A calash has lately arrived, and the horses are now being baited at the inn stables. The day is excessively warm and sultry, so that the young gentleman who came in the calash is having his bread, and a bottle of the wine for which the inn is famous, served to him under the great chestnut-tree before the door. It is Oliver Munier, but so different from the Oliver that left Paris a year before that even his mother would hardly have known him. He is no longer that peasant lad in blouse who crouched, shrunk together, in the corner of the great coach of the rich American uncle, being carried with thunderous rumble to some hideous and unknown fate which he did not dare to tell even to his own soul. He wore a silk coat, a satin waistcoat, satin breeches, silk stockings, a laced hat; he wore fine cambric cuffs at his wrists, and a lace cravat with a diamond solitaire at his throat, and his manners befitted his dress.
"THE INNKEEPER SERVED HIM IN PERSON."
"THE INNKEEPER SERVED HIM IN PERSON."
"THE INNKEEPER SERVED HIM IN PERSON."
He carried with him a small and curiously wrought iron box, of which he seemed excessively careful, keeping it close beside him, and every now and then touching it with his hand, as though to make sure that it had not been spirited away.
The innkeeper, a merry little pot-bellied rogue, as round as a dumpling and as red as an apple, served him in person, talking garrulously the while. Monsieur was on his way to Flourens? Ah! there was great excitement there to-day. What! Monsieur did not know? He must then be a stranger not to know that Monseigneur the Marquis had left Paris, and was coming back to the château to live.
Oliver was interested. He had seen monseigneur in Flourens once some two or three years before, when he had paid a flying visit to the château to put on another turn of the screw, and to squeeze all the money he could from the starving peasants of the estate, to pay some of his more hungry and clamorous creditors. All Flourens had known that the marquis was over head and ears in debt, and now the little gossiping landlord added the supplement. It was, he told Oliver, through no choice that Monseigneur the Marquis was to come back to the country again, but because he had no more wherewithto support his Paris life. He loathed Flourens, and he loved Paris; he hated the dull life of the country, and he adored the gayety of the city, its powder, its patches, its masques, its court, its vanity, its show, and, most of all, its intrigues and its cards. But all these cost money, for Monseigneur the Marquis had lived like a prince of the blood, and it had cost a deal. Ah, yes! such little matters as intrigues and the cards cost treasures of money in Paris, he had heard say. So now the marquis and the family were coming back again to Flourens.
By the time that the landlord had half done his gossip, Oliver had finished his bread and wine; then, the horses being refreshed, he bade the servant whom he had brought down from Paris with him to order out the calash. The landlord would have assisted Oliver in carrying his iron box, but Oliver would not permit it. He commanded him somewhat sharply to let it alone, and he himself stowed it safely within the calash.
His man-servant was holding the door open for him to enter, and Oliver already had his foot placed upon the step ready to ascend, when the clatter of hoofs and the rumble of a coach caught his attention, and he waited to see it pass.
It was a huge, lumbering affair, as big as a smallhouse, and was dragged thunderously along by six horses. A number of outriders surrounded it as it came sweeping along amid a cloud of dust, in the midst of which the whips of the postilions cracked and snapped like pistol-shots.
So Oliver waited, with some curiosity, until the whole affair had thundered by along the road, with its crashing, creaking, rattling clatter, preceded by the running footmen with their long canes, and the outriders in their uniform of white and blue. It was all gone in a moment—a moment that left Oliver standing dumb and rooted. In that instant of passing he had seen three faces through the open windows of the coach: the first, that of a stout, red-faced man, thick-lipped, sensual; second, that of a lady, pale and large-eyed, once beautiful perhaps, now faded and withered. But the third! The third face was looking directly at him, and it was the glimpse of it that left him rooted, bereft of motion. It was the same face that he had seen that first day in the magic mirror in the master's house; the face that he had seen in that mirror, and unknown to the master, not once, not twice, but scores of times—hundreds of times.
The landlord's voice brought him to himself with a shock. "Monsieur has dropped his handkerchief."
Oliver took the handkerchief mechanically from his hand, and as he entered the coach like one in a dream, he heard the landlord say, as his servant closed the door with a clash.
"That was Monseigneur the Marquis on his way to the Château Flourens."