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Museums, Modernity and Conflict

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relation-

ship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have
responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts.
Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and rang-
ing across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book exam-
ines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts
such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contrib-
ute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature
of the objects held by a variety of museums and demonstrates how muse-
ums of war and of the military came into existence during this period.
Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact
on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the
Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and
the State Art Collections Dresden.
Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and
students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums,
war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary
museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the
book will also be of interest to museum practitioners.

Kate Hill teaches History at the University of Lincoln. She has written exten-
sively on the history of nineteenth-century British museums; her most recent
book is Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of
Knowledge (2016). She is Co-Editor of the Museum History Journal.
Routledge Research in Museum Studies

Museum Gallery Interpretation and Material Culture

Edited by Juliette Fritsch

Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums

Edited by Laurajane Smith, Geoff Cubitt, Kalliopi Fouseki, and Ross
Wilson

Exhibiting Madness in Museums

Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display
Edited by Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon

Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience

Tiina Roppola

Museum Communication and Social Media

The Connected Museum
Edited by Kirsten Drotner and Kim Christian Schrøder

Doing Museology Differently

Duncan Grewcock

Climate Change and Museum Futures

Edited by Fiona R. Cameron and Brett Neilson

Animals and Hunters in the Late Middle Ages

Evidence from the BnF MS fr. 616 of the Livre de chasse by Gaston Fébus
Hannele Klemettilä

Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice

Decolonising Engagement
Bryony Onciul

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Museum-Studies/book-series/
RRIMS
Museums, Modernity and
Conflict
Museums and Collections in and of War
since the Nineteenth Century

Edited by Kate Hill

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Kate Hill; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Kate Hill to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hill, Kate, 1969- editor.
Title: Museums, modernity and conflict : museums and collections in and of
war since the Nineteenth Century / Kate Hill.
Other titles: Museums and collections in and of war since the Nineteenth
Century
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series:
Routledge research in museum studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028260 (print) | LCCN 2020028261 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367272500 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429295782 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Museums--Europe--History--20th century. | Art treasures in
war. | War and society. | Historic sites--Conservation and restoration.
| Monuments--Conservation and restoration. | Cultural
property--Protection. | Cultural property--Destruction and
pillage--History--20th century. | Military museums--History--20th
century.
Classification: LCC AM40 M8758 2020 (print) | LCC AM40 (ebook) | DDC
069.094/09041--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028260
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028261
ISBN: 978-0-367-27250-0 (HB)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29578-2 (eB)
Contents

Figures vii
Contributors xi

Introduction: museums and war 1

KATE HILL

PART I
Collecting and conflict 13

1 Salvage and speculation: collecting on the London art market

after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) 15
TOM STAMMERS

2 Treasure, triumph and trespass: the place of conflict

in the collecting and display of ‘Priam’s Treasure’ 39
ZOE MERCER-GOLDEN

PART II
Keeping going? 59

3 The evacuation and management of the Louvre Museum’s Near

Eastern Antiquities Department during the Second World War 61
ZOÉ VANNIER

4 Implementing preventive strategies between World War I and II:

the Catalan art museums and the Spanish Civil War 79
EVA MARCH
vi Contents
PART III
Propaganda, morale and resistance 103

5 ‘The present is pretty terrible, the future is unknown, the past

is the only stable thing to which we can turn’: Philip Ashcroft,
Rufford Village Museum and the preservation of rural life and
tradition during the Second World War 105
BRIDGET YATES

6 Museums without objects? The Staatliche Sammlungen

für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden during
the Second World War 129
KARIN MÜLLER-KELWING

7 Exhibiting in wartime. Nazification and resistance in Dutch art

exhibitions 149
EVELIEN SCHELTINGA

PART IV
Museums of war and conflict 169

8 Displaying Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial: from

the ‘antifascist fight’ to ‘history and memory of the women’s
concentration camp’ 171
DOREEN PASTOR

9 ‘Flight without feathers is not easy’: John Tanner and the

development of the Royal Air Force Museum 191
PETER ELLIOTT

10 ‘We are a social history, not a military history museum’: large

objects and the ‘peopling’ of galleries in the Imperial War
Museum, London 213
KASIA TOMASIEWICZ

11 War stories: the art and memorials collection at the

Canadian War Museum 235
SARAFINA PAGNOTTA

Index 255
Figures
viii Figures
Figures ix
Contributors
Peter Elliott is the RAF Museum’s first Curator Emeritus, having retired
from the post of Head of Archives in 2016. He is now studying for a
PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, examining the development of
aviation museums in the United Kingdom.
Kate Hill teaches History at the University of Lincoln (UK) and researches
the history of British museums. Her recent publications include Women
and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge
(2016) and, as editor, Britain and the Narration of Travel in the
Nineteenth Century (2016). She is Co-Editor of the Museum History
Journal.
Eva March is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the
Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). Her field of study is public and
private collections in Catalonia during the last years of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth century. On this topic, she
has published various books and articles. Her current research focuses
on methodological issues related to the patterns of artistic reception.
Zoe Mercer-Golden received her BA from Yale University and her MA
from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Assistant Curator at Royal
Museums Greenwich, London, and is currently helping to build a new
museum focused on the counterculture in San Francisco.
Karin Müller-Kelwing is a freelance art-historian. Previously she was
Research Associate at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
(Dresden State Art Collections) and worked on the research project
‘Between art, science and politics: Museums under National Socialism.
The Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden and
their scholarly employees.’
Sarafina Pagnotta completed her master’s degree in Art History with
a concurrent diploma in curatorial studies in 2018. Since then, she
has continued her research and has given papers at conferences both
nationally and internationally. She presented at the Canterbury 100
conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of the centenary
commemorations of the Armistice in November 2018. She is currently
working as a research consultant at the Canadian War Museum and will
begin her doctoral research at Carleton University in September 2020.
Doreen Pastor recently completed her PhD candidate in German Studies
at the University of Bristol and is currently working as Teaching Fellow
in German Politics and Society at the University of Bath. Her research
focusses on the politics of memorialisation of the Nazi past and the
xii Contributors
GDR legacy in contemporary Germany. She is particularly interested in
the visitor response to exhibitions and conducted empirical research at the
concentration camp memorials Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg, the House
of the Wannsee Conference and the former Stasi prison Bautzen II.
Evelien Scheltinga is a curator and researcher, with a focus on propaganda
and fascism. She took part in the research for the exhibition The Stedelijk
in wartime at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2015) and had a
curatorial traineeship at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She worked
with Jonas Staal on various projects and exhibitions. Her paper ‘The van
Abbemuseum under Fascist influences. Exhibitions and daily life 1940-
1944’ resulted in an exhibition focusing on Eindhoven’s daily life during
the occupation and the role of the museum during the Second World
War at the Van Abbemuseum, where she currently holds the position of
assistant curator; she works on several projects, such as the exhibition
series Positions.
Tom Stammers is an Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural
History at the University of Durham. His book The Purchase of the Past:
Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris (2020) explores the
politics of collecting, the art market and cultural heritage in nineteenth-
century France. He continues to publish work related to collecting,
connoisseurship, museum institutions, the historiography of art and the
cultural memory of the French Revolution. He has two new research
projects: one related to the Orléans family and nineteenth-century French
monarchism, and another related to the theme of Jewish collectors as
co-investigator on the major AHRC-funded project ‘Jewish’ Country
Houses: Objects, Network, People.
Kasia Tomasiewicz is a final year Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD
researcher at the University of Brighton and the Imperial War Museum.
Her research traces the changing landscapes of Second World War
memory and commemoration at the Museum’s flagship London site. She
uses archival, ethnographic and oral history research methods, and is
particularly interested in methodological approaches to museum spaces.
Zoé Vannier is a PhD student at the Ecole du Louvre and Paris 1 Panthéon-
Sorbonne, and has a double bachelor in Art History & Archaeology and
History (Sorbonne) and a master’s degree from the Ecole du Louvre on
museology. Her research focuses on the protection and rehabilitation of
the National Museums of Beirut and Kabul in times of crisis.
Bridget Yates is a retired museum professional and independent researcher
with a particular interest in volunteer run rural museums, especially
those established in the 1920s and 1930s. She holds a doctorate from the
University of Gloucestershire on the history of volunteer-run museums.
 Introduction
Museums and war
Kate Hill

The impact of conflict on museums is very visible in the twenty-first cen-

tury.1 Not only have museums been destroyed, their collections looted,
and their curators killed in the course of recent conflicts, but older con-
flicts continue to dog modern museums and to undermine their claims to
advance humanity. 2 Equally, though, war and conflict continue to drive the
formation of new museums, new exhibitions and new collections. In 2019,
the Musée de la Libération de Paris opened; while in 2014 the Imperial
War Museum (London) opened its redisplayed First World War galleries,
to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the war, a centenary
which has driven a large quantity of new displays in many museums.3 Legal
frameworks, such as the Hague Convention of 1954, and international
bodies such as UNESCO, have emerged from conflict to protect cultural
property during war.4 Museums are undertaking collecting of contempo-
rary and recent conflicts in Afghanistan and elsewhere.5 Thus museums
and their collections are both at great threat from, and substantially cre-
ated by, modern warfare. Moreover, modern warfare has itself been shaped
by museums. They have helped to define the qualities of the nation which
was being fought for, and shaped the memory and understanding of con-
flict in the aftermath.
This volume aims to extend the examination of war and museum history
into new fields. Some aspects of this history are already quite well-trodden
ground; during the recent centenary of the First World War, museum com-
memoration has been both an action and a focus of study. Attention has
been drawn both to the ways in which museums aligned with new state
mechanisms for remembering war, through official artists and photogra-
phers, for example, and to the ways in which museums adapted and gave
some voice to the widespread experience of loss and trauma and to popular
expressions of this experience through the collecting and donation of ordi-
nary objects of war. Jay Winter suggests that museums were key ‘vectors
of the memory boom.’6 Moreover, museum narratives of the First and then
Second World Wars in museums, which innovatively included both official
and family memories, drove today’s configuration of museums and public
history in general towards the location of ‘family stories in bigger, more
2 Kate Hill
universal narratives.’7 It is clear, therefore, that museum representations of
war have been critical to our understandings of war, memory and museums
themselves. However, the way that war commemoration intersected with
other aspects of museums, such as the physical effects of war on them, has
rarely been considered, and this volume aims to move beyond a focus on
commemoration and engage in new ways with the relationship between
and history of museums and military conflict in the modern world.
In drawing together a number of studies of conflict and museums over a
150-year period, this volume aims to offer a more wide-ranging examina-
tion of that complex and contradictory history and to highlight particularly
the different effects war could have on museums, as well as the different
roles museums could play in shaping understandings of conflict. Despite this
emphasis on diversity and on unexplored aspects of the war-museums rela-
tionship, the volume also seeks to suggest that there is a distinctive align-
ment between modern museums and modern war in two key ways. First, it
suggests that although museums and their history are usually seen as part of
process of modernisation resting on ‘expanding secularisation, individualis-
ation, peaceful bureaucratisation, multicultural integration, tourism and a
growing cultural industry,’ the more violent and disruptive forces of moder-
nity, in particular imperial conquest and the development of ‘total war,’ are at
least as important in driving the development of museums during the period
of modernity.8 There is, in other words, a productive relationship between
museums and war which is part of the modern world. ‘Total war’ has been
defined as ‘modern industrial war, involving the mobilisation of society and
the erosion of the distinction between military and civilian’ (my emphasis),
and is often seen as originating in the nineteenth century (in the US Civil War,
the German wars of unification, or the Franco-Prussian War, or occasionally
as far back as the Napoleonic Wars) and accelerating through the twentieth
centuries with the First and Second World Wars.9 Such an approach to war,
however distinct and wherever and whenever it originated, put museums and
heritage at the service of military action in ways they had not hitherto been.
Museums themselves, it could be argued, while no more exclusive to moder-
nity than war, took on their current ‘modern’ form at the same time as war
itself was modernising.10 Sections 2 and 3 of this volume show that total war
had enormous implications for museums’ functioning during wartime.
Second, the ways in which modern nation states and their populations
engaged with both war and museums has produced contradictory results.
Museums have a role in the legitimation of power and of violent conflict,
and also in the growth of memorialisation and marking of individual
loss. Both trends have been visible in museums over the last two centu-
ries; museum memorialisation can be seen in the nineteenth as well as the
twentieth century, while power and its legitimation was a key question for
museums in the twentieth century, as chapters in this volume on museums
in the occupied Netherlands and in Germany during the Second World War
 Introduction 3
show. Sections 1 and 4 look at these quite different aspects of museums’
role in relation to shaping the meanings of conflicts.

War, nation states and power

In many ways, the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century mark the start of a certain
relationship between museums, especially national ones, and state aggran-
disement. Napoleon’s conquests across Europe were accompanied by sys-
tematic confiscation of cultural heritage assets as part of a wide-ranging
attempt to harness culture to support the creation of an empire. It has been
suggested that he was trying to overlay his military network with a cultural
network legitimising the new, expansionist French state.11 So significant was
this attempt that though it was very short-lived, it stimulated those nations
who had been conquered by Napoleon to create their own national museum
as soon as they were able to reclaim their art and culture; thus solidifying
the principle that military and imperial power, power as a nation, is vested
in control of culture and heritage.12 This was a principle asserted between
European nations, although not necessarily over European heritage; Britain
and France played out a European rivalry through competition for histor-
ical treasures from Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Mesopotamia. Such
scenarios continued in the twentieth century, as Mercer-Golden shows in
her chapter, with the dispersal of ‘Priam’s treasure’ around Europe as well
as Turkey through forces of nationalism and conflict. This means that even
during civil wars, museums and the control of cultural heritage assets have
been a critical part of the conflict, because it is the meaning of the nation
that is at stake and which is both produced and threatened by conflict.
Both March and Vannier explore how fascist regimes of the mid twen-
tieth-century tried to use the circumstances of war to move and display
cultural heritage in order to legitimate their visions of nations and empires.
Even without such national or state engagement with the appropriation
of cultural heritage, though, commercial imperatives also function to put
museum objects in motion during conflict. Stammers’ chapter shows clearly
how the disruptions and economic hardships of war, in combination with
dealers and marketplaces keenly alert to the prospect of bargains, created
a flow of art out of France and into (largely) Britain in the aftermath of the
Franco-Prussian War. Thus, Section 1 examines the way in which mod-
ern international conflicts have created international flows of objects with
major effects on the collections of European museums and galleries.

Museums under threat

Because of the increasingly obvious power functions of museums, they
have become targets in war. Usually sited in city centres, they were acutely
4 Kate Hill
vulnerable to bombardment and air attacks; this was noticeable from the
period of the Franco-Prussian War when the first evacuation plan for
the Louvre was created, but accelerated rapidly and was most prominent
in the Second World War. In the United Kingdom, a number of museums
suffered direct hits in bombing raids during this conflict, and the dam-
age was extensive: Liverpool Museums, the Hunterian Museum of the
Royal College of Surgeons, and the Natural History Museum are exam-
ples.13 Other combatant and occupied nations had similar stories to tell; in
Frankfurt am Main, concentrated bombardment of the historic centre of
the city meant nearly all the city’s museums needed housing in new build-
ings.14 The second section of the volume thus examines the ways in which
threats of destruction affected museums and galleries.
Such vulnerability in fact led to the growth of partial consensus about
the mutual protection of such sites. As Vannier and March demonstrate, the
growth of a heritage profession with common standards and international
organisation led to the start of a focus on the protection of cultural heritage
during war, by attacking and occupying forces as well as by defending or
defeated ones.15 Yet such agreement was dependent on heritage profession-
als having positions of power during conflict, which as Vannier shows was
not always the case, and was strongly threatened by the competing impulse
not so much to destroy heritage as to appropriate it. In both Paris and
Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, works
of art were not just at risk of destruction, but also of being co-opted into
the schemes of the victorious power which would necessitate moving them
from their safe places to which they had been so carefully removed. In the
twenty-first century, the undoing of what was only ever a partial consensus
on heritage protection in places such as Iraq and Syria shows the limitations
of this approach.16
Modern warfare created unprecedented physical risks for museums
and their collections and in so doing also drove new methods of collec-
tion management which allowed for better, safer packing and evacuation,
record-keeping, environmental monitoring and conservation. In the same
way that modern warfare stimulated the development of certain branches
of medicine, especially surgery, so it impacted on museum practices.17
Vannier demonstrates that the Louvre became increasingly systematic in
evacuating its collections, gaining speed and safety from these innovations.
While museums in Catalonia had fewer opportunities to practice evacua-
tion, international guidelines were starting to become available to assist
museum curators and directors in planning to minimise war damage. Thus,
the section reveals the importance of warfare for the development both of
the practices and the networks of curatorship and conservation, developing
international organisations and a more specific professional set of compe-
tences both enhanced the power and prestige of museum work, and acted
to protect museums, in the twentieth century.
 Introduction 5
Museums and the war effort
The requirement that museums contribute to the war effort also devel-
oped in this period. Both museum visitors and museum staff were critical
in simultaneously embracing and evading the job of winning ‘hearts and
minds.’ Museums were more suitable for propagating a general emotional
tone rather than any specific propaganda message, but if they were still
open to visitors (and this is a significant caveat; as Section 2 shows, most
museums increasingly removed as much of their collection as was feasible
and sometimes had to shut because of staff absences through mobilisation)
they were increasingly seen as important for the morale, and patriotism of
the country; under certain circumstances such as occupation and defeat,
they could be even more important and contested.
The First World War largely saw museums struggling on with decreasing
numbers of staff and in some places increasing risk of aerial attack, but
there was relatively little thought on how they might actively support the
war. During the First and Second World Wars, museum spaces were occa-
sionally commandeered for direct contributions to the war effort; in the
United Kingdom, for example, the V&A Museum was used as a canteen
for the air force training college, and allotments for growing food were set
up in the grounds of the Natural History Museum in London. Part of the
Tate Gallery’s basements was used as an air raid shelter, while the Royal
Pavilion in Brighton was converted into a hospital during the First World
War.18 However, alongside these repurposings of museums, there was an
increasing interest in the ways in which, through their museum function,
they could contribute to the war effort.
Sometimes this was largely informational; in the United States and the
United Kingdom, special exhibitions were sometimes produced focused
on food and health; topics which were anyway of growing interest to
museum curators although given an added impetus with wartime condi-
tions.19 The UK’s Department of Information, a 1917 formation designed
to try and create or maintain a ‘pro-war attitude,’ produced a number of
exhibitions for provincial museums, of war drawings, paintings and pho-
tographs, mainly the creations of official war artists and photographers.
However, in 1917 the Department of Information produced an exhibi-
tion on ‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals in the Great War’ which, as the title
suggests, aimed to focus not so much on the war itself and its immediate
exigencies, as to highlight the nature of ‘our national life,’ and its under-
lying values such as democracy. This exhibition toured the USA as well as
Britain and was said to have a significant impact. 20 Jennifer Wellington
has described the general museum contribution during the First World
War as being part of a ‘culture for victory,’ aiming, with some success,
to encourage ‘emotional, physical, and financial commitment’ to the war
across the British Empire. 21
6 Kate Hill
The idea that museums might have more than a practical, informational
role during war time, but might be useful for inculcating values, improving
morale, and encouraging the vision of a certain post-war future, was then
developed substantially with the Second World War when a broader range
of museums in more combatant nations were drawn into the war effort.
By the Second World War, though, and at least across Europe, museums’
relationship with war propaganda became more difficult. It has recently
been shown how far museums in the United Kingdom stepped back from
the officially mandated circulating exhibitions, which were devastatingly
unpopular with visitors and staff. 22 Curators were usually as reluctant
as visitors to put forward messages about the war, especially when those
messages came from a contested political ideology; unless they themselves
owed their curatorial role to that ideology. The role of museums in propa-
gandising for Nazism, in both Germany and the Netherlands under occu-
pation, was substantially determined by the extent to which the slimmed
down museum staff had been purged of non-Nazis and was formed of party
members, as the analyses of Müller-Kelwing and Scheltinga show in this
volume. Moreover, the extent to which exhibitions could be categorised
as ‘propaganda’ or ‘resistance’ is complex; the kind of detailed exhibition
analysis which Müller-Kelwing and Scheltinga provide shows how contin-
gent such labels can be.
Nevertheless, and especially outside capitals, where museums stayed
open they were popular and often looked to the past or the future to engage
with war issues in a more oblique and less overtly propagandising way. In
Spain, the Civil War and aftermath saw an increasing Catalan focus on
Catalonian cultural heritage as a means of developing a sense of regional
identity. Similarly, as Yates shows in her chapter, during the Second World
War in rural Lancashire (UK) the ‘soul’ of the locality through its ordinary
past was held up as what was being fought for. The impulse to look to the
past for the ingredients to make the future, or to escape from the present,
was not universal but nevertheless significant in museums,’ curators’ and
collectors’ responses to war. Museums, then, took on a new role in varying
ways, entertaining, informing and performing ambiguous acts of ‘propa-
ganda’ for embattled populations.

Remembering and understanding war in museums

Modern museums increasingly took on a central role in remembering, inter-
preting and debating war, and a key part of this development was the crea-
tion of war museums. Yet what were these museums, how did they intersect
with other types of museum such as those dedicated to military forces, and
what did they ‘say’ about war? The Imperial War Museum, in many ways
the fons et origo of war museums, was set up in the immediate aftermath
of the First World War, exercising a centralising effect on numerous local
 Introduction 7
efforts across the United Kingdom to keep and remember objects testifying
to the experience of war. 23 Moreover, it was with the First World War that
the widespread national apparatuses of war artists and official collecting
started to be built in many combatant nations, to commence feeding into
national war museums.24 A recent study suggests the United Kingdom has
136 military museums, dating from the 1920s onwards. 25 Of course, mil-
itary museums are not the same as museums of war, and the category of
museums which deal with conflict is both broader and narrower than that
of military museums. That there is no clear way of defining museums which
interpret and display war is clear in the chapters making up the last section;
they show that museums have had a complex journey towards any sense of
purpose and narrative when it comes to representing and remembering war.
They have found themselves negotiating a difficult narrative: between the
national and the individual, between technology and people, and between
celebrating, adjudicating and remembering war.
From the nineteenth century, but accelerating with the increasing ‘totality’
of war in the twentieth century, museums have been used to help ‘process’ and
narrate war, through the collecting of different sorts of object; and to memo-
rialise new sorts of loss and trauma. In the United Kingdom, the Crimean,
but more particularly the first and second world wars have led to a focus on
the ‘ordinary’ soldier and their families.26 Genocide and war crimes, however,
have been hard to fit into existing narratives of war as ‘honourable’ and have
meant that while museums of the military emerged from the late nineteenth
century onwards, their purpose and narrative have been highly ambiguous.27
The chapters in the fourth section of this volume show how unstable
museums’ narration of war has been in the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first; this might be because, as Pastor shows so clearly, political
changes have repeatedly altered that narrative, or as she also demonstrates,
because the range of victims and the range of complicity in atrocities recog-
nised over time has become wider. It is also very clearly the case that muse-
ums’ role in a modern ecology of entertainment, and their responses to the
changing sensibilities of visitors, has profoundly changed the ways muse-
ums frame their coverage of war, and that this change has been ongoing
from at least the early twentieth century. Elliott and Tomasiewicz’s chap-
ters show that while museums connected to conflict might aim to function
as recruiting tools for the armed forces, or focus on the technology of war
through its machines, they might also connect visitors to personal stories
and memories, and an inability to understand this dual role has contributed
to delays and difficulties in creating museums. Such an interpretation is
also suggested by Pagnotta’s final chapter, where alongside the official war
art programme bringing a certain narrative of war into Canadian muse-
ums, trench art made by ordinary soldiers stressed the intimate, emotional
and personal narratives of war, and legitimated such narratives through
public display.
8 Kate Hill
Scope and aims
Although this volume aims to open up and bring into dialogue aspects of the
modern history of war and museums which have not been considered side
by side before, it does so in a preliminary and necessarily incomplete way.
In a single volume, a mere fraction of the wars and combatant nations of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be considered, and we have not even
attempted to cover twenty-first century conflicts. The present volume arises
from the 2018 conference of the Museums and Galleries History Group,
‘Museums, collections and conflict’ at the National Maritime Museum, UK,
which included papers on conflicts from the Napoleonic Wars to Afghanistan.
The chapters here represent a more focused chronological approach; the con-
flicts covered range from the 1870s to the 1940s, although the museum his-
tory covered is broader than this, showing how wars intervened in existing
collection and museum history, and how wars left a long shadow in museums.
The focus is primarily on museums and conflicts in Europe, not because there
is no history of museums and war outside that continent, but rather because
there is so much to say that it cannot be adequately covered in one volume.
The chapters do not generally engage with the history of imperial collecting
and conflicts, partly because this history is dealt with elsewhere, though it
is nevertheless clear that the collections which were threatened, created and
instrumentalised by war were often from extra-European territories, products
of colonial expansion and aggression.28 The settler colonies, on the other hand,
had particular reasons to engage with modern European museum practices
and a chapter on Canada is therefore included.29 Overall, this book aims to lay
out the conceptual terrain linking museums and conflict in productive as well
as destructive ways. Modern museums tend to see their role as contributing to
peace, justice and mutual understanding, but it is important to recognise the
extent to which their modern forms are created by and focused on conflict.

Notes
1. A variety of museums and conflicts are considered in this volume, but they
can be summarised here in the following ways: museums are institutions
which collect and display material traces from the past, including structures,
to communicate with a more or less general public, while wars are conflicts
typified by violence, destruction and mortality and the involvement of mil-
itary forces, regular or irregular. Periods of occupation during particularly
the Second World War are included, even though the occupied nation itself
might not actively be ‘at war’; and conflicts are sometimes followed through
active warfare to cold war and even to strong rivalry (the key point here being
that once war has dispersed objects, disagreements over those objects can last
centuries).
2. On attacks on heritage professionals and heritage sites, particularly in Syria
but also in Iraq, see Mark V. Vlasic and Helga Turku, ‘“Blood Antiquities”:
Protecting Cultural Heritage Beyond Criminalisation,’ Journal of Interna-
tional Criminal Justice, 14 (2016), pp. 1175–97. An example of a long-past
conflict whose echoes continue to be felt in museums today is the Benin
 Introduction 9
City Punitive Expedition covered in Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa:
Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and
Edwardian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). The contin-
uing impact on museums is the subject of Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums:
The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London:
Pluto, 2020 forthcoming).
3. Government of France, ‘The new Musée de la Libération de Paris has
opened!,’ 25.08.2019, online, available at: https://www.gouvernement.fr/en/
the-new-musee-de-la-liberation-de-paris-has-opened; Heritage Fund, ‘New
First World War galleries at IWM London,’ 16.07.2014, online, available at:
https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/news/new-first-world-war-galleries-iwm-
london; IWM, ‘New Second World War and Holocaust Gallery plans
unveiled,’ 29.08.2019, online, available at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/
new-second-world-war-and-holocaust-gallery-plans-unveiled.
4. Michael Pesendorfer, ‘Respecting and Protecting Cultural Heritage in Peace
Support Operations – A Pragmatic Approach,’ in Cultural Heritage in the
Crosshairs: Protecting Cultural Property During Conflict, ed. by J. Kila and
J. A. Zeidler (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Astrid Swenson, ‘The First Heritage Interna-
tional(s): Conceptualising Global Networks before UNESCO,’ Future Anterior:
Journal of History Preservation History Theory and Criticism, 13: 1 (2016),
pp. 1–15.
5. IWM, ‘Contemporary conflicts,’ n.d., online, available at: https://www.iwm.
org.uk/projects-partnerships/contemporary-conflicts-programme.
6. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History
in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 222.
7. Winter, Remembering War, p. 40.
8. Peter Aronsson, ‘Explaining National Museums,’ in National Museums:
New Studies from Around the World, ed. by Simon Knell et al (London: Rou-
tledge, 2011), p. 31. This of course aligns with competing interpretations and
understandings of modernity itself: as the rational product of Enlightenment
thought or as an aggressive set of ideologies and practices directed towards
establishing European dominance over the rest of the world; on modernity’s
links to colonialism see Gurminder Bhambra, ‘Historical Sociology, Moder-
nity and Postcolonial Critique,’ American Historical Review, 116: 3 (2011),
pp. 653–62; on the relationship between the Enlightenment and violence as
one at least in part derived from the violent nation-building of the French
Revolution, see Tadd Fernee, Enlightenment and Violence: Modernity and
Nation-Making (New Delhi: SAGE, 2014).
9. Andrew Barros, ‘Strategic bombing and restraint in “total war”, 1915–18,’ The
Historical Journal, 52: 2 (2009), 413–31; see also Roger Chickering and Stig
Förster, ‘Are we there yet? World War II and the theory of total war,’ in R. Chick-
ering, S. Förster and Bernd Greiner (eds.), A World at Total War: Global Conflict
and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009); Roger Chickering, ‘Total war: the use and abuse of a concept,’ in
Manfred F. Boemeke, R. Chickering and S. Förster (eds), Anticipating Total War:
The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Hew Strachan, ‘On total war and modern war,’ The
International History Review, 22: 2 (2000), 341–70, among others.
10. The modern museum, like ‘total war,’ has been seen as coming into existence
at a wide variety of dates, but here I follow Tony Bennett in seeing it as a nine-
teenth-century creation, based on a new kind of public rationality: Bennett,
The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Abingdon: Routledge,
1995), p. 1.
10 Kate Hill
11. Andrew McClennan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the Origins of
the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1994); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Muse-
ums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 176.
12. Napoleon’s Legacy: The Rise of National Museums in Europe 1794–1830,
ed. by Debora Meijers, Ellinoor Bergvelt, Lieske Tibbe, Elsa van Wezel (Ber-
lin: G. & H. Verlag, 2009).
13. Pearson, Museums in the Second World War, p. 68; Hunterian Museum,
‘History,’ https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums-and-archives/hunterian-mu-
seum/about-us/history/; Kerry Lotzof and Josh Davis, ‘The Museum at war-
time,’ Natural History Museum 2018, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/
the-museum-during-wartime.html.
14. Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘Museum architecture: a brief history,’ in A Com-
panion to Museum Studies, ed. by Sharon Macdonald (Oxford: Blackwell,
2011), p. 236.
15. See also Krysia Spirydowicz, ‘Rescuing Europe’s Cultural Heritage: The Role
of the Allied Monuments Officers in World War II,’ in Archaeology, Cultural
Property, and the Military, ed. by Laurie Rush (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer,
2010).
16. See The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq, ed. by Peter Stone and
Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2008).
17. On the development of surgery, see for example Panagiotis Stathapoulos,
‘Maxillofacial surgery: the impact of the Great War on both sides of the
trenches,’ Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, 22: 1 (2018), pp. 21–5.
18. Lotzof and Davis, ‘Museum at wartime’; Katrina Royall, ‘The V&A at war:
1939–1945,’ V&A 2005, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/v-and-a-at-
war-1939–45/; anon., ‘Archive journeys: Tate history,’ http://www2.tate.org.
uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/war_uses.htm; Royal Pavilion Brighton, ‘WW1
and the Royal Pavilion,’ https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/royalpavilion/history/
ww1-and-the-royal-pavilion/.
19. Gaynor Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War: A Social History,
London: Leicester University Press 1994, p. 65; Julie K. Brown, ‘Connect-
ing health and the museum: an exhibition initiative by the National Health
Council at the Smithsonian Institution’s United States National Museum,
1922–1924,’ Museum History Journal, 12: 2 (2020), p. 3.
20. Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War, pp. 68–70.
21. Jennifer Wellington, ‘War Trophies, War Memorabilia, and the Iconography
of Victory in the British Empire,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 54: 4
(2019), 737–58, 740.
22. Catherine Pearson, Museums in the Second World War: Curators, Culture
and Change, ed. by Suzanne Keene (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 75–81.
23. Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War, esp. chapter 10.
24. Wellington, ‘War trophies,’ 738.
25. Louise Tythacott, ‘Trophies of War: Representing ‘Summer Palace’ Loot in
Military Museums in the UK,’ Museum & Society, 13: 4 (2015), 469–88,
470.
26. Holly Furneaux and Sue Prichard, ‘Contested Objects: Curating Soldier Art,’
Museum & Society, 13: 4 (2015), pp. 447–61.
27. Military arms and armour display predates the nineteenth century by some
time; various older and disused items were on public display at the Tower of
London from the seventeenth century, for example: Malcolm Mercer, ‘Shap-
ing the Ordnance Office Collections at the Tower of London: The impact of
colonial expansion, diplomacy, and donation in the early nineteenth century,’
 Introduction 11
Museum History Journal, 9: 2 (2016), pp. 153–67, here p. 154. The Royal
United Services Museum was founded in 1831 and went beyond ordnance in
its military collections, but as Hartwell shows even in the nineteenth century
there was an enduring tension between reluctance to endorse militarism, and
desire to valorise military heroes and military successes: Nicole M. Hartwell,
‘A repository of virtue? The United Service Museum, collecting, and the pro-
fessionalization of the British Armed Forces, 1829–1864,’ Journal of the His-
tory of Collections, 31: 1 (2019), pp. 77–91, here p. 77.
28. On imperial/colonial violence and museums, see for example Colonialism
and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. by Tim Bar-
ringer and Tom Flynn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998); Curating Empire: Muse-
ums and the British Imperial Experience, ed. by Sarah Longair and John
McAleer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Alice Conklin, In
the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France 1850–1950
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
29. Again see Wellington for Australian museums’ engagement with ‘British’ sen-
timents on the First World War: ‘War trophies,’ p. 742.
Part I

Collecting and conflict

1 Salvage and speculation
Collecting on the London art
market after the Franco-Prussian
War (1870–1871)
Tom Stammers

Introduction
According to Guido Guerzoni in his celebrated overview of the British art
market: ‘War was the true mother of the market, with its thefts, robberies,
abuses of power and confiscations.’ In a provocative analysis, Guerzoni
described how the nineteenth-century artistic economy thrived on the
‘decomposition’ of the social structures in neighbouring states. ‘From time
immemorial, traumatic political turmoil (risings, rebellions, coups etc)
were accompanied by the arrival of exiles and fugitives in London, a city
which welcomed them with the sale of their treasures.’1 This observation
was true for the entire age of revolutions, as British collectors had been
quick to profit from the periodic crises engulfing the French monarchy, and
their acquisitions fed into museum and gallery development. The abolition
of corporate institutions and the attack on the nobility and clergy after
1789 threw a huge quantity of artworks onto the open market, with British
aristocrats in the vanguard of buying up Boulle cabinets, Sèvres porcelain
and rare books (a cross-Channel trade that flourished with the conniv-
ance of French dealers and despite the imposition of a wartime blockade).2
Thanks in part to the influx of émigré collections, London emerged from
the French Revolution as the undisputed hegemon of the European art mar-
ket. London’s commanding share of art arose from its commercial dyna-
mism, in marked contrast to coercive methods employed by Napoleonic
armies who plundered continental collections for the profit of the Louvre.3
Subsequent revolutions in July 1830 (with the overthrow of the Bourbons)
and February 1848 (the fall of the Orléans dynasty) drove the toppled
dynasties into exile. For pretenders of all stripes, London became a site
of political manoeuvring and financial restructuring. The recently elected
Prince-President of the Second Republic, Louis-Napoléon, arranged a sale at
Christie’s in 1849 to free up capital for his imperial ambitions; in May 1853
Christie’s witnessed the dispersal of the paintings of Louis-Philippe, includ-
ing many Spanish masters, three years after the king’s death at Claremont,
Surrey.4 The crisis of 1870–1871 was particularly acute, since it witnessed
not only the collapse of the monarchical system – embodied in the Second
16 Tom Stammers
Empire of Napoleon III – but also military defeat at the hands of Prussia,
a painful occupation and siege of the capital, and finally a metropolitan
insurgency against the National Government in Versailles. With the data
taken from customs receipts and the volume of imports, Guerzoni argued
that in 1870–1871 the number of auctions in Paris fell from 383 in 1869
to 268 in 1870 and 80 in 1871, as the political and military crisis brought
business to a standstill, whereas in London over these same years the num-
ber of sales increased from 196 to 205, and from 223 to 231 by 1872. This
can be backed up by considering London’s market share of European sales,
which rose from 25% in 1869 to 32% in 1870, 41% in 1871 – the zenith of
the crisis – and remained a healthy 31% in 1872.5
Guerzoni’s econometric approach has underlined the central dynamic
by which different poles of the art market were periodically paralysed or
replenished by the effects of war. Such indirect consequences of conflict on
collecting have received far less attention that more overtly coercive pro-
cesses of transferring and sometimes deliberately destroying works of art,
some of which were also visible in 1870–1871. Prussian scholars in 1870
undertook a full inquiry into works of art which had been looted from
German galleries by the Napoleonic armies seven decades before, although
the reclamation of lost art was not written into the final peace treaty.6 The
French press were horrified by the destruction of historic buildings caused
by Prussian shelling – such as the burning of the palace of Saint-Cloud,
and the loss of the library at Strasbourg – finding in this type of cultural
atrocities a barbaric assault on French civilisation.7 Meanwhile within Paris
the revolutionary government of the Commune instigated a policy of icon-
oclasm against the despised symbols of the monarchical past, whether the
memorial to Louis XVI, the Chapelle Expiatoire (which was not demol-
ished due to lack of time) or the Vendôme Column topped by a statue of
Napoleon I (which was). The enduring intolerance to political signs in
France has been recently diagnosed by Emmanuel Fureix via the metaphor
of the ‘injured eye’ (l’oeil brisé).8 Confiscation, looting, expropriation,
iconoclasm, vandalism: such phenomena have been generated a significant
literature, whereas the less volitional and more dispersive aspects of cul-
tural politics, as expressed through the market, demand fuller investiga-
tion. Yet it was out of the market that major private and public collections
were formed across the century, as individuals and institutions speculated
on the opportunities afforded by war to buy and sell, vying to possess (and
protect) artworks displaced or imperilled by violence. In this perspective,
the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune represent a fascinating
chapter in how art collections became enmeshed in the political crisis, a
chapter with lasting consequences for the fate of museums across Europe.
Artworks were portable, and their trajectories followed the flood of
refugees produced by war. As the Second Empire unravelled at astonish-
ing speed in early September 1870, the desperate former Surintendant des
 Salvage and speculation 17
Beaux-Arts, the comte de Nieuwerkerke, fled to London to dispose of his
collections. Here he found a buyer for his Renaissance objets d’art and
superb arms and armour in the shape of Richard Wallace.9 A great phi-
lanthropist to the besieged French capital (as commemorated in the city’s
drinking fountains), Wallace nonetheless doubted whether Paris could ever
be a safe place to house the objects he had inherited from the Hertford
estate. In 1872 Wallace displayed his new purchases before a mass public
at Bethnal Green and three decades later, his widow would bequeathed the
exceptional collection of fine and decorative art built up by succeeding gen-
erations of the Hertford family to London.10 In this way, the decisions made
by collectors in the heat of the conflict profoundly shaped the contents and
creation of a major British museum, one which introduced a thoroughly
French collection of art, assembled in Paris, to a new audience. Elsewhere,
the events of 1870–1871 pushed collectors in different directions: an ardent
Bonapartist, Louis Carrand, could not reconcile himself to the new French
Republic and bequeathed his own medieval and Renaissance artefacts
to the Barghello in Florence.11 Having narrowly escaped being shot by
Communards, the violence in Paris prompted Théodore Duret and Henri
Cernuschi to journey to Japan in 1871, a visit which profoundly shaped the
development of Asian collections at the Musée Cernuschi, now owned by
the City of Paris.12
Conflict and revolution were catalysts for the consolidation, the reloca-
tion and the dispersal of collections, although these processes have often
been difficult to acknowledge within conventional institutional histories.
Nonetheless, period observers could be disarmingly candid about the pros-
pects for buying art in wartime. The paintings acquired by William Tilden
Blodgett, and which represent the founding collection of the Metropolitan
Museum in New York, were sourced in Belgium and France in 1871. ‘At any
other time their purchase would not have been possible’ according to The
New York World.13 This chapter explores the traffic of art out of France dur-
ing or immediately after the political crisis. The aim is to consider the impact
of the war on different kinds of artworks – especially Old Master paintings
and the decorative arts – which left French shores and appeared in London
auctions. It goes further in insisting that the dislocation and circulation of art-
works was not just a side-product of the conflict, but a crucial means through
which curious Londoners could experience the drama at one remove. In the
spring of 1871, they could already relive the siege of Paris thanks to a special
exhibition held on Argyll street in a building branded ‘The Palais-Royal,’
and where they could see maps, models, ‘living photographs’ of captured
French and German ‘officers’ and even a mitrailleuse or volley gun used in
the battles (see Figure 1.1).14 In a less-sensational vein, the London salerooms
were another venue in which the British public could directly encounter the
fallout from the conflict, its victims, its ideas and its ruins, just as they had
encountered the remnants of earlier French Revolutions.
18 Tom Stammers

Figure 1.1 Exhibition relating to the Siege of Paris, Palais Royal, Argyll Street,
1871 [@ Victoria & Albert Museum, London]

Cross-Channel commerce
On 8 September 1870, Paul Durand-Ruel left his family and travelled to
London with 35 crates of paintings where he set up business in the unfor-
tunately named ‘German Gallery’ on New Bond Street. In January 1871,
Durand-Ruel’s life was changed when he was introduced to the young
draft dodger, Claude Monet. As the compelling exhibition at the Tate in
2017 demonstrated, the future Impressionists were among the least com-
mercially successful of the colony of refugee artists in London, since they
were rejected from exhibiting at the Royal Academy (unlike Salon favourite
 Salvage and speculation 19
Jean-Louis Gérôme), failed to find patrons (unlike the Communard sculp-
tor, Jules Dalou) and failed to attract much attention at the Kensington
international exhibition in spring 1871 (unlike Meissonnier). In Camille
Pissarro’s gloomy analysis: ‘Here there is no art, it is all a matter of busi-
ness.’15 Their marginal position in the market is radically different from an
artist like Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, the sculptor who organised suc-
cessful sales of his terracotta through Christie’s in November 1871.16 The
focus on a handful of avant-garde painters has prevented reflection for how
the so-called année terrible played out on other sections of the art market.
One valuable window on this process comes from the stock books of
Agnews, a firm originally from Liverpool but with premises on Bond Street
and which emerged as leading dealers of reproductive prints, Old Masters
and contemporary painting. Intriguingly, Charles Morland Agnew was fas-
cinated by events in Paris and his diary records a trip he and his father
William made to the French capital in mid-September 1871, mirroring the
delight many British tourists took in the sublimity of the ruins. On this
occasion he visited many of the sites reduced to rubble either by Prussian
shelling or the terrible fires of la semaine sanglante, the week of street
battles fought between the Communards and the Versaillais troops deter-
mined to recapture the city. The scars of battle were apparent everywhere
(‘marks of firing on several houses’); the Tuileries and the Hôtel-de-Ville
lay in ashes, shot marks were visible on Notre-Dame, the outlying palace of
Saint-Cloud was a ‘mass of burnt things’ and he inspected ‘the stump of the
Vendôme column, which the communists pulled down.’ Agnew also found
time to visit studios of artists like William Wyld, see the galleries of the
Louvre which were still accessible (‘some of it is burned down’) and exam-
ined ‘a very pretty picture in Mr. Petit’s rooms, which W. wanted to buy.’17
The ledgers in London confirm the importance of Agnew’s contacts
with European dealers. On 6 August 1872 Paul Durand-Ruel bought
from Agnew’s Paul Delaroche’s Christ in the Garden and on 30 June
1873 he sold them a genre scene by Antony Serres, The Widow. Such
academic and Romantic canvases were more regular staples of Durand-
Ruel’s dealing than the works of Manet or Monet, which were a minor
concern at this juncture. He even took a gamble on the English school:
on 12 June 1871 he sold to Thomas Agnew a work by Pre-Raphaelite
painter John Everett Millais, namely The Bridesmaid, which now hangs
in the Fitzwilliam Museum.18 Durand-Ruel was only one of several
French dealers in modern painting who were active in London during
these busy years. Agnew’s conducted with Georges Petit and Alexandre
Bernheim, both of whom would in future play a major role in marketing
Impressionism. In 1870–1871, by contrast, they were trading in Barbizon
landscapes by artists such as Daubigny, Troyon and Diaz, as well as the
fashionable Félix Ziem, all of whom already had a loyal following among
British industrialists.19
20 Tom Stammers
Moreover, the presence of French dealers was matched if not exceeded
by that of Belgian agents. In the bifocal analysis of Guerzoni, centred on
the rivalry of London and Paris the role of Brussels is underrated, yet it
attracted a significant number of artistic refugees in 1870–1871 (includ-
ing Eugène Boudin and Carolus-Duran) as well as anxious collectors and
dealers like Durand-Ruel. Belgian dealers were also highly influential in
London, not just the so-called prince of the Victorian art world, Ernest
Gambart, who had pioneered the successful ‘French Gallery’ in the 1860s,
but also Prosper-Léopold Everard, who opened a distinct ‘Flemish Gallery’
on Pall Mall in 1871. 20 As the case of Gambart suggests, the war did not
represent a sudden breakthrough so much as an acceleration of the interna-
tional business ties that had been growing across the past two decades. In
the famous words of Pamela Fletcher, shoppers could already do a ‘Grand
Tour on Bond Street’ taking in European art schools simply by passing
by different dealers’ windows. The luxury shopping precinct around St
James and the West End was predicated on a certain cosmopolitan specta-
torship and continental chic. 21 Already in May 1870, a month before war
was declared, Everard had organised a sale of popular Flemish and Dutch
artists at Christie’s. 22 These continuities in personnel were crucial for help-
ing refugees assimilate. Durand-Ruel’s chief associate in London, Henry
Wallis, had previously succeeded Gambart at the ‘French Gallery.’23
What goods, though, were actually changing hands? In what follows,
my analysis will be focused on the evidence from Christie’s, Manson &
Woods on King street, who were the chief handlers of the period, although
it is important to recognise other relevant sales that were held by rival firms
such as Philips and Fosters. 24 Sales labelled as ‘From Paris,’ or ‘Property
of a French Nobleman’ punctuated the calendar of Sotheby’s and Foster’s
auction houses through the spring and summer of 1871. 25 On closer inspec-
tion, this supposed nobleman was often a fictive persona, created to tie
together and enhance disparate lots, only some of which might have orig-
inated in France. Take the sale of decorative arts objects which took place
at Christie’s on 10 July 1871, where the consignment records reveal that
the anonymous vendor was Charles-Félix Maillet du Boullay. A student of
Charles Percier, this prominent architect had undertaken major restoration
work in Rouen, although in the summer of 1871 he listed his home address
as Trevor Square in Knightsbridge and the Rue Royale in Brussels, where
he had presumably taken refuge. 26 Among his rich collection of porcelain,
glass, carved panels and jewellery was a superb 1737 Beauvais tapestry,
mounted by the arms of the marquis de Boufflers and one of eight designed
and signed by Oudry, who was then director of the factory. It was sold to
Moon for £37 6s. 27
By using the consignment books and annotated catalogues, the identities
of the sellers and those transporting the lots to and from the premises at
Kings Street can be reconstructed, testifying to a web of cross-Channel
 Salvage and speculation 21
connections. 28 When considering French aristocratic vendors who used
Christie’s in the wake of the Commune, two consecutive sales in June 1871
merit dissecting in some detail. On 3 June 1871, hidden within a larger
sale, appeared ‘twenty important pictures, the property of the marquis du
Lau.’29 This abbreviation referred to the marquis Alfred du Lau d’Allemans,
famously depicted by James Tissot as a lounging gentleman in the golden
waistcoat on the far left of his group portrait of the exclusive social club,
the cercle royale (Figure 1.2). In the words of one recent historian, he was
the ‘paragon of elective sloth,’ deciding due to his unbending monarchist
principles to retire from public life.30 The marquis was also a noted collec-
tor with an eye for a profit, as recalled in the memoirs of Durand-Ruel. He
had sold Durand-Ruel Delacroix’s Convulsionnaires of Tangiers in 1869
at a price of 48,500 francs, having paid only 29,000 francs for it 11 years
before.31 Whilst he saw military service during the Franco-Prussian War, it
seems he turned to Christie’s as the surest way to generate capital, needed
to repair his ancestral home Montardy in the Dordogne whose library had
been wrecked by fire in 1870.32
The first lot of his 20 paintings was not delivered by the marquis, accord-
ing to consignment records, but Charles Haas, his Jewish comrade from
the Jockey Club (and one of the models for Swann in Proust’s epic novel)
whose address in London was listed as Duke Street.33 It was a Romney
portrait of a young lady snapped up by Colnaghi for £186 10s – one of the
top prices of the sale. A second lot, this time a Renaissance Madonna by

Figure 1.2 James Tissot, The cercle de la rue royale (1868) [Musée d’Orsay/Google
Art Project]
22 Tom Stammers
Marco d’Oggione, appears to have been put forward by another French
aristocrat, Henri Edmond comte de Lambertye-Tornielle, who was at
that time a resident of Piccadilly.34 The 18 remaining lots were eclectic –
embracing Spanish and French historical portraits by artists as diverse as
Boucher and Coello, as well as Dutch genre scenes and landscapes (many
of which had impressive provenances linking back to the cabinets of the
ancien régime). At an after-sale, Durand-Ruel acquired a large Cuyp land-
scape with three cows for 700 guineas, a reminder of his continued activity
in dealing Old Masters.35 The highlight, though, was lot 49: a portrait of
Thomas Kiligrew, page and poet to Charles I, depicted in his page’s cos-
tume and accompanied by a dog wearing his master’s name emblazoned on
the collar. Attributed to Van Dyck, it was bought by Graves for £299 5s,
and in 1892 was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.36 In addition
to the obvious concessions to English taste – including a supposed portrait
of Anne of Denmark, painted by Franz Pourbus – this compact selection of
paintings was united by their common pedigree and learned credentials.37
Two days later, on 5 June 1871 occurred the sale of the marquis H de V,
subsequently identified by Fritz Lugt as the baron Antoine-Marie Héron
de Villefosse.38 The descendant of a scholarly family, with his father an
esteemed mineralogist, Héron de Villefosse was an acclaimed archivist and
archaeologist of Roman Gaul who in 1869 had been assigned to the depart-
ment of antiquities in the Louvre. Only weeks before, he had allegedly
helped protect the museum collections against the Communards by refus-
ing to step down from his post and demonstrating ‘prodigious quick-think-
ing and bravery.’39 In his capacity as secretary to the French Society of
Numismatics and Archaeology, he thundered against the horrific losses
suffered by Parisian libraries and private collectors during the Commune.40
Although only his name appeared on the catalogue, this disguised a com-
posite sale made up from different French sources, notably the dealer Deloris
(an exceptionally active supplier of furniture and china to Christie’s, oper-
ating from rue Joubert in Paris) and Madame Goguet. The first day was
dominated by samples of the decorative arts, including Limoges enamels,
snuff boxes, candelabras, furniture and clocks (including a Louis XIII style
piece originally from the château of Arenberg). Purchasers included some
of the major dealers in European curiosity, including Baker, Benjamin,
Pond, Lewis, Jarvis, Aymard, Rhodes, Agnew, Donder and Durlacher.41
The pictures on the second day, however, were the main event, and
derived from Villefosse personally. They proved to be of extremely fine
quality, a mix of seventeenth-century Dutch and eighteenth-century French
genre paintings many boasting eminent provenances.42 However, it is strik-
ing that very few of the Rococo works found a home, even if they did
attract some considerable bids. One hundred guineas were offered for the
Greuze painting of a Bacchante originally in the cabinet of Prince Paul of
Wurttemberg, whilst 130 guineas were insufficient to secure Pater’s Plaisir
 Salvage and speculation 23
d’été, linked with the eighteenth-century cabinet of Randon de Boisset. In
most cases, though, artists like Chardin failed to attract bids of over ten
pounds, a fifth of that spent on acquiring a landscape by Wouwermans.43 We
might remember that French eighteenth-century painting was still viewed
as decadent by mainstream British opinion; whilst the decorative arts of the
ancien régime, whether original pieces or artful reproductions, were avidly
fought over, eighteenth-century painting was condemned as immoral or
trifling.44 The only exception to this rule, importantly, was a set of three
panels featuring painted conversation by Le Prince which was sold for £120
and 15 guineas – its far higher price linked not to the identity of the art-
ist, but its utility for interior decoration. French eighteenth-century artists
were outperformed by Romantic stars of the Salon such as Horace Vernet,
Camille Roqueplan and Gabriel Descamps, of proven market appeal.45
In the final and third section, the lots were listed as the ‘property of
a French gentleman’; thanks to the Christie’s consignment books, we can
see that these were dispatched by one Villars in Boulougne-sur-Mer, who
had dropped off the crates of pictures in early April.46 Of the pictures in
this section a few Italian primitives changed hands for small sums, and a
supposed Watteau harlequin failed to reach its reserve – but more striking
is the large quantity of major paintings listed in the catalogue but inexpli-
cably passed over during the sale, with no bids recorded next to them. This
includes a Tiepolo painting of the Virgin and Child, a Carracci Vision of
St Jerome, a Tintoretto Descent from the Cross and a Brueghel Landscape
with figures. According to the consignment books, these unsold pictures
were not sent back to France but to one Szarvady living on Upper Bedford
Row – perhaps the sign of a subsequent, private sale, or another instance of
cross-Channel coordination.47 The most important painting which did sell
in this section was Peter Lely’s portrait of the Duchess of Cleveland and her
son, acquired by the dealer Graves for the sum of £25, and now hanging in
the National Portrait Gallery (Figure 1.3).48
Aristocratic vendors like the marquis du Lau and Héron de Villefosse
were eager to take advantage of the buoyant London market, motivated
by fears for the security of their possessions in revolutionary Paris and by
hopes of commercial speculation. Their objects were able to enter London
thanks to a cosmopolitan network of social and professional intermedi-
aries, whose collaboration often predated the crisis. The logistics of the
Villefosse sale hinged on the collaboration between a Paris-based dealer
based on the rue Chaussée d’Antin – most probably Émile Barre, a well-
known expert at the Drouot salerooms – and one Steinmitz who lived
on Argyll street in London. Together they cooperated in transporting 20
cases of furniture and paintings into Christie’s over six different deliveries
between 11 April and 24 May 1871.49 Judging from the bidding, the appeal
of historic British portraits far outstripped other European schools, and it
is not surprising that such pictures eventually came into the possession of
24 Tom Stammers

Figure 1.3 Peter Lely, The Duchess of Cleveland and Her Son (1664) [@ National
Portrait Gallery]

national museums. The fact that numerous other pictures went unsold due
to the hefty reserves suggests that vendors like Villefosse were in no rush to
make a sale. Rather, they could afford to see if London buyers would take
the bait and pay prices in excess of what might be expected in Paris. This
willingness to wait-and-see was a luxury that our second group of vendors,
the survivors of the imperial regime, could not afford.

Imperial dissolution
Due to their speedy and desperate exit from France, the former paladins
of the Empire found themselves in significant hardship and quite cramped
new surroundings. At Camden Place, Chislehurst, Eugénie confessed to her
 Salvage and speculation 25
son’s tutor, the historian Ernest Lavisse, that her court resembled the Raft
of the Medusa, whose survivors often thought of eating each other.50 She
told her lady-in-waiting of her despair to learn of the destruction of the
furniture in her apartments at Saint-Cloud and in the Tuileries.51 Eugénie’s
agent Rouher made frequent travels back and forth across the Channel in
order to fight for the return of the possessions of the imperial family. It
remained a vexed issue what lawfully belonged the Bonapartes as their pri-
vate property, and what belonged to the state as acquired through the civil
list – ongoing battles over rights and restitution would drag on unresolved
until Eugénie’s death in 1920.52
Urgently needing funds, the imperial family began to sell off its holdings:
the Emperor handed some of his horses and the palais des Césars to the
Italian government; the Empress sold her properties in Spain; meanwhile
the republican government put the former home of the Princesse Mathilde
on the rue de Courcelles up for sale in 1873.53 Upon fleeing from France,
Eugénie had managed to hide a portion of her jewels through the help of
her friend Pauline von Metternich, who helped transfer them to the Bank
of England for safe keeping in the last phases of the war. Nonetheless on
24 June 1872, Eugénie consented to putting these pieces up for sale. Her
name was officially omitted from the catalogue at Christie’s, which referred
in vague terms to ‘the magnificent jewels, the property of a distinguished
personage.’ Nonetheless, word quick went round about the true identity of
the vendor – after all, many items were decorated with an ‘E’ monogram –
and there was considerable public excitement.54 The catalogue spelled out
that she would be selling off jewels not just with illustrious provenances –
such as the marquise ring with pink diamond which had been worn by that
earlier Empress Joséphine and her daughter Hortense – but also jewels that
had been given as diplomatic gifts, including a bracelet of sapphires from
the Viceroy of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal, or
an emerald-set tiara from the Sultan of Turkey. 55 The sale drew in many
of the leading jewellers and wider dealers in London, but also rich foreign
buyers including Edmond de Rothschild and the Gaekwad of Baroda (who
reputedly bought the so-called Eugénie diamond for £12,000). The 23 lots
raised the imposing sum of £45,000 sterling – although as Bertrand Morel
has argued, this was perhaps only half of their real market value or cost
when commissioned.56
The symbolism of such sales was unmistakeable for audiences who were
present at those events, or who read about them in then newspapers. They
were witnessing the end of an era, and to attend or take part in such auc-
tions was one way to lay claim to a piece of history. A view by Meissonier of
Eugénie at the town hall in Nancy was advertised in one April 1871 sale as
even more desirable in light of recent events: ‘A very important work, with
portraits of celebrated personages, executed by command of the Emperor
Napoleon III. This work, after the recent events on the Continent, will form
26 Tom Stammers
an important episode in history.’57 The liquidation of the Second Empire on
English shores was matched by dispersal sales happening in parallel across
the Channel. In March 1872, the Pereire brothers, the financial wizards of
the Second Empire, brought their exceptional collection of Old Master paint-
ings to hotel Drouot auction house.58 ‘Just now the whole town is talking
of the Pereire sale,’ enthused The Daily News. ‘The Messrs Pereire are very
skilful in giving publicity to their merchandise. They do not act on the prov-
erb which tells us that good wine needs no bush. The sale of their gallery
was advertised by the telegraph all over the United States, in Russia and
other countries where money bags are recklessly emptied.’ This global pub-
licity machine was necessary to grab the attention of American buyers who
were increasingly drawn into the art market, and whose extravagance could
help repair the shortfalls occasioned by the war crisis. ‘It was easy to foresee
that Messrs Pereire would repair many of their financial losses through the
sale of their pictures.’59 The following month, it was the turn of the duc de
Persigny, whose death emptied of its treasures the chateau of Chamarande (a
one-time gift from the Emperor to his trusted Minister of the Interior).60 At
the same time, the republic authorised selling off the remainder of the liste
civile to pay off impatient creditors, much to the bemusement of the press:
this included Fourdinois furniture from the imperial yacht, Sèvres porcelain
services (which attracted healthy interest, especially from foreigners and
Americans), tablecloths and tableware (which pulled in just a few domestics
and restauranteurs), and 40,000 bottles of wine from the imperial cellars.61
One auction above all others advertised this change of fortunes in the
most spectacular way: that of the Emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoléon-
Jérome, known to his intimates as ‘Plon-Plon,’ and to his critics as ‘le
Bonaparte Rouge.’ The Prince was the third son of Napoleon I’s youngest
brother, Jérome, and had shocked conservatives by standing as the repub-
lican deputy for Corsica in 1848. Throughout the Second Empire he was a
champion of democratic and anticlerical policies, and after the catastrophe
at Sedan, took the lead in machinations to return the Bonapartes to power.
His own revenues had been decimated by the fall from favour, and he was
forced to sell his beloved chateau at Prangins, Italy, at a substantial loss.
Renting an apartment overlooking Hyde Park, he came to dislike London
as ‘an expensive, boring town, and impossible to live in all year round.’62
He was a frequent caller on his cousin at the new home in Camden Place,
Chislehurst, and was the architect of a hair-brained scheme to launch a
coup against the new Republic by gathering loyal veterans and storming
back into France from across the Swiss border at Thonon. Having sounded
out Bonapartist agents abroad, and even Bismarck, the date set for this
replay of the Hundred Days scenario was January 1873 – but for the scheme
to work not only would his cousin need to stay healthy, which was far from
guaranteed, but substantial sums were needed, not least to keep bribing the
British press to run stories predicting a Napoleonic comeback.63
 Salvage and speculation 27
The sale through Christie’s from 9 May 1872 was designed to grab maxi-
mum publicity. The Prince Napoleon had owned one of the most recognisable
properties of the Second Empire, the whimsical Maison Pompéeinne on the
avenue Montaigne.64 The luxurious neo-Greek, neo-Roman and neo-Etrus-
can revivalist art objects commissioned for the villa from leading designers
such as the goldsmith Christofle and the bronzier Lérolle, not to mention a
special dessert service from Sèvres, made for a colourful début to the three-
day sale. London dealers such as McClean, Holloway, Solomon and Agnew
competed to own the stylish candelabra and amphorae on offer.65 This buzz
of interest continued on the second day thanks to the Prince’s collection of
armour, some with historic associations – such as a helmet engraved with
the medallion of Pope Julius II – but much more of it was of exotic manu-
facture. Among the fashionable Oriental items – including a thirteenth-cen-
tury lamp taken from the tombs of the Caliphs near Cairo in 1863, at the
time of the excavations of Auguste Mariette, for which Agnew paid £230
– were many other ethnographic oddities (like the sundry ornaments made
of Scandinavian buffalo horns, or the cigar stand fashioned out of croco-
dile skin). These strange, piquant items were mixed in with more traditional
connoisseurial fare, including Urbino earthenware pottery and monumental
sixteenth-century bronzes, including a large figure of Bacchus.66
There was an added frisson by the knowledge that this represented only a
portion of what had been lost in the fires of the Commune. At the time when
war broke out, Plon-Plon had followed his father by living in the ancient seat
of the Orléans family, and home of the Conseil d’état, the Palais-Royal. In
May 1871, the complex was set alight, and although local residents rushed
in to contain the flames, the Valois wing of the Cour de l’horloge and the
central floors of the building were wrecked. Prince Napoléon-Jérome esti-
mated that the fire that night cost him 700,000–800,000 francs worth of
property, including a finely stocked library (Figure 1.4).67 The preface to the
sale catalogue mused on the sad destiny of the Palais-Royal and its contents,
so often haunted by the scourge of revolutionary violence, whether in 1791,
when the duc d’Orléans sold his inherited masterpieces to fund his unhappy
political ambitions, or in February 1848, when the Palais-Royal was sacked
by the crowds who brought down the July Monarchy, or now in 1871. This
curse seemed appropriate for a building which had previously housed many
paintings that Cardinal Mazarin had bought at the Commonwealth sale
following the execution of Charles I in 1649. This latest twist of fate was
described as a terrible loss not just to the owner, but to ‘all lovers of art,’
as the preface recited the names of artworks which were destroyed by the
‘communists’ the year before.68
After this roll call of incinerated masterpieces, the ordeal of the pieces
that survived the inferno only heightened their allure. According to the
reporter for the Daily News on 9 May, the public could still discern abun-
dant traces of the damage from when the house on the avenue Montaigne
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 In the late afternoon, the Captain turned to his architect, who had been
saying good-bye to the Harland party, and took out his watch.

"You have three quarters of an hour before your fly comes to fetch you,"
he said, "and Mayne has taken the Helstons to look at the church. I want to
show you something, if you would stroll down the lane with me."

To refuse would have been ridiculous; but as they went, she was acutely
conscious that this was the first time they had been alone together since the
day she had recognised him.

They were walking towards Lone Ash, and the wonderful beauty of the
May evening breathed incense about them as they went. Orchards
everywhere made the whole earth seem a-bloom. A glory of distant gorse
blazed on the horizon line.

After a few moments Melicent grew nervous, and felt she must speak.

"Is the first consignment of dressing-stone delivered?" she asked.

"Up at the station," he replied eagerly, as if the question pleased him.

"We bring some down to-morrow; it ought to be on the ground at ten
o'clock. I took a look at it to-day, and thought it was up to sample; but I
should like you to see it."

"It's a pity the journey from London is so long," she said regretfully.

"The very point I want to raise," returned he, with unconcern which was
not overdone. "I think I need my architect on the spot, and I'm prepared to
pay to have her there. Ah!" as they turned a corner and a charming cottage
faced them, "this is what I want to show you. How do you like it?"

She stopped short, with a certain glow of feature and glint of the eye,
which was characteristic. As usual, when very pleased, she did not speak.
He watched her eyes as they dwelt on the rustic English beauty of the place.

The white smother of cherry-blossom melted against the mellow red

tiles. By the garden-gate a big Forsythia bush bore a burden of honey-
coloured flowers. The garden was a tangle of periwinkle, woodruff, and
forget-me-not, with the all-pervading sweetness of wallflower; and the
glowing coral of the ribes nestled against the tumble-down porch.

"It will be a mass of lilac-bloom in a fortnight," said the girl, hardly

knowing she spoke.

"I want you to come in," Brooke told her.

The door was ajar. It opened upon a kitchen, beautifully clean and tidy,
evidently for ornament, not use. Within was a tiny parlour, with gate-leg
table, grandfather's clock and oak dresser.

"This is what I would ask my architect to put up with now and then, to
save her a good deal of going to and fro," said Brooke. "I have taken it for
three months, to accommodate my visitors, as there is no room in the inn."

Carried away by the sweetness of the place, she sat down upon the
window-seat.

"This is Arcady!" she said.

He leaned against the print valance of the mantel, looking very large in
the tiny place.

"Do you like it? Would you like to stay here now and again?"

She turned her little head, its outlines sungilt against the light without,
and looked at him; and she answered like a child, accepting unconsciously
the suggestion of an older person.

"I like it very much. It would be a great convenience to be able to stay. I

am so anxious about the house."

"If that is so, you shall wait here and talk to Mrs. Barrett, and ask her to
show you the upstairs rooms, while I go and fetch the Helstons to look at it.
There will just be time."
 CHAPTER XXIX

THE FRIENDSHIP GROWS

"A whole white world of revival awaits May's whisper a while,
Abides and exults in the bud as a soft hushed laugh in a smile.
As a maid's mouth, laughing with love and subdued for the love's
sake, May
Shines, and withholds for a little the word she revives to say."
—A. C. SWINBURNE.

For three weeks, Melicent came down to the cottage on Tuesday and
stayed till Friday. The first twice Brenda had accompanied her; but Pater
grumbled, and the third time she came alone.

She was growing bold. Brooke's behaviour never varied. He was

courteous and easy, but never confidential. He would come down the lane
with his dogs, whistling, and lean over the gate among the lilacs until
Melicent appeared from the cottage door, and they went on to Lone Ash
together. His first greeting always was:

"How are you? Good news of Burmester, I hope?"

He was in great social request, and dined out most nights, often
hurrying away from the absorbing spectacle of the rising walls of his home
to lunch with some neighbouring magnate.

During the third week, except for their morning chat together, she
scarcely saw him at all until Friday afternoon.
 The week had been wet and cold, and she had been tramping about in a
mackintosh and gaiters; but to-day was brilliantly fine, and she was
lunching al fresco, up at the works, being immensely interested in some
fresh boring operations then in progress in connection with her beloved
fish-pond. She was sitting upon a pile of dry planks, making a dessert of
almonds and raisins, and deep in a book, when she saw the Captain drive
up. He seldom brought the motor up to the works. He had his own cart now,
and a fast cob; and a trim young groom to look after them.

He sprang out, came up to where she sat, and began asking eager
questions about the boring. They talked shop for several minutes, he sitting
among the planks a little below her perch, bare-headed, and with his gaze
upon the long foundation-lines.

Then a short silence fell, while the exhilarating May air sang about
them. Looking straight before him, he said unconcernedly:

"Came to see if you cared for a drive this afternoon. It's a jolly day, and
I've got to go to Arnstock. Care to come?"

She hesitated. Why not? She had evicted Mrs. Grundy long ago, and on
what other grounds could she refuse? Yet something within said, "Don't," so
loudly as to drown the voice of calm reason.

"I think I'd better not. I'm waiting here to see them begin to lay the
damp course. Thanks all the same."

He looked at his watch. Then turned to her with a gleam in his eye.

"They quit work in an hour, so that reason won't do. Don't you trust
me?"

"I have no notion what you mean," said Melicent, instantly frozen.

"Well," he said, "of course I know you despise conventionalities or you

would not be following your present profession. When a girl steps down
into the arena and joins the wrestling, one takes it for granted that she
doesn't mind what folks say. So, if you refuse to let me take you a drive, I
have to conclude that your objection is personal, don't I?"

"Then you don't consider it possible that I really may not wish to take a
drive this afternoon?"

"Seeing what the weather's been this week, and what it is to-day, and the
way you've been sticking to work, I think it's unlikely," he said calmly. He
rose. "Pity you won't come," he added. "They're enlarging Arnstock
Churchyard, and they've unearthed the head of a Saxon cross." Melicent
sprang involuntarily to her feet. He looked at her steadily. "Knot-work," he
said firmly. "As clean-cut as if it had been carved last week. They have got
several bits. Harland thinks they may find it all. That's what I'm going to
see."

She laughed a little uneasily. "I don't believe I can resist that," she said.

"Come along then," he replied coolly, picking up her warm coat from
the planks. "There's Alfred to play propriety, you know."

"I don't believe you've ever been to Arnstock," he said, as they bowled
lightly along the firm high-road. "You do nothing but stick to work. It isn't
good for you."

"I have been to tea with the Harlands, and I am going to dine there next
week. I don't know what more you can suggest in the way of dissipation.
I'm sorry if I am ridiculous about Lone Ash, but you must consider the
fascination of it. My first house—my dream! To see it taking shape before
my eyes!"

She gazed before her with eyes that saw visions, and Hubert looked at
her.

"I feel great scruples about monopolising you so much," he remarked.

"Ought not all your energies just now to be concentrated on your
trousseau?"
 He was in a position to see the full play of expression in the face she
sought to avert He marked the instinctive repugnance, the effort at
concealment, the cold annoyance.

"Lancelot understands that I must first do what I undertook to do," she

said stiffly.

"Then I am actually postponing the wedding arrangements? This is

serious. My only excuse must be that there was no one who had a prior
claim when you pledged yourself to me."

For just one moment she misunderstood—for one second she was on the
verge of self-betrayal. It was on her tongue to say: "I never pledged myself
to you!" when she saw the trap laid for her. Was it intentional? Swiftly she
flashed a look at him. No babe could have been more innocent in
expression.

"My private concerns will never be allowed to clash with business

arrangements," she said haughtily. "What man would postpone, or throw up
good work, just because he was going to be married?"

"Marriage is a mere episode nowadays, isn't it?" he said. "Just a holiday

experience. The English fashion of it wouldn't content me."

"Marriage is not a thing you can talk about in the abstract," she said
irritably. "One marriage is not a bit like another. You can choose your own
kind, I suppose."

"Can you?" he asked urgently, in the candid tones of one seeking useful
information.

There was a shadow of emphasis on the pronoun. She made no reply,

and he went on:

"People's circumstances are so different I can imagine that you might

face the idea of marriage as a mere interlude, because your life is so full,
and holds so much else of love and fame and what not. Now in my case ...
will you allow a lonely man the luxury of talking about himself for five
minutes?"

"I am interested," said Melicent, quite politely.

"Well, you see, here am I, alone in the world. I can hardly remember my
mother. I never had but one real friend—a man. I don't think I can
remember a woman speaking one solitary kind word to me until I turned up
in England with money. Now do you see, that friendless as I am, without
human ties of kith or kin, what seems to you just a convenient arrangement,
is to me the one possibility life offers? ... I wonder if you have ever thought
what it must be to live altogether without intimacies, as I have done, for
thirty years?"

There was a quiet, earnest simplicity in his voice which disarmed her.
Suddenly she saw him in a new light. He was no longer the relentless
pursuer, the man who hunted down a girl as his desired quarry. He was a
lonely, heart-hungry fellow, who had been starving for kind words, thirsting
for feminine sympathy. Seeing him in the light of what he had since
become, she revolted from the memory of her own hardness. She had been
the only English girl—the only creature with whom he felt affinity—in
Slabbert's Poort. Among all the degradation and savagery of the place, he
had stretched out appealing hands to the one woman who might have
understood. And she had never given him one kind word! He said he could
not remember one!

Without her own volition she felt her heart assailed with a rush of pity
and tenderness wholly new in her self-centred, balanced experience.
Without a word of reproach, with an almost bald simplicity, this man had
opened the flood-gates of compassion. He had done more; made her
ashamed of herself. She felt her face suffused with colour—she knew that
her eyes swam with tears. The brilliant sun, facing them as they drove
westward, almost blinded her. She felt she must say something; but the
effect of his words had been so unexpected, so overwhelming, that she
could not control her voice at once. At last, feeling that her lack of response
must seem unkind, she faltered out:

"I—I am so sorry for you. I never guessed you were so—lonely!"

 And to her rage and fury, her eyes over-brimmed and two tears—rare
indeed with her—splashed down upon the rug that covered her knees.

Hubert made some kind of an inarticulate exclamation, and an abrupt

movement, abruptly checked by the consciousness of the neatly apparelled
back of Alfred, the groom, almost touching his own. He maintained
complete silence for a long minute, then, bending towards Melicent:

"Were those tears for me?" he asked, very low.

She had hastily found her handkerchief.

"I—I think so. I can't quite explain; what you said recalled something
else ... and I suppose I'm tired."

"Nevertheless," he replied, still below his breath, "I have had, at least
for a moment, the sympathy of a woman. I shan't forget that. I hope you
don't think I am in the habit of puling and drivelling about my lonely lot. I
don't know what impelled me to sentiment, but I assure you it is all over
now. See, there is Arnstock Church! We will have tea at the inn, and then
the workmen will be gone home, and we can have the churchyard to
ourselves."

They pulled up at a little low inn, covered with wisteria and

honeysuckle. As he helped her down, she realised that her fear of him had
suddenly disappeared.

Seated by a little table at an open window over-looking a quaint garden,

she poured out tea for him, and enjoyed home-made bread, and honey from
the row of hives which stood before the hawthorn hedge.

They talked easily and naturally, like two between whom a barrier has
been swept away. Hubert told her of his search among his mother's papers,
his discovery there of the name of his grandfather's native village, his
coming to England, and his quest of what Lance called his ancestral acres.

Tea over, they proceeded to the churchyard, and spent a vivid half-hour
with the fragments of the Saxon cross and its knot-work. Melicent was in a
fever of eagerness to discover runes, but there were none. However, they
found what was almost as good, a series of grotesques down the sides of the
shaft.

The workmen had turned up almost all the pieces, and when Melicent
suggested, in a moment of inspiration, that the Captain should pay for its
restoration and erection in the churchyard, by way of inaugurating his reign
at Clunbury, he took up the idea with avidity.

They drove back almost in silence; but a silence so full for both, that
they hardly realised their lack of words.

At the lilac-decked cottage gate, Hubert jumped out, and as usual held
his hands to help her down. She had just drawn off her leather gloves, and
there seemed something significant and wonderful in the warm contact of
their bare hands. The light was not good. That, or something else, caused
her foot to slip on the high step.

For just one moment she felt an instinctive tightening of his grasp, and
one arm went round her so swiftly that all danger of a fall was over before
recognised. She was set on the ground ... she felt dizzy, and almost
staggered when released. For in that arresting instant, his mouth had been
close to her ear, and she thought a sentence came to her—that he said, so
low that she could scarcely hear:

"Hadn't you better give in?"

She had regained her poise, drawn herself away, her eyes shot a
bewildered glance at him in the twilight. He did not look at her, but seemed
in a tremendous hurry to be off. He had jumped back into the cart and was
spinning down the lane before she had time to draw breath, or to ask herself
if he had really said what she thought she heard.

She stood there, listening to the brisk beat of the horse's hoofs on the
dry road, for quite a long time. Not a twig stirred in a stillness which
seemed almost portentous. The dampness and fragrance of earth and
growing things rose about her like incense. In a thicket not far distant, a
nightingale began to bubble and gurgle into song.
 Had he said it? If so, what did he mean? To what was she to give in? To
the influence which that afternoon had softened, and as it were, dilated her
heart? To the new kindness which she felt for him?

It must be illusion. Would he have asked a question of the kind and

ridden away without an answer? Was it an inner voice that had spoken? If
so, what was the purport?

Anger and self-will awoke. Her understanding, her emotions, her will
were and should remain in her own keeping. What was the sensation she
had experienced a moment ago, with his arms about her? She felt herself
blush scarlet in the darkness.

* * * * * * * *

Next morning she went back to London.

 CHAPTER XXX

THE TREACHERY
"Doubt you if, in some such moment
As she fixed me, she felt clearly
Ages past the soul existed,
Here an age 'tis resting merely,
And hence fleets again for ages,
While the true end, sole and single,
It stops here for, is this love-way,
With some other soul to mingle?

"Else it loses what it lived for,

And eternally must lose it;
Better ends may be in prospect,
Deeper blisses (if you choose it);
But this life's end and this love-bliss
Have been lost here; doubt you whether
This she felt, as looking at me,
Mine and her souls rushed together?"
—ROBERT BROWNING.

Melicent only came down to Clunbury for one day the following week;
and Mr. Helston was with her. The week after, she came for two days, and
brought Brenda.

This was not the result of any scheme of self-defence; it simply

happened in the ordinary course of events.

For she no longer disliked Hubert. Her mental attitude had changed.

The enlightenment which his simple and sparing speech had brought to
her had been a veritable shock. She saw herself again as she had been at the
time of his early devotion—the despised Cinderella, the half-grown slattern,
the insolent, self-absorbed little upstart. Her own dulness of perception and
ingratitude began to show themselves to her in a strong light. She marvelled
at his constancy, and stood amazed at his insight. He had seen her, not as
she was, but as she might be. It was she who had been blind.

So she thought of him: and yet, at the bottom of her mind, lurked a
mysterious reluctance to go down to Lone Ash again.

She wrote to Lance more affectionately than she had ever done. She told
him she meant to be less hard, more unselfish, to do her best to respond to
the affection he lavished upon her.

Time was flowing swiftly past her. In three weeks he would be home!

And it was June.

At last Captain Brooke wrote to say that there was a question in the
builder's mind respecting an additional support at a point where the thrust of
the wall was greater than had been reckoned for. He added that the builder
and the engineer were quarrelling about the Lee-Simmons man-holes.
Moreover, the weathered tiles were beginning to arrive, and there was a
question raised as to the condition of some of them. There was no doubt
that her presence was necessary, and finally she went down, upon a day that
focussed in its heart all the tender glories of an English summer.

The lilacs were fading now, but pink may and golden laburnum flaunted
in beauty; and Melicent, as she cycled up the lane from the station, caught
the intoxicating fragrance of syringa.

"What a garden this is! I believe it holds a bit of everything in the world
that smells sweet!" she cried, as she greeted Mrs. Barrett. "It reminds me of
the garden in Solomon's Song. How this sunshine does make the spices
flow out!" As she spoke, she gathered a tiny spray of waxen syringa and a
cluster of double pink may, like wee Banksia roses, and fastened them in
her white gown. "After London, this is so wonderful!" she sighed.

"You look pale, miss. The fresh air'll set you up. The Captain was round
this morning to know if you'd come. He seemed that disappointed not to
find you. I expect now he'll think you're not coming down till to-morrow."
 "Is he up at Lone Ash now, do you think?"

"I believe he will be, miss. Tommy, have you heard the Captain drive
back, down the lane?"

No, Tommy had not; he was sure the Cap'n had not returned.

"I'll have a glass of milk now, please, Mrs. Barrett, and then go up and
find him," said Melicent.

"There's been a gentleman had your rooms this week-end," said Mrs.
Barrett, as she provided refreshment. "Mr. Mayne, a clergyman. They do
say he's to be made a bishop. He was fine and took up with the building,
and as friendly as ever I see. I'm sure we oughter be grateful to the Lord for
sending of the Captain down here. A godsend to this village he be. There's
Carter down the lane, talked of drowning hisself, he did; wife and three
childer, no work to be had, nowhere to live if he got it. Now he's to have
head gardener's place, and Captain's going to build him a cottage, four
rooms and a kitchen! He just goes about, does the Captain, and finds out
truth about everybody. Nobody's going to get over him, not they! Keeps his
eyes skinned, and no mistake about it. Been into the bar of the Hearty
Welcome night after night since he's been staying there, and found out all he
wants to know about they chaps. He's got the whip-hand of the lot by now;
knows twice as much about 'em as what vicar does; and it's my belief, he'll
be the best served master in this county."

Melicent drank her milk absently. She wished, yet dreaded to see Hubert
again. Her novel mood of self-abasement craved humiliation. Since
realising how unlovable her conduct had been, she was invaded by
unreasonable desires to let him know that she was really not such a beast as
she seemed. A wish to tell him that she knew who he was, and would like to
be friends, assailed her like a temptation, though she knew that such
confidences would be the very height and apex of folly.

There was nothing for it, she firmly told herself, as she put on her shady
hat and mounted her bicycle, but to remain upon business terms.
 It gave her a little shock of joy, as she neared the gate leading to the
Captain's property, to see the grey walls high enough to be clearly discerned
from the road.

She rode noiselessly over the pasture, dismounted at the hill, wheeled
her bicycle forward among the trees, and propped it against the trunk of a
big beech.

The workmen were gone. She could see Hubert sitting there, on the pile
of planks where she had sat last month. How long ago that seemed! How far
she had travelled since their drive together!

He did not appear to be doing anything but meditating. His arms rested
on his knees, his hands hung down between; he was looking at the ground.
Melicent was taken with a sudden conviction that it would be wise to turn
and run before he saw her. She combated the feeling with indignation. She
remembered how loath she had been to go that drive. And how glad she
now was that she went! It had made so vast a difference to her, she felt
something as Gareth felt when he unhorsed the dread Black Knight, and
found the rosy child within.

Why not go forward?

The alternative no longer remained: he looked up and saw her.

She came towards him from among the trees, in her white gown,
wearing a look he had never seen upon her face before in life, though he
had dreamed of it now and then. Her eyes seemed to have grown larger,
darker, softer. Her face was of that warm rose whiteness which relieves
itself so vividly and strangely against a white dress.

He stood up; but absorbed in the picture she made, he did not advance
to greet her.

"I thought you had not come," he said; and even to say so much was an
effort.
 "I had things to do." She smiled. "Some of that shopping you reminded
me of the other day! I came by the later train."

He recollected himself.

"I hope you have good news of Burmester," he said mechanically.

"The best," answered Melicent quietly. "He will be home in less than
three weeks."

He had been staring at the grass, but on that he raised his eyes.

"And when shall you be—married?"

"The day is not fixed; only that it will be at Fransdale." There was a
pause, and to fill it she said: "I hear Mr. Mayne has been here."

"Yes; I suppose you are going to his consecration next week?"

"Oh, yes; he sent us tickets. Do you know how long he stays in

England? He ought to wait for my wedding."

"So I told him," said Captain Brooke slowly, balancing a long screw-
driver with which he was playing across one finger of his left hand.

"What did he say?"

"Oh!—well, he said several things; but he didn't mean me to repeat

them, so don't ask me, please."

She gave an odd, excited laugh. "I don't ask; I order you to tell me."

He gazed upon her, so absorbed in his thoughts about her, that the
subject in hand faded out of sight. She could not meet his look. Tossing her
head, she turned a little away.

"So you won't tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

 "What he said."

"What who said?"

"Captain Brooke, what is the matter with you? We were talking of Mr.
Mayne. We had better leave off if you are not attending, and go and look at
those tiles."

"The more serious matter is the water," he said, shaking off his
preoccupation and sensibly relieved by the change of subject.

He led the way from where they stood to a pit four feet deep, with a
stand-pipe projecting from the newly-turned soil. Kneeling down on the
edge, he bent over, and turned on the union tap, which had been fixed for
connection with a rubber hose. The girl gave a mortified exclamation:

"Why, it's dry!"

He acquiesced.

"That's where Shepherd's rage against the Lee-Simmons engineer comes

in, and why he wants to wipe up the floor with him. The supply was all
right the first two days, dribbled for two more; then stopped. The engineer
says it is simply that Shepherd's men have fixed the thing so carelessly that
the pipe's blocked down below. I think I'll get the jointed rod and probe it."

"Oh, my fish-pond, I thought I had secured you!" said Melicent sadly.

"You shall have it, if there's water in Wiltshire," he began; then stopping
dead—"I mean, the thing must be made to act somehow. By the way, there's
Alfred with the cart. I'll send him back for the rod; he can bring it in a few
minutes."

"Lend me your wrench, then, and I'll get the tap right off," said the girl.

He handed her the tool she asked for, and went off across the field to
give his directions.
 She jumped down into the muddy pit, and set herself to unscrew the tap.
It was not very easy, but she managed it at last; and then, with the thing in
her hand, remained in her crouching attitude, examining it to see if there
was any obstruction.

There was a sound like a deep sigh—a rush like heavy rain—a jet of
yellow water flew from the pipe, hit the opposite side of the pit with great
violence, and before she knew what had happened, she was over her ankles
in water. In a calmer moment, she would have scaled the miry sides of the
pit, regardless of appearances; but she was not calm, and she lost her head.
The unexpected nature of the thing scared her—she had the idea that if once
she let the pit fill, they would be unable to stop the flow; and so, with a
spring, she flung herself upon the pipe, clasping her two hands rigidly about
it, and stanching the most part of the rush. But the strength of the pulsing
water was great, her footing slimy, her purchase feeble. Raising her voice,
regardless of all but the emergency, she cried aloud:

"Bert! Bert! Bert! Quick!"

He had only just dismissed Alfred on his errand, and was hurrying back,
when that sound smote his ear. He broke into a laugh of pure joy as he
heard it, but he ran with all his might.

The moment he got to the brink of the pit, he saw what was happening;
and he, too, lost his head. Instead of calling to her to let go, and holding
down his hands to draw her up, at the expense of a drenching, he forthwith
sprang down, placed himself beside her, and locked his hands over hers.

The fact of his doing this bereft her of all power of speech.

She was totally unconscious of having called him by name; she did not
know the reason of his kindled, glowing look. Neither, for a few long-
drawn seconds, considered what was to be done. They simply stood there,
so acutely conscious of each other that nothing else in all the universe
seemed real.

She was the first to recall her scattered wits.

 "Oh, this is too ridiculous," she said faintly. "We can't hold on! We can't
hold on!"

"Just long enough for Alfred to get back," he whispered. "He can't be
ten minutes. He can have the thing ready to screw on, and save you a deluge
—"

"Nonsense!" she uttered feebly. "We can't hold on here for ten minutes!
We can't, simply."

"I wish we could hold on for ever," he jerked out, his voice sunk to a
note that made her quail.

The force in his hands seemed to be communicating itself to her. She

was dominated, absorbed, had forgotten everything but him. He never
spoke, but she became aware that he wished her to look at him. She tore
away her gaze from the sight of their gripped hands, raised her head,
searched his face with pleading eyes.

Their looks met and mingled.

A dull beat was hammering through her senses. Was it his heart or hers,
or the pulse of Time itself?

Their faces drew nearer, nearer to each other.

Something was going to happen—something that should explain all life

and blaze the answer to every secret ... that was the thought she had as their
lips met.

Was it he who bent to her, or was the impulse that drew them mutual?

The blinding sweetness of that kiss was unmarred by any thought of

treachery. The world and Lance with it, had simply gone out in the ecstasy
of the light that flooded her.

* * * * * * * *
 It was over. The world that had stood at gaze like Joshua's moon on
Ajalon, swung on once more her dance among the stars.

Melicent stood there, in the fair June evening, at the side of the man
who had kissed her. The wind came softly over meadows deep in
buttercups, and bent the white lacy sprays of delicate wild parsley which
fringed them. High in the blue sky the lark stormed heaven's gate with song.

"Let me go!" she cried, with a stifled sob. "I must go! Don't you see that
I must?"

It was a moment before he replied; but when he did, his voice was
perfectly composed and cool.

"As soon as you feel the pressure of my hands relax, slip yours
downwards," he said.

A moment later she was free.

"There! Oh, why couldn't you do that before?" she cried passionately, as
she made a frantic onslaught upon the crumbling side of the pit.

She was up and away in a minute, her white frock soaked, her feet
caked in pale yellow mud. She ran across the grass, never stopping to look
behind, and met the bewildered Alfred just at the edge of the plantation.

"Hurry to the Captain," she gasped. "The water has started to run and he
can't stop it. I must go home and change!"

Her throat was so dry she could hardly speak. In feverish, stumbling
haste she mounted her bicycle, and rode down the bumpy grass slope at a
dangerous pace. Mercifully the gate into the lane stood wide, and she was
through it and back at the cottage in a couple of minutes.

Alfred found his master up to the knees in what looked like weak tea
with cream in it. Between them they managed to re-fix the tap, connect the
long hose, and set the liquid flowing into Melicent's fish-pond.
 Emerging from the pit, the Captain looked at his legs—he was wearing
a cool, summer suit of light grey flannel.

"The wash-tub, Alfred, is the place for me," he said resignedly.

"Yessir!" said Alfred, who had prudently removed his own smart leg-
wear before venturing to the rescue.

"Joseph was better off than I am, Alfred. His pit was dry—there was no
water in it."

"Yessir! Miss Lutwyche, she was drenched, sir."

"I hope she won't take cold," said the Captain, with polite solicitude;
"but fortunately the day is warm. Get on your boots, Alfred. I'll let this thing
run all night, and perhaps there'll be something to show for it in the
morning. There must have been something in the pipe, and the force of the
water dislodged it, I suppose."

Melicent, lying upon her bed with hidden face, heard the cart go past the
cottage. The beat of the hoofs was not interrupted; they passed by without
stopping; and the tension of her strained nerves relaxed.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE REPUDIATION
"Escape me?
Never—
Beloved!
While I am I and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
 While the one eludes must the other pursue."
—ROBERT BROWNING.

The delicate veil of sapphire which June calls night was drawn across
the splendour of the sky; and it was like the device of a beauty who wears a
transparent gauze to enhance the glitter of her diamonds.

In the north still lingered a supernal glow, the hint of the day that has no
night.

The fragrance of unseen cottage gardens was all about Hubert as he

walked slowly up the lane from the inn. There was no moon. The glimmer
of starshine made mysterious radiance, yet left a soft, velvet dusk, without
the clean-cut lights and shades of moonlight.

He had bathed, changed, dined. Now he was coming to ascertain the

result of his daring experiment. Had he succeeded, as he hoped, in showing
Melicent her own heart?

He had no remorse. The thing was necessary; it had to be done. Could

he stand by and see a proud girl wreck three lives?

It was very dark among the lilacs by the cottage gate. Peering through
the thick boughs, he started; for there was no lamplight, either in the parlour
or the room above it. And he believed that she had fled from him.

This gave a jolt to the pleasing elation of his spirits. Walking on the
grass, he approached the open door without noise. Then he halted.

The casements of the parlour were wide open to the summer night. On
the window-sill lay a girl's abased head, the fair hair just touched by the
star-glimmer, the face hidden in her arms.

She lay very still, and was apparently not weeping. He went up to her,
resisting with firmness his great desire to lay his hand upon her hair. For the
first time in years he spoke the name that stood for all his ambitions.
 "Millie," he said softly.

She sat up quickly. He hardly knew what expression he had expected to

see; but the indignation of her eyes was a surprise.

"Oh, I wonder how you dare come near me!" she cried.

"I won't come near you. I'll stay outside here," he said hastily, with a
bewildered sense of having lost the thread of the situation.

"You certainly won't come in at my invitation."

"No, of course," he said meekly, his head fairly spinning with wonder;
"but I thought you would see I had to come and beg your pardon."

She stood up, withdrawing herself into the room, as if she meant to
escape.

"There are things that are unpardonable," she said coldly.

He contemplated this idea. "Do you mean that you never can forgive
me?"

"Perhaps I mean that I never can forgive myself," she said chokingly.
"You—you have humbled my pride to the dust. Lance ... trusts me, and I
have ... How am I to face him?"

"Then you mean to stick to that—to go on with your engagement—to

marry Lancelot—in spite of what happened to-day?" he asked hastily.

She stood up straight in a long, loose, pale-coloured gown, half lost,

half seen in the faint light. The glint of the stars swam in her eyes.

"May I ask what else you expected?"

He was at a loss. Ready enough had he been to console her, to tell her
that Fate was too strong for her, to urge her to correct her mistake before it
was too late. Her present attitude stunned him, and bereft him of words. The
dashing of the high hopes with which he had come bred in him a sudden
sense of being wronged.

"Millie," he expostulated, "do you know what you said—up there when
the water rushed out upon you? You called out: 'Bert! Bert!'"

There was silence. He saw her start.

"Did I say that?" she said slowly. "Then it is I who have betrayed
myself, and you—are not so much to blame as I thought. I can believe that
it excited you a little to find that I knew you, and made you think of old
times." She hesitated, seeming at a loss what to say or do; her
embarrassment was obvious, her distress manifest. Then, with sudden
determination, she came near the window again. "If that is true, I suppose I
must forgive you," she said stiffly, "and we must both forget a mad
moment."

He could hardly believe his ears. "Is that all you have to say?" he
demanded harshly.

"The less we either of us say the better, surely, concerning such an

affair."

The man drew in his breath sharply. "After all that has come and gone?"
he panted.

"Captain Brooke, for a moment this afternoon I allowed myself and you
to forget that I am engaged to your friend. I must remind you of it now."

"I wish to God that I had let him drown in the drift!" he flung out. "Or
that I had drowned myself—!"

"I don't wish to be hard or unkind, but I cannot listen to you. I am going
to close the window."

He inserted his shoulder, so that she could not close it. The expression
of his eyes was such that she dare not face him.
 "Answer me one question," he commanded brusquely. There was a
growl in his voice that she knew of old as a storm-signal. "I have a right to
ask it, and you ought to answer—you shall answer! When I kissed you to-
day ... was it against your will?"

Her expression made him feel as if he had slashed her across the face.
Had she accepted defeat in that moment—said anything to appease the
man's mounting wrath—he might have kept his head. But pain or insult had
never the effect of softening Melicent, but only of stiffening her. His taunt
stung her to real anger, and, in the midst of her stifled consciousness that
she was fighting a losing battle, she clutched at her indignation as at a blade
with which she might wound. She had moved towards the door with the
intention of escape, but now she returned to the window.

"You think you have the right to ask me that?" she said, with the same
ruthless arrogance that she might have used to him in Africa. "You say that
to me—you, who hope to turn into something that people may take for an
English gentleman! ... You did that this afternoon to get a hold over me! I
know your threat! You needn't say it! You mean that, if I don't tell Lance,
you will! ... And you suppose I care if you do, or what you do, or anything
about you...!"

Before she had got so far, Bert had flung his leg over the sill and vaulted
lightly into the room. He came quite close to her, but spoke quietly, under
his breath, with an air of desperately holding himself in.

"All right!" he said. "You say you don't care, do you? Well, then, if you
say so, I say you lie! You lie, do you hear me?"

"You had better go away before you grow unpardonable," said the girl
coldly.

"I'll go when I've said what I'm going to say, and not before. I'm going
to tell you the cold truth here and now. The Brooke farce is played out, we
know each other, and you shall hear what I have to say! You—kissed—me
to-day!—great God! do you suppose I don't know that you did?—and you
did it because—"
 Slight things decide momentous issues. Even then an appeal, the
smallest sign of surrender on the girl's part, would have brought him
crouching to her feet. But she flung back her head, and looked him in the
eyes to show how little she feared him; and she laughed.

That let loose the tempest. All in a moment he broke off his husky,
difficult words. All in a moment he had her by the waist, crushing her to
him as if holding her against an army. There was no love in the fierce hold,
only the determination that she should hear the cruel words that he spoke
into her ear:

"Because you love me! Because you love me! Because you're mine—
mine—mine!"

She disdained to struggle, as she disdained to plead. She made no effort

to fling him off. Her silent, passive contempt brought him to himself in a
flash.

The girl who, that golden afternoon had yielded to his spell, had
weakened, had been as it were his to take, now lay like a lifeless thing in his
ungentle hold. He realised what he had done.

When he let her go, she did, by an effort, stand alone. Her laugh of
scorn was quenched. She lifted one hand to hide the quivering of her mouth,
but did not move at once, perhaps because she feared to fall. He turned
away from the still, silent, accusing figure with a kind of roar of helpless
strength, of baffled will.

"The same, the same as ever," he said. "The woman's way! To make me
feel a great, rough brute, when all the time it's you that are cruel. Yes! As
cruel as a fiend."

To and fro he paced, to and fro upon the floor; then, with sense of defeat
in overwhelming bitterness, got to his knees at her feet.

He knew that his fatal moment of uncontrolled temper had undone all
that the past weeks had gained so painfully and slowly. Beneath his shame
was an undercurrent of conviction that he was right and she wrong. But
what was right or justice in face of Melicent's inflexibility?

"I'm sorry. I'm a brute. But it's your fault. You know what you can do
with me," he said chokingly.

"Get up!" said her exhausted voice. "Get up, do! Go away. You see you
are ... impossible. I thought you had improved, but you see it's all ... just as
bad as ever."

"Millie!"

"Don't touch me."

"You know I am not such a hound as to think I have any hold ... or to
use it, if I had?"

"What does it matter to me?" She moved: he held a fold of her gown.
"Are you going to detain me?" she asked. "Because if so, I shall call Mrs.
Barrett. This is not love—oh, no, nor anything like it; it's simply your fixed
determination to have your own way. I've always known it, all these years
—that you were not beaten, that you meant to try again. Not for love of me,
but simply because to conquer me is your fixed idea. And this afternoon
you thought you had succeeded. Well, you haven't, that's all."

He got to his feet, utterly humbled, reduced to abject pleading:

"Millie, see me again! Don't let it end here! I've lost my head, and don't
know what I am saying. Give me a chance to talk things out—"

"Never, never, never!" she shuddered, making for the door. There she
turned upon him. "You are a savage! If you knew how I hate savagery! You
are a Boer! If you knew how I hate the Boers! I'll marry a man who knows
how to treat a woman, not one whose civilisation is only skin-deep." He
took two maddened strides towards her. "Has that hurt you? Very well, then,
you can kill me, you know. I wonder you don't."

He passed a hand over his hair like one pushing a veil from his eyes.
 "I can tell you why I don't," he said, in tones that rapped out sharp as a
rapier thrust. "It's because you're not worth it."

Almost before he had spoken, he had turned about, sprung from the
window, and disappeared. The starshine glimmered in the silent room where
a moment ago had been such storm and stress.

Melicent stood alone, in possession of the field. The suddenness of the

withdrawal of the besieging forces took her breath. The Parthian shot, fired
in the moment of flight, reached her heart and quivered there.

She gave a strangled low cry, as if physically hurt.

At last, it seemed, the long struggle was over. Not because Bert realised
that she was out of reach, but because suddenly he had awoke from his
dream to find her not worth fighting for.

She told herself that, whatever the means, the thing was done, and
finally done now. There would be no more vehement assaults for her to
dread.

Yet something unpleasantly like remorse was gnawing at her heart. She
knew she had said things she did not mean; in the heat of battle she had
caught up every missile....

Well, now it was over. Silence and solitude were profound. The air
which had vibrated to Bert's rage and Bert's repentance was so still that the
nightingale's song sounded too loud in her ears.

"All over!" she said aloud; and the words sounded strange and horrible.

"All over!" She crept upstairs to a sleepless night; but this of late had
been no rare thing with her.

* * * * * * * *

In the early morning she went away to London, choosing a route to the
station which should not take her past the inn.
 And for weeks the grey walls of Lone Ash rose higher in their dignified
beauty, unseen by the eyes of her for whom they were being raised, and
whose genius had called them into being.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE FRANSDALE SPORTS

"Embrace me then, ye hills, and close me in;
Now in the dear and open day I feel
Your guardianship; I take it to my heart;
'Tis like the solemn shelter of the night."
—WORDSWORTH (The Recluse).

The wedding-day was fixed, and Melicent lived in an atmosphere of

wedding presents and dressmakers.

Since her fiancé's return she had altered noticeably, both in appearance
and manner. She was paler than usual, large-eyed and languid; and she had
grown strangely gentle and yielding. She deferred to Lancelot in
everything; and since two people cannot possibly continue to kneel at each
other's feet, and as Melicent persistently adopted the lowly posture formerly
monopolised by her lover, he had, as a result, grown the least bit dictatorial.

Theoretically, of course, the change pleased him; but as a matter of fact,

he had found his lady-love more interesting when she was remote and
prickly. Her new meekness was purely passive; it did not make her more
demonstrative. She submitted to be caressed, but it was always obvious that
it was mere submission.
 Brenda was very unhappy about her. She was sure that she was
suffering mentally. She knew she did not sleep. However, girls just before
marriage are often restless and unsettled, and there was nothing which she
could definitely take notice of.

At the end of July the Fransdale Sports took place, an annual event of
the highest local importance. They were held in a meadow near the head of
the Dale, not far below the Vicarage. The meadow sloped violently, but the
fact was accepted by the natives as part of an inexorable law of Nature. All
fields sloped; you might as well quarrel with the grass for being green.

From early morning the little heathery tracks leading down from the
Riggs were black with a crawling line of folks, descending Indian file by
devious ways to the scene of action. Traps of all kinds, crowded with
passengers, began to arrive, and to distribute themselves in all the
neighbouring stable-yards, which were soon filled to overflowing.

Streams of fine plough-horses, yearlings, hunters and little fluffy foals,

moved slowly along various radii to the centre. On the ground, the chief
farmers' wives were preparing a "ham tea" of vast proportions in a large
tent.

As the day wore on, the whole scene was alive with colour. Exhibits of
butter, eggs, vegetables and fruit, were being solemnly appraised by
business-like judges. There was a cackle of fowls, a cooing of doves, the
outraged cries of lordly rams tethered to stakes and with coloured ribbons
round their horns.

And the band! One of the visitors remarked that it was worth coming
far, if only to see that band!

The musicians sat upon boards in the large hay-cart in which they had
been conveyed to the festal scene, and from which the horses had been
removed. Their broad and solid backs, in every hue of weather-stained
fustian, formed a study for the eye of the humorously inclined.

Then, of course, there were cocoa-nut shies and gingerbread stalls, and
a wheel of fortune. For this one day in the year the austere solitude of the
moorland was broken through, and Fransdale was actually noisy and
crowded.

Among the throng, which grew thicker as the day wore into afternoon,
was a sprinkling of gentry, conspicuous among whom were the Burmesters.
Sir Joseph took a genuine interest in all the exhibits, and gave many
valuable prizes. There was naturally great interest among all the natives
over Lancelot's engagement. Melicent was a most popular person, and
glances of affectionate admiration followed her to-day.

She wore a white lace gown, with La France roses, and her white
sunshade was lined with rose colour. Brenda thought she had never seen her
look so pretty, nor so sad.

"The Ayres' party are here," said Lance, strolling up to where his mother
stood, with Mrs. Helston and Melicent, watching the first heats of a race run
off. "They've brought their tame crowd of convalescents with them."

"Did you know," said Lady Burmester, "that the Ayres' offered their
house for a Convalescent Home for wounded officers? That will arouse
enthusiasm, won't it, Lance? The people will cheer, if they know there are
African heroes about."

"They exhausted their enthusiasm when Lance came home," smiled

Brenda. "What a pity Captain Brooke is not here, then we should have all
the African contingent."

"Oh," said Lance, "I forgot to tell you, Mrs. Helston, I have at last
persuaded the obstinate old beggar to leave his beloved house to build itself
for a few weeks, and to come up here for a bit of rest."

"Oh, well done!" said Brenda, with animation. "I should have been so
sorry for him not to have been at the wedding."

"He won't promise that, even now. You know, I wanted him to be best
man. He says weddings are not at all in his line. But when we get him here,
perhaps you and Melicent can persuade him."
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