Initial commit of ebook 77484 filesHEADmain

1 files changed, 7608 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/77484-0.txt b/77484-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..80bfed7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/77484-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7608 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77484 ***
+
+
+
+
+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 77484 ***