Chapter II: Epilogue: , 118 (2)

When Henriette was a slip of a girl and Adèle a child of ten, young Dr. Vermont, the only son of Monsieur Lenormant’s comrade of youth, came down to Beaufort from Paris, in the full blaze of university honours, and not without promise of future scientific renown, backed by a substantial income and solid provincial influence. This young man looked surprisingly well upon horseback, and found it good exercise to ride frequently from the town to the house of his father’s old friend upon the island. Arrived there, it amused him to notice Adèle, who was free of anything like bashfulness, and in return, thought him the nicest person she had ever seen. Meanwhile, a grave, tall girl, too thin for her ungraceful age, looked on with very different eyes. To her Dr. Vermont was the traditional Phœbus Apollo of girlhood. She knew nothing of romance, or novels, or poetry, but she felt the dawn of womanhood upon sight of him, and blushed in divine self-consciousness. She was a plain girl then--unfinished, unformed, and painfully reserved; and it was not to be expected that such an elegant article of semi-Parisian make, as Dr. Vermont, should have an eye for material so crude and undeveloped. Had Dr. Vermont been thirty instead of twenty, he might have thought differently, but we all know how grandly exacting and dramatic twenty is. Whereas his conquest was not in the least astonishing. He was a fine-looking lad, with plenty of pluck and grace and worldly wisdom. He carried himself with a noble self-consciousness, was sufficiently attentive to his moustache to convince mankind of its supreme importance, and already his handsome dark eyes wore that look of mild scrutiny that never left them. Altogether a youth with justifiable pretensions and fascinations of an intellectual and bodily nature, and one by no means likely to learn to abate them by experience.

As the years went by, and the little women of the dark house by the river grew with them, the wealth of Monsieur Lenormant declined, and when Dr. Vermont, now a distinctive _somebody_ in his profession, came down one summer, and rode out from Beaufort to see him, matters were so bad that he found it his duty to come every day during the rest of his vacation. Adèle was now sixteen, a lovely flower opening in the sun of romantic dreams. Can we wonder if Dr. Vermont’s glance rested on her in amazed admiration? Dr. Vermont said nothing, but he looked. He looked constantly, and his glances were not without eloquence for the maiden blushing vividly beneath them. All this Henriette saw, and loved her sister none the less, wished not the less heartily both her dear ones happiness and success, though her own misery came of it. Only Monsieur Lenormant understood nothing of the situation. His dream always had been to marry his favourite Henriette to his young friend Vermont, but death overtook him before he could accomplish it.

One evening, as Dr. Vermont sat beside him with his hand upon his pulse, the poor gentleman looked up at him anxiously.

‘I have written for a relative, a lady, to come and look after my girls, but you, François, I expect to be their real protector. I like to think of you as my daughter’s husband. She is a good girl, François, an excellent girl. She has been a devoted daughter, and an adoring sister. She will make the best of wives.’

‘I am sure of it,’ said Dr. Vermont musingly, as he glanced down to where the two girls were silently embroidering in the deep recess of a window above the river. He knew perfectly well which daughter he was expected to marry and which he intended to marry, but he kept his counsel, and gazed in soft approbation upon the charming profile of Adèle.

When he came next day, Monsieur Lenormant had departed from this world of marriage and giving in marriage, and the lady relative had arrived. A formal engagement with Adèle was speedily entered upon, and the Doctor took the train for Paris, a happy prospective bridegroom, with the advantage of being in no hurry to jump into domestic responsibilities. His betrothed was somewhat young, and meanwhile he would have leisure to pursue pleasure elsewhere, and nourish her placid love upon the most expensive boxes of sweets direct from Boissier, and instalments of light and elegant literature to teach her what to respect of life and from mankind.

The bride was eighteen and the groom twenty-eight, when they were married one spring morning in the Mairie and in the Cathedral of Beaufort. That marriage still brought tears to Joséphine’s old eyes, and tempted her to unhabitual eloquence. How lovely the bride had looked!--too lovely, too delicate for health and long life. Eyes limpid like an angel’s, so sweetly blue and soft, a face upon which the tenderest breath would bring a stain of deepened colour, form slim and curved and dainty in every detail. The groom was proud, radiantly proud, perhaps not tender enough and unapprehensive of the rough winds of life for a creature so fragile and for bloom so evanescent. But he looked distinguished, well-bred, and eminently Parisian; and what more could provincial spectators desire?

A more interesting figure far was the grave, sad young lady, who smiled upon her happy sister through her tears, and could find words above the pain of a breaking heart to remind the groom that Adèle had always been petted and spoiled and cared, and fervently implore him to do the same by her, and treat her more like a child than a wife. The scene was clear before me. Mademoiselle, as she must have been at twenty-three, not pretty, but captivating enough for eyes not blinded by mere animal beauty, as the Doctor’s were. And he, fatuous, sure of himself, at heart indifferent to others, and intoxicated with foolish marital satisfaction. Did he know that tragedy brushed his happiness that moment--softly, benignantly, with blessing instead of prayer, with gaze of hope instead of reproach?

Joséphine could tell me nothing, and it pleased me to believe that he understood, and some day might remember.

After some months in Paris, the little bride was brought back to the dark house by the river by an anxious husband, there to linger in the warmth of two loves, two devotions, waited upon, worshipped in vain. The opening of her baby’s eyes was the signal for the closing of her own. Not then, not then could Dr. Vermont be expected to understand. As far as I could gather from Joséphine’s account, he passionately loved his young wife. Her death crushed him for a while, and he walked the earth like one blind to the changes of seasons, blind to surrounding faces, and fronting a future that would remain for ever a blank. Mademoiselle came, and gently touched his hand to remind him that he was not alone in his sorrow. He neither felt the fraternity nor the unspoken tenderness. The paleness of her cheek held no eloquence of suffering for him; the sadness of her eyes left his heart untouched. As for the child, far from feeling a thrill of paternity upon sight of it, he desired never to behold it more. He would regard it henceforth as the cause of his moral ruin, the beginning of a broken and joyless life.

In this hard and sullen mood he returned to Paris, and Gabrielle grew up with Mademoiselle, without any knowledge of her father, who apparently had forgotten the existence of both.

AN INTERLUDE

A DECISION FIN DE SIÈCLE AT THE CAFÉ LANDER

IN the middle of the rue Taitbout, there is a little café, which was not so well known twenty years ago as it is now, at the end of the nineteenth century. Then it was only beginning to emerge from the inferior position of crémerie. Came one day, from the unconventional region of the Latin Quarter, somewhere in the seventies, an enterprising proprietor; and in his wake followed a train of noble youths, enthusiastic in the praises of Lander, wishful for the further enjoyments of his hospitalities, and with kindly memory of his generosity in the matter of credit.

Lander brought the pleasant ways of the _Quarter_ across the town with him, and the band of noble youths stood by him, encouraged and sustained him. In consequence, the Café Lander flourished exceedingly, and its circle of clients daily increased, until it was known, far and wide, as the resort of embryo genius. For all the boisterous and good-tempered young fellows who crowded round its tables, and emptied bocks and consumed coffee (fifty centimes a cup with _fine champagne_), were coming great men. They were the future lights in literature, art, philosophy, and politics. The real living great man they professed to regard with respectful admiration, but they wanted none of him in their midst. In the slang of the day, he had made his pile, and reposed on velvet and laurels among the Immortals. When he would have become a part of the past, and the future was their present, they could afford to be on more intimate terms with him. But for the present, they belonged exclusively to the future.

These young fools had their place a while, and expectation dwelt indulgently upon them. They chatted loudly of isms and ologies and oxies, with refreshing crudeness: upheld the realistic, the romantic, the psychological, and Heaven knows what other schools of literature. They prated of form, and matter, and art, and style, as only Frenchmen, bitten by love of these things, can prate. And then, one by one, they dropped out of the ranks of embryo genius, having accomplished nothing, with the great epic unwritten, unwritten the drama, the psychological novel that was to teach M. Bourget something new about women; unwritten the important _History of the Franks_, that was to throw into relief hitherto unrevealed aspects of the character of their conquerors; unsolved the problems of metaphysics under discussion, undiscovered the great political panacea of the age, unpainted the grand masterpiece. With the first stone of their reputation still to be laid, they went, and the café saw them no more.

Some of them became commonplace advocates, and made uninteresting citizens and fairly reputable fathers of families: or sordid notaries, or humdrum bourgeois. Romance shook its bridle rein with a regretful backward glance: ‘Farewell for evermore,’ and the converted fool turned upon his heel to enter into the ignoble strife with his fellows in quest of daily bread. Others there were who had a troublesome way of right-about-facing upon fond expectation. They jilted the muse for historical research, or discarded art for literature, or drifted from sonnets to the stage. One youth of philosophic tastes was known, with inexcusable fickleness, to shake off the secular garb, and array himself in the white of the cloister. He was the only one who made a serious reputation; he became a fashionable preacher, and wrote a _History of the Church_ which brought upon him the wrath of Rome.

But if they were mostly crude, ineffectual youths, they had bright faces, and eager glances, and hearts full of hope and enthusiasm. They were each confident of his own powers, inapprehensive of defeat or failure, bound upon a fiery race for experience and new sensations, contemptuous of the past, and looked gaily toward a future of glorious achievement. Not a city but furnishes the type, and in no other city is it so persistent as in Paris. Paint one such, and you paint all her young men, nourished upon vivid imagination, upon inexhaustible hope and unconquerable self-faith.

Into this circle of frank and amiable egotists, Dr. Vermont dropped accidentally some ten years ago. Being of an experimental turn of mind, and apt to fall upon mild curiosity in his casual scrutiny of impetuous youth, he stayed. It is a mistake to assume that an interest in youth, and a tolerance of its nonsense, is an indication of lingering kindness of heart Dr. Vermont liked youth as a vivisectionist likes animals. It taught him much that he desired to know, and where it did not teach him precisely, it helped him along the path of observation. Men are grown-up children; boys are rude philosophers, artists, poets, what you will.

A cold, passionless man was Dr. Vermont, the one feeble flame of human feeling he had thrilled to having faded out of memory almost upon the death of his just buried young wife. She, too, had interested him, only differently, being of a less calculable and possibly less shallow order of being than the embryo great men of Lander’s. Widowhood had sundered him sharply from all personal ties, and left him all the freer to indulge his passion for experimental psychology.

As he sat evening after evening, and drank his coffee and little glass, and smoked a meditative cigar, it amused him to encourage the vivacious contentment around him, and lead the unborn reputations to reveal their bent. His influence upon young men was a thing to make older and saner persons gape. It was, perhaps, all the stronger and more subtle because it was unrecognised. He was feared, and yet admired, to an incredible degree. His mild, sarcastic face, with its finished features and wholly effaced humanity of expression, put a point upon emulation and goaded to rash display. But none were made to feel the rashness of their flights, or the absurdity of their theories. Dr. Vermont was too clever a man to scare expansion, or cow ambition. This was how he kept his hold upon the fresh-moustached lads around him. This was how they spoke of him among themselves as a good fellow--_un bon garçon, malgré_--well, in spite of a great many things.

Thus he sat, and smoked, and listened, while the years passed, and out of the circle familiar faces went and new ones came. It must be admitted there was not much variety in the entertainment. Always the same questions of form and expression, of style and matter; always the same comparison of international literatures and the relative virtues of different forms of government; above and beyond all, sex and its unexplained and stinging problems. They never tired, and each batch came up, fresh and eager for the old discussions. Names may vary, fashions may alter, but the rough, broad facts of life are there, immutable like nature, ever recurrent like the ebb and flow of the tide.

A sense of weariness was upon Dr. Vermont the December night I write of, as he walked toward the Café Lander. Most of the lads were dispersed by the Christmas vacation. But he knew precisely those who were expecting him. Anatole Buzeval, his favourite, a charming young fellow, with healthy Norman blood in his veins, and in spite of the disastrous environment of Paris _fin de siècle_, with something throbbing under his coat that suspiciously resembled a boy’s free heart. He came from a Norman fishing town, near the beat of the channel, washed by a friendly old river and wooded by still friendlier trees. In boyhood, he had walked in the woods, he had fished in the river, he had known the delights of amateur seafaring, and rode, and shot live things, and was first awakened by love to the melody of the birds, and to heroism by the genial spirit of endurance of the fishermen. These influences kept him partially sheltered from the century-worn cynicism and exhausted emotions prevailing. It accounted for the ring of sincerity in his laughter, for the zest of his ephemeral enthusiasms and the courageous freedom of his blue eyes. But he was nevertheless bitten by the disease of the hour, and his speech was tainted with the cheap _fin de siècle_ indifference and dejection. He was the youngest of the party, the most intelligent and the brightest. Beside him sat Gaston Favre, a youth who would have been an artist if the death-throes of the century left him any room to believe in art. Nothing any longer interested him, but he was still capable of remarking upon sight of a bad picture--

‘Now, if it were worth the trouble, or really mattered, there is food for indignation in that picture.’

Whereupon he would survey it in the spirit of ostentatious tolerance, without a wince or a critical flash of eye.

The third, Julien Renaud, was a little older than these two, and professed a dead interest in politics. Time was when Lander’s echoed with the noble flow of his eloquence. Time was when it was confidently believed that he was destined, not only in his own imagination, to reach the tribune, and thunder effectively against the abuses of government. But that was in M. Constans’ hour, and M. Constans was notoriously Julien’s pet aversion. In those remote days, he was antagonistic toward what he called ‘the whole shop of the Elysian Fields,’ and relished M. Carnot as little as he had ever relished ‘old Father Grévy.’ But these were now half-forgotten ebullitions of youth, and like his beloved France, he was battered and bruised by the defeats of life into complete indifference. Nothing mattered. In reply to everything, he had but one response, a quiet shrug, a weariedly lifted eyebrow, and a murmured _cui bono_ upon a long-drawn sigh. On this evening the chosen drink was punch, which resulted in more boisterous converse, and showed Anatole in almost a lyric mood. The first mention of the insipidly recurrent phrase of the hour--‘end of the century’--inspired him to fall upon mirthful reminiscences, just as Dr. Vermont entered the café.

‘M. le docteur désire?’ said the waiter, helping him off with his overcoat.

The doctor named his drink as he took a seat, and blandly scrutinised each flushed and smiling face.

‘We were talking, Doctor,’ Anatole cried, ‘of ways of ending the year. Do you remember, two years ago, when I first joined you, coming straight from Barbizon, where I chummed with a queer and amusing Scotch artist? how I taught you all to sing what I conceived to be a Scotch melody--_Les Temps Jadis_--and we drank at midnight an execrable decoction called in Scotland a tod-dy, standing, and gave an English shake-hands all round, which I am told is the way in Scotland of toasting the departing year?’

The Doctor paused in the act of lifting his glass, and nodded, as he threw out a couple of absent names in signification of his keen remembrance of the evening.

Followed good-natured and regretful words for each absent face. _Les temps jadis_ were not such bad times after all, though the melancholy Scotch might chant them with more melody than the vivacious sons of Gaul. Jean this was an excellent heart; Henri that, a capital good fellow, the pity was he stuttered so. Frédéric, poor fool, had settled down, and married a _dot_ and a squint, and the squint, alas! was so marked, that the dowry was a totally inadequate compensation. Upon which, Julien made cynical mention of the greater security of marital rights when backed by aid so powerful as a squint.

‘But, since women are only happy in virtue of their lovers and not in virtue of their husbands,’ shouted Anatole, with a charming look of _rouerie_, ‘what a dismal future for Frédéric’s wife! I declare I could find it in my heart to rush off and console her. I should be so blinded by my own burning eloquence, as I flung myself at her feet, that I would have no eyes left for the squint.’

‘Not until you came to yourself in a revulsion of feeling, my friend,’ sneered Julien Renaud.

‘Has any one seen Henri Lemaître since the night we drank our Scotch tod-dy, Anatole, and sang, or tried to sing, _Les Temps Jadis_?’ asked Dr. Vermont.

‘No. He was last heard of in Japan, studying the gentle art of self-defence, as practised by the gentle Japanese. He derided the duel, and loathed European pugilism, and he thought something might be done towards a more civilised settlement of disputes by borrowing of the remoter civilisation of the land of the chrysanthemum. What will you? Did he not study the washy water-colours of the immortal Monsieur Loti?’

‘Oh, an affection for Pierre Loti would explain any absurdity!’ said Gaston Favre, with a grim smile. ‘If we could hope to sit here a hundred years hence, and make a summary of the gods of the coming century, I wonder what sort of intellectual company should we have under discussion.’

‘Finished humbugs, I dare swear,’ shouted Anatole. ‘Already, from force of mere good writing, we have fallen upon intellectual inanition. The last century wound up by unveiling the goddess of reason; we’ve unveiled the goddess of form, and the devil swallow me, if there is anything to be found behind our excellent style. Each light of a new school sounds a loud trumpet to inform the world that he has at last discovered truth. So does a silly hen who lays an ordinary egg, the counterpart of her fellow-hen’s. You can’t convince her of the fatuous impertinence of her cackle, nor prove to her that there is nothing particularly great in the laying of eggs. I declare, nowadays, every trumpery artist and scribbler takes himself as seriously as the hen, and divides his time between laying and cackling.’

‘Each one has his theory, and it is more important that he should reveal that theory to the public than even paint his picture, write his play, or novel, or story upon it. So much has America taught him by means of that strange institution, the interviewer.’

‘Ah,’ cried Anatole, in a burst of exaggerated despair, ‘I gave up France when she took the American interviewer to her bosom, and the best papers were not ashamed to give us the opinions of the latest Minister, and expose the lack of taste and modesty in the youngest Master.’

‘Not France alone, _mon cher_,’ interposed Dr. Vermont; ‘English journalism has become no whit less vulgar and personal. Vulgarity, ostentation, fraud, rapacious advertisement--these are all the symptoms of the great moral disease of the century. Were a Lycurgus to rise up for each state, I doubt if the nations of the earth would have the wisdom to return to frugality, courage, and simplicity--so much have we lost by the long race of civilisation, so much our superiors were the old Pagan Spartans, and so dead are we to all promptings of delicacy,--without moral or physical value, without even valour.’

The Doctor spoke dejectedly, as if the hope of all good had died within him. The young men suddenly remembered that they, too, were weighted with a like lassitude and unbelief, and finished their punch in silence.

‘I expect we shall see the century out in a lugubrious spirit,’ sighed Anatole, when, upon a sign from Dr. Vermont, the waiter had replenished their glasses.

‘Where’s the use of facing a new one?’ asked the Doctor, with a vague, dull glance into space. ‘The same chatter, the same humbug, the same vulgarity and fraud. Always the same, and inevitably the same. New idols, new theories, new habits start up to prove more monotonous than the old ones----’

‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ interrupted Gaston Favre.

‘Exactly, and Alphonse Karr was not the first to find it out. I have a better plan, lads, for saluting the new century than your Scotchman’s tod-dy and _Les Temps Jadis_,--than even the insipid shake-hands of Albion.’

The punch had gone to the young heads, and gave them a craving for excitement. Each one leant forward over his glass, with shining eyes and flushed cheeks, eager and expectant. It was not often that Dr. Vermont condescended to plan for their amusement.

‘Let us suppose ourselves singing _Les Neiges d’Antan_, and toasting our old acquaintances. We shall awaken into a new century, just the same as the old. The more it changes, the more it will be the same. Are you not prospectively tired of it already?’

He looked round gravely upon the young men, and excitement died out of each glance under the sad indifference of his. They felt upon their honour to be no less weary and cynical than he. A nod of emphatic agreement from the three young pessimists was supplemented to the Doctor’s monologue, as he continued--

‘Suppose we salute the twentieth century--already worn before birth--by a single pistol-shot, the mouth of each man’s to his brains. As we are none of us likely to do anything with our brains, more than the hundreds of other young men I have seen vanish from these tables into nothingness, there can be no patriotic objection to our blowing them out in company.’

The young men sat back in their chairs, and drew a long, deep breath. They were almost sobered for the moment, and profoundly troubled by their leader’s extraordinary proposition. However firmly we may be convinced of the nothingness of life, such a method of toasting the new year is calculated to give the stoutest courage pause. Not that they held any squeamish objections to suicide--quite the contrary, they professed to regard it as the natural and legitimate remedy for a broken heart, damaged honour, or a ruined life. But, _tudieu!_ they all sat there drinking their punch in freedom and security, with pockets not inconveniently full, it is true, but with sound hearts and sounder appetites. The prison was not before them: then, why the deuce should they be offered the grave?

‘I thought, like Solomon, you were disposed to complain of the sameness of all things under the sun,’ sneered the Doctor.

‘That is true, Doctor,’ assented Anatole. ‘But suppose we were to find things just as same beyond the sun--or a good deal worse? For, after all, we may flatter ourselves with being sceptics, but what security have we that the pistol-shot will be the end of it all? and what if it happened to be infernally disagreeable somewhere else, and there was no getting back?’

‘Bah, another glass of punch will put you all right,’ laughed Julien. ‘On reflection, I find the Doctor’s proposal an excellent one. We are sick of everything here--wine, women, and song, such as Paris now furnishes. Then, let us go and see for ourselves what is going on among the stars. There’s this comfort, Anatole, we go in a body, if there is anything ugly to face. That’s the difficulty about suicide,--its lugubrious solitude. In company, one may snap his fingers at fear. To see three friendly faces round you, all ready to plunge at once into the same boat, and exchange jokes simultaneously with old Father Charon! When you lift your own cocked pistol to your forehead, to see three other hands and all four be shot together out of the mystery, either into eternity or--_le néant_.’

‘Ah, there, you’re not sure either, Gaston,’ Anatole protested, reproachfully.

‘That’s just it, boy; I know nothing now, but with the dawn of the new century I should know everything.’

‘My humble contribution to the Doctor’s plan is the proposal that we blow our brains out together--I mean in the same room,’ suggested Julien.

‘Precisely; I have just been thinking the matter out. Now here in Paris, we should excite excessive attention. But it might better be managed in some quiet place--near the sea, or close to a river bank, where our bodies might disappear easily, without giving rise to immediate alarm. I know of a half deserted island down near Beaufort, my native town. You will hardly believe that a place so near a busy factory town--one of the largest provincial cities of France--could be so forsaken and desolate. I doubt if any one lives on it now. My father-in-law had a big gloomy house on that island. I don’t think there was another inhabitant but himself. We might go down there, and toast the new century in among the dark rocks above the river.’

‘Beaufort! a commonplace train with such an end in view,’ sighed Anatole.

‘Not necessarily a train. What is to prevent us from taking horse, as your favourite heroes of Dumas did?’ said the Doctor, smiling a little at him.

‘With all my heart, if we are going to ride to Beaufort,’ cried Anatole. ‘I don’t care if I am shot then.’

_PART SECOND_

DR. VERMONT

(_Told by the author_)

DR. VERMONT AND HIS GUESTS UPON THE ISLAND

IT wanted three days to the end of the year. The afternoon had been so exceptionally mild, that Mademoiselle Lenormant and her foreign friend were still sitting out on the gallery enjoying the sunset. The air was very clear, and the heavens beautifully coloured, though the winter dusk was beginning to drop. But it was as yet a mere suggestion of dimness that did not hide, while it accentuated, the edge of bleak and empty road along the sky-line. It sharpened the outlines of the bridge and its castellated points below. The river was smooth like dark glass, and rosy clouds made a blood-red margin along its outer bank. No wind blew among the trees of the melancholy garden, visible from the other side of the gallery, and so still was it, that the farthest sounds sent back their travelling echoes. The footfall of a solitary peasant crossing the bridge made a martial clatter, so clear and strong and self-assertive was it upon the pavements that seemed to sleep since feudal times.

Little Gabrielle sat in a corner of the gallery in jacket and hood, hugging Minette, who bore the discomfort bravely, while she spelled out a story from a large picture-book on her knee. It was satisfactory to see that the kitten took as much interest in the story as the reader, and enlivened the study by occasional lunges at the brown finger following each line. The child’s pretty voice hardly interrupted the low conversation of the two ladies, who faced the view of Beaufort, and watched the road, while they discoursed upon the philosophy of life. Mademoiselle Lenormant always watched that road, whether she sat in the gallery or upstairs in her own room. It was the rival of Gabrielle and her books, for she would willingly leave either at any moment to look at it.

Joséphine came down to carry Gabrielle inside, out of the chill air, and the child was still protesting loudly, and calling imperiously on her aunt to rescue her from private tyranny, when Mademoiselle bent forward with an excited gesture, her eyes riveted upon the point where the road seemed to issue from the sky.

‘Do you not see something down there--something dark that moves?’ she breathed, without looking at her companion.

‘Effectively. It appears to be a group of men on horseback. Yes, Mademoiselle, it is a party of riders, and they are coming straight towards the bridge.’

Mademoiselle shook from head to foot, and went and caught the balustrade to steady herself, while she continued to examine the blot of moving shadow upon the landscape, that increased with each wink of eyelid, until soon it was a visible invasion of males on horseback. A dull thud of hoofs was borne upon the air, and near the bridge, one of the party, apparently the leader, drew up, and seemed to address the others. These at once fell behind, three in number, and the foremost turned his face to the island, and galloped ahead.

‘Joséphine, viens, viens vite,’ shrieked Mademoiselle, her whole face dyed pink, and her grey eyes dark and luminous with emotion.

Joséphine hurried out, cap-strings flying, all in a state of wild concern. What was it, but what on earth was it? What did Mademoiselle see?

Mademoiselle began in a thick voice--

‘Je crois, Joséphine, que c’est le docteur’--and then stopped, and drew her hand slowly across her eyes, like one awakened from a moment’s stupor. ‘C’est Monsieur le docteur qui nous arrive enfin,’ she added, in her usual voice, and with a full return to her old self.

Joséphine peered over the balustrade, but she only saw three moving shapes upon the bridge, the outlines of horse and man intermelted to her vision.

‘The foremost rider must now be half way up the street,’ cried Mademoiselle’s companion, glad yet ashamed that she should be there at such a moment.

‘Take Gabrielle, Joséphine, and put on her pretty grey dress and her laces. Marie will open the door for Dr. Vermont.’

Joséphine carried off the startled child, too frightened to ask questions or demur, and at that moment the bell rang loudly, with violent emphasis.

‘I will leave you now, dear Mademoiselle,’ said her friend, with sympathetic pressure of her fingers. ‘Monsieur will doubtless require this _appartement_, in which case I can return to Beaufort this evening.’

‘No, no, there is a bedroom upstairs. You will not leave me so abruptly, not now, when perhaps I may most need a friend. Stay yet a while.’

A heavy step was crossing the hall, and came through the dining-room towards the gallery. The foreigner, on her way to her own room, caught sight of a lean, youngish-looking gentleman, with a fair beard and thin brown hair worn off temples, deeply marked by life. He glanced at her keenly, as he stood for her to pass, and she had time to note the social polish of his manners, and the melancholy dignity of his aspect, and then he crossed the floor and stepped out through the window, searching with mild brown eyes for the woman who had waited for his coming for ten long years.

His face lit up with a soft smile when he saw her, and he went forward, upon the pleasant exclamation--‘Ma sœur!’ His intention was to bestow upon her a formal embrace. His hand was stretched out, and when her cold slim fingers touched it, and lay in his palm, and he saw the lustre of unshed tears in the sad grey eyes that met his own steadily, and a rosy flame tremble like confession over the cheeks’ pallor, a new impulse came to him, and he simply lifted her hand to his lips.

‘Henriette,’ he murmured, in a troubled voice.

‘The silence has been long, François,’ she said, and smiled.

He still held her hand, and gazed at her curiously. She was not so changed as he, and if the years had thinned, they had not lined her face. At thirty-three, he even found her more attractive than at twenty. There was that about her which compelled interest, and gave an odd charm to the simplest speech.

‘Henriette, you have much to pardon me, and your indulgence will have to go still further than you dream. Ah, how vividly a forgotten past may bear down upon a man at the first sight of a familiar place! All my life down here had clean gone from my mind. This queer old house, your father, you, even Adèle, have been for me years past, not even a memory, much less a link with all that is gone. It is incredible how completely a man may forget. No regret, no remembrance pursued me in Paris, and the instant I crossed the bridge it all surged back on me, not as remembered days, but as the actual present. Verily, we are droll rascals, Henriette, and mercilessly tyrannised by experience.’

He had dropped her hand now, and was leaning against a pillar, staring across at Beaufort. Mademoiselle’s brows twitched sharply, but she uttered no word of reproach, partly from pride, and partly from surprise.

‘It will be good news for Gabrielle, and for me, if such a change decided you to remain here now,’ she said.

‘Gabrielle?’ he interrogated softly.

‘Your child, François!’

Oh, this he understood as a reproach, though it touched him but slightly. He made a step forward, still questioning her with movement of brow and eyelid.

‘_Tiens!_ It is true. Is it credible I could forget I had a child? Oh! I know what you must think of me, Henriette; and the worst of it is, you cannot think badly enough of me;’ he said, laughing drearily.

‘It would be a poor satisfaction for me to think badly of you, François. I am not your judge. It is enough for me that you have come back--at last.’

‘What a sweet woman!’ cried Dr. Vermont, in amazement. ‘My sister, your kindness confounds me. Life has not taught me to expect anything like it, and I begin to believe I am not the sage I have lately loved to contemplate. What, indeed, if these steadfast, silent creatures be the sages after all, and we, the philosophers and seekers after light, but the fools, who wear cap and bells, and mistake them for badges of sovereignty.’

‘Here comes Gabrielle, François,’ said Mademoiselle, interrupting his reflections.

The little girl lingered shyly upon the edge of the gallery, which Joséphine endeavoured to make her cross by whispered entreaty and pushes. She did not know this man who was her father, and her small brains were busy contriving a way to greet him. She made a pretty picture thus, in grey silk and white lace, with a broad crimson sash, and a big bow of red ribbon on the top of her curly brown head. Dr. Vermont stared at her as an object of natural curiosity rather than a charming little girl, his own daughter.

‘She is very like you, Henriette,’ he said, and held out his hand with an ingratiating smile.

Gabrielle came slowly forward, and took it; then looked up into his face in grave and silent deliberation. She decided suddenly to offer her cheek for the paternal kiss, which she did, with much conscious dignity and no sense of pleasure whatever.

‘Let me see,’ said Dr. Vermont, when he had perfunctorily kissed her, ‘she is now about ten. The very age her mother was when I first beheld her. Poor pretty Adèle! She does not in any way resemble her.’

He sighed deeply, and Henriette’s eyes, fixed on Gabrielle, filled with tears.

‘What rooms does Monsieur wish me to prepare for him?’ Joséphine asked in the pause.

The Doctor started, and remembered, with a quick disagreeable sensation, the nearness of his friends, and its extraordinary significance. If that good soul Joséphine but knew! If Henriette suspected!

‘That reminds me, Henriette--I have left three friends outside. I suppose you can put us up down here, or upstairs, for a couple of nights?’

‘Only a couple of nights?’ Mademoiselle exclaimed.

‘Yes. By the dawn of New Year’s Day we shall be far from Beaufort, so we will leave you on New Year’s Eve after dinner. What accommodation have you here?’

‘You have forgotten that, too! There is your old room--the large one opposite, which a friend of mine has been using. There is a canapé, which one of the gentlemen can sleep on. And then there is my sister’s room, and in the little dressing-room off it, another bed could be put up. I think you can manage.’

‘Capitally. We shall be lodged like kings. Gaston and Julien in my old room--yes, I quite remember it now. Yellow hangings, and an engraving of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and a picture of Madame Lebrun. Not so? Anatole will sleep in the dressing-room, and I in the blue room. Is it still so blue? There used to be a photograph of my favourite Del Sarto, “The Madonna with St John.” Poor Adèle! What would I not give to be the same enamoured young fellow of ten years ago, violently combating death? But I have lived twenty years since, and everything is dead for me.’

He thrust his hands into his pockets, and went toward the door in search of his friends, without troubling to note the effect of his heartless words upon Henriette.

These he found trotting unconcernedly up and down the broken pavement. With all eternity before them, a few minutes more or less outside a particular door could not affect them. And when they were ushered into the house by the Doctor, and presented to his sister-in-law, they cast a glance of pity upon her that she should be at so much pains to welcome doomed, indifferent men. They listened politely to her apologies for the insufficiencies of their installation, and to her prayers for indulgence in the matter of _cuisine_; and shook their heads in despondent wonder. As for Anatole, he was as lugubrious as a funeral mute, and the Doctor’s cynical animation at table completely mystified him.

When once the fumes of punch had abated, poor Anatole saw his mad engagement in quite a novel light. The thought of that pistol held by his own hand to his own brains drove him to panic. He looked wan with fear, and fierce from desire to conceal his fear. He was a coward in both senses: without courage to stand out against a foolish engagement, and equally without courage to face death. Despite his boasted conviction that one death is as good as another, and any possibly better than life, he entertained a very private notion that suicide is a social as well as a moral crime, hardly justifiable by the most abject blunder and excesses--and by nothing less than absolute dishonour.

Besides, at heart he loved life, and he only played at pessimism not to look less jaded and cynical than the rest of the century. It was the fashion not to be gay, to have no belief, to have exhausted all emotions, and reached the end of all things. Now what would those around him say if it were known that Anatole Buzeval relished in the privacy of his own chamber Alexandre Dumas, and shed tears at the death of Porthos? What self-respecting Parisian of his day would associate with a youth, whose favourite hero was D’Artugnan, and who loved the great optimist Scott, whose novels he studied stealthily in an indifferent translation, and knew by heart.

He was abashed by contemplation of his own spuriousness as member of an effete circle, where death was regarded as the best of all things; and Mademoiselle Lenormant was seriously distressed by the wretchedness of his appetite and the misery of his boyish face. She forgot herself in another, and left the Doctor to entertain her friend, who had been invited to join them at dinner, while she set herself the task of rescuing the poor lad from his own reflections. Anatole was an affectionate and grateful young fellow, and the way to his heart was inconveniently easy of access. When he went to bed that night, to his other woes was added the delightful misfortune of being head and ears in love with the Doctor’s sister-in-law.

This was a complication not unnoted by Dr. Vermont or his companions. The Doctor calmly stroked his beard, and watched Anatole between the pauses of his conversation on matters English with the foreign lady. The foreigner, he was pleased afterwards to describe, as intelligent, but as she had already touched the rim of the arid plain of middle-age, with equal dulness, far from the hills of youth and from the valley of old age, he saw no reason to pursue her thoughts or shades of speech upon her face--by the way, he did not like English women; they lacked _atmosphere_, and were born without any natural grace, or coquetry, or any desire to please--and hence he had the more leisure to devote to inspection of Mademoiselle Lenormant and his susceptible comrade. He understood all the boy thought hidden of the struggle within him. He contemplated a magnanimous turn at the last moment, and caressed it in all its dramatic details. Meanwhile, it amused him to follow the conflict, and watch the childish eagerness with which Anatole, thinking his last hour at hand, abandoned himself to this new fancy, with a volume of eloquent declaration on the edge of his eyelids.

And yet the Doctor’s calm inspection was not without a twinge of anger, as at a kind of infringement of his personal rights. As he sat in the old salon, where in his youth he used to chat with Monsieur Lenormant, he was in the grip of the past, softened, almost sentimental. Nothing was changed about the place, which wore the same homely aspect of shabbiness and comfortable untidiness. But three of the personages of that little drama were dead: Monsieur Lenormant, Adèle, and young Dr. Vermont. For he, too, had been young and bright and pleasant. Once he had thrilled from head to foot when Adèle, with a charming movement, took one of his long fingers, and helped him to vamp the _Marseillaise_, and their eyes met in a foolish fluttering glance, and _tudieu!_ his own were wet!

These were extraordinary things to remember, perhaps, but not so extraordinary as the persistence with which his backward glance rested, not on the image of his lovely young wife evoked from the past--but upon Henriette as she then was. That picture of grave, silent girlhood haunted him in a singular and unexpected way. The forgotten drama rose up, and confronted him with its ruthless _dénouement_. And if he were not too proud and wilful ever to acknowledge regret, he might know that it was there the sting lay, as he remembered: that he should have played an ignoble trick upon poor old Monsieur Lenormant, and have looked at Adèle instead of at Henriette--on one memorable occasion. He had played for his happiness, and happiness had passed him by. Perchance, had he played a more honourable game, happiness would have been with him all these years, and the noble woman, whose suffering in his choice he now knew he had then divined, would have brought him finer and more delicate enjoyment than that which he had found elsewhere.

‘Yet who knows?’ he added, as a sound lash upon sentimental musing. ‘There is no such thing as happiness, and I should have tired of her goodness as I have tired of the badness of others.’

But he smiled indulgently, when Anatole droned a melancholy melody upon her charms that night.

NEW YEAR’S EVE

WHILE the young men were still sitting over their coffee and rolls in uncheerful converse, Dr. Vermont stole upstairs--not to see Gabrielle, but to talk to Henriette. His thoughts had been with her all night, and he was eager for sight of her by day.

When he entered, a spot of insufferable radiance burnt into the hollow of her thin cheek; but this confession was counteracted by the extreme sadness of her greeting. She, too, had thought during the night, and thought had cruelly struck at her life-long idol. For had he not forgotten Adèle? and was Adèle’s child anything more than his by name? To have found him indifferent to her because of the dead! But to find him indifferent to both! There was the point of pain, and with it the wrench of a wounded faith, which could never more uphold her in her solitude.

She looked at him anxiously, to see if a night spent in the blue room had stamped his cynical, handsome face with a trace of suffering, of revived feeling. The poor lady could not be expected to interpret any such sign except as homage to her dead sister. So she lifted up her heart in honest gratitude for the touch of humanity in his manner as he held Gabrielle to his knee, and stroked her brown hair gently. Such is the guileness and simplicity to be found on a forsaken island, where gossip is not, and society revelations are unknown.

‘And you have lived here the old quiet life, Henriette, with no thought of marriage or change,’ the Doctor said musingly, and noted with pleasure the charming habit of blushing she had retained, like a very young girl.

‘Surely, François, you would have expected to be apprised of my marriage, or of any other change?’

‘I? Why should I? Had I not of my own will dropped out of your existence? If I chose to forget our relationship, what claim on your courtesy could I urge? You are too sensitive, too loyal, too good, Henriette. You were always that. Your father used to say so, and so used Adèle. Ah! they loved you well--those two. I wish now for your sake--I honestly wish you had dealt me the measure I deserved, and my neglect would have stung you less.’

‘It did not sting me, François. I have no pride of that kind. Life is too full of pain. But I was sorry and grieved for Gabrielle’s sake.’

Had she not the right to hide the rest from him--simple-minded lady? who believed she had succeeded--since she so honourably strove to hide it from herself? Dr. Vermont pushed the child away, and came and stood before his sister-in-law. His imperious glance compelled hers, which she lifted timidly, apprehensively.

‘You are an angel, Henriette--oh, I don’t mean in the hackneyed conventional sense, but as a man means it when the goodness of another forces him to face right and wrong, and he feels he cannot undo the wrong and cannot choose the right. It is a miserable position. Ah! if it were not so late? But my tongue is tied. My first mistake was here, in this very room, years ago--twenty, thirty, a lifetime may be. Your father lay on the canapé dying, and I was sitting beside him. He spoke of you; I knew well that he spoke of you, though he did not mention your name. It was you he wished me to marry, and I, following his glance, looked at Adèle instead. Happiness seemed to woo me from that flower-like face, and I believed in happiness then. Now!’ he shrugged in his expressive way, and added, in a softer voice, drooping humbly to her: ‘God forgive me, Henriette, but now I question the wisdom of that choice.’

‘It was a natural choice, François, and it would be anguish for me to think that you could regret it. Spare me that sorrow. Surely I have suffered enough, and have not reproached you. But this indignity would indeed give voice to the pain of silent years, and bid me utter words neither you nor I could forget. I gave her to you,’ she went on, in a dull tone of protest. ‘It was the best I had, my dearest and sole one on earth. But what did it matter if I was the lonelier, so that you and she were happy together? I have asked so little of life. Leave me that remembrance, François. No man had a sweeter wife than my Adèle, and for her I can be satisfied with a loyalty no less from her husband than that which I have given her.’

She glided from the room without another look for him. He stood and stared after her, with a fantastic, almost amused movement of eyebrow, though the heart within him felt heavy to bursting with an odd assortment of sensations.

When they met again, it was at the luncheon table, with his companions and Mademoiselle’s foreign friend.

‘Anatole devours her with his eyes,’ he said to himself. ‘Poor moth! he is sadly burnt, and the fact that she is eight or nine years his senior makes his hurt the graver. There are compensations in a hopeless love when the ages are reversed.’

But his mild sarcastic face wore no look of dejection or dismay as he sat and discoursed upon Shakespeare and Molière with the foreigner, only of intelligent survey and an amiable satisfaction in all things, including the clowns of Shakespeare, from whom most Frenchmen instinctively shrink. After lunch they played chess and discussed, in the usual way, the school of realists, décadents, symbolists, and the recent revival of romanticism in a gentleman, said to combine the melodious style of George Sand with the adventurous spirit of the great Dumas. It was only when the foreigner retired, and the young men went upstairs to study the stars in the friendly odour of tobacco, that the Doctor ventured again to address Henriette.

‘He is an interesting lad, Anatole--eh?’

‘Very. But it distresses me to see him so sad and worried at his age. He appears to have some trouble on his mind,’ said Mademoiselle, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin upon her folded hands.

‘He has fallen in love with you--that’s his trouble, Henriette. I assure you, up in Paris, he is the reverse of sad or worried. He is the life of Lander’s.’

Dr. Vermont achieved his purpose: he made her blush from neck to forehead.

‘You forget, François, that you are talking to a middle-aged woman of a very young man,’ she said, in surprise.

‘Not so middle-aged as that,’ laughed Dr. Vermont, unjoyously. ‘And the others,--do they appear to have any trouble on their minds?’

‘It has not struck me. I should say they are rather futile men, who would probably fail in any undertaking in an abject way,’ she said, dismissing them.

But she did not dismiss Anatole from her mind, and when he came to say ‘Good-night’ to her, she greeted him with so much direct and personal sympathy in her smile, in her glance, and in the slight pressure of her fingers, that I declare the poor fellow was only restrained by the presence of Dr. Vermont from bursting into tears then and there, and confessing all to her. Instead, he choked an inclination to sob, and turned despairingly on his heel.