think, that would long
endure this demure quietude and existence of a recluse. But patience,
do not yet despair; thou hast been beautiful, thou hast been loved!
Yes, and now, it appears, thou art anew beloved. It was not, then, all
in vain that I have lived, and the world may not be altogether so dirty
a bog of egotism and rotted dogs as I have lately grown to regard it.
Heavens! that is droll—I feel myself anew young! The sky looks bluer,
my feet would be almost dancing, and I am no more morose within myself
at everything: for with a few touches of art there is nought which may
not yet be hidden, and it is as if all the mirrors had of late years
conspired to make me appear to myself plainer than I really am, since,
as a matter of fact, I find the flesh under my jaws yet firmly plump,
my eyes glow as gaudily as a girl’s, their creases have existed chiefly
in my fears, and each day I appear to myself to grow more fit to please.
But how little does one know what is before oneself! The boat had been
already lowered down into the water when, having put aside the dressing
of the dolls, I went up on deck and saw Miss Ruth, Miss Eve, Lord
Astor, Miss Savage, and Monsieur le Comte de Courcy ready to descend
to go to the shore, though Mr. Vickery did not go to the shore, but
abided on the ship’s poop perusing his big Bible through his glasses.
When we had come to the shore, the ladies were taken out of the boat
both by the sailors and by the gentlemen, and Monsieur le Comte de
Courcy, one may be sure, took care to be he who lifted out Miss Eve,
while, as for me, I was left to be taken out by a mariner who, in doing
it, embraced me, I think, with intention. In the boat it had been said
that the island was uninhabited, but, to our surprise, we found a
“coble” or sail-boat, with a brown sail, with the rags of a philibeg,
and with a pair of the sort of shoes which they call “brogues” in it,
lying in some bushes; also a little inland, on some waste land over
which many peewees and moorfowl were chattering their screeches, we
found the ruin of a long shed, built of loose stones, with a roof of
turf; also on the sands a sort of post or flag-staff: all showing that
there were, or had once been, people on this place. On the shore the
party split into two parts, Miss Ruth and Miss Savage marching off one
way, and Monsieur de Courcy and Lord Astor following after Miss Eve as
insects infest a feast of sweetmeat, while I was left to wander as I
would. I therefore walked alone over that claw of the coast which was
to the left as one looked toward the sea, where I paced in shade over a
species of peat between bush and briar, which was deep on either hand,
though little higher than my head, with thousands of gulls and whaups
whistling and crying together in the air around me; and meantime,
whatever seemed rare or strange, such as a weed or a piece of flint,
I picked it up to keep for the ladies’ pleasure. In this manner I
was engaged, waging war on the fog of midges that sang and stung my
face, when, at a place where the glow of the morning’s sun was quite
extinguished under the shade of the bush, I all at once felt within
myself the instinct that two great eyes were regarding me from the
darkness of an ambush. I sprang up from my stooping with affright! And
it proved no fancy, for there, a yard before and to the right of me,
I beheld, yes, two ardent eyes, glowing huge and close to the ground,
it might be those of a tiger crouching, only that they were as dark as
night. No second glance I gave, but with my heart in my mouth ran my
hardest back toward the sands, awaiting at every instant the devouring
teeth of a beast in my rear. Nothing, however, pursued me, and at
length, seeing this, I halted, even ventured back a few feet, peering
forward: for I have never lacked bravery, I, and am not to be terrified
by a mere pair of eyes like that; but I could now see nothing, though,
as I stood peering, my ear seemed to catch through the leafage not
far from me a sharp rush which afresh had the effect of putting me to
flight. However, I was about once more to stop to pry round, when the
whistle of our boatswain sounded to summon me, and I ran down to the
boat, where I found all our party already come back to embark.
When the ladies had been again placed in the boat, and we were all
again on the water making toward the yacht, Miss Ruth, noticing my
looks, remarked to me, “Why are you so pale?” and I then related to
them my adventure in the dark of the bush, how two eyes had glared
strangely at me from the ground, and had scared me. At this all the
talk stopped short, and no small astonishment was shown at my hap:
for all had thought that the island bore on it no form of life except
those of the smaller sea-fauna, as sea-birds and suchlike, so that, in
short, I was the centre of the interest of all the world for a while,
and every eye looked toward me. Miss Savage took the view that it must
have been my “fancy,” but I at once quashed such a notion by a gush of
assurances, whereat Monsieur le Comte de Courcy gave his opinion that
it was the eyes of “the genius of the place” which I had seen, Lord
Astor thought that they were “the eyes of Hermes searching the island
for the nymph Lamia,” and Miss Eve believed that “more of inhabitants
crowd in the village than count in the census; each grove harbours its
ghost, heart-sighs and eyes are about——” in the midst of which argument
the boat reached the yacht, and at once our anchor was tackled, our
canvas thrown to the breeze, and we started out upon the last part of
the voyage, no more to tarry till our craft should be at her buoy on
the coast of Scotland.
Well, now, I come to the event: I am about to write it! During the
hours of the forenoon I had been mainly bound down to the dressing of
Miss Ruth’s dolls; during those of the afternoon I had found my hands
full enough with the making ready of the trunks, and with the thousand
other little last cares that crowd upon one before a disembarking:
and it was now evening, about half-past eight o’clock, when, passing
out of Miss Eve’s apartment, I went in a hurry round into my own to
get and bring out her older brown gown. My wee apartment was quite
in darkness; I was able merely to see the circle of my window, near
under which, it being on the lee-side of the leaning ship, one was
able to hear like a dirging the seething of the sea’s surge sweep by
toward the rear. So now I reached out my hand to switch on the light,
and at that moment it was that it came upon me, while I, in a blue
affright, gave up everything, recommending my soul to the good God,
for it was as if thirty-six[A] tigers flung their weight against me,
and in the very same breath, as it seemed to me, I found myself lying
on the ground, my feet bound together, and my mouth gagged with my
apron; and so instantly were all these different performances done to
me, that I understood, I remember, that I must be under the power of
at least three ruffians. Heavens, that moment! I lay as it were given
over and drowned far down in the gloom of the tomb, and I said within
myself, “Jeanne, thou art finished now,” for one could not catch one’s
breath, nor cry out, nor see anything! However, by a cunning move—for
I was ever astute and deep in an extremity, I, and not to be done for
so easily like that—I managed to jerk myself sharply upward a little,
remembering that the switch was just above, and by a feat of luck my
free arm, reaching wildly up, chanced to touch this switch, upon which
the apartment was flooded with light, and I saw, to my bewilderment,
that my tormentor was not many, but one. At once I had a sigh of escape
and of regained hope, for though his right hand still held the gag, I
could understand at the flash of the light that it was not a butcher,
but a suppliant, who knelt at my side; and at once with that flash of
light his lips were passionately at my ear, panting words so warm and
queer, that I half questioned whether I heard him well when the young
fellow whispered wildly to me that he knew that I am a woman and wanted
me for his wife. Heavens! of the two surprises of my situation here
was the greater! For I could scarce believe that he was jeering at me,
seeing that he gave utterance to his words with so earnest a _naïveté_,
so that I wondered whether I had to do with a lunatic! And even in the
thick of my fears, I was so pierced with a feeling of the queerness
of the young man’s remark, “I know that you are a woman,” that I had
to laugh within myself! for I was suddenly light-hearted and relieved
in that he wanted me to be his wife rather than to be his victim.
Again he made me hear his demand in a pant at my ear, this time with a
glance in his gallant eyes which made me afresh apprehensive, and gave
me to guess that the penalty of hesitation might be grave; so with my
finger I now indicated the stuffing in my mouth, whereat he told me to
nod my yes or no, so, to humour him, I nodded yes, I would wed him!
He now demanded of me a vow that I would not betray him “to Man” (as
he said), till the ship should come to land, and this, too, I vowed
with movements of my head and with my uplifted hand. But little did he
trust me! for, on releasing me, he flew to the door, and had it secured
before I was yet even on my feet. We then stood staring the one at the
other, both bosoms labouring, and during some moments my tongue seemed
to be unable to dare to address this being, till on a sudden I said to
him, “But you are deranged! Who, then, are you?” to which his answer in
the lowest whisper was that he was “Hannibal Lepsius.”
[A] Anglicè: a dozen, a hundred.
“Little that imports to me, your name,” said I: “I wish to know, since
you are not one of the ship’s company, how came you here?”
His answer was a whisper at my ear that I already broke my vow, since
I spoke loudly enough, he said, to be heard by everyone throughout the
vessel; but that since he was now certain that he was more powerful
than I, therefore he would throw me down, and bind me anew, if I
betrayed him “to Man.”
At this I stood scared, half-laughing within myself, for I seemed to
have to do with a quixote or one crazed! but because of the beauty of
his young face and form, and of some _naïveté_, and of some power,
that was all about the young man, I could not be cross with him, for
I declare that in some way he at the same time touched my soul with
compassion, with mockery, and with awe of him, so that I craved at the
same moment to become his mother and his love, his protectress and his
slave. Something odder than anything in the world—in his looks, his
words, his being—widened my eyes with the wondering of a babe, and
made life a new thing to me ... he had sandals on his feet, a belt, no
jacket, no hat ... he seemed to me fleet enough to leap up and fly with
pinions. At this menace of his to bind me anew I said to him, “But you
must have taken leave of your senses, as it seems to me! for I spoke
scarcely above a whisper, which no one could possibly hear.”
As I said this, my young man, without saying more, drops on a sudden
down, with his hands outstretched to me: and when I said to him, “Well,
what now?” his answer was a prayer not to be untrue to him, but to hide
him “from Man” and be his wife!
I laughed anew at this within myself! for he seemed to be blind to my
forty-one foundered summers, and the flowers that withered in them, he
a youth of hardly twenty years. So I said to him, “Get away with you,
for you are crazy; how do you know that I am not already a married
woman with a husband?” on which he told me very secretly that in any
case he believed it to be possible that he should be able to make me
one of “the most sovereign of ladies,” and with that he presents me
with a piece of stone, resembling an ink-bottle, saying to me, “Read
that.”
“What is this now?” said I, turning the thing round in my hands, since
I could see nothing to read, only some holes cut in the stone; upon
which he repeated his demand that I should “read” it, telling me that
it was partly in Coptic and partly in—some long expressions which I did
not comprehend.
“I know nothing of this,” said I to him, handing him back the piece
of stone, whereat he peered piercingly at me a moment, and then all
at once a light seemed to dawn upon his mind, and he rose up from his
knees saying to himself, “I thought so.”
“Thought what?” said I to him, but to this he made no reply, only
smiled upon me.
He gave me an impression of some young god gone mad! “You are hardly
very polite,” I said to him, “and another woman might think you a
little crazed, since at one moment you crave to be my husband, and
at another moment you smile upon me as upon some ninny,” to which he
replied something about being bound to adore me, ninny or no, inasmuch
as I am so adorable!
“Why, get you gone,” I said to him, “you have hardly had time to see me
yet!”
He asked me how much time was necessary, and if he had not gazed at me
through the bushes?
“Those, then, were your eyes that gazed there at Shunter through the
bushes at me?” said I; “and you found me beautiful? What, then, could
you have found so very beautiful about me, my face, or my figure—or
both?” to which he replied, “Both.”
“And do you mean,” said I to him, “that it was merely through love of
me that you concealed yourself in the yacht? What a sudden flame of
passion! But I am at a loss to know how you could come here!” on which
he explained that he had swum under water from the shore.
“But how could you possibly steal down here without being seen?” I
asked him, to which he replied that “that question of itself charged me
with a drowsy consciousness.”
His little smile of a superior man (_petit sourire d’homme supérieur_)!
“Well,” said I fondly to him, “you, for your part, are of a wakeful
consciousness, and I, for mine, am beautiful both in face and form,
is it not so? and it is a pair of us, is it not? But since we are now
about to come to land, tell me this——” but before I could utter another
word I heard the call of “Jeanne,” and was recalled by it to this
world. It was the voice of Miss Eve who called me, and ere I could find
my tongue to reply she called again, “Jeanne, where are you?” but I
could not answer her, my eyes were fixed upon the boy, who now appeared
lost in a joyous attention to the call, and with his finger held up
gave deep into my ear a whisper of “Sweet voice.” Whereat I, being a
little perturbed, turned from him, switched off the light, whispered
him to await my return there, and went out in haste to Miss Eve,
wondering within myself how in Heaven’s name I was now to restrain him
from making the acquaintance of other ladies.
CHAPTER VI.
THE TOWERS.
Jeanne Auvache thus continues: It all went beautifully, the landing. He
had the wit, on appearing suddenly, to take upon his back the trunk of
Miss Eve, which he bore over the pier to the little station, and in the
dimness must have seemed to the sailors a porter, and to the porters
a sailor. He did not see anyone in the light of the station, save a
stationmaster in his uniform, and I praised Heaven that the train was
a special one which carried none save our party. As she moved, he ran
from the outer dark to the door of the compartment in which I stood
beckoning him, and skipped in beautifully, so that we two went quite
alone. Ah, but he trembled—all the way, so that one could see his
jaws chattering anon. When I kept on saying to him, “But why do you
so shiver?” he confessed to me that he felt fear. “But fear of what
specially?” I asked, and when I pressed him he replied, “of Man and of
my father.” I compassionated, but could scarce comprehend him, and I
felt myself abashed and banished from contact with his soul, for though
we were side by side, yet he was alone, and I was alone. I could only
console myself with the thought that I had to do with an _ingénu_—a
beautiful fault soon enough to be cured. But such an _ingénu_! one
dropped down from the moon, as it looked to me. His curiosity about
the train! for, to begin with, it was his terrors and tremblings that
were uppermost, and then it was his curiosity struggling with them.
His eyes were wide with an amazement which at first I took to be the
natural amazement of a rustic suddenly plunged into the thick of the
wonders of civilisation, until I learned that his amazement was not
at the speed, but at the slowness, with which the train was creeping!
This caused me to laugh within myself! “Why, we must be flying at fifty
miles an hour,” I said to him: “how much more do you wish?” But he did
not appear to pay much heed to my statements, and continued to rush
about the compartment, touching this and that, now springing up to peer
into the lamp, now darting down to lie and pry under the seats, gazing
into the make of the window, tapping the woodwork with his fingers,
all with so eager a zeal, my God! with the omnipresence of a monkey
imprisoned in a crib, and trembling all the time with excitement, as
I could see. What most of all amazed him was the size of the train!
Why, he wished to know, was this particular train so miserable a thing,
seeing that its largeness could be vastly increased with only a paltry
increase of the motive force. “But are not all trains of the same
size?” I said to him: “they are of a certain size, that is all; one
does not know why they are so, and this is no smaller than the others.”
But after starting and staring at me, in a moment, as if he regarded me
as an ignoramus that did not know what I was saying, he told me with
disdain that most trains were raging palaces, though this one, for some
sage motive that he did not understand, was not so.
I began then to recognise that he must have lived wholly buried away
from actualities amid those islands of the sea, for his ignorance of
life could scarce be greater, since he harbours the most laughably
large notions of the glory and achievements of beings: and I was glad
within myself at this, and resolved that he should be kept like that up
to the day following my marriage with him. But even as I was thinking
this within myself, what was my astonishment when he informed me that I
am a Frenchwoman, and spoke thenceforth to me in very passable French
of Bordeaux! So that here is a rustic with a difference.
When we had arrived at Thring we found that, though the sun had not
yet risen up, the night had now been replaced by daylight, and the
birds were loud at their works in the silence of the world. I had by
that time told him by what way to make to the brink of the river, and
where to await my coming to him there under the ruin: so some moments
before the train stopped he leapt from the door on the off side, and
hied off over the metals. A moment more and laughter was sounding on
the platform, and I looked out to see Miss Eve alighted, calling out
to her father, while she fingered her now withered violets of Parma,
that getting home in the dawn was like dying to earth and a getting to
heaven, and immediately her father was to be seen stepping down out
of his compartment, on his arm Miss Ruth, and the rest of the party
trooping out after. Anne and I, having then assisted to carry the rugs
to the carriages outside, set out together in the mail-phaeton for
The Towers some minutes later than the others: and we found a gaiety
in returning once again after so much of London and the sea, for
everything is good in its turn, but a curse upon too much of any one
condition of being. So down the mountain through the townlet to the
river we drove in a procession, and up the mountain beyond, no one yet
to be met on the roads, but one constable, and the day slowly working
about us toward its birth.
After our arrival at The Towers, having first perfumed Miss Eve’s bath
with the infusion of frangipane and ambergris, and then got her hair
prepared while she perused an accumulation of her correspondence, I put
her to bed, she impressing it upon me that I, too, must take a nap. I
had other thoughts than napping, tired as I was! all my nerves tingling
at the whispered word within me that love was now again by God’s
goodness about to be mine in this dog’s world. The moment, therefore,
that I was free, I was down and away, tapping my face with powder,
taking from the larder and housemaid’s pantry a parcel of bread, meat,
and preserves, and down by the river found him seated in a cavern of
the cliffs, searching into the interior of wild plants which he had
slit with a knife. He was still visibly atremble with excitement, but
did not rise when I came to him, continuing to gaze into the make
of the plants, having recognised my coming step, as I think. But on
a sudden he started upright with something of a laugh, and made the
remark, gazing upward at the sky and around at the girdle of mountains,
that it was a world worthy of “Man” to circulate in. “It is more
imposing than those islands of the sea, is it not?” said I to him,
and he replied, “Yes,” for that those are mostly of bog and boulders,
with hags in between, but that these parts are made of stones with
strange names, so many millions of ages old; only he wished to know
what creatures could live in those sheds over the river, and looked
dumfounded when I informed him that they are the ordinary houses of
a country townlet! But he scarce seems to believe my statements. The
windows, he remarked, can only be opened half-way at the most to take
in the fresh air, and when I gave him to know that all English windows
are of this sort, though French windows fully open, this caused him to
fall into so extraordinary a marvelling, that one had to laugh! For one
kind must be ideally the better, he said, so why do we find the British
tied to one kind, and the French married to another? But this I was
unable to make plain to him, and he remained in his surprise.
I now went into the question of our wedding, telling him how everything
could be fixed up in some days, how I found myself possessed of two
hundred pounds funded out of my earnings, which amount would serve
nicely for our small _ménage_, till he should have found his niche in
the world; and I engaged myself to see to everything as to getting the
licence from the surrogate, as I desired him meanwhile to hide in the
church-steeple near St. Peter, whither twice a day I would fetch him
a meal: for I did not wish him to see the world at all as yet, and
so, working on his awes as to his father, I warned him that he would
certainly be caught, if he but once looked forth of his hiding; though,
_after_ our marriage, I said, he could safely range out anywhere, since
the laws would not allow his father to take him out of his spouse’s
arms.
As to this he bent his head; but as to bringing him meals, he made
the observation that that was not worth the trouble, inasmuch as he
frequently exercised himself in abstaining from eating for a week at
a time, and he asked if he might not remain in the cave where he was,
in order that he might peep at the people passing over the opposite
rivershore: to which, as I could see no reason against it, I gave my
consent, and even agreed that he should come to meet me in the east
shrubbery of The Towers that evening about nine. So, having given him
to observe the zig-zag running down round the mountain’s brow from The
Towers, I ran from him.
CHAPTER VII.
THE TERRACES.
Arrived at The Towers, I first slumbered a couple of hours, and then,
the day still early, returned to my mistress’ bedside. She had bidden
me wake her, but I just massaged her with a gentle touch, contemplating
with a smile of pleasure that face whose charms I am soon no more to
behold: and never did she show to me in so angel-like a light as then,
for everything is suddenly changed in me, I find myself inclined to
be kindly-minded to everybody, and then Miss Eve is ever beguiling,
from her very breathing being given forth a breeze fraught with that
fainting fragrance of frangipane, which is as essentially a part of
her self as are her eyes or her smile. When her lids unclosed of their
own action she once more bathed, and it was when I was doing her hands
in making her toilette for the forenoon that she begged me to bear
tea with my own hands to her, if she should happen to be in the small
drawing-room after four that afternoon.
I at once suspected an interview with Monsieur le Comte de Courcy,
and this proved true: for on looking into the small drawing-room in
the afternoon, I saw the two alone at a window, and when I presently
stole in bearing the tray, there they still were, Miss Eve considering
something that had been entreated of her with her head bent, while
Monsieur le Comte, in his grey frock-coat, spoke pressingly at her,
eagerly fingering his imperial. Now, the sight of lovemaking always
profoundly agitates me, causing me a shivering round my right knee; so,
having announced the tea in a mutter, I could not, on stealing out,
tear my ears away, but stood there by the stair-top, hung upon what
was said; and presently could hear the Minister of the Interior say,
“You have permitted me to hope these four months,” then mumble, mumble,
and then the lips of Miss Eve were speaking, saying, “Days have their
weirds and their weathers, if Thursday its drought, perchance Friday
its showers: somehow to-day I am dull, empty of every reply.” “Only
whisper to me the word ‘hope,’” I then heard Monsieur the Minister
implore with much agitation, though what answer was made to this I
could not catch; and he then said, “Soon?” to which she replied, “Soon
necessarily, since you are going.” So he asked her, “To-morrow?” and
the answer given was, “Well, to-morrow, if God will,” at which point I
saw the boy-in-buttons rushing up, so went away.
For the evening Miss Eve had arranged for the party a ball, to which
came a troop of neighbour visitors, though Miss Ruth and Mr. Vickery,
of course, kept themselves from the levity of it. So, after preparing
Miss Eve’s third bath—Miss Ruth, I have heard, considers it to be
“worldly” to bathe her body as frequently as once in a week, as nuns
believe!—after bathing Miss Eve anew, I advised her to put on for the
evening the Chantilly over-skirt and the pearls, for I knew that Miss
Savage in her crimson robe would be making Miss Eve’s pink appear
pale; and having aided nature one wee bit by a touch on her cheeks,
her lashes, and her eye-brows, I turned her out an object _chic_ to
kiss the hand at, proudly certain in myself that she must prove the
finest-costumed of the company; and still I had uttered no word to her
as to my leaving her service immediately, it was so immense a step,
like a ravine from which I shrank.
After dinner, till nearly nine, I was down in the housekeeper’s place,
making a pretence at playing cards, and some moments after nine rose
to rush off to meet him in the east shrubbery, as arranged; but just
then my bell summoned me, and when I went to the shrubbery ten minutes
late, with a rush of terrors I became aware that he was not there. I
ran my hardest now, my heart raised to Heaven in a prayer that nothing
had happened—down the mountain to the cliffs, down their face to his
cave. He was not there, and I wrung my hands together in an anguish
of apprehension, begging the good God not once again to bring me all
the gall of the draught of frustration to drain to the dregs, and the
bitterish bread of drabness to chew for ever: for there he was not,
and where he could have gone to I could not guess. Thinking at last
that I might have missed him in coming, I made my way back up, with
runs and stoppages to take my breath, came back to the shrubbery, but
failed to find him there. However, on looking out across the lake, I
saw in the moonlight that laved the lawn-terraces two forms: one of
them Miss Ruth, pacing there with her gaze poring upon the zodiac,
and her rubric of devotion hung between her fingers; the other, whom
I could just perceive, was lying flat, peeping into the drawing-room
through a window, and I knew that it was he, for a rumour of the music
and dancing came faintly to me there, and I knew that this must have
seduced him to it. I could not but feel pleased to find him, but to
my feet my being was pierced with fear to see him lying there, peeping
carefully in. In a minute, however, he bounded to his feet, hearing,
I presume, the step of Miss Ruth, and he ran some paces, looking back
at her; but when she beckoned to him he waited, and in a minute I
perceived them standing together engaged in speech.
I crept then through the bushes of the lake’s edge, till I came to the
lawn; and there, observing their backs turned toward me, I stalked
still further forward on my hands and knees, till I was in concealment
beneath the stonework of a terrace—little dreaming that I had been
overheard; and thence I heard the voice of Miss Ruth saying to the boy,
“But you must have lived in a strange isolation never to have heard
speak of Jesus Christ?” upon which he, gazing down upon the ground,
said in a low tone that he was altogether ignorant, till two days ago
having never met with anyone save his father and an idiot.
“Poor dear boy!” coos the voice of Miss Ruth, who, being but
twenty-five years of age, has scarcely the right, I think, thus to
soothe a youth of twenty. “And where,” says she, “was this?”
In a tone in his throat he replied, “On an island of the Outer
Hebrides.”
“Why, I am even now from there!” she told him. “But your father, has he
also never known the blessed name of Jesus?”
He answered her that his father possesses the sum of worldly wisdom,
but that he had never at all heard from his father any mention of this
personage.
“Why, this is strange!” she cries in a maze, with her azure eyes of a
child widely agape at him: “to think of such pagans living in Christian
England! Do you not, then, know the words ‘Christian,’ ‘Christianity,’
‘Christendom’?”
To this he answered that he had never heard these words.
“Tell me this, then,” said she: “in what year is it that we are now
living?” to which he made her the amazing answer that we are now in the
year six hundred thousand three hundred and sixty-three.
At this reply Miss Ruth smiled, and during some time appeared wrapped
in silent prayer, until she suddenly asked him, “From what event, then,
do you date this vast sum of years?”
“From the presumed date of the evolution of human life from the
ape-state,” was his reply.
For a few moments Miss Ruth mused upon the young man, then threw up her
hands with drollery in her little human way which just rescues her from
being angelic; and she asked him, “But are not all dates reckoned among
us from the Lord Christ?”
At these words of hers he seemed extremely perplexed, and, after
frowning upon the ground, asked her if the Lord Jesus Christ was a
Greek or a Roman.
“He was a Hebrew!” cries Miss Ruth.
“With an Arianised name,” said he: “lived, then, under the later
Romans.”
“Just so,” said she: “how much you know for one of your station, and
how little!”
“How little,” he said, and on a sudden knelt to her, begging her to
bear with his ignorance, for that she was much more gracious and
merciful to discourse with him than he deserved, as he was not only
strange to the world, but his brain, moreover, was all in a whirl,
inasmuch as he had only just made away from his father’s control, nor
had ever before been intoxicated with strains of harmony such as those
escaping from out of the house, nor beheld such blessed beings as she
and those fabulous beldams moving beautifully to music over the floor
of the drawing-room.... Upon this Miss Ruth raised him up, bid him
wait, and, moving to a window of the drawing-room, peeped in to Miss
Eve, becking her to come, too, to inspect the curiosity. I disliked
her for it, since there was little need for him ever to have seen Miss
Eve near at hand, save for this. At all events, out stepped Miss Eve
now, very tall in the sheen of the moon, Miss Ruth seeming a midget
near her, and even when the three stood face to face, still Miss Eve
appeared the tallest of all. So Miss Ruth recounted now in how odd a
solitude the young man had spent his existence, and then fell anew to
talking of the Lord Christ, he eyeing Miss Eve steadily with the corner
of his wild eye, speaking with a drooped head to Miss Ruth, eyeing
steadily Miss Eve; till now Miss Ruth cried out, “He was man and God,
too!” and only then did the ogler, peering in surprise at her, cease to
eye Miss Eve. Immediately now, too, his meekness appeared to cease, for
looking straight now at Miss Eve, he asked her if she also shared this
belief.
Miss Eve had as yet uttered not a word, but now with her eyes turned
downward, her lips muttered, “Why, yes.”
He smiled, and at the same time looked perfectly perplexed, turning his
stare from one to the other lady, until Miss Ruth remarked to him, “Do
not doubt it, though it is marvellous in all our eyes, so that even the
cherubic natures of the skies deeply brood with admiration upon it,”
and he then very impolitely replied to her that her consciousness of
the size of this earth could not be alert.
To this answered Miss Ruth, “The earth? she is huge in momentousness,
you know: with each tick of the clock a human being ceases to breathe——”
“A human being?” he replied with a cry of surprise: “with each tick of
the clock a million worlds are burned, and are born!”
“Oh, La!” says she, startled a little at him.
Then she said, with that veiling of the eyes with the eyelids that
lends her her air of Madonna saintliness, “That cannot be, I think.”
But the other sister murmured, “Ruth, it must truly be so, if the
universe truly is termless: prove me one world that’s been burned,
millions a minute must burn.”
“Let it be so, then,” said Miss Ruth, “since you say so, and glory be
to God, for the remotest of them, I think, His hand holds, and His
right hand guides it.”
“He is it,” the young man said.
“He is with it, I think,” Miss Ruth replied.
“And _you_ also say this?” he asked of Miss Eve.
“Yes,” she answered curtly, with a touch of pique, as it appeared to me.
Silent he stood now a while, with that smile of his that hides all the
windings of his mind behind his brow, but still giving an impression
of one plunged in bewilderment at the creatures he was speaking with.
Then, glancing upward, he swept his fingers athwart the vault of the
stars, with the remark that all that was a darksome mathematic, a
perfection which was deaf.
But now Miss Eve, going rosy, frowned upon the ground, and in tones
that trembled a little, she observed, “Perfect it _is_, though a Heart,
not a Head, was its Father and Harper; tolling melodious notes, wrung
with emotion it rolls;” and it was now that the young man suddenly
caused my heart to bound into my mouth by coming out with the statement
that, inasmuch as _the fourth_ sharer in the conversation would
undoubtedly be found to contemplate the universe in the same sort of
mood, he could only suppose that all ladies were prone to criticisms of
the same quality.
The two ladies looked round, and “which ‘fourth sharer’ can he mean?”
Miss Ruth wished to know of Miss Eve, while I crouched there beneath
the terrace, trembling lest he should betray my whereabouts; but when
they pressed him to say where I was, to my great gladness, he gave an
evasive reply.
He next requested Miss Ruth to instruct him further in her views of the
universe, upon which she begged him to come the next night that she
might give him a Bible and teach him of the Lord Jesus; and as to his
father, after some hesitation on her part, he gained from her a promise
that, if his father, or his father’s agents, should get upon his scent,
the sisters would not let out to them where he lurked down there in the
river-cave. And next he began to beg Miss Eve for one of the begonias
at her girdle, but at that moment, before he could be answered,
Monsieur le Comte de Courcy stepped out of the house, and, really as
if by magic, the instant he appeared the young man had vanished. By
this time I had somewhat recovered of my fit of affright, my eyes were
anew at the parapet-top, and I could spy the surprise of the ladies,
who seemed unable to believe what their two eyes had seen: for though
the nearest leafage was quite nineteen or twenty metres away, in the
twinkling of an eye, as it seemed, he was within it, and gone like a
ghost at cock-crow.
I, for my part, having crawled back to the lake, rushed through the
shrubbery obliquely, meaning to meet him somewhere in his career
downward: but he was nowhere to be found, until I was on the footpath
above the cliffs, when down there in the moonlight I beheld him walking
furiously to and fro before his cave’s mouth. Down, then, I scrambled,
calling out to him, asking why he had not awaited me; but he is not
very well-bred, went on silently walking, and on marking one of the
swans glide past on the water, he suddenly darted to lie on his face
and gaze at it.
“But why did you fly like that?” I asked him when he returned to me,
“since the gentleman could not have hurt you?” but still he made me no
reply.
“And what did you think of the two ladies?” I next asked him.
Then he: “Who are those ladies?”
I: “They are Miss Ruth and Miss Eve Vickery, the daughters of Mr.
Richard Vickery, who is what is called ‘An Iron King,’ a very rich
and an extremely religious man, who sometimes preaches in a chapel on
Sundays.”
He: “Preaches?”—and I had now to try to explain that “preaching” means
teaching the people how to be devout and grave; but I failed to get him
to comprehend how Mr. Vickery could have attained to greater gravity
than the rest, and he struck his brow in the misery of his failure to
grasp the signification of a single word that I uttered as to this.
“Well, it is so, and that is all,” I said at last; “but as to the
ladies, you have still not told me which of the two you most admire.”
Then he: “Which is the first-born?”
So I: “That auburn-haired one is the elder by three years, being
already twenty-five, and it is she who has the reputation of a saint
in society, though it is Miss Eve who is so much the more queenly; so
which of the sisters do you like, the auburn or the light?”
He: “A saint?”—and I had anew to make an explanation which he little
comprehended, and then anew I wished to know of him which of the two
sisters he the most admired.
And now he, making that stone like an ink-bottle which he keeps inside
his shirt whirl about his forefinger without attachment in a quite
wonderful way, his waist swaying to keep the thing whirling wildly
quick, answered with whistling lips, “I like Miss Ruth.”
Then I: “Oh, you do? You like her better, I see, than you do Miss Eve?”
upon which he, putting his hand behind his back for the stone to whirl
behind there, answered, “Yes.”
Then I: “But leaving Miss Ruth out of the question, since she will
never marry, which of the two do you most admire—Miss Eve or me?”
He: “You.”
I: “Oh, you do?”
He whistled quietly awhile, whirling the thing wildly with a swaying
waist, as it were a wheel wheeling on his hand, and he answered, “Yes”
to me; but I thought that my heart would be breaking with its rankling.
So I to him: “Well, since this is so, that you like me so very vastly
better than Miss Eve and than all, why go to-morrow evening to get
the Bible, since there is no need, really; it is all nonsense and
make-believe, and will merely mean that you will be caught by your
father,” upon which he, suddenly ceasing to wheel the thing, sharply
asked if she had not promised not to betray him.
So I: “She has promised, yes, but she little means it, wait, you will
see, you little know women, they are deceivers all; she will betray you
surely enough, if she but has the chance.”
He glanced sharply at me, then said, “No.”
I: “But I say yes.”
He: “The lapwing says pee-wit.”
What he meant I was not sure, but I was so broken-hearted that night,
that with sobs I threw myself now in a passion to his breast, and on my
knees, kissing my own tears on his hands, implored him like a dear boy
not to leave and despoil me, but to love me for ever, for if he left
me, that would be my death, I said, and his death as well.
He smiled with his fixed little smile upon me, and I could believe that
he meant well by me; so, getting up now, I told him how I had that day
gained all information as to English marriages, and meant on the morrow
to take the first measures; but as I was speaking of this, he, leaning
aside, bent his ear to the ground, hearing God only knows what sound
under the grass, and when I had bidden him good-night, and was going up
the cliff’s brow again, on glancing back I beheld him bent down aside,
eagerly listening with his ear near the ground.
CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE GARDEN.
The next day the first thing that happened was the coming of a person
whom Miss Ruth interviewed for her father in the morning-room. I was
even then seeking Miss Ruth for Miss Eve, and on coming near the room
could hear the man say that he was one Shan Healy, a servant of Dr.
Lepsius, who, having traced to The Towers the owners of the yacht which
had touched at Shunter, was now come to find out what he could as to
his master’s son.
He seemed a person of some thirty years, slimly tall, with a scar that
twists his upper lip, clad in rough new clothes: a man of an alert and
amiable personality, so that Miss Ruth laid her hand on his sleeve
to soothe him, for indeed he was in deep dreariness, and frequently
sniffled. When I went in with the message, Miss Ruth sent me to call
Miss Eve to her, so I ran back, and having brought Miss Eve, hung near
to hear.
It was a long talk, the stranger having been given a seat near the
grate, the sisters seated on each side of him, hearing his tale. I,
for my share, was kept fidgety by the sounds of footsteps going about
the house, and could gather only in fragments what was said—enough,
however, to inform me of the marvel of the opportunity which has
brought me this gorgeous bridegroom of mine, for here, it would appear,
is Aladdin, and it is the wonderful lamps that are alight in his eyes.
Only sparkle crisply, do, do, my little star, and come to me some
spirit of perfect luck and alertness to spur me now with whispers how
only four days more to hold him, till I have safely erected myself
on my thrones, and bound my brows with crowns. Oh, I am silly with
thoughts. But thrones, may be; may be, many crowns, as Josephine, who
was but a _bourgeoise_, wore: for when Miss Eve asked this man, Healy,
for what reason the father is in this fever as to the son being abroad
in the world, the man answered that “the doctor regards it, lady, as a
peril greater than a charge of gun-cotton piled under the globe, with a
child holding a glowing coal by it: for, says he, the day that Master
Hannibal gets to recognise the real grade of mankind’s mind he’ll be
dragging the frame of society to fragments, like a child tearing a fly,
leg by leg, for mischief.” The ladies had the eyes of a child who has
listened late in the night to tales of the ancient time! “Well,” Miss
Ruth murmured, having heard the wonders that the man had to tell, “I
am in for it now, for though I do know, I promised him not to tell his
whereabouts, being cross with his parent for not having instructed him
in the Christian faith.” Then to Miss Eve, who, leaning forward with
her chin on her palm, sat staring at some vision which she saw in the
hearthplace, she remarked, “What do you say, Eve; what should I do?”
Now Miss Eve knit her brows, and presently replied, “Promises can’t be
repealed, dear.”
“But since it may do much harm?” Miss Ruth suggested.
“Still,” muttered the lips of Miss Eve, “a promise.”
“Oh, lady, do, for God’s sake,” Healy now entreated of Miss Ruth, “not
that I expect him to go back with me, but he’s so green to everything,
badly needs somebody, lady, like a whale run ashore, has got no razors
to shave, no jacket——”
At this of “razors,” Miss Ruth placed her hand upon the man’s in a
movement of friendliness: for in truth he appears to be rather like his
young master’s nurse than servant, and Miss Ruth’s heart, like waters
haunted with squalls, is anew every minute smitten with all the world’s
smart, as fluid and easy as Miss Eve is aloof. So she smiles with the
man, saying, “Wait, I’ll question my God,” and gets up to go away to a
window, from which she presently returns to Miss Eve with the words,
“Eve, I’ll peach.”
To this Miss Eve at first answered nothing, but after a little asked,
“What will he think of the worth of the promises made by us Christians?
Knowing a first that has failed, never a second he’ll trust”; but
Miss Ruth continued to believe that it would be better on the whole
to betray; did not, however, outright do so, only revealing to Healy
that the boy would be coming that evening to receive a Bible, and
instructing Healy to be then on the terraces to meet him.
But there was one who had no wish that the boy should be taken
unawares, and who, not meaning him any more to meet Miss Eve,
immediately made up her mind to make known to him that he had been
deceived by the ladies. So, after placing Miss Eve’s half-hourly
hot water, down at once I started to him, and in passing near the
morning-room, again had a peep of Miss Eve in solitude now, pacing
there regularly to and fro with something of a frown, as it were a
sentinel in a gown. But when I had got down to the cave, again my heart
went aching, for again he was not there, and I thought then within
myself, “It is going to be more troublesome to hold him in my prison
than to keep quicksilver in a sieve, or to bind a wind with twine,
and this is a wild kind of horse with wings that I have vaulted on, I
think, which may chance in its raging to break every rib of my body.”
Louder and louder I called out after him now, and there was no sound
nor sign of him: only, on the cave’s floor now was a thing resembling
a telescope, made of oak bored through the core; also I saw there a
thing like a trap made of twigs, with the guts and gore of some animal
close to it; also a hollowed stone containing water that was violently
on the boil, though by what means the boy could cause this water to
be bubbling and boiling there was more than one could conceive. There
remained also most of the food which I had brought him, and having left
what I had now brought, I had to hurry back up to The Towers.
There I spied Miss Eve still pacing in that same machine-like fashion
as before, as queenly slow of step as when a lady, conning poetry by
rote, paces with closed eyes. However, within twenty minutes now she
called me, to ask me to take tea to her with my own hands, as on the
day before; nor did I get any time to go down the mountain again,
for after lunch I had to take the walk over to St. Arvens, where, at
the vicarage, before a Mr. Rae, an aged _curé_, I made an affidavit
as to there being “no impediment” to my marriage, and he promised to
procure me by the 27th, from “the Bishop’s Registry,” the licence
to marry, with a stamp on it for £2 3s. 6d. So far, then, all goes
well, thank God; and in passing back through St. Arvens, having got
my finger measured at Martin’s shop, I there gave orders for the
wedding-ring, since I do not regard it as a good thing to bring my
former wedding-ring into use for this new bridegroom. By the time I
came home, elated with hopes, it was already late, and before long I
was bearing tea, as bidden, to Miss Eve. There was an afternoon picnic
at the Devil’s Pulpit, where many of the party were; a few were at
tennis; Miss Ruth was in the book-room in the thick of scribbling off
a basketful of her correspondence with Christendom; and Miss Eve was
with Monsieur the Minister of the Interior. But this time when I bore
in their tea they were less close together: Monsieur de Courcy sitting
in a mood of gloom on the sofa, gazing at the floor between his legs,
Miss Eve standing nearer the fire-place, fingering white violets, with
a bent face. And I, listening in the corridor, heard her murmur to him
that “pain like a curse or some venomous perfume infects all Eve’s poor
daughters: curst that they needs must endure, worse when they needs
must inflict,” from which I gathered that the poor Monsieur de Courcy,
having been given to hope for twenty-four hours, was now definitely
turned away, though, as I left the corridor, I heard him cry out
crazily, “There is some reason! I know that you like me, Eve!” but what
answer was given to this I did not gather.
Then, after spending some time at the wardrobe, preparing the bath,
arranging four costumes for her choosing, and the perfumery and lotions
for her _toilette de soir_, I thought I might have just time to run
down to the boy, but was now anew disappointed by being summoned to yet
new toils by Miss Ruth, who, having received a bale of toys from the
Dean of somewhere, presents me five dolls to dress! So that is the way
it is? It was always to be dressing dolls that I was born, was it not,
ladies? Wait only four days more! and perhaps you will then not know
your lady’s-maid for the smile that will writhe her lips, and for the
royalty of that rage of joy which will shine in her eyes.
For the evening Miss Eve, for some reason, would put on her poudre blue
with the Borzoi ornaments, and orchids, and now I had a small hour to
myself, for, as to dinner, eating was far enough beneath that sphere
of fairies where my brain was in a reel; so, having merely tasted a
spoonful of soup, off I hastened to him....
He was not there at the cave, still he was not there! And I could only
guess that, his awes of his “Man” having already grown less great, he
had roamed far, and ah, I asked my heart if he had not done it four
days too soon for my fate.... I had no paper to write him that he would
be betrayed by the ladies if he came up, and after half an hour’s
waiting returned to The Towers.
Nothing was then left me to do but to watch, and at first I lurked
under the conservatory’s shadow, and then, conscious that I might
be observed, moved up to pry from behind the curtains of that front
bedroom on the right.
Thence I soon saw Healy appear on the terraces, and soon from the
drawing-room out to him moves Miss Ruth. Miss Eve did not appear,
though invited by Miss Ruth, I know, to assist at the rendezvous. So
Miss Ruth and Healy conversed a while, and I heard the stable-clock
strike nine as Miss Ruth introduced Healy into the conservatory to
wait there concealed, and then returned to pace the terrace in the
moonlight. Three minutes afterwards, half a mile off on the meadow
below the lawn, I beheld a runner coming with a wide stride, his elbows
at his side, his head thrown back, his lips opened, pressing prone
home like a beast with its ribs breathing deeply from long travelling.
At once I was certain that it was no one but him by his black skull,
his shaggy shirt, and by observing how with a bouncing somehow and a
buoyancy in his gait the boy came gaily—beautiful! like a fabulous
youth booted with something pneumatic; and soon, scaling the terraces,
he stood panting before Miss Ruth, I kneeling at the window’s sill with
my ear low to hear him excusing his lateness: for, said he, he had had
a high-day of adventures, and then had been again delayed by watching a
conflagration eight miles away, and the deaths of a man and a child.
“Really?” says Miss Ruth to him, “and what, sir, is the name of this
poor man who was burnt?” to which he gave the answer that he had heard
the man called “George Perkins, the grocer.”
“What, Mr. Perkins, the grocer, of Up Brooming?” cries Miss Ruth
shrinkingly, with eyes of alarm, “burnt to death?” and “Oh!” she
murmured with ruth.
To this he replied—and I disliked him for it—that there was no need
for any feeling of grief or loss, since this grocer’s life, he felt
certain, was a life of no value, one greatly below the human grade, his
figure having the grossness of the gorilla’s, and his soul on a similar
level, since in the attempt that he had made to steal he had failed
even to death....
“To steal?” breathed Miss Ruth; “Mr. Perkins, the grocer? A
prayer-leader? There must be some mistake!”
“No,” he said—at least he took it, he said, for granted that the grocer
had meant to steal, since there appeared to be no other motive for his
demented rush into the conflagration.
“He rushed to rescue the child!” cries Miss Ruth.
“So,” he replies, with his smile, “the people of the region seemed to
imagine,” but as the child, he observed, was not even the grocer’s own
offspring, and as even an ape’s eye might have recognised the fatal
state of the conflagration, therefore he could only suppose that the
motive of the grocer was to grasp some hoard.... Whereupon the saint
suddenly throws up her hands with drollery, and once more, as on the
evening before, could not resist running to bring Miss Eve to hear the
story of the good grocer, who, having perished as a hero, was still
impeached of stealing! But Miss Eve would not immediately come, so
that the other sister had need to entreat her thrice with, “Yes, come,
yes, come,” ere Miss Eve, deciding, appeared on the terrace in her
poudre blue, the moonlight’s hue, Hannibal Lepsius making the abject
obeisances of a Jew before her face. Then the three spoke during some
moments, or Miss Ruth and the young man spoke, Miss Eve, with an air
of musing, waiting mutely near. I heard only in fragments what was
said, but gathered that Miss Ruth, having ridiculed the grotesqueness
of the good grocer being accused of stealing, the young man now began
to glorify and laud stealing, asking if the Spartans did not rightly
regard it as an excellent art of life; and what was dishonourable
about it, he wished to know, save to be of so drowsy a consciousness,
he said, as to fail or to be found out in it? In the midst of which
speech of his, Miss Eve, without saying a word, turned away, and went
pacing westward behind the conservatory toward the garden, the young
man all agape after her, and Miss Ruth saying to him, “Now, I’m afraid
you have quite blundered into my sister’s bad books, though I, too,
say with you that there’s no wrong in stealing, save that it does seem
rather selfish, does it not? and selfishness, I think, is the sole
falsity, the only fault. But never mind, it will be quite well, let us
wait and pray, for I prophesy in the Spirit that one day light will
spring from on high in you. I am only sorry that we have to separate,
but here’s the promised Bible, which for love of me you will read
frequently, while I for love of you will wrestle—Listen!” for he, half
turned toward the conservatory, hardly heard her, his eyeballs all
beguiled away with a hungry glaring in them the way that Miss Eve had
disappeared. “Listen!” she says, “I have considered it best to betray
you——”
“Ah!” now he span about to frown a second at her, into her, one may
say, and some other seconds stood dumb, considering it; looked up, too
(why, I do not know), at the window where I knelt hidden. At any rate,
he saw now the truth of my prophecy that Miss Ruth would betray him,
and that I was no lapwing that says “pee-wit.” In a moment more by some
reasoning of his own he seems to have surmised that Healy was concealed
in the conservatory, for toward it with his usual ill-breeding, leaving
Miss Ruth, he immediately rushed. Just then the footman John ran out
with some message for Miss Ruth, who went in with him, and soon out
from the conservatory hurried Hannibal Lepsius, holding Healy by the
sleeve, leading him to the terrace’s brink, where he caused him to sit
with a warning finger. The next instant he himself was off with the
fleetest feet the way that Miss Eve had disappeared, tossing aside in
his flight the Bible brought him by the other sister into the basin of
water where the sun-dial stands, and as he vanished I, too, though with
a shivering in my right knee which shook me throughout, rushed toward
the house-back, and out into the top part of the garden, all my heart
in a conflagration and tremble of haste to break into some outrageous
row, and shout my wrongs.
I thought I heard talking down there at the bottom of the garden, and,
bottling up my rage, shivering, I crawled like a snail down the three
steps into a garden-walk which lay between bowers and arches made of
box-twigs. There the voice of the boy again reached me, clearly now; so
down another path on my right I prowled to its end, and now could see
them down there at the bottom by the seat, he on his knees to Miss Eve
like a very slave, she standing still, looking not at him, but at the
north shrubbery-wall with a frown on her brow, while round in cruises
above-head a white owl, I remember, was moving smoothly about in the
moonlight, like a musing spirit cruising: for I somehow observed each
little object, just as a person in going to the guillotine does, I have
heard; and I observed that, though the previous day there had been
bristles on his cheeks, he was at present clean-shaven, and I observed
that Miss Eve’s handkerchief, which she had dropped, hung from the
young man’s right ear; and I observed that he offered her earnestly the
one half of a halfpenny, or of a penny, at which she would not look.
Then I saw her lips speak, and she pointed southward, enjoining him, it
seemed, to leave her, upon which up the boy sprang, and was now about,
I believe, to seize her body, but all at once now was in flight—along
the alley down which I was peeping! _Why_ in flight I could not
conjecture, till suddenly I saw Monsieur le Comte de Courcy appear from
the north walk, with his cane uplifted in the air. He, it seems, pacing
with two ladies in the north shrubbery, and seeing through the gate,
may be, a male without a jacket molesting Miss Eve, had run to protect
her, at which the young man, ever fearful of his “Man,” had taken to
his heels: and before ever I could raise my self up to run, he, raining
his steps, had pelted by me, looking back over his shoulder at Monsieur
de Courcy. He seemed, when his eyes fell upon me, to see me there
without surprise; and on some way he still ran, more and more slowly
now, however, looking back always at Monsieur de Courcy who, cane in
air, was pursuing him. But all at once the boy, making only loitering
steps that halted, almost stopped, amazement painted on his face—that
he was so inefficiently chased, I take it; amazement, and also, though
he always smiled, a terror which stretched his nostrils as the cane of
Monsieur the Minister came. I stood awe-struck at it! and Miss Eve,
too, appeared to be apprehensive of something fearful, for she tripped
some distance in Monsieur the Minister’s rear, and once called out
after him. He, however, seemed not to hear her: still on came his great
bulk of body, the cane, the eye-glass and glassy shirt-front, till
he was quite near the turning in which I lurked, his teeth grinning
white to bite his cigarette between them. But he never advanced as far
forward as my turning: all at once Hannibal Lepsius was at him; and
in that instant of bewilderment, ere one’s wits could decide what had
been done, or in what way done, one was aware of the cane of Monsieur
the Minister wheeling high away up in the air, up where the owl wound
its flight, while the Minister himself was now on the ground, and his
cigarette, no longer in his mouth, now stuck out of one nostril, the
glowing end upward.... Oh, I was smitten with compunction for Monsieur
de Courcy, he a man of so much culture—and with a feeling of affright!
he being one whose anger it must be a truly grievous thing to bring
upon oneself.... As Miss Eve hurried to him, I ran off.... The young
man also had vanished, appalled, as I imagine, at the enormity of his
defiance of his “Man”; and when I ran out to the terraces, neither
of him nor of Healy was any trace to be seen, nor when I ran down to
his river-cave.... I came back up lagging and agued, yes, trembling
throughout in a kind of ague-fit....
Then, till my bell summoned me at midnight, I lay sullen, and, as it
were, dead, though uttering a sob anon. But soon after midnight I had
my mistress in my hands before the mirror, had already made ready her
hair, and now after massage with the preparation, was getting on her
night-gloves, when she remarks to me, “What is the matter? Your fingers
quiver,” and I then replied to her, “Miss Vickery, this is because I
have it on my mind to inform you that I am about to leave your service
in a hurry, since I am about to be married.” I expected to feel her
start a little! but even in that electric blaze of the two candelabra
I could detect no surprise in her, and oh, these English with their
cold spleens, how one dislikes them! She muttered to me, “Don’t be
agitated; when do you go?” did not even inquire who was that future-one
of mine. But as it was mainly in order to proclaim this to her that I
had spoken, I made the remark, “I believe, Miss Vickery, that you have
even seen my future-one, who is that young individual named Hannibal
Lepsius”—whereat as when a nerve leaps a little, it appeared certain
to me that her hand stirred in mine: and I was pleased within myself at
this.
She asked not one question, but I now informed her frankly of
everything, how, in his passion for me, after seeing me in the bushes,
the young man had swum aboard the yacht, how I had hidden him, brought
him hither, and now was about to receive the bishop’s licence to
marry him—keeping meantime a sharp eye of observation upon her face
in the mirror: but beyond a little raising up of her palms once as in
amazement, she listened calmly, making no remark; only, the moment
I stopped, up she stood, went to the large wardrobe, and now began
prodigally to shower out her gowns, gown after gown, upon the arm-chair
for my wedding-gift, so that I stood agape at the largesse of her busy
arm, and this sharp shower of her bounty—quite a thousand pounds, as
I now count—for out, too, with the others flew that pearl grey, the
ermine stole, that orchid-mauve silk with the spotted poplin, and
now the China silk tea-gown with the Valenciennes insertions, and
that great creation for the Coaching Club Meet last year, only that
once worn. “And are all these really for me, Miss Vickery?” I said
to her in the midst of it; “you are truly good and gracious, Miss
Vickery,” I said, to which she made no answer, but continued to rain
her largesse with a scornful arm. I had to make three journeys out of
the chamber, submerged beneath these riches, and comforted inwardly of
the pangs that rankled in me. Even when I supposed that I had taken out
everything, the stole was still left, and when I now stepped in softly
for this from behind the portière, I came upon the lady standing there
as naked now as a lily, her outlines all slenderly long-drawn as by
the pencil of a stripling painter who has never yet ventured, save in
his dreamings, to be voluptuous, and she appeared to stand tip-toe
stretched to spurn and desert this earth, and return to her heavens.
Suddenly, chancing to catch sight of me behind her, all that marble was
washed in one blush, as though I was he upon whom perhaps her heart was
musing.
CHAPTER IX.
“VITRIOLISERAI.”
The next morning he was gone, he was not there in the cave, and as for
the man, Healy, he was not there, and where to seek I knew not at all:
only the thing like a telescope was there in the cave, the thing like a
trap, the dead creature’s remains, the stone which he has hollowed into
a vase, and under some rubbish and leaves in a corner the thing like an
ink-bottle that he has called a “stele”: but all the bread, etc., that
I had brought him he had either eaten or taken away.
Eaten, may be; but, if not eaten, whither, I asked myself—with this
food—was he off to? Ah, many questions I asked myself; and then,
hurrying across the bridge, went to the cottage of Mrs. Bream, with
whom Healy was lodging, to ask if the man did not sleep there the
previous night; but she said no, he had merely come in, together with
a stripling who wore sandals, to take away his bag, saying, however,
that he would be back to her in some days; and he had taken the 10.20
up-train with this stripling, who had wished to know of her, poor
sinner, if she did not know even so much as the names of the mountains
in the moon.
Upon this, seeing me near to fainting, she made me sip a little of a
white wine made, she said, out of cowslips. I was not, however, wholly
without hope, since Healy, who is clearly a captive, and probably but
repeated his master’s words, had promised to return; nor did I believe
that the man could mean to deceive, since he seems an honest-minded
person. To this, then, I clung; though that the boy should fly off thus
wildly to London without breathing anything of it to me who am his
sweetheart seemed hard—_to London_, I assumed! for that 10.20 train
stops only at Gloucester and Swindon before London, and I thought that
he may have wished to behold the capital. Indeed, this is probable:
for the conviction has clearly been growing upon him that his “Man,”
hereabouts, at all events, is hardly all that he has thought him; and I
guess that the feebleness of such a magnate as Monsieur the Minister of
the Interior in that encounter in the garden may have sent him flying
off to the capital to find out once and for all how things actually
are. What, then, I asked myself, would be his opinion of it all? Would
what he there saw fascinate or in any other way keep him from returning
to me? Would not Healy find the means to communicate with Dr. Lepsius,
or in some way to kidnap and immure the young man? Ah, many, many
questions I asked myself....
The 26th. It was vindictive of Monsieur de Courcy to give information
to the police as to his grievance against the young man, which, after
all, was hardly very grave; but his no doubt is one of those hard brows
that hardly ever forgive. At any rate, this morning an “inspector”
demanded to interview me with regard to the whereabouts of the young
man, my relation with whom, owing to my haste to crow my marriage, is
already known throughout the household, just as the fact that Miss
Eve is in negotiation with a lady for a new maid is well known to
everyone.... My God! what is to become of me now, my good God? Have
I not conducted myself like a light-headed young girl who has not yet
learned to govern her nerves or her tongue, who skips into enthusiasm
at the first music, and boasts beforehand of shadows as though they
were substances? At any rate, I had to confess to this constable my
complete ignorance of my bridegroom’s movements, whereupon he, getting
up to go, said to me, “Well, we shall make it hot for him if he dares
show his nose about here again.”
The 27th. But is he such a blackguard, or is his scorn of me so great,
that he cannot even write me a line to say that I am never again to see
him? Still not even a line, and Miss Eve this morning would not let me
do her hands, but ordered me to bed, I looked so bad. I went, but had
to get up to go to St. Arvens to receive the marriage-licence, after
which I took the train, as directed, to Wynton, to give notice of it to
the registrar there; and now any day after to-morrow, this gentleman
told me, I may be married: a statement that made me in coming down the
stairs break bitterly out into tears.... In passing through Wynton I
procured myself at the chemist’s a vial of vitriol....
The 28th. Again to-day I was several hours in bed with my headache,
Miss Ruth coming at noon to read aloud to me a fairy-tale named _The
Pilgrim’s Progress_, and after luncheon comes Miss Eve also to sit five
minutes at my bedside. It was in going away, when she had reached the
door, that she stopped and said, “And as to your marriage?” whereupon
I too rashly indulged my shame with the falsehood that I had that very
morning received a communication from my future-one, assuring me that
he would immediately be here to be mine.... The house is now empty of
guests, the two Gordons having departed this morning....
The 29th. Well, dear Lord, he is here, and I thank you. I now write at
six in the morning, after having spent a nearly sleepless night with
him and Healy, and still with no desire to close my eyes. By to-morrow
evening we shall have been secretly and safely married, and within a
week I shall have taken farewell of this my life here....
I was in the housekeeper’s room alone, for Mrs. Bowden had gone up,
it being long past midnight, and I was lying on the sofa, the vial of
vitriol beside me on the table, for I had been foolishly fingering
it, when there came a tapping at that back door which opens upon the
passage. I get up, I go to it, I open it.... And it was _he_! Oh, my
wild one with wings, with the light of life flying wildly in his eyes,
it was he! and while one might reckon three I stood breathless, then
with a cry was on his breast.
His nature is not yet coaxed over into tolerating the luxury of
kissing, and even in the ecstasy of our meeting his chastity shrank
from the touch of my lips; but, my faith, that will soon be “al-right”!
and he patted my shoulder fondly, even while hurriedly saying, “I need
light for an hour or two.”
I was too much flurried to attend to what he said! I cooed to him, “And
is it actually true that you have come back to me?”
“Yes, yes, let me get in,” he mutters hurriedly, and now, seizing Healy
by the sleeve, hurries in into the housekeeper’s room. He had climbed
outside, and spied me alone in there through the window, Healy told me
afterwards.
But his air was much changed! all bustle now, business, and aloofness
from one! When I now said to him, “But where, then, have you been?”
he mutters to Healy, “Just answer her questions, and see that she
speaks in whispers,” and instantly sits to the table, places on it
that ink-bottle “stele” of his that he had left in the cave, takes a
magnifying-glass out of his shirt, and begins to gaze through it at the
marks that are cut in the stone.
“But tell me——” I began to say to him, when “_Sh-h-h!_” breathes Healy
into my ear, “_I_’ll tell you,” and draws me away to a corner, where
he whispers me, “Mum, can you offer a body such a thing as a bite of
something? He”—indicating Hannibal Lepsius with his thumb—“can do
without food and sleep, but that’s a bit more than _I_ can bring off,
anyway.”
I made him sit, stole out, and in five minutes was back with bread,
meat, cheese, and a bottle of beer. Hannibal Lepsius at this time could
no more be said to be sitting, but was half over the table, one knee
on the chair, poring with greed over that “stele,” as if he would eat
it with his gaze. I was about to say something to him, when my ear was
afresh reached by the _sh-h-h_ of Healy, like a whispering of leafage
fretted by a zephyr; so I placed the victuals on Healy’s knees, sat
before him, and commenced to question him; but it was many minutes
before his stuffed mouth could bring out a syllable.
“Why were you so famished?” I asked him, “since you had money to pay
railway-fare?”
With his lips at my ear, he answered: “It was a question of time,
mum—no time to eat, no time to sleep; but that’s good meat, that is,
and that’s good beer, too.”
“Was he, then, in such a hurry to return to his marriage?” I asked.
The man looked at me under his eyes—strangely, I thought—and replied,
“I know nothing of that, mum; but we went to see London, and we saw it
in a tear, I tell you, and we left it in a tear, for by the end of the
third day London had got a bit too hot for us.”
“Why, how was that?” I asked him.
“Truth is,” he whispered, “some of us have been putting into our
pockets more than what belongs to us!”
“What!” I said.
“_Sh-h-h_,” he went.
Mrs. Bowden’s clock just then struck one, and glancing round at it, I
beheld Hannibal Lepsius bent yet further over the table, poring upon
that stone, and heard him whimper over it as if in pain.
“What is he doing?” I whispered to Healy.
“Lord knows, mum,” he whispered back.
“So the London police were after him?”
“That’s so.”
“What a thing!” I said in awe.
“Thrice in three days!” he whispered; “aye, and that second time it
was a close go with us, too, seeing that he wouldn’t let go hold of
me—a thousand people after us through London streets, if there was one,
and he dragging me, thinking that I am against him, too, and want to
betray him. That’s hard, too, that’s hard. Here am I, mum, Dr. Lepsius’
servant—I’d give this hand for the doctor—yet keeping the lad dark from
the doctor, going against the doctor, mind, knowing that I am doing
wrong, but no more able to help it than a man addicted to liquor, I
am that given up to the lad; yet he keeps me as his prisoner, I who’d
race after him to hell; thinks I want to run away and betray him to
everybody, can’t believe in a motive that’s not selfish, it’s hard.”
“You haven’t, then, written to tell his father that you have found
him?” I asked.
“God forgive me, no,” he answered with a bent head; “though I have had
chances to do it, too, mum, and the doctor must be in as much of a
wonder what’s come to me as what’s come to Master Hanni. God forgive
me! for never I’ll forgive myself on this side Jordan. And all to
pleasure the lad—but he can’t see it, keeps me as a prisoner, it’s
hard.”
“But what did he do in London? what did he think of the ladies there?
was he really chased by the London people?” I asked, for I could not
whisper my questions fast enough to satisfy my inquisitiveness.
Healy answered yes, that the sandals and bauge shirt of Shunter Island
had been chased with hue and cry all up Tottenham Court Road at midday,
and twice by night in other places; and that not the London police
only were after him, for that he had no sooner stepped from the train
down here than a constable laid hands on him; but he had filliped the
constable in the face, and run away, making to the cave to get the
“stele,” which he seemed to be extremely eager to get, and then had run
up here, dragging Healy with him.
“And he actually filliped the constable?” I said to Healy: “he is no
longer, then, at all in awe of his ‘Man’?”
Healy grinned a grimace to himself, and throwing up his hands a little,
whispered to me, “All idiots! that was the verdict on the second
night—about eight o’clock, mum, drizzling, hazy night, he and I sitting
in one of those recesses of Waterloo Bridge, and over the river a
sight, mum, greatly like a fairyland going on in a haze, with that host
of lights.... So he sits awhile there, weary from the two days’ tear,
looking at the traffic rolling over the bridge; then getting up on the
seat, he leans over the parapet; and presently, as he was there looking
down upon the river, I hear him say to himself ‘idiots,’ and then I
hear him say ‘all, all,’ with a sort of wail, shaking his head a bit,
and then I see him bury his face in his hands, and a sound came out of
him that at first was more like crying, but afterwards was more like
laughing; and from that minute he was eager to get back down here to
his cave.”
I looked round at Hannibal Lepsius, and now saw his body all across the
table, with one knee also on it, for, in the keenness of his strain
as to that “stele,” he had been pushing it inch by inch from him and
following it; and now his brow was all brown and engorged, his eyes
were glaring at the object like a maniac’s, and now also a sort of
groan broke out of his breast.
When I turned back to Healy to continue our conversation, I found that
during those few moments that I had been looking away his brow had
dropped in sleep; and I was just disengaging from his fingers the glass
that he had been drinking from lest he should drop it, when I became
aware of a tapping at the little door at the back. I stole out to it,
I opened it, and now, heavens! my soul faints within me when I behold
standing there the big Inspector Gibbon, together with that graceful
young constable of Thring with the moustache, whose name is Shooter.
“We have found him at last,” remarks Inspector Gibbon, for they had
seen the light, climbed a little by the spout outside, and seen the
young man poring over the stele.
“But what has he done?” I asked them, with a trembling about my right
knee, hearing, as I asked it, Mrs. Bowden’s clock strike twice.
“There are no less than five counts against him,” answered Inspector
Gibbon, “three from London, two down here; let’s have the beauty
out”—and he steps within the doorway.
At once now with a wild heart I darted back into Mrs. Bowden’s room, to
whisper to the young man, “I am afraid that two officers are come to
arrest you!”
He groaned, without glancing up from his poring over that stone. I
waited several seconds, hearing the clock tick, and my own heart as
loudly pounding. Healy also, who had started awake, now sat staring
with an open mouth.
“What shall I say to the two officers?” I asked the young man.
Again he groaned grievously, but did not glance up at me, and again I
stood in suspense some seconds; till now he in an absent way, still
without glancing up, mumbled at me, “Bring them here.”
I ran out, and found the officers already at the door: in another
moment they were standing within the housekeeper’s room. Hanni Lepsius
was now on his feet awaiting them, and the instant they appeared he
stepped up to them, saying, “Now, I wish you to take me; take me—only
be swift.”
“You are a beauty——” Inspector Gibbon began to say, taking the young
man by one arm, while Shooter took him by the other; but Hannibal
Lepsius cut short his words, saying to him, “Yes, I know: you all
delight in the waste of time, the waste of words. But come, take me,
and I shall know now with certainty whether you are of the smallest
worth.” The boy now pointed out of the back door at the old oak tree
that stands there in the courtyard about twelve yards from the door.
“You see that oak tree,” he said to them: “only get me past that,
and not only will I go with you the rest of the way to prison, but
four hundred pounds which I stole in London shall be for your private
use”—and how earnestly he spoke to them! turning from one to the other,
instilling his meaning into their ears as into the ears of people hard
of hearing, while they calmly smiled upon him with a contempt for him
equal to his concern for them. “You are poor,” he told them, “ah, poor
even to meanness, even to shame; and here in this pocket is the money.
Rouse yourselves now, then! _Ask_ yourselves, ‘How can he escape us?’
Not by strength!—each of you is as strong as I. By craft, then? Surely,
only by craft!”—turning from one to the other, pleading earnestly at
the ear of each in turn. “But there are at most only six possible
ways,” he said, “in which, by craft, even a lord of Mars or Venus, I
think, could escape you. Think in lightning _now_ of those ways! Rouse,
rouse yourselves! Oh, rouse, rouse, now, all those dark powers that
profoundly drowse in your soul! Look round the room: for the means by
which I choose to escape lie here before your face; nor are you idiots
born, your brain has the same bulk, your reason is equal to mine,
only it deeply sleeps—oh, dull, dull, dull—and wakefulness is bliss,
wakefulness is life——”
“Oh, come, no more of it,” now said Inspector Gibbon, interrupting him
with a good-natured disdain, drawing the young man away; and Hannibal
Lepsius uttered no other word.
They took him to the back door, Healy and I following mutely behind,
and down the two steps they went, and across the yard toward the oak
tree and the swing-gate that is close by the south garden-wall. The
moon was about at her full in a sky without one cloud in it, so that
I could see that the boy’s right foot, as he walked, was drawing part
of the coil of rope from the stables which generally lies just there by
the back door; and I whispered to Healy, “He has got his leg entangled
in the rope!”
They were by this time not three feet from the old oak tree, Inspector
Gibbon at the young man’s right arm, Shooter at the left, keeping a
strong grip, I could see, and a cautious guard, since they had been so
warned; nor had I, for my part, the least expectation of seeing him
escape them ere they reached the tree, or indeed at any time; but all
at once, just as they reached the tree, without even the least effort I
now beheld him easily free; and the next instant one saw a sight!—the
two constables all entangled, and Hannibal Lepsius running furiously
round and round the tree, ever with every revolution at a shorter
distance from it, the rope in his hand, roping with many whorles the
two men to the tree. I never was so curiously affected, I think, by any
sight—with a feeling of religion and hallelujah, I may say, the two
men’s bulk of flesh looking so abject and helpless in the hands of that
wit, like hippopotami with their insignificant skulls: though how he
had contrived to escape out of their grasp without a struggle I still
had no idea. To tie their hands, their arms being already bound, was to
him not the work of a minute, and suddenly he was rushing back to the
house, dashed inward past Healy and me without a word, and by the time
we two had returned to Mrs. Bowden’s room, he was already whining and
whimpering anew over his stone, as if nothing had happened.
“But in what way——?” I began to say to him, when Healy’s “_sh-h-h_”
again checked my tongue; so in the corner Healy and I discussed in
agitated whispers what had taken place. When I asked Healy if he knew
in what manner the young man had escaped the police, he answered by
asking me, “What’s in that little bottle on the table?”
At this I felt myself fly red to the roots of my hair! for he meant
the vial of vitriol which, procured at Wynton on the 27th, I have been
foolishly fingering ever since.
“How should I know what is in the vial?” I said to Healy.
“Well, whatever it is,” he said, “it is something that makes cloth
rotten in a tick, for when you went out to tell the officers to come
in, he dipped a match into the vial, drew with the match a circle
on each of his shirt sleeves, and now, you see, the two pieces of
shirt have disappeared”—and in truth the young man’s arm nearest me
was showing through a hole in his shirt, so I understood that by the
working of the vitriol the two pieces of shirt had come away in the
policemen’s hands. I had begun to say, “Well, it was not so wonderful,
after all, now that one knows how——” when one of the bound men began to
shout out for succour; upon which Hanni Lepsius groaned within himself
over his stone, and, without glancing up, told Healy to go and give
them to know that if they made but one other outcry before the daybreak
he would gag and agonise them; so Healy hastened out to say this, and
thenceforth the two men remained mum.
After this Healy and I talked in our corner till the clocks tolled
three, by which time both our heads were ready to nod, our words dried
up, and still on in the soundless night worked Hanni Lepsius over that
stone. I did not hear four strike, for I was in a little sleep; but
immediately after half-past four I heard, or dreamed that I heard, a
laugh somewhere, and I started awake, aware that his study of the stone
was over, and that he was standing at my side.
At once, as I opened my eyes, he handed me the vial of vitriol, bowing
a little, and smiling.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“It is oil of vitriol,” replies the boy.
I ought, if I had had my wits, to have asked him why he handed it to
me! but, being only half-awake and confused, I foolishly took the thing
and put it down without finding a word to say; and I saw his gaze
linger strangely upon me. Then he said, “I am very hungry.”
I ran and fetched him bread, cheese, and water, for he will eat no
meat; and it was while eating that he asked me whether I had with me
those two hundred pounds which I had told him that I had hoarded. I
replied that I had with me ninety pounds only; he then demanded of me
if I had this in metal or in notes, and on my replying “in notes,”
he said that he desired to see at once what a banknote is like, and
would I run and bring him the money that he might see. Proud to do him
a pleasure, though it was a journey through the house at that hour,
I light my candle, I set off, and soon return with my roll of notes.
He sat with them, fingering, holding them up to the gas, while I,
with my hand on his shoulder, remarked that all that was to begin our
little _ménage_, informed him that everything had been arranged for our
marriage, and asked him when that little affair was to be. His answer
was that it should be that very day at two o’clock, and I felt my heart
start once and cease to beat, my right knee trembling like a string.
While I stood thus agitated behind him, he, examining the banknotes,
requests me to give him an envelope; so I go to Mrs. Bowden’s desk, I
get an envelope, and, as I give this to him, he hands me back my roll
of notes, takes the envelope, puts into it a piece of tissue-paper, on
which he had written some words with a stump of blue pencil, fastens
the envelope, and with the pencil writes on it the words, “To Eve
Vickery.”
I started! and I started anew when he said to me, “Hand this to that
lady when she awakes.”
“But what do you mean?” I said, shrinking from him; “do you, then, wish
to outrage me? and do you suppose that I would do such a thing, really?”
“You will,” he said; and to Healy, “Come.”
“But stay!” I cried; “at what hour of the day do I see you?...”
He was already at the door of the room, but came back a little, saying,
“At noon; and the marriage at two”—whereupon he anew picks up the
vial of vitriol from the table, hands it to me, and goes through the
doorway—the good God only knows why he did this.
I darted after, caught him at the back door, and, casting my arms about
him, wet his cheek with my kisses and tears. He made no remark, save to
say, “Do not release those police until twenty minutes past five”; and
he went.
The moon had set, and the new day hardly yet dawning, but I could see
him go past the oak tree without a glance at the two prisoners, and go
away like ghosts, he and his Healy, through the swing-gate close by the
south garden-wall.
I had then to sit up till twenty past five, as he had said, to release
the police, when I brought them in, gave them some breakfast, and
impressed it upon them that it was useless for them to seek him, since
he was “gone away,” I said; and even if he was not, they could never
get him, I said: a statement which they seemed to believe, for they
were very dejected and shivering.
It is now near seven, and here I still sit, even now not sleepy, for
this is the day of my life. What is in my heart? Is it peace? Is it
dancing? I think I have a fear....
It will soon be time to be at Miss Eve’s bedside. Of course, I shall
not give her the envelope, though he said with assurance that I will;
but I have not as yet opened it to see what is in it, for I fear his
consciousness of things.... There is something solid in it, like the
half of a halfpenny, and a chain....
The 29th, at nine in the night. He has robbed me of my savings, he has
abandoned me, he is gone for ever!... No, my God, I cannot write, my
head cannot hold itself up.
The 30th. I will vitriolise him. God knows, that will not be easy,
he has many eyes, it will be almost impossible: but those great men
who make discoveries which amaze the creation—in what manner do they
accomplish this? I think it is not because their wits are so vastly
more than those of ordinary folk, but because their lives are wholly
devoted to one thing only, as my life henceforth will be wholly devoted
to this alone. God help me in this; it will be only after years of
effort that I can even hope to do it, but one day, if God be my Helper,
it will be done “al-right.”
When at two yesterday he could not be anywhere found, I opened with
steam the envelope addressed to Miss Eve, and found that he had written
on the piece of tissue-paper in it the words, “Beldam Eve, farewell
for two years, from your slave for ever, Hannibal Lepsius. Please tell
Jeanne Auvache where I have laid her money.” The meaning of this last
phrase I could not for fully an hour make any sense of, since my brain
was reeling round and round; then it occurred to me to look anew at
the roll of notes that he had handed me back, and when I now flew to
them, I found that only the two outer ones were now notes, all within
being mere stuffing of tissue-paper. For a long time I lay on the floor
by the trunk, feeling myself ruined, for the loss of even a franc has
always appeared irreparable to me, and here were two thousand francs
departed by fraud, for ever, out of my life. But after a time I thought
of the words in the note to Miss Eve, “Please tell Jeanne Auvache where
I have laid her money,” and without stopping to ask myself how Miss
Eve could know this, I picked myself up to run straight to her with
the note, no more caring whether she noticed that I had opened it, for
I cared for nothing. First, however, I tried to detach the half-coin
from the note—it was the half of a sovereign which had been split in
two, and through a hole in it passed one of those little chains such
as medallions are hung from round infants’ necks; but he had artfully
gummed the half-coin to the tissue-paper just by the words “please tell
Jeanne Auvache,” and, as I could not get away the coin without tearing
the paper, I ran with the whole to Miss Eve in the eagerness of my hope
to get back my money—forgetting at the moment that this was even what
that fiend had foretold that I would do. Miss Eve was in her boudoir
alone, reading in her rocking-chair, and suddenly, without rapping, I
was there before her, holding out the note and chain. She lifts her
eyes, and instantly a faint flush flew to suffuse her face. “What is
it?” says she, taking the thing, and in one moment her eyes had run
over the words, she had thrown the note aside with a little motion of
the wrist in a little hurry, like one brushing off a fly, and was anew
perusing her book.
“Miss Vickery,” I said, “can you tell me where my money is laid?”
Anew she lifts her eyes, looks at me silently, and from that look I
knew at once that that phrase in the note had only been put into it so
as to ensure that Miss Eve should receive the note; for he knew that I
would open the envelope, and that Miss Eve knew nothing as to where my
money is, for how could she? My money is in his pocket, that is where
my money is, my two thousand francs.
The 31st. I was not allowed to get out of bed to-day, and ah, these
English, they are frigid, they are hard on the surface, but beneath
they are tenderer and better than all the world. I expected that Miss
Ruth would lavish the compassion of her ever-wounded bosom upon my
grief, but I have been even deeper touched by the goodness of Miss
Eve. When, in one of the paroxysms, I cried, “Miss Vickery, I will
vitriolise, I will vitriolise him, if it is in fifteen years to come!”
she, with a look that flashed anger at me, began to say, “You shameful
woman!” but then rushed to the bed and warmly embraced me in her arms,
murmuring many times in words of wooing, “Poor bruised heart, poor
wounded woman,” with water swimming in her eyes, while I wept on her. A
French lady would not have kissed me on the lips.... In the afternoon
when I knew that she was below, I stole from bed, and, creeping to her
boudoir, peeped in to see if the tissue-paper note with the half of a
sovereign was yet on the card-table, whither she had brushed it from
her; but it had vanished.
The 2nd. I must go away, and in haste, since this holy house is no
place for me to linger one hour in, with my heart all a nest of
hissing asps. I recognise it to be an incongruity, as a devil in
disguise in high heaven might be. Miss Eve would have me revoke the
notice to leave that I have given her: but I will go. In truth, thy
youth is over, Jeanne, thy last hope of happiness has perished, thy
very last rose is ashes. Is it not certainly a dog’s world? and I will
get back into it black and bitter, a hag at heart, bidding good-bye
to the time of bloom, to all beauties of youth, abandoning my being
recklessly to rancour and wrinkles, decay and tragedy and destruction.
I do not care, I will vitriolise him, if he live as high from me as the
sky, and within a week, I swear it, will have left this place and these
people....
CHAPTER X.
“THE MOON.”
The narrative of Jeanne Auvache, which continues yet through three
volumes, may here be dropped, and what else took place may be gleaned
from the “Memoirs” of Monsieur Goncourt Leflô (Prefect of the Seine),
and from the “Notes” of Saïd Pasha (Chargé d’Affaires), together with
jottings and gossips of other witnesses.
In that place which used, I think, to be called “La Plage,” but is
now the Club des Décavés, a crowd one afternoon sat surveying the
Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. (The Décavés is far up at the top of
the Avenue by the Arc de Triomphe, from which point the throngs of
bicyclists who have toiled up the incline of the Champs Elysées put
their legs up, give themselves to God, and by Him are taken gaily down
the long-drawn-out incline to the Bois, like boats in the river of
carriages which rolls droning down.) It was an afternoon in June, and
everyone who knows his “capital of the universe” at all knows that
sight, whose mood, in its large-minded worldliness, is rather to be
recalled than to be described.
The Décavés itself, with people coming, going, sitting, sipping,
gossiping, was a scene of no little vivacity; and to a new-comer, as
he stepped up, one of a group of three said eagerly, “You have heard,
Leflô?”
“Well, naturally, one has heard,” answered Monsieur Leflô, the Prefect,
as he sat, “inasmuch as one cannot dodge the omnipresent, and all
Paris is talking of it.”
“But what an indiscretion!” cried Monsieur Isabeau Thiéry.
“A public embrace at the Foreign Office, my friends!” added the Abbé
Sauriau, his plump palms spread a little.
“But, then, everything is possible at the Foreign Office,” remarked the
Prefect of the Seine: “above all, dizziness of the head.”
“This, however, my friends,” now said the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet,
“is an incident, not of the Third Republic, but of the Second Empire!
Transfer the scene to the Bal Morel, and the lady might have been
Païva, as the male Plon-Plon,” whereat Isabeau Thiéry shook backward
his lion’s mane of hair with, “It may be an incident of the Third
Empire, which we see beginning—unless by chance a patriot or two
still exists in France.” (“He was”—to quote from the “Notes” of Saïd
Pasha—“one of the tribe of poet-politicians—the Hugos, Lamartines,
Châteaubriands—and though neither his poetry, nor even his politics,
was at all equal to theirs, Thiéry, as we know, took himself awfully
seriously, excelling them all, since not in head, at any rate in hair,
in his spread of hatrim and La Vallière cravat, whose crimson hue
proved him “of the Left.”)
“But was it Lepsius who did this?” now said the Abbé Sauriau, his
tumbler of byrrh brought half-way up to his broad mouth: “Lepsius,
the Nazarene, reeling beneath the mead of Venus! This Puritan, whose
existence is presumed to be made up of a race with the sun, to whom
a speck of dust appears a heap of leprosy, and the loss of a minute
the loss of a province?... This Lepsius, indeed, is a myth he has
contrived by chance to create in men’s minds a Lepsius-Phantasm, as
there is a ‘Napoleonic Legend’; but oh, if he had but a real existence!
Who in that case, my friends, could fail to revere this furious reaper
of the tickings of the clock, who lives with one eye on a second-hand,
and with the other, I am told, on a pyramid of thrones? Do you know
the story that is told of what he replied to Proudhon _ainé_, who at
that time was one of the Quæstors of the Chamber, when Proudhon _ainé_
said to him, ‘To-morrow, monsieur, it shall be done’? The answer of
Lepsius—as they say—was, ‘Monsieur, believe me, to-day is each man’s
last, last chance, for it will be doubly impossible for him to effect
to-morrow just that which he may effect to-day, since to-morrow it will
be all an altered world, he an altered man in it.’... Is it _he_, my
friends, whom we find engaging in an amour so touched with giddiness
that it may not wait for privacy?”
“A propos of ‘the clock,’” remarked the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, his
little hand all aflash with diamonds in the sunshine, “Freycinet _fils_
is said to have remarked this afternoon at Tortoni’s that then at
least, during the kiss, Monsieur Lepsius lost reckoning of the clock,
seeing that his eyes were tight closed! And it is now being said round
about the Palais-Bourbon of Cardinal Pontmartin, who has declared that
the kiss lasted a minute and eight seconds by the clock, ‘How could the
Prelate have seen the clock, when those holy eyes of his must have been
poring upon Paradise revealed before them!’—a _mot_ at which the titter
and grin of the beau set his (!) teeth atremble with a rather ghastly
glitter on his gums.
“But as to the lady——” Isabeau Thiéry began to say at the same moment
that the old gossip exclaimed, “Here comes Saïd Pasha, one of the
keenest listeners and best observers in Paris”—and a brown man with
a firm lip, perfectly turned out, came up to the table, the duke
observing to him, “Monsieur, one is conscious from the very blush of
your boots that you bring with you much that is new.”
“But, Monsieur le Duc, they were not polished by myself,” replied Saïd
Pasha innocently—a reply which raised a smile! since everybody knew
that the duke, in the course of a very varied career, had had need to
be his own menial.
“In any case, you can enlighten us as to the identity of the lady who
is on the tapis in connection with a certain individual,” said Isabeau
Thiéry to Saïd Pasha, who at that time was generally supposed to be
in quite the inner _côterie_ of the Palais-Lepsius; but in the same
instant that the staid and cautious _chargé d’affaires_ was asking what
lady was meant, the duc was saying, “Here, too, comes Monsieur the
Englishman,” and one Mr. E. Reader Meade, an attaché at the Faubourg
St. Honoré, walked up—a man who, because of his bulk, and of that mass
of face on which was written “phlegm” and “judgment,” was often in the
Paris of that day nicknamed “the Englishman.” As he approached, the
aged gossip, holding up his eye-glass before a dilapidated eye, made
the observation, “But do I read aright in Monsieur Meade’s air that he
is unaware of anything having happened?”
“Very possibly, Monsieur le Duc,” replied the Englishman, sitting down,
“since I only arrived from London an hour ago”—at which confession
of benightedness, in a moment the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet was at
Meade’s ear, leaning over, tittering forth the story with no little
vivacity—Soirée last night at the Quai d’Orsay—all the Faubourg
St. Honoré there, much of the Faubourg St. Germain itself, not to
mention a Chausée d’Antin mob—in the grand _salon_ the _quadrille
d’honneur_ had already begun, the Prince of Wales the partner of
Madame la Ministre—out in the vestibule, moving in, a crowd—in its
midst the young Lepsius and his usual retinue—also a lady, supposed to
be English, who at any rate was under the chaperonage of the English
Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard; this lady and a certain individual
gradually work together through the throng, by accident, say some, by
design or blind desire, say others—do not, however, seem to see each
other—move on with the crowd, shoulder to shoulder, without speech
or look—till for some reason two of the electric jets chance to go
dark, leaving the vestibule in partial gloom, whereupon that pale
dark face of a certain individual turns toward the lady’s pale fair
face—the lady’s pale face turns somewhat toward his—and, according
to Cardinal Pontmartin, who was quite near the pair, their wide and
wild eyes stare awhile at each other with a stare of scare, of even
the extreme of terror, as in apprehension of some impending crash and
catastrophe—until now the lips of Lepsius pounce upon the lady’s—nor
does the good girl turn hers away, gives herself gallantly up to the
vertigo and whirl of it, smiling though white, her eyes closed, his
eyes closed—the crowd looking on in an amazement so profound, that
Cardinal Pontmartin had since declared that his hair could not but have
stood on end, if he had had any, as beyond all question would the hair
of the good Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, if it had been real.”
“And we who imagined that Society under the Third Empire was destined
to be as earnest and _bourgeoise_ as was that under the Citizen
Monarchy,” remarked Isabeau Thiéry with sarcasm when the old duke had
concluded the story, to which Mr. E. Reader Meade replied with a smile,
“But what can be more ‘_bourgeois_’ than kissing, monsieur, or more
‘earnest’ than such a kiss?”
“Such a kiss,” the Abbé Sauriau said, “is a proof, my friends, of
nothing save of Lepsius’ disdain of mankind, since he certainly weighed
the thirty or so pairs of eyes which observed that kiss as lightly as
lovers on a stile weigh the eyes of kine which watch them. Do you know
the story that is told of his answer to Marshal Macintosh, à propos
of the Marshal’s remark that a foreigner, even after a hundred years,
is never regarded and behugged by the French as a Frenchman? Lepsius
replied, ‘It may be nice to be loved, monsieur, but what is nicer far
is to be disliked, to behold yourself surrounded by people thirsting
like Tantalus to hurt you, and to behold them powerless, because of
your towering superiority.’ So you see, my friends: Napoleon regarded
men mainly as pawns in his game; Monsieur Lepsius, in his more _savant_
mood, regards them as gorillas in his garden of zoology”—and now the
abbé’s eyes shot out beneath his bush of eyebrow a beam of bile, bush
that burned, yet was not consumed, while Isabeau Thiéry’s eyes, quick
as tinder, caught fire also, for company.
Saïd Pasha, however, with a frown, was saying, “Oh, pardon, Monsieur
l’Abbé!... This anecdote of the reply of Monsieur Lepsius to Marshal
Macintosh is, indeed, known; but I need hardly remark that to repeat
is not quite to prove, and, in fact, the words are so unlike the
individual to whom they are attributed, that I have even ventured to
assert that they were never uttered by Monsieur Lepsius, the mood of
whose converse is usually much more taciturn. As to Monsieur l’Abbé’s
mention of gorillas, I think I have the honour to know that Monsieur
Lepsius is far too exact an intellect to regard mankind precisely in
that light, but rather, let us say, as sons of Hannaman, the ape-god of
the Brahmins; and as to the alleged kiss at the Quai d’Orsay, of which,
by the way, everyone in Paris is spreading about a different account,
I am able to state that its occurrence, if it occurred, was the result
of no world-disdain, but simply of one of those magnetic gales that
deflect even the needle of the compass. After all, as was said in a
certain Orléaniste _salon_ not thirty minutes since, ‘it takes two to
make a kiss,’ and since the lady is not accused of world-disdain, I do
not see why the male.”
At this Monsieur Leflô—a little quick personality, whose hairs grew
like a wig of bristles—ogled Isabeau Thiéry with, “We are all aware
that the utiliser of the moon has a champion wherever Saïd Pasha is
present!”
“But, Monsieur le Prefect,” said Saïd Pasha, sudden and quick in
quarrel, “am I charged with partisanship for aught but the simple
truth?”
“No, monsieur,” replied the Prefect dryly, “even though it is a matter
of common talk that Saïd Pasha once shed tears of admiration at the
sight of a certain individual racing with camels from a sand-storm
near Khartoum, and from that moment became a hero-worshipper. So it
is said—I was not there. In any case, I beg leave to question the
‘magnetic gale’ by which you explain this embrace, since I believe that
the reason of it is quite a different one than people conceive.”
At this Saïd Pasha’s brow bowed low, with the reply, “We know that
Monsieur Leflô is a prefect who is a Fouché and a Réal in one.”
“Oh, as for that,” Leflô answered in his off-hand way, “it requires no
spy of the Rue de Jerusalem to recognise the truth that this kiss was
no result of vertigo, but of a political purpose.”
“That is only the truth,” added the old Due de Rey-Drouilhet, “since it
is certain that a certain individual ‘knows his Paris’—more perfectly
knows it than Napoleon the First, as perfectly perhaps as Napoleon the
Third; and knowing that your Parisian, as Victor Hugo has observed,
must for ever be grinning the teeth, either in a laugh or in a snarl,
the arch-gamester never permits himself to forget that there must be no
flagging in the game, since in Paris to be out of sight is to be out of
mind, and so seeks continually to _épater les gens_, keeping himself
alive in the public eye by breaking ever anew upon it in a new attitude
and costume, and invariably with an _éclat_ whose radiance blinds. No,
this gentleman is hardly one of those who like to shine in the dark!
If for once in his life he tears his lips from the telephone to apply
them to those of a lady, he takes care that there shall be as many
eye-witnesses to the event as when some months ago he used to assume
the rôle of Haroun al Raschid by appearing in an incognito of rags in
the thieves’ kitchens of the Quartier Mouffetard, where he engaged in a
knife-fight with a Spaniard, and in a cangiar-fight with two Moors who
had attacked him. For here, my friends, we meet with the scenic skill
of a Bonaparte in combination with the ambitious mania of a Thiers,
Bismarck’s steel, that art-genius for _Welt-politik_ of a Cæsar Borgia,
and——”
“All possibly true,” interrupted the Abbé Sauriau, “but the thing
that this very young man lacks is a certain humanity and nativeness
to the world: for a man above the world he may be, since they say so,
but one discerns that, with all his worldliness, he is hardly a man of
the world. How perfect, how Parisian even, his manners when he likes;
but one gleans that they have been but recently acquired, and girt on
externally for a purpose, as Cato learned Greek at eighty. He lacks a
_je ne sais quoi_ which no one lacks. If he laughs, one feels that he
has said to himself, ‘Just here I will do a laugh, in order to produce
such or such an impression upon this brute-mind.’ All men, indeed,
are actors: but Lepsius is an actor who acts acting, like the players
in _Hamlet_, and I am not certain whether he is to be considered the
best of the world’s actors, or the worst: for ‘the brute-mind’ is
frequently not so brute as not to perceive that his art lacks the art
to conceal its art, owing to the fact that he shares in the mistake
made by each superior mind in deeming the difference between himself
and other beings deeper than it really is. Hence, for all his brains,
a certain _gaucherie_ in his being, a grimace, a guffaw, in relation
to the world, to which he is innately a stranger. How very alien to
our humanity, for example, the commercial use which he has proposed
of the bodies of the dead, a use which he pretends would solve the
world-problem of poverty. On that afternoon, too, when the Moon Company
Bill was being introduced, and he in the Centre began to scratch his
head with one finger in the manner of Cæsar—a signal to his creature
Huguenin on the extreme left to scream, ‘Cæsar! Cæsar!’ in a bogus tone
of indignation—the intention, as everybody knows, was that the whole
Chamber should take up the roar and reverberate it through France; but
not one soul took it up! The trick was immediately seen through by each
French child...!”
“Yes, last August,” said Mr. E. Reader Meade, gazing away at all the
throng and flutter of the scene, “last August, when the individual in
question had not yet been two months a factor in politics; but nine
biggish months of world-knowledge, of archive-searching, of worming in
the Big Book,[B] have since gone by——”
[B] National Debt Ledger.
“My friends,” answered the Abbé Sauriau, still with his Jesuit
blandness, though his bush burned, “I have quite recently been in
personal contact with the individual in question, and still I say that
I receive from him, as previously, the impression of a being destitute
of humour.... He does not please; he cannot speak to you: for though
his memory which, I admit, is no bad one, should render him the best of
_causeurs_, his uneasy feeling that idle speaking is a crime renders
him the worst.... Oh, I am not demolishing any idol! Why, my friends,
should I? You have lately listened to that charge brought against me
in the Chamber by Maître Tombarel, the charge of intellectual egoism
and envy. I cannot, it appears, be envious of a Rockefeller or a Mogul,
but I go green with envy, it appears, on hearing a great epigram that
I did not myself think of making. Well, I deny it.... If to my little
books my contemporaries have too amiably granted the name of ‘great,’
does that impede my conceiving the possibility of some brain brighter,
greater, being made by Nature? Or, can _no_ mind really conceive,
and frankly admit to itself, a mind of better fibre than itself?
I—don’t know; or rather! _my_ mind could and would, I am most sure,
if—the occasion arose. Thus I can speak, I hope, of the individual
in question without spleen; indeed, I have even been touched with a
feeling of compassion for this poor boy, so joylessly toiling, all
lone and lorn, fatherless, a stone thrown from Utopia—for who could
picture him in the rôle of a son? And did he not once say to Freycinet
_père_, ‘Monsieur the Président of the Senate,’ said he, ‘I never had
a parent.’ Never, at any rate, a brother being, a friend probably,
climbing his mountain-way without quite knowing why or whither, but
willy-nilly climbing.... Oh, my friends, it is not through jealousy,
but for pity, that men should be busying themselves in bottling up the
buzzing of this bee.”
To words so bold no one answered anything, till Isabeau Thiéry
observed, “From the bee honey, though, as aroma from the rose, though
the former _has_ its sting, as the latter its thorn.”
“Ah, monsieur,” answered the Abbé Sauriau, knowing on which nerve to
work upon Thiéry, “Brutuses, I fear, are even rarer than Cæsars!”
whereat, instantly, Isabeau Thiéry, with a new enthusiasm, was crying,
“Still, Monsieur l’Abbé, Brutuses—exist!”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Reader Meade, with a twinkling eye on Thiéry,
“but could a patriot be the Brutus of a Cæsar, whose first work would
be a frontier reconstructed ‘as in 1814’?”—words which had the effect
of making Thiéry glance gladly at the Englishman with the exclamation,
“That, too, is a truth, monsieur!” (“His, Thiéry’s, soul,” says Saïd
Pasha, in his _Paris Notes_, “was like meadows over which sweep shadows
that fleetly succeed each other. He had no self, this man, but only a
set of stock concepts, borrowed emotions—provided only that they were
pure, enthusiastic, and high-souled. Hence he was _the very serf_ of
certain catchwords! If one breathed ‘Brutus’ nothing could keep the
poet-politician from leaping to his feet to butcher Lepsius, if one but
breathed ‘as in 1814,’ Thiéry was secretly ready to press Lepsius to
his breast.”)
“But,” demands the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet now, smuggling a cachou
into his mouth, “where is the guarantee of the promise ‘as in 1814’?
Certainly, fancy pictures to us in that workshop of the Palais-Lepsius
the models of many a mechanism which will whiff into wind the
barricades of the next 18th Brumaire or 2nd of December, to say nothing
of the _corps d’armée_ of the Fatherland and the navies of Albion.
And, indeed, they exist, these legions of ingenious steels! For it
was but yesterday that Colonel Doumic, whom Barras, of Public Works,
and I met at Bignon’s, was dropping hints of another wonderful thing,
a ‘steerable bullet,’ he said, which, it appears, is to be both a
bullet and a boat, being made with a hole somewhere in its steel to
hold a man, who will steer it.... It appears, my friends, that the
keel of this contrivance will merely skim along the sea’s surface,
being upheld by the rebound of a gun or something exploding downward,
I forget how many times a minute; and the boat so upheld will be
swept forward rocketwise by another succession of explosions, like a
motor-car; so that this thing will safely visit vessel after vessel at
bullet’s rate, with fatal results to all a navy within some minutes.
Doumic should know, being one of the elect with the individual in
question: for is it not Doumic who already is choosing the regiments to
be quartered upon Paris, in order to send them back to the provinces
imbued, one after the other, with this new-imperial dream? But as for
me, who am hardly still a youth, I little believe in dreams that are
unrealised; I have witnessed many, many things, and heard many words:
I have heard Cora Pearl hum the _Kyrie_, and I have beheld Alfred
de Musset sober. Hence to me the individual in question is mainly a
_directeur de spectacle forain_—a famous one, it is true. His palaces
that are like the blasphemous gardens built to reproduce Paradise by
that king of Irim whom the gods struck blind for arrogance—then the
revels—his Moon-proposal—then his riding of his _Chérie_ to victory at
Longchamp—his Exhibition-proposal—then this kiss—each seems to belong
to a series of scenic——”
“_Was_ the kiss scenic?” asked Mr. E. Reader Meade semi-privately
of Saïd Pasha, upon which Saïd Pasha undid his cross-looking lip to
answer, “No, monsieur. I state only a fact when I declare that for over
four months I have foreknown some such collapse of the intellectual
tension of the individual in question—a collapse owing, I say again, to
a magnetic gale and to nothing else. Nor was this thing at all sought
by Monsieur Lepsius. He is not, we are aware, by nature a Petrarch or
Ortis; he is by nature an athlete, an engineer, a financier, a juggler,
a sage—what you will, save a gallant; and as others flee the pest, so
he has fled this infirmity of his. All which, by the way, I can state
on the authority of a man already known, I think, to Monsieur Meade,
to Monsieur l’Abbé Sauriau, and to Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet,
one Shan Healy, who is known to have followed Monsieur Lepsius from
England to Ceylon, to Japan, and other regions, some couple of years
ago: and from this man’s statement one is afraid that the blame for
what has taken place must be laid upon the lady. In fact, although
Monsieur Lepsius certainly knew the young girl before his departure
from Europe, and knew on his return that she was then in France with
her aunt, the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, he appears to have given
himself no sort of pains to greet her again; nor was it until some
four months after his star had well risen over the horizon, that the
eyes of the two individuals in question encountered one another on
the Palais-Lepsius roof, during the morning hours of that ball that
followed upon the passing of the Moon Bill. We remember the sight,
messieurs: a morning all stars, the Champs Elysées all one swarm of
carriage-lights from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde,
the Palais-Lepsius looking like one of the buildings of Chilminar or
Balbec which the genii are believed to have wished into being, and
everyone to be met there, save Monsieur Lepsius himself. Monsieur
Lepsius, it appears, had gone to sleep during the rout at his usual
hour, but at the hour of three had roused himself to go up to his
observatory, no one but his servant being with him; and up there he
was, his gaze glued to his tube, a busy-body in the concerns of other
worlds, when the lady, as ladies seem to conceive it their duty to do,
smartly recalled him to this one. ‘Oh! pardon,’ says she, and with
what object, or by what right, she had got herself up thither is not
known, though she was not the only one of the guests who, beguiled by
the desire of the eye, were roaming _ad lib._ through the rooms of the
building that night. At all events, as her lips part to pronounce her
‘pardon,’ the other individual in question darts his glance round from
the glass to her, crouches there aghast some eight seconds, gazing,
dumb-struck, and—vanishes. Monsieur Healy declares that his heart
all but ceased to beat, believing as he did that his master, who had
darted out of a casement, had cast his body headlong down! Well, three
several times since then have the two individuals——”
But now, before the anecdotist could further go, a sound arose and
grew, not loud, but universal over the grounds of the Club, the
Avenue, l’Etoile—a rumour in whose droning the word “Lepsius” was
to be heard, as a troop of Zouaves and Turcos, riding all in their
bright robes, broke into the ocean-current of carriages that rolled
through the Avenue. Up from the Elysées they came, making down for
the Bois de Boulogne; and up soon after them trotted another crowd
of troopers—Moors, Hindoos—voluminous in their vestments of various
hues, carrying javelins (jereeds), with streamers, on large chargers
which caracoled; and, close behind these, three carriages with
gentlemen-ushers, household gentlemen; and up behind these outriders;
grooms costumed in green and gold; pigmies in jockey-caps, from which
hung fringes of gold; and up behind all a phaeton hauled by Orloff
horses that haughtily pawed the air, to fling far their front-hoofs,
trotting. In this sat Lepsius. He was in mufti, but clearly no “mere
_pékin_,” the insignia of the Grand Cordon of the Legion showing
his connection with the Army; and by his side sat a girl who looked
American, on her lap a scribbling-book, and flying in her fingers a
pencil. He, as he drove up, bowed repeatedly a little to the buzz that
droned about his ear, but without ever once glancing upward, his lips
never ceasing to move and murmur to the girl whose fingers flew. And
away to the wood swept the wind of it.
Everyone then turned anew to sip his _aperitif_, and the old Duc de
Rey-Drouilhet was anew observing that turn-outs so perfect had not
conquered the eye since “the early sixties,” when a man with white
hair that curled upward at his nape came up to the table of our
anecdotists to inquire whether the Comte de Courcy had been with them,
or had been noticed about the club. “I had to meet the count here,” he
explained; and something humble, bowed down and sad in his air touched
their compunction. During the moving-by of the cavalry troop he had
been semi-secretly eyeing the sight through trees some distance from
the street; then had come out to seek the count, and now was about
to fare farther, when all at once the count himself was there with
a raised hat, and at once, grasping the old man’s hand, he began to
present “Dr. Lepsius” to the rest.
“‘Lepsius’?” Isabeau Thiéry breathed the word.
“_Need_ I explain,” said Monsieur le Comte, taking a chair, all
business, all smiles, with dimples in the chart of his large face,
“that there may be many men of that name?—_not_ necessarily related by
ties of family? which ties, in any case, can never possess much weight
in the matter of politics. So that if by chance we here are all a
harmony, politically speaking——”
The count’s eye ran prying with an underlook about the table from face
to face, whereat Mr. E. Reader Meade glanced at Saïd Pasha, Saïd Pasha
glanced at Mr. Meade, and they two got up to bow themselves out of
the business, while the others, with glances at one another, silently
smiled.
Then Monsieur le Comte de Courcy, fingering a crucifix of gold that
from of old lay smooth from his fingering under his shirt-frills,
said to the others, “Gentlemen, it is not without a purpose that I
present to you now (rather than more formally at our meeting this
evening in Monseigneur Piscari’s house) our actuated by precisely the
same motives as ourselves, nay, if possible, by motives still nobler,
concerned not with France alone, but of world-wide anxiety. He brings
with him something which, as I believe that it will prove of even
extreme interest to you, I wished to lay before the Abbé Sauriau, our
excellent secretary, previous to our meeting at Monseigneur Piscari’s
this evening, in order——”
“Gentlemen,” suddenly rising, said Dr. Lepsius in a low tone, “I think
that perhaps if I took a stroll while you talk the matter over, that
might be more in order. I will be back to answer any question that may
occur to you,” whereat hats were anew raised, the doctor went away,
Monsieur de Courcy’s underlook peered about to see that nobody was too
near, and now he drew with care from out a pocket-book a bit of paper,
rather brown and brittle, that had passed through flame. He laid it
on the table: and quickly, like a congress of eagles, the intriguers’
heads were together over it, the old duke skipping like a youth closer
round to it, and that lax skin of the Abbé Sauriau’s brow, which above
was narrow, broad below, twitching short-sightedly over the browned
words, while his bush burned. Only the Count de Courcy leaned back,
fingering his secret crucifix, musing through his cigarette fumes upon
the clouds, humorously dimpled. (“He was ever healthy and happy-hearted
when in office-harness,” says Saïd Pasha of him, “with a no small
degree of rush and magnetism when revelling in the thick of affairs;
one of your true _gens de bureau_; an intellect essentially narrow,
bigot, bourgeois, as ‘devout’ as he was profoundly irreligious; but
iron; and the busier the blither.”)
And presently when Isabeau Thiéry, demanded whence the paper came,
“This script,” replied the Comte de Courcy, “is a portion of a
private letter written from Paris some seven months ago to a certain
English nobleman who is a Directeur Publique—say a ‘Permanent
Under-Secretary’—of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government. By what
succession of good chances the fragment has got itself into the hands
of our friend, Dr. Lepsius, will no doubt be described by him to-night
at Monseigneur Piscari’s.”
“But can we be sure who wrote it?” Isabeau Thiéry said, “when it lacks
a signature?” to which the count stopped his humming to reply, “Would
a signature add to our certainty, monsieur, when the individual whom
you have in your mind is said to write a hundred hands a day, as it
suits his purpose? But surely the internal evidence furnishes us with a
certainty which is ample.”
“Oh, ample,” said Monsieur Leflô, glancing up.
“Well, he is a showman,” sighed the old gossip, rising with satisfied
old eyes from the script, while his eye-glass dropped.
“But he is mad,” added the Abbé Sauriau.
“That is the definition of God,” remarked Isabeau Thiéry: “a showman
who is mad”—a remark which caused the Comte de Courcy to laugh, though
with one hand he was at the crucifix, while with the other he was
taking up to replace in its nook the bit of paper, which had on it,
still to be read through the burn, the typewritten words, “World ...
redistribution which I shall choose ... two worlds ... nevertheless,
England ... world’s total capital ... Bank of Dresd ... S. America
_plus_ Africa the first, Asia _plus_ Russia the second, the rest of
Europe _plus_ North America the ... Russia, too, to be included in
Manchuria ... the Caspian ... from the Caspian to the Bosphorus ...
France first, then, by means of France, the world.... The ocean of
blood which will flow, but that, of course ... Quebec to be the capital
of the world, and the seat of my ... Moon ... has been too stupid ...
shape of the ape’s brain ... nevertheless, moonlight will ... like
the eggs of the ostrich, which she hatches, not by sitting on them,
but by just gazing at them, so I may.... If the moon had been of some
beautiful hue, and of a brighter light, and a reliable light, men ...
would naturally have used the day-time for slumber.... Even birds and
brutes, I assume, will soon learn to prefer the mood of the beautiful
night-time of my ... it is for _you_, therefore ... when the Exhibition
... come to Paris at ... discreet fash ... afterwards ... my friend
and....”
“Well, it is a great and a gallant brain, after all,” cried Isabeau
Thiéry with a flush, when Monsieur le Comte had put away his
pocket-book with the script in it.
“A great and a gallant brain,” mused the Minister of the Interior,
who, fingering his imperial, was smiling at the sky; “though not a
Christian, not a Catholic, not a French brain.”
“Tush! the brain of a precocious, pert youth,” observed the Abbé
Sauriau, with a burning bush, “whom it is the duty of us all to remove
out of harm’s way without more delay.”
“Though that will not be done without difficulty, mind you!” Monsieur
Leflô remarked with a little grimace, planting his fore finger-tip
against his hard nut: “but in the event of a citation of the individual
before the Sixth Correctional Tribunal, with a view to obtaining a
decree of banishment against him for instigating civil strife, I should
say that this document would be of use.”
“The Sixth Correctional Tribunal,” mused the count, smiling; “I
thought, however, that that idea had by this time been abandoned by
us all, if only for the reason that the trial could not possibly be
completed before the Exhibition, during which, as we assume, the _coup
d’état_ that we dread is to take place? Personally I cannot help
thinking that a court-trial of uncertain termination is no longer
pertinent to the situation, especially as we have been so happy as to
win the sanction of the Church (in the persons of Monsieur l’Abbé and
of Monseigneur) to move urgent and more certain ways of averting this
danger to the world.”
The Abbé Sauriau, who had a habit of ever eyeing his right shoe and
red sock, which shook up continually (the leg being crossed), struck
smartly with his gloves, remarking, “A stronghold close to the coast,
with grim bastions and the gloomiest of oubliettes! twelve or fifteen
years of that is what the youth wants——” and he struck back his spread
of hair that broadened lankly out down over the ears, the Count de
Courcy repeating with approval in his musing manner, “Twelve to fifteen
years of that, twelve to fifteen years——” and going suddenly grim-red,
he giggled gleefully to himself.
“Monsieur l’Abbé is right,” the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet said: “fifteen
years of a bastille’s oubliette is known to induce in a youth a
definite diffidence as to using his lips in public, either in speaking
or in kissing,” at which speech Monsieur de Courcy, who was drinking
menthe, grew crimson, gripping his glass so grimly that it cracked, the
green fluid streaming from the table to the abbé’s sock.
“If it can be done ...” muttered Monsieur Leflô; “_if_ it can be
done....”
“Why, Monsieur le Prefect,” said the abbé, “was it not a Frenchman who
said that ‘cannot’ is a _bête de mot_?”
“That is a truth, too, monsieur!” cried Isabeau Thiéry, “and provided
it prove necessary....”
But now a trooper, as troopers do everywhere pursue every Ministre de
l’Intérieur, came to the table with a document for the Count de Courcy,
who, making his excuses, raised himself to hasten away; but some
yards off stopped to beckon to the Abbé Sauriau, who rolled after him
with his big stick and soft hat, and together they two walked toward
the minister’s carriage, the abbé’s top-heavy bulk, all thickness of
shoulder without any throat, shambling short below the minister’s mass;
and the minister said to him, “Twelve to fifteen years of a bastille
by the coast, you say: and, certainly, such things have often enough
been effected by private effort for public purposes. But I do not blind
myself to the fact that it would be beyond the Law, and—in fact—I
have to consult you now on a matter of—conduct. I am now about to go
through a singular interview, and I—address myself, Monsieur l’Abbé,
to the ecclesiastic in you. You understand me, I think. We are all
first of all Catholics and good Christians, are we not? and afterwards
men-of-state. A singular interview—with a woman, who, on the strength
of having been in the same yacht, the same house, as myself some three
years since, has lately—thrice—addressed herself to me by letter. A
lady’s maid she—_was_; and as such knew the individual whom we have
been discussing: for this individual whom we habitually associate only
with the future has also, it appears, a past—aye, and a shameful past,
too—I say a baleful and abominable past—which merits to be punished,
which it is righteous to punish. Think of it, Monsieur l’Abbé! as a
mere boy—oh, really, my blood boils to speak of these turpitudes!—he
not only betrayed this poor soul, but afterwards robbed her of all,
all, her paltry savings; was chased through the thoroughfares of London
for petty theft....”
“The young Lepsius?”
“Yes, Monsieur l’Abbé—your hero.”
“Whose hero?”
“Is it not being stated on the boulevards by Léon Bergerac in
particular, who is always the best informed man in Paris, that you are
bitten by an infatuation which is half an idolatry of admiration, and
half a hatred, and wholly a hankering, that hardly permits you to talk
of aught but of one being?”
“_I?_” breathed the Abbé Sauriau, standing still to stare, revealed a
moment to himself; then with rage, “oh, he lies, he lies: Léon Bergerac
is known to be my enemy!”
“Well, well, no doubt,” muttered the minister “... but as to this
woman, whose name is Auvache——”
“Not the Jeanne Auvache who threw vitriol at the individual in question
at Dover on the 11th of November, threw it wide, and was imprisoned for
five months?” queried Monsieur l’Abbé.
“It _may_,” said the minister, “be the same; in fact—it is a
possibility; though the name is not an uncommon one, Monsieur
l’Abbé—Auvache—men, women enough of that name, you will say. But I
may tell you one thing: this woman has been spied by a clerk in her
lodgings throwing vials of water at a nail’s head .... It is her hobby,
it seems, having arranged rows of vials on the floor, to eject water at
a run from them upon a nail in the wall; a drill of the eye, wrist,
fingers, that goes on regularly in the loneliness of that garret every
day; she will also practise herself in rushing with a knife to stab a
bull’s-eye on the wall—_why_, no one can say.”
The Abbé Sauriau pondered it for some moments, and presently observed,
“She must be an imbecile.”
“That is what I have said to myself, Monsieur l’Abbé,” replied the
minister; “why else should the woman, in wishing to obtain an _entrée_
into the _valetaille_ Lepsius, address herself to _me_? unless by some
chance she is aware that I know one Nundcumar, a functionary in the
Palais-Lepsius.... This Nundcumar has risen, Monsieur l’Abbé. Eight
years ago he was a lean scarecrow down on his luck about Paris and
London, pretending to be a doctor of medicine, but possessing even less
knowledge of medicine than the present Prefect of Police possesses
of the police. Then he became a cook, and it was thus that I again
came across him at Egmond, the Brittany château of the Comtesse de
Pichegru-Picard. Then he remigrated to his native Agra, and was there
met and admired by the individual whom we now have in our minds—so
Nundcumar avers, though this person, who never ceases to speak,
certainly never yet produced a word which by chance was an accuracy. At
all events, I am still in touch with the man, and could easily induce
him—to-day even—to introduce that ill-used and lunatic woman into the
_valetaille_ Lepsius, provided I do not definitely find in my interview
with her presently that she has any purpose in view other than the
search for work.”
Monsieur l’Abbé pondered it a little. Then, “Let it be so, then,” he
suddenly replied, as they now arrived at the count’s brougham; “but
though your interview will no doubt prove over-brief to permit of any
deep probing into the woman’s motives and so on, you will very likely
find the time to impress upon her that the practice, or drill, with the
_knife_, at least, is quite offensive, while——”
“You have known how to say what I was only able to think, Monsieur
l’Abbé.... Au revoir, then.” And the Count de Courcy drove away.
The abbé then turned to go back to the table of the gossips; but now a
little girl who was gambolling among the trees, tumbling down before
his feet and beginning to scream, immediately he had her garnered
in his arms, hugging her to his bosom, his lips on her head, with
whimperings of love (“for,” says a Note of Saïd Pasha, “he had a most
fond father’s heart, if especially for children, hardly less for all
the world, whenever he was not merciless with envy of some other
mind”); and he toyed before the child’s eyes one of his few coins,
saying, “But look, then, all this is for thee—all, all,” and he pointed
at the receding brougham, leering, breathing, “Look! that is the
brougham of Monsieur the Minister of the Interior—but look! a man whose
‘blood boils to speak of these turpitudes’ since he has need to condone
his deeds to his own shabby-genteel conscience”—and he clasped the
little girl’s fingers upon the franc, placed her on the ground, and now
hurried back to the table where by now Dr. Lepsius was again sitting
with the gossips.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CHAMBER-WINDOW.
At that very time Shan Healy was speeding on a bicycle (having missed
a train) from Paris to Versailles, with perspiration raining over his
face and swear-words vented when racing through those villages paved
with old pavers, which mercilessly jerked him. It was not until six
o’clock that he got to Versailles and the Villa des Medicis there,
a house of the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, where, having scorched
down to the house-front through a great avenue of yews, he craved to
interview Miss Ruth Vickery.
He was taken to the door of a chamber in the middle of which stood
three ladies talking warmly, though in low tones—two elderly ladies and
Miss Ruth Vickery; and a whirl of words was being uttered among them,
sometimes all the three trying to make their opinions heard at once,
all looking as exhausted and haggard as if they had been going on all
the day long, while in the gloom of a far corner of the room lay Miss
Eve Vickery asleep, with an appearance of exhaustion, even of swoon.
Shan Healy stood on the threshold, and he could just hear the Comtesse
de Pichegru-Picard, whom he knew very well, cry with a casting up of
her hands and eyes, “Ah, my dear Lina, you can persuade an angel or the
good God himself to change their mind, but you cannot persuade a saint
who is English too.”
This lady, although English herself, spoke English in quite a halt
way, with effort, was tall and fair, resembling Miss Eve, her niece, in
stand and being.
“But, Aunt,” wooed Miss Ruth, “bear with me, since I do mean well,
as in my God’s sight. Ask yourself—how can I, how could I, try to
induce Eve to marry a man who, it appears, is without even morality,
whose mood is pagan, whose aim is Cæsarian, whose God is arrogance?...
And Eve never would, I think, if I know her! You have heard her say
yourself——”
“Ah, then, why in the good God’s name did the girl go and kiss him with
all Paris gazing at it?” exclaimed the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard.
“Aunt,” breathed Miss Ruth, all ruby-red, with drooped lids, “you know
that Eve did not—‘kiss’— him; he—‘kissed’—her.”
“Ah, my good Ruth,” observed the third lady, one Madame Lina Grammont,
“the world does not draw these exquisite distinctions, believe me: it
knows that in a kiss it is generally the gentleman who both begins
against the lady’s will and ends against her will.”
“Exactly,” remarked the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard; “but then, we all
know our English: it is always their little mannerism to regard the
lady as made of anything but of flesh and blood. The fact, however,
that stares one in the face is that Eve is now bound to be married
immediately; and I repeat that the scandal will be less if of the two
gentlemen she chooses the one who has kissed her.”
“Truly, the scandal will be less,” Miss Ruth answered; “and you do
not say, if you think it, that the worldly grandeurs will be greater;
but, happily for her peace, Aunt, Eve would rather choose, I think, to
live in a hovel with a Christian gentleman like the Comte de Courcy
than with one whose bosom was never vaccinated with the stigmata of
compassion and abnegation, though he were five times a Mogul.”
“So I hear you say, my dear,” replied the countess, “though Eve herself
no doubt most accurately knows her own secret; but if it be a fact that
her stomach is such as to like the Comte de Courcy better, why will she
not send for him, since he is every hour expecting her reply?”
“She will send, I think,” replied Miss Ruth. “What, however, was the
use of summoning papa from London unless she is to hold out for his
presence before pronouncing her decision? He should by now have arrived
in Paris, and within an hour will be in Versailles; then, I think, she
will speak, she will send, for she feels, I am sure, the nobleness of
Monsieur de Courcy’s renewed offer, and will not, I think, grieve him
by any longer——”
But at that moment Healy at the door sneezed, and, the ladies noticing
him, two of them, still speaking eagerly together, went away through
another door, Miss Ruth going to meet Healy. She was just beginning
to say, “I am so glad——” when Healy put his lips to her ear with “Not
in here, miss! every word breathed in here all day has been heard in
the palace at Paris”—whereon he showed her the telephone over the sofa
on which Miss Eve lay asleep, whispering deeply afresh, “He’s this
minute lying on his face, hearing her very breathing, I believe”; and
when Miss Ruth, as they now moved out of the room into a vestibule,
asked how that was possible, Healy replied that it was by means of a
whispering-gallery, as at St. Paul’s in London, where anyone stationed
at the part of a circular wall farthest from a telephone in the wall
heard greatly augmented any sounds thrown out of the telephone-mouth,
being in a focus of the sound-waves. “The telephone-number of that
gallery has been plugged on to yours the whole day, miss,” Healy said,
“someone here is in his pay, and he has been lying on the ground in the
gallery with a crowd of tools strewn round about, modelling something
and listening, smiling with himself the while. I know that he knows at
what moment your papa was summoned to you, and at what moment Mr. de
Courcy’s proposal reached here; so, as soon as I could slip away when
he went out, I made paces to answer your letter in person, so as to
impress upon you that he is really in earnest in this, miss: for he has
lost time and given up other things to see to this, seeing that he had
arranged to go to the Chamber to-night, but isn’t going any more; so he
is serious, miss, oh, he means business, believe me, miss, in this, and
it will be a bitter pity if Miss Eve isn’t whipped off secretly this
hour right out of his way somehow, though, as his spies are all about——”
“You do not believe, Healy, I see, that such a union could be good?”
said Miss Ruth, her gaze on his face.
“Well, to be frank, no, miss, marriage wouldn’t hardly suit him,”
said the voluble Healy. “No, no; he’d be that miserable, you wouldn’t
believe; and the fonder he was of the lady, the more he’d hate and
hiss at her for making him waste time. Time’s his wife; the clock, the
clock, miss. Believe me, only to be near him, people feel in a prickly
heat themselves, as if they were breathing fever from some fierce
atmosphere—the very Orientals in the palace, miss, only that slothful
old story-teller, Nundcumar.... No, no, miss, do now, he’ll be that
miserable——”
“And his lady, too, I think, Healy?” suggested Miss Ruth, with her
smile.
“Well, and the lady, too, now you mention it, miss,” Healy agreed;
“true enough—the lady too; she’d be like a dog tied behind a railway
train, couldn’t keep up the pace anyhow; try now, miss, try, try;
he’ll be that wretched, you wouldn’t believe, and everything’ll be
changed, and instead of me it’ll be the lady may be, and I nowhere with
him; try, try. From that night in the forest round the ruined town of
Anuradhapura, he has been good friends with me—till two days ago when
the doctor came to France. I have told you about that night before,
miss. Oh, that’s a forest, if you like, boundless, miss, I can tell
you, and the men and brutes of that country move about in a brown,
brown day, miss—big black brutes looming upon you out of the gloom with
their stupid gazing, and thousands upon thousands of gods and ogres of
stone broken to bits in those groves a thousand centuries ago, they
say. He left me one nightfall at the top of one of the big dagabas
to go all by himself into the dark of the timber, I to watch each
nightfall there till he should come back with the piece of a stele; and
there on the dagaba I watched and waited fifteen weeks, miss, night by
night, till I began to fancy that he was gone for good. Eh, but he did
come back to me all right, miss, one darksome night, under the large
stars which look upon those parts, almost starved and stark naked he
was, bearing forty old stone boxes on top of a buffalo-cart; and in
his hand was that little gold thing made in the shape of a pear which
he never lets go of, and even in his sleep keeps with him.... Do you
know what’s in that little thing, miss? A little key, they say; and
that old story-teller, Nundcumar, who fancies he knows everything,
says that this little key opens a certain casket in which there’s a
second key; and that second key opens a certain safe in which there’s
a third key; and that third key opens a certain turret at Serapis, the
Brittany palace, in which there’s a fourth key; and that fourth key
opens a certain chamber in which there’s a fifth key; and that fifth
key—I can’t quite call to mind what the fifth key opens; any way, it
goes on till you get to the twelfth key, which opens the room in which
all his jewels and riches are strewn—so says that Nundcumar, miss, and
whereabouts under the ground that room may be no human being has yet
got scent of, though that Nundcumar swears that _he_ knows where; and
the key to the whole is within that little gold thing made in the shape
of a pear which he never lets go of, miss.”
At this Miss Vickery, with her stare of child-wonder, stared at Healy,
muttering, “How very much lighter and kinder would he feel, now, if he
had no keys, nor any jewels to lay up for himself!”
“Doubtless, miss,” said the other; “but that’s how it stands—what would
you have? What was I saying? Oh, about that night in the forest round
about the ruined town of Anuradhapura; yes, that’s a forest, miss, if
you like—boundless; but I think I’ve told you about that night before,
miss, often; and from that night he has been good friends with me, till
two days ago, when the doctor came——”
“Does he still avoid a meeting with his father?” asked Miss Vickery in
a voice of secrecy.
“Rather, miss; his treatment of that old man is so shocking——” Healy
commenced to answer, but was checked by a “_sh-h-h_” breathed by
Miss Ruth, who through the doorway had noticed Miss Eve moving in
her sleep; and they two stood peeping at the unfolding of Miss Eve’s
eyes, saw Miss Eve notice a Bible which lay open by her nose on the
sofa-cushion—a Bible which had been placed there by Miss Ruth with one
phrase in it underlined in blue—saw her take the Book to gloat closely
over the phrase in the gloaming’s dusk, saw her laugh, and, after
laughing, suddenly press her lips upon the phrase with ravishment, to
drop suddenly afresh on the cushion with a covering up of the face; the
phrase which she had read and kissed being this, “Be ye not unequally
yoked with unbelievers.”
“Steal softly in,” breathed Miss Ruth to Healy; and softly she herself,
having moved into the room, stole on tip-toe quite to the telephone,
the opening of which she shut off and stuffed up, Miss Eve meanwhile
seeming still asleep; and to Healy Miss Ruth now said aloud, “Continue
now, Healy, to speak of your master’s treatment of his poor father.”
Healy looked at her, and, discerning her meaning, whispered to himself,
“Why, if she isn’t as wise as a serpent!”
“No, miss,” he added aloud, “he won’t see the doctor not on no account:
never once seen him willingly since the day he left the island in your
yacht; flies him like death, he does. Fact is, he is nervous of the
doctor; nothing on earth below, nor in heaven above, is he nervous of,
but of the doctor he is. Can’t get over his youth, you see, can’t get
over all those years in which he used to believe the doctor a god,
not a human being—shuns him as death, he does. And partly it’s the
doctor’s own fault, I must say, for that’s only the truth, you know,
miss, seeing that the doctor is going all dead against him, taking part
with his political enemies, and he well aware of it, for there’s an eye
spying for him behind every blind, so to say; and he’s afraid of the
doctor, oh, he’s afraid, miss, that the doctor’s big brains may be
digging his grave for him. So that’s his excuse, look; but still, when
all’s said, his conduct to the doctor has been just shocking—shocking
it has. Again and again has the old soul’s nose pressed against his
gates, and begged and prayed to be let in, but no go; and that time
at Lyons when the old man tried to spring into the carriage, just as
Master Hanni stepped down out of the town-hall, that was a bit beyond:
for as the father made to spring in, the son darted to the reins, the
horses pranced and started off, leaving a father prostrate and bleeding
on the street—oh no, that was a bit beyond, that was.”
Miss Vickery, with her face averted from the narrator, held her eyes
bent skyward with a steadfast gaze, begging for God’s forgiveness of
men; but from Miss Eve, who must have heard, who was meant to hear,
neither word was uttered, nor a stir seen.
After a silence the talkative Healy proceeded to remark, “Well, I can
understand him, miss. I recollect that when I was a little lad ten
years of age, one day a great big girl of thirteen meets me in a lane,
miss, and begins to kiss and hug me—couldn’t make out anyhow what it
was about, so I got pretty scared, I did, and from that day for years,
if I but spied that lass a league off, my hair’d go creepy, I’d take
to my heels like a long-dog, and I do believe if I caught sight of
her even now, I’d be bound to do a dart for it. It’s the same with
Master Hanni—shy, shy; the doctor’s a great big bogey to him—thinks the
doctor’ll be digging his grave, though he knows that the doctor can’t.
And who suffers for it, miss? _I_ do. Thinks I am secretly on the
doctor’s side against him, can’t believe I’m on his side against all
comers, thinks I’m always going to ‘betray’ him to the doctor, trusts
no one, trusts no one, it’s hard, because——”
Now, however, that stream of Healy’s speech was checked by the
appearance in the doorway of a gentleman neatly dressed in grey, with a
grey top-hat on his head, a neat umbrella, and side-whiskers, with him
being the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard and Madame Grammont; and Healy,
seeing him, murmured, “Your pa, miss,” and now bowed himself out; while
Mr. Vickery, darting his eyes all about the room, and discerning in the
gloom his younger girl on the couch, rushed by Miss Ruth without any
greeting, his eyes brimming with tears, his mouth trembling, and on his
knees garnering Miss Eve in his arms, gave way now to weeping, again
and again darting down his lips at her mouth, with pausings to gaze at
her face, then again darting down at her mouth, with mania.
Miss Eve sat up, breathing “papa,” and laughed a little, casting back
some hairs from her brow with a gesture which, undoubtedly, was not
without something of hectic and hare-brained. Indeed, she appeared that
day to be dwelling in a region so infected with fever, that through the
day she had been treated as a patient, and on the sick list.
“Well, here I am,” Mr. Vickery said to her, “just arrived by God’s
help—in time, I hope.... Got a headache, have you? my soul? my love?”
Miss Eve smiled triumphantly in her parent’s face, replying, “No, papa;
why should I?”
“That’s all right, don’t say a word,” muttered the father, fast patting
her arm, “don’t say a word.... Well, here I am, you see; arrived,
arrived, by God’s help. And—I have telegraphed to Monsieur de Courcy
to come. Have I done well? I thought I would, and—I did. All the way
from London to Paris I was praying to be guided, and the moment I got
to Paris the thought was given me to telegraph at once to Monsieur de
Courcy, and—I did.”
“Did you, papa?” asked Miss Eve, smiling with her father.
“Yes. Eve, have I done well?”
“Why, papa, I think so,” replied Miss Eve, smiling that defiance which
is amused, that triumph which is secure. “Monsieur de Courcy is a most
estimable man.”
“He is; but still, Eve, tell me, tell me, dear—have I done well?”
“Oh, I quite think so, papa.... Have you had a pleasant trip across?”
“No, no, let us be frank now; let us make use of plain terms, let’s not
mince matters, Eve; come now, tell your papa—my own, my sweet—will you
have de Courcy?”
“Oh, as to that, why, I think so, papa,” replied Miss Eve with some
appearance of surprise about the eye-brows. “I thought that that was
rather understood as a settled thing: ask Ruth, ask aunt: they’ll tell
you that Monsieur de Courcy, that model of morals, high at the head of
my list, hasn’t a rival to dread.”
Upon this the father turned with an opening of the arms toward the
other ladies, saying, “Why, this is well.... You didn’t tell me!”
No reply was made to him; only the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard
exchanged half a smile with Madame Grammont, who just shrugged, while
Miss Ruth remained with her eyelids drooped.
“Why, that’s all right, then!” cried Mr. Vickery to Miss Eve: “I knew,
I knew, that my dear’s instincts would strike true. Well, de Courcy
should have nearly reached Versailles by this, and—you’ll be sending
him away a happy man, will you? Is that settled?”
The young lady, contemplating her father’s face with a calm smile,
replied, “Quite settled, papa—for _my_ share. If it _can_ be, it shall
be.”
“‘_Can_ be?’ What does she mean?”—Mr. Vickery threw this whisper at
the other ladies behind him; but before anything further could be
uttered, a bomb was hurled into the _salon_ by the words of a servant
who entered, saying “Monsieur Lepsius to talk with Mr. Vickery”—and he
handed a card.
Straight sprang Mr. Vickery up, Miss Eve also raising herself by
degrees, and all with blanched cheeks gaped in silence at the menial,
till Mr. Vickery, his visage rushing into crimson, cried in a high and
hysteric kind of cry, “Say to that gentleman that Mr. Vickery, being
engaged, begs him to state his business by letter!”
The menial bowed and backed out, and immediately now there reigned a
gale of breaths among the ladies, Madame Grammont and the countess
making a thousand gesticulations together, Mr. Vickery standing again
pale-faced by a reaction, Miss Ruth at him instigating him to be grim,
Miss Eve moving about from place to place, reading the titles of books,
glancing at trees outside, glancing at looking-glasses.
It lasted four minutes, which seemed much more, after which the menial
was once more there, bearing a note scribbled in pencil, whose folds
Mr. Vickery tremblingly opened. Miss Ruth meantime breathing in his
ear, “Pray, papa, do not read it aloud!”—words which Miss Eve either
heard or surmised, for now immediately she muttered with some huff,
“Oh, I have no wish to hear anything,” and went away.
The rest then, laying their heads over the note, read the words: “Dear
sir,—I, a suitor for your daughter’s hand, having run a race with
another suitor to your door, and having won the race, am amazed at your
want of fairness and also of forethought in refusing me an audience.
Why do you? Pray question yourself. Can any king with a rope restrain
the rolling of rivers or the drift of fate? I warn you that you waste
your time in this, causing me also the woe of wasting mine; nor could
that be just to another suitor to permit Miss Eve Vickery in a freakish
humour to promise him marriage, since she has no such intention,
knowing that such a nonsense is not on the files of life.—LEPSIUS.”
It was Madame Grammont who, gifted with the strongest eyesight, read
the note aloud in a monotone, the gloaming in the room having now
grown very heavy; and as she finished, and all raised their eyes, all
started, for there afresh was Miss Eve, who had been seen to leave the
chamber, hovering anew near to hear.
“I am not to be browbeaten!” suddenly cried Mr. Vickery in a high kind
of cry.
“Ah, papa, no agitation, papa!” Miss Ruth called through a throat whose
music broke.
“I say I am not to be browbeaten, I am not to be threatened!” screamed
Mr. Vickery querulously afresh in an ecstasy, for the atmosphere was
all electric, and each one present caught from all the rest a hectic
cheek and a lip of quivering.
“My God, I foresaw all! and my advice was not followed,” cried the
Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, with a casting up of the hands.
“‘The files of life,’ ‘the drift of fate’!” Madame Grammont muttered in
a maze.
“Get my daughter’s trunks packed!” cried the father; “am I an
Englishman? Are there no laws?”
“Calm, papa, calm!” called out Miss Ruth anew: “ah, how disastrous!
papa, I warn you, this agitation is fatal to the welfare of the soul!”
“Oh, Ruth, let one alone!” now said the countess in an irritation
without restraint; “it is you who are the cause of all, at the end of
the tale.”
“Aunt, I?” asked Miss Ruth, with reproach lodged in the soul of her
eyes.
“But no, Margaret, but no,” protested Madame Grammont: “it is not the
fault of Ruth, it is not the fault of Ruth.”
“Let me get my girl out of this infernal country!” now cried out the
high-strung Mr. Vickery; “it is France that has done this!”
“Oh, but be reasonable, Matthieu, at the end of the tale!” the countess
mouthed, with intolerance.
“Quite right, papa,” now cried out Miss Eve in a spirit of rollicking
and recklessness, “let us clearly prove to everyone that we act in no
‘humour of freak,’ having a will of our own!”
“My love!” cried Mr. Vickery.
“‘The files of life,’” mused Madame Grammont anew; “‘humour of
freakishness’!”
“Ah, but he is right, believe me!” cried the Comtesse de
Pichegru-Picard; “he has his meaning! he knows Eve better than she
knows herself.”
“You and others may _think_ so, Aunt,” called Miss Eve, snapping her
thumb and finger daintily up in the air, with a wheel on her feet.
“But he may still be there!” said Madame Grammont; “is he still there
at the door, Gabriel?”
“Monsieur Lepsius has departed, madame,” the gaudy Gabriel gave answer,
who through all this had stood there with a bowed brow.
“What happened in the hall?” asked the countess. “Did Monsieur Lepsius
make any attempt to enter?”
“Monsieur Lepsius desired to enter, madame,” answered Gabriel, “when I
gave him Mr. Vickery’s reply that it might be better for him to state
his business by letter; but on his attempt to force an entrance, both
Baptiste and myself barred his advance with our arms outspread, and
he then, after staring a moment into our faces, broke into a laugh,
hastily wrote the note that has been handed you, and drove very quickly
away.”
“Did Monsieur Lepsius utter any remark at all?” Madame Grammont began
to ask, but before the words were well uttered, there had entered
another flunky, who came to proclaim the presence of Monsieur de Courcy
at the door; whereupon—a renewed flutter and flurry of consultation!
until the ladies rushed from the room, leaving Mr. Vickery to receive
the visitor; and immediately in came the Minister of the Interior
with his brisk and breezy air, but about his brow now a shade of
deliberation.
They two then conversed together until the hour when the dinner-gong
began to sing out, whereupon the ladies in their bravery came sailing
in, smirking as superbly now as personalities translated beyond the
concerns of earth; and after a little small-talk the visitor stepped
away with them to dinner.
However, they had not well moved out of the room when now the
telephone-rattle in the alcove started to prattle, upon which Mr.
Vickery with passion in his heart darted back to it, and Miss Eve also
doubled back to be near, though remaining far from her father in the
centre of the apartment, staring.
“Who are you?” called Mr. Vickery, the receiver at his ear.
The answer was “Lepsius,” and even Miss Eve, though hovering away off
in the middle of the room, could hear it in thunder, for the speaker
now no doubt lay in his whispering-gallery, where the sound-waves from
his mouth, focusing themselves upon his telephone, struck monstrous
rough, their grumble trumpeting unease upon Mr. Vickery’s ear-drum with
the gutturalness of some grum god thundering; and, “I want to speak
with Miss Eve Vickery,” grumbled the thunder.
“It is Mr. Vickery who hears you!”
“I know; allow one to speak with Miss Eve, Mr. Vickery!”
Now with wide eyes hied Miss Eve on tip-toe nigh, hissing, “_Say I am
at dinner, papa!_”
“Miss Eve Vickery is about to sit down to dinner,” Mr. Vickery cried,
with stricter accuracy.
“She will not eat much!... But as for you, Mr. Vickery, will you have
me for a son-in-law?”
“The proposal sounds abrupt, Monsieur Lepsius!”
“Why so? How much waste of time is necessary? And what is your
complaint against me? I quite fail to gather this.”
“It cannot be discussed over the telephone!”
“Why can it not? Is it that you are offended with me for kissing your
daughter?”
“_S-s-s-s-s, sir!_... But I am being awaited at dinner, Monsieur
Lepsius!”
“It was not I who wished to kiss her, it was she who wished to kiss me!”
“Eve, go! go!” screamed Mr. Vickery, warding his daughter away with one
arm.
“Say, papa,” Miss Eve hissed, reaching far forward to her father’s
ear with her cheeks afire, “that I am affianced to a good and gallant
gentleman!”
“My daughter——” Mr. Vickery commenced to call.
“Tell Miss Eve, sir,” the thunderer rumbled, “that I can hear each word
that she utters, and that I know she does not mean one syllable of any
one of them.”
“I have to wish you good evening, Monsieur Lepsius!” cried Mr. Vickery
with a high-pitched cry.
“Go, if you choose; but you prove yourself a feeble and foolish old
pantaloon, you know.”
“And you, sir, a courteous young gentleman!” upon which Mr. Vickery put
up the receiver, and went with one cheek-bone branded rosy, and one
blanched, Miss Eve smiling, with her eyes alight, by his side.
The meal was then eaten serenely by all, after which, in the midst of
Parisian chat in the salon, it was found not impossible to bring about,
without intention, a _tête-à-tête_ between Miss Eve and the Minister
of the Interior; and Monsieur de Courcy, having come through this with
success, remained still on, the merriest of ministers and men, until
close on eleven o’clock, when, hunted down by a mounted officer with a
cipher, he made his bows, and went away.
And now anew the family sat in council to discuss the situation of
affairs, though Miss Eve now took no share in it, seated far aloof,
with her cheek on her palm, looking out into the dark of the park.
At midnight she bid good-night; and, having gone up to her chamber,
having been prepared for her bed, and having prayed by her bedside, was
soon lying in the semi-gloom of a big bedroom, with her will bent upon
slumber. But sleep she could not, though two hours went by. One of her
jalousie-windows lying open, through this she could perceive trees,
mountains, and in the sky a moon moving in and out among mounds of
cloud, now drowning the countryside in shine, and now shrouding it in
shadow; until this growing into a grievance and a weariness, at last
she got up, swathed all that elongation of her form in a great drapery,
got her violin and bow, and in an arm-chair by the jalousie played. So
that she might not be heard, she had first shut the shutter and fixed
the bar, though, as her apartments were in a rather remote part of the
château, this was hardly very necessary, since it was Mendelssohn’s
Andante which she chose to utter in a low tone; and there during many
minutes she remained in a mood of drooping, moving the air of the room
with the mazes of the music, roaming over and over anew through the
same old moon-realms of melancholy, feeling even sleepy now, her ear
wearied out with sweetness; until on a sudden she had sprung upon her
feet, her cheeks struck white like a sheet, and her eyes wide with
affright.
“Who is it?” she hoarsely hissed, for outside the shutter a tap had
sounded.
“I! Open!” some chest panted to her, and she knew him, yet anew she
hissed with all her wild heart in her windpipe, “_Who is it? What is
it?_”
“The staple to which I hang is giving to my weight,” the chest gasped:
“forty seconds and I fall a corpse.”
In ten Lepsius had leapt within the window....
And now were boundless breaths! and the rough sirocco broken free,
flights for life, puffs, pantings, runnings to and fro, momentary
manias, aimless aims! “Help!” hissed her hoarse heart’s breath,
“this wardrobe, help!” whereat he, quite carried away by her rage of
agitation, hardly knowing why, caught hold of one side of a wardrobe,
while she bent and laboured at the other side, bearing it somewhither.
But it was a huge mass Henri Quatre, which, being moved, naturally
made some hubbub, so he threw the whisper across to her, “It makes a
racket!” whereto her pant replied “Never mind, help!” and finally by
tugs and effort they got one narrow side of it against a wall, one
broad side against the bed-foot; and now anew she flew, with “This
couch, help!” and he helped her to place the couch against the wall and
against the bed-head; and now it was “Now, this chair!” and he helped
her to heap an easy-chair upon the couch, feet up: which done, she
scrambled quick across the bed’s breadth, and now stood in the place
betwixt bed and wall, barricaded now from him in front by the bed, to
the left by the wardrobe, to the right by the couch and the chair. And
then immediately all that to-do was seen to be needless when her hand
happened to hit upon a key in the wall behind her, for there was a door
there in the wall, and a small window also by it above, and behind
the door some steps leading up to another chamber a little above the
bed-chamber; so immediately she scuttled through the door, locked it
within, skipped up the four steps, appeared at the window, threw the
key from her down upon the bed before him, and now succumbed to the
floor, panting, safe at any rate from herself.
He, looking up to the window, threw out to her the whisper, “You are
wise! You are witty!” upon which she sprang up to throw out to him the
whisper, “Do not come across the bed!” for he stood now with one knee
on it, and she could see him in a ray of the moon as she had first
beheld him at The Towers in a red shirt loose about the neck and belt,
without any jacket or hat; and he, too, could see her in shadow at the
window.
“Did I not help you to escape?” he asked her; and then disjointedly,
“Do you wear the half-coin which I sent you?”
Miss Eve gave no reply, getting by degrees her breath again in silence.
“Did you know in your heart,” he asked her, “that I would come
to-night? You were waiting up for me, playing the fiddle; it was that
Andante of Mendelssohn; you played it four times over.”
“Lepsius, you must go,” Miss Eve said.
“I will go near the peep of day, and you with me!”
“No, now; and without me, I think.”
“Oh, you are cold,” he replied, “and I hate your stone’s heart: cold
by nature, and colder by hypocrisy that penetrates your texture to
the core of you. Oh, I know and foreknow you to my agony, negative,
null, enigmatic, like a watch which won’t go, though one goads it,
and finally one crushes it under a rock; as frigid as that water of a
mortal quality which drips from a rock in the territory of Nonacris; or
like that bag——”
But she stopped him with, “Lepsius, you should go!” whereat he leaned
keenly across to whisper her, “Cold! I am told that your mother was a
patrician of a most ancient race, so from her you have that faintness
of air, your rarity of blood, which makes you resemble lilies too
super-cultivated and rare to transparency, or resemble that aroma that
you exhale, or hoary old ages of Asia gone that give no answer to the
historian’s gaze. No, the mortal heart can’t hold you all, you are far
too large for me.... That superciliousness, all but Chinese somehow, in
the heave of your eyebrow’s arch, that rather-too-much of the eyewhites
shown below the irises ... though I admire, mind, the faintness of
it, the faint disdain, the dieaway disdain, so confirmed and hoary,
reposed and at home in the universe, with which you look out askance
upon the world; and now dark circles will be under them, for I vow you
shan’t sleep, and that will please me to be conscious that you are
marked with dark underlids because of me.”
“I did not think,” Miss Eve rejoined, leaning both her elbows on the
window’s sill, “that you were such a silly boy.”
He during some seconds did not answer this, drew back a bit from the
bed with a bent head, reflecting, and then said, “Well, it is silly, it
is self-sacrifice; and yet—curious! while I fought against you, since
it is silly, I thought it sillier than after I gave in to you. Silly,
indeed, I still see it, for these feelings of love make the blood to
flow from the front of the brain to other caves of the frame—ruinously!
so that loving is a reverting to lower-animal natures whose brains are
less largely furnished with blood, the sense of romance and poetry in
loving being due to some umbra of remembrance in us of old brutes,
moons, and moods, of the geologic ooze, the deluge, the roll in the
Jurassic morass, the rufous Vesuvius, the gloomy lagoon, when the
moon glowed more big and close to this globe. Love is thus a fall and
relapse; and yet—curiously——”
When he paused, she asked, “Well?” upon which he said, “My
consciousness has been enlarged by it. I see, in fact, that though it
is a fall toward the past, and silly, it is the one silliness that one
may partly pardon oneself in view of its use to the future, because man
will not always be man, and ages forward I see the sons’ sons of you
and me a multitude, shining like stars in the sky, vaunting John to
George in voices of joy. No other children instead of ours, if ours
are preordained to be born, will do for this evolution: for, since we
observe that the perfection which is purposed by the earth can never be
accomplished but by a preordained marshalling of atoms, we know that,
if this or that atom fails of its place, nothing can be done: far less
if this or that baby fated to be born fails anon to be born.”
Miss Eve, her face half concealed with her palm, asked, “But _what_ is
fated? that is the question. We imagine that what we wish is fated.”
“Love is apparently an instinct of fate,” Lepsius replied: “the lover
prophesies in a kind of trance of triumphs to come. True, he is
silly, since he sacrifices his time and life, but when he succumbs
in his fight with the world-typhoon which whirls him to the moon,
he can excuse his infirmity with a sense that this time it is worth
while. I find that I have a tendency to reflect upon you in reveries
extravagant to grotesqueness, comparing you with galaxies, fragrances,
graces, fairies, lilies, with Dewildé, and Helen of Troy, and the boy
Crobylus of Corinth, and that purple of Hermione whose wool was combed
with poison-honey and oil of lotus; and though this is not strictly a
truth at present of you, it is strictly a true instinct and prophecy
of princes to spring through you. The line of your profile has a hint
of hollowness to the eye, owing only to a most slight jutting of your
chin’s point, a nothing which has overjoyed me with emotions the most
poignant, with a sense of brotherhood for you, with a sense of the
earth from her furnace-birth to her furthest sunsets, when the sun
shall shine much nigher her, and the moon loom hugely: and I have
compared you with ages, and with the Lady in the Chair of Cassiopeia.
Or, looking sideways at you with your legs crossed, I have been
struck by the great prolongation of your thigh-bones—so great that you
could hardly run on your toes and palms, as I and apes may, since your
kneecaps would doubtless graze the ground—so evolved, patrician: and
I have cried extravagantly that, at their greatest stretch, the very
galaxy would find space and to spare ’twixt their gaping gateway—an
extravagance merely in appearance, since it is in a trance-dream of
graces great even to _infinity_ in types fated to grow from you that
I thus exclaim; it is my subconsciousness, nay, my consciousness
somewhat, all bewildered with a blaze of the world-wonder, and how,
darling, but in boundless words may the mortal heart blurt out a little
that burden of the Eternal? Or when I think of my love’s upper-shape,
so _élancé_, like the racer’s stretch of waist and neck, like one
escaping, dodging, eluding upward—dodging, eluding the ape-shape—the
very revelation of evolution——”
Here Miss Eve smiled, remarking dryly, “Lepsius, you are full of apes.”
“Aren’t you? Isn’t the world?” he asked; upon which she said, “Yes,
I know your low view of men—and of women, I suppose, still more; but
beside my _élancé_ upper-shape, my thigh-bone, my chin, my faded old
air and hoary disdain of iris, I have a mind, which is jealous of your
omission to mention it.”
“I meant to mention it!”
“Oh?” says she, “that was too sweet of you. Last but not least?”
“By no means least!” he answered earnestly: “a mind, I am certain,
better than mine.”
“Ah, now you are insincere,” she said.
“I to you? As if I could be!” Lepsius replied with reproach; “I only,
of course, mean a mind better than mine in possibility, since yours is
uneducated, and mine more or less educated.”
“Mine un——! But what, then, is ‘education’ in your view?” she wished to
know.
“Education,” he told her, “is a waking of one’s subconsciousness to
consciousness. I, for instance, know nothing that you do not—or not
much; but I am much more conscious of what we both know. Tell me,
now—whereabouts were you twenty-four hours since?”
“Where?” repeated Miss Eve: “I was—here,” whereto he replied, “You see,
that answer and its tone shows that your education was never initiated.
You know, no doubt—are subconscious—that you were a thousand thousand,
and half a thousand thousand, miles from here, flying at the speed of
fifteen times a rifle-bullet’s rabies: subconscious, but not conscious
of it. I, now, could never say ‘_here_’ in that fashion, without
compunction, as though a million miles or two were of no account,
Eve, since now and at each instant I can hardly but be conscious of
this horse that jaunts us, and his ardour.... Oh, this race of man
suppurates in dullness, you know, and I am sometimes most—lonely: I
mention this to you that you may compassionate and come to me. I ride a
star, inhabiting the unbounded as my house, and the rest, more drowsing
than the dormouse, Tortoni’s; their glance of a morning darts no
surprise of gladness at this romance of time, space and game of balls,
the Grand Boulevard their galaxy, pigmies grey, phlegmatic, unflushed,
unconscious of their contemporaries in a myriad realms of the creation,
among whom are at this moment taking place great crises, hegiras,
revolutions, doomsdays, moonfalls, vast marches, everlasting partings;
they little know that Venus is uneven and severe in scenery, nor does
the thundering of even the nearest sun stun their ear-drum; uneducated;
not polite citizens of time and space.”
“But you remember——” Miss Eve started to say, but now, startled by some
sound, breathed eagerly to him, “_did you hear something_?”
“It is a mouse going down the right sound-hole of your violin,” he
replied; and now Miss Eve anew leaned her elbow on her window-sill to
continue saying, “But you remember that all this you started to utter
of _me_, then continued with ‘they,’ ‘they’; since then, as ‘they’ are
so _I_, why are you there by my bed?”
“But are you not in all things far above me?” he asked, “save in this
of a wakeful consciousness?”
“But this of a wakeful consciousness,” said she, “is everything, is it
not? It is this which makes the difference between a genius and an ape,
a god and a dog, you believe, do you not? And you have it, and not I.
Only a thigh-bone I own, let me be thrown to a dog.”
Upon this Lepsius bent well across the bed to throw to her the whisper,
“Hypocrite! Colder than the coldest Kydnus! It is your mind that I
esteem, and in speaking of your thigh, implied it.... You should
shun the mood of the modern woman of the West, ever touchy as to her
footing, as to the spirit of the marriage-law, and men’s estimate of
her mentality. Men _must_ admire the mind of woman, for since we know
that we all get our wit from our mother, as our grit from our father,
therefore I, having my mind from a female, must needs love the female
mind with home-longing, as you, having your grit from a male, must love
the male grit with home-longing; so it is not for my wit that you love
me, but because you are instinctive that I am gritty and good; nor is
it for your grit that I love you, but because I am instinctive that,
if educated, you would be witty, and will make witty babies. Give up,
then, I beg you, for ever, the idea that I despise your mind, since I
do so idolise it; and believe, too, that, for each one of these reasons
which I can discover for my love of you, myriads of other reasons
exist, ineffable, unknowable to us, but in some manner known to that
Man to whose behests men may at no moment but submit.”
“What Man is that?” Miss Eve asked, frowning, her wits rather winded
now and flustered at the speed of her speaker’s thoughts.
“I mean, do I not,” said he, “the genius of our species? In every crowd
of a thousand there are present, are there not? not a thousand, but
a thousand and One, which One we can speak of as the ‘genius of the
crowd,’ since it leads each of the thousand by the nose, making him
behave in a totally different way than when alone—especially in such
crowds as French crowds, which rush into action like one individual, as
in ’92. So in _séances_ where those gathered believe that a ghost tilts
their table, there is indeed a species of ghost-Man there, an eighth
in a meeting of seven, a ‘genius of the crowd,’ compounded, no doubt,
of the brain-rays radiated out from the seven. So, too, of the crowd
who make up our human race: a Genius-of-the-species, his escutcheon
and escheats mentioned on no census-sheet, leads us at each moment,
teaching me to know and adore you, and none below the sun but you: to
know you well: the very mood of the tune which, if you could be turned
into a rhapsody of music, you would produce, a tune with some alto
undertone, more old-eternal than the world. Beloved. But I fail to
utter half, beloved, my heart faints....”
“Do you love me?” Miss Eve asked him in a whisper, leaning now far out
of her window to him, who leaned near to her.
“Beloved,” Lepsius groaned, and again, “beloved.... When I came home
from the Quai d’Orsay last night, I dropped down in a drowse, and,
with the feast of your kiss still warm in my mouth, I thought in my
dream that your feet walked with mine athwart fields of asphodel in
future far, far off under a forlorn and morphia moon—I could not tell
you. Then in the dark of the morning I awaked, and you were not there
in my arms. I passed my palm thrice across my bed of straws, but you
were nowhere there; so I had the thought that my darling might be in
the garden, among the lilies by the lake, gazing up at my casement, a
thought half-crazy, half-drowsy; but up I bounded and raced all round
the palace-walls, gazing down into the gardens in order to spy you out
and call you up, and you were nowhere there. If one of the spokes of
the kite-contrivance on which I fly had not been broken, I should have
flown to you. But I ran down, got out, and began to run to you; and
the _sergents de ville_ must have asked themselves where Lepsius was
rushing to under the morning stars, with half a thought, perhaps, in
their heart’s heart of a _coup d’état_.”
“You didn’t come,” Miss Eve observed.
“No,” he answered, “I turned back; four leagues to Versailles, and I
had already lost a good deal of time on your account.... Eve, I have
lost hours.”
This he avowed with a bowed brow, and “Dear me,” breathed Miss Eve with
irony; then, suddenly, like one whose will arises and triumphs, added,
“It would have been so fruitless, too.... Lepsius, you should, perhaps,
be given to know—can you see? this one is the ring: I am engaged.”
“Bomb of _poudre Rachel_,” Lepsius mumbled with a chuckle; “so you came
to an arrangement with de Courcy this evening?”
“Yes, then,” Miss Eve said, _her_ left shoulder, too, shaken a second
by a chuckle.
“And the same night you admit another lover to your bed-chamber!” he
said, chuckling.
“Oh, well,” she muttered with lowered lids, chuckling within one
shoulder, and they chuckled one with the other.
“Are ladies, then, restrained by no scruples as to justice?” Lepsius
asked. “Delighter in lies! enigma! through what abstruse movement
of your bosom did you get yourself into this embroglio? Not that it
matters; but you will inflict a sense of injury upon this man, who
has done you no injury,” a speech at which in one instant Miss Eve
flew into a passion, and, leaning forth, thrice struck the window-sill
imperiously, crying through a gruff throat, “As God is my witness——”
“Sh-h-h,” Lepsius went.
“Let me speak!” she imperiously hissed: “I mean to marry him, do you
hear it? Heaven be my witness!” and up she threw her eyes, trembling as
she held them bent on high.
“Eve, no,” said Lepsius gently: “you do not mean to do that; you
believe that you do, but meantime in your subconsciousness you firmly
confide in me never to permit such an absurdity, and so can afford to
boast and be wayward.... Dear, would it not certainly kill us both?”
“If it kills a host I will do it!” Miss Eve heatedly replied; “never
through life have I broken a promise, nor now shall begin with a vow;
given and pledged is my troth; God be my witness in this.”
“But _why_ did you give it and pledge it? I can’t guess!”
“Because I chose!”
“Cogent waste of three words!”
“I shall never have _you_, anyway!” she said with a nod and threat of
the head.
“And why?” he asked in a bewilderment.
“Because you despise my mind!” she sharply replied.
“I have already explained why that is quite impossible,” he made answer.
“Oh, woman knows her own secret, and people’s explanations make no
impression upon her intuitions. You despise my mind; and there’s this
still deeper reason against any getting together of you and me, that I
despise yours.”
“I despise it, too; yet I endure it.”
“Oh!” she sighed, “that untrue humility of yours, it irritates me
to the soul, till I hate! ... doubly untrue because insincere, and
because, if it were sincere, it would be true to facts: for whereas you
regard yourself as far greater than all, all as as far greater than you
as you fancy them smaller, since your greatness is bedraggled rags that
prevents you from being good. Oh, why are you not some ordinary wight,
a young workman, Lepsius, a mason, a sailor, who has never learned to
spell? Then some girl would so gleefully desert all her father’s—— But
now, ah, _il desir vive, e la speranza è morta_!... Do you, by the way,
still believe it fine to steal?”
“Successfully, you mean?” he said quickly; “stealing seldom needs much
show of wit, but _swindling_ is very frequently fine. You, I know, do
not appreciate its fineness, but to me it is evident; it is lying in
deed as you frequently do in speech.”
That this would give the profoundest offence Lepsius had no grounds to
think, lying being to his philosophy no crime; but with that chastity
of the swan, which, being but brushed in her array of whiteness, frills
and ruffles awhile, then with majesty swims away, so she ruffled.
“Not ‘frequently,’ I think,” Miss Eve repeated; “if I ‘lie,’ it is to
myself, unwittingly; and in every event differ from you in fancying it
‘fine.’ Anyhow, now you can see how what you have wanted is out of the
question.”
At this Lepsius, looking at her under his eyes, said, “Eve, be sincere
with me!”
“I mean to be sincere,” Miss Eve told him; “I do hope I am; yes, I
_am_. We hate each other, Lepsius, shockingly, like cat and dog, oh,
we _do_, do not gainsay it. _I_ lack a culture you have, _you_ lack
a culture I have—in my very marrow. Oh, I know that you are awfully
clever and all that, and you fancy that because you can deck me with
queenship I shall be dashing myself feverish and shivering upon your
breast, little dreaming that the more thrones you throw before my
feet, the more bitterly I’ll spurn and keep you groaning in purgatory
eternally. They say that just before the Exhibition you will be
shooting into the sky a kind of sun infused with stored-up moonlight,
which will make private lights at night useless through Europe, and
France the richest of the nations; and that then, during the business
of the Exhibition, you mean in a _coup d’état_ to seize the throne, so
as to sweep France off to overrun Providence knows what. It sounds
mighty grand—I don’t know if it is true; I only know—forgive my
outspokenness—that it is howlingly vulgar, that it is not Christian,
and that I should have far greater joy of a young mason or sailor-boy
who behaves graciously to his father—one with a belt, may be, and your
figure—that is——”
She stopped, and he said, “I listen,” but as she added nothing, he then
said, “‘Vulgar,’ ‘not Christian’; your criticism, of course, interests
one, though it is curious.”
“Tell me,” Miss Eve said, “for whose weal do you purpose all that
slaughter and upheaval—for the world’s?”
“For my own,” he said: “the weal of the world is in the management of
the Genius-of-the-world, Who ceaselessly sees to it. I personally am
not concerned in it.”
“Then,” replied Miss Eve, “that is what I mean by ‘vulgar’ and ‘not
Christian.’”
“One idea or two?” he asked.
“No, one.”
Lepsius sat slowly aside on the bed, puzzling to understand her mind;
and he said that he should have called Japan a far less ‘vulgar’ land
than England, to which Miss Eve replied that if Japan was really the
less vulgar, that could only signify that Japan was the more Christian.
“Clearly, then,” said Lepsius, “‘Christian’ bears in your mind some
meaning of which I am not yet aware, since Japan does not pretend to
be Christian. I will see one day in the month following the Exhibition
just what Christianity is; but, as I knew that religions have all so
far been infant fancies, and as the religion of Europe is so slightly
in the minds of the peoples whom I mean to govern, I have never given
myself the pains to investigate it. And you do not say for what reason
I ought to cease from my schemes because they are ‘vulgar’ and ‘not
Christian.’ Vulgar they are, since I am a man, and man is a temporary
and trumpery little race, ingrained, whatsoever it attempts, with
vulgarity. But put yourself, beloved, in my place: what can I find to
do with my life? I am sequestered in the world; and it has occurred
to me that that would entertain me to make a world-state. True, I
might have turned my life to the delights of research, with the idea
of laying the foundations of knowledge in the world: it is, however,
such a work! since I should have to begin quite at the beginning, and I
shirked it. You may have no idea what a mess your little knowledge or
‘science,’ as you say, is in! Without foundation, top-heavy, like the
education of a child who has been made to learn the Babylonish Talmud
by rote, but can write not one word of his own tongue. The so-called
‘scientists’ know the stars of the night, and talk in millions of
millions; but as to the elements of knowledge, as to, say, the nature
of gravitation, and what is the ground-reason why their candle-grease
dribbles downward instead of bounding skyward, or why it is that the
atoms in a twig or anything cling together, though when one breaks the
twig, and then again puts the broken ends together, the atoms won’t
any longer cling, they possess no more notion than the chimpanzee.
Knowledge without foundation; vague, then, foggy, gappy: so that one
may say, man knows nothing, and of that little which he knows he is
but subconscious, hardly at all conscious. However, when these schemes
of mine which you have called ‘vulgar’ are accomplished, I mean to
turn almost the whole vigour of the world toward research and the
gaining of some little ground-knowledge of the nature of things: for
undoubtedly the want of this knowledge is what is now chiefly unwell
with our species. But I mustn’t say to you, beloved, that men’s good is
my aim, my only aim being to bustle and bluff a little as the governor
of a globe in space.”
“But if a million men are killed by it?” Miss Eve remarked.
“Dear, it will not matter,” Lepsius replied.
“Will it matter if you are killed?”
“It will to you, to no one else, since everyone dislikes me.”
“But _one_ will clamour and cry out, you think? One will bleat and beat
the breast?”
“Dear, it will not happen; I am so easily the king of men.”
“Better, may be, if it did.... No, it is all awfully low, Lepsius, I
say, even lower than Cæsar, as low as Napoleon, and proves how many
a thousand miles divide you from me and from men: for far at fault,
I can see, is what you said just now that Christ’s religion is but
‘slightly in the mind’ of the crowd! Deeply the world has breathed of
its atmosphere, yes, and the murderer Burke, guillotined in the week
gone, deep in its stream was immersed, everywhere save at his heel.
One sees that, when one hears _you_ speak. Do you know those words of
Julian as to that Jew workman, ‘thou hast conquered, O Galilean’?—so
scarcely true then, how greatly true now! You who can see, don’t you
notice how pity prevails like the flood, and how charity roars like an
ocean? Christs on the ’bus, at the ball, martyrs that saunter in clubs?
Firemen, nurses, the Red Cross; the blind boy pampered and spoiled;
the sweater and swindler inwardly worked with a qualm for the world’s
weal; the moon on her throne still ruling, seducing the rudeness which
roars in the tides with her mild smile, still by the touch of a Robe
virtue disbursed through the world; and with that hem of his vesture
encrimsoned, treading the wine-press of history, the white Christ
travels, or, riding his triumph, rides on the foal of an ass over
dominions and thrones. When you said, Lepsius, that self-sacrifice is
silly——”
But here Lepsius stopped her with the whisper, “someone is coming!” on
which the lips of Miss Eve, going at once quite sheet-white, breathed,
“God! it must be my sister! Lepsius! go!”
“Why should I?” Lepsius said.
“Lepsius!”—she was beside herself—“would you compromise me? Lepsius?
For ever? Would you?” for she herself could now catch the sound of
something, a door moving open in an outer room.
“If I go,” Lepsius whispered, “may I come every night?”
“Every——” Even in that storm of her eagerness for his going Miss Eve
paused; but she breathed, “Yes, every night—the key!”
In an instant the key was handed her, and he out of the outer window:
on which she, too, in some seconds was down, was across the bed and at
the outer window, all her breath breathing down to him fifteen feet
below, “Every night! But I shan’t ever be here!”
She could just catch his ejaculation of “Wretch!” and as she snatched
her fiddle, dashed herself into the chair at the casement, and arranged
her drapery, soft footfalls came on the carpet, the elder sister
breathing, “Eve! not in bed. Oh, Eve!”
“Dear,” said Miss Eve with languor, “I couldn’t get to sleep; I was
playing the fiddle....”
“Well, I knew it.... I had a feeling that you were not asleep, so I got
up and came to you, and here you are. Poor Evie! Cast your care upon
God, will you, Eve?... But playing at this hour! And—where’s the bow?”
“I put the bow over there.... Oh, Ruth, put your hand on my brow,
I have a headache,” upon which, her head now lying back on the
chair-back, she shut down her eyelids, and Miss Ruth, stooping, held
her hand over the brow of trouble, groaning now and again a little in
her soul, her cheek pressed against Miss Eve’s cheek, till presently
she breathed, “That better now?”
“Yes, sweet, that’s sweet,” Miss Eve breathed.... “Sweet, Lepsius was
here.”
“Eve, here?”
And now, under the compulsion of that touch upon her brow, Miss Eve
breathed out the whole story.
The sandals of Lepsius, meanwhile, were speeding away, till they
arrived at his phaeton awaiting him beneath trees at Viroflay by the
forest of Meudon, where, throwing himself in, under the setting moon he
went tearing by way of Sèvres, Boulogne, Passy, to the palace. There,
at the top of a stair, he was awaited by a man in robes of the Orient
with a scraggy grey beard, hollow cheeks, and a nose mostly nostrils
which gaped, who, with ever a wagging and nodding of his head, stood
gossiping and gassing to Shan Healy: his name, Nundcumar. And these
two, Shan Healy and Nundcumar, when Lepsius had mounted the stair,
hastened without speech after their master’s speed.
It was when they three were in the midst of a corridor whose two rows
of cressets seemed to meet at its remoter end, that Lepsius suddenly
peered ahead, stopped, and murmured very low in Urdu to Nundcumar,
“Anyone new in the palace to-day?”
Perhaps a second lapsed before Nundcumar answered, “One: a person who
can spangle silk-muslin with gold of Dacca for the women-folk.”
“Tell! Man or woman?”
“It was a woman. She——”
“Name.”
“I cannot at this moment remember her——”
“Tell! European?”
“Yes. She——”
Lepsius walked on; but after some steps, without stopping, went slower,
and now beckoning Nundcumar to him, said low, “_You_ walk before.”
Nundcumar’s eyes opened with some apprehension as he began to walk on
ahead, and immediately Lepsius brought forth from the bag of his shirt
a species of pigmy weapon which one fired off by pressure upon a button.
The walls here had hangings of tinsel at intervals, between these being
daubs on the walls themselves by Hindoo artists in hues as warmly
gaudy to the eye as water flooded with the sun’s after-glow. And it
was when Nundcumar, having reached the middle of the corridor, was at
the extremity of a hanging, that on a sudden he cast up his arms, all
shivering, with shrieks which pierced the ear, vitriol eating now that
doughy nose-tip, streaming down his beard. Meantime, Lepsius had swung
forth by the elbow a woman who had been hidden behind the hanging,
and in the quickest demisemiquavers fired two pairs of bullets, one
into her right wrist, one into the left, one into her right foot, one
into the left. Then during a few seconds he peered with a curiosity
of disgust into the disfigurement of the squealing Hindoo, and was
gone, throwing behind him to Shan Healy, who was kneeling over Jeanne
Auvache, the order, “Call in the police.”
He then made his way to the place where he slept: an apartment as broad
as the palace in that part, resembling a barn, but possessing no walls
on three of its faces, only processions of columns of marble which bore
up three architraves. Within this chamber a hound—a mastiff all but as
large as Lepsius himself—was pacing about; and when Lepsius had well
bolted four doors, had again loaded his weapon, had placed it on some
straw strewn over one angle of the plain of floor, had let his gaze
muse some moments upon the moon going down within a couch of clouds
which she flushed, and now had thrown himself down upon the bed of
straw, the hound moved to lie down by his side, and both soon dozed.
CHAPTER XII.
THE WEDDING-PLACE.
The day of the opening of the Exhibition was coming near, so was the
day of the nuptials of Miss Eve and Monsieur de Courcy, which had first
been fixed for the 23rd of July, and then, by the nerves and eagerness
of the bride’s groom and friends, fixed for the 5th; and now orders
for the _gâteau de noce_ and other articles had already gone out, and
already the lady and her guardians were at Grönland, a seat of the
Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard near to Orléans, where it was arranged that
the marriage should take place.
In these circumstances Shan Healy observed truly to the Hindoo
Nundcumar, “There be things brewing in his brain, as you’ll see before
too long—at work like six whirlwinds! And there’s a little smile
about’n somehow, and a something somewhere in his eye that spells
pestilence to somebody, I haven’t a doubt.”
Healy was seated in the evening dusk by the Hindoo’s side, who, still
luxuriating in bed with his nose sore in cotton-wools, lay silent
awhile, but then lifting himself to hug his meagre knees, said with
that wagging of his head, “Let him run, let him go along; but one day
the whirlpools of destiny will decapitulate his head.”
“Oh, you go to hell,” Healy muttered; “learn to speak Christian English
first, and then turn prophet.”
The Hindoo’s loose tongue, in these weeks unusually quiet, was anew
silent, his silences as well as his speech filled with that movement
of his head which was as continuous as the neck-movement of Chinese
playthings, and as full of meaning and meditation; and presently he
observed, “And when he is done for, whirled up and filibustered for all
he is worth, I know who will be the doer of it.”
“Who’s that, then?” Healy demanded, and the Hindoo’s bony little face
became animated a moment as he made answer, “The woman who threw the
vitriol in my face!”
“Oh, she,” said the other, “safe enough in chokey for four years
anyway—‘_travaux forcés_’ they d’ name it here; and serves her jolly
well right, too.”
Nundcumar, with his eyes shut and a head that wagged, said, “If she
stops there!”
“Who’s to get her out?” demanded Healy aggressively.
“I—do not know,” remarked the Oriental innocently, with opening palms.
“Look here, you’re a nice one to be speaking in this kind of way,”
Healy suddenly said; “appears to me as if you’d like to see it done!”
“Me?” said Nundcumar; “na, na, not me, my sonnies. What! me? Why, what
was I when he ascended me out of the gutter? A dog, a hungry wretch in
rags, just ready for the hangman to garrot by the throat”—he rushed his
forefinger across his scraggy throat—“and now, what has he made of me?
A king with slaves to ceremony my bathing, and everybody bowing himself
down to make me the how-d’-you-do. And why this? Because he liked while
at his work to listen with one ear to Nundcumar retailing wholesale
his anecdotes of past doings, times, histories, befallings, happenings
and epochs, and to hear Nundcumar speak his ingenious English; he
wanted me for his gas-bag, his gabbling ape! and he gave me garments of
shawl-goat wool, and dancing-girls of Persia with gold bells on their
ankles to play the kitar before my godhood, all because he couldn’t do
without his Nundcumar’s tongue. Na, na, not me. And then he made the
villain woman vituperate her vitriol upon the nose and mouth of his
good old hound-dog.”
“Serves you right,” observed Healy: “what earthly right had you to
admit the woman into the palace without proper inquiries? And who was
to have the vitriol in the chops, you or he, I should like to know?”
“He might have chosen _you_ to have it,” the Oriental quietly replied,
throwing an underlook at Healy, upon which Healy chuckled within
himself, saying, “Ey, but he didn’t choose, you see!”
“No,” said the Hindoo, “he chose his Nundcumar instead. But never mind,
it’s nothing, this. Only that’s bad, Healy, my friend, when the evil
eye is thrown upon a man, for there’s not a god sitting on his throne
of gold can escape——”
“And who’s thrown this evil eye upon him?”
“That woman—that villain woman.”
“Safe, thank God, under lock and key.”
“May be; safe, thank God, under lock and key, may be: but did I never
tell and expostulate you the history and anecdote of the time and epoch
when I and my brother were in the service of the Maharajah of——”
“Oh, I’m ill of your lies,” said the other; “you never had a brother,
nor he nor you never were in the service of any Maharajah in this
world. So help me God, I never heard tell of a nigger the like of
you: other men lie with a view to deceiving people, but you lie like
a lying-machine, just because you needs must, without the least bit
expecting that anybody will be believing you.”
“Do they believe _you_?” the Hindoo demanded; “may be I know one that
doesn’t, since he has had every step of yours spied, vigilised, and
super-inspected ever since his sire has been over.”
At this Healy, eyeing the floor, heaved a sigh, and then getting up
from his seat, said with the dignity of grief, “Well, you are right
there, no doubt,” and walked out.
At that hour Lepsius himself, in an apartment without walls on a lower
floor, was speaking with Mr. E. Reader Meade, who reposed on a couch
at his ease, handing a moustache that rolled down like a weir, while
Lepsius himself, in a sudeyree and trousers of nankeen, stood close
to a telephone hung on one of the columns. In the midst a punkah,
somehow worked, fanned the face; a fountain which span showered whirls
of spray round flowers and ferns; two girls a good way off in corners
continually caused their typewriters to prattle, peering nigh their
work in the dusk; while here and there other species of machines
competed in making their workings heard.
“Well,” Mr. Reader Meade was saying in English, “their scheme of
getting hold of your person, of course, seems to me, too, a bit
absurd—and you say you knew of it?”
“Well?” said Lepsius to someone at the telephone, throwing immediately
to Meade the reply, “Yes, I knew,” and to the telephone-speaker the
words, “Where, then, is Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet at present?”
and to Meade again, “Go on.”
“I’ll wait,” said Meade.
“I listen,” said Lepsius.
“Let us take it, then,” said Meade, “that you will scarcely fail to
elude that plot: for that’s the sick spot of your Frenchman, he lacks
humour, is so pre-occupied with _ideas_, that he lacks nice adjustment
to facts, often fails to measure his new man or thing, and so comes a
cropper in practice——”
“Precisely,” said Lepsius, “you are very shrewd—as usual. Say then,” he
added to his telephone-speaker, “that I can receive Monsieur le Duc de
Rey-Drouilhet for seven minutes.”
“The castle to which you are to be inveigled,” said Meade, “is called
Château Egmond, on the Brittany coast, a league from St. Brieuc,
and fourteen from your own Serapis. It is the property of Madame la
Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, has been leased from her by the League,
I hear, and de Courcy, it is said, means to make it his residence
immediately after his marriage, which takes place at Grönland, near
Orléans, on the 5th—or am I giving you all stale news?”
“I knew,” Lepsius said, as he now flew through the room to drop some
words at the ear of one of the girls, who in turn eagerly spurted out;
and now, returning, he said to Meade, seating himself on the floor with
clasped knees, “Only I don’t quite understand by what means they hope
to get me to go to this Château Egmond.”
“I am not too sure,” said the other, “but Saïd Pasha, who is always
at the bottom of the _dessous de la politique_, asked me at the
Palais-Bourbon last night to tell you that Nuncio _ad interim_ Montijo
will be of the company at the château, and as you are believed to be
eager to gain the Church-party, this may be intended to motive you to
accept their invitation. Then also Marshal Rémy will be there, and
your right hand, Schuré.”
Lepsius was up, speeding off to peer into a little machine hitched
on to the telephone which fretted and roared in fits, saying as he
ran, “But do they imagine that one cannot negotiate with Rémy, Schuré
and Montijo without going down to Brittany? It is conspiracy of—let
us say of Bismarcks, all born on the first of April!” at which word
“Bismarcks” he chuckled maliciously within himself.
“But a conspiracy having this peril,” remarked Meade, “that Isabeau
Thiéry seems to be more or less in it.”
“Oh, Thiéry is a shadow,” said Lepsius, throwing himself flat on a
table, his hands under his head; “his characteristic is that he does
not exist.”
“I should rather say,” said Meade, “that his characteristic is that he
is the half-brother of Fanny Schuré, who is the wife of Schuré, who is
the engineer-in-chief of the moon-machine.”
“And that matters in your judgment, I see,” said Lepsius.
“Much in my judgment,” the other answered very impressively; “you
don’t, I think, know the Thiérys well; they are one of those French
families who regard each of their members as something between a god, a
genius, and a pet-dog to be pampered; and Isabeau Thiéry in particular,
with his three volumes of Victor Hugo verse, is to Fanny dear no less
than Hermes Trismegistus. I tell you so, Lepsius. He is a ghost, you
say, and I say ditto; but his influence with this grande dame of a
Fanny must be great enough: if he is against you, Fanny is against
you. And you won’t undervalue this woman’s sway? A bit Brantômesque in
tone as the girl may be, with her ambition to say things worthy of
Esther Guimont, if not of Ninon de l’Enclos, she has quite earnestly
this further ambition, to revive the _alcove_, and, by pulling the
wires in the political drama, to be called a Chateauroux or a Genlis.
As to Schuré himself, you know him: _au fond_ he is a viveur living in
the _odor di femina_; his guts is his God, and his ‘fafemme’[C] is his
Devil. If she tempts, he attempts; she says go, and he goeth. And I say
that, if Isabeau Thiéry goes against you, then, through Fanny, Schuré
would agree to yield to the immense pressure of your enemies to tamper
with the moon-construction; and if there’s the smallest failure as to
the moon—ah! well, you know the consequence of that.”
[C] Wifie.
“You are always very shrewd,” said Lepsius, lying on his back with shut
eyes, “and but for your judgment I should surely miscarry in everything
that I attempt. All this that you say is quite true, and I have always
intended to bribe Isabeau Thiéry at the right moment.”
“With money? Isabeau Thiéry?”
“Why the surprise?”
The Englishman got his limbs together, and sitting now on his
couch-edge, stared, saying, “You cannot do that, you know.... Bribe any
of them, the brokers, popes, emperors; but you cannot bribe a poet,
man! Don’t you know that for a fact, Lepsius? Frankly, you occasionally
bring your friends’ admiration of your brain to some sudden cropper...!
You, too, having that French fixity of idea and lack of humour, knowing
the human clock so minutely in everything, except just its divine
trick, its ‘eccentricity,’ as mechanicians say. You couldn’t bribe
Thiéry!”
“Abundantly, I meant,” observed Lepsius.
“But that’s worse! If you send him five hundred francs, there’s just
the millionth fraction of a chance that it might influence him, since
he is so jolly poor; but if you send him five millions, don’t you know,
really, what will happen? He’ll throw up the melodramatic right-hand
that crumples the cheque, cry ‘Cato!’ and rush off to Sister Fanny to
crush you. It’s the ‘eccentricity’ in the earth’s yearly journey: you
count ill if you leave it out.”
At this Lepsius, springing up, looked at the other in the way of one
who is struck by what has been said, and he had begun to say, “What
grounds, now, have you——” when a negro, coming in between two of the
columns, announced, “Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet,” and now Meade
said, “Well, I’ll be away,” adding, “you can bribe _him_, Lepsius.”
“And all of you,” thought Lepsius within himself with a somewhat sullen
eye askance on his friend.
The friendly Englishman and Lepsius, looking rather like cow and
calf together, now exchanged a hand-shake, and in soon stepped the
aged little duke, diffusing smells of perfumery, showing a youthful
streak of teeth which shook, to seat himself finically on the couch
which Meade had left, while anew Lepsius flew hither and thither, for
some time paying no heed to the fop’s presence, who meantime secretly
touched his teeth, lips, cheeks, and sucked a cachou; till at last
Lepsius, casting a look at one of a quartette of clocks, cheque-book in
hand, dashed to sit by his side, remarking, “Six minutes and a half,
Monsieur le Duc, and my admirable friend: tell.”
“Why, it was you who sent for me,” the duke said, tittering in his
fluttering and fussy manner, “it is you, Monsieur Lepsius, whose rôle
it is to tell!”
To this Lepsius made no answer, but stamping a cheque with a number of
francs, furiously wrote the duke’s name on it, and now threw the cheque
askew to the duke’s knees, without looking at him; upon which the duke
sprang up somewhat pallid under his rouge, muttering in a protesting
manner, “No, Monsieur Lepsius—your manner—I cannot accept—you forget,
monsieur——”
Lepsius groaned. “We are such old cronies! And surely time is ever a
thing of some value. Can you _not_ see it? Tell, tell.”
“I am aware that your time is valuable——”
“Yes, of course: tell.”
“But——”
“No, tell.”
“But are there to be no preliminaries? No pourparlers? You have handed
me a cheque, monsieur—I know not for what amount, since positively I
decline to inspect it——”
“Twenty thousand, that being the first of several, the others to be
written out as you proceed in amounts proportioned to the worth of your
words.”
“The figures will be big in that event!”
“They shall be; you know that I am immense in generosity.”
“But it is a bribe!—if you consider it. I was never, however, to be
bribed! You forget, monsieur, that I bear a name which I never have,
nor ever shall, stain by any real meanness; nor, if I have accepted
money of you in the past——”
“It was not a bribe, it was a gratuity; a meanness, but not a ‘real’
meanness, because of your secret ardour for my person and service. I
know it all, nor should ever dream of insulting that name you bear with
a ‘real’ bribe: tell.”
“Well, provided we do thoroughly understand each other’s tone, monsieur
...” the duke now said, sitting down anew with a twitching up of
his trousers’ knees, “though in the present instance I absolutely
do not feel that I could touch your cheque with honour, since,
really, if you consider it, monsieur, it is a betrayal of comrades,
this, in which I am engaged—you cannot get rid of the fact by any
sophistry!—it—is—a—betrayal; nothing less!”
“Not a betrayal, only an exposure,” said Lepsius drearily, “nor need
you actually touch the cheque,” and picking it up, he put it into the
peer’s pocket.
“Well, say an ‘exposure,’ since everything, after all, depends on
the tone of an act, and everything is right that is done by the
right-minded.... At any rate, let me tell you, monsieur, that you stand
in a situation of even the extremist danger!”
“I know; and Isabeau Thiéry is in it.”
“Why, yes.”
“Tell—deeply?”
“Deeply enough, although not whole-heartedly, I know. Moreover, he
hasn’t a sou, so can at any moment be opened to you by the golden key.”
“And Dr. Lepsius?”
“He also ... I am in the dark, by the way, as to whether the doctor is
a relative of yours, although the question is being asked——”
“No relative. But that man is actually in the inside of the inner plot
to kidnap and imprison me? Yes?”
“Why, yes. He has attended each of the recent councils in the house of
Monseigneur Piscari, has even made suggestions as to the means of your
capture.”
The left cheek of Lepsius went ashen a second or two, and all at once
he was up to fly with an eye on fire to a speaking-tube some distance
off, through which, when he had whistled, he murmured low, “33, you?”
The answer was, “Yes.”
“Telephone to P.,” said Lepsius, “asking if all is ready on his side,
in which case let him now wire to B13 to burn within an hour.” At the
same time, without looking round, he cried out to the duke, “You see
the amount is as I stated it, Monsieur le Duc!” for the duke was taking
the chance to scrutinise his cheque narrowly in the twilight.
“I will see to it,” was the answer of the speaking-tube to Lepsius, who
then sped back to the duke, saying, “Two minutes more, monsieur; tell
details.”
The old fop laid one forefinger on the other, and with much animation
of manner gave the details. Lepsius was to be got to Château Egmond,
a league from St. Brieuc, by means of an accumulation of inducements,
the chief being that Schuré, the engineer, without speaking with whom
it was assumed that Lepsius could not exist a week, would be present:
for Schuré, though not of the conspiracy—at all events not formally,
so far—had, however, promised to be of the house-party for two or
three days; and it was proposed that Schuré should fall more or less
indisposed while there through unwholesomeness in his wine for, at
any rate, eight or nine days, until Lepsius should be impelled to hie
to his bedside. Then Lepsius was to be shut up in the château some
days, until he could be taken to the bastille on the Ile de Bas, named
Château Labîme, which, too, the League had got on lease; and it was
moreover hoped to reduce Lepsius to penury by seizing a minute key
which Lepsius was believed to carry continually on his body.
Lepsius threw a new cheque when this had been said, saying, “Their
names,” on which the duke, taking a leaf of paper out of his pocket,
and speaking now eagerly with a mean secrecy of voice, galloped out
a string of names, “Thiéry you know, Dr. Lepsius you know, and, of
course, Sauriau, de Courcy, Leflô, Piscari, General-of-Brigade Rabot,
Grand-Almoner Persigny; then there is Maspéro and Gustave Ghéon;
the big bresseur d’affaires Brückner, Aly of gas, and Huguette of
electricity; Captain Pertius; Pichot of Justice and Public Worship;
Léonce Pettit; Director of Fine Arts Rémy-Rehaut; and Maître Sorel—with
some provincials.”
“Their names,” said Lepsius, smiling a little, toying under his vest
with that half a coin whose sister-half he had sent to Miss Eve Vickery
two years previously.
“The provincials,” said the duke, “are obscure rich persons, not worth
your resentment, monsieur; there is a Monsieur Louis Jammes of Lyons,
a chocolate-maker, then a Monsieur Flammarion of Tours, a Monsieur
Brisson of Rouen—who, by the way, is booked to go to the conference at
Château Egmond.”
“I do not know these people,” remarked Lepsius with no little alertness
of thought in his eyes which stirred fleetly from side to side like
sheet-lightning. He then asked if the provincials had attended the
Paris conferences, to which the other replied that they had not, being
but “associates” by correspondence with Sauriau, their secretary.
Lepsius stamped yet a cheque, saying, “Make it your work to-morrow,
Monsieur le Duc, to discover whether this Monsieur Brisson of Rouen,
who is to go to the Egmond conference, is known by sight to any of
the Paris conspirators, and you become affluent for six months, as
already you are for three,” in saying which he threw the new cheque to
the duke, and dashed away to peer steadily at the picture of a château
colouring itself as by miracle in one of the electric machines. The
duke’s arm had half started out for a hand-shake of farewell, but drew
back without it; and now, after waiting some time, at last with a
raising of the shoulders in a shrug which lingered long, he first with
a grimace murmured to the four winds, “Is the interview, then, at an
end?” and now, doing a very exquisite bow to Lepsius’ back, withdrew
with bows.
As he departed, Lepsius threw half a look at one of four clocks, their
staring faces of a largeness so exaggerated that they concealed, each
of them, four of the columns’ mass, and afflicted the air with the
click of their tick-tack; and with one tap of impatience on a chair he
went muttering, “Come, Sauriau.”
Some seconds afterwards the name of the Abbé Sauriau was called.
“Admit him!” called Lepsius in reply, at the same time darting behind a
screen, whence in scarce more than forty seconds he came out “dressed”
in clothes made for quickness, without any buttons about them, and a
second before the abbé came in had caught up, and was casting his eye
over, a page of a book of the abbé’s just published.
“Monsieur l’Abbé Sauriau,” he murmured, shaking hands, “I was at this
moment deep in _Hellenic Idylls_.... But what are you, then, Monsieur
l’Abbé Sauriau. A re-incarnation of Plato? For surely, only a Greek
could so utterly know the soul of Greece!”
Monsieur l’Abbé Sauriau had shy eyelids. “I am glad.... Ah! you have
seen _Hellenic Idylls_.”
“Seen and devoured ... and what charm! How airy! What daintiness of
manner! Oh, truly, those gross fingers of the Abbé Sauriau know how to
engrave with a fairy’s grace.”
“Why, this is well,” said the abbé; “have you, by chance—finished the
book?”
“Not quite, yet, monsieur: I am now at the myth of Leda.”
“It is the end that is the best,” breathed the abbé with downbent lids.
“Let us sit here, monsieur, and speak about it,” and now he led to
the couch a spirit so bludgeoned and kidnapped by the scoop of this
typhoon of flattery, that Lepsius might possibly then and there have
made the abbé his slave for ever. This, may be, was actually his aim:
for the Abbé Sauriau, owing to his amiable personality, his learning,
and his well-deserved celebrity through the whole world of letters,
was an individual of no slight influence in the under-currents of the
life of the Paris of his time, both within and without the sound of
the Palais-Bourbon bell; and not only was his brother, Louis Sauriau,
a general-of-division, but the engineer Schuré himself was believed to
be deeply under the influence of the abbé’s fascination. This being
so, Lepsius, in his gross way, continued with a smile of amusement to
eulogise to the skies the volume of which he had perused only one page,
nor found any praise too gross for the poet to gulp down, while the
poet eyed his right red sock which continually shook up, and struck the
crossed leg with his glove. Unfortunately, Lepsius never knew more than
forty-nine of the fifty parts of man, and as for man’s vanity, he was
himself so exempt from any iota of it—his tone being that of a broker,
wholly pre-occupied with the facts of things—that he little recognised
to what a degree vanity, in its government of the soul, may famish
such grosser passions as avarice. Hence, not content with praising the
abbé’s book, he went on to mention his intention of buying an immense
number of copies, and at once was aware of change in the abbé’s air,
for at once the abbé was offended, reflecting within himself, “It is a
bribe; and since he has a desire to bribe, _perhaps_ what he has said
as to the worth of the ‘Idylls’ is just humbug with a purpose?” and his
bush began to burn.
Lepsius, who did not much care, leapt up just then to answer the
telephone, and before he came back to the abbé peered into the machine
in which a château was slowly painting its shape on a pane of paper:
upon which his visitor called to him, “What a fuss of mechanism you
have squalling in this hall!”
“Come, I’ll let you see them,” said Lepsius in a humour of devilry, to
humiliate the spirit that he had lately praised; and he led the priest
from little machine to little machine, teaching him something of the
meaning of each—things of steel acting in the manner of rational and
ingenious creatures—into which those bushy eyes of the Abbé Sauriau
peered near-sightedly, and though he uttered hardly a word, from
time to time a “humph!” would start from him. When, however, they
came to the one where the château was coming out in colours, Lepsius
nonchalantly said, “This one you could not comprehend, however much I
explained it,” and dropped a handkerchief on it.
In this manner, half by carelessness, half in malice, he made for
himself many enemies, by contempt; and in the abbé’s eyes came a flame.
“However, to come to details, monsieur,” he said as he sat down
anew.... “I have bound myself to sound you in advance on behalf of
Monseigneur Piscari, who met me last night in the Salle des Pas Perdus,
as to whether you would be likely to feel inclined to make one of a
party, mainly political, to meet in the country in a fortnight’s time.”
Lepsius span round to the abbé, saying, “I wonder?... Whereabouts?”
“The name is Château Egmond——”
“I didn’t know that the prelate had a palace of that name.”
“He has lately taken it on a——”
“Where is it?”
“In Brittany, not twenty leagues from your own Palace Serapis, and a
league from——”
“Ah, too far. Time, Monsieur l’Abbé,” and off Lepsius dashed anew to
the machine of the château-picture, snatched the handkerchief from
it, peered, and now beheld midget people rushing about it, and the
château at four places wrapt in flames; upon which he flew back to
the abbé, who was observing, “Well, certainly, it is a long way off,
but then everywhere is near to Dædalus; moreover, everybody will be
there—Schuré, Montijo—many charming dames——”
“Ah! Who, for instance?”
“Madame Schuré for one,” replied the abbé with a flash of the eye.
“Unfortunately, monsieur,” remarked Lepsius very rashly, “I can’t be
expected to make love to a _rat d’opéra_ like Fanny Schuré when it is
well known that I am already in love, and with a sovereign lady. If,
now, you had informed me that the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard and her
charming relatives would be there, that to a great extent would have
abolished the distance.”
The abbé sat up at this, staring like one who is struck by a new
idea, then muttered with some spite, “I was wondering if that could
be managed, just to please you. It seems, however, to be out of the
question, since one of those relatives of the countess is to be married
on the 5th to Monsieur de Courcy at Grönland, in the centre.”
“And Monsieur de Courcy has not asked me to be a guest!” crowed Lepsius
with gross sarcasm, adding, “Forgive me—forty seconds,” and anew he
flew to the machine of the château-picture, a “living” picture, in
which could be seen the leaping of flames that now surrounded all the
place, and crowds rushing all about, and fire-engines spouting out
waters in the night, all such mites as are the images which walk tiny
in the eye of an ox. Lepsius gazed at it through a magnifying-glass,
and when in a group of eight moving down a terrace in disarray from the
house of flame he could make out the faces and shapes of the Misses
Vickery, back he rushed to the abbé, saying, “That, then, must be my
answer, Monsieur l’Abbé, to Monseigneur Piscari, with my thanks; nor
will anything earthly alter my decision—unless, perhaps, it be some
temptation in the shape of the eternal feminine.... You see, Monsieur
l’Abbé, I become dissipated in mind like the rest, and oh, believe me,
it is a relaxing thing to live among men.... What’s the time?”
The abbé stood smartly up at the hint, and, as always after being
with Lepsius, hobbled away brisker than he came, braced in spirit and
pricked to be a man of the same height and stride as that model that
he yet disliked; and with that baggy skin of his brow twitching with
cogitation, gazing at the ground, he went quick of gait, galvanic-young
again, making sounds with his great stick, down to a carriage, where
he gave an address in the Rue Jean Gougeon.
It was the home of the Count de Courcy. The count, however, was out,
but might be found, the abbé was told, at the Ministère, or else at a
house in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré.
To the Ministère drove the abbé; no de Courcy was there; so thence
he drove to the Faubourg, where the Comte de Courcy rose from dinner
to go to him at the head of a stair, and there the abbé said, with
a scantness of breath, “I have been chasing you—am fresh from the
individual whom—that is, from the young Lepsius, and shall be surprised
from his mood at present if anything which we can devise will get him
to step into the Egmond trap.... Would you believe? he is love-struck
with _Hellenic Idylls_; it appears, my friend, that the young man
dreams of it at night!”
“_C’est vrai?_” said Monsieur de Courcy (i.e., “By Jove,” touched with
irony).
“Yes, you will find him turning author before long in order to vie with
us others! But, believe me, monsieur, he is destined to discover that
it needs a deeper brain to create a true and poetical book than to
imagine machines of steel.”
“As Phœbus beats Hephæstus; but—you see—I am being awaited——”
“Yes, forgive me—only to tell you that it will be most difficult, as
I can already see, to get him to go to Egmond, unless—may I express
myself? it is delicate....”
“I even pray you to do so.”
“Unless Madame de Pichegru-Picard and her—nieces are of the party, in
which event he will agree——”
The Comte de Courcy’s neck stiffened. “My friend, the suggestion would
be ingenious, if it were not impossible.”
“I see that,” breathed the Abbé Sauriau, “especially its ingeniousness.”
“To me its impossibility is no less obvious, monsieur,” said Monsieur
de Courcy.
But now steps were mounting the stair, and a man bearing a document
and a telegram came up to give them to the count, who, having read the
telegram, grew pale, and every second paler, and presently observed to
the abbé, “My God! Grönland house burned to the ground!”
“Burned!” exclaimed the abbé; “why, accept my sym—— But where, then,
monsieur, will your wedding take place?”
“It may now _have_ to be at Egmond,” the count said slowly, with
meditation dwelling in his underlook.
“Why, then, this may be a Providence in view of the individual whom we
have in our mind!” cried out the Abbé Sauriau.
“We will see how Heaven works it,” the count observed, now suddenly
holding out his hand to bid _bon soir_.
CHAPTER XIII.
AT EGMOND.
Within ten days everything was settled: the Comtesse de
Pichegru-Picard, burnt out of Château Grönland, came to an arrangement
with Monseigneur Piscari (who had already got from her the lease of
Egmond in Brittany on behalf of the League), to go down there for the
wedding of Miss Eve without interfering with the prelate’s house-party;
and Lepsius, for his part, on hearing now that Miss Eve would be at
Egmond, agreed to go down, too, to meet the other political intriguers.
By the last day of June all the party were there, except a Monsieur
Brisson of Rouen, and Lepsius, who had arranged to come on the 2nd of
July for two days, the date of the wedding remaining fixed for the 5th
of July.
As for this Monsieur Brisson, who lived not far from Brittany, why he
did not appear was not very clear, for though he had been written to by
Monseigneur Piscari, he had sent no reply.
However, about an hour after dinner on the 1st of July, Monsieur
Brisson was announced just as a council which met to consider last
details as to Lepsius had sat round a table in a chamber in a tower.
The door was already locked when the card of Monsieur Brisson was
brought, who, on being admitted, was seen to be the embodiment of the
_bourgeois_ in glasses, one of his legs bowed and booted with a sole
inches deep, on which he steeply limped. As he was unknown by sight to
the others, he had to produce some of his notes from the League before
being given leave to assume his seat; and the conference then began
in a gloaming still unlighted by any lamp, present being Monsieur de
Courcy, the Abbé Sauriau, Monsieur Leflô, the Duc de Rey-Drouilhet; the
bent back of Dr. Lepsius sat sideways to the table, dumb; Monseigneur
Piscari, a lank and stark inquisitor, presided; Isabeau Thiéry was
absent; but there were some ten more, men of wit or weight.
The difficulty was to get Lepsius into Egmond without scandal: for
if he once came in as a guest, and was seen, his disappearance would
naturally excite comment and unrest; but after much discussion one
Captain Pertius, a spark of the _beau sabreur_ type, who had five
_pioupious_ (privates) at command in the château, proposed that as
Lepsius came, his capture should take place outside a summer-house in a
south avenue, and Lepsius there kept till everybody was abed; and this
was carried.
But now Monsieur Brisson of Rouen, with a rasping throat of the
_nouveau riche_, at last gave a croak, saying, “It will be a great risk
to keep him idling there for hours in that summer-house.”
And now, too, for the first time, Dr. Lepsius breathed a weary word, “I
agree.”
However, their votes were overborne on the authority of Pertius, who,
having thoroughly examined the summer-house, had found it strong and
sound.
Then, till it was almost dark, many details were discussed, many
proposals put to the vote, everybody knew what his own duty was to be,
and the council was now about to be broken up when anew the throat of
Monsieur Brisson of Rouen was croaking, “But I feel uneasy.... _Who_
chose the chamber in which Lepsius is to be kept?”
“It was Captain Pertius,” said Monseigneur Piscari.
“And you have all inspected it?” asked Monsieur Brisson.
“Most of us,” remarked Monsieur de Courcy; “it is a good, good place,
monsieur.”
“It may be good,” said Monsieur Brisson, “but is it the best? Oh,
believe me, messieurs, in everything there is a bad, a good, a better,
and a best, the best ever more grievous than the rest, but so greatly
better than the better.”
“True,” murmured the Abbé Sauriau: “_is_ it the best?”
“I propose that we search the château in a body first,” suggested
Monsieur Brisson.
“I agree,” murmured Dr. Lepsius, and after some talk this was done.
Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet took with alacrity a blue candle from
a candelabrum of ormolu, and with it led the procession, first up the
tower’s stair to the chamber prepared for the prisoner’s sojourn, and
then down and through almost the whole building, down to the vaults, up
other towers, through crowds of halls and corridors, now with sounding
footsteps, now with muffled, everyone chattering with some other in
sets nonchalantly, Monsieur de Courcy and Monseigneur with their heads
together before, and, behind, the Abbé Sauriau with the good bonhomme
Brisson, whose right side, as along he stumped, stooped at every step
of his right bow-leg. He was giving the abbé a reason why he must
needs leave Egmond that very evening, having come merely to attend the
committee-meeting, when for the twentieth time he stopped to stare at a
painting; and since he had already explained that he was then buying,
he was left to pursue his hobby by the abbé, who did not observe that
behind each of the pictures that Monsieur Brisson peered at he left a
certain little object resembling a night-light; and behind one picture
he left a vial and his handkerchief.
After all, it was found that the tower-chamber which Captain Pertius
had chosen was the most eligible; and, everything at last arranged, the
committee separated to come among the ladies.
At this hour, with the moon in the clouds, and groups of ladies and
their gallants moving round the grounds, and sounds of music in the
_salons_ and galleries, Egmond looked a stately and picturesque place.
The Misses Vickery were strolling with Monsieur de Courcy along the
brink of an oblong of water that stretched far-slumbering in boscage
from the bottom of the terraces to a mosque of marble at its far end,
when there came up to them Dr. Lepsius to take part in their walk; but
presently a messenger from Monseigneur Piscari came to call Monsieur de
Courcy, who with his lips just touched a finger-tip of his future-one
with a great parade of grace, and went away; soon after which Miss
Ruth, too, was called by another party of promenaders—a Schuré group,
Fanny Schuré burnished in coloured fires like mother-of-pearl, with
whom Miss Ruth stopped to gossip, the innocent with the guilty, Dr.
Lepsius and Miss Eve meantime going on to the mosque.
And there, sitting alone in a casement, they two spoke some time in low
tones, while more and more the moon imbued the night with the mood of
her beauty and her quietude, and communed sleepily the lily-leaves of
the pool. It was when they were getting up to go away that Dr. Lepsius
said, “But I mustn’t trouble a bride with an old man’s sorrows—in three
days’ time you will be a bride, and I rejoice in your choice, which I
think a wise one.”
Miss Eve had risen, seeming in her white evening-dress, with whitest
cheeks, even weird in that sheen, and she replied with a chuckle, “It
was prophesied me that I should not be a bride for some time to come!”
“By my son?... Well, he has no little might in this lower world,” the
old man murmured, “but have no fear, he is by no means omnipotent, and,
as I have hinted, he is at this moment in extreme peril for his own
skin.”
Sharply at this, with a haughty heave-up of her chin, Miss Eve asked,
“Who could touch him?”
“Ah! it is dubious,” the old man said musingly, bending over his oak
stick; “still—I believe—by many eyes, and by many hands, and by the
agreement of many wits and wills of men and God, it shall be achieved!”
and now he struck the stick sharply upon the _perron_ of steps down
which they were now passing to the path, Miss Eve laughing a little
with a meaning that was hardly understood, saying, “And his father, if
I am rightly informed, is with his enemies?”
“That is so,” said Dr. Lepsius with an inclination of his head, whereat
she stopped walking to face him, asking, “With your eyes quite open,
Dr. Lepsius?”
“Well, I hope so,” the doctor answered.
“You have thought, then, of what will certainly happen, if—after—I am
married on Friday?”
Dr. Lepsius glanced up at her, having noted her tones go shaky, and on
beholding her face bony with agitation, said with some astonishment,
“No, what will happen?”
“Your son will _kill_ himself.”
And while the doctor with an eye of scare stared at her, she with a
certain roistering and hilarity added, “And since royalty should have
servants rejoicing to join in its voyages, _two_ you may see, if not
more, go to attend on his ghost.”
“Two—I do not quite——” the doctor stammered.
“I meant my poor father for one,” she sighed, continuing to walk.
But since her “kill himself” the doctor had but absently heard what was
said, and “kill himself!” he cried suddenly, crimson with anger, “let
him! let him! I will go to his funeral! For I’d sooner follow him to
the tomb——”
“Now, Dr. Lepsius, a father ought not to be down on a son,” Miss Eve
said, “though I know that he has been beastly to you.”
At this tears gushed to the old man’s eyes. “Oh, it isn’t that, dear
Eve—it isn’t the bitter ingratitude, the bruise, the gash in here: but
how shall I not be against him in what he undoubtedly aims to bring
about, when the mouth of every gash which he gives our race will shout
out in rage against me? You see, do you not——?”
But now the old man, touched on the shoulder, looked about, and saw
Monsieur Leflô, who had come down an _allée_ in the leafage as a
messenger of the Count de Courcy, seeking the doctor; so the doctor
went off with Monsieur Leflô, while Miss Eve, spying Miss Ruth in a
group ahead, moved to go to her; but suddenly became aware of a stump,
stump, of one limping in an _allée_, and in some seconds was accosted
with a murmur of the word, “Mademoiselle.”
It was Monsieur Brisson of Rouen.
And when Miss Eve looked at him without seeming to know him, he, though
undoubtedly agitated, said with a coarse chuckle that she and he had
been shoulder to shoulder at the Quai d’Orsay that evening when a
particular individual had dared to take a liberty with her lips: at
which thing Miss Eve stood like a queen who stands astonished at so
much insolence under the sun, then silently went on her way.
But this Monsieur Brisson was not one who could be banished with a
chin; he followed to breathe near Miss Eve’s ear, “I wish to speak to
you of him, he may be here to-morrow, and I have a message....”
“_Here?_”
“Let us go down that _allée_.”
She hesitated, and he glanced like lightning at his watch. “Only three
minutes to be with you—come.”
Now she walked with him into the dark of the _allée_, looking down at
the ground, like one magnetised, drawn with a cord.
“For what reason will he be here?” she breathed.
“On business.”
“You are to inform your master, monsieur,” she then said in a haughty
manner, “if Monsieur Lepsius happens to be your master, that I know him
to be in much danger, so that he should have a care.”
“Oh, trust in him!” said Monsieur Brisson imploringly, stumping along
by her side with dippings of his right shoulder; “do you imagine that,
loving you, he can miscarry? He feels that the breath of his love is
vibrant enough by itself to heave mountains out of their beds, and bear
them as bubbles to the sea. Nor is his danger so much; it will be
nothing, if you will consent to fly with me this instant.”
“This instant?” she whispered furtively: “to fly? Away? With you?...
But what, then, am I? A beast, with a beast’s soul? Evil to the core?
Reckless, furious, moon-struck? Is there no Christ for me on high, I
wonder? No right? No wrong?”
“If you came,” said her companion with some bitterness, though touched
by her trouble, “it would save much time; and you would come, if
hypocrisy was not your breath and bread,” upon which she rushed into an
irritation not to be restrained, crying, “That is monstrously untrue
and unkind! I mean well!”
“Well,” he said, “I did not expect you to come with me, for I know you.
But you have to show me the windows of your bed-chamber.”
Now she stopped walking, standing tall, gaunt, her heart galloping up
in her gorge, asking, “Why my windows?”
“Oh, nothing: just show,” he muttered; and when she had stared a little
while at him, she paced on in silence.
Presently she went down another _allée_ which led them to the terraces
at the front and south of the house, and hence went on to the brink
of a lake which laved with its waters a platform of marble at the
château-back. Not a soul was thereabouts, no sound, only the spirit of
the moon brooding upon the face of the lake and down the solitude of
avenues of yews; and here immediately Monsieur Brisson stooped to whip
off that thick-soled boot of his, whipped off his frock-coat, wrapped
his two boots, with his top-hat, his spectacles, and his waist-coat in
the coat, and cast all into the water, where they sank; in doing which
very hurriedly, he asked, “Well, which are your windows?”
She, with her back toward the house and toward him, her brow bent
downward, replied to the ground in a proud guttural that trembled, “I
am sure I do not know why such a question should be asked of me.... My
windows happen to be those two on the first floor immediately over the
balcony-end near by the statue—since it seems that the knowledge is
desired.”
The plash of the coat with its weight sounded now in the lake, and
“Monsieur Brisson,” that bow of his right leg quite gone, stood now
limber on his bare feet, his elbow suddenly about Miss Eve’s waist:
whereat she, feeling his lips stealing near her face, went fearfully
pale; nearer, and she shivered with sickness; nearer, and she sucked in
her breath as at luscious juice and shooting pangs, sighed “By heaven,”
and had his lips.
He put her to lie on a bench of marble by the waterside, whence she
through her half-shut eyelids watched him run away with a deer’s ease
up an avenue of the park, and disappear in darkness.
Some way down that avenue was a summer-house in a bower, and there the
runner stopped his career some seconds to conceal beneath the seat
some sheets of paper, a piece of pencil, and two tiny tools of steel
like keys, then shot on. And it was there that at 6 p.m. the next day,
as Lepsius was driving from St. Brieuc station to the château in a
carriage of Monseigneur Piscari, the carriage stopped, and was at once
surrounded by a crowd of _pioupious_ and others. When he demanded of
them what was the matter, they answered that he was a captive, and
Captain Pertius, who was with them, then proceeded, with a perfectly
ashen visage and hands which shivered like leaves, to search each nook
of Lepsius’ costume, even his shoes, searching especially for a certain
little key, which, however, was not to be found. Lepsius’ trunk was
sent on to the house, and everything taken from him. “Oh, let one have
his watch,” he protested, but without effect. However, by an act one
might say infinite in deftness, he contrived as he was being hustled
down out of the carriage to snatch behind him the watch of Shan Healy
who attended him, and was not seen. He was then imprisoned in the
summer-house with a sentry of some ten mounted upon him; and in there,
having taken the paper and pencil from their place of concealment
beneath the seat, he threw himself, face down, on the seat, and in a
brown light began to draw diagrams.
On the day commencing to dim, he took out his collar-stud, touched it,
and it shed round his sheets an electric sheen.
Soon after two in the morning he was removed to the room fitted out for
him in the tower; the same hour the members of the League being met in
council to congratulate each other and resolve on the next measures.
But early the next day their joys suffered much alloy through the
turning up at the château of a certain Monsieur Brisson of Rouen, who
had no resemblance to that first Monsieur Brisson of the conference!
this new Brisson having the story to tell that, on going to a bogus
business interview in Rouen, he had been imprisoned in a room by a gang
of men, his papers grabbed, and he made to write a letter to his family
saying that he was safe, and in Amiens on affairs. Only after four and
forty hours had he been set free. So now the problem arose—_who_ could
have been that Brisson-of-the-limp who had attended the conference?
Lepsius, however, was there in the tower, safe enough, which was
everything.... It was an eight-cornered chamber where he was, arranged
with some little luxury, and large; but he suffered, being unaccustomed
to be between walls, and here was but one window, with bars in it,
while, as to the lush carpet, the eye of his consciousness was at every
moment open to the microbic hordes that must be at barracks within it,
nor could he bathe with ease, he who bathed frequently each day, nor
was the food such as was usual with him, being much too luscious.
This was first served to him by a person who had a beard and appeared
to be a man, but was not so loosely costumed but that certain curves
of the womanly could be observed in him—or her. On seeing her when she
bore in his breakfast, Lepsius moaned, and flew to the other extremity
of the chamber, where he held a chair-back, ready if she attacked; but
when she had put down the breakfast without glancing at him, and had
gone, his brow reddened, and having begged one of four guards for pen
and ink, he wrote to Monseigneur Piscari, asking whether monseigneur
was privy to the fact that one Jeanne Auvache, a convict with a mania,
who had been aided by his, Lepsius’, enemies, to evade prison, had been
sent to attend upon him. He received no answer to this, but the woman
ceased to appear at meals.
It was a superb day—the third of July—and by springing up to his little
window-ledge, and hanging on, as he twice did, he could see groups of
elegant folk moving remotely over the terraces or gossiping in retreats
of greenery, appearing pigmy far down below all that half-globe of sky
and tabernacle-hall of cloud, like spirits idling in paradise; and
once he was able to make out the face of Mr. Vickery, and once knew
Miss Ruth, but of that form that his eyes sought saw no sign.
Most of the day he spent on his face on his table over plans of
buildings and machines, which he concealed when the meals came in
at one o’clock and at seven in the evening—for it was not suspected
that he had any pencil and paper; and when the meals—none of which he
touched—had been cleared away, he bathed at a basin of delf ware that
stood on a tripod of iron under the window. This window looked toward
the west, though the tower itself formed the south-east corner of
the château, which looked eastward. So as the afternoon’s heat waxed
fierce in the room, he drew down his blind of dimity, and now continued
his labour cooler in a cave of shade which the blind’s maroon colour
imbrued with a blush of ruby; but when the sun had well declined, he
anew drew up the blind, sprang up to the window, and, like a monkey
peering keenly into something never previously seen among its trees,
clung on long to peer into the scene of the sunset—a sight rather high
and tragic really for the heart of a man, the sun going down all among
bars of crimson, the brow of God drooped, disgloried, His arms far
outcast in gory crucifixion. Then the door opened and the meal of the
evening came in, to be immediately taken away untasted; and now with
feet of impatience, frowning, the prisoner paced about the chamber. No
light was brought him when it became dark, for his jailers, having an
apprehension that he might turn objects to unusual uses, took care that
as few objects as might be should be in the chamber, not even a knife
having been taken him with the meals. But by the aid of an electric
stud, he spent some time in prying into the make of the lock of the
door, though he had already looked into it two nights before, after the
conference, in his rôle of “Monsieur Brisson”: which done, near eight
o’clock, shunning the bed with its bed-clothes, he chose a part of the
floor where no carpet was, cast a look at Shan Healy’s watch, and went
to sleep there.
He knew (having been at the council), that at the hour of two he was to
be roused to go on board a brig, bound for the bastille on the Ile de
Bas; so he had commanded Shan Healy to conceal himself in the château
and come to the prison-door exactly at 1.50, so as to help Lepsius to
carry a load which Lepsius conceived that he would have need to carry.
Ten minutes, then, before that 1.50, at a moment when preparations were
being made in the château below to take him to the ship, Lepsius awoke
to act. He was still at the lock of the door with the two little tools
that he had hidden in the summer-house before his capture, when howls
of “Help! help!” broke out without the door, and he was made aware that
Shan Healy must be engaged in a struggle with the greenhorn _pioupiou_
on guard out there; but the _pioupiou’s_ howls were at once drowned in
the sound of a disturbance resembling the bursting of some tremendous
drum somewhere, which just then made the château to tremble through its
breadth and length; and before that roaring was well over, Shan, who
had felled the _pioupiou_ with the _pioupiou’s_ lantern, broke blithely
with the lantern-light into the room, the lock of whose door had at
that moment opened to the key of Lepsius.
But the poor fellow’s blitheness had no long life. He did not enter the
chamber alone—at least, scarcely less closely than a shadow follows
did the feet of a female follow him in. No word had yet been uttered
between Shan Healy and Lepsius, and Lepsius was just going to call
out “Come!” (in a din now as dreadful as all the guns of Armageddon
mouthing, the house racking its frame to fragments, the ground quaking)
when he changed his “Come” into a shout of “Out with the light!” at
the same moment bolting to the other side of the chamber. But either
Healy did not hear, or stood in a condition of mind too flurried for
sprightly action (for he, too, had spied the woman as she had slammed
the door after her); at all events, nothing was done as to the light,
and Lepsius, as he pelted, moaned, the ogress after him, staring,
her hair cut close, ugly, ghostly, grim as the very grave. “Shoot!”
shrieked the fugitive to Healy, who, too, was in hot pursuit; but, even
assuming that Healy was able to hear in the blare of that tumult, he
must have perceived that he lacked the time to fire—unless, indeed, he
was quite wondrously quick—because at that moment the woman’s arm was
drawn back to throw her liquid; he saw it; did not see that by this
time Lepsius was safe, having a chair with which to hide his face; and
as the fluid was starting from the vial, wildly Healy flew between,
receiving the bath of vitriol all over his right cheek and throat.
He could not help shrieking...!
“Idiot!” hissed Lepsius, who, as he now darted away, caught a weapon
out of Shan’s pocket, sent with one glance backward and a nervous
gurgle of chuckling a bullet into the woman’s bosom, which, however,
chanced not to end her, and was out and away.
Right through the howling hell of the house from east to west he had
now to hie: and fleet were his feet and alight his eye. Twice only he
stopped a moment, once when, in pelting up a stair, he met flying down
in a nightgown a girl whom with his lowered head he felled by butting
her, knowing that if she descended she would be butchered; and a second
time he stopped in a corridor to take the vial and handkerchief which
as “Monsieur Brisson” he had placed there behind a painting. No want
of light anywhere: for at various places the building was already in
flames, which flames, serving as flambeaux, reddened the chambers
where no flame burned; but as he spurted onward with his vial, the
flooring violently sprang beneath his feet, and he was thrown against
a wall, where he remained rather aghast some moments, until smoke in
his throat caused him to cough, and anew he flew, though at one point
forced to win his way with toil and patience over floorless joists.
And afresh every forty seconds or so all the house started at a sound
which opened its mouth to appal the heart and astound the darkness
with the message of its solemnity, after each of which deep-mouthed
sounds count one second’s pause and waiting, and now came downfalls
crackling, like the brittle outbreaks of arrays of rifles prattling:
for the bombs resembling night-lights that “Monsieur Brisson” had left
behind statues, etc., had been timed to fuse, not in a mass, but one
by one; and though he had so placed them in the below-stairs as not
much to imperil the lives of the château slumberers, they were many,
and were meant by him thoroughly to wreck the structure wherein men in
their vanity had ventured to hem him. Anon he was aware of fugitives,
single or in groups, staring, conscious of sin and of doomsday come:
the Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, all toothless now, his nightshirt aflaunt,
flying down a curving stair, calling out upon the rocks and hills to
cover him; then the stout Abbé Sauriau clambering over a mound of
débris, his trousers unbraced; then through the fumes that rolled all
round a courtyard Miss Ruth Vickery in a dressing-gown on a gallery,
dragging her father faster than he could go, Monsieur de Courcy, too,
with them, Lepsius himself then flying along a lower gallery on the
opposite side of the court; and as they were going west—to see to Miss
Eve, he guessed—and were well ahead of him, never did his feet so
fleetly speed. The delay of some seconds occasioned by the invasion
of his chamber by Jeanne Auvache had disturbed the course of events
as forecasted by him, and he had hardly burst into his darling’s
apartments and turned the outer key, when her father’s poundings were
sounding at the panels without.
Erect on her bare soles in an alcove, robed in a bedroom-robe of lace,
a stone stone-still, her hair a rope plaited to a bow of ribbon at her
knees, Miss Eve stood, waiting, aware of his tumults, but beauteously
dead, as one who has interviewed the stare of Medusa; and all in a
tick, like a cat fawning, Lepsius was cast at her feet, kissing them,
pleading, “Dear, will you come with me?”
Her friends were pressingly clamouring at the entrance; they screamed,
“_Eve!_”
She took no notice of them, if she heard; as to Lepsius, she hurled up
her right hand to strike him dead, crying, “You brute!”
“Oh, do—for us two—beloved——”
“I bitterly hate and abhor the pair of us!”
“But you will get us both killed——”
“Thank God!”
Now he started up, an arm about her. “I have to make you faint,” his
handkerchief at her face; and like fate she took it, did not fight, or
very slightly, resigned herself, smiled, sighed, closed her eyes ...
and in some moments, by means of a sheet, he had reached the platform
of marble thirty feet beneath, heard through the turmoil in his rear
the noise of guns booming before—a signal from his yacht in the
bay—leapt the balusters with his burden into the lake waters, waded,
swam a bit, obliquely north-westward, reached the lake’s bank, and
there among reeds and bulrushes sat down to breathe and rest, her brow
on his breast.
Southward, a smoke that soared to the clouds was being poured
out steadily from the château, which ever throed inwardly with
loud-bursting noises and sounds of rumbling like poisoned bowels and
Etna boiling; and that plume of fume-and-fire slanted continually from
point to point of the compass, for a wind boisterously blew, drizzle
sprayed the face, and the moon, while suffusing the night wildly with
the whiteness of her light, was herself quite hidden away out of sight
in cloud.
Lepsius was soon up and gone again with his load, knowing that pursuit
would not be slow: but it was a great labour; the country there is
rugged; Miss Eve, drugged, could not, or would not, keep on her feet;
Healy, with whose help the load would have been easy, moaned in his
agonies somewhere; and the bay lay nearly a league away.
However, half-way to the shore he found waiting in a gorge where the
gloom was gross under crags the Hindoo Nundcumar, together with four
of his mariners, their eyes raised to the inflamed sky; nor was it
long before a little half-harbour snoring in sleep between the arms
of beetling crags, a brig’s green and crimson beams, a steam-yacht’s
three beams, lay before them, and near a little pier of stone the men
of two boats who lay on their oars for him, one a boat of his foes,
one his own; and flushing the vault of heaven, even here, a false dawn
flung far abroad from the château, and over the shore the breakers
making their snoring, Miss Eve’s feet bleeding, and streamlets of
drizzle-spray in haste on her face.
They lodged her, still unconscious (as it seemed), among cushions,
and plied to the ship, which, lying with steam at a moment’s notice,
immediately steamed away, turning toward the west: and rushing
she went, urgently churning the sea—a long boat burnished with
Tobin-bronze, burning the eye like a strip of the sun; and as the dawn
worked and began gradually to overspread all the world of waters and
of coast, Lepsius, prying a port on the stern, spied like pearl the
pinnacles of Serapis.
CHAPTER XIV.
AT SERAPIS.
Lepsius, to the amazement of men, remained at Serapis for weeks, to the
very eve of the Exhibition, though he quickly established a system of
posts and telephones with Monsieur Schuré and other men of importance:
as to which the Hindoo, Nundcumar, remarked to Shan Healy, “It is a
piece of slackness, this; once he would not have done this: but when
a woman comes in, great minds begin to go rotten, and look a little
ahead, my sonnies, and you will see their catastrophe head-over-heels.”
It was then the turn of the Hindoo with his burned nose to drone by
the bedside of Healy; and Healy, who had conceived a fever from his
vitriol-dose, said with a moan, “Won’t she let him see her yet?”
Nundcumar wagged his head meaningly-meaninglessly, going, “Not she:
true-blue British and A1, a queen of queens! keeps him dewrithing in
the deepest depths of hell! That morning when she landed, he thought
he had her, my sonnies; but, if he is artful, she is a bit artfuller
still: peeped through the rose-curtains of her palankeen, smiling
with him like any dancing-girl, gabbing and gossiping with him about
Serapis, and how he built it; then when she was in and saw Serapis,
and what it is, her nostrils spread a bit, her breath stops a bit;
but by the time he had got her into the west ivory seraglio, and gave
her to know that that was to be her special palace, she had come to
herself again, looking as compleased as Sir Punch himself, smiling
with him, and he with her, and she with him, all very fine and large;
so she halts before one of the bashi-bazouks guarding a hall, gaping
at his get-up, his thises and his thats, his whys and his wherefores,
makes him draw his sword to show her, all marquetry of little gems and
gold, his dagger, all marquetry of little seed-gems, a real pleasure,
delight and comfort to man’s ophthalmoscoptics; and, says she, ‘How
pretty, Lepsius!’ she says, drawing the dagger out of the guard’s paws;
‘oh, I mean to keep this; may I?’ So Mr. High and Mr. Mighty he looks
at her quick, then lowers his eyes, and at last he mutters, ‘Yes,’
reluctantly. Then she begs him to go, as she has a migraine-ache, so he
hands her over to her ladies, and goes; and the moment he is gone she
squats to pen him a note: and what do you suppose was in it?”
Shan Healy tossed for ease, moaning. “Anybody can easy enough guess out
what was in it; but how the deuce do _you_ know?”
“I know and I know,” said the Hindoo with a moving head, “and what I do
not know is what man knoweth not, for that which is is shown unto me.
And in the note, word for word, she says, ‘Lepsius, I admit myself your
prisoner here in Serapis. You understand though, I think, knowing me
armed, that I instantly die if you venture to enter anew any part of my
palace; test me, I woo you, to see whether I mean it or not.—EVE.’ That
was her scribble, my sonnies, and the wording and reverbosity of her
constructing.”
Healy opened and closed anew his sick eyes to reply, “_If_ it’s true.”
“What, don’t you suppose I ever let slip something that’s true, for
form’s sake, in the hey-day and prime of life?” prated the utterly
senseless ape-tongue of the Hindoo that ambled blandly in a monotone
along, with the obscurest meanings anon, if meaning it had.
“So he ain’t seen her since?” Healy asked.
“He has seen her every day, though she little thinks it! for she is
artful, but he is artfuller still——”
“Old gas-bag,” Healy moaned, “you said just now that _he_ is artful,
but _she_ is artfuller still.”
“Both are artfuller than each one, my chum Healy,” Nundcumar said:
“_he_ is artfuller than she because he is of the guiley ones and artful
dodges, the beguilers and the wilers, and _she_ is artfuller than he
because she is a woman, and the guilt of womanhood is in the juice of
her gall-bladder. But he sees her when she little believes it: his eyes
have their peep-holes and their spy-places to weigh her and dwell upon
her when she’s wantoning on the water with her poet and her ladies, or
when she is walking under the arcade of the courtyard gazing at the
gauderies and the graces of her Persian and Delhi girls dancing with
their carcanets of pearl in the moonshine: for she grows every day
more luxuriatingous, which is the curse of Serapis for everyone who
enters it, from the lord of all to the low-cast coolie who polishes
the porphyries; and in these three weeks she has grown into a regular
begum-queen, true-blue old England as she is, and if he only waits a
bit, he will get and win her, be certain—that is, if she does not flirt
off abscond and run away first with the young poet Pershorez——”
At this the sick man looked at Nundcumar to sigh, “Oh, you scandalous
tongue—if I only had the strength——”
“Why, my friend Healy,” said Nundcumar, “have your ears not heard how
she pets her little Pershorez? Cannot stir without him near her! Feeds
him with sweetmeats, conserve of roses, orange-honey of Kauzeroon, and
all delights, almond-patés, and amusements! her eyes musing on his
eyes all an afternoon in that small hall of red andem-wood, while he
recites to her from Hafez and Ferdousi, sir-poets of Persia whom she
cannot understand a word, though she can well understand the face of
Pershorez, my sonnies, which is only made of cream of gazelle-milk
and rose-leaves fading, and his little figure more perfect in grace,
symmetry, curves, and very hungriness of perfecting than Thammuz, the
love-god that Syrian girls go thin for fancy of, and sigh for very
hungriness of delight, and die of. And that other one, the lord of
all, he knows, he knows, of this, because Barova, the little Arab
slave-maid, who is thin, faint and gaunt for love of lord Lepsius,
she pushed her way one night right into his private hall in the north
palace, and told out of her mistress, how the grossness of the sap
of womanly hungriness grows wanton in the arteries of her gall for
Pershorez; and first he could not grasp what the girl wished to say to
him, but then for very anguish of jealousy he cast back his head-piece
and laughed wild——”
“Laughed for fun,” sighed Healy—“if any of it is true.”
“For fun, may be, and may be not for fun,” the Hindoo said with a
moving head: “though not much fun in Serapis going on these days. Wait,
wait: for that’s bad, Healy, when the evil eye is cast upon a man,
and the villain woman with the vitriol is not yet dead, for first it
was poor old-boy Nundcumar on his oil-factory nose, and then it was
you, poor boy, and the third time it will be—another one of the ones.
That’s bad, that’s bad. And the seeds of disease spring and spread in
Serapis; he loses hours now in peeping and dreaming and brooding about
her—loose! looser every day; and when the woman comes in greatness
goes out and out, for the race of man would be a crowd of gods, but
the presence of woman relaxes his screw and corrupts his entrails.
Peeping, dreaming, like any Pershorez poet! and his Exhibition that
is all the talk coming so near! Several times he has passed hours
hanging about her: once stood guard disguised as a Mamaluke under that
cupola of enamels of her outer hall to see her pass close; and he has
fanned her face disguised as a slave-girl, where she sat listening
among her cushions to her Persian girls singing to the vina, with the
zels clashing aloud, and the kanoon-lutes making music and all sorts
of sounds, alarms, loudness and howdedo of melody; and he has come to
embalm her musk-baths, attended her bathing, painted her nails with
henna, and she with her weapon none the wiser——”
The sick fellow whined at this, sighing, “Pity you’re quite so vile an
old liar, after all.”
“Who—me?” said the Hindoo, a finger at his breast: “why, some of it
is true, my friend Healy, as the four and fourteen gospels! And how
about the letters that go between them, have you not heard of this?
For every day he writes her three-four times, and every morning that
dawns she writes him a line, though for two weeks she would not, but
when he raged, prayed, raved, consought and implored her with so much
squalling, pain, despair and foaming, she said at last that she would
write him one line every morning, giving him a puzzle-problem to solve,
since he is so witty, wise and witful in all wiles and witticisms, and
if ever once he failed wittily to answer her, he must agree to let her
go from her prison in Serapis to her parent, who is sick to death for
lack of her, though Sir Lepsius sends her daily the report that her
parent is in health and roarious spirits. So every morning that dawns
her note goes as regular as the milk-carts and the market-gardeners
all the way through from the west to the north of Serapis, wrapt in
satin in her poet’s hand; and one day the lady has written, ‘Lepsius,
tell me to-day if the spirits of men live ever and ever.—EVE’; and
one day she has written ‘Lepsius, write me to-day (with a why) which
wild-rose is sweeter and wilder: those all white on the weald, or those
which are washed as with shame.—EVE’; and one day she has written,
‘Lepsius, tell me to-day how the heavens and star-dust were formed
out of nothing.—EVE’; and he to her writes the most fantasticalest,
whimsiest, witticismest answers, replies and respondencies, as she has
shown them to her old Nundcumar when she sits listening with delight to
my tales, faries, frivols, and other lip-froth; and as to that of the
forming of the heavens and star-dust, he wrote her that, once upon a
time of the times, One Who Is, wishing to compose an oratorio of music,
brewed oceans of ink in a bowl of gold, and, holding in hand a pen of
gold, began to compose and throw off the notes of his oratorio; but
soon, when the beauty of the music stressed and throed in his soul,
so that he pressed well upon the pen, the pen splintered, and the ink
spattered, blotching with spots and splashes all the blackness of the
vault: so One Who Is roamed more remotely into the womb of gloom to
compose some more glorious oratorio. So they toy and coy, and bill and
coo together, my sonnies; but wait—let him go on: the seeds of disease
spring and spread in Serapis, say I; he gets slacker and laxer with
his idol-lady; wantonness and riot is growing among some of the scum
of the domestics; many of the men, and their commanders, too, are
grumbling with discontent because of regulatings and strictness; that
villain woman——”
Here, however, the entrance of a sister-of-mercy, Healy’s nurse, whose
frown the Hindoo knew, interrupted and drove him out; immediately
whereupon Healy begged to be permitted to pen a note, and on gaining
the battle, wrote as follows: “Master Hanni, I beg to be forgiven for
writing to you, but as I do not much fancy now that I shall ever be
getting up out of this again, that’s why I take this liberty, which is
to say that I wish to God, Master Hanni, you would get that dog of a
Hindoo Nundcumar from being near about you, for he means you no good,
I doubt, and under the ridiculousness of a parrot this man hides ten
times the craftiness of a fox. Dear Master Hanni, you may not be aware
that thirteen years since Nundcumar was two years in Wormwood Scrubbs
Prison, near by London, for stealing two bicycles. And, Master Hanni,
that you may never cease to remember with any breath you breathe that
Jeanne Auvache remains alive is the dying prayer of yours till death,
Shan Healy. I’d give fifteen years, if I had fifteen days, to lay my
eyes on your face once again for one moment on this side, but that may
be a bit more than I can expect of you: and, if not, good-bye to you.”
A little slave of Healy’s was at once sent out with this letter, which
two hours later reached the hand of Lepsius in the north-east regions
of Serapis, where he lay in a diwan-i-am, or hall of audience; and
his glance having lassoed in one swoop the significance of the note,
he threw it among other notes into an alcove of the throne in which
he lay, saying to a gentleman (a commissaire) who sat with him, “No,
Monsieur Hugonnet, you have my assurance: she is not in Serapis; she
perished in the collapse of Egmond.”
“Not so, monsieur, I think,” said Monsieur Hugonnet, a big bureaucrat,
who ever struck the wind with his eye-glass in his fingers: “that
theory is no longer tenable, for it is now established that some shreds
of her body must have been found. Moreover, you do not forget the crew
of the brig’s boat who saw a lady carried into your boat?”
“It was another lady,” replied Lepsius, smiling, “as ten days ago I
gave myself the pains to prove to Monsieur Leflô and Lord Rawlinson.”
“Monsieur, I admit it,” the commissary replied: “you have conclusively
proved that Miss Vickery is made of air; this, nevertheless, seems a
matter in which frankness, reasonableness and right feeling might well
be invoked on both sides. Think, monsieur—the lady’s father lies half
dead of it; and the English Government, I give you my word, monsieur,
grows every day more earnest, more urgent——” at which Lepsius, jumping
up with a rather reddened brow, went walking about a hall all pillars
of marble, between which stretched screens of perforated marble and
filigrees of gold, screens low enough for one to overgaze, away below,
the crags of the Brittany coast, and, away beyond these, a streak of
sea, indigo corruscated with snow-glints under the sun’s glare.
“_Let_ the English Government grow urgent,” Lepsius, returning to
Monsieur Hugonnet, suddenly said: “what then? What would you and it
have? Have I not allowed your troops to enter and ransack every crack
of Serapis? Have you found Miss Vickery? No. So, then, she is not
here? Nor is she made of air, monsieur, believe me, but of flesh and
blood, and her palms, if you palpate them, will be warmer to you than
the bark of the maple. So, why have you not found her? And how much
more of my time shall I have to lavish on this matter?”
“Serapis is not so much a palace as a town——” the commissary commenced
to say.
“Still, you have searched it throughout!”
“Let us search it again, monsieur, for certainty’s sake!”
“Again? And when?”
“Say to-morrow, will you?”
“Well, it is ridiculous; still——”
“Scribble me a pass, monsieur!”
Lepsius scribbled a pass for the following day, and the commissary went
away.
As for Lepsius, he had no fear of the legal visit, since his reason
for giving Miss Eve her (west) palace was that in it were rooms so
curiously and astutely concealed, that no keenest wit could suspect
them; and on the previous visit of the police Miss Eve was easily
induced on some excuse to step, unsuspecting, into one of these. So
Lepsius smiled, as he once more stepped up to recline in his kind of
throne, little thinking that that commissary was more cunning than he
looked.
He was about to sound for the following interview, but instead put out
his hand to Healy’s letter: did not, however, lift it; but, his hand on
it, reflected a little; then sprang up, and ran out, down the length of
three corridors, across a hanging gallery, guards making him salaam,
down a stair, along a lake, southwestward always, knowing his way
without fail, slaves and dignitaries, going on their various duties,
standing agape, saluting his tunic’s glare, his turban’s egrette of
heron’s feathers aburn with seed-pearl, and up a curved stairway to
a certain curtain: and Healy’s Ursuline nurse stood up amazed to see
him peer in, and wished to wake Healy, who lay breathing strangely in
sleep; but Lepsius restrained her.
Lepsius stood about two minutes, looking down at that rash on the sick
brow, the bandages on the breached cheek; took up, looked at, smelled
two of the medicine bottles; took up and held the sick hand; and,
holding it, gazed out with a brow of trouble through a great window
which was hollowed out in Moorish ogives, out into a court where
the whiteness of a minaret in the midst of a lake was reflected far
down in the water, with zephyrs flirting along the water’s surface:
an afternoon in July in which all that Brittany country slumbrously
basked, and bumblebees, as air-boats trading, tromboned a moment, as
through steamboat throttles, their boom of music across the ear-drum
dreamily, and cruised to some other ear. Somehow Lepsius sighed. And
whispering the sister, “Tell him that I came,” he went away in haste.
But he had hardly passed beyond the door’s hanging, when a French
functionary with a wild and white face, wringing his hands together,
raced to him with the hiss, “My God, monsieur, all is lost! Monsieur
Hugonnet has gained admission with a squad of gendarmes, and is now
searching Miss Vickery’s house!”
Quickly Lepsius’ eyes stirred from side to side. What had happened
he saw: Hugonnet, aiming to take Lepsius by surprise (as he did!)
had adventured to present to the guards at the great gates the pass
intended for the morrow, and they had not noticed the date; nor was
there any possibility of inducing Miss Eve at a moment’s notice to
move into one of the secret rooms, nor any possibility of checking the
officers in their search, nor any possibility of keeping her a prisoner
in Serapis, if she was once seen, nor any possibility of living without
keeping her....
Lepsius flew....
Not toward the west palace, but back toward his own north, and not the
way he had come, but as the bird flies, one eye on the watch on his
palm, one on the way he went, once swinging over a wall, once swimming
an oval of water, trampling flower-beds, routing men, making one bound
of stairs, while the fowls of the air cried out their affright at his
flight; and now like whirlwind his fingers were scattering among masses
of trinkets and things in a certain mahogany, he groaning in his soul;
got what he wanted; and now was gone again, going straight as the bird
goes, west and south, swinging, swimming, bounding, and now at last was
in the south-west house.
Standing within a doorway under a dome, he heard above-stairs the sound
of the troop; and stealing in a tick up sixty steps on the belly, his
wet streaming on the alabaster, he spied the troop, who, he saw with
spite, were just moving from one of his secret rooms, proving treachery
in Serapis. And on they went, Monsieur Hugonnet and ten gallants in
gaudy garments with swords, walking with a swagger between two white
walls with lines of doorways in them that seemed without any end, he
hiding behind, wriggling with eagerness as a tigress wriggles about to
spring, hearing now a sound as of the harp far off (which, however, the
gendarmes seemed not to hear), and aware now where Miss Eve was. So the
moment that the commissaire, examining a plan in his hand, went into a
doorway with his men, Lepsius sped on to slip ahead of them, but before
he could get to the door heard the sound of the searchers coming out
again, a glance having shown them that no one was in there: and he had
to shy into a side-corridor on the right. And now on a sudden the sound
of the strings of an instrument struck to the ears of the seekers,
too; they looked alive; “Come on!” cried the commissaire, and on they
stepped. Now Lepsius sped ten-footed to the right down the length of
his side-corridor, turned at its end down a second corridor, turned
left down a third, and in this last spurted through door-curtains
into a room, before ever the troop had attained the bottom of their
corridor—a room of monstrous circumference, domed with moresque-work in
gold, and, though looking a ghost of marble, cool, too, and balmy, its
circle of rose-curtains being all closed, embarring a grotto of umbrage
within, which was pregnant with fragrances of frankincense burning in
urns and cassolets. Two fountains wheeled about its centre, between
these in the wilderness of floor being one flush of colour and odour of
woman, cushions, stuffs, rugs, for snugly grouped there lay an oasis
of ladies making music, Miss Eve seated in their midst, cuddling a
gazelle which lay chewing the sugar of its cud with lids of indolence.
All at once she was up, tall! a weapon started out of her breast, yes,
and was brought down, and would have been driven to her heart, if the
feet of Lepsius had been by one whisp less fleet, or his eye less wise.
He had her in his arms, the ataghan-dagger cast far, she struggling
against a handkerchief which he held on her face, with stifled cries
of “Let me go! Lepsius, let me go!” He, however, clearly hearing now
the near-coming of the steps in the corridor, pressed heavily, had
her senseless, laid her down on the yatag (ground-bed) where she had
been sitting, and drew to her chin a coverlet over her. At that moment
the troop stood at the door, and, had the music not ceased on his
entrance, Lepsius, however speedy-handed, could not have succeeded; he
had counted, however, upon the music ceasing: and during the seconds
that the troop remained out there in a state of hesitation as to which
was the chamber of the music, his raging hands had her face brown with
some ulmin or umber-stain, had his turban bound about her brows, her
mouth, cheeks, submerged beneath a snow of beard. “Say ‘_sh-h-h_’ if
one enters,” he whispered, “fan her,” and he vanished.
Some seconds later Monsieur Hugonnet and his troop rapped, came in,
inspected the group of Oriental maids, the poet (lone male among women)
with his lute, the gazelle, and the old Ulema, Imam or Cadi taking
siesta on the yatag in his turban, softly fanned by his girls. The
gendarmes cast glances at the group of girls—could hardly be got to
move on; but presently searched through the hall, and spent the rest of
the day in searching Serapis in vain.
Nor did Monsieur Hugonnet go out as he came in. In passing down a stair
in the north palace, he and several of his men slipped down it, three
spraining their legs; in one place he got an electric stroke; and in
his going out of Serapis a grate gave way under him—a grate that had
sustained all his men—nor was it without difficulty that he was raised
up, half-drowned in filth, out of a drain.
Thus ended the final attempt of the two Governments to find the
prisoner in Serapis. But no sooner did the Governments begin to give
up than her sister, Miss Ruth, said, “_I_ will find her”: and two
days after that failure of the police, late in the evening, Lepsius
received a request to admit Miss Vickery, for no one was admitted into
Serapis unless permitted; and he at once sent for her.
“Alone?” said he, with his elbows laid on a table to stare at her paled
face upon which a lamp shone, she seated with her luggage (a hand-bag)
at her feet, a pretty sprig in her hat, for she liked little fineries
and vanities, provided they were very cheap.
“Yes,” she replied to him, “quite alone.”
“You have come to see—Serapis?”
“Why, what a question—for Eve!”
“If I had Eve, do you imagine that I should give her to you?”
“I am even sure that you will, if I beg you.”
“Beg me, and see.”
“You admit, then, that you have her.... Tell me whether she is well!”
“No, she is not in Serapis. I fancy I know where she might be traced,
but she is not in Serapis.”
“Oh, fie, you tell lies; why, I have seen her here.”
“You?”
“Yes, three afternoons ago, in a dream. I hardly ever go to sleep in
the day-time, but somehow that afternoon about two sleep overpowered
me, and Eve lay before my feet. She lay asleep, and she was an old man
with a beard somehow, and yet she was Eve, and a goat with its forelegs
doubled underneath it fed by her feet, and it was here in Serapis, I
knew very well, in a room with a dome over it.”
Lepsius, staring at her, remained dumb.
“So you see,” she remarked with an underlook, “there are more kingdoms
than you have visited.”
“Myriads more,” he mumbled.
Now all of a sudden she brought down her fist masterfully upon the
table, bending forward. “Let me take her back to her poor papa!”
whereat he laughed with a sort of wrath, crying, “_I!_ I have her for
ever and ever!”
“Have you married her, may I ask?”
He, his gaze on the table, mumbled, “If I even go near her, she raises
a dagger to pierce her bosom.”
“Good old Eve,” breathed Miss Ruth, staring in surprise; but added
immediately with veiled eyes, to soothe the agonies which she guessed,
“that is not because she loves anyone less, but because she loves God
more.”
“You are an unintelligible family,” he remarked with half a shrug.
“Oh, but well-meaning, I think, well-wishing,” she said. “Anyway,
if—since—she may not come with me, I will stay with her.”
“No; if you stay, you stay a captive; and, if I allow you to, I thereby
avow that Eve is here.”
“No one will know but my papa, who promises you, if you will let me be
with her, never to tell anyone.”
“So, then,” asked Lepsius, “you imagine me sufficiently childish to
rely upon your father’s promise?”
“You do not? Really? How curious! Well, _I_ undertake, then——”
“Your undertaking is without weight. Moreover, you once before broke a
promise that you made me.”
“When?”
“At The Towers, as to betraying my presence to Dr. Lepsius....”
“Oh, but if one meant well! Look, now, into one’s eyes....”
She looked into his, and he into hers, which had water and all her
heart in them—ten seconds, twenty, thirty—until his dropped at her
purity, with a murmur of the word “sweet” on his lips.
Then he said, “But you are all against me; you would be speaking
against me to Eve.”
“Well, then, I will undertake never again to do that.”
“That is not enough; I say no, unless you will undertake to woo her in
my favour.”
“Now, how can I? Is she not affianced to——?”
“How laughable!” shouted Lepsius: “she shrieks with laughter at the
mere thought of such a farce! De Courcy is a gnat, a limpet in a hag of
peat-water! And since you, meaning well, could break your promise made
to me, why may not Eve, meaning well, break her promise made to this
ape-man?”
“Oh, I,” Miss Ruth replied with her touch of flippancy, “I’d crash
through a promise like piecrust any day, if I saw fit, for I think
that a Christian is set free from rules, and in the pure every crime
is pure. My sister, however, regards herself as more bound by laws and
modes, and as to departing from a promise once given, it has always
been her way, I know, to regard that as rather a ghastly business. But
suppose that somehow the fact of her espousal could be overcome, how
can I ever possibly cry back to your cause, knowing that you are not a
Christian?”
Lepsius smiled. “If that be all, regard the knot of Gordium as cut: I
become a Christian this night.”
“How will you—‘this night’?”
“Isn’t there something about being plunged into holy water?”
“To be plunged into holy water is hardly to be a Christian, I think.”
“What, then, is?”
“To wish well to the world, I think; to live to serve it; to stand
piously alert to suffer and die for it”—with down-turned lids she
uttered this, and, as he heard it, his brow twitched once; then
bringing his mouth down to the table, he mumbled, as it seemed, to
nobody, “A lady here to be led away west,” and as a guard in gauds
appeared, he remarked to Miss Ruth, “You will hardly be able to
persuade me that you are a thinker, you know; but I am persuaded that
you are in some way the sweetest of sisters and girls, and a prisoner
whom Serapis will not readily let go.”
“Have I won, then? Am I about to see her?”—Miss Ruth bounded
upright—“oh, but you are pretty good, after all, and I shall never,
never forget you whenever I lift my eyes to the hills of God.... How is
she? How far is it? May I go now?” ... Lepsius was whispering to the
guard, who soon afterwards turned to Miss Ruth, and it was in quite
a gush of girlish flutter and flightiness of glee that she went with
her guide’s steps, inclined to prattle, crying anon, “Why, Serapis is
all like a white metropolis swimming on water!”—for all the lights of
Serapis had by this time been lit, and beamed star-wise far and near in
myriads, as it seemed—white, crimson, green—streaming on negro waters
that gleamed like steel, so that it all seemed of the drama of some
teeming dream. But when at last they came to the west-end, it was only
to be told that the lady of the place was away on the west lake with
her playmates; and making their way to this with haste and impatience
through alleys and courts, an increasing roar now sounding in their
ears, the pair of seekers stood on the lake’s shore and shouted. During
some moments, however, Miss Ruth screamed “Eve!” without result,
inasmuch as the gondola of gold-moresque in which Miss Eve rowed was
close under the gross roar of a cataract that rolled with a hoary
angriness, Niagara-like, over crags near a hundred feet deep at one
end of the parallelogram of water that made the lake—a lake surrounded
with towering house-walls and crags. But soon Miss Ruth was seen from
the boat, Miss Eve screamed, and before many moments the sisters were
breast to breast, uttering breathless syllables, broken with kisses.
“But—let one look at you!”—and when Miss Eve exhibited herself, “Is
this Eve?” the other asked, for Miss Eve was in a garb all of flimsies
of the Orient as gaudy as rainbows—silk-muslins, gauzes—her ears gross
with ear-rings of coral-rock and gold, a kefie-cloth draping her face,
with her gazelle, her maids, her boy-poet wearing his embroidered
sandals and strings of little pearls....
“Well, this is Eve,” breathed Miss Ruth, musing upon the other with her
bambino eyes, a smile of happiness chronic on her lips; “and whatever
can that be on your nails?”
“Henna.”
“Eve!”
Miss Eve snapped her thumb and finger gaily up in the air saying, “Oh,
well, never say die, and in Rome let’s row with the Romans; once I was
queen of the Greeks, hundreds of eras ago. Come, sweet, to see the
seraglio,” and thither they hurried.
CHAPTER XV.
TO SHUNTER.
Lepsius, the Exhibition being now about to begin, should have been
in Paris, but was at Serapis: and that was a true word of the gossip
Nundcumar that woman works a relaxation in the screw of greatness,
and taints its vein. Paris was strange; and the weather there
“treacherous,” as they say. Frequently each day Lepsius was in
communication with Monsieur Fautras, his broker, and with Schuré, his
chief engineer. A rumour was abroad that the last of the Moon Debenture
Bills (asking the sanction of the Chamber to the issue of yet new
stock to the tune of a milliard and a half) would hardly be carried,
because of another rumour that the moon-structure itself was fated to
failure: an event that must ruin very many investors. So the croakers
and screamers arose and mouthed: the scheme, they screamed, was
never sound; down all at once one day from par to 97 fell the stock;
speeches breathing rage were everywhere being made, in the streets, on
’Change, in the Chamber; newspapers furious with froths of abuse—true
Paris-babies, created to live three days—saw the light, cried, and
died; pamphlets, pamphlets, flooded the cafés; Lepsius, men said, had
fled.
During all which a kind of riot one afternoon (the seventh of July)
sprang up in Serapis itself. As the old Nundcumar told it with a
moving head to Miss Ruth Vickery at the bedside of Healy that evening,
“Sir Lepsius was at the telephone when Captain Bréhat broke into his
presence with a face like volcano-ashes mixed with fire-flashes, to
bring him the message news and betidings that some two hundred and
fifty of the private troops had broken loose, and had wrecked two of
the barrack-rooms. So Sir Lepsius finished his talk and chit-chat at
the telephone, and then, starting off with a malign light in his eyes,
though smiling ever his smile of the smiles, caught up a weapon of
queer and dark appearances, and ran away to a square in the north-east,
where the crew of them stood—all picturesque rascals of Spahis, mixed
with Turcos, Mamalukes, Zouaves, Uhlans, Don Cossacks, some of them on
horse-back, but most on foot in their half-dress, all under arms, so
that the heart, missie, paused under the bosom-bone to see it through.
Three-four of them said ‘Bravo,’ on beholding Sir Lepsius come, but
the brows of the rest only scowled blackly at him, and one big Spahi
spurred out to him with his grievance-list. Never a word breathed
Sir Lepsius from first to last, but as the grievance-list was going
to be presented, all at once he sprang like a flea of the fleas to
the ringleader’s horse-back—a great Hungarian horse, all rings and
piebalds—and he began to stick the horse with his penknife like a pig,
here and there, till the creature in its raging, plunging, prancing,
and very arrogance of arrogances dashed down the ringleader on the
ground. Then Sir Lepsius shot his gun-shot up in the clouds, and
down upon the crowd of them a shower of shot dropped back broadcast
and hard-hitting; at the same moment he aimed the gun at them, drove
the Hungarian mare at a gallop round about, pressing them, and on a
sudden they were gone in a rout with bowed backs, as a crowd rushes
out of a shower suddenly. Then he came again to the north palace, and
later in the afternoon got the news that all was well, as the troops
had resumed their duties. But wait, wait, it is not done with yet——”
He stopped, Miss Ruth rising to wipe the lips of the dying man in
silence....
But it was, in truth, not “done with”: for the very next forenoon the
troops anew broke into mutiny, and Lepsius was told that one part of
the soldiers’ quarters was being burnt. He had already observed the
redness of it in the sky, spent twenty seconds in dire reflecting, and
then sped away, intending this time to be terrible. It was a morning
of storm that spat dribble and brine, the strip of sea seen from the
higher parts of Serapis had an appearance of wrath, a league to the
east a brigantine had been wrecked in the night, the sky was all grey
and hurried like a current, and all pools of water darted darkling
continuously under the swoops and pursuits of the squalls. Lepsius
was making headway in the teeth of it eastward to the scene of the
_émeute_, when, to his amazement, a maid came pelting to meet and
present him a line scribbled on the fly-leaf of a Bible, “Pray, sir,
do not come to the men. It will be well.—RUTH VICKERY.” Nevertheless,
he ran on; and presently, peering through a wicket, saw Miss Ruth with
the mutineers in a court, moving to and fro before them, her hair blown
loose over an old cloak of faded blue that enfolded her, flapping,
on her head a forage-cap of the men, she haranguing them loudly in
French against the sounding of the gale. Lepsius stood too far off to
know what was being said, but saw Miss Ruth laughing anon, the troop
laughing also, soon became aware of a rumour of voices raving “Bravo!”
then of Miss Ruth pointing at the flame, as if enjoining the troop
to hasten to help in its suppression, then saw them press pell-mell
through a gate and go, taking her in the current of their haste.
In truth, Miss Ruth was at present no more a prisoner in Serapis, but
roamed whithersoever she chose in and out of it, visiting the Breton
peasants round about, the sick in Serapis, and corresponding whenever
she chose with her parent, to whom she wrote that the angel of the Lord
had broken the bars of her prison. On the whole, she was so well known,
and with so much respect, to everyone in Serapis, that it may have been
beyond the wit of Lepsius, had he willed it, to keep her strictly a
prisoner. At any rate, the _émeute_ thus suppressed did not recur; and
Lepsius pondered this anon.
Little enough time had he for pondering, however. That forenoon of
wet and wind the slump in moon-stock continued from 97 to 95, and
at nine that night a crowd that had waited for hours outside the
Palais-Bourbon in the storm, unharnessed the horses from Monsieur de
Courcy’s brougham, and brought the Minister home with hurrahs, because
his thunder at the Debenture Bill had resulted in its overthrow.
“Thrice on the eighth,” writes Saïd Pasha in his Notes, “I raced across
to the Rue de la Chausée d’Antin, on each occasion getting wetted to
the skin, in order to talk with Lepsius through Monsieur Schuré’s
private telephone. On each occasion I had to wait, since others were
before me. The first time I saw Colonel Doumic, Monsieur Leflô and
Cardinal Dampmartin talking together, standing in a corner of the
drawing-room; and two hours later when I returned they still stood
in the same place, talking. The house, in fact, was much frequented
throughout the day, people coming, lingering, going, and coming
again; but no sign of either host or hostess. The Abbé Sauriau, who
for some time sat alone on a sofa with his legs crossed, perusing
with quite evident surprise and delight an old book of his own—it
was his _Pindar_—told me that Monsieur Schuré ‘was supposed’ to be
at home, but abed, in a condition of alcoholism; while as to Madame,
Colonel Doumic, who had a cold in the head, and trumpeted persistently
through the nose, told me that the lady was spending three days with
her sister at Meudon. To Monsieur Favre, the Procurator-General,
and to me the colonel also made this remark, ‘My friends, let the
politicians do their worst, but what can un _tas de pékins_ do to the
individual in question when the name of Lepsius still raises a cheer
in each company of _pioupious_ through France?’ I wished that I could
share in his confidence, but to me who knew the under-currents and
each secret wire which each of the puppets obeyed, it appeared quite
beyond the ingenuity of a Nestor and a Richelieu in one to save the
situation. ‘Nothing has happened!’ exclaimed General Le Goffic, the
Prefect’s aide-de-camp, to me at Bignon’s near eight in the evening,
‘and yet what a revolution in public opinion within these two little
weeks!’ ‘_Mon ami_,’ added the old Orléaniste, who was a descendant
of the mulatto Ducs de Dornis, and still at seventy a gallant figure,
‘the individual in question thought to inaugurate an empire on the
race-course at Longchamp, as the Prince de Condé is said to have
begun the battle of Lérida to the cry-cry of a dozen violins: but the
fantastic soon ceases to amuse at a cost of three milliards. As to “La
Lune,” since the word means also the part of the human person on which
children are spanked, it was always certain that this fact, by itself,
would doom the scheme to failure. At the actual moment, what hope
remains, monsieur? since we know that when Belleville, St. Antoine
and Ménilmontant have pricked the ear, _le plis est pris_, and Heaven
itself is helpless. In passing down the Boulevard Majenta just now, I
encountered a crowd bounding south, to the Palais-Bourbon, no doubt,
singing “Conspuez Leps_ie_, conspuez Leps_ie_, conspuez”—the grave
sound on the last syllable of “Leps_ie_”—a truly gross and terrible
growl.’
“Well, at half after eight a messenger hastened to tell me that Isabeau
Thiéry was about to mount the tribune, and to the Palais-Bourbon Pierre
Huré and I set off in a fiacre, seeing on the way streams of people
who were speeding to join the crowd that loitered round the House,
without seeming to heed the showers and the noise of the wind. Having
reasons of my own for not desiring to be seen within the Chambre des
Députés itself, I strolled in the Salle des Pas Perdus, while Thiéry,
ever the _enfant terrible_ of the Députés, rolled his periods in the
interior. Among us outside in the Pas Perdus the question was, ‘Is
Thiéry speaking for or in opposition to the Debenture Bill?’ and
managing to seize upon the old Major-General Dauriac, one of the three
Quæstors, who came rushing in, I put to him the question. He shrugged
both his shoulders on high, giving me the reply, ‘Who knows, my friend?
In the former half of his oration Thiéry has denounced the Bill, but
now is no less loudly sounding its praises. _C’est un homme nul, ce
monsieur-là_’—and he hastened on his way.
“I did not remain during the oration of Monsieur de Courcy, who
followed Isabeau Thiéry in the tribune, but hurried back northward
in order to have direct speech with Lepsius himself. I now found the
_salon_, the stairs, the passages of Schuré’s house actually crowded—I
am unable to state why, since Schuré himself remained invisible—men
of the Bourse, newspaper-men, men-of-state, besides a number of mere
well-dressed _badauds_ and _désœuvrés_. Monsieur Fautras, the broker
of Lepsius, was speaking with General Figuier, the Military Governor
of Paris, and with Graf Bobertag of the German Embassy, which last
arrested me thirteen minutes with conversation of a secret nature. To
Lepsius I then spoke of the tone of Paris up to the present, and was
surprised that, though I had come at full speed, he already knew the
gist of Thiéry’s speech. It was said, indeed, that he had mysterious
instruments by means of which he could see and hear that which takes
place at a distance, though I myself have never seen any such with
him: at any rate, I now freely revealed my fears, reading to him some
headlines from the evening papers, and even venturing to say that the
air of Paris was believed to be bearable even in September! He took
it coldly. But did he ever know his friends? Was Lepsius ever capable
of appreciating the nature of friendship? Yet how he was loved by a
few! and how he was abhorred by all, even by the few who loved him!
‘I knew,’ he replied to everything of mine. ‘The Debenture Bill will
undoubtedly now be thrown out,’ I told him. ‘I knew,’ he answered,
adding, ‘it is of no importance, if Schuré be kept staunch: I rely upon
you to keep him staunch.’ This astonished me. ‘How can I?’ I asked.
‘Keep close to Thiéry to-night and to-morrow,’ he replied, ‘influence
him, and you will find out how I can repay.’ ‘Monsieur,’ was my answer,
‘I will do this with much pleasure without the prospect of any such
discovery.’ ‘Many thanks,’ said he. ‘I have,’ I then said, suddenly
remembering it, ‘to deliver to you this message from Mr. E. Reader
Meade, that it might be most inadvisable at the actual moment to try
to tempt Thiéry in a monetary sense’—a suggestion which (unless I was
mistaken) had the effect of strangely irritating Lepsius, for he made
me the amazing reply, ‘Monsieur, the oak is hardly the highest form of
life,’ and closed the interview.
“I at once set out on the quest of Thiéry, wondering within myself
how it was that Lepsius was not that night in Paris! Was it _because_
of the very hardship of combating the storm from the place in which
he happened to find himself that he decided to remain in it? Some
stiffness of neck? Some arrogance? For he was arrogant. Nothing was
greater than the grossness of his arrogance, save the glory of his
lowliness. Seeing men, he felt himself a deity; but he was saved from
even the least taint or vein of vanity, because his consciousness was
so quick and large, that no less nearly and clearly than he saw men
he saw stars, and felt himself a flea. At any rate, he could never be
induced to take the human race quite _au sérieux_; he abided in his
Brittany.
“Thiéry I did not light upon until nigh on eleven in the night, and
then in the unexpected quarter of his own tiny _apartment_ in the
Rue de Rome—a two-roomed den, with a _cuisine_ and a vestibule; and
it was necessary for me to sit waiting in the vestibule, since the
Abbé Sauriau was there in the _salon_, engaged in talk which it was
altogether impossible for me to escape hearing, since nothing separated
us save an aged green drapery, which the gale, penetrating between
the beams, waved in my face. Thiéry was going up and down wrapped in
a greasy dressing-gown, a fez on his head, the abbé being seated,
speaking ceaselessly; nor was it long before I knew that it was a
question of offering Thiéry the portfolio of Justice as from Monsieur
de Courcy, who that day could have foreseen for himself nothing less
than the Chief Magistracy of France. Thiéry did not accept, did not
reject it. The abbé coaxed, quoted, fawned, exhorted, flattered. ‘The
destinies of France rest this night on your shoulders’; ‘it is for you
to-night, my friend, in rocking the tocsin of enfranchisement, to toll
once and no more for ever the death-knell of despots.’ ‘But the Army,’
said Thiéry, ‘the Army.’ ‘Can the Army rescue a ruined man?’ asked the
abbé; and he added, ‘Listen, my friend, you are not a financier, but
you know that the company started with a capital of three milliards
in 1,200,000 shares of 2,500 francs each; you know, too, that 800,000
ordinary shares were offered at par to the public at the first issue,
as to which the individual in question not only gave his guarantee to
pay four per cent. interest during construction, but to repay every
ordinary shareholder at par, if the venture should prove a failure.
And if it does!—as it is in your power to make it! Could revenues so
countless really come out of any private fund and not leave it dry? And
how in the day of his failure may the Army avail to save him from the
wrath of France?’ But numbers always dropped like water on a duck’s
back upon the skull of Isabeau Thiéry: and the breezes penetrating
beneath the door chilled my shins, and still he remained in his
indecision of mind. Finally he undertook to deliver his reply as to the
portfolio before twelve the next day, and the Abbé Sauriau then went
away.
“It was then my turn to convert the poet, and certainly I worked with
no little fervour, throwing off reserve. I blessed with my hands
upon its head the bust of Cæsar on the mantel-piece; I spoke of the
offer of the portfolio as a bribe, and as unpatriotic in spirit;
I said ‘as in 1814,’ and ‘the destinies of France’; I spoke of the
crowd of crowned heads then in Paris to be present at the opening of
the Exhibition, and of their exultation to behold the overthrow of
that being who was the hope of France; and, sitting on his table’s
edge, his face glowed gallantly when in glaring hues I sketched the
glories of the future. Lepsius, I saw, occupied a place in his heart.
Unfortunately, just as 12.45 struck, in came Monsieur Josef, formerly
a _mouchard_ of the Rue de Jerusalem, then a man who to Lepsius was
‘P.2.’ The moment I beheld him I had a boding of trouble; and, certain
that the envelope that he delivered to Thiéry derived from Lepsius, I
kept my eyes fixed upon Thiéry while he read. Thiéry at once turned
quite worm-white; one could observe how his fingers quivered; and,
getting down from the table, he began to move about the room in an
absent manner, with a bosom somewhat breathless, and a visage at once
flushed and blanched in patches. I muttered to myself, ‘Lepsius must
have tempted him with some momentous money-offer.’ He walked presently
near to me, and with his arms quivering and somewhat spread appealed
rather piteously to me with a ‘Mon ami!’ He then began to walk about
again; till now again he halted to frown piercingly into the bust of
Cæsar on the mantel-piece; and now, beating his palm with his finger,
he breathed, ‘But no, but no, the Eagle does not blink’; and all at
once he was scarlet, cast up his head, letting slip a little ‘Ha!’ and
suddenly all in a hurry and flurry, muttering to himself, ‘Stop, he is
going to see,’ he was gone away.
“He very soon hurried in again from his bedroom, dressed, drawing on
a glove, begging me to forgive him, since he must necessarily go. I
ventured to ask him whither, and his answer, ‘Ah! to Meudon,’ convinced
me that all was lost....
“When I flew to tell Lepsius of it, he during two seconds or so stood
mute, then very hurriedly said, ‘Thanks. I’ll look to it’....”
What Lepsius did on learning of the disaster was urgently to telephone
a certain course of conduct to an agent in Chantilly; he then at once
summoned to his presence the Due de Rey-Drouilhet, who during two days
had been staying at Serapis; and he took two pilules out of a cabinet
and put them in a pill-box.
As soon as the duke came in he was struck staggering a step or two
against one of the pillars, for the hall, all open to the four winds,
was all vocal and haunted with the storm, and half its area of floor
was as washed with rain-water as a ship’s quarterdeck. Lepsius seated
the old man near him in the middle, and speaking as low as the sound
of the winds allowed, said, “I wish to pray you to set off for Paris
for me by my next special at 1.6; for if you wish to prove useful to
me, and at the same time to make yourself affluent for life, this is
your chance of chances. I may tell you that Thiéry has just taken train
from Paris to Meudon to see his sister, Fanny Schuré, with a design
unfriendly to me. Well, he will not see her to-night: for an agent
of mine in Chantilly, where Schuré is, is at this moment telephoning
her the false news that her husband is dying, and either fifteen or
four minutes before Thiéry reaches Meudon she will have left it for
Chantilly; nor will he be able, I see, to follow her thither to-night
for want of a train. But to-morrow he will see her, unless I prevent
him; hence I ask you to assist at his _premier déjeûner_ in the
morning, and deftly to drop these two pilules into his coffee or
chocolate. You are his friend—— What is it?”
He turned to a servant by his elbow who bore him a leaf of ivory
scribbled with these words: “Healy can live only a few minutes
more.—RUTH.”
Lepsius sprang up, pestered at this the third missive of the kind
received that day, he having been too busy to pay any heed to them,
though Healy was at this time, by his orders, near him in the north
palace. He walked away to the columns, and cast a look out: no stars
out there, no vault of heaven, only darksomeness mixed all with water
and winds wawling; and back he bolted to the duke, saying, “Excuse me
two minutes,” and hastened away.
His own motive in going he hardly knew, since that was hardly very
rational that he should go: but something that is in the breast brought
him. However, he did not enter, only stole nigh, and, standing outside
a door-hanging, listened, spied.
The two windows looked toward the coast, and though these were well
closed, everything movable in the room moved to a breeze that ever
breathed through it—the bed-curtains, the skirt of an Ursuline who
kneeled near the bottom of the bed, telling her beads, the skirt of
Miss Ruth who kneeled at the bed’s head, reading, the beard of the old
Nundcumar who sat leaning forward on a sofa between these two.
Miss Vickery held under her eyes on the bed’s edge a Greek Bible from
which with a poignancy and grieving in her voice she was translating,
the gale battering anon great breaches in her speech in the ear of
Lepsius.
“Nor be called masters ... but he that is greatest among you will be
your servant ... and he that humbles himself is high.”
The bed was low and small, in the north-west corner of the chamber
under a window—the window which was opposite the door where Lepsius
waited, there being two doors in the length of the room (which was
longish and narrow), and two great windows, under a groined roof; and
though an Arabian boy, crouching on a rug in the south-west corner of
the marble floor, made a fourth watcher in the chamber, there was an
air of loneness in there, an odour of death. This little Arab, indeed,
but increased this feeling: for, though kneeling, he was so doubled
on himself, so stone-still, that he seemed to be dead, and a greenish
sheen gloating on his cheek from the lamp-globe just above his head
increased his appearance of death.
“And they came to a place named Gethsemane, and he said to his
disciples, ‘You wait here, while I go to pray.’”
The light of the only lamp was somehow a local halo about itself,
throwing the remainder of the room in some obscurity, so that the
clicks of the nun’s rosary arose from shadows in which she was herself
no more than a shadow; nor could Healy be seen, nothing but his toes
sticking up beneath the clothes, though anon that keen ear of Lepsius
could hear his throat croaking the death-ruckle, pouring it low,
hurried, like a purring rolling; and, still more pressed with haste,
rain-water outside struggling darkly down spouts, with gulps and sobs
and goblin sounds; and again that poignancy and break in Miss Vickery’s
voice....
“And he went a little onward, and dropped down upon the ground, and
prayed, saying, ‘Abba (papa), take away this cup from me; still, not
what I want, papa, but what thou.’”
Loudly from across the sea came the sound of the gale, flapping with
the sound of a navy of argosies going down in some archipelago of
gloom, with all their great sails whooping loose, and all their sailors
wailing.
“And again he went away, and dropped down on the ground, and prayed,
saying, ‘If it be possible, let this draught pass away from me; still,
not what I want, papa, but what thou.’”
The hand of Lepsius tightened on the box that held the two pilules
designed for Isabeau Thiéry’s breakfast; at the same time the
death-ruckle on the bed came on a sudden to an end; the happy saint
raised herself from the bedside with a smile and a light in her eyes;
and during some moments nobody moved in the room, until now the crony
Nundcumar rose to move to the bed’s head, and, bowed over the dead with
a moving brow and body, crooning, he said, “He is dead. But his head
is not yet thoroughly dead and done, and he lies reflecting dimly in
himself, thinking: ‘I am dead: no more to view the sight of the sun,
nor any light of the moon at night, nor all the stars: for I am dead,
and this is death; and what I long saw falling upon others, and was
long in awe of for myself, is fallen at last this day upon me, me,
also: for I lie dead, and this is my day.’”
As for Lepsius, he was gone; not so swiftly as he had come.
When he got back to the hall where the duke awaited him, he halted
two seconds betwixt two of the columns, struck with hesitancy: until,
suddenly running, he muttered, “Forgive me for being longer than I
meant; and now, to catch the train, you should be in haste”—he held out
the pill-box.
The old man was very tremulous; his hand that rose to take the
box hesitated midway. “I assume, monsieur, that the dose is not—is
innocuous....”
Lepsius’ lip of disdain deigned no reply.
“I know it, of course,” remarked the old fop piteously in a flurry,
“and asked only for form’s sake.... On those terms I am entirely at
your service.”
“Rey-Drouilhet, be certain and deft,” said Lepsius impressively; and
within eight minutes Rey-Drouilhet was on the way to the railway.
Before 7.40 the following morning he sat, in the Rue de Rome, at
Isabeau Thiéry’s bed’s head.
He pretended that pressing Serapis-gossip had thus brought him at the
matin-gun; but he had hardly any need to invent the gossip, since by
this time Thiéry could speak of nothing but Lepsius’ bribe.
“My friend, what was the amount?” the duke questioned with a screwed
countenance.
“It was two millions, monsieur.”
“_De Dieu de Dieu!_... I who am no more a youth would undoubtedly have
refused it without difficulty, but how could you, a young man?”
“Ah, mon cher ami, noblesse oblige,” remarked Isabeau Thiéry in an
absent mutter.
He was now about to get out of bed to get on his clothes, when his
_gouvernante_ bore him in his coffee and little loaf; and during
the minutes that he took to fling on his things, the coffee stood
cooling on a commode close to the duke. The flesh of the duke’s face
during this became very blanched and aged, his manners nervous and
fluttered; but, though he had the two pills in his hand, and had
many opportunities of dropping them into the coffee during Thiéry’s
dressing, he did not. He now thought to himself, “No, Thiéry must be
out of the room,” and presently he passed the remark that he had not
breakfasted.
“My friend, pardon me!” cried out Thiéry, and darted out half-dressed
to order another cup of coffee.
Now was the duke’s opportunity. Yet he did not drop the pills into
Thiéry’s coffee. He started! First athwart the whirl of his thoughts
flushed Isabeau Thiéry’s words, “_noblesse oblige_,” the example of
that generous blood: and away he rushed, bent, from the coffee; and
then back to it he rushed, fleet and thievish, to dash in the pills;
and away from it afresh, without having dashed them in. And now he was
casting his arms on high, his rickety eyes, distracted; and now he was
creeping on his knees, sneakingly, to drop the two pills into a pot
beneath the bed; and now he was at Thiéry’s bread, sneakingly kneading
two pills out of the pith; and _these_ he dropped into Thiéry’s
coffee....
Later that forenoon he misquoted Shakespeare, despatching to Lepsius,
in English, the telegram, “The deed is done.”
Nor did Lepsius need the coming of this telegram to be perfectly
certain that the deed was done, though he could scarcely still have
been ignorant that very many threads congregate to make the mental
texture of modern men. Anyway, till late in the day he was securely
acting upon the fact that the duke could not fail; and then, suddenly,
he knew—too late....
The next night, the second of the Exhibition, was the night on which
men had been given to hope that a strange glory would change the look
of the skies: but no such glory arose upon the eyes.
And now more in number than the messengers of Job crowded upon Lepsius
the recorders of his downfall; French laws and procedures were tortured
in order to reach him swiftly; during the midnight of the ninth the
offices of the moon in the Rue St. Honoré, as well as the offices of
several newspapers in his pay, were wrecked; on the 11th the troops
of the 67th, posted to protect his palace in the Elysées, could not
prevent it from being sacked and burned; by the 13th he had been
accused, and had been convicted by the Sixth Tribunal, of fermenting
civil strife; by the 15th the decree of his banishment from French
land, posted in every commune, had been gaped at as old and usual, and
glared from the gates of Serapis.
Lepsius smiled, but bitterly. He was lying on his belly on a bed of
straw, reading the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the book of Matthew
when the news of the destruction of the moon-offices reached him; and
at once, throwing away the book to run out with a reddened brow, he
said within himself, “I will blot out this name of France.” During the
rage and deluge of the few days following, he yet more hardened his
heart. To Miss Ruth Vickery he refused an interview, and to Miss Eve
Vickery, who wrote “I am sorry for you,” and entreated him to be meek,
to cease from scheming, and to bend his head before the tempest, he
condescended to send no answer.
Indeed, he was now too busy to heed anything but what he was now about
to do. In his resentment he had resolved to stretch out his arm in
terror, of each and all of his enemies to make a clean sweep in one
heap, and immediately to leap into a throne, some months before he
had previously proposed. Of the Army, which regarded him as its hope
of glory, he was still certain; and on the morning of the 15th the
first of his thunderbolts bewildered the world, when from his rostrum
at the Bourse, Monsieur Fautras roundly denounced the downfall of the
moon-structure as due to the schemings of paltry politicians, and to
the treachery of the engineer Schuré. He was authorised, he said,
by Monsieur Lepsius, to present as a loan to the company a sum of a
milliard and a half of francs, not to be repaid till ordinary shares
should be earning a dividend of 8 per cent.; and, further, he was
authorised by Monsieur Lepsius, who was prepared to finance the concern
entirely from his private purse, to purchase back, if desired, every
ordinary share at par from that morning; and, further, he had to say
that by midday of the 17th instant Monsieur Lepsius proposed to be in
Paris....
Never did Lepsius loom so hugely upon the universal world, luminous
as some angel of the welkin, as that afternoon, France, for her part,
casting upon her head the ashes of contrition. As for the foes of
Lepsius, they saw only instant loss of place and power, only ruin,
degradation, disgrace, knowing that now the decree of banishment
against him was nothing but a dead letter. Hence the Count de Courcy
took a hurried trip down into Brittany that day, and contrived to talk
a little with the prattler Nundcumar outside the walls of Serapis....
At five on the morning of the 17th all was in order for the departure
for Paris, and Lepsius, not having slept through the night, went to lie
a little in his bath, his big dog, Argo, and the old Nundcumar, going
also with him. As he locked the door, he noticed that the dog, going
up to a coffer of cedarwood, in which it was usual to keep towels,
etc., sniffed at it; the dog, however, did not growl, and, as his head
was now crowded with cares, he gave it no heed. It was an apartment of
marble with a row of round windows in one wall up near the ceiling, and
in the centre of it a sort of well or cistern, with a tower of marble
about it as light and beautiful as a flower, whose whiteness bloomed
again down in the water’s gloom, and it had a bell in it; otherwise
the apartment was without any ornament, except for the coffer in one
corner, and the bath in the corner opposite, this being a mass of
augite and gold, so big that one might swim a little, with lumps of ice
floating in the water that almost filled it. Lepsius’ pieces of raiment
dropped from him, he was in immediately, dived, and remained under a
long while. Argo, the dog, was walking uneasily to and fro, but if one
had looked narrowly at him, the dog might have been seen to be not
quite himself, to be drunk or drugged. Nundcumar, for his part, stood
by the side of the bath, his knees weak beneath him, but with no sign
of this to be seen in his lean looks; and the air in there seemed to
wait for somewhat, and to wait, a dusk air, for though it was now fully
day outside, in there the light was scarce.
At the moment when Lepsius went under the water for the second time,
Nundcumar, suddenly grabbing the dog by the collar, coughed twice: and
the next moment the dog broke roaring from his grasp to drag down a
woman who rose out of the coffer and flew through the room.... Lepsius,
hearing the row, reared up his head, and even as the woman went down
under the hound, received vitriol about his brows....
He at once dived....
Later in the day he discovered that one of his sandals, in a chamber
of which he kept a little key, was missing. It was the Abbé Sauriau
who told him so, kneeling over Lepsius on his bed of straw, as the
gloaming began to grow deep. “It is intended that your hoards shall be
distributed among charitable institutions,” the abbé said; and he cried
accusingly, his body convulsed with sobs, “Lepsius, you are blind! and
it is I who have been the cause of this.”
Lepsius lay with a band covering his eyes, his limbs cast all asprawl
at random, tossing for ease; and presently he bleated, “I am blind!”
And now Isabeau Thiéry, waiting for hours at the far end of the
chamber, dashed both his palms to his ears to shut out the sound of
that bleat, which each three minutes was repeated, and rushed with the
stare of a maniac away.
Lepsius could get no rest, for though the ravage of the vitriol (thanks
to the rush of the dog and to the bath-water) was local about the
brows, and he was hardly at all disfigured in his face, yet the agony
was great, and the heat of the atmosphere every moment growing greater,
since a reign of licence and riot had kept carnival during all the
afternoon, and at several places Serapis was flaring.
“You must not stay here much longer,” blubbed the Abbé Sauriau, with
two big tears streaming on his cheeks.... “I have a little cottage in
Chantilly, and thither you will come to abide until my death by my
side. You are poor, you are many millions in debt, you are utterly
destitute, naught can be more utter, more boundless, than your
downfall. So you will come, my friend, to my breast, and in the cottage
we shall be, we two, dwelling in a shaded leisure and seclusion of
literature, for I shall be reading my books to you, and you will be
dictating books to me, which I shall write for you.”
“I am blind!” bleated the blind boy to his obscurity, neither heeding
nor hearing him.
It was at this point that the blind boy’s father arrived after a voyage
from London; and, lying on the straws, the old man rubbed his cheek
on his son’s cheek silently, a sob in his throat keeping him from
speaking; whereat the Abbé Sauriau and some others who were there
stole away; and presently, when he had wept plenteously, Dr. Lepsius
said to his son, who kept shrinking from his touch, “You have yet your
yacht at anchor yonder in the bay; let’s cut back to Shunter! you and
me; only no Shan any more, no Shan: back out of the dirty world, to
listen to the waups whistling, what? Don’t you remember the old castle?
And the old coble-boat on the north coast? And the long, low old shed,
centuries old, all encrusted with peat-smoke, which we could see from
the east castle-turret far off in the heugh of the crags? And all the
gulls, and the bog, and the hags of water with the buckies in ’em,
can’t you recall it all, and the sea? Say that you are coming....”
“I shall never run again!” complained Lepsius to his gloom.
“You may! You do not know yet! God may will to give you back your eyes,
or one of them! But say that you will come this night with me.”
“Are you not still against me?” asked Lepsius in pain.
“What, against my own? Was I ever really against _you_, do you dream?
Oh, fie, hard heart, to let yourself utter those words!”
Lepsius now turned a little to put his arm about the old man’s
shoulder, and water washed with a whey of blood wound all down one side
of his nose, while the old man moaned.
“So, then,” the old man said, “you will come, for I feel that it will
do you good, and I’ll go at once to see to it.”
He stood up; and he had scarcely gone away when with eager feet Miss
Eve Vickery came in, and fifteen feet from Lepsius stood looking
at him, her father halting far off near the pillars, his eyes all
alight with excitement. Having come for his daughters, he had ordered
them both into a brougham, and they had started to roll away in
it through the ruelles and courts of Serapis, lurid at this time
with conflagrations glaring in the gloomy night, where groups of
distinguished men from Paris and elsewhere stood to watch the flames
and fumes, and, like devils in fire, troops of luxurious rioters roved
with uproars to and fro. But when about to pass out of this scene, Miss
Eve had seen a wing of the north palace in passing near it, and had
leapt up. Nor could anything stay her. “I will see him once,” she had
said over her shoulder: whereon her father, ordering his other daughter
to remain where she was, had followed Miss Eve’s speeding feet; and
Miss Eve came, and stood, and looked at Lepsius.
“Eve, I am blind!” bleated Lepsius aloud, perhaps having caught and
known the sound of her walk, or probably invoking her without any
knowledge that she was present; and what pen of poet or seer of the
soul can disclose the olio of her whole emotion then, sketching with
what fiendishness of hell-spite her whitened lip touched her lower
teeth, as she flung at him, “You should have been good!” and then again
how the bowels of her woman’s ruth moved and rued, beholding him so
low, when he rose on his elbow, but tumbled back, calling, “Eve! you
are here!”
“Lepsius, I am going for good from you!”
“Eve, do not leave me!”
“Eve!” her father now called out in a sort of whisper.
She crammed her mouth with her handkerchief to bite on, and letting
fall her arm behind her toward the bed of straws, wafting it a
good-bye, tried to get away toward her father, but half-way gave up,
smiling, her knees going feeble beneath her, and lapsed, seated, upon
the floor; whereat Mr. Vickery came, raised, and carried her away to
their carriage.
The carriage then went on its way toward the station two miles distant
through a dark night unlighted by one star in the sky, with wild winds
blowing. But they had not advanced half a mile when the driver suddenly
halted, having noticed lying right athwart the road a woman whom, but
for the light radiating from the blazing of Serapis, he must have
driven over. Mr. Vickery, getting out, gave a hand to raising her up:
and now, to his consternation, she turned out to be his old servant,
Jeanne Auvache. The woman, her life-work now performed, was now all
maudlin, and desired to die—hence had thrown herself on the road. She
instantly dashed into chattering (against the grain of her hearers)
as to the various phases of the day, on her face a rain of tears,
Miss Ruth and her father induced to hear, Miss Eve, for her part,
reclining in swoon with her lips parted like the dying, not appearing
to hear. One piece of the chatter, however, appeared to pierce to her
consciousness; and now her eyes unclosed, she sat up. It was when
Jeanne Auvache was recounting how she had been arrested at St. Brieuc,
and how at about 3 p.m. she had been brought back to Serapis in order
to be presented to, and identified by, Lepsius, the officers not then
knowing that Lepsius was entirely sightless. “He is good, he is very
good,” the hag groaned, “so that I regret at the actual moment to have
done it, and have a desire to die. He lay there on his bed of straws,
all solitary, calling to nobody ‘I am blind’; and when the two officers
asked him if he was able to say whether I was the woman, he answered
them, ‘Let her say something’; so I said, ‘Monsieur Lepsius!’ and I
said again, ‘Monsieur Lepsius!’ and he gave no answer to the two men
for some time, but lay still, frowning, passing his palm over his brow
and his bandage; and he then said gently, ‘No, it was not she; it was
not a woman who did it,’ and then——”
Now, however, a crazy stare was gazing out of the carriage window, Miss
Eve leaning out, saying, “Do you say, woman, that he forgave you? Oh,
tell me the God’s truth!”
“Why, yes, since you see me here——” the hag began to say: but now Miss
Eve was gone.
“Eve!” howled her father after her, “remember your vow to——?”
Miss Eve threw her hand backward without looking round, and went
fluttering on her way, her frocks quarrelling with the winds; nor was
it possible to pursue her with the brougham, since she took a shortcut
path through a meadow; and though her father and Miss Ruth ran after
her, calling, her youth and long legs soon got them pretty far behind,
she slipping back to Serapis like a spring which, pressed the wrong
way, is of a sudden sprung free. In some fifteen minutes she lay on her
love’s bed, shuddering on his breast, her teeth chattering feverishly
into his ear “for ever,” and anew “for ever.”
“Eve, you are here!” he called to her in that voice of the blind which
has lost its way like a lambkin bleating in the void of the night; and
she in the fever of her joy said to him, “Here, you can feel it, the
half coin: where should I be but in you, but interned in your heart, my
eternal? I who eternities since yearned at the altar with you.”
But now Dr. Lepsius walked actively in to announce that everything was
ready as to the vessel; and about half an hour after this, a small
crowd consisting of Dr. Lepsius, Lepsius, Miss Eve, Miss Ruth, Mr.
Vickery, a Dr. Proudhomme of Serapis, the Abbé Sauriau, Isabeau Thiéry,
Saïd Pasha, and Mr. E. Reader Meade, paced to the quay of the little
bay named Petit Bazaine. Yonder on the sea the yacht’s three lights
glared tiny in a darkness made rather Tartarian by the conflagration of
Serapis, the glows from which, glaring on the slopes of the billows’
blackness in dabblements, gave to the bay the goriness of Aceldama.
A boat lay at the end of the quay; but as the sea was very rough,
and trouble was looked for in embarking Lepsius, all the party went
forward to see the boat, leaving him seated alone on a block of stone.
The boatmen, who lay on their oars, called that they would wait for a
calmer moment; so it was some minutes ere Miss Eve ran back to bring
Lepsius, and then to her amazement, met him on his knees—the roar of
the breakers and of the gale in his ears, the sprays raining on his
face, or his engrossment, may be, in his prayer, preventing him from
hearing her approach. She with an uplifted hand, stood hushed a little,
listening, catching some words, the bursting of his sobs.... “Who
hearest, but dost not heed, the bleatings of brutes ... yet if just one
human wish for once may move thee ... let no speck of grit ever prick
her eyes to agonise her; oh, I was sick and she visited me pelt her; I
am reft, despoiled, and she makes choice of me ... chase, infest her
every hour with fresh showers and astonishments of joy——”
She touched him, saying, “Come.”
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ISLE OF LIES ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
