LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 343, 19 July 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC. {Continued,') 'I shall not like Gerard,' said Philip Rutterby, quietly, looking out of window, and passing his thin hand over his thin irongrey hair. ' And why ?' • Because I like Ondelette too well. . . But this deluge will never stop, De Malmy !' he said, with quite a new impatience, turning round and leaving the room. ' Excellent man !' ejaculated DeMalmy to himself. 'I am not sure now but that he will propose to marry her. He is not quite as young as he might be. But what does that matter, now-a-days, when science has added ten years to the average of life? Nelation and Ricord can keep a man going pretty long. The science of patching people up has been carried very far. And then there is no devotion like the devotion of a man who is getting well past middleage, and has been stranded from the sea of passions—into which, however, ce ban Rutterby was never thrown, I am sure.' Philip llutterby went back into the salon with a book. An hour passed, and Ondelette came in. ' See !It is clearing,' said Ondelette, 'and you want a walk. You look rather miserable. Papa can lend you a maceintosh, if you think it will rain again. I will go and put on my thick boots, and we will march away to the Druid monument. Papa never walks out in the wet. He is glad of an excuse to go on with his monograph. I walk alone generally at Pornic. See, there is the sun ! These gravelly lanes about here soon dry up, with the strong west wind.'

So out they walked again together j a thin, wiry, anxious man, with quiet contemplative eyes ; and a blooming girl, all brown and gold-coloured with the warmth of a land near the sun, and the health-bearing sea. The blackberry hedges, glistening after the morning rain, as they walked alorg the lanes, were not fresher than Ondelette. She had to talk, for Philip Eutterby was silent ; but she did not notice his silence, but prattled on about Pornic and Angers, the points of view here on the upland by the sea, the little old chateau at Angers, her brother Le<on, who was ' learning his law' in Paris. If he were wise, she said, ho

would persevere to take it up professionally ; not as a mere finishing accomplishment, but as the business of his life. 'For my brother is not only extravagant, you know, Mr Rutterby: he is very goodnatured and clever besides. He is very easily influenced, except by me, who am young, and by papa who is indulgent, and by mamma, who dotes upon him so.' * Which seems a very pretty way of saying, Ondelette, that he is only capable of being influenced for the bad,' responded Mr Rutterby, with a faint, hopeless smile, which in a bolder man one would have called slightly satirical. «No. Leon is much better than that. All depends on the people he is with. Here, early in the season, he saw something of Monsieur Gerard, who did him good for the time. T think I should like my brother to live always with Monsieur Gerard. I do not know him very well, but it seems to me just this—that I should make him the hero of a story book, if I ever wrote one.' Rutterby made no comment, and there was silence for a minute or two. Ondelette had to begin again. 'You thought that very foolish, I see by your face; and so it was, indeed, for what can we girls know about men till we are married and quite in the world? Supposing I were married to Monsieur Gerard, for instance—only I am too insignificant—no doubt I should find out that he had his faults. . . . Well, but a good man with faults would be only a hero in life, instead of a hero in a story book. Papa, now, has his faults. You, if I only knew you long enough —a certain tristesse is what I should complain about in you. . . . Ah ! now I remember one fault which would be enough to dethrone him from my story book—he does not care a bit for music, Fancy such a thing! 1 1 adore music,.' said Philip Rutterby, scarcely knowing why he spoke so strongly. ' Here is the common, high over the sea, and here the Druid stone. Will you go down into the chamber? There are no ghosts but toads." Philip Rutterby did not care a rush just now for Druid stones; he feigned an interest clumsily; spoke awkwardly about it, in forgetfulness of the diplomatist's creed that the use of speech is to conceal your thought. But the two went down into the cavernous chamber together—the cavernous chamber in the solitary waste land of an opulent country—and came up again, and marched homewards. Rutterby, spurred on almost to folly by a not distant rivalry, was quite aware that he had said nothing worth saying, and he welcomed a swift shower which, as they needs must shelter, must prolong his time with her. Very near them was a large homestead, with granaries, cattle-sheds, and wood-house. ' The wood-house will be the place,' said Ondelette, leading the way with a run, and stopping under the rough friendly roof with her feet on the floor of bare soil, dry with time. The wood was stacked round them. Light enough came in at the unglazed rough windows. Mr Rutterby looked about him at the bare stone walls and high pitched roof, at the sawdust, at a neglected tressel, a neglected hatchet. ' Ostade would have liked to paint this place, with its half lights and shades,' he said. • I should so much like Ostade's pictures, then ! I love anything that is tumble-down and dreary, and common, and dull, and sad,' said she. Philip Rutterby was standing close to her, and now, as she spoke, looked almost anxiously at her dark brown eyes, with their long lashes giving depth to their darkness, and a sense of quietude, much in accord with her young French voice of subtle tenderness. The shower was suddenly over. The two looked out together at the window. It was autumn sunset, Shafts of wan yellow were shot up very feebly by the spent sun, into the greyness and the calm of the high skies. The wind had gone down now, but a deep under roll was in the sea; a turbid sea, of dark grey greens and autumn browns; angry, forbidding, and bitter and wild, along its miles of rocky coast and in uunumbered leagues in the infinite west. Ondelette saw all that, and was a little awed by it. She knew nothing of any element of storm in Rutterby's heart. ' You love anything that is tumble down, and dreary, and common, and dull, and sad,' said Rutterby, repeating her words after her, and laying his hand, which trembled a little, on Ondelette's warm hand by the rough window sill. An anxious, nervous, oversensitive man, snatching with useless haste at the unready Future. The quickened pulses promised a keener life, compared with which that past life must seem but as a sleep. 'Think of me very kindly when I go away, Ondelette,' he said, checking himself. ' You have only just arrived. Do not talk about going,' said she. What should he say next, when her look was sympathy and kindness? Why not say, that suddenly she had become very much to him? But no. For a minute he was silent. ' I shall owe more than one pleasant time and happy thought to you, Ondelette,' he said then, gravely, and lifted the young hand to his bent face, and kissed it. And they went their way. She made her usual music in the evening, but did not try to talk with him, as he was quiet and sad; and she felt that his life must have had some sadness in it—more than she knew of—more than she could understand. Next day, at middle-day breakfast, came a telegram for Rutterby's host. It was from Jules Gerard. De Malmy did not read it aloud, but said presently—in such a manner that no one but Philip Rutterby guessed any connection between the telegram and the remark—' Ha! By the bye, Jules Gerard is coming to stay a day or two to-morrow. Have the second spare room arranged for him, won amie.' It was to Madame De Malmy that De Malmy spoke. But Ondelette flushed suddenly, and. Rutterby saw it. ' My room, which is larger, will be free ; I am going to-morrow,' said Philip Rutterby, resolutely calm. 1 1 hope there was nothing amiss in your letters r inquired Madame De Malmy. ' I am obliged to go,' answered the guest, quietly. ' I do not see at all why this young man should propose to himself to intrude on our happy little party. I am sure I wanted to see more of Mr Rutterby myself; and with two guests, in a small villa, you know ' began Madame De Malmy, again. But her lord abbreviated her discourse by saying, in a full-toned voice, ' I see the archaeologists, meeting at Olisson ' And so the talk was turned to art and antiquarianism. Why analyse Philip Rutterby's mind, or by what devious ways he had come at last, and at last suddenly, to decide to go ? Of

course, if he had coolly and determinately fixed on the idea of marriage, his friend and his friend's wife would have helped his claim. And Ondelette hardly knew herself ; and with her dutiful love, and infinite pity, and young naive sympathy, she might have said she would be Rutterby's wife, and, with her honour and pure-hearted dignity, have kept the promise to the uttermost, and in some sort learnt to love a foreigner, a stranger, a lonely man with his life in the Past and hers in the Future. But how much of that love would have been spontaneous and free? Would it on his part, as time passed, and the new presence and new pleasure became familiar things of every day—would it then continually dominate, as it did in those brief hours at Pornic, over the older memory, strong with the passion of youth, and long renewed by the accumulating thoughts of many days, by the very knowledge of joys that might have been participated, and loneliness that might have been companionship ? No, no. Ondelette, and all the new and possible experience with her, could be but the sweet echo of a far-away voice. And the voice was more than the echo. In the evening Philip Rutterby followed De Malmy to his study, j' Three pages and a half this morning, Rutterby,' said the host, holding up the monograph in triumph. He would not ask his guest the reason of his departure. But Rutterby had come in to speak, and, like most strong-feeling men, he could speak to the purpose when the occasion moved him. ' I have thought a good deal about my going away,' he said, pacing the room with his thin hands clasped behind him, ' and it seems to me only right, De Malmy, that you should only know the reason of it. I have had my last romance at Pornic. I have been in love with Ondelette.' ( To be continued.')