"I have heard it advanced. No. It is hard to hold."

"It is like a mighty serpent. You would think you had it and then it is gone.... If one could hold it it would transform the world."

"Yes, it would. At what are you staring?"

"The serpent is gone. I thought that I saw one whom I do not hold to be art and part with me." He gazed after a crossing horseman. "No!

There was merely a trick of him. It is some other."

"The man for whom you are waiting?"

"Yes."

Deschamps returned to the subject of a moment before. "It is likely that language bewrays much more than we think it does. I say 'the man.' You echo it. And I am 'man.' And you are 'man.' 'Man'--'Man'!

Every instant it is said. Yet the ident.i.ty that we state we never a.s.sume!"

"I said that we could not hold the serpent."

Ten days afterward he did see Ian. The latter, after a slow and difficult progress through France, came afoot into Paris. He sought, and was glad enough to find, an old acquaintance and sometime fellow-conspirator--Warburton.

"Blessed friendship!" he said, and warmed himself by Warburton's fire.

Something within him winced, and would, if it could, have put forward a different phrase.

Warburton poured wine for him. "Now tell your tale! For months those of us who remained in Paris have heard nothing but Trojan woes!"

Ian told. Culloden and after--Edinburgh--Lisbon--Vigo--travel in Spain--Senor n.o.body--

"That was a curious adventure! And you don't know the ransomer's name?"

"Not I! Senor n.o.body he rests."

"Well, and after that?"

Ian related his wanderings from the Pyrenees up to Paris. Scotland, Spain, and France, the artist in him painted pictures for Warburton--painted with old ableness and abandon, and, Warburton thought, with a new subtlety. The friend hugged his knees and enjoyed it like a well-done play. Here was Rullock's ancient spirit, grown more richly appealing! Trouble at least had not downed him. Warburton, who in the past year had been thrown in contact with a number whom it had downed, and who had suffered depression thereby, felt grat.i.tude to Ian Rullock for being larger, not smaller, than usual.

At last, the fire still burning, Ian warmed and refreshed, they wheeled from retrospect into the present. Warburton revealed how thoroughly shattered were Stewart hopes.

"I begin to see, Rullock, that we've simply pa.s.sed those things by. We can't go back to that state of mind and affairs."

"I don't want to go back."

"I like to hear you say that. I hear so much whining the other way!

Well, as a movement it's over.... And the dead are dead, and the scarred and impoverished will have to pick themselves up."

"Quite so. Is there any immediate helping hand?"

"King Louis gives a pension. It's not much, but it keeps one from starving. And as for you, I've in keeping a packet for you from England. It reached me through Goodworth, the India merchant. I've a notion that your family will manage to put in your hand some annual amount. Of course your own fortune is sequestered and you can return neither to England nor to Scotland."

"My aunt may have had faith that I was living. She would do all that she could to help.... No, I'll not go back."

"Your chance would lie in some post here. Take up old acquaintances where they have power, and recommend yourself to new ones with power.

Great ladies in especial," said Warburton.

"We haven't pa.s.sed that by?"

"Not yet, Rullock, not yet!"

Ian dreamed over the fire. At last he stretched his arms. "Let us go sleep, Warburton! I have come miles...."

"Yes, it is late. Oh, one thing more! Alexander Jardine is in Paris."

"Alexander!"

"I don't know what he is doing here. In with the writing, studying crew, I suppose. I came upon him by accident, near the Sorbonne. He did not see me and I did not speak."

"I'll not avoid him!"

"I remember your telling me that you had quarreled. That was the eve of your leaving Paris in the springtime, before the Prince went to Scotland. You haven't made it up?"

"No. I suppose we'll never make it up."

"What was it over?"

"I can't tell you that.... It had a double thread. Did he come to Paris, I wonder, because he guessed that I would bring up here?" He rose and stood staring down into the fire. "I think that he did so.

Well, if he means to follow me through the world, let him follow! And now no more to-night, Warburton! I want sleep--sleep--sleep!"

The next day and the next and the next began a new French life. He had luck, or he had the large momentum of a personality not negligible, an orb covered with a fine network of enchanter's symbols. The packet from England held money, with an engagement to forward a like sum twice a year. It was not a great sum, but such as it was he did not in the least scorn it. It had come, after all, from Archibald Touris--but Ian knew the influence behind that.

Warburton presented his name to the Minister who dispensed King Louis's fund for Scots gentlemen concerned in the late attempt, losers of all, and now dest.i.tute in France. So much would come out of that!

The two together waited upon monseigneur in whose coach they had once crossed the Seine. He had blood ties with Stewart kings of yesterday, and in addition to that evidenced a queer, romantic fondness for lost causes, and a willingness to ferry across rivers those who had been engaged in them. Now he displayed toward the Englishman and the Scot a kind of eery, distant graciousness. Ah yes! he would speak here and there of Monsieur Ian Rullock--he would speak to the King. If there were things going _ces messieurs_ might as well have some good of them! Out of old acquaintances in Paris Ian gathered not a few who were in position to further new fortunes. Some of these were men and some were women. He took a lodging, neither so good nor so bad.

Warburton found him a servant. He obtained fine clothes, necessary working-garb where one pushed one's fortune among fine folk. The more uncertain and hazardous looked his fortunes the more he walked and spoke as though he were a golden favorite of the woman with the wheel.

All this moved rapidly. He had not been in Paris a week ere again, as many times before, he had the stage all set for Success to walk forth upon it! But it had come December--December--December, and he looked forward to that month's pa.s.sing.

He had not seen Alexander. Then, in the middle of the month he found himself one evening in a peac.o.c.k cl.u.s.ter of fine folk, at the theater--a famous actress to be viewed in a comedy grown the rage. The play was nearly over when he saw Alexander in the pit, turned from the stage, gazing steadily upon him. Ian placed himself where he might still see him, and returned the gaze.

Going out when the play was over, the two met face to face in the lighted s.p.a.ce between the doors. Each was in company of others--Ian with a courtier, decked and somewhat loudly laughing group, Glenfernie with a painter of landscape, Deschamps, and an Oriental, member of some mission to the West. Meeting so, they stopped short. Their nostrils dilated, there seemed to come a stirring over their bodies.

Inwardly they felt a painful constriction, a contraction to something hard, intent, and fanged. This was the more strongly felt by Alexander, but Ian felt it, too. Did Glenfernie mean to dog him through life--think that he would be let to do so? Alone in a forest, very far back, they might, at this point, have flown at each other's throat. But they had felled many forests since the day when just that was possible.... The thing conventionally in order for such a moment as the present was to act as though that annihilation which each wished upon the other had been achieved. All that they had shared since the day when first they met, boys on a heath in Scotland, should be instantaneously blotted out. Two strangers, jostled face to face in a playhouse, should turn without sign that there had ever been that heath. So, symbolically, annihilation might be secured! For a moment each sought for the blank eyes, the unmoved stone face.

As from a compartment above sifted down a dry light with great power of lighting. It came into Alexander's mind, into that, too, of Ian....

How absurd was the human animal! All this saying the opposite left the truth intact. They were not strangers, each was quite securely seated in the other. Self-annihilation--self-oblivion!... All these farcical high horses!... Men went to see comedies and did not see their own comedy.

The laird of Glenfernie and Ian Rullock each very slightly and coldly acknowledged the other's presence. No words pa.s.sed. But the slow amenity of life bent by a fraction the head of each, just parted the lips of each. Then Alexander turned with an abrupt movement of his great body and with his companions was swallowed by the crowd.

On his bed that night, lying straight with his hands upon his breast, he had for the s.p.a.ce of one deep breath an overmastering sense of the suaveness of reality. Crudity, angularity, harshness, seemed to vanish, to dissolve. He knew dry beds of ancient torrents that were a long and somewhat wide wilderness of mere broken rock, stone piece by stone piece, and only the more jagged edges lost and only the surface worn by the action, through ages, of water. It was as though such a bed grew beneath his eyes meadow smooth--smoother than that--smooth as air, air that lost nothing by yielding--smooth as ether that, yielding all, yielded nothing.... The moment went, but left its memory. As the moment was large so was its memory.

He fought against it with tribes of memories, lower and dwarfish, but myriads strong. The bells from some convent rang, the December stars blazed beyond his window, he put out his arms to the December cold.

Ian, despite that moment in the playhouse, looked for the arrival of a second challenge from Glenfernie. For an instant it might be that they had seen that things couldn't be so separate, after all! That there was, as it were, some universal cement. But instants pa.s.sed, and, indubitably, the world was a broken field! Enmity still existed, full-veined. It would be like this Alexander, who had overshot another Alexander, to send challenge after challenge, never to rest satisfied with one crossing of weapons, with blood drawn once! Or if there was no challenge, no formal duel, still there would be duel. He would pursue--he would cry, "Turn!"--there would be perpetuity of encounter.

To the world's end there was to be the face of menace, of old reproach--the arrows dropped of pain of many sorts. "In short, vengeance," said Ian. "Vengeance deep as China! When he used to deny himself revenge in small things it was all piling up for this!... What I did slipped the leash for him! Well, aren't we evened?"