“When you are silent, Zouche,” said Thord with a half smile; “We may perhaps meditate upon him in our thoughts, — but not while you talk thus volubly! You take up time — and Pequita is getting tired.”
“Yes,” said Lotys; “Pequita and I will go home, and there will be no dancing to-night.”
“No, Lotys! You will not be so cruel!” said Zouche, pushing his grey hair back from his brows, while his wild eyes glittered under the tangle, like the eyes of a beast in its lair; “Think for a moment! I do not come here and bore you with my poems, though I might very well do so! Some of them are worth hearing, I assure you; — even the King — curse him! — has condescended to think so, or else why should he offer me pay for them? Kings are not so ready to part with money, even when it is Government money! In England once a Premier named Gladstone, gave two hundred and fifty pounds a year pension to the French Prince, Lucien Buonaparte, ‘for his researches into Celtic literature’! Bah! There were many worthier native-born men who had worked harder on the same subject, to choose from, — without giving good English money to a Frenchman! There is a case of your Order and Justice, Lotys! You spoke to-night of these two impossible things. Why will you touch on such subjects? You know there is no Order and no Justice anywhere! The Universe is a chance whirl of gas and atoms; though where the two mischiefs come from nobody knows! And why the devil we should be made the prey of gas and atoms is a mystery which no Church can solve!”
As he said this, there was a slight movement of every head towards Lotys, and enquiring eyes looked suggestively at her. She saw the look, and responded to it.
“You are wrong, Zouche! — I have always told you you are wrong,” she said emphatically, “It is in your own disordered thoughts that you see no justice and no order, — but Order there is, and Justice there is, — and Compensation for all that seems to go wrong. There is an Intelligence at the core of Creation! It is not for us to measure that Intelligence, or to set any limits to it. Our duty is to recognize it, and to set ourselves as much as possible in harmony with it. Do you never, in sane moments, study the progress of humanity? Do you not see that while the brute creation remains stationary, (some specimens of it even becoming extinct), man goes step by step to higher results? This is, or should be, sufficient proof that death is not the end for us. This world is only one link in our chain of intended experience. I think it depends on ourselves as to what we make of it. Thought is a great power by which we mould ourselves and others; and we have no right to subvert that power to base uses, or to poison it by distrust of good, or disbelief in the Supreme Guidance. You would be a thousand times better as a man, Zouche, and far greater as a poet, if you could believe in God!”
She spoke with eloquence and affectionate earnestness, and among all the men there was a moment’s silence.
“Well, you believe in Him;” said Zouche at last, “and I will catch hold of your angel’s robe as you pass into His Presence and say to Him;—’ Here comes poor Zouche, who wrote of beautiful things among ugly surroundings, and who, in order to be true to his friends, chose poverty rather than the gold of a king!’”
Lotys smiled, very sweetly and indulgently.
“Such a plea would stand you in good stead, Zouche! To be always true to one’s friends, and to persistently believe in beauty, is a very long step towards Heaven!”
“I did not say I believed in beauty,” said Zouche suddenly and obstinately;— “I dream it — I think it — but I do not see it! To me the world is one Horror — nothing but a Grave into which we all must fall! The fairest face has a hideous skull behind it, — the dazzling blue of the sea covers devouring monsters in its depths — the green fields, the lovely woodlands, are full of vile worms and noxious beetles, — and space itself swarms with thick-strewn worlds, — flaming comets, — blazing nebulae, — among which our earth is but a gnat’s wing in a huge flame! Horrible! — horrible!” And he spoke with a kind of vehement fury. “Let us not think of it! Why should we insist on Truth? Let us have lies! — dear, sweet lies and fond delusions! Let us believe that men are all honest, and women all loving! — that there are virgins and saints and angels, as well as bishops and curates, looking after us in this wild world of terror, — oh, yes! — let us believe! — better the Pope’s little private snuggery of a Heaven, than the crushing truth which says ‘Our God is a consuming fire’! Knowledge deepens sorrow, — truth kills! — we must — we must have a little love, and a few lies to lean upon!”
His voice faltered, — and a sudden ashy paleness overspread his features, — his head fell back helplessly, and he seemed transfixed and insensible. Leroy and one or two of the others rose in alarm, thinking he had swooned, but Sergius Thord warned them back by a sign. The little Pequita, slipping from the arms of Lotys, went softly up to him.
“Paul! Dear Paul!” she said in her soft childish tones.
Zouche stirred, and stretching out one hand, groped with it blindly in the air. Pequita took it, warming it between her own little palms.
“Paul!” she said; “Do wake up! You have been asleep such a long time!”
He opened his eyes. The grey pallor passed from his face; he lifted his head and smiled.
“So! There you are, Pequita!” he said gently; “Dear little one! So brave and cheerful in your hard life!”
He lifted her small brown hand, and kissed it. The feverish tension of his brain relaxed, — and two large tears welled up in his eyes, and rolled down his cheeks. “Poor little girl!” he murmured weakly; “Poor little hard-working girl!”
All the men sat silent, watching the gradual softening of Zouche’s drunken delirium by the mere gentle caress of the child; and Pasquin Leroy was conscious of a curious tightening of the muscles of his throat, and a straining compassion at his heart, which was more like acute sympathy with the griefs and sins of humanity than any emotion he had ever known. He saw that the thoughtful, pitiful eyes of Lotys were full of tears, and he longed, in quite a foolish, almost boyish fashion, to take her in his arms and by a whispered word of tenderness, persuade those tears away. Yet he was a man of the world, and had seen and known enough. But had he known them humanly? Or only from the usual standpoint of masculine egotism? As he thought this, a strain of sweet and solemn music stole through the room, — Louis Valdor had risen to his feet, and holding the violin tenderly against his heart, was coaxing out of its wooden cavity a plaintive request for sympathy and attention. Such delicious music thrilled upon the dead silence as might have fitted Shelley’s exquisite lines.
“There the voluptuous nightingales,
Are awake through all the broad noon-day,
When one with bliss or sadness fails,
And through the windless ivy-boughs
Sick with sweet love, droops dying away
On its mate’s music-panting bosom;
Another from the swinging blossom,
Watching to catch the languid close
Of the last strain; then lifts on high
The wings of the weak melody,
Till some new strain of feeling bear
The song, and all the woods are mute;
When there is heard through the dim air
The rush of wings, and rising there
Like many a lake-surrounded flute
Sounds overflow the listener’s brain,
So sweet that joy is almost pain.”
“Thank God for music!” said Sergius Thord, as Valdor laid aside his bow; “It exorcises the evil spirit from every modern Saul!”
“Sometimes!” responded Valdor; “But I have known cases where the evil spirit has been roused by music instead of suppressed. Art, like virtue, has two sides!”
Zouche was still holding Pequita’s hand. He looked ill and exhausted, like a man who had passed through a violent paroxysm of fever.
“You are a good child, Pequita!” he was saying softly; “Try to be always so! — it is difficult — but it is easier to a woman than to a man! Women have more of good in them t
han men!”
“How about the dance?” suggested Thord; “The hour is late, — close on midnight — and Lotys must be tired.”
“Shall I dance now?” enquired Pequita.
Lotys smiled and nodded. Four or five of the company at once got up, and helped to push aside the table.
“Will you play for me, Monsieur Valdor?” asked the little girl, still standing by the side of Zouche.
“Of course, my child! What shall it be? Something to suggest a fairy hopping over mushrooms in the moonlight? — or Shakespeare’s Ariel swinging on a cobweb from a bunch of may?”
Pequita considered, and for a moment did not reply, while Zouche, still holding her little brown hand, kissed it again.
“You are very fond of dancing?” asked Pasquin Leroy, looking at her dark face and big black eyes with increasing interest.
She smiled frankly at him.
“Yes! I would like to dance before the King!”
“Fie, fie, Pequita!” cried Johan Zegota, while murmurs of laughter and playful cries of ‘Shame, Shame’ echoed through the room.
“Why not?” said Pequita; “It would do me good, and my father too! Such poor, sad people come to the theatre where I dance, — they love to see me, and I love to dance for them — but then — they too would be pleased if I could dance at the Royal Opera, because they would know I could then earn enough money to make my father comfortable.”
“What a very matter-of-fact statement in favour of kings!” exclaimed Max Graub;— “Here is a child who does not care a button for a king as king; but she thinks he would be useful as a figure-head to dance to, — for idiotic Fashion, grouping itself idiotically around the figure-head, would want to see her dance also — and then — oh simple conclusion! — she would be able to support her father! Truly, a king has often been put to worse uses!”
“I think,” said Pasquin Leroy, “I could manage to get you a trial at the Royal Opera, Pequita! I know the manager.”
She looked up with a sudden blaze of light in her eyes, sprang towards him, dropped on one knee with an exquisite grace, and kissed his hand.
“Oh! — you will be goodness itself!” she cried;— “And I will be grateful — indeed I will! — so grateful!”
He was startled and amazed at her impulsive action, and taking her little hand, gently pressed it.
“Poor child!” he said;— “You must not thank me till I succeed. It is very little to do — but I will do all I can.”
“Someone else will be grateful too!” said Lotys in her rich thrilling voice; and her eyes rested on him with that wonderful magnetic sweetness which drew his soul out of him as by a spell; while Zouche, only partially understanding the conversation said slowly: —
“Pequita deserves all the good she can get; more than any of us. We do nothing but try to support ourselves; and we talk a vast amount about supporting others, — but Pequita works all the time and says nothing. And she is a genius — she does not know it, but she is. Give us the Dagger Dance, Pequita! Then our friend Leroy can judge of you at your best, and make good report of you.”
Pequita looked at Lotys and received a sign of assent. She then nodded to Valdor.
“You know what to play?”
Valdor nodded in return, and took up his violin. The company drew back their seats, and sat, or stood aside, from the centre of the room. Pequita disappeared for a moment, and returned divested of the plain rusty black frock she had worn, and merely clad in a short scarlet petticoat, with a low white calico bodice — her dark curls tumbling in disorder, and grasping in her right hand a brightly polished, unsheathed dagger. Valdor began to play, and with the first wild chords the childish figure swayed, circled, and leaped forward like a young Amazon, the dagger brandished aloft, and gleaming here and there as though it were a snaky twist of lightning. Very soon Pasquin Leroy found himself watching the evolutions of the girl dancer with fascinated interest. Nothing so light, so delicate or so graceful had he ever seen as this little slight form bending to and fro, now gliding with the grace of a swan on water — now leaping swiftly as a fawn, — while the attitudes she threw herself into, sometimes threatening, sometimes defiant, and often commanding, with the glittering steel weapon held firmly in her tiny hand, were each and all pictures of youthful pliancy and animation. As she swung and whirled, — sometimes pirouetting so swiftly that her scarlet skirt looked like a mere red flower in the wind, — her bright eyes flashed, her dark hair tangled itself in still richer masses, and her lips, crimson as the pomegranate, were half parted with her panting breath.
“Brava! Brava!” shouted the men, becoming more and more excited as their eyes followed the flash of the dagger she held, now directed towards them, now shaken aloft, and again waved threateningly from side to side, or pointed at her own bosom, while her little feet twinkled over the floor in a maze of intricate and perfectly performed steps; — and “Brava!” cried Pasquin Leroy, as breathless, but still glowing and bright with her exertions, she suddenly out of her own impulse, dropped on one knee before him with the glittering dagger pointed straight at his heart!
“Would that please the King?” she asked, her pearly teeth gleaming into a mischievous smile between the red lips.
“If it did not, he would be a worse fool than even I take him for!” replied Leroy, as she sprang up again, and confronted him. “Here is a little souvenir from me, child! — and if ever you do dance before his Majesty, wear it for my sake!”
He took from his pocket a ring, in which was set a fine brilliant of unusual size and lustre.
She looked at it a moment as he held it out to her.
“Oh, no,” she faltered, “I cannot take it — I cannot! Lotys dear, you know I cannot!”
Lotys, thus appealed to, left her seat and came forward. Taking the ring from Leroy’s hand, she examined it a moment, then gently returned it.
“This is too great a temptation for Pequita, my friend,” she said quietly, but firmly. “In duty bound, she would have to sell it in order to help her poor father. She could not justly keep it. Let me be the arbiter in this matter. If you can carry out your suggestion, and obtain for her an engagement at the Royal Opera, then give it to her, but not till then! Do you not think I am right?”
She spoke so sweetly and persuasively, that Leroy was profoundly touched. What he would have liked would have been to give the child a roll of gold pieces, — but he was playing a strange part, and the time to act openly was not yet.
“It shall be as you wish, Madame!” he said with courteous deference. “Pequita, the first time you dance before the King, this shall be yours!”
He put aside the jewel, and Pequita kissed his hand impulsively, — as impulsively she kissed the lips of her friend Lotys — and then came the general dispersal and break-up of the assembly.
“Tell me;” said Sergius Thord, catching Leroy’s hand in a close and friendly grasp ere bidding him farewell; “Are you in very truth in personal danger on account of serving our Cause?”
“No!” replied Leroy frankly, returning the warm pressure; “And rest assured that if I were, I would find means to elude it! I have managed to frighten Carl Pérousse, that is all — and Jost!”
“Jost!” echoed Sergius; “The Colossus of the Press? Surely it would take more than one man to frighten him!”
Leroy laughed.
“I grant you the Jewish centres of journalism are difficult to shake! But they all depend on stocks and shares!”
A touch on his arm caused him to turn round, — Paul Zouche confronted both him and Thord, with a solemn worn face, and lack-lustre eyes.
“Good-night, friends!” he said; “I have not kicked at a king with my boot, but I have with my brain! — and the effort is exhausting! I am going home to bed.”
“Where is your home?” asked Leroy suddenly.
Zouche looked mysterious.
“In a palace, dear sir! A palace of golden air, peopled with winged dreams! No money could purchase it; — no ‘Emp
ire Builder’ could build it! — it is mine and mine alone! And I pay no taxes!”
“Will you put this to some use for me?” said Leroy, holding out a gold piece; “Simply as comrade and friend?”
Zouche stared at him.
“You mean it?”
“Of course I mean it! Zouche, believe me, you are going to be the fashion! You will be able to do me a good turn before long!”
Zouche took the gold piece, and as he took it, pressed the giver’s hand.
“You mean well!” he said tremulously; “You know — as Sergius does, that I am poor, — often starving — often drunk — but you know also that there is something here!” — and he touched his forehead meaningly. “But to be the ‘fashion’! Bah! I do not belong to the Trade-ocracy! Nobody becomes the ‘fashion’ nowadays unless they have cheated their neighbours by short weight and falsified accounts! Good-night! You might be the King from your looks; — but you have something better than kingship — Heart! Good-night, Pequita! You danced well! Good-night, Lotys! You spoke well! Everyone does everything well, except poor Zouche!”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 554