Our Lady of Darkness

From two till four o’clock on any summer afternoon during the penultimate decade of the last century, the Right Honourable Gustavus Hilary George, third Viscount Murk, Baron Bri...

On a supremely hot noon of August, Mr Edward Murk, walking leisurely along a road pounded and compounded of small coal, came down towards the ancient city of Liége, and paused a...

Facing an opulent sunset, Ned made his way some three or four miles out of Liége through scenery whose very luxuriance affected him like the qualmish aftermath of excess. It gav...

Writhing, as it were, from the edges to a central core of heat, Ned woke to find himself wriggling like an eel in a bath of dripping. He sat up in his dingy cupboard, and feelin...

Monsieur the master of Méricourt would seal that queer compact of entertainment with the nephew of his father’s friend over a bottle of Niersteiner, which he had up from the cel...

“Perhaps it is the war of the spirit with the flesh, monsieur. Who knows, were a man of vigour not to reasonably indulge his senses, if his senses would not maliciously lead his...

The company sprawled over a bank to one side of the clearing where the great tree stood. The wine-flasks lay cool in moss. The two countrymen had thrown off their coats and bare...

It was characteristic enough of M. de St Denys to bear his guest no grudge for the fiasco, chiefly brought about, it must be admitted, by that guest’s malfeasance. With no man w...

In Nicette’s little lodge, doors and windows stood all open. Even then the languid air that entered fell fainting almost on the threshold. The heat of many preceding days seemed...

Mr Murk, recalling, on the morning after the storm, certain ultra-fervid expressions of remorse into which, during it, he had been betrayed, and realising, possibly, how of a sa...

Consistent in his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a littl...

Looking on a certain afternoon (it was that of the 27th of November) from his high perch, Ned saw the people of the streets to be in a more than usual state of excitement and co...

Ned’s chance meeting with the painter, whose art was then much exciting, in a characteristic freak of perversity, the enthusiasm of his fellow-citizens, was the prelude to a str...

Mr Murk was suffering from a _toujours perdrix_ of politics. He needed, he felt, a prolonged constitutional, both to clear his brain of a certain blood-web that confused its vis...

During the course of his short journey from the wood-skirt to the inhospitable hostelry of his former acquaintance, Ned could have thought himself conscious of an atmosphere vag...

Pretty early on the morning following his arrival in Méricourt, Ned strolled up the easy slope leading to the lodge of the chateau, and found himself lingering over against the...

Mr Murk walked straight from the lodge of the chateau out of the village, stopping only on his way to take up his knapsack at the “Landlust.” He moved, very haughty and inflexib...

Before--hurrying like a weaponless man through sinister thickets--Ned had come to within a mile of Liége, the memory of the rather grim comedy he had been forced to play a part...

Of so wanton and inexplicable a nature had been the assault committed on him, that for some three days succeeding it Ned could have fancied himself lying rather in a stupor of a...

During the short course of his restoration to vigour, Mr Murk, indulging that power of self-abstraction that was constitutionally at his command, gave himself no further concern...

Edward, Lord Murk--now three years enjoying the viscounty--was established, during the summer of ’92, at “Stowling,” his lordship’s seat near Bury St Edmunds. Since his uncle’s...

Had Lord Murk been of a present inclination less reserved and withdrawing, he had months before found easy access to the presence of the merry maid, whose little red heels seeme...

A much-stricken young gentleman--very undeservedly released from the onus of a social embarrassment for which he was alone responsible--stood gravely bowing before the lady of t...

Pretty early on the morning after the ball Ned rode over to pay his respects to, and inquire after the health of, the ladies. None, apparently, was as yet in evidence; but Mr Sh...

Twice again only, before he started for the Continent--as he persisted in thinking at her sole behest--was Ned vouchsafed the partial company of his mistress. In each instance h...

It was on a day of the last week of broiling July that Ned knocked at the door of a house in the Rue de Ragule, near the Schaerbeck Gate in Brussels, and desired to be shown int...

The thunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It burned without a flutter, diffusing, ev...

“_Enfin_,” said this gentleman, “if report is to be believed, it is the most timely place for him. At least he will not put himself at the head of the emigrants,” he added, with...

On the very day following that of his arrival, the pendulum of Ned’s particular destiny began its driving swing. He had taken good lodgings in a house in the Rue St Honoré, less...

Pierre-Victorin Vergniaud, the source of much present enthusiasm, the full fountain-head of the Gironde river of eloquence, was already--though but a few months a citizen of Par...

In the early morning of the 10th of August a young man, wearing the uniform of the National Guards, was arrested in the Champs Elysées by a patrol of the very corps to which he...

From the day of the massacre in the Cour des Feuillans, when--a casual and involuntary witness of the opening deed of blood--he had made a desperate attempt to save the life of...

Citoyenne Théroigne had not, it is to be supposed, the wit of a Mohl, or the tact of a Recamier; but her sensuous and long-practised beauty so vindicated her sins of omission in...

At the end of November the young Viscount Murk was still a sojourner in Paris. Always reserved and self-contained, he was become by then a creature of wilful and habitual loneli...

In front of the fire a girl lay on the floor asleep. She had placed herself on her side, facing the glow and cuddled into it; but in the relaxation of profound slumber her head...

“Let the citizen--and, moreover, monsieur the Englishman--rest assured,” he said, “that I accept his commission with a high sense of the compliment implied. But it is not specif...

The morrow--that is always, by some alchemistic process, to convert the drossy problems of the night into liquid gold--greeted Ned with leaden untransmutable skies, that were on...

Snow, soft, dazzling, bewildering, was again falling in the streets as Ned, a spectre of desperation, hurried along them. The city was all one strung movement of flakes--cloud m...