"Why such darkness under so bright a sun! such blindness to what is so patent! such a deaf ear to the roaring of that thunderous harmony which you call the eternal silence! – you of the earth, earthy, who can hear the little trumpet of the mosquito so well that it makes you fidget and fret and fume all night, and robs you of your rest. Then the sun rises and frightens the mosquitoes away, and you think that's what the sun is for and are thankful; but why the deuce a mosquito should sting you, you can't make out! – mystery of mysteries!
"At the back of your brain is a little speck of perishable matter, Barty; it is no bigger than a needle's point, but it is bigger in you than in anybody else I know, except in Leah; and in your children it is bigger still – almost as big as the point of a pin!
"If they pair well, and it is in them to do so if they follow their inherited instinct, their children and their children's children will have that speck still bigger. When that speck becomes as big as a millet‐seed in your remote posterity, then it will be as big as in a Martian, and the earth will be a very different place, and man of earth greater and even better than the Martian by all the greatness of his ampler, subtler, and more complex brain; his sense of the Deity will be as an eagle's sense of the sun at noon in a cloudless tropical sky; and he will know how to bear that effulgence without a blink, as he stands on his lonely summit, ringed by the azure world.
"Indeed, there will be no more Martians in Mars by that time; they are near the end of their lease; all good Martians will have gone to Venus, let us hope; if not, to the Sun itself!
"Man has many thousands of years before him yet ere his little ball of earth gets too cold for him; the little speck in his brain may grow to the size of a pea, a cherry, a walnut, an egg, an orange! He will have in him the magnetic consciousness of the entire solar system, and hold the keys of time and space as long and as far as the sun shines for us all – and then there will be the beginning of everything. And all through that little episode in the street of those White Ursulines! And the seed of Barty and Leah will overflow to the uttermost ends of the earth, and finally blossom and bear fruit for ever and ever beyond the stars.
"What a beginning for a new order of things! what a getting up‐stairs! what an awakening! what an annunciation!
"Do you remember that knock at the door?
"'Il est dix heures, savez‐vous? Voulez‐vous votre café dans votre chambre?'
"She little knew, poor little Frau! humble little Finche Torfs, lowly Flemish virgin, who loved you as the moth loves the star; vilain mangeur de cœe]urs que vous êtes!
"Barty, I wish your wife to hear nothing of this till the child who once was your Martia shall have seen the light of day with eyes of its own; tell her that I have left you at last, but don't tell her why or how; tell her some day, years hence, if you think she will love me the better for it; not otherwise.
"When you wake, Barty, I shall still be inside you; say to me in your mezza voce all the kind things you can think of – such things as you would have said to your mother had she lived till now, and you were speeding her on a long and uncertain journey.
"How you would have loved your mother! She was most beautiful, and of the type so dear to you. Her skin was almost as white as Leah's, her eyes almost as black, her hair even blacker; like Leah, she was tall and slim and lithe and graceful. She might have been Leah's mother, too, for the likeness between them. How often you remind me of her when you laugh or sing, and when you're funny in French; those droll, quick gestures and quaint intonations, that ease and freedom and deftness as you move! And then you become English in a moment, and your big, burly, fair‐haired father has come back with his high voice, and his high spirits, and his frank blue eyes, like yours, so kind and brave and genial.
"And you, dear, what a baby you were – a very prince among babies; ah! if I can only be like that when I begin again!
"The people in the Tuileries garden used to turn round and stare and smile at you when Rosalie with the long blue streamers bore you along as proudly as if Louis Philippe were your grandfather and she the royal wet‐nurse; and later, after that hideous quarrel about nothing, and the fatal fight by the 'mare aux biches,' how the good fisher people of Le Pollet adored you! 'Un vrai petit St. Jean! il nous portera bonheur, bien sûr!'
"You have been thoroughly well loved all your life, my Barty, but most of all by me – never forget that!
"I have been your father and your mother when they sat and watched your baby‐sleep; I have been Rosalie when she gave you the breast; I have been your French grandfather and grandmother quarrelling as to which of the two should nurse you as they sat and sunned themselves on their humble doorstep in the Rue des Guignes!
"I have been your doting wife when you sang to her, your children when you made them laugh till they cried. I've been Lady Archibald when you danced the Dieppoise after tea, in Dover, with your little bare legs; and Aunt Caroline, too, as she nursed you in Malines after that silly duel where you behaved so well; and I've been by turns Mérovée Brossard, Bonzig, old Laferté, Mlle. Marceline, Finche Torfs, poor little Marianina, Julia Royce, Father Louis, the old Abbé, Bob Maurice – all the people you've ever charmed, or amused, or been kind to – a legion; good heavens! I have been them all! What a snowball made up of all these loves I've been rolling after you all these years! and now it has all got to melt away in a single night, and with it the remembrance of all I've ever been during ages untold.
"And I've no voice to bid you good‐bye, my beloved; no arms to hug you with, no eyes to weep – I, a daughter of the most affectionate, and clinging, and caressing race of little people in existence! Such eyes as I once had, too; such warm, soft, furry arms, and such a voice – it would have wanted no words to express all that I feel now; that voice – nous savons notre orthographie en musique là bas!
"How it will please, perhaps, to remember even this farewell some day, when we're all together again, with nothing to come between!
"And now, my beloved, there is no such thing as good‐bye; it is a word that has no real meaning; but it is so English and pretty and sweet and child‐like and nonsensical that I could write it over and over again – just for fun!
"So good‐bye! good‐bye! good‐bye! till I wake up once more after a long living sleep of many years, I hope; a sleep filled with happy dreams of you, dear, delightful people, whom I've got to live with and love, and learn to lose once more; and then – no more good‐byes!
"Martia."
So much for Martia – whoever or whatever it was that went by that name in Barty's consciousness.
After such close companionship for so many years, the loss of her – or it – was like the loss of a sixth and most valuable sense, worse almost than the loss of his sight would have been; and with this he was constantly threatened, for he most unmercifully taxed his remaining eye, and the field of his vision had narrowed year by year.
But this impending calamity did not frighten him as in the old days. His wife was with him now, and as long as she was by his side he could have borne anything – blindness, poverty, dishonor – anything in the world. If he lost her, he would survive her loss just long enough to put his affairs in order, and no more.
But most distressfully he missed the physical feeling of the north – even in his sleep. This strange bereavement drew him and Leah even more closely together, if that were possible; and she was well content to reign alone in the heart of her fractious, unreasonable but most affectionate, humorous, and irresistible great man. Although her rival had been but a name and an idea, a mere abstraction in which she had never really believed, she did not find it altogether displeasing to herself that the lively Martia was no more; she has almost told me as much.
And thus began for them both the happiest and most beautiful period of their joint lives, in spite of sorrows yet to come. She took such care of him that he might have been as blind as Belisarius himself, and he seemed almost to depend upon her as much – so wrapt up was he in the work of his life, so indifferent to all mundane and practical affairs. What eyesight was not wanted for his pen and pencil he reserved to look at her with – at his beloved children, and the things of beauty in and outside Marsfield: pictures, old china, skies, hills, trees, and river; and what wits remained he kept to amuse his family and his friends – there was enough and to spare.
The older he grew the more he teemed and seethed and bubbled and shone – and set others shining round him – even myself. It is no wonder Marsfield became such a singularly agreeable abode for all who dwelt there, even for the men‐servants and the maid‐servants, and the birds and the beasts, and the stranger within its gates – and for me a kind of earthly paradise.
And now, gentle reader, I want very badly to talk about myself a little, if you don't mind – just for half a dozen pages or so, which you can skip if you like. Whether you do so or not, it will not hurt you – and it will do me a great deal of good.
I feel uncommonly sad, and very lonely indeed, now that Barty is gone; and with him my beloved comrade Leah.
The only people left to me that I'm really fond of – except my dear widowed sister, Ida Scatcherd – are all so young. They're Josselins, of course – one and all – and they're all that's kind and droll and charming, and I adore them. But they can't quite realize what this sort of bereavement means to a man of just my age, who has still got some years of life before him, probably – and is yet an old man.
The Right Honorable Sir Robert Maurice, Bart., M. P., etc., etc., etc. That's me. I take up a whole line of manuscript. I might be a noble lord if I chose, and take up two!
I'm a liberal conservative, an opportunist, a pessi‐optimist, an in‐medio‐tutissimist, and attend divine service at the Temple Church.
I'm a Philistine, and not ashamed; so was Molière – so was Cervantes. So, if you like, was the late Martin Farquhar Tupper – and those who read him; we're of all sorts in Philistia, the great and the small, the good and the bad.
I'm in the sixties – sound of wind and limb – only two false teeth – one at each side, bicuspids, merely for show. I'm rather bald, but it suits my style; a little fat, perhaps – a pound and a half over sixteen stone! but I'm an inch and a half over six feet, and very big‐boned. Altogether, diablement bien conservé! I sleep well, the sleep of the just; I have a good appetite and a good digestion, and a good conceit of myself still, thank Heaven – though nothing like what it used to be! One can survive the loss of one's self‐respect; but of one's vanity, never.
What a prosperous and happy life mine has been, to be sure, up to a few short months ago – hardly ever an ache or a pain! – my only real griefs, my dear mother's death ten years back, and my father's in 1870. Yes, I have warmed both hands at the fire of life, and even burnt my fingers now and then, but not severely.
One love disappointment. The sting of it lasted a couple of years, the compensation more than thirty! I loved her all the better, perhaps, that I did not marry her. I'm afraid it is not in me to love a very good wife of my own as much as I really ought!
And I love her children as well as if they'd been mine, and her grandchildren even better. They are irresistible, these grandchildren of Barty's and Leah's – mine wouldn't have been a patch on them; besides, I get all the fun and none of the bother and anxiety. Evidently it was my true vocation to remain single – and be a tame cat in a large, warm house, where there are lots of nice children.
O happy Bob Maurice! O happy sexagenarian!
"O me fortunatum, mea si bona nôrim!" (What would Père Brossard say at this? he would give me a twisted pinch on the arm – and serve me right!)
I'm very glad I've been successful, though it's not a very high achievement to make a very large fortune by buying and selling that which put into a man's mouth is said to steal away his brains!
But it does better things than this. It reconciles and solves and resolves mental discords, like music. It makes music for people who have no ear – and there are so many of these in the world that I'm a millionaire, and Franz Schubert died a pauper. So I prefer to drink beer – as he did; and I never miss a Monday Pop if I can help it.
I have done better things, too. I have helped to govern my country and make its laws; but it all came out of wine to begin with – all from learning how to buy and sell. We're a nation of shopkeepers, although the French keep better shops than ours, and more of them.
I'm glad I'm successful because of Barty, although success, which brings the world to our feet, does not always endear us to the friend of our bosom. If I had been a failure Barty would have stuck to me like a brick, I feel sure, instead of my sticking to him like a leech! And the sight of his success might have soured me – that eternal chorus of praise, that perpetual feast of pudding in which I should have had no part but to take my share as a mere guest, and listen and look on and applaud, and wish I'd never been born!
As it is, I listened and looked on and clapped my hands with as much pride and pleasure as if Barty had been my son – and my share of the pudding never stuck in my throat!
I should have been always on the watch to take him down a peg when he was pleased with himself – to hold him cheap and overpraise some duffer in his hearing – so that I might save my own self‐esteem; to pay him bad little left‐handed compliments, him and his, whenever I was out of humor; and I should have been always out of humor, having failed in life.
And then I should have gone home wretched – for I have a conscience – and woke up in the middle of the night and thought of Barty; and what a kind, genial, jolly, large‐minded, and generous‐hearted old chap he was and always had been – and buried my face in my pillow, and muttered:
"Ach! what a poor, mean, jealous beast I am – un fruit sec! un malheureux raté!"
With all my success, this life‐long exclusive cultivation of Barty's society, and that of his artistic friends, which has somehow unfitted me for the society of my brother‐merchants of wine – and most merchants of everything else – has not, I regret to say, quite fitted me to hold my own among the "leaders of intellectual modern thought," whose company I would fain seek and keep in preference to any other.
My very wealth seems to depress and disgust them, as it does me – and I'm no genius, I admit, and a poor conversationalist.
To amass wealth is an engrossing pursuit – and now that I have amassed a good deal more than I quite know what to do with, it seems to me a very ignoble one. It chokes up everything that makes life worth living; it leaves so little time for the constant and regular practice of those ingenuous arts which faithfully to have learned is said to soften the manners, and make one an agreeable person all round.
It is even more abrutissant than the mere pursuit of sport or pleasure.
How many a noble lord I know who's almost as beastly rich as myself, and twice as big a fool by nature, and perhaps not a better fellow at bottom – yet who can command the society of all there is of the best in science, literature, and art!
Not but what they will come and dine with me fast enough, these shining lights of culture and intellect – my food is very good, although I say it, and I get noble lords to meet them.
But they talk their real talk to each other – not to me – and to the noble lords who sit by them at my table, and who try to understand what they say. With me they fall back on politics and bimetallism, for all the pains I've taken to get up the subjects that interest them, and keep myself posted in all they've written and done. Precious little they know about bimetallism or politics!
Is it only on account of their pretty manners that my titled friends are such favorites with these highly intellectual guests of mine – and with me? If so, then pretty manners should come before everything else in the world, and be taught instead of Latin and Greek.
But if it's only because they're noble lords, then I'm beginning to think with Mr. Labouchere that it's high time the Upper House were abolished, and its denizens wafted into space, since they make such snobs of us all – including your humble servant, of course, who at least is not quite so snobbish as to know himself for a damned snob and pretend he isn't one.
Anyhow, I'm glad my life has been such a success. But would I live it all over again? Even the best of it? The "forty year"?
Taking one consideration with another, most decidedly not.
I have only met two men of my own age who would live their lives over again. They both cared more for their meals than for anything else in the world – and they have always had four of these every day; sometimes even five! plenty of variety, and never a meal to disagree with them! affaire d'estomac! They simply want to eat all those meals once more. They lived to feed, and to refeed would re‐live!
My meals have never disagreed with me either – but I have always found them monotonous; they have always been so simple and so regular when I've had the ordering of them! Fried soles, chops or steaks, and that sort of thing, and a pint of lager‐beer – no wine for me, thank you; I sell it – and all this just to serve as a mere foundation for a smoke – and a chat with Barty, if possible!
Hardly ever an ache or a pain, and I wouldn't live it all over again! yet I hope to live another twenty years, if only to take Leah's unborn great‐grandchildren to the dentist's, and tip them at school, and treat them to the pantomime and Madame Tussaud's, as I did their mothers and grandmothers before them – or their fathers and grandfathers.
This seems rather inconsistent! For would I care, twenty years hence, to re‐live these coming twenty years? Evidently not – it's out of the question.
So why don't I give up at once? I know how to do it, without pain, without scandal, without even invalidating my life‐insurance, about which I don't care a rap!
Why don't I? why don't you, O middle‐aged reader – with all the infirmities of age before you and all the pleasures of youth behind? Anyhow, we don't, either you or I – and so there's an end on't.
O Pandora! I have promised myself that I would take a great‐grandchild of Barty's on a flying‐machine from Marsfield to London and back in half an hour – and that great‐grandchild can't well be born for several years – perhaps not for another twenty!
And now, gentle reader, I've had my little say, and I'm a good deal better, thanks, and I'll try not to talk about myself any more.
Except just to mention that in the summer of 1876 I contested East Rosherville in the Conservative interest and was successful – and owed my success to the canvassing of Barty and Leah, who had no politics of their own whatever, and would have canvassed for me just as conscientiously if I'd been a Radical, probably more so! For if Barty had permitted himself any politics at all, he would have been a red‐hot Radical, I fear – and his wife would have followed suit. And so, perhaps, would I!
Part Tenth
"Je suis allé de bon matin
Cueillir la violette,
Et l'aubépine, et le jasmin,
Pour célébrer ta fête.
J'ai lié de ma propre main
Bouton de rose et romarin
Pour couronner ta blonde tête.
"Mais de ta royale beauté
Sois humble, je te prie.
Ici tout meurt, la fleur, l'été,
La jeunesse et la vie:
Bientôt, bientôt ce jour sera,
Ma belle, où l'on te portera
Dans un linceul, pâle et flétrie."
– A Favorite Song of Mary Trevor's.
That was a pleasant summer.
First of all we went to Ste. Adresse, a suburb of Hâvre, where there is very good bathing – with rafts, périssoires, pique‐têtes to dive from – all those aquatic delights the French are so clever at inventing, and which make a "station balnéaire" so much more amusing than a mere British watering‐place.
We made a large party and bathed together every morning; and Barty and I taught the young ones to dive and do "la coupe" in the true orthodox form, with that free horizontal sweep of each alternate arm that gives it such distinction.
It was very good fun to see those rosy boys and girls taking their "hussardes" neatly without a splash from the little platform at the top of the pole, and solemnly performing "la coupe" in the wake of their papa; one on his back. Right out to sea they went, I bringing up the rear – and the faithful Jean‐Baptiste in attendance with his boat, and Leah inside it – her anxious eyes on the stretch to count those curly heads again and again. She was a good mathematician, and the tale always came right in the end; and home was reached at last, and no one a bit the worse for a good long swim in those well‐aired, sunlit waves.
Once we went on the top of the diligence to Étretat for the day, and there we talked of poor Bonzig and his first and last dip in the sea; and did "la coupe" in the waters that had been so fatal to him, poor fellow!
Then we went by the steamer Jean Bart to Trouville and Deauville, and up the Seine in a steam‐launch to Rouen.
In the afternoons and evenings we took long country walks and caught moths, or went to Hâvre by tramway and cleared out all the pastry‐cooks in the Rue de Paris, and watched the transatlantic steamers, out or home, from that gay pier which so happily combines business with pleasure – utile dulci, as Père Brossard would have said – and walked home by the charming Côte d'Ingouville, sacred to the memory of Modeste Mignon.
And then, a little later on, I was a good Uncle Bob, and took the whole party to Auteuil, near Paris, and hired two lordly mansions next door to each other in the Villa Montmorency, and turned their gardens into one.
Altogether, with the Scatcherds and ourselves, eight children, governesses, nurses, and other servants, and dogs and the smaller animals, we were a very large party, and a very lively one. I like this sort of thing better than anything else in the world.
I hired carriages and horses galore, and for six weeks we made ourselves thoroughly comfortable and at home in Paris and around.
That was the happiest holiday I ever had since the vacation Barty and I spent at the Lafertés' in the Gué des Aulnes when we were school‐boys.
And such was our love for the sport he called "la chasse aux souvenirs" that one day we actually went there, travelling by train to La Tremblaye, where we spent the night.
It was a sad disenchantment!
The old Lafertés were dead, the young ones had left that part of the country; and the house and what remained of the gardens now belonged to another family, and had become formal and mean and business‐like in aspect, and much reduced in size.
Much of the outskirts of the forest had been cleared and was being cleared still, and cheap little houses run up for workmen; an immense and evil‐smelling factory with a tall chimney had replaced the old home‐farm, and was connected by a single line of rails with the station of La Tremblaye. The clear, pellucid stream where we used to catch crayfish had been canalized – "s'est encanaillé," as Barty called it – its waters fouled by barge traffic and all kinds of horrors.
We soon found the haunted pond that Barty was so fond of – but quite in the open, close to an enormous brick‐field, and only half full; and with all its trees cut down, including the tree on which they had hanged the gay young Viscount who had behaved so badly to Séraphine Doucet, and on which Séraphine Doucet afterwards hanged herself in remorse.
No more friendly charcoal‐burners, no more wolves or boars or cerfs – dix‐cors; and as for were‐wolves, the very memory of them had died out.
There seems no greater desecration to me than cutting down an old and well‐remembered French forest I have loved; and solving all its mystery, and laying bare the nakedness of the land in a way so brutal and expeditious and unexpected. It reminds one of the manner in which French market‐women will pluck a goose before it's quite dead; you bristle with indignation to see it, but you mustn't interfere.
La Tremblaye itself had become a flourishing manufacturing town, and to our jaundiced and disillusioned eyes everybody and everything was as ugly as could be – and I can't say we made much of a bag in the way of souvenirs.
We were told that young Laferté was a barrister at Angers, prosperous and married. We deliberated whether we would hunt him up and talk of old times. Then we reflected how curiously cold and inhospitable Frenchmen can sometimes be to old English friends in circumstances like these – and how little they care to talk of old times and all that, unless it's the Englishman who plays the host.
Ask a quite ordinary Frenchman to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be – what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth of your British welcome.
Then go and call on him when you find yourself in Paris – and you will soon learn to leave quite ordinary Frenchmen alone, on their own side of the Channel.
Happily, there are exceptions to this rule!
Thus the sweet Laferté remembrance, which had so often come back to me in my dreams, was forever spoiled by this unlucky trip.
It had turned that leaf from the tablets of my memory into a kind of palimpsest, so that I could no longer quite make out the old handwriting for the new, which would not be obliterated, and these were confused lines it was hard to read between – with all my skill!
Altogether we were uncommonly glad to get back to the Villa Montmorency – from the distorted shadows of a nightmare to happy reality.
There, all was fresh and delightful; as boys we had often seen the outside walls of that fine property which had come to the speculative builder at last, but never a glimpse within; so that there was no desecration for us in the modern laying out of that beautiful double garden of ours, whatever there might have been for such ghosts of Montmorencys as chose to revisit the glimpses of the moon.
We haunted Auteuil, Passy, Point du Jour, Suresnes, Courbevoie, Neuilly, Meudon – all the familiar places. Especially we often haunted the neighborhood of the rond point de l'Avenue du Bois de Boulogne.
One afternoon, as he and I and Leah and Ida were driving round what once was our old school, we stopped in the lane not far from the porte‐cochère, and Barty stood up on the box and tried to look over the wall.
Presently, from the grand stone loge which had replaced Jaurion's den, a nice old concierge came out and asked if we desired anything. We told him how once we had been at school on that very spot, and were trying to make out the old trees that had served as bases in "la balle au camp," and that if we really desired anything just then it was that we might become school‐boys once more!
"Ah, ma foi! je comprends ça, messieurs – moi aussi, j'ai été écolier, et j'aimais bien la balle au camp," said the good old man, who had been a soldier.
He informed us the family were away, but that if we liked to come inside and see the garden he was sure his master would have no objection. We jumped at this kind offer and spent quite an hour there, and if I were Barty I could so describe the emotions of that hour that the reader would feel quite as tearfully grateful to me as to Barty Josselin for Chapters III. and IV. in Le Fil de la Vierge, which are really founded, mutatis mutandis, on this self‐same little adventure of ours.
Nothing remained of our old school – not even the outer walls; nothing but the big trees and the absolute ground they grew out of. Beautiful lawns, flower‐beds, conservatories, summer‐houses, ferns, and evergreen shrubs made the place seem even larger than it had once been – the very reverse of what usually happens – and softened for us the disenchantment of the change.
Here, at least, was no desecration of a hallowed spot. When the past has been dead and buried a long while ago there is no sweeter decking for its grave than a rich autumn tangle, all yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, with glossy evergreens and soft, damp moss to keep up the illusion of spring and summer all the year round.
Much to the amusement of the old concierge and his wife, Barty insisted on climbing into a huge horse‐chestnut tree, in which was a natural seat, very high up, where, well hidden by the dense foliage, he and I used to color pipes for boys who couldn't smoke without feeling sick.
Nothing would suit him now but that he must smoke a pipe there while we talked to the good old couple below.
"Moi aussi, je fumais quand c'était défendu; que voulez‐vous? Il faut bien que jeunesse se passe, n'est ce pas?" said the old soldier.
"Ah, dame!" said his old wife, and sighed.
Every tree in this enchanted place had its history – every corner, every square yard of soil. I will not inflict these histories on the reader; I will restrain myself with all my might, and merely state that just as the old school had been replaced by this noble dwelling the noble dwelling itself has now been replaced, trees and garden and all, by a stately palace many stories high, which rears itself among so many other stately palaces that I can't even identify the spot where once stood the Institution F. Brossard!
Later, Barty made me solemnly pledge my word that if he and Leah should pre‐decease me I would see to their due cremating and the final mingling of their ashes; that a portion of these – say half – should be set apart to be scattered on French soil, in places he would indicate in his will, and that the lion's share of that half should be sprinkled over the ground that once was our play‐ground, with – or without – the legitimate owner's permission.