You are an evil woman, you blight all you meddle with!'

He rode away, grey of face; he believed that he must see his friend hang; he had sworn not to reveal who he was, so that the scandal might be kept from the world, so little or no influence could be used for the unfortunate wretch.

All Madam's servants left her, save an ancient couple, cut off by deafness from gossip; she and Edmund Jenniston were alone in the jointure house the day before the trial, when Mr Barton came to make a last appeal.

'Will you dare, madam, to go tomorrow and bear false witness? For you know that he did not come for your jewels and had no intention of murdering Mr Jenniston—'

'I shall say the truth and put the rope round the neck of a villain,' she declared; then, as he was leaving she asked him for a copy of the Book with a wafer on the cover.

'You must be in great extremity to ask me that—'

'I dream. I think I see the spectre of my husband. I want to say—"I forgive you—go to your rest", but I cannot speak. I thought if I clasped the Book when he appears my tongue might be loosened.'

'It will not be till you have come to a sincere repentance.'

Then Madam jeered and said she had spoken in a wry jest and was afraid of nothing; she asked after Agnes, hoping the girl was dead or crazed; but Mr Barton said:

'There has been a great change in the young woman, she has lost all her timidity and terror of Mr Rowe. She declares she is betrothed to him and has taken a lodging near the jail. If you would have mercy, madam, they would be a very happy couple.'

He fled before her dreadful face, away into the grey mist of the park; I think I can see him now, on his ambling pad, hastening through the chestnut avenue—averting his face as he passes the uncertain shape of the Mausoleum where the late Squire's body mouldered...but his spirit, where was it?

The poor parson put up a prayer to this wretched ghost which might be, for all he knew, wandering in the neighbourhood, and bade him, if he could, save his innocent daughter and her lover...and he believed that he saw an errant shape, like a globe of pale wavering light, start through the ground mist and float towards the jointure house.

Madam and Mr Jenniston were very silent that evening; she had prepared his false evidence, all the lies he was to swear to, and presently went up to her chamber, giving him a silent insult by her last look.

The steward sat alone where the nettles now grow and tried to warm himself, but the fire seemed to give out no heat.

And as he sat there he heard a tapping on the window and rose and drew the curtains fearfully.

There was a dim light showing without, as if one held a candle in the fog, then Edmund Jenniston, peering closer, saw it was no light, but the fat face of the dead Squire, luminous with charnel damps.

As he recoiled into the room he heard a squeaky voice say:

'Edmund Jenniston, wilt thou be damned for this wicked woman?'

The steward did not go to bed that night, but sat crouched over the flames, thinking of many things not pleasant to consider even in the daylight.

On the morrow he took in Madam pillion to town (the Assizes being on) and there she gave her false witness without a blush or a falter; had she needed an incitement to her evil purpose she would have found it in the presence of Agnes who sat close beneath the dock where the prisoner stood.

Then came the turn of Edmund Jenniston; there seemed, then, no hope for Francis Rowe (the tale knows not his real name and rank) and I recall that in those days a man went straight from his trial to his hanging, with the utmost grace of about twenty-four hours...Madam had engaged a room at The Black Horse that she might witness the execution.

But the steward's evidence changed all; he said that Madam had asked Mr Rowe to the jointure house and that he had taken the message, that the young man had come for the sake of the bond, that Madam had made love to him and, on his coldness, staged the fracas.

The prisoner interrupted—'this was not true—he had had no such invitation'—but his words were unheeded; what Edmund Jenniston had said was what everyone wanted to hear; any evil was eagerly believed of Madam, and her infatuation for the prisoner was well known, while the young lovers had the sympathy even of the roughest; the verdict was 'Not Guilty', and the Judge sternly ordered Madam to deliver up the bond.

The wretched woman fainted as she saw Francis Rowe leave the dock and take Agnes in his arms, Mr Garnet, the parson, all the neighbours crowding round them; they left her alone to recover as best she might.

When she got her senses, she cried out:

'Edmund Jenniston, take me home—'

'Nay,' he grinned. 'I do not like the company you keep.'

'How could you betray me?'

'I don't fancy Hell fire.'

He pushed through the crowd and was gone; to Canada, they said; he had amassed a pretty fortune while in the service of Madam.

And she, abandoned by all, rode back alone through the winter evening to the jointure house.

At the Mausoleum the horse shied violently; she believed that a hand caught at the bridle; it was getting very dark.

Beatrice, say you forgive me for dying.'

'I cannot, my lips are sealed on those words.'

Her spirit was broken and her passion dead within her; not even the embraces of Francis Rowe could have warmed her then, as she stumbled over the threshold where the ash sapling now waves and the toads hide beneath flat stones.

Not even Edmund Jenniston for company that night and her utter defeat heavy on her; the two old servants avoided her, frightened of her look.

She went up to her chamber with the bowed back and slow step of an old woman; she was forced to go up, though she knew what awaited her there.

Only one person pitied Madam Spitfire; and that was Agnes, healed by love, happy in all that makes life beautiful; she had persuaded her lover to take her to the jointure house.

'We will ask her to forgive us—we will bring people, friends, round her again—'

They came through the bare woods, he reluctant, she full of foolish hope.

The jointure house was empty save for the two old servants who were, they muttered, leaving; nothing could be got out of them; they did not know what had become of Madam.

No one ever saw her again, alive or dead.

Agnes, clinging to her lover, saw on the parlour table the bond signed by her father; it was weighed down by a heavy gold signet ring the Squire was known to have worn when he was buried in the Mausoleum.

 

3.—THE FAIR HAIR OF AMBROSINE

No record of prior publication found

Claude Boucher found himself awaiting with increasing dread the approach of the 12th of December.

He still called it December to himself; the new names of the divisions of the years of liberty had never taken root in his heart, which remained faithful to many of the old traditions.

Yet he was a good servant of the new Republic and had so far escaped peril during perilous times without sinking into servile insignificance. He was a clerk in the Chamber of Deputies, well paid and unmolested. From the safe vantage of a dignified obscurity he watched greater men come and go; and ate his supper and smoked his pipe in peace while the death-carts went to and from the prisons and the Place de la Revolution—which Boucher, in his mind, thought of as the Place du Louis XVI.

He had his ambitions, but he held them suspended till safer times: he was not the man for a brilliant, fiery career ending in the guillotine; he was not, either, pessimistic; a better epoch, he would declare, would certainly emerge from the present confusion (he refused to accept it as anything else), which could but be regarded as the birth-throes of a settled state.

Therefore, being young and calm and having lost nothing by the upheaval of society, he waited, as he felt he could afford to wait, until the order of things was once more stable and established. The horrors that had washed, like a sea of filth and blood, round his safety, had scarcely touched him; this terror he felt at looking forward to the 12th of December was the first fear that he had ever known.

A fear unreasonable and by no means to be explained.

The first and main cause of his dread was a trifle, an affair so slight that when he had first heard of it he had put it from his mind as a thing of no importance.

One of the Deputies of Lille had put his finger on a conspiracy in the Department of Béarn, involving several names that had hitherto passed as those of good friends of the Republic. The matter did not loom large, but required some delicacy in the handling. The Deputy for the Department concerned was away; no steps were to be taken until his return, which would be on the 12th of December; then Boucher, as a man reliable and trustworthy, was to carry all papers relating to the alleged conspiracy to his house at Saint-Cloud.

At first the young clerk had thought nothing of this; then he had been rather pleased at the slight importance the mission gave him. That night, over his supper in the little café in the Rue Saint-Germains, he began to think of Ambrosine, who had long been a forbidden memory.

She was a little actress in alight theatre that existed during the days of the Terror like a poisonous flower blooming on corruption.

She had lived in a little house on the way to Saint-Cloud, a house on the banks of the river, an innocent and modest-looking place to shelter Ambrosine, who was neither innocent nor modest.

Claude Boucher had loved her; and every night she had finished her part in the wild and indecent performance, he would drive her home in a little yellow cabriolet which had once belonged to a lady of fashion.

They had been quite happy; she was certainly fond of Claude and, he believed, faithful to him; he had rivals, and it flattered him to take her away from these and make her completely his, almost subservient to him; she was only a child of the gutters of Saint-Antoine, but she was graceful and charming, and endearing too in her simplicity and ardour, which she preserved despite her manifold deceits and vices.

She was not beautiful, but she had dark blue eyes and kept her skin lily pale, and her hair was wonderful, and untouched by bleach or powder; fair and thick and uncurling, yet full with a natural ripple, she kept it piled carelessly high with such fantastic combs as she could afford, and from these it fell continuously on to her thin bosom and slanting shoulders.

Claude, sitting in his café, remembered this fair hair, and how it would fly about her when she ran from the stage, flushed, panting, half naked from the dance by which she had amused men inflamed with blood.

He thought; 'To take those papers I shall have to pass the house where she lived...'

He checked himself then his thought continued: 'Where she died.' Ambrosine had been murdered three years ago.

One day in winter she had not appeared at the theatre. As there was a new topical song for her to learn, they had sent a messenger to the little house on the river.

He found her in her bed-gown on the floor of her bedchamber, stabbed through and through the fragile body. The house was in confusion and had been stripped of its few poor valuables.

No-one knew anything: the house was lonely, and Ambrosine lived alone; the old woman who worked for her came in for a portion of the day only. It was found that she had no friends or relatives and that no-one knew her real name—she was just a waif from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

That night Claude went to see her; they had quarrelled a little, and for two days he had kept away.

Rough care had disposed her decently on the tawdry silks of the canopied bed; she was covered to the chin, and her face, bruised and slightly distorted, had the aggrieved look of a startled child.

Her hair was smoothed and folded like a pillow beneath her head, her little peaked features looked insignificant beside this unchanged splendour of, her hair.

As Claude looked at her he wondered how he could have ever loved her—a creature so thin, so charmless; his one desire was to forget her, for she now seemed something malignant.

He paid what was needful to save her from a pauper's burial and went back to Paris to forget. No-one found it difficult to forget Ambrosine; her obscure tragedy troubled no-one—there was too much else happening in France. Thieves had obviously murdered her for her few possessions: it was left at that, for no-one really cared. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine could provide plenty such as she.

For a while she held Claude at night; with the darkness would come her image, holding him off sleep.

Always he saw her dead, with the strained, half-open lips, the half-closed, fixed eyes, the thin nose, and the cheeks and chin of sharp delicacy outlined against the pillow of yellow hair.

Always dead. Again and again he tried to picture her living face, her moving form, but he could not capture them.

He could not recall the feel of her kisses or her warm caresses, but the sensation of her cold yet soft dead cheek as he had felt it beneath a furtive touch was long with him.

But after a while he escaped from Ambrosine; he forgot.

Now, as he remembered the way his route took him on the 12th of December, he remembered.

Not that he had any horror of the house or the locality—it simply had not happened that he had ever had occasion to go there since her death. Probably there were other people living there now, or the house might even be destroyed—in any case he would take a détour round the deserted park.

But it was absurd to suppose that he was afraid of that house or unwilling to pass the way he had last passed coming from her deathbed. It was all over and he had forgotten. So he assured himself; yet he began to recall Ambrosine, and always with a sensation of faint horror.

That night was the beginning of his fear.

He went home late to his lodging near the café and, on sleeping, dreamt very exactly this dream, which had the clearness and force of a vision.

He dreamt that it was the 12th of December and that he was riding towards Saint-Cloud carrying the papers he was to take to the Béarnais Deputy.

It was a cold, clear, melancholy afternoon, and the silence of dreams encompassed him as he rode.

When he reached the great iron gates of the dismantled park, his horse fell lame. He was not very far from his destination, and he decided to go on foot. Leaving his horse at a little inn, he struck out across the park.

He saw it all perfectly plainly—the great avenues of leafless trees, the stretches of greensward scattered with dead leaves, the carp ponds and fountains with their neglected statues and choked basins, the parterres where flowers had bloomed not so long ago, and that now looked as utterly decayed; and to his right, as he walked, always the pale glimpse of the river, shining between the trees.

Now, as he proceeded and the dusk began to fill the great park with shadows, he was aware of a companion walking at his side, step for step with him. He could not discern the head and face of this man, which seemed inextricably blended with the shadows, but he saw that he wore a green coat with dark blue frogs.

And he at once began to conceive of this companion a horror and dread unspeakable. He hastened his steps; but the other, with the silent precision of dreams, was ever beside him. The day had now faded to that fixed, colourless light which is the proper atmosphere of visions, and the trees and grass were still, the water without a ripple.

They came now, Claude and the figure that dogged him, to a flat carp-basin, dried and lined with green moss. A group of trees overshadowed it with bare branches; a straight stone figure rose behind, faceless and ominous. Claude could not remember this place, well known as was Saint-Cloud to him.

His companion stopped and bent down to adjust the buckles of his shoe. Claude longed to hasten on, but could not move; the other rose, took his hand, and led him hurriedly across the dry grass.

They approached the bank of a river and a house that stood there, on the confines of the park.

Claude knew the house. It was shuttered as when he had seen it on his last visit to Ambrosine.