At a Winter's Fire Part 16

"Then keep to your sandwiches, sir."

"I must. But the person who invented them was no gentleman!"

"Papa would like to hear you say that."

"Say what?"

"Admit the possibility of any social distinction."

"It is only a question of sandwiches."

"George, must you be a Chartist and believe in Feargus O'Connor?"

"My soul, I cannot go back on my principles, for all that the violets of your eyes have sprouted under the shadow of a venerable family-tree."

"That is very prettily said. You may kiss my thumb-nail with the white spot in it for luck. No, sir. That is presuming. Now I am snug, and you may talk."

"Plancine, I am a son of the people. I hold by my own. No doubt, if I had blue blood to boast of, I should keep a vial of it in a prominent place on the drawing-room mantelpiece. As it is, I confess my desire is to carve for myself a name in art that shall be independent of all advent.i.tious support; to answer to my vocation straight, upright, and manly."

"That is better than n.o.bility--though I have pride in my own. I wish papa thought so. Yet he has both himself."

"The fine soul! For fifty years he has stood square to adversity with a smile on his face. Could I ever achieve that? Already I cry out on poverty; because I want an unenc.u.mbered field for work, and--yes, one other trifle."

"One other trifle, George?"

He took Plancine's face between his hands and looked very lovingly into her eyes.

"I think I did the old man too much honour," he said. "You nestling of eighteen--what credit to scout misfortune with such a bird at one's side!"

"Ah! but papa is sixty-nine and the bird but eighteen."

"And eighteen years of heaven are a good education in happiness."

So they coo'd, these two. The June scents of the little garden were wafted all about them. The moon had come up out of the sea, and, finding a trellis of branches over their heads, hung their young brows with coronals of shadowy leaves, like the old dame she was, rummaging in her trinket box for something for her favourites.

In the dimly-luminous parlour (that smelt of folios and warm coffee) of the little dark house in the background, the figure of papa, poring at the table over geological maps, was visible.

Fifty years ago an _emigre_, denounced, proscribed, and escaped from the ruin of a shattered society: here, in '49, a stately, large-boned man, placidly enjoying the consciousness of a serene dignity maintained at the expense of much and prolonged self-effacement--this was papa.

Grey hair, thinning but slightly near the temples; grey moustache and beard pointed _de bouc_; flowered dressing-gown girdled about a heart as simple as a child's--this was papa, papa who grubbed over his ordnance surveys while the young folks outside whispered of the stars.

Right beneath them--the latter--a broad gully of the hills went plunging precipitously, all rolled with leaf and flower, to the undercliff of soft blue lias and the very roof ridges of King's Cobb, whose walls and chimneys, now snowed with light, fretted a scallop of the striding bay that swept the land here like a scythe.

Plancine's village, a lofty appanage or suburb of this little seaboard town at the hill-foot, seemed rather the parent stock from which the other had emanc.i.p.ated itself. For all down the steep slope that fled from Upper to King's Cobb was flung a _debris_ of houses that, like the ice-fall of a glacier, would appear to have broken from the main body and gone careering into the valley below.

It was in point of fact, however, but a subordinate hamlet--a hanging garden for the jaded tourist in the dog days, when his soul stifled in the oven of the sea-level cliffs--an eyrie for Plancine, and for George, the earnest painter, a Paradise before the fall.

And now says George, "We have talked all round your confession, and still I wait to give you absolution."

"I will confess. I read it in one of papa's books that is called the _Talmud_."

"Gracious me! you should be careful. What did you read?"

"That whoever wants to see the souls of the dead--"

"Plancine!"

"--must take finely sifted ashes, and strew them round his bed; and in the morning he will see their foot-tracks, as a c.o.c.k's. I did it."

"You did?"

"Last night, yes. And what a business I had afterwards sweeping them up!"

"And did you see anything?"

"Something--yes--I think so. But it might have been mice. There are plenty up there."

"Now you are an odd Plancine! What did you want with the ghosts of the dead?"

"I will tell you, you tall man; and you will not abuse my confidence.

George, for all your gay independence, you must allow me a little family pride and a little pathetic interest in the fortunes of the dead and gone De Jussacs."

"It is Mademoiselle De Jussac that speaks."

"It is Plancine, who knows so little:--that 'The Terror' would have guillotined her father, a boy of fourteen: that he escaped to Prussia, to Belgium, to England; for six years always a wanderer and a fugitive: that he was wrecked on this dear coast and, penniless, started life anew here on his little accomplishments: that he made out a meagre existence, and late in the order of years (he was fifty) married an expatriated countrywoman, who died--George, my mother died when I was seventeen months old--and that is where I stop. My good, big father--so lonely, so poor, and so silent! He tells me little. He speaks scantily of the past.

But he was a Vicomte and is the last of his line; and I wanted the ghosts to explain to me so much that I have never learned."

The moonlight fell upon her sweet, pale, uplifted face. There were tears in her eyes that glittered like frost.

But George, for all his love, showed a little masculine impatience.

"Reserve is very good," he said; "but we can't all be Lord Burleighs by holding our tongues. There is a sort of silence that is pregnant with nothing."

"George, you cannot mean to insult my father?"

"No, dear. But why does he make such a mystery of his past? I would have mine as clear as a window, for all to look through. Why does he treat me with such suave and courteous opposition--permitting my suit, yet withholding his consent?"

"If you could be less democratic, dear--"

"It is a religion with me--not a brutal indulgence."

"Perhaps he cannot dissociate the two. Then, he admires your genius and commends your courage; but your poor purse hungers, my lover, and he desires riches for his Plancine."

"And Plancine?"

"She will die a grey-haired maid for thee, 'O Richard! O my king!'"

"My sweet--my bird--my wife! Oh, that you could be that now and kiss me on to fortune! I should be double-souled and inspired. A few months, and Madame la Vicomtesse should 'walk in silk attire.' I flame at the picture. Why will your father not yield you gracefully, instead of plying us with that eternal enigma of Black Venn?"