At a Winter's Fire Part 19

He saw the eyes questioning what the lips would not ask.

"But how I lost it?" he said. "I took the box; I obeyed her behests. The moment was acute; the times peremptory. I sailed for England, hurriedly and secretly, never to this day having feasted my eyes on what lies within there. With me went Lacombe, Madame's 'runner' in the old days--a stolid Berrichon, who had lived upon her bounty to the end. The rogue!

the ingrate! We were wrecked upon this coast; we plunged and came ash.o.r.e.

I know not who were lost or saved; but Lacombe and I clung together and were thrown upon the land, the box still in my grasp. We climbed the cliffs where a stair had been cut; we broke eastwards from the upper slopes and staggered on through the blown darkness. Suddenly Lacombe stopped. The day was faint then on the watery horizon; and in the ghostly light I saw his face and read the murder in it. We were standing on the verge of the cleft under Black Venn. 'No further!' he whispered.

'You must go down there!' He s.n.a.t.c.hed the box from my hand. In the instant of his doing so, stricken by the death terror, the affection to which I was then much subject seized me. I screamed, 'My G.o.d! the guillotine!' Taken by surprise, he started back, staggered, and went down cras.h.i.+ng to the fate he had designed for me. I seemed to lie prostrate for hours, while his moans came up fainter and fainter till they ceased.

Then I rose and faced life, lonely, friendless, and a beggar."

The restless wandering of his eyes travelled over his daughter's head to the rusty casket by the window.

"It was very well," he whispered. "I thank my G.o.d that He has permitted me at the perfect moment to realize my investment in that dead rascal's dishonesty. Have I ever desired wealth save for my little _pouponne_ here? And I have sorely tried thee, my George. But the old naturalist had such faith in his prediction. Now--"

His vision was glazing; the muscles of his face were quietly settling to the repose that death only can command.

"Now, I would see the fruit of my prophecy; would see it all hung on the neck, in the hair of my child, that I may die rejoicing. Canst thou force the casket, George?"

The young man turned with a stifled groan. Some tools lay on a shelf hard by. He grasped a chisel and went to his task with shaking hands.

The box was all eaten and corroded. It was a matter of but a few seconds to prise it open. The lid fell back on the table with a rusty clang.

"Ah!" cried the dying man. "What now? Dost thou see them? Quick! quick!

to glorify this little head! Are they not exquisite?"

George was gazing down with a dull, vacant feeling at his heart.

"Are they not?" repeated the voice, in terrible excitement.

"They--Mr. De Jussac, they are loveliness itself. Plancine, I will not touch them. You must be the first."

He strode to the kneeling girl; lifted, almost roughly dragged her to her feet.

"Come!" he said; and, supporting her across the room, whispered madly in her ear: "Pretend! For G.o.d's sake, pretend!"

Plancine's swimming eyes looked down, looked upon a litter of perished rags of paper, and, lying in the midst of the rubbish, an ancient stained and c.o.c.kled miniature of a powdered Louis _Seize_ coquette.

This was all. This was the treasure the old crazed vanity had thought sufficient to build her nephew his fortune.

The diamonds! Probably these had long before been sacrificed to the armies ineffectively manoeuvring for the destruction of Monsieur "Veto's"

enemies.

Plancine lifted her head. Thereafter George never ceased to recall with a glad pride the n.o.bility that had shone in her eyes.

"My papa!" she cried softly, going swiftly to the bed; "they are beautiful as the stars that glittered over the old untroubled France!"

De Jussac sprang up on his pillow.

"The guillotine!" he cried. "The beams break into flowers! The axe is a shaft of light!"

And so the glowing blade descended.

AN EDDY ON THE FLOOR

PART I

OF POLYHISTOR'S NARRATIVE

WRITTEN FOR, BUT NEVER INSERTED IN, THE ----- FAMILY MAGAZINE

The eyes of Polyhistor--as he sat before the fire at night--took in the tawdry surroundings of his lodging-house room with nothing of that apathy of resignation to his personal [Greek: ananke] which of all moods is to Fortune, the G.o.ddess of spontaneity, the most antipathetic. Indeed, he felt his wit, like Romeo's, to be of cheveril; and his conviction that it needed only the pull of circ.u.mstance to stretch it "from an inch narrow to an ell broad" expressed but the very wooing quality of a const.i.tutional optimism.

Now this inherent optimism is at least a serviceable weapon when it takes the form of self-reliance. It is always at hand in an emergency--a guard of honour to the soul. The loneliness of individual life must learn self-respect from within, not without; and were all creeds to be mixed, that truism should be found their precipitate.

Therefore Polyhistor was content to draw gra.s.s-green rep curtains across window-panes sloughed with wintry sleet; to place his feet upon a rug flayed of colour to it dusty sinews; to admit to his close fellows.h.i.+p--and find a familiar comfort in them, too--three separate lithographs of affected babies inviting any canine confidences but the bite one desired for them, and a dismal daguerreotype of his landlady's deceased husband, slowly peris.h.i.+ng in pegtops and a yellow fog of despondency, out of which only his boots and a very tall hat frowned insistent, the tabernacles of enduring respectability:--he was content, because he knew these were only incidents in his career--the slums to be first traversed on a journey before the rounding breadths of open country were reached,--and the station in life he purposed stopping at eventually was the terminus of prosperity, intellectual and material.

With no present good fortune but the capacity for desiring it; with the right to affix a letter or so--like grace after skilly--to his name; with the consciousness that, having overcome theoretical pharmaceutics masterfully, he was now combatting practical dispensing slavishly; with full confidence in his social position (he stood under the shadow of "high connections," like the little winged "Victory" in a conqueror's hand, he chose to think) to help him to eventual distinction, he toasted his toes that sour winter evening and reviewed in comfort an army of prospects.

Also his thoughts reverted indulgently to the incidents and experiences of the previous night.

He had had the pleasure of an invitation to one of those reunions or seances at the house, in a fas.h.i.+onable quarter, of his distant connection, Lady Barbara Grille, whereat it was his hostess's humour to gather together those many birds of alien feather and incongruous habit that will flock from the hedgerows to the least little flattering crumb of attention. And scarce one of them but thinks the simple feast is spread for him alone. And with so cheap a bait may a t.i.tle lure.

Lady Barbara, to do her justice, trades upon her position only in so far as it shapes itself the straight road to her desires. She is a carpet adventurer--an explorer amongst the nerves of moral sensation, to whom the discovery of an untrodden mental tract is a pure delight, and the more delightful the more ephemeral. She flits from guest to guest, shooting out to each a little proboscis, as it were, and happy if its point touches a speck of honey. She gathers from all, and stores the sweet agglomerate, let us hope, to feed upon it in the winter of her life, when the hive of her busy brain shall be thatched with snow.

That reference to so charming a personality should be in this place a digression is Polyhistor's unhappiness. She affects his narrative only inasmuch as he happened to meet at her house a gentleman who for a time exerted a considerable influence over his fortunes.

Here Polyhistor's narrative must give place to certain editorial marginalia by Miss Lucy ----, who "runs" the ---- Family Magazine:--

"Polyhistor, indeed!" she writes. "The conceit of some people! He seems to take himself for a sort of _Admirable Crichton_, and all because his chance meeting with the gentleman referred to (a very _interesting_ person, who is, I understand, reforming our prisons) brought him the offer of an appointment quite beyond his deserts. I was very glad to hear of it, however, and I asked the creature to contribute a paper recording his first impressions of _this notable man_; instead of which he begins with an opinionated rigmarole about himself, and goes on from bad to worse by describing a long conversation he had about prison reform with that horrid, masculine Mrs. C----, whom all the officers call 'Charlie,'

and who thinks that for men to grow humane is a sign of their _decadence_. _Of course_ I shall 'cut' the whole of their talk together (it is a blessed privilege to be an editor), and jump to the part where _Polyhistor_ (!) describes the _notable person's_ visit to him, which was due to his (the N.P.'s) having the night before overheard some of the conversation _between those two_."

POLYHISTOR'S NARRATIVE (_continued_).

Now as Polyhistor sat, he humoured his recollection (in the intervals of scribbling verses to the _beaux yeux_ of a certain Miss L----) with some of "Charlie's" characteristic last-night utterances.

She had dated man's decadence from the moment when he began to "poor-fellow" irreclaimable savagery on the score of heredity.

She had repudiated the old humbug of s.e.x superiority because she had seen it fall on its face to howl over a trodden worm, with the result that it discovered itself hollow behind, like the elf-maiden.

She had said: "Once you taught us divinely--_argumentum baculinum_," said she; "(for you are the sons of G.o.d, you know). But you have since so insisted upon the Rights of Humanity that we have learned ourselves in the phrase, and that the earthy have the best right to precedence on the earth."