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A DOG OF FLANDERS,
AND
Ófºr Štúrits,
TYe la Wawee, loºse
A DOG OF FLANDERS,
AND
OTHER STORIES.
By OUIDA, pseve
AUTHOR of ‘cEcil castLEMAINE's GAGE,’ ‘Folle-FARINE,’ ‘IDALIA,’
‘UNDER Two FLAGs,” Etc.
AVEW ED/77OAZ
* w £only on :
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY.


Olu II) A'S IN 0 WIEI, S,
Uniform Edition, crown 8vo, red cloth
eactra, 58. each.
FOLLE FARINE.
IDALIA : A Romance.
CHANDOS : A Novel.
UNIDER TWO FILAGS.
TRICOTRIN.
CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE.
HELD IN BONDAGE,
PASCAREL: Only a Story.
PUCK : His Wicissitudes, Adventures, &c
A DOG OF FLANDERS.
STRATHMORE.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
SIGNA.
IN A WINTER, CITY-
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY, W.
-
l | *
|- H -1.7
| 3 || K st
CONTENTS.
-— —
A DOG OF FLANDERS . º Ö t º {O • ſº 1
A lºßANCH OF LILAC ſº M j & Q * > , , 65
A PROVENCE ROSE . . . . . . . . . 172
#
A LEAF IN THE STORM , o • " © $ . . 239
A D00 OF FLANDERS,
*-Q-
I.
&|ELLO and Patrasche were left all alone in
the world.
They were friends in a friendship closer
than brotherhood.
Nello was a little Ardennois—Patrasche was a big
Fleming. They were both of the same age by length
of years, yet One was still young, and the other was
already old. They had dwelt together almost all their
days: both were Orphaned and destitute, and owed
their lives to the same hand. It had been the begin-
ning of the tie between them, their first bond of sym-
pathy; and it had strengthened day by day, and had
grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until
they loved one another very greatly.
Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little
village—a Flemish village a league from Antwerp, set
ſº T.

2 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with
long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the
breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran
through it. *
It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with
shutters of bright green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-
red or black and white, and walls whitewashed until
they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of the
village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown
slope: it was a landmark to all the level country
round.
It had once been painted Scarlet, sails and all, but
that had been in its infancy, half a century or more
earlier, when it had ground wheat for the soldiers of
Napoleon ; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by
wind and weather. It went queerly by fits and starts,
as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age,
but it served the whole neighbourhood, which would
have thought it almost as impious to carry grain else-
where as to attend any other religious service than the
mass that was performed at the altar of the little old
gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood oppo-
site to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon
and night with that strange, subdued, hollow sadness
which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries
seems to gain as an integral part of its melody,
A DOG OF FILANDERS. 3
Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost
from their birth upward, they had dwelt together,
Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on the edge of
the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising
in the north-east, beyond the great green plain of seed-
ing grass and spreading corn that stretched away from
them like a tideless, changeless Sea.
It was the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man—
of old Jehan Daas, who in his time had been a soldier,
and who remembered the wars that had trampled the
country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had
brought from his service nothing except a wound, which
had made him a cripple.
When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty,
his daughter had died in the Ardennes, hard by Stave-
lot, and had left him in legacy her two-year-old son.
The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but
he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and
it soon became welcome and precious to him. Little
Nello—which was but a pet diminutive for Nicolas—
throve with him, and the old man and the little child
lived in the poor little hut contentedly.
It was a very humble little mud-hut indeed, but it
was clean and white as a sea-shell, and stood in a
small plot of garden-ground that yielded beans and
herbs and pumpkins,
4. A Dog OF FLANDERs.
They were very poor, terribly poor—many a day
they had nothing at all to eat. They mever by any
chance had enough : to have had enough to eat would
have been to have reached paradise at once. But the
old man was vary gentle and good to the boy, and the
boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-natured
creature; and they were happy on a crust and a few
leaves of cabbage, and asked no more of earth or
heaven; save indeed that Patrasche should be always
with them, since without Patrasche where would they
have been 2
For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their
treasury and granary; their store of gold and wand of
wealth ; their bread-winner and minister; their only
friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from
them, they must have laid themselves down and died,
likewise. Patrasche was body, brains, hands, head
and feet to both of them : Patrasche was their very
life, their very soul.
For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple, and Nello
was but a child ; and Patrasche was their dog.
A dog of Flanders—yellow of hide, large of head
and limb, with wolf-like ears that stood erect, and legs
bowed and feet widened in the muscular development
wrought in his breed by many generations of hard ser-
vice. Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 5
and cruelly from sire to son in Flanders many a cen-
tury—slaves of slaves, dogs of the people, beasts of
the shafts and the harness, creatures that lived
straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and
died breaking their hearts on the flints of the
streets.
Patrasche had been born of parents who had laboured
hard all their days over the sharp-set stones of the
various cities and the long, shadowless, weary roads of
the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been born
to no other heritage than those of pain and of toil.
He had been fed on curses and baptised with blows.
Why not ? It was a Christian country, and Patrasche
was but a dog.
Before he was fully grown he had known the bitter
gall of the cart and the collar. Before he had entered
his thirteenth month he had become the property of
a hardware-dealer, who was accustomed to wander over
the land north and south, from the blue sea to the
green mountains. They sold him for a small price,
because he was So young.
This man was a drunkard and a brute. The life of
Patrasche was a life of hell.
His purchaser was a sullen, ill-living, brutal Bra-
bantois, who heaped his cart full with pots and pans
and flagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery
6 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
and brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load
as best he might, whilst he himself lounged idly by
the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his black
pipe and stopping at every wineshop or café on the
road.
Happily for Patrasche—or unhappily—he was very
strong: he came of an iron race, long born and bred
to such cruel travail; so that he did not die, but
managed to drag On a wretched existence under the
brutal burdens, the scarifying lashes, the hunger, the
thirst, the blows, the curses and the exhaustion which
are the only wages with which the Flemings repay the
most patient and laborious of all their fourfooted
victims. * ~!
One day, after two years of this long and deadly
agony, Patrasche was going on as usual along one of
the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that lead to the
city of Rubens.
It was full midsummer, and very warm. His cart
was very heavy, piled high with goods in metal and in
earthenware. His owner sauntered on without noticing
him otherwise than by the crack of the whip as it curled
round his quivering loins.
The Brabantois had paused to drink beer himself at
every wayside house, but he had forbidden Patrasche
to stop a moment for a draught from the canal. Going
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 7
along thus, in the full sun, on a scorching highway,
having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and, which
was far worse to him, not having tasted water for nearly
twelve, being blind with dust, sore with blows and
stupefied with the merciless weight which dragged upon
his loins, Patrasche, for once, staggered and foamed a
little at the mouth, and fell. ** -
He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, in
the full glare of the Sun: he was sick unto death,
and motionless. His master gave him the only medi-
cine in his pharmacy—kicks and oaths and blows with
a cudgel of oak, which had been often the only food
and drink, the only wage and reward, ever offered to
him. -
But Patrasche was beyond the reach of any tor-
ture or of any curses. Patrasche lay, dead to all
appearances, down in the white powder of the summer
dust. .
After a while, finding it useless to assail his ribs
with punishment and his ears with maledictions, the
nearly that his carcass was for ever useless, unless
indeed some one should strip it of the skin for gloves
—cursed him fiercely in farewell, struck off the
leathern bands of the harness, kicked his body heavily
aside into the grass, and, groaning and muttering in
8 A Dog of FLANDERs.
Savage wrath, pushed the cart lazily along the road up
hill, and left the dying dog there for the ants to sting
and for the crows to pick. - - -
It was the last day before Kermesse away at
Louvain, and the Brabantois was in haste to reach
the fair, and get a good place for his truck of brass
wares. -
He was in fierce wrath, because Patrasche had been
a strong and much-enduring animal, and because he
himself had now the hard task of pushing his charette
all the way to Louvain. But to stay to look after
Patrasche never entered his thoughts: the beast was .
dying and useless, and he would steal, to replace
him, the first large dog that he found wandering alone
out of sight of its master. Patrasche had cost him
nothing, or next to nothing, and for two long, cruel
years had been made to toil ceaselessly in his service
from sunrise to Sunset, through summer and winter,
in fair weather and foul. - -
He had got a fair use and a good profit out of
Patrasche : being human, he was wise, and left the
dog to draw his last breath alone in the ditch, and
have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be
by the birds, whilst he himself went on his way to beg
and to steal, to eat and to drink, to dance and to sing,
in the mirth at Trouvain. A dying dog, a dog of the
A DOG OF FiANDERS. 9
cart—why should he waste hours over its agonies at
peril of losing a handful of copper coins, at peril of a
shout of laughter. -
Patrasche lay there, flung in the grass-green ditch.
It was a busy road that day, and hundreds of
people, on foot and on mules, in waggons or in carts,
went by, tramping quickly and joyously on to Louvain.
Some saw him, most did not even look: all passed
on. A dead dog more or less—it was nothing in
Brabant: it would be nothing anywhere in the
world.
After a time, amongst the holiday-makers, there
came a little old man who was bent and lame, and
very feeble. He was in no guise for feasting: he was
very poorly and miserably clad, and he dragged his
silent way slowly through the dust amongst the
pleasure-seekers. -
He looked at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned
aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds
of the ditch, and surveyed the dog with kindly eyes
of pity.
There was with him a little rosy, fair-haired, dark-
eyed child of a few years old, who pattered in amidst
the bushes, that were for him breast-high, and stood
gazing with a pretty seriousness upon the poor, great,
quiet beast.
10 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
Thus it was that these two first met—the little Nello
and the big Patrasche.
The upshot of that day was, that old Jehan Daas,
with much laborious effort, drew the sufferer home-
ward to his own little hut, which was a stone's throw
off amidst the fields, and there tended him with so
much care that the sickness, which had been a brain-
seizure, brought on by heat and thirst and exhaustion,
with time and shade and rest passed away, and health
and strength returned, and Patrasche staggered up
again upon his four stout, tawny legs. \
Now for many weeks he had been useless, power-
less, sore, near to death; but all this time he had
heard no rough word, had felt no harsh touch, but
Only the pitying murmurs of the little child’s voice
and the soothing caress of the old man's hand.
In his sickness they too had grown to care for him,
this lonely old man and the little happy child.
He had a corner of the hut, with a heap of dry
grass for his bed; and they had learned to listen
eagerly for his breathing in the dark night, to tell
them that he lived; and when he first was well enough
to essay a loud, hollow, broken bay, they laughed
aloud, and almost wept together for joy at such a sign
of his sure restoration ; and little Nello, in delighted
glee, hung round his rugged neck with chains of
- A DOG OF FLANDERS. - 11
marguerites, and kissed him with fresh and ruddy
lips.
So then, when Patrasche arose, himself again,
strong, big, gaunt, powerful, his great wistful eyes
had a gentle astonishment in them that there were no
curses to rouse him and no blows to drive him; and
his heart awakened to a mighty love, which never
wavered once in its fidelity whilst life abode with
him. - -
Dut Patrasche, being a dog, was grateful. Patrasche
lay pondering long with grave, tender, musing brown
eyes, watching the movements of his friends.
Now, the old soldier, Jehan Daas, could do nothing
for his living but limp about a little with a small cart,
with which he carried daily the milk-cans of those
happier neighbours who owned cattle away into the
town of Antwerp. -
The villagers gave him the employment a little out
of charity—more because it suited them well to send
their milk into the town by so honest a carrier, and
bide at home themselves to look after their gardens,
their cows, their poultry, or their little fields. But it
was becoming hard work for the old man. He was
eighty-three, and Antwerp was a good league off, or
more. -
Patrasche watched the milk-cans come and go that
12 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
first day when he had got well, and was lying in the
sun with the wreath of marguerites round his tawny
neck. *.
The next morning, Patrasche, before the old man
had touched the cart, arose and walked to it, and
placed himself betwixt its handles, and testified, as
plainly as dumb show could do, his desire and his
ability to work in return for the bread of charity that
he had eaten. Jehan Daas resisted long, for the old
man was one of those who thought it a foul shame to
bind dogs to labour for which nature never formed
them.
But Patrasche would not be gainsayed; finding they
did not harness him, he tried to draw the cart onward
with his teeth. -
At length Jehan Daas gave way, vanquished by the
persistence and the gratitude of this creature whom
he had succoured. He fashioned his cart so that
Patrasche could run in it, and this he did every morn-
ing of his life thenceforward.
When the winter came, Jehan Daas thanked the
blessed fortune that had brought him to the dying dog
in the ditch that fair-day of Louvain; for he was very
old, and he grew feebler with each year, and he would
ill have known how to pull his load of milk-cans over
the snows and through the deep ruts in the mud if it
A DoG OF FLANDERS. 13
had not been for the strength and the industry of the
animal he had befriended.
As for Patrasche, it seemed heaven to him.
After the frightful burdens that his old master had
compelled him to strain under, at the call of the whip’
at every step, it seemed nothing to him but amusement
to step out with this little light green cart, with its
bright brass cans, by the side of the gentle old man
who always paid him with a tender caress and with a
kindly word. Besides, his work was over by three or
four in the day, and after that time he was free to do
as he would—to stretch himself, to sleep in the sun,
to wander in the fields, to romp with the young child,
or to play with his fellow-dogs. Patrasche was very
happy.
Fortunately for his peace, his former owner was
killed in a drunken brawl at the kermesse of Mechlin,
and so sought not after him nor disturbed him in his
new and well-loved home. -
A few years later, Old Jehan Daas, who had always
been a cripple, became so paralysed with rheumatism
that it was impossible for him to go out with the cart
any more. ---
Then little Nello, being now grown to his sixth year
of age, and knowing the town well from having accom-
panied his grandfather so many times, took his place
14 A DoG OF FLANDERS.
beside the cart, and sold the milk and received the
coins in exchange, and brought them back to their
respective owners with a pretty grace and seriousness
which charmed all who beheld him.
The little Ardennois was a beautiful child, with
dark, grave, tender eyes, and a lovely bloom upon his
face, and fair locks that clustered to his throat; and
many an artist sketched the group as they went by
him—the green cart with the brass flagons of milk,
and the great, tawny-coloured, massive dog, with his
belled harness, that chimed cheerily as he went, and the
small figure that ran beside him, which had little white
feet in great wooden shoes, and a soft, grave, innocent,
happy face like the little fair children of Rubens.
Nello and Patrasche did the work so well and so
joyfully together that Jehan Daas himself, when the
summer came and he was better again, had no need to
stir out, but could sit in the doorway in the sun, and
see them go forth through the garden wicket, and
then doze, and dream, and pray a little, and then awake
again as the clock tolled three, and watch for their
return. And on their return Patrasche would shake
himself free of his harness with a bay of glee, and
Nello would recount with pride the doings of the day;
and they would all go in together to their meal of rye
bread and milk and soup, or would see the shadows
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 15
lengthen over the plain, and see the twilight veil the
fair cathedral spire; and then lie down together to
sleep peacefully while the old man said a prayer.
So the days and the years went on, and the lives of
Nello and Patrasche were happy, innocent, and
healthful. - **
II.
N the spring and summer especially were
they glad. Flanders is not a lovely land,
and around the burgh of Rubens it is per-
haps least lovely of all. --
Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each
other on the characterless plain in wearying repetition,
and save by some gaunt gray tower, with its peal of
pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart the
fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a
woodman's faggot, there is no change, no variety, no
beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the
mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by
imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of
that vast and dreary level.
But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide
“orizons that have a certain charm of their own even

16 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
in their dulness and monotony; and amongst the
rushes by the water-side the flowers grow, and the trees
rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their
great hulks black against the sun, and their little green
barrels and vari-coloured flags gay against the leaves.
Anyway, there is a greenery and breadth of space
enough to be as good as beauty to a child and a dog;
and these two asked no better, when their work was
done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses on the side
of the canal, and watch the cumbrous vessels drifting
by, and bringing the crisp salt smell of the sea amongst
the blossoming scents of the country Summer.
True, in the winter it was harder, and they had to
rise in the darkness and the bitter cold, and they had
seldom as much as they could have eaten any day, and
the hut was scarce better than a shed when the nights
were cold, although it looked so pretty in warm weather,
buried in a great kindly-clambering vine, that never bore
fruit, indeed, but which covered it with luxuriant
green tracery all through the months of blossom and
harvest. - - sº -
In winter the winds found many holes in the walls.
of the poor little hut, and the vine was black and leaf-
less, and the bare lands looked very bleak and drear
without, and sometimes within the floor was flooded
and then frozen. In winter it was hard, and the Snow
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 17
numbed the little white limbs of Nello, and the icicles
cut the brave untiring feet of Patrasche.
But even then they were never heard to lament,
either of them. The child’s wooden shoes and the
dog's four legs would trot manfully together over the
frozen fields to the chime of the bells on the harness;
and then sometimes, in the streets of Antwerp, some
housewife would bring them a bowl of soup and a
handful of bread, or some kindly trader would throw
some billets of fuel into the little cart as it went home-
ward, or some woman in their own village would bid
them keep some share of the milk they carried for their
own food; and they then would run over the whitg
lands, through the early darkness, bright and happy,
and burst with a shout of joy into their home. -
So, on the whole, it was well with them, very well;
and Patrasche, meeting on the highway or in the
public streets the many dogs who toiled from daybreak
into nightfall, paid only with blows and curses, and
loosened from the shafts with a kick to starve and
freeze as best they might, Patrasche in his heart was
very grateful to his fate, and thought it the fairest and
the kindliest the world could hold. Though he was
often very hungry indeed when he lay down at night;
though he had to work in the heats of summer noons
and the rasping chills of winter dawns; though his
C
18 A DOG OF FILANDERS.
feet were often tender with wounds from the sharp
edges of the jagged pavement; though he had to per-
form tasks beyond his strength and against his nature,
—yet he was grateful and content: he did his duty
with each day, and the eyes that he loved smiled down
On him. It was sufficient for Patrasche.
There was only one thing which caused Patrasche
any uneasiness in his life, and it was this. Antwerp,
as all the world knows, is full at every turn of old
piles of stones, dark and ancient, and majestic,
standing in crooked courts, jammed against gateways
and taverns, rising by the water's edge, with bells
ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out
of their arched doors a swell of music pealing.
There they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the
past, shut in amidst the squalor, the hurry, the crowds,
the unloveliness and the commerce of the modern
world, and all day long the clouds drift and the birds
circle, and the winds sigh around them, and beneath
the earth at their feet there sleeps—RUBENs.
And the greatness of the mighty Master still rests
upon Antwerp ; wherever we turn in its narrow streets
his glory lies therein, so that all mean things are
thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through
the winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant
water, and through the noisome courts, his spirit abides
A DOG OF FILANDERS. I9
with us, and the heroic beauty of his visions is about
us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps and bore
his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living
voices. For the city which is the tomb of Rubens
still lives to us through him, and him alone.
Without Rubens, what were Antwerp 2 A dirty,
dusky, bustling mart, which no man would ever care
to look upon save the traders who do business on
its wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men
it is a sacred name, a sacred soil, a Bethlehem, where
a god of Art Saw light, a Golgotha, where a god of Art -
lies dead.
It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre—
so quiet, Save only when the Organ peals, and the
choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or the Kyrie
Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone
than that pure marble Sanctuary gives to him in the
heart of his birth-place in the chancel of St. Jacques 2
O nations ! closely should you treasure your great
men, for by them alone will the future know of you.
Flanders in her generations has been wise. In his
life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his
death she magnifies his name. But her wisdom is
very rare.
Now, the trouble of Patrasche was this.
Into these great sad piles of stones, that reared
G 2
20 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
their melancholy majesty above the crowded roofs, the
child Nello would many and many a time enter, and
disappear through their dark arched portals, whilst
IPatrasche, left without upon the pavement, would
wearily and vainly ponder on what could be the charm
which thus allured from him his inseparable and be-
loved companion. -
Once or twice he did essay to see for himself, clat-
tering up the steps with his milk-cart behind him ;
but thereon he had been always sent back again sum-
marily by a tall custodian in black clothes and silver
chains of office; and fearful of bringing his little
master into trouble, he desisted, and remained couched
patiently before the churches until such time as the
boy reappeared.
It was not the fact of his going into them which
disturbed Patrasche : he knew that people went to
church : all the village went to the small, tumbledown,
gray pile opposite the red windmill. What troubled
him was that little Nello always looked strangely when
he came out, always very flushed or very pale ; and
whenever he returned home after such visitations
would sit silent and dreaming, not caring to play, but
gazing out at the evening skies beyond the line of the
canal, very subdued and almost sad.
What was it 2 wondered Patrasche.
A DOG OF FLANDERs. . 2 i
He thought it could not be good or natural for
the little lad to be so grave, and, in his dumb fashion,
he tried all he could to keep Nello by him in the sunny
fields or in the busy market-place.
But to the churches Nello would not go : most often
of all would he go to the great cathedral; and
Patrasche, left without on the stones by the iron frag-
ments of Quentin Matsys’ gate, would stretch himself
and yawn and sigh, and even howl now and then, all in
vain, until the doors closed and the child perforce
came forth again, and winding his arms about the
dog's neck, would kiss him on his broad, tawny-
coloured forehead, and murmur always the same
words:— -
“If I could only see them, Patrasche –if I could
only see them l’
What were they 2 pondered Patrasche, looking up
with large, wistful, sympathetic eyes.
One day, when the custodian was out of the way and
the doors left ajar, he got in for a moment after his
little friend and saw. “They ’’ were two great
covered pictures on either side of the choir.
Nello was kneeling, wrapt as in an ecstasy, before
the altar-picture of the Assumption, and when he
noticed Patrasche, and rose and drew the dog gently
out into the air, his face was wet with tears, and he
22 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
looked up at the veiled places as he passed them, and
murmured to his companion :- -
“It is so terrible not to see them, Patrasche, just
because one is poor and cannot pay ! He never meant
that the poor should not see them when he painted
them, I am sure. He would have had us see them
any day,+every day: that I am sure. And they keep
them shrouded there, shrouded in the dark, the beau-
tiful things l—and they never feel the light, and no eyes
look on them, unless rich people come and pay. If I
could only see them, I would be content to die.”
Put he could not see them, and Patrasche could not
help him, for to gain the silver piece that the Church
exacts as the price for looking on the glories of the
“Elevation of the Cross * and the “Descent of the
Cross,” was a thing as utterly beyond the powers of
either of them as it would have been to scale the
heights of the cathedral-spire.
They had never so much as a sou to spare: if they
cleared enough to get a little wood for the Stove, a
little broth for the pot, it was the utmost they could
do. And yet the heart of the child was set in sore
and endless longing upon beholding the greatness of
the two veiled Rubens. -
The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and
stirred with an absorbing passion for art,
A DOG OF FILANDERS. 23
Going on his ways through the old city in the early
daybreak before the Sun or the people had seen them,
Nello, who looked only a little peasant-boy, with a
great dog drawing milk to sell from door to door, was
in a heaven of dreams, whereof Rubens was the god.
Nello, cold and hungry, with stockingless feet in
wooden shoes, and the winter winds blowing amongst
his curls and lifting his poor thin garments, was in a
rapture of meditation, wherein all that he saw was the
beautiful fair face of the Mary of “The Assumption,”
with the waves of her golden hair lying upon her
shoulders, and the light of an eternal sun shining
down upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and
buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters, and un-
heeded by men, had the compensation or the curse
which is called Genius.
No one knew it. He as little as any. No One
knew it.
Only, indeed, Patrasche, who being with him always,
saw him draw with chalk upon the stones any and
every thing that grew or breathed,—heard him on his
little bed of hay, murmur all manner of timid, pathetic
prayers to the spirit of the great Master; watched his
gaze darken and his face radiate at the evening glow
of sunset or the rosy rising of the dawn; and felt,
many and many a time, the tears of a strange, name-
24 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
less pain and joy mingled together, fall hotly from
the bright young eyes upon his own wrinkled, yellow
forehead. . .
“I should go to my grave quite content if I thought,
Nello, that when thou growest a man thou could'st
own this hut and the little plot of ground, and labour
for thyself, and be called Baas by thy neighbours,”
said the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed.
For to own a bit of soil and to be called Baas—
master—by the hamlet round, is to have achieved the
highest ideal of a Flemish peasant; and the old
soldier, who had wandered over all the earth in his
youth, and had brought nothing back, deemed in his
old age that to live and die on one spot in contented
humility was the fairest fate he could desire for his
darling.
Dut Nello said nothing.
The same leaven was working in him that in other
times begat Rubens, and Jordaens, and the Van Eycks,
and all their wondrous tribe, and in times more recent
begat—in the green country of the Ardennes, where
the Meuse washes the old walls of Dijon—the great
artist of the Patroclus, whose genius is too near us for
us aright to measure its divinity. -
Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of
tilling the little rood of earth, and living under the
A DOG OF FLANDERS. * . 25
wattle roof, and being called Baas by neighbours a little
poorer or a little less poor than himself. The cathedral-
spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy
evening skies or in the dim, gray, misty mornings, said
other things to him than this. But these he told only
to Patrasche, whispering, child-like, his fancies in the
dog's ear when they went together at their work through
the fogs of the daybreak, or lay together at their rest
amongst the rustling rushes by the water's side.
For such dreams are not easily shaped into speech
to awake the slow sympathies of human auditors; and
they would only have Sorely perplexed and troubled
the poor old man, bedridden in his corner, who, for his
part, whenever he had trod the streets of Antwerp,
had thought the daub of blue and red that they called
8, Madonna, on the walls of the wine-shop where he
drank his sou's worth of black beer, quite as good as
any of the famous altar-pieces for which the stranger-
folk travelled far and wide into Flanders from every
land on which the good sun shone.
There was only one other beside Patrasche to whom
Nello could talk at all of his daring fantasies. This
other was little Alois, who lived at the old red mill on
the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was
the best-to-do husbandman in all the village.
Iittle Alois was only a pretty baby, with soft, round,
26 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
rosy features, made lovely by those sweet dark eyes
that the Spanish rule has left in so many a Flemish
face, in testimony of the Alvan dominion, as Spanish
art has left, broadsown throughout the country,
majestic palaces and stately courts, gilded house-
fronts and sculptured lintels, histories in blazonry
and poems in stone.
Little Alois was often with Nello and Patrasche.
They played in the fields, they ran in the snow, they
gathered the daisies and bilberries, they went up to
the old gray church together, and they often sat toge-
ther by the broad wood-fire in the mill-house.
Little Alois, indeed, was the richest child in the
hamlet. She had neither brother nor sister; her blue
serge dress had never a hole in it ; at kermesse she
had as many gilded nuts and Agni Dei in sugar as her
hands could hold ; and when she went up for her first
communion, her flaxen curls were covered with a cap
of richest Mechlin lace, which had been her mother's
and her grandmother's before it came to her. Men
spoke already, though she had but twelve years, of the
good wife she would be for their sons to woo and win;
but she herself was a little, gay, simple child, in no-
wise conscious of her heritage, and she loved no play-
fellows so well as Jehan Daas' grandson, and his dog.
One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good man, but
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 27
somewhat stern, came on a pretty group in the long
meadow behind the mill, where the aftermath had that
day been cut.
ſt was his little daughter sitting amidst the hay,
with the great tawny head of Patrasche on her lap,
and many wreaths of poppies and blue cornflowers
round them both : On a clean Smooth slab of pine
wood the boy Nello drew their likeness with a stick of
charcoal.
The miller stood and looked at the portrait with
tears in his eyes, it was so strangely like, and he
loved his only child closely and well. Then he roughly
chid the little girl for idling there whilst her mother
needed her within, and sent her indoors Crying and
afraid : then, turning, he snatched the wood from
Nello's hands. -
“Dost do much of such folly 2” he asked, but there
was a tremble in his voice. -
Nello coloured and hung his head. “I draw every-
thing I see,” he murmured.
The miller was silent : then he stretched his hand
out with a franc in it.
“It is folly, as I say, and evil waste of time: neverthe-
less, it is like Alois, and will please the house-mother.
Take this silver bit for it, and leave it for me.”
The colour died out of the face of the young Arden.
28 A DoG OF FLANDERS.
nois: he lifted his head and put his hands behind his
back. -
“Keep your money and the portrait both, Baas
Cogez,” he said simply. “You have been often good
to me.” - .
Then he called Patrasche to him, and walked away
across the fields.
“I could have seen them with that franc,” he mur-
mured to Patrasche, “but I could not sell her picture
—not even for them.” :
Baas Cogez went into his mill-house sore troubled
in his mind. +
“That lad must not be so much with Alois,” he
said to his wife that night. “Trouble may come of it
hereafter: he is fifteen now, and she is twelve; and the
boy is comely of face and form.”
“And he is a good lad and a loyal,” said the house-
wife, feasting her eyes on the piece of pine wood
where it was throned above the chimney with a cuckoo
clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.
“Yea, I do not gainsay that,” said the miller,
draining his pewter flagon.
“Then, if what you think of were ever to come to
pass,” said the wife, hesitatingly, “would it be matter
so much 2 She will have enough for both, and one
cannot be better than happy.”
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 29
“You are a woman, and therefore a fool,” said the
miller harshly, striking his pipe on the table. “The
lad is nought but a beggar, and, with these painter's
fancies, worse than a beggar. Have a care that they
are not together in the future, or I will send the child
to the surer keeping of the nuns of the Sacred
Heart.” -
The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly
to do his will. Not that she could bring herself alto-
gether to separate the child from her favourite play-
mate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme of
cruelty to a young lad who was guilty of nothing ex-
cept poverty. But there were many ways in which
little Alois was kept away from her chosen companion;
and Nello, being a boy, proud and quiet and sensitive,
was quickly wounded, and ceased to turn his own steps
and those of Patrasche, as he had been used to do
with every moment of leisure, to the old red mill upon
the slope. - .
What his offence was he did not know : he supposed
he had in some manner angered Baas Cogez by taking
the portrait of Alois in the meadow; and when the
child who loved him would run to him and nestle her
hand in his, he would smile at her very sadly, and say º
with a tender concern for her before himself,
“Nav, Alois, do not anger your father. He thinks
30 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
that I make you idle, dear, and he is not pleased that
you should be with me. He is a good man and loves
you well: we will not anger him, Alois.”
But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the * .
earth did not look so bright to him as it had used
to do when he went out at sunrise under the poplars
down the straight roads with Patrasche.
The old red mill had been a landmark to him, and
he had been used to pause by it, going and coming,
for a cheery greeting with its people as her little
flaxen head had risen above the low mill-wicket, and
her little rosy hands had held out a bone, or a crust
to Patrasche.
Now the dog looked wistfully at a closed door, and -
the boy went on without pausing, with a pang at his
heart, and the child sat within with tears dropping
slowly on the knitting to which she was set on her
little stool by the stove; and Baas Cogez, working
among his sacks and his mill-gear, would harden his
will, and say to himself, “It is best so. The lad is
all but a beggar, and full of idle, dreaming fooleries.
Who knows what mischief might not come of it in the
future ?”
So he was wise in his generation, and would not
have the door unbarred, except upon rare and formal
occasions, which seemed to have neither warmth nor
A DOG OF FILANDERS. 31
mirth in them to the two children, who had been
accustomed so long to a daily, gleeful, careless, happy
interchange of greeting, speech, and pastime, with no
other watcher of their sports or auditor of their fancies
than Patrasche, Sagely shaking the brazen bells of his
collar, and responding with all a dog's Swift sympathies
to their every change of mood. -
All this while the little panel of pine wood remained
over the chimney in the mill-kitchen with the cuckoo
clock and the waxen Calvary, and sometimes it seemed
to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was accepted
he himself should be denied. - -
But he did not complain : it was his habit to be
quiet: old Jehan Daas had said ever to him, “We are
poor: we must take what God sends—the ill with the
good: the poor cannot choose.”
To which the boy had always listened in silence,
being reverent of his old grandfather; but neverthe-
less a certain vague and Sweet hope, such as beguiles
the children of genius, had whispered in his heart,
“Yet the poor do choose sometimes—choose to be
great, so that men cannot say them nay.”
And he thought so still in his innocence ; and one
day, when the little Alois, finding him by chance alone
amongst the corn-fields by the canal, ran to him and
held him close, and sobbed piteously because the mor-
32 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
row would be her saint's day, and for the first time in
all her life her parents had failed to bid him to the
little supper and romp in the great barns with which
her feast-day was always celebrated, Nello had kissed
her, and murmured to her in firm faith,
“It shall be different one day, Alois. One day that
little bit of pine wood that your father has of mine
shall be worth its weight in silver; and he will not
shut the door against me then. Only love me always,
dear little Alois; only love me always, and I will be
great.”
“And if I do not love you?” the pretty child asked,
pouting a little through her tears, and moved by the
instinctive coquetries of her sex. -
Nello's eyes left her face and wandered to the dis-
tance, where in the red-and-gold of the Flemish night
the cathedral spire rose.
There was a smile on his face so sweet and yet so
sad that little Alois was awed by it.
“I will be great still,” he said under his breath—
“great still, or die, Alois.” *&
“You do not love me then l’” said the little spoilt
child, pushing him away; but the boy shook his head
and smiled, and went on his way through the tall yellow
corn, seeing as in a vision some day in a fair future
when he should come into that old familiar land and
A DOG OF FIANDERS. 33
ask Alois of her people, and be not refused nor denied,
but received in honour, whilst the village folk should
throng to look upon him, and say in one another's
ears, “Dost see him 2 He is a king among men, for
he is a great artist, and the world speaks his name ;
and yet he was only our poor little Nello, who was a
beggar, as one may say, and only got his bread by the
help of his dog.”
And he thought bow he would fold his grandsire in
furs and purples, and pourtray him as the old man is
pourtrayed in the Family in the chapel of St. Jacques;
and of how he would hang the throat of Patrasche
with a collar of gold, and place him on his right
hand, and say to the people, “This was Once my
only friend;” and of how he would build himself a
great white marble palace, and make to himself luxu-
riant gardens of pleasure, on the slope looking out-
ward to where the cathedral spire rose, and not dwell
in it himself, but summon to it, as to a home, all men
young and poor and friendless, but of the will to do
mighty things; and of how he would say to them
always, if they sought to bless his name, “Nay, do
not thank me—thank Rubens. Without him, what
should I have been 2''
These dreams, beautiful, impossible, innocent, free
of all selfishness, full of heroical worship, were 50
-- T)
34 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
closely about him as he went that he was happy—
happy even on this sad anniversary of Alois' saint's
day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves
to the little dark hut and the meal of black bread,
whilst in the mill-house all the children of the village
sang and laughed, and ate the big round cakes of
Dijon and the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and
danced in the great barn to the light of the stars and
the music of flute and fiddle. -
“Never mind, Patrasche,” he said, with his arms
round the dog's neck, as they both sat in the door of
the hut, where the sounds of the mirth at the mill
came down to them on the night air—“never mind.
It shall all be changed by and by.”
He believed in the future: Patrasche, of more expe-
rience and of more philosophy, thought that the loss
of the mill supper in the present was ill compensated
by dreams of milk and honey in some vague hereafter.
And Patrasche growled whenever he passed by Baas
Cogez.
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 35
III.
àBIIS is Alois's name-day, is it not?” said
the old man Daas that night from the
corner where he was stretched upon his
bed of sacking.
The boy gave a gesture of assent: he wished that
the old man's memory had erred a little, instead of
keeping such exact account.
“And why not there? ” his grandfather pursued.
“Thou hast never missed a year before, Nello.”
“Thou art too sick to leave,” murmured the lad,
bending his handsome young head over the bed.
“Tut! tut! Mother Vulette would have come and
sat with me, as she does scores of times. What is the
cause, Nello?” the old man persisted. “Thou
surely hast not had ill words with the little one 2"
“Nay, grandfather—never,”
said the boy quickly,
with a hot colour in his bent face. “Simply and
truly, Baas Cogez did not have me asked this year.
He has taken some whim against me.”
“But thou hast done nothing wrong?”
“That I know—nothing. I took the portrait of
Alois on a piece of pine : that is all.”
“A}) ] ''

D 2
36 A Dog OF FLANDERs.
The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself
to him with the boy's innocent answer. He was tied
to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut,
but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the
world were like. * i
He drew Nello's fair head fondly to his breast with
a tenderer gesture. - -
“Thou art very poor, my child,” he said with a
quiver the more in his aged trembling voice—“so
poor It is very hard for thee.”
“Nay, I am rich,” murmured Nello; and in his
innocence he thought so—rich with the imperishable -
powers that are mightier than the might of kings.
And he went and stood by the door of the hut in the
quiet autumn night, and watched the stars troop by
and the tall poplars bend and shiver in the
wind. - - -
All the casements of the mill-house were lighted,
and every now and then the notes of the flute came to
him. The tears fell down his cheeks, for he was but
a child, yet he smiled, for he said to himself, “In the
future l’” ".
He stayed there until all was quite still and dark,
then he and Patrasche went within and slept together,
long and deeply, side by side. -
Now he had a secret which only Patrasche knew.
**
A DOG OF FILANDERS. 37
There was a little out-house to the hut, which no one
entered but himself—a dreary place, but with abundant
clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned
himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here on
a great gray sea of stretched paper he had given
shape to one of the innumerable fancies which pos-
sessed his brain.
No one had ever taught him anything; colours he
had no means to buy; he had gone without bread
many a time to procure even the few rude vehicles
that he had here; and it was only in black and white
that he could fashion the things he saw. This great
figure which he had drawn here in chalk was only an
old man sitting on a fallen tree—only that. He had
seen old Michel the Woodman sitting so at evening
many a time. -*
He had never had a soul to tell him of outline or
perspective, of anatomy or of shadow, and yet he had
given all the weary wornout age, all the Sad, quiet
patience, all the rugged, careworn pathos of his
original, and given them so that the old lonely figure
was a poem, sitting there, meditative and alone, on
the dead tree, with the darkness of the descending
night behind him.
It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many
faults, no doubt; and yet it was real, true in Nature
38 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
true in Art, and very mournful, and in a manner
beautiful.
Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours watching
its gradual creation after the labour of each day was
done, and he knew that Nello had a hope—vain and
wild perhaps, but strongly cherished—of sending this
great drawing to compete for a prize of two hundred,
francs a year, which it was announced in Antwerp
would be open to every lad of talent, scholar or pea-
sant, under eighteen, who would attempt to win it
with some unaided work of chalk or pencil. Three of
the foremost artists in the town of Rubens were to be
the judges and elect the victor according to his merits.
All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had
been at work upon this treasure, which, if triumphant,
would build him his first step toward independence,
and the mysteries of the art which he blindly, igno-
rantly, and yet passionately adored.
He said nothing to any one : his grandfather would
not have understood, and little Alois was lost to him.
Only to Patrasche he told all, and whispered, “Rubens
would give it me, I think, if he knew.” - -
Patrasche thought so too, for he knew that Rubens
had loved dogs or he had never painted them with
such exquisite fidelity; and men who loved dogs were,
as Patrasche knew, always pitiful.
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 39
The drawings were to go in on the first day of
December, and the decision be given on the twenty-
fourth, so that he who should win might rejoice with
all his people at the Christmas season.
In the twilight of a bitter wintry day, and with a
beating heart, now quick with hope, now faint with
fear, Nello placed the great picture on his little green
milk-cart, and took it, with the help of Patrasche, into
the town, and there left it, as enjoined, at the doors of
a public building.
“Perhaps it is worth nothing at all. How can I
tell?” he thought, with the heart-sickness of a great
timidity.
Now that he had left it there, it seemed to him so
hazardous, so vain, so foolish, to dream that he, a
little lad with bare feet, who barely knew his letters,
could do anything at which great painters, real artists,
could ever deign to look. -
Yet he took heart as he went by the cathedral: the
lordly form of Rubens seemed to rise from the fog
and the darkness, and to loom in its magnificence
before him, whilst the lips, with their kindly smile,
seemed to him to murmur, “Nay, have courage It
was not by a weak heart and by faint fears that I wrote
my name for all time upon Antwerp.”
Nello ran home through the cold night, comforted.
40 - A Dog OF FLANDERs.
He had done his best: the rest must be as God
willed, he thought, in that innocent unquestioning
faith which had been taught him in the little chapel
amongst the willows and the poplar trees.
The winter was very sharp already. That night,
after they reached the hut, snow fell; and fell for very
many days after that, so that the paths and the divi-
Sions in the fields were all obliterated, and all the
smaller streams were frozen over, and the cold was
intense upon the plains. Then, indeed, it became
hard work to go round for the milk, while the world
was all dark, and carry it through the darkness to the
silent town.
Hard work, especially for Patrasche, for the passage
of the years, that were only bringing Nello a stronger
youth, were bringing him old age, and his joints were
stiff, and his bones ached often. But he would never
give up his share of the labour. Nello would fain
have spared him, and drawn the cart in himself, but
Patrasche would never allow it. All he would ever
permit or accept was the help of a thrust from behind
to the truck as it lumbered along through the ice-ruts.
Patrasche had lived in harness, and he was proud of
it. He suffered a great deal sometimes from frost, and
the terrible roads, and the rheumatic pains of his
limbs, but he only drew his breath hard and bent
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 4]
his proud neck, and trod onward with steady
patience. * ,”
“Rest thee at home, Patrasche—it is time thou
didst rest—and I can quite well push in the cart by
myself,” urged Nello many a morning; but Patrasche,
who understood him aright, would no more have con-
sented to stay at home than a veteran soldier to shirk
when the charge was sounding; and every day he
would rise and place himself in the shafts, and plod
along over the snow, through the fields that his four
round feet had left their print upon so many, many
years. .
“One must never rest till one dies,” thought Pa- .
trasche ; and sometimes it seemed to him that that
time of rest for him was not very far off. His sight
was less clear than it had been, and it gave him pain
to rise after the night's sleep, though he would neveſ
lie a moment in his straw when once the bell of the
chapel tolling five, let him know that the daybreak of
labour had begun. -
“My poor Patrasche, we shall soon lie quiet to.
gether, you and I,” said old Jehan Daas, stretching
out to stroke the head of Patrasche with the old
withered hand which had always shared with him its
one poor crust of bread; and the hearts of the
old man and the old dog ached together with one
42 - A Dog of FLANDERs.
thought: When they were gone who would care
for their darling 2
One afternoon, as they came back from Antwerp,
over the snow, which had become hard and Smooth as
marble over all the Flemish plains, they found dropped
in the road a pretty little puppet—a tambourine-
player, all scarlet and gold, about six inches high,
and, unlike greater personages when Fortune lets
them drop, quite unspoiled and unhurt by his fall. It
was a pretty toy. Nello tried to find its owner, and,
failing, thought that it was just the thing to please
Alois. -
It was quite night when he passed the mill-house :
he knew the little window of her room. It could be
no harm, he thought, if he gave her his little piece
of treasure-trove, they had been play-fellows so long.
There was a shed with a sloping roof beneath her
casement: he climbed and tapped softly at the lattice:
there was a little light within. -
The child opened it and looked out, half frightened.
Nello put the tambourine-player into her hands. -
“Here is a doll I found in the snow, Alois. Take
it,” he whispered, “take it, and God bless thee,
dear.” -
He slid down from the shed-roof before she had
time to thank him, and ran off through the darkness.
A DOG OF FILANDERS. 43
That night there was a fire at the mill. Out-
buildings and much corn were destroyed, although the
mill itself and the dwelling-house were unharmed. All
the village was out in terror, and the engines came
tearing through the snow from Antwerp. The miller
was insured, and would lose nothing; nevertheless,
he was in furious wrath, and declared aloud that the
fire was due to no accident, but to some foul intent.
Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to help with
the rest; Baas Cogez thrust him angrily aside.
“Thou wert loitering here after dark,” he said
roughly. “I believe, on my soul, thou dost know more
of the fire than anyone.”
Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, not supposing
that anyone could say such things except in jest, and
not comprehending how anyone could pass a jest at
such a time.
Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal thing openly
to many of his neighbours in the day that followed;
and though no serious charge was ever preferred
against the lad, it got bruited about that Nello had
been seen in the mill-yard after dark on some un-
spoken errand, and that he bore Baas Cogez a grudge
for forbidding his intercourse with little Alois; and
so the hamlet, which followed the sayings of its richest
landowner, servilely, and whose families all hoped to
44 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
*
secure the riches of Alois in some future time for their
sons, took the hint to give grave looks and cold words
to old Jehan Daas' grandson. .
No one said anything to him openly, but all the
village agreed together to humour the miller's preju-
dice, and at the cottages and farms where Nello
and Patrasche called every morning for the milk for
Antwerp, downcast glances and brief phrases replaced
to them the broad smiles and cheerful greetings to
which they had been always used. No one really
credited the miller's absurd suspicion, nor the outra-
geous accusations born of them, but the people were
all very poor and very ignorant, and the One rich man
of the place had pronounced against him. Nello, in
his innocence and his friendlessness, had no strength
to stem the popular tide.
“Thou art very cruel to the lad,” the miller's wife
dared to say, weeping, to her lord. “Sure he is an in-
nocent lad and a faithful, and would never dream of any
such wickedness, however sore his heart might be.”
But Baas Cogez, being an obstinate man, having
once said a thing, held to it doggedly, though in his
innermost soul he knew well the injustice that he was
committing.
Meanwhile, Nello endured the injury done against
him with a certain proud patience that disdained to
A DOG OF FLANDERS. - 45
disclaim : he only gave way a little when he was quite
alone with Patrasche. Besides, he thought, “If my
picture should win They will be sorry then,
perhaps.” -
Still, to a boy not quite sixteen, and who had dwelt
in one little world all his short life, and in his child-
hood had been caressed and applauded on all sides, it
was a hard trial to have the whole of that little world
turn against him for naught. Especially hard in that
bleak, snow-bound, famine-stricken winter-time, when
the only light and warmth there could be found abode
beside the village hearths and in the kindly greetings
of neighbours. In the winter-time all drew nearer to
each other, all to all, except to Nello and Patrasche,
with whom none now would have anything to do, and
who were left to fare as they might with the old para-
lysed, bedridden man in the little cabin, whose fire
was often cold, and whose board was often without
bread, for there was a buyer from Antwerp who had
taken to drive his mule in of a day for the milk of the
various dairies, and there were only three or four of the
people who had refused his terms of purchase and
remained faithful to the little green cart. So that the
burden which Patrasche drew had become very light,
and the centime-pieces in Nello's pouch had become,
alas ! very small likewise.
46 A Dog of FLANDERs.
The dog would stop, as usual, at all the familiar
gates, which were now closed to him, and look up at
them with wistful, mute appeal; and it cost the neigh-
bours a pang to shut their doors and their hearts,
and let Patrasche draw his cart on again, empty.
Nevertheless, they did it, for they desired to please
Baas Cogez. - - .
Noël drew close at hand.
The weather was very wild and cold. The snow was
six feet deep, and the ice was firm enough to bear oxen
and men upon it everywhere. At this season the little
village was always gay and cheerful. At the poorest
dwelling there were possets and cakes, joking and
dancing, Sugared saints and gilded Jésus. The merry
Flemish bells jingled everywhere on the horses; every-
where within doors some well-filled Soup-pot sang and
smoked over the stove; and everywhere over the
snow without laughing maidens pattered in bright
kerchiefs and stout kirtles, going to and from the
mass. Only in the little hut it was very dark and very
cold.
Nello and Patrasche were left ºutterly alone, for one
night in the week before the Christmas Day, Death
Antered there, and took away from life for ever old
Jehan Daas, who had never known of life aught save
its poverty and its pains. He had long been half dead,
*
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 47
incapable of any movement except a feeble gesture,
and powerless for anything beyond a gentle word ; and
yet his loss fell on them both with a great horror in
it: they mourned him passionately. He had passed
away from them in his sleep, and when in the gray
dawn they learned their bereavement, unutterable soli-
tude and desolation seemed to close around them.
He had long been only a poor, feeble, paralysed old
man, who could not raise a hand in their defence, but
he had loved them well: his smile had always welcomed
their return. They mourned for him unceasingly,
refusing to be comforted, as in the white winter day
they followed the deal shell that held his body to the
nameless grave by the little church. They were
his only mourners, these two whom he had left friend-
less upon earth—the young boy and the old dog.
“Surely, he will relent now and let the poor lad
come hither ?” thought the miller's wife, glancing at
her husband where he smoked by the hearth.
Baas Cogez knew her thought, but he hardened his
heart, and would not unbar his door as the little,
humble funeral went by. “The boy is a beggar,” he
said to himself: “he shall not be about Alois.”
The woman dared not say anything aloud, but when
the grave was closed and the mourners had gone, she
put a wreath of immortelles into Alois' hands and bade
***** *-
48 A 1).OG OF FILANDERS,
her go and lay it reverently on the dark unmarked
mound where the snow was displaced.
Nello and Patrasche went home with broken hearts.
But even of that poor, melancholy, cheerless home
they were denied the consolation. There was a month's
rental over-due for the little place, and when Nello
had paid the last sad service to the dead he had not a
coin left. He went and begged grace of the owner of
the hut, a cobbler who went every Sunday night to
drink his pint of wine and smoke with Baas Cogez.
The cobbler would grant no mercy. He was a harsh,
zaiserly man, and loved money. He claimed in default
of his rent every stick and stone, every pot and pan,
in the hut, and bade Nello and Patrasche to be out of
it on the morrow.
Now, the cabin was lowly enough, and in some sense
miserable enough, and yet their hearts clove to it with
a great affection. They had been so happy there, and
in the summer, with its clambering vine and its flower-
ing beans, it was so pretty and bright in the midst of
the sun-lighted fields ! Their life in it had been full
of labour and privation, and yet they had been so well
content, so gay of heart, running together to meet the
old man's never-failing smile of welcome !
All night long the boy and the dog sat by the
fireless hearth in the darkness, drawn close to-
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 49
gether for warmth and sorrow. Their bodies were
insensible to the cold, but their hearts seemed frozen
in them. -
When the morning broke over the white chill earth
it was the morning of Christmas Eve. With a shudder,
Nello clasped close to him his only friend, while his
tears fell hot and fast on the dog's frank forehead.
“Let us go, Patrasche—dear, dear Patrasche,” he
murmured. “We will not wait to be kicked out : let
us go.” 4”
Patrasche had no will but his, and they went sadly,
side by side, out from the little home which was so
dear to them, and in which every humble, homely thing
was to them precious and beloved. Patrasche drooped
his head wearily as he passed by his own green cart:
it was no longer his—it had to go with the rest in the
dues of debt, and his brass harness lay idle and glitter-
ing on the Snow. The dog could have lain down beside
it and died for very heart-sickness as he went, but
whilst the lad lived and needed him Patrasche would
not yield and give way.
They took the old accustomed road into Antwerp.
The day was yet scarce more than dawned, most of the
shutters were still closed, but some of the villagers were
about. They took no notice whilst the dog and the
boy passed by them. At one door Nello paused and
50 A Dog OF FLANDERs.
looked wistfully within : his grandfather had done -
many a kindly turn in neighbour's service to the people
who dwelt there. f - **
“Would you give Patrasche a crust?” he said, timidly.
“He is old, and he has had nothing since last forenoon.”
The woman shut the door hastily, murmuring some
vague saying that wheat and rye were very dear that
season. The boy and the dog went on again wearily;
they asked no more. -
By slow and painful ways they reached Antwerp as
the chimes tolled ten. - -
“If I had anything about me I could sell to get him
bread tº thought Nello, but he had nothing except the
wisp of linen and serge that covered him, and his pair
of wooden shoes. -
Patrasche understood, and nestled his nose into the
lad's hand, as though to pray him not to be disquieted
for any woe or want of his.
The winner of the drawing prize was to be pro-
claimed at noon, and to the public building where he
had left his treasure Nello made his way. On the
steps and in the entrance-hall there was a crowd of
youths—some of his age, some older, all with parents
or relatives or friends. His heart was sick with fear
as he went amongst them, holding Patrasche close to
him. The great bells of the city clashed out the hour
A Dog OF FLANDERS. 5i
of noon with brazen clamour. The doors of the immer
hall were opened; the eager, panting throng rushed
in : it was known that the selected picture would be
raised above the rest upon a wooden dais.
A mist obscured Nello's sight, his head swam, his
limbs almost failed him. When his vision cleared he
saw the drawing raised on high : it was not his own
A slow sonorous voice was proclaiming aloud that
victory had been adjudged to Stephan Kiesslinger, born
in the burgh of Antwerp, son of a wharfinger in that
town. -
When Nello recovered his consciousness he was
lying on the stones without, and Patrasche was trying
with every art he knew to call him back to life. In
the distance a throng of the youths of Antwerp were
shouting around their successful comrade, and escort-
ing him with acclamations to his home upon the quay.
The boy staggered to his feet and drew the dog into
his embrace. “It is all over, dear Patrasche,” he
murmured—“all over !”
He rallied himself as best he could, for he was weak
from fasting, and retraced his steps to the village.
Patrasche paced by his side with his head drooping
and his old strong limbs feeble under him from hunger
and sorrow. -
The snow was falling fast: a keen hurricane blew
T o
52 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
from the north : it was bitter as death on the plains.
It took them long to traverse the familiar path, and
the bells were sounding four of the clock as they ap-
proached the hamlet. Suddenly Patrasche paused,
arrested by a scent in the snow, scratched, whined,
and drew out with his teeth a small case of brown
leather. He held it up to Nello in the darkness.
Where they were there stood a little Calvary, and a
lamp burned dully under the cross: the boy mechani-
cally turned the bag to the light: on it was the name
of Baas Cogez, and within it were notes for six thou-
sand francs. - -
The sight roused the lad a little from his stupor.
IIe thrust it in his shirt, and stroked Patrasche and
drew him onward. The dog looked up wistfully in his
face.
Nello made straight for the mill-house, and went to
the house-door and struck on its panels. The miller's
wife opened it weeping, with little Alois clinging close
to her skirts. •
“Is it thee, thou poor lad 2 ” she asked kindly
through her tears. “Get thee gone ere the Baas
see thee. We are in sore trouble to-night. He is
out seeking for a power of money that he has let
fall riding homeward, and in this snow he never will
find it; and God knows it will go nigh to ruin us. It
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 53
is heaven's own judgment for the things we have done
to thee.”
Nello put the note-case in her hand and signed
Patrasche within the house.
“Patrasche found the money to-night,” he said
quickly. “Tell Baas Cogez so : I think he will not
deny the dog shelter and food in his old age. Keep
him from pursuing me, and I pray of you to be good
to him.”
Ere either woman or dog knew what he did, he had
stooped and kissed Patrasche : then had closed the
door hurriedly on him, and had disappeared in the
gloom of the fast-falling night.
The woman and the child stood speechless with joy
and fear: Patrasche vainly spent the fury of his anguish
against the iron-bound oak of the barred house-door.
They did not dare unbar the door and let him forth :
they tried all that they knew how to solace him. They
brought him sweet cakes and juicy meats; they
tempted him with the best they had ; they tried to
lure him to abide by the warmth of the hearth; but it
was of no avail. Patrasche refused to be comforted or
to stir from the barred portal.
It was six at night when, from an opposite entrance,
the miller at last came, jaded and broken, into his
wife's presence. “It is lost for ever,” he said, with
54 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
an ashen cheek and a quiver in his stern voice. “We
have looked with lanterns everywhere : it is gone—
the little maiden's portion and all!”
PIis wife put the money into his hold, and told him
how it had come back to her. The strong man sank
trembling into a seat and covered his face with his
hands, ashamed and almost afraid.
“I have been cruel to the lad,” he muttered at
length : “I deserved not to have good at his hands.”
Little Alois, taking courage, crept close to her father
and nestled against him her curly fair head.
“Nello may come here again, father ?” she whis-
pered. “He may come to-morrow as he used to do 2 ”
The miller pressed her in his arms: his hard, Sun-
burned face was very pale and his mouth trembled.
“Surely, surely,” he answered his child. “He shall
bide here on Christmas Day, and any other day he
will. In my greed I sinned, and the Lord chastened
me gently : God helping me, I will make amends to
the boy—I will make amends.”
Little Alois kissed him in gratitude and joy, then
slid from his knees and ran to where the dog kept
watch by the door.
“And to-night I may feast Patrasche 2’” she cried
in a child’s thoughtless glee.
Her father bent his head gravely: “Ay, ay; let the
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 55
dog have the best ;” for the stern old man was moved
and shaken to his heart's depths.
It was Christmas Eve, and the mill-house was filled
with oak-logs and squares of turf, with cream and
honey, with meat and bread, and the rafters were hung
with wreaths of evergreen, and the Calvary and the
cuckoo-clock looked out from a red mass of holly.
There were little paper-lanterns, too, for Alois, and
toys of various fashions, and sweetmeats in bright-
pictured papers. There were light and warmth and
abundance everywhere, and in it the child would fain
have made the dog a guest honoured and feasted.
But Patrasche would neither lie in the warmth nor
share in the cheer. Famished he was and very cold,
but without Nello he would partake neither of comfort
nor food. Against all temptation he was proof, and
close against the door he leaned always, watching only
for a means of escape.
“He wants the lad,” said Baas Cogez. “Good
dog ! good dog! I will go over to the lad the first
thing at day-dawn.”
For no one but Patrasche knew that Nello had left
the hut, and no one but Patrasche divined that Nello
had left him there, to face starvation and misery
alone.
The mill-kitchen was very warm ; great logs crackled
b6 A DOG OF FLANDERS.
and flamed on the hearth; neighbours came in for a
glass of wine and a slice of the fat goose baking for
supper. Alois, gleeful and sure of her playmate back
on the morrow, bounded and sang, and tossed back
her yellow hair. Baas Cogez, in the fulness of his
heart, smiled on her through moistened eyes, and spoke
of the way in which he would befriend her favourite
companion ; the house-mother sat with calm con-
tented face at the spinning-wheel; the cuckoo in the
clock chirped mirthful hours. Amidst it all Patrasche
was bidden with a thousand words of welcome to tarry
there a cherished guest, and he would not. Neither
peace nor plenty could allure him where Nello was not,
When the supper smoked on the board, and the
voices were loudest and gladdest, and the Christ-childs
brought choicest gifts to Alois, Patrasche, watching
always an occasion, glided out when the door was un-
latched by a careless new-comer, and as swiftly as his
weak and tired limbs would bear him sped over the
Snow in the bitter, black night. He had only one
thought—to follow Nello. A human friend might have
paused for the pleasant meal, the cheery warmth, the
cosy slumber ; but that was not the friendship of
Patrasche. He remembered a bygone time, when an
old man and a little child had found him sick unto
death in the wayside ditch.
A DOG OF FLANDERS. 57
Snow had fallen freshly all the evening long; it was
now nearly ten; the trail of the boy's footsteps was
almost obliterated. It took Patrasche long and arduous
labour to discover any scent by which to guide him in
pursuit. When at last he found it, it was lost again
quickly, and lost and recovered, and again lost and
again recovered, a hundred times, and more.
The night was very wild. The lamps under the
wayside crosses were blown out: the roads were sheets
of ice; the impenetrable darkness hid every trace of
habitations; there was no living thing abroad. All
the cattle were housed, and in all the huts and home-
steads men and women rejoiced and feasted. There
was only Patrasche out in the cruel cold–old and
famished and full of pain, but with the strength and
the patience of a great love to sustain him in his
search.
The trail of Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it
was under the new snow, went straightly along the
accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was past mid-
night when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of
the town and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets.
It was all quite dark in the town. Now and then some
light gleamed ruddily through the crevices of house-.
shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns
chanting drinking-Songs. The streets were all white
58 A DoG OF FLANDERs.
with ice: the high walls and roofs loomed black
against them. There was scarce a sound save the riot
of the winds down the passages as they tossed the
creaking signs and shook the tall lamp-irons.
So many passers-by had trodden through and
through the snow, so many divers paths had crossed
and recrossed each other, that the dog had a hard
task to retain any hold on the track he followed. But
he kept on his way, though the cold pierced him to
the bone, and the jagged ice cut his feet, and the
hunger in his body gnawed like a rat's teeth. But he
kept on his way—a poor gaunt, shivering, drooping
thing in the frozen darkness, that no one pitied as he
went—and by long patience traced the steps he loved
into the very heart of the burgh and up to the steps
of the great cathedral.
“He is gone to the things that he loved,” thought
Patrasche; he could not understand, but he was full
of sorrow and of pity for the art-passion that to him
was so incomprehensible and yet so sacred.
The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the
midnight mass. Some heedlessness in the custodians,
too eager to go home and feast or sleep, or too drowsy
to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left
one of the doors unlocked. By that accident the foot-
falls Patrasche sought had passed through into the
A DOG OF FILANDERS. 59
building, leaving the white marks of snow upon the
dark stone floor. By that slender white thread, frozen
£US it fell, he was guided through the intense silence,
through the immensity of the vaulted space—guided
straight to the gates of the chancel, and stretched
there upon the stones, he found Nello. He crept up
noiselessly, and touched the face of the boy. “Didst
thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake
thee? I–a dog?” said that mute caress.
The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped
him close.
“Let us lie down and die together,” he murmured.
“Men have no need of us, and we are all alone.”
In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his
head upon the young boy's breast. The great tears
stood in his brown sad eyes: not for himself—for
himself he was happy. -
They lay close together in the piercing cold. The
blasts that blew over the Flemish dykes from the
northern seas were like waves of ice, which froze every
living thing they touched. The interior of the im-
mense vault of stone in which they were was even
more bitterly chill than the snow-covered plains with-
out. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows—now
and then a gleam of light came to the ranks of carven
figures. Under the Rubens they lay together, quite
60 A DOG OF FLANDERS,
still, and soothed almost into a dreaming slumber by
the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they
dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased
each other through the flowering grasses of the sum-
mer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall bulrushes by
the water's side, watching the boats go seaward in the
Sllll.
No anger had ever separated them ; no cloud had
ever come between them; no roughness on the One
side, no faithlessness on the other, had ever obscured
their perfect love and trust. All through their short
lives they had done their duty as it had come to them,
and had been happy in the mere sense of living, and
had begrudged nothing to any man or beast, and had
been quite content because quite innocent. And in
the faintness of famine and of the frozen blood that
stole dully and slowly through their veins, it was of
the days they had spent together that they dreamed,
lying there in the long watches of the night of Noël.
Suddenly through the darkness a great white radi-
ance streamed through the vastness of the aisles; the
moon, that was at her height, had broken through the
clouds; the Snow had ceased to fall; the light reflected
from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn.
It fell through the arches full upon the two pictures
above, from which the boy on his cutrance had flung
A DOG OF FILANDERS. 61
back the veil: the Elevation and the Descent of the
Cross were for one instant visible as by day.
Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to
them : the tears of a passionate ecstasy glistened on
the paleness of his face.
“I have seen them at last !” he cried aloud. “O
God, it is enough l’”
His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his
knees, still gazing upward at the majesty that he
adored. For a few brief moments the light illumined
the divine visions that had been denied to him so long
—light, clear and sweet and strong as though if
streamed from the throne of Heaven.
Then suddenly it passed away: once more a great
darkness covered the face of Christ.
The arms of the boy drew close again the body of
the dog.
“We shall see His face—there,” he murmured ;
“ and He will not part us, I think; He will have
mercy.”
62 A Dog of FLANDERs.
IV.
N the morrow, by the chancel of the cathe
dral, the people of Antwerp found them
both. They were both dead : the cold of
the night had frozen into stillness alike
the young life and the old. When the Christmas
morning broke and the priests came to the temple,
they saw them lying thus on the stones together.
Above, the veils were drawn back from the great
visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of the sunrise
touched the thorn-crowned head of the God.
As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured
man, who wept as women weep. -
“I was cruel to the lad,” he muttered, “and now
I would have made amends—yea, to the half of my
substance—and he should have been to me as a son.”
There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter
who had fame in the world, and who was liberal of
hand and of spirit. -
“I seek one who should have had the prize yester-
day had worth won,” he said to the people, “A boy
of rare promise and genius. An old wood-cutter on
a fallen tree at eventide,-that was all his theme.

A DoG OF FLANDERs. 63
But there was greatness for the future in it. I would
fain find him, and take him with me and teach him
art.”
And a little child with curling fair hair, sobbing bit-
terly as she clung to her father's arm, cried aloud, “Oh,
Nello, come ! We have all ready for thee. The Christ-
child's hands are full of gifts, and the old piper will
play for us; and the mother says thou shalt stay by
the earth and burn nuts with us all the Noël week long
—yes, even to the Feast of the Kings ! And Patrasche
will be so happy Oh, Nello, wake and come !”
But the young pale face, turned upward to the light
of the great Rubens with a smile upon its mouth,
answered them all, “It is too late.”
For the sweet sonorous bells went ringing through
the frost, and the sunlight shone upon the plains of
snow, and the populace trooped gay and glad through
the streets, but Nello and Patrasche no more asked
charity at their hands. All they needed now Antwerp
gave unbidden.
Death had been more pitiful to them than longer
life would have been. It had taken the one in the
loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of faith,
from a world which for love has no recompense, and
for faith no fulfilment.
All their lives they had been together, and in their
64. A DOG OF FILANDERS.
deaths they were not divided; for when they were
found the arms of the boy were folded too closely
around the dog to be severed without violence, and the
people of their little village, contrite and ashamed,
implored a special grace for them, and, making them
one grave, laid them to rest there side by side—for
€Wel's

A BRANCH OF LILAC.
—{}—
I.

ES, I shall be shot at dawn. So they say.
All for a branch of lilac. You do not
believe? Chut ! Men have been shot
many a time for as little. A glance, a
SlºGſNºss
Smile, a tear, a withered flower. So little. And yet
so much when they are a woman's. So much. All
one's present, all One's past, all one's future.
There is the lilac—look | There is no colour, no
fragrance, no loveliness in it now. It is so pale, so
faded, so scentless. So faded—just like a love that is
dead.
People say that men cannot love in these days. It
is a lie. Rich men—perhaps not. But the poor l—
Then, women do not care for that.
You asked me my story. Why? To have a history
is a luxury for the rich. What use can one be to the
F
66 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
poor? If they tell it, who listens? And I have been
very poor, always. Yet I was happy till that lilac
blossomed one fair spring day.
I am a comedian. My mother was one before me.
My father—oh, ta-ta-ta ! That is another luxury for
the wealthy.
My mother was quite obscure always. A little
humble player. She passed with a little wandering
troupe, at certain seasons, from town to town, from
province to province.
I remember, when I was very small, being carried
on her shoulders or about her waist along the dusty
roads, and catching at the butterflies in the sunshine
as we went.
I was a little, round, brown, mischievous child—
very ugly, I am sure, as I am now and have ever been.
But to her, no doubt—dear soul!—I had beauty.
I must have plagued her sorely, always on the move
as she was; but she never made me think myself a
nuisance. However tired she might be, she was never
too tired to romp and gambol with me. Poor little
white, bright, thin-cheeked mother I see her now,
dancing in her spangles with the red paint on, and the
bird-like eyes of her always seeking the plump, rough
boy who only pulled her dress to pieces when he was
hungry, or pommeled her with his sunburnt fist, when
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 67
he was cross and tired. And he was often both tired
and hungry: that I remember also. But it was not
her fault. Poor little mother She would have danced
her feet to the bone to keep me like a baby prince, if
it had been possible for dancing to have brought in
wealth.
Poor little mother She had a heavy fall from some
scaffolding when I was five years old; but I can see
her now, as though it were yesterday, in her scarlet
bodice and her silvered skirts, running off the stage
the moment she was free to take me in her arms and
cover me with kisses.
And, as I remember her, I think she must have
been full of grace—such grace as a bird’s is on a
bough full of summer leaf; but if I am right, the
people whom she danced for were wrong, for the public
never saw anything particulār in her, and she died as
she had lived—a strolling player to the last.
“Piccinino” was the last word she spoke ; Piccinino
was the name she always called me ; Piccinino I
remained. I must have had some other name, of
course, that the law gave me. But the law and I were
never close friends, and I never asked my debts to it.
The little troupe of comedians whom my mother
had been associated with were very good to me.
There is so very much goodness in ail Bohemians,
gº º
68 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
They are always kindly, generous, sympathetic, com-
passionate. I was a little motherless, penniless, deso-
late wretch of five years old; ugly, too—brown and
ugly, as you see me now, very much. I have had a .
face too good for comedy, too good to make the people
laugh, for it ever to have been anything except gro-
tesque and unlovely. But they were as good to me as
though I had been beautiful to the sight and had in-
herited a patrimony. *
The old men and the young, the beldames and the
pretty women of the little company, vied with each
other in charity and hospitality. True, they were all
very poor, but what they had they never grudged to
me. They took me with them everywhere, and
never even dreamed of turning off the cost and trouble
of me upon that bitter stepmother—the state.
As I grew older I took to the stage myself. I could
not have imagined life lived to any other music than
that of the little shrill reed-pipe and deep-rolling
drum, that had drowned my first cries at my birth;
and had awakened my laughter so many and many a
time later on, that it seemed to me that their cheery
sounds were as needful to all sense of existence as
was the very light of the sun itself.
There were little things that a child could do, little
parts that a child could play, and these I had and
A BRANCH Of LIHLAC. 69
these I did almost from the time my mother left me
alone in the world. They said I did them well. I
do not know about that. I only know that the boards
of our little travelling theatre always seemed the
hatural home to me, and that I was never afraid of *
the innumerable eyes of the largest audience: they
always seemed to me the eyes of friends—of the only
friends that I had upon earth.
It was so pleasant, too, to make them laugh. I, a
little child, a little ugly fellow, whom the children of
the towns and villages hooted as I passed up their
Streets, could hold all these mature men and women,
all these fathers of families and grandsires and grand-
dames, shaking and shouting with laughter at the
pranks of my mirth and my talent. It was my re-
venge, and it was sweet to me. Those children who
hooted me, who sometimes stoned me, who called me
“mountebank,” and yelled at me for my ugliness, they
could not make their elders laugh at will. But I could.
I did not bear the children, my foes, any malice.
I was what they called good-tempered, and whether I
were on or off the stage I was gay at heart almost
always at that time, and every other time indeed till
that lilac blossomed two years ago. -
It was a merry life we led. Very poor, oh yes, and
hard in many ways. We had to tramp in all weathers
70 A BRANCII OF LILAC.
from place to place, timing ourselves to reach this
hamlet or that town by such and such a saint's day or
festivity. We had to sleep very often in haylofts or
even in cattle-sheds, for usually such taverns as we
alone could afford to go to were full to overflowing at
any feast-time or market-season. At other periods,
too, we did not always make enough to leave anything
to be divided amongst ourselves after all expenses of
setting up and lighting our little portable playhouse
were paid; and old Vico Mathurin, our head and
chief, was as honest as the day, and would cheat no
man of a sou though he starved for it.
But what did that matter ? We were a cheerful
little fraternity, loving one another, only vying with
each other in good-natured rivalry; and always ready,
each of us, to make the best of all chances and all
circumstances. We often thought, as we went through
the towns, how much happier and freer we were than
those were who dwelt in them, bound to one spot,
mewed under one roof, seeing one landscape always,
looking always to find a grave in the self-same place
where they were born, whilst we went and came as
we chose, never tarried long enough in One place to
grow weary of it, seldom saw the fruit ripen on the
same trees where we saw it blossom, and had nothing
between us and the width of the skies.
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 71
I dare say the townspeople pitied us as homeless
vagrants. No doubt. But we never pitied ourselves.
So we must have been happy 2 Wisely or unwisely 2
I was but a little creature when I went first on the
stage, but I was born a Bohemian, and I was con-
tent—more than content, full of joy—as I pattered.
along by Vico Mathurin's side, my little bare feet
deep in the summer dust or splashing into puddles of
the autumn rain. - -
Full of joy, for Mathurin would pat me on the head
and prophesy wondrous things of my talent; and then
pretty, blue-eyed Euphrasie would kiss me and weave
the roadside grasses into crowns for me, and big Fran-
cisque, her lover, would raise me for a ride on his
stout shoulder; and ever and again a lark would sing,
or a rabbit would scud across the path, or an old
peasant would drop me a handful of mulberries or a
clump of honeycomb wrapped in a green leaf; or
some other little homely, innocent, simple pleasure
would blossom in my way as the country wild-flowers
sprang up beneath my steps.
In the winter, it is true, it was more severe.
Winter tries hardly all the wandering races: if the
year were all summer, all the world would be Bo-
hemians.
But even in the winter there was so much that
72 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
was mirthful and pleasant one could not be sad or
despondent. Usually in the winter we tarried in some
Southerly town ; and if one were cold, some good
creature sitting at her chestnut-stall in the street
would be sure to thrust some fine nuts smoking into
my hands with a smile, or pretty Euphrasie would
catch me in her arms and warm my cheek upon her
beating heart; and them big Francisque would pretend
a ferocious jealousy, and take a terrible vengeance by
pelting me with gilded gingerbreads from the fairy
booths until I cried for quarter; while Vico Mathurin,
the gentle good old man, would, if he had a chance to
do so unperceived, slip his share of the frugal meal
into my plate, and make believe that some friend at a
wineshop had so feasted him at breakfast that he had
no appetite nor power left for more. Ah, dear people,
dear people ! are you with the dead? I wonder. I
shall know soon.
So my childhood and boyhood went away very
happily. Poverty I did not mind, for it was a poverty
so contented and mirthful, and I had never known
anything else; and ugliness I did not regret, for they
all told me that my physiognomy was the most ductile
and expressive for the comic mummeries which were
the special vein of my stage-talent.
Only now and then, when the little dark-eyed girls
A BRANCH of LILAC. 73
of some religious procession with their white lilies
and their upraised crosses shrank a little from me
under their white clouds of muslin, only then did
I wish that I were straight of feature and comely to
the eye, as most lads were.
“It is stupid to be as ugly as that,” said one
little pretty, fair creature to me once on a confirma-
tion-day, pushing me aside in the street on to the
sharp-set stones of the roadway. I stumbled and I
winced, she was so fair and angel-like.
But that night she came, my little angel, still with
her white rosebuds on her yellow curls, to the theatre
which we had set up in the market-place—came with
her parents, who were rich tanners in the town. I saw
her; I saw nothing but her: she laughed, she cried,
she applauded: she was scarlet with wonder, beside
herself with glee.
They told me — Mathurin and Francisque, my
teachers and masters—that I had never played so
well, so wonderfully for my years, as I played that
night. I laughed as I heard them, an hysterical
choking laugh, I remember, not seeing them, only
Seeing in the sea of faces one little golden head
crowned with white rosebuds.
“Ask her now if it be stupid to be "ugly,” I said
to them; then I fainted.
74 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
You do not care to hear all this. What does it
matter? Whether I suffered or enjoyed, loved or
hated, is of no consequence to any one. The dancing-
dog suffers intensely beneath the scourge of the stick,
and is capable of intense attachment to any one who
is merciful enough not to beat him ; but the dancing-
dog and his woe and his love are nothing to the world:
I was as little.
There is nothing more terrible, nothing more cruel,
than the waste of emotion, the profuse expenditure of
fruitless pain, which every hour, every moment, as it
passes, causes to millions of living creatures. If it
were of any use who would mind? But it is all waste,
frightful waste, to no end, to no end.
I wander: I cannot help it. I must tell of myself
in my own way, or not at all.
Thus I grew up with these gay, kindly, tender-
Souled people, who were outcasts in the sight of most
men. When I was about fifteen years of age the
old man died—died of cold, I believe. He gave
his little scaldino and his one thick cloak to warm
the feet of a poor young creature who had hardly
recovered from child-birth, and who lay shivering
on a bed of straw in a wayside hut ; and having
done this, saying nothing to any One, he lay shiver-
ing all night in his garret in a bitter frost,
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 75
till his heart ceased its slow gentle beating for
€We]".
His loss broke up the little troop. Its members
held loosely together for a while, but the keystone
which had united the whole had fallen when Mathurin
died, and the several pieces of the little structure
dropped asunder one by One. Francisque and
Euphrasie bethought themselves late in the day of
getting the sanction of priests on their love, and
wedded one another and went somewhere southward,
I forget whither, and together opened a café and
flower-shop, thinking it time to get a roof over their
heads and a place in the reputable world as middle
age crept upon them. The others all went right and
left, east and west, as they would. I went first with
some, then with others.
Luphrasie would have had me go to live with them
and help to plant her flower seeds and bind up her
carnations, but I would not leave the old ways of the
old life. A roof?—what could that matter to me, young
and strong and gifted with one talent, as all people said?
Besides, I had been born a Bohemian : the wan-
derer's, the stroller's blood was in me strong and ar-
dent. I loved the freedom and the change—ay, I loved
the very risks and deprivations—of the career I had
always followed, and I was resolved that there should
76 A BRANCH OF T.I.T.A.C.
never be any music sweeter in my ear than the sounds
of the old reed-pipe and the brazen drum which had
greeted my young senses in my cradle. I was eighteen :
I was full of health and strength. I had a talent that
at least was good for this—to make the people laugh. .
* I do not need to say I had no fear of the future: I
loved the career of a comedian, and I would not have
exchanged its gaiety and carelessness and freedom for
anything—nay, not for an empire. -
My early instructor, Mathurin, although he had
remained an obscure stroller to the last, had been a
man of accurate judgment and of genuine taste. He
had reared me to discern the difference between a
graceful fooling and a witless buffoonery: he had
taught me to aim always at raising the pure mirth
and the happy glee of the populace by legitimate
means, and not by the vile medium of obscene jests
and of lascivious side-play. I was a comic actor, as
he had been: yes, but this I can say, as he did before
me—that never by me were the people the worse for
the laughter I raised.
What does that matter, either ? you say. Not much
to any One ; only, when one is to die at break of day,
it is not unpleasant to remember that no girl's mind
was the baser, no man's impulses were the lewder, for
the way one has followed one's art.
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 77
I joined various troops of wandering players after
the old band broke up at Mathurin’s death. I was
successful, in my way, with the people. I never
attracted notice enough to be called to any city or
sought by any impresario.
I do not think I was ever coarse enough for the
famous theatres. Nay, I speak in sober earnest, not
in any irony. The taste of cities requires indecent
gesture, and sees no point in a jest unless it have
some foul meaning hidden in its équivoque. Now, my
fooling was cleanly and honest in its mirth—simple, I
dare say, but, as far as I could make it, harmless.
When the tired hordes of the labouring classes and the
stupid, open-mouthed peasantry crammed the wooden
booth to overflowing, and laughed at me till they lifted
the canvas roofing with the loud gusts of their ex-
panding lungs, they were never the worse for that
momentary oblivion of their hunger and travail—
never:—that I know.
. So I spent my life for ten years—spent it till that
lilac bloomed.
Oh, do not think I was a saint. I had plenty of
follies, plenty of sins. I loved a draught of wine,
a fling at dominoes, a kiss of ripe lips, a dance
with limber limbs: I loved all these as well as any
man, and had my share of them. But what I would
78 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
say is, that in my art I always tried to do good. Vico.
Mathurin had always led me to see that any career
may be ennobled by the leading of it, and he hād
always held that though the world may rate it low, the
art of the comic player may have a noble aim if it
aspire ever to make the weary and overtasked mul.
titude forget for a little season the gall of heavy
harness and the toil of flinty roads.
“See you here,” he would say to me many a time
when I was a boy. “These people come and look at
us and hearken to us, and laugh and are glad for a
little space: then, when they go back into their cabins
or their attics, some little trill of our song will stay on
their famished lips, some little bubble of laughter at
the memory of one of our jokes will remain with them
amidst their poverty and their hard work; and these
will be like a stray sunbeam in a cellar in the dark-
mino, and it will not hurt you when any scoffer casts at
you, as a term of scorn, your title of strolling player.”
And these words of my dear old master abode with
me always, and as far as I could I trod closely in his
footsteps; and in many places where he had been
known the people welcomed me and loved me a little
for his sake, -
I never left France: we who speak only to the
A BRANCH of LILAC. 79
populace cannot go where the populace have another
tongue than ours. But France is so wide, and I was
for ever on the move—in the north for the harvest, in
the centre for the vintage, in the south for the winter
season; going whithersoever there was a festival or a
bridal or a great market, or a holiday of any sort that
made the townsfolk or the villagers in festal trim and
in the mood to smile.
When I sit in the gloom here I see all the scenes of
that pleasant life pass like pictures before me.
No doubt I was often hot, often cold, often foot-
sore, often ahungered and athirst : no doubt; but all
that has faded now. I only see the old, lost, unfor-
gotten brightness; the sunny roads, with the wild
poppies blowing in the wayside grass; the quaint
little red roofs and peaked towers that were thrust
upward out of the rolling woods; the clear blue skies,
with the larks singing against the sun; the quiet,
cool, moss-grown towers, with old dreamy bells ring-
ing sleepily above them; the dull casements opening
here and there to show a rose like a girl's cheek, and
a girl's face like the rose; the little wine shops buried
in their climbing vines and their tall many-coloured
hollyhocks, from which sometimes a cheery voice would
cry, “Come, stay for a stoup of wine, and pay us with
a song.”
$0 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
Then, the nights when the people flocked to us, and
the little tent was lighted, and the women's and the
children's mirth rang out in peals of music ; and the
men vied with each other as to which should bear
each of us off to have bed and board under the cot-
tage roof, or in the old mill-house, or in the weaver's
garret; the nights when the homely supper-board
was brightened and thought honoured by our presence;
when we told the black-eyed daughter's fortunes, and
kept the children round-eyed and flushing red with
wonder at strange tales, and smoked within the leaf-
hung window with the father and his sons; and then
went out, quietly, alone in the moon-light, and saw
the old cathedral white and black in the shadows and
the light; and strayed a little into its dim aisles, and
watched the thorn-crowned God upon the cross, and
in the cool fruit-scented air, in the sweet silent dusk,
moved softly with noiseless footfall and bent head, as
though the dead were there.
Ah, well ! they are all gone, those days and nights.
Begrudge me not their memory. I am ugly, and very
poor, and of no account ; and I die at Sunrise, so they
say. Let me remember whilst I can : it is all oblivion
there. So they say.
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 8 |
II.
LED this life for ten years after the death
of Vico Mathurin—led it happily, yes, very
happily in the main, although at no time
in it did I ever make money enough to pay
for more than the simplest fare, the hardest couch,
the thinnest draught of wine.
But happiness depends so much upon one's self.
That is a threadbare saying of the preachers. Yes, I
know. But it is true, for all that. n
So long as one has no regret, one can be happy;
and as for me, I envied no man. This was ignorance,
no doubt. If I had ever known what wealth and its
powers and its pleasures were like, no doubt I should
have hungered for them like the rest of men. But I
had never known, and it was not in my nature merely
to be jealous of possession. If I had been crippled, I
should have passionately envied those who still walked
at will straightly and swiftly whither they would. But
it was not in me, whilst I could march as I pleased,
strongly and fast, through the seeding grasses, over
the sun-swept plains, amongst the red and gold leaves
of autumn, and over the white fields of the midwinter
snows, it was not in me then, I Say, to envy the men
G

82 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
who rolled on wheels or were borne by horses. It was
not in me: it would have seemed to me peevish,
childish, ingrate, mean.
This was my ignorance, no doubt. Men, I have
noticed, knowing much, do envy much—almost always.
One day, in the early spring-time, I came with my
troop into a little town that stood on the Toire River
—a little old, gray town, high on a rock, circled by 4.
crumbling walls, all blossoming everywhere just then
with bud and leaf, all over its moat and its ramparts,
in its streets and its casements: its very ditches were
white with lilies-of-the-valley, and its very roofs were
yellow with flowering houseleeks, while at every nook
and corner over the walls of its gardens the lilacs,
white and purple, were in bloom. I can smell them
now: in the ditch that they will bury me in, I shall
smell them still, I think. –
We entered the gates at high noon, and set up our
play-house in the market-square.
The morrow would be a fête-day, and the town was
stirred from the gray torpor and stillness of its ex-
treme old age, and was alive and gay with country-
people and its own small population, all afoot and
thronging the wooden stalls of the fair, and the
crookèd steep alleys that crossed and recrossed each
other up the slope of the place,
A BRANCH OF LILAC. ' 83
As I went up one of these, bearing my share of the
framework and the canvas of our play-house, with the
reed-pipe and the old drum sounding merrily as ever
before our tired steps, I heard a voice above me, the
clear, high voice of a woman.
“How ugly he is, that one l’ it cried with a laugh.
“His face alone is a burlesque. He will make the
very dogs in the streets die of laughter.” — `
“ Hush !” said a voice that was lower in tone and
fuller. “Who knows? He may hear. And he looks
so weary and so tired l’’ -
The other voice laughed on in its cruel and saucy
glee : * - * -
“Pooh ! He is too ugly to live Why does God
make such creatures?”
And across the eyes the fragrance of lilac in full
blossom struck me a cool refreshing blow.
She who spoke last had broken a branch of the
sweet spring flower and cast it down to me in merry
scorn, so that it fell across the timber on which my
hands were clasped. There was a little Saffron-hued
butterfly upon it, I remember, and one golden-brown
bee. The bee paused a moment upon my wrist and
then flew from me ; the butterfly remained upon the
blossoms.
I looked up. An old man, a gardener, who had
G 2
34 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
chidden her and the bright creature who had thrown
the sweet blossom and the harsh words at me, leaned
Over the old gray moss-grown wall. The lilac boughs
were all about her—above, beneath, around. Her
golden head glistened in the sunlight. She had a
knot of lilacs in her breast.
Can I describe her ? No: think of the woman who
to you, above all others of her sex, has meant—Love.
She was but a young girl of the people, the Orphan
daughter of a poor wood-carver, simply clad in the garb
of her province, spending a momentary rest from her
daily labour in leaning over the old garden wall to
watch the strange strollers pass by with pipe and beat
of drum; but to me she became the world. -
It is so strange | We see a million faces, we hear
a million voices, we meet a million women with flowers
in their breasts and light in their fair eyes, and they
do not touch us. Then we see one, and she holds for
us life or death, and plays with them idly so often—as
idly as a child with toys. She is not nobler, better or
more beautiful than were all those we passed, and yet
the world is empty to us without her.
I went on up the street. I held the bough of lilac -
in my hand. - - -
Yes: this bough, poor faded, scentless thing! And
that morning it was so bright, so full of odour, so
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 85
eagerly kissed by the butterfly and the bee. Two years
ago, just two years ago ! Are the lilacs in flower
there, I wonder, now 2 Surely; and she gathers them
and throws them to her lover. Why not ?
Shall she think of the bough that is dead—of the
bough that blossomed last season—so long ago, so
long ago? No. The lilac flowers live but a day.
IBut that brief day is longer than a woman's memory,
I think. -
I went on up the street.
That night !—how I played I cannot tell. I did not
know what I did. All about me was the smell of the
lilac trees, and in the sea of faces below I looked only
for hers. She was not there.
When the stage wanted me no longer, and the
audience had flocked out, loud in eager praises of
us, I shook myself free of all my comrades and of the
hearty townsfolk, and went back to that little steep
street full of the smell of the lilacs.
There was a clear, full moon. The lilacs were all
colourless in it, and their scent was heavy on the wind.
Some rill of water within the garden walls was falling
with musical and even measure. An owl flew by me with
swift white wing gleaming silver-bright in the lustre of
the stars. Why do I speak of these things? They
are nothing now. And yet they are with me always.
86 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
I walked there to and fro all night. At sunrise I
went away ashamed.
What was a bough of lilac to make me a fool
thus 2 -
At daybreak I asked a stone-cutter, as he went by
me to his work, who dwelt behind those old crumbling
walls. He told me no one. They were the walls of
an old monastic garden, into which any one might
Stray at pleasure. I asked him no more. I felt a
Strange silence and shyness upon me.
I went home to the little miserable tavern where my
people had found lodging, and went up to my garret
there, and looked at the lilac bough, and bent my head
and kissed it foolishly. I felt as though it were my
fate in some way. t
I had placed it in water, and kept it in the shade,
but already it had withered, and the yellow butterfly
was dead.
All that day through I endeavoured to find the
woman who had dropped it into my hands, but I
had no success. It was a festal day, and the streets
were full of people, bright with banners and strea-
mers, crucifixes and images, white-robed singing-
boys and gay little children with their heads crowned
with spring flowers. But I did not light, amongst
all the faces, on the face for which I sought. She
A BRANCH OF LILAC. - 87
must have been there, but in some way or other she
had escaped me.
Night came, and I went again upon the stage. I
was still incessantly pursued by one image.
“What are you looking for, Piccinino 2° my com-
panions asked me. .
I laughed stupidly, and answered them, “A bough
of lilac.” -
They stared, and thought me out of my wits, for
all over the town, in the little gardens and in the
shrubberies on the ramparts, and against the old
*
stone gateways, the lilacs, white and purple, were
in bloom, and amongst their tender green leafage the
mated birds were nestling. x
I went on the boards as usual. I remember well
the little piece we performed that evening. It was a
very simple little scene of humour, wherein I played
the chief part—a part which always Suited me—a poor -
cobbler, who, old and ugly and Crippled, loves a young
girl of his village, and is the butt and laughing-stock
of all the village youth for his misplaced and despised
passion.
The part was a very droll One, and I was always
accustomed to play it amidst shrieks of laughter from
my audiences at the follies and presumptions of the
old, crippled, ugly, withered shoemaker, who had
88 - A BRANCH OF LILAC.
dared to lift his eyes and his thoughts to the loveliest
and most mischievous maiden in his village.
This night, however, I played it in a different spirit.
The sounds of those words, “How ugly he is ſ” were
ringing in my ears, and my brain was giddy with
them. - : -
They shouted me a vociferous welcome when I ap-
peared. I was popular in the place, and the piece WaS
popular likewise. The presumption of emotion in any
creature unlovely and aged has always been a favourite
theme with the populace for gibes and mockery. It
must seem very ridiculous, no doubt. And yet it is
not the young, not the handsome, who feel most.
This night I played the part differently.
I did not know what possessed me. It had been a
comic part always: I had always been a comic actor.
Neither in the part nor in me had ever any one seen
on the stage aught except farcical drolleries, absurd
situations, ludicrous aspects. And yet that night
suddenly I changed, and the part with me, and I was
powerless to help it.
I was compelled by an impulse stronger than my-
self to transform the character into something higher,
nobler, infinitely sadder than the poor old fool whom
it had been my amusement to portray and theirs
to applaud. I cannot tell how it Was. I changed no
A BRANCH OF LILAC, 89
action, altered no single word, and yet the part I
played ceased to be contemptible, farcical, absurd : it
became full of pathos, dignity almost—I might say,
of heroism. That poor old, feeble, ill-favoured,
poverty-stricken man, had a heart that could love
infinitely and infinitely despair—a heart which knew
itself deeper and truer and keener in loyalty and
suffering than any heart that beat around him with
the joyous vain throbs of an exultant youth, and yet
which only made him the standing jest of all his little
world, the jeered-at dotard mocked by the gay lips of
the very creature for whom he would have died a
thousand deaths.
That was how I read the character now : this was
how I played it; and when my last words were spoken,
I, looking for the first time that night on the crowd
before me, saw that they were breathless, tremulous,
very still—saw that I, their paid buffoon, their hired
jester, had not made them laugh, but made them weep.
They did not know what ailed them, but by that
strange tie which unites the actor with his audience,
the vague and bitter pain in me communicated itself to
them, and they wept where they had mocked, they
sorrowed where they had scoffed.
“What possessed you, Piccinino?"my comrades said
to me, clustering around when the piece was over.
90 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
“Who could have thought you had it in you? A part
like that, too ! Why, the people cried like children—
all of them, old and young. What could possess you,
eh 2 '' - -
I laughed foolishly again, I know, for my own
throat was husky and my own eyes were dim.
“It is all the fault of a branch of lilac,” I muttered
to them, laughing off my folly. They must have
thought me mad, I suppose. I thought myself so.
My chief came and stared at me curiously, then
struck me a kindly blow upon the shoulders.
“Peste, Piccinino l’’ he swore with a good-humoured
oath of wonder, “you will be a tragic actor, after all,
I should not be surprised. But another time do not
Imake my whole house cry like women when we adver-
tise a comic entertainment. Our trade is to make
folk laugh: do not forget that, my friend, again.”
I was silent. I could not offer any explanation of
what had so strangely and so unwontedly moved me.
It had all come of a branch of lilac. But then who
would believe that ? People never will believe what is
true. - -
Well, it appeared later on that, although the impre-
sario of our troupe of jesters had feared the anger of
the audience for being mournful when we had pro-
mised to be gay, he had feared it needlessly. This little
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 91
piece, which my change of mood had changed from
farce to poetry, pleased them none the less in its
altered aspect. They knew me well, had known me.
when I was a little round, sunburnt child; and it was
wonderful to these simple people that their odd, ugly
old friend Piccinino should have any such powers in
him. -
“We knew he could always make us laugh, but he
makes us weep too, the droll one Who knows? He
may be great one day. He may even go to Paris,”
they said to one another as they left the theatre.
And they clustered round me and embraced me, and
pressed me to go drink and Smoke with them ; but
seeing that I was silent and in no mood for boisterous
company, forbore to solicit me, and went away shak-
ing their heads sadly, and yet proudly withal; for I
was their old friend Piccinino: their graybeards had
given me pears and peaches when I was a little lad;
their elders had all seen me toddle by my poor.
mother's side, holding on to her spangled skirts; and
now I had genius, their wiseacres said, and genius was
something very vague in their minds, very audacious,
very terrible—an honour and yet a plague. - -
The next time we were to play that piece I would
fain have had it changed and have gone back to my
old fooling; but I was not master of the troupe, and
92 A BRANCH of LILAC.
the townspeople, it seemed, clamored for me, Piccinino, .
to play the part a second time with that new talent
which time or chance, as they thought, had developed
in me. So we played it.
Genius can do as it likes with its world, but we
poor folk, who had only a little rifle of talent, for
which we could not always even find any market at all,
—we could only obey our little shred of the public
obediently, and give it what it asked.
That night, when I went on the stage, I felt that she
was there before I saw her—there amidst the populace,
with that bright golden head of hers rising out from
the sea of the swarthy peasant faces, and the sweet,
saucy child’s eyes laughing upon me across the yellow
Smoky flicker of the dull oil lamps.
I saw her : I stammered, I stumbled, I felt blind
and dizzy. My comrades playing with me hissed
sharply in my ear, “What ails thee, Piccinino 2 Art
mad, or drunk, or ill, or what ?” They did not rouse
me. I stood staring dully across the little play-
house. -
The people grew angry at the pause and at the
silence. Their favour was my daily bread; their
wrath would be my ruin. Yet they did not stir me.
I did not see them ; I only saw the face that had
laughed on me from the lilacs.
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 93
Across the rising uproar in the tent there came to
me a small, soft, silvery sound. It was the sound of
her voice, and it murmured with a cruel glee,_
“so ugly and so stupid, too ! That is surely too
Imuch in one creature l’’
And then she laughed again, the pretty, babyish,
mutinous laugh with which she had tossed me the
lilac-bough. - - -
That One sound roused me, like a thorn thrust in
an open wound. I rallied; I forced myself into the
part I played; I knew little, nothing, all the time
of where I was or of what I did, and the audience
was gone to me : I only saw one face. But to this
one I played with all the soul that was in me; and
they told me that I eclipsed myself, that I held the
people breathless and almost afraid. This, from my
own knowledge, I cannot say, of course. I only know
that they shouted for me, at the end, again and again;
that, in their rude fashion, they did me all the homage
they could ; that they waved their kerchiefs and
their caps at me ; that they screamed their vivas at
me until their lungs were weary; and that they
clutched at me, with a hundred eager hands, to lead
me out amidst them to the noisy honours of the
tavern. But I shook myself free of them—churlishly,
I fear—upon some plea of sickness, and got out alone,
94. A BRANCH OF LILAC.
and hid myself and watched the women depart from
the wooden booth of the play-house.
But I was too late. My kindly tormentors had
robbed me of the only recompense I cared for. She
was gone, and I could not tell whether or no I had
gained my triumph there, whether or no the sunny
cruel eyes had moistened into tears as the eyes of all
the other women had done that night.
I went away sick at heart, despite that victory on
which my old companions so generously felicitated me.
A victory over these poor boors who knew not one
letter from another What was it worth 2
In the great cities, no doubt, they would have hissed
down my acting. For the first time, my career seemed
miserable, and any successes in it seemed ridiculous
either to seek or to prize. For, in imagination, I fol-
lowed the bright creature to her home, and saw her
unloose her thick light hair before her mirror, and
heard her laugh in her solitude as she thought of me,
an ugly wretch who fancied if ploughmen laughed at
him, or kitchen-wenches wept, that he had fame !
For the first time since I had awakened in my poor
mother's arms to the summons of the pipe and the
drum, the life I had led seemed vile to me, foolish
and wretched, and of no result.
As I went home in the darkness, her laughter
A BRANCH or LILAC. 95
seemed all about me, in the leaves, in the fountains,
in the little low winds, in the tremulous singing of the
grass-hidden insects.
All of them seemed to laugh at me with her laugh-
ter, and shout in chorus with all their tiny, tender
Voices, in a derision the more cruel because coming
from things so slight and fair. “So ugly and so
stupid too ! Why does God make such creatures?”
Ah, why indeed ? Often have I asked that
also.
My story is nothing new, you see. It is such a
common one. I was a fool.
That night my chief followed me up into the garret
where I slept, and told me that he would give me some
increase of payment, and that he thought that we
might tarry full a month in this small town, since I
was So popular with the people, and the district was in
a manner rich; its tanners, its vine-dressers, its hus-
bandmen were well to do, and, for our country, it was
populous, and from the many hamlets round there
would be, most likely, audiences for us all the summer
Season through.
I did not question his judgment. I caught eagerly
at his will to stay. For me, I knew the whole earth
now only one road worth the treading, the road
where the lilacs blossomed.
96 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
Well, we stayed on till the lilacs faded, as he had
said, and long ere the month was out I had found
her name and her dwelling. I do not care to say
her name: let it die with me. After I saw her that
first day it was always “She’’ in my thoughts. The
world held for me only one woman. .
She lived in a high old house in a gray dusky
street, in the topmost corner of it, close against the
sky. The old garden was near, and she went thither
often. She had no friends. She got her bread by
making lace. She sat at her lattice, with her golden
hair bound up in the gold-coloured kerchief, with her
small rosy hands flying in and out among the bobbins,
and the senseless pillow close-pressed against the white
warmth of her breast.
I have often watched her so, hidden myself in
some old dark doorway or some crumbling arch
opposite and far below. And all the time the
lilacs were in blossom. She always had a great
sweet cluster of them set in a brown, broken jar
upon the stone sill of her window. And while I
watched there below, the winds would shake some
breath of their fragrance out to me, and the little blue
butterflies would fly to and fro betwixt me and the
lattice; and, like a fool, I would tell myself that she
would hardly, sure, have flung me a bough of her
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 97
favourite flower if she had thought me so utterly
hideous and ridiculous as her words had said. -
I was very shy and silent. I had been bold enough
in my day. I had never cared what audacious jest I
passed, what careless impudence I attempted with any
woman. My very knowledge of how absolutely I,
poor and ill-favoured, was nothing to all their sex, had
made me reckless and dauntless in my ways with them. .
Such kisses as I had ever tasted had all been
bought; such lips as had smiled on me had only Smiled
because even my Small guerdon was the only thing which
stood between them and starvation: and although my
memory of my mother had kept me less vicious than
my mode of life might have made me, yet I had never
been over-modest where female creatures were in ques-
tion. But with her, I did not know what ailed me, I
was so timid, so dumb-stricken, so unlike what I had
ever been.
Partly, no doubt, it was the knowledge of her scorn
that silenced me. But chiefly it was that she had been
to me, from the first instant I had seen her, a creature
inexpressibly beautiful and full of sanctity, as far
above me as though she had been a sovereign in her
palace and amidst her guards, instead of a girl of the
populace weaving lace at her casement in an attic.
All her people were dead. She was sixteen years
Tº:
98 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
old, and she was poor. So much I learned. I had
not courage to speak her name, or to ask much of
her. I fancied every one must see the blood coming
and going in my foolish face if I but spoke of her by
chance to any neighbour.
One old woman, who had a fruit-stall in the street,
shrugged her shoulders and thrust out her mouth,
and muttered some evil words against her, and would
have told me something, I remember now, one day.
But I knew what the venom of women was . I would
not hear; I could not bear to look to play the spy on
her. Otherwise, perhaps— But it was not to be.
Men, when they stumble to their fate, are blind
and deaf : it is the will of God.
She seemed to me to live quite innocently and most
, simply, for she, too, was very poor. Poverty for
myself I had never esteemed as any sort of ill: I
thought that in it men were healthy, strong, untempted,
and most manlike. But it made my heart ache to
watch that little bare chamber which was all her home.
She was so infinitely lovely, so golden-bright, so
rose-like, so dainty in hue and shape, that it seemed
to me she ought to be housed as graciously as a but-
terfly in a lily cup, as a little blue warbler in a summer
nest of leaves. .
She soon espied me where I kept my vigil. She
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 99
would laugh a little and glance at me with her sweet
mischievous eyes, and now and then would nod her
head with some charming little gesture, half of invi-
tation, half of derision and disdain. And yet she was
coy too.
She would take her way to mass in early morning,
with a string of red dried berries round her throat
for rosary, and would go counting them, with her
white lids and her long dark eyelashes cast downward,
nor look to right or left of her, seeming ever absorbed
in earnest prayer.
God in heaven who teaches women 2 This one
had not fully spent her seventeenth year; she had been
the child of poor labouring people, her father a hewer
of wood, her mother a weaver of lace; she had seen
naught of any world except this little one of the gray
quiet old town set on the river-rock; and yet who
could have taught her any wile which she had not by
nature of her sex’s Science 2 No one—not even him
by whom the mother of Cain was tempted, as priests
Say.
It is strange—strange and most terrible. And
still I think they know not what they do. They are
subtle for very play; they are cruel for mere sport;
they devour what loves them by their simple instinct,
as the young kitten dallies with its mouse.
II 2
100 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
Others have said this all much better than I say it 2
Oh yes, no doubt—only to every man, when he suffers,
it seems new, and he thinks no wound was ever yet SO
deep, or dealt in such utter wantonness, as his has
been.
sºmewar est-sº-º- ºrº--~~~~~~~~~~~~ *** ****
III.
#ELL, we tarried in that place until all the
blossoms of the lilacs had died off, and
above the low stone walls, and between
the gables of the streets, and in the gardens
slanting to the water's edge, there flowered in their
stead the tall silver lilies and the radiant roses of the
summer-time.
My lilac bough was withered and colourless as dust,
but in its stead there budded for me the wonder-flower
of a supreme happiness. She came oftentimes to our
play-house with some of the townspeople, and I
thought, or cheated myself into thinking, that after
she had seen me act she grew to despise me less.
The nights she was not there I played ill, very
ill, I know : our chief rated me gravely many a time.
But when she was there, though I saw nothing of any
". . . . audience, save only the bright ring of her hair in the

A BRANCH OF LILAC. 101
lamplight, that glistened like the nimbus about the
heads of saints, I know that I performed my part
with a fire and a soul in me which were wholly
inspired by her.
“If he were not so uncertain he would be an artist
fit even for Paris,” I heard the folk say round me ;
and my old chief said so likewise.
I laughed to myself and felt heartsick; it was hor-
rible to have one's skill, one's brain, one's strength,
one's life, all ruled by the presence or absence of one
human creature.
And yet so it was. If I could make her mouth part
with mirth or fill her eyes with wondering concern at the
humour or the pathos of my representation, I became
for the time a great artist. If she were not before me,
the whole place was empty; I was dull, lifeless, stupid,
and I dragged my limbs with effort through the allotted
part until the play was over.
But she was often there. In common with the
other players, I had a right to admit some one when I
would to the theatre free, and every morning she found
a pass upon her little deal table, with some simple
gift of flowers or fruit or other trifles, such as I could
afford to get with the poor pittance which was all to
which my share in the profits of our representations
ever amounted.
I02 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
She took all I offered, and I was more than repaid
whenever she gave me in return a saucy nod, a sunny
smile. Sometimes she would deny me these, and pass
me by with a little shudder of aversion, or affect not
even to see me standing in her path.
I could not resent it ; I had no title ; I knew
full well she thought me too grotesque and ugly for
any female thing to Smile on twice in the same day.
I was content if she would let me follow her without
rebuke, or gaze at her without her putting her hands
before her eyes, as though to screen them from some
sight repulsive to her. For this she did often, and
then would laugh with sauciest merriment at my
misery, so that I never rightly knew whether she hated
IY) 6 OI! Il O.
|Until one day. It had been very warm. There was
no wind to cool the air. The yellow sun scorched that
old dark, cool street into an amber glare, and turned
the dusky, sombre shadows to a russet gold.
The little sad caged birds opened their bills thirstily
and gasped. The red carnations in the window em-
brasures drooped sadly, and the dogs crept faint and
fevered into the shelter of every jutting doorway or pro-
jecting gallery of the ancient houses. Between the roofs
shone the blue cloudless sky. I can see the quiver of
the white dusty trees against it. I can hear the slow
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 103
indolent murmur of the unseen river far below. I can
smell the sickly heavy odour of the parched lilies in
the heat. All the blinds and shutters were closed. No
one was astir. The whole place seemed to sleep.
I only was awake and out—I only, who felt neither
heat nor cold, knew neither day nor night, but only
looked up at that one little casement in the roof to see
the sunbeams illumine a girl's hand passing amidst the
threads, or to watch the moonbeams slanting in their
purity upon the dark closed lattice where she
slept.
I was out in the burning noontide, pacing to and fro
on the stony way lest by any chance she might be
there, at the window, at her work. Long I stayed in
vain, moving up and down in the shadowless heat on
the other side of the street, as my custom was.
The garret window was empty, and the flowers in
it, my flowers, were dead. I had others in my hand,
screened with wet leaves from the searching sun-rays.
I waited for her to come to the lattice ere I should
lay them down, as my wont was, in the entrance, upon
the basin scooped above the bench in the stone wall
to hold the holy water.
But instead of leaning above there, high up against
the heavens, she came toward me—came down the
street, drooping in the heat as the roses drooped.
104. A BRANCH OF LILAC.
She had been out with some lace to the market
Square. - -
She and I were all alone, facing one another sud-
denly in the silent, Sultry, sleepy noon beneath the
eaves of the old houses. She had a kirtle of green, I
remember, and a bodice of white; and she had sheltered
her bright hair and her little yellow kerchief with some
broad woven green leaves. She looked herself like a
flower blossoming out from the gray wrinkled Square
stones of the pavement.
It might be the heat, it might be her fatigue, it
might be—I know not. Her face was paler than its
wont, and her eyes were softer. I cannot tell what it
was: something gave me voice, and I spoke—spoke as
I gave her my poor little gift.
I knew how foolish it was : I knew how mad it was.
I knew no woman could ever look on me with any
sentiment perhaps except disgust—with nothing more
than pity at the most. I knew a man's heart might
break for ever and no creature see aught except a jest
in his despair if he were vilely-featured and poor of
habit and estate, as I was.
And yet I spoke, borne out of myself and swept
away upon a flood of words, irresistibly, senselessly,
I know not how, as some impulse would impel me on
the stage sometimes, so that in the torrent of my
A BRANCH OF LILAC. - T 05
speech the hearers would be carried away, and forget
that he who moved them was but an ugly, poor, and
Inameless comic player. I could not hope to move her
thus, and yet I spoke. It would end all, I thought.
I must do so, I knew. And yet I spoke in the old
dim, quiet street, with no listeners anywhere except
the dusky carnations drooping in the heat.
What I said I cannot tell, but I prayed to her as
men should only pray to their God, they say. I did
not ask her for any love in answer: I might as soon
have dreamed of asking for the sun in heaven. But
I begged for a little pity, for a little patience: it was a
crime, I knew, for any creature ugly and poor as I to
speak of love at all to any woman.
When my heart had spent itself and my voice had
died on my parched dry lips, I grew cold with deadly
fear. I listened for her laughter, her cruel, sweet,
merciless, childlike, mocking laughter.
Instead, she was quite silent. Then suddenly she
trembled and grew pale, and was so still—so still. T.
heard the loud heavy beating of my own heart in the
silence: that was all the sound there was.
Suddenly she looked at me, and her mouth quivered,
and she drew her breath with a little, low, quick sob.
“I am all alone,” she murmured, half with laughter,
half with tears—“I am all alone !”
106 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
What could I think?
I was so ugly, so grotesque, so poor, so utterly
deserted by all fortune; and yet the gray street, the
yellow light, the red carnations nodding at the window,
the hard blue sky, with the white thirsty leaves painted
on it, all went round with me in a blind, sickly whirl.
It was impossible!—and yet she looked at me and
laughed a little, with her own old, sweet scorn at my
madness, though her tears were falling.
“Yes, do you hear?” she said low in her throat, so
softly, and yet with such a pretty petulance. “Do you
hear? You are so ugly, so absurd : you have a mouth
like a frog and eyes like a fish, and yet you are good—
you can say beautiful things, and—I am all alone !”
And then I knew her meaning. Ah, God! If only
I could have died that day, when heaven itself seemed
open to me !
Was it all a lie, then 2 I often wonder.
Nay, not all, I think. Perhaps not any of it. She
was very young, and she was very poor, and she was
weary of her life; and even such a one as I was welcome
to her, since I loved her with such utter passion, and
could give her freedom, as she thought. Nay, I would
not think it a lie—then.
She never loved me. But she knew that I loved
her, and perhaps the woe of my words had moved her
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 107
to compassion; and perhaps she thought, “Better go
with this poor fool and roam the world, and be a little
glad, than waste all my fair years in loneliness, losing
my sight over the cobwebs of laces that I only weave
for other women's wear.” -
Perhaps, too, she had heard the people say that I
had genius, and might make a name for myself in the
great cities of the earth some day; and so it seemed
to her that even my poor life might become worth the
sharing; and she surely knew that any harvest it
might ever reap upon the fields of wealth and fame
would be garnered for her only, and into her lap only
- poured. . . t
Or perhaps she did not reason at all, did not at all
reflect, but only felt—felt some new impulse, vague
and childish, stir at her heart on hearing how I loved
her—as never Surely woman yet was loved by man—
and so leaned toward me and took the gift I gave, and
wept a little, and then softly laughed, not rightly
knowing what she wished, nor looking to the future.
Yes, that is likeliest. Yes, I would not think all
was a lie —then.
Well, I married her. Do you know what life was
to me then 2 A paradise—a fool's paradise, doubt-
less, but one without cloud, or stain, or fear, or
regret upon it whilst it lasted.
| {}S - A BRANCH OF LILAC,
*
She loved me ! -
So she had said, so she had proved. It seemed so
marvellous to me ! Day and night I thanked Heaven
for it, for in Heaven I believed—now. What but a
God—pure and perfect as the priests said—could
create such a creature as this ? -
She seemed so wonderful to me, this white and
golden thing, with her snowy limbs, and rosy lips, and
her smile like the sunlight, which yet were all mine—
only mine. When I looked at her in the first faint
morning light and watched her soft still slumber, I
used to think that this must be a dream—this won-
drous ecstasy of mine, this intoxication of pos-
session.
What was I, a man so poor, so ill-favoured, so
grotesque, so destitute of any charm or grace which
could win love, that I should have been able to touch
and gather such a rare blossom as this was to bloom
upon my heart 2 - -
With every night that fell, with every day that
dawned, I blessed the sacred chances which had led
my footsteps thither in the month of lilacs.
All the while I kept the dear branch by me, dead
and scentless and without colour as it was.
It would have seemed no miracle to me if any morn-
ing I had found it bloom with fresh bud and leaf, for
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 109
that would have been not more miraculous than was
the beauty and the joy into which my life had suddenly
burst forth. -
I do not know if ever she quite knew how much I -
loved her.
Poor men cannot show their love in those symbols
of rich gifts which women most value and most easily
read. No doubt it seems hard and cold in us that
we do not lavish on our best beloved all that her
Heart craves: no doubt it seems to a young, thought-
less female creature that it is not so much the
power lacking as the will when we forbear to hang
her neck with gems and fill her hand with gold.
And when not only do we fail in that, but when we
are even powerless to feed the bright lips we kiss
with any save the scantiest fare, and stretch the fair
limbs we cherish on any save the poorest bed of
straw, - then, I dare say, it seems to her that if
we truly loved we should discover some means, by
some periling of our body or our soul, to bestow on
her the luxuries she craves.
No doubt it seems so. And I was very poor. I
could not change the manner of my life. The only
talent that I had was my talent on the stage, and
though I had some true dramatic power in me, I was
obscure and nameless, and could not, in a day nor
II 0 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
in a year, change my estate. The simple folk of the
provinces applauded me, it is true, but to win applause
in Paris — one must be very great for that.
I had always loved the old life, as I say.
It had always seemed to me the freest and the
gladdest that a man born of the people could enjoy or
could desire. But now it seemed to me to alter, some
way. It was not fit for her, and it would not give me
what I wished for her.
To tramp all along the sun-baked roads had been
for me no hardship ; to be hungry and suffer thirst
had been to me small pain; to go to roost in some
straw-yard or cattle-shed no difficult matter when the
taverns were all full. The rough jests, the rude revel-
ries, the drinking bouts, and the wine-shop supper-
tables, these had all been welcome enough to me at
the end of a long day's travel afoot.
But now—she was so young, so fair to see, so deli-
cate of frame, so precious to me, that it was horrible to
me to make her toil along the stony shadowless high-
ways, to lay down her dainty body on a truss of hay,
to see the glances of my comrades light on her, and
to hear the jests of the drunkards soil her ear. It
poisoned the old life to me.
I had never wanted anything easier, choicer, better
in any manner, for myself; but for her—for her, for
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 11]
the first time I envied others; for her I looked with
jealousy on the snow-white villas set within their
gardens, and the gilded balconies of the pretty houses
in the streets, and the silken standards fluttering
from the gray towers of the nobles' châteaux, as we
passed by them in our route.
Perhaps I should not have felt this had she herself
been contented with the life. But she was not.
When we give a woman a great love she so often re-
pays us by teaching us discontent
Nay, I do not blame the woman. A man should
not take his heart in his hand to her, unless in the
other hand he can take also idols of gold and silver.
Before the lilac had dropped across the path I had
only noticed the different way of life of the rich to
draw pleasure from it.
It had afforded me many pretty pictures as I had
looked at it from the outside, and I had never felt any
desire to look at it more closely, or to be angered
with it because I stood without. When I had looked
through the gilt gateways into some rose-pleasaunce,
where the great ladies sauntered and pretty children
played, I had always felt glad that there were people
so happy as that, and had passed on the better for the
sight. But now, when I saw such things, I only felt,
“Why has my darling not such rose-gardens as these,
112 A BRANCH C/F LILAC.
and why should her children be born and nurtured in
poverty instead of wealth ?”
I did what I could to soften what seemed for such a
one as she the hardness and privations of our lot.
I was able to hire an old mule, which I could lead
across the fields and along the highlands where the
stones and the Sun had so Sorely tried her. By doing
some turn at hand-labour in the towns where we tarried,
such as hewing wood or weeding garden-plats, or
fetching heavy weights, I was able also to get a little
chamber for her in some quiet place away from the
boisterous life of the taverns. Sometimes some one
among the audiences would take some special interest
in my performance, and ask me what I would choose
that he should give me—a bottle of wine, a Supper at
the restaurant, a bundle of cigars?—and then I would
thank him and decline them all, and in their stead
select some basket of rich fruit or some cluster of rare
flowers, and depart with it gratefully, and take it home
to her and enjoy her innocent surprise. -
I did what I could—indeed I did what I could—but
then that uttermost was so little. - -
The love-gifts of one who is poor must always seem
so small. How can it be otherwise ?
What a rich man can do every hour with a mere
sign of the hand, a mere stroke of the pen, a poor
A BRANCH OF LILAC. T 13
man can only do so slowly, so laboriously—in such
niggardly, foolish fashion, no doubt it seems—once a
year maybe, on a fête-day. And that only by sore
hard work of body and of mind; for when it is diffi-
cult to get enough even to live on, look you, how can
One have surplus to spare for roses, and trinkets, and
all pretty trifles such as pretty women love 2
It is impossible. But then that very impossibility.
looks so harsh, so narrow, so miserly, beside the easy
lavishness of love that has gold at its call. A woman
can hardly believe that you care for her unless, at her
bidding, you know how to make all impossibilities pos.
sible.
And how can one be a magician without gold 2 I
have heard that in old times there were men who
spent their years and lost their wits trying always to
transmute base metals, by fire and chemistry, into
gold. I am very sure that they would never have
thought of it unless some woman whom they loved
had first wailed in their ear for some jewel they were
too poor to be able to gain for her.
I do not know what she could have expected in my life.
I had never, from the first, disguised to her how poor
and often hard it was. But she had seen it from the
outside, and, I suppose, she had anticipated more mer-
riment and variety from it. At any rate, she was disap-
I
114 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
pointed, and nothing I could do would avail to render
her content. One thing, indeed, she was very restless
for, which I denied,—the sole denial I ever gave her
of any wish she had. She desired to go upon the
boards herself. Some of my comrades told her,
thoughtlessly, that it was a sin, with such a face as
hers, to sit behind the scenes in lieu of passing before
them to delight an audience. And she would fain
have gone. But I–I told her bitterly, the only time
that ever I spoke violently to her, that I would sooner
slay her with my own hand than see her give her love-
liness to the lewd public gaze.
Ay, so I felt. For I loathed to see even the passers-
by on the high-road glance freely at her. I could
have struck to earth even my best friend amongst our
own company when over-easily he parried jests and
exchanged gay phrases with her.
“You are a simpleton, Piccinino,” the chief of my
troop said to me. “Chance has given you, in your
wife, a lantern of Aladdin. But in lieu of using the
brightness of your lamp to get you gold, you hide it
and bury it in your bosom.”
I understood him; he never said it twice to me.
Nor were we ever after friends.
My comrades did not regard me with all their old
careless amity,<-any one of them.
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 115
“Have a care l’” I heard them say one to another.
“Our old dancing-dog, Piccinino, can growl,-ay,
and bite, too, it seems. One used to be able to
plague him on all sides: he never turned ; but
now—”
And yet I do not think that I was jealous of her in
any foolish or barbarous manner then. I begrudged her
no pleasure that came through others. I would have
had her happy at any privation to me of body or of
mind. I loved her to trick out her delicate beauty in
all the fantasies she would, and make it radiant in the
eyes of all men. But when a man is as ugly as I am,
and regards the creature that he loves as I regarded
her, with breathless adoration, as a thing sent by
Heaven and too perfect to tarry long with him on
earth, he cannot choose but bitterly resent any glance
or any phrase which would seem to treat a possession
so sacred as though it were a thing of mere beauty or
rarity, to be admired and coveted by any chance
observer. There are countries, I have heard, where
women go always thickly veiled, hiding their beauty
from all men's eyes save those of husband or father.
I do not wish that it were so in France : I would not
desire that the loveliness God has given to be the
delight of his creatures should be secreted from view,
casting none of its light or glory on Surrounding
I 2
}
H
6
A BRANCH OF LILAC.
objects. But, Surely, if a man may not gaze at the
stars without a reverent awe, much less should he be
permitted to examine with a curious stare, or accost
with familiar speech, one of those beings whose out-
ward beauty was meant as the reflection of an inward
purity and sacredness. Therefore it was that I
watched closely all who came near her, seeking to
shield her from all obtrusive looks or words, even such
as she herself might not have noticed or understood.
And sometimes, not knowing why I so acted, she
would be impatient or angry, and perhaps go away and
be silent or petulant, like a spoiled child when it is
denied. But then she had so many other moods, when
she would sing and laugh and be gay ! Yes, I think
Whe was not otherwise than happy then.
It was midwinter when a great thing happened to
me, a wonder which I had all my life dreamed of as
a glory quite impossible to ever fall to such a one as
thyself. Whilst we were in the central provinces,
playing in a little town at the Noël season, a man from
Paris, owning a theatre there, it was the theatre of
the Folies-Marigny, saw me act in our wooden booth,
and thought so much of it, that he sought me out at
the close of the performance.
“You are a fine actor,” he said. “Has no one ever
found that out before now, that you stroll about with
A is RANCH OF LIHLAC. 117
a wooden show 2 Come with me and I will make you
known in Paris.” -
I could not believe my ears. Yet he was quite
serious, and had meant every word he had said. I
closed with his offer, dizzy with astonishment at such
fulfilment of my most golden dream; and then I went
and told her.
She threw her arms round my throat and kissed me
many times.
“Ah, now I shall be very happy l’” she cried. “To
be in the world at last !”
And then she fell to a thousand pretty schemes for
feasts and ornaments and all sorts of brilliancies, as
though I had become possessor of some vast estate.
But I had no thought to check her ecstasies or teach her
reason. I was too full of triumph, for her sake, myself.
I was so proud and glad that night ! My head was
so light that I was in amity with all creation.
A bought a simple little Supper and a stoup of Bur-
gundy, and called my comrades in to rejoice with us;
and I purchased for her some bright gilded papers of
sugared meats, and a stove-forced rose, and a thread
of amber beads, for she was a very child in all these
things; and my new chief joined with us, and we kept
the night right joyously. .
It was the Old Nuit des Rois I know, and all the
118 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
town was dancing and feasting, and there were not
beneath its many roofs any group gladder or gayer
than the light-hearted people who gathered in my
attic under the eaves, by the light of one little lamp.
The Burgundy wine was good, and she looked so
fair with the snow-born rose red in her breast, and I
knew that all men envied me ; and we laughed long
and lightly, and my heart was fearless and content as
we drank our pledge to the Future.
Ah, Heaven the old saw may well say that the
gods make us blind ere they drive our stumbling fools'
feet to our bitter fools’ end.
Well, that same week we went to Paris. There I
played under my new master: there I won success—
in a humble manner.
It was a little theatre, of no great account, and its
patrons came chiefly from students and artists and
sewing-girls, and their like, -merry people and poor.
Still, it was a theatre of Paris, a public of Paris: it
was a theatre, too, of fixed position and name, builded
of wood and stone and iron; and such a change was
in itself eminence for me, Piccinino, a strolling droll,
who had never played under any better roof. than a
sheet of canvas, which blew to and fro as it would in
all the four winds of the air.
It was eminence for me, and might lead—who could
A BRANCH OF Lllſ,AC. II9
Say?—to great things, to the greatest, perhaps. It
was so much to have one's foot planted at all, one's
voice at all heard, amidst the busy throng and the loud
clamours of the capital.
Certes, the theatre was every night filled from floor
to roof, so I cannot doubt that I did, in a mea-
Sure, stand well with this volatile, critical, hard-to-win
public of Paris. They applauded me to the echo, and
for a season I dreamed golden dreams. Truly, I was
not myself altogether so much at ease as I had been
under the old, malleable, mutable roof, which had
often, indeed, been in holes, through which the rains
had dropped, but which also had been so easily taken
down, folded up, and borne whithersoever one would,
where the life of the hour might promise the best.
I had been a country stroller always. I knew
nothing of the great city: the streets seemed to pen
me in a prison, and the sea of gas to Suffocate me.
But, still, I was making money: I was making also—
in a minor way, indeed, but still Surely—a histrionic
repute. I had ambition,-for her, and so, when I
drank a pint of red wine, I still pledged, with firm
heart, my future.
She was so well content too.
We had a little bright rose-and-white room, gilded
like a sweetmeat box, set very high in the glittering
i20 A BRANCH. Ol' LILAC.
zone roof of a house of many stories, shut in a narrow
passage-way amongst many other buildings, close
against the theatre.
It was terribly dear, and no bigger than a hazel-nut,
and hot and stifling always, being so high above the
roof.
But she thought it a paradise—a paradise, because
above the stove there was a mirror, and opposite
on the street, far down below, there was a busy
café that was thronged the whole day long; and
beneath, on the ground-floor, was a great magazine of
laces and shawls and such-like fineries, into which the
keepers thereof let her peep from time to time, and
even handle the precious stuffs, for sake of her fair eyes.
She thought it a paradise, I say; but I–I thought
wistfully, many and many a time, of our old clean,
bare, wind-swept attics, with their empty walls, and
their quaint lattices, and their shadowy eaves, and
the little ancient towns where the old belfry bells were
ringing in the quiet provinces far away.
I had always been in the air, you see, in the sun
and the rain, and the open weather : even when I had
played, it had been under a tent, where every breeze
that blew stirred the awning above my head, and made
the little round coloured lamps flicker and grow *
brighter and duller by turns. I had led a hardy, free,
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 12] :
open-air life, and the imprisonment of a city—even of
such a city as Paris—was, in a manner, grievous to me.
Not that I ever let her think so. Oh, no : it would
have been very selfish. She was so content.
When I came home from the day-business of the
stage at noon, I would find her always looking down
into the street below, leaning her little soft face on her
hands, and watching the tide of life in the café oppo-
site. It was always full, as I said: there was a
barrack hard by, and the place was always gay with
uniforms and noisy with the clatter and clash of steel,
as the officers ate and drank at the tables in front of
the doors, under the gilded scrollwork and the green
shutters. r *
It was a pretty scene: it was no wonder that she
watched it ; and no doubt I seemed to her a brute,
and a fool to boot, when I pulled her, one day, from
her favourite seat and drew the sun-blinds sharply. I
could not bear the lewd bold looks those soldiers cast
up at her.
She broke out into a low piteous sobbing, and
wailed wearily to know what had she done. I kissed
her, and knelt to her, and besought her pardon, and
blamed my jealous passion, and cursed the world
which was not worthy of a look from her.
And then she laughed—no doubt I seemed a fool
122 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
to her—such a fool, good God l—and shut her hands
upon my mouth to silence me, and broke from me and
threw the shutter open wide again, laughing still, to
get her way thus wilfully.
The cuirassiers in the courtyard of the café down
beneath laughed too. A man poor and ugly and
jealous—jealous of his wife—is a thing ridiculous to
all, no doubt. *
They thought me jealous, and they laughed, those
handsome, careless, gay youngsters, drinking their
breakfast wines under the green vine-leaves and the
gold scrollwork; but their thought did me wrong. I
was never jealous then : jealousy can only be born of
suspicion, and I had in her a spotless, implicit, perfect
faith, to which suspicion was impossible. g
But she was to me So Sacred and so precious, that a
light look or a loose word cast at her cut me like a
sword. The face that had first looked on me amidst
the lilac-blossoms always seemed to me a thing of
Sanctity, a gift of Heaven. I would fain have had the
city crowds bend before it as reverently as the poor
peasants bend before the images of Mary.
I was never jealous. It had seemed wonderful to
me that she could give her beauty to any creature so
ungainly in person and so ill-favoured by fortune as
myself—a miracle, indeed, for which I thanked Heaven
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 123
daily. But that, having thus bestowed herself, she
would be faithless, was a thought against her of which
I never once was guilty. I am thankful to remember
that—now.
Thankful to have been a dolt, a fool, a madman?
you will say. Ah, well ! it is our moments of blind-
Iness and of folly that are the sole ones of happiness
for all of us on earth. We only see clearly, I think,
when we have reached the depths of woe.
The time went by in Paris, and I was successful in
my own Small way, and she was happy. I am sure
she was happy—then. She was very young and very
ignorant, and the little suppers at some cheap
restaurant in the woods, the simple ornaments and
dresses I could alone afford her, the mere sense of the
stir and glow and glitter and change that were all
around, sufficed to amuse her and keep her contented
—then.
Besides, she had also what is very dear to every
female thing—she had admiration everywhere, from the
errand boys who cried aloud her praises in street slang,
to the titled soldiers who doffed their caps to her from
the café-court below, and would, no doubt, have
heaped upon her flowers and bonbons, and jewels and
rare gifts, had I not stood betwixt her and their
Smiles.
124 A l;INANCH OF LILAC.
They jeered at me and jested about me many a
time I knew, but I turned a deaf ear: for her sake I
would not be embroiled; and though very surely
they despised me—me, the poor, ugly comedian who
owned a thing so fair—yet they did not openly pro-
voke me.
The grief I had—and it was one I could not change
—was that I was compelled to leave her so often in
Solitude.
With rehearsal and performance the theatre usurped
almost all the hours. But I made her chamber as
bright as it was possible, and bands played and troops
passed by, and showmen exhibited their tricks, and
churchmen defiled with banners and crucifixes all
day long through the busy street below: she said it
was amusement enough to watch it all, and she told
me she was content, and I had no suspicion. She said
she was so well pleased sitting there at the little win-
dow among the plants of musk and the red geranium
blossoms, watching that stream of street-life, which
seemed to me so tawdry, so dusty, so deafening, but
which, I know well, almost always seems paradise to
women, who are seldom poets, and who are almost
never, one may say, artists.
All this while I gave offence and even, in some
sense, lost friends in many quarters, because I kept
A BRANCH OF LITAC. 125
her thus sacredly and would have none of the women
of our stage associate with her. I have often thought
since that this was wrong and harsh in me.
What right had I to judge 2 Priestly benison had
never hallowed my poor mother's loves, and yet a
gentler and truer little soul never dwelt in human body.
What right had I to judge 2
This poor, gay, frail, light-hearted sisterhood, which
had been about me always—had I not seen in it sacri-
fice, tenderness, generosity, even heroism, many and
many a time, from the first days of my orphanage,
when the blue-eyed Euphrasie had sold her necklace
of beads to get my motherless mouth bread by the
weary wayside 2
Had I not beheld, time out of mind, a stanch
patience under poverty and ill-usage, a cheery con-
tentment under all the evils of adversity, a genuine
mirth that laughed through tears, a tender good-
ress to all comrades in misfortune,—all these virtues
and others likewise in those dear friends of my child-
hood and manhood whom I banned from her because
their life was defiled by one frailty?
Yes: it was harsh in me, and presumptuous and
ungrateful: that I knew too late ; and yet it was .
because I held my lustre lily so soilless that I could
not bear a profane breath to stir the air it dwelt in.
l
6 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
2
Well, if this were sin in me, sin of ingratitude and
of pharisaism,_it has been punished.
So our life in Paris went by until the weeks grew
into months, and in all the gardens of the city, and all
about the palaces, and in the parks and woods, the
lilac-trees were blossoming with the sweet odours that
seemed born to me of paradise.
It might be foolish,_for I was quite poor still, since
the expenses of my new and greater life were more
than equal to its profits, but I spent many silver
pieces to fill her little chamber every day freshly with
endless masses, white and purple, of those flowers all
the while they lasted. They were to me the symbol
of the greatest happiness that ever man had known on
earth.
I loved them so well that I was almost super-
stitious about them ; and when they were faded and
had lost their colour, I hardly liked to cast them aside
to go into the dust-cart; and when their fallen petals
strewed by millions the green paths through the woods
and on the edge of the river, I could never crush them
as I passed along without regret.
When the last lilac-blossom had died that spring,
the troop with which I was associated had offers made
to it which its leader deemed too advantageous to
reject. His lease of the theatre in Paris had expired
A BRANCH or LILAC. 127
in the first days of May, and with the beginning of the
month he changed his quarters and took us eastward
to the little town of Spa, where lucrative promises had
tempted him to pass the season.
I knew it well. In the old times, with my dear old
Mathurin, we had often passed through it on our way
from Lorraine and Luxembourg to play at the various
kermesses of the pretty hill hamlets of the Meuse
district and the villages and bourgs of the wide
Flemish plains farther northward.
But that had been many years before, and then we
had set up our little wooden and leathern booth humbly
in some retired quarter, where the poor people of the
place could come to us, for we had no means or hopes
of attracting the rich, gay crowd of foreign residents.
The wood-carvers and wood-cutters from all the villages
round about had used to throng to us; but the mass
of fashion and frivolity that scattered its gold in the
town we had never approached in any way, we, simple
strollers, playing in a tent which any one might enter
for a few centimes a head.
Put now it was all different.
I had an established repute, if not a very great one :
I belonged to a settled management; I had the aroma
of Paris upon my name; I played at the theatre which
all the fashionable guests frequented; and I could
| 28 - A BRANCH OF LILAC.
afford to dwell, no longer at some miserable tavern
in a stifling lane, half stable and half wineshop, but
in a cheery and sunshiny little apartment that looked
out upon the trees of the avenue of Marteau.
My spirits rose as I came once more amongst the
woods and fields, and heard the waters brawl and
murmur their pleasant song over the stones. The
unaccustomed life of the great city had stifled and
depressed me, but in this mountain air I could breathe
again.
I was even childishly happy: I could have Sung
aloud in very gaiety of heart to the chiming bells
of the Flemish teams and the carillons of the
churches. The leaves, the streams, the hills, the
skies, all seemed to Sparkle and to smile. It was
warm and light and fresh : the woods were full of
wild flowers, the fields were green with the long hay-
grasses, the sweet Smell of the firs came into the valley
on every breath that blew. Ah God! how happy I
felt |
In the oldest part of the little place there lived an
old man and his wife, who maintained themselves by
painting fans and silk-reels and bonbon-boxes and
the like toys, such as are made in that neighbour-
hood. -
They had been good to me when I had come
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 129
thither, a mere lad, with Mathurin. I went to see
them, and took her with me. They would scarce
believe that the boy Piccinino whom they had known,
could be an artist great enough to be playing to all the
nobles and gentry in the theatre in the town, which,
to them, appeared the grandest building of the sort
that any kingdom in the universe could hold.
These old people looked long and with devout eyes
of wonder at the young beauty of my wife. ... I
“Thou art a happy soul, Piccinino,” said the old
man, heartily; and would make a present to her—
though I knew he could ill afford it—of a little black
fan on which he had just painted with much grace and
truthfulness a group of white and purple violets.
The old woman looked up sharply through her spec-
tacles, and said nothing.
“What will she care for it?—it is not jewelled and
gilded,” she muttered, as she went on with her
spinning in the doorway in the sun.
I have often wondered since how it is that the eyes
of women at a glance read the souls of other women,
so cruelly, as it seems to us, and yet so surely.
It was a pretty little fan : it had cost him much
labour, though it could only have sold for a franc or
two. It was a plaything as graceful as if it had been
encrusted with diamonds—more so, I think, for the
- *
130 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
old man had studied the forest flowers till he could
portray them to the very life. ... -
But a few days later the kindly little gift was lost :
she dropped it from the balcony, and it fell shivered
to atoms on the ground.
I reproached her gently for her carelessness.
“To give thee the fan,” I urged, “he will, I
know well, have to go for many a day without a bit
of meat to boil with his beans and lentils in the Soup-
pot.”
She only laughed.
“It was worth nothing,” she answered me.
I picked up the poor little broken plaything in the
street below, and put the pieces aside and kept them.
It was only the carelessness of her youth and of her
SeX, I told myself. But for the first time that day
there seemed to me a dissonance in the chiming bells
and the murmuring streams, a shadow on the spark-
ling sunshine, a taint in the sweet young summer
odours of the wood-clothed hills.
Why should she value my love, I thought, more
than the little broken fan 2 It was hardly worth
more to her in any sense of wealth.
A BRANCH OF Elfla C. - 131
IV.
fºL were to stay in the town while its season
lasted. This had scarcely begun when we
entered it. There were very few persons
arrived then, and I had plenty of leisure
time, in which I took her to spend the hours in
the shady alleys of the hills and under the deep
foliage of the winding woodland roads, taking our
noonday meal most often under the trees of Géron-
stère. * .
There were two or three of the artists of my com-
pany who used generally to go with us: one of them
sang well—he was of the south. There were two
young painters, brothers, poor but full of talent, and
full of mirth and hope : these would accompany us
also. We were a gay, light-hearted, merry little
group enough, and raised the echoes of the rocks
many a time with our part-singing, and many a time
brought some great, white, mild-eyed bull from out
the woods to gaze at us with grave eyes in amazement
at our laughter.
They were happy times, full of harmless gaiety and
blissful belief in the fortunes of the future, in that

3, 2
132 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
pleasantest season of the earliest summer, when the
first dog-roses were budding on the briers, and the
abundant dews of the morning silvered every blade of
grass, and were shaken off in a million drops from
every stem of cowslip or bough of hawthorn that one
gathered. This was yet in earliest summer, whilst the
visitors were still few in numbers, and all the green
alleys and pretty promenades and shadowy bridle-
paths seemed almost all our own, and the fresh mountain
air blew through the place cool and strong, untainted
by the perfumes and the powders and the bouquets
and the wine-odours of fashion.
But very soon this changed. Very soon the avenue
grew gay with equipages and riding-parties. Very
soon the nobles and the idlers flocked into the little
valley-town, and all was movement and colour and
change from noon to midnight. Of course for the -
theatre I was glad : the house filled nightly; our
bright little comic pieces charmed an idle audience of
fainéants. I was well received and became popular,
and disputed with the Redoute in power of attraction.
Of course I was glad of this. -
My impresario was well pleased with me, and
offered me an increase of salary from midsummer.
I even came to be noted enough for people to point
me out when I passed into the paths or lingered to
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 133
hear the music in the pretty Promenade des Sept
Heures. ~
“There,” they would say to one another, “do you
see him, that quaint, misshapen, ugly fellow 2 That is
Piccinino, the French player. Have you seen him in
Le Chevreuil 3 Myself, I like him better than Ravel.”
Then would the other answer,
“Yes, he is clever, no doubt; but what an ugly
beast ! And that pretty creature—she is his wife
they say.”
And then they would laugh, and the music would
seem all discord to me. -
Not that I heeded the taunt about my ill looks: I
had become long used to that. I knew so well that I
was ugly: that could not wound me. It was the way
in which they spoke of her, as if, because I was not
handsome, I had no title to her. And indeed it seemed
so to myself sometimes.
When I moved in the crowded alleys amidst those
beaua messieurs dorés, it seemed to me that such a
homely ill-favoured brown bird as I was had no right
to mate with that beautiful young golden Oriole.
I knew they thought so : I wondered often if she
did likewise. -
So, though I had success and fair promise of the
future from my present popularity, I was ill at ease
134 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
now that the world had come about us, and that we
could no more go and laugh and sing and drink our
little cheap wine in the green woods by ourselves
without meeting scores of brilliant, languid, graceful
people, who stared at us coldly, and then turned aside
and laughed.
Amongst these—we met him often—was a young
noble of the southern provinces, the Marquis de
Carolyié, a cavalry soldier and a man of wealth. He
was as beautiful as a woman: he was beautiful living—
and dead, I see his face now, there where the lilac
flowers are. -
What? I am alone in my cell, you say, and it is
late in the autumn, and the lilac trees are all torn
with shot and ploughed up with cannon-balls all over
France, and will blossom no more this year, nor any
other year, but are all killed—for ever, for ever !
You think that my brain wanders ? It is not so.
You cannot see the dead man's face, you cannot smell
the lilac flowers, but I can. No, I am not mad. I
am quite calm. I will tell you how it all happened.
Let me go on in my own way. . . . .
This young Marquis de Carolyié came into the
Ardennes with the midsummer. We saw him very
often, a dozen times a day. Every one is always
seeing every one else in Spa.
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 135
I held aloof as much as I could from the gay world.
I had nothing in common with it, and no means to
shine amidst it. Besides, every evening I was playing .
at the theatre ; and as I knew no woman with whom
to leave my wife, I took her with me to the playhouse,
and whilst I was upon the stage she stayed in my
dressing-chamber.
It was dull, I knew, very dull for her : she wanted
to be at the Kursaal and at the balls, I knew, but
none of the women there of any fair repute would
have associated with her, a girl of the populace,
the wife of a comic actor; and with those of light
fame I would never let her exchange a word. So
we went hardly at all into any of the resorts of the
idle people, yet we saw them and they saw us in
the promenades, by the bands of music, and in the
woods; and so we came a dozen times a day by
chance across Carolyié's path, or he, by design, across
ours.
He lodged at the D'Orange, and could have had no
call to pass and repass, as he did, down our avenue ;
but this he would do, either riding or on foot, con-
tinually.
I noticed him at first for his great beauty: people
as ugly as I am are sure to note any singular physical
perfection. He rode in the steeple-chases too, and
136 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
won; he played recklessly at the tables, and won there
also, because he could so well afford to lose; he was
sought and adored by many of the elegant and weary
women there; he was very rich and very attractive:
he was a man, in a word, of whom the world always
talked. - -
I ought to have said ere now that she had her first
anger against me—or at least the first she showed—
on the score of the gaming-tables. She had urged me
with the prettiest and most passionate insistence to
try and make my fortune in a night at the roulette-
ball. And I had refused always. -
I was no better then other men; I did not condemn
what they did; but gaming had no charm for me, and
it seemed to me that in one who had so little as I it
would be utter madness to court ruin by staking that
little on the chance of an ivory ball. And my resolve
on this point was very bitter to her.
It seemed to her so cruel in me, when by one
lucky hazard I might make in an hour as much as it
took me years to earn. She wanted dresses, cache-
mires, laces, jewels, like those of the - great ladies that
she saw ; she wanted to Sweep along the grassy roads
with carriage-horses in gilded harness and with chim-
ing bells, like the aristocratic teams that trotted by ;
she wanted to go to the Redoute of an evening in
A BRANCH OF LILAC. J 37
trailing trains of velvet and of satin: she wanted, in
a word, to be entirely other than she was. It is a
disease, very common, no doubt, but it is mortal,
always.
She was a soft, dainty, mignonne thing, full of
natural grace, though she had been but a little Loirais
peasant girl making lace in a garret: she would
have taken kindly to affluence and luxury, and would
have looked at home in them, no doubt. But how
could I give her them 2 It was impossible.
I could not run the chance of fortune at the
roulette-wheel, when, if I had lost my little all, she
would have been cast a beggar on the world.
So this was a difference and a barrier between us.
She would not pardon me, and I could not alter
my resolve against my reason and my conscience.
But I think her thoughts were first drawn to Carolyié
because she heard from some of our people how reck-
lessly he played at nights, and how continually he won.
- Well, one evening he came behind the scenes at our
theatre. He knew our chief, it seemed, and was made
welcome. He paid me many courteous compliments.
IIe was so frank, so easy, so kindly in his ways, I
could not choose but like him. Still, I shut the door
of my dressing-room in his face.
She was there, making lace for herself, as her habit
138 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
was, but whilst her hands moved with their old skill,
the tears dropped on the network. -
“It is so dull !” she murmured piteously. “It is so
dull ! You do not think of that, you ! You are on
the stage there, in the light, with all the people before
* * : * - tº
is miserable, miserable ! I can hear them laugh and
shout and clap their hands, while I am all alone !”
I could not bear to see her so. I took blame to
myself for my cruel carelessness. The next night I
asked for a stage-box for her, and she passed the hours
that I played in front. Whilst I was acting I saw
Carolyié with her. It seemed that he had requested
my chief to take him thither, which had been done. I
joined them between the acts.
He told us that he was very weary of the daily round
of gaieties, as they were called. He begged us to let
him join us in our little breakfast parties in the woods.
He had heard us singing often, he had said, and had
longed to get away from his friends and join us and
laugh with us. I assented willingly.
I liked the young man, and his gallant gracious
ways and candid eyes, that were blue as the corn-
flowers. I had no thought of any evil, and I had a
perfect faith in her.
So the next day he went with us. But our break-
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 139
fast parties were not the same—never quite the
Sālīlé. -
He brought his carriage, with its four black horses
with their Flemish collars and silver bells, and he
would have us drive with him ; and when the others
came on foot, heated and dusty, and joined us at
Géronstere, it was not quite the same. My comrades
were never quite so merrily absurd in their vagaries,
nor did the buffo songs sound ever quite so joyously as
they had done when we had all walked up the hilly
road together, shouting and rallying one another, and
gathering ferns and foxgloves for our caps, like children
out of school.
It was no fault of the Marquis de Carolyié; he
was cordial and gay and familiar, as though he were
a Bohemian like ourselves; but yet, with those horses
champing in the background in their silver harness,
with the champagne that he had brought superseding
our cheap little thin wine, with the bearskins and
tigerskins that his servants spread for our seats over
the green hill-mosses; — with all this some subtle
charm of mirth had fled, some sense of inequality,
of difference, had arisen. -
I think he must have found us nearly as dull as he
said that his own great world was.
He took greatly to our company, however; he would
140 - A BRANCH OF LILAC.
forsake his own people for us always, whenever he could.
He would fain have had us go in return to brilliant
suppers and the like that he gave in his rooms at the
D’Orange, and at which they said that he was accus-
tomed to spare no extravagance. My fellow-artists
went to them, but not I: I had no means to return
such costly courtesies, and it had always been my
habit to refuse what I could not repay. -
They thought, no doubt, that I kept her away from
jealous fear, but I had no feeling of the kind : that I
swear. I liked the young man, and I had no suspicion
of evil. It was only that I had always been in a man-
ner proud amongst those whom birth and wealth made
my superiors in station, and I could not become a
debtor, -
It seemed to me that it would have a very ill
look if I, a man ugly and poor, and struggling in my
first efforts after fame, should accept the gifts and
banquets of this rich young aristocrat. I knew well
how my companions would all laugh and sneer and
shrug their shoulders, and mutter, “They ask Picci-
mino because his wife has a fair face; and the fool
goes. Oh ho ! he knows how his bread is buttered l’.
I knew the sort of scoffs that they would surely cast;
and I thought it worthy neither of her innocence nor
of my honesty to incur them ; so that I never broke
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 14]
bread with Carolyié once. But it was not because I
ever had an evil thought of him.
Here again there arose matter of difference betwixt her
and myself. She thought me harsh and cruel and tyran-
nous that I would not accept for myself or her the many
brilliant offers of the young Marquis; and T-I could
not tell her the real reasons which influenced me ; I
could not soil her ear with the things that mean, vile
tongues would say; and so my motives doubtless
seemed to her but poor ones, and perhaps she fancied
that I crossed her will and denied her pleasure from
sheer caprice or hardness.
For a while she reproached me bitterly; for many
days she would upbraid me in her pretty and impetuous
manner, with her petulant childlike anger continually;
she would take no enjoyment in any scheme that I
proposed nor any toy I bought for her ; she would tell
me always that I hated to see her happy.
It was a cruel saying, for she knew, as God knew,
that I would have laid down my life any day to give
her joy. But she was disappointed, and blind to
justice, and angered like a spoilt child that is denied a
plaything; the glitter of the young man's gay and
gracious life had dazzled her.
After a week or two had lapsed, however, she ceased
to reproach me aloud.
142 - A BRANCH OF LILAC.
She grew very silent, and seemed strangely softened
into obedience to my desires on all subjects. She did
not care to go out nearly so much as she used to do. It
was with some trouble that I prevailed on her to go
forth at the hours when the bands played.
She would sit all day long by the window of our
little chalet in the Marteau Road, working at her lace,
with a cluster of flowers on the table before her. She
talked little; she did everything I asked her; she was
often in reverie, musing, with a smile upon her lips,
and when I spoke to her after some minutes' silence,
she would start up as if awaking suddenly from a
dream. -
I thought she was not well, and grew anxious, but
she assured me that she ailed nothing; and indeed I
had never seen her sweet eyes clearer or the rose
bloom brighter on her cheeks. I thought it was the
mountain air perhaps which was too strong, and made
her listless. ..-->
Of course I had to leave her very often, I could
not anyway avoid it. We were the only company at
Spa: and to amuse the fastidious audience for which
we played, we were obliged to change our little pieces
almost every night.
This entailed on us great fatigue, and most of all on
me, because the kind of pieces that we now performed
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 143
were not such as I had acted in when I had gone
about with my little wooden theatre ; which, indeed, I
had written chiefly myself. The studying so many
new characters, and the rehearsal of them, occupied
much of my day-time, and left me but little leisure as
the season advanced.
Of an evening she would always go with me to the
theatre, and sit in the little baigmoir which they
assigned her : occasionally, when I joined her in the
entr’actes, I found Carolyié there, but not very often.
He somewhat avoided me. I supposed that I might
have given him some cause for offence in my per-
sistent refusal of the many invitations which he had
pressed upon me in the beginning of the summer.
Once, too, in quite the earliest days of his appear-
ance there, he had sent her a magnificent bouquet of
rare flowers; and I had taken him aside, and spoken to
him frankly.
“You mean well and in all kindness, I know,” I
said to him, “but do nothing of this sort with us.
Remember that what is a mere pretty grace of courtesy
amongst your equals is to people poor and obscure as
we are a debt that we can ill carry without losing the
only honour that we have—our title to respect our-
selves.”
He had seemed moved, and had coloured a little,
144 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
and had shaken my hand with cordiality. And from
that time he had sent no gifts to her. But I fancied
that to me he, on afterthought, resented the words I
had spoken. - *
One night, when the summer was well advanced, I
was to play in a quite new piece, in which it was
thought that I should achieve a signal success.
There were some very great people at that time in
Spa; for want of something to do they came to our
little entertainments. The favour with which they re-
ceived and spoke of me was something very promising,
and made me more and more valued by my chief. On
the whole, life was very good and pleasant to me at
that time, and many whose words were of weight said
that I should become with time and practice one of the
best comedians of the country. -
That night she pleaded that she was not quite
well—she had a headache from the heat of the past
day, and feared the suffocating atmosphere of the
theatre. s -
She smiled and sang a little to herself, and told me
she would sit by the open window in the little alcove
which she had made peculiarly her own, and wait for
me and hear the tidings of the night's triumphs when
I returned. - -
I knew the theatre was oppressive at this season of
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 145
the year, crowded nightly as it was, and I did not
attempt to press her to accompany me.
I took her an immense knot of white roses which I
had bought in the town. She set them in a large blue
jar, and said their fragrance and freshness had already
done her good. She kissed me, and threw her arms
about my neck, and murmured, with a little tender
laugh, “Au revoir, au revoir l’’ and then bade me go
or I should be late.
I left her sitting in the window, the unlit lamp, with
a small crucifix against it, on the table by her, with
the jar of roses. - -
She had her frame and bobbins, and was working at
her lace. She looked at me from the open lattice, and
waved me a second adieu.
I had no thought, no suspicion. I only said to
myself, “Surely she has learned to love me a little
now.”
It is an old old story, you will say. Yes, very
old. *-
I left her, and went to the theatre. I remember
walking down the avenue in the brilliant sunlight. It
had rained at noonday. It was a red and golden even-
ing, very beautiful. The band was playing in the
Place Royale. Every one was out. From the little
gardens there were all sorts of sweet scents from roses
I.
146 - A BRANCH OF LILAC.
and mignonette and carnations, and all fragrant mid-
summer things that were growing in the warmth and
the moisture. Clouds in all manner of lovely shapes
Swept above the green hills, and seemed to rest on
them.
I saw the people go in and out of the gaming-rooms.
I pitied them for wasting this divine weather, which
they were all free to enjoy as they would, in that
feverish atmosphere. Amongst them there came out
Carolyié. He appeared to avoid or not to see me; he
passed by on the other side, and went on to dine at
Baas-Cogez.
Some one near me said,
“What good fortune that young man has He wins
every day. If he goes on like that for one week more,
he will break the bank.”
Another added, 3. -
“Because he wants nothing, he gets everything.”
I heard, but I did not envy him : I envied no one.
I would not have changed places with a king, though
I was but a poor actor going to his work, to be shut
up in a steaming theatre to amuse others with the
tricks of gesture and of language. I would not have
exchanged my lot for that of an emperor.
I was so happy that night, as I went on through the
town, away from the smell of the gardens and woods,
A BRANCH OF LILAC. - 147
and the sounds of the music and the falling waters
and the singing of many little birds, into the dusky
den where I dressed for my part in the playhouse.
The new piece was called Le Pot de Vin de Thibautin.
It was very absurd and humorous, and yet graceful. I
have never played in it since, and yet every line of it
is burnt into my mind.
I had a fresh and genuine success in the part of
Thibautin. - -
I was recalled five times, and the house, which was
a full one, applauded me to the echo. A great duke
who was there, a foreigner, came behind the scenes
and gave me a gold snuff-box of his own, and spoke
very high words of praise. I knew my future was
sure : I had a reputation which would grow with
every year in France. I went from the theatre a
happy man.
It was still very warm—a beautiful dark, starless
might. The clouds were heavy: there was a sort of
hush in the air. There was only just light enough in
the little town to make deeper by contrast the circle
of the hills. The flowers scented the air more
strongly still than at sunset: they were heavy with
great dews. º
All was so quiet. Everyone was in the ball-room
or the card-room. The casements stood wide open in
I, 2
148 A BRANCH or LILAC.
the deserted houses. Here and there the little coloured
lamps glimmered. Here and there a woman leaned
from a balcony. .
I went on down the avenue of Marteau.
In the stillness I could hear the brook running over
the stones, and the rustle of the leaves in the water as
the wind stirred them.
I looked up at the windows of my little rooms.
The light shone through their green shutters. The
vine that climbed around them was dark against
the reflection. I looked up, and, though I had
known little of God in the life that I had led, I
blessed Him.
Yes, I blessed God that night.
I opened the door, and went up the stairs, and
entered my own chamber. I looked for her in her
accustomed place, near the lamp, in the alcove,
where the great jar of white roses stood. She was
not there.
I need not tell you any more, the story is so old,
so old. -
For many weeks after that night I knew nothing.
I was mad, I believe. They say so. I cannot tell;
I remember nothing; only that blank deserted room,
and the great mass of white roses, and the lamp with
the little crucifix under it, and the empty chair with
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 149
the lace-work that had fallen beside it, all unfinished
a 1d untingled. I can see that always, always.
She had gone without any word or any sign ; and
yet it was all so plain. Everyone had foreseen it, so
they said—everyone except myself.
From that night nothing more was ever seen or
heard in that place of him or of her : the people of
the house knew nothing; so at least they said. But
on the floor, under the mirror, there was a torn letter,
which had been forgotten or mislaid. -
Not many words were in it, but they were words
enough to tell me that when she had kissed me on the
mouth, and smiled, and sent me on my way to play in
my new part that evening at Sunset, she had known
that when the night fell she would betray me.
It is a woman's way, they say. -
I might be really mad: they told me that I was ; it
may be so. I think it was quite late in autumn
when I had any sense or consciousness of what I did
or what I spoke. The place was all deserted, the
woods were brown, the music was silent, the flowers
were dead.
I awoke stupidly, as it were, but yet I was quite
calm, and I knew what had chanced to me. It seemed
to me that I had lived many years since that horrible
night. My hair was grey. I felt feeble and grown old.
150 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
Life was ended for me, you know. I wondered why
I was not dead as others were and quiet in my grave.
When they let me go I walked out into the forsaken
streets: they looked so strange—there was scarcely a
soul in them, and the shutters of the houses were
closed. I had only one idea—to follow them, to find
them. And I had lost so much time : it was now
nearly winter. ~
My chief and his troop had all gone, of course.
What little money I had had people had taken whilst
I was unconscious. They told me I owed my life to
. charity. My life I laughed aloud in their faces.
They were afraid of me : they thought I was mad
still. But I was not. I knew what I did, and I had
one fixed purpose left, which was quite clear to me,
and for which alone I endured to live an hour.
I was a fool—oh yes |—and she was worthless. No
doubt, no doubt. But then—I loved her. -
Not that I ever dreamed of winning her back. Nay,
do not think so base a thought of me. My life had
been upright and without shame in the sight of men:
I would not have stained it with any weakness so un-
manly and so foul. But I had a purpose, and that
one purpose gave me nerve and strength.
In the gray of the morning I left the town. I had
not a coin in the world. My one little talent was
A BRANCH OF LILAC. I5].
killed in me. My career was gone. My dawning
repute was already a thing of the past, forgotten by all
men. You see she had destroyed all for me—utterly.
But no doubt she never counted the cost. They do
not think, those fair, soft, smiling things.
When I had come into that valley I had had an
honest past, a precious present, a hopeful future.
When I left it—— -
Well, it matters not now. I died then. The
bullets to-morrow for me can have no pain. &
It signifies little to tell you how I have subsisted
betwixt the time that I quitted the little town in the
mountains, and this day when I lie under sentence of
death.
My old career had become to me abhorrent, impos-
sible. Such skill as I had been master of had
perished out of me. If I had gone upon the stage,
I could not have said a word nor moved a limb. The
old pursuit, the old pleasure, familiar and dear to me
from my childhood, was all withered up for ever.
Men have played—and women, too, I know—a
thousand times with hearts broken and bleeding, and
the world has applauded them. But with me any
talent I had ever possessed was gone for ever: to
have passed within a playhouse would have made me
mad, I think. That last night I had been so happy—
I 52 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
that last night, in the fulness of my joy, I had blessed
God lº - -
I lived—no matter how. The life of avery wretched
creature, but still not the life of a beggar. The man-
ner of my existence from my birth up had taught Iſle
to live almost upon nothing, and had taught me also
many ways of providing for myself such scanty daily
bread as I was forced to eat. -
All the winter long I sought for tidings of her—
and him. But the land was wide, and months had
gone by, and I had no knowledge of where he dwelt,
and I gleaned nothing that was of any service to me.
When I reached Paris I abode there for awhile. I
reasoned that soon or late—being of fair fortune and
of lofty rank—he would of a surety come thither. So
I waited. * *
I waited all through the winter, but he did not come.
I worked my way into his own south-country, and
tried to find traces of him. I saw his great palace
amongst pine forests, the palace as of a prince, but I
learned that he had not been there for several
seasons. He had deserted it almost utterly for the
world of cities. -
They said that he was in Italy. -
I travelled thither, but there I was always too late:
he had left each city before I entered it. It is no use
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 153
to tell of all these wanderings, none of which bore any
fruit. -
Once, in Venice, I only missed him by a day: a
gondolier told me that he had a woman with him fair
àS 8. rose. . *
Ah, God! this was in the sweet time of spring.
Everywhere the lilacs were in flower. |
I lived to hear that and to see the trees blossom.
How can the bullets hurt me to-morrow 2
Let me make an end quickly. I lived, wretchedly,
indeed, but still I lived on : I would not lie down and
die without my vengeance. -
The summer came, and with summer war. When
it was declared I was on the frontier. I hastened into
my own country as well as I could, being on foot
always, and having to work my way from village to
village, day by day.
I had lost everything. I had become feeble, stupid,
dull: I was what they call a monomaniac, I think. I
thought always I saw her face looking toward me
amidst the lilac clusters. I never spoke to anyone of
her, but that was what I Saw, always.
I had lost all the mind I had ever had, and when I
met any of my old comrades I shunned them.
Some of them wanted to pity me, to assist me.
They meant well, no doubt, but I would sooner that
154. A BRANCH OF LILAC.
they should have stabbed me. I avoided everyone
and everything which could remind me of what I had
been, and I was morose, and perhaps in a manner
mad; I do not know.
IBut when I heard of war I seemed to myself to
awake. It seemed to call to me like a living creature.
I was good for nothing else, but I could still strike, I
thought. Besides, I knew he was a soldier. It would
go hard if I found him not somewhere in the mêlée.
And indeed I loved France: still, in the misery of
my life, I loved her for all that I had had from
her.
I loved her for her sunny roads, for her cheery
laughter, for her wine-hung hamlets, for her con-
tented poverty, for her gay sweet mirth, for her
pleasant days, for her starry nights, for her little
bright groups at the village fountain, for her old,
brown, humble peasants at her wayside crosses, for
her wide wind-swept plains all red with her radiant
sunsets. She had given me beautiful hours; she is
the mother of the poor, who sings to them so that
they forget their hunger and their nakedness; she
had made me happy in my youth. I was not un-
grateful.
It was in the heats of September that I reached .
my country. It was just after the day of Sedan, I
A BRANCII OF III A.C. T
5
5
heard all along the roads, as I went, Sad Sullen mur-
murs of our bitter disasters. It was not the truth
exactly that was ever told at the poor wine-shops and
about the harvest-fields, but it was near enough to
the truth to be horrible.
The blood-thirst which had been upon me ever since
that night when I found her chair empty seemed to
burn and seethe, till I saw nothing but blood—in the
air, in the sun, in the water. -
1 had always been of a peaceful temper enough.
I had always abhorred contention. I had lived quietly,
in amity and agreement at all times with my fellow-
creatures. It had used even to be a jest against me
that if any man were to rob me I should only think of
how best I could shield him from justice. But all that
was changed. y
I had become, as it were a beast of prey. I wanted
to kill, to appease the sickly hot thirst always in me.
You do not know 2 Well, pray to God, if you have
one, that you may never know.
No man, I think, is ever safe from coming to know
it, if Fate so wills. A day can change us so that the
very mother who bore us would not recognise her
SOI).S.
I hated myself, and yet I could not alter what I had
become. If we are held accountable hereafter for
156 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
such changes in us, it will be very unjust. We cannot
escape from them.
By the time I reached the centre of France, they
were everywhere forming new corps and bands of
francs-tireurs. In one of these latter I enrolled my-
self. I was strong of body, and of good height,
though somewhat misshapen : they were glad of me.
For me, I had only one idea—to strike for the Country,
and, soon or late, to reach him. -
I fought several times, they said—well, I do not
know. Probably I did, for I flew on them like a tiger
—that I can remember—and of personal pain or peril
I had never any consciousness. -
We lived in the woods. We hid by day: by night
we scoured the country. We made fierce raids, we
stopped convoys, we cut telegraph wires, we intercepted
orderlies, we attacked and often routed the invaders'
cavalry. We knew that if taken we should be hanged
like common murderers for the guilt of patriotism,
but I do not think any one of us ever paused for that:
we only attacked them with the greater desperation.
Sometimes, in the forests or on the highway we
would find the body of one of our comrades hung by
the neck to a straight tree, though he had been taken
fighting fairly for his country's sake: such a sight did
not make us gentler. We poured out blood like water,
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 157
and much of it was the proud blue blood of the old
nobility. We should have saved France, I am sure, if
there had been anyone who had known how to con-
solidate and lead us. No one did ; so it was all of no
llS6.
Guerillas like us can do much, very much, but to
do so much that it is victory we must have a genius
amidst us. And we had none. • If the First Bona-
parte had been alive and with us, we should have
chased the foe as Marius the Cimbri.
I think other nations will say so in the future: at
the present they are all dazzled, they do not see clearly
—they are all worshipping the rising sun. It is blood-
red, and it blinds them. -
In time it became known that I fought, they said, like
ten men in one. They gave me an officer's grade in
the real army. It was the doing of Gambetta, I believe.
For me it made no difference. Place, name, repute
—what could these be to me? I was dead—dead with
my old life: it was a devil, I thought, that inhabited
my body, and drank himself with blood into a likeness
of humanity—as humanity is in war. -
I was drafted from the free corps into the battalions
of Bourbaki. I saw more service, hard service, and
the Republic said that I did well. By my side there
often fought, and often fell, old comrades of my own,
158 A BRANCH of LILAC.
The comedians and the artists did their full duty by
Trance: the derided kingdom of Bohemia sent hun-
dreds of its brightest leaders in loyal answer to the
call of Death. - -
Well, all this while I never saw his face, though
continually I searched for it, and for it alone, in the
tempest of a charge and in the slaughter-heaps after
battle.
“Is it a brother you seek always?” men asked me
often, seeing how I would lift up face after face
from amongst the dead upon a battle-field, and let each
one drop, and go on again upon my quest. And I an-
swered them always, “One closer than a brother.”
For was he not ? - *
But all this while I never saw his face.
France was a great Sea in storm, on which the lºves
of all men were as frail boats tossing to their graves:
some were blown east, some west: they passed each
other in the endless night, and never knew, the tem-
pest blew so strong.
One day there was a bitter strife. It was in the
time of our last struggle. We were trying to cut our
way through the iron wall that had raised itself around
Paris. - -
We failed, as the world knows, but we strove hard
that day. At least all those around me did, and for a
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 159
little space we saw the granite mass roll back from us,
and we thought that we had won.
In that moment, in the white thick shroud of Smoke
where I pressed forward on foot with my comrades of
the line, there came on with us in a beautiful fierce
sweep, like lightning, a troop of horse half cut to
pieces, with many of its chargers riderless, and with
its thinned ranks hidden in clouds of blinding dust.
But shattered though it was, it charged for us: it
was one of the southern Inobles' free corps of cavalry,
the Cuirassiers of Corrèze.
Close against me a grey horse, shot through the
body, reeled and fell: the rider of it sank an instant,
then shook himself free and rose.
It was he—at last !
He knew me and I him, even in that mad moment.
I sprang upon him like a beast ; my sword was at
his throat; the Smoke was all around us; no one
saw ; he was disarmed and in my power.
My men shouted together, “En avant en avant ”
They thought they were victorious.
I heard, I remembered : he too fought for France.
I dared not slay him. I let him go.
“Afterwards ! afterwards !” I said in his ear. He
knew well what I meant.
He caught a loose charger that galloped snorting
160 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
by; he seized his fallen sabre; he swept onward with
his troops; I charged in line with my own men. With
the roar of the firing in my ear, and the shouts of our
fancied triumph, I pressed onward and downward into
the ranks of the enemy: then I dropped sense-
less.
When the surgeon found me at dawn the next day, I
had no wound on me.
For the victory—it had lived only in vanquished
soldiers' dreams, as all the victories of France have
lived in this bitter season.
I woke to consciousness and to remembrance, saying
again and again in my heart, “Afterwards! after-
Wards ! ”
The time soon came.
I saw him no more then. The Cuirassiers of Cor-
rêze passed eastward. Those whom I served sent me
into the capital. It was now the beginning of the new
year. -
There soon came to us that deadliest hour when all
we had done and endured received as recompense the
shame of the capitulation.
How long is it ago?—a day, a year?
I cannot tell. I was amongst those who held it a
crime, an outrage, a betrayal. I did not pretend to
have any knowledge, any statecraft, but I knew that,
A BRANCH or LILAC. 161
had I been a man in power there, sooner than sign the
Surrender I would have burned Paris as the Russians
did Moscow. .
There were many who thought as I did, but we were
not asked, were not counted. We had but to hold our
tongues, and stand quiet and see the Germans enter
Paris.
Then you know this other war came, the civil war.
I was in the capital still. It seemed to me that the
people were in the right. I cannot argue, but I think
SO still. They might go ill to work, unwisely perhaps,
but they asked nothing unreasonable, and they were
not at fault—in the comm encement, at least.
When the strife and carnage had ceased, I felt very
strange. I felt as men do who have been long in the
great roãr of a cataract, and who come Suddenly again
where all is quiet. The calm seems to daze them. So
the stillness bewildered me. ... -
I began to think that it had all been a dream, a
nightmare; only I remembered so well the look of his
eyes into mine when my steel was at his throat, and if
I dropped asleep a while I always awoke muttering,
“Afterwards afterwards!”
At this time I often went and looked at the house
where I had dwelt with her in Paris.
A shell had laid open the little rose-and-white room
* M.
162 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
under the roof; the front and back walls had been torn
away; I saw the day through them; some of the gild-
ing of the mirror still clung there.
Another shell had struck the little gay theatre where
I had played for the first and last time in Paris: it
was now a blank and smoking ruin. And it had been
such a little while ago l—Great Heaven
him.
I was dull and silent, and lived wholly to myself:
all the people I had known were slain or had perished
of want.
I made no new friends, I dwelt aloof. Nevertheless,
the day came when I had to choose sides: whilst one
lives at all on earth one cannot be a coward.
I chose the side of the people; I cast in my lot with
them ; I remained in Paris. They might be right,
they might be wrong—I do not say; I knew they were
my class, my kind, my brethren. I abided by their
election.
The world will always say they were wrong because
wrong in this—that they tried a mighty experiment
before the earth was ripe for it. It is fatal to be before
your time—always. -
But it was not because I thought them very right
*.
A BRANCH OF LIf,AC. 163
that I joined with them. I was no politician : I hardly
asked them what they meant. I cast in my lot with
theirs because I was of them, and because it would
have seemed to me a cowardice to desert them.
All that horrible season went by slowly, slowly. It
was but yesterday, you say: it seems a thousand years
ago.
I was cooped up in the city: it was much worse
than the first siege. I went out in many sorties. I
made no doubt he was at Versailles, and every day
that I arose and went into the air I said in my soul,
“There will be no need to spare him—now.’
On the bastions where the red flag was set, through
the smoke of the guns, I used to stand hour after hour,
and look across at the woods of Versailles, and think
to myself,
“If only we might meet once more—only once
more l’” -
For I was free now: his brethren fought against
mine. It was the thought that nerved my arm for the
Commune.
I think it was with many as with me; or something
like it. -
I remember in that ghastly time Seeing a woman put
dead. She fired with sure aim : her shot swept straight
164 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
into a knot of horsemen on the Neuilly road, and
emptied more than one saddle.
“You have a good sight,” I said to her.
She smiled.
“This winter,” she said slowly, “my children have
all died for want of food—one by one, the youngest
first. Ever since then I want to hurt something—
always. Do you understand 2 ”
I did understand: I do not know if you do. It is
just these things that make revolutions. -
This is only away from us by a day or so, you say?
It is strange : it seems to me half a lifetime.
It was a horrible season. The streets ran wine and
blood. The populace was drunk, and Savage in its
drunkenness. The palaces were pillaged, the churches
reeked with filth. I fought without the gates when I
could : when I could not, I shut myself in my garret,
so that I should not see or hear. So far as I had
sense to feel, my heart was sick for France.
One day, when I was going from the fortifications
through the by-streets to the place that sheltered me,
Ipassed through a street which had been almost utterly
destroyed by shell and fire. - -
The buildings were mere skeletons, the hearths and
homes mere heaps of calcined dust. The rafters, the
bricks, the iron girders, the rubble and the rubbish
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 165
had fallen pell-mell amidst the broken mirrors, the
shattered gilding, the SCOrched pictures: perhaps under
the mountains of cinders and of ruin the charred bodies
of the dwellers and the owners might be lying: no one
knew. - -
It was all desolate, dark, unutterably miserable.
Yet amidst it all there was one lovely living thing,
surrounded everywhere by devastation, but uncrushed,
unharmed, untouched. In what had once been a green
and cherished little garden there sprang upward a
young lilac-tree in full flower, fragrant, erect, wet with
sweet dews, covered with blossoms—alone amidst the
wreck.
For the first time since she had left me I fell on my
knees and hid my face in my hands, and wept—as
women Weep.
Soon after that the end came.
Baris was on fire in a thousand places. They slew
the hostages: they did strange and fearful things.
You have seen them more clearly than I. I was
in the midst of the Smoke, of the violence, of
the flames, of the bloodshed, of the ignorance, of the
ferocity : I was too close to it all to judge any of
it aright.
Evil had become their good; and yet in the beginning
of the time the people had not been to blame.
166 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
From the day they put the old priests to death I
would fight no more for the Commune.
But I knew that the Commune would fall, and so I
would not forsake them. I think many felt as I did—
detested the acts into which the people had plunged,
but would not forsake them on the edge of ruin.
I would not fight again for them, but neither would
I fight against them : I went forth into the streets
and stood and looked. . -
It seemed hell itself. The sky was black: every-
thing else was illumined by the fires.
The Versaillais were pouring in : I do not know how
many hours or days had gone. It seemed to me all
night—all one endless night that the endless flames
illumined. -
Little children ran past me with lighted brands in
their hands, which they flung into houses or cellars,
laughing all the while. Women, black with powder,
with their hair loose and their breasts bare, streamed
by me like furies, shrieking curses till the shot struck
them and they dropped upon the stones. -
From the windows, from the roofs, from the trees,
the people fired upon the soldiery: the soldiery raked
the streets with their fire in return, and stormed the
dwellings, and threw the dead bodies out of the case-
ments. The roads were wet everywhere with a tide
A BRANCH OF LILAC. I67
of blood, always rising higher and higher : the corpses
were strewn in all directions. Some lay in the aisles
of the churches, some on the steps of the high altars.
You know, you know: I need not tell it.
It will seem strange to you, but in all that horror
I thought of the lilac tree: I went and looked
for it. }* *
The street behind, the street before, were both
burning. In the little garden there had been a bitter
strife: the dead lay there in pools of blood by scores.
But the little lilac was still erect, its green boughs
and its sweet blossoms blowing in the wind.
There were some little birds that had their young
in a nest in the lilac boughs. They were uneasy;
they twittered and fluttered about amongst the leaves.
It was so dark they thought that it was night. But
the church chimes were tolling noon.
I sat down on a pile of timber that had crushed the
grasses at the roots of the tree. I sat still there and
waited. I could do nothing. I could not fight for
them: I would not fight against them.
Down the ruined, smoking street, as I sat thus,
there came a soldier hastily, with his sword drawn,
glancing hither and thither rapidly, as one who had
lost his way or missed his men. His dress was
splashed, torn, covered with dust, and here and there
l68 . . . A BRANCH OF LILAC.
with blood, but it was the dress of a soldier of rank.
As he came the glare of the fires in front shone full
on his face—his beautiful face: I knew it in an
instant. -
God had delivered him into my hands. So I said
in my soul, exultant. We always charge our crimes
upon God. - -
I sprang up and stood in his way.
“At last ! at last !” I cried to him. -
He wavered, paused and looked at me bewildered:
no doubt I was greatly changed, and in the
horrid scorching gloom he did not recognise my
features. -
I gave him no breathing-space, but drew my sword
and rushed on him. .
“Defend yourself!” I said in his ear ere I touched
him. We would fight until death—that I swore in my
heart—but we would fight fairly, man to man.
When I spoke he knew me. He was a brave man
and loyal. He raised no shout to rally his comrades.
He took my challenge as I gave it. He threw himself
in a second into position.
“I am ready,” he said, simply.
We were all alone. The fire was around us on all
sides. The dead alone were our spectators. The
little lilac tree waved in the wind.
A BRANCH OF LILAC. 169
Our Swords crossed a score of times swift as the
lightning; then, in a moment as it seemed, he fell
forward on my blade : his body drooped and doubled
like a broken bough.
The steel had passed through his breast-bone. I
had my vengeance. -
It was a fair fight, man to man.
He looked up at me as he sank down dying on the
stones.
A strange shadowy Smile flickered over his mouth.
“You were revenged—before,” he said slowly, each
word drawn feebly with his breath. “Did you not
know 2. She betrayed me last autumn to the
Prussians; she had a lover amongst them greater
than I.”
A rush of blood choked his voice: he lay silent,
leaning upon One hand. The flames shone upon his
face, the smoke drove over us, the little lilac tree blew
in the breeze, the birds murmured to their young
O]16S.
Then all at once the street grew full of men. They
were his own soldiery. They rushed on me to avenge
his death. With the last effort of life in him he raised
himself, and signed them back.
“Do not touch him,” he cried aloud to them. “It
was I who injured him : I fall in fair fight °
170 A BRANCH OF LILAC.
Eyen as he spoke a shudder shook him, and he
died.
His head was on the stones; his hair was soaked
with the blood that had already been shed there; a
grey pallop stole over his face; and yet even then he
was still beautiful. - º
The lilac blossoms, loosened by the driving wind
and by the fire's heat, fell softly on him, one by one,
like tears. f -
I did not stir; I stood there looking down at him.
My hate of him had died away with his young life:
I only pitied him with an intense passion of pity.
We both perished for a thing so vile.
His comrades and men heeded nothing of his words;
they arrested me as they would have done a common
felon. I did not attempt to resist them. I had
broken my sword and cast it down by his body: its
end was accomplished, its fate was fulfilled: I had no
further use for it.
They have brought me hither ; they have given me
a full trial, so they say, and to-morrow they will kill
Ime. - -- *
What is the éharge against me? That I, a soldier
of the Commune, slew a soldier of Versailles. It is
enough, more than enough, in these days. I say no-
thing. I am glad there should be an end. ;
A BRANCH OF LILAC. ' 171
If you ask any grace for me, ask only this—that the
men who fire on me shall not be the same men by
whose side I fought so long for France.
And when they throw my body in the ditch—see
here !—let them bury this branch of lilac with me.
It is of no value—it is dead.

A PROWENCE ROSE.
–3–
I.
WAS a Provence rose.
A little slender rose, with leaves of
shining green and blossoms of purest white
—a little fragile thing, but fair, they said,
growing in the casement in a chamber in a street.
I remember my birth-country well. A great wild
garden, where roses grew together by millions and
tens of millions, all tossing our bright heads in the
light of a southern Sun on the edge of an old, old city—
old as Rome—whose ruins were clothed with the wild
fig-tree, and the Scarlet blossom of the climbing
creepers growing tall and free in our glad air of
France.
I remember how the ruined aqueduct went like a
dark shadow straight across the plains; how the green
and golden lizards crept in and out and about amongst

A PROVENCE ROSE. 173
the grasses; how the cicala sang her song in the moist
Sultry eves; how the women from the wells came
trooping by, stately as monarchs, with their water-jars
upon their heads; how the hot hush of the burning
Inoons would fall, and all things droop and sleep except
ourselves; how swift amongst us would dart the little
blue-winged birds, and hide their heads in our white
breasts and drink from our hearts the dew, and then
hover above us in their gratitude, with sweet faint
music of their wings, till Sunset came.
I remember But what is the use ? I am only
a rose ; a thing born for a day, to bloom and be
gathered, and die. So you say: you must know. God
gave you all created things for your pleasure and use.
So you say.
There my birth was ; there I lived—in the wide
south, with its strong, quivering light, its radiant
skies, its purple plains, its fruits of gourd and
vine. I was young; I was happy; I lived : it was
enough."
One day a rough hand tore me from my parent stem
and took me, bleeding and drooping, from my birth-
place, with a thousand other captives of my kind.
They bound a score of us up together, and made us a
cruel Substitute for Our cool, glad garden-home with
poor leaves, all wet from their own tears, and
174 A PROVENCE ROSE.
mosses torn as we were from their birth-nests under
the great cedars that rose against the radiant native
skies. t
Then we were shut in darkness for I know not how
long a space; and when we saw the light of day again
we were lying with our dear dead friends, the leaves,
with many flowers of various kinds, and foliage and
ferns and shrubs and creeping plants, in a place quite
strange to us—a place filled with other roses and with
all things that bloom and bear in the rich days of
midsummer; a place which I heard them call the
market of the Madeleine. And when I heard that
name I knew that I was in Paris.
For many a time, when the dread hand of the reaper
had descended upon us, and we had beheld our fairest
and most fragrant relatives borne away from us to
death, a shiver that was not of the wind had run
through all our boughs and blossoms, and all the
roses had murmured in sadness and in terror, “Better
the worm or the drought, the blight or the fly, the
whirlwind that scatters us as chaff, or the waterspout
that levels our proudest with the earth—better any of
these than the long-lingering death by famine and
faintness and thirst that awaits every flower which
goes to the Madeleine.”
It was an honour, no doubt, to be so chosen. A
A PROVENCE ROSE. 175,
rose was the purest, the sweetest, the haughtiest of
t all her sisterhood ere she went thither. But, though
honour is well, no doubt, yet it surely is better to
blow free in the breeze and to live one's life out, and
to be, if forgotten by glory, yet also forgotten by pain.
Nay, yet: I have known a rose, even a rose who had
but one little short life of a summer day to live
through and to lose, perish glad and triumphant in its
prime because it died on a woman's breast and of a
woman's kiss. You see there are roses as weak as
men are.
I awoke, I say, from my misery and my long night
of travel, with my kindred beside me in exile, on a
flower-stall of the Madeleine.
It was noon—the pretty place was full of people; it
was June, and the day was brilliant. A woman of
Picardy sat with us on the board before her—a woman
with blue eyes and ear-rings of silver, who bound us
together in fifties and hundreds into those sad gather-
ings of our pale ghosts, which in your human language
you have called “bouquets.” *
The loveliest and greatest amongst us suffered de-
capitation, as your Marie Stuarts and Marie Antoinettes
did, and died at once to have their beautiful bright
heads impaled—a thing of death, a mere mockery of a
flower—on slender spears of wire.
176 A PROVENCE ROSE.
I, a little white and fragile thing, and very young,
was in no way eminent enough amongst my kind to
find that martyrdom which as surely awaits the love-
liest of our roses as it awaits the highest fame of your
humanity. -
I was bound up amongst a score of others with
ropes of gardener's bass to chain me amidst my fellow-
prisoners, and handed over by my jailer with the silver
ear-rings to a youth who paid for us with a piece of
gold—whether of great or little value I know not
now. None of my own roses were with me: all were
strangers. You never think, of course, that a little
rose can care for its birth-place or its kindred; but
you err. -
O fool! Shall we not care for one another ?—we
who have so divine a life in common, who together
sleep beneath the stars, and together sport in the
summer wind, and together listen to the daybreak
singing of the birds, whilst the world is dark and deaf
in slumber—we who know that we are all of heaven
that God, when He called away His angels, bade them
leave on the sin-stained, weary, sickly earth to now
and then make man remember Him
You err. We love one another well; and if we may
not live in union, we crave at least in union to droop
and die. It is seldom that we have this boon. Wild
A PROVENCE ROSE. 177
flowers can live and die together; so can the poor
amongst you; but we of the cultivated garden needs
must part and die alone. - \
All the captives with me were strangers; haughty,
scentless pelargoniums; gardenias, arrogant even in
their woe ; a knot of little humble forget-me-nots,
ashamed in the grand company of patrician prisoners;
a stephanotis, virginal and pure, whose dying breath
was peace and sweetness; and many sprays of myrtle
born in Rome, whose classic leaves wailed Tasso's
lamentation as they went.
I must have been more loosely fettered than the rest
were, for in the rough swift motion of the youth who
bore us my bonds gave way, and I fell through the
silver transparency of our prison-house, and dropped
stunned upon the stone pavement of a street.
There I lay long, half senseless, praying, as far as
I had consciousness, that some pitying wind would rise
and waft me on his wings away to some shadow, some
rest, some fresh, cool place of silence.
I was tortured with thirst ; I was choked with dust;
I was parched with heat. -
The sky was as brass, the stones as red-hot metal;
the sun scorched like flame on the glare of the staring
walls; the heavy feet of the hurrying crowd tramped
past me black and ponderous: with every step I
- N
178 A PROVENCE ROSE.
thought my death would come under the crushing
weight of those clanging heels. -
It was five seconds, five hours—which I know
not. The torture was too horrible to be measured by
time.
I must have been already dead, or at the very gasp
of death, when a cool soft touch was laid on me: I
was gently lifted, raised to tender lips, and fanned
with a gentle cooling breath—breath from the lips
that had kissed me. -
A young girl had found and rescued me—a girl
of the people, poor enough to deem a trampled
flower a treasure-trove. -
She carried me very gently, carefully veiling me
from sun and dust as we went ; and when I recovered
perception I was floating in a porcelain bath on the
surface of cool fresh water, from which I drank
eagerly as soon as my sickly sense of faintness
passed away.
My bath stood on the lattice-sill of a small chamber;
it was, I knew afterward, but a white pan of common
earthenware, such as you buy for two sous and put in
your birdcages. But no bath of ivory and pearl and
silver was ever more refreshing to imperial or patrician
limbs than was that little clean and snowy pattypan
to me. -
A PROVENCE ROSE. 179
TJnder its reviving influences I became able to lift
my head and raise my leaves and spread myself to the
Sunlight, and look round me.
The chamber was in the roof, high above the traffic
of the passage-way beneath; it was very poor, very
simple, furnished with few and homely things. True,
to all our nation of flowers it mattered little, when
we are borne into captivity, whether the prison-house
which receives us be palace or garret.
Not to us can it signify whether we perish in Sèvres
vase of royal blue, or in kitchen pipkin of brown ware.
Your lordliest halls can seem but dark, pent, noisome
dungeons to creatures born to live on the wide plain,
by the sunlit meadow, in the hedgerow, or the forest,
or the green, leafy garden-Way ; tossing always in the
joyous winds, and looking always upward in the open.
sky.
But it is of little use to dwell on this. You think
that flowers, like animals, were Only created to be
used and abused by you, and that we, like your horse
and dog, should be grateful when you honour us by
slaughter or starvation at your hands.
To be brief, this room was very humble, a mere
attic, with One Smaller still opening from it; but I
scarcely thought of its size or aspect. I looked at
nothing but the woman who had saved me.
R 2
| S0 A PROVENCE ROSE.
She was quite young ; not very beautiful, perhaps,
except for wonderful soft azure eyes and a mouth
smiling and glad, with lovely curves to the lips, and
hair dark as a raven's wing, which was braided and
bound close to her head. She was clad very poorly,
yet with an exquisite neatness and even grace; for
she was of the people, no doubt, but of the people of
France. Her voice was very melodious; she had a
silver cross on her bosom ; and though her face was
pale, it had health.
She was my friend, I felt sure. Yes, even when she
held me and pierced me with steel, and murmured
Over me, L-
“They say roses are so hard to rear thus, and you
are such a little thing; but do grow to a tree and live
with me. Surely you can, if you try.”
She had wounded me sharply and thrust me into a
tomb of baked red clay filled with black and heavy
mould. But I knew that I was pierced to the heart
that I might—though only a little offshoot gathered
to die in a day—strike root of my own and be strong,
and carry a crown of fresh blossoms.
For she but dealt with me as your world deals with
you, when your heart aches and your brain burns, and
Fate stabs you, and says in your ear, “O fool! to be
great you must suffer.”
A PROVENCE ROSE. IS]
You to your fate are thankless, being human; but
I, a rose, was not.
I tried to feel not utterly wretched in that little dull
clay cell: I tried to forget my sweet glad southern
birth-place, and not to sicken and swoon in the
noxious gases of the city air.
I did my best not to shudder in the vapour of the
Stove, and not to grow pale in the clammy heats of the
Street, and not to die of useless lamentation for all
that I had lost—for the noble tawny sunsets, and the
Sapphire blue skies, and the winds all fragrant with
the almond-tree flowers, and the sunlight in which the
yellow orioles flashed like gold.
I did my best to be content and show my gratitude
all through a parching autumn and a hateful winter;
and with the spring a wandering wind came and wooed
me with low, amorous whispers—came from the south,
he said; and I learned that, even in exile in an attic
window, love may find us out and make for us a
country and a home. -
So I lived and grew and was happy there, against the
small dim garret panes, and my lover from the south
came, still faithful, year by year; and all the voices
round me said that I was fair—pale indeed, and fragile
of strength, as a creature torn from its own land and
all its friends must be ; but contented and glad, and
T82 A PROVENCE ROSE.
grateful to the God who made me, because I had not
lived in vain, but often saw sad eyes, half blinded with
toil and tears, smile at me when they had no other
cause for smiles.
“It is bitter to be mewed in a city,” said Once to
me an old old vine who had been thrust into the
stones below and had climbed the house wall, heaven
knew how, and had lived for half a century jammed
between buildings, catching a gleam of Sunshine on
his dusty leaves once perhaps in a whole summer. “It
is bitter for us. I would rather have had the axe at
my root and been burned. But perhaps without us
the poorest of people would never remember the look
of the fields. When they see a green leaf they laugh
a little, and then weep—some of them. We, the trees
and the flowers, live in the cities as those souls amongst
them whom they call their poets live in the world—
exiled from heaven that by them the world may now
and then bethink itself of God.”
And I believe that the vine spoke truly. Surely,
he who plants a green tree in a city way plants a
thought of God in many a human heart arid with the
dust of travail and clogged with the greeds of gold.
So, with my lover the wind and my neighbour the
vine, I was content and patient, and gave many hours
of pleasure to many hard lives, and brought forth
A PTOWENCE ROSE. 183
many a blossom of sweetness in that little nook under
the roof. - -
Had my brothers and sisters done better, I wonder,
living in gilded balconies or dying in jewelled hands?
I cannot say: I can only tell of myself.
The attic in which I found it my fate to dwell was
very high in the air, set in one of the peaked roofs of
the quarter of the Luxembourg, in a very narrow
street, populous and full of noise, in which people of
all classes, except the rich, were to be found—in a
medley of artists, students, fruit-sellers, workers in
bronze and ivory, seamstresses, obscure actresses, and
all the creators, male and female, of the thousand and
one airy arts of elegant nothingness which a world of
pleasure demands as imperatively as a world of labour
demands its bread.
It would have been a street horrible and hideous in
any city save Florence or Paris; in Florence it would
have been saved by colour and antiquity—in Paris it
was saved by colour and grace. Just a flash of a
bright drapery, just a gleam of a gay hue, just some
tender pink head of a hydrangea, just some quaint
curl of some gilded woodwork, just the green glimmer
of my friend the vine, just the snowy sparkle of his
neighbour the water-spout.-just these, so little and
yet so much, made the crooked passage a bearable
184 A PROVENCE ROSE.
home, and gave it a kinship with the glimpse of the
blue sky above its pent roofs. - . .
O wise and true wisdom to redeem poverty with
the charms of outline and of colour, with the green
bough and the song of running water, and the artistic
harmony which is as possible to the rough-hewn pine-
wood as in the polished ebony. “It is of no use /’’
you cry. O fools which gives you perfume—we, the
roses, whose rich hues and matchless grace no human
artist can imitate, or the rose-trémière, which mocks
us, standing stiff and gaudy and scentless and
erect 2 . . .
Grace and pure colour and cleanliness are the
divinities that redeem the foulness and the ignorance
and the slavery of your crushed coarse lives when you
have sight enough to see that they are divine. But
that is so seldom—so seldom.
In my little attic, in whose window I have passed
my life, they were known gods and honoured; so that,
despite the stovepipe and the poverty, and the little
ill-smelling candle, and the close staircase without,
with the rancid oil in its lamps and its foetid faint
odours, and the refuse, and the gutters, and the gas in
the street below, it was possible for me, though a rose
of Provence and a rose of the open air freeborn, to
draw my breath in it and to bear my blossoms, and to
A PROVENCE ROSE. 185.
smile when my lover the wind roused me from sleep
with each spring, and said in my ear, “Arise ! for a
new year is come.”
Now, to greet a new year with a smile, and not a
sigh, one must be tranquil, at least, if not happy.
Well, I and the lattice, and a few homely plants of
saxifrage and musk and balsam who bloomed there
with me, and a canary who hung in a cage amongst
us, and a rustic creeper who clung to a few strands of
strained string and climbed to the roof and there
talked all day to the pigeons,—we all belonged to the
- girl with the candid sweet eyes, and by name she was
called Lili Kerrouel, and for her bread she gilded and
coloured those little cheap boxes for sweetmeats that
they sell in the wooden booths at the fairs on the
boulevards, while the mirlitons whirl in their giddy
go-rounds and the merry horns of the charlatans chal-
lenge the populace.
She was a girl of the people: she could read, but I
doubt if she could write. She had been born of
peasant parents in a Breton hamlet, and they had
come to Paris to seek work, and had found it for a
while and prospered; and then had fallen sick and
lost it, and struggled for a while, and then died,
running the common course of So many lives amongst
you. They had left Lili alone at sixteen, or rather
186 - A PROWENCE ROSE.
worse than alone—with an old grandam, deaf and
quite blind, who could do nothing for her own support,
but sat all day in a wicker chair by the lattice or the
stove, according as the season was hot or cold, and
mumbled a little inarticulately over her worn wooden
beads.
Her employers allowed Lili to bring these boxes to
decorate at home, and she painted at them almost
from dawn to night. She swept, she washed, she
stewed, she fried, she dusted; she did all the house-
work of her two little rooms; she tended the old
woman in all ways; and she did all these things with
such cleanliness and deftness that the attics were
wholesome as a palace; and though her pay was very
small, she yet found means and time to have her linen
spotless, and make her pots and pans shine like silver
and gold, and to give a grace to all the place, with the
song of a happy bird and the fragrance of flowers that
blossomed their best and their sweetest for her sake,
when they would fain have withered to the root and
died in their vain longing for the pure breath of the
fields and the cool of a green woodland world. ef
It was a little, simple, hard life, no doubt—a life
one would have said scarce worth all the trouble it
took to get bread enough to keep it going. A hard
life, colouring always the same eternal little prints all
A PROVENCE ROSE. 187
day long, no matter how sweet the Summer day might
be, or how hot the tired eyes.
A hard life, with all the wondrous, glorious,
wasteful, splendid life of the beautiful city around it
in so terrible a contrast ; with the roll of the car-
riages day and night on the stones beneath, and the
pattering of the innumerable feet below, all hurrying
to some pleasure, and every moment some burst of
music or some chime of bells or some ripple of
laughter on the air. -
A hard life, sitting by one's self in a little dusky
garret in the roof, and straining one's sight for two
sous an hour, and listening to an old woman's childish
mutterings and reproaches, and having always to
shake the head in refusal of the neighbour's invita-
tions to a day in the woods or a sail on the river. A
hard life, no doubt, when one is young and a woman,
and has soft shining eyes and a red curling mouth.
And yet Lili was content.
Content, because she was a French girl; because
she had always been poor, and thought two sous an
hour, riches; because she loved the helpless old crea-
ture whose senses had all died while her body lived
on ; because she was an artist at heart, and Saw beau-
tiful things round her even when she scoured her
brasses and washed down her bare floor.
1SS A PROVENCE ROSE.
Content, because with it all she managed to gather
a certain “sweetness and light” into her youth of toil;
and when she could give herself a few hours’ holiday,
and could go beyond the barriers, and roam a little in
the wooded places, and come home with a knot of
primroses or a plume of lilac in her hands, she was
glad and grateful as though she had been given gold
and gems.
Ah! In the lives of you who have wealth and
leisure we, the flowers, are but one thing among
many: we have a thousand rivals in your porcelains,
your jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mo-
saics, all your treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy.
But in the lives of the poor we are alone : we are all
the art, all the treasure, all the grace, all the beauty
of outline, all the purity of hue that they possess: often
we are all their innocence and all their religion too.
Why do you not set yourselves to make us more
abundant in those joyless homes, in those sunless
windows 2
Now, this street of hers was very narrow ; it was
full of old houses, that nodded their heads close to-
gether as they talked, like your old crones over their
fireside gossip. -
I could, from my place in the window, see right
into the opposite garret window. It had nothing of
A PROVIENCE ROSE. 189
my floral nation in it, save a poor colourless stone-
wort, who got a dismal living in the gutter of the roof,
yet who too, in his humble way, did good and had his
friends, and paid the sun and the dew for calling him
into being. -
For on that rainpipe the little dusty thirsty sparrows
would rest and bathe and plume themselves, and bury
their beaks in the pale stone-crop, and twitter with
one another joyfully, and make believe that they were
in some green and amber meadow in the country in
the cowslip time. -
I did not care much for the stone-crop or the
sparrows; but in the third summer of my captivity
there with Lili the garret casement opposite stood
always open, as ours did, and I could watch its tenant
night and day as I chose.
He had an interest for me.
|He was handsome, and about thirty years old; with
a sad and noble face, and dark eyes full of dreams,
and cheeks terribly hollow, and clothes terribly thread-
bare.
He thought no eyes were on him when my lattice
looked dark, for his garret, like ours, was so high that
no glance from the street ever went to it. Indeed,
when does a crowd ever pause to look at a garret,
unless by chance a man have hanged himself out of its
190 A PROVENCE ROSE.
window 2 That in thousands of garrets men may be
dying by inches for lack of bread, lack of hope, lack
of justice, is not enough to draw any eyes upward to
them from the pavement. -
He thought himself unseen, and I watched him
many a long hour of the Summer night when I sighed
at my square open pane in the hot, Sulphurous mists
of the street, and tried to see the stars and could not.
For, between me and the one small breadth of sky
which alone the innumerable roofs left visible, a vintner
had hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as a sign
on his roof-tree ; and the crown, with its sham gold
turning black in the shadow, hung between me and
the planets.
I knew that there must be many human souls in a
like plight with myself, with the light of heaven blocked
from them by a gilded tyranny, and yet T sighed, and
sighed, and sighed, thinking of the white pure stars
of Provence throbbing in the violet skies. - -
A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see: neither
rose nor poet will be comforted, and be content to
dwell in darkness because a crown of tinsel swings on
high.
A TROWENCE ROSE. T91
II.
tº ELL, not seeing the stars as I strove to do,
I took refuge in sorrow for my neighbour.
It is well for your poet when he turns to
a like resource. Too often I hear he takes,
instead, to the wine cellar which yawns under the
crown that he curses.
My neighbour, I soon saw, was poorer even than we
were. He was a painter, and he painted beautiful
things. But his canvases and the necessaries of his
art were nearly all that his empty attic had in it ; and
when, after working many hours with a wretched
glimmer of oil, he would come to his lattice and lean
out, and try as I had tried to see the stars, and fail as
I had failed, I saw that he was haggard, pallid, and
weary unto death with two dire diseases—hunger and
ambition.
He could not see the stars because of the crown,
but in time, in those long midsummer nights, he came
to see a little glow-worm amongst my blossoms, which
in a manner, perhaps, did nearly as well.
He came to notice Lili at her work.
Often she had to sit up half the night to get enough

192. - A PROVENCE Rose.
colouring done to make up the due amount of labour ;
and she sat at her little deal table, with her little feeble
lamp, with her beautiful hair coiled up in a great knot
and her pretty head drooping so wearily—as we do in
the long days of drought—but never once looking off,
nor giving way to rebellion or fatigue, though from the
whole city without there came one ceaseless sound,
like the sound of an endless sea; which truly it was—
the sea of pleasure.
Not for want of coaxings, not for want of tempters,
various and subtle, and dangers often and perilously
sweet, did Lili sit there in her solitude earning two
sous an hour with straining sight and aching nerves
that the old paralytic creature within might have bed
and board without alms. -
Lili had been sore beset in a thousand ways, for she
was very fair to see; but she was proud and she was -
innocent, and she kept her courage and her honour;
yea, though you smile—though she dwelt under an
attic roof, and that roof a roof of Paris.
My neighbour, in the old gabled window over the
way, leaning above his stone-wort, saw her one night
thus at work by her lamp, with the silver ear-rings,
that were her sole heirloom and her sole wealth,
drooped against the soft hues and curves of her grace-
ful throat. -
A PROVENCE ROSE. 193.
And when he had looked once, he looked every
night, and found her there ; and I, who could see
straight into his chamber, saw that he went and made
a picture of it all—of me, and the bird in the cage,
and the little old dusky lamp, and Lili with her silver
ear-rings and her pretty drooping head.
Every day he worked at the picture, and every night
he put his light out and came and sat in the dark
square of his lattice, and gazed across the street through
my leaves and my blossoms at my mistress. Lili
knew nothing of this watch which he kept on her : she
had put up a little blind of white network, and she
fancied that it kept out every eye when it was up ; and
often she took even that away, because she had not
the heart to deprive me of the few faint breezes which
the sultry weather gave us.
She never saw him in his dark hole in the old gable
there, and I never betrayed him—not I. Roses have
been the flowers of silence ever since the world began.
Are we not the flowers of love 2
“Who is he 2 " I asked of my gossip the vine. The
vine had lived fifty years in the street, and knew the
stories and sorrows of all the human bees in the
hive.
“He is called René Claude,” said the vine. “He
is a man of genius. He is very poor.”
\ . O
194 A PROVENCE ROSE.
“You use synonyms,” murmured the old balsam
who heard. -
“He is an artist,” the vine continued. “He is
young. He comes from the south. His people are
guides in the Pyrenees. He is a dreamer of dreams.
He has taught himself many things. He has eloquence
too. There is a little club at the back of the house
which I climb over. I throw a tendril or two in at the
crevices and listen. The shutters are closed. It is
forbidden by law for men to meet so. The René
speaks by the hour, superbly. Such a rush of words,
such a glance, such a voice, like the roll of musketry
in anger, like the sigh of music in sadness | Though
I am old, it makes the little sap there is left in me
thrill and grow warm. He paints beautiful things too;
so the two swallows say who build under his eaves;
but I suppose it is not of much use: no one believes
in him, and he almost starves. He is young yet, and
feels the strength in him, and still strives to do great
things for the world that does not care a jot whether
he lives or dies. He will go on so a little longer.
Then he will end like me. I used to try and bring
forth the best grapes I could, though they had shut
me away from any sun to ripen them and any dews to
cleanse the dust from them. But no one cared. No
one gave me a drop of water to still my thirst, nor.
A PROVENCE RosB. 195
pushed away a brick to give me a ray more of light.
So I ceased to try and produce for their good; and I
only took just so much trouble as would keep life in
me myself. It will be the same with this man.”
I, being young and a rose, the flower loved of the
poets, thought the vine was a cynic, as many of you
human creatures grow to be in the years of your age
when the leaves of your life fall sere. w
Iwatched René long and often. He was handsome,
he suffered much ; and when the night was far spent
he would come to his hole in the gable and gaze with
tender, dreaming eyes, through my pale foliage at the
face of Lili. I grew to care for him, and I disbelieved
the prophecy of the vine; and I promised myself that
one summer or another, near or far, the swallows, when
they came from the tawny African world to build in the
eaves of the city, would find their old friend flown and
living no more in a garret, but in some art-palace where
men knew his fame.
So I dreamed—I, a little white rose, exiled in the
passage of a city, seeing the pale moonlight reflected
on the gray walls and the dark windows, and trying to
cheat myself by a thousand fancies into the faith that
I once more blossomed in the old Sweet leafy garden-
ways in Provence.
One night—the hottest night of the year—Lili came
- O 2
196 A PROVENCE ROSE.
to my side by the open lattice. It was very late: her
work was done for the night. She stood a moment,
with her lips rested softly on me, looking down on the
pavement that glistened like silver in the sleeping rays
of the moon. *
For the first time she saw the painter René watching
her from his niche in the gable, with eyes that glowed
and yet were dim.
I think women foresee with certain prescience when
they will be loved. She drew the lattice quickly to,
and blew the lamp out: she kissed me in the darkness.
Because her heart was glad or sorry? Both, per-
haps. -
Love makes one selfish. For the first time she left
my lattice closed all through the oppressive hours
until daybreak. -
“Whenever a woman sees anything out of her win-
dow that makes her eager to look again, she always
shuts the shutter. Why, I wonder ?” said the balsam
to me.
“That she may peep unsuspected through a chink,”
said the vine round the corner, who could overhear.
It was profane of the vine, and in regard to Lili
untrue. She did not know very well, I dare say, why
she withdrew herself on that sudden impulse, as the
pimpernel shuts itself up at the touch of a raindrop.
A PROVENCE ROSE. . Y 97
But she did not stay to look through a crevice ; she
went straight to her little narrow bed, and told her
beads and prayed, and slept till the cock crew in a
stable near and the summer daybreak came.
She might have been in a chamber all mirror and
velvet, and azure and gold in any one of the ten
thousand places of pleasure, and been leaning over
gilded balconies under the lime leaves, tossing up
little paper balloons in the air for gay wagers of love
and wine and jewels. Pleasure had asked her more
than once to come down from her attic and go with its
crowds; for she was fair of feature and lithe of limb,
though only a work-girl of Paris. And she would
Inot, but slept here under the eaves, as the swallows
did.
“We have not sun enough, little rose, you and I,”
she would say to me with a smile and a sigh. “But
it is better to be a little pale, and live a little in the
dark, and be a little cramped in a garret window,
than to live grand in the Sun for a moment, and the
next to be tossed away in a gutter. • And one can be
so happy anyhow—almost anyhow !—when one is
young. If I could only see a very little piece more of
the sky, and get every Sunday out to the dear woods,
and live one floor lower, so that the winters were not
quite so cold, and the summers not quite so hot, and
198 A PROVENCE ROSE.
find a little more time to go to mass in the cathedral,
and be able to buy a pretty blue-and-white home of
porcelain for you, I should ask nothing more of the
blessed Mary—nothing more upon earth.” •-
She had had the same simple bead-roll of innocent
wishes ever since the first hour that she had raised
me from the dust of the street; and it would, I doubt
not, have remained her only one all the years of her
life, till she should have glided down into a serene and
cheerful old age of poverty and labour under that very
same roof, without the blessed Mary ever deigning to
hearken or answer. Would have done so if the painter
René could have seen the stars, and so had not been
driven to look instead at the glowworm of her lamp
as it was shining through my leaves.
But after that night on which she shut-to the lattice
so suddenly, I think the bead-roll of her pure
desires lengthened—lengthened, though for some time
the addition to it was written on her heart in a mys-
tical language which she did not try to translate even
to herself—I suppose fearing its meaning.
René made approaches to his neighbour's friendship
soon after that night. He was but an art-student, the
son of a poor mountaineer, and with scarce a thing
he could call his own except an easel of deal, a few
plaster casts, and a bed of straw. She was but a
A PROVENCE ROSE. 199
working-girl, born of Breton peasants, and owning as
her sole treasures two silver ear-rings, and a white
I’OSé. -
But for all that, no courtship could have been more
reverential on the one side, or fuller of modest grace
on the other, if the scene of it had been a palace of
princes or a château of the nobles.
He spoke very little.
The vine had said that at the club round the corner
he was very eloquent, with all the impassioned and
fierce eloquence common to men of the South. But
with Lili he was almost mute. The vine, who knew
human nature well—as vines always do, since their
juices unlock the secret thoughts of men and bring to
daylight their darkest passions—the vine said that
such silence, in one by nature eloquent, showed the
force of his love and its delicacy.
This may be so; I hardly know. My lover the
wind, when he is amorous, is loud, but then it is true
his loves are not often very constant.
René chiefly wooed her by gentle service. He
brought her little lovely wild flowers, for which he
ransacked the woods of St. Germain's and Meudon.
He carried the billets of her fire-wood up the seven
long, twisting, dirty flights of stairs. He fought for
her with the wicked old porteress at the door down
200 A PROVENCE ROSE.
stairs. He played to her in the grey of the evening
on a quaint simple flute, a relic of his boyhood, the
sad, wild, touching airs of his own southern moun-
tains—played at his open window while the lamps
burned through the dusk, till the people listened at
their doors and casements, and gathered in groups in
the passage below, and said to one another, “How
clever he is –and yet he starves.”
He did starve very often, or at least he had to
teach himself to keep down hunger with a morsel of
black chaff-bread and a stray roll of tobacco. And
yet I could see that he had become happy.
Lili never asked him within her door. ... All the
words they exchanged were from their open lattices,
with the space of the roadway between them.
I heard every syllable they spoke, and they were on
the one side most innocent, and on the other most
reverential. Ay, though you may not believe it—you
who know the people of Paris from the travesties of
theatres and the slanders of salons.
And all this time secretly he worked on at her
portrait. He worked out of my sight and hers, in
the inner part of his garret, but the swallows saw
and told me.
There are never any secrets between birds and
flowers. * -
A PROVENCE ROSE. 20]
We used to live in Paradise together, and we love
one another as exiles do ; and we hold in our cups the
raindrops to slake the thirst of the birds, and the
birds in return bring to us from many lands and over
many waters tidings of those lost ones who have been
torn from us to strike the roots of our race in far-off
soils and under distant suns.
Late in the summer of the year, one wonderful fête-
day, Lili did for once get out to the woods, the old
kindly green woods of Vincennes.
A neighbour on a lower floor, a woman who made
poor scentless, senseless, miserable imitations of all
my race in paper, sat with the old bedridden grand-
mother while Lili took her holiday—so rare in her
life, though she was one of the motes in the bright
champagne of the dancing air of Paris. I missed her
solely on each of those few sparse days of her absence,
but for her I rejoiced.
“Je reste : twº t'en vas,” says the rose to the
butterfly in the poem; and I said so in my thoughts
to her.
She went to the broad level grass, to the golden
fields of the sunshine, to the sound of the bees mur-
muring over the wild purple thyme, to the sight of
the great snowy clouds slowly sailing over the sweet
blue freedom of heaven—to all the things of my birth-
202 A PROVENCE ROSE.
right and my deathless remembrance—all that no
Woman can love as a rose can love them.
But I was not jealous; nay, not though she had
Cramped me in a little earth-bound cell of clay. I
envied wistfully indeed, as I envied the swallows their
wings which cleft the air, asking no man’s leave for
their liberty. But I would not have maimed a
Swallow's pinion had I had the power, and I would
Inot have abridged an hour of Lili's freedom. Flowers
are like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and,
like all lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.
We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasury
of fragrance, at the feet of the one we love; and then,
having spent ourselves in that too abundant sacrifice,
you cry, “A yellow, faded thing !—to the dust-hole
with, it !” and root us up violently and fling us to
rot with the refuse and offal; not remembering the
days when our burden of beauty made sunlight in your
darkest places, and brought the odours of a lost para-
dise to breathe over your bed of fever.
Well, there is one consolation. Just so likewise do
you deal with your human wonder-flower of genius.
Tili went for her day in the green midsummer world
—she and a little blithe, happy-hearted group of young
work-people—and I stayed in the garret-window, hot
and thirsty, and drooping and pale, choked by the
A PROWENCE ROSE. 203
dust that drifted up from the pavement, and hearing
Hittle all day long save the quarrels of the sparrows
and the whirr of the engine-wheels in a baking-house
close at hand.
For it was some great day or other, when all Paris
was out 6m fěte, and everyone was away from his or
her home, except such people as the old bedridden
Woman and the cripple who watched her. So, at least,
the white roof-pigeons told me, who flew where they
listed, and saw the whole splendid city beneath them
—saw all its glistening of arms and its sheen of palace
roofs, all its gilded domes and its white wide squares,
all its crowds, many-hued as a field of tulips, and all
its flashing eagles, golden as the Sun.
When I had been alone two hours, and whilst the
old building was silent and empty, there came across
the street from his own dwelling-place, the artist
Bené, with a parcel beneath his arm.
He came up the stairs with a light and noiseless step,
and pushed open the door of our attic. He paused
on the threshold a moment with the sort of reverent
hushed look on his face that I had seen on the faces
of one or two Swarthy, bearded, Scarred soldiers as
they paused before the shrine at the door of the little
chapel which stood in my sight on the other side of
our street.
204 A PROWENCE ROSE.
Then he entered, placed the thing which he carried
on a wooden chair fronting the light, uncovered it,
and went quietly out again without the women in the
inner closet hearing him.
What he had brought was the canvas I had seen
grow under his hand, the painting of me and the
lamp and Lili. I do not doubt how he had done it :
it was surely the little attic window, homely and true
in likeness, and yet he had glorified us all, and so
framed in my leaves and my white flowers, the low
oil flame, and the fair head of my mistress, that there
was that in the little picture which made me tremble
and yet be glad.
On a slender slip of paper attached to it there was
written “Il n'y a pas de nuit sans étoile.”
Of him I saw no more. The picture kept me silent
company all that day.
At evening Lili came. It was late. She brought
with her a cool perfume of dewy mosses and fresh
leaves, and strawberry plants—sweet as honey. She
came in with a dark dreamy brilliance in her eyes,
and long coils of foliage in her hands.
She brought to the canary chickweed and a leaf of
lettuce. She kissed me and laid wet mosses on my
parching roots, and fanned me with the breath of her
fresh lips. She took to the old women within a huge
A PROVENCE ROSE. 205
cabbage leaf full of cherries, having, I doubt not, gone
herself without in order to bring the ruddy fruit to
them.
She had been happy, but she was very quiet. To
those who love the country as she did, and, thus loving
it, have to dwell in cities, there is as much of pain,
perhaps, as of pleasure in a fleeting glimpse of the
lost heaven. - -
She was tired, and sat for a while, and did not see
the painting, for it was dusk. She only saw it when
she rose to light the lamp : then, with a little shrill
cry, she fell on her knees before it in her wonder
and her awe, and laughed and sobbed a little, and
then was still again, looking at this likeness of her-
self.
The written words took her long to spell out, for
she could scarcely read, but when she had mastered
them, her head sank on her breast with a flush
and a smile, like the glow of dawn over-my own
native Provence, I thought.
She knew whence it came, no doubt, though there
were many artists and students of art in that street.
But then there was only one who had watched her
night after night as men watched the stars of old to
read their fates in the heavens.
Lili was only a young ouvrière, she was only a girl
206 A PROVENCE ROSE.
of the people: she had quick emotions and innocent
impulses; she had led her life straightly because it
was her nature, as it is of the lilies—her namesakes,
my cousins—to grow straight to the light pure and
spotless. But she was of the populace : she was
frank, fearless, and strong, despite all her dreams.
She was glad, and she sought not to hide it.
With a gracious impulse of gratitude she turned to
the lattice, and leaned past me, and looked for my
neighbour. - \
He was there in the gloom ; he strove not to be
seen, but a stray ray from a lamp at the vintner's
gleamed on his handsome dark face, lean, and pallid,
and yearning, and sad, but full of force and of soul,
like a head of Rembrandt's. Lili stretched her hands
to him with a noble candid gesture, and a sweet
tremulous laugh:
“What you have given me !—it is you ?—it is
you?”
“Mademoiselle forgives?” he murmured, leaning
as far out as the gable would permit. -
The street was still deserted, and very quiet. The
theatres were all open to the people that night free,
and bursts of music from many quarters rolled in
through the Sultry darkness.
Lili coloured over all her fair pale face, even as I
A PROWENCE ROSE. w 207
have seen my sisters' white breasts glow to a won-
drous wavering warmth as the sun of the west kissed
them. She drew her breath with a quick sigh. She
did not answer him in words, but with a sudden rnove-
ment of exquisite eloquence, she broke from me my
fairest and my last-born blossom and threw it from
her lattice into his. A .
Then, as he caught it, she closed the lattice with a
swift and trembling hand, and fled to the little
sleeping-closet where her crucifix and her mother's
rosary hung together above her bed.
As for me I was left bereaved and bleeding. The
dew which waters the growth of your human love is
usually the tears or blood of some martyred life.
I was sacrificed for Lili.
I prayed, as my torn stem quivered, and my fairest
begotten sank to her death in the night and in the
silence, that I might be the first and the last to suffer
from the human love born that night. -
I, a rose—Love's flower.
203 A PROVENCE ROSE. * ,
III.
OW before that summer was gone, these two
were betrothed to one another, and my
little, fair, dead daughter, the Rosebud, all
faded and scentless though her half-opened
leaves were, remained always on René's heart as a
tender and treasured relic.
They were betrothed, I say,+not wedded, for they
were so terribly poor.
Many a day he, I think, had not so much as a crust
to eat; and there passed many weeks when the works
on his canvas stood unfinished because he had not
wherewithal to buy the oils and the colours to finish
them.
René was frightfully poor, indeed; but then, being
an artist and a poet, and the lover of a fair and noble
woman, and a dreamer of dreams, and a man God-
gifted, he was no longer wretched.
Eor the life of a painter is beautiful when he is still
young, and loves truly, and has a genius in him stronger
than calamity, and hears a voice in which he believes
say always in his ear, “Fear nothing. Men must
believe as I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile—we
can wait !”

A l’HOWENCE ROSE. 209
And a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a
few Sous a day, can have so much that is lovely and
full of picturesque charm in his daily pursuits: the
long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores;
the “realité de l'idéal’ around him in that perfect
World; the slow, sweet, studious hours in the calm
wherein all that is great in humanity alone survives;
the trance—half adoration, half aspiration, at once
desire and despair—before the face of the Mona Lisa ;
then, without, the streets so glad and so gay in the
Sweet, living sunshine ; the quiver of green leaves
among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn
about the doors; the glow of colour in market-place
and peopled square; the quaint gray piles in old
historic ways; the stones, from every one of which
some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the
green and silent woods, the little leafy villages, the
winding waters garden girt; the forest heights, with the
city gleaming and golden in the plain;-all these are his.
With these, and youth, who shall dare say the
painter is not rich,-ay, though his board be empty
and his cup be dry 2
I had not loved Paris, I, a little imprisoned rose,
caged in a clay pot, and seeing nothing but the sky-line
of the roofs. But I grew to love it, hearing from
René and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness
P
210 A PROVENCE ROSE.
that Paris made possible in their young and burdened
lives, and which could have been thus possible in no
other city of the earth.
City of Pleasure you have called her, and with
truth; but why not also City of the Poor ? For what
city, like herself, has remembered the poor in her
pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the
richest, the treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her
melodious music, of her gracious hues, of her million
flowers, of her shady leaves, of her divine ideals 2
Oh, world! when you let Paris die, you let your
last youth die with her Your rich will mourn a
paradise deserted, but your poor will have need to weep
with tears of blood for the ruin of the sole Eden
whose sunlight sought them in their shadow, whose
music found them in their loneliness, whose glad green
ways were open to their tired feet, whose radiance
smiled the Sorrow from their aching eyes, and in
whose wildest errors and whose vainest dreams their
woes and needs were unforgotten.
Well, this little, humble love-idyl, which grew into
being in an attic of Paris, had a tender grace of its
own; and I watched it with tenderness, and it seemed
to me fresh as the dews of the morning in the midst
of the hot stifling world. x * *
They could not marry : he had nothing but famine
A PROVENCE ROSE. 211
for his wedding-gift, and all the little that she made
Was taken for the food and wine of the bedridden old
grandam, in that religious execution of a filial duty
which is so habitual in the French family-life, that no
One dreams of counting it as any virtue.
But they spent their leisure-time together: they
passed their rare holiday hours in each other's society
in the woods which they both loved, or in the public
galleries of art ; and when the autumn came on apace,
and they could no longer sit at their open casements,
he still watched the gleam of her pale lamp as a pil-
grim the light of a shrine, and she, ere she went to
rest, would push ajar the closed shutter and put her
pretty fair head into the darkling night and waft him a
gentle good-night, and then go and kneel down by her
bed and pray for him and his future before the cross
which had been her dead mother's.
On that bright summer, a hard winter followed.
The poor suffered very much ; and I, in the closed
lattice, knew scarcely which was the worse;-the icy
shivering chills of the snow-burdened air, or the close
noxious suffocation of the stove.
I was very sickly and ill, and cared little for my life
during that bitter cold weather, when the panes of the
lattice were all blocked from week's end to week's end
with the solid silvery foliage of the frost.
P 2
212 A PROWENCE ROSE.
René and Lili both suffered greatly: he could only
keep warmth in his veins by the stoves of the public
libraries, and she lost her work in the box trade after
the New Year fairs, and had to eke out as best she
might the few francs she had been able to lay back in
the old brown pipkin in the closet.
She had, moreover, to sell most of the little things
in her garret: her own mattress went, though she kept
the bed under her grandmother. But there were two
things she would not sell, though for both was she
offered money, they were her mother's reliques and
myself.
She would not, I am sure, have sold the picture,
either. But for that no one offered her a cen-
time. - .
One day, as the last of the winter solstice was
passing away, the old woman died. -
Lili wept for her sincere and tender tears, though
never in my time—nor in any other, I believe, had the
poor, old, querulous, paralytic sufferer rewarded her
with anything except lamentation and peevish dis-
content. :
“Now you will come to me?” murmured her lover,
when they had returned from laying the old dead
peasant in the quarter of the poor.
Lili drooped her head softly upon his breast.
A PROWENCE ROSE. - 213
“If you wish it !” she whispered, with a whisper as
Soft as the first low breath of summer.
If he wished it ! - .
A gleam of pale gold sunshine shone through the
dulled panes upon my feeble branches ; a little timid
fly crept out and spread its wings; the bells of the
church rang an angelus; a child laughed in the street
below ; there came a smile of greenness spreading over
the boughs of leafless trees; my lover, the wind,
returned from the south, fresh from desert and ocean,
with the scent of the spice-groves and palm-aisles, of
the east in his breath, and softly unclosing my lattice,
murmured to me, “Didst thou think I was faithless 2
See, I come with the spring !”
So though I was captive and they two were p0Or,
yet we three were all happy; for love and a new year
of promise were with us.
I bore a little Snowy blossom (sister to the one
which slept lifeless on René's heart) that spring, whilst
yet the swallows were not back from the African
gardens, and the first violets were carried in millions
through the streets, the only innocent imperialists
that the world has ever seen. - -
That little winter-begotten darling of mine was to
be Lili's muptial-flower. She took it so tenderly from
me, that it hardly seemed like its death.
214, A PROVENCE ROSE.
“My little dear rose, who blossoms for me,
though I can only cage her in clay, and only
let her see the sun's rays between the stacks of the
chimneys l’” she said softly over me as she kissed me ;
and when she said that, could I any more grieve for
Provence 2
“What do they wed upon, those two 2° said the old
vine to me.
And I answered him, “Hope and dreams.”
“Will those bake bread and feed babes 2’” said the
vine, as he shook his wrinkled tendrils despondently
in the March air.
We did not ask in the attic.
Summer was nigh at hand, and we loved one
another.
René had come to us—we had not gone to him.
For our garret was on the sunny, his on the dark,
side of the street, and Lili feared the gloom for
me and the bird; and she could not bring herself
to leave that old red-leaved creeper who had wound
himself so close about the rain-pipe and the roof,
and who could not have been dislodged without being
slain. s *...
With the Mardi Gras her trade had returned to her.
René, unable to prosecute his grand works, took many
of the little boxes in his own hands, and wrought on
A PROVENCE ROSE. 215
them with all the nameless mystical charm and the
exquisite grace of touch which belong to the man who
is by nature a great artist. The little trade could not
at its best price bring much, but it brought bread :
and we were happy.
While he worked at the box-lids she had leisure for
her household labours: when these were done she
would draw out her mother's old Breton distaff, and
would sit and spin. When twilight fell they would go
forth together to dream under the dewy avenues and
the glistening stars, or as often would wait within
whilst he played on his mountain flute to the people
at the doorways in the street below.
“Is it better to go out and see the stars and the
leaves ourselves, or to stay in-doors and make all these
forget the misfortune of not seeing them 2’” said Lili,
on one of those evenings when the warmth and the
sunset almost allured her to draw the flute from her
husband's hands and give him his hat instead; and
then she looked down into the narrow road, at the
opposite houses, at the sewing-girls stitching by their
little windows, at the pale students studying their
sickly lore with scalpel and with skeleton, at the hot
dusty little children at play on the asphalte sidewalk,
at the sorrowful darkened casements behind which she
knew beds of sickness or of paralyzed old age were
2 || 6 A PROVENCE ROSE.
hidden—looked at all this from behind my blossoms,
and then gave up the open air and the evening stroll
that were so dear a pastime to her, and whispered to
René, “Play, or they will be disappointed.”
And he played, instead of going to the debating-club
in the room round the corner.
“He has ceased to be a patriot,” grumbled the old
vine. “It is always so with every man when once he
has loved a woman l’”
Myself, I could not see that there was less patriotism
in breathing the poetry of sound into the ears of his
neighbours than in rousing the passions of hell in the
breasts of his brethren.
But perhaps this was my ignorance: I believe that
of late years people have grown to hold that the only
pure patriotism is, and ought to be, evinced in the
most intense and the most brutalized form of one pas-
sion—“Envy, eldest born of Hell.”
So these two did some good, and were happy, though
more than once it chanced to them to have to go a
whole day without tasting food of any sort.
I have said that René had genius—a genius bold,
true, impassioned, masterful—such a genius as colours
the smallest trifles that it touches. René could no
more help putting an ideal grace into those little
sweetmeat boxes—which sold at their very highest,
A PROWENCE ROSE. 217
itſ the booths of the fairs, at fifty centimes apiece—
than we, the roses, can help being fragrant and
fair. - -
Genius has a way of casting its pearls in the dust
as we scatter our fragrance to every breeze that blows.
Now and then the pearl is caught and treasured, as
now and then some solitary creature pauses to smell
the sweetness of the air in which we grow, and thanks
the God who made us.
But as ninety-nine roses bloom unthanked for one
that is thus remembered, so ninety-nine of the pearls of
genius are trodden to pieces for one that is set on high
and crowned with honour. -
In the twilight of a dull day a little, feeble, brown
old man climbed the staircase and entered our attic
with shambling step.
We had no strangers to visit us : who visits the
poor 2 We thought he was an enemy : the poor always
do think so, being so little used to strangers.
René drew himself erect, and strove to hide the
poverty of his garments, standing by his easel. Lili
came to me, and played with my leaves in her tender,
caressing fashion.
“You painted this, M. René Claude 2" asked the
little brown old man.
He held in his hand one of the bombon boxes, the
218 A PROVENCE ROSE,
prettiest of them all, with a tambourine-girl dancing
in a wreath of Provence roses. René had copied me
with loving fidelity in the flowers, and with a sigh had
murmured as he cast the box aside when finished,
“That ought to fetch at least a franc l’” But he had
- got no more than the usual two sous for it.
The little old man sat down on the chair which Lili
placed for him.
“So they told me, where I bought this. It was at
a booth at St. Cloud. Do you know that it is
charming?” -
René smiled a little sadly : Lili flushed with joy. It
was the first praise which she had ever heard given to
him.
“You have a great talent,” pursued the little
IY) all, - -
René bowed his handsome haggard face—his mouth
quivered a very little : for the first time Hope entered
into him.
“Genius, indeed,” said the stranger; and he saun-
tered a little about and looked at the canvases, and
wondered and praised, and said not very much, but
said that little so well and so judiciously that it was
easy to see he was no mean judge of art, and possibly
no slender patron of it.
As Lili stood by me, I saw her colour come and go
A PROVENCE ROSE. 219
&nd her breast heave. I too trembled in all my leaves:
were recognition and the world's homage coming to
René at last 2
“And I have been so afraid always that I had in-
jured, burdened him, clogged his strength in that end-
less strife ” she murmured below her breath. “O,
dear little rose ! if only the world can but know his
greatness l’” ', '
Meanwhile the old man looked through the sketches
and studies with which the room was strewed.
“You do not finish your things?” he said abruptly.
René flushed darkly. r -
“Oil pictures cost money,” he said, briefly, “and
—I am very poor.” - -
Though a peasant's son; he was very proud : the
utterance must have hurt him much.
The stranger took snuff. - -
“You are a man of singular genius,” he said simply.
“You only want to be known to get the prices of
Meissonier.” - -
Meissonier —the Rothschild of the studios, the
artist whose six-inch canvas would bring the gold
value of a Raphael or a Titian | -
Tili, breathing fast and white as death with ecstasy,
made the sign of the cross on her breast : the delicate
brown hand of René shook where it leaned on his easel.
220 A PROVENCE ROSE.
They were both silent—silent from the intensity of
their hope.
“Do you know who I am 2 ” the old man pursued,
with a cordial smile. .
“I have not that honour,” murmured Tené.
The stranger, taking his snuff out of a gold box,
named a name at which the painter started. It was
that of one of the greatest art-dealers in the whole of
Europe; one who at a word could make or mar an
artist's reputation; one whose accuracy of judgment
was considered infallible by all connoisseurs, and the
passport to whose galleries was to any unknown paint-
ing a certain passport also to the fame of men.
“You are a man of singular genius,” repeated the
great purchaser, taking his snuff in the middle of the
little bare chamber. “It is curious—one always finds
genius either in a cellar or in an attic: it never, by any
chance, is to be discovered midway on the stairs
never in the mezzanino. But to the point. You have
great delicacy of touch, striking originality of idea, a
wonderful purity yet bloom in your colour, and an
exquisite finish of minutiae, without any weakness—a
combination rare, very rare. That girl yonder feeding
white pigeons on the leads of a roof, with an atom
of blue sky, and a few vine leaves straying over the
parapet—that is perfectly conceived. Finished it
A PROWENCE ROSE. 22]
must be. So must that little study of the beggar-
boy looking through the gilded gates into the rose-
gardens—it is charming, charming. Your price for
those?”
René’s worn young face coloured to the brows.
“Monsieur is too good,” he muttered brokenly. “A
95
nameless artist has no price, except
“Honour,” murmured Lili, as she moved forward
with throbbing heart and dim eyes. “Ah, monsieur,
give him a name in Paris | We want nothing else—
nothing else !” -
“Poor fools l’” said the dealer to the snuff-
box.
I heard him—they did not. -
“Madame,” he answered aloud, “Paris herself will
give him that the first day his first canvas hangs in
my galleries. Meanwhile, I must in honesty be per-
mitted to add something more. For each of those
little canvases, the girl on the roof and the boy at the
gate, I will give you now two thousand francs, and
two thousand more when they shall be completed.
Provided—” -
|He paused and glanced musingly at René.
Lili had turned away, and was sobbing for very joy
at this undreamed-of deliverance.
René stood quite still, with his hands crossed on
• * * * - * -
222 A PROWENCE ROSE.
the easel and his head bent on his chest. The room,
I think, swam round him.
The old man sauntered again a little about the
place, looking here and looking there, murmuring
certain artistic disquisitions technical and scientific,
leaving them time to recover from the intensity of
their emotion.
What a noble thing old age was, I thought, living
only to give hope to the young in their sorrow, and
to release captive talents from the prison of obscurity!
We should leave the little room in the roof, and
dwell in some bright quarter where it was all leaves
and flowers; and René would be great, and go to dine
with princes, and drive a team of belled horses, like
a famous painter who had dashed once with his
splendid equipage through our narrow passage; and
we should see the sky always—as much of it as ever
we chose ; and Lili would have a garden of her own,
all grass, and foliage, and falling waters, in which I
should live in the open air all the day long, and
Imake believe that I was in Provence.
My dreams and my fancies were broken by the
sound of the old man's voice taking up the thread of
his discourse once more in front of René.
“I will give you four thousand francs each for
those two little canvases,” he repeated. “It is
A PROWENCE ROSE. 223
a mere pinch of dust to what you will make in
six months’ time, if—if—you hear me 2—your
name is brought before the public of Paris in my
galleries and under my auspices. I suppose you have
heard something of what I can do, eh? Well, all
I can do I will do for you ; for you have a great
talent, and without introduction, my friend, you may
as well roll up your pictures and burn them in your
stove to save charcoal 2 You know that ?”
René indeed knew—none better. Lili turned on
the old man her Sweet, frank Breton eyes, Smiling
their radiant gratitude through tenderest tears.
“The Saints will reward you, monsieur, in a better
world than this,” she murmured softly.
The old man took snuff a little nervously.
“There is one condition I must make,” he said
with a trifling hesitation—“one only.”
“Ask of my gratitude what you will,” answered
René quickly, while he drew a deep breath of relief
and freedom—the breath of one who casts to the ground .
the weight of a deadly burden.
“It is that you will bind yourself only to paint for me.”
“Certainly.”
René gave the assent with eagerness. Poor fellow !
it was a novelty so exquisite to have anyone Save the
rats to paint for. It never dawned upon his thoughts
224 A PROVENCE ROSE.
that when he stretched his hands out with such pas-
sionate desire to touch the hem of the garment of
Fortune and catch the gleam of the laurels of Fame,
he might be in truth only holding them out to fresh
fetters. -
“Very well,” said the old man quietly, and he sat
down again and looked full in René's face, and unfolded
his views for the artist’s future.
He used many words, and was slow and suave in
their utterance, and paused often and long to take out
his heavy gold box; but he spoke well. Little by
little his meaning gleamed out from the folds of ver-
biage in which he skilfully enwrapped it.
It was this.
The little valueless drawings on the people's Sweet-
meat boxes of gilded cardboard had a grace, a colour,
and a beauty in them which had caught at a fair-
booth in the village of St. Cloud, the ever-watchful
eyes of the great dealer. He had bought half-a-dozen
of the boxes for a couple of francs. He had said,
“Here is what I want.” Wanted for what? Briefly,
to produce Petitót enamels and Fragonard cabinets,
aud perhaps now and then a Greuze portrait—genuine
eighteenth-century work. There was a rage for it.
René would understand 2 -
René's dark Southern eyes lost a little of their new
A PROWENCE ROSE. 225
lustre of happiness, and grew troubled with a sort of
cloud of perplexity. He did not seem to under-
stand.
The old man took more snuff, and used phrases
clearer still.
There were great collectors—dilettanti of houses
imperial, and royal, and princely, and noble, of all
grades of greatness—who would give any sum for bon-
bonnières and tabatières of eighteenth-century work
by any one of the few famous masters of that time. A
genuine incontestable sweetmeat box from the ateliers
of the Louis XIV. or Louis XV. period would fetch
almost a fabulous sum. Then again he paused, doubt-
fully.
René bowed, and his wondering glance said without
words, “I know this. But I have no eighteenth-
century work to sell you : if I had, should we starve
in an attic 2''
His patron coughed a little, looked at Lili, then
proceeded to explain still farther.
In René's talent he had discerned the hues, the
grace, the delicacy yet brilliancy, the voluptuousness
and the désinvolteure of the best eighteenth-century
work. René doubtless did other and higher things
which pleased himself far more than these airy trifles.
Well, let him pursue the greater line of art if he
{}
226 A PROVENCE ROSE.
chose ; but he, the old man who spoke, could assure
him that nothing would be so lucrative to him as those
bacchantes in wreaths of roses and young tamborine-
players gorge au went dancing in a bed of violets, and
beautiful marquises, powdered and jewelled, looking
over their fans, which he had painted for those poor
little two-sous boxes of the populace, and the like of
which, exquisitely finished on enamel or ivory, set in
gold and tortoise-shell, rimmed with pearls and tur-
quoises or Opals and diamonds, would deceive the
finest connoisseur in Europe into receiving them as–
whatever they might be signed and dated.
If René would do some half dozen of these at dicta-
tion and a Greuze or Boucher head in a year, not
more—more would be perilous—paint and sign them,
and produce them with any touches that might be
commanded; never ask what became of them when
finished, nor recognize them if hereafter he might see
them in any illustrious collection,--if René would
bind himself to do this, he, the old man who spoke,
would buy his other paintings, place them well in his
famous galleries, and, using all his influence, would
make him in a twelvemonth's time the most celebrated
of all the young painters in Paris.
It was a bargain? Ah, how well it was, he said, to
put the best of one's powers into the most trifling things
A PROVENCE ROSE. 227
One did ' If that poor little two-sous box had been
less lavishly and gracefully decorated, it would never
have arrested his eyes in the bonbon-booth, at St.
Cloud. The old man paused to take snuff and receive
an answer.
René stood motionless.
Lili had sunk into a seat, and was gazing at the
tempter with wide-open, puzzled, startled eyes. Both
were silent.
“It is a bargain?” said the old man again. “ Un-
derstand me, M. René Claude. You have no risk,
absolutely none, and you have the certainty of fair fame
and fine fortune in the space of a few years. You will
be a great man before you have a gray hair : that comes
to very few. I shall not trouble you for more than
six dix-huitième siècle enamels in the year—perhaps
for only four. You can spend ten months out of the
twelve on your own canvases, making your own name
and your own wealth as swiftly as your ambition and
impatience can desire. Madame here,” said the acute
dealer with a pleasant Smile—“Madame here can have
a garden sloping on the Seine and a glass-house of
choicest flowers—which I see are her graceful weak-
ness—ere another rose-season häs time to come round,
if you choose.” -
His voice lingered softly on the three last words.
Q 2
228 A PROVENCE ROSE.
The dew stood on René's forehead, his hands clenched
on the easel:
“You wish me—to paint—forgeries of the Petitót
onamels 2 ”
The old man smiled unmoved :
“Chut, chut ! Will you paint me little bombon-
Inières on enamel or porcelain instead of on cardboard?
That is all the question. I have said where they go,
how they are set : what they are called shall be my
affair. You know nothing. The only works of yours
which you will be concerned to acknowledge will be
your own canvas pictures. What harm can it do any
creature? You will gratify a connoisseur or two inno-
cently, and you will meanwhile be at leisure to follow
• 35
the bent of your own genius, which otherwise
He paused : I heard the loud throbs of René's heart
under that cruel temptation.
Lili gazed at his tempter with the same startled
terror and bewilderment still dilating her candid eyes
with a woeful pain. -
“Otherwise,” pursued the old man with merciless
tranquillity, “you will never see me any more, my
friends. If you try to repeat any story to my hin-
drance, no one will credit you. I am rich, you are
poor. You have a great talent: I shall regret to see
it lost, but I shall let it die—so.” -
A PROVENCE ROSE. 229
And he trod very gently on a little gnat that crawled
near his foot, and killed it. -
A terrible agony gathered in the artist's face.
“O God ' " he cried in his torture, and his eyes
went to the canvases against the wall, and then
to the face of his wife, with an unutterable yearning
desire.
For them, for them,-his genius and his love, this
sin which tempted him looked virtue.
“Do you hesitate 2 ” said the merciless old man.
“Pshaw whom do you hurt 2 You give me work as
good as that which you imitate, and I call it only by a
dead man's name : who is injured ? What harm can
there be in humouring the fanaticism of fashion ?
Choose—I am in haste.”
René hid his face with his hands, so that he should
not behold those dear creations of his genius which so
cruelly, so innocently, assailed him with a temptation
beyond his strength.
“Choose for me—you !” he muttered in his agony
to Lili.
Lili, white as death, drew closer to him.
“My René, your heart has chosen,” she murmured
through her dry and quivering lips. “You cannot
buy honour by a fraud.”
René lifted his head and looked straight in the eyes
230 A PROVENCE ROSE.
of the man who held the scales of his fate, and could
weigh out for his whole life's portion either fame and
fortune or obscurity and famine. - - - -
“Sir,” he said slowly, with a bitter tranquil smile
about his mouth, “my garret is empty, but it is
clean. May I trouble you to leave it as you found
it 2 '' -
So they were strong to the end, these two famished
children of frivolous Paris.
But when the door had closed and shut their
tempter out, the revulsion came: they wept those
tears of blood which come from the hearts' depths
of those who have seen Hope mock them with a
Smile a moment, to leave them face to face with
Death. ... "
“Poor fools l’” sighed the old vine from his corner
ºn the gray, dull twilight of the late autumn day.
Was the vine right?
The air which he had breathed for fifty years
through all his dust - choked leaves and tendrils
had been the air off millions of human lungs, cor-
rupted in its passage through millions of human lips,
and the thoughts which he thought were those of
human wisdom. -
The sad day died; the night fell; the lattice was
closed; the flute lay untouched.
A PROVENCE ROSE. - 231
A great misery seemed to enfold us. True, we were
InO worse off than we had been when the same day
dawned. But that is the especial cruelty of every
tempter always: he touches the innocent closed eyes
of his victims with a collyrium which makes the
happy blindness of content no longer possible. If
the tempted be strong to resist him, the tempter
has still his vengeance, for they are never again at
peace as they were before that fatal hour in which
he showed them all that they were not, all that they
might be.
Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more
empty; our darkness not more dark amidst the gay,
glad, dazzling city; our dusky roof and looming crown
that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy and
* impenetrable than they had been on all those other
earlier nights when yet we had been happy. Yet how
intensified millionfold seemed cold and loneliness, and
poverty and darkness, all!—for we had for the first
time known what it was to think of riches, of fame,
of homage, of light, as possible, and then to lose them
all for ever !
I had been resigned for love's sake to dwell amongst
the roofs, seeing not the faces of the stars, nor feeling
ever the full glory of the sun; but now—— I had
dreamed of the fair freedom of garden-ways and the
232 A PROVENCE ROSE,
endless light of summer sums on palace terraces, and
I drooped and shivered and sickened, and was twice
captive and twice exiled; and knew that I was a little
nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest
chaplet of blossom no hand would ever gather for a
P}^OWI). *
As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs.
They had been so poor, but they had been so happy:
the poverty remained, the joy had flown. • ,
That winter was again very hard, very cold : they
suffered greatly.
They could scarcely keep together body and soul,
as your strange phrase runs: they went without food
sometimes for days and days, and fuel they had scarcely
eVel’.
The bird in his cage was sold : they would not keep
the little golden singing thing to starve into silence
like themselves.
As for me I nearly perished of the cold : only the
love I bore to Lili kept a little life in my leafless
branches. -
All that cruel winter-time they were strong still,
those children of Paris.
For they sought no alms, and in their utter-
most extremity neither of them ever whispered to
the other, “Go seek the tempter: repent, be wise.
A PROVENCE ROSE. 233
Give not up our lives for a mere phantasy of
honour.”
“When the snow is on the ground, and the can-
vases have to burn in the stove, then you will change
your minds and come to me on your knees,” the old
wicked, foul spirit had said, mocking them, as he had
opened the door of the attic and passed away creaking
down the dark stairs.
And I suppose he had reckoned on this ; but if he
had done so he had reckoned without his host, as your
phrase runs: Ineither René nor Lili ever went to him,
either on their knees or in any other wise.
When the spring came we three were still all living—
at least their hearts still beat and their lips still drew
breath, as my boughs were still green and my roots
still clung to the soil. But no more to them or to me
did the coming of spring bring, as of old, the real living
of life, which is joy.
And my lover the wind wooed me no more, and the
birds no more brought me the rose-whispers of my
kindred in Provence. For even the little pigeon-hole
in the roof had become too costly a home for us, and
we dwelt in a den under the stones of the streets,
where no light came and Scarce a breath of air ever
strayed to us. -
There the uncompleted canvases on which the painter
234. A PROVENCE ROSE.
whom Lili loved had tried to write his title to the im-
mortality of fame, were at last finished—finished, for
the rats ate them.
All this while we lived—the man whose genius and
misery were hell on earth; the woman whose very
purity and perfectness of love were her direst torture;
and I, the little white flower born of the sun and the
dew, of fragrance and freedom, to whom every moment
of this blindness, this Suffocation, this starvation, this
stench of putrid odours, this horrible roar of the street
above, was a moment worse than any pang of death.
Away there in Provence so many a fair rose-sister
of mine bowed her glad, proud, innocent head with
anguish and shuddering terrors to the sharp summons
of the severing knife that cut in twain her life, whilst
I—I, on and on—was forced to keep so much of life
as lies in the capacity to suffer and to love in vain.
So much was left also to them : no more.
“Let us compel Death to remember us, since even
Death forgets us !” René murmured once in his
despair to her.
But Lili had pressed her famished lips to his :
“Nay, dear, wait : God will remember us even yet, I
think.”
It was her faith. And of her faith she was justified
at last.
A PROWENCE ROSE. 235
There came a ghastlier season yet, a time of horror
insupportable—of ceaseless sound beside which the
roar of the mere traffic of the streets would have seemed
silence—a stench beside which the sulphur smoke and
the gas fumes of a previous time would have been as
Some sweet fresh woodland air—a famine beside which
the daily hunger of the poor was remembered as the
abundance of a feast—a cold beside which the chillness
of the scant fuel and empty braziers of other winters
were recalled as the warmth of summer—a darkness
only lit by the red flame of burning houses—a solitude
only broken by the companionship of woe and sickness
and despair—a Suffocation only changed by a rush of
air strong with the scent of blood, of putridity, of the
million living plague-stricken, of the million deadlying
unburied.
For there was War.
Of year or day or hour I knew nothing. It was
always the same blackness as of night ; the same horror
of sound, of scent, of cold; the same misery; the same
torture. I suppose that the Sun was quenched, that
the birds were dumb, that the winds were stilled for
ever—that all the world was dead: I do not know.
They called it the Siege of Paris. I suppose that
they meant the Revolt of Hell.
Yet Lili lived, and I: in that dread darkness we had
236 A PROWENCE ROSF.
lost René–we saw his face no more. Yet he could
not be in his grave, I knew, for Lili, clasping my barren
branches to her breast, would murmur, “Whilst he
still lives I will live—yes, yes, yes!”
And she did live—so long, so long !—on a few
draughts of water and a few husks of grain.
I knew that it was long, for full a hundred times
she muttered aloud, “Another day ? O God!—how
long? how long?” -
At last in the darkness a human hand was stretched
to her, close beside me. -
A foul and fierce light, the light of flame, was some-
where on the air above us, and at that moment glowed
through the horrid gloom we dwelt in in the bowels
of the earth. I saw the hand and what it held to
her : it was a stranger's, and it held the little colour-
less dead rosebud, my sweetest blossom, that had lain
ever upon René’s heart.
She took it—she who had given it as her first love-
gift. She was mute. In the glare of the flame that
quivered through the darkness I saw her standing quite
erect and very still.
The voice of a stranger thrilled through the din from
the world above.
“He fought as only patriots can,” it said softly and
as through tears. “I was beside him. He fell with
A PROVENCE ROSE. 237
Regnault in the sortie yesterday. He could not speak:
he had only strength to give me this for you. Be com-
forted : he has died for Paris.”
On Lili’s face there came once more the radiance of
a perfect peace, a glory pure and endless as the glory
of the sun.
“Great in death !” she murmured. “My love, my
love, I come !”
I lost her in the darkness.
I heard a voice above me say that life had left her
lips as the dead rose touched them.
What more is there for me to tell?
I live, since to breathe, and to feel pain, and to
desire vainly, and to suffer always, are surest proofs
of life. -
I live, since that stranger's hand which brought my
little dead blossom as the message of farewell, had pity
on me and brought me away from that living grave.
But the pity was vain : I died the only death that had
any power to hurt me when the human heart I loved
grew still for ever.
The light of the full day now shines on me; the
shadows are cool, the dews are welcome : they speak
around me of the coming of spring, and in the silence
of the dawns I hear from the woods without the piping
of the nesting birds; but for me the summer can never
238 A PROVENCE ROSE.
more return—for me the Summer can never again be
shining—for me the greenest garden world is barren
as a desert.
For I am only a little rose, but I am in exile and
France is desolate.

A LEAF IN THE STORM.
g —4–
T.
àHE Berceau de Dieu was a little village in
the valley of the Seine.
As a lark drops its nest amongst the
grasses, so a few peasant people had
dropped their little farms and cottages amidst the
great green woods on the winding river. It was a
pretty place, with one steep, stony street, shady with
poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose
roofs a cloud of white and gray pigeons fluttered all
day long; a little aged chapel with a conical red roof;
and great barns covered with ivy and thick creepers,
red, and purple, and lichens that were yellow in the
Sli Iſle - -
All around it there were the broad, flowering mea-
dows, with the sleek cattle of Normandy fattening
in them, and the sweet dim forests where the young

240 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
men and maidens went on every holy day and feast-
day in the summer-time to seek for wood-anemones,
and lilies of the pools, and the wild campanula, and
the fresh dog-rose, and all the boughs and grasses
that made their house-doors like garden bowers,
and seemed to take the cushat's note and the linnet's
song into their little temple of God.
The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed.
Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day
of the Virgin of Orléans; and a stone cross of the
twelfth century still stood by the great pond of water
at the bottom of the street, under the chestnut-tree,
where the villagers gathered to gossip at sunset when
their work was done.
It had no city near it, and no town nearer than four
leagues. It was in the green core of a pastoral dis-
trict, thickly wooded and intersected with orchards.
Its produce of wheat, and oats, and cheese, and fruit,
and eggs, was more than sufficient for its simple pros-
perity. Its people were hardy, kindly, laborious,
happy; living round the little gray chapel in amity
and good-fellowship.
Nothing troubled it. War and rumours of war,
revolutions and counter-revolutions, empires and insur-
rections, military and political questions,—these all
were for it things unknown and unheard of—mighty
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 24]
winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around
it, but never came near enough to harm it, lying there,
as it did, in its loneliness like any lark's nest.
Even in the great days of the Revolution it had
been quiet. It had had a lord whom it loved in the
old castle on the hill at whose feet it nestled: it had
never tried to harm him, and it had wept bitterly when
he had fallen at Jemappes, and left no heir, and the
château had crumbled into ivy-hung ruins.
The thunder-heats of that dread time had scarcely
scorched it. It had seen a few of its best youth march
away to the chant of the Marseillaise to fight on the
plains of Champagne; and it had been visited by some
patriots in bonnets Touges and soldiers in blue uniforms,
who had given it tricoloured cockades and bade it wear
them in the holy name of the Republic one and indi-
visible. But it had not known what these meant, and
its harvests had been reaped without the sound of a
shot in its fields or any gleam of steel by its innocent
hearths ; so that the terrors and the tidings of those
noble and ghastly years had left no impress on its
generations.
Reine Allix, indeed, the oldest woman amongst
them all, numbering more than ninety years, remem-
bered when she was a child hearing her father and
his neighbours talk, in low awestricken tones, one
Fº
242 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
bitter wintry night, of how a king had been slain to
save the people ; and she remembered likewise—re-
membered it well, because it had been her betrothal-
night and the sixteenth birthday of her life—how a
horseman had flashed through the startled street like a
comet, and had called aloud, in a voice of fire, “ Gloire!
gloire gloire 1 – Marengo 1 Marengo 1 Marengo l’”
And how the village had dimly understood that some.
thing marvellous for France had happened afar off, and
how her brothers, and her cousins, and her betrothed,
and she with them, had all gone up to the high slope
over the river, and had piled up a great pyramid of
pine-wood and straw and dried mosses, and had set
flame to it, till it had glowed in its scarlet triumph all
through that wondrous night of the sultry summer of
victory.
These and the like memories she would sometimes
relate to the children at evening, when they gathered
round her begging for a story. -
Otherwise, no memories of the Revolution or the
Limpire disturbed the tranquillity of the Berceau; and
even she, after she had told them, would add :
“I am not sure now what Marengo was. A battle,
no doubt, but I am not sure where nor why. But we
heard later that little Claudis, my aunt's youngest
born, a volunteer, not nineteen, died at it. If we
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 243
had known, we should not have gone up and lit the
bonfire.”
This woman, who had been born in that time of
famine and flame, was the happiest creature in the
whole hamlet of the Berceau.
??
“I am old: yes, I am very old,” she would Say,
looking up from her spinning-wheel in her house-door,
and shading her eyes from the sun, “very old—ninety-
two last summer. But when one has a roof over one’s
head, and a pot of soup always, and a grandson like
mine, and when one has lived all one's life in the
Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be so old. Ah,
yes, my little ones—yes, though you doubt it, you
little birds that have just tried your wings—it is well
to be so old. One has time to think, and thank the
good God, which one never seemed to have a minute
to do in that work, work, work, when one was young.”
Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman, very
withered, and very bent, and very brown, yet With
sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light in them,
and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century
had bronzed it with its harvest suns and blown on it
with its winter winds.
She wore always the same garb of homely dark-blue
Serge, always the same tall white headgear, always the
same pure silver ear-rings, that had been at Once an
R 2
244. A LEAF IN THE STORM.
heirloom and a nuptial gift. She was always shod in
her wooden sabots, and she always walked abroad with
her staff of ash.
She had been born in the Berceau de Dieu ; had
lived there and wedded there ; had toiled there all her
life, and never left it for a greater distance than a
league or a longer time than a day.
She loved it with an intense love : the world beyond
it was nothing to her : she scarcely believed in it as ex-
isting. She could neither read nor write. She told the
truth, reared her offspring in honesty, and praised God
always—had praised Him when starving in a bitter
winter after her husband’s death, when there had been
no field-work, and she had had five children to feed
and clothe ; and still praised Him now that her sons
were all dead before her, and all she had living of her
blood was her grandson Bernadou.
Pſer life had been a hard one.
Her parents had been hideously poor. Her marriage
had scarcely bettered her condition. She had laboured
in the fields always, hoeing and weeding, and reaping,
and carrying wood, and driving mules, and continually
rising with the first streak of the daybreak. She had
known fever and famine, and all manner of earthly ills.
f But now in her old age she had peace.
Two of her dead sons, who had sought their for-
A LEAF IN THE STORM.
2.
4.
o
tunes in the other hemisphere, had left her a little
money, and she had a little cottage and a plot of
ground, and a pig, and a small Orchard. She was
well-to-do, and could leave it all to Bernadou; and for
ten years she had been happy, perfectly happy, in the
coolness, and the sweetness, and the old familiar ways
and habits of the Berceau.
Bernadou was very good to her.
The lad, as she called him, was five-and-twenty
years old, tall and straight and clean-limbed, with the
blue eyes of the North, and a gentle frank face. He
worked early and late in the plot of ground that gave
him his livelihood. He lived with his grandmother,
and tended her with a gracious courtesy and veneration
that never altered. He was not very wise ; he also
could neither read nor write ; he believed in his priest
and his homestead, and loved the ground that he had
trodden ever since his first steps from the cradle had
been guided by Reine Allix.
He had never been drawn for the conscription, be-
cause he was the only support of a woman of ninety :
he, likewise, had never been half-a-dozen kilometres
from his birth-place.
When he was bidden to vote, and he asked what his
vote of assent would pledge him to, they told him, L.
“It will bind you to honour your grandmother so
246 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
long as she shall live, and to get up with the lark, and
to go to mass every Sunday, and to be a loyal son to
your country. Nothing more.”
And thereat he had smiled and straightened his
stalwart frame, and gone right willingly to the voting-
TII’Il,
He was very stupid in these things; and Reine
Allix, though clear-headed and shrewd, was hardly
more learned in them than he.
“Look you,” she had said to him oftentimes, “ in
my babyhood there was the old white flag upon the
château. Well, they pulled that down and put up a
red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of
three colours. Then somebody with a knot of white
lilies in his hand came One day and set up the old
white one afresh ; and before the day was done that
was down again, and the tricolour again up where it
is still. Now some I know fretted themselves greatly
because of all these changes of the flags, but as for me,
I could not see that any one of them mattered : bread
was just as dear, and sleep was just as sweet, whichever
of the three was uppermost.” -- *
Bernadou, who had never known but the flag of
three colours, believed her, as, indeed, he believed
every word that those kindly and resolute old lips ever
uttered to him.
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 24,7
He had never been in a city, and only once, on the
day of his first communion, in the town four leagues
away. He knew nothing more than this simple,
cleanly, honest life that he led. With what men did
outside his little world of meadow-land and woodland
he had no care nor any concern.
Once a man had come through the village of the
Perceau, a travelling hawker of cheap prints, La man
with a wild eye and a restless brain, -who told Ber-
nardou that he was a downtrodden slave, a clod, a
beast like a mule, who fetched and carried that the
rich might fatten,_a dolt, an idiot, who cared nothing
for the rights of man and the wrongs of the poor.
Bernadou had listened with a perplexed face : then,
with a smile, that had cleared it like sunlight, he had
answered, in his country dialect:—
“I do not know of what you speak. Rights?
Wrongs 2 I cannot tell. But I have never owed a
sou; I have never told a lie; I am strong enough to
hold my own with any man that flouts me ; and I am
content where I am. That is enough for me.”
The pedler had called him a poor-spirited beast of
burden, but had said so out of reach of his arm, and
by night had slunk away from the Berceau de Dieu,
and had been no more seen there to vex the quiet
contentment of its peaceful and peace-loving ways.
248 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
At night, indeed, sometimes, the little wine-shop of
the village would be frequented by some half-dozen of
the peasant proprietors of the place, who talked Com-
munism after their manner, not a very clear one, in
excited tones and with the feverish glances of con-
spirators. But it meant little, and came to less.
The weather and the price of wheat were dearer
matters to them; and in the end they usually drank
their red wine in amity, and went up the village street
arm in arm, singing patriotic songs until their angry
wives flung open their lattices and thrust their white
headgear out into the moonlight, and called to them
shrewishly to get to bed and not make fools of them-
selves in that fashion ; which usually silenced and
sobered them all instantly; so that the revolutions of
the Berceau de Dieu, if not quenched in a wine-pot,
were always smothered in a nightcap, and never, by
any chance, disturbed its repose.
But of these noisy patriots, Bernadou was never
one. He had the instinctive conservatism of the
French peasant, which is in such direct and tough
antagonism with the feverish Socialism of the French
artisan.
His love was for the soil—a deep-rooted love as the
oaks that grew in it. Of Paris he had a dim, vague
dread, as of a Superb beast continually draining and
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 249
devouring. Of all forms of government he was alike
ignorant. So long as he tilled his little angle of land
in peace, so long as the sun ripened his fruits and
corn, so long as famine was away from his door
and his neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship with
him, so long he was happy, and cared not whether he
was thus happy under a monarchy, an empire, or a
republic.
This wisdom, which the pedler called apathy and
cursed, the young man had imbibed from Nature and
the teachings of Reine Allix.
“Look at home and mind thy work,” she had said
always to him. “It is labour enough for a man to
keep his own life clean and his own hands honest.
Be not thou at any time as they are who are
for ever telling the good God how He might have
made the world on a better plan, while the rats gnaw
at their haystacks and the children cry over an empty
platter.”
And he had taken heed to her words; so that in all
the countryside there was not any lad truer, gentler,
braver or more patient at labour than was Bernadou ;
and though some thought him mild even to foolishness,
and meek even to stupidity, he was no fool; and he
had a certain rough skill at music, and a rare gift at
the culture of plants, that made his little home bright
250 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
within in the winter time with melody, and in the
Summer gay without as a king's parterre.
At any rate, Reine Allix and he had been happy
together for a quarter of a century under the old gray
thatch of the wayside cottage, where it stood at the
foot of the village-street, with its great Sycamores
spread above it. Nor were they less happy when in
mid-April, in the six-and-twentieth year of his age,
Bernadou had come in with a bunch of primroses in
his hand, and had bent down to her and saltited her
with a respectful tenderness, and said, softly and a
little shyly, “Gran’mère, would it suit you if I were
ever—to marry 2”
Reine Allix was silent a minute and more, cherishing
the primroses and placing them in a little brown cupful
of water. Then she looked at him steadily with her
clear dark eyes:
“Who is it, my child 9”
He was always a child to her, this last-born of the
numerous brood that had once dwelt with her under
the spreading branches of the sycamores, and had now
all perished off the face of the earth, leaving himself
and her alone. -
Bernadou's eyes met hers frankly :
“It is Margot Dax: does that please you, gran’mère,
or no 2''
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 251
“It pleases me well,” she said simply. But there
was a little quiver about her firm-set mouth, and her
aged head was bent over the primroses. She had fore-
seen it; she was glad of it; and yet, for the instant,
it was a pang to her. - - -
“I am very thankful,” said Bernadou, with a flash
of joy on his face.
He was independent of his grandmother : he
could make enough to marry upon by his daily
toil, and he had a little store of gold and silver in
his bank in the thatch, put by for a rainy day;
but he would have no more thought of going against
her will than he would have thought of lifting his hand
against her. In the primitive homesteads of the
Berceau de Dieu, filial reverence was still accounted
the first of virtues, yet the simplest and the most im-
perative. -
“I will go see Margot this evening,” said Reine
Allix, after a little pause. “She is a good girl, and a
brave, and of pure heart and fair name. You have
chºsen well, my grandson.” -
Bernadou stooped his tall, fair, curly head, and she
laid her hands on him and blessed him.
That evening, as the sun set, Reine Allix kept her
word, and went to the young maiden who had allured
the eyes and heart of Bernadou.
2
5
2
A LEAF IN THE STORM.
Margot was an orphan: she had not a penny to her
dower; she had been brought up on charity, and she
dwelt now in the family of the largest landowner of the
place, a miller, with a numerous offspring, and several
head of cattle, and many stretches of pasture and of
orchard. -
Margot worked for a hard master, living, indeed, as
One of the family, but sharply driven all day long at all
manner of house-work and field-work. Reine Allix had
kept her glance on her, through some instinctive sense
of the way that Bernadou's thoughts were turning, and
she had seen much to praise, nothing to chide, in the
young girl's modest, industrious, cheerful, uncom-
plaining life. -
Margot was very pretty too, with the brown oval
face, and the great black soft eyes, and the beautiful
form of the southern blood that had run in the veins
of her father, who had been a sailor of Marseilles,
whilst her mother had been a native of the Provençal
country. Altogether, Reine Allix knew that her be-
loved one could not have done better or more wisely,
if choose at all he must.
“Some people indeed,” she said to herself as she
climbed the street whose sharp-set flints had been
trodden by her wooden shoes for ninety years—“Some
people would mourn and scold because there is no
A LEAF IN THE STORM, 253
store of linen, no piece of silver plate, no little round
sum in money with the poor child. But what does it
matter ? We have enough for three. It is wicked
indeed for parents to live so that they leave their
daughter portionless, but it is no fault of the child's.
Let them say what they like, it is a reason the more
that she should want a roof over her head and a hus-
band to care for her good.” -
So she climbed the steep way and the slanting road
round the hill, and went in by the door of the mill-
house, and found Margot busy in Washing some spring
lettuces and other green things in a bowl of bright
Water. -
Reine Allix, in the fashion of her country and her
breeding, was about to confer with the master and
mistress ere saying a word to the girl, but there was
that in Margot's face and in her timid greeting that
lured speech out of her.
She looked long and keenly into the child’s down-
cast countenance, then touched her with a tender
smile : & *
“Petite Margot, the birds told me a little secret
to-day. Canst guess what it is ? Say ?”
Margot coloured and then grew pale. True, Ber-
nadou had never really spoken to her, but still, when
one is seventeen, and has danced a few times with the
254, A LEAF IN THE STOIRM.
same person, and has plucked the leaves cf a daisy
away to learn one's fortune, spoken words are not very
much wanted. .
At sight of her the eyes of the old woman moistened
and grew dimmer than age had made them. She
Smiled still, but the smile had the sweetness of a
blessing in it, and no longer the kindly banter of
humour. t
“You love him, my little one 2 ” she said, in a soft
hushed voice.
“Ah, Mère Allix ” Margot could not say more.
She covered her face with her hands, and turned to
the wall, and wept with a passion of joy.
Down in the Berceau there were gossips who would
have said, with wise shakes of their heads, “Tut, tut !
how easy it is to make believe in a little love when
One is a serving-maid, and has not a sou, nor a roof,
nor a friend in the world, and a comely youth, well-to
do, is willing to marry us!”
But Reine Allix knew better. She had not lived
ninety years in the world not to be able to discern
between true feeling and counterfeit. She was touched,
and drew the trembling frame of Margot into her
arms, and kissed her twice on the closed, blue-veined
lids of her black eyes.
“Make him happy, only make him happy,” she
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 255
murmured ; “for I am very old, Margot, and he is
alone, all alone.”
And the child crept to her, sobbing for very rapture
that she, friendless, homeless, and penniless, should
be thus elected for so fair a fate, and whispered
through her tears, “I will.”
Reine Allix spoke in all form to the miller and his
wife, and with as much earnestness in her demand as
though she had been seeking the hand of rich Yacobé,
the tavern-keeper's only daughter. The people as-
sented : they had no pretext to oppose, and Reine
Allix Wrapt her cloak about her and descended the
hill and the street just as the twilight closed in and
the little lights began to glimmer through the lattices
and the shutters and the green mantle of the boughs,
whilst the red fires of the smithy forge glowed brightly
in the gloom, and a white horse waited to be shod, with
a boy in a blue blouse seated on its back and switching
away with a branch of budding hazel the first grey
gnats of the early year.
9
“It is well done, it is well done,” she said to her-
self, looking at the low rosy clouds and the pale gold
of the waning sky. “A year or two, and I shall be in
my grave. I shall leave him easier if I know he has
some creature to care for him, and I shall be quiet in
my coffin, knowing that his children's children will
256 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
live on and, on and on in the Berceau, and sometimes
perhaps think a little of me when the nights are long
and they sit round the fire.”
She went in, out of the dewy air, into the little low,
square room of her cottage, and went up to Bernadou
and laid her hands on his shoulders.
“Be it well with thee, my grandson, and with thy
sons’ sons after thee,” she said solemnly. “Margot
will be thy wife. May thy days and hers be long in
thy birth-place l’”
II.
MONTH later they were married.
It was then May.
The green nest of the Berceau seemed
to overflow with the singing of birds and
the blossoming of flowers. The cornlands promised a
rare harvest, and the apple orchards were weighed
down with their red and white blossoms. The little
brown streams in the woods brimmed over in the
grass, and the air was full of a sweet mellow sunlight,
a cool fragrant breeze, a continual music of humming
bees and soaring larks and mule-bells ringing on the
roads, and childish laughter echoing from the fields.
In this glad spring-time Bernadou and Margot were

- A LEAF IN THE STORM. 257
wedded, going with their friends one sunny morning
up the winding hill-path to the little grey chapel
whose walls were hidden in ivy, and whose sorrowful
Christ looked down through the open porch across the
blue and hazy width of the river.
Georges, the baker, whose fiddle made merry melody
at all the village dances, played before them tunefully;
little children, with their hands full of wood-flowers,
ran before them; their old blind poodle smelt its way
faithfully by their footsteps; their priest led the way
*- upward with the cross held erect against the light ;
Teine Allix walked beside them, nearly as firmly as
she had trodden the same road seventy years before
in her own bridal hour; in the hollow below lay the
Berceau de Dieu, with its red gables and its thatched
roofs hidden beneath leaves, and its peaceful pastures
smiling under the serene blue skies of France.
They were happy—ah Heaven, so happy!—and all
their little world rejoiced with them.
They came home, and their neighbours entered with
- them, and ate and drank, and gave them good wishes
and gay songs; and the old priest blessed them with
a father's tenderness upon their threshold; and the
fiddle of Georges sent gladdest dance-music flying
through the open casements, across the road, up the
hill, far away to the clouds and the river.
258 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
At night, when the guests had departed, and all was
quite still within and without, Reine Allix sat alone
at her window in the roof, thinking of their future and
of her past, and watching the stars come out, one by
another, above the woods. From her lattice in the
eaves she saw straight up the village street; saw the
dwellings of her lifelong neighbours, the slopes of the
rich fields, the gleam of the broad grey water, the
whiteness of the crucifix against the darkened sky.
She saw it all—all so familiar, with that intimate
association only possible to the peasant who has dwelt
on one spot from birth to age.
In that faint light, in those deep shadows, she
could trace all the scene as though the brightness of
the noon shone on it; it was all, in its homeliness and
simplicity, intensely dear to her.
In the playtime of her childhood, in the courtship
of her youth, in the joys and woes of her wifehood
and widowhood, the bitter pains and sweet ecstacies of
her maternity, the hunger and privation of struggling,
desolate years, the contentment and serenity of old
age, in all these her eyes had rested only on this
small quaint leafy street, with its dwellings close and
low, like beehives in a garden, and its pasture-lands
and corn-lands, wood-girt and water-fed, stretching as
far as the sight could reach. w
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 259
Every inch of its soil, every turn of its paths, was
hallowed to her with innumerable memories: all her
beloved dead were garnered there where the white
Christ watched them : when her time should come,
she thought, she would rest with them nothing loth.
As she looked the tears of thanksgiving rolled down
her withered cheeks, and she bent her feeble limbs
and knelt down in the moonlight, praising God that
He had given her to live and die in this cherished
home, and beseeching Him for her children that they
likewise might dwell in honesty, and with length of
days abide beneath that roof.
“God is good,” she murmured as she stretched
herself to sleep beneath the eaves—“God is good.
Maybe, when He takes me to Himself, if I be worthy,
He will tell His holy Saints to give me a little corner
in His kingdom, that He shall fashion for me in the
likeness of the Berceau.”
For it seemed to her that, than the Berceau, heaven
itself could hold no sweeter or fairer nook of Paradise.
The year rolled on, and the cottage under the syca-
mores was but the happier for its new inmate. .
Bernadou was serious of temper, though so gentle,
and the arch gay humour of his young wife was like
perpetual sunlight in the house. Margot, too, was so
docile, so eager, so bright, and so imbued with devo-
8 2
260 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
tional reverence for her husband and his home, that
Reine Allix day by day blessed the fate that had
brought to her this fatherless and penniless child.
Bernadou himself spoke little: words were not in his
way, but his blue frank eyes shone with an unclouded
radiance that never changed, and his voice, when he
did speak, had a mellow softness in it that made his
slightest speech to the two women with him tender as
8, C8,1'éSS,
“Thou art a happy woman, my sister,” said the
priest, who was wellnigh as old as herself.
Reine Allix bowed her head and made the sign of
the cross: “I am, praise be to God!”
And being happy, she went to the hovel of poor
Madelon Dreux, the cobbler's widow, and nursed her
and her children through a malignant fever, sitting
early and late, and leaving her own peaceful hearth for
the desolate hut with the delirious ravings and heart-
rending moans of the fever-stricken.
“How ought one to dare to be happy if one is not
of use?” she would say to those who sought to dis-
suade her from running such peril. X-
Madelon Dreux and her family recovered, owing to
her their lives, and she was happier than before, think-
ing of them when she sat on the settle before the
wood-fire roasting chestnuts and spinning flax on the
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 261
wheel, and ever and again watching the flame reflected
on the fair head of Bernadou or in the dark, smiling
eyes of Margot. -
Another spring passed and another year went by,
and the little home under the sycamores was still no
less honest in its labours or bright in its rest.
It was one amongst a million of such homes in
France, where a sunny temper made mirth with a
meal of herbs, and filial love touched to poetry the
prose of daily household tasks.
A child was born to Margot in the spring-time with
the violets and daisies, and Reine Allix was proud of
the fourth generation, and as she caressed the boy's
healthy fair limbs, thought that God was indeed good
to her, and that her race would live long in the place
of her birth. -
The child resembled Bernadou, and had his clear
and candid eyes. It soon learned to know the voice of
& 4 Granmere,” and would turn from its young mother's
bosom to stretch its arms to Reine Allix. It grew
fair and strong, and all the ensuing winter passed its
hours curled like a dormouse or playing like a puppy
at her feet in the chimney corner.
Another Spring and summer came, and the boy was
more than a year old, with curls of gold, and cheeks
like apples, and a mouth that always Smiled. He could
262 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
talk a little, and tumbled like a young rabbit amongst
the flowering grasses. w
Reine Allix watched him and her eyes filled.
“God is too good,” she thought. She feared that
she should scarce be so willing to go to her last
sleep under the trees on the hillside as she had
used to be. She could not help a desire to see this
child, this second Bernadou, grow up to youth and
manhood; and of this she knew it was wild to
dream.
It was ripe midsummer.
The fields were all russet and amber with an abund-
ance of corn. The little gardens had seldom yielded
so rich a produce. The cattle and the flocks were in
excellent health.
There had never been a season of greater promise
and prosperity for the little traffic that the village and
its farms drove in sending milk and sheep and vege-
table wealth to that great city which was to it as a dim,
wonderful, mystic name without meaning.
One evening in this gracious and golden time the
people sat out as usual when the day was done, talking
from door to door, the old women knitting or spinning,
the younger ones mending their husbands' or brothers'
blouses or the little blue shirts of their infants, the
children playing with the dogs on the sward that edged
A. LEAF IN THE STORM. 263
the stones of the street, and above all the great calm
heavens and the glow of the sun that had set.
Reine Allix, like the others, sat before the door, for
Once doing nothing, but with folded hands and bended
head dreamily taking pleasure in the coolness that had
come with evening, and the smell of the limes that
were in blossom, and the blithe chatter of Margot with
the neighbours.
Bernadou was close beside them, watering and
weeding those flowers that were at once his pride and
his recreation, making the face of his dwelling bright
and the air around it full of fragrance.
The little street was quiet in the evening light, only
the laughter of the children and the gay gossip of their
mothers breaking the pleasant stillness: it had been
thus at evening with the Berceau centuries before
their time—they thought that it would thus likewise
be when centuries should have seen the youngest-born
there travel to his grave. -
Suddenly there came along the road between the
trees an old man and a mule : it was Mathias Rével
the miller, who had been that day to a little town four
leagues off, which was the trade-mart and the corn-
exchange of the district. He paused before the cottage
of Reine Allix: he was dusty, travel-stained and sad.
Margot ceased laughing among her flowers as she saw
264 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
her old master. None of them knew why, yet the
sight of him made the air seem cold and the night
- Seem. Inéâr. -
“There is terrible news,” he said, drawing a sheet.
of printed words from his coat-pocket—“terrible
news | We are to go to war.”
“War !” The whole village clustered round him.
They had heard of war, far-off wars in Africa and
Mexico, and some of their sons had been taken off like
young wheat mown before its time; but it still re-
mained to them a thing remote, impersonal, incon-
ceivable, with which they had nothing to do, nor ever
would have anything. -
“Read l’” said the old man, stretching out his
sheet. The only one there who could do so, Picot
the tailor, took it and spelled the news out to their
wondering ears.
It was the declaration of France against Prussia.
There arose a great wail from the mothers whose
sons were conscripts.
The rest asked in trembling, “Will it touch
us?” - -
“. Us!” echoed Picot the tailor, in contempt.
“How should it touch us? Our braves will be
in Berlin with another fortnight. The paper says -
so.”
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 265
The people were silent: they were not sure what he
meant by Berlin, and they were afraid to ask.
“My boy! my boy l’’ wailed one woman, smiting
her breast. Her son was in the army.
“Marengo !” murmured Reine Allix, thinking of
that far-off time in her dim youth when the horseman
had flown through the dusky street and the bonfire
blazed on the highest hill above the river.
“Bread will be dear,” muttered Mathias the miller,
going onward with his foot-weary mule. -
Bernadou stood silent, with his roses dry and
thirsty round him. - - ..
“Why art thou sad?” whispered Margot, with wist-
ful eyes. “Thou art exempt from war-service, my
love 2 ”
Bernadou shook his head. -
“The poor will suffer somehow,” was all he an-
swered. -
Yet to him, as to all in the Berceau, the news was
not very terrible, because it was so vague and distant
—an evil so far off and shapeless.
Picot the tailor, who alone could read, ran from
house to house, from group to group, breathless,
gay, and triumphant, telling them all that in two
weeks more their brethren would sup in the king's
palace at Berlin; and the people believed and laughed
266 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
and chattered, and, standing outside their doors in
the cool nights, thought that some good had come to
them and theirs.
Only Reine Allix looked up the hill above the river,
and murmured, “When we lit the bonfire there,
Claudis lay dead.”
And Bernadou, standing musing amongst his roses,
said with a smile that was very grave,
“Margot, see here ! When Picot shouted. “ Á
Berlin l’ he trod on my Gloire de Dijon rose and
killed it.”
The sultry heats and cloudless nights of the won-
drous and awful summer of the year eighteen hundred
and seventy passed by, and to the Berceau de Dieu it
was a summer of fair promise and noble harvest, and
never had the land brought forth in richer profusion
for man and beast.
Some of the youngest and ablest-bodied labourers
were indeed drawn away to join those swift trains that
hurried thousands and tens of thousands to the
frontier by the Rhine. But most of the male popula-
tion were married, and were the fathers of young
children, and the village was only moved to a thrill of
love and of honest pride to think how its young Louis
and Jean and André and Valentin were gone full of
high hope and high Spirit, to come back, maybe-who
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 267
could say not ?—with epaulettes and ribbons of
honour. -
Why they were gone they knew not very clearly,
but their superiors affirmed that they were gone to
make greater the greatness of France; and the folk
of the Berceau believed it, having in a corner of their
quiet hearts a certain vague, dormant, yet deep-rooted
love, on which was written the name of their country.
News came slowly and seldom to the Berceau.
Unless some one of the men rode his mule to the
little town, which was but very rarely, or unless some
pedler came through the village with a news-sheet
or so in his pack, or rumours or tidings on his lips,
nothing that was done beyond its fields and woods
came to it. And the truth of what it heard it had no
means of measuring or sifting.
It believed what it was told, without questioning;
and as it reaped the harvests in the rich hot sun of
August, its peasants laboured cheerily in the simple
and firm belief that mighty things were being done for
them and theirs in the far eastern provinces by their
great army, and that Louis and Jean and André and
Valentin and the rest—though, indeed, no tidings had
been heard of them—were safe and well and glorious
somewhere, away where the sun rose, in the sacked
palaces of the German king.
268 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
Reine Allix alone of them was serious and sorrowful
—she whose memories stretched back over the wide
Space of near a century.
“Why art thou anxious, gran’mère?” they said to
her. “There is no cause. Our army is victorious
everywhere; and they say our lads will send us all the
Prussians' corn and cattle, so that the very beggars
will have their stomachs full.”
But Reine Allix shook her head, sitting knitting in
the sun :
“My children, I remember the days of my youth.
Our army was victorious then ; at least they said
so. Well, all I know is that little Claudis and the
boys with him never came back; and as for bread,
you could not get it for love or money, and the people
lay dead of famine out on the public roads.”
“But that is so long ago, gran’mère l’ they urged.
Reine Allix nodded.
“Yes. It is long ago, my dears. But I do not
think that things change very much.”
They were silent out of respect for her, but amongst
themselves they said, “She is very old. Nothing is
as it was in her time.”
One evening, when the sun was setting red over the
reapen fields, two riders on trembling and sinking
horses went through the village, using whip and spur,
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 269
and scarcely drew rein as they shouted to the cottagers
to know whether they had seen go by a man running
for his life. -
The people replied that they had seen nothing of
the kind, and the horsemen pressed on, jamming their
spurs into their poor beasts' steaming flanks.
“If you see him, catch and hang him,” they shouted
as they scoured away : “he is a Prussian spy l’”
“A Prussian l’” the villagers echoed with a stupid
stare—“a Prussian in France 1"
One of the riders looked over his shoulders for a
moment: - -
“You fools do you not know? We are beaten—
beaten everywhere—and the Prussian pigs march on
Paris.” - t
The spy was not seen in the Berceau, but the news
brought by his pursuers scared sleep from the eyes of
every grown man that night in the little village.
“It is the accursed Empire!” screamed the patriots
of the wineshop. -
- But the rest of the people were too terrified and
downstricken to take heed of empires or patriots:
they only thought of Louis and Jean and André and
Valentin; and they collected round Reine Allix, who
said to them, “My children, for love of money all our
fairest fruits and flowers—yea, even to the best blos-
270 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
soms of our maidenhood—were sent to be bought and
sold in Paris. We sinned therein, and this is the will
of God.”
III.
HIS was all for a time that they heard.
It was a place lowly and obscure enough
to be left in peace. The law pounced down
on it once or twice and carried off a few
more of its men for army-service, and arms were sent
to it from its neighbouring town, and an old soldier of
the First Empire tried to instruct its remaining sons
in their use. But he had no apt pupil except Berna-
dou, who soon learned to handle a musket with skill
and with precision, and who carried his straight form
gallantly and well, though his words were seldom heard
and his eyes were always Sad.
“You will not be called till the last, Bernadou,”
said the old soldier: “you are married, and maintain
your grandame and wife and child. But a strong,
muscular, well-built youth like you should not wait to
be called—you should volunteer to serve France.”
“I will serve France when my time comes,” said -
Bernadou, simply, in answer. But he would not leave

A LEAF IN THE STORM. 271
his fields barren, and his orchard uncared for, and his
wife to sicken and starve, and his grandmother to
perish alone in her ninety-third year. They jeered
and flouted and upbraided him, those patriots who
screamed against the fallen Empire in the wineshop,
but he looked them straight in the eyes, and held his
peace, and did his daily work. r
“If he be called, he will not be found wanting,” said
Reine Allix, who knew him better than did even the
young wife whom he loved.
Bernadou clung to his home with a dogged de-
votion.
He would not go from it to fight unless compelled,
but for it he would have fought like a lion. His feel-
ing for his country was a feeling for only an indefinite
shadowy existence that was not clear to him : he could
not love a land that he had never seen, a capital that
was only to him as an empty name ; nor could he com-
prehend the danger that his nation ran, nor could he
desire to go forth and spend his life-blood in defence
of things unknown to him. He was only a peasant,
and he could not read nor greatly understand.
But affection for his birth-place was a passion with
him—mute indeed, but deep-seated as an oak. For
his birth-place he would have struggled as a man can
only struggle when supreme love as well as duty
272 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
nerves his arm. Neither he nor Reine Allix could see
that a man's duty might lie from home; but in that
home both were alike ready to dare anything and to
suffer everything.
It was a narrow form of patriotism, yet it had noble-
ness, endurance, and patience in it: in song it has
been oftentimes deified as heroism, but in modern
philosophy it is derided, and in modern warfare it is
punished as the blackest crime.
So Bernadou tarried in his cottage till he should
be called, keeping watch by night over the safety of his
village, and by day doing all he could to aid the de-
serted wives and mothers of the place by the tilling of
their ground for them and the tending of such poor
cattle as were left in their desolate fields.
He and Margot and Reine Allix, between them, fed
many mouths that would otherwise have been closed in
death by famine, and denied themselves all except the
barest and most meagre subsistence, that they might
give away the little they possessed.
And all this while the war went on, but seemed
far from them, so seldom did any tidings of it pierce
the seclusion in which they dwelt. By and by, as
the autumn went on, they learned a little more.
Fugitives coming to the Smithy for a horse's shoe;
women fleeing to their old village homes from their
A. LEAF IN THE STORM, 273
base gay life in the city; mandates from the govern-
ment of defence sent to every hamlet in the country;
stray news-sheets brought in by carriers, or hawkers,
and hucksters, all these by degrees told them of the
peril of their country—vaguely, indeed, and seldom
truthfully, but so that by mutilated rumours they came
at last to know the awful facts of the fate of Sedan, the
fall of the Empire, the siege of Paris.
It did not alter their daily lives: it was still too far
off, and too impalpable. But a foreboding, a dread,
an unspeakable woe settled down on them.
Already their lands and cattle had been harassed
to yield provision for the army and large towns; al-
ready their best horses had been taken for the siege-
trains and the forage-waggons; already their plough-
shares were perforce idle, and their children cried
because of the scarcity of nourishment; already the
iron of war had entered into their souls.
The little street at evening was mournful and very
silent: the few who talked spoke in whispers, lest a
spy should hear them, and the young ones had no
strength to play: they wanted food.
“It is as it was in my youth,” said Reine Allix,
eating her piece of black bread and putting aside the
better food prepared for her, that she might, save it,
unseen, for “the child,”
274 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
It was horrible to her and to all of them to live in
that continual terror of an unknown foe—that per-
petual expectation of some ghastly, shapeless misery.
They were quiet—so quiet!—but by all they heard
they knew that any night, as they went to their beds,
the thunder of cannon might awaken them ; any
morning, as they looked on their beloved fields, they
knew that ere sunset the flames of war might have
devoured them. - -
- They knew so little, too: all they were told was so
indefinite and garbled, that sometimes they thought
the whole was some horrid dream—thought so, at
least, until they looked at their empty stables, their
untilled land, their children who cried from hunger,
their mothers who wept for the conscripts.
But as yet it was not so very much worse than it
had been in times of bad harvest and of dire distress;
and the storm which raged over the land had as yet
spared this little green nest among the Woods on the
Seine.
November came.
“It is a cold night, Bernadou; put on more
wood,” said Reine Allix. Fuel at the least was plen-
tiful in that district, and Bernadou obeyed. -
He sat at the table, working at a new churn for his
wife; he had some skill at turnery and at invention in
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 275
such matters. The child slept soundly in its cradle by
the hearth, smiling while it dreamed. Margot spun at
her wheel. Reine Allix sat by the fire, seldom lifting
her head from her long knitting-needles, except to cast
a look on her grandson or at the sleeping child. The
little wooden shutter of the house was closed. Some
winter roses bloomed in a pot beneath the little
crucifix. Bernadou's flute lay on a shelf: he had not
had heart enough to play it since the news of the war
had come.
Suddenly a great sobbing cry rose without—the .
cry of many voices, all raised in woe together.
Bernadou rose, took his musket in his hand, undid
his door, and looked out. All the people were turned
out into the street, and the women, loudly lamenting,
beat their breasts and strained their children to their
bosoms. - -
There was a sullen red light in the sky to the east-
ward, and on the wind a low, hollow roar stole to them. -
“What is it 2’’ he asked.
“The Prussians are on us!” answered twenty
voices in one accord. “That red glare is the town
burning.” -
Then they were all still—a stillness that was more
horrible than their lamentations.
Reine Allix came and stood by her grandson. “If
* , , T 2
276 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
we must die, let us die here,” she said, in a voice that
was low, and soft, and grave. -
He took her hand and kissed it. She was content
with his answer. -
Margot stole forth too, and crouched behind them,
holding her child to her breast. “What can they do
to us?” she asked, trembling, with the rich colours of
her face blanched white.
Bernadou smiled on her: “I do not know, my dear.
I think even they can hardly bring death upon women
and children.” -
“They can, and they will,” said a voice from the
crowd.
None answered. The street was very quiet in the
darkness. Far away in the east the red glare glowed.
On the wind there was still that faint, distant ravening
roar, like the roar of famished wolves: it was the roar
of fire and of war.
In the silence Reine Allix spoke : “God is good.
Shall we not trust in Him 2 ”
With one great choking Sob the people answered:
their hearts were breaking. All night long they
watched in the street—they who had done no more
to bring this curse upon them than the flower-roots
that slept beneath the Snow. They dared not go to
their beds: they knew not when the enemy might be
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 277
upon them. They dared not flee : even in their own
woods the foe might lurk for them. One man indeed
did cry aloud, “Shall we stay here in our houses to
be smoked out like bees from their hives 2 Let us
fly "
But the calm, firm voice of Reine Allix rebuked
him: “Let who will, run like a hare from the hounds.
For me and mine, we abide by our homestead.”
And they were ashamed to be outdone by a woman,
and a woman ninety years old, and no man spoke any
more of flight. All the night long they watched in
the cold and the wind, the children shivering beneath
their mothers' skirts, the men sullenly watching the
light of the flames in the dark, starless sky. All
night long they were left alone, though far off they
heard the dropping shots of scattered firing, and in
the leafless woods around them the swift flight of
woodland beasts startled from their sleep, and the
hurrying feet of sheep terrified from their folds in the
outlying fields.
The daybreak came, gray, cheerless, very cold. A
dense fog, white and raw, hung over the river: in the
east, where the sun, they knew, was rising, they could
only see the livid light of the still towering flames and
pillars of black smoke against the leaden clouds.
“We will let them come and go in peace if they
278 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
will,” murmured old Mathurin. “What can we do?
We have no arms—no powder, hardly—no soldiers—
no defence.” c -
Bernadou said nothing, but he straightened his tall -
limbs, and in his grave, blue eyes a light gleamed.
Reine Allix looked at him as she sat in the doorway
of her house. “Thy hands are honest, thy heart
pure, thy conscience clear. Be not afraid to die if
need there be,” she said to him.
He looked down and smiled on her. Margot clung
to him in a passion of weeping. He clasped her close
and kissed her softly, but the woman who read his
heart was the woman who had held him at his
birth. -.
By degrees the women crept timidly back into their
houses, hiding their eyes, so that they should not see
that horrid light against the sky, whilst the starving
children clung to their breasts or to their skirts, wail-
ing aloud in terror. The few men there were left, for
the most part of them very old or else mere striplings,
gathered together in a hurried council. Old Mathurin
the miller and the patriots of the wineshop were agreed
that there could be no resistance, whatever might
befall them—that it would he best to hide such weapons
as they had and any provisions that still remained to
them, and yield up themselves and their homes with
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 279
humble grace to the dire foe. “If we do otherwise,”
they said, “the soldiers will surely slay us, and what
can a miserable little hamlet like this achieve against
Cannon and steel and fire ?”
Bernadou alone raised his voice in opposition. His
eye kindled, his cheek flushed, his words for once
sprang from his lips like fire. “What!” he said to
them, “shall we yield up our homes and our wives
and our infants without a single blow 2 Shall we be
So vile as to truckle to the enemies of France, and
show that we can fear them 2 It were a shame, a foul
shame : we were not worthy of the name of men. Let
us prove to them that, there are people in France who
are not afraid to die. Tet us hold our own so long as
We can. Our muskets are good, our walls strong, our
woods in this weather morasses that will suck in and
Swallow them if only we have tact to drive them there.
Let us do what we can. The camp of the francs-
tireurs is but three leagues from us. They will be
certain to come to our aid. At any rate, let us die
bravely. We can do little—that may be. But if every
man in France does that little that he can, that little
will be great enough to drive the invaders off the soil.”
Mathurin and the others screamed at him and
hooted. “You are a fool!” they shouted. “You
will be the undoing of us all. Do you not know that
280 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
one shot fired—may, only one musket ‘found—and the
enemy puts a torch to the whole place 2"
“I know," said Bernadou, with a dark radiance in
his azure eyes. “But then it is a choice between
disgrace and the flames: let us only take heed to be
clear of the first—the last must rage as God wills.”
But they screamed and mouthed and hissed at him :
“Oh yes! fine talk, fine talk | See your own roof in
flames if you will : you shall not ruin ours. Do what
you will with your own neck. Keep it erect or hang
by it, as you choose. But you have no right to give
your neighbours over to death, whether they will or
He strove, he pleaded, he conjured, he struggled
with them half the night, with the salt tears running
down his cheeks, and all his gentle blood burning with
righteous wrath and loathing shame, stirred for the
first time in all his life to a rude, simple, passionate
eloquence. But they were not persuaded. Their few
gold-pieces, hidden in the rafters, their few feeble
sheep starving in the folds, their own miserable lives,
all hungry, woe-begone and spent in daily terrors,
these were still dear to them, and they would not im.
peril them. They called him a madman; they de-
nounced him as one who would be their murderer; they
110.
threw themselves on him and demanded his musket to
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 281
bury it with the rest under the altar in the old chapel
on the hill. - -
Bernadou's eyes flashed fire; his breast heaved;
his nerves quivered; he shook them off and strode a
step forward. “As you live,” he muttered, “I have
a mind to fire on you, rather than let you live to shame
yourselves and me !” -
Reine Allix, who stood by him silent all the while,
laid her hand on his shoulder.
“My boy,” she said in his ear, “you are right, and
they wrong. Yet let not dissension between brethren
open the door, for the enemy to enter thereby into
your homes. Do what you will with your own life,
Bernadou—it is yours—but leave them to do as they
will with theirs. You cannot make sheep into lions,
and let not the first blood shed here be a brother's.”
Bernadou's head dropped on his breast.
“Do as you will,” he muttered to his neighbours.
They took his musket from him, and in the darkness
of the night stole silently up the wooded chapel-hill
and buried it, with all their other arms, under the
altar where the white Christ hung. -
“We are safe now,” said Mathurin the miller to the
patriots of the tavern. “Had that madman had his
way, he had destroyed us all.”
Reine Allix Softly led her grandson across his own
282 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
threshold, and drew his head down to hers and kissed
him between the eyes. -
“You did what you could, Bernadou,” she said to
him; “let the rest come as it will.” -
Then she turned from him, and flung her cloak over
her head and sank down, weeping bitterly, for she had
lived through ninety-three years only to see this agony
at the last. -
Bernadou, now that all means of defence was gone
from him, and the only thing left to him to deal with
was his own life, had become quiet and silent and
passionless, as was his habit. He would have fought
like a mastiff for his home, but this they had forbidden
him to do, and he was passive and without hope. He
shut-to his door, and sat down with his hand in that of
Reine Allix and his arm around his wife.
“There is nothing to do but to wait,” he said sadly.
The day seemed very long in coming.
The firing ceased for a while : then its roll com-
menced afresh, and grew nearer to the village. Then
again all was still. - - -
- At noon a shepherd staggered into the place, pale,
bleeding, bruised, covered with mire. The Prussians,
he told them, had forced him to be their guide, had
knotted him tight to a trooper's saddle, and had
dragged him with them until he was half dead with
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 283.
fatigue and pain. At night he had broken from them
and had fled: they were close at hand, he said, and
had burned the town from end to end because a man
had fired at them from a housetop. That was all he
knew. - -
Bernadou, who had gone out to hear his news,
returned into the house and sat down and hid his face
within his hands. -
“If I resist you are all lost,” he muttered. “And
yet to yield like a cur !”
It was a piteous question, whether to follow the
instinct in him and see his birth-place in flames and
his family slaughtered for his act, or to crush out the
manhood in him and live, loathing himself as a coward
for evermore ? - -
Reine Allix looked at him, and laid her hand on his -
bowed head, and her voice was strong and tender as
music :
“Fret not thyself, my beloved. When the moment
comes, then do as thine own heart and the whisper of
God in it bid thee.” -->
A great sob answered her : it was the first since
his earliest infancy that she had ever heard from
IBernadou.
It grew dark. The autumn day died. The sullen
clouds dropped scattered rain. The red leaves were
284. . A LEAF IN THE STORM.
blown in millions by the wind. The little houses on
either side the road were dark, for the dwellers in
them dared not show any light that might be a star to
allure to them the footsteps of their foes. Bernadou
sat with his arms on the table, and his head resting on
them. Margot nursed her son: Reine Allix prayed.
Suddenly in the street without there was the sound
of many feet of horses and of men, the shouting of
angry voices, the splashing of quick steps in the
Watery ways, the screams of women, the flash of steel
through the gloom.
Bernadou sprang to his feet, his face pale, his blue
eyes dark as night.
“They are come !” he said under his breath. It
was not fear that he felt, nor horror: it was rather a
passion of love for his birth-place and his nation—a
passion of longing to struggle and to die for both.
And he had no weaponſ - f
He drew his house door open with a steady hand,
and stood on his own threshold and faced these, his
enemies. The street was full of them—some mounted,
some on foot: crowds of them swarmed in the woods
and on the roads. They had settled on the village as
vultures on a dead lamb's body.
It was a little, lowly place : it might well have been
left in peace.
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 285
It had had no more share in the war than a child
still unborn, but it came in the victors’ way, and their
mailed heel crushed it as they passed. They had
heard that arms were hidden and francs-tireurs shel-
tered there, and they had swooped down on it and held
it hard and fast. Some were told off to search the
chapel; some to ransack the dwellings; some to seize
such food and bring such cattle as there might be left;
some to seek out the devious paths that crossed and
recrossed the fields; and yet there still remained in
the little street hundreds of armed men, force enough
to awe a citadel or storm a breach.
The people did not attempt to resist.
They stood passive, dry-eyed in misery, looking on
whilst the little treasures of their household lives were
swept away for ever, and ignorant what fate by fire or
iron might be their portion ere the night was done.
They saw the corn that was their winter store to
save their offspring from famine poured out like ditch-
water. They saw oats and wheat flung down to be
trodden into a slough of mud and filth. They saw the
walnut presses in their kitchens broken open, and their
old heirlooms of silver, centuries old, borne away as
booty. They saw the oak cupboards in their wives’
bed-chambers ransacked, and the homespun linen and
the quaint bits of plate that had formed their nuptial
286 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
dowers cast aside in derision or trampled into a bat-
tered heap. They saw the pet lamb of their infants,
the silver ear-rings of their brides, the brave tankards
they had drunk their marriage wine in, the tame bird
that flew to their whistle, all seized for food or seized
for spoil. -
They saw all this, and had to stand by with mute
tongues and passive hands, lest any glance of wrath or
gesture of revenge should bring the leaden bullet in
their children's throats or the yellow flame amidst
their homesteads. Greater agony the world cannot
hold.
Under the porch of the cottage, by the Sycamores,
one group stood and looked, silent and very still—Ber-
madou, erect, pale, calm, with a fierce scorn burning in
his eyes; Margot, quiet, because he wished her so,
holding to her the rosy and golden beauty of her son ;
Reine Allix, with a patient horror on her face, her
figure drawn to its full height, and her hands holding
to her breast the crucifix.
They stood thus, waiting they knew not what,
only resolute to show no cowardice and meet no
shame. -
Behind them was the dull, waning glow of the wood-
fire on the hearth which had been the centre of all
their hopes and joys; before them the dim, dark
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 287
country, and the woestricken faces of their neighbours,
and the moving soldiery with their torches, and the
quivering forms of the half-dying horses.
Suddenly a voice arose from the armed mass:
“Bring me the peasant hither.”
Bernadou was seized by several hands and forced
and dragged from his door out to the place where the
leader of the Uhlans sat on a white charger that shook
and snorted blood in its exhaustion.
Bernadou cast off the alien grasp that held him, and
stood erect before his foes. He was no longer pale,
and his eyes were clear and steadfast.
“You look less a fool than the rest,” said the
Prussian commander. “You know this country
well ?”
“Well!”
The country in whose fields and woodlands he had
wandered from his infancy, and whose every meadow-
path and wayside tree and flower-sown brook he knew
by heart as a lover knows the lines of his mistress's
face | x
“You have arms here 2° pursued the German.
** We had.”
“What have you done with them 2"
“If I had had my way, you would not need ask.
You would have felt them.” ^
288 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
The Prussian looked at him keenly, doing homage
to the boldness of the answer. “Will you confess
where they are 2 ” -
“ No.”
“You know the penalty for concealment of arms is
death 2’’
“You have made it so.”
“We have, and Prussian will is French law. You
are a bold man: you merit death. But still, you know
the country well ?” - -
Dernadou smiled, as a mother might Smile were any
- foolish enough to ask her if she remembered the look
her dead child's face had worn.
“If you know it well,” pursued the Prussian, “I
will give you a chance. Lay hold of my stirrup-leather
and be lashed to it, and show me straight as the crow
flies to where the weapons are hidden. If you do, I
will leave you your life. If you do not—”
“If I do not ?”
“You will be shot.” -
Bernadou was silent: his eyes glanced through the
mass of soldiers to the little cottage under the trees
opposite : the two there were straining to behold him,
but the soldiers pushed them back, so that in the
flare of the torches they could not see, nor in the
tumult hear. He thanked God for it.
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 289
“Your choice 2" asked the Uhlan, impatiently, after
a moment's pause.
Bernadou's lips were white, but they did not tremble
as he answered, “I am no traitor.” And his eyes as
he spoke went softly to the little porch where the
light glowed from that hearth beside which he would
never again sit with the creatures he loved around
him.
The German looked at him: “Is that a boast or a
fact. 2”
“I am no traitor,” Bernadou answered simply once
IY).OI’62.
The Prussian gave a sign to his troopers. There
was the sharp report of a double shot, and Bernadou
fell dead. One bullet had pierced his brain, the other
was bedded in his lungs. The soldiers kicked aside
the warm and quivering body. It was only a peasant
killed !
With a shriek that rose above the roar of the wind,
and cut like steel to every human heart that beat
there, Reine Allix forced her way through the throng,
and fell on her knees beside him, and caught him in
her arms, and laid his head upon her breast, where he
had used to sleep his softest sleep in infancy and
childhood.
“It is God's will ! it is God's will !” she muttered;
U
290 A LEAF IN THE STORM.
and then she laughed—a laugh so terrible that the
blood of the boldest there ran cold.
Margot followed her and looked, and stood dry-
eyed and silent; then flung herself and the child she
carried in her arms beneath the hoof of the White
charger.
“End your work l’” she shrieked to them. “You
have killed him—kill us. Have you not mercy enough
for that ?”
The horse, terrified and snorting blood, plunged
and trampled the ground: his fore foot struck the
child's golden head and stamped its face out of all
human likeness. Some peasants pulled Margot from
the lashing hoofs; she was quite dead, though neither
wound nor bruise was on her. &
Reine Allix neither looked nor paused. With all
her strength she had begun to drag the body of Ber-
madou across the threshold of his house.
“He shall lie at home, he shall lie at home,” she
muttered. She would not believe that already he was
dead.
With all the force of her earliest womanhood she
lifted him, and half drew half bore him into the home
that he had loved, and laid him down upon the hearth,
and knelt by him, caressing him as though he were
O]] (28 IIl Ol’é à, child, and saying softly, { % Hush ' ''
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 291
for her mind was gone, and she fancied that he only
slept. -
Without, the tumult of the soldiery increased : they
found the arms hidden under the altar on the hill;
they seized five peasants to slay them for the dire
offence. The men struggled, and would not go as the
sheep to the shambles. They were shot down in the
street before the eyes of their children. Then the
order was given to fire the place in punishment, and
leave it to its fate. - -*
The torches were flung with a laugh on the dry
thatched roofs—brands Snatched from the house-fires
on the hearths were tossed amongst the dwelling-
houses and the barns. The straw and timber flared
alight like tow.
An old man, her nearest neighbour, rushed to
the cottage of Reine Allix and seized her by the
arm.
“They fire the Berceau,” he screamed. “Quick
quick 1 or you will be burned alive l’”
Reine Allix looked up with a smile : “Be quiet !
Do you not see ? He sleeps.”
The old man shook her, implored her, strove to
drag her away—in desperation pointed to the roof
above, which was already in flames.
Reine Allix looked; at that sight her mind cleared
292 A LEAF IN THE STORM,
and regained consciousness; she remembered all, she
understood all: she knew that he was dead. --
“Go in peace and save yourself,” she said in the
old, Sweet, strong tones of an earlier day. “As for me,
I am very old. I and my dead will stay together at
home.”
The man fled, and left her to her choice.
The great curled flames and the livid vapours closed
around her : she never moved. The death was fierce
but swift, and even in death she and the one whom
she had loved and reared were not divided.
The end soon came.
From hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into
flames. The village was a lake of fire, into which the
statue of the Christ, burning and reeling, fell. Some
few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to the
woods, and there escaped one torture to perish more
slowly of cold and famine. All other things perished.
The rapid stream of the flame licked up all there was
in its path. The bare trees raised their leafless
branches on fire at a thousand points. The stores of
corn and fruit were lapped by millions of crimson
tongues. The pigeons flew screaming from their
roosts and sank into the smoke. The dogs were suffo-
cated on the thresholds they had guarded all their
lives. The calf was stifled in the byre. The sheep
A LEAF IN THE STORM. 293
ran bleating with the wool burning on their living
bodies. The little caged birds fluttered helpless, and
then dropped, scorched to cinders. The aged and the
sick were stifled in their beds. All things perished.
The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in
which every living creature was caught and consumed
and changed to ashes. •
The tide of war has rolled on and left it a blackened
waste, a smoking ruin, wherein not so much as a
mouse may creep or a bird may nestle. It is gone,
and its place can know it never more.
Never more.
But who is there to care ?
It was but as a leaf which the great storm withered
as it passed.
THE END.
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & Co., PRINTERs, witHTEFRIARs.

October, 1874.
CHAT TO & W IN DUS'S
A. ZS 7 OF APOO K.S.
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24 POOR.S. PUB Z.Z.S.H.A.Z) A3 Y
THE PICCADILLY NOVELS-continued.
Z%e Queen of Commaught.
The Dark Colleen.
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Antomizza. - By WILKIE Collins.
Basil. By WILKIE Collins.
Aſide and Seek. - By WILKIE COLLINS.
The Dead. Secret. By WILKIE Collins.
The Queen of Hearts.
My Miscellanies.
The Moozeszozze.
Man and Wife.
Poor MŽss Fancſ.
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