Had John Turner been able to see round the curve of his own vast cheeks he might have perceived the answer to his proposition lurking in a little contemptuous smile at the corner of Miriam’s closed lips. Loo saw it there, and turned again to the contemplation of the clock on the mantelpiece which had already given a preliminary click.
Thus they waited until the minutes should elapse, and Turner, with a smile of simple pleasure at their ready acquiescence in his suggestion, probably reflected behind his vacuous face that silence rarely implies indecision.
When at last the clock struck, Loo turned to him with a laugh and a shake of the head as if the refusal were so self-evident that to put it into words were a work of supererogation.
“Who makes the offer?” he asked.
Turner smiled on him with visible approbation as upon a quick and worthy foe who fought a capable fight with weapons above the board.
“No matter—since you are disposed to refuse. The money is in my hands, as is the offer. Both are good. Both will hold good till to-morrow morning.”
Septimus Marvin gave a little exclamation of approval. He had been sitting by the table looking from one to the other over his spectacles with the eager smile of the listener who understands very little, and while wishing that he understood more, is eager to put in a word of approval or disapprobation on safe and general lines. It was quite obvious to John Turner, who had entered the room in ignorance on this point, that Marvin knew nothing of Barebone’s heritage in France while Miriam knew all.
“There is one point,” he said, “which is perhaps scarcely worth mentioning. The man who makes the offer is notonly the most unscrupulous, but is likely to become one of the most powerful men in Eur—men I know. There is a reverse side to the medal. There always is a reverse side to the good things of this world. Should you refuse his ridiculously generous offer you will make an enemy for life—one who is nearing that point where men stop at nothing.”
Turner glanced at Miriam again. Her clean-cut features had a stony stillness and her eyes looked obstinately at the clock. The banker moved in his chair as if suddenly conscious that it was time to go.
“Do not,” he said to Barebone, “be misled or mislead yourself into a false estimate of the strength of your own case. The offer I make you does not in any way indicate that you are in a strong position. It merely shows the indolence of a man naturally open-handed, who would always rather pay than fight.”
“Especially if the money is not his own.”
“Yes,” admitted Turner, stolidly, “that is so. Especially if the money is not his own. I dare say you know the weakness of your own case: others know it too. A portrait is not much to go on. Portraits are so easily copied; so easily changed.”
He rose as he spoke and shook hands with Marvin.
Then he turned to Miriam, but he did not meet her glance. Last of all he shook hands with Barebone.
“Sleep on it,” he said. “Nothing like sleeping on a question. I am staying at ‘The Black Sailor.’ See you tomorrow.”
He had come, had transacted his business and gone, all in less than an hour, with an extraordinary leisureliness almost amounting to indolence. He had lounged into the house, and now he departed without haste or explanation. Never hurry, never explain, was the text upon which John Turner seemed to base the sleepy discourse of his life. For each of us is a living sermon to his fellows, and, it is to be feared, the majority are warnings.
Turner had dragged on his thick overcoat, not without Loo’s assistance, and, with the collar turned up about his ears, he went out into the night, leaving the three persons whom he had found in the drawing-room standing in the hall looking at the door which he closed decisively behind him. “Seize your happiness while you can,” he had urged. “If not—” and the decisive closing of a door on his departing heel said the rest.
The clocks struck ten. It was not worth while going back to the drawing-room. All Farlingford was abed in those days by nine o’clock. Barebone took his coat and prepared to follow Turner. Miriam was already lighting her bedroom candle. She bade the two men good night and went slowly upstairs. As she reached her own room she heard the front door closed behind Loo and the rattle of the chain under the uncertain fingers of Septimus Marvin. The sound of it was like the clink of that other chain by which Barebone had made fast his boat to the tottering post on the river-wall.
Miriam’s room was at the front of the house, and its square Georgian windows faced eastward across the river to the narrow spit of marsh-land and the open sea beyond it. A crescent of moon far gone on the wane, yellow and forlorn, was rising from the sea. An uncertain path of light lay across the face of the far-off tide-way—broken by a narrow strip of darkness and renewed again close at hand across the wide river almost to the sea-wall beneath the window. From this window no house could be seen by day—nothing but a vast expanse of water and land hardly less level and unbroken. No light was visible on sea or land now, nothing but the waning moon in a cold clear sky.
Miriam threw herself, all dressed, on her bed with the abandonment of one who is worn out by some great effort, and buried her face in the pillow.
Barebone’s way lay to the left along the river-wall by the side of the creek. Turner had gone to the right, taking the path that led down the river to the old quay and the village. Whereas Barebone must turn his back on Farlingford to reach the farm which still crouches behind a shelter of twisted oaks and still bears the name of Maiden’s Grave; though the name is now nothing but a word. For no one knows who the maiden was, or where her grave, or what brought her to it.
The crescent moon gave little light, but Loo knew his way beneath the stunted cedars and through the barricade of ilex drawn round the rectory on the northern side. His eyes, trained to darkness, saw the shadowy form of a man awaiting him beneath the cedars almost as soon as the door was closed.
He went toward him, perceiving with a sudden misgiving that it was not John Turner. A momentary silhouette against the northern sky showed that it was Colville, come at last.
“Quick—this way!” he whispered, and taking Barebone’s arm he led him through the bushes. He halted in a little open space between the ilex and the river-wall, which is fifteen feet high at the meeting of the creek and the larger stream. “There are three men, who are not Farlingford men, on the outer side of the sea-wall below the rectory landing. Turner must have placed them there. I’ll be even with him yet. There is a large fishing-smack lying at anchor inside the Ness—just across the marsh. It is the ‘Petite Jeanne.’ I found this out while you were in there. I could hear your voices.”
“Could you hear what he said?”
“No,” answered Colville, with a sudden return to his old manner, easy and sympathetic. “No—this is no time for joking, I can tell you that. You have had a narrow escape, I assure you, Barebone. That man, the Captain of the ‘Petite Jeanne,’ is well known. There are plenty of people in France who want to get quietly rid of some family encumbrance—a man in the way, you understand, a son too many, a husband too much, a stepson who will inherit—the world is full of superfluities. Well, the Captain of the ‘Petite Jeanne’ will take them a voyage for their health to the Iceland fisheries. They are so far and so remote—the Iceland fisheries. The climate is bad and accidents happen. And if the ‘Petite Jeanne’ returns short-handed, as she often does, the other boats do the same. It is only a question of a few entries in the custom-house books at Fécamp. Do you see?”
“Yes,” admitted Barebone, thoughtfully. “I see.”
“I suppose it suggested itself to you when you were on board, and that is why you took the first chance of escape.”
“Well, hardly; but I escaped, so it does not matter.”
“No.” acquiesced Colville. “It doesn’t matter. But how are we to get out of this? They are waiting for us under the sea-wall. Is there a way across the marsh?”
“Yes—I know a way. But where do you want to go to-night?”
“Out of this,” whispered Colville, eagerly. “Out of Farlingford and Suffolk before the morning if we can. I tell you there is a French gunboat at Harwich, and another in the North Sea. It may be chance and it may not. But I suspect there is a warrant out against you. And, failing that, there is the ‘Petite Jeanne’ hanging about waiting to kidnap you a second time. And Turner’s at the bottom of it, damn him!”
Again Dormer Colville allowed a glimpse to appear of another man quite different from the easy, indolent man-of-the-world, the well-dressed adventurer of a day when adventure was mostly sought in drawing-rooms, when scented and curled dandies were made or marred by women. For a moment Colville was roused to anger and seemed capable of manly action. But in an instant the humour passed and he shrugged his shoulders and gave a short, indifferent laugh beneath his breath.
“Come,” he said, “lead the way and I will follow. I have been out here since eight o’clock and it is deucedly cold. I followed Turner from Paris, for I knew he was on your scent. Once across the marsh we can talk without fear as we go along.”
Barebone obeyed mechanically, leading the way through the bushes to the kitchen-garden and over an iron fencing on to the open marsh. This stretched inland for two miles without a hedge or other fence but the sunken dykes which intersected it across and across. Any knowing his way could save two miles on the longer way by the only road connecting Farlingford with the mainland and tapping the great road that runs north and south a few miles inland.
There was no path, for few ever passed this way. By day, a solitary shepherd watched his flocks here. By night the marsh was deserted. Across some of the dykes a plank is thrown, the whereabouts of which is indicated by a post, waist-high, driven into the ground, easily enough seen by day, but hard to find after dark. Not all the dykes have a plank, and for the most part the marsh is divided into squares, each only connected at one point with its neighbour.
Barebone knew the way as well as any in Farlingford, and he struck out across the thick grass which crunched briskly under the foot, for it was coated with rime, and the icy wind blew in from the sea a freezing mist. Once or twice Barebone, having made a bee-line across from dyke to dyke, failed to strike the exact spot where the low post indicated a plank, and had to pause and stoop down so as to find its silhouette against the sky. When they reached a plank he tried its strength with one foot and then led the way across it, turning and waiting at the far end for Colville to follow. It was unnecessary to warn him against a slip, for the plank was no more than nine inches wide and shone white with rime. Each foot must be secure before its fellow was lifted.
Colville, always ready to fall in with a companion’s humour, ever quick to understand the thoughts of others, respected his silence. Perhaps he was not far from guessing the cause of it.
Loo was surprised to find that Dormer Colville was less antipathetic than he had anticipated. For the last month, night and day, he had dreaded Colville’s arrival, and now that he was here he was almost glad to see him; almost glad to quit Farlingford. And his heart was hot with anger against Miriam.
Turner’s offer had at all events been worth considering. Had he been alone when it was made he would certainly have considered it; he would have turned it this way and that. He would have liked to play with it as a cat plays with a mouse, knowing all the while that he must refuse in the end. Perhaps Turner had made the offer in Miriam’s presence, expecting to find in her a powerful ally. It was only natural for him to think this. Ever since the beginning, men have assigned to women the rôle of the dissuader, the drag, the hinderer. It is always the woman, tradition tells us, who persuades the man to be a coward, to stay at home, to shirk a difficult or a dangerous duty.
As a matter of fact, Turner had made this mistake. He had always wondered why Miriam Liston elected to live at Farlingford when with her wealth and connections, both in England and France, she might live a gayer life elsewhere. There must, he reflected, be some reason for it.
When whosoever does anything slightly unconventional or leaves undone what custom and gossip make almost obligatory, a relation or a mere interfering neighbour is always at hand to wag her head and say there must be some reason for it. Which means, of course, one specific reason. And the worst of it is that she is nearly always right.
John Turner, laboriously putting two small numerals together, after his manner, had concluded that Loo Barebone was the reason. Even banking may, it seems, be carried on without the loss of all human weakness, especially if the banker be of middle age, unmarried, and deprived by an unromantic superfluity of adipose tissue of the possibility of living through a romance of his own. Turner had consented to countenance, if not actually to take part in, a nefarious scheme, to rid France and the present government of one who might easily bring about its downfall, on certain conditions. Knowing quite well that Loo Barebone could take care of himself at sea, and was quite capable of effecting an escape if he desired it, he had put no obstacle in the way of the usual voyage to the Iceland fisheries. Since those days many governments in France have invented many new methods of disposing of a political foe. Dormer Colville was only anticipating events when he took away the character of the Captain of the “Petite Jeanne.”
Turner had himself proposed this alternative method of securing Barebone’s silence. He had even named the sum. He had seized the excellent opportunity of laying it before Barebone in the quiet intimacy of the rectory drawing-room with Miriam in the soft lamp-light beside him, with the scent of the violets at her breast mingling with the warm smell of the wood fire.
And Barebone had laughed at the offer.
Turner, stumbling along the road to “The Black Sailor,” probably wondered why he had failed. It is to be presumed that he knew that the ally he had looked to for powerful aid had played him false at the crucial moment.
His misfortune is common to all men who presume to take anything for granted from a woman.
Barebone, stumbling along in the dark in another direction, was as angry with Miriam as she in her turn was angry with Turner. She was, Barebone reflected, so uncompromising. She saw her course so clearly, so unmistakably—as birds that fly in the night—and from that course nothing, it seemed, would move her. It was a question of temperament and not of principle. For, even half a century ago, high principles were beginning to go out of fashion in the upper strata of a society which in these days tolerates anything except cheating at games.
Barebone himself was of a different temperament. He liked to blind himself to the inevitable end, to temporise with the truth, whereas Miriam, with a sort of dogged courage essentially English, perceived the hard truth at once and clung to it, though it hurt. And all the while Barebone knew at the back of his heart that his life was not his own to shape. At the end, says an Italian motto, stands Destiny. Barebone wanted to make believe; he wanted to pretend that his path lay down a flowery way, knowing all the while that he had a hill to climb and Destiny stood at the top.
Colville had come at the right time. It is the fate of some men to come at the right moment, just as it is the lot of others never to be there when they are wanted and their place is filled by a bystander and an opportunity is gone for ever. Which is always a serious matter, for God only gives one or two opportunities to each of us.
Colville had come with his ready sympathy, not expressed as the world expresses its sympathy, in words, but by a hundred little self-abnegations. He was always ready to act up to the principles of his companion for the moment or to act up to no principles at all should that companion be deficient. Moreover, he never took it upon himself to judge others, but extended to his neighbour a large tolerance, in return for which he seemed to ask nothing.
“I have a carriage,” he said, when on a broader cart-track they could walk side by side, “waiting for me at the roadside inn at the junction of the two roads. The man brought me from Ipswich to the outskirts of Farlingford, and I sent him back to the high road to wait for me there, to put up and stay all night, if necessary.”
Barebone was beginning to feel tired. The wind was abominably cold. He heard with satisfaction that Colville had as usual foreseen his wishes.
“I dogged Turner all the way from Paris, hardly letting him out of my sight,” Colville explained, cheerily, when they at length reached the road. “It is easy enough to keep in touch with one so remarkably stout, for every one remembers him. What did he come to Farlingford for?”
“Apparently to try and buy me off.”
“For Louis Bonaparte?”
“He did not say so,”
“No,” said Colville. “He would not say so. But it is pretty generally suspected that he is in that galley, and pulls an important oar in it, too. What did he offer you?”
“Fifty thousand pounds.”
“Whew!” whistled Colville. He stopped short in the middle of the road. “Whew!” he repeated, thoughtfully, “fifty thousand pounds! Gad! They must be afraid of you. They must think that we are in a strong position. And what did you say, Barebone?”
“I refused.”
“Why?”
Barebone paused, and after a moment’s thought made no answer at all. He could not explain to Dormer Colville his reason for refusing.
“Outright?” inquired Colville, deep in thought.
“Yes.”
Colville turned and glanced at him sideways, though it was too dark to see his face.
“I should have thought,” he said, tentatively, after a while, “that it would have been wise to accept. A bird in the hand, you know—a damned big bird! And then afterwards you could see what turned up.”
“You mean I could break my word later on,” inquired Barebone, with that odd downrightness which at times surprised Colville and made him think of Captain Clubbe.
“Well, you know,” he explained, with a tolerant laugh, “in politics it often turns out that a man’s duty is to break his word—duty toward his party, and his country, and that sort of thing.”
Which was plausible enough, as many eminent politicians seem to have found in these later times.
“I dare say it may be so,” answered Barebone, “but I refused outright, and there is an end to it.”
For now that he was brought face to face with the situation, shorn of side issues and set squarely before him, he envisaged it clearly enough. He did not want fifty thousand pounds. He had only wanted the money for a moment because the thought leapt into his mind that fifty thousand pounds meant Miriam. Then he saw that little contemptuous smile tilting the corner of her lips, and he had no use for a million.
If he could not have Miriam, he would be King of France. It is thus that history is made, for those who make it are only men. And Clio, that greatest of the daughters of Zeus, about whose feet cluster all the famous names of the makers of this world’s story, has, after all, only had the reversion of the earth’s great men. She has taken them after some forgotten woman of their own choosing has had the first refusal.
Thus it came about that the friendship so nearly severed one evening at the Hotel Gemosac, in Paris, was renewed after a few months; and Barebone felt assured once more that no one was so well disposed toward him as Dormer Colville.
There was no formal reconciliation, and neither deemed it necessary to refer to the past. Colville, it will be remembered, was an adept at that graceful tactfulness which is somewhat clumsily described by this tolerant generation as going on as if nothing had happened.
By the time that the waning moon was high enough in the eastern sky to shed an appreciable light upon their path, they reached the junction of the two roads and set off at a brisk pace southward toward Ipswich. So far as the eye could reach, the wide heath was deserted, and they talked at their ease.
“There is nothing for it but to wake up my driver and make him take us back to Ipswich to-night. To-morrow morning we can take train to London and be there almost as soon as John Turner realises that you have given him the slip,” said Colville, cheerily.
“And then?”
“And then back to France—where the sun shines, my friend, and the spring is already in the air. Think of that! It is so, at least, at Gemosac, for I heard from the Marquis before I quitted Paris. Your disappearance has nearly broken a heart or two down there, I can tell you. The old Marquis was in a great state of anxiety. I have never seen him so upset about anything, and Juliette did not seem to be able to offer him any consolation.”
“Back to France?” echoed Barebone, not without a tone of relief, almost of exultation, in his voice. “Will it be possible to go back there, since we have to run away from Farlingford?”
“Safer there than here,” replied Colville. “It may sound odd, but it is true. De Gemosac is one of the most powerful men in France—not intellectually, perhaps, but by reason of his great name—and they would not dare to touch a protégé or a guest of his. If you go back there now you must stay at Gemosac; they have put the château into a more habitable condition, and are ready to receive you.”
He turned and glanced at Loo’s face in the moonlight.
“There will be a difference, you understand. You will be a different person from what you were when last there,” he went on, in a muffled voice.
“Yes, I understand,” replied Barebone, gravely. Already the dream was taking shape—Colville’s persuasive voice had awakened him to find that it was no dream, but a reality—and Farlingford was fading back into the land of shadows. It was only France, after all, that was real.
“That journey of ours,” explained Colville, vaguely, “has made an extraordinary difference. The whole party is aroused and in deadly earnest now.”
Barebone made no answer, and they walked on in meditative silence toward the roadside inn, which stood up against the southern sky a few hundred yards ahead.
“In fact,” Colville added, after a silence, “the ball is at your feet, Barebone. There can be no looking back now.”
And again Barebone made no answer. It was a tacit understanding, then.
For greater secrecy, Barebone walked on toward Ipswich alone, while Colville went into the inn to arouse his driver, whom he found slumbering in the wide chimney corner before a log fire. From Ipswich to London, and thus on to Newhaven, they journeyed pleasantly enough in company, for they were old companions of the road, and Colville’s unruffled good humour made him an easy comrade for travel even in days when the idea of comfort reconciled with speed had not suggested itself to the mind of man.
Such, indeed, was his foresight that he had brought with him to London, and there left awaiting further need of it, that personal baggage which Loo had perforce left behind him at the Hotel Gemosac in Paris.
They made but a brief halt in London, where Colville admitted gaily that he had no desire to be seen.
“I might meet my tailor in Piccadilly,” he said. “And there are others who may perhaps consider themselves aggrieved.”
At Colville’s club, where they dined, he met more than one friend.
“Hallo!” said one who had the ruddy countenance and bluff manners of a retired major. “Hallo! Who’d have expected to see you here? I didn’t know—I—thought—eh! dammy!”
And a hundred facetious questions gleamed from the major’s eye.
“All right, my boy,” answered Colville, cheerfully. “I am off to France to-morrow morning.”
The Major shook his head wisely as if in approval of a course of conduct savouring of that prudence which is the better part of valour, glanced at Loo Barebone, and waited in vain for an invitation to take a vacant chair near at hand.
“Still in the south of France, I suppose?”
“Still in the south of France,” replied Colville, turning to Barebone in a final way, which had the effect of dismissing this inquisitive idler.
While they were at dinner another came. He was a raw-boned Scotchman, who spoke in broken English when the waiter was absent and in perfect French when that servitor hovered near.
“I wish I could show my face in Paris,” he said, frankly, “but I can’t. Too much mixed up with Louis Philippe to find favour in the eyes of the Prince President.”
“Why?” asked Colville. “What could you gain by showing in Paris a face which I am sure has the stamp of innocence all over it?”
The Scotchman laughed curtly.
“Gain?” he answered. “Gain? I don’t say I would, but I think I might be able to turn an honest penny out of the approaching events.”
“What events?”
“The Lord alone knows,” replied the Scotchman, who had never set foot in his country, but had acquired elsewhere the prudent habit of never answering a question. “France doesn’t, I am sure of that. I am thinking there will be events, though, before long, Colville. Will there not, now?”
Colville looked at him with an open smile.
“You mean,” he said, slowly, “the Prince President.”
“That is what he calls himself at present. I’m wondering how long. Eh! man. He is just pouring money into the country from here, from America, from Austria—from wherever he can get it.”
“Why is he doing that?”
“You must ask somebody who knows him better than I do. They say you knew him yourself once well enough, eh?”
“He is not a man I have much faith in,” said Colville, vaguely. “And France has no faith in him at all.”
“So I’m told. But France—well, does France know what she wants? She mostly wants something without knowing what it is. She is like a woman. It’s excitement she wants, perhaps. And she will buy it at any cost, and then find afterward she has paid too dear for it. That is like a woman, too. But it isn’t another Bonaparte she wants, I am sure of that.”
“So am I,” answered Colville, with a side glance toward Barebone, a mere flicker of the eyelids.
“Not unless it is a Napoleon of that ilk.”
“And he is not,” completed Colville.
“But—” the Scotchman paused, for a waiter came at this moment to tell him that his dinner was ready at a table nearer to the fire. “But,” he went on, in French, for the waiter lingered, “but he might be able to persuade France that it is himself she wants—might he not, now? With money at the back of it, eh?”
“He might,” admitted Colville, doubtfully. The Scotchman moved away, but came back again.
“I am thinking,” he said, with a grim smile, “that like all intelligent people who know France, you are aware that it is a King she wants.”
“But not an Orleans King,” replied Colville, with his friendly and indifferent laugh.
The Scotchman smiled more grimly still and went away.
He was seated too near for Colville and Loo to talk of him. But Colville took an opportunity to mention his name in an undertone. It was a name known all over Europe then, and forgotten now.
“It is,” Madame de Chantonnay had maintained throughout the months of January and February—“it is an affair of the heart.”
She continued to hold this opinion with, however, a shade less conviction, well into a cold March.
“It is an affair of the heart, Abbé,” she said. “Allez! I know what I talk of. It is an affair of the heart and nothing more. There is some one in England: some blonde English girl. They are always washing, I am told. And certainly they have that air—like a garment that has been too often to theblanchisseuseand has lost its substance. A beautiful skin, I allow you. But so thin—so thin.”
“The skin, madame?” inquired the Abbé Touvent, with that gentle and cackling humour in which the ordained of any Church may indulge after a good dinner.
The Abbé Touvent had, as a matter of fact, been Madame de Chantonnay’s most patient listener through the months of suspense that followed Loo Barebone’s sudden disappearance. Needless to say he agreed ardently with whatever explanation she put forward. Old ladies who give good dinners to a Low Church British curate, or an abbé of the Roman confession, or, indeed, to the needy celibate exponents of any creed whatsoever, may always count upon the active conversational support of their spiritual adviser. And it is not only within the fold of Papacy that careful Christians find the road to heaven made smooth by the arts of an efficient cook.
“You know well enough what I mean, malicious one,” retorted the lady, arranging her shawl upon her fat shoulders.
“I always think,” murmured the Abbé, sipping his digestive glass of eau-de-vie d’Armagnac, which is better than any cognac of Charente—“I always think that to be thin shows a mean mind, lacking generosity.”
“Take my word for it,” pursued Madame de Chantonnay, warming to her subject, “that is the explanation of the young man’s disappearance. They say the government has taken some underhand way of putting him aside. One does not give credence to such rumours in these orderly times. No: it is simply that he prefers the pale eyes of some Mees to glory and France. Has it not happened before, Abbé?”
“Ah! Madame—” another sip of Armagnac.
“And will it not happen again? It is the heart that has the first word and the last. I know—I who address you, I know!”
And she touched her breast where, very deeply seated it is to be presumed, she kept her own heart.
“Ah! Madame. Who better?” murmured the Abbé.
“Na, na!” exclaimed Madame de Chantonnay, holding up one hand, heavy with rings, while with the other she gathered her shawl closer about her as if for protection.
“Now you tread on dangerous ground, wicked one—wicked! And you so demure in your soutane!”
But the Abbé only laughed and held up his small glass after the manner of any abandoned layman drinking a toast.
“Madame,” he said, “I drink to the hearts you have broken. And now I go to arrange the card tables, for your guests will soon be coming.”
It was, in fact, Madame de Chantonnay’s Thursday evening to which were bidden such friends as enjoyed for the moment her fickle good graces. The Abbé Touvent was, so to speak, a permanent subscriber to these favours. The task was easy enough, and any endowed with a patience to listen, a readiness to admire that excellent young nobleman, Albert de Chantonnay, and the credulity necessary to listen to the record (more hinted at than clearly spoken) of Madame’s own charms in her youth, could make sure of a game of dominoes on the evening of the third Thursday in the month.
The Abbé bustled about, drawing cards and tables nearer to the lamps, away from the draught of the door, not too near the open wood fire. His movements were dainty, like those of an old maid of the last generation. He hissed through his teeth as if he were working very hard. It served to stimulate a healthy excitement in the Thursday evening of Madame de Chantonnay.
“Oh, I am not uneasy,” said that lady, as she watched him. She had dined well and her digestion had outlived those charms to which she made such frequent reference. “I am not uneasy. He will return, more or less sheepish. He will make some excuse more or less inadequate. He will tell us a story more or less creditable.Allez! Oh, you men. If you intend that chair for Monsieur de Gemosac, it is the wrong one. Monsieur de Gemosac sits high, but his legs are short; give him the little chair that creaks. If he sits too high he is apt to see over the top of one’s cards. And he is so eager to win—the good Marquis.”
“Then he will come to-night despite the cold? You think he will come, Madame?”
“I am sure of it. He has come more frequently since Juliette came to live at the château. It is Juliette who makes him come, perhaps. Who knows?”
The Abbé stopped midway across the floor and set down the chair he carried with great caution.
“Madame is incorrigible,” he said, spreading out his hands. “Madame would perceive a romance in a cradle.”
“Well, one must begin somewhere, Materialist. Once it was for me that the guests crowded to my poor Thursdays. But now it is because Albert is near. Ah! I know it. I say it without jealousy. Have you noticed, my dear Abbé, that he has cut his whiskers a little shorter—a shade nearer to the ear? It is effective, eh?”
“It gives an air of hardihood,” assented the Abbé. “It lends to that intellectual face something martial. I would almost say that to the timorous it might appear terrible and overbearing.”
Thus they talked until the guests began to arrive, and for Madame de Chantonnay the time no doubt seemed short enough. For no one appreciated Albert with such a delicacy of touch as the Abbé Touvent.
The Marquis de Gemosac and Juliette were the last to arrive. The Marquis looked worn and considerably aged. He excused himself with a hundred gestures of despair for being late.
“I have so much to do,” he whispered. “So much to think of. We are leaving no stone unturned, and at last we have a clue.”
The other guests gathered round.
“But speak, my dear friend, speak,” cried Madame de Chantonnay. “You keep us in suspense. Look around you. We are among friends, as you see. It is only ourselves.”
“Well,” replied the Marquis, standing upright and fingering the snuff-box which had been given to his grandfather by the Great Louis. “Well, my friends, our invaluable ally, Dormer Colville, has gone to England. There is a ray of hope. That is all I can tell you.”
He looked round, smiled on his audience, and then proceeded to tell them more, after the manner of any Frenchman.
“What,” he whispered, “if an unscrupulous republican government had got scent of our glorious discovery! What if, panic-stricken, they threw all vestige of honour to the wind and decided to kidnap an innocent man and send him to the Iceland fisheries, where so many lives are lost every winter; with what hopes in their republican hearts, I leave to your imagination. What if—let us say it for once—Monsieur de Bourbon should prove a match for them? Alert, hardy, full of resource, a skilled sailor, he takes his life in his hand with the daring audacity of royal blood and effects his escape to England. I tell you nothing—”
He held up his hands as if to stay their clamouring voices, and nodded his head triumphantly toward Albert de Chantonnay, who stood near a lamp fingering his martial whisker of the left side with the air of one who would pause at naught.
“I tell you nothing. But such a theory has been pieced together upon excellent material. It may be true. It may be a dream. And, as I tell you, our dear friend Dormer Colville, who has nothing at stake, who loses or gains little by the restoration of France, has journeyed to England for us. None could execute the commission so capably, or without danger of arousing suspicion. There! I have told you all I know. We must wait, my compatriots. We must wait.”
“And in the mean time,” purred the voice of the Abbé Touvent, “for the digestion, Monsieur le Marquis—for the digestion.”
For it was one of the features of Madame de Chantonnay’s Thursdays that no servants were allowed in the room; but the guests waited on each other. If the servants, as is to be presumed, listened outside the door, they were particular not to introduce each succeeding guest without first knocking, which caused a momentary silence and added considerably to the sense of political importance of those assembled. The Abbé Touvent made it his special care to preside over the table where small glasses of eau-de-vie d’Armagnac and other aids to digestion were set out in a careful profusion.
“It is a theory, my dear Marquis,” admitted Madame de Chantonnay. “But it is nothing more. It has no heart in it, your theory. Now I have a theory of my own.”
“Full of heart, one may assure oneself, Madame; full of heart,” murmured the Marquis. “For you yourself are full of heart—is it not so?”
“I hope not,” Juliette whispered to her fan, with a little smile of malicious amusement. For she had a youthful contempt for persons old and stout, who talk ignorantly of matters only understood by such as are young and slim and pretty. She looked at her fan with a gleam of ill-concealed irony and glanced over it toward Albert de Chantonnay, who, with a consideration which must have been hereditary, was uneasy about the alteration he had made in his whiskers. It was perhaps unfair, he felt, to harrow young and tender hearts.
It was at this moment that a loud knock commanded a breathless silence, for no more guests were expected. Indeed the whole neighbourhood was present.
The servant, in his faded gold lace, came in and announced with a dramatic assurance: “Monsieur de Barebone—Monsieur Colville.”
And that difference which Dormer Colville had predicted was manifested with an astounding promptness; for all who were seated rose to their feet. It was Colville who had given the names to the servant in the order in which they had been announced, and at the last minute, on the threshold, he had stepped on one side and with his hand on Barebone’s shoulder had forced him to take precedence.
The first person Barebone saw on entering the room was Juliette, standing under the spreading arms of a chandelier, half turned to look at him—Juliette, in all the freshness of her girlhood and her first evening dress, flushing pink and white like a wild rose, her eyes, bright with a sudden excitement, seeking his.
Behind her, the Marquis de Gemosac, Albert de Chantonnay, his mother, and all the Royalists of the province, gathered in a semicircle, by accident or some tacit instinct, leaving only the girl standing out in front, beneath the chandelier. They bowed with that grave self-possession which falls like a cloak over the shoulders of such as are of ancient and historic lineage.
“We reached the château of Gemosac only a few minutes after Monsieur le Marquis and Mademoiselle had quitted it to come here,” Barebone explained to Madame de Chantonnay; “and trusting to the good-nature—so widely famed—of Madame la Comtesse, we hurriedly removed the dust of travel, and took the liberty of following them hither.”
“You have not taken me by surprise,” replied Madame de Chantonnay. “I expected you. Ask the Abbé Touvent. He will tell you, gentlemen, that I expected you.”
As Barebone turned away to speak to the Marquis and others, who were pressing forward to greet him, it became apparent that that mantle of imperturbability, which millions made in trade can never buy, had fallen upon his shoulders, too. For most men are, in the end, forced to play the part the world assigns to them. We are not allowed to remain what we know ourselves to be, but must, at last, be that which the world thinks us.
Madame de Chantonnay, murmuring to a neighbour a mystic reference to her heart and its voluminous premonitions, watched him depart with a vague surprise.
“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!” she whispered, breathlessly. “It is not a resemblance. It is the dead come to life again.”