The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSuspense: A Napoleonic NovelThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Suspense: A Napoleonic NovelAuthor: Joseph ConradRelease date: August 27, 2021 [eBook #66156]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Doubleday, Page & company, 1925Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUSPENSE: A NAPOLEONIC NOVEL ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Suspense: A Napoleonic NovelAuthor: Joseph ConradRelease date: August 27, 2021 [eBook #66156]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Doubleday, Page & company, 1925Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
Title: Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel
Author: Joseph Conrad
Author: Joseph Conrad
Release date: August 27, 2021 [eBook #66156]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Doubleday, Page & company, 1925
Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUSPENSE: A NAPOLEONIC NOVEL ***
PART IPART IIPART IIIPART IV
A deep red glow flushed the fronts of marble palaces piled up on the slope of an arid mountain whose barren ridge traced high on the darkening sky a ghostly and glimmering outline. The winter sun was setting over the Gulf of Genoa. Behind the massive shore the sky to the east was like darkening glass. The open water too had a glassy look with a purple sheen in which the evening light lingered as if clinging to the water. The sails of, a few becalmed feluccas looked rosy and cheerful, motionless in the gathering gloom. Their heads were all pointing towards the superb city. Within the long jetty with the squat round tower at the end, the water of the harbour had turned black. A bigger vessel with square sails, issuing from it and arrested by the sudden descent of the calm, faced the red disc of the sun. Her ensign hung down and its colours were not to be made out; but a lank man in a shabby sailor's jacket and wearing a strange cap with a tassel, who lounged with both his arms thrown over the black breech of an enormous piece of ordnance that with three of its monstrous fellows squatted on the platform of the tower, seemed to have no doubt of her nationality; for to the question of a young civilian in a long coat and Hessian boots and with an ingenuous young countenance above the folds of a white neckcloth he answered curtly, taking a short pipe out of his mouth but not turning his head.
"She's Elban."
He replaced his pipe and preserved an unsociable air. The elegant young man with the pleasant countenance, (who was Cosmo, the son of Sir Charles Latham of Latham Hall, Yorkshire), repeated under his breath, "Elban," and remained wrapped up in still contemplation of the becalmed ship with her undistinguishable flag.
It was not till the sun had sunk beneath the waters of the Mediterranean and the undistinguishable flag had been hauled down on board the motionless ship that he stirred and turned his eyes towards the harbour. The nearest prominent object in it was the imposing shape of an English line-of-battle ship moored on the west side not far from the quay. Her tall spars overtopped the roofs of the houses and the English ensign at her flagstaff had been just hauled down and replaced by a lantern that looked strange in the clear twilight. The forms of shipping crowded towards the head of the harbour were merging into one another. Cosmo let his eyes wander over the circular platform of the tower. The man leaning over the gun went on smoking with indifference.
"Are you the guardian of this tower?" asked the young man.
The other gave him a sidelong glance and made answer without changing his attitude and more as if speaking to himself:
"This is now an unguarded spot. The wars are over."
"Do they close the door at the bottom of this tower at night?" enquired Cosmo.
"That is a matter worth consideration especially for those like you, for instance, who have a soft bed to go to for the night."
The young than put his head on one side and looked at his interlocutor with a faint smile.
"You don't seem to care," he said. "So I conclude I need not. As long as you are content to stay here I am safe enough. I followed you up the stairs, you know." The man with the pipe stood up abruptly. "You followed me here? Why did you do that, in the name of all the saints?"
The young man laughed as if at a good joke. "Because you were walking in front of me. There was nobody else in view near the Mole. Suddenly you disappeared. Then I saw that the door at the bottom of the tower was open and I walked up the stairs on to this platform. And I would have been very surprised if I hadn't found you here."
The man in the strange cap ornamented with a tassel had taken his pipe out of his mouth to listen. "That was all?"
"Yes, that was all."
"Nobody but an Englishman would behave like that," commented the other to himself, a slight appearance of apprehension passing over his features. "You are an eccentric people."
"I don't see anything eccentric in what I've done. I simply wanted to walk out of the town. The Mole was as good as any other part. It is very pleasant here."
A slight breeze touched the two men's faces, while they stood silent, looking at each other. "I am but an idle traveller," said Cosmo easily. "I arrived this morning by land. I am glad I had the idea to come out here to behold your town glowing in the sunset and to get a sight of a vessel belonging to Elba. There can't be very many of them. But you, my friend . . ."
"I have as much right to idle away my time here as any English traveller," interrupted the man hastily.
"It is very pleasant here," repeated the young traveller, staring into the dusk which had invaded the platform of the tower.
"Pleasant?" repeated the other. "Yes, perhaps. The last time I was on this platform I was only ten years old. A solid round shot was spinning and rattling all over the stone floor. It made a wondrous disturbance and seemed a living thing full of fury."
"A solid shot!" exclaimed Cosmo, looking all over the smooth flagstones as if expecting to see the traces of that visitation. "Where did it come from?"
"It came from an English brig belonging to Milord Keith's Squadron. She stood in quite close and opened fire on us. . . . Heaven only knows why. The audacity of your people! A single shot from one of those big fellows," he continued, slapping the enormous bulging breech of the gun by his side, "would have been enough to sink her like a stone."
"I can well believe it. But the fearlessness of our seamen has ceased to astonish the world long ago," murmured the young traveller.
"There are plenty of fearless people in the world, but luck is even better than courage. The brig sailed away unscathed. Yes, luck is even better than courage. Surer than wisdom and stronger than justice. Luck is a great thing. It is the only thing worth having on one's side. And you people have always had it. Yes, signore, you belong to a lucky nation or else you would not be standing here on this platform looking across the water in the direction of that crumb of land that is the last refuge of your greatest enemy."
Cosmo leaned over the stone parapet near the embrasure of the gun on the other side of which the man with the short pipe in his hand made a vaguely emphatic gesture: "I wonder what thoughts pass through your head," he went on in a quiet detached tone. "Or perhaps you are too young yet to have many thoughts in your head. Excuse my liberty, but I have always heard that one may be frank in speech with an Englishman; and by your speech there can be no doubt of you being of that nation."
"I can assure you I have no thoughts of hatred. . . . Look, the Elban ship is getting farther away. Or is it only the darkness that makes her seem so?"
"The night air is heavy. There is more wind on the water than up here, where we stand; but I don't think she has moved away. You are interested in that Elban ship, signore."
"There is a fascination now about everything connected with that island," confessed the ingenuous traveller. "You have just said that I was too young to think. You don't seem so very much older than myself. I wonder what thoughts you may have."
"The thoughts of a common man, thoughts that could be of no interest to an English milord," answered the other, in a grimly deprecatory tone.
"Do you think that all Englishmen are lords?" asked Cosmo, with a laugh.
"I didn't think. I went by your appearance. I remember hearing an old man once say that you were a lordly nation."
"Really!" exclaimed the young man and laughed again in a low, pleasant note. "I remember hearing of an old man who called us a nation of traders."
"Nazione di mercante," repeated the man slowly. "Well, that may be true too. Different men, different wisdoms."
"This didn't occur to me," said Cosmo, seating himself with a little spring on the stone parapet of the tower. He rested one foot on the massive gun-carriage and fixed his clear eyes on the dark red streak on the western sky left by the retreating sun like a long gash inflicted on the suffering body of the universe. . . . "Different men, different wisdoms," he repeated, musingly. "I suppose it must be. People's lives are so very different. . . . And of what kind was the wisdom of your old man?"
"The wisdom of a great plain as level almost as the sea," said the other gravely. "His voice was as unexpected when I heard it as your own, signore. The evening shadows had closed about me just after I had seen to the west, on the edge of the world as it were, a lion miss his spring on a bounding deer. They went away right into the glow and vanished. It was as though I had dreamed. When I turned round there was the old man behind me no farther away than half the width of this platform. He only smiled at my startled looks. His long silver locks stirred in the breeze. He had been watching me, it seems, from folds of ground and from amongst reed beds for nearly half a day, wondering what I might be at. I had come ashore to wander on the plain. I like to be alone sometimes. My ship was anchored in a bight of this deserted coast a good many miles away, too many to walk back in the dark for a stranger like me. So I spent the night in that old man's ranch, a hut of grass and reeds, near a little piece of water peopled by a multitude of birds. He treated me as if I had been his son. We talked till dawn and when the sun rose I did not go back to my ship. What I had on board of my own was not of much value, and there was certainly no one there to address me as "My son" in that particular tone—you know what I mean, signore."
"I don't know—but I think I can guess," was the answer whose light-hearted yet earnest frankness was particularly boyish and provoked a smile on the part of the older man. In repose his face was grave. His English interlocutor went on after a pause. "You deserted from your ship to join a hermit in a wilderness simply because the tone of his voice appealed to your heart. Is that your meaning?"
"You have guessed it, signorino. Perhaps there was more in it than that. There is no doubt about it that I did desert from my ship."
"And where was that?"
"On the coast of South America," answered the man from the other side of the big gun, with sudden curtness. "And now it is time for us to part."
But neither of them stirred and for some time they remained silent, growing shadowy to each other on the massive tower, which itself, in the advancing night, was but a gray shadow above the dark and motionless sea.
"How long did you stay with that hermit in the desert?" asked Cosmo. "And how did you leave him?"
"Signore, it was he who left me. After I had buried his body I had nothing more to do there. I had learned much during that year."
"What is it you learned, my friend? I should like to know."
"Signore, his wisdom was not like that of other men and it would be too long to explain to you here on this tower and at this late hour of the day. I learned many things. How to be patient, for instance. . . . Don't you think, signore, that your friends or the servants at the inn may become uneasy at your long absence?"
"I tell you I haven't been much more than two hours in this town and I have spoken to nobody in it till I came upon you, except of course to the people at the inn."
"They may start looking for you."
"Why should they trouble their heads? It isn't late yet. Why should they notice my absence?"
"Why? . . . Simply because your supper may be ready by this time," retorted the man impatiently.
"It may be, but I am not hungry yet," said the young man casually. "Let them search for me all over the town if they like." Then in a tone of interest, "Do you think they would think of looking for me here?" he asked.
"No. This is the last spot anybody would think of," muttered the other as if to himself. He raised his voice markedly, "We must part indeed. Good-night, signore."
"Good-night."
The man in the seaman's jacket stared for a moment, then with a brusque movement cocked his cap with the strange tassel more on the side of his head. "I am not going away from this spot," he said.
"I thought you were. Why did you wish me good-night then?"
"Because we must part."
"I suppose we must some time or other," agreed Cosmo in a friendly voice. "I should like to meet you again."
"We must part at once, this moment, on this tower."
"Why?"
"Because I want to be left alone," answered the other after the slightest of pauses.
"Oh, come! Why on earth do you want to be left alone? What is it you could do here?" protested the other with great good humour. Then as if struck by an amusing notion, "Unless indeed you want to practise incantations," he continued lightly, "and perhaps call the Evil One to your side." He paused. "There are people, you know, that think it can be done," he added in a mocking tone.
"They are not far wrong," was the other's ominous reply. "Each man has a devil not very far from his elbow. Don't argue, signore, don't call him up in me! You had better say no more and go in peace from here."
The young traveller did not change his careless attitude. The man in the cap heard him say quietly, almost in a tone of self-communion:
"I prefer to stay in peace here."
It was indeed a wonderful peace. The sound of their quiet voices did not seem to affect it in the least. It had an enormous and overpowering amplitude which seemed rather to the man in the cap to take the part of the Englishman's calm obstinacy against his growing anger. He couldn't repress an impulsively threatening movement in the direction of his inconvenient companion but it died out in perplexity. He pushed his cap still more on one side and simply scratched his head.
"You are one of those people that are accustomed to have their own way. Well, you can't have your way this time. I have asked you quietly to leave me alone on this tower. I asked you as man to man. But if you won't listen to reason I . . ."
Cosmo, putting the palms of his hands against the edge of the parapet, sprang lightly nearly to the middle of the platform and landed without a stagger. His voice was perfectly even.
"Reason is my only guide," he declared. "But your request looks like mere caprice. For what can you possibly have to do here? The sea birds are gone to sleep and I have as much right to the air up here as you. Therefore . . ."
A thought seemed to strike him. "Surely this can't be your trysting place," he commented in a changed tone through which pierced a certain sympathy.
A short scornful laugh from the other checked him and he muttered to himself soberly, "No. Altogether unfit . . . amongst those grim old guns." He raised his voice. "All I can do is to give you all the room." He backed away from the centre of the platform and perched himself this time on the massive breech of a sixty-pounder. "Go on with your incantations," he said then to the tall and dim figure whose immobility appeared helpless for a moment. It broke the short period of silence, saying deliberately:
"I suppose you are aware that at any time since we have begun to talk together it was open to me to fling myself upon you unawares as you sat on the parapet and knock you over to the bottom of this tower?" He waited a moment, then in a deeper tone, "Will you deny it?" he said.
"No, I won't deny it," was the careless answer. "I hadn't thought to be on my guard. But I can swim."
"Don't you know there is a border of big blocks of stone there? It would have been a terrible death. . . . And now, will the signore do what I ask him and return to his inn which is a much safer place than this platform?"
"Safety is not a great inducement; and I don't believe for a moment you ever thought of attacking me in a treacherous manner."
"Well," the tall shadowy figure crowned by the shape of the strange cap admitted reluctantly. "Well, since you put it in those words, signore, I did not."
"You see! I believe you are a fine fellow. But as it is I am under no sort of obligation to listen to you."
"You are crafty," burst out the other violently. "It's in the blood. How is one to deal with people like you?"
"You could try to drive me off," suggested the other.
There was no answer for a time, then the tall figure muttered reflectively to itself.
"After all—he's an Englishman."
"I don't think myself invincible on that account," observed Cosmo calmly.
"I know. I have fought against English soldiers in Buenos Ayres. I was only thinking that, to give the devil his due, men of your nation don't consort with spies or love tyranny either. . . . Tell me, is it true that you have only been two hours in this town?"
"Perfectly true."
"And yet all the tyrants of the world are your allies," the shadowy man pursued his train of thought half aloud.
The no less shadowy traveller remarked quietly into the gathering night:
"You don't know who my friends are."
"I don't, but I think you are not likely to go with a tale to the Austrian spies or consort with the Piedmontesesbirri.As to the priests who are poking their noses everywhere, I . . ."
"I don't know a single soul in Italy," interrupted the other.
"But you will soon. People like you make acquaintances everywhere. But it's idle talk with strangers that I fear. Can I trust you as an Englishman not to talk of what you may see?"
"You may. I can't imagine what unlawful thing you are about to commit here. I am dying from curiosity. Can it be that you are really some sort of sorcerer? Go on! Trace your magic circle if that is your business, and call up the spirits of the dead."
A low grunt was the only answer to this speech uttered in a tone between jest and earnest. Cosmo watched from the breech of his gun with intense interest the movements of the man who objected so strongly to his presence but who now seemed to pay no attention to him at all. They were not the movements of a magician in so far that they certainly had nothing to do with the tracing of circles. The figure had stepped over to the seaward face of the tower and seemed to be pulling endless things out of the breast pocket of his jacket. The young Englishman got down from the breech of the gun, without ceasing to peer in a fascinated way, and moved closer step by step till he threw himself back with an exclamation of astonishment. "By heavens! The fellow is going to fish." . . . Cosmo remained mute with surprise for a good many seconds and then burst out loudly:
"Is this what you displayed all this secrecy for? This is the worst hoax I ever . . ."
"Come nearer, signore, but take care not to tangle all my twine with your feet. . . . Do you see this box?"
The heads of the two men had come together confidentially and the young traveller made out a cylindrical object which was in fact a round tin box. His companion thrust it into his hand with the request, "Hold it for me a moment, signore," and then Cosmo had the opportunity to ascertain that the lid of it was hermetically sealed. The man in the strange cap dived into the pocket of his breeches for flint and steel. The Englishman beheld with surprise his lately inimical companion squeeze himself between the massive tube of the piece of ordnance and the wall of stone and wriggle outwards into the depth of, the thick embrasure till nothing of him remained visible but his black stockings and the soles of his heavy shoes. After a time his voice came deadened along the thickness of the wall:
"Will you hand me the box now, signore?"
Cosmo, enlisted in these mysterious proceedings, the nature of which was becoming clear enough to him, obeyed at once, and approaching the embrasure thrust the box in at the full length of his arm till it came in contact with the ready hand of the man who was lying flat on his stomach with his head projecting beyond the wall of the tower. His groping hand found and snatched away the box. The twine was attached to the box and at once its length laid on the platform began to run out till the very end disappeared. Then the man lying prone within the thickness of the gun embrasure lay still as death and the young traveller strained his ears in the absolute silence to catch the slightest sound at the foot of the tower. But all he could hear was the faint sound of some distant clock striking somewhere in the town. He waited a little longer, then in the cautious tone of a willing accomplice murmured within the opening:
"Got a bite yet?"
The answer came hardly audible:
"No. But this is the very hour."
Cosmo felt his interest growing. And yet the facts in themselves were not very exciting, but all this had the complexion and the charm of an unexpected adventure, heightened by its mystery, playing itself out before that old town towering like a carved hill decorated with lights that began to appear quickly on the sombre and colossal mass of that lofty shore. The last gleam had died out in the west. The harbour was dark except for the lantern at the stern of the British ship of the line. The man in the embrasure made a slight movement. Cosmo became more alert but apparently nothing happened. There was no murmur of voices, splash of water, or sign of the slightest stir all round the tower. Suddenly the man in the embrasure began to wriggle back on to the platform and in a very few minutes stood up to his full height facing the unexpected helper.
"She has come and gone," he said. "Did you hear anything, signore?"
"Not a sound. She might have been the ghost of a boat—for you are alluding to a boat, are you not?"
"Si.And I hope that if any eye on shore had made her out it had taken her for only a ghost. Of course that English vessel of war rows guard at night. But it isn't to look out for ghosts."
"I should think not. Ghosts are of no account. Could there be anything more futile than the ghost of a boat?"
"You are one of the strong-minded, signore. Ghosts are the concern of the ignorant—yet who knows? But it does sound funny to talk of the ghost of a boat, a thing of brute matter. For wouldn't a ghost be a thing of spirit, a man's soul itself made restless by grief or love, or remorse or anger? Such are the stories that one hears. But the old hermit of the plain, of whom I spoke, assured me that the dead are too glad to be done with life to make trouble on earth."
"You and your hermit!" exclaimed Cosmo in a boyish and marvelling tone. "I suppose it is no use me asking you what I have been just helping you in."
"A little smuggling operation, signore. Surely, signore, England has custom houses and therefore must have smugglers too."
"One has heard of them of course. But I wouldn't mind a bet that there is not one of them that resembles you. Neither do I believe that they deal with packages as small as the one you lowered into that ghostly boat. You saw her of course. There was a boat."
"There was somebody to cut the string, as you see, signore. Look, here is all that twine, all of it but a little piece. It may have been a man swimming in the dark water. A man with a soul, fit to make a ghost of . . . let us call him a ghost, signore."
"Oh yes, let us," the other said lightly. "I am sure that when I wake up to-morrow all this will seem to me a dream. Even now I feel inclined to pinch myself."
"What's that for, in Heaven's name?"
"It's a saying we have in our country. Yes, you, your hermit, our talk, and this very tower, all this will be like a dream."
"I would say 'nothing better' if it was not that most people are only too ready to talk about their dreams. No, signore, let all this be to you of less consequence than if it were a tale of ghosts, of mere ghosts in which you do not believe. You forced yourself on me as if you were the lord of this place, but I feel friendly enough to you."
"I didn't ask for your friendship," retorted the young traveller in a clear voice so void of all offence that the other man accepted it for a mere statement of a fact.
"Certainly not. I spoke of my own feelings, and though I am, you may say, a new-comer and a stranger in my own native city, I assure you it is better to have me for a friend than for an enemy. And the best thing of all would be to forget all about me. It would be also the kindest thing you could do."
"Really?" said Cosmo in a tone of sympathy. "How can you expect me to forget the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me in all my life?"
"In all your life! H'm! You have a long life before you yet, signorino."
"Oh, but this is an adventure."
"That's what I mean. You have so many marvellous adventures before you, signorino, that this one is sure to be forgotten very soon. Then why not at once?"
"No, my friend, you don't seem somehow a person one could easily forget."
"I—— God forbid. . . . Good-night, signore."
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the man in the cap bounded across the platform, dived into the black square opening on its landward side, and ran down the steps so lightly that not a sound reached the ears of the other. Cosmo went down the winding stair, but cautiously in the profound darkness. The door at the bottom stood open and he stepped out on to the deserted jetty. He could see on it nothing in the shape of a fleeting shadow.
On the very edge of the shore a low little building with three arcades sent a dim gleam of light through its open door. It seemed to be a sort of guardroom, for there was a sentry, an Austrian soldier apparently, in a white coat. His duty, however, seemed to be concerned with the landing-steps in front of the guardhouse, and he let the young traveller pass on as though he had not seen him at all. Dark night had settled upon the long quay. Here and there a dim street lamp threw a feeble light on the uneven stones which the feet of the young traveller with his springy walk seemed hardly to touch. The pleasurable sensation of something extraordinary having happened to him accelerated his movements. He was also feeling very hungry and he was making haste towards his inn to dine first and then to think his adventure over, for there was a strong conviction within him that he certainly had had an adventure of a nature at the same time stimulating and obscure.
Cosmo Latham had an inborn faculty of orientation in strange surroundings, most invaluable in a cavalry officer, but of which he had never made much use, not even during the few months when he served as a cornet of horse in the Duke of Wellington's army in the last year of the peninsular campaign. There had been but few occasions to make use of it for a freshly joined subaltern. It stood him in good stead that night, however, while making his way to his inn in a town in which he was a complete stranger, for it allowed him, with but little concern for the direction he took, to think of his home which he loved for itself, every stone and every tree of it—and of the two people he left there, whom he loved too, each in a different way: his father, Sir Charles, and his sister Henrietta.
Latham Hall, a large straggling building showing traces of many styles, flanked by a romantic park and commanding a vast view of the Yorkshire hills, had been the hereditary home of Lathams from the times before the Great Rebellion. That it escaped confiscation then might have been the effect of the worldly prudence of the Latham of the time. He probably took good care not to shock persons of position and influence. That, however, was not the characteristic of the later Lathams down to Sir Charles, Cosmo's father.
Sir Charles's unconventional individuality had never been understood by his country neighbours. Born endowed with a good intellect, a lively imagination, and a capacity for social intercourse, it had been his fate, owing to the idiosyncrasies of his own father, to spend his early youth in the depths of Yorkshire in surroundings not at all congenial to his tastes. Later he served for a time in the Guards; but he very soon left the army to make an extended tour in France and Italy. In those last days before the Revolutionle chevalierLatham obtained a great social recognition in Paris and Versailles amongst the very best people, not so much by his brilliance as by the depth of his character and the largeness of his ideas. But suddenly he tore himself away from his friendships and successes and proceeded to Italy. There, amongst the members of the English colony in Florence, he met the two Aston girls and, for some reason or other, became a great favourite with their widowed mother. But at the end of some months he suddenly made up his mind to return home. During a long, sleepless night, which he spent pacing up and down in the agony of an internal struggle with himself in the magnificent rooms of his lodgings in Florence, he concluded that he would go home by sea. It was the easiest way of avoiding coming near Paris. He had heard not long before that the best friends he had made in the brilliant society he had frequented in France, the Marquis and the Marquise d'Armand, had a daughter born to them. At Leghorn on the very eve of embarking he had another struggle with himself—but he went by sea. By the time when, after a long sea passage, he put his foot on native soil he had renounced the idea of hurrying on north to shut himself up in his country home. He lingered in London, disdainful and idle, and began reluctantly to fall into the ways of a man about town, when a friend returning from Italy brought him news that Miss Aston was going to marry a Tuscan nobleman of mature years, and, as a piece of queer Florentine gossip, that if the younger sister. Miss Molly Aston, had refused two suitors in quick succession it was because she regarded herself in some way as being engaged to him, Charles Latham.
Whether stung by his conscience or urged by indignation Sir Charles started impulsively for Italy, travelling across the south of France. It was a long road. At first he had been amazed, confounded, and angry; but before he came to the end of his journey he had time to reflect upon what might have easily become an absurd and odious situation. He said to himself that a lot of bother of one sort and another would be saved by his marrying Molly Aston. He did so, to the applause of all right-minded people, and at the end of two years spent abroad came home with his wife to shut himself up in his ancestral hall commanding the view of a wide and romantic landscape, which he thought one of the finest in the world.
Molly Aston had been beautiful enough in her time to inspire several vagrant poets and at least one Italian sculptor; but as Cosmo grew older he began to understand that his mother had been a nonentity in the family life. The greatest piece of self-assertion on her part was his name. She had insisted on calling him Cosmo because the Astons counted, far back in the past, an ancestress of Florentine origin, supposed to have been a connection of the Medici family. Cosmo was fair, and the name was all about him that he had received from his mother. Henrietta was a type of dark beauty. Lady Latham died when both her children were still young. In her life she adorned Latham Hall in the same way as a statue might have adorned it. Her household power was limited to the ordering of the dinner. With habits of meticulous order and a marvellously common-place mind she had a temperament which, if she had not fallen violently in love at the age of eighteen with the same man whom she married, would have made her fond of society, of amusement, and perhaps even of dissipation. But her only amusement and dissipation consisted of writing long letters to innumerable relations and friends all over the world, of whom after her marriage she saw but very little. She never complained. Her hidden fear of all initiative and the secret ardour of her temperament found their fulfilment in an absolute submission to Sir Charles's will. She would never have dreamed of asking for horses for a visit in the neighbourhood, but when her husband remarked, "I think it would be advisable for you, my lady, to call at such and such a house," her face would light up, she would answer with alacrity, "Certainly, Sir Charles," and go off to array herself magnificently indeed (perhaps because of that drop of Medici blood), but also with great taste.
As the years went on Sir Charles aged more than he ought to have done, and even began to grow a little stout, but no one could fail to see that he had been a very handsome man in his time and that his wife's early infatuation for him was justified in a way. In politics he was a partisan of Mr. Pitt rather than a downright Tory. He loved his country, believed in its greatness, in its superior virtue, in its irresistible power. Nothing could shake his fidelity to national prejudices of every sort. He had no great liking for grandees and mere aristocrats, despised the fashionable world, and would have nothing whatever to do with any kind of "upstart." Without being gentle he was naturally kind and hospitable. His native generosity was so well known that no one was surprised when he offered the shelter of his Yorkshire house to a family of French refugees, the Marquis and the Marquise d'Armand and their little daughter Adèle. They had arrived in England in a state of almost complete destitution but with two servants who had shared the dangers and the miseries of their flight from the excesses of the Revolution.
The presence of all these people at Latham Hall which, considered at first as a temporary arrangement, was to last for some years, did not affect in the least Lady Latham's beautifully dressed, idle equanimity. Had not the D'Armands been Sir Charles's intimate friends years ago, in France? But she had no curiosity. She was vaguely impressed by the fact that the Marquise was a god-daughter of the Queen of Naples. For the rest it was only so many people more in the servants' hall, at the dinner table, and in the drawing room where the evenings were spent.
High up on one of the walls a lamp with a shaded reflector concentrated its light on the yellow satin coat on the half-length portrait of a rubicund Latham in a white coburg, which but for the manly and sensitive mouth might have been the portrait of his own coachman. Apart from that spot of beautiful colour the vast room with its windows giving on a terrace (from which Sir Charles was in the habit of viewing sunsets) remained dim with an effect of immensity in which the occupants, and even Sir Charles himself, acquired the appearance of unsubstantial shadows uttering words that had to travel across long, almost unlighted distances.
On one side of the mantelpiece of Italian marbles (a late addition designed by Sir Charles himself) Lady Latham's profuse jewellery sparkled about her splendid and restful person posed placidly on a sofa. Opposite her, the Marquise would be lying down on a deep couch with one of Lady Latham's shawls spread over her feet. The D'Armands in their flight from the Terror had saved very little besides their lives, and the Marquise d'Armand's life had by this time become a very precarious possession.
Sir Charles was perhaps more acutely aware of this than the Marquis her husband. Sir Charles remembered her gentle in her changing moods of gaiety and thought, charming, active, fascinating, and certainly the most intelligent as she was the most beautiful of the women of the French court. Her voice reaching him clear but feeble across the drawing room had a pathetic appeal; and the tone of his answers was tinged with the memory of a great sentiment and with the deference due to great misfortunes. From time to time Lady Latham would make a remark in a matter-of-fact tone which would provoke something resembling curtness in Sir Charles's elaborately polite reply, and the thought that woman would have made the very Lord's Prayer sound prosaic. And then in the long pauses they would pursue their own thoughts as perplexed and full of unrest as the world of seas and continents that began at the edge of the long terrace graced by gorgeous sunsets; the wide world filled with the strife of ideas and the struggle of nations in perhaps the most troubled time of its history.
From the depths of the Italian chimneypiece the firelight of blazing English logs would fall on Adèle d'Armand sitting quietly on a low stool near her mother's couch. Her fair hair, white complexion, and dark blue eyes contrasted strongly with the deeper colour scheme of Henrietta Latham, whose locks were rich chestnut brown and whose eyes had a dark lustre full of intelligence rather than sentiment. Now and then the French child would turn her head to look at Sir Charles, for whom in her silent existence she had developed a filial affection.
In those days Adèle d'Armand did not see much of her own father. Most of the time the Marquis was away. Each of his frequent absences was an act of devotion to his exiled Princes, who appreciated it no doubt but found devotion only natural in a man of that family. The evidence of their regard for the Marquis took the shape mainly of distant and dangerous missions to the courts of north Germany, and northern Italy. In the general disruption of the old order those missions were all futile, because no one ever stopped an avalanche by means of plots and negotiations. But in the Marquis the perfect comprehension of that profound truth was mingled with the sort of enthusiasm that fabricates the very hopes on which it feeds. He would receive his instructions for those desperate journeys with extreme gravity and depart on them without delay, after a flying visit to the Hall to embrace his ailing wife and his silent child and hold a grave conference with his stately English friend from whom he never concealed a single one of his thoughts or his hopes. And Sir Charles approved of them both; because the thoughts were sober and absolutely free from absurd illusions common to all exiles, thus appealing to Sir Charles's reason and also to his secret disdain of all great aristocracies—and the second, being based on the Marquis's conviction of England's unbroken might and consistency, seemed to Sir Charles the most natural thing in the world.
They paced a damp laurel-bordered walk together for an hour or so: Sir Charles lame and stately like a disabled child of Jupiter himself, the Marquis restraining his stride and stooping with a furrowed brow to talk in measured, level tones. The wisdom of Sir Charles expressed itself in curt sentences in which scorn for men's haphazard activities and shortsighted views was combined with a calm belief in the future.
After the peace of Amiens the Compte d'Artois, the representative of the exiled dynasty in England, having expressed the desire to have the Marquis always by his side, the Marquise and Adèle left Latham Hall for the poverty and the makeshifts of the life of well-nigh penniless exiles in London. It was as great a proof of devotion to his royal cause as any that could be given. They settled down in a grimy house of yellow brick in four rooms up a very narrow and steep staircase. For attendants they had a dark mulatto maid, brought as a child from the West Indies before the Revolution by an aunt of the Marquise, and a man of rather nondescript nationality called Bernard, who had been at one time a hanger-on in the country house of the D'Armands, but following the family in its flight and its wanderings before they had found refuge in England, had displayed unexpected talents as a general factotum. Life at Latham Hall had bored him exceedingly. The sense of complete security was almost too much for his patience. The regularity of the hours and the certitude of abundant meals depressed his spirits at times. The change to London revived him greatly, for there he had something to do and found daily occasion to display his varied gifts. He went marketing in the early morning, dusted the room he called the salon, cooked the meals, inspired and made happy by the large white smile of Mlle. Aglae, the Negress, with whom he was very much in love. At twelve o'clock, after tidying himself a bit, he would go in on the tips of his heavy square shoes and carry the Marquise from her room to the sofa in the salon with elaborate sureness and infinite respect, while Aglae followed with pillow, shawl, and smelling bottle, wearing a forced air of gravity. Bernard was acutely aware of her presence and would be certain—the Marquise once settled on her sofa—to get a flash of a white grin all to himself. Later Mlle. Adèle, white and fair, would go out visiting, followed by Aglae as closely as night follows day; and Bernard would watch them down the depths of the staircase in the hope of catching a sight of a quickly upturned dark brown face with fine rolling eyes. This would leave him happy for the rest of the afternoon. In the evening his function was to announce visitors who had toiled up the stairs: some of the first names in France that had come trudging on foot through the mud or dust of the squalid streets to fill the dimly lighted room which was the salon of the Marquise d'Armand. For those duties Bernard would put on a pair of white stockings, which Miss Aglae washed for him every second day, and encase his wide shoulders in a very tight green shabby jacket with large metal buttons. Miss Aglae always found a minute or two to give him a hasty inspection and a brush-down. Those were delightful instants. Holding his breath and in a state of rigid beatitude he turned about as ordered in gay whispers by his exotic lady-love. Later he would sit on a stool outside the closed door listening to the well-bred soft uproar of conversation; and when the guests began to depart he lighted them downstairs, holding a tallow dip in a small candlestick over the banister of the landing. When his duties for the day were over he made up for himself a bed on the floor of a narrow passage which separated the living rooms from a sort of large cupboard in which Miss Aglae reposed from her daily labours. Bernard, lying under a pair of thin blankets and with the tallow candle burning on the floor, kept slumber off till Miss Aglae stuck out her head tied up in an old red foulard—nothing but her head through the crack of the door—in order to have a little whispered conversation. That was the time when the servants exchanged their views and communicated to each other their ideas and observations. The black maid's were shrewder than the white factotum's. Being a personal attendant of the two ladies she had occasion to see and hear more than her admirer. They commented on the evident decline of the Marquise's health, not dolefully but simply as a significant fact of the situation; on the Marquis's manner of daily life which had become domestic and almost sedentary. He went out every day but now he never went away for weeks and months as he used to before. Those sudden and mysterious missions for which a misanthropic Yorkshire baronet had paid out of his own pocket had come to an end. A Marquis d'Armand could not be sent out as a common spy and there was now no court in Christendom that would dare to receive an emissary, secret or open, of the royal exiles. Bernard, who could read, explained these things shortly to Miss Aglae. All great folk were terrified at that Bonaparte. He made all the generals tremble. On those facts Miss Aglae would have it that he must be a sorcerer. Bernard had another view of Napoleonic greatness. It was nothing but the power of lies. And on one occasion after a slight hesitation he burst out: "Shall I tell you the truth about him. Miss Aglae?" The tied-up black head protruding through the crack of the door nodded assent many times in the dim light of the tallow dip. "Well then," continued Bernard with another desperate effort, "he is of no account."
Miss Aglae repressed with difficulty the loud burst of laughter which was the usual expression of her unsophisticated emotions. She had heard ladies and gentlemen in the salon express a very similar opinion of Bonaparte, but she thought suddenly of Miss Adèle and emitted a sigh.
"He seems to get him paw on the whole world, anyhow. What sort of a fellow is he, Bernard? You have seen him."
Bernard had seen the fellow. He assured Miss Aglae that he was a miserable shrimp of a man in big boots and with lank hair hanging down his yellow cheeks. "I could break him in two like a straw if I could only get him into my hands."
Believing it implicitly, the black maid suggested that Bernard should go and do it.
"I would go at once," said the faithful follower. "But if I went I would never see you again. He has always a hundred thousand men around him."
At this Miss Aglae, who had begun to smile, ended with a sigh of such a deeply sorrowful nature that Bernard assured her that the time would come, yes, some day the time would come when everybody would get back his own. Aglae was ready to believe this prophecy. But meantime there was Miss Adèle. That sweet child was now ready to get married, but everybody was so very poor. Bernard put on a sentimental expression in the dim light of the tallow dip, the flame of which swayed by the side of his straw mattress and made the shadow of his head, protected by a nightcap, dance too, high up the wall of the drafty passage. Timidly he muttered of love. That would get over all the difficulties.
"You very stupid man, Mr. Bernard. Love! What sort of trash you talk? Love don't buy fish for dinner." Then with sudden anxiety she inquired: "Have you got money for marketing to-morrow?" Bernard had the money. Not much, but he had the money. "Then you go out early and buy fish for dinner. This Madame la Marquise orders. Easier than killing an emperor," she continued sarcastically. "And take care fat woman in Billingsgate don't cheat you too much," she added with dignity before drawing her head in and shutting the door of her dark cupboard.
A month later, sitting upon his straw bed and with his eyes fixed on the door of Miss Aglae's cupboard, Bernard had just begun to think that he had done something to offend, and that he would be deprived of his whispered midnight chat, when the door opened, the head of the girl appeared in its usual position. It drooped. Its white eyeballs glistened full of tears. It said nothing for a long time. Bernard was extremely alarmed. He wanted to know in an anxious whisper what was wrong. The maid let him cudgel his brains for a whole minute before she made the statement that oh! she did not like the looks of a certain gentleman visitor in a "too-much-laced coat."
Bernard, relieved but uncomprehending, snatched the candlestick off the floor and raised it to the protruded head of the maid.
"What is there to cry about?" he asked. The tears glistening on the dusky cheek astonished him beyond measure; and as an African face lends itself to the expression of sorrow more than any other type of human countenance, he was profoundly moved, and without knowing the cause, by mere sympathy felt ready to cry himself.
"You don't see! You don't understand anything, Bernard. You stand there at the door like a stick. What is the use of you I can't tell."
Bernard would have felt the injustice to be unbearable if he had not had a strong sense of his own merits. Moreover, it was obvious that Aglae was thoroughly upset. As to the man in the too-much-laced coat, Bernard remembered that he was dressed very splendidly indeed. He had called first in company of a very fine English gentleman, a friend of the family, and he had repeated the call always with that same friend. It was a fact he had never called by himself yet. The family had dined with him only the day before, as Bernard knew very well because he had had to call the hackney coach and had given the address, not to mention the confidential task of carrying the Marquise down the stairs and then up again on their return from that entertainment. There could be nothing wrong with a man with whom the family dined. And the Marquise herself too, she who, so to speak, never went out anywhere!
"What has he done?" he asked without marked excitement. "I have never seen you so distressed. Miss Aglae."
"Me upset? I should think me upset. I fear him wants carry off Mlle. Adèle—poor child."
This staggered the faithful Bernard. "I should like him to try," he said pugnaciously. "I keep a cudgel there in this passage." A scornful exclamation from the maid made him pause. "Oh!" he said in a changed tone, "carry her off for a wife? Well, what's wrong in that?"
"Oh! you silly!" whimpered Aglae. "Can't you see him twice, twice and a half, the age of Miss Adèle?"
Bernard remained silent a minute. "Fine-looking man," he remarked at last. "Do you know anything else about him?"
"Him got plenty of money," sobbed out Aglae.
"I suppose the parents will have something to say about that," said Bernard, after a short meditation. "And if Mlle. Adèle herself . . ."
But Aglae wailed under her breath, as it were. "It's done, Bernard, it's done!"
Bernard, fascinated, stared upwards at the maid. A mental reference to abundance of money for marketing flashed through his mind.
"I suppose Mlle. Adèle can love a man like that. Why not?"
"Him got very fine clothes certainly," hissed Aglae furiously. Then she broke down and became full of desolation. "Oh, Bernard, them poor people, you should have seen their faces this morning when I served the breakfast. I feel as if I must make a big howl while I give plate to M. le Marquis. I hardly dare to look at anybody."
"And Mademoiselle?" asked Bernard in an anxious whisper.
"I don't like to look at her either," went on Aglae in a tone of anguish. "She got quite a flush on her face. She think it very great and fine, make everybody rich. I ready to die with sorrow, Bernard. She don't know. She too young. Why don't you cry with me?—you great stupid man."
The marriage, the prospect of which failed to commend itself to the coloured maid, took place in due course. The contract which expressed the business side of that alliance was graced by the signature of a Prince of the blood and by two other signatures of a most aristocratic complexion. The French colony in London refrained from audible comments. The gracious behaviour of H.R.H. the Duc de Berry to the bridegroom killed all criticism in the very highest circles of the emigration. In less exalted circles there were slight shrugs and meaning glances, but very little else besides, except now and then a veiled sarcasm which could be ascribed to envy as much as to any other sentiment. Amongst the daughters of the emigration there must have been more than one who in her heart of hearts thought Adèle d'Armand a very lucky girl. The splendour of the entertainments which were given to the London society by the newly wedded couple after their return from the honeymoon put it beyond all doubt that the man whom Aglae described as wearing a "too-much-laced coat" was very rich. It began also to be whispered that he was a man of fantastic humours and of eccentric whims of the sort that do not pass current in the best society; especially in the case of a man whose rank was dubious and whose wealth was but recently acquired. But the embittered and irreconcilable remnant of the exiled aristocracy gave but little of its sympathy to Adèle d'Armand. She ought to have waited till the King was restored, and either married suitably—or else entered a convent for ladies of rank. For these too would soon be restored.
The Marquis, before the engagement of his daughter had become public, had written to his friend Sir Charles of the impending marriage in carefully selected terms which demanded nothing but a few words of formal congratulation. Of his son-in-law he mentioned little more than the name. It was, he said, that of a long-impoverished Piedmontese family with good French connections formed in the days before it had fallen into comparative obscurity but, the Marquis insisted, fully recognized by the parties concerned. It was the family De Montevesso. The world had heard nothing of it for more than a century, the Marquis admitted parenthetically. His daughter's intended husband's name was Helion—Count Helion de Montevesso. The title had been given to him by the King of Sardinia just before that unfortunate monarch was driven out of his dominions by the armies of republican France. It was the reward of services rendered at a critical time and none the less meritorious because, the Marquis admitted, they were of a financial nature. Count Helion, who went away very young from his native country and wandered in many lands, had amassed a large personal fortune, the Marquis went on to say, which luckily was invested in a manner that made it safe from political revolutions and social disasters overwhelming both France and Italy. That fortune, as a matter of fact, had not been made in Europe, but somewhere beyond the seas. The Marquis's letter reached Latham Hall in the evening of an autumn day.
The very young Miss Latham, seated before an embroidery frame, watched across the drawing room her father reading the letter under the glare of the reflector lamp and at the feet, as it were, of the Latham in the yellow satin coat. Sir Charles raised his eyebrows, which with passing years had become bushy and spoiled a little the expression of his handsome face. Miss Latham was made very anxious by his play of physiognomy. She had already been told after the first rustle of unfolded paper that her big friend Adèle d'Armand (Miss Latham was four years younger) was going to be married, and had become suddenly, but inwardly, excited. Every moment she expected her father to tell her something more. She was dying from impatience; but there was nothing further except the rustle of paper—and now this movement of the eyebrows. Then Sir Charles lowered his hands slowly. She could contain herself no longer.
"Who is it, Papa?" she asked with animation.
Henrietta Latham was fifteen then. Her dark eyes had remained as large as ever. The purity of her complexion, which was not of the milk-white kind, was admirable and the rich shade of the brown curls clustering on each side of her faintly glowing cheeks made a rich and harmonious combination. Sir Charles gazed at his daughter's loveliness with an air of shocked abstraction. But he too could not contain himself. He departed from his stateliness so far as to growl out scathingly:
"An upstart of some kind."
Miss Latham was, for all her lively manner, not given to outward manifestations of emotions. This intelligence was too shocking for a gasp or an exclamation. She only flushed slowly to the roots of her pretty hair. An upstart simply meant to her everything that was bad in the way of a human being, but the scathing tone of Sir Charles's outburst also augmented her profound emotion, for it seemed to extend to Adèle d'Armand herself. It shocked her tender loyalty towards the French girl, which had not been diminished by a separation of more than three years. She said quietly:
"Adèle . . . Impossible!"
The flush ebbed out of her healthy cheeks and left them pale, with the eyes darker than Sir Charles had ever seen them before. Those evidences of his daughter's emotion recalled Sir Charles to himself. After looking at his daughter fixedly for a moment he murmured the word "impossible" without any particular accent and again raised the letter to his eyes.
He did not find it in anything to modify his first impression of the man whom Adèle d'Armand was about to marry. Once more in his vaguely explanatory message the Marquis alluded to the wealth of his prospective son-in-law. It gave him a standing in the best society which his personal merits could not perhaps have secured for him so completely. Then the Marquis talked about his wife's health. The Marquise required many comforts, constant care, and cheerful surroundings. He had been enabled to leave the disagreeable lodgings in a squalid street for a little house in Chiswick very near London. He complained to his old friend that the uncompromising royalists reproached him bitterly for having signed a three-years' lease. It seemed to them an abominable apostasy from the faith in a triumphal return of the old order of things in a month or two. "I have caused quite a scandal by acting in this sensible manner," he wrote. "I am very much abused, but I have no doubt that even those who judge me most severely will be glad enough to come to Adèle's wedding."
Then, as if unable to resist the need to open his heart, he began the next line with the words:
I need not tell you that all this is my daughter's own doing. The demand for her hand was made to us regularly through Lord G., who is a good friend of mine, though he belongs to the faction of Mr. Fox in which the Count of Montevesso numbers most of his English friends. But directly we had imparted the proposal to Adèle she took a step you may think incredible, and which from a certain point of view might even be called undutiful, if such a word could ever be applied to the sweet and devoted child our Adèle has always been to us. At her personal request, made without consulting either her mother or myself. Lord G. had the weakness to arrange a meeting between her and the Count at his own house. What those two could have said to each other I really cannot imagine. When we heard of it, the matter was so far settled that there was nothing left for us but to accept the inevitable . . .
I need not tell you that all this is my daughter's own doing. The demand for her hand was made to us regularly through Lord G., who is a good friend of mine, though he belongs to the faction of Mr. Fox in which the Count of Montevesso numbers most of his English friends. But directly we had imparted the proposal to Adèle she took a step you may think incredible, and which from a certain point of view might even be called undutiful, if such a word could ever be applied to the sweet and devoted child our Adèle has always been to us. At her personal request, made without consulting either her mother or myself. Lord G. had the weakness to arrange a meeting between her and the Count at his own house. What those two could have said to each other I really cannot imagine. When we heard of it, the matter was so far settled that there was nothing left for us but to accept the inevitable . . .
Again Sir Charles let his big white aristocratic hands descend on his knees. His daughter's dark head drooped over the frame, and he had a vision of another head, very different and very fair, by its side. It had been a part of his retired life and had had a large share of his affection. How large it was he discovered only now, at this moment, when he felt that it was in a sense lost to him for ever. "Inevitable," he muttered to himself with a half-scornful, half-pained intonation. Sir Charles could understand the sufferings, the difficulties, the humiliations of poverty. But the Marquis might have known that, far or near, he could have counted on the assistance of his friend. For some years past he had never hesitated to dip into his purse. But that was for those mysterious journeys and those secret and important missions his Princes had never hesitated to entrust him with without ever troubling their heads about the means. Such was the nature of Princes, Sir Charles reflected with complete bitterness. And now came this . . . A whole young life thrown away perhaps, in its innocence, in its ignorance. . . . How old could Adèle be now? Eighteen or nineteen. Not so very much younger than her mother was when he used to see so much of her in Paris and Versailles, when she had managed to put such an impress on his heart that later he did not care whom he married or where he lived. . . . Inevitable! . . . Sir Charles could not be angry with the Marquise, now a mere languid shadow of that invincible charm that his heart had not been able to resist. She and her husband must have given up all their hopes, all their loyal royalist hopes before they could bow like this to the Inevitable. It had not been difficult for him to learn to love that fascinating French child as though she had been another daughter of his own. For a moment he experienced an anguish so acute that it made him move slightly in his chair. Half aloud he muttered the thought that came into his mind:
"Austerlitz has done it."
Miss Latham raised her lustrous dark eyes with an enquiring expression and murmured, "Papa?"
Sir Charles got up and seized his stick. "Nothing, my dear, nothing." He wanted to be alone. But on going out of the room he stopped by the embroidery frame and, bending down, kissed the forehead of his daughter—his English daughter. No issue of a great battle could affect her future. As to the other girl, she was lost to him and it couldn't be helped. A battle had destroyed the fairness of her life. This was the disadvantage of having been born French or indeed belonging to any other nation of the continent. There were forces there that pushed people to rash or unseemly actions; actions that seemed dictated by despair and therefore wore an immoral aspect. Sir Charles understood Adèle d'Armand even better than he understood his own daughter, or at least he understood her with greater sympathy. She had a generous nature. She was too young, too inexperienced to know what she was doing when she took in hand the disposal of her own person in favour of that apparently Piedmontese upstart with his obscure name and his mysteriously acquired fortune. "I only hope the fortune is there," thought Sir Charles with grim scepticism. But as to that there could be no doubt, judging from the further letters he received from his old friend. After a short but brilliant period of London life the upstart had carried Adèle off to France. He had bought an estate in Piedmont, which was his native country, and another with a splendid house, near Paris. Sir Charles was not surprised to hear a little later that the Marquise and the Marquis had also returned to France. The time of persecution was over; most of the great royalist families were returning, unreconciled in sentiment if wavering in their purposes. That his old friend should ever be dazzled by imperial grandeurs Sir Charles could not believe. Though he had abandoned his daughter to an upstart, he was too good a royalist to abandon his principles, for which certainly he would have died if that had been of any use. But he had returned to France. Most of his exiled friends had returned too, and Sir Charles understood very well that the Marquis and his wife wanted to be somewhere near their daughter. This departure closed a long chapter in his life, and afterwards Sir Charles hardly ever mentioned his French friends. The only positive thing which Henrietta knew was that Adèle d'Armand had married an upstart and had returned to France. She had communicated that knowledge to her brother, who had stared with evident surprise but had made no comment. Living away from home at school and afterwards in Cambridge, his father's French friends had remained for him as shadowy figures on the shifting background of a very poignant, very real, and intense drama of contemporary history, dominated by one enormously vital and in its greatness immensely mysterious individuality—the only man of his time.
Cosmo Latham at the threshold of life had adopted neither of the contrasted views of Napoleon Emperor entertained by his contemporaries. For him as for his father before him, the world offered a scene of conflicting emotions in which facts appraised by reason preserved a mysterious complexity and a dual character. One evening during an artless discussion with young men of his own age, it had occurred to him to say that Bonaparte seemed to be the only man amongst a lot of old scarecrows. "Look how he knocks them over," he had explained. A moment of silence followed. Then a voice objected:
"Then perhaps he is not so great as some of you try to make him out."
"I didn't mean that exactly," said Cosmo in a sobered tone. "Nobody can admire that man more than I do. Perhaps the world may be none the worse for a scarecrow here and there left on the borders of what is right or just. I only wished to express my sense of the moving force in his genius."
"What does he stand for?" asked the same voice.
Cosmo shook his head. "Many things, and some of them too obvious to mention. But I can't help thinking that there are some which we cannot see yet."
"And some of them that are dead already," retorted his interlocutor. "They died in his very hands. But there is one thing for which he stands and that will never die. You seem to have forgotten it. It is the spirit of hostility to this nation; to what we in this room, with our different views and opinions, stand for in the last instance."
"Oh, that!" said Cosmo confidently. "What we stand for isn't an old scarecrow. Great as he is he will never knock that over. His arm is not long enough, however far his thoughts may go. He has got to work with common men."
"I don't know what you mean. What else are we? I believe you admire him."
"I do," confessed Cosmo sturdily.
This did not prevent him from joining the army in Spain before the year was out, and that without asking for Sir Charles's approval. Sir Charles condemned severely the policy of using the forces of the Crown in the Peninsula. He did not like the ministry of the day and he had a strong prejudice against all the Wellesleys to whose aggrandizement this whole policy seemed effected. But when at the end of a year and a half, after the final victory of Toulouse, his son appeared in Yorkshire, the two made up for the past coolness by shaking hands warmly for nearly a whole minute. Cosmo really had done very little campaigning and soon declared to his father the wish to leave the army. There would be no more fighting for years and years, he argued, and though he did not dislike fighting in a good cause, he had no taste for mere soldiering. He wanted to see something of the world which had been closed to us for so long. Sir Charles, ageing and dignified, leaned on his stick on the long terrace.
"All the world was never closed to us," he said.
"I wasn't thinking of the East, sir," explained Cosmo. "I heard some people talk about its mystery, but I think Europe is mysterious enough just now, and even more interesting."
Sir Charles nodded his bare gray head in the chill evening breeze.
"France, Germany," he murmured.
Cosmo thought that he would prefer to see something of Italy first. He would go north afterwards.
"Through Vienna, I suppose," suggested Sir Charles with an impassive face.
"I don't think so, sir," said Cosmo frankly. "I don't care much for the work which is going on there and perhaps still less for the men who are putting their hands to it."
This time Sir Charles's slow nod expressed complete agreement. He too had no liking for the work that was about to begin there. But no objection could be raised against Italy. He had known Italy well thirty or more years ago, but it must have been changed out of his knowledge. He remained silent, gazing at the wide landscape of blue wooded rises and dark hollows under the gorgeous colours of the sunset. They began to die out.
"You may travel far before you see anything like this," he observed to his son. "And don't be in a hurry to leave us. You have only just come home. Remember I am well over sixty."
Cosmo was quite ready to surrender himself to the peace of his Yorkshire home, so different from the strenuous atmosphere of the last campaign in the South of France. Autumn was well advanced before he fixed the day for his departure. On his last day at home Sir Charles addressed him with perfect calmness.
"When you pass into Italy you must not fail to see my old friend the Marquis d'Armand. The French King has appointed him as ambassador in Turin. It's a sign of high favour, I believe. He will be either in Turin or Genoa. . . ." Sir Charles paused, then after a perfectly audible sigh added with an effort: "The Marquise is dead. I knew her in her youth. She was a marvellous woman. . . ." Sir Charles checked himself, and then with another effort, "But the daughter of my old friend is I believe with her father now, a married daughter, the Countess of Montevesso."
"You mean little Adèle, sir," said Cosmo, with interest, but on Sir Charles's face there passed a distinct shade of distress.
"Oh, you remember the child," he said, and his tone was tender but it changed to contempt as he went on. "I don't know whether the fellow, I mean the man she married, is staying with them or whether they are living with him, or whether . . . I know nothing!"
The word "upstart," heard many years ago from his sister Henrietta, crossed Cosmo's mind. He thought to himself, "There is something wrong there," and to his father he said, "I will be able to tell you all about it."
"I don't want to know," Sir Charles replied with a surprising solemnity of tone and manner which hid some deeper feeling. "But give the Marquis my love and tell him that when he gets tired of all his grandeurs he may remember that there is a large place for him in this house as long as I live."
Late that evening Cosmo, saying good-bye to his sister, took her in his arms, kissed her forehead, and holding her out at arm's length said:
"You have grown into a charming girl, Henrietta."
"I am glad you think so," she said. "Alas, I am too dark. I can never be as charming as Adèle must have been at my age. You seem to have forgotten her."
"Oh no," protested Cosmo carelessly. "A marvel of fairness, wasn't she? I remember you telling me years ago that she married an upstart."
"That was Father's expression. You know what that means, Cosmo."
"I do know what it means, exactly," he said, laughing. "But from what Father said this afternoon it seems as if he were a rather nasty upstart. What made Adèle do it?"