At a Winter's Fire Part 17

"Because enthusiasm alone may not command wealth," said a deep voice near them.

Papa had come upon them un.o.bserved. The young man wheeled and charged while his blood was hot.

"Mr. De Jussac, it is a shame to hold me in this unending suspense."

"Is it not better than decided rejection?"

"I have served like Jacob. You cannot doubt my single-hearted devotion?"

"I doubt nothing, my George" (about _his_ accent there was no tender compromise)--"I doubt nothing, but that the balance at your bankers' is excessive."

"You would not value Plancine at so much bullion?"

"But yes, my friend; for bullion is the algebraic formula that represents comfort. When Black Venn slips his ap.r.o.n--"

George made a gesture of impatience.

"When Black Venn slips his ap.r.o.n," repeated the father quietly, "I shall be in a position to consider your suit."

"That is tantamount to putting me off altogether. It is ungenerous. It is preposterous. You may or may not be right; but it is simply farcical (Plancine cried, "George!"--but he went on warmly, nevertheless) to make our happiness contingent on the possible tumbling down of a bit of old cliff--an accident that, after all, may never happen."

"Ah!" the quiet, strong voice went on; and in the old eyes turned moonwards one might have fancied one could read a certain pathos of abnegation, or approaching self-sacrifice; "but it will, and shortly, for I prophesy. It was no idle cruelty of mine that first suggested this condition, but a natural reluctance to sign myself back to utter loneliness."

Plancine cried, "Papa! papa!" and sprang into his arms.

"A little patience," said De Jussac, pressing his moustache to the round head, "and you will honour this weary prophet, I think. I was up on the cliff to-day. The great crack is ever widening. A bowling wind, a loud thunderstorm, and that ap.r.o.n of the hill will tear from its bondage and sink sweltering down the slopes."

In the moment of speaking a tremor seized all his limbs, his eyes glared maniacal, his outstretched arm pointed seawards.

"The guillotine!" he shrieked, "the guillotine!"

In the offing of the bay was a vessel making for the unseen harbour below. It stood up black against the moonlight, its sails and yards presenting some fantastic resemblance to that engine of blood.

George stepped back and hung his head embarra.s.sed. He had more than once been witness of a like seizure. It was the guillotine fright--the fright that had smitten the boy of fourteen, and had pursued the man ever since with periodic attacks of illusion. Anything--a branch, a door-post, a window, would suggest the hateful form during those periods--happily brief--when the poor mind was temporarily unhinged. No doubt, in earlier years, the fits had occurred frequently. Now they were rare, and generally, it seemed, attributable to some strong excitement or emotion.

Plancine knew how to act. She put her hand over the frantic eyes, and led the old man stumbling up the garden path. She was going to sing to him from the little sweet folk-ballads of the old gay France before the trouble came--

_"The king would wed his daughter Over the English sea; But never across the water Shall a husband come to me."_

Love floated on the freshet of her voice straight into the heart of the young man who stood without.

II

Perhaps at first it had not been the least of the bitterness in M. De Jussac's cup of calamity that his mere pride of name must adjust itself to its altered conditions. That the Vicomte De Jussac should have been expatriated because he declined when called upon to contribute his heart's blood to the red conduit in the Faubourg St. Antoine was certainly an infamy, but one of which the very essence was that unquestioning acknowledgment of his rank. That the land of his adoption should have dubbed him Mr. Jussuks--in stolid unconsciousness, too, of the solecism--was an outrage of a totally different order--an outrage only to be condoned on the score that an impenetrable insular _gaucherie_, and not a malicious impertinence, was responsible for it.

Mr. Jussuks had, however, outlived his sense of the injurious appellation; had outlived much prejudice, the wear of poverty, his memory of many things, and, very early, his scorn of the plebeian processes that to the impecunious are a condition of living at all. He was certainly a man of courageous independence, inasmuch as from the hour of his setting foot in England--and that was at the outset of the century--he had controlled his own little fortunes without a hand to help him over the deep places.

Of his first struggles little is known but this--that for years, turning to account some small knowledge of draughtsmans.h.i.+p he had acquired, he found employment in ladies' academies, of which there was a plenitude at that date in King's Cobb.

That, however, which brought him eventually into a modest prominence--not only in that same beautiful but indifferently known watering-place (upon which he had happened, it would appear, fortuitously), but elsewhere and amongst men of a certain mark--was a discovery--or the practical application of one--which in its result procured him a definite object in life, together with the means to pursue it.

Ammonites, and such small geological fry, were to be found by the thousand in the petrified mud beds of the Cobb region; but it was left to the ingenuity, aided by good fortune, of the foreigner to unearth from the flaking and peris.h.i.+ng cliffs of lias some of the earliest and finest specimens of the ichthyo- and plesio-saurus that a past world has yielded to the naturalists.

Out of these the _emigre_ made money, and so was enabled to pursue and enlarge upon his researches. Presently he prospered into a competence, married (poor Mademoiselle Belleville, of the Silver Street Academy, who died of typhoid at the end of a couple of summers), and so grew into the kindly old age of the absorbed and gentle naturalist, with his Plancine budding at his side.

What in all these fifty years had he forgotten? His name, his rank, his very origin? Much, no doubt. But that there was one haunting memory that had dwelt with him throughout, his child and her lover were to learn--one memory, and that dreadful recurring illusion of the guillotine.

"When Black Venn slips his ap.r.o.n, I shall be in a position to consider your suit."

Surely that was an odd and enigmatical condition, entirely remote from the subject at issue? Yet from the moment of the first impa.s.sioned pleadings of the stricken George, De Jussac had insisted upon it as one from which there should be no appeal.

Now the Black Venn referred to was a great mound of lias that rolled up and inland, in the far sweep of the bay, from the giddy margin of the lower ruin of cliffs. These--mere compressed mountains of mud, blown by the winds and battered by the sea--were in a constant state of yawn and collapse. Yard by yard they yielded to the scourge of Time, and landslides were of common occurrence.

All along the middle slope of Black Venn itself, a wide, deep fissure, dark and impenetrable, had stretched from ages unrecorded. But the eventual opening-out of this creva.s.se, and the consequent subsidence of the incline, or ap.r.o.n, below it, had been foretold by Mr. De Jussac; and this, in fact, was the condition to which he had alluded.

III

"Mr. De Jussac! do you hear me?"

"I am coming, my friend."

The light s.h.i.+ning steadily through a front window of the cottage flickered and s.h.i.+fted. The young man in the rain and storm outside danced with impatience.

Suddenly the door opened, and Plancine's father stood there, candle in hand.

"What is it, my George?"

"The hill, sir--the hill! It's fallen! You were right. You must stand by your word. Black Venn has slipped his ap.r.o.n!"

"My G.o.d, no!"

There were despair and exultation in his voice.

"My G.o.d, no!" he whispered again, and dived into a cupboard under the stair.

Thence he reappeared with a horn lantern and his old blue cloak.

"Come, then!" he cried. "My hour is upon me!"

"Mr. De Jussac, it will wait till the morning."