(6)"Cholera? Oh dear no, nor anything like it," said the doctor next morning to the anxious cousins. "Nervous shock, a touch of fever. I have let him blood. Keep him quiet and he will be all right in a couple of days. I wish we were all as far from the grave. But, Messieurs, as for the cholera, though M. le Comte has it not, we are all going to see more of it, I doubt, than we shall like...""You have told him, I suppose, that Madame de Vigerie is likely to recover?" asked Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon as the doctor left the room."Yes," said Emmanuel, "and also that it has already been arranged for my sister and the children to go to Plaisance at once."He went in again to his brother, in the priest's own, narrow, cell-like bedroom with its carved prie-dieu, its sacred prints and its agonised ivory crucifix. Armand, pale, but no longer ghastly, was lying back in an arm-chair without his doublet, his knees wrapped in a quilt, with a bandaged left arm to testify to the doctor's activity. He smiled at his visitor."Mon vieux, what made you think I had the cholera? I was never so well in my life—since your news, bien entendu. Do you think Prosper will tell me how many candles I should put up to Our Lady—but perhaps St. Roch or St. Sebastian would be more appropriate. Now that old butcher has gone I must dress and go round to the Chaussée d'Antin; but I have no clothes suitable to the streets in daylight. Will Prosper lend me a cassock, think you? I believe I was rather rude to him last night, but his duty as a Christian will oblige him to forgive me.... Sais-tu, Emmanuel, that the cholera, if only it strike hard enough, may be the best ally that Henri V could have? And how can I work for Henri V sitting here in my shirt among these objects of piety? As well be a sacristan...."CHAPTER XIX(1)Out of a cloudless sky a hard, bright, metallic sun was shining upon Paris, as it had shone, without variation, for the last five weeks, looking down unwinking on a Terror worse than that of '93. And along the deserted streets its companion, the glacial East wind, frolicked in a dance of death, stirring the April dust, and fluttering, on the Pont Neuf, the black flag which Henri Quatre held in his hands of stone. Neither Charles X nor Louis-Philippe reigned in Paris now, but the cholera. Long ago the supply of hearses had proved insufficient, and there crawled along, to gather up the daily harvest of eight or nine hundred dead, artillery waggons, furniture vans, even fiacres. Even so, a sheeted corpse could often be seen in a doorway awaiting burial—to receive it, perhaps, at the hands of that devoted company of young men which numbered some of the first names of France. Yet the machinery of life worked on as usual—the Chambers and the law courts sat, the Bourse was open, professors lectured and the theatres were far from empty, though not a soul had more than half a hope of seeing the sun rise next day, and every time a man left his home he said farewell to wife and child.From an archway in the long Rue de Sèvres, literally a street of the dead, for on one side at least there was not a single house unstricken, came suddenly a tall priest in a cassock, a garb not seen till now, in the streets of Paris, since the Days of July. His eyes, sunk in a tired, strained face, blinked a little as they met the light, for it had been dark in the garret where he had just confessed the dying man—the fourth cholera patient whom he had visited that day. He pulled the cloak he was wearing closer over his breast as he turned north-eastward and met the wind.As he crossed the end of the Rue du Bac a fiacre passed him at a lumbering trot, a coffin across the seat. Ere the noise and rattle had died away in the sunny, silent street, the priest heard alert steps behind him, and a voice that he knew well crying, "Prosper! Prosper! que diable! stop a moment!"Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon slackened his pace and turned his head, but did not stop. "I have just come from a case."Armand, arriving abreast of his cousin, sniffed at the saturated handkerchief which he held. "Peste, so I supposed. (By the way, how very apt is that expletive just now!) But everybody has either come from a case, or is going to a case ... or is about to become a case, so that is nothing. I will walk with you; I am going this way.""How is our grandmother?" asked the priest, as they fell into step together."Never better. Strange how she fears a cold and defies the plague. She keeps her rooms inundated with camphor and chloride. But Madame de Camain died last night, and the Comtesse de Montlivault, I hear this morning, is 'prise.'"."God have mercy on them!" said Prosper, crossing himself. "It seems to me that in the last few days the Faubourg St. Germain has suffered more than the poorer quarters.""That is so, I believe," returned his cousin. "Figure to yourself that the rabbit warren of the Palais-Royal is apparently more healthy than our large houses with their gardens, for I am told that there has not been a single case in those airless glass passages."They walked on in silence for a little, their footsteps echoing in the deserted street, the icy wind cold on their faces, the sun fierce overhead. Even Armand, untouched by the pest, by labours for the stricken, or, apparently, by apprehension, looked ill, though he was jauntily dressed in the new spring fashions, in a peacock-blue coat with olive-green collar, a flowered waistcoat and white cashmere trousers. The sight of a man hurrying past them, holding an onion to his nose, struck him into speech again."Heavens!" he exclaimed, "I had really rather have the cholera than carry about a raw onion. You do not carry anything, I notice, Prosper; not, I dare say, that it is much good.—By the way, I have long been wanting to tell you that I regard you as the bravest man I know, and if (as is probable) you have heard me say anything uncomplimentary about priests I beg you will consider it unsaid. I am really proud to be your kinsman.... Don't spoil it by saying that you are only doing your duty, or tell me that the Archbishop of Paris has come out of hiding and the Archbishop of Besançon returned from Rome to do the same as you are doing, for I do not believe that even his Eminence of Rohan dislikes it as much as you. Mort de ma vie, but you must have seen some horrible things lately!""The worst thing that I have seen," said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon sadly, "was not the visitation of the plague, but the outburst of the vile passions of men, excited by fear, and played upon by the unscrupulous.""You mean the murders, at the beginning of the outbreak, due to the report that it was caused by poison? But what can you expect? There was a man hanged on a lamp-post, as in the good old times, in one of those very streets, for the same reason. And the Republican newspapers have proclaimed that even the cholera is a scourge less cruel than the government of Louis-Philippe. You remember how the Duc d'Orléans went with the late Casimir Périer to the Hôtel-Dieu to visit the sick? Well, they said that Louis-Philippe had sent his son there to gloat over the misery of the people, and that the people would return his visit ... after the manner of the Tenth of August and the Twenty-ninth of July!"The young man's tone was not free from satisfaction. The priest, aware of the alliance between a certain section of the Legitimists and the Extreme Left, turned and looked at him."I hope," he said sternly, "that Madame's party does not stain their cause by using such weapons.""We have no need," returned Armand with an air. "You will soon see the gleam of the noblest weapon of all—the sword.""The sword, so be it!" said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon. "But not the dagger—not another conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires, I trust."They had come to the Place St. Sulpice, and stopped."You speak as if I had been implicated in that," said his cousin, rather aggrieved. "Or as if I were M. de Berthier, who tried to run over the King and Queen. No, I am for a stroke of a different kind. Wait a little, a very little, Prosper, and you will see the South in flames for Marie-Caroline, and then the West, Brittany, and Vendée...""And then?""Then you will see Louis-Philippe, his large family and his umbrella, disencumbering the Tuileries of their presence, and at Rheims a child—a mother and child—crowned ... as you may see at this hour in there." He pointed with one hand to the façade of St. Sulpice, while with the other he tugged something from his pocket."Cousin, you do not serve your cause by blasphemy!" said the priest sharply.Armand looked innocent. "But I thought the idea would appeal to you! It occurs to me, as an omen, every time I enter a church.Mea culpa!... Take this for your cholera cases, Monsignor, in expiation. I was going to give it you in any case, but now it will atone, perhaps, for comparing Marie-Caroline to Our Lady. Au revoir—if the Fates permit." He thrust a roll of notes into his cousin's hand, lifted his hat, and turned down the Rue du Pot-de-Fer towards the Luxembourg.(2)It was not to admire the spring foliage of the trees in that now deserted garden that Armand walked slowly eastwards along one of its alleys. Yet he was engaged, rather strangely, in counting the trunks. When he reached the thirty-fifth, he stopped, looked about for the nearest seat, and sitting down upon it, pulled an opened letter from his pocket and re-read it.It was from his wife at Plaisance, the family seat in Normandy, whither she and the child had been sent for safety. It informed him merely that she and Maurice were very well, and concluded by hoping that all at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon were in the same condition.Armand made a slight grimace as he folded and refolded this epistle. Stretched out on the seat, his eyes raised to the new leaves, it occurred to him again to wish that his wife were a Catholic, and had a director, who might perhaps prescribe to her a more conciliatory line of conduct. Once, indeed, he had congratulated himself that in his domestic affairs, at least, no priest could intermeddle; now he thought regretfully of a certain friend of his acquaintance, a great deal more culpable than he, whose wife, in obedience (he suspected) to her confessor, was trying to win back her husband by a demeanour of unvarying amiability. Well, that was certainly not Horatia's way at present, nor was he sure that he would have liked it if it had been; but it would have made things more comfortable.He had not set eyes on Laurence de Vigerie since the fatal night of the masked ball a month ago. As soon as she could be moved she had been hurried out of Paris under medical supervision, and she was now completing her convalescence at Spa, whence she wrote to him every few days. It had needed all her influence to keep him from following her thither, indeed he had only been restrained by her express prohibition, and the knowledge that if he left Paris at this juncture he cut himself off from communication with the cause for which they were both working. For, as Armand had hinted to his cousin, a crisis in Legitimist affairs was very near now. Since February the Duchesse de Berry had definitely resolved to come to France. The younger and more ardent spirits of her party, impatient of delay, continually wrote urging her to hasten. Now, with the cholera occupying the attention of the government, which had, moreover, lost Casimir-Périer from its head, with the Republicans about to rise, so it was rumoured, against Louis-Philippe, the favourable moment seemed at last arrived. And Armand, deprived of his regular channel of information through Madame de Vigerie, had come to this peaceful resort in quest of news.He had not long to wait, for there presently approached along the deserted avenue, from the opposite direction, another gilded youth of about his own age, muffled almost up to his eyes in a cloak. He also appeared to be counting the trees, and when he arrived opposite Armand's seat came and sat down on it, without looking at its occupant. Then, without warning, he suddenly shot out the word "Marie.""Caroline," responded Armand instantly.And they both looked at each other and laughed, for if these conspirators resorted sometimes to the methods of opéra-bouffe, they did not take them very seriously."Any news this morning?" inquired Armand."The best," answered the other. "Late last night the Committee received a letter from Madame for transmission to the chiefs in the West, warning them to be ready by the third of May. She has probably embarked by now!"Armand stared at him a moment. Then he sprang to his feet, and lifting his olive-green hat, cried aloud to the empty garden: "At last, at last! Vive la guerre!"CHAPTER XX(1)"But, my aunt," protested Claude-Edmond, "what is a 'calender'? It is evidently not an almanac, but a person."Horatia laid down the "Arabian Nights" and laughed, a little laugh of real enjoyment. "Do you know, Claude," she said, "that I have never been quite sure myself. If you would find out for me I should be very grateful to you." She slid her hand a moment over her nephew's head, and Claude-Edmond, a Gallic child, caught and conveyed it with respect and affection to his lips.It was impossible to be unhappy this morning. It was May. Behind Horatia's back lay the great mass of Plaisance, all built in the style of the stables of Chantilly, with flanking pavilions, chapel and laundry, and in front the two immense lime-tree avenues, now gloriously green, and the artificial pieces of water reminiscent of Versailles, with stone urns of tortured design, and stone animals, wolves and lions. On the grass by Claude-Edmond lay the rod with which he had been unsuccessfully fishing for carp in these lakes, before his aunt began her present occupation of reading the "Arabian Nights" to him in English. A little way off Maurice was being slowly walked to and fro in Martha's arms. And it was May."With your permission, I should like to kiss my cousin," said Claude-Edmond suddenly, indicating his infant relative."I have the same desire myself," returned Horatia, and Martha, coming to a stand, offered her charge for inspection."Did I once have only two teeth—only one tooth?" inquired Charles-Edmond."No teeth at all, once," responded his aunt.Claude felt his existing dental arrangements. "There is one loose now," he announced. "May I pull it out?""Let me see," said Horatia; and, after inspection, "I should wait a little if I were you, Claude. It will be looser yet. Besides, it will hurt.""I know," said the child. "But one must learn to bear pain, must one not?""I wish you were not such a little prig," thought Horatia, and instantly repented of the thought. "Yes," she said gently, "but we need not inflict it on ourselves unnecessarily. Give Maurice to me for a little, Martha. Claude, could you fetch my chair over here?"Delightedly the boy sped off. That his aunt should give him something to do for her was the summit of his desires. When Horatia sat down he stood by her, studying Maurice, who, sucking his fist, in his turn studied the sky."He does not remind me greatly of Uncle Armand," observed his cousin. "His face is ... is..." He paused for a word."Never mind," said Horatia. "I know what you mean."Claude Edmond sat down upon the grass at her feet. After a moment or two of silence he said with solemnity, "Ma tante, I will confide to you my great ambition. It is to grow up like Uncle Armand."Horatia made a movement. "You should desire to resemble your father.""But that goes without saying," returned the boy, rather shocked. "I meant, in outward things, voyez-vous. I desire to have the learning of Papa, and to be able to ride like Uncle Armand, to know about plants and flowers and books—yes, and perhaps about animals—and to be able to fence and shoot...."The child babbled on, but Horatia had fallen suddenly silent, and after a few moments, seeing her for once unresponsive, and mindful of having been warned by his father never to weary her, he tactfully announced that he would return to his attempts on the carp, and went off."I'll take the precious now, Mam, if you please," said Martha, bearing down on her mistress. "I don't want you to tire yourself, when you are getting some of your roses back again.""Oh, I'm not tired," said Horatia smiling, but she kissed and surrendered her son, and having done so leant back in her chair and watched the distant figure of Claude-Edmond, in the eternally hopeful pose of the fisher, and trusted that he would not fall into the water.It was true, she was not tired. Six weeks in the air of Plaisance had done wonders for her physical well-being. And something—could it have been the power of dulness?—had healed her mind of much of its malady. She was young and healthy, and she no longer troubled to make herself remember that Maurice was Armand's son. Here he was hers.No doubt of Armand's guilt ever entered her mind. But Claude-Edmond's words about him had roused a picture ... Was it possible that she had behaved like a foolish girl? She had often heard Aunt Julia say, and had been irritated by the dictum, that a woman could make what she liked of her husband. And, though she had had everything in her favour, she had given up the attempt at the first difficulty. If he had gone straight to his mistress, it was largely her own fault.But if she were regretting that she had not disputed with the Vicomtesse for Armand, that meant that Armand was worth fighting for, and over and over again she had told herself that he was nothing to her now. But was that quite true? If it were, how was it that she scanned so eagerly what newspapers she could procure for accounts of the progress of the cholera in Paris? His own short, polite notes to her told her little of it, but the sight of them stirred her, she could not quite say how.Something else was stirring in her too. Suppose she had not merely acted foolishly, but wrongly?The feelings which had surprised her that morning in the Embassy Chapel had returned, but on a different plane. "We have erred and strayed ... there is no health in us." What if the over-familiar words really had a meaning, what if she herself, who uttered them so often and so lightly, had actually done wrong, grave wrong? This conviction grew in her. It was to Horatia the first vivid connection between the spiritual and material worlds, and was bringing her to the resolve that, when she returned, she would in some degree forgive Armand. She would admit that she had been a little hard. And the thought of this great concession pleased her; being in the future, it took on something of the glamour of the noble things we mean to do one day.(2)A week later a letter from the Duchesse announced that it was safe for her and the children to return to Paris, where the scourge, though still present, seemed to have spent its force. So they went back.An air of calamity still brooded over the capital, and as they stopped at the barrier Horatia shuddered to see the street urchins playing at "cholera morbus," dragging one of their companions, a simulated corpse, along the ground. But her mind, after all, was full of a more personal concern. As she drew nearer to the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon, as Claude-Edmond, looking out of the window of the post-chaise, announced, "Here we are in the Place Vendôme," or, "Now we are turning into the Rue de Rivoli," it did not seem so easy a matter to bestow a pardon to which the culprit might now be indifferent.Emmanuel, not Armand, was on the steps to receive her. He came down and helped her to alight. Claude-Edmond flung himself into his father's arms. And all at once Horatia knew that she was bitterly hurt. That Armand should not care whether she returned or no was one thing; that he should affront her before her brother-in-law and the servants was quite another. Too proud to make any remark at the moment on his absence, she turned to busying herself over Maurice, but once inside she said to Emmanuel, as lightly as she could, "I suppose that Armand was not expecting me so early?"The Marquis looked disconcerted. "My dear sister, has the letter not reached you? He went very suddenly, the day before yesterday, to join Madame in Vendée."(3)Not by the tragic words "Too late" was the situation thus created summed up in Horatia's mind, for she had never been able to take the Duchesse de Berry very seriously. And though she was told that the princess had undoubtedly landed near Marseilles one dark night at the end of April, the very fact that the conflagration in the South which was to spring up at her appearance absolutely failed to emit a single spark only confirmed the English girl in her conviction. Nor did Marie-Caroline's romantic journey in disguise to Vendée (now matter of knowledge in Royalist circles) impress Horatia; it seemed to her too much like Walter Scott to be quite real, and she could not fancy that there would be actual fighting round such a fantastic heroine. Emmanuel did not seem to think so, either; at any rate he took no rosy views of her chances. The Duchesse, on the other hand, was at once more sanguine and more alarming, continually preaching with a mixture of resignation and elation a sort of version of "Paris vaut une messe," thus conceived: "If Henri V. cannot be set on the throne without the life-blood of one of our family, then I am willing that it should be given." This attitude seemed to Horatia so uncalled for that it irritated rather than dismayed her. Nor could she help feeling a tinge of annoyance, even if she would not confess it, at the check given by Armand's absence to her plan of forgiveness, for now she could not set herself right with him. She must wait till his return.Yet she had her hours of apprehension. As a fortnight, three weeks passed without news these grew more frequent. And at last, when the Republican riots of the 5th and 6th of June burst over Paris, what she heard of the fierce street fighting, the stand at Saint-Merri, the eight hundred slain, brought home to her the political passions of the time with a horrible vividness, and she was at last nakedly afraid. The Duchesse, incurable Frondeuse that she was, was pleased at anything that shook or embarrassed the government, and declared that the news would be very encouraging to Madame's party.When she made this declaration Madame's party as such no longer existed. Two days later, Horatia, having said good-night to Maurice, found Emmanuel, looking very grave, waiting for her in her boudoir."Horatia," he said, "we have news at last. The whole rising has failed. There have been several engagements, and Charette has been defeated. They are all scattered; it is a sauve qui peut. My grandmother does not know yet.""And Armand?""We can only hope for the best. If he could cross the Loire he would go and lie hidden at Kerfontaine. He told me that before he went.""There has been a battle, you say? But perhaps he was not in it ... you do not even know that? ... O Emmanuel, have you no news of him?""Absolutely none; it is impossible. We can only hope for the best, as I say. I think that if he is alive he will probably succeed in making his way up to Brittany.""I must go down there," she said feverishly. "I must go at once. Emmanuel, you must help me!""My dear," said the Marquis, rather amazed, "you cannot do any good by going. Please God, Armand is alive. If he escapes, he escapes.... In any case your presence at Kerfontaine cannot help him.""I must go," she repeated, twisting her hands together. "It is very important. Emmanuel, you said you would do anything for me...." Her voice began to break.Her brother-in-law did not fully understand, but he took her hands with his accustomed kindness, and said that if she wished it, she should go, and he would take her. And so, in spite of the vehement opposition of the Duchesse, who was quite broken down by the bad news, but who finally said, weeping, that they could at least bring back Armand's body if it was found, they started early next morning on the road to Chartres.CHAPTER XXI(1)There had been a time when Armand de la Roche-Guyon had certainly not anticipated ever seeing Brittany again, yet here he was in Brittany after all.When he left Paris in the middle of May he had gone straight down to join Charette in Vendée, for he wanted to offer his sword in person to Madame. He had done so; he had seen her, "Petit-Pierre," in her peasant boy's attire, gay and indomitable, and had kissed her hand in a farmhouse kitchen. Other young men like himself were there, full of hope and ardour; though even then it was beginning to be apparent that Vendée was not really ready to rise, and some of the chiefs did their utmost to dissuade the princess at the eleventh hour from the scheme. The fatal mistake was made of postponing the insurrection, already fixed for the 24th of May, by a counter order, circulated only two days beforehand. When the fourth of June came, much of the fervour of the peasants had evaporated and the Philippistes were on the alert. Nevertheless, two days afterwards, at the hamlet of Le Chêne, Armand had been one of the little band, only two hundred and twenty strong, who, splashing through the ford or firing (in the old manner) from behind the orchard hedges, had beaten off two bodies of Government troops, only to be routed by a third. Nor was theirs the only defeat. It was over, the chance of a restoration, and, disillusioned but unhurt, Armand had, with difficulty and danger, made his way across the Loire.Yet for prudence' sake he had come back, not to Kerfontaine itself, but to the tiny shooting-box in the wood of St. Clair, and therein, this June evening, the day before Horatia's arrival at Kerfontaine, he lay at full length on a settle, his hands behind his head, and thoughtfully surveyed the unceiled rafters, where the twilight was beginning to weave a veil.The shooting-box belonged to the château of St. Clair, and stood on the edge of a little clearing in the forest; it consisted only of one room, but a portion had been partitioned off as a kitchen. Armand had known it full of sportsmen. On the table in the centre lay, at this moment, his pistols, in company with a half empty bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a ham; for the place had been provisioned against his coming. He had kicked off his long boots, and flung his cloak on a chair. It was very odd to be, not only without a valet, but without a cook; it did not amuse him, for he was both tired and bored. Already, since his arrival in the early morning, he was beginning to think his concealment absurd. He had heard vague rumours of the presence of soldiers, but since the nearest (and abortive) rising was twenty miles away, he was not disposed to believe them. At any rate, as soon as it was darker he was going to venture out.For he was back near Laurence de Vigerie, and all that the past week had held of death and broken hopes was shrivelled up in that knowledge. She was at St. Clair, and they, who had never seen each other since the night when she had worn the tell-tale roses in the masquerade, would meet at last. No problematic peril was likely to keep him from her.The cobwebs of twilight, dropping lower and lower from the rafters, began to reach the young man where he lay on the settle. Surely he could go now. He pulled himself off the hard couch, drew on his boots, picked up his cloak, then, remembering prudence, removed, with visible annoyance, the remains of his meal, and, locking the door behind him, stepped out into the evening.The wood was sinking into sleep. A gust of subtle, heady scent immediately assailed him, and he saw, on the other side of the little clearing by the hut, a thicket of tall elderbushes, intruders in the ranks of forest trees. The over-fragrant smell seemed to be blown after him down the twilight ride; it was still in his nostrils when he came, twenty minutes later, on the great mass of the château of St. Clair. He jumped down into the fosse, climbed up on the other side, and began cautiously to make his way through the rose garden towards the one lighted window on the ground floor, a long window hung over only with some thin blind or curtain. It was that of Madame de Vigerie's smaller salon, and since there was a light she must be there. Probably, indeed, she was expecting him.Had the window been open he might have walked in upon her, but since it was closed and he could not see through, she might not be alone. The traditional method of summons would serve him as well as any. He caught up a handful of gravel from the path and flung it sharply against the glass. Almost immediately the light within was extinguished; then a hasp was heard to turn, and the window opened outward, the panes shimmering a little in the dim light. A figure slipped out."Who is it?" asked Madame de Vigerie. But there was that in her voice which made the question unnecessary.Armand gave no answer at all, but taking a step or two forward, caught both her hands. Then, with a sob of laughter, she was in his arms, and he was kissing her lips, her hair.... Was she not given back to him from the grave?In a little they were wandering among the dew-drenched roses. Roses and nightingales after the reddened swamps of Le Chêne—it was like a dream. For he, too, had been through his baptism of fire, and bore the singe of it, to make him for the moment to the woman by his side what he had never been before—stronger than she."You are at the shooting-box, then?" she said at last. "It is well provisioned? I gave orders.""It wants only one thing.""What is that?""You.""I cannot come there," said Madame de Vigerie. "Not now, I know. I would not ask it. But to-morrow ... in the afternoon, when the sun is getting low, you will come...?"She did not answer, but he could feel her tremble."I am starving, Laurence. If anyone should see you, it is easy to explain. I am a fugitive—you are a conspirator, too.""I was not countingthatcost," she said in a low voice. "O Armand, Armand, why will you not go away and leave me in peace!""Because, at last, you love me."And she made no denial, but breaking from his hold, stood in the midst of the roses with her face in her hands."There is the nightingale," said Armand softly. "It sings for us. There are no nightingales in the forest, nor roses. But if you came to me there, Laurence, in the little hut, it would not lack either. O my world, my rose ... I have waited so long, so patiently! ... Has not death itself spared us for this...?"Half an hour later he was groping his way across the hut. It was foolish to strike a light, so, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down in the dark on the settle. But his brain was on fire, and phantasmagoric figures danced before his eyes—Charette, and the little princess in her boy's clothes, and he heard himself saying, as he had said to Marie-Caroline, when he had kissed that royal, adventurous hand, "I would gladly die for you, Madame." But in the half-dream Madame had the face of Laurence de Vigerie.He came back from it. The settle was confoundedly hard, as hard as a coffin. Then he remembered having seen, lying dead on a couch just like this, in a peasant's cottage at Le Chêne, before the engagement began, a young man shot by an Orleanist patrol. He had been sorry for him then; he was sorrier now, for perhaps the blood had once raced and pounded in his veins as now in his own, and he, too, had thought, perhaps, "To-morrow! to-morrow...."(2)That night, the last of her journey, the cloud of apprehension lifted from Horatia's mind, and sitting by her window in the inn at Ploermel, she had a clear conviction that Armand was alive, and had escaped from Vendée. She would not be too late. She would forgive him; she would even ask him to forgive her the hardness she had shown him. And—who knew—they might perhaps take up their life together again where it had been broken off, for she had experience now.But who knows when the cup of experience is fully drained?When Kerfontaine came in sight next morning she could hardly control herself. Would he have had any word of her approach; was he there at all? ..."Yes, we know for certain that M. le Comte has escaped from Vendée, praise the saints," said old Jean to Horatia and Emmanuel. "But he has not been here, and we think he is probably in hiding in the wood for a day or two. Then he will come here. It was arranged so.""He might come any time—to-day even?""Yes, Madame la Comtesse, any time, when it is safe. And M. le Comte was never one to be over-cautious.""But there are no soldiers about here, surely?" asked Emmanuel."We have not seen any, Monsieur le Marquis, but there are reported to be some in Pontivy."Emmanuel drew his sister-in-law aside. "I think I will ride over to Pontivy," he said, "and see if I can get any information. I am not known in these parts, and I may be able to find out something."So, after déjeuner, he set out. The afternoon crawled slowly on. Horatia went over the château, most of which was shut up. The nurseries were still unfurnished, and behind the screen which she and Claude-Edmond had made a year ago she found a heap of dusty pictures and a pot with dried relics of paste. After supper she sat in the salon. The suspense was beginning to tell on her—not the suspense about Armand's safety, for as he had succeeded in getting away from Vendée he must be out of danger now—but the suspense about his entrance. At any moment he might come in. Would he be surprised to see her there? She could not picture their meeting; she would not try to; she must trust that with the moment would come the right words.About nine o'clock she wandered out into the hall. What time would Emmanuel be back? The sardonic smile of the ancestress over the hearth followed her, as on that night when Armand had lain there, his head on her knee, and she had hoped to be the first to die. Nothing now could ever restore the perfume of that rapture; but the broken vase, which once held it, might yet be pieced together....... Surely that was a horse's hoofs in the avenue, the hoofs of a horse approaching at breakneck pace. If it was Emmanuel he evidently had important news. Horatia ran to the door and opened it herself. A mounted man was tearing up between the trees, had flung himself off his panting horse and dashed up the steps, a little square of white in his hand."For Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon," he said, thrusting it into her hold. "Give it to her at once!" And she was aware that he wore Madame de Vigerie's livery. How strange; she had not known that she was here!She read the letter in the hall. It was very short. When she had done so she put her hands over her eyes, read it again, and hurried to the bell-pull."Jean," she said, "order the carriage at once! I am going to St. Clair. There is not a moment to lose.... Give this letter to Monsieur le Marquis directly he returns."(3)It was six o'clock in the evening of the longest day that Armand de la Roche-Guyon had ever spent. He had hardly slept all night; at dawn he had risen and gone out, but since that time he had been a self-constituted prisoner. If, at any time, there was risk in his being seen—which he could not bring himself to believe—that risk was much greater in the day-time. Besides, he had Laurence to think of.So he sat before the fireless hearth, he paced up and down, he flung himself on the settle, he examined over and over again all the heads of beasts upon the walls, the only ornaments of the place. The hut was very tidy, but he could not deck it as befitted the guest. He had told her last night that there were no roses, but it now occurred to him that he might at least have gathered this morning a branch of something green and living—a branch, for instance, of the flowering elder just outside. Thinking of these bushes, but without any intention of going out to rifle them, his restless feet carried him to the little half-shuttered window. Yes, there they stood, with their broad flat masses of blossom. How strong the scent had been last night! She would smell it as she came; she would hear the birds beginning their vespers. This golden sun would shine on her; would she ride or walk?Leaning idly by the window, Armand looked at his watch. Half an hour still. He glanced at the elder-bushes again ... and suddenly even Laurence was forgotten, and the little trees were everything in the world to him. For among the leaves he had caught sight of a leaf of other kind, thin and shining. It was a bayonet.Armand stood a moment incapable of thought or movement. Then the truth stabbed him with a cold and sickening pang. He looked again. Further along they had scarcely troubled to take cover; he could see the uniforms among the tree-trunks. He went a little white round the mouth, and moving away sank into a chair by the table and hid his face in his hands.What he had thought so absurd, so incredible, had happened! He had been tracked or betrayed, and they were waiting to shoot him as he came out. They did not mean to force an entrance, that was obvious, or they would have done so by now. They had no intention, the careful Philippistes, of running any risks. They would wait there in ambush until he came out....... Or till he came in. It might be that they were watching for his entrance, not knowing that he was there already. And that was, after all, a more likely explanation of their present inaction. More than that, it gave him a chance, a feeble glimmering chance, for his life. It was just conceivable that, seeing no one enter, they would go away without searching the hut. It was a chance, a chance ... O God! it was a chance....But even as his mind caught at that slender hope, embracing it fiercely, the very heart in his body stopped beating.Seeing no one enter! Why, in half an hour Laurence would come along the clearing, and then ... He heard the report, saw her writhing on the ground... Why should they hesitate because she was a woman the men who could shoot a girl of sixteen in cold blood. She was a Carliste. It might even be she that they were expecting.Armand raised his face, grown old and haggard. On him lay the burden of her coming there; it was for him to avert, if by any means he could, so horrible a thing. They must be sent away before she came. And there was only one way of doing that. It might not be successful. That he would never know. But he had to do it; he had to do it.He pressed his hands tightly round his head, where the whirling thoughts drove like bees, and where the remembrance of Horatia, and his courtship, and Maurice, and the consciousness of the sunshine outside, the knowledge that in an incredibly short space of time he would lie out in it and neither feel nor see it, clear and vehement in themselves, were all subordinated to a vision of Laurence coming along the forest path. He looked once more at his watch. Twenty-five minutes—not a second to lose, since they must be gone some distance before she came, and they would probably spend some time in searching his body and the hut before they left. His brain had suddenly become as clear as ice. He stood up, turned out his pockets, put his money and watch on the table, took up his pistols, which were loaded; then laid them down again. It would waste time, and be quite useless. For a moment more he stood looking round the room which had been so irradiated by the thought of her presence, where—it was his last prayer—she would never come now.And then, since with whatever of less worthy commingled, there ran in his veins the blood of a long line that had never stayed for mortal peril, Armand de la Roche-Guyon set his teeth, and, opening the door, walked out to death.
(6)
"Cholera? Oh dear no, nor anything like it," said the doctor next morning to the anxious cousins. "Nervous shock, a touch of fever. I have let him blood. Keep him quiet and he will be all right in a couple of days. I wish we were all as far from the grave. But, Messieurs, as for the cholera, though M. le Comte has it not, we are all going to see more of it, I doubt, than we shall like..."
"You have told him, I suppose, that Madame de Vigerie is likely to recover?" asked Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon as the doctor left the room.
"Yes," said Emmanuel, "and also that it has already been arranged for my sister and the children to go to Plaisance at once."
He went in again to his brother, in the priest's own, narrow, cell-like bedroom with its carved prie-dieu, its sacred prints and its agonised ivory crucifix. Armand, pale, but no longer ghastly, was lying back in an arm-chair without his doublet, his knees wrapped in a quilt, with a bandaged left arm to testify to the doctor's activity. He smiled at his visitor.
"Mon vieux, what made you think I had the cholera? I was never so well in my life—since your news, bien entendu. Do you think Prosper will tell me how many candles I should put up to Our Lady—but perhaps St. Roch or St. Sebastian would be more appropriate. Now that old butcher has gone I must dress and go round to the Chaussée d'Antin; but I have no clothes suitable to the streets in daylight. Will Prosper lend me a cassock, think you? I believe I was rather rude to him last night, but his duty as a Christian will oblige him to forgive me.... Sais-tu, Emmanuel, that the cholera, if only it strike hard enough, may be the best ally that Henri V could have? And how can I work for Henri V sitting here in my shirt among these objects of piety? As well be a sacristan...."
CHAPTER XIX
(1)
Out of a cloudless sky a hard, bright, metallic sun was shining upon Paris, as it had shone, without variation, for the last five weeks, looking down unwinking on a Terror worse than that of '93. And along the deserted streets its companion, the glacial East wind, frolicked in a dance of death, stirring the April dust, and fluttering, on the Pont Neuf, the black flag which Henri Quatre held in his hands of stone. Neither Charles X nor Louis-Philippe reigned in Paris now, but the cholera. Long ago the supply of hearses had proved insufficient, and there crawled along, to gather up the daily harvest of eight or nine hundred dead, artillery waggons, furniture vans, even fiacres. Even so, a sheeted corpse could often be seen in a doorway awaiting burial—to receive it, perhaps, at the hands of that devoted company of young men which numbered some of the first names of France. Yet the machinery of life worked on as usual—the Chambers and the law courts sat, the Bourse was open, professors lectured and the theatres were far from empty, though not a soul had more than half a hope of seeing the sun rise next day, and every time a man left his home he said farewell to wife and child.
From an archway in the long Rue de Sèvres, literally a street of the dead, for on one side at least there was not a single house unstricken, came suddenly a tall priest in a cassock, a garb not seen till now, in the streets of Paris, since the Days of July. His eyes, sunk in a tired, strained face, blinked a little as they met the light, for it had been dark in the garret where he had just confessed the dying man—the fourth cholera patient whom he had visited that day. He pulled the cloak he was wearing closer over his breast as he turned north-eastward and met the wind.
As he crossed the end of the Rue du Bac a fiacre passed him at a lumbering trot, a coffin across the seat. Ere the noise and rattle had died away in the sunny, silent street, the priest heard alert steps behind him, and a voice that he knew well crying, "Prosper! Prosper! que diable! stop a moment!"
Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon slackened his pace and turned his head, but did not stop. "I have just come from a case."
Armand, arriving abreast of his cousin, sniffed at the saturated handkerchief which he held. "Peste, so I supposed. (By the way, how very apt is that expletive just now!) But everybody has either come from a case, or is going to a case ... or is about to become a case, so that is nothing. I will walk with you; I am going this way."
"How is our grandmother?" asked the priest, as they fell into step together.
"Never better. Strange how she fears a cold and defies the plague. She keeps her rooms inundated with camphor and chloride. But Madame de Camain died last night, and the Comtesse de Montlivault, I hear this morning, is 'prise.'".
"God have mercy on them!" said Prosper, crossing himself. "It seems to me that in the last few days the Faubourg St. Germain has suffered more than the poorer quarters."
"That is so, I believe," returned his cousin. "Figure to yourself that the rabbit warren of the Palais-Royal is apparently more healthy than our large houses with their gardens, for I am told that there has not been a single case in those airless glass passages."
They walked on in silence for a little, their footsteps echoing in the deserted street, the icy wind cold on their faces, the sun fierce overhead. Even Armand, untouched by the pest, by labours for the stricken, or, apparently, by apprehension, looked ill, though he was jauntily dressed in the new spring fashions, in a peacock-blue coat with olive-green collar, a flowered waistcoat and white cashmere trousers. The sight of a man hurrying past them, holding an onion to his nose, struck him into speech again.
"Heavens!" he exclaimed, "I had really rather have the cholera than carry about a raw onion. You do not carry anything, I notice, Prosper; not, I dare say, that it is much good.—By the way, I have long been wanting to tell you that I regard you as the bravest man I know, and if (as is probable) you have heard me say anything uncomplimentary about priests I beg you will consider it unsaid. I am really proud to be your kinsman.... Don't spoil it by saying that you are only doing your duty, or tell me that the Archbishop of Paris has come out of hiding and the Archbishop of Besançon returned from Rome to do the same as you are doing, for I do not believe that even his Eminence of Rohan dislikes it as much as you. Mort de ma vie, but you must have seen some horrible things lately!"
"The worst thing that I have seen," said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon sadly, "was not the visitation of the plague, but the outburst of the vile passions of men, excited by fear, and played upon by the unscrupulous."
"You mean the murders, at the beginning of the outbreak, due to the report that it was caused by poison? But what can you expect? There was a man hanged on a lamp-post, as in the good old times, in one of those very streets, for the same reason. And the Republican newspapers have proclaimed that even the cholera is a scourge less cruel than the government of Louis-Philippe. You remember how the Duc d'Orléans went with the late Casimir Périer to the Hôtel-Dieu to visit the sick? Well, they said that Louis-Philippe had sent his son there to gloat over the misery of the people, and that the people would return his visit ... after the manner of the Tenth of August and the Twenty-ninth of July!"
The young man's tone was not free from satisfaction. The priest, aware of the alliance between a certain section of the Legitimists and the Extreme Left, turned and looked at him.
"I hope," he said sternly, "that Madame's party does not stain their cause by using such weapons."
"We have no need," returned Armand with an air. "You will soon see the gleam of the noblest weapon of all—the sword."
"The sword, so be it!" said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon. "But not the dagger—not another conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires, I trust."
They had come to the Place St. Sulpice, and stopped.
"You speak as if I had been implicated in that," said his cousin, rather aggrieved. "Or as if I were M. de Berthier, who tried to run over the King and Queen. No, I am for a stroke of a different kind. Wait a little, a very little, Prosper, and you will see the South in flames for Marie-Caroline, and then the West, Brittany, and Vendée..."
"And then?"
"Then you will see Louis-Philippe, his large family and his umbrella, disencumbering the Tuileries of their presence, and at Rheims a child—a mother and child—crowned ... as you may see at this hour in there." He pointed with one hand to the façade of St. Sulpice, while with the other he tugged something from his pocket.
"Cousin, you do not serve your cause by blasphemy!" said the priest sharply.
Armand looked innocent. "But I thought the idea would appeal to you! It occurs to me, as an omen, every time I enter a church.Mea culpa!... Take this for your cholera cases, Monsignor, in expiation. I was going to give it you in any case, but now it will atone, perhaps, for comparing Marie-Caroline to Our Lady. Au revoir—if the Fates permit." He thrust a roll of notes into his cousin's hand, lifted his hat, and turned down the Rue du Pot-de-Fer towards the Luxembourg.
(2)
It was not to admire the spring foliage of the trees in that now deserted garden that Armand walked slowly eastwards along one of its alleys. Yet he was engaged, rather strangely, in counting the trunks. When he reached the thirty-fifth, he stopped, looked about for the nearest seat, and sitting down upon it, pulled an opened letter from his pocket and re-read it.
It was from his wife at Plaisance, the family seat in Normandy, whither she and the child had been sent for safety. It informed him merely that she and Maurice were very well, and concluded by hoping that all at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon were in the same condition.
Armand made a slight grimace as he folded and refolded this epistle. Stretched out on the seat, his eyes raised to the new leaves, it occurred to him again to wish that his wife were a Catholic, and had a director, who might perhaps prescribe to her a more conciliatory line of conduct. Once, indeed, he had congratulated himself that in his domestic affairs, at least, no priest could intermeddle; now he thought regretfully of a certain friend of his acquaintance, a great deal more culpable than he, whose wife, in obedience (he suspected) to her confessor, was trying to win back her husband by a demeanour of unvarying amiability. Well, that was certainly not Horatia's way at present, nor was he sure that he would have liked it if it had been; but it would have made things more comfortable.
He had not set eyes on Laurence de Vigerie since the fatal night of the masked ball a month ago. As soon as she could be moved she had been hurried out of Paris under medical supervision, and she was now completing her convalescence at Spa, whence she wrote to him every few days. It had needed all her influence to keep him from following her thither, indeed he had only been restrained by her express prohibition, and the knowledge that if he left Paris at this juncture he cut himself off from communication with the cause for which they were both working. For, as Armand had hinted to his cousin, a crisis in Legitimist affairs was very near now. Since February the Duchesse de Berry had definitely resolved to come to France. The younger and more ardent spirits of her party, impatient of delay, continually wrote urging her to hasten. Now, with the cholera occupying the attention of the government, which had, moreover, lost Casimir-Périer from its head, with the Republicans about to rise, so it was rumoured, against Louis-Philippe, the favourable moment seemed at last arrived. And Armand, deprived of his regular channel of information through Madame de Vigerie, had come to this peaceful resort in quest of news.
He had not long to wait, for there presently approached along the deserted avenue, from the opposite direction, another gilded youth of about his own age, muffled almost up to his eyes in a cloak. He also appeared to be counting the trees, and when he arrived opposite Armand's seat came and sat down on it, without looking at its occupant. Then, without warning, he suddenly shot out the word "Marie."
"Caroline," responded Armand instantly.
And they both looked at each other and laughed, for if these conspirators resorted sometimes to the methods of opéra-bouffe, they did not take them very seriously.
"Any news this morning?" inquired Armand.
"The best," answered the other. "Late last night the Committee received a letter from Madame for transmission to the chiefs in the West, warning them to be ready by the third of May. She has probably embarked by now!"
Armand stared at him a moment. Then he sprang to his feet, and lifting his olive-green hat, cried aloud to the empty garden: "At last, at last! Vive la guerre!"
CHAPTER XX
(1)
"But, my aunt," protested Claude-Edmond, "what is a 'calender'? It is evidently not an almanac, but a person."
Horatia laid down the "Arabian Nights" and laughed, a little laugh of real enjoyment. "Do you know, Claude," she said, "that I have never been quite sure myself. If you would find out for me I should be very grateful to you." She slid her hand a moment over her nephew's head, and Claude-Edmond, a Gallic child, caught and conveyed it with respect and affection to his lips.
It was impossible to be unhappy this morning. It was May. Behind Horatia's back lay the great mass of Plaisance, all built in the style of the stables of Chantilly, with flanking pavilions, chapel and laundry, and in front the two immense lime-tree avenues, now gloriously green, and the artificial pieces of water reminiscent of Versailles, with stone urns of tortured design, and stone animals, wolves and lions. On the grass by Claude-Edmond lay the rod with which he had been unsuccessfully fishing for carp in these lakes, before his aunt began her present occupation of reading the "Arabian Nights" to him in English. A little way off Maurice was being slowly walked to and fro in Martha's arms. And it was May.
"With your permission, I should like to kiss my cousin," said Claude-Edmond suddenly, indicating his infant relative.
"I have the same desire myself," returned Horatia, and Martha, coming to a stand, offered her charge for inspection.
"Did I once have only two teeth—only one tooth?" inquired Charles-Edmond.
"No teeth at all, once," responded his aunt.
Claude felt his existing dental arrangements. "There is one loose now," he announced. "May I pull it out?"
"Let me see," said Horatia; and, after inspection, "I should wait a little if I were you, Claude. It will be looser yet. Besides, it will hurt."
"I know," said the child. "But one must learn to bear pain, must one not?"
"I wish you were not such a little prig," thought Horatia, and instantly repented of the thought. "Yes," she said gently, "but we need not inflict it on ourselves unnecessarily. Give Maurice to me for a little, Martha. Claude, could you fetch my chair over here?"
Delightedly the boy sped off. That his aunt should give him something to do for her was the summit of his desires. When Horatia sat down he stood by her, studying Maurice, who, sucking his fist, in his turn studied the sky.
"He does not remind me greatly of Uncle Armand," observed his cousin. "His face is ... is..." He paused for a word.
"Never mind," said Horatia. "I know what you mean."
Claude Edmond sat down upon the grass at her feet. After a moment or two of silence he said with solemnity, "Ma tante, I will confide to you my great ambition. It is to grow up like Uncle Armand."
Horatia made a movement. "You should desire to resemble your father."
"But that goes without saying," returned the boy, rather shocked. "I meant, in outward things, voyez-vous. I desire to have the learning of Papa, and to be able to ride like Uncle Armand, to know about plants and flowers and books—yes, and perhaps about animals—and to be able to fence and shoot...."
The child babbled on, but Horatia had fallen suddenly silent, and after a few moments, seeing her for once unresponsive, and mindful of having been warned by his father never to weary her, he tactfully announced that he would return to his attempts on the carp, and went off.
"I'll take the precious now, Mam, if you please," said Martha, bearing down on her mistress. "I don't want you to tire yourself, when you are getting some of your roses back again."
"Oh, I'm not tired," said Horatia smiling, but she kissed and surrendered her son, and having done so leant back in her chair and watched the distant figure of Claude-Edmond, in the eternally hopeful pose of the fisher, and trusted that he would not fall into the water.
It was true, she was not tired. Six weeks in the air of Plaisance had done wonders for her physical well-being. And something—could it have been the power of dulness?—had healed her mind of much of its malady. She was young and healthy, and she no longer troubled to make herself remember that Maurice was Armand's son. Here he was hers.
No doubt of Armand's guilt ever entered her mind. But Claude-Edmond's words about him had roused a picture ... Was it possible that she had behaved like a foolish girl? She had often heard Aunt Julia say, and had been irritated by the dictum, that a woman could make what she liked of her husband. And, though she had had everything in her favour, she had given up the attempt at the first difficulty. If he had gone straight to his mistress, it was largely her own fault.
But if she were regretting that she had not disputed with the Vicomtesse for Armand, that meant that Armand was worth fighting for, and over and over again she had told herself that he was nothing to her now. But was that quite true? If it were, how was it that she scanned so eagerly what newspapers she could procure for accounts of the progress of the cholera in Paris? His own short, polite notes to her told her little of it, but the sight of them stirred her, she could not quite say how.
Something else was stirring in her too. Suppose she had not merely acted foolishly, but wrongly?
The feelings which had surprised her that morning in the Embassy Chapel had returned, but on a different plane. "We have erred and strayed ... there is no health in us." What if the over-familiar words really had a meaning, what if she herself, who uttered them so often and so lightly, had actually done wrong, grave wrong? This conviction grew in her. It was to Horatia the first vivid connection between the spiritual and material worlds, and was bringing her to the resolve that, when she returned, she would in some degree forgive Armand. She would admit that she had been a little hard. And the thought of this great concession pleased her; being in the future, it took on something of the glamour of the noble things we mean to do one day.
(2)
A week later a letter from the Duchesse announced that it was safe for her and the children to return to Paris, where the scourge, though still present, seemed to have spent its force. So they went back.
An air of calamity still brooded over the capital, and as they stopped at the barrier Horatia shuddered to see the street urchins playing at "cholera morbus," dragging one of their companions, a simulated corpse, along the ground. But her mind, after all, was full of a more personal concern. As she drew nearer to the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon, as Claude-Edmond, looking out of the window of the post-chaise, announced, "Here we are in the Place Vendôme," or, "Now we are turning into the Rue de Rivoli," it did not seem so easy a matter to bestow a pardon to which the culprit might now be indifferent.
Emmanuel, not Armand, was on the steps to receive her. He came down and helped her to alight. Claude-Edmond flung himself into his father's arms. And all at once Horatia knew that she was bitterly hurt. That Armand should not care whether she returned or no was one thing; that he should affront her before her brother-in-law and the servants was quite another. Too proud to make any remark at the moment on his absence, she turned to busying herself over Maurice, but once inside she said to Emmanuel, as lightly as she could, "I suppose that Armand was not expecting me so early?"
The Marquis looked disconcerted. "My dear sister, has the letter not reached you? He went very suddenly, the day before yesterday, to join Madame in Vendée."
(3)
Not by the tragic words "Too late" was the situation thus created summed up in Horatia's mind, for she had never been able to take the Duchesse de Berry very seriously. And though she was told that the princess had undoubtedly landed near Marseilles one dark night at the end of April, the very fact that the conflagration in the South which was to spring up at her appearance absolutely failed to emit a single spark only confirmed the English girl in her conviction. Nor did Marie-Caroline's romantic journey in disguise to Vendée (now matter of knowledge in Royalist circles) impress Horatia; it seemed to her too much like Walter Scott to be quite real, and she could not fancy that there would be actual fighting round such a fantastic heroine. Emmanuel did not seem to think so, either; at any rate he took no rosy views of her chances. The Duchesse, on the other hand, was at once more sanguine and more alarming, continually preaching with a mixture of resignation and elation a sort of version of "Paris vaut une messe," thus conceived: "If Henri V. cannot be set on the throne without the life-blood of one of our family, then I am willing that it should be given." This attitude seemed to Horatia so uncalled for that it irritated rather than dismayed her. Nor could she help feeling a tinge of annoyance, even if she would not confess it, at the check given by Armand's absence to her plan of forgiveness, for now she could not set herself right with him. She must wait till his return.
Yet she had her hours of apprehension. As a fortnight, three weeks passed without news these grew more frequent. And at last, when the Republican riots of the 5th and 6th of June burst over Paris, what she heard of the fierce street fighting, the stand at Saint-Merri, the eight hundred slain, brought home to her the political passions of the time with a horrible vividness, and she was at last nakedly afraid. The Duchesse, incurable Frondeuse that she was, was pleased at anything that shook or embarrassed the government, and declared that the news would be very encouraging to Madame's party.
When she made this declaration Madame's party as such no longer existed. Two days later, Horatia, having said good-night to Maurice, found Emmanuel, looking very grave, waiting for her in her boudoir.
"Horatia," he said, "we have news at last. The whole rising has failed. There have been several engagements, and Charette has been defeated. They are all scattered; it is a sauve qui peut. My grandmother does not know yet."
"And Armand?"
"We can only hope for the best. If he could cross the Loire he would go and lie hidden at Kerfontaine. He told me that before he went."
"There has been a battle, you say? But perhaps he was not in it ... you do not even know that? ... O Emmanuel, have you no news of him?"
"Absolutely none; it is impossible. We can only hope for the best, as I say. I think that if he is alive he will probably succeed in making his way up to Brittany."
"I must go down there," she said feverishly. "I must go at once. Emmanuel, you must help me!"
"My dear," said the Marquis, rather amazed, "you cannot do any good by going. Please God, Armand is alive. If he escapes, he escapes.... In any case your presence at Kerfontaine cannot help him."
"I must go," she repeated, twisting her hands together. "It is very important. Emmanuel, you said you would do anything for me...." Her voice began to break.
Her brother-in-law did not fully understand, but he took her hands with his accustomed kindness, and said that if she wished it, she should go, and he would take her. And so, in spite of the vehement opposition of the Duchesse, who was quite broken down by the bad news, but who finally said, weeping, that they could at least bring back Armand's body if it was found, they started early next morning on the road to Chartres.
CHAPTER XXI
(1)
There had been a time when Armand de la Roche-Guyon had certainly not anticipated ever seeing Brittany again, yet here he was in Brittany after all.
When he left Paris in the middle of May he had gone straight down to join Charette in Vendée, for he wanted to offer his sword in person to Madame. He had done so; he had seen her, "Petit-Pierre," in her peasant boy's attire, gay and indomitable, and had kissed her hand in a farmhouse kitchen. Other young men like himself were there, full of hope and ardour; though even then it was beginning to be apparent that Vendée was not really ready to rise, and some of the chiefs did their utmost to dissuade the princess at the eleventh hour from the scheme. The fatal mistake was made of postponing the insurrection, already fixed for the 24th of May, by a counter order, circulated only two days beforehand. When the fourth of June came, much of the fervour of the peasants had evaporated and the Philippistes were on the alert. Nevertheless, two days afterwards, at the hamlet of Le Chêne, Armand had been one of the little band, only two hundred and twenty strong, who, splashing through the ford or firing (in the old manner) from behind the orchard hedges, had beaten off two bodies of Government troops, only to be routed by a third. Nor was theirs the only defeat. It was over, the chance of a restoration, and, disillusioned but unhurt, Armand had, with difficulty and danger, made his way across the Loire.
Yet for prudence' sake he had come back, not to Kerfontaine itself, but to the tiny shooting-box in the wood of St. Clair, and therein, this June evening, the day before Horatia's arrival at Kerfontaine, he lay at full length on a settle, his hands behind his head, and thoughtfully surveyed the unceiled rafters, where the twilight was beginning to weave a veil.
The shooting-box belonged to the château of St. Clair, and stood on the edge of a little clearing in the forest; it consisted only of one room, but a portion had been partitioned off as a kitchen. Armand had known it full of sportsmen. On the table in the centre lay, at this moment, his pistols, in company with a half empty bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a ham; for the place had been provisioned against his coming. He had kicked off his long boots, and flung his cloak on a chair. It was very odd to be, not only without a valet, but without a cook; it did not amuse him, for he was both tired and bored. Already, since his arrival in the early morning, he was beginning to think his concealment absurd. He had heard vague rumours of the presence of soldiers, but since the nearest (and abortive) rising was twenty miles away, he was not disposed to believe them. At any rate, as soon as it was darker he was going to venture out.
For he was back near Laurence de Vigerie, and all that the past week had held of death and broken hopes was shrivelled up in that knowledge. She was at St. Clair, and they, who had never seen each other since the night when she had worn the tell-tale roses in the masquerade, would meet at last. No problematic peril was likely to keep him from her.
The cobwebs of twilight, dropping lower and lower from the rafters, began to reach the young man where he lay on the settle. Surely he could go now. He pulled himself off the hard couch, drew on his boots, picked up his cloak, then, remembering prudence, removed, with visible annoyance, the remains of his meal, and, locking the door behind him, stepped out into the evening.
The wood was sinking into sleep. A gust of subtle, heady scent immediately assailed him, and he saw, on the other side of the little clearing by the hut, a thicket of tall elderbushes, intruders in the ranks of forest trees. The over-fragrant smell seemed to be blown after him down the twilight ride; it was still in his nostrils when he came, twenty minutes later, on the great mass of the château of St. Clair. He jumped down into the fosse, climbed up on the other side, and began cautiously to make his way through the rose garden towards the one lighted window on the ground floor, a long window hung over only with some thin blind or curtain. It was that of Madame de Vigerie's smaller salon, and since there was a light she must be there. Probably, indeed, she was expecting him.
Had the window been open he might have walked in upon her, but since it was closed and he could not see through, she might not be alone. The traditional method of summons would serve him as well as any. He caught up a handful of gravel from the path and flung it sharply against the glass. Almost immediately the light within was extinguished; then a hasp was heard to turn, and the window opened outward, the panes shimmering a little in the dim light. A figure slipped out.
"Who is it?" asked Madame de Vigerie. But there was that in her voice which made the question unnecessary.
Armand gave no answer at all, but taking a step or two forward, caught both her hands. Then, with a sob of laughter, she was in his arms, and he was kissing her lips, her hair.... Was she not given back to him from the grave?
In a little they were wandering among the dew-drenched roses. Roses and nightingales after the reddened swamps of Le Chêne—it was like a dream. For he, too, had been through his baptism of fire, and bore the singe of it, to make him for the moment to the woman by his side what he had never been before—stronger than she.
"You are at the shooting-box, then?" she said at last. "It is well provisioned? I gave orders."
"It wants only one thing."
"What is that?"
"You."
"I cannot come there," said Madame de Vigerie. "Not now, I know. I would not ask it. But to-morrow ... in the afternoon, when the sun is getting low, you will come...?"
She did not answer, but he could feel her tremble.
"I am starving, Laurence. If anyone should see you, it is easy to explain. I am a fugitive—you are a conspirator, too."
"I was not countingthatcost," she said in a low voice. "O Armand, Armand, why will you not go away and leave me in peace!"
"Because, at last, you love me."
And she made no denial, but breaking from his hold, stood in the midst of the roses with her face in her hands.
"There is the nightingale," said Armand softly. "It sings for us. There are no nightingales in the forest, nor roses. But if you came to me there, Laurence, in the little hut, it would not lack either. O my world, my rose ... I have waited so long, so patiently! ... Has not death itself spared us for this...?"
Half an hour later he was groping his way across the hut. It was foolish to strike a light, so, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down in the dark on the settle. But his brain was on fire, and phantasmagoric figures danced before his eyes—Charette, and the little princess in her boy's clothes, and he heard himself saying, as he had said to Marie-Caroline, when he had kissed that royal, adventurous hand, "I would gladly die for you, Madame." But in the half-dream Madame had the face of Laurence de Vigerie.
He came back from it. The settle was confoundedly hard, as hard as a coffin. Then he remembered having seen, lying dead on a couch just like this, in a peasant's cottage at Le Chêne, before the engagement began, a young man shot by an Orleanist patrol. He had been sorry for him then; he was sorrier now, for perhaps the blood had once raced and pounded in his veins as now in his own, and he, too, had thought, perhaps, "To-morrow! to-morrow...."
(2)
That night, the last of her journey, the cloud of apprehension lifted from Horatia's mind, and sitting by her window in the inn at Ploermel, she had a clear conviction that Armand was alive, and had escaped from Vendée. She would not be too late. She would forgive him; she would even ask him to forgive her the hardness she had shown him. And—who knew—they might perhaps take up their life together again where it had been broken off, for she had experience now.
But who knows when the cup of experience is fully drained?
When Kerfontaine came in sight next morning she could hardly control herself. Would he have had any word of her approach; was he there at all? ...
"Yes, we know for certain that M. le Comte has escaped from Vendée, praise the saints," said old Jean to Horatia and Emmanuel. "But he has not been here, and we think he is probably in hiding in the wood for a day or two. Then he will come here. It was arranged so."
"He might come any time—to-day even?"
"Yes, Madame la Comtesse, any time, when it is safe. And M. le Comte was never one to be over-cautious."
"But there are no soldiers about here, surely?" asked Emmanuel.
"We have not seen any, Monsieur le Marquis, but there are reported to be some in Pontivy."
Emmanuel drew his sister-in-law aside. "I think I will ride over to Pontivy," he said, "and see if I can get any information. I am not known in these parts, and I may be able to find out something."
So, after déjeuner, he set out. The afternoon crawled slowly on. Horatia went over the château, most of which was shut up. The nurseries were still unfurnished, and behind the screen which she and Claude-Edmond had made a year ago she found a heap of dusty pictures and a pot with dried relics of paste. After supper she sat in the salon. The suspense was beginning to tell on her—not the suspense about Armand's safety, for as he had succeeded in getting away from Vendée he must be out of danger now—but the suspense about his entrance. At any moment he might come in. Would he be surprised to see her there? She could not picture their meeting; she would not try to; she must trust that with the moment would come the right words.
About nine o'clock she wandered out into the hall. What time would Emmanuel be back? The sardonic smile of the ancestress over the hearth followed her, as on that night when Armand had lain there, his head on her knee, and she had hoped to be the first to die. Nothing now could ever restore the perfume of that rapture; but the broken vase, which once held it, might yet be pieced together....
... Surely that was a horse's hoofs in the avenue, the hoofs of a horse approaching at breakneck pace. If it was Emmanuel he evidently had important news. Horatia ran to the door and opened it herself. A mounted man was tearing up between the trees, had flung himself off his panting horse and dashed up the steps, a little square of white in his hand.
"For Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon," he said, thrusting it into her hold. "Give it to her at once!" And she was aware that he wore Madame de Vigerie's livery. How strange; she had not known that she was here!
She read the letter in the hall. It was very short. When she had done so she put her hands over her eyes, read it again, and hurried to the bell-pull.
"Jean," she said, "order the carriage at once! I am going to St. Clair. There is not a moment to lose.... Give this letter to Monsieur le Marquis directly he returns."
(3)
It was six o'clock in the evening of the longest day that Armand de la Roche-Guyon had ever spent. He had hardly slept all night; at dawn he had risen and gone out, but since that time he had been a self-constituted prisoner. If, at any time, there was risk in his being seen—which he could not bring himself to believe—that risk was much greater in the day-time. Besides, he had Laurence to think of.
So he sat before the fireless hearth, he paced up and down, he flung himself on the settle, he examined over and over again all the heads of beasts upon the walls, the only ornaments of the place. The hut was very tidy, but he could not deck it as befitted the guest. He had told her last night that there were no roses, but it now occurred to him that he might at least have gathered this morning a branch of something green and living—a branch, for instance, of the flowering elder just outside. Thinking of these bushes, but without any intention of going out to rifle them, his restless feet carried him to the little half-shuttered window. Yes, there they stood, with their broad flat masses of blossom. How strong the scent had been last night! She would smell it as she came; she would hear the birds beginning their vespers. This golden sun would shine on her; would she ride or walk?
Leaning idly by the window, Armand looked at his watch. Half an hour still. He glanced at the elder-bushes again ... and suddenly even Laurence was forgotten, and the little trees were everything in the world to him. For among the leaves he had caught sight of a leaf of other kind, thin and shining. It was a bayonet.
Armand stood a moment incapable of thought or movement. Then the truth stabbed him with a cold and sickening pang. He looked again. Further along they had scarcely troubled to take cover; he could see the uniforms among the tree-trunks. He went a little white round the mouth, and moving away sank into a chair by the table and hid his face in his hands.
What he had thought so absurd, so incredible, had happened! He had been tracked or betrayed, and they were waiting to shoot him as he came out. They did not mean to force an entrance, that was obvious, or they would have done so by now. They had no intention, the careful Philippistes, of running any risks. They would wait there in ambush until he came out....
... Or till he came in. It might be that they were watching for his entrance, not knowing that he was there already. And that was, after all, a more likely explanation of their present inaction. More than that, it gave him a chance, a feeble glimmering chance, for his life. It was just conceivable that, seeing no one enter, they would go away without searching the hut. It was a chance, a chance ... O God! it was a chance....
But even as his mind caught at that slender hope, embracing it fiercely, the very heart in his body stopped beating.Seeing no one enter! Why, in half an hour Laurence would come along the clearing, and then ... He heard the report, saw her writhing on the ground... Why should they hesitate because she was a woman the men who could shoot a girl of sixteen in cold blood. She was a Carliste. It might even be she that they were expecting.
Armand raised his face, grown old and haggard. On him lay the burden of her coming there; it was for him to avert, if by any means he could, so horrible a thing. They must be sent away before she came. And there was only one way of doing that. It might not be successful. That he would never know. But he had to do it; he had to do it.
He pressed his hands tightly round his head, where the whirling thoughts drove like bees, and where the remembrance of Horatia, and his courtship, and Maurice, and the consciousness of the sunshine outside, the knowledge that in an incredibly short space of time he would lie out in it and neither feel nor see it, clear and vehement in themselves, were all subordinated to a vision of Laurence coming along the forest path. He looked once more at his watch. Twenty-five minutes—not a second to lose, since they must be gone some distance before she came, and they would probably spend some time in searching his body and the hut before they left. His brain had suddenly become as clear as ice. He stood up, turned out his pockets, put his money and watch on the table, took up his pistols, which were loaded; then laid them down again. It would waste time, and be quite useless. For a moment more he stood looking round the room which had been so irradiated by the thought of her presence, where—it was his last prayer—she would never come now.
And then, since with whatever of less worthy commingled, there ran in his veins the blood of a long line that had never stayed for mortal peril, Armand de la Roche-Guyon set his teeth, and, opening the door, walked out to death.