Two days later indeed--for he had promptly and charmingly replied,
keeping with alacrity the appointment she had judged best to propose
for a morning hour in a sequestered alley of the Park--two days later
she was to be struck well-nigh to alarm by everything he had acquired:
so much it seemed to make that it threatened somehow a complication,
and her plan, so far as she had arrived at one, dwelt in the desire
above all to simplify. She wanted no grain more of extravagance or
excess of anything--risking as she had done, none the less, a recall
of ancient license in proposing to Murray such a place of meeting. She
had her reasons--she wished intensely to discriminate: Basil French
had several times waited on her at her mother's habitation, their
horrible flat which was so much too far up and too near the East Side;
he had dined there and lunched there and gone with her thence to other
places, notably to see pictures, and had in particular adjourned
with her twice to the Metropolitan Museum, in which he took a great
interest, in which she professed a delight, and their second visit
to which had wound up in her encounter with Mr. Pitman, after her
companion had yielded, at her urgent instance, to an exceptional
need of keeping a business engagement. She mightn't, in delicacy,
in decency, entertain Murray Brush where she had entertained Mr.
French--she was given over now to these exquisite perceptions and
proprieties and bent on devoutly observing them; and Mr. French, by
good-luck, had never been with her in the Park: partly because he had
never pressed it, and partly because she would have held off if he
had, so haunted were those devious paths and favoring shades by the
general echo of her untrammelled past. If he had never suggested their
taking a turn there this was because, quite divinably, he held it
would commit him further than he had yet gone; and if she on her side
had practised a like reserve it was because the place reeked for her,
as she inwardly said, with old associations. It reeked with nothing
so much perhaps as with the memories evoked by the young man who now
awaited her in the nook she had been so competent to indicate; but
in what corner of the town, should she look for them, wouldn't those
footsteps creak back into muffled life, and to what expedient would
she be reduced should she attempt to avoid all such tracks? The Museum
was full of tracks, tracks by the hundred--the way really she had
knocked about!--but she had to see people somewhere, and she couldn't
pretend to dodge every ghost.

All she could do was not to make confusion, make mixtures, of the
living; though she asked herself enough what mixture she mightn't find
herself to have prepared if Mr. French should, not so very impossibly,
for a restless, roaming man--_her_ effect on him!--happen to pass
while she sat there with the mustachioed personage round whose name
Mrs. Maule would probably have caused detrimental anecdote most
thickly to cluster. There existed, she was sure, a mass of luxuriant
legend about the "lengths" her engagement with Murray Brush had gone;
she could herself fairly feel them in the air, these streamers of
evil, black flags flown as in warning, the vast redundancy of so cheap
and so dingy social bunting, in fine, that flapped over the stations
she had successively moved away from and which were empty now, for
such an ado, even to grotesqueness. The vivacity of that conviction
was what had at present determined her, while it was the way he
listened after she had quickly broken ground, while it was the special
character of the interested look in his handsome face, handsomer than
ever yet, that represented for her the civilization he had somehow
taken on. Just so it was the quantity of that gain, in its turn, that
had at the end of ten minutes begun to affect her as holding up a
light to the wide reach of her step. "There was never anything the
least serious between us, not a sign or a scrap, do you mind? of
anything beyond the merest pleasant friendly acquaintance; and if
you're not ready to go to the stake on it for me you may as well know
in time what it is you'll probably cost me."

She had immediately plunged, measuring her effect and having thought
it well over; and what corresponded to her question of his having
become a better person to appeal to was the appearance of interest she
had so easily created in him. She felt on the spot the difference that
made--it was indeed his form of being more civilized: it was the
sense in which Europe in general and Paris in particular had made him
develop. By every calculation--and her calculations, based on the
intimacy of her knowledge, had been many and deep--he would help her
the better the more intelligent he should have become; yet she was to
recognize later on that the first chill of foreseen disaster had been
caught by her as, at a given moment, this greater refinement of his
attention seemed to exhale it. It was just what she had wanted--"if
I can only get him interested--!" so that, this proving quite vividly
possible, why did the light it lifted strike her as lurid? Was it
partly by reason of his inordinate romantic good looks, those of a
gallant, genial conqueror, but which, involving so glossy a brownness
of eye, so manly a crispness of curl, so red-lipped a radiance of
smile, so natural a bravery of port, prescribed to any response
he might facially, might expressively, make a sort of florid,
disproportionate amplitude? The explanation, in any case, didn't
matter; he was going to mean well--that she could feel, and also that
he had meant better in the past, presumably, than he had managed to
convince her of his doing at the time: the oddity she hadn't now
reckoned with was this fact that from the moment he did advertise an
interest it should show almost as what she would have called weird. It
made a change in him that didn't go with the rest--as if he had broken
his nose or put on spectacles, lost his handsome hair or sacrificed
his splendid mustache: her conception, her necessity, as she saw, had
been that something should be added to him for her use, but nothing
for his own alteration.

He had affirmed himself, and his character, and his temper, and his
health, and his appetite, and his ignorance, and his obstinacy, and
his whole charming, coarse, heartless personality, during their
engagement, by twenty forms of natural emphasis, but never by emphasis
of interest. How in fact could you feel interest unless you should
know, within you, some dim stir of imagination? There was nothing in
the world of which Murray Brush was less capable than of such a dim
stir, because you only began to imagine when you felt some approach to
a need to understand. _He_ had never felt it; for hadn't he been born,
to his personal vision, with that perfect intuition of everything
which reduces all the suggested preliminaries of judgment to the
impertinence--when it's a question of your entering your house--of
a dumpage of bricks at your door? He had had, in short, neither to
imagine nor to perceive, because he had, from the first pulse of his
intelligence, simply and supremely known: so that, at this hour,
face to face with him, it came over her that she had, in their old
relation, dispensed with any such convenience of comprehension on his
part even to a degree she had not measured at the time. What therefore
must he not have seemed to her as a form of life, a form of avidity
and activity, blatantly successful in its own conceit, that he could
have dazzled her so against the interest of her very faculties and
functions? Strangely and richly historic all that backward mystery,
and only leaving for her mind the wonder of such a mixture of
possession and detachment as they would clearly to-day both know.
For each to be so little at last to the other when, during months
together, the idea of all abundance, all quantity, had been, for
each, drawn from the other and addressed to the other--what was it
monstrously like but some fantastic act of getting rid of a person by
going to lock yourself up in the _sanctum sanctorum_ of that person's
house, amid every evidence of that person's habits and nature? What
was going to happen, at any rate, was that Murray would show himself
as beautifully and consciously understanding--and it would be
prodigious that Europe should have inoculated him with that delicacy.
Yes, he wouldn't claim to know now till she had told him--an aid to
performance he had surely never before waited for, or been indebted
to, from any one; and then, so knowing, he would charmingly endeavor
to "meet," to oblige and to gratify. He would find it, her case, ever
so worthy of his benevolence, and would be literally inspired to
reflect that he must hear about it first.

She let him hear then everything, in spite of feeling herself slip,
while she did so, to some doom as yet incalculable; she went on very
much as she had done for Mr. Pitman and Mrs. Drack, with the rage
of desperation and, as she was afterward to call it to herself, the
fascination of the abyss. She didn't know, couldn't have said at the
time, _why_ his projected benevolence should have had most so the
virtue to scare her: he would patronize her, as an effect of her
vividness, if not of her charm, and would do this with all high
intention, finding her case, or rather _their_ case, their funny old
case, taking on of a sudden such refreshing and edifying life, to
the last degree curious and even important; but there were gaps of
connection between this and the intensity of the perception here
overtaking her that she shouldn't be able to move in _any_ direction
without dishing herself. That she couldn't afford it where she had got
to--couldn't afford the deplorable vulgarity of having been so many
times informally affianced and contracted (putting it only at that, at
its being by the new lights and fashions so unpardonably vulgar): he
took this from her without turning, as she might have said, a hair;
except just to indicate, with his new superiority, that he felt the
distinguished appeal and notably the pathos of it. He still took
it from her that she hoped nothing, as it were, from any other
_alibi_--the people to drag into court being too many and too
scattered; but that, as it was with him, Murray Brush, she had been
_most_ vulgar, most everything she had better not have been, so she
depended on him for the innocence it was actually vital she should
establish. He flushed or frowned or winced no more at that than he did
when she once more fairly emptied her satchel and, quite as if they
had been Nancy and the Artful Dodger, or some nefarious pair of that
sort, talking things over in the manner of _Oliver Twist_, revealed
to him the fondness of her view that, could she but have produced a
cleaner slate, she might by this time have pulled it off with Mr.
French. Yes, he let her in that way sacrifice her honorable connection
with him--all the more honorable for being so completely at an end--to
the crudity of her plan for not missing another connection, so much
more brilliant than what he offered, and for bringing another man,
with whom she so invidiously and unflatteringly compared him, into her
greedy life.

There was only a moment during which, by a particular lustrous look
she had never had from him before, he just made her wonder which turn
he was going to take; she felt, however, as safe as was consistent
with her sense of having probably but added to her danger, when he
brought out, the next instant: "Don't you seem to take the ground that
we were guilty--that _you_ were ever guilty--of something we shouldn't
have been? What did we ever do that was secret, or underhand, or any
way not to be acknowledged? What did we do but exchange our young vows
with the best faith in the world--publicly, rejoicingly, with the full
assent of every one connected with us? I mean of course," he said with
his grave kind smile, "till we broke off so completely because we
found that--practically, financially, on the hard worldly basis--we
couldn't work it. What harm, in the sight of God or man, Julia," he
asked in his fine rich way, "did we ever do?"

She gave him back his look, turning pale. "Am I talking of _that_? Am
I talking of what _we_ know? I'm talking of what others feel--of what
they _have_ to feel; of what it's just enough for them to know not to
be able to get over it, once they do really know it. How do they know
what _didn't_ pass between us, with all the opportunities we had?
That's none of their business--if we were idiots enough, on the top of
everything! What you may or mayn't have done doesn't count, for _you_;
but there are people for whom it's loathsome that a girl should have
gone on like that from one person to another and still pretend to
be--well, all that a nice girl is supposed to be. It's as if we had
but just waked up, mother and I, to such a remarkable prejudice; and
now we have it--when we could do so well without it!--staring us
in the face. That mother should have insanely _let_ me, should so
vulgarly have taken it for my natural, my social career--_that's_ the
disgusting, humiliating thing: with the lovely account it gives of
both of us! But mother's view of a delicacy in things!" she went on
with scathing grimness; "mother's measure of anything, with her grand
'gained cases' (there'll be another yet, she finds them so easy!) of
which she's so publicly proud! You see I've no margin," said Julia;
letting him take it from her flushed face as much as he would that her
mother hadn't left her an inch. It was that he should make use of the
spade with her for the restoration of a bit of a margin just wide
enough to perch on till the tide of peril should have ebbed a little,
it was that he should give her _that_ lift--!

Well, it was all there from him after these last words; it was before
her that he really took hold. "Oh, my dear child, I can see! Of course
there are people--ideas change in our society so fast!--who are not in
sympathy with the old American freedom and who read, I dare say, all
sorts of uncanny things into it. Naturally you must take them as they
are--from the moment," said Murray Brush, who had lighted, by her
leave, a cigarette, "your life-path does, for weal or for woe, cross
with theirs." He had every now and then such an elegant phrase.
"Awfully interesting, certainly, your case. It's enough for me that it
_is_ yours--I make it my own. I put myself absolutely in your place;
you'll understand from me, without professions, won't you? that I do.
Command me in every way! What I do like is the sympathy with which
you've inspired _him_. I don't, I'm sorry to say, happen to know him
personally,"--he smoked away, looking off; "but of course one knows
all about him generally, and I'm sure he's right for you, I'm sure it
would be charming, if you yourself think so. Therefore trust me and
even--what shall I say?--leave it to me a little, won't you?" He had
been watching, as in his fumes, the fine growth of his possibilities;
and with this he turned on her the large warmth of his charity. It was
like a subscription of a half-a-million. "I'll take care of you."

She found herself for a moment looking up at him from as far below as
the point from which the school-child, with round eyes raised to the
wall, gazes at the parti-colored map of the world. Yes, it was a
warmth, it was a special benignity, that had never yet dropped on her
from any one; and she wouldn't for the first few moments have known
how to describe it or even quite what to do with it. Then, as it still
rested, his fine improved expression aiding, the sense of what had
happened came over her with a rush. She was being, yes, patronized;
and that was really as new to her--the freeborn American girl who
might, if she had wished, have got engaged and disengaged not six
times but sixty--as it would have been to be crowned or crucified. The
Frenches themselves didn't do it--the Frenches themselves didn't dare
it. It was as strange as one would: she recognized it when it came,
but anything might have come rather--and it was coming by (of all
people in the world) Murray Brush! It overwhelmed her; still she could
speak, with however faint a quaver and however sick a smile. "You'll
lie for me like a gentleman?"

"As far as that goes till I'm black in the face!" And then while he
glowed at her and she wondered if he would pointedly look his lies
that way, and if, in fine, his florid, gallant, knowing, almost
winking intelligence, _common_ as she had never seen the common
vivified, would represent his notion of "blackness": "See here, Julia;
I'll do more."

"'More'--?"

"Everything. I'll take it right in hand. I'll fling over you--"

"Fling over me--?" she continued to echo as he fascinatingly fixed
her.

"Well, the biggest _kind_ of rose-colored mantle!" And this time, oh,
he did wink: it _would_ be the way he was going to wink (and in the
grandest good faith in the world) when indignantly denying, under
inquisition, that there had been "a sign or a scrap" between them. But
there was more to come; he decided she should have it all. "Julia,
you've got to know now." He hung fire but an instant more. "Julia,
I'm going to be married." His "Julias" were somehow death to her; she
could feel that even _through_ all the rest. "Julia, I announce my
engagement."

"Oh, lordy, lordy!" she wailed: it might have been addressed to Mr.
Pitman.

The force of it had brought her to her feet, but he sat there smiling
up as at the natural tribute of her interest. "I tell you before any
one else; it's not to be 'out' for a day or two yet. But we want you
to know; _she_ said that as soon as I mentioned to her that I had
heard from you. I mention to her everything, you see!"--and he almost
simpered while, still in his seat, he held the end of his cigarette,
all delicately and as for a form of gentle emphasis, with the tips
of his fine fingers. "You've not met her, Mary Lindeck, I think: she
tells me she hasn't the pleasure of knowing you, but she desires it so
much--particularly longs for it. She'll take an interest too," he went
on; "you must let me immediately bring her to you. She has heard so
much about you and she really wants to see you."

"Oh mercy _me_!" poor Julia gasped again--so strangely did history
repeat itself and so did this appear the echo, on Murray Brush's lips,
and quite to drollery, of that sympathetic curiosity of Mrs. Drack's
which Mr. Pitman had, as they said, voiced. Well, there had played
before her the vision of a ledge of safety in face of a rising tide;
but this deepened quickly to a sense more forlorn, the cold swish of
waters already up to her waist and that would soon be up to her chin.
It came really but from the air of her friend, from the perfect
benevolence and high unconsciousness with which he kept his
posture--as if to show he could patronize her from below upward quite
as well as from above down. And as she took it all in, as it spread to
a flood, with the great lumps and masses of truth it was floating, she
knew inevitable submission, not to say submersion, as she had never
known it in her life; going down and down before it, not even putting
out her hands to resist or cling by the way, only reading into the
young man's very face an immense fatality and, for all his bright
nobleness his absence of rancor or of protesting pride, the great gray
blankness of her doom. It was as if the earnest Miss Lindeck, tall and
mild, high and lean, with eye-glasses and a big nose, but "marked" in
a noticeable way, elegant and distinguished and refined, as you could
see from a mile off, and as graceful, for common despair of imitation,
as the curves of the "copy" set of old by one's writing-master--it was
as if this stately well-wisher, whom indeed she had never exchanged
a word with, but whom she had recognized and placed and winced at
as soon as he spoke of her, figured there beside him now as also in
portentous charge of her case.

He had ushered her into it in that way as if his mere right word
sufficed; and Julia could see them throne together, beautifully at one
in all the interests they now shared, and regard her as an object of
almost tender solicitude. It was positively as if they had become
engaged for her good--in such a happy light as it shed. That was the
way people you had known, known a bit intimately, looked at you as
soon as they took on the high matrimonial propriety that sponged over
the more or less wild past to which you belonged, and of which, all of
a sudden, they were aware only through some suggestion it made them
for reminding you definitely that you still had a place. On her
having had a day or two before to meet Mrs. Drack and to rise to her
expectation she had seen and felt herself act, had above all admired
herself, and had at any rate known what she said, even though losing,
at her altitude, any distinctness in the others. She could have
repeated later on the detail of her performance--if she hadn't
preferred to keep it with her as a mere locked-up, a mere unhandled
treasure. At present, however, as everything was for her at first
deadened and vague, true to the general effect of sounds and motions
in water, she couldn't have said afterward what words she spoke, what
face she showed, what impression she made--at least till she had
pulled herself round to precautions. She only knew she had turned
away, and that this movement must have sooner or later determined
his rising to join her, his deciding to accept it, gracefully and
condoningly--condoningly in respect to her natural emotion, her
inevitable little pang--for an intimation that they would be better on
their feet.

They trod then afresh their ancient paths; and though it pressed upon
her hatefully that he must have taken her abruptness for a smothered
shock, the flare-up of her old feeling at the breath of his news, she
had still to see herself condemned to allow him this, condemned
really to encourage him in the mistake of believing her suspicious of
feminine spite and doubtful of Miss Lindeck's zeal. She was so far
from doubtful that she was but too appalled at it and at the officious
mass in which it loomed, and this instinct of dread, before their walk
was over, before she had guided him round to one of the smaller gates,
there to slip off again by herself, was positively to find on the
bosom of her flood a plank by the aid of which she kept in a manner
and for the time afloat. She took ten minutes to pant, to blow gently,
to paddle disguisedly, to accommodate herself, in a word, to the
elements she had let loose; but as a reward of her effort at least she
then saw how her determined vision accounted for everything. Beside
her friend on the bench she had truly felt all his cables cut, truly
swallowed down the fact that if he still perceived she was pretty--and
_how_ pretty!--it had ceased appreciably to matter to him. It had
lighted the folly of her preliminary fear, the fear of his even yet to
some effect of confusion or other inconvenience for her, proving
more alive to the quotable in her, as she had called it, than to the
inexpressible. She had reckoned with the awkwardness of that possible
failure of his measure of her charm, by which his renewed apprehension
of her grosser ornaments, those with which he had most affinity, might
too much profit; but she need have concerned herself as little for his
sensibility on one head as on the other. She had ceased personally,
ceased materially--in respect, as who should say, to any optical or
tactile advantage--to exist for him, and the whole office of his
manner had been the more piously and gallantly to dress the dead
presence with flowers. This was all to his credit and his honor, but
what it clearly certified was that their case was at last not even one
of spirit reaching out to spirit. _He_ had plenty of spirit--had all
the spirit required for his having engaged himself to Miss Lindeck,
into which result, once she had got her head well up again, she read,
as they proceeded, one sharp meaning after another. It was therefore
toward the subtler essence of that mature young woman alone that he
was occupied in stretching; what was definite to him about Julia
Bride being merely, being entirely--which was indeed thereby quite
enough--that she _might_ end by scaling her worldly height. They would
push, they would shove, they would "boost," they would arch both their
straight backs as pedestals for her tiptoe; and at the same time, by
some sweet prodigy of mechanics, she would pull them up and up with
her.

Wondrous things hovered before her in the course of this walk; her
consciousness had become, by an extraordinary turn, a music-box in
which, its lid well down, the most remarkable tunes were sounding. It
played for her ear alone, and the lid, as she might have figured, was
her firm plan of holding out till she got home, of not betraying--to
her companion at least--the extent to which she was demoralized. To
see him think her demoralized by mistrust of the sincerity of the
service to be meddlesomely rendered her by his future wife--she would
have hurled herself publicly into the lake there at their side, would
have splashed, in her beautiful clothes, among the frightened swans,
rather than invite him to that ineptitude. Oh, her sincerity, Mary
Lindeck's--she would be drenched with her sincerity, and she would
be drenched, yes, with _his_; so that, from inward convulsion to
convulsion, she had, before they reached their gate, pulled up in the
path. There was something her head had been full of these three or
four minutes, the intensest little tune of the music-box, and it made
its way to her lips now; belonging--for all the good it could do
her!--to the two or three sorts of solicitude she might properly
express.

"I hope _she_ has a fortune, if you don't mind my speaking of it:
I mean some of the money we didn't in _our_ time have--and that we
missed, after all, in our poor way and for what we then wanted of it,
so quite dreadfully."

She had been able to wreathe it in a grace quite equal to any he
himself had employed; and it was to be said for him also that he kept
up, on this, the standard. "Oh, she's not, thank goodness, at all
badly off, poor dear. We shall do very well. How sweet of you to have
thought of it! May I tell her that too?" he splendidly glared. Yes, he
glared--how couldn't he, with what his mind was really full of? But,
all the same, he came just here, by her vision, nearer than at any
other point to being a gentleman. He came quite within an ace of
it--with his taking from her thus the prescription of humility of
service, his consenting to act in the interest of her avidity, his
letting her mount that way, on his bowed shoulders, to the success in
which he could suppose she still believed. He couldn't know, he would
never know, that she had then and there ceased to believe in it--that
she saw as clear as the sun in the sky the exact manner in which,
between them, before they had done, the Murray Brushes, all zeal and
sincerity, all interest in her interesting case, would dish, would
ruin, would utterly destroy her. He wouldn't have needed to go on, for
the force and truth of this; but he did go on--he was as crashingly
consistent as a motorcar without a brake. He was visibly in love
with the idea of what they might do for her and of the rare "social"
opportunity that they would, by the same stroke, embrace. How he had
been offhand with it, how he had made it parenthetic, that he didn't
happen "personally" to know Basil French--as if it would have been at
all likely he _should_ know him, even _im_ personally, and as if he
could conceal from her the fact that, since she had made him her
overture, this gentleman's name supremely baited her hook! Oh, they
would help Julia Bride if they could--they would do their remarkable
best; but they would at any rate have made his acquaintance over it,
and she might indeed leave the rest to their thoroughness. He would
already have known, he would already have heard; her appeal, she was
more and more sure, wouldn't have come to him as a revelation. He had
already talked it over with _her_, with Miss Lindeck, to whom the
Frenches, in their fortress, had never been accessible, and his whole
attitude bristled, to Julia's eyes, with the betrayal of her hand, her
voice, her pressure, her calculation. His tone, in fact, as he talked,
fairly thrust these things into her face. "But you must see her for
yourself. You'll judge her. You'll love her. My dear child"--he
brought it all out, and if he spoke of children he might, in his
candor, have been himself infantine--"my dear child, she's the person
to do it for you. Make it over to her; but," he laughed, "of course
see her first! Couldn't you," he wound up--for they were now near
their gate, where she was to leave him--"couldn't you just simply make
us meet him, at tea say, informally; just _us_ alone, as pleasant old
friends of whom you'd have so naturally and frankly spoken to him: and
then see what we'd _make_ of that?"

It was all in his expression; he couldn't keep it out of that, and his
shining good looks couldn't: ah, he was so fatally much too handsome
for her! So the gap showed just there, in his admirable mask and
his admirable eagerness; the yawning little chasm showed where the
gentleman fell short. But she took this in, she took everything in,
she felt herself do it, she heard herself say, while they paused
before separation, that she quite saw the point of the meeting, as he
suggested, at her tea. She would propose it to Mr. French and would
let them know; and he must assuredly bring Miss Lindeck, bring her
"right away," bring her soon, bring _them_, his fiancГ©e and her,
together somehow, and as quickly as possible--so that they _should_
be old friends before the tea. She would propose it to Mr. French,
propose it to Mr. French: that hummed in her ears as she went--after
she had really got away; hummed as if she were repeating it over,
giving it out to the passers, to the pavement, to the sky, and all as
in wild discord with the intense little concert of her music-box. The
extraordinary thing too was that she quite believed she should do it,
and fully meant to; desperately, fantastically passive--since she
almost reeled with it as she proceeded--she was capable of proposing
anything to any one: capable too of thinking it likely Mr. French
would come, for he had never on her previous proposals declined
anything. Yes, she would keep it up to the end, this pretence of owing
them salvation, and might even live to take comfort in having done for
them what they wanted. What they wanted _couldn't_ but be to get at
the Frenches, and what Miss Lindeck above all wanted, baffled of it
otherwise, with so many others of the baffled, was to get at Mr.
French--for all Mr. French would want of either of them!--still more
than Murray did. It was not till after she had got home, got straight
into her own room and flung herself on her face, that she yielded to
the full taste of the bitterness of missing a connection, missing the
man himself, with power to create such a social appetite, such a grab
at what might be gained by them. He could make people, even people
like these two and whom there were still other people to envy, he
could make them push and snatch and scramble like that--and then
remain as incapable of taking her from the hands of such patrons as of
receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high
note, too, of Julia's wonderful composition that, even in the long,
lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim
lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her supremely
proud of him.




A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

_Robert Louis Stevenson_ (1850-1894)


It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous,
relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered
it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after
flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous,
interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it
seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had
propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was
it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus, or were the holy
angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as
the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture
to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the
company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honor of the
jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his
own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when
he was Villon's age.

The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the
flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up.
An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given
the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the
island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white
spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow
settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was
drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque
or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false
noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright
pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind there was a
dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.

The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All the
graves were decently covered; tall, white housetops stood around in
grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, benightcapped like
their domiciles; there was no light in all the neighborhood but a
little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and
tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock
was hard on ten when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern,
beating their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious about the
cemetery of St. John.

Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall,
which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring
district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream
of warm vapor from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted
on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door. But
within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis Villon, the poet,
and some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted, were keeping the
night alive and passing round the bottle.

A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from
the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy
monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the
comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the
firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in
a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the beery,
bruised appearance of the continual drinker's; it was covered with a
network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now
pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him
on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange
excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled,
grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly
frame.

On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a
scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the
_Ballade of Roast Fish_, and Tabary spluttering admiration at his
shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with
hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty
years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes,
evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled
together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly
countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted
like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in
violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent,
admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips:
he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of
burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese
and human donkeys.

At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game
of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good birth and
training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly
in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin,
poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery
that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been
gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald
head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant
stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

"Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

"_Some may prefer to dine in state_" wrote Villon, "_On bread and
cheese on silver plate_. Or--or--help me out, Guido!"

Tabary giggled.

"_Or parsley on a silver dish_" scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and
sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral
grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night
went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something
between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent
of the poet's, much detested by the Picardy monk.

"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are
all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my
gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew, what a gust! Down
went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged
medlar-tree!--I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night on the St.
Denis Road?" he asked.

Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his
Adam's apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by
the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for
Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard
anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon
fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an
attack of coughing.

"Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of rhymes to 'fish.'"

"Doubles or quits," said Montigny doggedly.

"With all my heart," quoth Thevenin.

"Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk.

"Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever hope to fill that big
hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you
expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared
to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think yourself
another Elias--and they'll send the coach for you?"

"_Hominibus impossibile_" replied the monk, as he filled his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

"Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said.

"It was very good," objected Tabary.

Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to 'fish,'" he said. "What
have you to do with Latin? You'll wish you knew none of it at the
great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus--the
devil with the humpback and red-hot finger-nails. Talking of the
devil," he added, in a whisper, "look at Montigny!"

All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be
enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril
nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his
back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed
hard under the gruesome burden.

"He looks as if he could knife him," whispered Tabary, with round
eyes.

The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to
the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and
not any excess of moral sensibility.

"Come now," said Villon--"about this ballade. How does it run so far?"
And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal
movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin
was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny
leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow
took effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to
move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut,
his heels rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over
one shoulder with the eyes open, and Thevenin Pensete's spirit had
returned to Him who made it.

Everyone sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos.
The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly
fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a
singular and ugly leer.

"My God!" said Tabary, and he began to pray in Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and
clucked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then
he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued
laughing bitterly as though he would shake himself to pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

"Let's see what he has about him," he remarked; and he picked the dead
man's pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money into four
equal portions on the table. "There's for you," he said.

The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy
glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself
and topple sideways off the chair.

"We're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. "It's a
hanging job for every man jack of us that's here--not to speak of
those who aren't." He made a shocking gesture in the air with his
raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one
side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged.
Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with
his feet as if to restore the circulation.

Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and
retired to the other end of the apartment.

Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the dagger,
which was followed by a jet of blood.

"You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he wiped the blade on
his victim's doublet.

"I think we had," returned Villon with a gulp. "Damn his fat head!" he
broke out. "It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right has a man
to have red hair when he is dead?" And he fell all of a heap again
upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming in.

"Cry baby," said the monk.

"I always said he was a woman," added Montigny with a sneer. "Sit up,
can't you?" he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body.
"Tread out that fire, Nick." But Nick was better employed; he was
quietly taking Villon's purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on
the stool where he had been making a ballade not three minutes before.
Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a share of the booty, which the
monk silently promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of
his gown. In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical
existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself,
jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the
embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into
the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in
sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon
was himself in a hurry to escape from the neighborhood of the dead
Thevenin, and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him
before he should discover the loss of his money, he was the first by
general consent to issue forth into the street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a
few vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It
was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost
more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was
absolutely still: a company of white hoods, a field full of little
Alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it
were still snowing! Now, wherever he went he left an indelible trail
behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still
tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he
must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the
crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came
back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to
pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped
boldly forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows at
Montfaucon in this bright windy phase of the night's existence, for
one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and
garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept
quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by
mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder
with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the
white streets, except when the wind swooped round a corner and threw
up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering
dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of
lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though
carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely
crossing his line of march, he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot
as speedily as he could. He was not in the humor to be challenged, and
he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just
on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a
large porch before the door; it was half-ruinous, he remembered, and
had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it and jumped
inside the shelter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after
the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with
outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance which offered an
indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose.
His heart gave a leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared
dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It
was only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon
this latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A
little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her
cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were
quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found
two of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was little
enough; but it was always something; and the poet was moved with a
deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent
her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he
looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to
the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V. of
England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and
this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway,
before she had time to spend her couple of whites--it seemed a cruel
way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such a little
while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in
the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul,
and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all
his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half-mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating;
a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold
blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment;
then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst
upon him, and he was covered with perspiration. To spendthrifts money
is so living and actual--it is such a thin veil between them and their
pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune--that of time; and
a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they
are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most
shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing,
in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter
for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly
earned, so foolishly departed. Villon stood and cursed; he threw the
two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped,
and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse. Then
he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house beside the
cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone
by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in
vain that he looked right and left upon the snow; nothing was to be
seen. He had not dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen in the
house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of
the grisly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near,
that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the
contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played
in the chinks of the door and window, and revived his terror for the
authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the
snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he
could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and
sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects
for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And
it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive
discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before
the porch. His perspiration had dried upon him; and though the wind
had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every
hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done?
Late as was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the
house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.