Later he strayed into a sunny, green-turfed public garden, full of white statues, sparkling fountains, and municipal seats whereon Burgundian, Dalmatian, and Alsatian wet-nurses dandled or rocked or nourished their infant charges, and bonnes or governesses presided over the gambols of older babies, who played with belled Pierrots, or toy automobiles, or inflated balls of gorgeous hues.
There is nothing profoundly moving in the sight of a stout, beribboned wet-nurse suckling her employer's infant. But into the company of these important hirelings came quite unconsciously a young working-woman in a shabby brown merino skirt and a blouse of white Swiss. Her shining black hair was uncovered to the sunshine. On one arm she carried a bouncing baby, on the other a basket containing cabbages and onions, and a flask of cheap red wine, which receptacle its owner, having taken the other end of the seat Franky occupied, set down between herself and the young man. She was a healthy, plump young woman with too pronounced a moustache for beauty. But when, having methodically turned the baby upside down to rearrange some detail of its scanty dress, she reversed it and bared her breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went through Franky. A dimness came before his vision, and it was as though those dimpled hands plucked at his heart. He suffered a sudden revulsion strange in a young man so modern, up-to-date, and beautifully tailored. He knew that he longed for a son most desperately. And the devil of it was--Margot did not.
*CHAPTER VII*
*THE CONSOLATRIX*
Thus, Franky got up and moved away, driven by the stinging cloud of thoughts that pursued and battened on him, and presently found himself following a stream of people up a flight of marble steps, and under an imposing portico that ended in a turnstile and a National Collection of Paintings and Sculptures.
Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries where the master-works of Modern Art are conserved and cherished, he was to encounter the thought that haunted him in a myriad of images, wrought by the chisel, the brush, the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or bronze, upon canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold.
A sculptured Hagar mourning by the side of her dying Ishmael caught his eye as he entered the first gallery. Farther on, Eve after the Fall lifted the infant Cain to receive the kiss of Adam, homing to his shack of green branches at the end of the labouring day. And a shag-thighed, curly-horned Pan romped with a litter of sturdy bear-cubs, and medallions and panels of childhood were everywhere.
It was the same in the galleries devoted to painting. A Breton christening-party, depicted with the roughness that hides consummate mastery of technique, trudged along a snowy coast-road towards a little chapel near the seashore. The young mother in her winged starched cap and bodice of black velvet, yet pale from the ordeal of anguish, walked between her smiling gossips, carrying her new-born infant, chrysalis-like in its linen swaddlings, to be made into a good Christian by M. le Cure. And seated on a broken throne of red granite beneath the towering propylaeum of a ruined Egyptian temple, whose colonnades of lotus columns, and walls painted with processions of hierophants offering incense to bird or beast-headed deities, and bewigged dancers and musicians ministering to the pleasures of long-eyed kings, receded down long perspectives into distance, a Woman, young and slender and draped in a long blue cloak over a white robe, gazed downwards at a naked Child sleeping upon her knees. And about the downy temples of the Child shone a slender ring of mystic brightness, and another, more faint, haloed the chastely beautiful head of the Mother bending above.
Another canvas, austere and gorgeous, with the marvellous blues and emeralds and rich deep crimsons of old Byzantine ornament in relief against a background of dull tawny gold, showed the same maternal figure, far older and in darker draperies, seated upon a chair of wrought ivory upon a dais, looking outward and upward with deep eyes of unfathomable tenderness and sorrow, and pale hands lifted in supplication to that Heaven whither Her Son ascended after His Victory over Death. Across the knees of the Consolatrix Afflictorum a mourning mother lay prone and tearless. And at the feet of the Virgin, outstretched amidst the scattered petals of some fallen roses, you saw the nude, beautiful body of a male child of some three years old.
But little of the inner meaning of Bouguereau's great picture filtered through Franky's honest brown eyes to the mind that lay somewhere behind them. But he realised that for the grieving woman who had borne a son and lost him there was no more joy in the world.
The Child of that Woman upon whose knees she leaned her breaking heart had lived to attain to the perfect ripeness of glorious Manhood. But then.... Franky followed the lines of the dark, downward-drifting veil up to the rapt Mother-face with the sorrowful, close-folded mouth and the deep, fathomless eyes, and remembered what had happened to Her Son.
"Beg pardon!" he found himself muttering between his teeth. His hand went up, and he had bared his sleek brown head before he knew. This wasn't a Roman Catholic Church, anyway ... there was no obligation even to appear respectful; France had long ago kicked over the traces of Religion--all French people were Freethinkers in these days. Telling himself this, Franky did not replace the shiny topper. One rapid glance to right and left had shown him that the gallery was nearly empty; the few visitors it contained were too far distant to have observed the action. Except, possibly, one person, a lean, short, elderly man in shabby black, who stood some paces behind, a little to the left of Franky, holding a shovel-brimmed round-crowned beaver with both hands against his sunken chest as he gazed with bright, absorbed eyes at the wonderful rapt face of the Consoler; his lips moving rapidly as he whispered to himself, not breaking off or twitching a muscle because Franky had glanced round:
Franky glanced round again, and this time encountered the oddly young eyes of his neighbour, looking from a brown, deeply wrinkled visage framed in thickly growing, straight black hair, heavily streaked with white.
"Monsieur is a lover of Art?"
Undoubtedly a Frenchman, he addressed Franky in cultured English, with a tone and manner excellently graced. The vivid clearness of his amber-coloured eyes, set in the now smiling mask of walnut-brown wrinkles, was attractive. And Franky answered, unconsciously warming to the look and smile:
"Must say I hardly know. Things that clever, intellectual people go into raptures over, bore me simply stiff. Other things--things they howl down--go straight to the spot, you see. And all I can say when I'm hauled over the coals for liking rubbish is, that the rubbish is good enough for this child."
"I comprehend. Monsieur has the courage of his convictions. It is a quality rare in these days. And--this painting particularly appeals to Monsieur? May one be pardoned for asking why?"
The voice was suave, but it somehow compelled an answer. Franky, with an indistinct remembrance of _viva voce_ examinations awakening in him, cleared his throat and fell back a pace or two.... Well set up and well-bred, well-groomed and well-dressed, his figure, beside that other in the priestly soutane of rusty alpaca, short enough to reveal coarse ribbed stockings of black yarn, and cracked prunella shoes with worn steel buckles, made a contrast sufficiently quaint to provoke a stare of curiosity, had any observer passed just then. But standing together on the beeswaxed floor at the upper end of the long, bright, skylighted gallery, the Guardsman and his temporary acquaintance were as private as it is possible to be in a public place.
Thus, at the cost of a heightened complexion and an occasional stammer, Franky explained himself. The painting appealed to him because it recalled a Bible story--made familiar to Franky by reason of having swotted it at School for Sunday Ques. with other fellows of the Fifth in Greyshott's time. Also, on the wind-up Sunday of his, Franky's, Last Term, having passed for the Army with the dev--hem!--of a lot of trouble--a beastly epidemic of diphtheria and scarlet fever having broken out among the children of the Windsor poor, the Head had preached from the text in Big Chapel. And the text went something like this:
"_A Voice in Rama was heard, of lamentation and mourning: Rachel bewailing her children: and would not be comforted because they are not._"
The haggard, beautiful, tearless Rachel of the picture hadn't bucked at the disfigurement and the pain and the danger of child-bearing. She had welcomed them for the sake of the kid.... It was a thundering pity he hadn't lived--in Franky's opinion; "woman jolly well deserved to have been let keep that clinking fine boy to rear."