Chapter I: HAD wandered into a tangle of slummy streets, and began to think (1)

it time to inquire my way back to the hotel; then, turning a corner, I came out upon the quays. At one hand there was the open night, with the dim forms of many ships, and stars hanging in a web of masts and cordage; at the other, the garish illumination of a row of public-houses: _Au Bonheur du Matelot_, _Café de la Marine_, _Brasserie des Quatre Vents_, and so forth; rowdy-looking shops enough, designed for the entertainment of the forecastle. But they seemed to promise something in the nature of local colour; and I entered the _Brasserie des Quatre Vents_.

It proved to be a _brasserie-à-femmes_; you were waited upon by ladies, lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would sit with you and chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense. The front part of the room was filled up with tables, where half a hundred customers, talking at the top of their voices, raised a horrid din--sailors, soldiers, a few who might be clerks or tradesmen, and an occasional workman in his blouse. Beyond, there was a cleared space, reserved for dancing, occupied by a dozen couples, clumsily toeing it; and on a platform, at the far end, a man pounded a piano. All this in an atmosphere hot as a furnace-blast, and poisonous with the fumes of gas, the smells of bad tobacco, of musk, alcohol, and humanity.

The musician faced away from the company, so that only his shoulders and the back of his grey head were visible, bent over his keyboard. It was sad to see a grey head in that situation; and one wondered what had brought it there, what story of vice or weakness or evil fortune. Though his instrument was harsh, and he had to bang it violently to be heard above the roar of conversation, the man played with a kind of cleverness, and with certain fugitive suggestions of good style. He had once studied an art, and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in his age, was come to serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in a disreputable tavern, where they danced with prostitutes. I don’t know why, but from the first he drew my attention; and I left my handmaid to count her charms neglected, while I sat and watched him, speculating about him in a melancholy way, with a sort of vicarious shame.

But presently something happened to make me forget him--something of his own doing. A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began to play an interlude. It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes, have the power to wake sleeping memories. The tune he was playing now, simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual--ten, fifteen years backwards--to my student life in Paris, and set me to thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero, friend, and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair’s composition, a melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to sing a good deal, half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love, Godelinette:

“Lavender’s blue, diddle-diddle,
Lavender’s green;
When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen.”

It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his kingdom Godelinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but, so far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd chance that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing a single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors’ pothouse and hear it again.

Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you would meet the men who had “arrived”--actors, painters, musicians, authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as more or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said, “He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.” A few of us already addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as _cher maître_.

He was three or four years older than I--eight or nine and twenty to my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that we were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate. He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself I admired him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my hero-worship and the lion’s share of my friendship; perhaps I was vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine, or over the table of a café, talking till the small hours--Elysian sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more _bocks_ than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St. Michel, flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students and _étudiantes_ sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the _trottoir_; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the multitude on the terrace of a café; and Edmund and Godelinette coming to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured spring toilets: I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden age. Then we would drink our _apéritifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue’s.

Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading; she could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally a very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was Parisian and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected her origin; you would have found it hard to believe that she had been the wife of a drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night, four or five years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling stranger. Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered study for rather more than nine weeks she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well there was no talk of her leaving. Pair couldn’t let her go back to her tailor; he couldn’t turn her into the streets. Besides, during the months that he had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great tenderness for her; it made his heart burn with grief and anger to think of what she had suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain and protect and comfort her for the future. This perhaps was no more than natural; but, what rather upset the calculations of his friends, she, towards whom he had established himself in the relation of a benefactor, bore him, instead of a grudge therefor, a passionate gratitude and affection. So, Pair said, they were only waiting till her tailor should drink himself to death, to get married; and meanwhile, he exacted for her all the respect that would have been due to his wife; and everybody called her by his name. She was a pretty little thing, very daintily formed, with tiny hands and feet, and big gipsyish brown eyes; and very delicate, very fragile--she looked as if anything might carry her off. Her name, Godeleine, seeming much too grand and mediæval for so small and actual a person, Pair had turned it into Godelinette.

We all said, “He is splendidly gifted; he will do great things.” He had studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to Paris. He was learned, enlightened, and extremely modern; he was a hard worker. We said he would do great things; but I thought in those days, and indeed I still think--and, what is more to the purpose, men who were themselves musicians and composers, men whose names are known, were before me in thinking--that he had already done great things, that the songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had style and they had “go.” One would have imagined they must please at once the cultivated and the general public. I could never understand why they weren’t popular. They would be printed; they would be praised at length, and under distinguished signatures, in the reviews; they would enjoy an unusual success of approbation; but--they wouldn’t _sell_, and they wouldn’t get themselves sung at concerts. If they had been too good, if they had been over the heads of people--but they weren’t. Plenty of work quite as good, quite as modern, yet no whit more tuneful or interesting, was making its authors rich. We couldn’t understand it, we had to conclude it was a fluke, a question of chance, of accident. Pair was still a very young man; he must go on knocking, and some day--to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day certainly--the door of public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile his position was by no means an unenviable one, goodness knows. To have your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there as a star; to be written about in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_; to possess the friendship of the masters, to know that they believe in you, to hear them prophesy, “He will do great things”--all that is something, even if your wares don’t “take on” in the market-place.

“It’s a good job, though, that I haven’t got to live by them,” Pair said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own. But his father’s elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather a liberal allowance, something like six hundred a year, I believe, which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been aware of Pair’s relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when, one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced his intention of marrying her, _dans les délais légaux_, the squire protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and banter. “Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your mistress heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the _man_ who marries. And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a false position.” But he soon became serious, presently furious, and, when the marriage was an accomplished fact, cut off the funds.

“Never mind, my dear,” said Pair. “We will go to London and seek our fortune. We will write the songs of the people, and let who will make the laws. We will grow rich and famous, and

‘When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen!’”

So they went to London to seek their fortune, and--that was the last I ever saw of them, nearly the last I heard. I had two letters from Pair, written within a month of their hegira--gossipy, light-hearted letters, describing the people they were meeting, reporting Godelinette’s quaint observations upon England and English things, explaining his hopes, his intentions, all very confidently--and then I had no more. I wrote again, and still again, till, getting no answer, of course I ceased to write. I was hurt and puzzled; but in the spring we should meet in London, and could have it out. When the spring came, however, my plans were altered: I had to go to America. I went by way of Havre, expecting to stay six weeks, and was gone six years.

On my return to England I said to people, “You have a brilliant young composer named Pair. Can you put me in the way of procuring his address?” The fortune he had come to seek he would surely have found; he would be a known man. But people looked blank, and declared they had never heard of him. I applied to music-publishers--with the same result. I wrote to his uncle in Hampshire; the squire did not reply. When I reached Paris I inquired of our friends there; they were as ignorant as I. “He must be dead,” I concluded. “If he had lived, it is impossible we should not have heard of him.” And I wondered what had become of Godelinette.

Then another eight or ten years passed, and now, in a water-side public at Bordeaux, an obscure old pianist was playing Pair’s setting of “Lavender’s blue,” and stirring a hundred bitter-sweet far-away memories of my friend. It was as if fifteen years were erased from my life. The face of Godelinette was palpable before me--pale, with its sad little smile, its bright appealing eyes. Edmund might have been smoking across the table--I could hear his voice, I could have put out my hand and touched him. And all round me were the streets, the lights, the smells, the busy youthful _va-et-vient_ of the Latin Quarter; and in my heart the yearning, half joy and all despair and anguish, with which we think of the old days when we were young, of how real and dear they were, of how irrecoverable they are.

And then the music stopped, the Brasserie des Quatre Vents became a glaring reality, and the painted female sipping _eau-de-vie_ at my elbow remarked plaintively, “Tu n’es pas rigolo, toi. Vieux-tu faire une valse?”

“I must speak to your musician,” I said. “Excuse me.”

He had played a bit of Pair’s music. It was one chance in a thousand, but I wanted to ask him whether he could tell me anything about the composer. So I penetrated to the bottom of the shop, and approached his platform. He was bending over some sheets of music--making his next selection, doubtless.

“I beg your pardon----” I began.

He turned towards me. You will not be surprised--I was looking into Pair’s own face.

* * * * *

You will not be surprised, but you will imagine what it was for me. Oh, yes, I recognised him instantly; there could be no mistake. And he recognised me, for he flushed, and winced, and started back.

I suppose for a little while we were both of us speechless, speechless and motionless, while our hearts stopped beating. By-and-by I think I said--something had to be said to break the situation--I think I said, “It’s you, Edmund?” I remember he fumbled with a sheet of music, and kept his eyes bent on it, and muttered something inarticulate. Then there was another speechless, helpless suspension. He continued to fumble his music, without looking up. At last I remember saying, through a sort of sickness and giddiness, “Let us get out of here--where we can talk.”

“I can’t leave yet. I’ve got another dance,” he answered.

“Well, I’ll wait,” said I.

I sat down near him and waited, trying to create some kind of order out of the chaos in my mind, and half automatically watching and considering him as he played his dance--Edmund Pair playing a dance for prostitutes and drunken sailors. He was not greatly changed. There were the same grey eyes, deep-set and wide apart, under the same broad forehead; the same fine nose and chin, the same sensitive mouth. The whole face was pretty much the same, only thinner perhaps, and with a look of apathy, of inanimation, that was foreign to my recollection of it. His hair had turned quite white, but otherwise he appeared no older than his years. His figure, tall, slender, well-knit, retained its vigour and its distinction. Though he wore a shabby brown Norfolk jacket, and his beard was two days old, you could in no circumstances have taken him for anything but a gentleman. I waited anxiously for the time when we should be alone--anxiously, yet with a sort of terror. I was burning to understand, and yet I shrunk from doing so. If to conjecture even vaguely what experiences could have brought him to this, what dark things suffered or done, had been melancholy when he was a nameless old musician, now it was appalling, and I dreaded the explanation that I longed to hear.

At last he struck his final chord, and rose from the piano. Then he turned to me and said, composedly enough, “Well, I’m ready.” He, apparently, had in some measure pulled himself together. In the street he took my arm. “Let’s walk in this direction,” he said, leading off, “towards the Christian quarter of the town.” And in a moment he went on: “This has been an odd meeting. What brings you to Bordeaux?”

I explained that I was on my way to Biarritz, stopping for the night between two trains.

“Then it’s all the more surprising that you should have stumbled into the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You’ve altered very slightly. The world wags well with you? You look prosperous.”

I cried out some incoherent protest. Afterwards I said, “You know what I want to hear. What does this mean?”

He laughed nervously. “Oh, the meaning’s clear enough. It speaks for itself.”

“I don’t understand,” said I.

“I’m pianist to the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You saw me in the discharge of my duties.”

“I don’t understand,” I repeated helplessly.

“And yet the inference is plain. What could have brought a man to such a pass save drink or evil courses?”

“Oh, don’t trifle,” I implored him.

“I’m not trifling. That’s the worst of it. For I don’t drink, and I’m not conscious of having pursued any especially evil courses.”

“Well?” I questioned. “Well?”

“The fact of the matter simply is that I’m what they call a failure. I never came off.”

“I don’t understand,” I repeated for a third time.

“No more do I, if you come to that. It’s the will of Heaven, I suppose. Anyhow, it can’t puzzle you more than it puzzles me. It seems contrary to the whole logic of circumstances, but it’s the fact.”

Thus far he had spoken listlessly, with a sort of bitter levity, an affectation of indifference; but after a little silence his mood appeared to change. His hand upon my arm tightened its grasp, and he began to speak rapidly, feelingly.

“Do you realise that it is nearly fifteen years since we have seen each other? The history of those fifteen years, so far as I am concerned, has been the history of a single uninterrupted _déveine_--one continuous run of ill-luck, against every probability of the game, against every effort I could make to play my cards effectively. When I started out, one might have thought, I had the best of chances. I had studied hard; I worked hard. I surely had as much general intelligence, as much special knowledge, as much apparent talent, as my competitors. And the stuff I produced seemed good to you, to my friends, and not wholly bad to me. It was musicianly, it was melodious, it was sincere; the critics all praised it; but--it never took on! The public wouldn’t have it. What did it lack? I don’t know. At last I couldn’t even get it published--invisible ink! And I had a wife to support.”

He paused for a minute; then: “You see,” he said, “we made the mistake, when we were young, of believing, against wise authority, that it _was_ in mortals to command success, that he could command it who deserved it. We believed that the race would be to the swift, the battle to the strong; that a man was responsible for his own destiny, that he’d get what he merited. We believed that honest labour couldn’t go unrewarded. An immense mistake. Success is an affair of temperament, like faith, like love, like the colour of your hair. Oh, the old story about industry, resolution, and no vices! I was industrious, I was resolute, and I had no more than the common share of vices. But I had the unsuccessful temperament; and here I am. If my motives had been ignoble--but I can’t see that they were. I wanted to earn a decent living; I wanted to justify my existence by doing something worthy of the world’s acceptance. But the stars in their courses fought against me. I have tried hard to convince myself that the music I wrote was rubbish. It had its faults, no doubt. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t epoch-making. But, as music goes nowadays, it was jolly good. It was a jolly sight better than the average.”

“Oh, that is certain, that is certain,” I exclaimed, as he paused again.

“Well, anyhow, it didn’t sell, and at last I couldn’t even get it published. So then I tried to find other work. I tried everything. I tried to teach--harmony and the theory of composition. I couldn’t get pupils. So few people want to study that sort of thing, and there were good masters already in the place. If I had known how to play, indeed! But I was never better than a fifth-rate executant; I had never gone in for that; my ‘lay’ was composition. I couldn’t give piano lessons, I couldn’t play in public--unless in a _gargotte_ like the hole we have just left. Oh, I tried everything. I tried to get musical criticism to do for the newspapers. Surely I was competent to do musical criticism. But no--they wouldn’t employ me. I had ill luck, ill luck, ill luck--nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment. Was it the will of Heaven? I wondered what unforgivable sin I had committed to be punished so. Do you know what it is like to work and pray and wait, day after day, and watch day after day come and go and bring you nothing? Oh, I tasted the whole heart-sickness of hope deferred; Giant Despair was my constant bed-fellow.”

“But--with your connections----” I began.

“Oh, my connections!” he cried. “There was the rub, London is the cruellest town in Europe. For sheer cold blood and heartlessness give Londoners the palm. I had connections enough for the first month or so, and then people found out things that didn’t concern them. They found out some things that were true, and they imagined other things that were false. They wouldn’t have my wife; they told the most infamous lies about her; and I wouldn’t have _them_. Could I be civil to people who insulted and slandered _her_? I had no connections in London, except with the underworld. I got down to copying parts for theatrical orchestras; and working twelve hours a day, earned about thirty shillings a week.”

“You might have come back to Paris.”

“And fared worse. I couldn’t have earned thirty pence in Paris. Mind you, the only trade I had learned was that of a musical composer; and I couldn’t compose music that people would buy. I should have starved as a copyist in Paris, where copyists are more numerous and worse paid. Teach there? But to one competent master of harmony in London there are ten in Paris. No; it was a hopeless case.”

“It is incomprehensible--incomprehensible,” said I.

“But wait--wait till you’ve heard the end. One would think I had had enough--not so? One would think my cup of bitterness was full. No fear! There was a stronger cup still a-brewing for me. When Fortune takes a grudge against a man, she never lets up. She exacts the uttermost farthing. I was pretty badly off, but I had one treasure left--I had Godelinette. I used to think that she was my compensation. I would say to myself, ‘A fellow can’t have all blessings. How can you expect others, when you’ve got her?’ And I would accuse myself of ingratitude for complaining of my unsuccess. Then she fell ill. My God, how I watched over, prayed over her! It seemed impossible--I could not believe--that she would be taken from me. Yet, Harry, do you know what that poor child was thinking? Do you know what her dying thoughts were--her wishes? Throughout her long painful illness she was thinking that she was an obstacle in my way, a weight upon me; that if it weren’t for her, I should get on, have friends, a position; that it would be a good thing for me if she should die; and she was hoping in her poor little heart that she wouldn’t get well! Oh, I know it, I knew it--and you see me here alive. She let herself die for my sake--as if I could care for anything without her! That’s what brought us here, to France, to Bordeaux--her illness. The doctors said she must pass the spring out of England, away from the March winds, in the South; and I begged and borrowed money enough to take her. And we were on our way to Arcachon; but when we reached Bordeaux she was too ill to continue the journey, and--she died here.”

We walked on for some distance in silence, then he added: “That was four years ago. You wonder why I live to tell you of it, why I haven’t cut my throat. I don’t know whether it’s cowardice or conscientious scruples. It seems rather inconsequent to say that I believe in a God, doesn’t it?--that I believe one’s life is not one’s own to make an end of? Anyhow, here I am, keeping body and soul together as musician to a _brasserie-à-femmes_. I can’t go back to England, I can’t leave Bordeaux--she’s buried here. I’ve hunted high and low for work, and found it nowhere save in the _brasserie-à-femmes_. With that, and a little copying now and then, I manage to pay my way.”

“But your uncle?” I asked.

“Do you think I would touch a penny of his money?” Pair retorted, almost fiercely. “It was he who began it. My wife let herself die. It was virtual suicide. It was he who created the situation that drove her to it.”

“You are his heir, though, aren’t you?”

“No, the estates are not entailed.”

We had arrived at the door of my hotel. “Well, good-night and _bon voyage_,” he said.

“You needn’t wish me _bon voyage_,” I answered. “Of course I’m not leaving Bordeaux for the present.”

“Oh, yes, you are. You’re going on to Biarritz to-morrow morning, as you intended.”

And herewith began a long and most painful struggle. I could persuade him to accept no help of any sort from me. “What I can’t do for myself,” he declared, “I’ll do without. My dear fellow, all that you propose is contrary to the laws of Nature. One man can’t keep another--it’s an impossible relation. And I won’t be kept; I won’t be a burden. Besides, to tell you the truth, I’ve got past caring. The situation you find me in seems terrible to you; to me it’s no worse than another. You see, I’m hardened; I’ve got past caring.”

“At any rate,” I insisted, “I shan’t go on to Biarritz. I’ll spend my holiday here, and we can see each other every day. What time shall we meet to-morrow?”

“No, no, I can’t meet you again. Don’t ask me to; you mean it kindly, I know, but you’re mistaken. It’s done me good to talk it all out to you, but I can’t meet you again. I’ve got no heart for friendship, and--you remind me too keenly of many things.”

“But if I come to the _brasserie_ to-morrow night?”

“Oh, if you do that, you’ll oblige me to throw up my employment there, and hide from you. You must promise not to come again--you must respect my wishes.”

“You’re cruel, you know.”

“Perhaps, perhaps. But I think I’m only reasonable. Anyhow, good-bye.”

He shook my hand hurriedly, and moved off. What could I do? I stood looking after him till he had vanished in the night, with a miserable baffled recognition of my helplessness to help him.

To a Bunch of Lilac

By Theo Marzials

“_Dis-moi la fleur, je te dirai la femme_”

Is it the April springing,
Or the bird in the breeze above?
My throat is full of singing,
My heart is full of love.

O heart, are you not yet broken?
O dream, so done with and dead,
Is life’s one word not spoken,
And the rede of it all not read?

No hope in the whole world over!
No hope in the infinite blue!
Yet I sing and laugh out like a lover--
Oh, who is it, April--who?

And the glad young year is springing;
And the birds, and the breeze above,
And the shrill tree-tops, are singing--
And I am singing--of love.

* * * * *

O beautiful lilac flowers,
Oh, say, is it you, is it you
The sun-struck, love-sick hours
Go faint for murmuring through?

O full of ineffable yearning,
So balmy, mystical, deep,
And faint beyond any discerning,
Like far-off voices in sleep--

I love you, O lilac, I love you!
Till life goes swooning by,
I breathe and enwreathe and enfold you,
And long but to love, and die.

From a Pastel

By Albert Foschter

Apple Blossom in Brittany

By Ernest Dowson

I

IT WAS the feast of the Assumption in Ploumariel, at the hottest part of the afternoon. Benedict Campion, who had just assisted at vespers, in the little dove-cotted church--like everything else in Ploumariel, even vespers were said earlier than is the usage in towns--took up his station in the market-place to watch the procession pass by. The head of it was just then emerging into the Square: a long file of men from the neighbouring villages, bare-headed and chaunting, followed the crucifer. They were all clad in the picturesque garb of the Morbihan peasantry, and were many of them imposing, quite noble figures with their clear-cut Breton features, and their austere type of face. After them a troop of young girls, with white veils over their heads, carrying banners--children from the convent school of the Ursulines; and then, two and two in motley assemblage (peasant women with their white coifs walking with the wives and daughters of prosperous _bourgeois_ in costumes more civilised but far less pictorial) half the inhabitants of Ploumariel--all, indeed, who had not, with Campion, preferred to be spectators, taking refuge from a broiling sun under the grateful shadow of the chestnuts in the market-place. Last of all a muster of clergy, four or five strong, a small choir of bullet-headed boys, and the Curé of the parish himself, Monsieur Letêtre chaunting from his book, who brought up the rear.

Campion, leaning against his chestnut tree, watched them defile. Once a smile of recognition flashed across his face, which was answered by a girl in the procession. She just glanced from her book, and the smile with which she let her eyes rest upon him for a moment, before she dropped them, did not seem to detract from her devotional air. She was very young and slight--she might have been sixteen--and she had a singularly pretty face; her white dress was very simple, and her little straw hat, but both of these she wore with an air which at once set her apart from her companions, with their provincial finery and their rather commonplace charms. Campion’s eyes followed the little figure until it was lost in the distance, disappearing with the procession down a by-street on its return journey to the church. And after they had all passed, the singing, the last verse of the “Ave Maris Stella,” was borne across to him, through the still air, the voices of children pleasantly predominating. He put on his hat at last, and moved away; every now and then he exchanged a greeting with somebody--the communal doctor, the mayor; while here and there a woman explained him to her gossip in whispers as he passed, “It is the Englishman of Mademoiselle Marie-Ursule--it is M. le Curé’s guest.” It was to the dwelling of M. le Curé, indeed, that Campion now made his way. Five minutes’ walk brought him to it; an unpretentious white house, lying back in its large garden, away from the dusty road. It was an untidy garden, rather useful than ornamental; a very little shade was offered by one incongruous plane-tree, under which a wooden table was placed and some chairs. After _déjeûner_, on those hot August days, Campion and the Curé took their coffee here; and in the evening it was here that they sat and talked while Mademoiselle Hortense, the Curé’s sister, knitted, or appeared to knit, an interminable shawl; the young girl, Marie-Ursule, placidly completing the quartet with her silent, felicitous smile of a convent-bred child, which seemed sometimes, at least to Campion, to be after all a finer mode of conversation. He threw himself down now on the bench, wondering when his hosts would have finished their devotions, and drew a book from his pocket as if he would read. But he did not open it, but sat for a long time holding it idly in his hand, and gazing out at the village, at the expanse of dark pine-covered hills, and at the one trenchant object in the foreground, the white façade of the convent of the Ursuline nuns. Once and again he smiled, as though his thoughts, which had wandered a long way, had fallen upon extraordinarily pleasant things. He was a man of barely forty, though he looked slightly older than his age: his little, peaked beard was grizzled, and a life spent in literature, and very studiously, had given him the scholar’s premature stoop. He was not handsome, but, when he smiled, his smile was so pleasant that people credited him with good looks. It brought, moreover, such a light of youth into his eyes, as to suggest that if his avocations had unjustly aged his body, that had not been without its compensations--his soul had remained remarkably young. Altogether, he looked shrewd, kindly and successful, and he was all these things, while if there was also a certain sadness in his eyes--lines of lassitude about his mouth--this was an idiosyncracy of his temperament, and hardly justified by his history, which had always been honourable and smooth. He was sitting in the same calm and presumably agreeable reverie, when the garden gate opened, and a girl--the young girl of the procession, fluttered towards him.

“Are you quite alone?” she asked brightly, seating herself at his side. “Has not Aunt Hortense come back?”

Campion shook his head, and she continued speaking in English, very correctly, but with a slight accent, which gave to her pretty young voice the last charm.

“I suppose she has gone to see _la mère Guémené_. She will not live another night they say. Ah! what a pity,” she cried, clasping her hands; “to die on the Assumption--that is hard.”

Campion smiled softly. “Dear child, when one’s time comes, when one is old as that, the day does not matter much.” Then he went on: “But how is it you are back; were you not going to your nuns?”

She hesitated a moment. “It is your last day, and I wanted to make tea for you. You have had no tea this year. Do you think I have forgotten how to make it, while you have been away, as I forget my English words?”

“It’s I who am forgetting such an English habit,” he protested. “But run away and make it, if you like. I am sure it will be very good.”

She stood for a moment looking down at him, her fingers smoothing a little bunch of palest blue ribbons on her white dress. In spite of her youth, her brightness, the expression of her face in repose was serious and thoughtful, full of unconscious wistfulness. This, together with her placid manner, the manner of a child who has lived chiefly with old people and quiet nuns, made her beauty to Campion a peculiarly touching thing. Just then her eyes fell upon Campion’s wide-awake, lying on the seat at his side, and travelled to his uncovered head. She uttered a protesting cry: “Are you not afraid of a _coup de soleil_? See--you are not fit to be a guardian if you can be so foolish as that. It is I who have to look after you.” She took up the great grey hat and set it daintily on his head; then with a little laugh she disappeared into the house.

When Campion raised his head again, his eyes were smiling, and in the light of a sudden flush which just died out of it, his face looked almost young.

II

This girl, so foreign in her education and traditions, so foreign in the grace of her movements, in everything except the shade of her dark blue eyes, was the child of an English father; and she was Benedict Campion’s ward. This relation, which many persons found incongruous, had befallen naturally enough. Her father had been Campion’s oldest and most familiar friend; and when Richard Heath’s romantic marriage had isolated him from so many others, from his family and from his native land, Campion’s attachment to him had, if possible, only been increased. From his heart he had approved, had prophesied nothing but good of an alliance, which certainly, while it lasted, had been an wholly ideal relation. There had seemed no cloud on the horizon--and yet less than two years had seen the end of it. The birth of the child, Marie-Ursule, had been her mother’s death; and six months later, Richard Heath, dying less from any defined malady than because he lacked any longer the necessary motive to live, was laid by the side of his wife. The helpless child remained, in the guardianship of Hortense, her mother’s sister, and elder by some ten years, who had already composed herself contentedly, as some women do, to the prospect of perpetual spinsterhood, and the care of her brother’s house--an ecclesiastic just appointed curé of Ploumariel. And here, ever since, in this quiet corner of Brittany, in the tranquil custody of the priest and his sister, Marie-Ursule had grown up.

Campion’s share in her guardianship had not been onerous, although it was necessarily maintained; for the child had inherited, and what small property would come to her was in England, and in English funds. To Hortense Letêtre and her brother such responsibilities in an alien land were not for a moment to be entertained. And gradually, this connection, at first formal and impersonal, between Campion and the Breton presbytery, had developed into an intimacy, into a friendship singularly satisfying on both sides. Separate as their interests seemed, those of the French country-priest, and of the Englishman of letters, famous already in his own department, they had, nevertheless, much community of feeling apart from their common affection for a child. Now, for many years, he had been established in their good graces, so that it had become an habit with him to spend his holiday--it was often a very extended one--at Ploumariel; while to the Letêtres, as well as to Marie-Ursule herself, this annual sojourn of Campion’s had become the occasion of the year, the one event which pleasantly relieved the monotony of life in this remote village; though that, too, was a not unpleasant routine. Insensibly Campion had come to find his chief pleasure in consideration of this child of an old friend, whose gradual growth beneath influences which seemed to him singularly exquisite and fine, he had watched so long; whose future, now that her childhood, her schooldays at the convent had come to an end, threatened to occupy him with an anxiety more intimate than any which hitherto he had known. Marie-Ursule’s future! They had talked much of it that summer, the priest and the Englishman, who accompanied him in his long morning walks, through green lanes, and over white, dusty roads, and past fields perfumed with the pungently pleasant smell of the blood-red _sarrasin_, when he paid visits to the sick who lived on the outskirts of his scattered parish. Campion became aware then of an increasing difficulty in discussing this matter impersonally, in the impartial manner becoming a guardian. Odd thrills of jealousy stirred within him when he was asked to contemplate Marie-Ursule’s possible suitors. And yet, it was with a very genuine surprise, at least for the moment, that he met the Curé’s sudden pressing home of a more personal contingency--he took this freedom of an old friend with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, which suggested that all along this had been chiefly in his mind. “_Mon bon ami_, why should you not marry her yourself? That would please all of us so much.” And he insisted, with kindly insistence, on the propriety of the thing: dwelling on Campion’s established position, their long habit of friendship, his own and his sister’s confidence and esteem, taking for granted, with that sure insight which is the gift of many women and of most priests, that on the ground of affection alone the justification was too obvious to be pressed. And he finished with a smile, stopping to take a pinch of snuff with a sigh of relief--the relief of a man who has at least seasonably unburdened himself.

“Surely, _mon ami_, some such possibility must have been in your mind?”

Campion hesitated for a moment; then he proffered his hand, which the other warmly grasped. “You read me aright,” he said slowly, “only I hardly realised it before. Even now--no, how can I believe it possible--that she should care for me. _Non sum dignus, non sum dignus._ Consider her youth, her inexperience; the best part of my life is behind me.”

But the Curé smiled reassuringly. “The best part is before you, Campion; you have the heart of a boy. Do we not know you? And for the child--rest tranquil there! I have the word of my sister, who is a wise woman, that she is sincerely attached to you; not to speak of the evidence of my own eyes. She will be seventeen shortly, then she can speak for herself. And to whom else can we trust her?”

The shadow of these confidences hung over Campion when he next saw Marie-Ursule, and troubled him vaguely during the remainder of his visit, which this year, indeed, he considerably curtailed. Inevitably he was thrown much with the young girl, and if daily the charm which he found in her presence was sensibly increased, as he studied her from a fresh point of view, he was none the less disquieted at the part which he might be called upon to play. Diffident and scrupulous, a shy man, knowing little of women; and at least by temperament, a sad man, he trembled before felicity, as many at the palpable breath of misfortune. And his difficulty was increased by the conviction, forced upon him irresistibly, little as he could accuse himself of vanity, that the decision rested with himself. Her liking for him was genuine and deep, her confidence implicit. He had but to ask her and she would place her hand in his and go forth with him, as trustfully as a child. And when they came to celebrate her _fête_, Marie-Ursule’s seventeenth birthday--it occurred a little before the Assumption--it was almost disinterestedly that he had determined upon his course. At least it was security which he could promise her, as a younger man might not; a constant and single-minded kindness; a devotion not the less valuable, because it was mature and reticent, lacking, perhaps, the jealous ardours of youth. Nevertheless, he was going back to England without having revealed himself; there should be no unseasonable haste in the matter; he would give her another year. The Curé smiled deprecatingly at the procrastination; but on this point Campion was firm. And on this, his last evening, he spoke only of trivial things to Marie-Ursule, as they sat presently over the tea--a mild and flavourless beverage--which the young girl had prepared. Yet he noticed later, after their early supper, when she strolled up with him to the hill overlooking the village, a certain new shyness in her manner, a shadow, half timid, half expectant in her clear eyes which permitted him to believe that she was partly prepared. When they reached the summit, stood clear of the pine trees by an ancient stone Calvary, Ploumariel lay below them, very fair in the light of the setting sun; and they stopped to rest themselves, to admire.

“Ploumariel is very beautiful,” said Campion after a while. “Ah! Marie-Ursule, you are fortunate to be here.”

“Yes.” She accepted his statement simply, then suddenly: “You should not go away.” He smiled, his eyes turning from the village in the valley to rest upon her face; after all, she was the daintiest picture, and Ploumariel with its tall slate roofs, its sleeping houses, her appropriate frame.

“I shall come back, I shall come back,” he murmured. She had gathered a bunch of ruddy heather as they walked, and her fingers played with it now nervously. Campion stretched out his hand for it. She gave it him without a word.

“I will take it with me to London,” he said; “I will have Morbihan in my rooms.”

“It will remind you--make you think of us sometimes?”

For answer he could only touch her hand lightly with his lips. “Do you think that was necessary?” And they resumed their homeward way silently, although to both of them the air seemed heavy with unspoken words.

III

When he was in London--and it was in London that for nine months out of the twelve Benedict Campion was to be found--he lived in the Temple, at the top of Hare Court, in the very same rooms in which he had installed himself, years ago, when he gave up his Oxford fellowship, electing to follow the profession of letters. Returning there from Ploumariel, he resumed at once, easily, his old avocations. He had always been a secluded man, living chiefly in books and in the past; but this year he seemed less than ever inclined to knock at the hospitable doors which were open to him. For in spite of his reserve, his diffidence, Campion’s success might have been social, had he cared for it, and not purely academic. His had come to be a name in letters, in the higher paths of criticism; and he had made no enemies. To his success indeed, gradual and quiet as this was, he had never grown quite accustomed, contrasting the little he had actually achieved with all that he had desired to do. His original work was of the slightest, and a book that was in his head he had never found time to write. His name was known in other ways, as a man of ripe knowledge, of impeccable taste; as a born editor of choice reprints, of inaccessible classics: above all, as an authority--the greatest, upon the literature and the life (its flavour at once courtly, and mystical, had to him an unique charm) of the seventeenth century. His heart was in that age, and from much lingering over it, he had come to view modern life with a curious detachment, a sense of remote hostility: Democracy, the Salvation Army, the novels of M. Zola--he disliked them all impartially. A Catholic by long inheritance, he held his religion for something more than an heirloom; he exhaled it, like an intimate quality; his mind being essentially of that kind to which a mystical view of things comes easiest.

This year passed with him much as any other of the last ten years had passed; at least the routine of his daily existence admitted little outward change. And yet inwardly, he was conscious of alteration, of a certain quiet illumination which was a new thing to him.

Although at Ploumariel when the prospect of such a marriage had dawned on him, his first impression had been one of strangeness, he could reflect now that it was some such possibility as this which he had always kept vaguely in view. He had prided himself upon few things more than his patience; and now it appeared that this was to be rewarded; he was glad that he had known how to wait. This girl, Marie-Ursule, had an immense personal charm for him, but, beyond that, she was representative--her traditions were exactly those which the ideal girl of Campion’s imagination would possess. She was not only personally adorable; she was also generically of the type which he admired. It was possibly because this type was, after all, so rare, that looking back, Campion in his middle age, could drag out of the recesses of his memory no spectre to compete with her. She was his first love precisely because the conditions, so choice and admirable, which rendered it inevitable for him to love her, had never occurred before. And he could watch the time of his probation gliding away with a pleased expectancy which contained no alloy of impatience. An illumination--a quite tranquil illumination: yes, it was under some such figure, without heart-burning, or adolescent fever, that love as it came to Campion was best expressed. Yet if this love was lucent rather than turbulent, that it was also deep he could remind himself, when a letter from the priest, while the spring was yet young, had sent him to Brittany, a month or two before his accustomed time, with an anxiety that was not solely due to bewilderment.

“_Our child is well, mon bon_,” so he wrote. “_Do not alarm yourself. But it will be good for you to come, if it be only because of an idea she has, that you may remove. An idea! Call it rather a fancy--at least your coming will dispel it. Petites entêtées: I have no patience with these mystical little girls._”

His musings on the phrase, with its interpretation varying to his mood, lengthened his long sea-passage, and the interminable leagues of railway which separated him from Pontivy, whence he had still some twenty miles to travel by the _Courrier_, before he reached his destination. But at Pontivy, the round, ruddy face of M. Letêtre greeting him on the platform dispelled any serious misgiving. Outside the post-office the familiar conveyance awaited them: its yellow inscription “Pontivy-Ploumariel,” touched Campion electrically, as did the cheery greeting of the driver, which was that of an old friend. They shared the interior of the rusty trap--a fossil among vehicles--they chanced to be the only travellers, and to the accompaniment of jingling harness, and the clattering hoofs of the brisk little Carhaix horses, M. Letêtre explained himself.

“A vocation, _mon Dieu_! if all the little girls who fancied themselves with one, were to have their way, to whom would our poor France look for children? They are good women, _nos Ursulines_, ah, yes; but our Marie-Ursule is a good child, and blessed matrimony also is a sacrament. You shall talk to her, my Campion. It is a little fancy, you see, such as will come to young girls; a convent ague, but when she sees you” ... He took snuff with emphasis, and flipped his broad fingers suggestively. “_Craque!_ it is a betrothal, and a _trousseau_, and not the habit of religion, that Mademoiselle is full of. You will talk to her?”