The History of David Grieve Part 82

And putting his arm through Ancrum's, he swept him away, repeating, as they walked, the substance of a letter from his precious nephew, in which the Barbizon episode as it appeared to the inhabitants of No. 7 Rue Chantal and to the students of Taranne's _atelier de femmes_ was related, with every embellishment of witticism and _blague_ that the imagination of a French _rapin_ could suggest. Mademoiselle Delaunay was not yet restored, according to the writer, to the _atelier_ which she adorned. '_On criait au scandale_,' mainly because she was such a clever little animal, and the others envied and hated her. She had removed to a studio near the Luxembourg, and Taranne was said to be teaching her privately. Meanwhile Dubois requested his dear uncle to supply him with information as to _l'autre;_ it would be gratefully received by an appreciative circle. As for _la soeur de l'autre_, the dear uncle no doubt knew that she had migrated to the studio of Monsieur Montjoie, an artist whose little affairs in the _genre_ had already, before her advent, attained a high degree of interest and variety. On a review of all the circ.u.mstances, the dear uncle would perhaps pardon the writer if he were less disposed than before to accept those estimable views of the superiority of the English _morale_ to the French, which had been so ably impressed upon him during his visit to Manchester.

For after a very short stay at Brussels the nephew had boldly and suddenly pushed over to England, and had spent a fortnight in Barbier's lodgings reconnoitering his uncle. As to the uncle, Xavier had struck him, on closer inspection, as one of the most dissolute young reprobates he had ever beheld. He had preached to him like a father, holding up to him the image of his own absent favourite, David Grieve, as a brilliant ill.u.s.tration of what could be achieved even in this wicked world by morals and capacity. And in the intervals he had supplied the creature with money and amused himself with his _gaminerie_ from morning till night. On their parting the uncle had with great frankness confessed to the nephew the general opinion he had formed of his character; all the same they were now embarked on a tolerably frequent correspondence; and Dubois' ultimate chance of obtaining his uncle's savings, on the _cha.s.se_ of which he had come to England, would have seemed to the cool observer by no means small.

'But now, look here,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles to wipe away the 'merry tear' which dimmed them, after the recapitulation of Xavier's last letter, 'no more nonsense! I come and have it out with that young man. I sent him to Paris, and I'll know what he did there. _He's_ not made of burnt sugar. Of course he's broken his heart--we all do. Serve him right.'

'It's easy to laugh,' said Ancrum dryly, 'only these young fellows have sometimes an uncomfortable way of vindicating their dignity by shooting themselves.'

Barbier started and looked interrogative.

'Now suppose you listen to me,' said the minister.

And the two men resumed their patrol of Albert Square while Ancrum described his rescue of David. The story was simply told but impressive. Barbier whistled, stared, and surrendered. Nay, he went to the other extreme. He loved the absurd, but he loved the romantic more. An hour before, David's adventures had been to him a subject of comic opera. As Ancrum talked, they took on 'the grand style,' and at the end he could no more have taken liberties with his old pupil than with the hero of the _Nuit de Mai._ He became excited, sympathetic, declamatory, tore open old sores, and Mr. Ancrum had great difficulty in getting rid of him.

So now the minister was sitting at home meditating. Through the atmosphere of mockery with which Dubois had invested the story he saw the outlines of it with some clearness.

CHAPTER XIII

In the midst of his meditations, however, the minister did not forget to send John out for David's supper, and when David appeared, white, haggard, and exhausted, it was to find himself thought for with a care like a woman's. The lad, being sick and irritable, showed more resentment than grat.i.tude; pushed away his food, looking sombrely the while at the dry bread and tea which formed the minister's invariable evening meal as though to ask when he was to be allowed his rational freedom again to eat or fast as he pleased. He scarcely answered Ancrum's remarks about the war, and finally he got up heavily, saying he was going out.

'You ought to be in your bed,' said Ancrum, protesting almost for the first time, 'and it's there you will be--tied by the leg--if you don't take a decent care of yourself.'

David took no notice and went. He dragged himself to the German Athenaeum, of which he had become a member in the first flush of his inheritance. There were the telegrams from Paris, and an eager crowd reading and discussing them. As he pushed his way in at last and read, the whole scene rose before him as though he were there--the summer boulevards with their trees and kiosks, the moving crowds, the shouts, the 'Ma.r.s.eillaise'--the blind infectious madness of it all. And one short fortnight ago, what man in Europe could have guessed that such a day was already on the knees of the G.o.ds?

Afterwards, on the way to the Parlour, he talked to Elise about it,--placing her on the boulevards with the rest, and himself beside her to guard her from the throng. Hour by hour, this morbid gift of his, though it tortured him, provided an outlet for pa.s.sion, saved him from numbness and despair.

When he got to Dora's sitting-room he found Daddy sitting there, smoking sombrely over the empty grate. He had expected a flood of questions, and had steeled himself to meet them. Nothing of the sort. The old man took very little notice of him and his travels.

Considering the petulant advice with which Daddy had sent him off, David was astonished and, in the end, piqued. He recovered the tongue which he had lost for Ancrum, and was presently discussing the war like anybody else. Reminiscences of the talk amid which he had lived during those Paris weeks came back to them; and he repeated some of them which bore on the present action of Napoleon III and his ministry, with a touch of returning fluency. He was, in fact, playing for Daddy's attention.

Daddy watched him silently with a wild and furtive eye. At last, looking round to see whether Dora was there, and finding that she had gone out, he laid a lean long hand on David's knee.

'That'll do, Davy. Davy, why were you all that time away?'

The young man drew himself up suddenly, brought back to realities from this first brief moment of something like forgetfulness. He tried for his common excuse of illness; but it stuck in his throat.

'I can't tell you, Daddy,' he said at last, slowly. 'I might tell you lies, but I won't. It concerns myself alone.'

Daddy still bent forward, his peaked wizard's face peering at his companion.

'You've been in trouble, Davy?'

'Yes, Daddy. But if you ask me questions I shall go.'

He spoke with a sudden fierce resolution.

Daddy paid no attention. He threw himself back in his chair with a long breath.

'Bedad, and I knew it, Davy! But sorrow a bit o' pity will you get out o' me, my boy--sorrow a bit!'

He lay staring at his companion with a glittering hostile look.

'By the powers!' he said presently, 'to be a gossoon of twenty again and throubled about a woman!'

David sprang up.

'Well, Daddy, I'll bid you good night! I wanted to hear something about your own affairs, which don't seem to be flouris.h.i.+ng. But I'll wait till Miss Dora's at home.'

'Sit down, sit down again!' cried Lomax angrily, catching him by the arm. 'I'll not meddle with you. Yes, we're in a bad way, a deuced bad way, if you listen to Dora. If it weren't for her I'd have walked myself off long ago and let the devil take the creditors.'

David sat down and tried to get at the truth. But Daddy turned restive, and now invited the traveller's talk he had before repelled. He fell into his own recollections of the Paris streets in '48, and his vanity enjoyed showing this slip of a fellow that old Lomax was well acquainted with France and French politics before he was born.

Presently Dora came in, saw that her father had been beguiled into foregoing his usual nocturnal amus.e.m.e.nts, and looked soft grat.i.tude at David. But as for him, he had never realised so vividly the queer aloofness and slipperiness of Daddy's nature, nor the miserable insecurity of Dora's life. Such men were not meant to have women depending on them.

He went downstairs pondering what could be done for the old vagabond. Drink had indeed made ravages since he had seen him last.

For Dora's sake the young man recalled with eagerness some statements and suggestions in a French treatise on 'L'Alcoolisme'

he chanced to have been turning over among his foreign scientific stock. Dora, no doubt, had invoked the parson; he would endeavour to bring in the doctor. And there was a young one, a frequenter of the stall in Birmingham Street, not as yet overburdened with practice, who occurred to him as clever and likely to help.

Nor did he forget his purpose. The very next morning he got hold of the young man in question. Out came the French book, which contained the record of a famous Frenchman's experiments, and the two hung over it together in David's little back room, till the doctor's views of booksellers and their probable minds were somewhat enlarged, and David felt something of the old intellectual glow which these scientific problems of mind and matter had awakened in him during the winter. Then he walked his physician off to Daddy during the dinner hour and boldly introduced him as a friend. The young doctor, having been forewarned, treated the situation admirably, took up a jaunty and jesting tone, and, finally, putting morals entirely aside, invited Daddy to consider himself as a scientific case, and deal with himself as such for the benefit of knowledge.

Daddy was feeling ill and depressed; David struck him as an 'impudent varmint,' and the doctor as little better; but the lad's solicitude nevertheless flattered the old featherbrain, and in the end he fell into a burst of grandiloquent and self-excusing confidence. The doctor played him; prescribed; and when he and David left together it really seemed as though the old man from sheer curiosity about and interest in his own symptoms would probably make an attempt to follow the advice given him.

Dora came in while the three were still joking and discussing. Her face clouded as she listened, and when David and the doctor left she gave them a cool and shrinking good bye which puzzled David.

Daddy, however, after a little while, mended considerably, developed an enthusiasm for his self-appointed doctor, and, what was still better, a strong excitement about his own affairs. When it came to the stage of a loan for the meeting of the more pressing liabilities, of fresh and ingenious efforts to attract customers, and of a certain gleam of returning prosperity, David's concern for his old friend very much dropped again. His former vivid interest in the human scene and the actors in it, as such, was not yet recovered; in these weeks weariness and la.s.situde overtook each reviving impulse and faculty in turn.

He was becoming more and more absorbed, too, by the news from France. Its first effect upon him was one of irritable repulsion.

Barbier and Hugo had taught him to loathe the Empire; and had not he and she read _Les Chatiments_ together, and mocked the Emperor's carriage as it pa.s.sed them in the streets? The French telegrams in the English papers, with their accounts of the vapouring populace, the wild rhetoric in the Chamber, and the general outburst of _fanfaronnade_, seemed to make the French nation one with the Empire in its worst aspects, and, as we can all remember, set English teeth on edge. David devoured the papers day by day, and his antagonism grew, partly because, in spite of that strong gravitation of his mind towards things expansive, emotional, and rhetorical, the essential paste of him was not French but English--but mostly because of other and stronger reasons of which he was hardly conscious. During that fortnight of his agony in Paris all that sympathetic bond between the great city and himself which had been the source of so much pleasure and excitement to him during his early days with Elise had broken down. The glamour of happiness torn away, he had seen, beneath the Paris of his dream, a greedy brutal Paris from which his sick senses shrank in fear and loathing. The grace, the spell, was gone--he was alone and miserable!--and amid the gaiety, the materialism, the selfish vice of the place he had moved for days, an alien and an enemy, the love within him turning to hate.

So now his mortal pain revenged itself. They would be beaten--this depraved and enervated people!--and his feverish heart rejoiced.

But Elise? His lips quivered. What did the war matter to her except so far as its inconveniences were concerned? What had _la patrie_ any more than _l'amour_ to do with art? He put the question to her in his wild evening walks. It angered him that as the weeks swept on, and the great thunderbolts began to fall--Wissembourg, Forbach, Worth--his imagination would sometimes show her to him agitated and in tears. No pity for him! why this sorrow for France? Absurd! let her go paint while the world loved and fought. In '48, while monarchy and republic were wrestling it out in the streets of Paris, was not the landscape painter Chintreuil quietly sketching all the time just outside one of the gates of the city? There was the artist for you.

Meanwhile the growing excitement of the war, heightened and poisoned by this reaction of his personality, combined with his painful efforts to recover his business to make him for a time more pale and gaunt than ever. Ancrum remonstrated in vain. He would go his way.

One evening--it was the day after Worth--he was striding blindly up the Oxford Road when he ran against a man at the corner of a side street. It was Barbier, coming out for the last news.

Barbier started, swore, caught him by the arm, then fell back in amazement.

'_C'est toi? bon Dieu!_'

David, who had hitherto avoided his old companion with the utmost ingenuity, began hurriedly to inquire whether he was going to look at the evening's telegram.

'Yes--no--what matter? You can tell me. David, my lad, Ancrum told me you had been ill, but--'

The old man slipped his arm through that of the youth and looked at him fixedly. His own face was all furrowed and drawn, the eyes red.

'_Oui; tu es change_,' he said at last with a sudden quivering breath, almost a sob, 'like everything,--like the world!'