(3)Horatia was destined also to see Paris under a less smiling aspect.An air as mild as milk, a sun almost of May, saluted her on the morning of the fourteenth of February, as Armand helped her from the family coach outside St. Germain l'Auxerrois. She was going into that church, of name ominous to Protestant ears, to hear her first Mass, and that a Requiem—the Requiem for the Duc de Berry, murdered in 1820, and father of the little boy whom all good Legitimists now regarded as their King. The occasion was therefore gloomy, but it was also exciting; though Horatia was clad in black she had no grief in her heart for an assassinated prince whom she had never seen, and though during the drive she had composed her features to a decent melancholy, she was secretly attacked by mirth at the overpoweringly funereal aspect of the Duchesse. It was an event when that lady left the Hôtel; and she had left it now swathed in crape, a-dangle with jet chains, and—unprecedented mark of mourning—devoid of her toupée. A large black rosary depended from her wrist. Armand and the Marquis sat opposite. Emmanuel had his usual air of sad patience; he was in fact the only one of the four who looked perfectly appropriate to the occasion (since the Dowager was merely ludicrous), yet Horatia knew that his Royalist sentiments were the least strong of all his family. Armand, his head thrown back against the brown silk lining of the vehicle, directed from time to time a glance at Horatia between his half-closed lids. He looked very well in black. From time to time also the Duchesse speculated on the likelihood of there being a riot; it was true that nothing of the sort had occurred on the 21st of January, the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI, when there had also been a Requiem; moreover the Government was forewarned. However, the fact that the ceremony had been forbidden to take place at St. Roch looked, she said with some unction, suspicious. It was plain that the old lady had no objection to the idea of a tumult, and perhaps even pictured herself as a martyr to the throne and the altar.There were already two rows of emblazoned carriages on either side the church; a few curious sightseers, the usual beggars. The portals were hung with black. The Duchesse, on Emmanuel's arm, hobbled towards them; the leather door squeaked, Armand caught it from his brother, and they were inside. The Comte dipped his finger in the holy-water stoup and held it out half-smiling to his wife; finding, however, that she had no idea what he intended her to do, he crossed himself carelessly and preceded her up the aisle. The Swiss (whose semi-martial appearance Horatia supposed to be peculiar to this particular ceremony) having found seats for the Dowager and the Marquis, waved them into two chairs just behind.The church too was hung with black—Horatia had never imagined an effect so gloomy. It was already nearly full of bowed, sable figures. In the middle of the nave was a great black-draped catafalque surrounded by enormous candles; the Bourbon arms glinted on the top, and at the end hung a large wreath of immortelles.And the Mass began—but Horatia paid small attention to what, after all, she could not follow. Rather she came increasingly to realise that this was history. The old white-haired priest of whom she could catch glimpses at the altar, had, so they said, taken the last consolations of religion forty years ago to the murdered Queen; now he was praying (so she supposed) for the soul of the murdered Prince, her nephew. "Dona ei requiem," sang the choir, and it became impossible for her not to fancy that the Duc de Berry's actual body lay under the pall.(4)The Mass was finished, or nearly finished, Horatia conjectured, for people were moving their chairs about, when something was passed from hand to hand along the row in front of her—a paper of some kind. The Duchesse, when it came to her, kissed it; the Marquis Emmanuel glanced at it a moment and then, slightly turning, passed it to his brother behind him. And Horatia, looking at it with her husband (and having imagined it to be some holy relic) saw only a coloured lithograph of a boy about ten years of age, wearing a crown and a royal mantle."The Duc de Bordeaux—Henri V," whispered Armand, and he passed it on. Evidently there were other copies going round the congregation, for a moment or two later Horatia saw a young man in the uniform of the National Guard walk up to the catafalque and affix one to the end, just above the wreath of immortelles. A murmur rippled through the congregation then chairs scraped in all directions, and half a dozen ladies heavily veiled, and one or two men, were out of their places detaching the flowers, which, after kissing, they placed in their bosoms or their paroissiens. More came, till the catafalque was the centre of a crowd, and it took Emmanuel a long time to get the flower for which his grandmother asked him. Progress down the church was equally difficult, and Armand and Horatia became separated from their elders, who were in front. At the door there was difficulty in getting out and a sound of loud voices, and when they did at length emerge it was into the midst of a vociferating and hostile crowd."Take tight hold of my arm!" said Armand. "No, it is all right—they will not dare to touch us, the canaille!" And indeed they got through to the coach without much difficulty, except for the press of bodies. Threats were flying about, but nothing else, and Horatia was really more thrilled than frightened. Emmanuel was at the door of the coach, and opened it; Horatia, relinquishing Armand's arm, put her foot on the step. A man, slipping at that moment round the horses' heads, shouted something almost in her face; startled, she missed her footing on the high step, slipped and half fell into Emmanuel's arms, and was by him pushed into the coach, but not before she had a glimpse of Armand, white with fury, striking out at the man's face. The man went down; she stumbled into the coach, saw the Marquis catch his brother by the arm, and somehow, in the midst of cries, the two men also were in, the door was banged and the coach started.It had all happened in a moment, and here was Armand, with blazing blue eyes, leaning forward with her hands in his, beseeching her to tell him that she was not hurt, that the scoundrel had not really touched her."No, no," reiterated Horatia. "He did not mean to, I am sure. It was my stupidity ... I slipped.""Take my vinaigrette, child," said the Duchesse, fumbling among her blackness and beads."My sister was not frightened," observed the Marquis quietly. It was true; but Armand continued to breathe out slaughter all the way home."Well, it is over now," said the Dowager as they turned into the courtyard, "and you need not work yourself into a fever, mon petit."But it was not over, it was only beginning. Late that afternoon came the news that the mob was breaking into St. Germain l'Auxerrois and pillaging it, smashing the glass, the statues, the pictures, the confessionals, all to the accompaniment of parodies of the services, in the vestments of the church. The great iron cross with the three fleurs-de-lis, which surmounted the building, was pulled down by order of the mayor of the district, destroying the organ in its fall, and by night one of the chef d'oeuvres of the Renaissance was merely bare walls and a heap of debris. Thus did the people of Paris testify their objection to the Legitimists.On the Legitimists fell also the displeasure of the government, who, instead of proceeding against the rioters, arrested a prominent Royalist or two and issued warrants against the Archbishop of Paris (who was in hiding) and the curé of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. The Duchesse, not from nervousness, but rather from the joy of battle, ordered the great gates of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon to be closed and barricaded. But the Faubourg was quite quiet, though hundreds were howling outside the minister Dupin's house in the Rue Coq-Héron. And there were rumours that the mob had publicly given itself rendez-vous for the next day outside the Archbishop's palace.On the morrow, therefore, Armand, unmoved by his wife's entreaties, sallied forth to see what was afoot. He was away about an hour and a half, a time that seemed to Horatia as long as the whole day of the wolf-hunt in Brittany. When, to her inexpressible relief, he returned, he announced that there was not a stone left of the Archevêché, that even the iron railings were gone, all the books and furniture in the river, and that the rioters were threatening Notre-Dame itself.But it passed, that brief sirocco of popular fury, and Paris was gay again—had in fact been gay all the time, after the manner of Paris (seeing it was carnival-tide), though, or perhaps because, the richest ecclesiastical library in France was voyaging down the Seine, and the maskers on the quays were amusing themselves by trying to fish out the Archbishop's furniture from the stream.CHAPTER IV(1)"Then, if you please, Sir, will you have dinner at a quarter after six?" suggested Mrs. Thwaites. "Mr. Dormer can hardly get here before six o'clock."Tristram glanced at the leaden sky. "I am afraid that he will not be here then if we have snow, as seems probable. We had better say half-past. You will see that there is a good fire in his room, Mrs. Thwaites? He is ill, you know."When she had withdrawn he got up from his writing-table and poked his own fire. It was ten o'clock on a morning late in February. In eight or nine hours Dormer would be here. And after dinner they would sit by the fire, and, if his friend were not too tired by the journey, perhaps he could have the relief of talking to him a little—or, if not that, at any rate the comfort of being with him, as on that day at Oxford. He was intensely anxious to see how he was, for about the beginning of December Dormer's headaches had become of alarming severity, and he had been ordered away from Oxford at a day or two's notice. Having spent the vacation and more at his brother's house at Colyton, he had now been to London to consult a well-known physician, and was at this moment on his way to Compton Parva.Tristram stood a moment with his elbow on the mantelpiece, passed his hand once or twice over his eyes, and with a short, quick sigh went back to his letters.As a watcher by the crisis of fever is cut off from all else, untouched by the life of every day that surges round the house but is powerless to enter it, unconcerned at great calamities, unresponsive to great joys, so, until Horatia's wedding-day, had it been with Tristram Hungerford. He was watching the last moments, as it were, of the person he loved best on earth. He did not care that the whole country was in a state of ferment, that the agricultural riots were spreading all over the south, and that men were being hanged for them, that there were tumults in London, nor even that in mid-November Wellington and Peel resigned and were succeeded by a Whig ministry under Lord Grey—which meant Reform. If the strain reached its acutest point on the evening that he said farewell to Horatia in the drawing-room at the Rectory, it was nevertheless prolonged, with very little alleviation, until the day that he stood behind her at the altar, and the vigil was over. Some means of relief indeed he had, for he prayed as he had never prayed before, fierce and desperate daily prayers for strength to endure; and he knew, too, at any rate, that his own life and circumstances would be changed by his ordination. More, he even saw, in the interval before the wedding, when Horatia was gone from Compton, a real ray of comfort in that prospect; there was still something he could do in life.Then had come the marriage in December, the triple marriage. And after that a numbness and a merciful fatigue fell upon him for a while. He had returned with Mr. Grenville to Berkshire and taken up his ordinary occupation. Nearly every day he went over to see the old man, and Horatia's spaniel leapt up at him, and he sat in the rooms which would know her no more. It seemed to him sometimes that he was always there, to such an extent did Mr. Grenville lean on him. But so mortal a weariness had laid hold of him, body and mind, that he could not fully taste the pain. He often fell asleep in the middle of the morning, alarming Mrs. Thwaites. At night he slept long and almost dreamlessly. One waking dream pursued him indeed, for once again he stood behind Horatia in the little French Roman Catholic chapel in King Street, with its memories of banished royalty and the emigration, and in front of him was a figure in white silk and swansdown, with wired orange flowers, that shook when she moved, upon her deep satin bonnet, and with the long veil of a bride. At the time he had derived some self-control by pretending that it was someone else. "Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine..." he heard the words, too, in the unfamiliar pronunciation of the old French priest, and he saw the altar with its four pillars and canopy and some dark picture that he could not distinguish, and the strange little gallery beside it, and the Rector, looking old and bowed, and the Duke ... and another figure. Neither the civil marriage at the Embassy nor the more familiar ceremony at Margaret Chapel remained with him like this ... and this, he supposed, would wear itself off his brain in time; he was too tired to wrestle with it.This state of blurred consciousness continued till about the middle of December. Then one day, quite suddenly, the fatigue, the mental mist, seemed to lift, and brighter and sharper than before the picture shone before him. And gradually it came to him what it meant. He was in love with another man's wife. He could not present himself for Orders. The straw of comfort to which he had clung was swept away, and now he saw, or thought he saw, the tarnished motives which had made him look forward to his entrance to the priesthood. It was not wonderful that Dormer's coming meant much to him, for he could not write about these things—he was not even sure that he could bring himself to talk about them.(2)The two friends each suffered a shock at dinner, for Tristram saw, in the full candle-light, how ill Dormer looked, and Dormer noticed that in two months Tristram had begun to grow grey at the temples.But they talked during the meal of other things. Once settled in the study before the fire, however, Tristram began without preamble."Now, Charles, I want to hear exactly what the doctor says.""Oh, the usual silly sort of thing that can never be carried out," replied Dormer with a weary smile. "If I were a farm labourer and lived out of doors and did not use my brain, I should never have another headache.""But, seriously, doesn't he think you any better for these weeks at Colyton?""Not permanently, if at all." Dormer stirred his coffee. "The worst of it is that I'm almost afraid that he is right in what he says.""What does he say—beyond the farm labourer idea?" asked Tristram anxiously."He says that I cannot think of going back to work this term; that if I do, I shall have a bad breakdown, and it may be years before I am able to write another word."Tristram's heart sank."Then what are you going to do?""Well, there isn't much choice for me," responded his friend sighing. "He recommends, I might say he orders, a voyage."And as Dormer struck Tristram as being extraordinarily submissive to this decree, Tristram was proportionately alarmed. But he concealed this fact, and merely said, "So he recommends a voyage, does he? Where to?""The Mediterranean.""That," said Tristram with decision, "is where I have wanted to go all my life. I shall come with you.""You!" exclaimed Dormer, a gleam of animation on his face. "I only wish it were possible. But how about your ordination? Would it be worth while for you to come for part of the time? I admit I had thought of you."And in this confession he was certainly not overstepping the mark, having indeed schemed to get Tristram away at once from his present surroundings, so full of painful memories, but not having hoped that Tristram would himself jump at the idea."Certainly it would be worth it," replied his friend. "Besides, there is no hurry about my ordination ... This is a godsend to me. Now tell me what you have done. What about Rose and the Councils?""Rose is arranging for Newman to do them," replied Dormer. "He offered to wait for me, but I should not like the work to be delayed on my account. Newman knows as much about the subject as I do—probably more. But there is a great deal of reading to be done, and I should not be fit for that under a year. Of course I know that he is overworked as it is, and doesn't sleep well, but as he sees the importance to the cause that this particular book should not be delayed, he will drop something else. So that is settled."Tristram vented his feelings without mercy on the fire. "I'm sorry to hear it," he observed very shortly. "I think Rose might have waited.""I knew you would feel like that," said his friend with a half-amused smile that ended, despite himself, in a sigh. "Let's leave it alone ... About yourself—I don't understand what you said about your ordination?""Oh, never mind that now," said Tristram, abandoning the poker. "I never did like those Cambridge men!—Suppose we go to bed."As Tristram, later, sat stretched out alone by the fire, he was realising acutely what it must mean to Dormer to give up the work on which he had entered with such hopes, and, quite unreasonably, he felt that he hated Rose and Newman, although he knew quite well that Dormer must have over-ridden both of them. It was just like him. Life was a sorry place. As for his own troubles, how could he, with Charles looking like that, risk keeping him awake by talking about them. It was not his sympathy that he wanted, for that he knew he had always, under its veil of more than ordinary reserve, but his counsel. So badly did he want the latter that it seemed an aggravation to have him in the house and to be silent, to know that if he went upstairs now he could have it—at a price for the giver. But he had not so learned friendship.(3)Yet, after all, Dormer was not asleep. The fire to which Mrs. Thwaites had paid special attention was burning with the disturbing brilliance which comes to a fire when one is in bed and desires the dark, and, lying wakeful, he watched it leaping on the faded chintzes. And he, too, was going through a dark hour.The austerity of Charles Dormer's religion was the measure of its passion. Knight and lover, he was set upon a quest, whereof the road was holiness, and the end—God. And that he might not follow wandering fires he had looked back for guidance to the first ages of the Church, to the training of the confessors and martyrs, who had learnt of the divine pattern from those who had themselves seen the Lord. In this school of character he found no comfortable complacency, no sickly sentimentality, but hardness, and reality and the cross.From a boy, just as he had been sure that he was called to serve God as a priest, so had he been certain that he would never marry. It fitted in, therefore, with his own instinct when he came to realise that the Fathers had given honour to those who lived the life of sacrifice for the kingdom of Heaven's sake, and that, taking literally the words of their Master and of St. Paul, they had applied them in particular to the priesthood. The memory that an almost renaissance love of the beautiful had once entered into fierce conflict with this ideal disposed him to follow still more closely the principles of asceticism. To observe the primitive duty of fasting during the first decades of the nineteenth century, and that in an Oxford college, might have seemed a task likely to tax the highest ingenuity, but others besides Charles Dormer accomplished it. Like his friend Hurrell Froude, though unknown to him, he devised methods of self-chastisement which would have seemed morbid and ludicrous not only to that generation but also to its descendants. Of their extent Keble knew a little and Tristram guessed. And now Dormer himself suspected—in fact he partly knew—that his own self-discipline was partly responsible for his state of health. Had he been right, or was it after all only some subtle form of pride or self-will that had set him on this path? Perhaps he had been making an idol both of his warfare with himself and of his work, and this was why he was going to be taken away from both ... At any rate it was clearly God's Will that he should be thus taken away, and therefore, however hard, it was the best for him.... Tristram, too, was coming with him, and he fell asleep, as the fire died down, wondering why it had been so easy to persuade him to this course.When he came downstairs next morning, after breakfasting, by orders, in his room, Dormer discovered Tristram engaged with maps and guide-books, in the business-like mood of one who intends to get things settled up at once. They talked over plans for about an hour; after which, since there was a gleam of sun, he was commanded to wrap up and come for a walk.He laughed, and rallied Tristram on his despotism, but it was pleasant enough, and he obeyed it. There had been no snow the previous day; it was yet to come. They walked between the bare hedgerows, still talking plans, discussing the rival attractions of Sicily and Corfu, settling how, when Dormer was well enough, they would take the opportunity of seeing Naples and Rome, and possibly Florence, and returning by sea, perhaps, from Leghorn, if they got as far north. Animation grew upon both of them as they realised the delightful possibilities of their journey, and was not damped when a sudden storm of sleet, descending on them, drove them into an open shed by the side of the road, where, seated on the shafts of a hay-waggon, they continued for a while, scarcely conscious of the change of place.At last, however, the subject suddenly ran dry, and Tristram, getting up, went to the doorway to see if the storm were over."I am afraid we must make up our minds to another quarter of an hour or so," he reported. "I do trust that you are not cold, Charles. Pull your cloak properly about you."Dormer obeyed, and then, still sitting on the shaft, he launched a disturbing question."What did you mean last night, Tristram, when you said that there was no hurry for your ordination? Is it that you are glad to get away because of all that has happened, or is there something else?"Tristram hesitated a second, then he took the plunge. "I am glad to get away, but there is something else.""I thought so," said his friend quietly. "Do you mean to tell me about it?""Of course," replied Tristram. "I should have told you last night, but I didn't want my affairs to keep you awake.""Well, what is it? I am awake now and am not going to bed for eight hours at least, so this is a good opportunity to tell me," observed Dormer, who was not troubled by incongruities of time or place."Charles, I cannot be ordained!"The effort to get out these words was apparent; not so the effort which it cost Dormer to hide the shock they gave him. He merely asked coolly, "Why not?""Because I'm thinking day and night of another man's wife. Charles, Charles, it's unbearable! I see her always as she was on her wedding-day, and ... I see him standing beside her, too. I picture them in their own house. The Rector reads little things from her letters. He does not say much, out of consideration for me perhaps—only I know that she is happy so far—thank God!—very happy."Dormer looked at him compassionately as he sat, his head in his hands, on a log near the door. "My poor Tristram!" he said gently. "I know. I quite understand." And then he was silent.After a little he went on again. "All the same I hardly see how you could expect it to be otherwise. Of course you see her. If one image has been in a person's mind for many years, how can it be suddenly expelled at a certain hour, on a certain day? God does not ask from us impossibilities.""But I want her," said Tristram from between his hands, "more than I have ever wanted her in my life ... and sometimes I think I could kill him!"It appeared to Dormer that these statements might or might not be serious. For the present he ignored them, and only said, "I'm thankful you are coming away with me. You need to give yourself a rest." And then, because, for Tristram's sake, he himself wanted time to think, he got up and went to the door. "The storm is nearly over, isn't it?"It was not, but since the carrier's cart was at that moment descried coming along the road, and since Tristram thought that Dormer looked cold, he felt obliged to take the opportunity of getting him home without further delay. After all, his own affairs could wait a little longer.(4)But Tristram's need was too pressing to let them wait for very long; and this time he made the opening himself. It was after dinner, and they were in the library again, and Dormer was not looking nearly as tired as the night before. So he said, almost directly they had sat down:"Tell me what you think I should do, Charles. Surely you see that I can't be ordained?"And Dormer, who had spent the afternoon in preparation for this question, said, gazing at the fire, "My advice is that you should be patient with yourself. You see you have been through a long strain. You have acted, God knows. Anyone would say that you had given her up absolutely, and you have certainly been a friend to both of them, to him as well as to her. Give yourself time, and your feelings will follow.""Oh, yes, I've acted," said Tristram. "But what is that but a case of necessity after all? All these years I have watched her and tried ineffectually to do whatever small things I could for her, so that it was impossible to fail her in a big thing.""Impossible for you, perhaps, but then you are one of the most unselfish people I have ever met.""If you think I'm unselfish," returned Tristram rather bitterly, "how do you explain that at this moment I hate Armand just because I know Horatia to be blissfully happy with him? If she were unhappy I should hate him still more, but that does not affect my present feeling.""My dear Tristram, don't put yourself to the trouble of telling me that sort of thing! Of course it is wrong, utterly wrong, but if your will is constant, if you hate and repudiate such thoughts, they only amount to a suggestion of the Evil One.""I wish I could believe you.""I am sure," said Dormer, "that in time you will come to hold the same view. And meanwhile I should just put away the idea of ordination. You were going to wait till Lent anyhow if necessary, and you can wait till June."Tristram looked straight at him to see if he could read anything more in his expression."I don't know that I can trust you, so to speak," he said slowly. "I think you are too kind—to other people."Dormer raised his eyebrows with a little smile. "Am I?""I know that I did what I could," went on Tristram in a sort of outburst, "and it hurt all the time like a knife. But now I feel swamped with a sense of failure, and I pray and go on praying, but there is no comfort anywhere. Sometimes I begin to wonder if, apart from my own feelings, I did right in helping on the marriage at all." And he laughed, because he was conscious of his own habit of introspection, and half ashamed to lay it bare.At that Dormer sat up a little in his chair, and turned a very penetrating gaze upon him. "Now what do you mean exactly by that? I thought you felt quite sure from the beginning?""So I did," responded his friend, "and so I do, but—it's no use. I cannot really trust Armand. I know nothing against him, but I have a very shrewd suspicion that he only thinks of himself, and that he will always put his own interests before Horatia's. And for all Horatia's apparent independence she needs protection far more than many of her sex.""Well?""You see I know Horatia," pursued Tristram, "and I realised that if she were once awakened, and then her hopes were frustrated, it might be a very serious thing for her; and there was always the chance that Armand might turn out better than I expected. Of course I put all that to the Rector, and, as you know, by degrees he came round.""I quite understand. It would have been hard enough to resign her to a man whom you knew and trusted, especially as it practically devolved on you to plead your rival's cause, but it would have been easy compared with this.""Yes, that's just it. It fairly breaks me to feel that I have given her up, perhaps, only to sorrow and neglect.""You can't tell about that, Tristram," said Dormer very gravely. "When you resigned her, you gave her absolutely into the hands of God, and that means you gave her as you would give yourself, for joy or for sorrow. It has always seemed to me that it is quite possible for vicarious resignation to the Divine Will to be a higher thing than the resignation of oneself; certainly it can be a harder.... And, besides," he went on after a moment's pause, "I have something more to say. I have a favourite theory of my own. That rather hackneyed phrase of two people being made for one another is capable of another interpretation. It may mean that from all eternity Providence has intended two souls to meet to play upon each other, and that it is only through the discipline of married life that they can become what God intended them to become. I should never think of any two people as necessarily destined to happiness, but as destined by their union to work out God's Will. After all, what have any of us to do with happiness?"There was a long silence. Tristram lay back in his chair, and Dormer looked as if he were thinking that the two souls in question would perhaps be the better for any kind of discipline. But at last he said:"To go back to what you said this morning, that you wanted her more than you have ever wanted her in your life—""Yes?""The more I think of it the more I believe you to be experiencing the inevitable struggleafterthe sacrifice has been made. Even our Lord knew what that was.""What do you mean?""Nothing was wanting to the completeness of the sacrifice when He offered the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, and yet—afterwards—came the Agony in the Garden."(5)That night again his bedroom fire was the companion of Dormer's vigil. He sat long before it, thinking of all that Tristram had told him. He had always had a high ideal for his friend, but now he had even a higher, for he could not help the conviction that God was dealing specially with him, and that disappointment meant that He had some particular work for him to do. But he saw that Tristram had still a hard fight before him, for though he was, perhaps, tormenting himself unnecessarily about his feelings, yet if he was to become what Dormer believed, more and more, that God meant him to be, his loss must be turned from mere endurance into the painful joy of sacrifice. He guessed that it was possible for a soul fully to submit, and yet to fret, and that such an one would for the time lie beyond the reach of consolation.Charles Dormer could never so much as think of consolation without the memory of Mrs. Hungerford coming back to him. Yes, if anyone could have comforted Tristram it would have been his own mother. This was her room; Dormer had it always when he stayed here, and it seemed full of her. Downstairs in the dining-room—he had glanced at it several times to-day over Tristram's head—was a picture, representing her as standing and looking down at her husband, seated at a table that bore a map of the West Indies outspread upon its crimson cloth. Curtains of a darker crimson, looped back to columns, and a vista of mixed landscape completed the ill-painted composition, which was only made beautiful by Mrs. Hungerford's expression. But, looking at that, Dormer knew why, as boy and young man, he had told her so many things.It was impossible to think of her as anything else but a mother, and yet she had not married till she was nearly forty, and she had only had one child. To him she had always seemed the ideal of motherhood. That he should think so was no disloyalty to his own mother, to whose memory he still gave the almost awed worship of his childish days, for he saw now how that mother, despite her early marriage and her five sons, had never had just this gift which would always have been Mrs. Hungerford's, married or single. He knew that Mrs. Hungerford had understood what his own mother had been to him, as she understood everything else. Perhaps, indeed, she understood about Tristram now....CHAPTER V(1)The pillaging of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the fact that it now bore the legend "Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement" upon its doors had, of course, no direct effect on Horatia—beyond teaching her of what the Paris mob was capable, and how exiguous were the titles to respect of the Laffitte ministry, already on its deathbed. Her places of worship lay elsewhere—the Embassy chapel in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, or that of the Reverend Lewis Way in the Avenue de Neuilly. For the Hon. and Rev. Stephen Grenville, if he wished to keep his daughter faithful to the Church of her baptism, had done a very shrewd thing when he extracted from her a promise to attend Morning Prayer every Sunday, when possible, and, if not, to read it herself. Horatia kept her promise faithfully. However bright the day, however alluring the prospect of going out with Armand, she resisted the temptation, and set forth, rather scandalised at the crowd of pleasure-seekers in the Tuileries gardens or elsewhere.On the whole the service was pleasant to her, chiefly because it was a link with all things English, and in particular with her home. However commonplace and familiar "Dearly beloved brethren" might sound in English sunoundings, Horatia found that it had power greatly to stir her heart in a foreign land. It gave her, too, a sort of happy sadness to displace the Evangelical minister by her father, and his chapel (which had been a café) by Compton church.Armand could not accompany Horatia to church, nor could she go with him—if he ever went there. This separation she had, of course, anticipated from the first, and it did not seem really to be of great importance. It mattered more to her that he did not care so much about the things of the past as she did—a discovery which she was gradually making, and which appeared to her all the more disconcerting because he, by his ancestors, belonged to that past in a way that she never could. But it interested him infinitely less, convinced and even fanatical Legitimist that he was.She saw the thing clearly at last on the day that he drove her to Versailles in his smart phaeton lined with blue flower-dotted piqué, wherein, however, as a "fashionable" should, he sat upon so high a seat that it was extremely difficult to talk to him. Besides, there was the ridiculous little tiger behind, in his overcoat to the ankles, his gaiters and his shiny hat, who could, Horatia imagined, hear everything that they said. But she enjoyed the drive exceedingly, and looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing the palace. Yet, when they got there, Armand displayed small concern as to which part of the great pile had stood in the days of Louis the Just, and which had been built by the Grand Monarque, or on what balcony the King and Queen had showed themselves to the mob on that wild day in October, 1789. She could not but be disappointed, for she regarded her husband, quite justly, as the scion of a long line of devoted royalists, and she remembered how he had spoken, in England, of the Lilies. To her the deserted palace, abandoned for want of means to keep it up and shortly, it was said, to be converted into a museum, was heart-rending in its associations of fallen glory. And Armand's ancestors had been among the very people who had moved, gay and gallant, upon its wide terraces; in no point would he have disgraced the cohort himself. But it was evident that the empty basins of the royal fountains, the forlorn bosquets, roused in him no pleasurable melancholy, and that the Allée d'Apollon was merely a place where he could tell her, undisturbed, how charming she looked, and laugh at her sad face. In the end he took her away before she had seen all she desired, lest the drive back should not be accomplished without rain, "and your pretty dress be spoiled."(2)Horatia had reason to remember that day at Versailles, because of what occurred on the following morning.She was paying her accustomed visit to her grandmother-in-law. The Duchesse was sitting propped up in bed, looking unusually grim, and not by any means beautified by the wrap in which she was enveloped."My dear," said the old lady, after some desultory conversation, "I have something to say to you which you probably will not like. You really must not see so much of Armand.""Not ... not see so much of Armand!" gasped Horatia, stupefied. "Not see so much of my husband!""No," replied Madame de la Roche-Guyon emphatically, and the flaps on her lace cap waggled. "You are always about with him, and it is not convenable. I hear that you spent the whole day together at Versailles yesterday.""But, Madame," ejaculated Horatia, scarcely believing her ears, "I don't under——what can you possibly mean? IfIcannot spend the day with Armand——""Now listen, ma fille," said the Duchesse, not unkindly. "I do not know how it may be with the bourgeoisie, but in our world it is not the thing for a husband to be always dancing attendance on his wife. A man who does so, after the first few weeks of marriage, is looked on as a nincompoop, or a bore. He is, in fact, despised. And no one wants to receive husband and wife together at their salons; it is gênant, it destroys all wit and freedom of intercourse. Armand will naturally attach himself to some salon, and you must not expect him to accompany you to those which you frequent—nor, above all, to be constantly seen about with you in public places. It is not the part of a galant homme. And you have, for the present, the chaperon we have provided for you, Eulalie de Beaulieu."A red spot came into Horatia's cheek. "But I do not like Madame de Beaulieu. I do not wish to go about with her."Even the snort which the Dowager permitted herself did not destroy the air of cold dignity with which she replied. "You seem to forget the class of society into which you have married. It would be unheard of for a bride to be seen about alone. When her husband does not accompany her—and, as I say, the time for that is already long past—she must be under the escort of her mother or her mother-in-law. You have neither. Did my years and health permit I would myself fulfil the duty, but if you do not wish to have my death at your door you will accept the chaperonage of the Marquise de Beaulieu. When you have been married a year—above all when you have had a child—you will be perfectly free to go where you will, to receive whom you will——""Even my own husband!" flashed Horatia.For a second or two the Duchesse seemed staggered by the interruption and its bitterness; then, for she rather liked spirit, a slow smile revealed the absence of her false teeth."Let me tell you, my child," she riposted, "that if you do not take my advice you will end by making Armand ridiculous. Perhaps—having known him only so short a time—you have not yet discovered that there is nothing in the world that he hates so much. I counsel you to remember this."The victory—or at all events the last stroke in battle—undoubtedly remained with Madame de la Roche-Guyon.
(3)
Horatia was destined also to see Paris under a less smiling aspect.
An air as mild as milk, a sun almost of May, saluted her on the morning of the fourteenth of February, as Armand helped her from the family coach outside St. Germain l'Auxerrois. She was going into that church, of name ominous to Protestant ears, to hear her first Mass, and that a Requiem—the Requiem for the Duc de Berry, murdered in 1820, and father of the little boy whom all good Legitimists now regarded as their King. The occasion was therefore gloomy, but it was also exciting; though Horatia was clad in black she had no grief in her heart for an assassinated prince whom she had never seen, and though during the drive she had composed her features to a decent melancholy, she was secretly attacked by mirth at the overpoweringly funereal aspect of the Duchesse. It was an event when that lady left the Hôtel; and she had left it now swathed in crape, a-dangle with jet chains, and—unprecedented mark of mourning—devoid of her toupée. A large black rosary depended from her wrist. Armand and the Marquis sat opposite. Emmanuel had his usual air of sad patience; he was in fact the only one of the four who looked perfectly appropriate to the occasion (since the Dowager was merely ludicrous), yet Horatia knew that his Royalist sentiments were the least strong of all his family. Armand, his head thrown back against the brown silk lining of the vehicle, directed from time to time a glance at Horatia between his half-closed lids. He looked very well in black. From time to time also the Duchesse speculated on the likelihood of there being a riot; it was true that nothing of the sort had occurred on the 21st of January, the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI, when there had also been a Requiem; moreover the Government was forewarned. However, the fact that the ceremony had been forbidden to take place at St. Roch looked, she said with some unction, suspicious. It was plain that the old lady had no objection to the idea of a tumult, and perhaps even pictured herself as a martyr to the throne and the altar.
There were already two rows of emblazoned carriages on either side the church; a few curious sightseers, the usual beggars. The portals were hung with black. The Duchesse, on Emmanuel's arm, hobbled towards them; the leather door squeaked, Armand caught it from his brother, and they were inside. The Comte dipped his finger in the holy-water stoup and held it out half-smiling to his wife; finding, however, that she had no idea what he intended her to do, he crossed himself carelessly and preceded her up the aisle. The Swiss (whose semi-martial appearance Horatia supposed to be peculiar to this particular ceremony) having found seats for the Dowager and the Marquis, waved them into two chairs just behind.
The church too was hung with black—Horatia had never imagined an effect so gloomy. It was already nearly full of bowed, sable figures. In the middle of the nave was a great black-draped catafalque surrounded by enormous candles; the Bourbon arms glinted on the top, and at the end hung a large wreath of immortelles.
And the Mass began—but Horatia paid small attention to what, after all, she could not follow. Rather she came increasingly to realise that this was history. The old white-haired priest of whom she could catch glimpses at the altar, had, so they said, taken the last consolations of religion forty years ago to the murdered Queen; now he was praying (so she supposed) for the soul of the murdered Prince, her nephew. "Dona ei requiem," sang the choir, and it became impossible for her not to fancy that the Duc de Berry's actual body lay under the pall.
(4)
The Mass was finished, or nearly finished, Horatia conjectured, for people were moving their chairs about, when something was passed from hand to hand along the row in front of her—a paper of some kind. The Duchesse, when it came to her, kissed it; the Marquis Emmanuel glanced at it a moment and then, slightly turning, passed it to his brother behind him. And Horatia, looking at it with her husband (and having imagined it to be some holy relic) saw only a coloured lithograph of a boy about ten years of age, wearing a crown and a royal mantle.
"The Duc de Bordeaux—Henri V," whispered Armand, and he passed it on. Evidently there were other copies going round the congregation, for a moment or two later Horatia saw a young man in the uniform of the National Guard walk up to the catafalque and affix one to the end, just above the wreath of immortelles. A murmur rippled through the congregation then chairs scraped in all directions, and half a dozen ladies heavily veiled, and one or two men, were out of their places detaching the flowers, which, after kissing, they placed in their bosoms or their paroissiens. More came, till the catafalque was the centre of a crowd, and it took Emmanuel a long time to get the flower for which his grandmother asked him. Progress down the church was equally difficult, and Armand and Horatia became separated from their elders, who were in front. At the door there was difficulty in getting out and a sound of loud voices, and when they did at length emerge it was into the midst of a vociferating and hostile crowd.
"Take tight hold of my arm!" said Armand. "No, it is all right—they will not dare to touch us, the canaille!" And indeed they got through to the coach without much difficulty, except for the press of bodies. Threats were flying about, but nothing else, and Horatia was really more thrilled than frightened. Emmanuel was at the door of the coach, and opened it; Horatia, relinquishing Armand's arm, put her foot on the step. A man, slipping at that moment round the horses' heads, shouted something almost in her face; startled, she missed her footing on the high step, slipped and half fell into Emmanuel's arms, and was by him pushed into the coach, but not before she had a glimpse of Armand, white with fury, striking out at the man's face. The man went down; she stumbled into the coach, saw the Marquis catch his brother by the arm, and somehow, in the midst of cries, the two men also were in, the door was banged and the coach started.
It had all happened in a moment, and here was Armand, with blazing blue eyes, leaning forward with her hands in his, beseeching her to tell him that she was not hurt, that the scoundrel had not really touched her.
"No, no," reiterated Horatia. "He did not mean to, I am sure. It was my stupidity ... I slipped."
"Take my vinaigrette, child," said the Duchesse, fumbling among her blackness and beads.
"My sister was not frightened," observed the Marquis quietly. It was true; but Armand continued to breathe out slaughter all the way home.
"Well, it is over now," said the Dowager as they turned into the courtyard, "and you need not work yourself into a fever, mon petit."
But it was not over, it was only beginning. Late that afternoon came the news that the mob was breaking into St. Germain l'Auxerrois and pillaging it, smashing the glass, the statues, the pictures, the confessionals, all to the accompaniment of parodies of the services, in the vestments of the church. The great iron cross with the three fleurs-de-lis, which surmounted the building, was pulled down by order of the mayor of the district, destroying the organ in its fall, and by night one of the chef d'oeuvres of the Renaissance was merely bare walls and a heap of debris. Thus did the people of Paris testify their objection to the Legitimists.
On the Legitimists fell also the displeasure of the government, who, instead of proceeding against the rioters, arrested a prominent Royalist or two and issued warrants against the Archbishop of Paris (who was in hiding) and the curé of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. The Duchesse, not from nervousness, but rather from the joy of battle, ordered the great gates of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon to be closed and barricaded. But the Faubourg was quite quiet, though hundreds were howling outside the minister Dupin's house in the Rue Coq-Héron. And there were rumours that the mob had publicly given itself rendez-vous for the next day outside the Archbishop's palace.
On the morrow, therefore, Armand, unmoved by his wife's entreaties, sallied forth to see what was afoot. He was away about an hour and a half, a time that seemed to Horatia as long as the whole day of the wolf-hunt in Brittany. When, to her inexpressible relief, he returned, he announced that there was not a stone left of the Archevêché, that even the iron railings were gone, all the books and furniture in the river, and that the rioters were threatening Notre-Dame itself.
But it passed, that brief sirocco of popular fury, and Paris was gay again—had in fact been gay all the time, after the manner of Paris (seeing it was carnival-tide), though, or perhaps because, the richest ecclesiastical library in France was voyaging down the Seine, and the maskers on the quays were amusing themselves by trying to fish out the Archbishop's furniture from the stream.
CHAPTER IV
(1)
"Then, if you please, Sir, will you have dinner at a quarter after six?" suggested Mrs. Thwaites. "Mr. Dormer can hardly get here before six o'clock."
Tristram glanced at the leaden sky. "I am afraid that he will not be here then if we have snow, as seems probable. We had better say half-past. You will see that there is a good fire in his room, Mrs. Thwaites? He is ill, you know."
When she had withdrawn he got up from his writing-table and poked his own fire. It was ten o'clock on a morning late in February. In eight or nine hours Dormer would be here. And after dinner they would sit by the fire, and, if his friend were not too tired by the journey, perhaps he could have the relief of talking to him a little—or, if not that, at any rate the comfort of being with him, as on that day at Oxford. He was intensely anxious to see how he was, for about the beginning of December Dormer's headaches had become of alarming severity, and he had been ordered away from Oxford at a day or two's notice. Having spent the vacation and more at his brother's house at Colyton, he had now been to London to consult a well-known physician, and was at this moment on his way to Compton Parva.
Tristram stood a moment with his elbow on the mantelpiece, passed his hand once or twice over his eyes, and with a short, quick sigh went back to his letters.
As a watcher by the crisis of fever is cut off from all else, untouched by the life of every day that surges round the house but is powerless to enter it, unconcerned at great calamities, unresponsive to great joys, so, until Horatia's wedding-day, had it been with Tristram Hungerford. He was watching the last moments, as it were, of the person he loved best on earth. He did not care that the whole country was in a state of ferment, that the agricultural riots were spreading all over the south, and that men were being hanged for them, that there were tumults in London, nor even that in mid-November Wellington and Peel resigned and were succeeded by a Whig ministry under Lord Grey—which meant Reform. If the strain reached its acutest point on the evening that he said farewell to Horatia in the drawing-room at the Rectory, it was nevertheless prolonged, with very little alleviation, until the day that he stood behind her at the altar, and the vigil was over. Some means of relief indeed he had, for he prayed as he had never prayed before, fierce and desperate daily prayers for strength to endure; and he knew, too, at any rate, that his own life and circumstances would be changed by his ordination. More, he even saw, in the interval before the wedding, when Horatia was gone from Compton, a real ray of comfort in that prospect; there was still something he could do in life.
Then had come the marriage in December, the triple marriage. And after that a numbness and a merciful fatigue fell upon him for a while. He had returned with Mr. Grenville to Berkshire and taken up his ordinary occupation. Nearly every day he went over to see the old man, and Horatia's spaniel leapt up at him, and he sat in the rooms which would know her no more. It seemed to him sometimes that he was always there, to such an extent did Mr. Grenville lean on him. But so mortal a weariness had laid hold of him, body and mind, that he could not fully taste the pain. He often fell asleep in the middle of the morning, alarming Mrs. Thwaites. At night he slept long and almost dreamlessly. One waking dream pursued him indeed, for once again he stood behind Horatia in the little French Roman Catholic chapel in King Street, with its memories of banished royalty and the emigration, and in front of him was a figure in white silk and swansdown, with wired orange flowers, that shook when she moved, upon her deep satin bonnet, and with the long veil of a bride. At the time he had derived some self-control by pretending that it was someone else. "Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine..." he heard the words, too, in the unfamiliar pronunciation of the old French priest, and he saw the altar with its four pillars and canopy and some dark picture that he could not distinguish, and the strange little gallery beside it, and the Rector, looking old and bowed, and the Duke ... and another figure. Neither the civil marriage at the Embassy nor the more familiar ceremony at Margaret Chapel remained with him like this ... and this, he supposed, would wear itself off his brain in time; he was too tired to wrestle with it.
This state of blurred consciousness continued till about the middle of December. Then one day, quite suddenly, the fatigue, the mental mist, seemed to lift, and brighter and sharper than before the picture shone before him. And gradually it came to him what it meant. He was in love with another man's wife. He could not present himself for Orders. The straw of comfort to which he had clung was swept away, and now he saw, or thought he saw, the tarnished motives which had made him look forward to his entrance to the priesthood. It was not wonderful that Dormer's coming meant much to him, for he could not write about these things—he was not even sure that he could bring himself to talk about them.
(2)
The two friends each suffered a shock at dinner, for Tristram saw, in the full candle-light, how ill Dormer looked, and Dormer noticed that in two months Tristram had begun to grow grey at the temples.
But they talked during the meal of other things. Once settled in the study before the fire, however, Tristram began without preamble.
"Now, Charles, I want to hear exactly what the doctor says."
"Oh, the usual silly sort of thing that can never be carried out," replied Dormer with a weary smile. "If I were a farm labourer and lived out of doors and did not use my brain, I should never have another headache."
"But, seriously, doesn't he think you any better for these weeks at Colyton?"
"Not permanently, if at all." Dormer stirred his coffee. "The worst of it is that I'm almost afraid that he is right in what he says."
"What does he say—beyond the farm labourer idea?" asked Tristram anxiously.
"He says that I cannot think of going back to work this term; that if I do, I shall have a bad breakdown, and it may be years before I am able to write another word."
Tristram's heart sank.
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Well, there isn't much choice for me," responded his friend sighing. "He recommends, I might say he orders, a voyage."
And as Dormer struck Tristram as being extraordinarily submissive to this decree, Tristram was proportionately alarmed. But he concealed this fact, and merely said, "So he recommends a voyage, does he? Where to?"
"The Mediterranean."
"That," said Tristram with decision, "is where I have wanted to go all my life. I shall come with you."
"You!" exclaimed Dormer, a gleam of animation on his face. "I only wish it were possible. But how about your ordination? Would it be worth while for you to come for part of the time? I admit I had thought of you."
And in this confession he was certainly not overstepping the mark, having indeed schemed to get Tristram away at once from his present surroundings, so full of painful memories, but not having hoped that Tristram would himself jump at the idea.
"Certainly it would be worth it," replied his friend. "Besides, there is no hurry about my ordination ... This is a godsend to me. Now tell me what you have done. What about Rose and the Councils?"
"Rose is arranging for Newman to do them," replied Dormer. "He offered to wait for me, but I should not like the work to be delayed on my account. Newman knows as much about the subject as I do—probably more. But there is a great deal of reading to be done, and I should not be fit for that under a year. Of course I know that he is overworked as it is, and doesn't sleep well, but as he sees the importance to the cause that this particular book should not be delayed, he will drop something else. So that is settled."
Tristram vented his feelings without mercy on the fire. "I'm sorry to hear it," he observed very shortly. "I think Rose might have waited."
"I knew you would feel like that," said his friend with a half-amused smile that ended, despite himself, in a sigh. "Let's leave it alone ... About yourself—I don't understand what you said about your ordination?"
"Oh, never mind that now," said Tristram, abandoning the poker. "I never did like those Cambridge men!—Suppose we go to bed."
As Tristram, later, sat stretched out alone by the fire, he was realising acutely what it must mean to Dormer to give up the work on which he had entered with such hopes, and, quite unreasonably, he felt that he hated Rose and Newman, although he knew quite well that Dormer must have over-ridden both of them. It was just like him. Life was a sorry place. As for his own troubles, how could he, with Charles looking like that, risk keeping him awake by talking about them. It was not his sympathy that he wanted, for that he knew he had always, under its veil of more than ordinary reserve, but his counsel. So badly did he want the latter that it seemed an aggravation to have him in the house and to be silent, to know that if he went upstairs now he could have it—at a price for the giver. But he had not so learned friendship.
(3)
Yet, after all, Dormer was not asleep. The fire to which Mrs. Thwaites had paid special attention was burning with the disturbing brilliance which comes to a fire when one is in bed and desires the dark, and, lying wakeful, he watched it leaping on the faded chintzes. And he, too, was going through a dark hour.
The austerity of Charles Dormer's religion was the measure of its passion. Knight and lover, he was set upon a quest, whereof the road was holiness, and the end—God. And that he might not follow wandering fires he had looked back for guidance to the first ages of the Church, to the training of the confessors and martyrs, who had learnt of the divine pattern from those who had themselves seen the Lord. In this school of character he found no comfortable complacency, no sickly sentimentality, but hardness, and reality and the cross.
From a boy, just as he had been sure that he was called to serve God as a priest, so had he been certain that he would never marry. It fitted in, therefore, with his own instinct when he came to realise that the Fathers had given honour to those who lived the life of sacrifice for the kingdom of Heaven's sake, and that, taking literally the words of their Master and of St. Paul, they had applied them in particular to the priesthood. The memory that an almost renaissance love of the beautiful had once entered into fierce conflict with this ideal disposed him to follow still more closely the principles of asceticism. To observe the primitive duty of fasting during the first decades of the nineteenth century, and that in an Oxford college, might have seemed a task likely to tax the highest ingenuity, but others besides Charles Dormer accomplished it. Like his friend Hurrell Froude, though unknown to him, he devised methods of self-chastisement which would have seemed morbid and ludicrous not only to that generation but also to its descendants. Of their extent Keble knew a little and Tristram guessed. And now Dormer himself suspected—in fact he partly knew—that his own self-discipline was partly responsible for his state of health. Had he been right, or was it after all only some subtle form of pride or self-will that had set him on this path? Perhaps he had been making an idol both of his warfare with himself and of his work, and this was why he was going to be taken away from both ... At any rate it was clearly God's Will that he should be thus taken away, and therefore, however hard, it was the best for him.... Tristram, too, was coming with him, and he fell asleep, as the fire died down, wondering why it had been so easy to persuade him to this course.
When he came downstairs next morning, after breakfasting, by orders, in his room, Dormer discovered Tristram engaged with maps and guide-books, in the business-like mood of one who intends to get things settled up at once. They talked over plans for about an hour; after which, since there was a gleam of sun, he was commanded to wrap up and come for a walk.
He laughed, and rallied Tristram on his despotism, but it was pleasant enough, and he obeyed it. There had been no snow the previous day; it was yet to come. They walked between the bare hedgerows, still talking plans, discussing the rival attractions of Sicily and Corfu, settling how, when Dormer was well enough, they would take the opportunity of seeing Naples and Rome, and possibly Florence, and returning by sea, perhaps, from Leghorn, if they got as far north. Animation grew upon both of them as they realised the delightful possibilities of their journey, and was not damped when a sudden storm of sleet, descending on them, drove them into an open shed by the side of the road, where, seated on the shafts of a hay-waggon, they continued for a while, scarcely conscious of the change of place.
At last, however, the subject suddenly ran dry, and Tristram, getting up, went to the doorway to see if the storm were over.
"I am afraid we must make up our minds to another quarter of an hour or so," he reported. "I do trust that you are not cold, Charles. Pull your cloak properly about you."
Dormer obeyed, and then, still sitting on the shaft, he launched a disturbing question.
"What did you mean last night, Tristram, when you said that there was no hurry for your ordination? Is it that you are glad to get away because of all that has happened, or is there something else?"
Tristram hesitated a second, then he took the plunge. "I am glad to get away, but there is something else."
"I thought so," said his friend quietly. "Do you mean to tell me about it?"
"Of course," replied Tristram. "I should have told you last night, but I didn't want my affairs to keep you awake."
"Well, what is it? I am awake now and am not going to bed for eight hours at least, so this is a good opportunity to tell me," observed Dormer, who was not troubled by incongruities of time or place.
"Charles, I cannot be ordained!"
The effort to get out these words was apparent; not so the effort which it cost Dormer to hide the shock they gave him. He merely asked coolly, "Why not?"
"Because I'm thinking day and night of another man's wife. Charles, Charles, it's unbearable! I see her always as she was on her wedding-day, and ... I see him standing beside her, too. I picture them in their own house. The Rector reads little things from her letters. He does not say much, out of consideration for me perhaps—only I know that she is happy so far—thank God!—very happy."
Dormer looked at him compassionately as he sat, his head in his hands, on a log near the door. "My poor Tristram!" he said gently. "I know. I quite understand." And then he was silent.
After a little he went on again. "All the same I hardly see how you could expect it to be otherwise. Of course you see her. If one image has been in a person's mind for many years, how can it be suddenly expelled at a certain hour, on a certain day? God does not ask from us impossibilities."
"But I want her," said Tristram from between his hands, "more than I have ever wanted her in my life ... and sometimes I think I could kill him!"
It appeared to Dormer that these statements might or might not be serious. For the present he ignored them, and only said, "I'm thankful you are coming away with me. You need to give yourself a rest." And then, because, for Tristram's sake, he himself wanted time to think, he got up and went to the door. "The storm is nearly over, isn't it?"
It was not, but since the carrier's cart was at that moment descried coming along the road, and since Tristram thought that Dormer looked cold, he felt obliged to take the opportunity of getting him home without further delay. After all, his own affairs could wait a little longer.
(4)
But Tristram's need was too pressing to let them wait for very long; and this time he made the opening himself. It was after dinner, and they were in the library again, and Dormer was not looking nearly as tired as the night before. So he said, almost directly they had sat down:
"Tell me what you think I should do, Charles. Surely you see that I can't be ordained?"
And Dormer, who had spent the afternoon in preparation for this question, said, gazing at the fire, "My advice is that you should be patient with yourself. You see you have been through a long strain. You have acted, God knows. Anyone would say that you had given her up absolutely, and you have certainly been a friend to both of them, to him as well as to her. Give yourself time, and your feelings will follow."
"Oh, yes, I've acted," said Tristram. "But what is that but a case of necessity after all? All these years I have watched her and tried ineffectually to do whatever small things I could for her, so that it was impossible to fail her in a big thing."
"Impossible for you, perhaps, but then you are one of the most unselfish people I have ever met."
"If you think I'm unselfish," returned Tristram rather bitterly, "how do you explain that at this moment I hate Armand just because I know Horatia to be blissfully happy with him? If she were unhappy I should hate him still more, but that does not affect my present feeling."
"My dear Tristram, don't put yourself to the trouble of telling me that sort of thing! Of course it is wrong, utterly wrong, but if your will is constant, if you hate and repudiate such thoughts, they only amount to a suggestion of the Evil One."
"I wish I could believe you."
"I am sure," said Dormer, "that in time you will come to hold the same view. And meanwhile I should just put away the idea of ordination. You were going to wait till Lent anyhow if necessary, and you can wait till June."
Tristram looked straight at him to see if he could read anything more in his expression.
"I don't know that I can trust you, so to speak," he said slowly. "I think you are too kind—to other people."
Dormer raised his eyebrows with a little smile. "Am I?"
"I know that I did what I could," went on Tristram in a sort of outburst, "and it hurt all the time like a knife. But now I feel swamped with a sense of failure, and I pray and go on praying, but there is no comfort anywhere. Sometimes I begin to wonder if, apart from my own feelings, I did right in helping on the marriage at all." And he laughed, because he was conscious of his own habit of introspection, and half ashamed to lay it bare.
At that Dormer sat up a little in his chair, and turned a very penetrating gaze upon him. "Now what do you mean exactly by that? I thought you felt quite sure from the beginning?"
"So I did," responded his friend, "and so I do, but—it's no use. I cannot really trust Armand. I know nothing against him, but I have a very shrewd suspicion that he only thinks of himself, and that he will always put his own interests before Horatia's. And for all Horatia's apparent independence she needs protection far more than many of her sex."
"Well?"
"You see I know Horatia," pursued Tristram, "and I realised that if she were once awakened, and then her hopes were frustrated, it might be a very serious thing for her; and there was always the chance that Armand might turn out better than I expected. Of course I put all that to the Rector, and, as you know, by degrees he came round."
"I quite understand. It would have been hard enough to resign her to a man whom you knew and trusted, especially as it practically devolved on you to plead your rival's cause, but it would have been easy compared with this."
"Yes, that's just it. It fairly breaks me to feel that I have given her up, perhaps, only to sorrow and neglect."
"You can't tell about that, Tristram," said Dormer very gravely. "When you resigned her, you gave her absolutely into the hands of God, and that means you gave her as you would give yourself, for joy or for sorrow. It has always seemed to me that it is quite possible for vicarious resignation to the Divine Will to be a higher thing than the resignation of oneself; certainly it can be a harder.... And, besides," he went on after a moment's pause, "I have something more to say. I have a favourite theory of my own. That rather hackneyed phrase of two people being made for one another is capable of another interpretation. It may mean that from all eternity Providence has intended two souls to meet to play upon each other, and that it is only through the discipline of married life that they can become what God intended them to become. I should never think of any two people as necessarily destined to happiness, but as destined by their union to work out God's Will. After all, what have any of us to do with happiness?"
There was a long silence. Tristram lay back in his chair, and Dormer looked as if he were thinking that the two souls in question would perhaps be the better for any kind of discipline. But at last he said:
"To go back to what you said this morning, that you wanted her more than you have ever wanted her in your life—"
"Yes?"
"The more I think of it the more I believe you to be experiencing the inevitable struggleafterthe sacrifice has been made. Even our Lord knew what that was."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing was wanting to the completeness of the sacrifice when He offered the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, and yet—afterwards—came the Agony in the Garden."
(5)
That night again his bedroom fire was the companion of Dormer's vigil. He sat long before it, thinking of all that Tristram had told him. He had always had a high ideal for his friend, but now he had even a higher, for he could not help the conviction that God was dealing specially with him, and that disappointment meant that He had some particular work for him to do. But he saw that Tristram had still a hard fight before him, for though he was, perhaps, tormenting himself unnecessarily about his feelings, yet if he was to become what Dormer believed, more and more, that God meant him to be, his loss must be turned from mere endurance into the painful joy of sacrifice. He guessed that it was possible for a soul fully to submit, and yet to fret, and that such an one would for the time lie beyond the reach of consolation.
Charles Dormer could never so much as think of consolation without the memory of Mrs. Hungerford coming back to him. Yes, if anyone could have comforted Tristram it would have been his own mother. This was her room; Dormer had it always when he stayed here, and it seemed full of her. Downstairs in the dining-room—he had glanced at it several times to-day over Tristram's head—was a picture, representing her as standing and looking down at her husband, seated at a table that bore a map of the West Indies outspread upon its crimson cloth. Curtains of a darker crimson, looped back to columns, and a vista of mixed landscape completed the ill-painted composition, which was only made beautiful by Mrs. Hungerford's expression. But, looking at that, Dormer knew why, as boy and young man, he had told her so many things.
It was impossible to think of her as anything else but a mother, and yet she had not married till she was nearly forty, and she had only had one child. To him she had always seemed the ideal of motherhood. That he should think so was no disloyalty to his own mother, to whose memory he still gave the almost awed worship of his childish days, for he saw now how that mother, despite her early marriage and her five sons, had never had just this gift which would always have been Mrs. Hungerford's, married or single. He knew that Mrs. Hungerford had understood what his own mother had been to him, as she understood everything else. Perhaps, indeed, she understood about Tristram now....
CHAPTER V
(1)
The pillaging of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the fact that it now bore the legend "Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement" upon its doors had, of course, no direct effect on Horatia—beyond teaching her of what the Paris mob was capable, and how exiguous were the titles to respect of the Laffitte ministry, already on its deathbed. Her places of worship lay elsewhere—the Embassy chapel in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, or that of the Reverend Lewis Way in the Avenue de Neuilly. For the Hon. and Rev. Stephen Grenville, if he wished to keep his daughter faithful to the Church of her baptism, had done a very shrewd thing when he extracted from her a promise to attend Morning Prayer every Sunday, when possible, and, if not, to read it herself. Horatia kept her promise faithfully. However bright the day, however alluring the prospect of going out with Armand, she resisted the temptation, and set forth, rather scandalised at the crowd of pleasure-seekers in the Tuileries gardens or elsewhere.
On the whole the service was pleasant to her, chiefly because it was a link with all things English, and in particular with her home. However commonplace and familiar "Dearly beloved brethren" might sound in English sunoundings, Horatia found that it had power greatly to stir her heart in a foreign land. It gave her, too, a sort of happy sadness to displace the Evangelical minister by her father, and his chapel (which had been a café) by Compton church.
Armand could not accompany Horatia to church, nor could she go with him—if he ever went there. This separation she had, of course, anticipated from the first, and it did not seem really to be of great importance. It mattered more to her that he did not care so much about the things of the past as she did—a discovery which she was gradually making, and which appeared to her all the more disconcerting because he, by his ancestors, belonged to that past in a way that she never could. But it interested him infinitely less, convinced and even fanatical Legitimist that he was.
She saw the thing clearly at last on the day that he drove her to Versailles in his smart phaeton lined with blue flower-dotted piqué, wherein, however, as a "fashionable" should, he sat upon so high a seat that it was extremely difficult to talk to him. Besides, there was the ridiculous little tiger behind, in his overcoat to the ankles, his gaiters and his shiny hat, who could, Horatia imagined, hear everything that they said. But she enjoyed the drive exceedingly, and looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing the palace. Yet, when they got there, Armand displayed small concern as to which part of the great pile had stood in the days of Louis the Just, and which had been built by the Grand Monarque, or on what balcony the King and Queen had showed themselves to the mob on that wild day in October, 1789. She could not but be disappointed, for she regarded her husband, quite justly, as the scion of a long line of devoted royalists, and she remembered how he had spoken, in England, of the Lilies. To her the deserted palace, abandoned for want of means to keep it up and shortly, it was said, to be converted into a museum, was heart-rending in its associations of fallen glory. And Armand's ancestors had been among the very people who had moved, gay and gallant, upon its wide terraces; in no point would he have disgraced the cohort himself. But it was evident that the empty basins of the royal fountains, the forlorn bosquets, roused in him no pleasurable melancholy, and that the Allée d'Apollon was merely a place where he could tell her, undisturbed, how charming she looked, and laugh at her sad face. In the end he took her away before she had seen all she desired, lest the drive back should not be accomplished without rain, "and your pretty dress be spoiled."
(2)
Horatia had reason to remember that day at Versailles, because of what occurred on the following morning.
She was paying her accustomed visit to her grandmother-in-law. The Duchesse was sitting propped up in bed, looking unusually grim, and not by any means beautified by the wrap in which she was enveloped.
"My dear," said the old lady, after some desultory conversation, "I have something to say to you which you probably will not like. You really must not see so much of Armand."
"Not ... not see so much of Armand!" gasped Horatia, stupefied. "Not see so much of my husband!"
"No," replied Madame de la Roche-Guyon emphatically, and the flaps on her lace cap waggled. "You are always about with him, and it is not convenable. I hear that you spent the whole day together at Versailles yesterday."
"But, Madame," ejaculated Horatia, scarcely believing her ears, "I don't under——what can you possibly mean? IfIcannot spend the day with Armand——"
"Now listen, ma fille," said the Duchesse, not unkindly. "I do not know how it may be with the bourgeoisie, but in our world it is not the thing for a husband to be always dancing attendance on his wife. A man who does so, after the first few weeks of marriage, is looked on as a nincompoop, or a bore. He is, in fact, despised. And no one wants to receive husband and wife together at their salons; it is gênant, it destroys all wit and freedom of intercourse. Armand will naturally attach himself to some salon, and you must not expect him to accompany you to those which you frequent—nor, above all, to be constantly seen about with you in public places. It is not the part of a galant homme. And you have, for the present, the chaperon we have provided for you, Eulalie de Beaulieu."
A red spot came into Horatia's cheek. "But I do not like Madame de Beaulieu. I do not wish to go about with her."
Even the snort which the Dowager permitted herself did not destroy the air of cold dignity with which she replied. "You seem to forget the class of society into which you have married. It would be unheard of for a bride to be seen about alone. When her husband does not accompany her—and, as I say, the time for that is already long past—she must be under the escort of her mother or her mother-in-law. You have neither. Did my years and health permit I would myself fulfil the duty, but if you do not wish to have my death at your door you will accept the chaperonage of the Marquise de Beaulieu. When you have been married a year—above all when you have had a child—you will be perfectly free to go where you will, to receive whom you will——"
"Even my own husband!" flashed Horatia.
For a second or two the Duchesse seemed staggered by the interruption and its bitterness; then, for she rather liked spirit, a slow smile revealed the absence of her false teeth.
"Let me tell you, my child," she riposted, "that if you do not take my advice you will end by making Armand ridiculous. Perhaps—having known him only so short a time—you have not yet discovered that there is nothing in the world that he hates so much. I counsel you to remember this."
The victory—or at all events the last stroke in battle—undoubtedly remained with Madame de la Roche-Guyon.