Bernard Capes

“ Then Ned heard Théroigne, pleading and tearful—
“Valentin, thou shalt not! It is mine! What right hast thou to rob and insult me?”
“The right that thou art a putain—a snake in the grass of a virgin community. Give it me, or I will break thy arm. Right, indeed! but every well-doer has a right to act the executive.”
“Thou shalt not take it!”
“You will prevent me? Oh, the strength of this conscious virtue! And does not thy refusal damn thee? Pull across, Charlot! I will wrench her arms out. It is another accursed whelp that she has strangled and would bury in the wood.” ”

“ She breathed quickly; a smouldering fire blazed up in her; her very voice, that had seemed to Ned starved like her beauty, gathered to something the remembered volume.
“He? Who?” said he.
She took no notice of the question, but went on in great excitement—
“What are these horrors that you speak of? Have you seen them? What are they, I say? Do they tear aristocrats limb from limb? This truth that he used to preach—my God! there is no hope for the world until they massacre them each one!”
“That who used to preach?” said Ned, quite shocked and bewildered.
“Liars! liars! liars!” ”

“ Yet, for all their horny cuticle, his fingers seemed to burn as luminous as those of the Troll in the fairy tale. They spouted music; the fire of inspiration ran out of their tips along the strings till the ceiling of the common little room vibrated deliciously as the dome of an elfin bell. And he extemporised, it would appear; he wove a web of chords about himself as it were a cocoon, out of which he should one day burst and be acknowledged glorious.
“Surely,” thought Ned, “if it isn’t necessary to be a fool to be a musician, at least the majority of born musicians are fools.” ”

“ Ned set foot on the long box-bordered path with his mind in a condition of strange ferment. The glamour of the previous night; the sweet glory of this new bidding to the side of his mistress (over which his soul laughed, as over its own humorous strategy in the hoodwinking of a credulous guardian) ; the thought that it was in his power to assist to its welfare the very dear object of his solicitude, and, by so assisting, to convert what might otherwise seem a pursuit into a welcome—such fancies combined made of his brain a house of pleasant dreams. ”

“ Ned, despite some emotion consequent on the mention of his rival, felt as remorseful as if he had wantonly crushed a rose in which lay a sleeping Cupid. He knew he had not asked the girl to dance with him, for only the reason that a morbid sensitiveness impelled him to self-martyrdom—drove his pride and his jealousy to battle; the one ready to resent that an obvious preference was not shown by her for him out of all the world, ready always to fold a wing of pretended indifference over the bleeding wound in his breast ”

“ St Antoine, even this west side of the prison bar, took life on the raw; dressed loudly as it talked; discussed its viands and its hopes with an equal appetite for un- and re-dress; was always far readier to hang a man than a joint of beef—instinctively, perhaps, to make him that was hard tender. And to this unposturing attitude Ned felt his sympathies extend. Here, at the smallest, was nakedness unashamed—material, not, as St Denys would have it, for indulgence, but for the re-ordering of a world that had confusedly strayed, not so far, from the paths of truth to itself. ”

“ Ned—the poor degenerate to a very human type—learned, on the other hand, to love and admire him. For in this mind—as in the mirror of sweet clear water—he found his own chastened theories shaping themselves, taking such form and gentle significance as he had never hitherto but more than conceived to be theirs. Nor this only, or chiefly. He was able to forget something of his own hard unhappiness, of his bitter sense of grievance, in the familiar contemplation of a nature so serene, so noble, so unsolicitous of its self-aggrandisement. ”

“ Théroigne put a hand on his arm.
“Do not speak to him, save to bid him return whither he came. God in heaven! I can see the grass withering under his feet! Monsieur, monsieur” (for Ned was walking towards the man) , “it is one of the accursed race!”
The creature fawned like a Celestial as the young man approached.
“Monseigneur, for the love of God, a drink of water!” said he.
His dry, thick lips seemed to grate on the words.
“Why not?” said Ned. “You have only to help yourself.”
“Let him dare!” shrieked Théroigne. “Monsieur, do you hear! it is a Cagot, a Cagot, I say!” ”

“ How was I, inexperienced, to know how a libertine will spend years, if need be, in undermining a trust that he may indulge a minute’s happiness?”
She had spoken so far with self-restraint. Now, suddenly, she flashed out superbly—
“You would not do the same—oh, mon Dieu, no! but you will condone his wickedness—yes, that is it! Liberty to you all is the liberty to act as you like; to use the State and abuse it; to use the woman and throw her aside!”
“Hush!” said Ned, a little startled and concerned. “Your liberty, I take it, you have committed to the keeping of my lord. ”

“ Ah, bah! one may mount to the topmost branch of a tree, and yet be no nearer escaping from the forest. I find myself here in interminable thickets, monsieur. I see the poor, leaf-blinded denizens of them nosing passionlessly for roots and acorns in a loveless gloom; and I know the long green fields of light and pleasure to stretch all round this core of melancholy, if only these could find the way to win to them. Is self-discipline necessary to existence? Surely our very butterflies of fashion prove the contrary.”
“Now what,” thought Ned, “is the goad to this inexplicable character?” ”

“ She died in the Salpétrière—in the very prison that had witnessed the triumph of her vengeance. And the spirit of her victim, blown in the moonlit nights against the bars of her cell, might cling to them like a bat, and peer in, and take its evil rapture of the retribution that had consigned her to that one haunted spot out of all the haunted city.
Ned—carried into a dusky vestibule, and thence into a little side office where he must await, under guard, the commissary’s pleasure—was ushered, after no great interval, into the presence of that tremendous functionary. ”

“ He never removed his hungry gaze from the mounting balloon while he talked.
“Fifteen sous a-day!” ejaculated M. David’s voice to the other side of Ned.
“It was like the bursting of a shell,” said Reveillon, in a sort of rapturous retrospection. “We were looking—our vivats still echoed in the air; the smiles with which they had parted from us were yet reflected on our faces; there came a spout of flame, very mean and small against the blue, and little black things shot from it and fled earthwards. It was fearful—heart-thrilling, that sound of a man falling through two-thirds of a mile. ”