THE LITTLE MARQUISTo Alice Cockran
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
To Alice Cockran
THE LITTLE MARQUISHERVÉDEVERVAINVILLE, Marquis de Saint-Laurent, was at once the biggest and smallest landlord of Calvados, the most important personage of that department and the most insignificant and powerless. Into his cradle the fairies had dropped all the gifts of fortune but those two, without which the others taste as ashes—love and happiness. His life was uncoloured by the affections of home, and his days, like his ragged little visage and his dull personality, were vague, with the vagueness of negative misery. Of his nurse he was meekly afraid, and his relations with the other servants were of the most distantly polite and official nature. He understood that they were there to do his bidding nominally, and compel him actually to do theirs, pending his hour of authority. With a little broken sigh, he envied the happiness that he rootedly believed toaccompany the more cheerful proportions of the cottager’s experience, of which he occasionally caught glimpses in his daily walks, remembering the chill solitude of his own big empty castle and the immense park that seemed an expansion of his imprisonment, including, as part of his uninterrupted gloom, the kindly meadows and woods, the babbling streams and leafy avenues, where the birds sang of joys uncomprehended by him.Play was as foreign to him as hope. Every morning he gravely saluted the picture of his pretty mother, which hung in his bedroom, a lovely picture, hardly real in its dainty Greuze-like charm, arch and frail and innocent, the bloom of whose eighteen years had been sacrificed upon his own coming, leaving a copy washed of all beauty, its delicacy blurred in a half-effaced boyish visage without character or colouring. Of his father Hervé never spoke,—shrinking, with the unconscious pride of race, from the male interloper who had been glad enough to drop an inferior name, and was considered by his friends to have waltzed himself and his handsome eyes into an enviable bondage. And the only return he could make tothe house that had so benefited him was a flying visit from Paris to inspect the heir and confer with his son’s steward (whose guardian he had been appointed by the old marquis at his death), and then return to his city pleasures, which he found more entertaining than his Norman neighbours.On Sunday morning little Hervé was conducted to High Mass in the church of Saint-Laurent, upon the broad highroad leading to the town of Falaise. Duly escorted up the aisle by an obsequious Swiss in military hat and clanking sword, with a long blonde moustache that excited the boy’s admiration, Hervé and his nurse were bowed into the colossal family pew, as large as a moderate-sized chamber, roughly carven and running along the flat wide tombs of his ancestors, on which marble statues of knights and mediæval ladies lay lengthways. The child’s air of melancholy and solitary state was enough to make any honest heart ache, and his presence never failed to waken the intense interest of the simple congregation, and supply them with food for speculation as to his future over their mid-day soup and cider. Hard indeed would it havebeen to define the future of the little man sitting so decorously in his huge pew, and following the long services in a spirit of almost pathetic conventionality and resignation, only very occasionally relieved by his queer broken sigh, that had settled into a trick, or a furtive wandering of his eyes, that sought distraction among ancestral epitaphs.He was not, it must be owned, an engaging child, though soft-hearted and timidly attracted by animals, whose susceptibilities he would have feared to offend by any uninvited demonstration of affection. He had heard himself described as plain and dull, and thought it his duty to refrain as much as possible from inflicting his presence upon others, preferring loneliness to adverse criticism. But he had one friend who had found him out, and taken him to her equally unhappy and tender heart. The Comtesse de Fresney, a lady of thirty, was, like himself, miserable and misunderstood. Hervé thought she must be very beautiful for him to love her so devotedly, and he looked forward with much eagerness to the time of her widowhood, when he should be free to marry her.There was something inexpressibly sad in the drollery of their relations. Neither was aware of the comic element, while both were profoundly impressed with the sadness. Whenever a fair, a race, or a company of strolling players took the tyrannical count away from Fresney, a messenger was at once despatched to Saint-Laurent, and gladly the little marquis trotted off to console his friend.One day Hervé gave expression to his matrimonial intentions. The countess, sitting with her hands in her lap, was gazing gloomily out of the window, when she turned, and said, sighing: ‘Do you know, Hervé, that I have never even been to Paris?’Hervé did not know, and was not of an age to measure the frightful depth of privation confessed. But the countess spoke in a sadder voice than usual, and, in response to her sigh, his childish lips parted in his own vague little sigh.‘When I am grown up, I’ll take you to Paris, Countess,’ he said, coming near, and timidly fondling her hand.‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess, and she stooped to kiss him.‘M. le Comte is so old that he will probably be dead by that time, and then I can marry you, Countess, and you will live always at Saint-Laurent. You know it is bigger than Fresney.’‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess musingly, thinking of her lost years and dead dreams, as she stared across the pleasant landscape.Hervé regarded himself as an engaged gentleman from that day. The following Sunday he studied the epitaph on the tomb of the last Marquis, his grandfather, who had vanished into the darkness of an unexplored continent, with notebook and scientific intent, to leave his bones to whiten in the desert and the name of a brave man to adorn his country’s annals. Hervé was all excitement to learn from the countess the precise meaning of the wordsdistinguishedandexplorer.‘Countess,’ he hurried to ask, ‘what is it to be distinguished?’‘It is greatly to do great things, Hervé.’‘And what doesexplorermean?’‘To go far away into the unknown; to find out unvisited places, and teach others how much larger the world is than they imagine.’This explanation thrilled new thoughts and ambition in the breast of the little marquis. Why should not he begin at once to explore the world, and see for himself what lay beyond the dull precincts of Saint-Laurent? He then would become distinguished like his grandfather, and the countess would be proud of him. The scheme hurried his pulses, and gave him his first taste of excitement, which stood him in place of a very small appetite. He watched his moment in the artful instinct of childhood with a scheme in its head. It was not difficult to elude a careless nurse and gossiping servants, and he knew an alley by which the broad straight road, leading from the castle to the town, might be reached over a friendly stile that involved no pledge of secrecy from an untrustworthy lodge-keeper. And away he was scampering along the hedge, drunk with excitement and the glory of his own unprotected state, drunk with the spring sunshine and the smell of violets that made breathing a bliss.Picture a tumble-down town, with a quantity of little streets breaking unexpectedly into glimpses of green meadow and foliage; ricketyomnibuses, jerking and rumbling upon uncouth wheels, mysteriously held by their drivers from laying their contents upon the jagged pavements; little old-fashioned squares, washed by runlets for paving divisions, with the big names ofLa Trinité,Saint-Gervais,Guillaume le Conquérant, and theGrand Turc,—the latter the most unlikely form of heretic ever to have shaken the equilibrium of the quaint town; a public fountain, a market-place, many-aisled churches, smelling of damp and decay, their fretted arches worn with age, and their pictures bleached of all colour by the moist stone; primitive shops, latticed windows, asthmatical old men in blouses and night-caps, in which they seem to have been born and in which they promise to die; girls in linen towers and starched side-flaps concealing every curl and wave of their hair, theirsabotsbeating the flags with the click of castanets; groups of idle huzzars, moustached and menacing, strutting the dilapidated public gardens like walking arsenals, the eternal cigarette between their lips, and the everlastingsapristiandsacréupon them. Throw in acuréor two, wide-hatted, of leisured and benevolent aspect, with a smileaddressed to the world as a generalmon enfant; anabbé, less leisured and less assured of public indulgence; a discreetfrère, whose hurrying movements shake his robes to the dimensions of a balloon; an elegantsous-préfet, conscious of Parisian tailoring, and much in request in provincial salons; a wooden-legged colonel, devoted to the memory of the first Napoleon, and wrathful at that of him of Sedan; a few civilians of professional calling, deferential to the military and in awe of the colonel; the local gossip and shopkeeper on Trinity Square, Mère Lescaut, who knows everything about everybody, and the usual group of antagonistic politicians. For the outskirts, five broad roads diverging star-wise from a common centre, with an inviting simplicity of aspect that might tempt the least adventurous spirit of childhood to make, by one of those pleasant, straight, and leafy paths, for the alluring horizon. Add the local lion, Great William’s Tower, a very respectable Norman ruin, where a more mythical personage than William might easily have been born, and which might very well hallow more ancient loves than those of Robert and the washerwoman Arletta; a splendid equestrianstatue of the Conqueror, and a quantity of threads of silver water running between mossy banks, where women in mountainous caps of linen wash clothes, and the violets in spring and autumn grow so thickly, that the air is faint with their sweet scent. Afar, green field upon green field, stretching on all sides, till the atmospheric blue blots out their colour and melts them into the sky; sudden spaces of wood making shadows upon the bright plains and dusty roads, fringed with poplars, cutting uninterrupted paths to the horizon.The weekly fair was being held on the Place de la Trinité, when Hervé made his way so far. The noise and jollity stunned him. Long tables were spread round, highly coloured and decorated with a variety of objects, and good-humoured cleanly Norman women in caps, and men in blue blouses, were shouting exchanged speech, or wrangling decorously. Hervé thrust his hands into his pockets in a pretence of security, like that assumed by his elders upon novel occasions, though his pulses shook with unaccustomed force and velocity; and he walked round the tables with uneasy impulses towards the toys and sweetmeats, and thoughta ride on the merry-go-round would be an enviable sensation. But these temptations he gallantly resisted, as unbecoming his serious business. Women smiled upon him, and called him,Ce joli petit monsieur, a fact which caused him more surprise than anything else, having heard his father describe him as ugly. He bowed to them, when he rejected their offers of toys and penknives, but could not resist the invitation of a fresh cake, and held his hat in one hand, while he searched in his pocket to pay for it. Hervé made up for his dulness by a correctness of demeanour that was rather depressing than captivating.Munching his cake with a secret pleasure in this slight infringement of social law, he wandered upon the skirt of the noisy and good-natured crowd, which, in the settlement of its affairs, was lavish in smiles and jokes. What should he do with his liberty and leisure when his senses had tired of this particular form of intoxication? He bethought himself of the famous tower which Pierrot, the valet, had assured him was the largest castle in the world. Glancing up the square, he saw the old wooden-legged colonel limping towards him, andHervé promptly decided that so warlike a personage could not fail to be aware of the direction in which the tower lay. He barred the colonel’s way with his hat in his hand, and said: ‘Please, Monsieur, will you be so good as to direct me to the castle of William the Conqueror?’The colonel heard the soft tremulous pipe, and brought his fierce glare down upon the urchin with hawklike penetration. Fearful menace seemed to lie in the final tap of his wooden leg upon the pavement, as he came to a standstill in front of Hervé, and he cleared his chest with a loud military sound likeboom. Hervé stood the sound, but winced and repeated his request more timidly. Now this desperate-looking soldier had a kindly heart, and loved children. He had not the least idea that his loudboom, and his shaggy eyebrows, and his great scowling red face frightened the life out of them. A request from a child so small and feeble to be directed to anybody’s castle, much less the Conqueror’s, when so many strong and idle arms in the world must be willing to carry him, afflicted him with an almost maternal throb of tenderness. By his smile hedispersed the unpleasant impressions of hisboomand the click of his artificial limb, and completely won Hervé’s confidence, who was quite pleased to find his thin little fingers lost in the grasp of his new companion’s large hand, when the giant in uniform turned and volunteered to conduct him to the tower. Crossing the Square of Guillaume le Conquérant, Hervé even became expansive.‘Look, Monsieur,’ he cried, pointing to the beautiful bronze statue, ‘one would say that the horse was about to jump, and throw the knight.’The colonel slapped his chest like a man insulted in the person of a glorious ancestor, and emitted an unusually gruffboom, that nearly blew little Hervé to the other side of the square, and made his lips tremble.‘I’d like, young sir, to see the horse that could have thrown that man,’ said the Norman.‘There was a Baron of Vervainville when Robert was Duke of Normandy. He went with Robert to the Crusades. The countess has told me that only very distinguished and brave people went to the Crusades in those days. They were wars, Monsieur, a great wayoff. I often try to make out what is written on his tomb in Saint-Laurent, but I can never get further than Geoffroi,’ Hervé concluded, with his queer short sigh, while in front of them rose the mighty Norman ruin upon the landscape, like the past glancing poignantly through an ever youthful smile.The colonel, enlightened by this communication upon the lad’s identity, stared at him in alarmed surprise.‘Is there nobody in attendance upon M. le Marquis?’ he asked.‘I am trying to be an explorer like my grandpapa; that is why I have run away at once. I am obliged to you, Monsieur, but it is not necessary that you should give yourself the trouble to come further with me. I shall be able to find the way back to the Place de la Trinité.’The colonel was dubious as to his right to accept dismissal. The sky looked threatening, and he hardly believed that he could in honour forsake the child. But,sapristi!there were the unread papers down from Paris waiting for him at his favourite haunt, the Café du Grand Turc, to be discussed between generous draughtsof cider. He tugged his grey moustache in divided feelings, and at last came to a decision with the aid of his terribleboom. He would deliver the little marquis into the hands of theconciergeof the tower, and after a look in upon his cronies at the Grand Turc and a glass of cider, hasten to Saint-Laurent in search of proper authority.Hervé was a decorous sightseer, who left others much in the dark as to his private impressions of what he saw. The tower, he admitted, was very big and cold. He did not think it would give him much satisfaction to have been born in the chill cavernous chamber wherein William had first seen the light, while the bombastic lines upon the conquest of the Saxons, read to him in a strong Norman accent, gave him the reverse of a desire to explore that benighted land. With his hands in his pockets, he stood and peeped through the slit in the stone wall, nearly as high as the clouds, whence Robert is supposed to have detected the charming visage of Arletta, washing linen below, with a keenness of sight nothing less diabolical than his sobriquet,le diable.‘I couldn’t see anybody down so far, couldyou?’ he asked; and then his attention was caught by the big rain-drops that were beginning to fall in black circles upon the unroofed stone stairs. Theconciergewatched the sky a moment, then lifted Hervé into his arms, and hurried down the innumerable steps to the shelter of his own cosy parlour. Excitement and fatigue were telling upon the child, who looked nervous and scared. The rain-drops had gathered the force and noise of several waterfalls, pouring from the heavens with diluvian promise. Already the landscape was drenched and blotted out of view. An affrighted peasant, insabotslarge enough to shelter the woman and her family of nursery rhyme, darted down the road, holding a coloured umbrella as big as a tent. The roar of thunder came from afar, and a flash of lightning broke through the vapoury veil, making Hervé blink like a distracted owl caught by the dawn. Oh, if he were only back safely at Saint-Laurent, or could hold the hand of his dear countess! No, he would not explore any more until he was a grown-up man. A howl of thunder and a child’s feeble cry——Meanwhile confusion reigned in the castle.Men and women flew hither and thither, screaming blame upon each other. In an agony of apprehension, the butler ordered the family coach, and was driven into town, wondering how M. le Vervainville would take the news if anything were to happen to remove the source of his wealth and local importance.Parbleu!he would not be the man to tell him. Crossing the Place de la Trinité, he caught sight of Mère Lescaut gazing out upon the deluged square. In a happy inspiration, he determined to consult her, and while he was endeavouring to make his knock heard above the tempest and to shield his eyes from the glare of the lightning flashes, Mère Lescaut thrust her white cap out through the upper half of the shop door, and screamed, ‘You are looking for M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent, and I saw him cross the square with Colonel Larousse this afternoon.’‘Diable! Diable!’ roared the distracted butler. ‘I passed the colonel on the road an hour ago.’The endless moments lost in adjuring the gods, in voluble faith in calamity, in imprecations at the storm, and shivering assertions of discomfort which never mend matters, and atlast the dripping colonel and swearing butler meet. M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent and Baron de Vervainville was found asleep amid the historic memories of Robert and Arletta.This escapade brought M. de Vervainville down from Paris, with a new tutor. The tutor was very young, very modern, and very cynical. He was not in the least interested in Hervé, though rather amused when, on the second day of their acquaintance, the boy asked—‘Monsieur, are you engaged to be married?’ The tutor was happy to say that he had not that misfortune.‘Is it then a misfortune? I am very glad that I am engaged, though I have heard my nurse say that married people are not often happy.’The tutor thought it not improbable such an important personage as the Marquis de Saint-Laurent had been officially betrothed to some desirablepartiof infant years, and asked her age and name.‘The Countess de Fresney. She is not a little girl, and at present her husband is alive, but I daresay he will be dead soon. You know, Monsieur, she is a great deal older than I am, but I shall like that much better. It will not be necessary for me to learn much, for she willknow everything for me, and I can amuse myself. I will take you to see her to-morrow. She is very beautiful,—but not so beautiful as my mamma—and I love her very dearly.’It occurred to the cynical tutor that the countess might be bored enough in this uncheerful place to take an interest in so captivating a person as himself. But when they arrived at Fresney, they learnt that the countess was seriously ill. Hervé began to cry when he was refused permission to see his friend, and at that moment M. le Comte, an erratic, middle-aged tyrant, held in mortal terror by his dependants, burst in upon him, with a vigorous—‘Ho, ho! the little marquis, my rival! Come hither, sirrah, and let me run the sword of vengeance through your body.’And the merry old rascal began to roll his eyes, and mutter strange guttural sounds for his own amusement and Hervé’s fright.‘I do not care if you do kill me, M. le Comte,’ the boy sobbed. ‘You are a wicked man, and it is because you make dear Madame unhappy that she is so ill. You are as wicked and ugly as the ogre in the story she gave me last Christmas. But she will get well, and youwill die, and then I will marry her, and she will never be unhappy any more.’‘Take him away before I kill him—the insolent little jackanapes! In love with a married woman, and telling it to her husband! Ho, ho! so I am an ogre! Very well, let me make a meal of you.’ With that he produced an orange and offered it to Hervé, who turned on his heel, and stumbled out of the room, blinded with tears.But the countess did not get well. She sent for Hervé one day, and kissed him tenderly.‘My little boy, my little Hervé, you will soon be alone again. But you will find another friend, and by and by you will be happy.’‘Never, never, if you die, Countess. I shall not care for anything, not even for my new pony, though it has such a pretty white star on its forehead. I do not want to grow up, and I shall never be married now, nor—nothing,’ he cried, with quivering lips.That evening his friend died, and the news was brought to Hervé, as he and the tutor sat over their supper. Hervé pushed away his plate, and took his scared and desolated little heart to the solitude of his own room. Duringthe night, the tutor was awakened by his call.‘Monsieur, please to tell me what happens when people die.’‘Ma foi, there is nothing more about them,’ cried the tutor.‘And what are those who do not die supposed to do?’‘To moderate their feelings,—and go to sleep.’‘But I cannot sleep, Monsieur. I am very unhappy. Oh, I wish it had been the count. Why doesn’t God kill wicked persons? Is it wicked to wish the count to be dead, Monsieur?’‘Very.’‘Then I must be dreadfully wicked, for I would like to kill him myself, if I were big and strong.’At breakfast next day, he asked if people did not wear very black clothes when their friends died, and indited a curious epistle to his father, begging permission to wear the deepest mourning for the lady he was to have married. Vested in black, his little mouse-coloured head looked more pitiful and vague than ever, as he sat out the long funeral service in the church of Saint-Gervais,and lost himself in endless efforts to count the candles, and understand what the strange catafalque and velvet pall in the middle of the church meant, and what had become of the countess.After the burial his tutor took him to the cemetery. The bereaved child carried a big wreath to lay upon the grave of his departed lady-love. Kneeling there, upon the same mission, was M. le Comte, shedding copious tears, and apostrophising the dead he had made it a point to wound in life. Hervé knelt opposite him, and stared at him indignantly. Why should he cry? The countess had not loved him, nor had he loved the countess. The boy flung himself down on the soft earth, and began to sob bitterly. The thought that he would never again see his lost friend took full possession of him for the first time, and he wanted to die himself. Disturbed by this passionate outbreak, the count rose, brushed the earth from his new trousers with a mourning pocket-handkerchief already drenched with his tears, and proceeded to lift Hervé.‘The dear defunct was much attached to you, little marquis,’ he said, and began to wipe awayHervé’s tears with the handkerchief made sacred by his own. ‘You were like a son to her.’‘I don’t want you to dry my eyes, Monsieur,’ Hervé exploded, bursting from his enemy’s arms. ‘I do not like you, and I always thought you would die soon, and not Madame. It isn’t just, and I will not be friends with you. I shall hate you always, for you are a wicked man, and you were cruel to Madame.’The count, who was not himself accounted sane by his neighbours, looked at the amused and impassable tutor, and significantly touched his forehead.‘Hereditary,’ he muttered, and stood to make way for Hervé.The birds were singing deliciously, the late afternoon sunshine gathered above the quiet trees (made quieter by here and there an unmovable cypress and a melancholy yew, fit symbols of the rest of death) into a pale golden mist shot with slanting rays of light, and the violets’ was the only scent to shake by suggestion the sense of soothing negation of all emotion or remembrance. Out upon the road, running like a broad ribbon to the town, unanimated in the gentle illumination of the afternoon, thetutor and Hervé met the colonel limping along one might imagine, upon the sound of a prolongedboom. Hervé’s tears were dried, but his face looked sorrowful and stained enough to spring tears of sympathy to any kind eyes. The colonel drew up, touched his cap, and uttered his customary signal with more than his customary gruffness. Hervé stood his ground firmly, though he winced, for he was a delicate child unused to rough sounds.‘How goes it, M. le Marquis? How goes it?’ shouted the colonel.‘M. le colonel, it goes very badly with me, but I try to bear it. My tutor tells me that men do not fret; I wish I knew how they manage not to do so when they are sad. I did want to grow up soon, and explore the world like my grandpapa, and then I should have married the Countess of Fresney, if her husband were dead. But now everything is different, and I don’t even want to see the tower of William the Conqueror again. I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want anything now.’‘Poor little man!’ said the colonel, patting his shoulder. ‘You’ve lost a friend, but you will gain others, and perhaps you’ll be a greatsoldier one of these days, like the little Corporal.’Hervé shook his head dolorously. He saw nothing ahead but unpleasant lessons varied by sad excursions to the countess’s grave.The unhappy little marquis was moping and fading visibly. He could not be got to take an interest in his lessons, and he proudly strove to conceal the fact that he was afraid of his tutor’s mocking smile. The news of his ill-health reached M. de Vervainville in Paris, and at once brought that alarmed gentleman down to Falaise. On Hervé’s life depended his town luxuries and his importance as a landed proprietor. Was there anything his son wished for? Hervé reflected a while, then raised his mouse-coloured head, and sighed his own little sigh. He thought he should like to see Colonel Larousse. And so it came that one morning, staring out of the window, the boy saw a familiar military figure limping up the avenue. Hervé’s worried small countenance almost glowed with expectation, as he rushed to welcome his visitor, the sound of whoseboomand the tap of his wooden leg upon the parquet, as well as his dreadful shaggy eyebrows, seemed even cheerful.‘Do you think, Monsieur,’ Hervé asked gravely ‘that you would mind having for a friend such a very little boy as I?’The colonel cleared his throat and felt his eyes required the same operation, though he concealed that fact from Hervé.‘Boom! Touchez là, mon brave.’Never yet had Hervé heard speech so hearty and so republican. It astonished him, and filled him with a sense of perfect ease and trust. It was like a free breath in oppressive etiquette,—the child-prince’s first mud-pie upon the common road of humanity. Hervé became excited, and confided to the colonel that his father had ordered a toy sailing-boat for him, and that there was going to be a ball at Saint-Laurent in honour of his birthday, though he was not quite sure that he would enjoy that so much as the boat, for he had never danced, and could not play any games like other children. Still if Colonel Larousse would come, they could talk about soldiers. Come? Of course the colonel came, looking in his brushed uniform as one of the heroes home from Troy, and Hervé admired him prodigiously.The birthday ball was a great affair. Guestscame all the way from Caen and Lisieux, and Hervé, more bewildered than elated, stood beside his splendid father to receive them. Ladies in lovely robes, shedding every delicate scent, like flowers, petted him, and full-grown men, looking at these ladies, made much of him. They told him that he was charming, but he did not believe them. One cannot be both ugly and charming, little Hervé thought, with much bitterness and an inclination to cry. Their compliments gave him the same singular sensations evoked by the tutor’s smile.‘I do not know any of these people,’ he said sadly to Colonel Larousse. ‘I don’t think a ball very cheerful, do you? It makes my head ache to hear so many strange voices, and feel so much smaller than anybody else. My papa amuses himself, but I would like to run away to my boat.’‘Boom! Mon camarade, a soldier sticks to his post.’Hervé sighed, and thought if the countess had been here that he would have sat beside her all the evening, and have held her hand. And the knowledge that he would never again hold her hand, and that so many long weekshad passed since fond lips had kissed his face, and a sweet voice had called him ‘Little Hervé, little boy,’ brought tears of desperate self-pitying pain to his eyes. In these large illuminated salons, vexed with the mingled odours of flowers and scented skirts, by the scraping of fiddles and the flying feet of laughing dancers, unmindful of him as other than a queer quiet boy in velvet and Alençon lace, with a plain grey little face and owlish eyes that never smiled, Hervé felt more alone than ever he had felt since the countess’s death.Stealthily he made his escape through the long open window, and ran down the dewy lawn. How gratefully the cool air tasted and the lovely stillness of the night after the aching brilliancy within! Hervé assured himself that it was a pleasant relief, and hoped there would not be many more balls at the castle.The lake fringed the lawn, and moored against the branches of a weeping willow was his toy-boat, just as he had left it in the afternoon. It would look so pretty, he believed, sailing under the rising moon that touched the water silver and the blue stars that showed so peacefully upon it. He unknotted the string,and gaily the little boat swam out upon his impulsion. If only the countess could come back to him, he thought, with his boat he would be perfectly happy. ‘But I am so alone among them all,’ he said to himself, with his broken sigh. ‘I wished somebody loved me as little children are loved by their mammas.’The boat had carried away the string from his loose grasp, and he reached out his arm upon the water to recover it. A soft, moist bank, a small eager foot upon it, a frame easily tilted by an unsteady movement, the dark water broken into circling bubbles upon a child’s shrill cry of terror, and closing impassably over the body of poor forlorn little Hervé and his pretty velvet suit and Alençon lace,—this is what the stars and the pale calm moon saw; and over there upon the further shore of the lake floated the toy-boat as placidly as if it had worked no treachery, and had not led to the extinction of an illustrious name and race.‘Where is M. le Marquis?’ demanded M. de Vervainville, interrupting an enchanting moment upon discovery of his son’s absence from the salon.A search, a hurry, a scare,—music stopped, wine-glasses at the buffet laid down untouched, ices rejected, fear and anxiety upon every face. M. le Marquis is not in the salons, nor in the tutor’s apartment, nor in his own. The grounds are searched, ‘Hervé’ and ‘M. le Marquis’ ringing through the silence unanswered. His boat was found and the impress of small footsteps upon the wet bank. M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent and Baron de Vervainville was drowned.Printed by T. and A.CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majestyat the Edinburgh University Press
HERVÉDEVERVAINVILLE, Marquis de Saint-Laurent, was at once the biggest and smallest landlord of Calvados, the most important personage of that department and the most insignificant and powerless. Into his cradle the fairies had dropped all the gifts of fortune but those two, without which the others taste as ashes—love and happiness. His life was uncoloured by the affections of home, and his days, like his ragged little visage and his dull personality, were vague, with the vagueness of negative misery. Of his nurse he was meekly afraid, and his relations with the other servants were of the most distantly polite and official nature. He understood that they were there to do his bidding nominally, and compel him actually to do theirs, pending his hour of authority. With a little broken sigh, he envied the happiness that he rootedly believed toaccompany the more cheerful proportions of the cottager’s experience, of which he occasionally caught glimpses in his daily walks, remembering the chill solitude of his own big empty castle and the immense park that seemed an expansion of his imprisonment, including, as part of his uninterrupted gloom, the kindly meadows and woods, the babbling streams and leafy avenues, where the birds sang of joys uncomprehended by him.
Play was as foreign to him as hope. Every morning he gravely saluted the picture of his pretty mother, which hung in his bedroom, a lovely picture, hardly real in its dainty Greuze-like charm, arch and frail and innocent, the bloom of whose eighteen years had been sacrificed upon his own coming, leaving a copy washed of all beauty, its delicacy blurred in a half-effaced boyish visage without character or colouring. Of his father Hervé never spoke,—shrinking, with the unconscious pride of race, from the male interloper who had been glad enough to drop an inferior name, and was considered by his friends to have waltzed himself and his handsome eyes into an enviable bondage. And the only return he could make tothe house that had so benefited him was a flying visit from Paris to inspect the heir and confer with his son’s steward (whose guardian he had been appointed by the old marquis at his death), and then return to his city pleasures, which he found more entertaining than his Norman neighbours.
On Sunday morning little Hervé was conducted to High Mass in the church of Saint-Laurent, upon the broad highroad leading to the town of Falaise. Duly escorted up the aisle by an obsequious Swiss in military hat and clanking sword, with a long blonde moustache that excited the boy’s admiration, Hervé and his nurse were bowed into the colossal family pew, as large as a moderate-sized chamber, roughly carven and running along the flat wide tombs of his ancestors, on which marble statues of knights and mediæval ladies lay lengthways. The child’s air of melancholy and solitary state was enough to make any honest heart ache, and his presence never failed to waken the intense interest of the simple congregation, and supply them with food for speculation as to his future over their mid-day soup and cider. Hard indeed would it havebeen to define the future of the little man sitting so decorously in his huge pew, and following the long services in a spirit of almost pathetic conventionality and resignation, only very occasionally relieved by his queer broken sigh, that had settled into a trick, or a furtive wandering of his eyes, that sought distraction among ancestral epitaphs.
He was not, it must be owned, an engaging child, though soft-hearted and timidly attracted by animals, whose susceptibilities he would have feared to offend by any uninvited demonstration of affection. He had heard himself described as plain and dull, and thought it his duty to refrain as much as possible from inflicting his presence upon others, preferring loneliness to adverse criticism. But he had one friend who had found him out, and taken him to her equally unhappy and tender heart. The Comtesse de Fresney, a lady of thirty, was, like himself, miserable and misunderstood. Hervé thought she must be very beautiful for him to love her so devotedly, and he looked forward with much eagerness to the time of her widowhood, when he should be free to marry her.
There was something inexpressibly sad in the drollery of their relations. Neither was aware of the comic element, while both were profoundly impressed with the sadness. Whenever a fair, a race, or a company of strolling players took the tyrannical count away from Fresney, a messenger was at once despatched to Saint-Laurent, and gladly the little marquis trotted off to console his friend.
One day Hervé gave expression to his matrimonial intentions. The countess, sitting with her hands in her lap, was gazing gloomily out of the window, when she turned, and said, sighing: ‘Do you know, Hervé, that I have never even been to Paris?’
Hervé did not know, and was not of an age to measure the frightful depth of privation confessed. But the countess spoke in a sadder voice than usual, and, in response to her sigh, his childish lips parted in his own vague little sigh.
‘When I am grown up, I’ll take you to Paris, Countess,’ he said, coming near, and timidly fondling her hand.
‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess, and she stooped to kiss him.
‘M. le Comte is so old that he will probably be dead by that time, and then I can marry you, Countess, and you will live always at Saint-Laurent. You know it is bigger than Fresney.’
‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess musingly, thinking of her lost years and dead dreams, as she stared across the pleasant landscape.
Hervé regarded himself as an engaged gentleman from that day. The following Sunday he studied the epitaph on the tomb of the last Marquis, his grandfather, who had vanished into the darkness of an unexplored continent, with notebook and scientific intent, to leave his bones to whiten in the desert and the name of a brave man to adorn his country’s annals. Hervé was all excitement to learn from the countess the precise meaning of the wordsdistinguishedandexplorer.
‘Countess,’ he hurried to ask, ‘what is it to be distinguished?’
‘It is greatly to do great things, Hervé.’
‘And what doesexplorermean?’
‘To go far away into the unknown; to find out unvisited places, and teach others how much larger the world is than they imagine.’
This explanation thrilled new thoughts and ambition in the breast of the little marquis. Why should not he begin at once to explore the world, and see for himself what lay beyond the dull precincts of Saint-Laurent? He then would become distinguished like his grandfather, and the countess would be proud of him. The scheme hurried his pulses, and gave him his first taste of excitement, which stood him in place of a very small appetite. He watched his moment in the artful instinct of childhood with a scheme in its head. It was not difficult to elude a careless nurse and gossiping servants, and he knew an alley by which the broad straight road, leading from the castle to the town, might be reached over a friendly stile that involved no pledge of secrecy from an untrustworthy lodge-keeper. And away he was scampering along the hedge, drunk with excitement and the glory of his own unprotected state, drunk with the spring sunshine and the smell of violets that made breathing a bliss.
Picture a tumble-down town, with a quantity of little streets breaking unexpectedly into glimpses of green meadow and foliage; ricketyomnibuses, jerking and rumbling upon uncouth wheels, mysteriously held by their drivers from laying their contents upon the jagged pavements; little old-fashioned squares, washed by runlets for paving divisions, with the big names ofLa Trinité,Saint-Gervais,Guillaume le Conquérant, and theGrand Turc,—the latter the most unlikely form of heretic ever to have shaken the equilibrium of the quaint town; a public fountain, a market-place, many-aisled churches, smelling of damp and decay, their fretted arches worn with age, and their pictures bleached of all colour by the moist stone; primitive shops, latticed windows, asthmatical old men in blouses and night-caps, in which they seem to have been born and in which they promise to die; girls in linen towers and starched side-flaps concealing every curl and wave of their hair, theirsabotsbeating the flags with the click of castanets; groups of idle huzzars, moustached and menacing, strutting the dilapidated public gardens like walking arsenals, the eternal cigarette between their lips, and the everlastingsapristiandsacréupon them. Throw in acuréor two, wide-hatted, of leisured and benevolent aspect, with a smileaddressed to the world as a generalmon enfant; anabbé, less leisured and less assured of public indulgence; a discreetfrère, whose hurrying movements shake his robes to the dimensions of a balloon; an elegantsous-préfet, conscious of Parisian tailoring, and much in request in provincial salons; a wooden-legged colonel, devoted to the memory of the first Napoleon, and wrathful at that of him of Sedan; a few civilians of professional calling, deferential to the military and in awe of the colonel; the local gossip and shopkeeper on Trinity Square, Mère Lescaut, who knows everything about everybody, and the usual group of antagonistic politicians. For the outskirts, five broad roads diverging star-wise from a common centre, with an inviting simplicity of aspect that might tempt the least adventurous spirit of childhood to make, by one of those pleasant, straight, and leafy paths, for the alluring horizon. Add the local lion, Great William’s Tower, a very respectable Norman ruin, where a more mythical personage than William might easily have been born, and which might very well hallow more ancient loves than those of Robert and the washerwoman Arletta; a splendid equestrianstatue of the Conqueror, and a quantity of threads of silver water running between mossy banks, where women in mountainous caps of linen wash clothes, and the violets in spring and autumn grow so thickly, that the air is faint with their sweet scent. Afar, green field upon green field, stretching on all sides, till the atmospheric blue blots out their colour and melts them into the sky; sudden spaces of wood making shadows upon the bright plains and dusty roads, fringed with poplars, cutting uninterrupted paths to the horizon.
The weekly fair was being held on the Place de la Trinité, when Hervé made his way so far. The noise and jollity stunned him. Long tables were spread round, highly coloured and decorated with a variety of objects, and good-humoured cleanly Norman women in caps, and men in blue blouses, were shouting exchanged speech, or wrangling decorously. Hervé thrust his hands into his pockets in a pretence of security, like that assumed by his elders upon novel occasions, though his pulses shook with unaccustomed force and velocity; and he walked round the tables with uneasy impulses towards the toys and sweetmeats, and thoughta ride on the merry-go-round would be an enviable sensation. But these temptations he gallantly resisted, as unbecoming his serious business. Women smiled upon him, and called him,Ce joli petit monsieur, a fact which caused him more surprise than anything else, having heard his father describe him as ugly. He bowed to them, when he rejected their offers of toys and penknives, but could not resist the invitation of a fresh cake, and held his hat in one hand, while he searched in his pocket to pay for it. Hervé made up for his dulness by a correctness of demeanour that was rather depressing than captivating.
Munching his cake with a secret pleasure in this slight infringement of social law, he wandered upon the skirt of the noisy and good-natured crowd, which, in the settlement of its affairs, was lavish in smiles and jokes. What should he do with his liberty and leisure when his senses had tired of this particular form of intoxication? He bethought himself of the famous tower which Pierrot, the valet, had assured him was the largest castle in the world. Glancing up the square, he saw the old wooden-legged colonel limping towards him, andHervé promptly decided that so warlike a personage could not fail to be aware of the direction in which the tower lay. He barred the colonel’s way with his hat in his hand, and said: ‘Please, Monsieur, will you be so good as to direct me to the castle of William the Conqueror?’
The colonel heard the soft tremulous pipe, and brought his fierce glare down upon the urchin with hawklike penetration. Fearful menace seemed to lie in the final tap of his wooden leg upon the pavement, as he came to a standstill in front of Hervé, and he cleared his chest with a loud military sound likeboom. Hervé stood the sound, but winced and repeated his request more timidly. Now this desperate-looking soldier had a kindly heart, and loved children. He had not the least idea that his loudboom, and his shaggy eyebrows, and his great scowling red face frightened the life out of them. A request from a child so small and feeble to be directed to anybody’s castle, much less the Conqueror’s, when so many strong and idle arms in the world must be willing to carry him, afflicted him with an almost maternal throb of tenderness. By his smile hedispersed the unpleasant impressions of hisboomand the click of his artificial limb, and completely won Hervé’s confidence, who was quite pleased to find his thin little fingers lost in the grasp of his new companion’s large hand, when the giant in uniform turned and volunteered to conduct him to the tower. Crossing the Square of Guillaume le Conquérant, Hervé even became expansive.
‘Look, Monsieur,’ he cried, pointing to the beautiful bronze statue, ‘one would say that the horse was about to jump, and throw the knight.’
The colonel slapped his chest like a man insulted in the person of a glorious ancestor, and emitted an unusually gruffboom, that nearly blew little Hervé to the other side of the square, and made his lips tremble.
‘I’d like, young sir, to see the horse that could have thrown that man,’ said the Norman.
‘There was a Baron of Vervainville when Robert was Duke of Normandy. He went with Robert to the Crusades. The countess has told me that only very distinguished and brave people went to the Crusades in those days. They were wars, Monsieur, a great wayoff. I often try to make out what is written on his tomb in Saint-Laurent, but I can never get further than Geoffroi,’ Hervé concluded, with his queer short sigh, while in front of them rose the mighty Norman ruin upon the landscape, like the past glancing poignantly through an ever youthful smile.
The colonel, enlightened by this communication upon the lad’s identity, stared at him in alarmed surprise.
‘Is there nobody in attendance upon M. le Marquis?’ he asked.
‘I am trying to be an explorer like my grandpapa; that is why I have run away at once. I am obliged to you, Monsieur, but it is not necessary that you should give yourself the trouble to come further with me. I shall be able to find the way back to the Place de la Trinité.’
The colonel was dubious as to his right to accept dismissal. The sky looked threatening, and he hardly believed that he could in honour forsake the child. But,sapristi!there were the unread papers down from Paris waiting for him at his favourite haunt, the Café du Grand Turc, to be discussed between generous draughtsof cider. He tugged his grey moustache in divided feelings, and at last came to a decision with the aid of his terribleboom. He would deliver the little marquis into the hands of theconciergeof the tower, and after a look in upon his cronies at the Grand Turc and a glass of cider, hasten to Saint-Laurent in search of proper authority.
Hervé was a decorous sightseer, who left others much in the dark as to his private impressions of what he saw. The tower, he admitted, was very big and cold. He did not think it would give him much satisfaction to have been born in the chill cavernous chamber wherein William had first seen the light, while the bombastic lines upon the conquest of the Saxons, read to him in a strong Norman accent, gave him the reverse of a desire to explore that benighted land. With his hands in his pockets, he stood and peeped through the slit in the stone wall, nearly as high as the clouds, whence Robert is supposed to have detected the charming visage of Arletta, washing linen below, with a keenness of sight nothing less diabolical than his sobriquet,le diable.
‘I couldn’t see anybody down so far, couldyou?’ he asked; and then his attention was caught by the big rain-drops that were beginning to fall in black circles upon the unroofed stone stairs. Theconciergewatched the sky a moment, then lifted Hervé into his arms, and hurried down the innumerable steps to the shelter of his own cosy parlour. Excitement and fatigue were telling upon the child, who looked nervous and scared. The rain-drops had gathered the force and noise of several waterfalls, pouring from the heavens with diluvian promise. Already the landscape was drenched and blotted out of view. An affrighted peasant, insabotslarge enough to shelter the woman and her family of nursery rhyme, darted down the road, holding a coloured umbrella as big as a tent. The roar of thunder came from afar, and a flash of lightning broke through the vapoury veil, making Hervé blink like a distracted owl caught by the dawn. Oh, if he were only back safely at Saint-Laurent, or could hold the hand of his dear countess! No, he would not explore any more until he was a grown-up man. A howl of thunder and a child’s feeble cry——
Meanwhile confusion reigned in the castle.Men and women flew hither and thither, screaming blame upon each other. In an agony of apprehension, the butler ordered the family coach, and was driven into town, wondering how M. le Vervainville would take the news if anything were to happen to remove the source of his wealth and local importance.Parbleu!he would not be the man to tell him. Crossing the Place de la Trinité, he caught sight of Mère Lescaut gazing out upon the deluged square. In a happy inspiration, he determined to consult her, and while he was endeavouring to make his knock heard above the tempest and to shield his eyes from the glare of the lightning flashes, Mère Lescaut thrust her white cap out through the upper half of the shop door, and screamed, ‘You are looking for M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent, and I saw him cross the square with Colonel Larousse this afternoon.’
‘Diable! Diable!’ roared the distracted butler. ‘I passed the colonel on the road an hour ago.’
The endless moments lost in adjuring the gods, in voluble faith in calamity, in imprecations at the storm, and shivering assertions of discomfort which never mend matters, and atlast the dripping colonel and swearing butler meet. M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent and Baron de Vervainville was found asleep amid the historic memories of Robert and Arletta.
This escapade brought M. de Vervainville down from Paris, with a new tutor. The tutor was very young, very modern, and very cynical. He was not in the least interested in Hervé, though rather amused when, on the second day of their acquaintance, the boy asked—‘Monsieur, are you engaged to be married?’ The tutor was happy to say that he had not that misfortune.
‘Is it then a misfortune? I am very glad that I am engaged, though I have heard my nurse say that married people are not often happy.’
The tutor thought it not improbable such an important personage as the Marquis de Saint-Laurent had been officially betrothed to some desirablepartiof infant years, and asked her age and name.
‘The Countess de Fresney. She is not a little girl, and at present her husband is alive, but I daresay he will be dead soon. You know, Monsieur, she is a great deal older than I am, but I shall like that much better. It will not be necessary for me to learn much, for she willknow everything for me, and I can amuse myself. I will take you to see her to-morrow. She is very beautiful,—but not so beautiful as my mamma—and I love her very dearly.’
It occurred to the cynical tutor that the countess might be bored enough in this uncheerful place to take an interest in so captivating a person as himself. But when they arrived at Fresney, they learnt that the countess was seriously ill. Hervé began to cry when he was refused permission to see his friend, and at that moment M. le Comte, an erratic, middle-aged tyrant, held in mortal terror by his dependants, burst in upon him, with a vigorous—‘Ho, ho! the little marquis, my rival! Come hither, sirrah, and let me run the sword of vengeance through your body.’
And the merry old rascal began to roll his eyes, and mutter strange guttural sounds for his own amusement and Hervé’s fright.
‘I do not care if you do kill me, M. le Comte,’ the boy sobbed. ‘You are a wicked man, and it is because you make dear Madame unhappy that she is so ill. You are as wicked and ugly as the ogre in the story she gave me last Christmas. But she will get well, and youwill die, and then I will marry her, and she will never be unhappy any more.’
‘Take him away before I kill him—the insolent little jackanapes! In love with a married woman, and telling it to her husband! Ho, ho! so I am an ogre! Very well, let me make a meal of you.’ With that he produced an orange and offered it to Hervé, who turned on his heel, and stumbled out of the room, blinded with tears.
But the countess did not get well. She sent for Hervé one day, and kissed him tenderly.
‘My little boy, my little Hervé, you will soon be alone again. But you will find another friend, and by and by you will be happy.’
‘Never, never, if you die, Countess. I shall not care for anything, not even for my new pony, though it has such a pretty white star on its forehead. I do not want to grow up, and I shall never be married now, nor—nothing,’ he cried, with quivering lips.
That evening his friend died, and the news was brought to Hervé, as he and the tutor sat over their supper. Hervé pushed away his plate, and took his scared and desolated little heart to the solitude of his own room. Duringthe night, the tutor was awakened by his call.
‘Monsieur, please to tell me what happens when people die.’
‘Ma foi, there is nothing more about them,’ cried the tutor.
‘And what are those who do not die supposed to do?’
‘To moderate their feelings,—and go to sleep.’
‘But I cannot sleep, Monsieur. I am very unhappy. Oh, I wish it had been the count. Why doesn’t God kill wicked persons? Is it wicked to wish the count to be dead, Monsieur?’
‘Very.’
‘Then I must be dreadfully wicked, for I would like to kill him myself, if I were big and strong.’
At breakfast next day, he asked if people did not wear very black clothes when their friends died, and indited a curious epistle to his father, begging permission to wear the deepest mourning for the lady he was to have married. Vested in black, his little mouse-coloured head looked more pitiful and vague than ever, as he sat out the long funeral service in the church of Saint-Gervais,and lost himself in endless efforts to count the candles, and understand what the strange catafalque and velvet pall in the middle of the church meant, and what had become of the countess.
After the burial his tutor took him to the cemetery. The bereaved child carried a big wreath to lay upon the grave of his departed lady-love. Kneeling there, upon the same mission, was M. le Comte, shedding copious tears, and apostrophising the dead he had made it a point to wound in life. Hervé knelt opposite him, and stared at him indignantly. Why should he cry? The countess had not loved him, nor had he loved the countess. The boy flung himself down on the soft earth, and began to sob bitterly. The thought that he would never again see his lost friend took full possession of him for the first time, and he wanted to die himself. Disturbed by this passionate outbreak, the count rose, brushed the earth from his new trousers with a mourning pocket-handkerchief already drenched with his tears, and proceeded to lift Hervé.
‘The dear defunct was much attached to you, little marquis,’ he said, and began to wipe awayHervé’s tears with the handkerchief made sacred by his own. ‘You were like a son to her.’
‘I don’t want you to dry my eyes, Monsieur,’ Hervé exploded, bursting from his enemy’s arms. ‘I do not like you, and I always thought you would die soon, and not Madame. It isn’t just, and I will not be friends with you. I shall hate you always, for you are a wicked man, and you were cruel to Madame.’
The count, who was not himself accounted sane by his neighbours, looked at the amused and impassable tutor, and significantly touched his forehead.
‘Hereditary,’ he muttered, and stood to make way for Hervé.
The birds were singing deliciously, the late afternoon sunshine gathered above the quiet trees (made quieter by here and there an unmovable cypress and a melancholy yew, fit symbols of the rest of death) into a pale golden mist shot with slanting rays of light, and the violets’ was the only scent to shake by suggestion the sense of soothing negation of all emotion or remembrance. Out upon the road, running like a broad ribbon to the town, unanimated in the gentle illumination of the afternoon, thetutor and Hervé met the colonel limping along one might imagine, upon the sound of a prolongedboom. Hervé’s tears were dried, but his face looked sorrowful and stained enough to spring tears of sympathy to any kind eyes. The colonel drew up, touched his cap, and uttered his customary signal with more than his customary gruffness. Hervé stood his ground firmly, though he winced, for he was a delicate child unused to rough sounds.
‘How goes it, M. le Marquis? How goes it?’ shouted the colonel.
‘M. le colonel, it goes very badly with me, but I try to bear it. My tutor tells me that men do not fret; I wish I knew how they manage not to do so when they are sad. I did want to grow up soon, and explore the world like my grandpapa, and then I should have married the Countess of Fresney, if her husband were dead. But now everything is different, and I don’t even want to see the tower of William the Conqueror again. I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want anything now.’
‘Poor little man!’ said the colonel, patting his shoulder. ‘You’ve lost a friend, but you will gain others, and perhaps you’ll be a greatsoldier one of these days, like the little Corporal.’
Hervé shook his head dolorously. He saw nothing ahead but unpleasant lessons varied by sad excursions to the countess’s grave.
The unhappy little marquis was moping and fading visibly. He could not be got to take an interest in his lessons, and he proudly strove to conceal the fact that he was afraid of his tutor’s mocking smile. The news of his ill-health reached M. de Vervainville in Paris, and at once brought that alarmed gentleman down to Falaise. On Hervé’s life depended his town luxuries and his importance as a landed proprietor. Was there anything his son wished for? Hervé reflected a while, then raised his mouse-coloured head, and sighed his own little sigh. He thought he should like to see Colonel Larousse. And so it came that one morning, staring out of the window, the boy saw a familiar military figure limping up the avenue. Hervé’s worried small countenance almost glowed with expectation, as he rushed to welcome his visitor, the sound of whoseboomand the tap of his wooden leg upon the parquet, as well as his dreadful shaggy eyebrows, seemed even cheerful.
‘Do you think, Monsieur,’ Hervé asked gravely ‘that you would mind having for a friend such a very little boy as I?’
The colonel cleared his throat and felt his eyes required the same operation, though he concealed that fact from Hervé.
‘Boom! Touchez là, mon brave.’
Never yet had Hervé heard speech so hearty and so republican. It astonished him, and filled him with a sense of perfect ease and trust. It was like a free breath in oppressive etiquette,—the child-prince’s first mud-pie upon the common road of humanity. Hervé became excited, and confided to the colonel that his father had ordered a toy sailing-boat for him, and that there was going to be a ball at Saint-Laurent in honour of his birthday, though he was not quite sure that he would enjoy that so much as the boat, for he had never danced, and could not play any games like other children. Still if Colonel Larousse would come, they could talk about soldiers. Come? Of course the colonel came, looking in his brushed uniform as one of the heroes home from Troy, and Hervé admired him prodigiously.
The birthday ball was a great affair. Guestscame all the way from Caen and Lisieux, and Hervé, more bewildered than elated, stood beside his splendid father to receive them. Ladies in lovely robes, shedding every delicate scent, like flowers, petted him, and full-grown men, looking at these ladies, made much of him. They told him that he was charming, but he did not believe them. One cannot be both ugly and charming, little Hervé thought, with much bitterness and an inclination to cry. Their compliments gave him the same singular sensations evoked by the tutor’s smile.
‘I do not know any of these people,’ he said sadly to Colonel Larousse. ‘I don’t think a ball very cheerful, do you? It makes my head ache to hear so many strange voices, and feel so much smaller than anybody else. My papa amuses himself, but I would like to run away to my boat.’
‘Boom! Mon camarade, a soldier sticks to his post.’
Hervé sighed, and thought if the countess had been here that he would have sat beside her all the evening, and have held her hand. And the knowledge that he would never again hold her hand, and that so many long weekshad passed since fond lips had kissed his face, and a sweet voice had called him ‘Little Hervé, little boy,’ brought tears of desperate self-pitying pain to his eyes. In these large illuminated salons, vexed with the mingled odours of flowers and scented skirts, by the scraping of fiddles and the flying feet of laughing dancers, unmindful of him as other than a queer quiet boy in velvet and Alençon lace, with a plain grey little face and owlish eyes that never smiled, Hervé felt more alone than ever he had felt since the countess’s death.
Stealthily he made his escape through the long open window, and ran down the dewy lawn. How gratefully the cool air tasted and the lovely stillness of the night after the aching brilliancy within! Hervé assured himself that it was a pleasant relief, and hoped there would not be many more balls at the castle.
The lake fringed the lawn, and moored against the branches of a weeping willow was his toy-boat, just as he had left it in the afternoon. It would look so pretty, he believed, sailing under the rising moon that touched the water silver and the blue stars that showed so peacefully upon it. He unknotted the string,and gaily the little boat swam out upon his impulsion. If only the countess could come back to him, he thought, with his boat he would be perfectly happy. ‘But I am so alone among them all,’ he said to himself, with his broken sigh. ‘I wished somebody loved me as little children are loved by their mammas.’
The boat had carried away the string from his loose grasp, and he reached out his arm upon the water to recover it. A soft, moist bank, a small eager foot upon it, a frame easily tilted by an unsteady movement, the dark water broken into circling bubbles upon a child’s shrill cry of terror, and closing impassably over the body of poor forlorn little Hervé and his pretty velvet suit and Alençon lace,—this is what the stars and the pale calm moon saw; and over there upon the further shore of the lake floated the toy-boat as placidly as if it had worked no treachery, and had not led to the extinction of an illustrious name and race.
‘Where is M. le Marquis?’ demanded M. de Vervainville, interrupting an enchanting moment upon discovery of his son’s absence from the salon.
A search, a hurry, a scare,—music stopped, wine-glasses at the buffet laid down untouched, ices rejected, fear and anxiety upon every face. M. le Marquis is not in the salons, nor in the tutor’s apartment, nor in his own. The grounds are searched, ‘Hervé’ and ‘M. le Marquis’ ringing through the silence unanswered. His boat was found and the impress of small footsteps upon the wet bank. M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent and Baron de Vervainville was drowned.
Printed by T. and A.CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESSome minor inconsistencies and obvious typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected silently.On page 184, ‘He will write to you to Paris’ has been changed ‘He will write to you in Paris’On page 217: A duplicate ‘for’ has been removed in ‘The less reason have they for for a vestige of belief in man’
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Some minor inconsistencies and obvious typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected silently.
On page 184, ‘He will write to you to Paris’ has been changed ‘He will write to you in Paris’
On page 217: A duplicate ‘for’ has been removed in ‘The less reason have they for for a vestige of belief in man’