CHAPTER XVI(1)That Tristram Hungerford, nearly four months later, should still be in Italy, should, indeed, be walking up and down the Cascine at Florence, among other promenaders, on a fine day in January, was due to the fact that an obscure Italian parroco had received from art a shadowy acquaintance with medicine and from nature, unbounded confidence wherewith to make use of it.Never again was Tristram likely to allow a physician of souls to try his hand at mending a body, least of all the body of a friend. Priestly surgery, as it had been practised on Dormer, he would henceforth eschew like the plague. For the result of the parroco's ministrations had been disastrous, and his setting of the broken leg so bungling that at last Tristram had Dormer removed to Florence and procured the services of a first-class surgeon. The latter pulled a long face, and said that if the English signor did not want to walk lame all his days the leg must be re-set. At the stage then reached this involved breaking the bone again. It is probable that Tristram, sitting in the next room with his hands over his ears, suffered quite as much as the victim himself. The surgeon indeed told him afterwards that, had not his friend been a heretic, he might have thought he had been miraculously relieved, as were sometimes the holy martyrs. Not, however, that when he saw Dormer afterwards, Tristram could discern much evidence of alleviation of any kind.However, in a week or ten days now they were going home. Dormer's accident had not, at any rate, brought back his headaches; he affirmed, on the contrary, that the long, enforced rest had done just what he needed. He had borne the pain and tedium serenely, almost lightly; the only thing that seemed to try him was his absence from Oxford, and the fact that his misfortune had delayed his friend's ordination. Their prolonged stay had brought them several acquaintances among the English colony at Florence, and of late they had come to know an Italian gentleman connected with the Court, a certain Signor della Torre Vecchia, who had become smitten with an immense admiration for Dormer. Tristram had indeed rather suffered from this worship, and so, though the Italian had been exceedingly kind to them both, putting a carriage at their disposal and doing his utmost to carry off Dormer from their hotel to his villa at Fiesole, Tristram was not altogether sorry that their benefactor was leaving Florence that very afternoon. For when Signor della Torre Vecchia could get Tristram alone he did nothing but talk about his dilettissimo amico, his charm, his looks ("one would say a portrait by Van Dyck, signore"), his intellectual distinction. He drove Tristram into promising him Dormer's book on the Non-Jurors, for he had been in England and manifested a most inexplicable interest in the English Church, though, despite their endeavours to prove to him that she was a part of the Church Catholic—instancing the Catholicity of her Prayer-Book, while admitting the Protestantism of her practice—he persisted in regarding her as a phenomenon, and they never got any further. Afterwards he would take Tristram aside and reiterate his conviction that nobody like Dormer could possibly remain permanently outside the True Church. The only consolation which Tristram derived from these confidences was the power of chaffing Dormer unmercifully on the effect produced by his "romantic appearance."Towards Horatia Tristram's feelings had changed. He would always, he supposed, love her better than anyone else in the world, but he did not love her now as a lover. Besides the fierce struggle of the past months to tear from his heart what he regarded as sin, a struggle which had slowly been successful, there was the knowledge, conveyed to him by the Rector, that she was about to have a child. Unconsciously this made a difference to him. He felt now as he imagined an elder brother might feel towards a sister who had always been very dear to him, full of an affection essentially protective. The time had been that, even though the sense of sin had left him, he could not receive a letter from her without being plunged in depression. But now he would have been very glad of a letter, for, whether they were lost or delayed in the notoriously uncertain Italian posts, or whether they were non-existent, no communications from the Rector or from Horatia had reached him since August, and he sometimes imagined horrible things, as that Horatia was dead, for he did not know when her child was expected.Another change, too, had gradually wrought in his spirit, He was, in a sense, quite honest when he mocked at Dormer's idealisation of the single life, though perhaps his mockery was due to the knowledge that the ideas which he derided were not really so very alien to his mind.Now, indeed, if the truth were known, they had even begun to have a curious attraction for him—a speculative attraction. What if to some souls there did really come a call to win "that little coronet or special reward which God hath prepared (extraordinary and beside the great Crown of all faithful souls)" as the author ofHoly Livinghad it, for those who had made the sacrifice of earthly affection and ties. And personsdidmake that sacrifice, in numbers—as witness the not very attractive religious whom he saw about the streets of Florence. Most of all, unforgettable, recurring again and again to his mind, there was the great fresco in the monastery of San Marco, where S. Dominic, kneeling at the foot of the Cross, embraces it in a passion of love and pain, and the Crucified looks down at him. It had taken Tristram's breath away when first he saw it at the end of the cloister. After some time he went and looked at it again—and came away very sad. Its message was not for him, whose obedience was loveless. All that the picture's spiritual beauty could do for him now was to remind him painfully of Keble's words, so applicable to himself, of the shame of the thought—"That souls in refuge, holding by the crossShould wince and fret at this world's little loss."Yes, to walk among the lilies might be given to such an one as Dormer, but not to a commonplace person like himself, who had been forced into sacrifice. He had nothing to give of his own free-will. That he would henceforth live without earthly ties was not because he had been smitten by a vision from on high, but because the woman he loved had been taken from him. It was enough for him if he could echo the close of those same lines—"Wash me, and dry these bitter tears,O let my heart no further roam,'Tis Thine by vows and hopes and fearsLong since——"Some way off a stir among the promenaders and the sight of the Ducal livery, portending, probably, that the Grand Duke was taking the air, reminded Tristram of Torre Vecchia, and his impending departure. Pulling out his watch, he hurried off.As he entered the hotel he was stopped by the porter."The post is in, Excellency, and there are two English letters for you."The letters were both addressed in Mr. Grenville's handwriting, and one had been posted no less than three months before.(2)Dormer crumpled up the paper on which he had been scribbling and pushed it under his cushions, where he lay on a couch near a window looking out on to the Arno. The translation which he had been making of a portion of Andrewes'Preces Privataedid not please his difficult taste, and he took up instead the other book lying beside him—Serenus Cressy's edition of Father Augustine Baker'sSancta Sophia, orDirections for the Prayer of Contemplation, a relic of one of his Jacobite ancestors who had afterwards become a Benedictine, which he had found, at his mother's death, among her books. He glanced at the title page, where the hand which more than a hundred years ago had written its owner's name—and his—Carolus Dormer—had traced below a cross and the family motto, 'Ciò che Dio vuole, io voglio—God's Will my will'; and began to read the chapter "Of the Great Desolation." Perhaps because he lived almost always in the conscious presence of God the description of "this most sharp purgatory of love" had for him a curious fascination."For what has a soul left to fear that can with a peaceable mind support, yea, and make her benefit of the absence of God Himself."He closed the book and lay back, gazing out of the window, yet San Miniato and its cypresses were nothing but a blur....The door opened, and the landlord admitted a tall, fair Italian, wrapped in an ample cloak."Do not rise, do not rise, my dear friend, I implore you!" exclaimed the visitor, swooping down upon Dormer and seizing both his hands. "And how do you find yourself this afternoon? Not in pain, I trust!""But I am perfectly well," protested Dormer, laughing. Accustomed as he was to these effusive greetings, he was always glad when Tristram was not by to witness them. "In a few days we, too, shall be leaving Florence."Standing over him in his great black cloak, Signor della Torre Vecchia shook his head dolefully. "I doubt if it is wise—whether you will really be fit to travel."At this point the landlord, with many apologies, desired to be permitted to set down the coffee on the table near the couch, and the guest had to make way for him."Your Excellencies have everything they require?" asked he. "Signor Ungerford is just come in; he reads his correspondence. The courier has arrived, but there are no other letters." One overflowing smile, he bowed himself out."Pray sit down, Signore," said Dormer. "We will not wait for Mr. Hungerford." And he stretched out his arm to the coffee."Ah, but you must allow me, in the circumstances, to do that!" said Torre Vecchia quickly, and he snatched away the tray. "With what pleasure should I not have done this for you up at Fiesole," he observed wistfully, as he poured out the coffee. "It will always be a life-long regret to me that you would not permit me to remove you to Villa San Giuliano.""As if I were not sufficiently indebted to you without that!" exclaimed the Englishman. "For all your kindness to a stranger I can make no return but to hope that, when you visit England again, you will come to Oxford as my guest."Torre Vecchia gave him, with his coffee, a promise that he would do so, and flowed on in a gentle but swift-running stream of converse, while Dormer began to wonder why Tristram did not join them. Finally he apologised for him, suggesting that he did not know of the Italian's presence. Torre Vecchia made a large gesture that excused him."We were told," said he, "that he is reading his letters, and who can say whether there is not one from his betrothed. Pray do not have him disturbed.... You know, Signore, that your Church is very fortunate in possessing material of the type of Signor Hungerford for her pastors—for I understand that he is about to enter that estate. Is it not true that the English country gentleman has an equal, if not a superior, in the parson, who is a man of the world, with a training of the University, whereas ours are ... to put it delicately, not high born, and seminary bred.... But here I am on this topic again—and I hope, Signore, that in our most interesting conversation of yesterday, when I said how much I disliked our system of enforced celibacy for the clergy, I did not seem to be criticising Holy Church, of which I trust I am a faithful son."Dormer relieved him of this apprehension, and he continued:"But there are these two points which, when I feel I shall not be misunderstood, I cannot help deploring—most of all the enforced celibacy." Torre Vecchia dropped his voice and looked round, apparently to make sure that they were alone, ere he went on earnestly, "'Signore, consider the isolated position of the ordinary priest, consider the number of things enjoyed by his fellow-men that he must renounce—above all, that great happiness, which our holy religion sanctifies for others, but which it forbids him even to think of for himself. His life may inspire respect, even admiration, but it excites—in me, at least—regret for so much rigour, which is surely in contradiction with what Nature and God Himself have implanted.... I find it so extraordinary that you, a divine of the English Church, do not agree with me!""But I do, in a sense," retorted Dormer. "I rejoice that our clergy are free to marry or not to marry; only I would wish to see the majority unmarried.""You would deprive them then of those pure pleasures which your Church allows, the pleasures of a home, of a wife, of children?""I would not deprive them of these. But I would have the greater number deprive themselves."Torre Vecchia lifted his hands and eyes to heaven. "But this is the spirit of Catholic asceticism, and yet you are not a Catholic! I am more puzzled than ever. You and your friends, you tell me, believe in the Real Presence, in the apostolical succession, in the power of the keys, and yet when I was in England last I never met a single person who seemed even to have heard of such things!""Perhaps not, but they will hear some day," said Dormer quietly, and at that moment Tristram entered, full of apologies, which were met by counter-apologies from the Italian, and finally merged into a scene of leavetaking, as the latter discovered that it was later than he thought."You must make amends for your absence now, Signore," he said, smiling at Tristram, "by allowing me to call upon you when next I am in England. And in spite of your friend's views (which never cease to astonish me) I cannot help hoping that this will be in one of those delicious country parsonages, embowered in roses, bright with wife and child, to which I have before now been welcomed—at what you call the 'family-living,' in short!"He left Tristram deprived of speech and once more bent over Dormer. "And for you, my dear friend, how I wish I could have seen you restored to perfect health before I left! I am putting a carriage at your entire disposal. Every afternoon one of my people shall come round and see if you need it. No, no thanks, I beg ... I must veritably fly. Addio, caro amico; I trust I may say a rivederci." Uttering further swift and polite phrases, and flinging his cloak round him with the art of the South, he was gone.Almost ere the door had closed Dormer had rolled over like a boy and buried his face in the sofa-cushions. "Why did you not come in before, you wretch!" he ejaculated. "I have been having such a disquisition, all to myself. What on earth were you doing? It was no time for reading letters." Turning over again, as a thought struck him, he said abruptly: "I hope that well-meaning blunderer did not hurt you?""Of course not," answered his friend. "But ... I've just had bad news." And he went and sat down in the Italian's vacant place.Dormer struggled off the sofa. "My dear fellow, what is it?""She's been very ill. The Rector had to go over—her child was born prematurely."Dormer gave an exclamation. "Did it live?""She was in great danger for four days," said Tristram, running his hands through his hair, "in great danger, and I never knew! It must have been about the time that we got here. The letter was temporarily lost, I suppose. Yes, the child lived. This second letter of the Rector's, dated about a month ago, which has reached me at the same time as the first, says that he is not satisfied with the reports he has of her, and that he would be very glad if I could see her before crossing the Channel."CHAPTER XVII(1)A fortnight later they drove into Paris.Tristram had written to Horatia announcing the probable date of their arrival, but, as in his trouble he had omitted to give their address, there was no letter to greet him, no invitation to stay instead at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon, as there would have been had she known where he would be. He was rather glad when he realised, on arrival, what he had done. It was late. Next day he sent a note by a messenger saying that he and Dormer would call in the early afternoon.In the morning he went out by himself, and leaning over the Pont Royal watched the Seine running to the sea. Much water had slipped under that bridge since last he was in Paris. He smiled at the commonplaceness of the thought; but it was true, nevertheless. Did Horatia ever cross the bridge?—of course she must often do so. Paris was different from the Paris of old—different from any other city in the world, now.One of the views of the world was before him, where up the stream Notre Dame lay magnificently at anchor. In his lonely walks in Florence Tristram had acquired the habit of going almost every day into some church or other; the desire to enter one now came upon him, and he left his post and made his way, not however to Notre Dame, but to the church which was to him the most attractive in Paris, St. Etienne du Mont.The beautiful jubé burst on his senses with a new surprise; the splendid windows blazed again. He knelt down, undisturbed by a couple of tourists who were wandering round. The church was full of light; the wonderful exultant lines of the screen caught up his spirit, and he saw once more, not with the faint sense of regret which once he had, that the most jewelled of the windows were set up high in the clerestory, where the eye had to seek for them. St. Etienne meant that, then—the rapture, the ardour, the flaming ecstasy of sacrifice—more, of sacrifice that seemed uncalled for. Would he ever know it, or must he always feel that he gave, not grudgingly indeed, but without a grain of the incense of joy?(2)He thought of the church as he and Dormer walked rather silently along the Rue St. Dominique that afternoon and came at last to the gateway of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon. Yes, he had made the sacrifice completely; it could not be redemanded now, even though he was to see her, to touch her hand. It was relief unspeakable to know this; nine months, six months ago he could not have met her. Yet he had a quite ordinary dread of the encounter, of its strangeness, of the feeling that something had come down and shut her off. Would she be looking ill?He had said to Dormer that he rather anticipated being received in the midst of a family gathering, since he was known to the Marquis as well, and since Armand was indeed no little in his debt. He was pleased to find that this was not the case. The lackey led them up the stairs to Horatia's boudoir. Madame la Comtesse (how unfamiliar!) was expecting them.At first sight, as Horatia rose to greet them, Tristram thought, "Yes, she has been ill, she looks a woman, but she is the same." She had for a moment all her old vivacity, her delightful smile, the same trick of screwing her eyes up when she talked. She gave him just the welcome that he might have had in Berkshire. He was even able to remember, as she held out her hand to Dormer, all the hits she used to aim at his friend."I hope you are quite recovered from your accident, Mr. Dormer," she said. "You must not stand a moment, I am sure. Let us all sit down, and we can gossip comfortably."She waved them into chairs. The voice, the words, were just Horatia's own; the air a little more assured, more mature—that of Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon. No harm in that.She talked on lightly. Papa, she was certain, had been alarming Tristram unnecessarily; she was as well as ever she had been in her life. And why had not Tristram given her an address?—could they not come and stay at the Hôtel now? Presently they must see her son, and Armand would soon be in.And as she talked the sense of effort began to be apparent, the glow, the first illusion faded. She was not the same Horatia; she was not even the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon, an Horatia ripened by her station, she was somehow different. She had not the same vitality. This was what her illness had done to her, thought Tristram—drained away some of that almost childish and petulant animation which he used to love in her. Spring had left those green boughs, perhaps not to revisit them. He was sad; and sat a little silent while she talked, without telling them much, about Armand, about this, that, and the other, about her own pleasure in seeing them, ending at last by saying, "Perhaps we had better be going now into the salon."So they followed her to that apartment where, throned in state on a sofa, out of deference to the English prejudice against being received in a bedroom, sat the Duchesse—and Tristram was momentarily startled to perceive that her hair, as he innocently supposed it to be, was of almost the same shade as Horatia's. Beside her, talking with great animation, was a young and fashionably dressed woman, the Marquise de Beaulieu. His old acquaintance Emmanuel was standing by these two, and in a window a tall ecclesiastic whom he did not know was conversing with a shrivelled little old lady equally unknown to him."Aha!" said the Dowager, "so this is the celebrated M. Hungerford to whom, I understand, our young couple owe their present felicity." And she tendered her small aged hand with a smile that unmasked the full battery of her false teeth. "I have also to thank you, Monsieur, for your kind hospitality to my son, as well as to my grandson. And why, I pray, are we to be given no opportunity of returning so many obligations?" And while, with half-bantering condescension, she proceeded in this vein, and Emmanuel greeted him again with genuine pleasure, Tristram was conscious that Dormer, rescued from his momentary fall into the clutches of Madame de Beaulieu, was borne off and presented by Horatia to the priest in the window. Then Armand appeared, with a smile for everybody, delighted to see his former host, very gallant to his wife.Hehad not altered. Eventually he separated Tristram from the Duchesse and his brother, and began to make courteous and tactful inquiries about his "old friends" at Compton, but all the while Tristram's mind was busy trying to account for the change in Horatia. He was beginning to think it due, not to her illness exactly, but to the atmosphere in which she lived, to these over-many relations, amongst whom her identity, once so strong, seemed almost lost.Presently further stir, and Maurice was borne in like a relic, and deposited in a strange shrine, his great-grandmother's lap. Somewhat to Tristram's surprise, Armand immediately went over to him and presented his finger; the infant, whose face had assumed an anxious expression, crowed loudly and seized it."Small doubt that he is thy son, mauvais sujet," Tristram heard the Duchesse to remark sotto voce to her grandson. "His eyes are more like thine every day. Do not throw thyself about thus, little one; I have held many children before thee."But Tristram, the prey of a curious fascination, remained where he was. And all this while, too, Horatia was sitting leaning her head on her hand, at the other side of the room, alone, almost unnoticed, except that Dormer, though still talking to Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, was looking at her intently. It was true that Horatia's eyes were fixed upon the group round the sofa, or rather upon its centre; their expression was not to be read, but the weariness, the profound lassitude of her pose was the ineffaceable thing which Tristram carried away from the scene—that, and Armand's look as he stooped over their child.CHAPTER XVIII(1)When Tristram and Dormer had departed, and the family party broken up, the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon went to her own apartments and wept hysterically. The following Sunday she resumed her attendance at Morning Prayer.The reason for her action was not far to seek. Of all the emotions which the sight of Tristram had called up, homesickness was the most piercing. She had not let him see it; she had not thought, before he came, that she was capable of any more feeling. She had told herself, when she got his letter from Italy, that she was far too miserable to care whether he came or no. But when she talked with him, when the sound of his voice had rekindled all the past years of happiness, she desired passionately the things of home, more even than when her father had come over, for then she had hardly strength for a wish of any kind.She had long been putting off going again to the Embassy chapel, on the score that she was not well enough; on the same pretext she did not read Morning Prayer with Martha either. It was only occasionally that she said her own prayers. She told herself that probably there was no God at all. But now, with Tristram's visit, there sprang up immediately the desire for this renewal of contact with things English, because she felt that there she could indulge in a very luxury of unhappiness. She went with that intention.But the effect was wholly different from her anticipations. Morning Prayer, both in its religious and national aspects, may be said to produce an atmosphere if repeated often enough. It disposes the mind to the ideals of duty, uprightness, and faithfulness. It does not move immediately to the heights and depths of great sacrifices, as the Mass will do, though in the end the result is perhaps the same. Horatia came away that Sunday from the Embassy Chapel with a most uncomfortable doubt whether she were really being, not a noble, injured, suffering wife, but a rather ignominious and cowardly person. Would not her father be shocked at her failure in wifely duty? Would not all the generations of Grenvilles behind her have been shocked?The idea was so unpleasant that she strove with it, and, having actually caught a slight cold during the week, absolved herself from attending Divine Service for some time.(2)Madame de Vigerie, since her astonishing reception of him at the New Year, had been many times called by Armand de la Roche-Guyon his good angel and his guiding star. And, in a political sense at least, she was not unworthy of these appellations. Horatia never knew to whom she owed it that her husband was not implicated in the conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires to gain access to the Tuileries and assassinate the Royal Family, the discovery of which, at the beginning of February, shook Paris. The enterprise was not chivalrous enough for Laurence de Vigerie's taste. There were more stirring plans afoot, for a rising on which all was to be staked was now much more imminent than it had been in the summer, and she was in even closer communication than before with the Regent's little court at Massa, that combination of the Coblentz of the emigration and the Paris of the Fronde. There was much to keep them occupied, for there was division not only among Madame's immediate counsellors, but also in the Royalist committees in France. That in Paris wished the rising adjourned; those in the provinces desired it immediately. These problems demanded daily intercourse, and, indeed, now that his wife had disavowed all interest in his doings, Armand considered himself free to visit the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin as often as he liked. To many a moth the light of a guiding star may well be attractive above all others.February slipped away, with the discovery of the plot, the trials of the implicated. The salons of the Faubourg were divided between those who, denying the conspiracy, ridiculed Louis-Philippe's baseless fears, and those who mourned its ill-success. Tristram Hungerford came and left, March entered, and Lent; Maurice was producing his first tooth, and George Sand her first novel. In England the Reform Bill passed the Commons; and in France Horatia was combatting the influence of Morning Prayer.But to Armand himself the most important event of the month was a little conversation which occurred during its second week. He had sent Madame de Vigerie flowers, as he constantly did, and came in one afternoon to find her bending over some lilies of the valley."I wonder who gave me these," she said."Cannot you guess?" asked Armand. He took out a spray and held it towards her. "They were meant for a better place than that vase."The Vicomtesse smiled and shook her head. "I never wear flowers, save those that I pick myself.""I have noticed that you never wear mine," said Armand."Nor anybody else's.""Why not?""Just a whim," said Madame de Vigerie, turning away."I believe I can read your mind," said Armand slowly. "Laurence, you are like a bird of the woods. You will not come to any man's whistling, and it means too much to you to wear a favour."She turned on him half grave, half gay. "Mon ami, you have guessed right. But I love your flowers ... I love to have them near me. I will do anything but wear them.""And some day," said the young man softly, "you will do that. Or am I never to hope for it, Laurence?""No," she said, "I shall never wear them." But she did not meet his eyes."But if you ever did...""O, suppose that I wore the stars as a necklace!" cried she. "It is as likely.""But if you ever did," persisted Armand. "Laurence, if you ever did...""Yes," she said, turning very pale....(3)March had all but completed its course with dust and wind, and at its extreme end Lent had come to a temporary pause for the Carnival.Armand de la Roche-Guyon had just finished dressing for a costume ball. The long mirror in his dressing-room, reflected him, clad from head to foot in white and gold, in ruff, doublet and hose, a gentleman of the Valois court. The dress, blazing with jewels, had been copied from a well-known picture of Charles IX. From the little flat cap with a feather set on the side of his handsome head to his shoes the costume suited him admirably, and his valet, standing by him, had just expressed this opinion."The mask, M. le Comte, and the domino?""No dominos to-night, but I will take it for a cloak. At what time did I order the carriage to be ready?""Not for a quarter of an hour yet, M. le Comte.""Well, you can go. Give me the mask."The man departed, and Armand, humming an air, the mask dangling from his hand, tried altering by at inch or two the position of the dagger at his hip. Then he looked at the clock, and on what seemed a sudden impulse, threw down the mask upon a sofa and went out of the room."He'll be frightened to death if he sees you like that, Sir," said Martha, looking with disapprobation at the costume which had already given her "a turn" in the corridor, where she now stood with its wearer."But since he is asleep..." said Armand ingratiatingly.Mrs. Kemblet shook her head, but opening the door with infinite precautions, allowed her master to enter, and watched from the doorway."Extraordinary how fond he is of him, to be sure," thought she, to whom the male heart was a perpetual mystery. Horatia very rarely came to say Good-night to the child; and the female heart being an even profounder riddle it was not given to Mrs. Kemblet nor to anyone else to know how often she longed to do so.As it befell, however, this night the desire had been too strong for her.Martha saw the Comtesse far down the corridor. She was in her dressing-gown, her hair hanging in great plaits. Two courses were open to Mrs. Kemblet; to prevent, by warning her mistress, a meeting which in the circumstances might have softening consequences, or to further it by removing herself. She chose the latter, and vanished before she could be seen.The door, ajar and unguarded, surprised Horatia. Very gently, so as to run no risk of waking the child, she pushed it a little wider. Her eyes, accustomed to the brighter light of the corridor, took in slowly the dim room, the shaded nightlight, and, by the side of the crib, a slim silkclad figure stooped over the occupant, its dark head almost touching the pillow.Without a sound Horatia looked; without a sound she moved away.(4)At the door of the ballroom Armand paused a moment adjusted his mask, and entered.Although everybody was masked none were wearing dominos, and provided a guest's disguise were already known it was easy to identify him. But there was so great a crowd that it was difficult to find a given person, and Armand looked in vain among the throng of monks, courtiers, dancing girls and devils, for the high headdress of Madame de Vigerie's fourteenth century costume, in which, as he knew, she was impersonating Jeanne de Flandre, the wife of Jean de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, as she rode with him into Nantes in 1341. But at last he saw in a doorway, above the sea of heads the peak of the hennin, with its floating veil of golden gauze. It must be she. Before he could get through the crowd he had to watch the hennin vanish without having seen the face beneath it, and ere he could pursue it further he was seized upon by an acquaintance and led up to a mask who represented Esmeralda, the heroine of Hugo's successful novel of the previous year. The lady was lively, and he was engaged in converse with her when, halfway down the long room, he caught sight of the tall headdress again, in the company of a Dominican friar, and he turned eagerly to look.Yes, it was Laurence, in a flowing dress of purple over gold. The room suddenly filled with mist ... for on her breast, tucked into the high golden girdle, lay two white roses, the flowers he had sent her that afternoon...."Beau masque, you are pale," said the voice of Esmeralda in his ear. "What has disturbed you—you are ill, perhaps?"The violins struck up as, for answer, Armand seized her. "You shall see if I am ill! Can you dance till daybreak, Esmeralda?"In the frenzy of rapture that possessed him he scarcely knew how his partners changed. Now he was dancing deliriously with an odalisque, now with a nun. His tongue ran riot like his blood; but he never came on the gold and purple dress again, though once or twice he saw it in the distance. Well, he could wait ... And at last, the pendulum swinging from exultation into dreams, he escaped from the hot ballroom into the quiet of the garden, and tried to think.When he came back, twenty minutes later, the dancing had ceased, though the violins were still playing madly. On the shining floor of the great room the dancers were broken up into groups, talking in low voices. Many had unmasked, and showed faces oddly whitened; some were hurrying away. At one end of the room a woman was screaming; near him another, the odalisque, had fainted. No one was caring for her. What had happened? He thought at first that Louis Philippe had been assassinated, that the Duchesse de Berry was dead.Then he caught the awful whisper that was passing from mouth to mouth. And hearing it, half-crazy with terror, he ran wildly out into the street, in the direction of the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin.(5)The Marquis Emmanuel de la Roche-Guyon, never a very good sleeper, was wakeful to-night. He had worked till nearly twelve o'clock at his monograph on the seaweeds of France, now approaching completion. Then he had sat a long time with his chin on his hand, thinking of the past, the only person awake in the great house, where they kept early hours. The lamp lit up his comfortable, untidy, prosperous surroundings, and the little bits of feathered stuff from the deep on which he tried to nourish a starved heart.After a while he sighed and stirred. The room seemed hot; he would take a turn in the courtyard before retiring, and perhaps the fresh air would bring him sleep.It was thus that he met his brother. Across the courtyard, lit by a faint, clouded moon and by the single oil lamp that burnt all night, there was coming, staggering, a figure which at first Emmanuel could not believe in, much less recognise—a gallant of the court of the later Valois, in ruff, doublet and hose. The Marquis almost rubbed his eyes; was it a ghost? Then, as the apparition drew nearer, he saw that it was his brother, with a face like death."Armand, in God's name, what is the matter?" he cried, catching hold of him as he lurched by. "Are you hurt? are you drunk?"Armand threw back his head. "They would not let me in!" he said between his teeth. "They would not let me in, and she is dying ... Stand out of the way! I am going to get my pistols.""Indeed you are not!" said his elder, understanding nothing of his speech, but reading a very frenzy of desperation in his demeanour. He seized him by the shoulders. "You do not go into the house until you have explained yourself. Where have you been? Who is dying?""Let me go, curse you!" exclaimed Armand, struggling in his grip. Then the strength seemed suddenly to ebb from him. "It is Laurence, Madame de Vigerie," he gasped. "She was at the ball—I saw her myself; then she disappeared before I could speak to her ... and she was wearing my flowers ... do you hear, Emmanuel, she was wearing my flowers! Then I heard ... she was dying ... I went to her house ... I sat a long time on the steps ... they would not let me in ... then I came here ... she was wearing my roses ... and now she is dying——""Dying!" ejaculated his brother. "And at the ball! What——""The cholera!" said Armand in a choking voice."O my God!" He freed himself from Emmanuel's loosened hold, and throwing himself down on the steps lay there like one bereft of life, his face hidden.So the pendent sword had descended! The cholera had been advancing on France for years; this, Carnival-tide, was then its chosen time of striking. The Marquis's first thought was of what was to come on Paris; his second, of the immediate future. If Horatia were to see Armand in this condition! ...He bent over the huddled form, plucking it by the short velvet cloak whose flame-coloured lining showed pale in the faint light."Armand, get up! You must not give way like this. Come with me, and I will take you to our cousin's."He dragged his brother, unresisting, to his feet, and piloted him out into the street, past the horrified concierge, and somehow, a little later, they found themselves at Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon's door. Prosper seemed to keep later hours than his secular kin, and they were admitted without difficulty. Armand wandered unsteadily to a chair and threw himself down in it, and at that moment the curtain at the end of the long room was pulled aside, and Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, looking startlingly tall in his long cassock, came out of what was, in effect, his private oratory."Who is that?" he asked in surprise, pointing to the white figure.His cousin in a low voice gave him a short review of the situation. "Can you keep him here, at least for the night?" he asked in conclusion. "He is scarcely responsible, I think, for his actions."Prosper's keen, grave gaze ran over the details of costume; of face he could see nothing. "Do you think he is likely to do himself an injury?" he whispered. He too could act quickly on occasions. He went to his cousin. "Armand!" he said, laying a hand on the bowed shoulders, while with the other he successfully plucked from its sheath the jewelled dagger at the young man's hip. This he held out behind his back to Emmanuel, who took and concealed it.The Comte slowly lifted his head. "What do you want with me?" he asked stupidly. "Are you come to bury her already?""Armand," said his cousin, "could you not sleep a little? No one will disturb you here, and in the morning...""In the morning she will be dead. They will put my white roses on her coffin. She should not have worn them ... Why are you staring at me like that, Prosper? You had better get back to your candles and things in there ... No, do not say that you will pray for her! She does not want it—no, nor I, by God! I did not come here to be prayed over ... though I suppose you would like to ... Yes, I suppose you would call it the judgment of God. Isn't that so? Answer me, priest—though you are my cousin!"Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon did not flinch. "I should call it the mercy of God," he said very gently.An angry flush dyed Armand's pale face. For a second he looked as if he were going to strike Prosper; then he changed his mind, and shrugging his shoulders, he turned away. "Priests will be priests," he said with a sneer. "Come, Emmanuel, I have had my benediction. Let us be going.""I think it is too late to go back," observed the Marquis quietly. "Prosper will give us hospitality to-night."His brother gave a short scornful laugh. "So that was why you brought me here! Very well—only for God's sake go away and don't stand staring at me. I don't want a bed. Do you suppose I shall sleep?—Go, you guardians of respectability!"They left him: there was nothing else to do.Towards dawn the Marquis came into the room again. All was quiet but the fire, and at first he could not see his brother anywhere. Then for a second or two his heart stood still, for he perceived Armand stretched motionless on the floor in front of the hearth, and there was something ominous in his attitude, in the pool of deep colour round his body, in the living, moving stains of crimson on the breast of his doublet....It was only a moment's illusion, gone as the elder man came quickly towards the fire. Worn out with emotion, Armand had evidently flung himself down there, had fallen profoundly asleep where he lay on the red Eastern rug, and the firelight winked on the jewels of his masquerade. Nevertheless, as he lay with sealed eyes at Emmanuel's feet, clad in the dress of that period of violent deaths, with one arm outflung on the parquet, his upturned face haggard and unfamiliar in the close-fitting ruff, he looked so lifeless that the Marquis was glad to think that Prosper had abstracted the poniard from its sheath.Though, indeed, he knew his brother too well to imagine that he would ever dream of sacrificing his life, even for the person he loved best at the moment. A faintly cynical but not untender smile came to Emmanuel's lips as he stood there. "Sleep well, my brother," he said under his breath, and went very quietly out of the room.
CHAPTER XVI
(1)
That Tristram Hungerford, nearly four months later, should still be in Italy, should, indeed, be walking up and down the Cascine at Florence, among other promenaders, on a fine day in January, was due to the fact that an obscure Italian parroco had received from art a shadowy acquaintance with medicine and from nature, unbounded confidence wherewith to make use of it.
Never again was Tristram likely to allow a physician of souls to try his hand at mending a body, least of all the body of a friend. Priestly surgery, as it had been practised on Dormer, he would henceforth eschew like the plague. For the result of the parroco's ministrations had been disastrous, and his setting of the broken leg so bungling that at last Tristram had Dormer removed to Florence and procured the services of a first-class surgeon. The latter pulled a long face, and said that if the English signor did not want to walk lame all his days the leg must be re-set. At the stage then reached this involved breaking the bone again. It is probable that Tristram, sitting in the next room with his hands over his ears, suffered quite as much as the victim himself. The surgeon indeed told him afterwards that, had not his friend been a heretic, he might have thought he had been miraculously relieved, as were sometimes the holy martyrs. Not, however, that when he saw Dormer afterwards, Tristram could discern much evidence of alleviation of any kind.
However, in a week or ten days now they were going home. Dormer's accident had not, at any rate, brought back his headaches; he affirmed, on the contrary, that the long, enforced rest had done just what he needed. He had borne the pain and tedium serenely, almost lightly; the only thing that seemed to try him was his absence from Oxford, and the fact that his misfortune had delayed his friend's ordination. Their prolonged stay had brought them several acquaintances among the English colony at Florence, and of late they had come to know an Italian gentleman connected with the Court, a certain Signor della Torre Vecchia, who had become smitten with an immense admiration for Dormer. Tristram had indeed rather suffered from this worship, and so, though the Italian had been exceedingly kind to them both, putting a carriage at their disposal and doing his utmost to carry off Dormer from their hotel to his villa at Fiesole, Tristram was not altogether sorry that their benefactor was leaving Florence that very afternoon. For when Signor della Torre Vecchia could get Tristram alone he did nothing but talk about his dilettissimo amico, his charm, his looks ("one would say a portrait by Van Dyck, signore"), his intellectual distinction. He drove Tristram into promising him Dormer's book on the Non-Jurors, for he had been in England and manifested a most inexplicable interest in the English Church, though, despite their endeavours to prove to him that she was a part of the Church Catholic—instancing the Catholicity of her Prayer-Book, while admitting the Protestantism of her practice—he persisted in regarding her as a phenomenon, and they never got any further. Afterwards he would take Tristram aside and reiterate his conviction that nobody like Dormer could possibly remain permanently outside the True Church. The only consolation which Tristram derived from these confidences was the power of chaffing Dormer unmercifully on the effect produced by his "romantic appearance."
Towards Horatia Tristram's feelings had changed. He would always, he supposed, love her better than anyone else in the world, but he did not love her now as a lover. Besides the fierce struggle of the past months to tear from his heart what he regarded as sin, a struggle which had slowly been successful, there was the knowledge, conveyed to him by the Rector, that she was about to have a child. Unconsciously this made a difference to him. He felt now as he imagined an elder brother might feel towards a sister who had always been very dear to him, full of an affection essentially protective. The time had been that, even though the sense of sin had left him, he could not receive a letter from her without being plunged in depression. But now he would have been very glad of a letter, for, whether they were lost or delayed in the notoriously uncertain Italian posts, or whether they were non-existent, no communications from the Rector or from Horatia had reached him since August, and he sometimes imagined horrible things, as that Horatia was dead, for he did not know when her child was expected.
Another change, too, had gradually wrought in his spirit, He was, in a sense, quite honest when he mocked at Dormer's idealisation of the single life, though perhaps his mockery was due to the knowledge that the ideas which he derided were not really so very alien to his mind.
Now, indeed, if the truth were known, they had even begun to have a curious attraction for him—a speculative attraction. What if to some souls there did really come a call to win "that little coronet or special reward which God hath prepared (extraordinary and beside the great Crown of all faithful souls)" as the author ofHoly Livinghad it, for those who had made the sacrifice of earthly affection and ties. And personsdidmake that sacrifice, in numbers—as witness the not very attractive religious whom he saw about the streets of Florence. Most of all, unforgettable, recurring again and again to his mind, there was the great fresco in the monastery of San Marco, where S. Dominic, kneeling at the foot of the Cross, embraces it in a passion of love and pain, and the Crucified looks down at him. It had taken Tristram's breath away when first he saw it at the end of the cloister. After some time he went and looked at it again—and came away very sad. Its message was not for him, whose obedience was loveless. All that the picture's spiritual beauty could do for him now was to remind him painfully of Keble's words, so applicable to himself, of the shame of the thought—
"That souls in refuge, holding by the crossShould wince and fret at this world's little loss."
"That souls in refuge, holding by the crossShould wince and fret at this world's little loss."
"That souls in refuge, holding by the cross
Should wince and fret at this world's little loss."
Yes, to walk among the lilies might be given to such an one as Dormer, but not to a commonplace person like himself, who had been forced into sacrifice. He had nothing to give of his own free-will. That he would henceforth live without earthly ties was not because he had been smitten by a vision from on high, but because the woman he loved had been taken from him. It was enough for him if he could echo the close of those same lines—
"Wash me, and dry these bitter tears,O let my heart no further roam,'Tis Thine by vows and hopes and fearsLong since——"
"Wash me, and dry these bitter tears,O let my heart no further roam,'Tis Thine by vows and hopes and fearsLong since——"
"Wash me, and dry these bitter tears,
O let my heart no further roam,
O let my heart no further roam,
'Tis Thine by vows and hopes and fears
Long since——"
Long since——"
Some way off a stir among the promenaders and the sight of the Ducal livery, portending, probably, that the Grand Duke was taking the air, reminded Tristram of Torre Vecchia, and his impending departure. Pulling out his watch, he hurried off.
As he entered the hotel he was stopped by the porter.
"The post is in, Excellency, and there are two English letters for you."
The letters were both addressed in Mr. Grenville's handwriting, and one had been posted no less than three months before.
(2)
Dormer crumpled up the paper on which he had been scribbling and pushed it under his cushions, where he lay on a couch near a window looking out on to the Arno. The translation which he had been making of a portion of Andrewes'Preces Privataedid not please his difficult taste, and he took up instead the other book lying beside him—Serenus Cressy's edition of Father Augustine Baker'sSancta Sophia, orDirections for the Prayer of Contemplation, a relic of one of his Jacobite ancestors who had afterwards become a Benedictine, which he had found, at his mother's death, among her books. He glanced at the title page, where the hand which more than a hundred years ago had written its owner's name—and his—Carolus Dormer—had traced below a cross and the family motto, 'Ciò che Dio vuole, io voglio—God's Will my will'; and began to read the chapter "Of the Great Desolation." Perhaps because he lived almost always in the conscious presence of God the description of "this most sharp purgatory of love" had for him a curious fascination.
"For what has a soul left to fear that can with a peaceable mind support, yea, and make her benefit of the absence of God Himself."
He closed the book and lay back, gazing out of the window, yet San Miniato and its cypresses were nothing but a blur....
The door opened, and the landlord admitted a tall, fair Italian, wrapped in an ample cloak.
"Do not rise, do not rise, my dear friend, I implore you!" exclaimed the visitor, swooping down upon Dormer and seizing both his hands. "And how do you find yourself this afternoon? Not in pain, I trust!"
"But I am perfectly well," protested Dormer, laughing. Accustomed as he was to these effusive greetings, he was always glad when Tristram was not by to witness them. "In a few days we, too, shall be leaving Florence."
Standing over him in his great black cloak, Signor della Torre Vecchia shook his head dolefully. "I doubt if it is wise—whether you will really be fit to travel."
At this point the landlord, with many apologies, desired to be permitted to set down the coffee on the table near the couch, and the guest had to make way for him.
"Your Excellencies have everything they require?" asked he. "Signor Ungerford is just come in; he reads his correspondence. The courier has arrived, but there are no other letters." One overflowing smile, he bowed himself out.
"Pray sit down, Signore," said Dormer. "We will not wait for Mr. Hungerford." And he stretched out his arm to the coffee.
"Ah, but you must allow me, in the circumstances, to do that!" said Torre Vecchia quickly, and he snatched away the tray. "With what pleasure should I not have done this for you up at Fiesole," he observed wistfully, as he poured out the coffee. "It will always be a life-long regret to me that you would not permit me to remove you to Villa San Giuliano."
"As if I were not sufficiently indebted to you without that!" exclaimed the Englishman. "For all your kindness to a stranger I can make no return but to hope that, when you visit England again, you will come to Oxford as my guest."
Torre Vecchia gave him, with his coffee, a promise that he would do so, and flowed on in a gentle but swift-running stream of converse, while Dormer began to wonder why Tristram did not join them. Finally he apologised for him, suggesting that he did not know of the Italian's presence. Torre Vecchia made a large gesture that excused him.
"We were told," said he, "that he is reading his letters, and who can say whether there is not one from his betrothed. Pray do not have him disturbed.... You know, Signore, that your Church is very fortunate in possessing material of the type of Signor Hungerford for her pastors—for I understand that he is about to enter that estate. Is it not true that the English country gentleman has an equal, if not a superior, in the parson, who is a man of the world, with a training of the University, whereas ours are ... to put it delicately, not high born, and seminary bred.... But here I am on this topic again—and I hope, Signore, that in our most interesting conversation of yesterday, when I said how much I disliked our system of enforced celibacy for the clergy, I did not seem to be criticising Holy Church, of which I trust I am a faithful son."
Dormer relieved him of this apprehension, and he continued:
"But there are these two points which, when I feel I shall not be misunderstood, I cannot help deploring—most of all the enforced celibacy." Torre Vecchia dropped his voice and looked round, apparently to make sure that they were alone, ere he went on earnestly, "'Signore, consider the isolated position of the ordinary priest, consider the number of things enjoyed by his fellow-men that he must renounce—above all, that great happiness, which our holy religion sanctifies for others, but which it forbids him even to think of for himself. His life may inspire respect, even admiration, but it excites—in me, at least—regret for so much rigour, which is surely in contradiction with what Nature and God Himself have implanted.... I find it so extraordinary that you, a divine of the English Church, do not agree with me!"
"But I do, in a sense," retorted Dormer. "I rejoice that our clergy are free to marry or not to marry; only I would wish to see the majority unmarried."
"You would deprive them then of those pure pleasures which your Church allows, the pleasures of a home, of a wife, of children?"
"I would not deprive them of these. But I would have the greater number deprive themselves."
Torre Vecchia lifted his hands and eyes to heaven. "But this is the spirit of Catholic asceticism, and yet you are not a Catholic! I am more puzzled than ever. You and your friends, you tell me, believe in the Real Presence, in the apostolical succession, in the power of the keys, and yet when I was in England last I never met a single person who seemed even to have heard of such things!"
"Perhaps not, but they will hear some day," said Dormer quietly, and at that moment Tristram entered, full of apologies, which were met by counter-apologies from the Italian, and finally merged into a scene of leavetaking, as the latter discovered that it was later than he thought.
"You must make amends for your absence now, Signore," he said, smiling at Tristram, "by allowing me to call upon you when next I am in England. And in spite of your friend's views (which never cease to astonish me) I cannot help hoping that this will be in one of those delicious country parsonages, embowered in roses, bright with wife and child, to which I have before now been welcomed—at what you call the 'family-living,' in short!"
He left Tristram deprived of speech and once more bent over Dormer. "And for you, my dear friend, how I wish I could have seen you restored to perfect health before I left! I am putting a carriage at your entire disposal. Every afternoon one of my people shall come round and see if you need it. No, no thanks, I beg ... I must veritably fly. Addio, caro amico; I trust I may say a rivederci." Uttering further swift and polite phrases, and flinging his cloak round him with the art of the South, he was gone.
Almost ere the door had closed Dormer had rolled over like a boy and buried his face in the sofa-cushions. "Why did you not come in before, you wretch!" he ejaculated. "I have been having such a disquisition, all to myself. What on earth were you doing? It was no time for reading letters." Turning over again, as a thought struck him, he said abruptly: "I hope that well-meaning blunderer did not hurt you?"
"Of course not," answered his friend. "But ... I've just had bad news." And he went and sat down in the Italian's vacant place.
Dormer struggled off the sofa. "My dear fellow, what is it?"
"She's been very ill. The Rector had to go over—her child was born prematurely."
Dormer gave an exclamation. "Did it live?"
"She was in great danger for four days," said Tristram, running his hands through his hair, "in great danger, and I never knew! It must have been about the time that we got here. The letter was temporarily lost, I suppose. Yes, the child lived. This second letter of the Rector's, dated about a month ago, which has reached me at the same time as the first, says that he is not satisfied with the reports he has of her, and that he would be very glad if I could see her before crossing the Channel."
CHAPTER XVII
(1)
A fortnight later they drove into Paris.
Tristram had written to Horatia announcing the probable date of their arrival, but, as in his trouble he had omitted to give their address, there was no letter to greet him, no invitation to stay instead at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon, as there would have been had she known where he would be. He was rather glad when he realised, on arrival, what he had done. It was late. Next day he sent a note by a messenger saying that he and Dormer would call in the early afternoon.
In the morning he went out by himself, and leaning over the Pont Royal watched the Seine running to the sea. Much water had slipped under that bridge since last he was in Paris. He smiled at the commonplaceness of the thought; but it was true, nevertheless. Did Horatia ever cross the bridge?—of course she must often do so. Paris was different from the Paris of old—different from any other city in the world, now.
One of the views of the world was before him, where up the stream Notre Dame lay magnificently at anchor. In his lonely walks in Florence Tristram had acquired the habit of going almost every day into some church or other; the desire to enter one now came upon him, and he left his post and made his way, not however to Notre Dame, but to the church which was to him the most attractive in Paris, St. Etienne du Mont.
The beautiful jubé burst on his senses with a new surprise; the splendid windows blazed again. He knelt down, undisturbed by a couple of tourists who were wandering round. The church was full of light; the wonderful exultant lines of the screen caught up his spirit, and he saw once more, not with the faint sense of regret which once he had, that the most jewelled of the windows were set up high in the clerestory, where the eye had to seek for them. St. Etienne meant that, then—the rapture, the ardour, the flaming ecstasy of sacrifice—more, of sacrifice that seemed uncalled for. Would he ever know it, or must he always feel that he gave, not grudgingly indeed, but without a grain of the incense of joy?
(2)
He thought of the church as he and Dormer walked rather silently along the Rue St. Dominique that afternoon and came at last to the gateway of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon. Yes, he had made the sacrifice completely; it could not be redemanded now, even though he was to see her, to touch her hand. It was relief unspeakable to know this; nine months, six months ago he could not have met her. Yet he had a quite ordinary dread of the encounter, of its strangeness, of the feeling that something had come down and shut her off. Would she be looking ill?
He had said to Dormer that he rather anticipated being received in the midst of a family gathering, since he was known to the Marquis as well, and since Armand was indeed no little in his debt. He was pleased to find that this was not the case. The lackey led them up the stairs to Horatia's boudoir. Madame la Comtesse (how unfamiliar!) was expecting them.
At first sight, as Horatia rose to greet them, Tristram thought, "Yes, she has been ill, she looks a woman, but she is the same." She had for a moment all her old vivacity, her delightful smile, the same trick of screwing her eyes up when she talked. She gave him just the welcome that he might have had in Berkshire. He was even able to remember, as she held out her hand to Dormer, all the hits she used to aim at his friend.
"I hope you are quite recovered from your accident, Mr. Dormer," she said. "You must not stand a moment, I am sure. Let us all sit down, and we can gossip comfortably."
She waved them into chairs. The voice, the words, were just Horatia's own; the air a little more assured, more mature—that of Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon. No harm in that.
She talked on lightly. Papa, she was certain, had been alarming Tristram unnecessarily; she was as well as ever she had been in her life. And why had not Tristram given her an address?—could they not come and stay at the Hôtel now? Presently they must see her son, and Armand would soon be in.
And as she talked the sense of effort began to be apparent, the glow, the first illusion faded. She was not the same Horatia; she was not even the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon, an Horatia ripened by her station, she was somehow different. She had not the same vitality. This was what her illness had done to her, thought Tristram—drained away some of that almost childish and petulant animation which he used to love in her. Spring had left those green boughs, perhaps not to revisit them. He was sad; and sat a little silent while she talked, without telling them much, about Armand, about this, that, and the other, about her own pleasure in seeing them, ending at last by saying, "Perhaps we had better be going now into the salon."
So they followed her to that apartment where, throned in state on a sofa, out of deference to the English prejudice against being received in a bedroom, sat the Duchesse—and Tristram was momentarily startled to perceive that her hair, as he innocently supposed it to be, was of almost the same shade as Horatia's. Beside her, talking with great animation, was a young and fashionably dressed woman, the Marquise de Beaulieu. His old acquaintance Emmanuel was standing by these two, and in a window a tall ecclesiastic whom he did not know was conversing with a shrivelled little old lady equally unknown to him.
"Aha!" said the Dowager, "so this is the celebrated M. Hungerford to whom, I understand, our young couple owe their present felicity." And she tendered her small aged hand with a smile that unmasked the full battery of her false teeth. "I have also to thank you, Monsieur, for your kind hospitality to my son, as well as to my grandson. And why, I pray, are we to be given no opportunity of returning so many obligations?" And while, with half-bantering condescension, she proceeded in this vein, and Emmanuel greeted him again with genuine pleasure, Tristram was conscious that Dormer, rescued from his momentary fall into the clutches of Madame de Beaulieu, was borne off and presented by Horatia to the priest in the window. Then Armand appeared, with a smile for everybody, delighted to see his former host, very gallant to his wife.Hehad not altered. Eventually he separated Tristram from the Duchesse and his brother, and began to make courteous and tactful inquiries about his "old friends" at Compton, but all the while Tristram's mind was busy trying to account for the change in Horatia. He was beginning to think it due, not to her illness exactly, but to the atmosphere in which she lived, to these over-many relations, amongst whom her identity, once so strong, seemed almost lost.
Presently further stir, and Maurice was borne in like a relic, and deposited in a strange shrine, his great-grandmother's lap. Somewhat to Tristram's surprise, Armand immediately went over to him and presented his finger; the infant, whose face had assumed an anxious expression, crowed loudly and seized it.
"Small doubt that he is thy son, mauvais sujet," Tristram heard the Duchesse to remark sotto voce to her grandson. "His eyes are more like thine every day. Do not throw thyself about thus, little one; I have held many children before thee."
But Tristram, the prey of a curious fascination, remained where he was. And all this while, too, Horatia was sitting leaning her head on her hand, at the other side of the room, alone, almost unnoticed, except that Dormer, though still talking to Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, was looking at her intently. It was true that Horatia's eyes were fixed upon the group round the sofa, or rather upon its centre; their expression was not to be read, but the weariness, the profound lassitude of her pose was the ineffaceable thing which Tristram carried away from the scene—that, and Armand's look as he stooped over their child.
CHAPTER XVIII
(1)
When Tristram and Dormer had departed, and the family party broken up, the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon went to her own apartments and wept hysterically. The following Sunday she resumed her attendance at Morning Prayer.
The reason for her action was not far to seek. Of all the emotions which the sight of Tristram had called up, homesickness was the most piercing. She had not let him see it; she had not thought, before he came, that she was capable of any more feeling. She had told herself, when she got his letter from Italy, that she was far too miserable to care whether he came or no. But when she talked with him, when the sound of his voice had rekindled all the past years of happiness, she desired passionately the things of home, more even than when her father had come over, for then she had hardly strength for a wish of any kind.
She had long been putting off going again to the Embassy chapel, on the score that she was not well enough; on the same pretext she did not read Morning Prayer with Martha either. It was only occasionally that she said her own prayers. She told herself that probably there was no God at all. But now, with Tristram's visit, there sprang up immediately the desire for this renewal of contact with things English, because she felt that there she could indulge in a very luxury of unhappiness. She went with that intention.
But the effect was wholly different from her anticipations. Morning Prayer, both in its religious and national aspects, may be said to produce an atmosphere if repeated often enough. It disposes the mind to the ideals of duty, uprightness, and faithfulness. It does not move immediately to the heights and depths of great sacrifices, as the Mass will do, though in the end the result is perhaps the same. Horatia came away that Sunday from the Embassy Chapel with a most uncomfortable doubt whether she were really being, not a noble, injured, suffering wife, but a rather ignominious and cowardly person. Would not her father be shocked at her failure in wifely duty? Would not all the generations of Grenvilles behind her have been shocked?
The idea was so unpleasant that she strove with it, and, having actually caught a slight cold during the week, absolved herself from attending Divine Service for some time.
(2)
Madame de Vigerie, since her astonishing reception of him at the New Year, had been many times called by Armand de la Roche-Guyon his good angel and his guiding star. And, in a political sense at least, she was not unworthy of these appellations. Horatia never knew to whom she owed it that her husband was not implicated in the conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires to gain access to the Tuileries and assassinate the Royal Family, the discovery of which, at the beginning of February, shook Paris. The enterprise was not chivalrous enough for Laurence de Vigerie's taste. There were more stirring plans afoot, for a rising on which all was to be staked was now much more imminent than it had been in the summer, and she was in even closer communication than before with the Regent's little court at Massa, that combination of the Coblentz of the emigration and the Paris of the Fronde. There was much to keep them occupied, for there was division not only among Madame's immediate counsellors, but also in the Royalist committees in France. That in Paris wished the rising adjourned; those in the provinces desired it immediately. These problems demanded daily intercourse, and, indeed, now that his wife had disavowed all interest in his doings, Armand considered himself free to visit the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin as often as he liked. To many a moth the light of a guiding star may well be attractive above all others.
February slipped away, with the discovery of the plot, the trials of the implicated. The salons of the Faubourg were divided between those who, denying the conspiracy, ridiculed Louis-Philippe's baseless fears, and those who mourned its ill-success. Tristram Hungerford came and left, March entered, and Lent; Maurice was producing his first tooth, and George Sand her first novel. In England the Reform Bill passed the Commons; and in France Horatia was combatting the influence of Morning Prayer.
But to Armand himself the most important event of the month was a little conversation which occurred during its second week. He had sent Madame de Vigerie flowers, as he constantly did, and came in one afternoon to find her bending over some lilies of the valley.
"I wonder who gave me these," she said.
"Cannot you guess?" asked Armand. He took out a spray and held it towards her. "They were meant for a better place than that vase."
The Vicomtesse smiled and shook her head. "I never wear flowers, save those that I pick myself."
"I have noticed that you never wear mine," said Armand.
"Nor anybody else's."
"Why not?"
"Just a whim," said Madame de Vigerie, turning away.
"I believe I can read your mind," said Armand slowly. "Laurence, you are like a bird of the woods. You will not come to any man's whistling, and it means too much to you to wear a favour."
She turned on him half grave, half gay. "Mon ami, you have guessed right. But I love your flowers ... I love to have them near me. I will do anything but wear them."
"And some day," said the young man softly, "you will do that. Or am I never to hope for it, Laurence?"
"No," she said, "I shall never wear them." But she did not meet his eyes.
"But if you ever did..."
"O, suppose that I wore the stars as a necklace!" cried she. "It is as likely."
"But if you ever did," persisted Armand. "Laurence, if you ever did..."
"Yes," she said, turning very pale....
(3)
March had all but completed its course with dust and wind, and at its extreme end Lent had come to a temporary pause for the Carnival.
Armand de la Roche-Guyon had just finished dressing for a costume ball. The long mirror in his dressing-room, reflected him, clad from head to foot in white and gold, in ruff, doublet and hose, a gentleman of the Valois court. The dress, blazing with jewels, had been copied from a well-known picture of Charles IX. From the little flat cap with a feather set on the side of his handsome head to his shoes the costume suited him admirably, and his valet, standing by him, had just expressed this opinion.
"The mask, M. le Comte, and the domino?"
"No dominos to-night, but I will take it for a cloak. At what time did I order the carriage to be ready?"
"Not for a quarter of an hour yet, M. le Comte."
"Well, you can go. Give me the mask."
The man departed, and Armand, humming an air, the mask dangling from his hand, tried altering by at inch or two the position of the dagger at his hip. Then he looked at the clock, and on what seemed a sudden impulse, threw down the mask upon a sofa and went out of the room.
"He'll be frightened to death if he sees you like that, Sir," said Martha, looking with disapprobation at the costume which had already given her "a turn" in the corridor, where she now stood with its wearer.
"But since he is asleep..." said Armand ingratiatingly.
Mrs. Kemblet shook her head, but opening the door with infinite precautions, allowed her master to enter, and watched from the doorway.
"Extraordinary how fond he is of him, to be sure," thought she, to whom the male heart was a perpetual mystery. Horatia very rarely came to say Good-night to the child; and the female heart being an even profounder riddle it was not given to Mrs. Kemblet nor to anyone else to know how often she longed to do so.
As it befell, however, this night the desire had been too strong for her.
Martha saw the Comtesse far down the corridor. She was in her dressing-gown, her hair hanging in great plaits. Two courses were open to Mrs. Kemblet; to prevent, by warning her mistress, a meeting which in the circumstances might have softening consequences, or to further it by removing herself. She chose the latter, and vanished before she could be seen.
The door, ajar and unguarded, surprised Horatia. Very gently, so as to run no risk of waking the child, she pushed it a little wider. Her eyes, accustomed to the brighter light of the corridor, took in slowly the dim room, the shaded nightlight, and, by the side of the crib, a slim silkclad figure stooped over the occupant, its dark head almost touching the pillow.
Without a sound Horatia looked; without a sound she moved away.
(4)
At the door of the ballroom Armand paused a moment adjusted his mask, and entered.
Although everybody was masked none were wearing dominos, and provided a guest's disguise were already known it was easy to identify him. But there was so great a crowd that it was difficult to find a given person, and Armand looked in vain among the throng of monks, courtiers, dancing girls and devils, for the high headdress of Madame de Vigerie's fourteenth century costume, in which, as he knew, she was impersonating Jeanne de Flandre, the wife of Jean de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, as she rode with him into Nantes in 1341. But at last he saw in a doorway, above the sea of heads the peak of the hennin, with its floating veil of golden gauze. It must be she. Before he could get through the crowd he had to watch the hennin vanish without having seen the face beneath it, and ere he could pursue it further he was seized upon by an acquaintance and led up to a mask who represented Esmeralda, the heroine of Hugo's successful novel of the previous year. The lady was lively, and he was engaged in converse with her when, halfway down the long room, he caught sight of the tall headdress again, in the company of a Dominican friar, and he turned eagerly to look.
Yes, it was Laurence, in a flowing dress of purple over gold. The room suddenly filled with mist ... for on her breast, tucked into the high golden girdle, lay two white roses, the flowers he had sent her that afternoon....
"Beau masque, you are pale," said the voice of Esmeralda in his ear. "What has disturbed you—you are ill, perhaps?"
The violins struck up as, for answer, Armand seized her. "You shall see if I am ill! Can you dance till daybreak, Esmeralda?"
In the frenzy of rapture that possessed him he scarcely knew how his partners changed. Now he was dancing deliriously with an odalisque, now with a nun. His tongue ran riot like his blood; but he never came on the gold and purple dress again, though once or twice he saw it in the distance. Well, he could wait ... And at last, the pendulum swinging from exultation into dreams, he escaped from the hot ballroom into the quiet of the garden, and tried to think.
When he came back, twenty minutes later, the dancing had ceased, though the violins were still playing madly. On the shining floor of the great room the dancers were broken up into groups, talking in low voices. Many had unmasked, and showed faces oddly whitened; some were hurrying away. At one end of the room a woman was screaming; near him another, the odalisque, had fainted. No one was caring for her. What had happened? He thought at first that Louis Philippe had been assassinated, that the Duchesse de Berry was dead.
Then he caught the awful whisper that was passing from mouth to mouth. And hearing it, half-crazy with terror, he ran wildly out into the street, in the direction of the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin.
(5)
The Marquis Emmanuel de la Roche-Guyon, never a very good sleeper, was wakeful to-night. He had worked till nearly twelve o'clock at his monograph on the seaweeds of France, now approaching completion. Then he had sat a long time with his chin on his hand, thinking of the past, the only person awake in the great house, where they kept early hours. The lamp lit up his comfortable, untidy, prosperous surroundings, and the little bits of feathered stuff from the deep on which he tried to nourish a starved heart.
After a while he sighed and stirred. The room seemed hot; he would take a turn in the courtyard before retiring, and perhaps the fresh air would bring him sleep.
It was thus that he met his brother. Across the courtyard, lit by a faint, clouded moon and by the single oil lamp that burnt all night, there was coming, staggering, a figure which at first Emmanuel could not believe in, much less recognise—a gallant of the court of the later Valois, in ruff, doublet and hose. The Marquis almost rubbed his eyes; was it a ghost? Then, as the apparition drew nearer, he saw that it was his brother, with a face like death.
"Armand, in God's name, what is the matter?" he cried, catching hold of him as he lurched by. "Are you hurt? are you drunk?"
Armand threw back his head. "They would not let me in!" he said between his teeth. "They would not let me in, and she is dying ... Stand out of the way! I am going to get my pistols."
"Indeed you are not!" said his elder, understanding nothing of his speech, but reading a very frenzy of desperation in his demeanour. He seized him by the shoulders. "You do not go into the house until you have explained yourself. Where have you been? Who is dying?"
"Let me go, curse you!" exclaimed Armand, struggling in his grip. Then the strength seemed suddenly to ebb from him. "It is Laurence, Madame de Vigerie," he gasped. "She was at the ball—I saw her myself; then she disappeared before I could speak to her ... and she was wearing my flowers ... do you hear, Emmanuel, she was wearing my flowers! Then I heard ... she was dying ... I went to her house ... I sat a long time on the steps ... they would not let me in ... then I came here ... she was wearing my roses ... and now she is dying——"
"Dying!" ejaculated his brother. "And at the ball! What——"
"The cholera!" said Armand in a choking voice.
"O my God!" He freed himself from Emmanuel's loosened hold, and throwing himself down on the steps lay there like one bereft of life, his face hidden.
So the pendent sword had descended! The cholera had been advancing on France for years; this, Carnival-tide, was then its chosen time of striking. The Marquis's first thought was of what was to come on Paris; his second, of the immediate future. If Horatia were to see Armand in this condition! ...
He bent over the huddled form, plucking it by the short velvet cloak whose flame-coloured lining showed pale in the faint light.
"Armand, get up! You must not give way like this. Come with me, and I will take you to our cousin's."
He dragged his brother, unresisting, to his feet, and piloted him out into the street, past the horrified concierge, and somehow, a little later, they found themselves at Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon's door. Prosper seemed to keep later hours than his secular kin, and they were admitted without difficulty. Armand wandered unsteadily to a chair and threw himself down in it, and at that moment the curtain at the end of the long room was pulled aside, and Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, looking startlingly tall in his long cassock, came out of what was, in effect, his private oratory.
"Who is that?" he asked in surprise, pointing to the white figure.
His cousin in a low voice gave him a short review of the situation. "Can you keep him here, at least for the night?" he asked in conclusion. "He is scarcely responsible, I think, for his actions."
Prosper's keen, grave gaze ran over the details of costume; of face he could see nothing. "Do you think he is likely to do himself an injury?" he whispered. He too could act quickly on occasions. He went to his cousin. "Armand!" he said, laying a hand on the bowed shoulders, while with the other he successfully plucked from its sheath the jewelled dagger at the young man's hip. This he held out behind his back to Emmanuel, who took and concealed it.
The Comte slowly lifted his head. "What do you want with me?" he asked stupidly. "Are you come to bury her already?"
"Armand," said his cousin, "could you not sleep a little? No one will disturb you here, and in the morning..."
"In the morning she will be dead. They will put my white roses on her coffin. She should not have worn them ... Why are you staring at me like that, Prosper? You had better get back to your candles and things in there ... No, do not say that you will pray for her! She does not want it—no, nor I, by God! I did not come here to be prayed over ... though I suppose you would like to ... Yes, I suppose you would call it the judgment of God. Isn't that so? Answer me, priest—though you are my cousin!"
Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon did not flinch. "I should call it the mercy of God," he said very gently.
An angry flush dyed Armand's pale face. For a second he looked as if he were going to strike Prosper; then he changed his mind, and shrugging his shoulders, he turned away. "Priests will be priests," he said with a sneer. "Come, Emmanuel, I have had my benediction. Let us be going."
"I think it is too late to go back," observed the Marquis quietly. "Prosper will give us hospitality to-night."
His brother gave a short scornful laugh. "So that was why you brought me here! Very well—only for God's sake go away and don't stand staring at me. I don't want a bed. Do you suppose I shall sleep?—Go, you guardians of respectability!"
They left him: there was nothing else to do.
Towards dawn the Marquis came into the room again. All was quiet but the fire, and at first he could not see his brother anywhere. Then for a second or two his heart stood still, for he perceived Armand stretched motionless on the floor in front of the hearth, and there was something ominous in his attitude, in the pool of deep colour round his body, in the living, moving stains of crimson on the breast of his doublet....
It was only a moment's illusion, gone as the elder man came quickly towards the fire. Worn out with emotion, Armand had evidently flung himself down there, had fallen profoundly asleep where he lay on the red Eastern rug, and the firelight winked on the jewels of his masquerade. Nevertheless, as he lay with sealed eyes at Emmanuel's feet, clad in the dress of that period of violent deaths, with one arm outflung on the parquet, his upturned face haggard and unfamiliar in the close-fitting ruff, he looked so lifeless that the Marquis was glad to think that Prosper had abstracted the poniard from its sheath.
Though, indeed, he knew his brother too well to imagine that he would ever dream of sacrificing his life, even for the person he loved best at the moment. A faintly cynical but not untender smile came to Emmanuel's lips as he stood there. "Sleep well, my brother," he said under his breath, and went very quietly out of the room.