PASTORALS 
 FTWMCE 
 
 RENVNCIATIONS
 
 FRANCE 
 
 RENVNCIATIONS/ 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK 
 WEDMORE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ELH1N MATHEWS 
 AND JOHN LAME
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 This is the Third Edition of ' Pastorals of France ' and 
 the Second of ' Renunciations' 'Pastorals of France' 
 which had originally appeared in ' Temple Bar' 
 was first published as a volume in 1877. The Second 
 Edition appeared in 1878. 'Renunciations' of which 
 one section, ' A Chemist in the Suburbs,' had appeared 
 in ' The Fortnightly Review ' was first published as a 
 volume in 1893. The First Edition was limited to 
 Four Hundred and Fifty copies, including those on 
 large paper. The Prefaces have now been withdrawn. 
 
 October 1893. 
 
 2076122
 
 Dedication 
 
 MILLICENT
 
 CONTENTS 
 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC, ... I 
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC, . . . -47 
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES, . . 87 
 
 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS, . . 151 
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE, . .177 
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR, . . IQ7
 
 PASTORALS OF FRANCE
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 
 
 MR RUTTERBY had come by diligence from 
 Paimbceuf. There was no traveller but himself, 
 so they had used the ' supplement.' The ' sup- 
 plement ' was like a phaeton, with back-seat 
 always covered by its head. Mr Rutterby had 
 sat in the back of the supplement, and the blue- 
 bloused driver of it had sat in front. The blue- 
 bloused driver had held the reins loosely the 
 horses were steady, and knew their road over 
 the hill from Paimboeuf to Saint Pere-en-Retz, 
 and on from Saint Pere-en-Retz to Pornic by 
 the sea and he had leant back half the way to 
 talk to the one traveller ; and as Mr Rutterby 
 was quiet and reserved, the driver had chattered 
 at will. Before the Bay of Biscay came in sight 
 or the little blue bay, out of the Bay of Biscay, 
 round which Pornic rises Mr Rutterby could 
 have passed a creditable examination in his
 
 4 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 charioteer's history, but the charioteer knew 
 nothing of Mr Rutterby. 
 
 At last, however having exhausted conversa- 
 tion on his own affairs he turned his attention 
 to the passenger's. 
 
 ' Do you go to Pornic to amuse yourself, or to 
 be a gentleman's valet ? ' 
 
 'Not to be a gentleman's valet,' said Mr 
 Rutterby, with a quiet smile at the corners of 
 his mouth. He wore a shabby overcoat ; he 
 was faithful to an old portmanteau ; and he 
 had an income of seven thousand a year. 
 
 'Then you go to amuse yourself? You cannot 
 amuse yourself at Pornic. There is no theatre, 
 no billiard -table no pretty women. Aha ! It 
 is at Nantes that you can amuse yourself. 
 Nantes ! What a city ! La grande mile. Ma 
 foi ! an inconceivable city. But Pornic ! 
 you have made a mistake.' 
 
 ' I am going on a visit to Monsieur de 
 Malmy,' said Philip Rutterby. 
 
 ' Monsieur de Malmy ! ' said the driver. De 
 Malmy, though not rich, was a man of social 
 importance and the driver was no longer a 
 comrade. That air of companionship and 
 brotherly equality is welcome to travellers who 
 hate gratuities and desire information. With it,
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 5 
 
 a gratuity is impossible, for a gratuity implies 
 inequality. The driver was no longer sociable. 
 At the top of the hill he was Mr Rutterby's 
 brother, at the bottom he was Mr Rutterby's 
 servant. 
 
 This was Pornic, if Monsieur pleased. If 
 Monsieur pleased, it might be anything else. 
 
 At last the diligence drove up to the yellow- 
 white inn, and rattled into its courtyard roofed 
 with vines. From the housetop on one side to 
 the housetop on the other, this green roof 
 stretched over the paved courtyard, a sunny 
 canopy, yet protecting the yard from a heat too 
 fierce. ' It is like an echo of Italy,' thought Mr 
 Rutterby, as he stepped slowly down from the 
 ' supplement,' and Monsieur de Malmy kissed 
 him on his cheek. 
 
 Then visitor and host got into the host's 
 pony-carriage, and drove out to Saint-Marie, 
 where the Frenchman had a chalet every year 
 for the bathing season. 
 
 ' And your son and daughter ? ' asked Mr 
 Rutterby, inquiring for them directly he had 
 been assured that Madame de Malmy was 
 well. 
 
 'Alas! dear friend, my son continues to dis- 
 turb me. Leon's expenditure is on the scale
 
 P PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 of a millionaire's. I am a weak man to allow 
 it, for it cripples me very much. Ondelette, 
 too, must suffer for it. It will reduce her 
 dowry; and the poor girl's dowry is small 
 enough already. She has little but beauty and 
 a name.' 
 
 ' Well, that is much,' said Mr Rutterby 
 pleasantly. 
 
 ' " Little " you mean in the age in which 
 we live. But never mind, never mind ! I am 
 not anxious to marry Ondelette. Ondelette is 
 young, and can wait. It will satisfy me for 
 her to be always with us. I should miss her 
 here miss her much more at Angers. I cannot 
 play Bach's preludes for myself. She must 
 stay to play them to me, I suppose.' 
 
 And now they were in front of the full sea. 
 The castle, and the little bay, and the many- 
 shuttered town rising tall on the hill side, were 
 left behind. They drove along the main road, 
 out to Saint-Marie, past villas and chalets set 
 in pleasant gardens, where silvery grass-plants 
 grew a dozen feet high, and rose-tree and 
 lavender, petunia and geranium, vine, acacia 
 and fig-tree, flourished together in that genial 
 sunshine and soft air of autumn afternoon. 
 
 ' The Bay of Biscay is placid enough to-day,'
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORN 1C 7 
 
 said Mr Rutterby. But the summer lingers, 
 his friend could have told him, and gives place 
 only suddenly to winter and storm. 
 
 But here was the particular chalet which was 
 home for the present a creeper-covered cottage, 
 with pretty front, bizarre and individual, like 
 all the rest in the long and varied row set in 
 their gardens along the mile of peopled and 
 cultivated coast from Pornic to Saint-Marie. 
 A glass door from the garden led straight 
 into the little salon, and there sat Ondelette. 
 
 She had just come in with a basket of black- 
 berries, which grow in Pornic hedges big and 
 rich as mulberries. 
 
 ' We will have them for dessert,' said 
 Ondelette. ' You must not neglect them my 
 blackberries. They all came out of the lane 
 leading to the Druids' Stones, papa. We must 
 take Mr Rutterby to see the Druids' Stones. 
 Oh ! but he doesn't care for anything except 
 Art I forgot. Whatever can you find to do at 
 Pornic ? ' 
 
 ' You shall take me to see the Druidical 
 remains, Ondelette,' said Mr Rutterby. He called 
 her by her Christian name because he was her 
 father's friend. He remembered the day when 
 he had congratulated her father on her birth.
 
 8 
 
 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 He was thirty-five years her senior, for she was 
 nineteen and he was four-and-fifty. 
 
 ' Thank you,' she said : ' that will be for to- 
 morrow. It will be a pleasant walk, at all 
 events. The stones stand high on neglected 
 ground. There are legends about them, and 
 terrors. But I don't myself care for legends 
 and terrors ; I assure you I prefer this dear 
 little sunny garden of a Pornic. It is all one 
 garden, in the eye of the sun from Pornic to 
 Saint-Marie.' 
 
 ' It looks like a revival of Eden, I fancy,' Mr 
 Rutterby observed. 
 
 ' With better gardening,' said Ondelette, ' for 
 Adam was but a beginner. He would never 
 have despised our Pornic and Saint-Marie.' 
 
 She had not seen the new guest for five years, 
 and was very young, inexperienced, and child- 
 like, but was as free with him as much at 
 home in a moment as any woman could have 
 been, were she accustomed to have a dinner- 
 party twice a week in London, and to say suit- 
 able nothings to half the world every night of 
 the season. For Ondelette lived a free family 
 life, quiet and intimate, whether at Angers 
 or Pornic. Few indeed were admitted to her 
 home ; but whoever was admitted, was at once
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 9 
 
 a friend. When Mr Rutterby went upstairs to 
 dress himself for dinner, he carried with him 
 the impression of her frank simplicity, and 
 thought that he had seen a comely picture in 
 seeing her sun-browned cheeks, her large brown 
 eyes, very soft, over-shadowed with shining 
 hair, the colour of deep gold. Philip Rutterby 
 knew the old French poetry, and remembered 
 that Ondelette was of the type that Ronsard 
 loved seen most in the green sunny country of 
 Anjou la petite pucelle Angevine, 
 
 The little dining-room looked pleasant in the 
 evening, with its dark buffet and deep grey 
 wall-paper, and the lamp hung from the ceiling 
 throwing a bright light on the table, where 
 silver glittered and fine glass was clear, and 
 Ondelette's blackberries had the place of honour, 
 and were duly flanked by blue plates with 
 greyish-red chrysanthemums. 
 
 'It is early to make a show of your chrys- 
 anthemums,' said Mr Rutterby, 'for to-morrow 
 is but the first day of October. But your 
 instinct of colour is exquisite, Ondelette.' 
 
 'Thank you,' said Ondelette. 'The chrys- 
 anthemums cannot come soon enough, nor stay 
 long enough. They are my favourite flowers. 
 O ! but that is a poor word "favourite " flowers.
 
 JO PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 They are more than that. But perhaps it's 
 too early in the year for you to value them. 
 They are best in their own time, after all 
 when the earth is gloomy, whichever way 
 you look. In November they come like 
 cheerfulness in winter, but always very sober 
 delightfully sober like a friend who comes 
 in your trouble.' 
 
 ' What is your " trouble," Ondelette ? ' asked 
 Madame de Malmy. 
 
 ' My trouble ! Oh ! I have no trouble. 
 Perhaps I should not like these sad, dear, sober 
 things, if I had. There ! lie as I put you. He 
 will sink down below the rest. He is so modest 
 his stem is not long enough. He doesn't 
 assert himself that chrysanthemum. He will 
 never get on in the world.' 
 
 Philip Rutterby smiled. 
 
 'You have come to a foolish place,' said 
 Ondelette. 'We talk nothing but nonsense at 
 Pornic. It is such a pleasant place, there is no 
 need to be wise in it.' 
 
 ' But we want to hear about your acquisitions, 
 my dear friend,' said De Malmy, with genuine 
 consideration for his friend, as well as with the 
 common worldly-wise knowledge that you please 
 a man most by talking about his own affairs.
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 1 1 
 
 ' What have you been picking up lately, since I 
 was with you in London ? ' 
 
 One of Rutterby's few pleasures was to talk 
 about Art : so he answered readily, ' You know 
 Crome ? The chief painter of the Norwich land- 
 scape school, you remember. Unless, indeed, 
 Cotman ' 
 
 ' Even /, in France, know Crome,' said Onde- 
 lette. ' Have you got a picture of his, Mr 
 Rutterby ? ' 
 
 'Two or three,' he answered, glad that she 
 cared to listen. ' I have had them for several 
 years on my dining-room wall. But it is a 
 little water-colour I was going to speak of to 
 your father. I had one home the day before I 
 came away. It is not at all a " taking " draw- 
 ing. But you must have what you can get of 
 Crome, I fancy, in water-colour. He is difficult 
 to meet with in water-colour; and when met 
 with, perhaps more interesting than valuable. 
 Perhaps he was not at his ease in water-colour 
 a little hard and dry, generally, I daresay; 
 but there are shivering, grey willows in the 
 background of this drawing which have the 
 same masterhand in them, unmistakably, as the 
 great willow picture which is still in Norfolk. 
 The French were right, I believe, in ranking
 
 12 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 Crome high. Ondelette, do you draw in water- 
 colours ? ' 
 
 'Ondelette obtained a certificate from the 
 teacher at the Convent,' her mother informed 
 Mr Rutterby, with pride. 
 
 ' But Sister Claire was almost as partial to 
 me as Reverend Mother herself,' said the girl. 
 ' I know it was not fair of her, though I did 
 try my best. And if I had deserved the cer- 
 tificate, it wouldn't have been much. I ought 
 indeed to be able to draw and play, being such a 
 wretched little housekeeper.' 
 
 'You tell us the truth, Mademoiselle,' her 
 father said, gently pulling the tip of her ear. 
 ' As long as you stay at home with us, and 
 have your mother to fall back upon ' a 
 graceful concession on De Malmy's part to 
 the claims of Madame de Malmy 'your faults 
 in this matter may be overlooked; but the 
 day on which I put on my hat, little girl, to 
 go out and look for a son-in-law, I shall have 
 to remember what a child you are in these 
 matters. You would be at the mercy of your 
 servants, Ondelette.' 
 
 ' Then I would have ^ooafservants, and should 
 like to be at their mercy. But that will not be 
 for a very long while.'
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC J 3 
 
 c Ondelette allows herself to say silly things,' 
 remarked her mother, in an explanatory 
 way. 
 
 ' She has a very pretty talent as an artist,' her 
 father added, to Mr Rutterby. Ondelette was 
 used to be spoken of frankly, and these chance 
 phrases of slight praise or blame wrought no 
 change in her look and manner a look and 
 manner of much peace, breaking now and again 
 into merriment, as when summer lightning 
 breaks across a placid summer sky. 
 
 ' Do you keep to your habit of walking 
 after dinner ? ' asked Monsieur de Malmy of his 
 guest. 
 
 ' Except in winter,' said Philip Rutterby. 
 ' Then I enjoy my own " interior " as best I 
 can looking over my portfolios, in my chair 
 by the fire, like the self-centred bachelor that 
 lam.' 
 
 ' Do you like interiors ? ' asked Ondelette ; 
 ' for if you do I will show you some pretty ones 
 in Pornic. I will take you a walk, some evening, 
 after dark.' 
 
 'There is no one to mind in Pornic,' inter- 
 polated Madame de Malmy. 
 
 ' Last year, when papa was less busy, he and 
 I used to go our rounds after dark very often.
 
 14 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 I have hardly been at all this year. Papa is 
 working so hard at his learned pamphlet, you 
 know all about the castle of Plessis-les-Tours. 
 But I tell papa your Walter Scott has been 
 before him in that.' 
 
 ' Sir Walter wrote a novel, and would have 
 been the last person to think he had anticipated 
 my monograph,' answered the man of learned 
 leisure. ' Give us some music, my child, and 
 place for my friend Rutterby the cosiest chair in 
 the salon. Even your enthusiasm can hardly 
 propose to lead him forth to-night. Ah ! that 
 is right,' he added, passing into the little salon 
 and seeing with satisfaction the cheerful light of 
 the wood fire flickering, sober, and low ; ' to- 
 morrow is the first of October. The nights 
 freshen, mafille? 
 
 ' No lamp, De Malmy no lamp, unless you 
 wish it. It would quite spoil the charm, I fancy. 
 I have no doubt Ondelette can play without any 
 further light, and the effect of the " interior " is 
 too pretty a one to spoil.' And Rutterby sat 
 down, as he was bidden, in the cosiest chair a 
 bachelor, when once past forty, takes the cosiest 
 chair without even knowing it and De Malmy 
 sat on the other side of the fire, and his wife be- 
 tween, and the firelight flickered on Ondelette's
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC ^5 
 
 hair and cheek, as she sat down to the little 
 straight black piano. 
 
 ' In my house I have no use for a piano,' said 
 Philip Rutterby, rather sadly. (For he was 
 often a calmly melancholy man, of much timidity, 
 and he never sought to hide the expression of 
 his temperament.) ' But if I had a piano, it 
 should be a plain straight box, like your French 
 ones, and not spoilt by our meaningless curves 
 and vicious ornaments. A piano, De Malmy, is 
 a cabinet for music, and that is simply what it 
 ought to look like. The spinnet was really the 
 better-shaped instrument, painted in quiet tints, 
 sage greens and yellow browns, as in a picture I 
 have, by Van der Meer of Delft.' 
 
 ' Shall you listen, do you think ? ' asked Onde- 
 lette, quite frankly. 
 
 1 Why, of course,' answered Rutterby. 
 
 ' I asked, because, if people listen, they deserve 
 to know what they are listening to. I am going 
 to play a prelude of Bach's first; then a fugue 
 that does not belong to it.' 
 
 She played. He listened and looked. She 
 stopped. He asked her to repeat it. She played 
 the two again, without even glancing round by 
 way of answer to his request. And when the 
 two were finished once more an affair of only
 
 1 6 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 five minutes there was nothing said directly; 
 and before the silence broke, Ondelette had 
 struck the full, deep chords once more, and 
 for the third time they heard that music's 
 passionate undertone. 
 
 ' Then you like Bach ? ' she said to Mr Rut- 
 terby, now turning round from the piano, very 
 happy and satisfied. ' The man who wrote that 
 prelude must have felt something deeply. I 
 wonder what it was ? ' said Ondelette. 
 
 ' You should play something else,' said 
 Madame de Malmy. ' One wearies of the same 
 thing.' 
 
 ' I never get tired of the sea in autumn, and 
 its long, low roll, out here, that never stops. 
 Why should one be tired of Sebastian Bach, at 
 a third hearing ? Eh, papa ? ' 
 
 It was to her father she appealed. And she 
 knelt down by him, and put her hand in his 
 arm, and looked into the fire, broodingly, 
 quietly. Madame de Malmy rang for the lamp, 
 and began to scan the pages of the ' Figaro.' 
 
 ' And the monograph on Plessis-les-Tours ? ' 
 asked Philip Rutterby, of his friend : ' Don't let 
 me interfere with your evening occupations.' 
 
 ' I have nothing to do this evening but to 
 write two words to an English archaeologist,
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC '7 
 
 acknowledging the receipt of a remarkable paper 
 on " The Use of the word Pig, in its connection 
 with Pig Cross." Then we will talk again, 
 dear friend, and hear more of your acquisitions.' 
 
 ' Have you long been a collector ? ' inquired 
 Madame de Malmy, with civil but languid 
 interest. 
 
 ' A matter of twenty years, dear Madam,' 
 Rutterby answered. ' You see I have neither 
 chick nor child, nor any relation. My little 
 fortune has always been more than enough for 
 my own needs, and men as ignorant of the 
 world as I am do not know how to be charitable 
 wisely to anyone but themselves. So I have a 
 good many things by this time not of much 
 value to others, I daresay but I admire them 
 myself. Moreover, I think one does some good, 
 in guarding reverently, beautiful things.' 
 
 He always spoke of his collection modestly, 
 but it had been brought together with the finest 
 taste, and as to its money value, it was the 
 result of an annual outlay of several thousands, 
 continued now for twenty years. Experts, who 
 had seen it, were right in judging that alto- 
 gether it had cost a hundred thousand pounds, 
 and would fetch double that money. 
 
 When Philip Rutterby went up to bed, his
 
 18 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 thoughts were full of Ondelette. A bachelor 
 of fifty-four, in indifferent health, is particular 
 about the disposition of his chamber, and the 
 set of its blinds and window curtains. He does 
 not sleep immediately in a fresh room. The 
 fresh room breaks in a little upon his familiar 
 ways. So Rutterby had time to think of 
 Ondelette. Her beauty had impressed him, and 
 he had been at home with it generally the 
 beauty he saw was only that which passed him 
 by chance in the street. There was such 
 simplicity, too, with the beauty, and with these 
 the poetry of girl-nature never suppressed 
 child-nature, perhaps; hardly a woman's yet. 
 'Were I a young man/ thought Philip Rut- 
 terby, ' I suppose I should fall in love with 
 her to-day or to-morrow. But for me, that is 
 all past all past,' he- muttered to himself. He 
 had had his passion in his youth, and had been 
 constant to it. 
 
 And yet not quite ' in his youth,' for his youth 
 had had its lighter loves ' blazes,' Polonius said, 
 1 giving more light than heat, you must not take 
 for fire.' These mild thin blazes of a mild quiet 
 temperament subsided soon, and at thirty an old 
 friendship glowed into love, and he looked 
 forward to happiness. The girl a city parson's
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC I 9 
 
 daughter fell suddenly ill. The marriage had 
 to be postponed, while she wintered abroad. 
 She came back stronger, and the marriage day 
 was fixed upon. But she was ill again, and 
 was hurried to the South to Hyeres whither 
 Philip Rutterby followed her. The new illness 
 was a short one. She died one bright November 
 morning, within sight of the Mediterranean. 
 They buried her under a row of cypresses that 
 bowed lightly over her with every wind from 
 the mountains. These things were very deep 
 in Rutterby's heart, and for two-and-twenty 
 years he had been faithful to that memory. 
 
 But, of course, in two-and-twenty years, a 
 structure wrought of many associations and 
 many days had arisen and spread itself over the 
 older memory, so that the older memory was 
 like some verses learnt in childhood, recalled 
 now and again, but not for service, or even 
 pleasure, in the present life the so-different, 
 ever-changing present life, with the common 
 thoughts and common needs of which this poor 
 dead far-away Past has nothing to do. To 
 many, when it does come up, that older memory 
 is like an attenuated ghost unreal beside the 
 gross, tangible presences of our vulgar days. 
 
 But there was nothing gross, indeed nothing
 
 20 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 vulgar, indeed in Ondelette and her environ- 
 ments. It seemed like a new poem, the bright 
 and placid experience of the last few hours, to 
 Rutterby. There was the sunny, unfamiliar 
 country; the brown peasants, merry amidst 
 their rich lands, still almost in their yielding 
 time; there was the quaint, tall, many-shuttered 
 town, with narrow house fronts one above the 
 other, and hanging gardens, and small castle 
 jutting out where the sinuous, shallow river 
 passed into the little blue bay; there was the 
 deep blue bay which, as you followed with 
 keenest eye the track of its water, became some- 
 how invisibly all one with the great outer sea. 
 Then there had been the pleasant sight of 
 ordered villa and chalet, with luxuriant garden; 
 the cottage- villa, which was home for a while; 
 the cosy lights and glooms of its chambers, full 
 of objects which spoke to Rutterby of gentle 
 life, its joys and busyness the music Onde- 
 lette. Yes Ondelette. 
 
 All this produced a pleasant wakefulness. You 
 remember Goethe when he was at Marienbad 
 the summer holiday, the encounter with one for- 
 gets what German FrSulein, the stirred pulses, 
 the half-recognised longings and the poet was 
 seventy-four. Philip Rutterby was twenty years
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 21 
 
 younger; but no poet, you may say. No, in- 
 deed, there was little power of expression 
 much reticence and timid reserve about that 
 lonely man, whose pictures were his friends, and 
 whose hermitage was in the heart of London. 
 
 Ondelette was in high spirits next morning, 
 at the ten o'clock breakfast ; flushed with the 
 salt-sea bath, and the walk after it along the 
 gleaming morning coast, sparkling with sun- 
 shine. Philip Rutterby looked at her from 
 under his thin iron-grey eyebrows, with the 
 quiet, steadfast examining eyes of the connois- 
 seur of Art eyes accustomed to the peaceful 
 contemplation of beautiful things. De Malmy 
 noticed how closely he looked at her. Presently, 
 when the meal was over, host and guest marched 
 out to the beach the beach of La Noveillard, 
 whose sands are washed by open sea ; more 
 timid bathers bathe in the little bay by the 
 castle, right under Pornic town ; but La Noveil- 
 lard was always the choice of De Malmy, who 
 was now only too glad to spend the best hours 
 of the day there with his friend, and watch the 
 sunlight steal along the coast, lighting up villa 
 and villa-garden, and the rising ground of brown 
 ploughed land beyond, dotted with grey farms 
 here and there, now rosy with late afternoon,
 
 22 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 and then look out to the clear sky and infinite 
 sea, and in the far horizon the dark line of coast 
 the long dark streak of Isle Noirmoutier. 
 
 ' You find her very beautiful my Ondelette ? ' 
 said De Malmy, when they had watched the 
 afternoon bathers, and when he saw that Rut- 
 terby was no more minded than himself to .read 
 the English newspaper which they had brought 
 out lest talk should flag. 
 
 Philip Rutterby did not often express admira- 
 tion in strong words, and when he said quietly, 
 ' I should think Ondelette a genius of happiness,' 
 the phrase meant much with him. 
 
 ' I have not judged it convenient to mention 
 to her that I have just received a proposal of 
 marriage. The young man himself takes the 
 initiative, by writing me a letter which I have 
 received this morning. He is called Jules 
 Gerard a young man of some little talent 
 sous-prcfet of Saumur. Only twenty-eight years 
 of age. I suppose he wishes to marry himself 
 into a premature reputation for steadiness.' 
 
 'What does Ondelette think of him 1 ?' asked 
 Philip Rutterby, rather nervously. 
 
 ' Ondelette, dear friend, thinks well of him, of 
 course ; for I have not educated Ondelette to 
 think ill of anybody. My child is as na'ive as
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 2 3 
 
 your Shakspere's "Miranda." Besides, she is 
 impulsive and sympathetic. She is your true 
 friend Ondelette when you have talked to her 
 quietly for a quarter of an hour.' 
 
 'I have not done so,' remarked Philip Rut- 
 terby. ' And this young man does he know 
 her well ? ' 
 
 ' Mon Dieit ! if my child is your friend in a 
 quarter of an hour, that is because you can know 
 her in that time. Ondelette is excellent. I 
 would not make a mere mariage de convenance 
 for her.' 
 
 ' There should be fine uses for so fine an instru- 
 ment,' said Philip Rutterby, broodingly, and in 
 a low voice from under his thin grey moustache. 
 
 'But I cannot regard a sotis-prefecture as an 
 adequate provision,' De Malmy observed. 
 
 ' She does not love him, then ? ' asked Rutterby. 
 
 ' Romantic fellow ! You forget of whom you 
 speak. She is French ma fille et bien elevee. 
 Of course she does not love him. . . . Well, 
 well, Rutterby, dear friend, we cannot settle it 
 out here this afternoon. Let us go in. They 
 will have come back from their drive. ... I 
 will consider at leisure Monsieur Gerard's pre- 
 tensions.' 
 
 'And what will Madame de Malmy think of
 
 24 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 them ? ' asked Rutterby, rising from the low 
 beach seat. 
 
 ' She will think them unjustified. But what 
 of that ? It is I who must decide, without 
 prejudice or influence. I have never yet 
 taken counsel of women especially middle-aged 
 women. Oh ! les femmes, les fcmmes ! fa ne 
 vautpas grand' 1 chose ! ' 
 
 Ondelette and her mother had come in from 
 their afternoon drive, when Rutterby and De 
 Malmy re-entered the villa. And again to-day 
 there was yesterday's pleasure of the cosy dining- 
 room and lamp-lit salon afterwards. Philip 
 Rutterby was again in his armchair, and was 
 looking at Ondelette. 
 
 ' Are you tired, Mr Rutterby ? ' said Ondelette. 
 ' I will play us all some music, if you are.' 
 
 ' Will you take your promised walk with me ? 
 your old evening round,' Rutterby made 
 answer. 
 
 ' That is what I was longing for,' said the girl, 
 with glistening eyes. These young eyes, thought 
 Philip Rutterby, can glisten with so small a 
 pleasure. 
 
 Her hat and shawl were on her in a minute. 
 
 ' Do not allow our child to tire you,' said 
 Madame de Malmy, who thought proper, in the
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 2 5 
 
 interests of respectability, and of her own age, 
 to insist upon the childhood of Ondelette. 
 
 ' Ondelette is not accustomed to make herself 
 a burden,' murmured her father, in his jealous 
 regard for her And he went out to the gate, 
 and followed with his eyes the vanishing figures 
 of his daughter and his friend. 
 
 She had put her hand at once, unasked, in 
 Rutterby's arm, so very confidingly, never 
 thinking that his arm was not so much her own 
 as was her father's. 
 
 ' If he were only ten years younger ! ' thought 
 De Malmy, going in, ' she would be very com- 
 fortably provided for. Even now ' 
 
 ' Now what sort of a house is yours ? ' asked 
 Ondelette boldly, after two minutes of silence, 
 for Rutterby did not begin a conversation. ' I 
 want so much to realise England I have only 
 read of it in books.' 
 
 ' A small house, in a quiet street, just out of a 
 London square. There is nothing to notice in 
 the old house, except my pictures.' 
 
 ' Have you any pictures by artists I know 
 about ? Oh ! yes there was Crome I for- 
 got.' 
 
 'The landscape painter, Corot he alone 
 among living men. Most modern artists are
 
 26 
 
 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 too much for me, Ondelette. I am of the old 
 school, and like the old things best.' 
 
 ' What else, then, Mr Rutterby ? What is it 
 right to like if you must always like wisely 
 among prints for instance 1 ! Prints now tell me!' 
 
 'You may always like Turner's "Liber Studi- 
 orum." Then I have a few of Rembrandt's 
 etchings, and some prints of Marc Antonio's. 
 Some Diirer's, Beham's. Jacopo di Barbarj's too. 
 And most of Mantegna's prints I am fortunate 
 enough to possess. That is, fortunate, if my own 
 taste is a right one. These great men who are 
 dead, could be vigorous without being violent. 
 I should like to show you one of Rembrandt's 
 landscapes his most exquisite one.' 
 
 ' Is it very beautiful ? ' she asked. 
 
 ' I think so. But much depends on the 
 impression. My own impression of this happens 
 to be fine. And yet it cost me less than sixty 
 pounds, I recollect.' 
 
 'And are these on the walls? ' 
 
 ' I keep them in a portfolio the score or so 
 of Rembrandt's etchings that I happen to have. 
 My room is an old panelled room, less cheerful 
 than your villa, but cheerful at night, and so 
 still that I can hear the tick of the insect in my 
 tapestry, on the further wall, facing the
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 2 7 
 
 windows, where I like the effect of tapestry, as 
 that is a bad light for pictures. There is 
 Flemish tapestry of the fifteenth century, and 
 some Italian of the thirteenth.' 
 
 ' You must be very happy with all your 
 pictures, over there in London,' the girl said. 
 
 ' You cannot buy happiness by buying pic- 
 tures, Ondelette,' answered Mr Rutterby, gently. 
 They had got into the little town now. 
 
 The town leads such an open life, that you 
 can see it all as you pass along its short and 
 narrow irregular streets, from the little yellow- 
 washed Hotel de France, with its vine-covered 
 court, in which the heavy diligence stands 
 waiting for to-morrow, on to the slender Thir- 
 teenth Century church, with the cafe by the side 
 of it, and so down hill a little, past the hospital 
 chapel, over whose door, in a scant pent-house 
 shrine, Our Lady of Good Succour stands to 
 watch over the port, and so on a little to where 
 the three roads meet and the bridge joins the 
 quiet quay, and the lazy river water laps the 
 stonework, and little lights gleam from detached 
 cottages that stand back from the port, and the 
 masts of yacht and fishing-smack rise like a 
 company of darkened spears against the clear 
 night sky.
 
 28 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 That was the evening round which Ondelette 
 took Philip Rutterby, and they glanced through 
 many a window as they passed, for the Pornic 
 people keep their shutters for the sun, and 
 never trouble in the evening to shut out from 
 view such simple ' interiors ' as their rooms pre- 
 sent; and no one, but here and there a passing 
 stranger, cares, as he walks, to take any heed 
 of the sight of such familiar homes. Here was 
 a tiny closet-like kitchen, with the fire burning 
 low, and a woman setting things in order after 
 the day's work, and a child sitting up at a high 
 kitchen-table, munching its supper. ( She will 
 put him to bed in a few minutes. A creature 
 of red fat legs of dawning intelligence and 
 developed appetite,' explained Ondelette, whereat 
 Philip Rutterby smiled happily. It was new 
 to him to have these pleasant little nothings 
 said to him confidentially. 
 
 They passed a small room where a grey- 
 haired woman sat as one waiting, and a high 
 capped servant-girl had brought the last things 
 for the evening meal. ' She is waiting for her 
 son,' said Ondelette. 'He works late in his 
 study a notary, I suppose. Mother and son, 
 you see. Mothers are always devoted to their 
 sons. Mamma dotes upon Leon,' said Ondelette
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 29 
 
 innocently. ' Indeed, he was quite my own 
 ideal, until he spent so much of papa's money. 
 I love him very much dear silly boy ! ' 
 
 Then they passed a darkened shop-front, and 
 saw that inside only one candle lighted the 
 family there. A small round table had been 
 drawn out into the shop, and the candle stood 
 on it, and on the three straight little chairs sat 
 mother and two daughters busily at work. One 
 snaps a thread, another reaches the big scissors, 
 and a third looks up and laughs at some light 
 chatter that beguiles their toil. ' They are 
 very merry in each other's company,' said 
 Philip Rutterby. ' I sit alone of an evening 
 myself, while my servants, in their servants' 
 parlour underneath, laugh at their own jokes as 
 merrily as these good stocking-menders here. 
 I shall be sorry, Ondelette, when I go back from 
 Pornic.' 
 
 They made their way along the high road, 
 following the coast, and the little salon clock 
 struck ten as they got inside from the dark 
 garden to the lamp-lit villa, and by that time 
 all Pornic slept, save the few hospital watchers 
 and the one constable trudging his rounds. 
 Small taverns were closed, chalets were shut, 
 the high road out to Saint-Marie deserted for
 
 3 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 the night; but clouds out of the west had drifted 
 up over the stars, and a wind had risen, and 
 there was a deeper roll of dark grey sea along 
 the shore. ' The weather breaks to-night,' 
 Ondelette said, with her hand in Philip Rut- 
 terby's dry palm for good-bye. ' The rainy 
 time has come our autumn in Anjou. But 
 here it was summer to-day, and will be winter 
 to-morrow.' 
 
 Philip Rutterby went upstairs, and rested a 
 minute at a still open window. The tall thin 
 spire of Saint-Marie stood out even now against 
 a space of yet unclouded sky, and, in the evening 
 dark, the land had something of the sea's signi- 
 ficance. He looked right and left along the 
 coast was somehow strangely touched by that 
 quick change that she had prophesied. 'It 
 might have waited a day or two, and when it 
 came, come sympathetically,' he half thought to 
 himself; ' for anyhow it will be winter indeed 
 with me when I go back, and away from her.' 
 And as imagination followed the infinite line of 
 sea-board, to fair city and populous port and 
 open country, out there, leagues away in the 
 dark, he wondered where, in all that guessed-at 
 country, undiscovered by his eye, there was any 
 heart as lonely as his, just now any life that
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 3 1 
 
 seemed so rich and prosperous, and was so 
 yearning and so hungry. He closed the 
 window, and drew its curtains, and shut out 
 that thought. ' A mere passing fancy,' he said 
 to himself. ' Utterly idle hopelessly idle ! ' 
 She might even marry him, he imagined, loving 
 no other; but if she did, how little time would 
 pass before she must be sorry for her choice, in 
 the gradual perception of his failing health and 
 advancing age, and in the rising of some unsatis- 
 fied need ! And he ? Why, of course, it was a 
 dreamer's dream, and had vanished even now. 
 
 It rained hard all next morning, and Mon- 
 sieur de Malmy was occupied with his mono- 
 graph on Plessis-les-Tours. But at last he sent 
 a message to his old friend Rutterby, and 
 Rutterby joined him in the room used as his 
 study. ' You look but poorly, Rutterby, this 
 morning. Ondelette must, after all, have taken 
 you too long a walk last night.' 
 
 ' No, no. But several money matters kept me 
 awake last night.' 
 
 De Malmy lifted his eyebrows in surprise. 
 ' You t money matters.' 
 
 'Why, yes,' rejoined Rutterby; C I fancy the 
 possession of money is often as great a tax on a 
 man's peace as the lack of it.'
 
 3 2 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 'Tell that to the gardener out there, who 
 works for me at two francs a day. Poor devil ! 
 I can't afford to give him any more, Rut- 
 terby.' 
 
 ' Casimir Delavigne is perhaps by no means a 
 great poet/ Philip Rutterby resumed, ' but there 
 are three lines in his " Louis the Eleventh " 
 which struck me very much this morning: 
 lonely wretch that I am ! ' 
 
 ' That is a strong word from you, my friend 
 " lonely wretch," indeed ! What are the 
 lines ? ' 
 
 ' These are the lines : 
 
 ' " Apres la danse, au fond de sa chaumiere, 
 
 Le plus pauvre d'entre eux va rentrer en chantant ; 
 Ah ! 1'heureux miserable ! un doux sommeil 1'attend ; 
 II va dormir ; et moi " 
 
 They mean much or little to you, according as 
 you take them. To me they mean very much, 
 De Malmy. They sum up all the weariness of 
 Louis Onze.' 
 
 ' You should have left the spleen in England,' 
 said De Malmy, lightly. ' Eh bien / I have 
 been weighing the pretensions of this young 
 man, Jules Gerard. Here is his photograph.' 
 
 ' He did not give it to Ondelette ? ' asked 
 Philip Rutterby, almost as if alarmed.
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 33 
 
 ' I should think not, indeed ! He insisted, 
 however, upon giving it to Madame de Malmy, 
 who values it even less than Ondelette or I 
 would do. For myself, I think he is a very 
 honourable young fellow. He has a good heart. 
 He has good intelligence. He will go very far 
 this young man you understand my idiom. 
 Madame de Malmy does not attach enough 
 importance to his future. She asks only for 
 present position the result attained in a son- 
 in-law. But we must not be influenced by 
 women in these matters. Women do not count 
 for very much unless they happen to be On- 
 delettes. I am myself inclined to have the 
 young man on a visit, and while you are here 
 immediately. For though you are no man 
 of the world, you are a close observer, never- 
 theless.' 
 
 Philip Rutterby was silent; and De Malmy 
 continued. 
 
 ' It is true the young man is not as well-to-do 5 
 at present, as I should have liked. What is a 
 sous-prefecture ? Four hundred a year, and the 
 obligation to feed several score of discontented 
 local people, once or twice a twelvemonth, in 
 order to report to head-quarters what is the 
 spirit of your population. . . . But Saumur is
 
 34 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 very near to Angers, I must remember. And 
 then, again, the little private fortune of Jules 
 Gerard is equal to that of Ondelette. I shall 
 still scrape together a dowry of seventy-five 
 thousand francs, if we like Gerard better, on 
 further acquaintance.' 
 
 ' I shall not like Gerard,' said Philip Rutterby, 
 quietly, looking out of the window, and passing 
 his thin hand over his thin iron-grey hair. 
 
 1 And why ? ' 
 
 ' Because I like Ondelette too well. . . . But 
 this deluge will never stop, De Malmy ! ' he said, 
 with quite a new impatience, turning round and 
 leaving the room. 
 
 ' Excellent man ! ' ejaculated De Malmy to 
 himself. ' I am not sure now but that he will 
 propose to marry her. He is not quite as young 
 as he might be. But what does that matter, 
 nowadays, when science has added ten years to 
 the average of life ? Nelaton and Corvisart 
 can keep a man going pretty long. The science 
 of patching people up has been carried very far. 
 And then there is no devotion like that of a 
 man who is getting well past middle-age, and 
 has been stranded from the sea of passions 
 into which, however, ce bon Rutterby was never 
 thrown, I am sure.'
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORN 1C 35 
 
 Philip Rutterby went back into the salon with 
 a book. An hour passed, and Ondelette came 
 in. 'See! It is clearing,' said Ondelette, 'and 
 you want a walk, I am sure. You look rather 
 miserable, you know. Papa can lend you a 
 waterproof, if you think it will rain again. I 
 will go and put on my thick boots, and we will 
 march away to the Druid monument. Papa 
 never walks out in the wet. I walk alone 
 generally at Pornic. See, there is the sun ! 
 These gravelly lanes about here soon dry up, 
 with the strong west wind.' 
 
 Of course he was pleased enough. So out they 
 walked again together ; a thin, wiry, anxious 
 man, with quiet contemplative eyes ; and a 
 blooming girl, all brown and gold-coloured with 
 the warmth of a land near the sun and the 
 health-bearing sea. The blackberry hedges, 
 glistening after the morning rain, as they walked 
 along the lanes, were not fresher than Ondelette. 
 
 She had to talk, for Philip Rutterby was 
 silent ; but she did not notice his silence, and 
 prattled on about Pornic and Angers, the points 
 of view here on the upland by the sea, the little 
 old chateau at Angers, her brother Leon, who 
 was ' learning his law ' in Paris. ' If he were 
 wise,' she said, he would persevere to take it
 
 3 6 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 up professionally ; not as a becoming accom- 
 plishment, but as the business of his life. ' For 
 my brother is not only extravagant you must 
 know, Mr Rutterby : he is very good-natured 
 and clever besides. He is easily influenced, 
 indeed ; except by me, who am young, and by 
 papa who is indulgent, and by mamrna, who 
 dotes upon him so.' 
 
 ' Which seems a very pretty way of saying, 
 Ondelette, that he is only capable of being influ- 
 enced for the bad,' responded Mr Rutterby, with 
 a faint, hopeless smile, which in a bolder man 
 one would have called slightly satirical. 
 
 'No. Le"on is much better than that. All 
 depends upon the people he is with. Here, early 
 in the season, he saw something of Monsieur 
 Gerard, who did him good for the time. I 
 think I should like my brother to live always 
 with Monsieur Gerard. I do not know him 
 very well, but it seems to me just this that 
 I should make him the hero of a story-book, 
 if I ever wrote one.' 
 
 Rutterby made no comment, and there was 
 silence for a minute or two. Ondelette had to 
 begin again. ' You thought that very foolish, 
 I see by your face; and so it was indeed, for 
 what can we girls know about men, till we are
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 37 
 
 married and quite in the world ? Supposing 
 I were married to Monsieur Gerard, for instance 
 only I am too insignificant no doubt I 
 should find out that he had his faults. . . . 
 Well, but a good man with faults would be 
 only a hero in life, instead of a hero in a story 
 book. Papa, now, has his faults. You, if I 
 only knew you long enough a certain tristesse 
 is what I should complain about in you. . . . 
 Ah ! now I remember one fault which would 
 be enough to dethrone him from my story 
 book he does not care at all for music. Fancy 
 such a thing ! ' 
 
 ' I adore music,' said Philip Rutterby, scarcely 
 knowing why he spoke so strongly. 
 
 'Here is the common, high over the sea, and 
 here the Druid stone. Will you go down into 
 the chamber ? There are no ghosts but 
 toads.' 
 
 Philip Rutterby did not care a rush just now 
 for Druid stones; he feigned an interest clumsily; 
 spoke awkwardly about it, in forgetfulness of the 
 diplomatist's creed that the use of speech is to 
 conceal your thought. But the two went down 
 into the cavernous chamber together the cavern- 
 ous chamber in the solitary waste land of an 
 opulent country and came up again, and
 
 3 8 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 marched homewards. Rutterby, spurred on 
 almost to folly by a not distant rivalry, was 
 quite aware that he had said nothing worth 
 saying little which that gentle girl could have 
 really cared to hear and he welcomed a swift 
 shower which, as they needs must shelter, must 
 prolong his time with her. Very near them 
 was a large homestead, with granaries, cattle- 
 sheds, and wood-house. 
 
 ( The wood-house will be the place,' said Onde- 
 lette, leading the way with a run, and stooping 
 under the rough friendly roof with her feet on 
 the floor of bare soil, dry with time. The wood 
 was stacked round them. Light enough came 
 in at the unglazed rough windows. 
 
 Mr Rutterby looked about him at the bare 
 stone walls and high pitched roof, at the saw- 
 dust, at a neglected trestle, a neglected hatchet. 
 
 ' Ostade would have liked to paint this place, 
 with its half-lights and shades,' he said. 
 
 ' I should so much like Ostade's pictures, then ! 
 I love anything that is tumble-down and dreary, 
 and common, and dull, and sad,' said she. Philip 
 Rutterby was standing close to her, and now, as 
 she spoke, looked almost anxiously at her dark 
 brown eyes, with. their long lashes giving depth 
 to their darkness, and a sense of quietude, much
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 39 
 
 in accord with her young French voice of subtle 
 tenderness. 
 
 The shower was suddenly over; and the two 
 looked out together from the window. It was 
 autumn sunset. Shafts of wan yellow were shot 
 up very feebly by the spent sun, into the grey- 
 ness and the calm of the high skies. The wind 
 had gone down now, but a deep under-roll was 
 in the sea ; a turbid sea, of dark grey greens 
 and autumn browns ; angry, forbidding, and 
 bitter and wild, along its miles of rocky coast 
 and in unnumbered leagues in the infinite west. 
 Ondelette saw all that, and was a little awed 
 by it. She knew nothing of any element of 
 storm in Rutterby's heart. 
 
 ' You love anything that is tumble-down and 
 dreary, and common, and dull, and sad,' said 
 Rutterby, repeating her words after her, and 
 laying his hand, which trembled a little, on 
 Ondelette's warm hand by the rough window- 
 sill. An anxious, nervous, over-sensitive man, 
 snatching with useless haste at the unready 
 Future. The quickened pulses promised a 
 keener life, compared with which that past life 
 must seem but as a sleep. 
 
 ' Think of me very kindly .when I go away, 
 Ondelette,' he said, checking himself.
 
 40 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 ' You have only just arrived. Do not talk 
 about going,' said she. 
 
 What should he say next, when her look was 
 sympathy and kindness? Why not say, that 
 suddenly she had become much to him ? But 
 no. For a minute he was silent. 
 
 ' 1 shall owe more than one pleasant time and 
 happy thought to you, Ondelette,' he said then, 
 gravely, and lifted the young hand to his bent 
 face, and kissed it. ... And they went their way. 
 
 She made her usual music in the evening, but 
 did not try to talk with him, as he was quiet 
 and sad ; and she felt that his life must have 
 had some sadness in it more than she knew 
 of more than she could understand. 
 
 Next day, at middle-day breakfast, came a 
 telegram for Rutterby's host. It was from Jules 
 Gerard. De Malmy did not read it aloud, but 
 said presently in such a manner that no one 
 but Philip Rutterby guessed any connection be- 
 tween the telegram and the remark ' Ha ! By- 
 the-bye, Jules Gerard is coming to stay a day or 
 two to-morrow. Have the second spare room 
 arranged for him, mon amie. 1 
 
 It was to Madame de Malmy that De Malmy 
 spoke. But Ondelette flushed suddenly, and 
 Rutterby saw it.
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 41 
 
 ' My room, which must be larger, will be free. 
 I am going to-morrow,' said Philip Rutterby, 
 resolutely calm. 
 
 'I hope there was nothing amiss in your 
 letters ? ' inquired Madame de Mai my. 
 
 ' I am obliged to go,' answered the guest, 
 quietly. 
 
 ' I do not see why this young man should pro- 
 pose to himself to intrude on our happy little 
 party. I am sure I wanted to see more of Mr 
 Rutterby myself ; and with two guests, in a 
 small villa, you know ' began Madame de 
 Malmy, again. But her lord abbreviated her 
 discourse by saying in a full-toned voice, ' I see 
 that the archaeologists, meeting at Clisson ' 
 And so the talk was turned to art and 
 antiquarianism. 
 
 Why analyse Philip Rutterby's mind, or by 
 what devious ways he had come at last, and at 
 last suddenly, to decide to go ? Of course, if he 
 had coolly and determinately fixed on the idea of 
 marriage, his friend and his friend's wife would 
 have helped his claim. And Ondelette hardly 
 knew herself; and with her dutiful love and 
 infinite pity and young naive sympathy, she 
 might have said she would be Rutterby's wife, 
 and, with her honour and pure-hearted dignity,
 
 4* PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 have kept the promise to the uttermost, and in 
 some sort learnt to love a foreigner, a stranger, a 
 lonely man, with his life in the Past and hers in 
 the Future. 
 
 But how much of that love would have been 
 spontaneous and free ? Would it on his part, as 
 time passed, and the new presence and new 
 pleasure became familiar things of every day 
 would it then continually dominate, as it did in 
 those brief hours at Pornic, over the older memory, 
 strong with the passion of youth, and long re- 
 newed by the accumulating thoughts of many 
 days, by the very knowledge of joys that might 
 have been participated, and loneliness that might 
 have been companionship ? No, no. Ondelette, 
 and all the new and possible experience with her, 
 could be but the sweet echo of a far-away voice. 
 And the voice was more than the echo. 
 
 In the evening Philip Rutterby followed De 
 Malmy to his study. 
 
 ' Three pages and a half during the morning, 
 Rutterby,' said the host, holding up the mono- 
 graph in triumph. 'And after three months' 
 labour, I think I have demolished my confrere's 
 theory as to the existence of an ogival window ' 
 He would not ask his guest the reason of his 
 departure. But Rutterby had come in to speak,
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 43 
 
 and, like most strong-feeling men, he could speak 
 to the purpose when the occasion moved him. 
 
 ' I have thought a good deal about my going 
 away,' he said, pacing the room with his thin 
 hands clasped behind him, ' and it seems to me 
 only right, De Malmy, that you should know the 
 reason of it. I have had my last romance at 
 Pornic. I have been in love with Ondelette.' 
 
 De Malmy, sitting at rus writing-desk, bowed 
 his head slightly, in token that thus far he 
 ' followed ' Philip Rutterby, and that his friend 
 might be assured of sympathetic attention. 
 
 ' Madame de Malmy, if you consulted her in 
 the matter, would probably give her vote for me, 
 and not for this young man. You, yourself, are 
 an old friend of mine, and it would be pleasant 
 to you to have a tie binding us very closely 
 together ; and again, you would not unnaturally 
 feel more immediate confidence I do not say 
 more permanent in giving your daughter to a 
 very dear old friend, than to a young man of 
 another generation almost a stranger whose 
 thoughts and ways would never be like yours 
 and mine, De Malmy, since ideas change every 
 year, and you and I belong, as we know very 
 well, to an old regime. . . . Well, then, Onde- 
 lette, with whatever secret and unacknowledged
 
 44 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 misgivings, would probably assent. Well, well, 
 then ... it is / who refuse. Let her marry 
 this young man, as the natural thing is.' 
 
 ' I understand you imperfectly,' said De 
 Malmy. 
 
 ' Let her marry this young man, as the 
 natural thing is. As to means, you know, they 
 will have between them eight hundred a year, 
 
 which will do for the present. Afterwards 
 
 But the vital point is just this, De Malmy : she 
 was born to make the happiness of some life 
 that has a Future. Well, the Future is for this 
 young man ; the Past is for me. No, no, it is 
 not all self-sacrifice, by any means, if I go away. 
 You remember two-and-twenty years ago 
 Hyeres I do not forget the Past. Why speak 
 of that ? You look at me, really, dear friend, 
 with a very civil surprise, as if you would 
 believe in some self-sacrifice after all, though 
 you know I have not generally in life been a 
 man called upon to make it. If this is almost 
 my first opportunity, let me take it, then, if you 
 will have it so. One must not regard oneself 
 and one's own life as the centre of everything. 
 That is the thing we rich men have to guard 
 against the world revolves round us, we think. 
 Even if my own happiness were in question
 
 A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC 45 
 
 which perhaps it is not wouldn't Ondelette's 
 happiness be of more importance than mine? ' 
 
 He put his hand into De Malmy's and shook 
 it silently, for good-night. 
 
 He came down early in the morning, very 
 pale and tired. He had seen from his window 
 that Ondelette, with fresh morning-gown, and 
 hair in a twist of gold, was busy in the sunny 
 garden, with the grey-red chrysanthemums. 
 
 ' I am going to say a word to Ondelette,' he 
 whispered to De Malmy, as he met him on the 
 stairs. 
 
 4 Say what you will. You are a fine, brave 
 fellow, Rutterby. Whatever you say she will 
 hear considerately. She always would do that, 
 of course; but last night I told her especially 
 what a very fine fellow you were, Rutterby. 
 There is no one, dear friend, whom she likes 
 better than you. Speak to her.' 
 
 She heard his step coming towards her in the 
 garden, and lifted her head, flushed with 
 stooping. Did she, too, come, as her favourite 
 flowers, like love in winter ? 
 
 4 Ondelette,' said Mr Rutterby, 4 1 have a 
 word to say to you before I go.' 
 
 ' Yes,' she answered gravely, laying her hand 
 on his, struck with his face.
 
 4& PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 ' The young man who is coming here to-day, 
 comes here to ask for you to be his wife.' She 
 took her hand away suddenly ; but Philip 
 Rutterby took it back again, and did not flinch 
 at all as he continued. ' The young man, Jules 
 Gerard, is worthy of you, my child. A manly 
 fellow, as you and your father know, better than 
 I do. In due time you will be his wife you 
 will both be very happy. I am going to start 
 this morning, and you will think of me some- 
 times, among my works of art my pictures 
 that talk to me. And you must not pity my 
 loneliness, you know, after all, with that com- 
 panionship. For pictures are the better voices 
 of great men. But sometimes sometimes you 
 will think of me, my sweet child ? ' 
 
 He kissed her gravely. She looked up, with 
 many feelings. 
 
 ' Mr Rutterby, why are you going away ? ' 
 she asked, very earnestly. 
 
 He did not answer for a minute. Then he 
 said only, 'I have heard and thought of sad 
 things sad things, Ondelette which I need 
 not tell you.' 
 
 London, December, 1874.
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 
 
 THE little farm-house Yvonne's home stood, 
 sober and grey, among the grey-green fields, but 
 half-a-mile from Croisic town. No ivy lodged 
 under its eaves, no vine crept confidently up its 
 southern wall, and the fields around it were wide 
 and bare, for close beyond just within sight 
 from the top of the haystack was the rock- 
 bound shore, and all that country-side was swept, 
 from October to March, with the heaviest winds 
 and shrewdest salt from the great western sea. 
 
 It was a lonely country, leading nowhere. 
 Croisic itself is the last town or village of the 
 long narrow land-strip which has the Atlantic 
 to the west and south, and to the north a huge 
 gulf, like an inland lake, dividing it from the 
 mainland of Brittany. And Croisic turns its 
 back on the farm, and its back on the outer 
 sea. Nearer to inland France, from Croisic, 
 
 D
 
 5 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 is Bourg de Batz, set on a sand hill, over its 
 square salt-marshes, intersected with streams 
 from the sea. Nearer again to inland France 
 is Le Pouliguen, a bathing-place, with a little 
 white bay, facing the sun and the south. But 
 these seemed far from Yvonne's home, beyond 
 which, as was said before, the roads led nowhere, 
 of rather, becoming mere rough lanes with 
 waggon tracks between the fields, lost them- 
 selves at last on the wide belt of coast here 
 brown or green with its short grass, here grey 
 and stony in its barrenness that formed the 
 top of the great cliff wall, beneath which 
 lapped blue in summer, or thundered grey in 
 late autumn and desolate winter, the ceaseless 
 waves of the Atlantic. 
 
 And that lonely country made lonely lives for 
 those who dwelt in it. It bred in them a 
 certain self-reliance and large quietude, hardly 
 found in the inhabitants of cities or of crowded 
 garden lands a large, restful, fearless quietude, 
 as of those accustomed to be much alone with 
 peaceful farm-work, and the beasts, and the wide 
 field-crops, and the wider sky. 
 
 The farm-life and the lonely country had 
 their own effect in moulding the few dwellers 
 near that Peninsula's point; and the influence
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 5 1 
 
 was a constant one greater, perhaps, just 
 because constant, than that of the cure who 
 preached on Sunday morning at Croisic church. 
 But, after all, both influences were somewhat 
 to the same end, of patience, quietude, sobriety; 
 and to remind the farm-folk Yvonne among 
 them of some life stranger than theirs, higher 
 than theirs, since filled with sorrow and sacrifice, 
 there stood, where the two roads met from the 
 coast, the dark, worm-eaten cross, with its up- 
 lifted figure the only sign to them, in all that 
 country-side, of an existence other than their own 
 of quiet hand-labour and quiet rest. 
 
 So the bare, rough, homely farm, at this 
 world's end, just beyond Croisic town, was no 
 forcing ground for human feelings ; and human 
 life might grow and spread there, one would 
 think, in its own natural way: the common 
 love of parent and child coming slowly, but 
 firmly, half unrecognised, because in each case 
 purely individual and genuine ; and that other 
 love the love of man for woman girl for boy 
 coming sweet, and new, and strong, and un- 
 checked alike in its birth and its fulness; and 
 from first to last never measured with curious 
 care, to see if it fitted the fanciful loves in story 
 books and plays.
 
 52 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 It was September, evening. Yvonne the 
 farmer's daughter was not at the farm. 
 Rohan, a fisher youth from Piriac, had put his 
 arm in hers, and led her along the lanes to 
 the coast. With the warm autumn and her 
 eighteen years, the time of love had come to 
 her. 
 
 But it began quietly, and was of gentle 
 growth, like any natural thing; and this girl, 
 very capable of passion, was lulled rather than 
 stirred by the presence in the lane with her of 
 that brown, sturdy figure, which owed its lithe- 
 ness and its young, manly grace and its sea- 
 beaten beauty to many days and nights spent 
 bending over the fishing-boat anchoring or 
 heaving anchor or setting sail to catch the 
 changing winds that came fresh over the 
 western sea. 
 
 Yvonne was calm in his presence. But the 
 natural soothing pleasure was not to last long 
 now, for in the background of that simple mind 
 of Yvonne's was the knowledge or the thought 
 that the new pleasantness in life must cease 
 the two must part. And the thought came up 
 to her, suddenly, as he led her along the lane. 
 
 ' When are you going away ? ' she asked, 
 suddenly grave.
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 53 
 
 'The boat is ready to-night,' he said. 'Be- 
 cause it is ready, I must go to-morrow.' 
 
 That was matter of fact; and it grieved her, 
 but did not surprise. He was not rough at 
 heart, though rough in words. And he added 
 seeing the trouble on her clear face 'My 
 mate is bound to be at Piriac again. I must 
 stick to my mate, whether I will or no.' 
 
 She had been half inclined to motion his arm 
 away from hers. They could walk separately, 
 and talk all the same, But his last tone had 
 been very gentle, and though she saw no end 
 but a parting for them, the parting need not be 
 before its time. So she let him hold her arm 
 still firmly in his grasp, and they walked quite 
 silently along the lane together. 
 
 Here was the great rough crucifix, lifted high 
 where the lanes met and widened towards the 
 coast. She forgot to cross herself. Here was 
 the bare field, giving place to barer, wind-blown 
 shore. Here was the water, blue beneath them, 
 tumbling in upon the strewn boulders and the 
 black line of sea-weed on the beach. 'The 
 Point of Croisic' the peninsula's end and to 
 right and left, as well as full in front of them, 
 the sparkling evening sea, and an immense sky, 
 orange-red at the sea's far edge, but fading above
 
 54 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 them into clear thin tones of bluish silvery 
 grey. 
 
 They sat down on the bare grey rock, still 
 almost warm with the long day's sun. Rohan 
 passed his hand over the lichen-crust that 
 roughened the surface ; found her hand there 
 too. It was a fine hand for a half peasant hand ; 
 shapely and sensitive, though brown and strong. 
 He put his own, broadened with heavier work, 
 upon it ; and did this gently, to her who looked 
 gently at him. There was nothing coarse or 
 common in the action of either. That Breton 
 population is born civilised. School boards 
 might teach it geography, but not refinement. 
 
 ' It is a long way Piriac. It is beyond the 
 furthest point,' said Yvonne, thinking of his 
 home. 
 
 ' Yes,' replied Rohan, hesitatingly ; ' with a 
 good wind, five hours.' 
 
 ' It is so far, I never saw it on the clearest day. 
 It is beyond the furthest point,' reiterated 
 Yvonne, looking at the line of mainland coast. 
 To be beyond the furthest point was to be 
 beyond imagination's widest reach. It must be 
 at the world's far end Piriac. 'And what is 
 there after Piriac ? ' asked the girl, with all the 
 readiness of an untrained mind to slip, even in
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 55 
 
 moments of strong feeling, from an anxious train 
 of thought on to another quite indifferent one. 
 And so the personal question of her lover's dis- 
 tance, to-morrow, was forgotten in the abstract 
 question of what the world might be beyond 
 Piriac. 
 
 Rohan, being a fisher, had sailed far travelled 
 wide. 
 
 ' After Piriac,' he said, ' there is Sarzeau, then 
 Quimper, then even Brest.' 
 
 She heaved a sigh. It was a great world, 
 then. Well, it was for other people to see it 
 not for her. 
 
 She leaned back on the rock. Her thick-soled 
 country shoes and strong, straight ankles lay out 
 beyond the last fold of her blue-grey gown. 
 The gown's tight bodice pressed the stout firm 
 figure about the breast and large throat ; and 
 the sleeve, on an arm thrown freely out, reached 
 but midway between the elbow and wrist, show- 
 ing the arm where it got full and white, above 
 the sun-browned wrist and hand. She had long, 
 pendent ear-drops, of base gold, roughly worked, 
 for only ornament. They were less bright and 
 straight than her teeth, seen now between the 
 parted lips. One hand was held to shade the 
 sunlight from her grave black eyes,
 
 56 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 She looked a little sad again, as Rohan saw. 
 What could he say or do ? He bent quietly over 
 her, and said, with his strange Breton calmness, 
 
 ' Yvonne I love you.' 
 
 She lifted herself up at once a deeper colour 
 in her warm-toned face. He said the words 
 again. But she shook her head. 
 
 ' Would you some day let me come again ? 
 Then, if the fishery is good this year, would you 
 would you go with me to Piriac ? ' 
 
 She took her hand from her eyes, and looked 
 at him very straight, and honestly, but sadly. 
 
 ' No. ... I am Croisicaise. . . . We are 
 all of Croisic. ... It is of no use. ... I 
 cannot do differently from all the rest. . . . 
 Rohan, I daresay I shall never be married 
 but I must live and die in Croisic.' 
 
 A modern Englishman would take such a 
 devotion to place rather than person as final and 
 sufficient proof that there was no love at all. 
 The simple Breton sailor had not learned our 
 way of disbelief in any love that is not wholly 
 absorbing. Rohan, not being suspicious, was 
 also not exacting. Other claims upon her were 
 as natural as his she had wishes, thoughts, 
 interests of her own, which the new-found love 
 need not quite supersede.
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 57 
 
 He never thought then that she did not love 
 him, because she said so strongly she must live 
 and die in Croisic town. But he did think as 
 a sailor, with the sea for his wide home that 
 her attachment was too particular and local. He 
 wondered at the strength of it. ' Who is it you 
 love so much?' he asked, after a silence. 'What 
 is it here that you could never leave ? . . . The 
 world is pretty well the same. Piriac, Croisic, 
 what matters ? If I were a girl I should be able 
 to live as far as Quimper perhaps even Brest 
 if the man I loved asked me.' 
 
 ' But you don't know] she answered. ' You 
 never had to try and you don't know, Rohan.' 
 
 ' That may be true,' he answered, with com- 
 mendable philosophy. The fact was undeniable 
 he had never had to try. And they were 
 silent again for a while. There were tears now 
 in Yvonne's eyes. She had seen him only a 
 little, but loved him very much. It was all such 
 a new joy to her, and new sorrow. 
 
 'I never knew before to-night,' she said, at 
 last, ' how much I loved the place. Of course, 
 I knew that I should have to spend my life here. 
 That was only right being Croisicaise. I never 
 could change myself into a Bretonne. But I 
 never felt before to-night only you can't under-
 
 5 8 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 stand me how I should be sad if any strange 
 thing happened, that I had to leave it. ... 
 Well, think of me sometimes when you have 
 got round the furthest point. We have been 
 very happy together. . . . Whenever I can 
 get to Croisic church, at Benediction, I shall 
 pray Our Lady of Croisic, and she will keep 
 you safe, as she has never forgotten to keep my 
 brothers. . . . You can think of me sometimes. 
 You must have lazy hours in the boats. Think, 
 I'd have done anything for you, except being 
 Croisicaise no more. Or no ! That is no good 
 after all. You'll see, some day, some other girl 
 to your mind. A Bretonne, Rohan; doubtless 
 the good God wills it so. You had better forget 
 me, then.' 
 
 Yvonne rose to her feet. It was supper-time 
 at the farm, and the dusk was gathering. 
 Rohan, while she spoke, had looked out rather 
 hopelessly on the last of the sunset; but the 
 beauty of it had not been lost on him or on the 
 girl. The poor never talk of scenery, but the 
 finer spirits among them sometimes sit and 
 watch it, with its changing lights, reverently; 
 sit with placid hands crossed or folded, as in act 
 of devotion. Of it they have nothing to say, 
 but it somehow speaks to them things half
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 59 
 
 understood, strange snatches of suggestion of 
 wider life and thought as they wait, with 
 their eyes fixed, in their grave loneliness. 
 
 And so, quite silently, Rohan and Yvonne 
 trudge homeward towards the farm. The quick 
 dusk of that country-side has fallen now, and 
 the long flat land, of bare low-walled meadows, 
 and square-cut salt-marsh, is dull and grey with 
 the coming night. She is thinking, will he 
 ever sail again in these seas near to Croisic, in 
 that huge gulf beyond which is Brittany? and 
 will some second mishap bring him to Croisic 
 port and town, and, while again the boat is 
 mended, will he stay, and find his path to the 
 farm, where she, with placid, unchanged life, 
 must still be at her farm-work ? No, no ! what 
 does she know about the boat ? about his mate, 
 his life, his toil, his home, far out of sight on 
 the Breton coast ? These can be nothing to 
 her but a pleasant dream, from which, on the 
 morrow, when he is gone once and for all, she 
 will wake resolutely. 
 
 Why it is even now a by-past thing. The 
 friendship, such as friendship is among the poor, 
 who have no intellectual interests in common, 
 to foster and encourage it the quick friendship, 
 the strange love, the kiss, the walk at twilight,
 
 60 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 the sad denial to him that evening all was well 
 over now : well nigh as past and over as to- 
 morrow when he should be gone. The familiar 
 beasts, she knew and called by name, crooned 
 low or bellowed in the homestead : the watch- 
 dog barked at the unknown step of the stranger; 
 it was supper-time; the light shone through the 
 window. Inside she knew that the small oil- 
 lamp stood on the round table, laid with plates 
 for three. And the father sat at ease after the 
 day's work, and the mother was serving a dish, 
 and had brought from the dark oak bahut the 
 bottle of thin white wine for the evening's meal; 
 and all this was as it had been on many nights 
 for many months nay, Yvonne's whole life had 
 scarcely known other than that regular round 
 and Rohan had no part in it; nor she in Rohan, 
 and whatever life might be his, in unknown 
 places, beyond the furthest coast. 
 
 And so, when, as they pass the wicket-gate, 
 and go in across the grass-grown, uneven, pebble- 
 paved yard, the fisher youth puts his arm on 
 hers again, and bends his head close over her, 
 and says so earnestly, ' Tell me one thing, 
 Yvonne do you love me ? ' she is not sure at 
 first of her reply, but says, as she touches the 
 latch of the iron-bound thick wooden house-
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 61 
 
 door, 'I don't know I am very young. 
 
 .... I think I love you. This is my home.' 
 
 This was her home, and he was not one of her 
 people, and could not enter there, to break in 
 upon that strange exclusiveness of Croisic, which 
 refused to be Breton. She had said to him, ' I 
 think I love you,' but then the qualification, 
 ' This is my home.' 
 
 The very place on which they stood, and its 
 surroundings those of her whole life seemed 
 to make a new distance between them. So very 
 quietly she gave him 'Good-night,' which was 
 perhaps ' Good-bye,' only he knew the way 
 across the fields from the port, and might, if 
 very earnestly minded, come once more in the 
 morning. 
 
 He vanished into the dark of the country lane 
 as she shut the heavy house-door slowly then 
 stopped suddenly, thinking she heard a sound 
 outside : listened with strained ears and fixed 
 eyes. Rohan could he be coming back ? Was 
 there something else to sayl How could he 
 brave the farmer at his hearthside ; the mother 
 quietly awaiting her child 1 No, there was 
 nothing to bring him back. He had no place 
 there. And with only the slightest shadow of 
 sadness, on her strong, simple, contemplative
 
 62 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 face, Yvonne passed on into the farm-house 
 eating-room, and sat down to her meal. 
 
 They knew where she had been, or, rather 
 with whom she had been, and that it was not the 
 first time she had been with him, and a word 
 of very mild disapproval had been spoken that 
 forenoon, and she knew well that father and 
 mother would think nothing was lost when the 
 boat was in right trim again, and the young 
 foreign sailor had gone, for good, beyond the 
 furthest point. 
 
 But at supper his name was not mentioned. 
 
 Silence as to the cause of her absence was their 
 
 only sign of disapproval of it. Nothing seemed 
 
 much amiss to them. She looked at them with 
 
 all the wonted candour of her dark wide-open 
 
 eyes, with their expression of receptiveness and 
 
 waiting. The day's work, and the evening walk, 
 
 and the air sharpened with salt from the sea, had 
 
 made her healthily hungry. Even love left her 
 
 body at peace ; and the stout old farmer, looking 
 
 up from his loaf and his fried fish and his mug 
 
 of white wine, thought confidently, ' There is 
 
 nothing amiss. The young will be young. But 
 
 nothing is wrong, and the stranger will go 
 
 to-morrow.' 
 
 The mother's meal was over, and she sat with
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 63 
 
 folded hands in the wooden armchair by the 
 side of the hearth, as was her wont after supper. 
 The same chair in the same place, winter and 
 summer. At supper she talked, but sat medita- 
 tive afterwards, straight upright in her chair. 
 Restless or fussy people would have called it 
 idle, and to other natures than that country 
 nature it might have been stupid and dull. 
 But old Annaic looked forward to the time, 
 after the day's work and evening meal. Her 
 face composed itself, and her hands 'settled' ; 
 and she sat seemingly waiting, waiting for 
 nothing, with great restfulness. Her dumb 
 quietude recalled that of the cattle. 
 
 Presently, when the clock struck, the mother 
 rose it was the regular time, never, in many 
 years, departed from old Annaic rose, and 
 struck a match for Yvonne's candle, which was 
 the signal for Yvonne to go to her father to be 
 kissed for ' Good-night.' And that was the 
 signal to Joel to put his pipe out; and when 
 Yvonne had gone, the old man lifted the oil- 
 lamp, by whose light they supped, and with this 
 in hand he trudged upstairs, followed closely by 
 Annaic. 
 
 Yvonne was now in her room. Leaving it 
 hurriedly early in the evening, she had left the
 
 64 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 lattice window closed, as it had been closed all 
 day. The room was hot, wanting its evening 
 air, and the girl went now to open the window 
 at the time at which she generally shut it. She 
 knew quite well why she had forgotten to open 
 it when the heat of the day was over. The 
 walk with Rohan Rohan in the lane ! 
 
 All that was so far past, only a minute ago, 
 when she had put her fresh brown cheek by her 
 father's for 'Good-night,' and everything had 
 been as it had been for many years. But now 
 it had come back once more the strange experi- 
 ence and as she stood at the window and felt 
 the night air, keen, but not harsh, from the sea, 
 she remembered his voice; her face flushed un- 
 consciously at the thought of his kiss, his pres- 
 sure, his strong warm words, the like of which 
 she heard for the first time : she, a lonely farm 
 girl, young and calm, and with little thought but 
 of her kin, and the farm work, and the cattle, 
 and the fishing-fleet that came (her brother's 
 boat amongst it) at night round Croisic pier into 
 Croisic port. 
 
 She looked down at the farm-yard ; the beasts 
 were quiet ; the watch-dog asleep ; the haystack 
 rose dark against the sky. She looked beyond, 
 and there was the flat country, one space of
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 65 
 
 meaningless plain to stranger eyes, but to her, 
 all a familiar land ; she could pick out in the 
 dark the spot where the roads met, and the side 
 where the salt-marsh was, and the Five Acres, 
 and the distant line of the Grande Cote where 
 the loftier shore was set against the sea. 
 
 ' Perhaps if he were but a Croisicais ! ' she 
 thought. . . . And to-morrow he would be 
 gone ! 
 
 The breezy morning found her at her work 
 again, and Rohan did not come. The one 
 farm-servant had gone off early into Croisic, on 
 a two days' leave. Yvonne was busy. The 
 servant had gone to have her bridesmaid's part 
 in wedding festivities. That morning there was 
 the service in Croisic church; then the feast 
 in the town; and then the wedding party, with 
 bride and bridegroom at their head preceded 
 only by the music-maker hired for the time 
 were to set out on the long, seemingly endless 
 walk, through country, and past village inn ; 
 through Bourg de Batz, set on the sandhills, to 
 Le Pouliguen, between its hazel coppice and its 
 little sunny white bay, then round to Guerande, 
 the Middle Age town, from whose ramparts one 
 looks down on the gulf and the long peninsula, 
 with Croisic near to the end of it, and beyond it
 
 66 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 the outer sea; and then, at last, into Croisic 
 again, the folk, however weary, still tripping 
 two and two au son du bz'm'ou, and in time with 
 that strange music. So they would trip and 
 trudge all day, and again, faithful to custom and 
 duty, all the morrow. And then, these gaieties 
 passed, the freshly-married pair would settle to 
 common life. The hired music-maker would 
 encourage some other party on the march, and 
 the farm-servant go back to the farm. 
 
 In thought, Yvonne would be with her a 
 little that morning more than a little, now 
 that Rohan did not come. Well, Rohan had 
 taken her words as final words, and with his 
 mate, in the fishing-boat, was off to some far 
 port she did not know. 
 
 'The young man who came, he said, from 
 Piriac, or beyond Piriac, and was about here 
 pretty much the last few days, he is gone, eh? ' 
 asked old Joel, at their midday meal. 
 
 Yvonne, thus suddenly taken, suddenly re- 
 minded, only nodded assent. It would have 
 been hard to say, ' Yes, father.' 
 
 The old man stretched his long legs comfort- 
 ably out under the table. He looked contented, but 
 said nothing. ' It is wise and well,' he thought. 
 Old Annaic's face smoothed and composed.
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 67 
 
 What might have been a trouble since the 
 young have ways of youth was well over. 
 Even apart from all the binding Croisic customs, 
 which were religion itself to them, they could 
 not spare Yvonne. Their two sons, finding the 
 farm but bare and poor, and loving the excite- 
 ment and chances of the sea, had long ago 
 passed over from farm life to the Croisic in- 
 dustry, and manned a fishing-boat, which came 
 sardine-laden into Croisic port, these autumn 
 nights. They had their home in Croisic town, 
 and their wives and children too, for they were 
 many years older than Yvonne. Yvonne 
 seemed the only young fresh thing at the farm. 
 The future of the farm was, in a sense, with 
 her. 
 
 She had gone out of the room after their meal ; 
 and Joel and Annaic, left alone, looked at each 
 other and were satisfied. Old Joel rose, his hand 
 in breeches' pocket, feeling for a key. He went 
 to the bureau which stood under the window. 
 
 'There is not so great a dowry to count for 
 her, wife,' he said, opening the lock ; ' but when 
 she chooses a Croisicais, he must come and live 
 here at the farm with us, eh ? ' he said, now 
 handling lovingly his leather bag, with a score or 
 so of gold coins in it nothing more.
 
 68 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 ' And that may be as soon as the child likes,' 
 said old Annaic, somewhat earnestly ; ' for you 
 are not as young as you were, and I I get more 
 tired of a night than I used to get. This next 
 Saint-Martin we shall have been married six-and- 
 thirty years.' 
 
 ' He looked a sturdy, honest fellow that I 
 may say, now he is gone,' said Joel, referring, as 
 his wife knew well, to Rohan. 
 
 ' That may be he was amiss here. What can 
 we know of any man who comes from Piriac ? 
 Poor girl, I saw that if he stayed much longer 
 she would fancy him. Praise be to God, he is 
 out of sight, and Yvonne's a good girl.' 
 
 With that reflection ended their desultory 
 conference, for there was work to do. 
 
 Yvonne was in the garden, and before sunset 
 there came a friend from Croisic the daughter 
 of the landlord of the inn. Jeanne Buillore 
 came to fetch something at the farm, and told 
 Yvonne what was the news. Yvonne was 
 strangely absent, when she began to speak of the 
 wedding procession, marching, au son du biniou, 
 in front of the inn, along the length of quay, and 
 so off by the dusty road, to Bourg de Batz. 
 
 ' By this time they will have got round as far 
 as Guerande,' said Jeanne. ' Perhaps they will
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 69 
 
 dance there, before coming home. How I should 
 like to see ! But have you heard how good a 
 take our Croisic boats had yesterday ? Never 
 such piles of fish-baskets on jetty and quay! 
 You must come down to-night. Come down 
 an hour after me; meet me at the pier-head. 
 Watch the boats in with me you can get away 
 for once.' 
 
 Yvonne nodded gravely. Yes, she would go 
 to-night. She rarely went. These small excite- 
 ments the only ones perhaps open to her did 
 not seem needed by her tranquil nature, self- 
 reliant, and in the main quietly happy in her 
 regular round. But she would go to-night. 
 
 So the dark found her under the short light- 
 house tower at the pier's far end. Here the pier 
 was broader than elsewhere along its length. A 
 parapet, plain granite, like the pier itself, was 
 round the end of it. The parapet was on one 
 side only of the pier's full length the exposed 
 side towards the west and the main sea. 
 But at the end it went all round, a yard or so 
 from the light-house base, so that two could just 
 pass between the light-house and the bounding 
 wall. And here, with eyes looking out eagerly 
 to sea, stood _Yvonne and Jeanne, pressing for- 
 ward against the parapet. They sang in unison
 
 7 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 a strange wild country song, or sailor song, half 
 like a chaunt, with voices deep and clear. Then 
 the boats, with set sails, swept up from the 
 west, and passing near the pier's end, went 
 round into the port. 
 
 ' A terre / a terre I ' the girls now cried to 
 them, ' Breton, ou Croisicais ? il y a du vin a 
 boire ! ' 
 
 4 Croisicais ! ' shouted the men from the boats. 
 And the dark sails swept past into the port. 
 The fishing was good, and the home-coming 
 joyous. Yvonne, with nothing to gain, nothing 
 to lose at the farm, threw herself into the quick 
 life of the moment. Her friends, the Croisicais 
 she must give them welcome. ' Land ! land ! 
 There is wine for you to drink.' 
 
 Presently, on the quay, far back from the 
 pier's end, and among the scattered lights of 
 Croisic town, and groups of watching folk, the 
 incoming boats were unladen of their load. The 
 sardine-salters, from the salting-house, came 
 down and bargained for the spoil ; so much 
 money the dozen baskets, and a bottle of wine 
 for luck ; and then, the bargaining over, feasting 
 began ; and late into the night, mate and sweet- 
 heart, and wife and friend, sat merry-making in 
 their humble rooms, with doors wide open, carry-
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 7* 
 
 ing light and sound to quay and street. Jeanne 
 had gone back to the inn, before whose door sat 
 Buillore, her father, smoking the pipe of peace. 
 Buillore's few guests were gone to bed ; the 
 father and two boys who had come from Nantes, 
 for bathing ; the man with his two sons who 
 had talked with Buillore at dinner for Buillore 
 sat at the board with his guests, and compared 
 experiences of inns at Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, 
 as he sliced the well-cooked fare, homely and 
 bourgeois. Buillore had waited for Jeanne, and 
 now his chair was taken inside his house, his 
 door shut, his light extinguished. Sleeping - 
 time was come. 
 
 And Yvonne? The excitement passed, the 
 movement over, she had stood still at the pier's 
 end, looking out broodingly to night and sea. 
 Then it was time to go : it would be late at the 
 farm. Rohan had gone ; he had taken her at 
 ner word. Had he been but a Croisicais ! These 
 Croisicais her- brothers one great family with 
 common interests they were all so different 
 from him. For all her love of : place and towns- 
 folk, there was something in Rohan from Piriac 
 strange that she had not known before 
 that she would not willingly lose. 
 
 He was suddenly by her, as she was leaving
 
 7 2 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 the pier, and spoke to her with no surprise for 
 he had heard of her there, incidentally, in the 
 talk of a fisher-friend of Jeanne's upon the quay. 
 So he went up quietly, and called her by her 
 name. 
 
 1 You ! ' she said, astonished. ' I thought, of 
 course, you were gone.' 
 
 Was anything wrong? the boat not ready at 
 last ? the mate away ? What ? 
 
 Her eyes asked, ' What ? ' though she framed 
 no question. He put his arm in hers, and they 
 walked down the dark pier. 
 
 ' I have been to the farm, but I saw no one. 
 I was a fool ; staying for nothing for what was 
 the good of speaking to you ? I could get but 
 the same answer. . . . Only I just felt that I 
 could not go.' 
 
 She let herself be held close to him, walking 
 a few paces on ; then suddenly stopped : ' Rohan ! 
 what is the use ? . . . . No, I cannot go out 
 there. I must go back to the farm.' 
 
 They turned, and walked quite silently from 
 pier to quay, from quay to little street, from 
 little jstreet into the lonely country road, 
 making for her home. They had both too 
 much to say. At first, perhaps, she hardly 
 knew her own mind, save that she knew she
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 73 
 
 was glad he was there. And he a simple 
 sailor, with no clever art in love-making he 
 could not very ^'easily press again what he had 
 pressed last night. Perhaps his faithful presence 
 would speak for him his quiet waiting for the 
 chance of seeing her better than words. 
 
 For she knew his story : at least he had 
 told it to her, at their earlier meetings. At 
 Piriac, there was his mother, blind and old, 
 rooted firmly, by age and weakness, to that 
 Piriac soil. So he was rooted too. He could 
 sail elsewhere; drop anchor here and there; 
 see far ports, and be contented for himself 
 wherever he was. But his home was Piriac. 
 No Russian serf was ever more firmly fixed. 
 
 So this night's meeting was after all only a 
 short reprieve. How intensely conscious was 
 Yvonne, then, of every step of the way ! The 
 turn in the road; the second field-gate; the 
 square salt-marsh gleaming in the night; their 
 own low boundary-wall of loose stones from the 
 coast; the cattle-shed, the hay-stack, the rounded 
 tower-like corner of the farm-house, heavy, 
 solid, grey-black in the night. And, with the 
 freshness of autumn, rising wind full in her 
 face, borne over the flat land from the furthest 
 sea.
 
 74 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 Here was the gate. Strange love-making ! 
 Hardly a word had been said. But she had not 
 put him away. 
 
 She passed inside the short wooden gate. He 
 held her hand still, and kissed her, once, quietly. 
 She burst out suddenly, with many tears, and 
 thick, deep sobs : ' Oh ! Rohan, Rohan ! Tell 
 me ! what am I to do ? God ! what am I to do ? ' 
 
 He could say nothing at the moment, but he 
 stood, tried to be kind to her, and the tears 
 passed. That weakness had been so unlike her. 
 Now she was herself again, save that a storm 
 had gone over her. 
 
 'You had better come to-morrow. At mid- 
 day. T will speak to father and mother before 
 that, and will ask them what we shall do. 
 They will think me very unnatural, at first 
 wishing to leave them, and the place, and the 
 people all our friends. I know there are fine 
 ladies going into convents, but that is for the 
 good God, or to leave more to their brothers. 
 But I am an only child, here at the farm. 
 What would they do, the two together father 
 and mother if I were gone ? . . . . Just for 
 myself, perhaps, after all, I could go away, you 
 know. Because I love you, yes, Rohan, I 
 must love you ! '
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 75 
 
 He caught with a new hope, and a rushing 
 thoughtless happiness, all the look of yearning, 
 yielding, in the sweet grave face then bent 
 suddenly over her, drawing her face to him, 
 kissing quickly her dark brows. And then he 
 was gone to come back with stronger hope on 
 the morrow. 
 
 It was late. And the first sound of Yvonne's 
 hand on the door-latch brought her father to 
 the door, holding a light on high. He did not 
 speak to her, but followed her straight from the 
 small stone passage to the living room, where 
 she saw by the light of his candle for the 
 lamp was gone that supper was long over. 
 She thought her father's face looked troubled; 
 and, keenly conscious of her inner conflict 
 half thinking too that he suspected it her 
 impulse was to show her sorrow. She threw 
 her arms round him and kissed him vehe- 
 mently. It half seemed to her she had been 
 false to him. But he suspected nothing. There 
 was nothing to tell him that Rohan had not 
 gone; and if he thought anything of her ex- 
 citement, he thought only that the cause of 
 it was the child's realisation that it was all over 
 such natural pleasantness as there had been 
 between those two. And so, when at last he
 
 76 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 spoke, he spoke very tenderly, not chiding her 
 for her lateness, but saying simply, ' C^cst bien, 
 mon enfant. But your mother was tired. She 
 went, as she goes always, when the clock 
 strikes.' 
 
 There was the chair where old Annaic had 
 been sitting. Should Yvonne go to her to say 
 1 Good-night ? ' 
 
 1 She sleeps,' said old Joel, moving towards 
 the door, and wishing his daughter placid ' Good- 
 night ' himself. ' Sleep well, my child.' 
 
 They went up stairs together; the old man 
 giving her the candle at her door. She went 
 in, shut the door, and sat down on the bed. 
 How should she tell them on the morrow ? she 
 thought. How should she persuade ? What 
 words could serve against the steady fact that 
 linked her life to Croisic, as Rohan's to that 
 unknown Brittany? Her face flushed red at 
 the thought of it was she not almost wicked, 
 to plan and nearly hope for parting, and a new 
 life which would be little different from her 
 death to them ! But Rohan was honest, manly, 
 gentle, kind; and, in a few days, had become so 
 much to her. 
 
 It was a hard question, and gave her a wakeful 
 night. Turning from side to side of her low
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 77 
 
 bed, she watched, sleepless, and waited for the 
 day. In the intense stillness she heard the 
 striking of the clock downstairs. Four of the 
 morning. The cock crew in the yard below 
 her, and presently from the window, by her 
 bed, she saw the dark night get greyer on the 
 horizon weird and cold and then came the 
 streak of red, widening and mounting in the 
 sky, and the fields rose grey out of the night. 
 Yes, this was all her home, and had been all her 
 life around her. She welcomed it, after the 
 sleepless hours, with weary eyes, and then 
 suddenly slept. 
 
 It was an hour after, in the full light of Sep- 
 tember morning, that she woke, roused by her 
 father's knock and call at the door. He said she 
 was to come quickly that her mother was ill. 
 Joel was, in general, a heavy sleeper, and it 
 was Annaic who woke first. But this morning 
 it had been different. Perhaps Annaic, from 
 her unexplained fatigue of the overnight, had 
 slept a little longer. Anyhow, the old man 
 was himself awake and thinking of rising, when 
 she turned in her bed, opened her eyes, and 
 seeing the full light, sprang suddenly; then 
 sunk back on the bed again, faint or uncon- 
 scious.
 
 78 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 The old man had not known what to do. 
 Almost for the first time in his life he was in 
 presence of sudden illness. Even the common 
 immediate remedies were strange to him, or, at 
 all events, long in coming to his slow thoughts. 
 He had left Annaic still unconscious when he 
 called his daughter, and, in hurriedly donned 
 raiment, prepared to go for skilful aid into the 
 town. 
 
 He said to Yvonne what he was going for, and 
 he then straightway went. He had been gone 
 hardly a minute when Yvonne, with loose hair 
 and troubled face, passed across the passage from 
 the one bedroom to the other, and was by her 
 mother's side, touching, with her warm strong 
 hand, the livid fingers looking, suddenly hope- 
 less and awed, into the glazing eyes. The girl 
 never said, afterwards, to strangers, what she had 
 done in those first terrible moments. But pre- 
 sently her mother was lifted and placed more 
 placidly than before in the bed. Yvonne's lips 
 blanched when she at first suspected, next was 
 awfully assured, that she was in the presence, 
 not of illness, but of death. 
 
 The half-hour between her father's going and 
 returning was at last over the half-hour that 
 seems years, because it is filled with many
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 79 
 
 thoughts that drag laborious as actions, with 
 fancies more real than facts. Times like these 
 mark epochs in life; they cut it sharply asunder. 
 The continuity of life is broken: life divided 
 once for all. There is a Past henceforth, which 
 is wholly past the memory of days, years, feel- 
 ings, experiences, which are left for ever beyond 
 recall; and with the death of others, in the flesh, 
 dies sometimes too much the life of our own spirit. 
 
 Her father's step over the bit of paving of the 
 yard, the clink of the house-door latch, his 
 mounting of the stairs with the rough doctor 
 of that country-side, the entry into the room 
 which had grown to Yvonne like a prison from 
 which she, in her ghastly solitude, only longed 
 to flee these things she remembered ever after 
 vividly, but told them to no one. 
 
 Then the examination had to be made 
 the simple malady was easily within the range 
 of the old surgeon's knowledge. There was 
 little that he had to say, except the due direction 
 for the next day's funeral. And again Yvonne 
 was in the house and alone: her father had gone 
 again, and this time for some hours, into Croisic 
 town. The horrible business, which keeps 
 stricken men up at such a time, had to be done 
 by him.
 
 8o PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 A woman, one of their nearest neighbours 
 she could not, though the nearest, be so very 
 near a one had come in soon after old Joel's 
 leaving. She was upstairs in the bedroom with 
 Annaic. Yvonne stood below, waiting at the 
 window of the living-room. For now there 
 had been time to think that Rohan would 
 be coming. He could not see the father now. 
 He could not plead now. All that pleading, 
 that had been looked for so anxiously, seemed a 
 now far-away thing. 
 
 It was a splendid autumn day : the pitiless 
 bright sun, high in the sky, shone down over the 
 large flat land, touching the parched dry fields 
 with more brilliant hue, and making the grey 
 salt-marsh flash here and there with silvery 
 light. The dust on the white road the thin 
 soil of the lane was raised by the happy breeze 
 that came from the grey rocks, and the clear 
 blue tumbling sea. Yvonne went outside the 
 house, and crossed the yard, and stood by the 
 low wall of loose stones from the coast, and 
 looked up the road towards the salt-marsh and 
 Croisic town, and down it to where the dark 
 wooden crucifix stood alone above the fields, 
 where the two roads met and became one lane 
 which led its lonely way between broken bits of
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 81 
 
 wall and hedge to the high green cliff top, in 
 front of the now sparkling sea. 
 
 It was the very world's end, in its bright loneli- 
 ness the farm, that day. She looked up at the 
 broad blue sky, flecked with little white clouds 
 that changed with the wind : she looked right 
 and left again, along the bare road. No sound 
 of voice or footstep, but, with figure sharp 
 relieved against the sky, the one stilt-mounted 
 salt-stirrer moved to and fro along the straight 
 tracks of the salt-marsh, stirring leisurely, here 
 and again, with the long pole which is the 
 tool for his work. No other sign of labour 
 hardly of life but that stilt-mounted figure on 
 his slow progress over the straight tracks of the 
 marsh. 
 
 The loneliness, which had used to be happy, 
 seemed cruel and not to be borne that day. 
 Yvonne cried out against it, not indeed with 
 voice or tears, but with her inmost heart, that 
 long, cruel, endless, brilliant morning. 
 
 She came inside soon again, and sat down in 
 her wonted chair in the living room, where at 
 least the tall clock in the corner ticked kindly 
 for companionship. Then Rohan came; first 
 heard opening the gate, then seen at the open 
 window, then boldly in the room with her, and 
 
 F
 
 82 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 bending over her for the first instant, ready to 
 press once for all the claim of his love, and to 
 say to old Joel, her father, all that on the night 
 before they had felt must be said. 
 
 He stood back ; or she put him aside who 
 knows ? He saw at once her changed face, and 
 strange trouble. 
 
 1 Comment f he said to Yvonne, with voice 
 caught in with fear. 
 
 She said to him quite simply, with some touch 
 re-found of that old calm of hers which came 
 alike of life and character ' Rohan ; my mother 
 is dead.' 
 
 All the simplicity and directness of the short 
 words, spoken with the solemn calm of one to 
 whom the intense hours of thought and feeling 
 have even now already put that new death into 
 the order of accepted things, made the young 
 man stand back aghast. And he could only 
 mechanically echo her last word, ' Dead ! ' and 
 she had to be the witness of surprise for him 
 her own being so utterly past. 
 
 She told him quietly sitting down again in 
 her chair, and with hands joined on grey apron 
 and lap a very little more : all that it was need- 
 ful anyone should know. She got up then 
 tears in her eyes, but the low-toned voice hardly
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 8 3 
 
 quivering perceptibly and went to him, and 
 putting a hand on his, said very slowly, ' So you 
 won't force me to say many times you see you 
 must go Rohan ! ' 
 
 He vowed, of course, what any man, high or 
 low, fisher or citizen, would have vowed then, 
 in few words, earnestly that he could not go : 
 she must not send him away in her trouble. 
 But he had to see, as she stood quietly by him, 
 that the very quietness of tone and look implied 
 finality. He had come in too late for the battle. 
 The battle if battle there had been was over. 
 
 So he only said, hesitatingly the strength 
 being hers ' I may come again ? In the spring ? 
 Next year?' And still less confidently: 'The 
 autumn ? Things change ! ' 
 
 Yvonne's eyes turned for a moment from him, 
 lighted on the hearth, the father's chair, her 
 own, her mother's. 
 
 She looked at him again, and shook her head, 
 slightly, with quivering lip. But it was quite 
 enough in its sad decisiveness. Soon after- 
 wards he was gone. 
 
 Presently her father trudged wearily back, 
 and came, a broken man, into the house and 
 room. He spoke a few words about the
 
 84 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 morrow : sighed as he sat down. And they sat 
 together silently. 
 
 The day had changed to afternoon. From 
 Croisic port the fishing-boats with spread sails, 
 orange and brown-red, were scudding round the 
 pier's end to the live, open sea. The bathers 
 had bathed; the post had come from Saint- 
 Nazaire and far-away Nantes; the dinner cloth 
 was laid on Buillore's inn table; Jeanne, Buil- 
 lore's daughter, was making ready for her 
 father's dining-guests. And about the farm, 
 far from all this little life of Croisic, shadows 
 gathered, of the quiet afternoon. The sun crept 
 round to the house-side; glowed more tenderly 
 on roof and haystack and wide-stretching field. 
 No one came near, and no sound broke the still- 
 ness; the barn-door fowls crossed the yard; the 
 clock ticked very gently; and the day wore on. 
 
 They had said nothing to each other father 
 and child. The old man knew nothing, im- 
 agined nothing, of Rohan's visit. Even yester- 
 day, the uneasy thought of the stranger had 
 been past, for him. It was of quite other things 
 that he was brooding now, with worn eyes now 
 closed, now open. 
 
 At last one cannot say why, save that such 
 times must have an end, and common life, the
 
 YVONNE OF CROISIC 85 
 
 life of work and rest, be lived out after all at 
 last he looked up, appealingly, to Yvonne, who 
 rose with him, and they went together, her head 
 touching his shoulder gently, to the door. 
 
 ' It is time to feed the cattle,' said the old 
 man. 
 
 She understood that word, and, in a deeper 
 sense than he, all that it signified of common 
 task and lonely life resumed. 
 
 ' It is time to feed the cattle.' 
 
 ' Out, mon pere.' 
 
 And that new death, and that dead love, were 
 both among the order of accepted things. 
 
 London, June, 1875.
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 
 
 A STRANGER walking out from Chartres, some 
 Sunday, to the upland village of Le Coudry 
 say, at the hour of mass or of vespers would 
 see indeed there, on the edge of La Beauce, the 
 typical church of rural France, but hardly its 
 typical priest. Say, it is three o'clock on a 
 Sunday afternoon. The sacristan is in the 
 church already. That simple blue - bloused 
 peasant, beadle and sexton in one, and doing on 
 week-days the duties of serving-man at a small 
 country-house some three or four miles away, 
 pulls the church-bell on Sunday to summon the 
 people by all their paths of the plain, from 
 scattered farms, rare wayside cottages, and dis- 
 tant village street, hidden in a hollow out of 
 sight. The church stands alone at the top of 
 the ascent from the valley of the Eure plain 
 solid grey stone walls, and square tower, slate-
 
 9 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 roofed, set against the breezy sky. Below it, on 
 the one hand, looking towards Chartres, the road 
 runs down, by little orchard and patches of 
 poorish vine, to the valley with its green river- 
 side meadows, its cattle-sheds, its rows of poplars 
 along the bank of the stream. And beyond the 
 valley there rises a hillside again, and the towers 
 of Chartres cap the summit. But, on the other 
 hand, looking south, and away from the valley 
 and Chartres, it is plain, it is table-land, that 
 extends to the far horizon. Just round the 
 church itself there is the little close-walled 
 churchyard, with its black wooden crosses among 
 the unequal grass ; and across the road, opposite 
 the church's tower, one large old oak all that 
 the country-side can boast of oak-trees lifts 
 itself above the brushwood of road-edge and low 
 growth of scanty copse. Further away it is all 
 plain and sky. 
 
 Slowly somehow the bell's one clear mono- 
 tonous strike brings the people from the hidden 
 village street, or from unsuspected homes lost 
 somewhere to the eye in the wide expanse of 
 clover and cornfield now low and bare with 
 autumn. These white-capped brown-gowned 
 peasants trudge by twos and threes along the 
 open field-paths : their slow gathering from
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 9 1 
 
 many sides all tending to the church. Books in 
 hand, they stand exchanging few and quiet words 
 at the church's gate, or loiter about the small 
 graveyard, waiting for the Cure. A flapping of 
 long black raiment is seen at the turn of the 
 highroad. The Cure, a little late, strides 
 actively forwards, from background to middle 
 distance ; he is now a foreground figure, and 
 now has passed through gate and churchyard 
 into the small sacristy. The scanty company is 
 gathered by this time in the church, and three 
 of the blue-bloused peasant proprietors of France 
 go from church to sacristy, and emerge in church 
 again, peasants no longer, but lay clerks, white- 
 surpHced singing men. 
 
 Half-an-hour passes the service has taken its 
 course. The priest has said his share by the 
 altar, decked out in bravery contrasting with the 
 bare and white-washed walls. The singing men, 
 on their low platform or dais placed out in the 
 middle of the chancel and between the altar and 
 the grouped village worshippers, have made 
 strange discords. The grouped villagers on the 
 rough pine benches have sat and knelt and risen. 
 The Cure has gone into the pulpit for the last 
 string of ' Ave Marias ' with the beads, and the 
 stranger can watch his face closely now, as the
 
 9 2 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 old country priest leans forward with repeated 
 phrase, to which the people answer. You catch 
 not always, unless you are familiar, every word; 
 but here and there, in the quick utterance. 
 ' benie parmi toutes les femmes . . . . et Jesus, 
 le fruit de vos entrailles.' Clearly the last words 
 are rung out for the twentieth time as for the 
 first another bead, closed eyes, and ' Jesus, le 
 fruit de vos entrailles.' 
 
 The Cure is seventy-four; he is hale, service- 
 able, yet abstracted and sad. His accent, when 
 you have caught it, in the native French, is not 
 that of the priest but just removed from peasant, 
 who ministers often in the country churches of 
 France. And his people are all peasants, though 
 some of them, with only a peasant's knowledge 
 and a peasant's life, own wide enough fields 
 aye, and coupons of the Three per Cents to boot. 
 Between them and him there is a wide, marked 
 difference. Nay, between him and them there 
 is seemingly nothing in common, except what 
 years of association must needs have wrought; 
 nothing in common, save for the somewhat 
 fatherly relation which nineteen years have 
 given him to the scattered people the quickly 
 ageing peasants who were almost young when 
 he knew them first; the young who were
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 93 
 
 children when he began his monotonous tranquil 
 service of nineteen years in those parts. 
 
 What has his life been ? He is perhaps as 
 simple as they; but why, on these rough faces, 
 the everyday village simplicity at best slowness 
 of apprehension, regularity of handwork, paucity 
 of experience and on his the sign of far other 
 memories, of a life not absorbed in the main in 
 the task work of village service, whether his own 
 of the church or theirs of the farm and fields ? 
 In that place, certainly a mystery of a face. 
 Physically healthy, mentally tranquil, perhaps 
 not uncheerful, as cheerfulness goes but cer- 
 tainly saddened. A face with the mixed expres- 
 sion of deep natures in age, or in the experience 
 which may stand for age. 
 
 You cannot solve the question by a ten 
 minutes' gaze the chance look perhaps, after 
 all, of chance moments in the pulpit. Or, as 
 there are saintly men still, such faces may yet 
 come without personal trouble come of pas- 
 sionate brooding over poor lives and fatal errors 
 of the many, unveiled to one more than another, 
 felt by one more than another, and, under all 
 the quiet, not quite absent, perhaps, even from 
 these far-away fields of the upland plain. You 
 do not know.
 
 94 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 And so he comes down from the pulpit, his 
 ' Aves ! ' done, and blessings given. Three 
 white-robed singing men that were peasants 
 pass out into the sacristy : three peasants that 
 were singing men come back again into the 
 church. Slowly the people disperse. A little 
 more chatting in the churchyard, and looking at 
 the sky, and prophecies of storm to-morrow 
 storm brooding now in the far south and then 
 the landscape of the plain is enlivened again by 
 the home -trudging peasantry. White caps, 
 blue blouses, disappear behind low roofs of 
 straggling farm and cattle-shed; turn this and 
 that way, are smaller, are lost, leaving the great 
 plain all barren of life once more, as far as eye 
 can see. 
 
 The Cure has something to keep him awhile 
 in the sacristy; the sacristan is closeted with 
 him question perhaps of baptism or burial. 
 At last both emerge. A pleasant parting word 
 and smile and wave of hand from village priest 
 to labourer, and the humbler has lunged forward 
 on his way. The old man will quickly follow. 
 For him too a look at the sky from that 
 upland place whence the sky is so vast that it 
 must be varied too; a look also at the graveyard, 
 which is name and date to our chance stranger
 
 95 
 
 name and date, and nothing beyond but 
 which, to the old furrow-faced man now raising 
 his stick as a first gesture of departure, is full of 
 histories he has known, and is familiar with, 
 this day. Then a step forward the gate is 
 closed the tall figure age has hardly bent is 
 out upon the road. The long black raiment is 
 flapping in the wind, as he marches too to his 
 unperceived home, somewhere amidst the silence 
 of the plain. And now there is no figure any- 
 where. And with the strange stillness save 
 for the motion of the wind a reserve and 
 reticence which are those of a wide country 
 only, are over these fields of the Beauce. Bare, 
 dull, and blind, they have nothing to tell the 
 stranger of the Past; nothing of the Future. 
 
 Five years ago, the old Cure, who seems, as 
 he strides home on Sunday afternoon, so much 
 a part of that landscape and its loneliness five 
 years ago, he with whom even short travel was 
 an event, had an unusual absence, and he did 
 not return alone. The village had heard, 
 through the gossip of his old serving-woman, 
 that his little house, when he came back, would 
 have a third inmate. His niece was coming 
 to him from her convent school.
 
 96 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 To Monsieur Devallet, the old Cure himself, 
 the news, when he got it in Paris, was a sur- 
 prise and a pleasant one. Clementine was the 
 child of his brother; she was one of only two 
 relations now remaining to a man who had lived 
 his lonely life long enough to hear of rather 
 than to see gap after gap in the family. The 
 Cure's brother had been dead some years already, 
 and the brother's child was placed in the con- 
 vent school in Paris; visited there rarely by the 
 old priest, and by his only other actual kins- 
 woman, a sister, settled at Orleans since half 
 a lifetime. The village priest, Monsieur 
 Devallet, was both uncle and guardian of the 
 girl; and his guardianship in those early years 
 of the girl's life was best exercised, he thought, 
 by leaving her very much undisturbed to her 
 school work and to the influence of women 
 to whom the best in France often confide 
 their daughters. In this view, the choice for 
 Clementine for schooling was a choice of con- 
 vents after all; and no teaching sisterhood had 
 so high a fame as that of the 'Sacred Heart.' 
 Its houses were all over France. Its rule was 
 strict, but its teaching excellent. And no house 
 of the sisterhood was deemed quite equal to that 
 in the middle of old Paris, in the Faubourg St
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 97 
 
 Germain. Thither then Clementine had been 
 sent when a child, at the death of her father. 
 Thence the old village priest had fetched her 
 when schooling was done. 
 
 The absence of any life in common, for a 
 couple of score of years the complete division 
 of interests which that entails had made the 
 Cure's sister at Orleans gradually of less and 
 less account to him. They had rare brief 
 interviews: visits which had got to be things 
 of convention, and times when both hid from 
 themselves the knowledge that joy and affec- 
 tion were played at more than felt; played 
 at with excellent will indeed, and the best of 
 unrecognised intentions but still at heart it was 
 make-believe. Common interests were wanting 
 to them. The old priest led his simple life, of 
 service in church and visit in cottage and farm, 
 in that secluded upland village of La Beauce. 
 Madame Beaumarie, deep in the petty bustle of 
 a provincial town, was pleased to consider she 
 ruled Society. The small aristocracy of Or- 
 leans had long been her world; and it was a 
 world that recognised no importance in any 
 other. 
 
 Often and often had the Cure pondered, as in 
 past years he had taken the accustomed solitary
 
 9 8 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 walks by clover field, cabbage field, and patches 
 of upland vineyard, on what might be the life in 
 store for the child of his brother ; and it may be 
 he had been led to that pondering by some in- 
 stinctive undefined perception that here, with 
 this girl, yet well-nigh a stranger to him, lay his 
 one chance of companionship that might still be 
 a delight. He was getting old when he first 
 thought of it ; hale, but feeling some progress of 
 the years. Alone so much with Nature, the 
 trite enough thought was somehow solemnly 
 borne to him his life had none of the perman- 
 ence of the fields. What were his own later 
 years to be the later still, and the last? All 
 these village people were in some sense distant 
 from him. Friendliness, respect, had always 
 been between them : hardly love. He was not 
 a model priest, to his own thinking, though only 
 blamed by himself. What he lacked, perhaps 
 and recognised he lacked, now in these later 
 times was impulse, enthusiasm for his career. 
 A certain element of routine and mechanism and 
 monotony mixed itself with all the honesty of 
 his work. The work was well, and the life 
 blameless, but was either or both enough ? The 
 haunting thought of a vocation somewhere 
 missed a greater happiness somewhere eluded
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 99 
 
 pursued him now and again in that repeated 
 labour and service, among the simple people, in 
 the wide and silent fields. 
 
 All this while, Clementine was preparing for 
 her life, by months and even years of an exist- 
 ence hardly less regular than his own. The 
 early morning studies, the lessons steadily given 
 by the skilled in languages and music, the 
 friendships made and cherished in the scanty 
 hours of ordered leisure, the walks in the great 
 high-walled garden which Paris holds in its very 
 heart without suspecting it these things in their 
 habitual interchange filled Clementine's days ; 
 but the great Future was still coming, and we 
 all in our youth look forward to To-morrow, 
 with the thought that it must be brighter than 
 any To-day. 
 
 One of two things Clementine might do, 
 thought the Cure, when schooling should be 
 over : one of two things, hardly of three. What 
 he had seen of the girl had made him already 
 fond of her. To be too fond of her, to seriously 
 fix his thoughts on her, ere she made her 
 important choice that had seemed to him a 
 thing he was bound to guard against. She 
 could hardly be his companion, in that lonely 
 village and secluded life. Practically the choice
 
 100 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 was small. A sojourn, shorter or longer, with 
 Madame Beaumarie at Orleans, and then 
 marriage, ordered as wisely as might be, and in 
 the selection of husband he must have himself 
 some share that or the discovery, true or false, 
 of a ( vocation,' as vocation is considered within 
 convent walls ; the choice, not for the world, 
 but for the convent for life. 
 
 The Cure knew very well that that last was 
 likely to be. As the time approached for leav- 
 ing, or at least for decision, Clementine was a 
 favourite with the sisters of the Sacred Heart, 
 and the Cure knew of influences that would be 
 at work constantly. The good Monsieur Deval- 
 let was in spirit so little an ecclesiastic that he 
 allowed himself at times to be sorry for those 
 influences. They existed, and he allowed him- 
 self priest as he was to look them in the face, 
 and at times to wish them away. The old man 
 went no step in the track of the new Catholic- 
 ism. He took his freedom, conservative and 
 French, hardly knowing that he took it; and he 
 did not want the convent life for Clementine. 
 Was she not more fitted for the activities of the 
 world ? 
 
 And so, of the two courses, Clementine's 
 going first to his sister might possibly be the
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES IOI 
 
 better. He would go there himself, then ; get to 
 know her more at that time; and the brother 
 and sister, long divided, might find some com- 
 mon ground in planning in the true French 
 fashion for the life and happiness of Clementine. 
 That at least was the thought with which he 
 chose to solace himself, after the last thus far 
 of those visits to the girl, which, rare in- 
 deed as they were, more and more impressed 
 his imagination, and lived before him at his 
 lonely meals or in the daily walks along the ac- 
 customed ways. 
 
 And so it was with a hesitation he hardly 
 allowed himself to recognise, that he went for 
 his last visit to the convent school. His 
 sister had gone there from Orleans a day or 
 two before, and both had agreed that school- 
 days were finally over. Madame Beaumarie 
 had written to her brother that as yet there 
 was no sign of a ' vocation ' ; but perhaps a 
 few months of the life of Orleans some way- 
 ward fancy perhaps not yet to be foreseen 
 might produce the momentary distaste for our 
 common ways which, under religious influence, 
 may ripen into mysticism. The world must 
 be lived in very long its spirit thoroughly 
 entered into some one of its attractions found
 
 102 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 absorbing before the convent ceases to be a 
 possible resource, and a girl's own life has led 
 her irrevocably beyond its gates. 
 
 The old priest a comely black-draped figure 
 in a second-class carriage journeyed up by the 
 train, reading alternately his breviary and some 
 secular volume. Presently he was in the city, 
 striding through it, with here and there an in- 
 quiry of the way, till he reached the portals of 
 the great house of the sisterhood. Then the 
 request to see his niece, the permission asked 
 for him in turn by a subordinate of one in 
 authority, and he was led into the large visiting- 
 parlour, and presently some gentle nun, with 
 subdued gesture and scant speech, came in with 
 Clementine. A few words only and courteous 
 bows of departure, and the old man and the girl 
 were left alone. 
 
 It was pleasant to him to see her. She re- 
 minded him of his brother, of whom he had 
 been fond, and of his brother's wife, who had 
 been beautiful and who had died young. 
 Clementine was perhaps not precisely beautiful ; 
 but she was brown-cheeked, black-eyed, glossy- 
 haired, splendidly healthy, and gay because she 
 was French. More than that, she was his niece. 
 To a man who is a father, a niece may be a
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES IO 3 
 
 distant relation, but to a childless man she may 
 be very near how near will depend on whether 
 he belongs to the class whose first need it is to 
 love themselves, or to the class whose first need 
 it is to love some other. 
 
 And so, with a tenderness in his face that had 
 some memories in it, and a bright cheerfulness 
 which his instinctive sympathy with that bright 
 young life gave him, he kissed Clementine and 
 talked to her, and had no thought at the moment 
 of the question he was going to put to her, and 
 of what depended on the answer. She was full 
 of talk, it happened said ordinary things 
 which were made bright and pleasant by the 
 pleasantness of her ways and when Monsieur 
 Devallet did remember and think of him- 
 self, he was in no hurry to stop her. But 
 at last, standing by the window and turning 
 his head round to face her, he said : 
 
 'Clementine, my child.' 
 
 Evidently from his tone it was going to be 
 very serious. 
 
 ' Mon oncle ? ' she answered lightly, waiting 
 for him to continue. 
 
 ' Your aunt, Madame Beaumarie, has doubtless 
 told you, and indeed my own letters have done 
 so too, that the time has come, Clementine, for
 
 104 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 a grave choice. You are going out into the 
 world, Clementine.' 
 
 A certain secular air about her words and 
 ways the keen appreciative merriment of her 
 dark vivacious eyes had told the old priest that 
 Madame Beaumarie had been right. Thus far 
 there was no sign of a ' vocation.' So, ' You are 
 going out into the world,' he said again. 
 
 ' It is what I have been longing for,' said 
 Clementine; and the old Cure's heart fell within 
 him as he thought of the society of Orleans. He 
 had so little sympathy with amusements, with 
 ' pleasure,' contrived with any gaiety but that 
 which was natural and spontaneous. 
 
 'My sister, Madame Beaumarie,' the Cure 
 continued in all these years of separated in- 
 terests he had got to speak of her somewhat 
 distantly ' will do her kindest for you, Clemen- 
 tine. She will make a home for you, where you 
 will not lack society. An old priest like myself 
 probably undervalues the uses of Society I 
 mean that which is general and mixed. But 
 your aunt is connected with very good families 
 there at Orleans, and on the whole the arrange- 
 ment will no doubt be a wise one. You are 
 fortunate, Clementine, having so few relations, 
 to find one who will be very kind to you, and
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES JO 5 
 
 will concern herself with your interests, and 
 will' 
 
 He hesitated a moment. He had thought it 
 his duty to send the girl away in good hope 
 as to her new life. He had been straining a 
 point in praise of Madame Beaumarie, but his 
 niece stopped him. 
 
 ' I don't think I should like her very much,' 
 said Clementine, quietly. She was calmly 
 recording an impression well formed before 
 to-day. 
 
 ' Not like her very much ? ' repeated old 
 Monsieur Devallet, a little puzzled how to pro- 
 ceed. ' Then alors, mon enfant, that is scarcely 
 the mood in which to leave the convent: scarcely 
 the mood is it, my child ? in which to go to 
 her.' 
 
 'Well, no ! ' answered the girl. ' I am afraid 
 it is not. But I am going to you, if you please.' 
 
 ' Clementine ! ' said the old priest, in a tone of 
 half incredulous surprise. 
 
 ' Yes,' said the girl, with unshaken decision. 
 She had thought before, when she had con- 
 sidered her choice, that even if she liked to go, 
 it might be a worry or a burden to him. She 
 must then of course have hesitated. She had 
 known for herself before she had known for
 
 106 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 him, and so until to-day she had been silent 
 on her choice. But to-day she felt instinctively 
 that he liked her already. He could soon get 
 very fond of her, she thought. And she had 
 her young French longing for quickly declared 
 fondness, for demonstrative affection; and her 
 aunt, without it, was repellent to her. 
 
 'I am a simple village cure,' said Monsieur 
 Devallet at length; ' very dull, very lonely, and 
 fast getting old.' He looked at her gently, and 
 it was not within his heart to urge any more. 
 He took her hand, and there was a silent 
 minute. ' You shall come to me,' he continued, 
 in a changed voice; 'free to go the moment 
 you may wish.' And he was silent again for 
 a little while. ' I am very touched very 
 touched, my child.' His voice shook a little 
 with the gladness of his heart. 
 
 Soon afterwards he left her. A few days 
 more and he would come back to fetch her 
 away. Meanwhile there were preparations to 
 make at Le Coudry many things to be 
 arranged in the small house. As the convent 
 gates closed behind him, the old priest strode 
 along the pavement with quicker and more 
 elastic step. He was a little flushed at first at 
 the decision. What a new interest in his life!
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES IO 7 
 
 And what a sudden gift ! He said a prayer 
 to himself with more than common devoutness 
 with the vividness of feelings stagnant no 
 more. The thought of the girl who was quite as 
 a child to him, and of his henceforth different 
 days, and of the brightened house in the village 
 on La Beauce, filled his mind. He passed, 
 preoccupied, through the clatter of Paris. 
 
 There were many things to prepare for Clem- 
 entine, besides the one guest-room, little used 
 hitherto, in the small house with its walled 
 garden, lost almost to sight among the great 
 farm buildings of the village street the im- 
 mense cattle-sheds, the straw-covered bartons, 
 the pointed-roofed granaries in whose long suc- 
 cession, close down the village street, was crammed 
 much of the produce of those wide fields that 
 stretched to the far horizon. The convent dress 
 had of course to be laid aside those gawky 
 slipping aprons of brown stuff in which graceful- 
 ness can hardly be graceful. And a Parisian 
 dressmaker, worthy to drape that pleasant figure 
 of Clementine's, was to make her her gowns, as 
 many as she chose. The selection was all the 
 girl's, but the work required time ; and for a 
 week, when the Cure went back to her from 
 Le Coudry, priest and girl were lodged, with a
 
 io8 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 view to these preparations, at an old hotel in 
 the Rue de Vaugirard, facing the Luxembourg. 
 That is really the girl's first taste of Paris, its 
 movement and freedom. The quaint third-floor 
 room, with windows looking on to the street and 
 the omnibus station and the sentry-box of the Lux- 
 embourg, is a delight to her. There is a sense 
 to her of companionship in the very noise of the 
 town. The convent bedroom was one unbroken 
 stillness. The great garden, generations old, shut 
 it off from the presence of Paris. But here all 
 night the uncertain noises came and went under 
 her window, leaving her only pleasantly wakeful 
 with the easy excitements of youth. Long after- 
 wards, in that other quiet to which she was 
 going the quiet of the upland plain, and its 
 nestling village with the low sound of bellowing 
 cattle would she remember the Paris night : 
 the candles extinguished, the pleasant reflections 
 of the street lamp shot upon wall and bed, the 
 lessening of passing voices and feet, the slacken- 
 ing of traffic, the first sleeps, and then the brief 
 waking, hardly less pleasant, when the hour of 
 return from thirty theatres had sounded by the 
 clock of the Luxembourg, and for one half-hour 
 omnibuses rumbled and coupes flew, and all the 
 clatter of the city had a little sweet excitement
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES i9 
 
 for her unaccustomed ears. Afterwards, the later 
 night the night of Paris. 
 
 And then the day, busy with the congenial 
 business of spending and acquiring ! It is quite 
 a levee that she holds the young queen of her 
 own freedom newly given in that third-floor 
 bedroom. Thither, up the wide high staircase 
 of the hotel, comes the servant with letter al- 
 ready from some convent friend ; comes the 
 tripping dressmaker's girl, neat, black-dressed, 
 and unbonneted, with attendant boy, with the 
 wicker basket that contains the gown ; comes 
 the errand man with bonnet-box ; comes re- 
 spectfully the laundress's apprentice with fine 
 linen and the washing bill ; come one and all 
 who minister in their small way to Clementine's 
 sense of new independence, and of the activities 
 of common life. The convent, truly, was not 
 the place for you, Clementine. These quick 
 black eyes and bounding pulses it is a secular 
 temperament. 
 
 But it is above all things variable ; for now at 
 home and settling into that quietness of life 
 which no previous thought could realise, 
 Clementine is happy in the visible happiness of 
 the old priest. He may idolise her soon, for he 
 will perceive her pleasure in the happiness she
 
 no PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 gives him, and will not remember that vanity 
 may have its part in such pleasure ; for to see 
 the happiness of another grow under the influ- 
 ence of your eyes and words and company, is to 
 have, at least, whatever be your sacrifice or effort, 
 the flattering sense of power. 
 
 And Clementine, indeed, in that bare country- 
 side, peopled sparely with peasants, was a unique 
 thing. If the old Cure had himself had any- 
 thing of vanity, he would have been vain of her. 
 A less simple affection would have cherished and 
 increased itself on the praise of others bestowed 
 on the girl as ours is wont to do, so often. But 
 old Monsieur Devallet, as he trudged with his 
 niece, in those early days, past the purple patches 
 of clover and the blue-green of potato-field, from 
 which bent figures of the labourer-folk rose to 
 salute him, was quite without regard of what 
 might be said in her praise. A long walk into 
 Chartres, to show once and again to Clementine 
 the glory of that country the immense and 
 towering cathedral church, whose distant spires 
 broke the horizon from every field of La Beauce 
 brought the girl into brief contact with people 
 of her own rank, who looked and admired, and 
 wondered who the two might be Cure and girl. 
 But no look or interest of any of them asw
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES Irl 
 
 noticed by the stalwart priest, black-robed, with 
 flowing iron-grey hair, as he strode, pleasantly 
 busy with explanation and answer, through 
 cathedral aisle, or city street, or along the great 
 road over the high plain. His life had been all 
 too simple for a score of years, for pride in her. 
 These petty natural vanities of our gregarious 
 life, in towns, in watering-places, under the 
 influence of men, are somehow lost in that 
 elemental life of larger outlook because of slower 
 and more tranquil thought, in the immense and 
 silent plains, under the infinite sky. 
 
 Poor Clementine ! with her interests, her ex- 
 istence, now more confined than she had deemed 
 possible, and her pretty dresses visible sign of it 
 now out of place in the unchanged simplicities 
 of the wide fields. The second Sunday she put 
 them finally by ; locked them up in her box 
 with an undefined feeling of dullness the first 
 touch of reaction at the experience of some 
 change which has not brought with it quite the 
 expected pleasure. That day she trudged along 
 the high-road by the Cure's side, in simple black 
 plain black stuff, plainly made. She might 
 have been a London shop-girl, or a Parisian 
 actress with some character to lose. We are to 
 picture her so dressed the lithe elastic figure
 
 H2 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 thus suitably arrayed during the time, lesser or 
 longer, in which she takes her walks, by many 
 weathers, to cottage, farm, or church, across the 
 fields, along the upland high-roads of La Beauce. 
 And Clementine, being sensitive and French, 
 fitted herself in other ways besides this small 
 one, to a life of which it had been difficult to 
 realise, before, the remoteness and seclusion. She 
 had that fortunate and girlish quality not all 
 unselfish, as has been said already of taking 
 pleasure wherever she gave it. And she gave it 
 to her uncle the Cure : perhaps to some of the 
 people besides, who praised, and at all events 
 liked her. But to enter at all intimately into 
 lives so firmly set as theirs of La Beauce lives 
 cast once as it were in a common mould, and 
 repeated without change or variety that would 
 have been no easy business. Beyond pleasant 
 words and kindly thoughts, she and the peasants 
 could hardly get, unless, indeed, by lapse of years ; 
 and even long years count as few to a peasantry 
 little accustomed to form impressions swiftly, 
 and with all its associations well defined and old, 
 dating from childhood, and with its slow life led 
 ever in sight of the permanence of Nature. 
 With all this, that young, changing, quickly- 
 touched life of hers could have little to do.
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES "3 
 
 But at first the country itself, of which the 
 spaciousness and freedom were a delight the 
 domesticities of that small home where she had 
 arranged a room to her own bright taste the 
 pleasure that the old priest had in her, in hours 
 of walking through the continuance of the fields, 
 or sitting by the cosiness of lamplight over their 
 evening meal with shutters closed against the 
 darkness of deserted village street and far-stretch- 
 ing plain at first these things in their very new- 
 ness sufficed her ; and she looked forward no 
 more than did the Cure (wrapt in the content- 
 ment of the Present) to what might be her life 
 in later years, when the need of some other life 
 would surely declare itself. So time went on. 
 Monsieur Devallet, in the tranquil occupation of 
 his village work, and the new happiness of his 
 leisure, thought of no other end than that, still 
 distant, perhaps, which the old man would him- 
 self meet with a brave patience his decrepitude 
 and death his later days, and his last. 
 
 Presently came letters from Madame Beau- 
 marie at Orleans. ' The child will tire of your 
 society, my dear brother. That is not all that she 
 requires. That she fancies you more than me, I 
 readily allow. Let us unite to find her some 
 home more suited to her than either yours or my 
 
 H
 
 H4 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 own. You live, my dear brother, in unusual 
 isolation, and we must consider her future. 11 
 
 Sensible it sounded. ' But there are difficulties 
 there are difficulties ! ' ejaculated the Cure in 
 under-breath. ' I do not see at all how this is to 
 be done. My child ! ' aloud ' Do you tire of 
 my company ? You do not tire of your life here, 
 Clementine, mafillef 1 
 
 She said ' No ' of course, and came to him to 
 lay her hand on his head, for he was worried 
 the letter had brought him face to face for that 
 moment with a question he was wishing to 
 shrink from and she looked first her brightest 
 at him, and then tempered her voice in talk with 
 him in a dozen changeful and delightful ways, 
 with that immediate sensitive appreciation of the 
 requirements of moment and mood which makes 
 a French girl a comedian, and makes a come- 
 dian an artist. So that it was pleasant to him 
 to think that all was well ; and time could pass, 
 and he could disregard the letter and its warning. 
 
 The town of Chartres itself, only a good 
 walk's distance from Le Coudry, of course had 
 interest for the girl the grey and vast cathedral 
 round which the black-winged birds sailed and 
 settled in the upper air; the narrow winding 
 streets from the Eure valley bringing one at
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES "5 
 
 last to the great horse-shoe Place where market- 
 stalls and bustling peasantry and townsfolk 
 crowded on market days, and where three grand 
 houses, inns now, but with the outside dignity 
 of mansions under Louis Quatorze, faced each 
 other in that open breathing-space of the town. 
 The old Cure, with something of the learning of 
 a man who had used studiously the leisure hours 
 of a life without distractions, could talk instruc- 
 tively on peculiarities of the work of sculpture 
 or of painted window ; but for Clementine the 
 cathedral was most interesting when her thought 
 of it was most vague. Its size and gloom gave 
 it its fascination for her, and the remembrance 
 that a score of generations had worshipped 
 within those walls. All that impressed the 
 imagination of youth. And Clementine had a 
 keener zest for personal experience than for the 
 reception of facts. 
 
 At length, in August, the quiet and narrow 
 house at Le Coudry, shut in by its walled garden 
 from neighbouring barton, farm, and cattle-shed, 
 received a new visitor. The Cure had known 
 only distantly before of the existence of a man 
 who looked to him just like five thousand 
 that might be met in Paris Adrien Roquette, 
 a youth to the Cure, who lacked to the Cure
 
 "6 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 the charm of youth, as much as the interest of 
 maturity. Madame Beaumarie at Orleans had 
 some slight knowledge of him, since he had 
 been there once to see her. He was the son of 
 a warm friend of Clementine's father, and was 
 now a visitor at Chartres. A master of his 
 means, such as they were never taken at dis- 
 advantage when taken unawares he annoyed 
 Monsieur Devallet with his easy and voluble 
 politeness. Along with his smooth city face 
 and fashionable garments, he seemed to bring 
 the clatter of the Boulevard into the quietude of 
 the upland village. Honestly, the Cure would 
 have been glad to see him, if only for the sake of 
 his niece, had there been possibility of sympathy 
 between them. But between that slow grave 
 man, weighted and wise a little restricted 
 perhaps by the lonely monotonous years of his 
 village service and this quick chatterer of 
 Paris street and club, who came with news of 
 the theatres, with opinions of operas, with 
 rumour of cafe and gossip of green-room, how 
 could there be much in common ? 
 
 And yet Adrien seemed a good-tempered 
 fellow, and it was right to be civil to him, 
 whatever might be the reason of his visits. 
 Besides, he had been born, promptly discovered
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES IJ 7 
 
 Clementine, with some natural liking for beauti- 
 ful things. He might perhaps be selfish in his 
 life, but he was not altogether gross. And he 
 brought some element of youth into Clemen- 
 tine's career of inexperienced loneliness. Again, 
 he was really a good-looking fellow, dressed 
 carefully by Dusautoy, or Laurent Richard : a 
 happy work of Nature and Art in his small 
 way, and pleasanter therefore to Clementine 
 than to the Cure. 
 
 It was plain that in his love for beautiful 
 things he admired Clementine. He had ad- 
 mired in Paris the Concierge's daughter, who 
 was a painter's model, and Madame Ruinart 
 of the Varietes, and Mademoiselle Adele of the 
 Bois de Boulogne. All these admirations had 
 come, and had gone. Now when Clementine 
 herself should admire any one, it might well be 
 that the admiration would not be exalted. Her 
 nature, pleasantly secular, did not tend to the 
 ideal. But at all events, with her, the thing 
 would be absorbing. She would love once, with 
 the youth of her spirit. 
 
 So they were dangerous, thought the Cure 
 these visits in which much might be looked, 
 when little was said. He began to blame him- 
 self. Presently, Adrien Roquette opened his
 
 "8 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 mind to Monsieur Devallet. The girl was in the 
 house reading in the little room which had 
 been so pleasantly planned for her : the nest 
 from which, almost without knowing it, she 
 might some day be wishing to fly. The old 
 man, matins long ago said in the little upland 
 chapel, was enjoying in quiet his long morning's 
 leisure. He is picking leaves from his peach- 
 trees on the wall side; the fruit is ripening well 
 in the late summer time, in the long day of sun. 
 The door in the garden-wall opens, and Adrien 
 Roquette makes straight for the Cure. Old 
 Monsieur Devallet is genial to all men. He in- 
 spires confidence and generally accords it. And 
 though he cannot like the young Parisian very 
 much, the young Parisian must needs at least 
 like him. There is a certain dignity with sweet- 
 ness and restraint, which a man must be wholly 
 bad not to like in another, and wish for himself. 
 And young Monsieur Roquette, who is not 
 slow to perceive, takes the Cure, as he takes the 
 niece, into the list of his admirations, which 
 began with Ruinart of the Varietes, and has 
 thus far ended with Adele of the Bois. 
 
 And now the September sun of La Beauce 
 glows happily on garden, fruit, and flower of 
 that secluded spot, as the old thick-shoed Cure,
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES "9 
 
 turning from his peach-trees, lifts his low hat in 
 courteous slowness to the young man as he enters 
 the garden. 
 
 ' We shall be alone ? ' asks the young man, in 
 a minute. 
 
 ' Certainly. We can certainly continue to 
 be/ answers the old priest, accustomed to confi- 
 dences, but with a touch of instinctive shrinking 
 from the confidence that is to come. 
 
 ' I have paid you many visits,' says the young 
 man respectfully, as venturing to chronicle a 
 fact which may possibly be significant. And 
 then he pauses, waiting the Cure's pleasure. 
 
 ' I am an old man,' replies Monsieur Devallet, 
 with a kindly smile, that is yet not quite cheer- 
 ful; ' and it is the first time that a young gentle- 
 man of Paris is so attentive to me.' 
 
 He waits a minute, and both men have now 
 allowed themselves to put on their hats again; 
 and the Cure takes half-a-dozen slow paces under 
 the garden wall, the young man following at 
 his side. 
 
 ' I have come to speak to you about your 
 niece,' says Monsieur Roquette. 
 
 The Cure has no look of surprise; a shade, 
 perhaps, of realised disappointment. It might 
 perhaps not have come, this dreaded request;
 
 120 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 but he could not persuade himself that it was 
 wholly unexpected. And Monsieur Roquette 
 continues : 
 
 ' My dear sir, I am informed of Mademoiselle 
 Clementine's position, and you are aware of 
 mine. You are so prudent a guardian that you 
 would hardly have allowed my calls thus far, if 
 you had intended to oppose my wishes. But 
 Mademoiselle Clementine's consent ' 
 
 ' Dear sir,' answered the Cure, ' I do not know 
 anything about it. I do know that I am in no 
 hurry whatever to get my niece married. It is 
 a bad system, a bad teaching, my dear sir,' he 
 went on, with an air of conviction, ' that places 
 marriage before girls as the prize of life, or as 
 their inevitable fate. That is not my teaching 
 at all; though, because I am a patriot, I do say 
 sometimes to these village people, "My chil- 
 dren, we must give children to France." ' 
 
 ' For a respectable woman,' said young Mon- 
 sieur Roquette, ' I see nothing but the convent 
 or marriage.' 
 
 ' I do not make that restriction " for a re- 
 spectable woman," because I do not concern 
 myself with any other,' rejoined the Cure. 
 
 The young man looked at him in surprise. 
 
 ( I do not mean that I am exclusive,' he added,
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 121 
 
 ' here in my village on La Beauce. Faults we 
 have, failings we have we have sins. But I do 
 not like such expressions as a woman who is 
 "respectable," " a woman who is comme il faut" 
 For me, every woman is respectable, because I 
 respect womanhood; but I am perhaps more 
 fortunate than some persons, in living in the 
 midst of a population that has kept the religious 
 sentiment.' 
 
 'In Paris, we always think the country is 
 ideal,' said the young man, wishing to humour 
 him. 
 
 But the Cure's face kept a certain reticence 
 an expression of mental separation and he only 
 answered slowly, 
 
 ' Devils rise also out of the silence of the 
 fields.' 
 
 ' Do you happen to know,' asked the young 
 man, now convinced that it was better for the 
 conversation to be narrowly practical, ' whether 
 I am personally disagreeable to Mademoiselle 
 Clementine ? ' 
 
 ' Why do you wish to marry her ? ' retorted 
 the Cure, parrying the question, after a minute's 
 silence, in which he had recalled to himself only 
 too surely the signs that Adrien counted for 
 much with Clementine already.
 
 122 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 ' There are several reasons,' answered the 
 young man promptly. ' I admire her greatly.' 
 
 ' You are a young Parisian,' remarked the old 
 priest, in a dry quietude of tone which implied 
 that that first reason could hardly be sufficient. 
 He had had many opportunities of 'admiring.' 
 
 ' You mean that Mademoiselle Clementine has 
 money at her disposal, and that when I came 
 here first I had only once seen her, and that by 
 chance and in Paris. That is what you wish to 
 hint, very politely, and it is perfectly true. But 
 I admire Mademoiselle Clementine excessively. 
 I think Mademoiselle a very exquisite young 
 girl, who in a year or two of married life would 
 become one of the most delightful of young 
 women of the world. Her fortune, again, though 
 not large, is sufficient for me. And, more than 
 that, it was my father who wished me to marry 
 her.' 
 
 ' How was that ?' said the Cure, beginning to 
 take an interest, against his inclination. 
 
 'The money-business, in which I am, was 
 established by my father and you know it was 
 your late brother, my dear sir, the father of 
 Mademoiselle Clementine, who helped him 
 started him in it. My father never forgot the 
 obligations of friendship ; and I who am a
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 123 
 
 Frenchman, have desired not to forget the 
 obligations of a son.' How proper he looked 
 when he made his little speech, and followed it 
 by a silence meant to be telling. 
 
 How should the Cure deal with the difficulty ? 
 He did not like the man, and had not the heart 
 to discuss the question with him. In past 
 times had such a question arisen he would 
 certainly have applied himself to it. He would 
 have grappled with the difficulty. But there 
 was growing on him now, with his well-nigh 
 seventy years, that love of procrastination which 
 belongs to the old, who have no time to pro- 
 crastinate. So, after pacing the garden two or 
 three times quietly, he looked up at the young 
 man with an air of relief, and said with an ex- 
 pression as of a thing satisfactorily settled 
 ' Well, you have made me aware of your in- 
 tentions.' 
 
 It was indeed sufficiently obvious that the 
 young man had done so. So he waited for 
 more to be vouchsafed. But they were at the 
 garden-gate. Arrived there, a man less simple 
 than old Monsieur Devallet a man to whom 
 the resources of a man of the world came con- 
 stantly and not at rare moments would have 
 grasped the other's hand, followed up the advan-
 
 124 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 tage of the first procrastination, and sent the 
 other away cordially, with nothing promised, 
 and with the whole business to be begun again. 
 But the slow, steady, stalwart Cure was too 
 simple for that. He was willing after all to 
 accept the initiative of the delay. And he said 
 as he opened the door in the garden- wall, 'I 
 shall ask you to absent yourself for a month, or 
 thereabouts. I do not wish to be uncourteous. 
 But I am not ready I really am not at all 
 ready to say anything more for the present. 
 My niece is very much to me. It is a great 
 responsibility. I cannot be hurried. Re- 
 member, sir, there are many questions to con- 
 sider. You will understand that the marriage of 
 my niece must be the gravest act of my later 
 years. I must take time, even to meditate a 
 refusal.' 
 
 And the young man, perhaps with a touch of 
 dignified indifference, yet by no means wholly 
 false, walked briskly away to Chartres, and the 
 train for Paris. And the old man, with his 
 mind crossed by the shadow of loss or disturb- 
 ance, went back to his garden peach-trees and 
 to uneasy leisure the pleasantness of leisure 
 being so wholly gone. 
 
 That was the beginning of September. A
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 125 
 
 whole month was to pass. And the first even- 
 ing, turning round from the little piano newly 
 installed in those hitherto silent quarters, Cle- 
 mentine asked him, Well, had he seen anyone 
 to-day ? 
 
 Of course he had seen some of his village folk. 
 He had stood for a quarter of an hour out in 
 the clover-fields, chatting to the brown-faced 
 peasant-woman, who was cutting her apron 
 full of clover for the rabbits. The two-wheeled 
 cart from a near farm had pulled up on the high- 
 road by the solitary cross upon the plains he 
 had said a few words to the driving farmer and 
 his wife on the return from market. They had 
 grumbled at the town dues two sous for every 
 fowl the farmer took at the bottom of the cart 
 into the town of Chartres. But that was not 
 what Clementine meant. And he knew it was 
 not, though doubtless she was not thinking of 
 the particular visit he had received. She had 
 been busy at the moment, and could not have 
 known of it ; and had she known, her French 
 girl's reticence, on things that concern men, 
 would have prevented her from asking. 
 
 But as she had put the question very simply, 
 he was bound to tell her the truth. If he did 
 not do so, there would be the beginning of
 
 126 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 secrets he must keep from her things which 
 she might not share. He had had secrets all 
 his life : as a priest he was used to keep them. 
 But that gave perhaps only greater strength to 
 his desire that all his dealings with Clementine 
 should be open and plain for her. Something 
 of that thought went through his mind as he 
 pondered. 
 
 ' Yes, I have seen la mere Marguery, and 
 Grossetete and his wife, and Quinet, the black- 
 smith, down in the valley and young Monsieur 
 Roquette.' 
 
 He looked at her closely, though not too 
 keenly, as he spoke. It was only half a minute, 
 but she blushed before turning to the piano. 
 Nothing was said; her very reticence told her 
 story; and as she struck the keyboard again, 
 and the notes of an intricate waltz of Chopin, 
 that nobody ever danced to, filled the little room 
 with its resonant music in which she made 
 several mistakes the old man's heart sunk 
 within him. Simple as his life had been, he 
 had not lived his well-nigh seventy years for 
 nothing. The many thoughts and the amassed 
 experiences of all that life gave him at times a 
 certain rapidity in insight which served him 
 instead of cleverness. He could never have
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 127 
 
 made a bargain, have become a merchant or a 
 diplomatist; but in all those years of country 
 priesthood he had thought, reflected, judged ; 
 and in questions of the human heart he saw to 
 the end of the thing. What he recognised now 
 was, that the man not being visibly bad, and the 
 girl being plainly fascinated, there was only one 
 end possible they must have their way. 
 
 Remonstrance, opposition, compulsion even 
 yes, indeed, there might be all that; but how 
 far all that would be from his plan ! his plan 
 that the girl, almost a child _to him, should love 
 and trust him, and that their will should be a 
 will in common. She should see with him, 
 or he with her. It did not perhaps so much 
 matter which, so that she gave him that almost 
 filial love which the lonely life had craved 
 for. 
 
 But there were her interests her interests 
 after all. These at least must be guarded. He 
 would urge upon her, reason and thoughtfulness 
 no claim of his own : that was quite past : no 
 word to recall how if marriage came so soon she 
 would in great part be lost to him, after a time 
 that had been too brief yes, but a time perhaps 
 that could not happily have lasted. 
 
 He got up from his one of the two seats of
 
 128 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 state and comfort in his village Cure's parlour 
 the Louis Quatorze chairs, with yellow velvet, 
 faded almost to straw-colour walked to the 
 marqueterie bureau at the other end of the 
 room, back again behind Clementine and the 
 piano, as that waltz of Chopin was jigging its 
 cruel triumph; so backwards and forwards a 
 turn or two, and then into the chair again. He 
 stretched his black and tightly covered legs, 
 settled his elbows on the chair-arms, joined the 
 finger tips of his two hands together. 
 
 1 Clementine -fillette! ' 
 
 It was over now, the music; and the swift 
 accurate hands brought down the lid of the 
 piano with a neat sharpness. There are two 
 ways of doing everything, even shutting a 
 piano, and Clementine's was the pretty way; 
 and the girl had swung herself round her chair- 
 seat, and now, while she sat sideways to listen, 
 her arms were on the chair-back, and her head 
 bent forward. So they faced each other, priest 
 and girl; the girl simply waiting; the old 
 Cure, with a touch of hesitation, nervousness 
 almost, about the lines of the mouth. With 
 a lonely life, and little experience, as he thought, 
 and advancing years, he did not trust himself 
 very much, now that he had to face, not the
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 129 
 
 light Paris youth he was indifferent to, but 
 the girl who was nearly all to him. 
 
 ( I have wondered sometimes, Clementine, 
 whether, after all the companionship of the 
 convent, you could settle down here, placidly 
 and restfully. We are .very fond of each other. 
 .... But I do not think you can.' 
 
 ' Oh I mon oncle ! ' 
 
 By way of deprecation and protest she ex- 
 claimed it. But it was the first touch of false- 
 ness: with kindness at the root of it, she 
 would fain have persuaded herself. But she 
 knew it was something of an acted lie with 
 which she faced the Cure. She would like 
 to have turned round to the piano again. A 
 pressing need of Chopin's music at her finger- 
 tips through all her mind and body and a 
 trying question shirked for the time. 
 
 'Monsieur Roquette was here to-day,' con- 
 tinued the Cure, who had sadly registered the 
 half-sincerity of ' Oh ! mon oncle ! ' ' He was 
 here to propose to me that you should be his 
 wife.' 
 
 The Cure got up from his chair and ceased 
 to look at her; several times he paced the 
 room. 
 
 'We will not talk very much about it to- 
 
 I
 
 *3<> PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 night,' he added. ' I daresay, Clementine, you 
 do not know your own mind.' 
 
 ' No, mon oncle f ' That was sincere at all 
 events, as well as dutiful. It was sincere and 
 grave. 
 
 ' I have thought lately, in observing you, I 
 have perhaps allowed you too much liberty.' 
 She and Monsieur Roquette had been alone 
 together for fourteen minutes; but in the eyes 
 of a man of ancient fashions, that may be ' too 
 much liberty.' ' You have seen in one way 
 or another something of this young man, and 
 of him only. I ought perhaps to reproach 
 myself for permitting customs which are un- 
 healthy. In general society, in " the great 
 world," it might be different. If a girl profits 
 by choice at all and possibly she does, our old 
 French habits notwithstanding it must be a 
 
 sufficient choice This young man no, 
 
 I will not conceal it from you is not all that 
 I should wish. I ask myself, note it well, 
 Clementine, not " Does he love you ? " but 
 " Will he love you ?".... I daresay I 
 should be exacting on your behalf. But, Cle- 
 mentine, you must yourself be grave, not rash. 
 You may leave me, my dear child, at the first 
 moment, when it comes the true time but
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES I3 1 
 
 you will not leave me lightly. They tell me 
 that in England they marry for the Present. 
 I do not know; but in France we marry for 
 the Future. I would rather not say anything 
 more to-night.' And he kissed her. Her eyes 
 were steadfast, grave, and brooding. ' Good- 
 night, Clementine.' 
 
 After that, he watched her behaviour closely 
 for a week watched her dutiful, quiet, pre- 
 occupied, the early restlessness gone and that 
 story which the one look and one blush had 
 told him, was told him a hundred times. 
 
 So he sends for Monsieur Roquette sooner 
 than he has meant to do. It is found that 
 there is nothing very visibly against him. It 
 is the middle of September, and the young 
 man is here again Bourse speculations left by 
 him for a day or two: manceuvrings of the 
 ' rise ' and ' fall ' confided to the hands of a 
 substitute, and the young man willing, nay, 
 somewhat desirous, to renew his suit. He fulfils 
 his promise to his dead father; he possesses him- 
 self of money which will make speculation more 
 easy; and he marries a girl whom he knows, 
 pretty soon, as well as it is given to him to 
 know women. What he knows is, that she is 
 graceful and good-natured, gentle and bright.
 
 '32 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 She is very much in love with him perhaps 
 for want of some knowledge of a better and it 
 is soon all settled as he wishes ; and the two, 
 with the guardian Cure, who, before many 
 months, must part with Clementine, trudge for 
 a day or two, during Adrien's stay at Le Coudry, 
 over the country and into the town of Chartres. 
 There are the sights to see will not Monsieur 
 Roquette see the great enamels ? Leonard le 
 Limosin's, in the Church of Saint Pierre. Per- 
 haps Monsieur Roquette is not all that is admir- 
 able ; but Clementine does not know it, for he 
 seems to promise the sympathy of youth. How 
 different now the house is the quiet little house 
 with his step in it ! How cheerful to hear his 
 voice in talk with the Cure at breakfast-time ! 
 The knowledge of his presence gives the village 
 life, and the dull plain becomes companionable. 
 And he himself how can he not be moved by 
 the ingenuous spectacle of her frank friendship 
 and prompt love ? 
 
 They have pleasant days together. One day, 
 it is the day of a great pilgrimage to the special 
 chapel of Our Lady of Chartres a side chapel in 
 the immense cathedral : an altar raised in honour 
 of one who wrought, they say, wonders of heal- 
 ing long ago. The faithful and the curious
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES !33 
 
 flock in numbers so great that it is a sight to 
 see. They come, men, women, children even, 
 from all the scattered villages of the immense 
 upland ; and peasants from the vineyards of La 
 Brie, that stretches beyond Paris, and from La 
 Perche, the orchard-country that lies towards 
 Normandy, and from La Sologne, the marsh 
 lands over the Loire by Orleans, Gien and the 
 South meet the corn farmers of La Beauce 
 under the great church whose towers are sign 
 and landmark to every villager of the plain. 
 The banner-hung streets are full of a great pro- 
 cession. Children, women, monks of many 
 orders, the village priests, each with his follow- 
 ing troop, the higher dignitaries, Monseigneur 
 himself these with banners and blessings carry 
 in triumph through Chartres, the town's great 
 relic, known far and wide to Catholic France, 
 the holy vestment, la sainte tunique, which was 
 once the Virgin's own. 
 
 Even our old Cure almost waxes enthusiastic. 
 'It. is such a display of faith,' he says : 'France 
 has kept the religious sentiment.' There is ex- 
 pectation of Miracle. The sceptic may perhaps 
 be confounded, as at Salette, and at Lourdes, 
 and at Paray-le-Monial. But no ! The sceptic 
 is convinced that it is too near Paris : miracles
 
 134 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 may hardly happen in the places to which a man 
 of science can take a return ticket and be back 
 by dinner-time. 
 
 All the four bells of Chart res, and the 
 Bourdon to boot, have pealed their welcome to 
 the pilgrims. What the bells are these famous 
 bells of an immense age Clementine can tell to 
 Adrien. They are christened bells, all of them 
 Anne, Elisabeth, Fulbert, and Piat and each 
 has his own service. At a funeral of the very 
 poor, one thin sound rings out : it is the humble 
 Piat: two francs the charge for him. Fulbert 
 will cost you three; Elisabeth six, for burial or 
 marriage. Anne is the greatest, and you may 
 ring her alone or in concert with one or two of 
 the others, or ring all together. Ringers and 
 fees are elaborately organised; and rank, con- 
 sideration, eminence in Chartres, hang somewhat 
 on the bells you ask for, for marriage or burial. 
 Clementine, who did not know, like her uncle, 
 the changes wrought in fourteenth century 
 Gothic, and was weak in her criticism of the 
 sculptures for which Chartres is famous, and 
 wondered what was beautiful in the enamels by 
 the great man of Limoges, found a touch of 
 what seemed intimate associations with many 
 lives and various fortunes in all that scheme duly
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES I 35 
 
 printed on the back of the church door, for the 
 ringing and paying the four bells of Chartres. 
 
 One pleasant day more pleasant days than 
 one went by for the young. Clementine was 
 in love, yet the stir of the pilgrimage gave a 
 little new excitement to that secular heart, which 
 asked, almost without knowing it, for life and 
 the world. Her uncle saw all that; recognised 
 it late, perhaps, when consent had been given to 
 an union which could hardly develope her 
 feared how life would be with her when the 
 present sweetness of hope was over, and no 
 guiding hand led that inexperience through 
 difficult ways. He began then to reproach him- 
 self : quietly, secretly, but almost bitterly. He 
 would like to have kept her to himself ; he 
 should have sent her betimes into the world, and 
 then, surrounded by a wise care, so slight a thing 
 as Adrien Roquette would have had no charm 
 for her. She had imagination, feeling, longing 
 no doubt for life less dull and experience more 
 varied than that of the village presbytery, the 
 upland church, the village and its farm-work, 
 and the unbroken plain. But why because of 
 that the Cure now asked himself with forebod- 
 ing ally herself with this weak thing? a 
 something that you touch and break, a toy of an
 
 J 3 6 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 hour, a gimcrack of the Palais Royal, a thing of 
 uselessness, an article de Paris ! 
 
 Once or twice this article dc Paris felt her 
 charm, the charm at all events of her face 
 when he came on it unawares. Roquette ar- 
 rived one day it was the first of October at 
 an unexpected hour, meaning to pay a visit at 
 Oiseme, on someone whom he knew there, 
 before walking south to Le Coudry. Oiseme is 
 a village not larger than Le Coudry, but quite 
 different, and there was one great house in it : 
 his friend's : a true maison de campagne, with 
 garden, terrace, and tall trees. It was the first 
 time that Roquette was at Oiseme, and in that 
 golden afternoon, with summer lingering, he 
 seemed to have fallen suddenly out of the bare 
 upland on an enchanted land of garden and 
 stream. The little valley, into which by almost 
 unperceived degrees his steps had brought him, 
 had nothing to recall the great bare plain of all 
 that country. The sun itself, which struck still 
 strongly on the unprotected upland, gleamed 
 quietly here as with a genial visitation, and 
 passed its level light through boughs and 
 greenery and over the clustered hayricks and 
 brown cottage roofs. A winding line of thin 
 slight lime-trees, hardly touched as yet with
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 1 37 
 
 autumn, edged the winding road, and beyond 
 them, by the path-side too, a brook, now shallow 
 with dryness of weather, gurgled on its long 
 low course among the pebbles and weed flowers. 
 Three paths suddenly met where the tiny valley 
 was lowest, and there was nothing seen around 
 but the sun-touched tree boughs, moved a little 
 in the afternoon breeze, and above them, and 
 through them, the calm sky. It was a very 
 nest of quietness and peace, and there was 
 Clementine discovered suddenly with head 
 bent over a small note-book, as she sat on a 
 felled tree trunk. Walking thus far, she had 
 stopped to jot down, amateur fashion, the 
 picturesqueness of the village well, with its 
 pent-house and bucket. She sketched badly. 
 But what did that matter ? Even to Adrien 
 Roquette, had he not been her affianced lover, 
 she would have seemed most perfectly to fit the 
 scene, to emphasise and complete it. The 
 moment with its light and silence had a sweet- 
 ness of its own, which could hardly return 
 again. It was one of those benedictions thrown 
 liberally on men, whether they heed them or 
 ignore. 
 
 Adrien, still fresh from the petty excitements 
 of Paris and the bustle of the Bourse, had senti-
 
 !3 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 ment enough to be made a little happier by so 
 pleasant a time. He could still be attracted, and 
 Clementine had never, he thought, looked so 
 delightful, for her face had flushed into pleasure 
 at seeing him, only after he had had time to 
 note already the immense calm of her solitude. 
 He was not the man to value her, to lead her, to 
 make the most of her so various moods ; but all 
 that the unspoilt girlhood of France possesses of 
 tender and restrained, of ' recueilli et retemij 
 had been, before she recognised him, in the 
 placid contentment of her eyes. And now the 
 eyes, dark, with the softness and abstraction of 
 solitude not quite gone out of them, looked at 
 him steadily, with the unapproachable candour 
 and directness of the very simple and the very 
 young. 
 
 With all his lightness and his flippancy, he 
 was a lover of beautiful things, and, moved 
 rightly for the moment, he did not make to her 
 any conventional exclamation of pleasure or sur- 
 prise. For a minute after she saw him, he said 
 nothing. Then, in a tone that was quite happy, 
 ' What was I thinking of? ' 
 
 She shook her head, smiling and gratified 
 how could she tell ? 
 
 4 Vous cics bien douce] he said, with unwonted
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES *39 
 
 feeling. ' Clementine, you are very sweet : you 
 are more exquisite than I thought.' 
 
 If the two risen to their best moments mo- 
 ments of shared happiness and pleasant things 
 the best for such as they if the two risen to 
 their best moments, could but keep them ! 
 
 Then, one month afterwards, there was the 
 marriage ; first, at the Mairie of Chartres, the 
 civil marriage ; then at the Cathedral, the cere- 
 mony and the blessing ' Piat,' 'Fulbert,' ' Elisa- 
 beth,' ' Anne,' making their happy play high up 
 in the tower. 
 
 Clementine and the Cure had never been so 
 much at one as in those weeks before the part- 
 ing. The old man took her, more regularly 
 then than before, on many a round, in the 
 autumn weather, past farm and cloverfield and 
 small scanty orchard that held its head up 
 timidly it seemed, against the winds of the plain. 
 Afterwards there was the growing dusk, the 
 lamp Clementine lighted, the two armchairs 
 set face to face at the small round table at dinner, 
 the shuttered room, the noise of heavy feet 
 some home-going peasant tramping down the 
 village road the wood fire, when the October 
 evening freshened, the stray bits of music, the
 
 14 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 game of piquet last of all, all the simple and 
 everyday companionship, sweeter and more 
 sweet as it drew on towards its close. 
 
 They sat very silent the last night before the 
 wedding, after Adrien and his friends, light of 
 heart and civil and free of speech, had gone back 
 to the inn in the town. The old man would 
 not perhaps have felt the parting quite so keenly 
 had he in early life or middle life known the 
 daily pleasure of that intimate companionship. 
 He had only known the lack of it. Now, of 
 course, she would come often to see him. She 
 had said so, and had meant it. But all these 
 promises for the future counted but for little 
 with the old man. People deceive themselves 
 with the like of them. He knew for himself 
 that a stage was passed: it was no use trying 
 to be persuaded that the altered circumstance 
 did not mean altered life, feelings perhaps gradu- 
 ally and subtly estranged. 
 
 Having to rise so early to say his Mass, at 
 seven o'clock, in the chapel by the highroad on 
 the edge of the plain, Monsieur Devallet was 
 used to go to bed betimes. At ten o'clock 
 Clementine said Good-night, and his servant 
 having gone before, he followed a minute after- 
 wards; the last, even then, of all the dwellers in
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 141 
 
 that village cluster of cottage and farm. But 
 this last night he did not go so quickly; 
 and Clementine, undressing slowly, with busy 
 thoughts about the morrow nay, not really un- 
 dressing at all, but putting on before the look- 
 ing-glass a pretty gown of twelve months ago 
 in which she had elected to be married 
 wondered why she had not heard, as usual, his 
 step on the stair; and after half-an-hour she de- 
 cided to go and summon him. Then she heard 
 him come upstairs, but for a minute only, and 
 then go down again. Soon afterwards she 
 followed him. The pretty gown was still on 
 her, and might wisely indeed be worn at the 
 wedding, for its rich simplicity was work of art 
 that could not pass out of fashion to-morrow. 
 With that she entered into the parlour. 
 
 When she had first gone upstairs to bed he 
 had paced up and down the little room. His 
 eye had fallen on the piano : on the cards and 
 cardbox for their evening game of piquet, which 
 were allowed to lie always on the corner of the 
 mantel-shelf. He had gone up to the piano and 
 locked it, for the first time since it had been in 
 the house. He had taken the cards and card- 
 box in his hand, and had mounted the stairs, and 
 there, in a little cabinet where he kept chiefly
 
 142 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 such papers as were important to him a few 
 old letters, and letters of hers from the convent, 
 and certain family treasures which had been un- 
 touched some forty years there he locked up 
 safely as if they were treasures, too card, card- 
 box, piano key. 
 
 Then, going downstairs again, at an unwonted 
 hour, he had taken from a book-shelf his volume 
 of Bossuet, and seating himself gravely before 
 the ash-white logs, now burnt thin and low 
 indeed, but enough for him to-night, he had 
 drawn the lamp to where it had been used to 
 stand for him alone, and had opened the book, 
 and while Clementine, before the mirror up- 
 stairs, was looking happily at her gown had 
 resumed the solitary life which must needs at 
 all events return with the morrow. For him, in 
 fact, much as for Bossuet, ' Us restes cTune voix 
 gut tombe, et d^une ardeur qui s*eteint! 
 
 Now the door opened Clementine appeared. 
 Yes, he was reading. 
 
 ' Remember to-morrow, mon oncle / ' she cheer- 
 fully exclaimed. ' Will you not go upstairs ? ' 
 
 ' I have locked the piano,' he said, looking at 
 her and rising. 
 
 ' Why ? ' she asked, glancing round quickly, 
 and seeing that the mantel-shelf was bare of
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES M3 
 
 cards and card-box in their accustomed place. 
 Without an answer then, she saw his face, and 
 understood. She went up to him tenderly, and 
 took his hand. ' Yes,' she said, speaking now 
 slowly, in the one perfect tone of all the pleasant 
 ones of that changeful voice : ' you do love me 
 very much ! ' 
 
 There was a recognition that repaid him in 
 the tone. It was their last word that night. 
 And the morrow was the happy day the day 
 of the bustle of marriage. 
 
 Six months passed, and then she came to him. 
 Her husband was busy in Paris. They lived in 
 an apartment in the Chaussee d'Antin, in the 
 full movement of the capital. Business and 
 pleasure were more and more engrossing. She 
 saw little of Adrien. The Cure was begged to 
 come up to Paris but how could he do it ? to 
 snatch a week from the country work, and see a 
 little of that bustling world of the Paris of 
 Finance restless action, life busy with 'rise' 
 and ' fall,' happiness hanging on a turn of the 
 Bourse, money made so as to purchase display, 
 and display purchased to make more money. 
 A world in which steadier heads than Adrien 
 Roquette's are lost every morning.
 
 144 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 Six months more, and she was with him 
 again; the autumn, that reminded him of the 
 parting, having again returned. She looked 
 older by three or four years; spoke little of 
 ' Monsieur Roquette '; talked of return to Paris 
 almost as if she were tired of it. Was she at 
 least happy ? ' Oh yes,' with half a heart. 
 
 Could it be that the Cure's sadness had had 
 something prophetic in it ? Except in a mo- 
 ment of selfish fondness, the mere parting would 
 not have been so mournful a thing. Had he 
 not divined what he could not express, and felt 
 what he could not persuade her that the mar- 
 riage was like Juliet's contract, 'too rash, too 
 unadvised, too sudden ? ' He did not seek 
 to press on her useless questions; if there was 
 anything still undefined, better far not to define 
 it. But he blamed himself constantly now, for 
 his whole mistaken plan of a life for her. 
 
 Property of the girl's was suddenly sold to 
 meet demands on Adrien Roquette; business 
 demands that must immediately be satisfied. 
 Clementine, made aware of them, chose with her 
 common promptitude. The money should go, 
 to bring more money back, though the husband 
 was no more to her what he was a year ago. 
 
 Monsieur Roquette now held, in his distant
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES '45 
 
 intercourse with her, that none of the expenses 
 which perhaps had begun by being pleasures 
 could safely be curtailed now that they were 
 not pleasures, but advertisements. Every even- 
 ing his wife must be at the Opera; every after- 
 noon she was sent to drive in the Bois, and in a 
 new carriage of Binder's, and behind horses had 
 over from Tattersall's. Older so much, in one 
 short year or two, she could understand, now, 
 that she was not leading a life the life she 
 wanted, of shared pleasure but playing a part : 
 an actress in a scene. 
 
 At last, ruin came, finding Clementine stricken 
 down with the commotion of the house the 
 old Cure arriving to fetch her away finding 
 Adrien Roquette white with disaster, talking of 
 pistols and poison to begin with, but settling 
 to every-day manners, and finishing up with a 
 party of pleasure, while drawing-room furniture 
 was seized for debts. Clementine journeyed 
 with Monsieur Devallet to Le Coudry. And 
 Adrien tottered merrily down the Boulevard 
 in the evening. His friends had promised that 
 he should start again, and, in Finance, he might 
 lose two fortunes, yet make a third and keep it. 
 
 Again, for Clementine, alone, and ill by this 
 
 time with the mental and physical trouble that 
 
 K
 
 146 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 her hard bright life in Paris has been preparing 
 for her again for her, so long as she is strong 
 enough to get to it, the quietude, the silence of 
 the plain. Summer now the long days when 
 the steady sun, the friend of all the peasants, 
 shines from morning till evening on the cornfields. 
 Waggons and implements are made ready for har- 
 vest. There are the signs of coming activity in 
 the village street. The quiet presbytery again 
 for Clementine : the chair placed for her in the 
 garden. And the peaceful Sunday, when the 
 thin-voiced bell, pulled by the blue-bloused sac- 
 ristan in the upland chapel, calls the farm-folk, 
 the white-capped peasantry, together, by all their 
 paths of the plain. The two-wheeled coburg, 
 with its time-worn dull black leather head, makes 
 its slow jogging way across the immense table- 
 land : the white geese, with the goose-keeper, 
 move, straggling over the fields. 
 
 Roquette sees Clementine hurriedly yes, she 
 is very ill. He manages to send down, for half- 
 an-hour, a famous man from Paris, a physician, 
 who examines briefly, and gives directions, looks 
 at his watch and catches the next train : ' cases ' 
 as bad as Clementine's, and griefs more import- 
 ant than the Cure's, waiting him in Paris. 
 
 One day it is over.
 
 THE FOUR BELLS OF CHARTRES 147 
 
 She had said one night, in the weakness of 
 just passing delirium, ' Not the great bell ! 
 Only Fulbert, which is next to the paupers.' 
 Strange fancy the Cure guessed a fancy that 
 she lay at Chartres, and must be buried there. 
 That was soon over. She recognised the Cure 
 later on, and knew she was again in the familiar 
 village; and held his hand in token of great 
 kindness of the one faithful love her life had 
 known. Death came to her gently. 
 
 Three days afterwards, they buried her the 
 Cure and the sacristan and the village folk and 
 the husband from Paris in the churchyard of 
 Le Coudry, opposite the big door to the west, 
 by which priest and sacristan, children and 
 farmer folk, go in on the Sunday. 
 
 After a second bankruptcy, Adrien Roquette, 
 aided by his friends, did really make a fortune 
 rapidly. Then he came down to Chartres, 
 radiant in his prosperity, when Clementine 
 lay quietly in the churchyard of Le Coudry. 
 ' Yes, it was very terrible/ he hastened to say; 
 strange things had happened to him. What 
 trouble he had had ! Who could have foreseen
 
 148 PASTORALS OF FRANCE 
 
 it ? And poor Clementine ! But in speculation 
 you lose two fortunes, you know, before you can 
 keep a third. 
 
 And old Monsieur Devallet ? 
 
 Seventy-four; firm seemingly as years ago; 
 flowing hair still iron grey; lines softened and 
 saddened about the mouth just so the stranger 
 sees him, who walks out from Chartres some 
 Sunday, as I said at the beginning. The old 
 Cure is carrying still with him his lonely sorrow, 
 which is more than expiation; and carrying it 
 with him to the end, whenever end may be. 
 There comes as yet no change nor break. His 
 days vary but with the seasons. The prayer, 
 trudged to betimes in sunny hours of the summer 
 morning, or in the snows of winter; the visits to 
 the hillside farm, on very sick or very old: 
 baptism; burial; the hours of reading the familiar 
 books; the pacing of the narrow garden all the 
 permitted, the now possible pleasure all the 
 repeated task-work, uninspired and dull, of that 
 quite solitary life. 
 
 Seventy-four ! 
 
 Bids, October, 1876 London, January, 1877.
 
 RENUNCIATIONS
 
 A -CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS 
 
 RICHARD PELSE was the chemist. The suburb 
 was near the 'Angel'; at the top of the City 
 Road; on the confines of Islington. There he 
 led his prosaic life getting old, and a bachelor. 
 But into the prosaic years years before Isling- 
 ton there had burst once the moment of 
 Romance. Then his shop was near Oxford 
 Street. Into the sitting-room over it there had 
 come, one evening, for an hour, the lady of his 
 dream. Unexpectedly; suddenly. She had drawn 
 her chair, by his own, to the fire. They had sat 
 together so; and he had been happy. She had 
 given him his tea; had opened his piano; had 
 played, a while, Xaver Scharwenka's wild music; 
 had kissed him once ; and had gone away. 
 
 Perhaps his years before and after had seemed
 
 154 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 at times two deserts, divided by that living 
 stream which was her momentary presence. Or 
 perhaps there was an outstretched darkness on 
 one side of the heavens; then a star ; then again 
 outstretched darkness the life of the shop and 
 the suburb. 
 
 Richard Pelse was one of those poor men 
 who are born cultivated: one of the cultivated 
 who are born poor. You had only to look at 
 him now, across the counter and the ranged 
 tooth-powder pots to see the clear-cut head, 
 against its background of dry drug jars and 
 Latin-labelled drawers ' Alumens ; ' ' Flor: 
 Sul;' 'Pot: Bitar;' 'Cap: Papav' to know that 
 he was individual. A sympathetic spectator 
 might have called him original; an unsympathetic, 
 eccentric. What fires burnt in the brownness 
 of his quick, keen, restless eyes ? What had 
 left his face not yet really old topped with 
 a mass of silvery-white hair ? There were the 
 delicate features, decisive and refined; the nose 
 aquiline ; the kindly mouth with nervous move- 
 ment at its corners. And, again, the hands 
 thin and white and long: with fingers and 
 thumbs turning back prodigiously: flexible, 
 subtle, sensitive. And the spare figure, still 
 quite straight, dressed in the black frock-coat
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS 155 
 
 of his business hours. Original or eccentric: 
 a man whom men and women looked at: either 
 liked or feared. 
 
 At home for years within a stone's throw 
 of the 'Angel,' he had all his life been a 
 Londoner. Energy and diligence he had from 
 his boyhood, but country colour had never 
 come into his cheeks; no robustness of the sea's 
 giving, into his frame. All his pursuits were 
 of the town and nearly all his recollections. 
 His mother was a widowed little news-agent 
 a withered woman, once pretty and vivacious 
 who kept, when he was a child and a lad, 
 her newspaper-shop in a by-way, two doors 
 from North Audley Street. His father? He 
 never knew him. 
 
 When he was twelve years old his mother 
 died, and a customer of theirs, a druggist of 
 the quarter, took him as 'useful boy.' Had 
 he ever changed, and risen, so far afterwards 
 as to be a famous physician, it would have 
 been told of him, in pride, or as astonishing, 
 that he had been an errand-boy only. As it 
 was, he had in fact been that, but something 
 besides. He was so intelligent that gradually 
 he had got into all the work of the shop. He 
 was civil, and comely too. From selling things
 
 156 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 behind the counter, he was put into the dis- 
 pensary. He educated himself; he passed his 
 examinations; he became an assistant who was 
 entirely necessary; then he became a partner. 
 At thirty-five he was a prosperous man and 
 alone; the shop's earlier master having retired. 
 For Richard Pelse, before that happened, there 
 had been twenty years of progress, and of self- 
 denial; no doubt of satisfactory, but of unre- 
 mitting work. Then he allowed himself a 
 holiday, and with a valise by his side and a 
 ' Baedeker ' in his pocket, started for Switzer- 
 land and Savoy. 
 
 ii 
 
 Mr Pelse had made more than half his tour 
 and had got over his surprises, the sense of all 
 that was strange, when he found himself, one 
 Sunday, arrived at Aix-les-Bains for two days' 
 rest, and for the charm of its beauty. He had 
 intended to go, rather modestly, to the Hotel de 
 la Poste. But when the omnibus pulled up, 
 opposite it, in the Place, the landlady, rushing 
 out breathless and busy, announced that the 
 house was full. 'Allez a 1'Hotel Venat,' she 
 immediately recommended. Then, having seen
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS 157 
 
 at a glance that the traveller was an English- 
 man, ' H6tel Venat et Bristol] she added, by way 
 of encouragement, ' Venat et Bristol] and every- 
 thing was right. 
 
 It was there that Mr Pelse stayed. Though a 
 tradesman, he had tact as well as education ; 
 various interests and real kindliness. He could 
 mix quite easily with ' his betters ' found his 
 ' betters ' much more his equals than his neigh- 
 bours had been. At the Venat, an argument 
 with an English chaplain brought him into 
 contact with a family of three Colonel Image, 
 a military politician, very well connected, and 
 busy in the House ; and his wife, who was above 
 all things fashionable ; and his daughter, who 
 was blonde and nineteen. 
 
 Richard Pelse must certainly then, with all 
 his earlier deficiencies and disadvantages, have 
 been picturesque, and almost elegant, as well as 
 interesting. The impulsive Miss Image found 
 him so. In the garden, from his ground-floor 
 bedroom, there had been a vision of a tall white 
 figure, of floating muslin, of pale-coloured hair. 
 Nearer, there were seen dancing eyes, large and 
 grey, and a mouth that was Cupid's bow. At 
 table d'hote there was heard the voice that he 
 liked best, and liked at once. A voice ? Hardly.
 
 IS 8 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 An instrument of music. You listened to it as 
 to a well-used violin. 
 
 In the drawing-room he got into talk with 
 her. Was she not, unexpectedly, the ideal real- 
 ised ? the lady of the dream of all his youth. 
 
 But that night he reflected on the distance 
 between them. He was no ambitious snob, 
 scheming for marriage in a sphere not his. The 
 distance the distance ! No, there could never 
 be marriage, or his career must change first. 
 Should he leave to-morrow, and forget the en- 
 counter ? Should he enjoy her for three days, 
 and forget her then instead, or hug the memory ? 
 At all events, he did not go. 
 
 And on both sides, in the short three days 
 prolonged to four and five there was interest 
 and fascination. Perhaps he should have told 
 her father who he was. Instead of it, he told 
 her. There was a recoil then and it might 
 have saved them. Her knowledge of the world 
 and of the convenances nineteen, but bred in 
 Society was suddenly uppermost. Nothing 
 more could be said to him, and she would 
 mention to her mother as a piece of gossip to 
 be heard and forgotten as the amusing adven- 
 ture of travelling and chance acquaintance that 
 the man was a shopkeeper, a chemist; might
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS 159 
 
 have sold her sponges, nail brushes, Eau de 
 Cologne. Then the simplicity, the naturalness, 
 warmth, impulsiveness which were in her too 
 came uppermost in their turn. She would 
 tell none of that. She would keep him to 
 herself, for the time at least him and his secret. 
 There was mutual attraction, strong and un- 
 questionable. Elective affinities. And such 
 things had their rights. 
 
 Wilful and independent it seemed so then 
 she laid herself out to be with him. Mrs Image 
 was indolent, physically. In the morning the 
 military politician was wont to wait in the ante- 
 chamber of a man of science who was great on 
 the healing waters ; later in the day he was 
 borne from the Bath House, closely muffled, in 
 a curtained chair, and put to bed till dinner- 
 time, at the hotel. He was not seriously ill, 
 however, and the treatment, which had begun a 
 fortnight before Richard Pelse's arrival, would 
 now soon be over. Anyhow their opportunities 
 were numbered. There was an end to meetings 
 chance meetings, after all, though wished for 
 on both sides at noon, under the shade of the 
 grouped trees, in a sun-smitten park encircled by 
 the mountains ; at night, amid the soft illumina- 
 tions of the Villa des Fleurs, whither Miss Image
 
 160 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 was chaperoned ; again, at breakfast time, when, 
 almost from the open windows of the hotel, 
 could be discerned, here and there, between 
 luxuriant foliage, gold and green beyond the 
 richness of walnut and chestnut branch, beyond 
 the vines, beyond the poplar marshes and the 
 sunny fields a level flash of turquoise, which 
 was the Lac de Bourget. 
 
 4 We go to-night,' said Beatrice, meeting Mr 
 Pelse by the Roman Arch, when she had de- 
 posited her father for his last consultation. 
 
 ' Shall I speak to Colonel Image ? ' he urged, 
 almost hopelessly. 
 
 ' I was mad for you to do it ; but you never 
 must. Nothing could possibly come of it but 
 harm. You must be loyal and obey me. There 
 is not the very ghost of a chance for us. Oh ! 
 you won't think of me very long. You have 
 your own life, you know ; and I must have mine. 
 Silly, silly lovers ! I might wait ; but then it 
 could never, never, be. Dick ! forget me ! ' 
 
 She had been presented that Season. For a 
 moment there had fallen upon her the smile of 
 the Princess. She had been admired at the 
 Drawing-room ; and she and what she wore had 
 been admired afterwards, at a Drawing-room tea. 
 She had danced at great houses, and was there as
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS l6l 
 
 a native of them. There was reason as well 
 as earnestness in the tone of ' Dick ! forget 
 me!' 
 
 1 And in England we live almost in the next 
 street,' he said to her. 'There is nothing but 
 class that divides us. I have done something 
 already, if you recollect how I began. I could 
 do more, and go a good deal further. You are 
 the first lady I ever talked to, intimately. You 
 would change me you would bring me up to 
 you.' 
 
 ' There is nothing in me to bring you up to, 
 Dick. Think how young I am ! I am a little 
 fool, who happened to take a fancy to you. 
 Pretty, am I ? But a little fool, after all. You 
 treated me so gravely and so well. I had been 
 flattered often enough. And I was mad to be 
 respected. . . . There is no chivalry left. . . . 
 
 Your respect was flattery, too Here is my 
 
 photograph, because I trust you. But forget me, 
 forget me ! My last word. Take my hand, and 
 good-bye ! ' 
 
 He took her hands both of them and saw 
 the last of her. And, by another train, he, too, 
 went back to London to the chemist's shop. 
 
 It was curious, at first, to think, as he was 
 making up prescriptions, or giving them to his 
 
 L
 
 162 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 assistants, that she was within a stone's throw 
 of that pestle and mortar : almost within sight of 
 the green and red and straw-coloured jars that 
 stood in his shop-window and were the sign of 
 his calling. His shop was in Orchard Street ; 
 their house, in Manchester Square. Once, did 
 she pass the shop ? Once, when he was on the 
 Oxford Street pavement, was that she, borne 
 along in a Victoria ? 
 
 But gradually he was training himself to for- 
 get all that. He was loyal, obedient was ac- 
 cepting the inevitable. Was it not a chance 
 fancy ! Was it not in sheer impulsiveness in 
 recognition of he wondered what in him, besides 
 his deepest admiration that she had flung him 
 her confidence ; honoured him by liking. Could 
 that last with her ? Could it anyhow have 
 lasted ? Probably he would never see her again. 
 Might he not one day console himself ? he once 
 half-whispered. No it could never be that. 
 He was so dainty about women ; he was so par- 
 ticular he either wanted nothing, or exacted so 
 much the experience of a rapid fascination 
 would never be repeated. He was an idealist of 
 those who want, in women, a picture and a 
 vision : not a housekeeper.
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS 163 
 
 III 
 
 The autumn dragged along. Pelse had ac- 
 quired from America the rights to an exclusive 
 sale of a particular preparation of the Hypo- 
 phosphites, and the Society doctors the men 
 who had charge of Royalty, and of overtasked 
 celebrities, of smart people, and of the very rich 
 had taken to recommend it. The extra work 
 which that involved made him very busy, and 
 his own more accustomed work, in all its thou- 
 sand details, was done at his shop with such a 
 singular nicety of which he, of course, was the 
 inspirer that the shop was more and more 
 frequented. 
 
 Winter succeeded to autumn. A thick fog 
 had lain for days over Orchard Street. Then 
 there came a little snow. But in the parlour 
 over the shop with the three windows closely 
 curtained one could have forgetfulness of 
 weather. There was the neat fire-place ; the 
 little low tea-table; a bookcase in which Pelse 
 before that critical event at Aix-les-Bains had 
 been putting, gradually, first editions of the 
 English Poets ; a cabinet of china, in which 
 but always before Aix-les-Bains he had taken
 
 164 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 to accumulate some pretty English things of 
 whitest paste or finest painting : a Worcester 
 cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold, its 
 scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire ; 
 a Chelsea figure ; something from Swansea ; 
 white plates of Nantgarw, bestrewn with Bil- 
 lingsley's greyish pink roses, of which he knew 
 the beauty, the free artistic touch. How the 
 things had lost interest for him ! ' From the 
 moment,' says some French art critic, ' that a 
 woman occupies me, my collection does not 
 exist.' And many a woman may lay claim to 
 occupy a French art critic ; only one had 
 occupied Richard Pelse. 
 
 It was on an evening in December, and Pelse 
 was in the sitting-room, tired with the day's 
 labours, and not particularly happy with the 
 evening newspapers for, apart from any causes 
 of private discontent, the Pall Mall had told 
 him that our upper classes were unworthy of 
 confidence, and from the St James's he had 
 gathered that even the lower could scarcely 
 boast complete enlightenment it was on an 
 evening in December, when the chemist was so 
 circumstanced, that his neat servant, opening 
 the door of the parlour, held it back for the 
 entrance of a veiled, tall lady. 'Miss Image,'
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS ^5 
 
 said the servant, for the name had been frankly 
 given her. 
 
 The servant vanished. Richard Pelse rose 
 from his seat, with his heart beating. The tall 
 lady was standing there, with lifted arms, de- 
 taching veil and the broad velvet hat. A minute 
 afterwards, laying aside her furs and her warm 
 wraps, the glowing face of a swift walker in the 
 winter weather was made visible : the blonde 
 head, the slim and straight and rounded figure 
 had got up to the fire-place. She put her hand 
 out towards Richard Pelse. He took it ; ex- 
 claimed to her, by her name : nothing more 
 ' Beatrice ! ' wheeled a chair to the fire. And 
 down she sat. 
 
 ' Yes. I could stand it no longer. I have 
 passed the place so often. I was mad to see 
 you. They are gone into the country on a visit. 
 I could manage it to-night.' She looked quite 
 good and sweet and serious passionate it might 
 be, as well as young, but, at all events, no 
 intriguing Miss. Strange ! the intuitive trust 
 she had in him, to come there, so. ' Perhaps 
 you can give me some tea ! ' 
 
 He flew downstairs to order it a bell's 
 summons would have been inadequate to the 
 occasion, and would have given no vent to his
 
 166 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 delight. Ten minutes later, it was in front of 
 the fire. The lamp was just behind her. Might 
 he be calm now ? Might he be excited ? 
 Might he be paralysed with astonishment ? She 
 was so quiet and so bright, he was made quiet 
 too. She sat there as in an old and daily place 
 the blonde head, the eyes, the figure's lines. 
 He was so happy. Suddenly his house was 
 made a home. 
 
 ' How have you been ? How are you ? ' But 
 before he answered he had given her a stool, 
 respectfully : had put a cushion at her head. 
 ' How good of you ! ' she said, with her grey eyes 
 very beautiful: thanking him for his mental 
 attitude : not for his cushion and his stool. 
 
 ' Well, you know, I have been trying to forget 
 you. Have you changed your mind ? ' he asked. 
 She gazed into the fire. ' Has the time come 
 for me to speak ? ' he continued. His chair was 
 beside hers. ' Why did you come here ? ' 
 
 ' I suppose I felt you cared about me. And 
 I was sick of not coming. I suppose I felt you 
 were a friend. No, I don't think I have changed 
 my mind at all. But I am one of the girls who 
 can do mad things. And girls who can do mad 
 things, once or twice in their lives at all events, 
 are commoner much commoner than proper
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS l6 7 
 
 people think. So here I am ! Tisn't wonderful. 
 Father and mother are at Lord Sevenoaks'.' 
 
 His brow clouded. Again, and, as it seemed, 
 with emphasis, the difficulty of class. Difficult ? 
 Impossible, was it not ? Yet this was what he 
 said : 
 
 ' You will come again ? And one day I will 
 speak. Beatrice, Beatrice, I am yours \ Have 
 it as you will it shall all be as you will but 
 you know that you can never go away for 
 good.' 
 
 ' If you are nice to me, very likely I shall come 
 back ever so many times. I can't stay very long 
 to-night. There my cup. Ah ! you have got 
 a piano ? Whose is it ? ' opening it. ' A Bech- 
 stein. Sit still there. I will play.' 
 
 She tried the instrument a moment, first. 
 Certain chords. Then, with turned head, she 
 waited silently: was making her choice. For, 
 whatever it was, it would have to be from 
 memory. There was not a single music book. 
 
 In a minute, she had chosen. It was a plunge 
 into a weird, wild dance. 'You know whose 
 that is ? ' 
 
 'No.' 
 
 ' Polish. Xaver Scharwenka's. Now the same 
 again, and then another.' And they were played,
 
 I RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 and then she rose from the piano. 'My cloak, 
 please. Thank you.' 
 
 He went to the window-curtain : listened for 
 the rumble of the street, for all the city was 
 about them they two. But the noises of the 
 town had ceased. 
 
 ' Snowing fast ! ' he said, coming back from the 
 red curtain. ' Can you go ? ' 
 
 ' It is only two minutes' walk,' she answered. 
 'And I don't quite think I see them cheeking 
 me. Besides, I will find some excuse or other 
 for wet things. O ! you think me mean. You 
 don't approve of prevarications. But prevarica- 
 tions give me to you.' Her smile would have 
 moved mountains. ' Thank you ' near the door. 
 ' I suppose I shall come back many times. Dick ! 
 I feel like it.' He looked enraptured. She 
 put her hand out, and he took it. Always 
 respectful, reverential, he had had an angel's 
 visit. From the Heavens, down into Orchard 
 Street, what divine, undreamt of, guest ! ' O ! 
 but you worship me too much] she said. She 
 brushed his cheek with her lips, and her hand 
 stayed in his. 
 
 'You must come back many times,' he said, 
 half gasping. All his manhood yearned for 
 her.
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS 169 
 
 And she was gone and gone as much as the 
 last note of Scharwenka's wild music. 
 
 For she never came back. The voice, the 
 figure's lines, the blonde head, and the eyes, and 
 the mouth that was Cupid's bow no more in 
 Richard Pelse's sitting-room. A flirt, was she ? 
 Heartless ? changeable ? a child ? Who shall 
 say ? For weeks, he waited. Then a short 
 letter : 
 
 ' O ! Dick ; It is of no use, you know. You'll have to 
 forgive me, because I was wrong and rash. Only, Dick, 
 understand that it is all over. I could never do that again. 
 If I say I owe Father and Mother something, you know I'm 
 not a fraud you know I mean it. After all, we should 
 never have done together. Yet, I love you. Think of me 
 kindly. Good-bye ! ' 
 
 And she kept her word. And it was over. 
 No lamplight welcomed her; nor fire gleamed 
 for her; nor chairs were placed again on the 
 cosy hearth for two. And, in the closed piano, 
 there slept, for ever, Scharwenka's wild music. 
 
 IV 
 
 But Pelse had to move from Orchard Street. 
 Change of scene; change of people. And good- 
 bye with all his heart to the fashionable 
 custom to the inroads of the elegant who
 
 1 7 Q RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 reminded him of Her, though with a difference. 
 He must seek a new life, in some work-a-day 
 quarter. To be with the busy and the common 
 not with any chosen or privileged humanity; 
 but just humanity: nothing else. To be with 
 people who really suffered ; not with people who 
 wanted hair-dyes. So it was that when a long- 
 established druggist of Islington passed away 
 old and decrepit, with a business neglected and 
 lessened, Richard Pelse came near the ' Angel ' 
 to the dingy shop you mounted into by two 
 steep steps from the pavement to the dingy 
 shop with the small-paned old-fashioned win- 
 dows; with the little mahogany desk at which 
 who stood at it commanded the prospect of the 
 City Road. He sold the Orchard Street busi- 
 ness; and, taking with him only the youngest 
 and least qualified of his young men and the 
 china and the First Editions, to coax his 
 thoughts to return again to these first loves he 
 established himself afresh, and did his own 
 work. Gradually he was recognised as rather 
 an exceptional person in the quarter. And his 
 energy was great enough to allow him, little by 
 little, year by year, to build up a trade. 
 
 Things were slack in the forenoons, and a 
 face sometimes depressed, sometimes pre-occu-
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS *7* 
 
 pied, looked out into the street; and Pelse 
 would stand at his desk with bright eyes and 
 clenched mouth, rapping a tune nervously with 
 long lean fingers. After Islington's early din- 
 ner, important people were abroad the people 
 who lived in the squares on the west side of 
 Upper Street and the wife of a City house- 
 agent, pompous and portly, patronised (with the 
 breadth of the counter, and all that that con- 
 veyed, between them) a man whom Beatrice 
 Image had once kissed. Acquaintance with 
 these folk was strictly limited. The shop- 
 keeper, refined and super-sensitive, was not good 
 enough company for the genteel. 
 
 But when evening came, he was wont to be 
 too busy to think for an instant of his social 
 place. The prescriptions brought to him were 
 few, but the shop and on Saturday night 
 especially was crowded with the smaller bour- 
 geoisie, with their little wants; the maid of all 
 work from the Liverpool Road arrived hurriedly 
 in her cap, and was comforted; Mr Pelse was 
 the recipient of sorry confidences from the 
 German clerks of Barnsbury. He was helpful 
 and generous kind to the individual and a 
 cynic to the race. Late in the evening the gas 
 flared in the little shop. Its shutters were just
 
 I7 2 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 closed when the cheap play-house, almost within 
 sight, vomited forth its crowd, and loafers were 
 many about the bars 'of the ' Angel ' and at the 
 great street-corner, and omnibus and tramcar 
 followed each other still upon the long main 
 roads. The night of the second-rate suburb. 
 
 That life went on for years ; and Pelse was a 
 bachelor with no relations ; getting visibly older 
 and thinner ; and a shock of white hair crowned 
 now the pale forehead, over the dark brilliance 
 of the keen, quick eyes. Long ago he had read 
 in the newspaper of the marriage of Miss Image 
 a day when he had been wondering where, of 
 all places in the wide world, the one face might 
 be? 
 
 ' Where is she now ? What lands or skies 
 Paint pictures in her friendly eyes ?' 
 
 Then he had read of her marriage. Hers, at 
 least, was a wound that had healed! His? 
 but what sign was there of wound at all ? For 
 in intervals of business he had come again to 
 hug his First Editions. They knew him at book 
 sales, at Sotheby's. He dusted his own Wor- 
 cester carefully. Was it not of the best period ? 
 with the ' square mark.' As a contrast to his 
 quarter's commonness, he had begun to cultivate 
 the exquisite with the simple in his daily ways.
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS J 73 
 
 His food was sometimes frugal, but it was cooked 
 to perfection. When he allowed himself a 
 luxury, for himself and one rare crony an un- 
 known artist of the neighbourhood, discovered 
 tardily ; a professor of languages, who under- 
 stood literature ; or a brother druggist, whom 
 business dealings caused him to know it was 
 nothing short of the best that he allowed 
 himself : he admitted not the second-rate : 
 he was an idealist still. The fruit with which, 
 just once or twice in summer or in autumn, 
 he regaled a pretty child, was not an apple or 
 an orange, but grey-bloomed grapes, or a peach, 
 quite flawless. The glass of wine which he 
 brought out from the parlour cupboard to 
 the weak old woman, accommodated with a 
 chair, was a soft Madeira, or a sherry nearly 
 as old as she was. It had known long voyages. 
 It was East India, or it was Bristol Milk. 
 Yes ; he was fairly prosperous ; and showed no 
 sign of wound. 
 
 Even ' the collector ' within him reasserted 
 itself in novel enterprise. To the Worcester, 
 the Swansea, the Nantgarw, the Chelsea, the 
 First Editions, there came to be added bits, that 
 were faultless, of Battersea Enamel casket and 
 candlesticks, saltcellars, needle-case, and rose-
 
 J 74 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 pink patchbox : best of all, the dainty etm\ 
 with the rare puce ground, or the white thing 
 with the tulip and the pansy pansies for thoughts 
 and, winding in between its gilded scrolls, 
 the foreign motto, ' Fidele en amitie* a French- 
 man's utmost vow. Yes ; he was prosperous. 
 
 Nor was it Battersea only. Hidden away in 
 the recesses of a cupboard Pelse questioning a 
 little, within himself, the Tightness of its barbaric 
 splendour there may have lain one specimen of 
 Vernis-Martin, a glow of gold and of red. He 
 was a collector, and fortunate. 
 
 Still, the nerves had been strained for many a 
 year ; and suddenly were shattered. Speechless 
 and one side stiffened stricken now with par- 
 alysis Mr Pelse lay in the bedroom over the 
 shop ; understanding much, but making small 
 sign to servant or assistant or medical man. 
 His last view before a second and a final seizure 
 was of the steady February rain ; the weary 
 London afternoon ; the unbroken sky ; the slate 
 roofs, wet and glistening ; the attic windows of 
 the City Road. He had lived it seemed to him 
 so long. The Past that moment of the Past, 
 however vivid might, one thinks, be quite for- 
 gotten. 
 
 Yet, wrapped in a soiled paper, in the pocket
 
 A CHEMIST IN THE SUBURBS 175 
 
 of his frock-coat, after death, they found a girl's 
 likeness. ' My photograph, because I trust you ! ' 
 she had said to him at Aix-les-Bains. And what 
 was all the rest ! 
 
 In all his thought, for all those years, she was 
 his great, dear friend. Once or twice he had 
 held her -beautiful hands looked at her eyes- 
 been strong and happy in the magnetism of her 
 presence. 
 
 Penarth, February, i&SSBuxton, August, 1890.
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 
 
 'YES, you must have the story with a certain 
 amount of detail, or you would only blame me in 
 a case in which, after all, in my heart of hearts, 
 I think there may be something to be said in my 
 excuse.' 
 
 Kenyon, the minor poet whose verse is much 
 ' inquired for ' at Paternoster House and at the 
 Bodley Head was the speaker. Binns, the 
 political leader-writer who had left the War 
 Office, for more remunerative work on a great 
 daily paper was preparing to listen. And the 
 place was the quietest corner in the house of the 
 Savile Club a spot to which the cigarette of the 
 stranger is not encouraged to penetrate. It was 
 thus that Kenyon continued : 
 
 ' I met her last Easter, at a villa near Tours. I 
 had been staying at the Hotel de 1'Univers ; 
 but it was between the seasons ; the winter
 
 io RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 visitors had left very early ; the summer ones 
 had not come ; and so, in a hotel generally fre- 
 quented by the English, there was not a soul to 
 speak to. For four nights in succession I dined 
 alone in the deserted salle-d-manger which 
 ended in my being more bored than entertained 
 by the superfluous attentions of the three waiters. 
 Not one of them young, and all of them solemn, 
 and their respectful devotion concentrated upon 
 me. One of them looked what he actually was 
 a waiter, simply, but a waiter who had pros- 
 pered. The second was meditative, recueilli, 
 sedately deferential like Regnier, you remember, 
 as the most firmly-fixed of confidential servants, 
 in La Joie fait Peur. The third was like a 
 priest who is man of the world also : ecclesiastic 
 first, but diplomatist and bon vivant besides. 
 Very different were the three ; yet, study them 
 as I would, I could distinguish no inequality in 
 their rank or place. No one of them seemed 
 greater than the others, or was before the others. 
 Saint Athanasius himself not to say it irreve- 
 rently would have been puzzled to define their 
 position. I felt the impressiveness of them all, 
 and I left the hotel. 
 
 'But come now, Binnsl' he resumed earnestly. 
 * We must not indulge ourselves in even my
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE iSl 
 
 very thinnest vein of comedy. We must get to 
 some one I want to talk about we must get to 
 the situation. When I decided to leave, I 
 bethought me of some well-bred French people 
 who, in a private fashion, put up two or three 
 boarders. A Madame Tessier and her husband, 
 a retired functionary. Having an introduction 
 from people who had stayed with them, I went 
 over the Loire, to Saint Symphorien, to call. I 
 see myself crossing the great stone bridge, of 
 fourteen arches. I remember the late March 
 sunlight on the shining river ; the steady mount 
 up the hill-side beyond it; white villas rising 
 above the cottages on the quay; tall walls enclos- 
 ing gardens, or, it may be, vineyards; and, above 
 the high sky-line, the calm blue yes, the calm 
 blue, even in that early spring. The name of 
 the house was ' Le Paradis.' It was a chateau- 
 like villa, built in the first days of the Restora- 
 tion; with a long, large garden shut in on three 
 sides by the grey, stone walls, but open on the 
 fourth, or, rather, ended on that side the side 
 towards the river and Tours by an alley of 
 lime trees, which formed a brown-screened walk 
 in winter, a green-screened walk in summer. 
 From the lime-tree alley, you dominated all the 
 country great river, and towered town, and
 
 182 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 absolutely endless plain. . . . You know I am 
 a deep believer in backgrounds and surroundings, 
 " environment," milieu. Do me the honour, 
 then, to take the trouble to realise the landscape 
 as I describe it; for it was there, with such a 
 background, that I saw Miss Pennell for the 
 first time, and there that I saw her for the last. 
 A country opulent, yet scarcely luxurious : ex- 
 quisite, and not overwhelming. 
 
 'Ringing the bell at the little green door in 
 the long garden wall, I found it answered by an 
 antique gardener; and, after braving the fury of 
 three savage mastiffs all of them, as I after- 
 wards discovered, Margaret PennelPs intimate 
 friends one went up the white steps, one was 
 shown into a pretty salon, furnished with oak 
 and hung with tapestry for the Tessiers had 
 seen better days. With Madame Tessier 
 thanks in part to my capital introduction I 
 was soon on excellent terms. She was eight 
 and fifty perhaps ; and silvery grey, with an 
 air " Marie-Antoinette." She had reached the 
 picturesqueness of age, and not its incapacity. 
 Though my stay was bound, in any case, to be 
 short, she made no difficulty about taking me. 
 I was to come at once, and was to go when I 
 must. So, later in the afternoon, I sent my
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 183 
 
 baggage up from the hotel, and for the rest of 
 my stay in Touraine I was installed in Le 
 Paradis. I had managed, I remember, to es- 
 tablish a truce with the three brutes who kept 
 its gates. My attitude towards a dog is always 
 that of an armed and watchful peace. Actual 
 amity is a condition I never hope for; but, from 
 a dog as well as from Russia one may demand 
 the maintenance of the status quo. 
 
 'At dinner, which was quite a family meal; 
 good, yet of the utmost simplicity from the 
 soup to the petit vin of the country : a Chinon, 
 was it, or a Joue? at dinner, my dear Binns 
 believe me, I entreat you, I do not tell you a 
 single detail that is not of importance there 
 were Monsieur and Madame Tessier; and their 
 niece, a brown French girl; and their nephew, 
 a young notary; and an invalid Englishwoman 
 of middle age ; and myself; and a vacant chair. 
 
 ' A vacant chair only for the first few minutes. 
 It belonged, as I gathered almost directly, to the 
 niece of the invalided Englishwoman ; to Miss 
 Margaret Pennell, who had been wintering with 
 her aunt at Le Paradis, and was going out to 
 India later in the spring, to join her people for 
 the first time since her childhood. Was she too 
 an invalid ? Yes, or No ? I had but time to
 
 184 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 ask myself the question when she appeared in 
 the flesh, to answer it. 
 
 ' She was the only blonde you ever saw who 
 had a brunette's vigour.* She was tall and fine ; 
 the mouth big; the cheeks warm coloured; the 
 hair crisp gold. She was dressed in black. I 
 may as well tell you at once what I discovered 
 gradually during the next day or two I cannot 
 prove it to you, nor is she here to help me that 
 she had the intelligence of cultivated people, 
 and of people who think for themselves; that 
 she had the enthusiasm of an artist I don't 
 mean of a painter and the fearlessness and the 
 distinction of the English upper class. And, 
 along with these virtues of very different sets, 
 she had a dignity which is of Woman her- 
 self. . . . We shall neither of us see her again, 
 Binns. No, my dear fellow, you will not be so 
 fortunate, I promise you ! You will never see 
 her. Long before now, some great vessel of* the 
 
 * Are we to conclude that Mr Kenyon unconsciously 
 reveals to us that hitherto his imagination had been fired by 
 brunettes alone ? Or are we justified in surmising that 
 there may have been hours when plenitude of grace had 
 made atonement for deficiency in ' vigour ' ? ' Doublement 
 femme puisqrf elle ttait blonde] says Edmond About. Alas! 
 on this important matter, History appears silent. There 
 would seem to be no authentic record of Mr Kenyon's 
 earlier dealings with the fair.
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 185 
 
 P. and O. has swung her across the seas. The 
 Rome perhaps, or perhaps the Chusan. And 
 this August she must be at a hill-station. I 
 think it was to be the hill-station. Simla. Yes, 
 Simla. But I must tell you the story. 
 
 { After my silent meals with the three waiters, 
 my first dinner at Le Paradis was a pleasant 
 opportunity. Speech, I assure you, was golden ! 
 And the flood-gates were opened. Margaret 
 Pennell came down next morning, to take her 
 coffee and roll in the dining-room. I was taking 
 mine there too. Another pleasant opportunity, 
 Binns and enjoyed even at an hour when, as 
 your experience of country-house visits must 
 have convinced you, it is curiously hard to be 
 entertaining. Some of us find it sufficiently 
 difficult to be agreeable at any hour. But, to 
 be agreeable at breakfast-time ! . . . Well, it 
 was another pleasant opportunity ; and salon, 
 salle-a-manger , garden, alley of lime-trees 
 brown with winter for it was but March, 
 remember they were witnesses of several more. 
 No end of talk, over a range of matters ! I was 
 not such a fool, of course, as to imagine that 
 because as regards society I had been for a few 
 days past on starvation diet, I was straightway 
 to fall in love with the first attractive person I
 
 '86 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 came across I, a man of four and thirty at that 
 moment; who had published his poems; who 
 had lived his poems; who had seen cities and 
 men. No, nothing of the kind ! Still, though 
 the circumstances in themselves didn't for a 
 minute justify my falling in love, you know, I 
 am not sure that the young woman did not. 
 She was peculiar in her intelligence, in her 
 beauty of strength, in her comprehensiveness 
 and tolerance. Along with these, she had that 
 gift of reverence which is not, as far as I have 
 noticed, the especial characteristic of our day. 
 You would have approved of her thoroughly. 
 She suited me down to the ground. 
 
 ' She had seen very little of Society had come 
 almost lately from a first-rate school at Clifton. 
 But her people were army people and an old 
 county family. Generations of courage and of 
 pretty manners and of willingness to be pleased 
 had given something to her blood. I can't, 
 of course, show you how it was, or bring it up 
 before you for you to see; but I believe, anyhow, 
 that she was born brave and wise and gracious. 
 In any case, we got on swimmingly, and it 
 didn't take me long to persuade myself that at 
 last, after so many hours misconceived, my hour 
 had come.
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 187 
 
 ' Her aunt Lady Jane Bayliss rather took to 
 me because I was a poet : I mean because I had 
 a name that was a little known. Binns if you 
 will allow me, in a parenthesis, to say so what 
 an advantage, among people of a certain" sort, I 
 have found that to be ! To be recognised at last 
 as the producer of some not very faulty Sonnets 
 to be spoken of as after all no mean authority 
 upon the ballade and the villanelle. Perhaps 
 one has earned it. But I am not sure, to this 
 day, whether Lady Jane ever once thought that 
 I was smitten seriously with Margaret, or 
 whether she would have looked upon me with 
 any sort of favour if I had shown that I was. 
 Anyhow, instead of raising barriers, she gave us 
 facilities for getting together was content if I 
 talked to her a little in the morning in the 
 garden, and made a fourth with her at whist, at 
 night. Lady Jane played a good hand, I re- 
 collect ; whilst I but my thoughts were other- 
 where. The rest of the time, or for much of it 
 at least, she encouraged me in my talks with 
 Margaret ; possibly considering me instructive, 
 and, it may be, less revolutionary than, say, an 
 average " Extension " lecturer almost always, as 
 I understand, a somewhat " advanced" person. 
 And, Binns as your expression at this moment
 
 1 88 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 politely conveys to me no doubt I was harmless. 
 / had lectured to nobody. Nowhere. Not 
 even at Toynbee Hall ; where Social and literary 
 questions are settled out of hand : no, not even 
 in Whitechapel that district in vogue, where 
 gifted charwomen and penetrating tailoresses 
 make plain to educated people Mr Watts's 
 allegories, and affable mechanics rarely scorn the 
 society of apologetic gentlepeople. . . . But I 
 beg your pardon ! 
 
 ' Lady Jane let us trudge off we two one 
 afternoon, I recollect, to Plessis-les-Tours, to see 
 what's left of Louis Onze's castle ; another day, 
 into the streets over the bridge, to discover the 
 house in which ^ Balzac was born. Margaret 
 Pennell had managed to read, already, not only 
 Eugenie Grandet. Some one must have advised 
 her, who knew. She had sensible things of her 
 own to say about L? Interdiction and La Messe 
 de VAthee. Though she was as healthy a young 
 woman as was ever beheld danced, rode, and 
 loved the country she had a true sympathy 
 with the making of books; and, as for myself, 
 you know very well, that, careful though I may 
 be about Form, my real respect, in my best 
 hours, is given to work that is substantial and 
 masculine. Could it be denied to Balzac ?
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 189 
 
 'Then we used to wait upon the quay, near 
 the great bridge, watching the men in the flat- 
 bottomed boats the bachots in mid-stream 
 getting up sand from the river's bed; or watch- 
 ing, perhaps, the play of the grey, uncertain, 
 afternoon light upon the river itself, and the 
 buildings of the outstretched town. For, in 
 Touraine, March, though it is not cold, has yet 
 its changes of weather. And now the light 
 revealed, and now displayed, the forms of the 
 cathedral the towers of Saint Gatien, the fine 
 outline of its northern transept. Now the square 
 and flat-topped Tower of Charlemagne, as they 
 call it, and the dome close by both further to 
 the right than the cathedral, in the panorama of 
 the town would stand dark iron-coloured, 
 against a silvery, luminous horizon. A drawing 
 by Fulleylove, say ! And then a storm-cloud 
 threw its great shadow over a reach of the river. 
 And now the poplars on the island in the Loire 
 bent with the west wind, and the shallow waters 
 hissed under the attack of a swift sudden rain- 
 shower as you have seen them on the lagoon, 
 at Venice. We watched these things together, 
 and, in the garden, when we had regained it, 
 watched from the terrace from that brown alley 
 of lime-trees the great changeful sky. Pleasant
 
 J 9 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 times, they were ! " Love in idleness," was it ? 
 But was it Love at all ? Was it only the re- 
 cognition of her healthy charm ? I, who at 
 home had been, at bottom, rather tired, you 
 know, of women with puffed sleeves and 
 theories ! 
 
 ' When we like people, thoroughly, something 
 that is more subtle than any word, more definite 
 than any thought something that is of the very 
 essence of our nature goes out from us to tell 
 them so. From me, I'm sure, something went 
 out, telling Miss Pennell that I liked her. And 
 I don't think I'm wrong in saying that from her 
 too came out, to me, something by which I felt 
 that in a certain way, up to a certain point, I 
 was liked too. 
 
 ' Yet we never got any further. No, my dear 
 fellow, I assure you not a step further ! It 
 came about in this way. Of course I spotted 
 her good qualities, quickly enough felt how 
 straight she was, and how capable. Still, you 
 know, among Englishwomen, after all, many are 
 like that. What I liked best in her face was 
 the soul in it; the vitality, vivacity, the immedi- 
 ate response. That, in the peculiar form of it, 
 was what, in my imagination, separated her 
 from all the others. And that once gone the
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 191 
 
 gulf between her and the rest of them the 
 whole long train of them existing no longer- 
 how idealise, how adore her, to the end of one's 
 days ? . . . But I'm anticipating. 
 
 ' This, Binns, was how it happened. I make a 
 clean breast of it. Once, in the salon of Le Paradis, 
 T caught Miss Pennell sleeping. It was at noon 
 just before mid-day breakfast. We had been 
 having a long walk together, on the uplands 
 behind the house. Walking along, she had con- 
 fessed to me that at an early hour, in her bed- 
 room, she had been much engrossed with a new 
 thing, which nobody in Tours could teach her. 
 Step dancing. A whim of hers, not to be be- 
 hind-hand even in that ! So she had practised 
 diligently her coupees and her battements 
 which were to give her the lightness that she 
 scarcely wanted and she was all the merrier 
 for the circumstance. I had never found her 
 more exhilarating never more responsive. It 
 was April, but a day of March wind we had 
 trudged for miles in the wild spring weather. 
 Coming back to the house, going into the salon 
 it had no other occupant she had taken up a 
 sailor-story of Pierre Loti's, lying on the table, 
 and was fingering its pages when I went upstairs. 
 When I came down, ten minutes afterwards
 
 T 9 2 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 having added a good sentence to my somewhat 
 insignificant " Note " on the " Essential Identity 
 of the Ballade and the Chant Royal " Loti's 
 Mon Frere Yves was fingered no longer. The 
 book lay in her lap had insufficient foothold 
 would tumble presently on the floor. Margaret's 
 hands large, healthy, full-veined and true flesh- 
 coloured hung by her side. I'm an observer of 
 hands, and hers were the right sort. But her 
 face ? The soul had gone out of it ! Not only 
 was her sleep "a most fast sleep," in the phrase of 
 Lady Macbeth's Gentlewoman there was the 
 half-opened mouth, with the closed eyes. If I 
 said that her jaw visibly fell, I should be wrong- 
 ing her. It did not do that. But the soul was 
 gone. What I seemed to see, was dead matter. 
 Margaret slept the sleep of the just, but the sleep 
 of the unattractive. 
 
 ' I remember, as if it had been yesterday, the 
 silence of the room; the spacious place, empty of 
 life; the face, with the thought vanished. Pre- 
 sently, Mon Frere Yves dropped to the ground 
 to the carpet, almost noiselessly. I laid it upon 
 the table, with some sadness. I went out into 
 the garden. 
 
 'When we met at the meal, afterwards, she was 
 not what I had known her. I v/as talking to her
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 193 
 
 with a want of interest. Dull, make-shift con- 
 versation : nothing to bring the soul back. 
 No, it was all over. If I looked forward, as 
 perhaps I did, I trust it was not indelicate. I 
 ask excuses for my apprehension. It was, I 
 daresay, exaggerated. You, Binns, may have 
 enjoyed more frequent opportunities of studying 
 the aspect of a woman in slumber. Next day, I 
 received an important, even an urgent, summons; 
 and I left Tours, after all, only ever so little 
 earlier than I had at first intended. 
 
 'But how often have I asked myself, since then, 
 " Ought I to have stomached it ? " Did I miss 
 my chance, Binns ? A question forced upon me, 
 not here only at the Savile not chiefly here, 
 indeed, in a world of well-informed and not un- 
 distinguished men but in times of quietude, in 
 times of reflection; in country holidays, some- 
 times a little aimless ; at accidental moments, 
 when, in a newspaper, one's eye catches " Indian 
 Intelligence" Bombay, Simla, the Presidency, 
 the Governor-General, the value of the rupee 
 or gets reminders of the passage of the P. and O. 
 boats : the Rome, the Chusan as I told you 
 before. . . . Well, am I to blame ? ' 
 
 Binns considered for a moment; smiled; then 
 delivered himself:
 
 194 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 'The case has not been tried before a com- 
 petent tribunal. Kenyon, ray dear fellow, I am 
 such an ordinary person ! It humiliates me to 
 recognise that that is so. I feel it deeply, I 
 assure you. Had I behaved as you did, I should 
 probably blame myself for having been so 
 attentive to the young woman for a fortnight: 
 so indifferent not to say neglectful of her 
 afterwards. For myself, I'm a believer in robust 
 loves, rather than in sentiment combed out 
 fragile and thin.' 
 
 Kenyon protested. Binns went on without a 
 pause. 
 
 4 For myself, it is just possible that I would 
 rather* actually live help the land, where I may; 
 clink glasses with my friend; and kiss the girl I 
 love than even be the author of your quite 
 admirable " Note " on the " Essential Identity of 
 the Ballade and the Chant Royal." But not for 
 a moment would I sit in judgment upon you 
 and your conduct. I know I'm not equal to it. 
 Cotton don't print my verses in the Academy, 
 nor MacColl in the Athenceum. The presiding 
 genius of Paternoster House would hardly look 
 at my manuscripts if I had occasion to send 
 them to him. The limited edition, and the 
 fifty copies on " large paper," you know I shall
 
 A CONFIDENCE AT THE SAVILE 195 
 
 never attain to that. My writing is for the 
 public. . . . My dear man! in the particular 
 matter you've consulted me about, you were 
 just yourself. Do I dream of blaming you ? Of 
 course not ! Had I your mastery of the sonnet- 
 form, the workings of my mind, in love affairs, 
 would no doubt be as subtle as yours.' 
 
 Tours, March, 1889 Kirby Moorside, September, 1892.
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 
 
 ' SHOCKING Tragedy at Whitby; Death of an 
 Artist and Actress ! ' The words were printed 
 in big capitals on the posters of the Whitby 
 newspapers they could be read across the street 
 by every passer by scarcely a month after the 
 same newspapers had contained, in a column of 
 ' Local Intelligence ' : ' To the list of visitors of 
 note now sojourning amongst us, there have 
 been added, during the present week, the Very 
 Rev. the Dean of Durham; Mr George Norton, 
 A.R.A., the well-known portrait painter; and 
 Miss Eleanor Lang, the rising actress.' And the 
 passer-by, the idle or the curious, who, attracted 
 by the sturdy capitals 'SHOCKING TRAGEDY 
 ARTIST AND ACTRESS ' went into the news-shop 
 and proffered the penny for the Whitby print, 
 read, when he opened the paper, a long para-
 
 200 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 graph, in which an intelligent reporter had set 
 down, with conscientious diffuseness, the little 
 he had discovered. It does not matter much 
 what was the paragraph ; instead of the para- 
 graph, there will be written here what the 
 intelligent reporter did not know. 
 
 George Norton, ' the well-known portrait 
 painter,' and Eleanor Lang, ' the rising actress,' 
 were friends who might have been lovers. But 
 he had been married eight years since, and was 
 still married; and she was good, and her life 
 modest, and her name beyond reproach. 'Lovers' 
 impossible then ! 
 
 Yet there would have been something to 
 plead in extenuation. Mrs Norton had been 
 for seven years one of the most deceptive, 
 because at her best moments one of the most 
 fascinating, inmates of the house in which Dr 
 Parker Brown prolonged the days of the dipso- 
 maniac. For seven years, although a certain 
 beauty remained to her, impressing the stranger, 
 she had given to her husband not a shred of the 
 comfort, not a fragment of the pleasure, she had 
 promised in her youth; so that the broken vows 
 if broken they came to be could never be his
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 2OI 
 
 only. His life his life of the spirithad been 
 lived alone. 
 
 George Norton and Eleanor Lang friends 
 from the first hour they saw each other had 
 arrived at Whitby on the same day; for he had 
 informed himself at the end of the season in 
 London, of where her holiday was to be spent. 
 And he stayed at the inn in Flowergate facing 
 the moors, with its back to the sea while she 
 was in lodgings with 'her mother, who believed 
 in her completely, and certainly with justice, 
 and without cavil acquiesced in an uncustomary 
 freedom in coming arid going a freedom which, 
 if it had not come of trust, might yet, indeed, 
 have come of the circumstances of Miss Lang's 
 profession. For, sooner or later, the upper hand 
 belongs in many things to the winner of bread; 
 it belongs, even when they do not claim it, to 
 the helpful and strong. Eleanor Lang had 
 supported the household for the last three or 
 four years humbly at first, very humbly; then 
 better; now quite well. Actress and fortunate 
 actress, too instead of governess or High-School 
 teacher, or distinguished shop-girl at Jay's. A 
 clergyman's daughter, she had always aimed to 
 be helpful : she had learnt to be strong. 
 
 Norton and Eleanor Lang, with their friend-
 
 202 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 ship facilitated by a certain mental kinship a 
 camaraderie of the intelligence and some like- 
 ness of temperament were much together at 
 Whitby. They talked for hours of her art and 
 of his ; talked of the theatre, its emotions and 
 technicalities ; talked of some painter's canvas, 
 its colours and lines : of Whistler and Henner 
 and Carolus Duran Bonnat, Gervex, Degas. 
 How soon, it seemed, they would have bored 
 other people ! they with their dreams of an 
 Idealism a little more imaginative than that which 
 is content with a docile imitation of the Primi- 
 tives, and of a Realism a little more significant 
 than that which consists in the faithful transcript 
 of the obvious. Then they had come down sud- 
 denly from sense to nonsense, and with nonsense 
 too they were happy. 
 
 They rowed up the river together; took the 
 boat over the weir at Ruswarp ; rowed again 
 along the sunny water, under the woods to 
 Sleights. One day they were on Danby Moor, 
 and there was a morning at Aislaby. In a fit of 
 Bohemianism, confessedly mild, they stayed, one 
 afternoon, to have their tea quite like the stray 
 excursionists from Leeds and Newcastle at the 
 cottage by the mill. They enjoyed the golden 
 weather on the coast, on the cliff. Bound so
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 203 
 
 much to the city, to studio and to stage, they 
 revelled in the sunshine, in the wind, with the 
 forces of Nature ; and they got to find, whether 
 they meant it or no, that they were revelling in 
 each other. 
 
 That was possible to Eleanor all that freedom, 
 all that association. Her ways were uncon- 
 strained, and she was at once both simple and 
 audacious, though she belonged to a profession 
 which much oftener makes women either wholly 
 reckless or slavishly Philistine afraid of nothing 
 under Heaven, or afraid of the parish curate. 
 
 Soon, however, the happy days must be over 
 and done with. Norton was going away to his 
 work again to a dozen commissions from Lady 
 This and That and the rich Mr So-and-So ; to 
 commissions from the women whose beauty his 
 art was to make fashionable, and from the 
 Croesus of Colonists, his pictures were to dis- 
 tinguish. Back he was going, to a life which, 
 whatever Society thought of his success, was 
 solitary without quietude and active without 
 satisfaction. Again must his painting display 
 some cheeky gaiety that had nothing of his 
 heart in it some sham enthusiasm for the arti- 
 ficial, which should please the Town, grown 
 tired of Nature.
 
 2 4 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 And she ? She was starting on a four months' 
 provincial tour to take her good looks and her 
 spirit and her fairly accomplished craft to a 
 round of country theatres from Bath to Edin- 
 burgh. She enjoyed so many things : her 
 career, her friendships, admiration : all her daily 
 doings. The excitement of her art might hide 
 from her, in that which was still her youth, the 
 need, some day, to her full being, of another 
 excitement love ! Did it ? That was the 
 question. 
 
 in 
 
 One evening, when their stay at Whitby was 
 close upon its end and he thought deeply, and 
 it may be moodily, of their now speedy separa- 
 tion Norton and Eleanor walked out together 
 on to Whitby Scaur. Whitby Scaur is an ex- 
 tended tract of gaunt flat rock that lies under 
 the steepest cliffs of all that coast, and is ap- 
 proached, at low tide only, from the further 
 pier, beyond the remotest houses. It was low 
 tide now, and two or three hours from dusk, and 
 Norton and Eleanor passed easily from the pier 
 steps to the flat rock-beach, and walked, slowly 
 picking their way, along the slight hollows of 
 the rock, filled still with the morning's water;
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 205 
 
 and so on and on, with the precipitous cliff close 
 on their right, and on their left the distant line 
 of encroaching or receding sea. The great cliff, 
 flaky and fossiliferous the joy of the geologist 
 rose slaty-black four hundred feet to the upper 
 greensward, crowned by the Abbey ruins. At 
 a lesser height, but left a long way now behind 
 them, was the quaint old parish church, amidst 
 its company of upright gravestones, crowding to 
 the cliffs edge. Half of the stones there, in the 
 graveyard, marked no actual grave; stood but in 
 memory of shipwrecked sailors, lost some of them 
 in southern, and some of them in western seas. 
 
 Norton thought of this and of a picture he 
 had seen at the Academy, of that churchyard in 
 its mystery of dusk. ' Unto this last] he said 
 to his companion, passing under the place below 
 the cliff. 'All of us, Eleanor, in one sense or 
 another, if not to Whitby churchyard, in the 
 grey of evening. Unto this last. The gift of 
 Death ! ' 
 
 She said, What was it had dejected him so 
 awfully ? The day, the solitary place ? 
 
 'No; it is the going away from you. But I 
 shall get the better of it. I shall be cheerful 
 enough this evening with your mother, you will 
 find.'
 
 206 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 Well, that was right, she answered. And 
 wasn't it better to be cheerful now ? 
 
 They were made to be together, and when 
 they were together as long as they forgot that 
 they must separate they were quite happy. 
 To-day Norton could not forget that they must 
 separate. Must they separate ? he asked him- 
 self. He had never asked her that. And it was 
 better to be silent at that moment silent, 
 though she was beside him than to disturb a 
 mind still generally untroubled: young and 
 fresh with her two-and-twenty years. Leave 
 her alone with her warm and honest heart; 
 leave her alone with her brown and healthy 
 beauty ! No use to perplex her soul with 
 murky problems ! 
 
 He had tried solutions for himself was trying 
 them even now but they had failed always, and 
 would fail again. The world was too strong for 
 them; for these two only; for Eleanor and him. 
 They could never live together. No; they must 
 separate. Hardly even could they hope that 
 that one time, which they had found delightful, 
 could recur. Scarcely again, on greyest days, 
 would she give warmth and colour to the 
 northern landscape, and be the best of fore- 
 ground figures, over whose arm, beside whose
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 207 
 
 head, to see the long lines of its moors and skies. 
 He must take some thought for her good name. 
 ' This is a weird place,' he said to her, after a 
 while. 'It t's that, perhaps, that makes me 
 gloomy to-night.' He said ' to-night,' for it was 
 now beginning to be evening. c Don't look out 
 there,' he added. 'Perhaps we will turn back. 
 It is too barren and pitiless a landscape that 
 great waste out there, that you were looking 
 at 
 
 "Where the dishevelled sea-weed hates the sea." 
 
 The sea is far enough away, however. Yet I 
 would rather think of what we have left 
 behind us behind the pier and the port those 
 massed red roofs of Whitby.' 
 
 ' The dear place we have been so happy in ! ' 
 she said, with enthusiasm, her face brightening 
 gratefully. 'We shall look back, shan't we? 
 And we shall look forward.' 
 
 'Those massed red roofs, you know,' he was 
 continuing; ' those massed roofs, flushing some- 
 times to rose colour, fading to purplish greys; 
 they will be greyer still with the coming night.' 
 He stopped a minute. ' But people have been 
 drowned hereabouts, you know, Eleanor. When 
 the sea once rises here, it is up much higher
 
 208 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 further back. And that place is impassable. 
 How would it be, I wonder, if two lovers two 
 quite hopeless lovers found themselves here, 
 and the sea gone up, to their surprise. What 
 would they feel like? Would they try to get 
 away ? Would they struggle, Eleanor ? How 
 would they spend the last of their little time ? ' 
 
 Her eyes dilated; her lips opened with won- 
 der or with horror. An actress's immediate 
 realisation was it ? of emotions not her own. 
 But she answered quietly, after a thoughtful 
 pause : ' It would be a wonderful time, any- 
 how. Perhaps they might pack a good deal of 
 happiness into their ten minutes.' Then, in a 
 low voice, with an intensity hardly betrayed 
 before, ' Oh, I think they would be awfully 
 happy ! ' 
 
 A silence, and then Norton : 
 
 ' What would they do ? Would they lie 
 down together ? Would they stand up to be 
 drowned ? No, no ! The sea would carry them 
 off their feet quickly enough, when once it 
 came; and when it reaches these rocks, even if 
 it has been quiet before, it's quiet no longer. It 
 beats itself back from them: it sways and 
 shatters itself. But if it were only in the day- 
 light, they might be seen from the water or
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 2 9 
 
 heard upon the land. At the cottage, high over 
 our heads here, some way farther than the 
 Abbey on the very edge of the cliff, you know 
 there is an apparatus : a ladder of rope. 
 " Rope ladders kept here ! " You remember the 
 notice, as we passed on the cliff yesterday. 
 Then, perhaps, the instinct of life might be 
 strong.' 
 
 ' But if the dark had fallen ? ' urged she. 
 
 ' Then the instinct, even if it showed itself, 
 would be useless.' 
 
 'The man might, perhaps, at some point or 
 other, be able to climb out of reach. But only 
 then if it were clear daylight,' said Eleanor. 
 
 ' But the woman ? ' answered her lover. ' She 
 could never climb ! Do you think he would 
 leave her ? ' 
 
 She shook her head for 'No,' with quiet 
 decision. ' Yet that would depend, after all, on 
 who he was.' 
 
 'I said, if he loved her,' answered Norton 
 shortly. And then he fell again to meditating. 
 They two, why must they separate? Was he, 
 who had had so much of Life's smart shows and 
 superficial experiences, to go for ever with so 
 little of its real happiness ? . . . She ? 
 
 Suppose she loved him just as completely, just
 
 210 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 as absorbingly, as he loved her, and that she 
 braved all condemnation for his sake, and came 
 to him to be his ? That had happened before 
 with women. All the world had heard of and 
 read of it; and it had not quite always ended in 
 disaster. Just now and then it had been justified: 
 when great souls did it, who knew what their 
 lives wanted, and had counted the cost. What 
 if it happened again, and were justified ? If 
 Eleanor came to him willingly, his conscience, 
 at the moment of her coming, might hold itself 
 clear. In the whole world he was for her, and 
 she for him, by the choice of God. God, was it, 
 or Nature ? Still, it was God. 
 
 Nine out of ten among the men and women 
 who married were less truly one than .they. He 
 felt that, and he knew it. So might she. And, 
 were they but once safe together, for a time it 
 would seem to them that every day in every 
 year of all their lives must show the difference 
 between an attained Heaven and an endless ennui. 
 
 Yet the Future would bring its revenge. For 
 her, apart from the immediate reproaches, there 
 would be the weary train of slow disparagement. 
 What if children should be born to them ? Dis- 
 grace and shame a most inevitable portion : all 
 Society against them.
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 21 1 
 
 But then, in some far-off country might there 
 be no place where their social fault would be 
 unknown, and the world fresh again, and the 
 start new ? How would it be with her there ? 
 
 Why, this is how it would be with her there : 
 so much of her own freshness gone; her cheer- 
 fulness and spirit, which were so much of her 
 charm, dashed and abated; her laugh quelled, 
 and her smile saddened. Would she be the 
 same? 
 
 No, no ! that settled the matter. She would 
 never be happy so. It was all hopeless : she 
 could never be for him. Never more, at least, 
 than she was for him now a dear friend. Ought 
 not friendship to suffice ? 
 
 Still, there would come at times the sense of a 
 profound blank, and of a life that had been 
 missed : the sense of a most vain longing for 
 the unattainable things. 
 
 ' Eleanor,' said he, stopping their walk sud- 
 denly, and sitting down on a low rock that rose 
 in a scanty space of shingle, ' those of us who 
 are most grateful to Christianity owe it much 
 more than we imagine, Christianity, with its 
 profoundest lessons of pity and hope ! Do you 
 know there have been moments in my life when 
 I've felt what they say in the Psalm" All Thy
 
 212 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 storms have gone over me : " moments when, if 
 I had not believed in a great good God, Who 
 governs His world after all and so had not tried 
 to look forward with some shred of patience, 
 thirty years perhaps, to the end I could have 
 wished that the Almighty had not " fixed His 
 canon 'gainst self-slaughter." ' 
 
 That was a wild saying ; yet she was ready to 
 receive it. It only expressed strongly a fact not 
 kept from her. In Norton's life, of late, success 
 professional or social was but the surface; 
 the depth was Eleanor. 
 
 Yet ' Hush ! ' she said to him, putting her 
 hand tenderly, or soothingly at least, upon his 
 arm for the first time in her life ; so cordially, 
 so naturally how much she liked, even if she 
 did not love him ! ' That is sad of you, or 
 absurd ; and you'll please not say such things 
 again. It is only if you will be the Hamlet to 
 my Ophelia, instead of painting my portrait for 
 the third time quite unnecessarily that I can 
 hear that quotation from Shakespeare. Never 
 out of the theatre ; on one side only of the float ' 
 she tried to be playful ' no, never unless it 
 is on the stage ; never again, please ! ' And he 
 was quieted and silent, and they began to walk 
 once more.
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 213 
 
 'I am so profoundly fond of you,' he said ; 
 speaking to her for the first time quite so 
 plainly owing her, having the right to give 
 her, just the truth. 'And I should always be as 
 fond of you, Eleanor, I know, as I am to-day 
 this hour, and have been all this month 
 though I detest the Puritan notion of measuring 
 love always by its constancy ; never by its in- 
 tensity. Constancy is not the only quality, as 
 you would some day see you who are ardent 
 and flexible, and impressed in many ways. The 
 limpet here is constant, and the rock-weed 
 constant, and the sea is not constant. Yet who 
 would weigh their petty constancy against the 
 force and beauty of the sea ? No ! Constancy 
 depends upon the mere conditions and oppor- 
 tunities of life. Intensity depends upon the 
 being that lives. My love would always be 
 faithful I know that it would but it would 
 like to be praised for fire, and not for faith- 
 fulness.' 
 
 'As it is, we can praise it for nothing] she 
 said, gently. But was that quite the whole of 
 her thought ? And, if not, what was her 
 secret ? 
 
 ' I know that ; I know it. In a sense, I feel 
 nothing to you. I have no share in your life
 
 2I 4 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 no place that is certain. Sometimes I am hardly 
 a friend. Then again, there are times, because 
 I was drawn to you by something much more 
 than your beauty only you will think me 
 fanciful when, if I look along my future, 
 Eleanor, I seem to see the shadow of no parting 
 from you.' 
 
 ' Come, come, you are getting very tre- 
 mendous ! ' she said, with what might have been 
 a little laughter in her eyes, and not much fear 
 in her voice. She believed in him so much. 
 Whenever he even threatened to be getting 
 ' tremendous ' she had a way of changing the 
 subject. ' I've been thinking lately,' she went 
 on, ' a good deal about Portia. I'm to try to 
 play her at Liverpool. We open there in The 
 Merchant. Has it ever struck you, now, that 
 there is any likeness some little bit of a likeness 
 between Portia and Shirley ? In the essentials 
 of character : actual character, I mean. As to 
 manner, Shirley, of course, couldn't help being 
 brusque, continually for that was Charlotte 
 Bronte herself while Portia could never have 
 been brusque at all.' 
 
 Her analysis was superficial, trivial, perhaps 
 at fault. It was well intended, however a 
 diversion, at all events.
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 215 
 
 ' Charlotte Bronte's Shirley 'Norton began 
 in answer. But a gusty autumn evening was 
 setting steadily in. It was true daylight no 
 longer, and the north wind blew from the sea. 
 And the line of the horizon was not visible any 
 more, where the grey sky met the grey water. 
 And the one sound, often recurrent, distinctly 
 heard and not far distant, was the fall and 
 splashing of the wave the long wave on the flat 
 shore. ' You'll be getting cold, Eleanor,' he said 
 to her, and he turned her hurriedly by the arm, 
 though he spoke in a voice that was intended 
 not to frighten her; ' and your mother will be 
 wondering what has become of you, and you 
 will be home late.' 
 
 She gave him a penetrating look as she joined 
 his hasty step. 
 
 ' But the sea is a long way off,' she said, 
 firmly; for, in an instant, she had understood his 
 mind. 
 
 ' Not so very far,' he answered. It was better 
 that she should know it. And they walked 
 hurriedly round one point scrambled round 
 another. And the mist thickened, driven by the 
 north wind to the shore. Suddenly it became 
 evident that a depression of the rock-beach an 
 alteration of the level, unnoticed as they had
 
 2I( RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 walked in just the opposite direction, an hour 
 ago had allowed to the in-pouring waters scope 
 and space, and the wave broke no longer and 
 dispersed itself upon a flattened shore, but met 
 the sheer cliff, where all the waters surged and 
 fell. 
 
 A breadth of beach and a bit of rising ground, 
 which for a while would be untouched, were still 
 before them their barrier from the great sea. 
 They reached the rising ground. The formation 
 of the coast, the treachery of the shore and tide, 
 made the passage of the sea, however close to 
 the cliff-side, now evidently hopeless, for the 
 waters were already deep. But Eleanor must be 
 saved, and their one chance was to climb. 
 Norton examined the rock. But, with the best 
 survey that the fading day allowed, there was all 
 along that line of still inaccessible coast along 
 that line of cliff with its base yet dry no foot- 
 hold for the climber. Here twenty feet, there 
 fifty feet, and there a hundred feet, of unrelenting 
 precipice. There was nothing to which the 
 hand could attach itself: no spot on which a 
 sea-bird could have paused. 
 
 1 See here ! ' said Norton to Eleanor, placing 
 his hand against the cliff, in gesture and token 
 of its uselessness.
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 217 
 
 She understood. The two were left alone 
 together to the wind, to the evening, to the 
 sea. 
 
 They looked around and wondered. It had 
 come, and could not be refused the gift of 
 Death. At the grey pier-head the light upon 
 the lighthouse gleamed its steady gleam of 
 warning and salvation not for them. The old 
 church upon the hill-side gathered its graves 
 about it in the dusk. ' Unto this, last 1 but 
 not for them. For them, the trampling surges. 
 
 Yet there was the cottage on the cliff-top, and 
 the rope ladder there, and perhaps some sailors 
 out at sea. 
 
 4 Shout ! ' 
 
 Norton shouted. 
 
 'No; it is no use deceiving ourselves, and no 
 use maddening ourselves,' he said crisply 
 almost hardly. 
 
 He was close to Eleanor now; his hand upon 
 her; and the wind shook out her hair across his 
 face. His tone was low, and his voice trembled. 
 ' And no use maddening ourselves,' he said again, 
 but very tenderly. ' We are utterly lost. . . . 
 Kiss me ! ' 
 
 ' But ' with a gesture of recoil or hesitation 
 * I I love you ! ' And then a gesture of ac-
 
 218 RENUNCIATIONS 
 
 ceptance, and a word besides. How her voice 
 altered ! ' Yes, yes ! ... we are to die.' 
 
 They were folded together in a wild embrace, 
 which yet had, certainly, the sanction of her 
 deepest being had the full sanction of her soul. 
 
 Presently another shout, and it was her shout. 
 ' Mother ! Mother ! ' with her childhood's 
 need come back to her: the claim of all her 
 early, half-forgotten days. And, in a wonder- 
 ful and tragic minute, she realised, now, some- 
 thing besides her baffled love the love that 
 after all had neither filled her life nor wholly 
 spoilt it. God ! God ! not to go down into the 
 darkness, with her two-and-twenty years ! 
 
 And Norton understood that instinct, and so, 
 to right and left, together and alone, came a 
 mad effort, foiled, of course, by cliff and waters 
 by the cruel precipice and the advancing 
 waves. The conquering waves ! 
 
 Presently, the tide being higher, higher, and 
 the wind stronger, and the black night come, 
 there roared along that wild North coast the 
 battle of the waters. The waves that shot into 
 the shallow caverns of the cliff-side were thrown 
 back again, in violent and blinding foam, to the 
 excited seas. The drench, the darkness, the 
 thunder of the seas !
 
 THE NORTH COAST AND ELEANOR 219 
 
 With which the triumph the seas that were 
 first, or the seas that would follow ? Human 
 life at least was nothing; and, in the dark and 
 heavy meeting of the trampling surges, the 
 voice of the very wind was drowned. 
 
 Whitby, October, 1884 London, November, 1892. 
 
 THE END
 
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 portraits of SIR HENRY ACLAND, K.C.B., F.R.S., 
 M.D., and of Mr. W. A. L. FLETCHER, of Christ- 
 church, President of the University Boat Club. 350 
 copies only, folio, wrapper, 55. net per part ; 50 special 
 copies containing proof impressions of the portraits 
 signed by the artist, IDS. 6d. net per part. 
 
 PINKERTON (PERCY). 
 
 GALEAZZO : A Venetian Episode and other Poems. 
 Etched Frontispiece. i6mo. 55. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers.
 
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 RADFORD (DOLLIE). 
 
 SONGS. A New Volume of Verse. [In preparation. 
 
 RADFORD (ERNEST). 
 
 CHAMBERS TWAIN. Frontispiece by WALTER CRANE. 
 
 250 copies. Imp. i6mo.;/f'5s. net. 
 Also 50 copies large paper. IDS. 6d. net. [Very/eui remain. 
 
 RHYMERS' CLUB, THE BOOK OF THE. 
 
 A second series is in preparation. 
 
 SCHAFF (DR. P.). 
 
 LITERATURE AND POETRY : Papers on Dante, etc. 
 Portrait and Plates, 100 copies only. 8vo. I OS. net. 
 
 SCOTT (WM. BELL). 
 
 A POET'S HARVEST HOME: WITH AN AFTERMATH. 
 300 copies. I2mo. 5s.net. [Very few remain. 
 
 *,* Will not be reprinted. 
 
 STODDARD (R. H.). 
 
 THE LION'S CUB; WITH OTHER VERSE. Portrait. 
 100 copies only, bound in an illuminated Persian 
 design. Fcap. 8vo. 55. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 SYMONDS (JOHN ADDINGTON). 
 
 IN THE KEY OF BLUE, AND OTHER PROSE ESSAYS. 
 Cover designed by C. S. RICKETTS. Second Edition. 
 Thick Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. 
 
 THOMPSON (FRANCIS). 
 
 A VOLUME OF POEMS. With Title-page and Cover 
 Design by LAWRENCE HOUSMAN. 500 Copies. 
 I2mo. 55. net. [In preparation. 
 
 TODHUNTER (JOHN). 
 
 A SICILIAN IDYLL. Frontispiece by WALTER CRANE. 
 250 copies. Imp. i6mo. 55. net. 
 
 Also 50 copies large paper, fcap. 410. los. 6d. net. 
 
 \Veryfptv remain.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 TOMSON (GRAHAM R.). 
 
 AFTER SUNSET. A Volume of Poems. With Title-page and 
 Cover Design by R. ANNING BELL. i2mo. 53. net. 
 
 Also a limited large paper edition. 125. 6d. net. [In preparation. 
 
 TREE (H. BEERBOHM). 
 
 THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY : A Lecture delivered at the 
 Royal Institution. With portrait of Mr. TREE from 
 an unpublished drawing by the Marchioness of Granby. 
 Fcap. 8vo, boards. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 TYNAN HINKSON (KATHARINE). 
 
 A CLUSTER OF NUTS : Poems. With Title-page and 
 Cover Design by LAWRENCE HOUSMAN. 500 copies. 
 55. net. [In preparation. 
 
 VAN DYKE (HENRY). 
 
 THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. Third Edition, enlarged. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 55. 6d. net. 
 
 The late Laureate himself gave valuable aid in correcting 
 various details. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 THE ELOPING ANGELS : A Caprice. Second Edition. 
 Square i6mo, buckram. 35. 6d. net. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 EXCURSIONS IN CRITICISM : being some Prose Recrea- 
 tions of a Rhymer. Second Edition. I2mo. 5s.net. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 THE PRINCE'S QUEST, AND OTHER POEMS. With a 
 Bibliographical Note added. Second Edition. lamo. 
 43. 6d. net. 
 
 WEDMORE (FREDERICK). 
 
 PASTORALS OF FRANCE RENUNCIATIONS. A volume of 
 Stories. Title-page by JOHN FULLEYLOVE, R.I. 
 Crown 8vo. 53. net. [In preparation. 
 
 A few of the large paper copies of Renunciations (first Edition) 
 remain. IDS. 6d. net.
 
 KLKIN MATHEWS & JOHN LANE 
 
 WICKSTEED (P. H.). 
 
 DANTE. Six Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 
 2s. net. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 THE SPHINX. A poem decorated throughout in line and 
 
 colour, and bound in a design by CHARLES RICKETTS. 
 
 250 copies. 2, 2s. net. 25 copies large paper. 
 
 .5, 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 The incomparable and ingenious history of Mr. W. H., 
 being the true secret of Shakespear's sonnets now for 
 the first time here fully set forth, with initial letters 
 and cover design by CHARLES RICKETTS. 500 copies. 
 IDS. 6d. net. 
 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 2is.net. [In preparation. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 DRAMATIC WORKS, now printed for the first time with a 
 specially designed Title-page and binding to each 
 volume, by CHARLES SHANNON. 500 copies. 75. 6d. 
 net per vol. 
 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 155. net per vol. 
 
 Vol. i. LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN : A Comedy in 
 
 Four Acts. 
 Vol. n. THE DUCHESS OF PADUA : A Blank Verse 
 
 Tragedy in Five Acts. 
 
 Vol. in. A WOMAN OF No IMPORTANCE : A Comedy 
 in Four Acts. [In preparation. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 SALOME : A Tragedy in one Act, done into English. 
 With 10 Illustrations and Cover Design by AUBREY 
 BEARDSLEY. 500 copies. 153. net. 
 
 Also ioo copies, large paper. 305. net. [In preparation. 
 
 WYNNE (FRANCES). 
 
 WHISPER. A Volume of Verse. Fcap. 8vo, buckram. 
 2s. 6d. net. 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers.
 
 PUBLICATIONS OF KLKIN MATHEWS &> JOHN LANE 
 
 The Hobby Horse 
 
 A new series of this illustrated magazine will be published 
 quarterly by subscription, under the Editorship of Herbert 
 P. Home. Subscription i per annum, post free, for the 
 four numbers. Quarto, printed on hand-made paper, and 
 issued in a limited edition to subscribers only. The 
 Magazine will contain articles upon Literature, Music, 
 Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts ; 
 Poems; Essays ; Fiction; original Designs; with reproduc- 
 tions of pictures and drawings by the old masters and 
 contemporary artists. There will be a new title- 
 page and ornaments designed by the Editor. 
 Among the contributors to the 
 Hobby Horse are : 
 
 The late MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 LAWRENCE BINYON. 
 
 WILFRID BLUNT. 
 
 FORD MADOX BROWN. 
 
 The late ARTHUR BURGESS. 
 
 E. BURNE-JONES, A.R.A. 
 
 AUSTIN DOBSON. 
 
 RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D. 
 
 A. J. HIPKINS, F.S.A. 
 
 SELWYN IMAGE. 
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON. 
 
 RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 
 SIR F. LEIGHTON, Bart., P.R.A. 
 
 T. HOPE MCLACHLAN. 
 
 MAY MORRIS. 
 
 C. HUBERT H. PARRY, Mus. Doc. 
 
 A. W. POLLARD, 
 
 I F. YORK POWELL. 
 
 CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI. 
 
 W. M. ROSSETTI. 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D. 
 
 FREDERICK SANDYS. 
 
 The late W. BELL SCOTT. 
 
 FREDERICK J. SHIELDS. 
 
 J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 JAMES SMETHAM. 
 
 SIMEON SOLOMON. 
 
 A. SOMERVELL. 
 
 The late J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 
 
 KATHARINE TYNAN. 
 
 G. F. WATTS, R.A. 
 
 FREDERICK WEDMORE. 
 
 OSCAR WILDE. 
 
 ETC. ETC. 
 
 Prospectuses on Afplication. 
 
 THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET, LONDON, W.
 
 ' Nearly every book put out by Messrs. Elkin Mathews & 
 John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head, is a satisfaction to 
 the special senses of the modern bookman for bindings, shapes, 
 types, and papers. They have surpassed themselves, and 
 registered a real achievement in English bookmaking by the 
 volume of ' ' Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical, " of Lord De Tabley. ' 
 
 Newcastle Daily Chronicle.
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE 
 Printers to Her Majesty
 
 A 000 123 545 6