Hannah Lynch

“ Already the landscape was drenched and blotted out of view. An affrighted peasant, in sabots large enough to shelter the woman and her family of nursery rhyme, darted down the road, holding a coloured umbrella as big as a tent. The roar of thunder came from afar, and a flash of lightning broke through the vapoury veil, making Hervé blink like a distracted owl caught by the dawn. Oh, if he were only back safely at Saint-Laurent, or could hold the hand of his dear countess! No, he would not explore any more until he was a grown-up man. ”

“ There was a light in the priest’s house, and the sound of our footsteps approaching brought him to the door even before we had knocked.
‘Who is it? What is it?’ he whispered.
‘It is I, Mademoiselle Lenormant, father. We want you to come and examine the island with us. There is shooting somewhere, and somebody may have been murdered or dying.’
‘You have a lamp. Wait a moment, and I will join you.’ Outside he said, ‘Let us try the cemetery. Phew! how it rains. It is a deluge. I am not surprised at your courage, Mademoiselle, for it is not since yesterday that I know you. ”

“ A perceptible start of emotion found expression in an interjectionary arch of brow, a sigh blown on the puff of a cigarette, and an uneasy shifting of attitudes. A baby girl! What a slight thing in the hurry of life, what a simple thing in its crowding perplexities! The tragic end of men and women whom the years have worn and fretted; the sudden death of happy youth in the midst of its bright promises; the peaceful sadness that accompanies the departure of the old, who have honourably lived their lives and accomplished all natural laws:—but the closed eyes of a little baby girl! ”

“ But when they arrived at Fresney, they learnt that the countess was seriously ill. Hervé began to cry when he was refused permission to see his friend, and at that moment M. le Comte, an erratic, middle-aged tyrant, held in mortal terror by his dependants, burst in upon him, with a vigorous—‘Ho, ho! the little marquis, my rival! Come hither, sirrah, and let me run the sword of vengeance through your body.’
And the merry old rascal began to roll his eyes, and mutter strange guttural sounds for his own amusement and Hervé’s fright.
‘I do not care if you do kill me, M. le Comte,’ the boy sobbed. ”

“ In such moments, happily brief, the savage is uppermost, whatever the training of the gentleman. The soul sleeps, and the body, with all its frenzied needs and desires, stands naked, primitive, elemental, the mere animal living through the senses. The handsome sobbing creature had all, and I had nothing. Yet he dared to speak of equality in misery between us.
‘Good-bye,’ I said, and moved to the door.
Trueberry sprang up, and clutched my arm. His dear, simple nature could understand nothing of the vileness that the finer and more complex order of being may contain. ”

“ Men are grown-up children; boys are rude philosophers, artists, poets, what you will.
A cold, passionless man was Dr. Vermont, the one feeble flame of human feeling he had thrilled to having faded out of memory almost upon the death of his just buried young wife. She, too, had interested him, only differently, being of a less calculable and possibly less shallow order of being than the embryo great men of Lander’s. Widowhood had sundered him sharply from all personal ties, and left him all the freer to indulge his passion for experimental psychology. ”

“ In such a mood, there is melody in all things, and warmth lies even in frosted starlight. Nothing but the sweetness of life is felt: its turbidness and accidents, its disappointments, pains, and stumbles, lie peacefully forgotten in the well of memory; and we wish somebody could have told us in some past trouble that the future contained for us a moment so good as this.
‘Mademoiselle is in the garden,’ a servant informed him, and led the way through halls and salons, down steps running from the long window into a shaded green paradise. ”

“ There was something to be done even by a fellow so sick at heart as I: books to be written, books to be read, people to see, and people to avoid, countries to travel in, and women to criticise. My host stood at the top of the path, bareheaded, cheering me on with his gracious ‘God speed ye, sir!’ until the bend of the hill hid his honest friendly face from me. I sought Trueberry in his room, and saw his gloves, and hat, and portmanteau on the table. I wandered about the house, through unfamiliar chambers, till, on lifting a curtain, a picture arrested me with a curdling thrill. ”

“ Honest affection that makes no pretence of concealment, humanised it, and a magnanimous resolve filled its expression with cheering purport. The worst of us, you see, have our heroic moments, only it often happens that, like Dr. Vermont’s, they pass unnoticed in the dark.
‘There is happiness ahead for you yet, Anatole,’ he breathed quickly through his teeth, while he swung the unhappy young fellow’s arm once up and down, in warm emphasis to communicate the reassuring fluid to him. ”

“ It is incredible how completely a man may forget. No regret, no remembrance pursued me in Paris, and the instant I crossed the bridge it all surged back on me, not as remembered days, but as the actual present. Verily, we are droll rascals, Henriette, and mercilessly tyrannised by experience.’
He had dropped her hand now, and was leaning against a pillar, staring across at Beaufort. Mademoiselle’s brows twitched sharply, but she uttered no word of reproach, partly from pride, and partly from surprise. ”

“ But there is this about a lady,’ he added, as an after reflection, while his eyes eagerly followed her movements and gestures, the flow of her garments and the lines of her neck and back; ‘simplicity is her crown. There is no use for the other sort to try it; they can’t succeed, and we know them. If Armand does not follow that girl to bank or battle, he’s an unmannerly ass.’
It was not in Armand to meet unsmilingly the arch glance of a smiling girl, even if there were not beauty in her to prick his senses and hold him thrilled. ”

“ It glowed like a lamp, and shed a faint illumination upon the dusk. The faded monotone of her voice murmured prayerfully above the weighted splash upon the stones, and awoke the essential impulse of existence. While such women lived and prayed for men, could the deeps of life be said to have closed? ’Tis an old-fashioned notion, but, like most old-fashioned things, ’tis the simplest and the best. It softened the hard retrospection of Dr. Vermont’s glance, and lent a wavering tenderness to his peculiar smile. ”

“ Vermont condescended to plan for their amusement.
‘Let us suppose ourselves singing Les Neiges d’Antan, and toasting our old acquaintances. We shall awaken into a new century, just the same as the old. The more it changes, the more it will be the same. Are you not prospectively tired of it already?’
He looked round gravely upon the young men, and excitement died out of each glance under the sad indifference of his. They felt upon their honour to be no less weary and cynical than he. ”

“ One despairs so quickly in youth, and then the children come, with their sweet faces made up of morning light, soft as flowers, with the smile of paradise in their clear eyes. And youth for me lies so far away,’ she added, with a scarce perceptible change of voice, and a ray lighting up her delicate face, showed a smile so wan and faint as rather to resemble the memory of a smile, reminiscent as the spectre of that youth she greeted as an alien, and I listening, wished I had died before hearing words so sad from her lips. ”

“ You are no longer a boy, Armand, but a young man of twenty-three, and you have no right to behave like a silly child, who aspires to fly, instead of contentedly riding along in the solid family coach provided for him. If I had any confidence in your talent I might, as you do, build my hopes upon your future fame, and console myself for present disappointment in the faith that your sacrifice is not in vain. But even a mother cannot be so foolish as to believe that her son is going to turn out a Raphael because he has donned a velvet coat and bought a box of paints. ”

“ Cathedral of Beaufort. That marriage still brought tears to Joséphine’s old eyes, and tempted her to unhabitual eloquence. How lovely the bride had looked!—too lovely, too delicate for health and long life. Eyes limpid like an angel’s, so sweetly blue and soft, a face upon which the tenderest breath would bring a stain of deepened colour, form slim and curved and dainty in every detail. The groom was proud, radiantly proud, perhaps not tender enough and unapprehensive of the rough winds of life for a creature so fragile and for bloom so evanescent. ”

“ In God’s name, let us knock down the brazen idol, and proclaim, without fear of being laughed at, that there are worthier and pleasanter objects in life, and that it is better to watch the fair aspects of earth than to jostle and strive with each other in its mean pursuit. My very name is distasteful to me, because it represents money. It is a password across the entire world, at which all men bow respectfully. And yet, I vow, I would sooner wander through the squalor and wretchedness of Saint-Ouen, any day, than find myself in the neighbourhood of the Rue de Grenelle. ”

“ This done, he examined a pair of pistols, loaded one which he laid upon the table, and with his odd, hard smile, carried the other into the dressing-room where Anatole slept, and placed it on the bed. There was still half an hour to dispose of before dinner—his last half hour of solitude. He took up the candle, and walked slowly round the room, inspecting each object, pricking by association, memory, that just then needed no pricking. The pity was that the man’s sharp face never lost its calm irony of expression, and his shapely mouth never lost its trick of quiet smiling. ”

“ I went outside to smoke a cigarette in the solitude of starlit night. One never wants for [Pg 145] proof of how much cruelty, shame, misery, and injustice may be gathered into an innocent girl’s existence by marriage. I had already seen much of it, and was familiar with the musings melancholy contemplation of it provoked. But here was matter not for musing but for fiery revolt. Every nerve thrilled with a sympathy so complete as to make her retrospective pain most personally mine, to thrust my individuality from its old bright environment out for ever into her desperate loneliness. ”

“ The best proof of moral worth lay in the excess of suffering endured. Virtue was measured by the degree of pain, and laughter dwelt with the ignoble jesters and clowns. Sorrow was a diadem upon that golden head, I murmured, and looked for confirmation in the cold radiance of the stars above, darting their shuttles of lambent flame in and out the purple depths of sky.
I peered down through the darkness, searching for the grey manor among the massive shadows. But no lighted window revealed it to my yearning gaze, and somehow I felt glad that Brases had suffered. ”

“ All was silence and desolation on this side of the island. No one walked its pavements, and the laundresses wheeling their barrows to town from the lower end, instinctively chose the inhabited quarter to pass.
‘A man might rot to carrion here,’ said Dr. Vermont, as he stood between the battered walls of the tower, and looked up at the weeping heavens, and then down at the sullen and swollen river. ”

“ I was saturated with the sadness of it, and my glance was still wedded to its dead charm, when a bloused peasant came out of the under shadows and luminous red upper sphere, like a cheerful commonplace note in the picturesque mystery of the imagination. Very real he looked, and not in the least like a ghost from other centuries. Prosperous, too, as befits a peasant who has earned his right to nod to his betters, and mayhap clink free and fraternal glasses with them through an ocean of blood. ”

“ The Benedictine monastery lay in massive gloom below, reaching an aerial coldness of sharp point and spire along its jagged tops. Feudal gashes in the arches let in large slips of green sky and glimmering stars, and its rough stone wall along one side was the division between the convent and the garden of my companion’s mistress. No, not even the cemetery I had left could, in the dreariest hour, look more inexpressibly dark, and lifeless, and forsaken than that old garden. Its beauty was the beauty of death and sadness and neglect. ”

“ However things happen, we hold folk once married can only be freed by death. I take it, sir, you come from foreign parts, though ’tis a wonder to me how you have learnt the English tongue so well. May be, beyond in your land, they’re like the Protestants, and play fast and loose with the marriage tie.’
He laid the dish of salmon on the table, and disappeared outside. My state of mixed emotions, of exasperated nerves, of pulses throbbing against my consciousness like a discordant instrument, anger with that prejudiced peasant predominating, reduced me to the level of savage and child. ”

“ Life has not taught me to expect anything like it, and I begin to believe I am not the sage I have lately loved to contemplate. What, indeed, if these steadfast, silent creatures be the sages after all, and we, the philosophers and seekers after light, but the fools, who wear cap and bells, and mistake them for badges of sovereignty.’
‘Here comes Gabrielle, François,’ said Mademoiselle, interrupting his reflections.
The little girl lingered shyly upon the edge of the gallery, which Joséphine endeavoured to make her cross by whispered entreaty and pushes. ”

“ For a moment an upbraiding word, a cold comment upon dear lips, might check his enthusiasm and cloud his mirthful glance, but a whistled bar of song, a smart stroke of pencil or brush, a glimpse of his becoming velvet jacket in a mirror, were enough to send hope blithely through his [Pg 233] veins, and speed him carolling on the way to fame.
It chanced one morning that he was interrupted at his easel by a letter from that domestic unbeliever who cast the sole blot upon his artist’s sunshine. There was a certain haziness in Armand’s relations with art. ”

“ So this was the end of that sorry drama of Fendon! Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy was dying in a far-off Swiss village on the top of St. Gothard. And the countess? Fred bent, and whispered his name, and begged to be used as a friend. A gleam of recognition broke the dark blankness of the dying man’s glance, and he made a feeble movement of his hand, which Luffington caught and held in a gentle clasp. The sick man’s eyes filled gratefully. He knew he was dying, and he was comforted by the presence of Luffington. ”

“ That a sharp-witted man of the world, an intelligent French writer of some fame, should be driven to inane stuttering at the greatest moment of his existence, was surely a grotesque fatality. I saw with a shock the contraction of the delicate brows, and the surprised interrogation of the proud glance she levelled at me. Then pride and surprise ebbed back to their still depths, and the brows smoothed by sheer effort of will, I divined, and she smiled coldly, a little austere smile, remote and frosted like a ray on ice. ”