She passed into her cabinet de toilette. This room was somewhat famous, for it had been decorated by Huret in the second quarter of the century, when “chinoiseries” and “singeries” were all the fashion, and on the jonquil-coloured paint of its walls, patterned with gold arabesques, queer little apes frolicked in a thousand antics, while sedate Chinamen walked under umbrellas or fished unendingly in bamboo-foliaged streams. Save for these, its fifty years old occupants, the room was empty. Gone was the great toilet table with all its appurtenances where the Duchesse de Trélan had been obliged to spend so much of her time, had sat so often watching her hair being piled up into some elaborate erectionà la candeurorà la victoire, and listening, half against her will, to the compliments and small talk of some male visitor. All that wasleft was the great full-length swinging mirror, mounted by Caffieri, with its couple of doves playfully pecking each other at the bottom, and its coronet at the top—the mirror which had so often reflected the Duchesse de Trélan, majestic in the spreading, festooned hoop and close-fitting square-cut bodice of traditional Court costume, thegrande robe parée, pearls lying in a rope on her white breast and pearls across her towering headdress of powder and curls and feathers . . . and which now showed Mme Vidal, the concierge of Mirabel, in a plain black dress with a rather old-fashioned fichu about the shoulders, and above it a courageous, sensitive face with a beautifully modelled brow, surmounted by masses of fair hair going grey—the concierge of Mirabel with the keys in her hand.
Valentine de Trélan looked at her image a moment and then walked to the door. The room opening out of this was her boudoir, where she had been sitting on the day which had put an end to all this life. Two years before that, something else had come to an end there too. Here, for the first time, she knew a real hesitation; but after a second or two she fitted the key into the lock and entered.
When, as a bride, Mme de Trélan had made the acquaintance of this room, she had fallen in love with its decorations, of the purest style of the Regency, and she had ever afterwards refused to have it redecorated—had refused to exchange Pineau’s shells and arabesques and fantastic birds and cornucopias either for the prettinesses of Van Spaendonck’s doves and rose-wreaths and forget-me-nots, or for the thin Pompeian style of a later fashion. And thus the room was very much as it had appeared to her at her first sight of it—and at her last.
For her boudoir with its furniture was quite untouched; its complete preservation seemed almost to argue some cynical purpose. The door giving on to the corridor, which had been broken down by the torrent of bodies that had poured through it, had been carefully put back in place. Perhaps the same care had obliterated the stains on its other side, where her maître d’hôtel had died for her in vain. Here were all the chairs and footstools of rose-coloured taffeta and silver, and the Boule secrétaire that her husband had given her, and the commode made for her on hermarriage by Riesener. She had never thought to gaze again on those familiar half-blown roses of its beautiful inlay, all amaranth and laburnum and tulipwood.
Her breath seemed to stop; it all became so real again. Just here, where the mirror with its framework of garlanded palm-stems still hung on the walls between the windows, here she had faced that river of violence and had thought, half hoped, to die. She could see now the door crashing inwards, the evil and stupid faces, the menacing gestures, the bare arms, the eyes alight with the lust of plunder and carnage . . . but the cries, the oaths, that spume on the tide of invasion, she could hear no longer—not even the scream of her murdered servant, which once she had fancied would ring in her ears for ever. No; though she could see the catastrophe, it was like a painting, fixed, and lacking the vitality of sound and motion—more frozen, a good deal, than the tapestry in the Galerie de Diane. In this room only one voice sounded, where it had sounded in her hearing for the last time, and it said only one thing. The room was full of it. . . . Very pale, Valentine turned from looking at the doorway by which Destiny had entered to look at that other, through which all her heart had gone out, with Gaston. The scene to which that exit had been the close had none of the quality of canvas or tapestry; it was alive, burning, as vivid as of yesterday. How had they ever come to it? But that she had asked herself a thousand times in the years between. And regret was so vain and so weak, and tore so terribly. She would not often visit this room again. . . .
As Mme de Trélan locked the door by which she had entered, she noticed that even her work-table was still here—an oval thing of marquetry and ormulu, poised on slender curving legs. Without thinking she opened it, to see inside on the gathered brocade of the lining a few odd skeins of embroidery silks, a tiny pair of scissors and a golden thimble, and wondered whether, since it did not seem to have been examined, any one had discovered the little false bottom that it had. There was nothing in it, she knew; yet her fingers sought it out. And she was mistaken! There in the recess were a couple of brooches and an old locket on a chain—things outworn, ornaments of no value which she did not recollect having placed there.The locket bore her maiden monogram in pearls and garnets, but it was empty, and she could not even remember what it used to hold. She slipped it into her pocket.
A moment later she was hurrying down the great staircase. A glance at her watch had shown her that Mme Prévost was almost due. She did not wish to be found up here. Then she remembered that the ex-concierge could not get in unless she admitted her. Truly she was the châtelaine of Mirabel!
The morning that the Duchesse de Trélan was led through the show portions of her own mansion by the former caretaker, to be initiated into what she was to point out to others, was naturally an initiation into a strange kind of discipline as well. Valentine had anticipated this. But that first morning’s experience was the most painful; afterwards she was to find that to accompany visitors herself was not nearly so trying. To that, she thought, she would become almost accustomed in time.
It was certainly one drop less in the cup of desecration that the family portraits were not displayed to the public view. Their absence, which had puzzled Mme de Trélan at first, had been explained by Mme Prévost. They were all hung in a small locked gallery on the second floor, together with what was left of the collection of china and other objects of rarity, and the Deputy Camain kept the key himself. “And he won’t so much as let you put your nose inside,” had concluded the ex-concierge sourly. “Often have I offered to dust them cups and saucers, and he won’t have it. Afraid of their being broken, I suppose—much more likely to break them himself with that feather brush he keeps in there.”
“And the family pictures are there too, you say?” asked Valentine.
“Every one,” returned Mme Prévost, “except the last Duchess’s, that had a pike stuck through it, and was spoilt.”
But for that pike’s activities, of which she was aware, Mme de Trélan would scarcely have ventured to ratify the assent which she had so precipitately given to Camain’s proposal. There was no other portrait of her at Mirabel, though she had often been painted.
In a week Mme de Trélan had settled down to the strange, lonely, monotonous life in a manner that amazed herself. The days began to follow each other in a regular routine, so many in thedécadefor cleaning, two for visitors. She contrived to secure her provisions without ever entering the tiny village, lest some of the older inhabitants might recognise her, in spite of her altered appearance. Suzon Tessier, resigned, yet always anticipatory of ill, had been twice to see her. M. Georges Camain had not yet made his appearance, but that he would soon do so Suzon had warned her. Valentine only trusted that he would not bring with him that Mlle Dufour mentioned by the sentry, of whose intimacy with the Deputy she had then heard for the first time, for there were memories connected with the actress which she did not wish revived.
When the bell jangled, therefore, about three o’clock one fine afternoon on a day devoted neither to cleaning nor to visitors the Duchesse felt convinced that it announced her employer. Sure enough, when she opened the door there stood M. Georges Camain, deputy of Maine-et-Loire, debonair even in the bottle-green habit with mother-of-pearl buttons, cut by Heyl and therefore thene plus ultraof that strange mania which afflicted the fashionables of the Directory for wearing purposely ill-fitting coats. Muffled in approved style to his very underlip in the voluminous folds of his neckcloth, he swept off his hat with a rather exaggerated politeness.
“Ah, our new guardian of the Hesperides! Not that I should wish, Madame, to compare you to a dragon! Have I your permission to enter?”
“You are master here, Monsieur le Député,” replied Mme de Trélan, standing back. She disliked his exuberant politeness.
“Not I, Madame Vidal,” retorted he, coming in, however, with an air of possession somewhat at variance with his words. “I am but the servant of our five kings. Well, I hope that Suzon considers you sufficiently comfortable here? She is always so solicitous about her relations—except about me!”
The Duchesse, still standing in the passage, assured him that she had nothing to complain of. He asked her a few more questions: whether her scrubbers were willingand obedient, whether she found the responsibility too much, and finally revealed what he had more particularly come for—to look over the collection of porcelain before putting it into her charge. And on that he preceded her up to the second floor, talking as he went.
“You observe, Madame Vidal,” he said, when at last he stopped before a door and fitted the key into the lock, “that I preferred the china in here to get dusty rather than to give the breaking of it to your predecessor’s fingers. But needlework keeps the hands fine, does it not?”—he gave as he spoke a glance at hers—“and I feel sure that those of yours could be trusted about the most fragile porcelain. I shall make over this key to you without uneasiness.”
Mme de Trélan followed him into the room with the tiny thrill of distaste which any personal remark from him always raised in her . . . and was instantly confronted, over the glass cases, by the eyes of her husband, looking down at her with a smile from his frame on the grey panelling of the wall.
Drouais, the King’s painter, had depicted him at three-quarter length in the twenty-third year of his age and in a primrose satin coat. His left hand rested lightly on his hip, just above the silver swordhilt which showed below the silk. A signet ring of emerald gleamed on the middle finger, and through the guard of the sword was stuck a yellow rose. And in the pastel the very assurance of the highborn, smiling face beneath the rime of its powdered hair was as seductive as the beauty of its lines. If this young prince with the rose in his swordhilt possessed so obviously everything that life had to offer, who could grudge him those gifts? He would always use them with ease and exquisite taste.
The blood rushed to Mme de Trélan’s heart. She had forgotten that the pictures were here. For a moment she did not hear what the Deputy was saying . . . Gaston de Trélan was not without company on the walls. His father was there, and the Cardinal of Louis XV.’s days, a mixture of sensuality and inscrutability in his lace and scarlet, and Antoine de Trélan, the marshal of France under the Roi Soleil, greatly bewigged and cuirassed, and François de Trélan, the mousquetaire, his hand on his sword, and thefirst owner of Mirabel, César de Trélan, by Clouet, in his tilted cap and earrings and little pointed beard. That imprisonment was shared by the ladies of the house also, and Diane de Trélan in her great ruff hung side by side with the kind and saintly-visaged Duchesse Eléonore. Only Valentine’s own picture seemed missing.
She hoped that Camain would make no reference to the personages by whom they were surrounded, of whose eyes she felt herself so conscious. And he did not, for his thoughts were set on the porcelain he had come to see, and he went the round with her, taking up with his careful plebeian fingers a fragile little two-handled cup out of which a queen might have drunk, touching a green Sèvres dish affectionately, calling her attention to a biscuit group, tendering her morsels of elementary ceramic information. And she began to see that this self-made, self-educated son of a small Angers builder had really learnt something about the least durable of all the arts, and seemed to appreciate the ephemeral loveliness of its productions.
And thus she went round half the room with him, listening to his commendations, and felt her husband’s eyes watching her.
“This has a crack, I’m afraid,” said the Deputy ruefully, taking up a teapot of yellow Sèvres covered with gold spots. “Hardly wonderful, when one thinks of the risks they have run. Some was smashed that night, I know. The People when inflamed with zeal is not remarkable for discrimination. Now, isn’t that Meissen candlestick delicious, Mme Vidal?”
He went on. As was perhaps natural, the ancient and prized but much less sophisticated Henri Deux ware did not appeal to him. Some of the old Rouen he approved, for it was gay, and some of the Chinese porcelain, but not all.
“I can’t think what the ci-devants could see in some of this foreign stuff!” he declared, stopping before a large bowl of dark blue Chinese pottery, over which crawled sinuous dragons of lighter blue and cream faintly tinged with pink. “I call that coarse!” Valentine, who knew that her father-in-law had prized the bowl because it was early Ming, did not venture to dispute this dictum.
“I like a thing with some work in it,” went on M.Georges Camain. “Now I feel I could have done those beasts myself; look at the rough, raised outline they have. It may be old—I believe it is. Give me something more modern and delicate, like the setting of that jasper cup over there—Gouthière, I fancy. You have a good look at it afterwards, Mme Vidal.”
The jasper cup was still here then! Yes, she would have a good look at it—afterwards, not now.
From the cup, under its glass shade, M. Camain’s eyes strayed up to the portraits.
“It would be strange, would it not, if all these painted gentry round us could really see us in this sanctum of theirs,” he said suddenly, giving voice to Valentine’s own thoughts. “That old lady yonder—she looks a terror!—rather reminds me of my aunt Fourrier, who used to keep the bric-à-brac shop in the Rue St. Julien at Angers.”
And he indicated the portrait of the Duchesse Charlotte-Elisabeth, a voluminous dame who had flourished in the Regency.
“The last Duchesse of all isn’t here,” went on M. Camain, raising his spy-glass again as if, after all, he were not sure. “They destroyed her portrait the night the château was taken—again that undiscriminating zeal of the Sovereign People, more undiscriminating than usual in this case, for I understand that the Duchesse was known for her charities. And I have often regretted the destruction on other grounds, because since Mirabel has been under my charge I wanted to see what she was like, and why the Duc deserted her.”
“Deserted her!” exclaimed Valentine, in a voice that made the Deputy drop his glass and turn and look at her. Then she added faintly, “I never heard. . . . Did he desert her, then?”
“Perhaps that’s putting it rather strongly,” said Camain smiling. “We all know that the aristocrats who hopped so gaily across the frontiers in ’90 and ’91 thought they were coming back again in a few weeks. I daresay the Duc de Trélan had the same delusion. But I have heard it said that he never even gave his wife the chance of going with him—hooked it without her knowing . . . I believe they hardly ever saw one another. So she stayed behind—more fool she!—and lost her life in consequence.”
Fire swept over Valentine’s pale visage. “Ah no, no, but he did——” she broke out, and then, finding a difficulty in speaking, pulled herself together. “I mean, surely he must have given the Duchesse the chance of accompanying him!” She looked down at the floor as she spoke; she was aware how deeply she was discomposed, and how hot an indignation possessed her at this false accusation which she had not the right to deny. And she went on, feverishly, “In any case did not a great many . . . ci-devants . . . emigrate without their wives?”
“Yes—sometimes with other people’s!” retorted the Deputy with a wink. “However, I never heard that the Duc de Trélan did that. Mademoiselle . . . the . . . er . . . lady to whom he was assigned as admirer at the time—untruly as I believe—would certainly never have gone with him; she was too good a patriot for that! That’s Monseigneur himself yonder, over the green console. What do you think of him? He must have been much younger when that was painted, of course.”
Valentine was forced to turn and look with him at the young man in primrose satin. “I . . . I think he must have been very handsome.” Surely that remark was both safe and natural!
“Oh, you women!” exclaimed the Deputy, showing signs of a return to his jocular manner. “That always takes you—never fails! They say the Duchesse herself was not insensible to it. Well, if it is any consolation to you, Madame Vidal, no doubt he is handsome still, for that matter . . . more than can be said for that old boy next him. Who is it?” He put up his glass again to make out the name of Gaston de Trélan’s neighbour, a very early dark portrait of a Knight of Malta.
“And I cannot believe,” went on Valentine with a thrill in her voice, “that he never invited his wife to go with him.”
“ ‘Raoul de Saint-Chamans, Vice-Commander of the Order,’ ” read out Camain. “What Order, I wonder?—I beg your pardon, Madame Vidal; you were saying? . . .”
Mme de Trélan ran a finger nervously along the edge of one of the cases. “I was wondering, Monsieur le Député, from what you said, whether you knew anything of the Duc’s present whereabouts.”
“I? Dame, no, nothing at all! Why should I?”
Valentine tried to perpetrate a jest. “He might appear at Mirabel some day.”
“I shouldn’t advise him to,” returned the Deputy rather grimly. “Not, at all events, till he has made his peace with the Government. . . . If he should turn up I shall expect you to tell me,” he added lightly. “It is part of your duties as concierge. But of course he will never come. Why should he, after all these years? Much too comfortable where he is, I expect—probably married again to some rich English lady. . . . Look here, Madame Vidal, I must be going. No, leave the shutters open, please, because I should like you to go round and have a good dust here when I am gone. I keep a feather duster in the drawer of that console, under Monseigneur the ex-Duc. After you, if you please!”
He held open the door for her.
“Do you know, Madame,” he said abruptly as they went down the great staircase together, “what I should like to do with Mirabel? It is mere extravagant nonsense trying to turn it into a museum. There’s the château of Versailles already for that, and at the Louvre those cart-loads of pictures and statues that General Bonaparte sent from Italy the year before last. No, I should like to see Mirabel made into something like an orphanage,—run by the State, of course, not by nuns—for the children of dead soldiers. If our wars go on much longer, they will need it—poor little devils!”
He spoke with genuine feeling. Valentine was astonished, and listened with a sort of unwilling respect while he developed the theme a little. By this time they were outside her own modest quarters in the lower regions, and here the Deputy, asking if he might come in, entered practically without permission. Once inside, he pulled from his pocket a leather case.
“Permit me, Madame, since I am here,” he said, “to discharge the office of paymaster. The concierge of Mirabel is usually paid on the first of every month, but you have no doubt had to disburse something, and will be glad not to wait till the beginning of Prairial.” And he counted out assignats on to the cloth.
Valentine de Trélan flushed. Although she knew thatthere was a salary attached to the post she occupied, it was a different thing to receive it in concrete form from the hand of an authority whom she did not recognise. She instantly renewed her resolve of giving it in charity through Suzon Tessier.
“Now I will leave you the key of the china gallery,” said Camain, bringing out the object in question. “None of the cases are locked, as you saw, so do not admit any visitors there at present. Keep everything carefully dusted, Madame Vidal, if you please, the pictures as well. I daresay you will like to give an extra flick now and then to the last Duc’s portrait, as you have evidently constituted yourself his champion against detractors such as myself—No, I like the sentiment; I wish the concierge of Mirabel to identify herself with Mirabel, and I am fortunate in having found one who is capable of it. Madame Prévost, good woman, was not. . . . I fear I must trouble you to accompany me to the door, in order to fasten it after me. . . . Au plaisir de vous revoir, Madame!” He made a sweeping bow and went up the steps.
So Valentine de Saint-Chamans, Duchesse de Trélan, went back to her room, found the assignats, the price of her services, lying on the table, and, with an expression of distaste, locked them away. Then she began to search for a cloth to supplement the feather duster.
No one in the world—that just-foundered world to which she belonged—had had unquestioned right to her services save the Queen of France, but to serve her (as she had done) was the crown of honour. Perhaps for that reason Mme de Trélan found a savour in the situation—commanded to dust her own china! There was even a faint smile on her lips as she entered the gallery again—but she kept her eyes averted from her husband’s portrait.
The Sèvres now was in hands such as it had been made for. She went over it slowly and carefully. Was it hers, or was it Camain’s, or the property of those who had ravished Mirabel? Not for the first time since ’92 the thought of the problem of property came over her. How could anything material be really owned? She, who had had so much of the world’s goods, was now stripped of everything, and all but constrained to accept a pittancefrom the plunderers. Were the only things that remained to one then, the mind, the heart, what one had learnt and suffered? She had begun to think so. And still the problem remained: were the rights of property inalienable, as it was in her blood to believe them, or was this little Dresden figure in her hand not hers by right any longer because she had no means now to enforce that right?
“Really, I am becoming a Jacobin, or a philosopher,” she said to the little shepherdess. “In any case, my dear, the roses round your hat are very dusty.”
After the Sèvres and Meissen and Vienna she dusted and wiped the Oriental ware; the great Chinese vase that Camain had pronounced “coarse,” and that frail and marvellous eggshell porcelain which must be held to the light before one can see that dragons and clouds and waves live within its walls of moonbeam. Then she came, among the other treasures of ivory and crystal and enamel, on the jasper cup to which the Deputy had directed her attention. As if she did not know it!
The low sun, pleased to find for once an entry at the rarely opened shutters, danced in shafts and motes of brightness over the dull golden mounting that had made of it so costly a thing. Round the curve of the red-brown, half translucent jasper ran a wreath of tiny golden laurel leaves gemmed with pearls; delicate little vine branches laden with grapes were woven together at the bottom to form a framework for the cup, and the whole rested on three faun-headed supports. Underneath, a golden serpent with eyes of topaz wriggled its way towards the vine clusters.
That jasper cup was the last thing which her husband had given her, not long before his emigration. But money could not buy what Valentine de Trélan wanted then. Gouthière, when he designed and mounted the goblet, had not done ill in placing the little snake underneath. Valentine had thought so at the time, and had almost disliked the precious thing—symbol, so it sometimes seemed to her, of her life and Gaston’s, that might have been so different if they had not been born to such idle greatness, a cup too richly set to drink out of.
She gazed at it now with compressed lips, aware that vine and laurel leaves were becoming blurred by the slow,hot tears that were rising to her eyes. Suddenly she turned away from it, and walking at last to the young man over the console looked up at him.
Yes, he had been like that! Yes, he had had that expression—once! “How could I have kept your heart, Gaston?” she asked, gazing at the smiling eyes. For he had a heart as undoubtedly as he had charm and distinction and courage and wit . . . as well as riches and a great name and Mirabel. Yet one thing was lacking always—and after all these years it was hard to be sure what it was.
Or—as she had often and often thought—was it not rather she who lacked? Yet what could she have given him that she had not? That other men in those days of universal gallantry had been so ready to call her cold and heartless, was that a reason for reproach? If she could have the past again, what would she have done differently?—till that last fatal taunt. She did not know. Had it all been inevitable tragedy then, fixed for them before ever they met, from the moment they had been born?
It was double tragedy too. Gaston’s indifference to her love was his wife’s private sorrow, and not his fault, for how could love come at bidding? But his lifelong indifference to the claims of ambition—of duty even—how was that to be condoned or explained? No, he was like some tall ship, gallantly furnished and manned, that had never made the great voyage for which it had been built, but had drifted always with light airs, till drifting was no longer possible . . . at least on a summer sea. Where was it now?
She could not take her eyes from the picture, though the glance the canvas gave her back was like a blade in a wound. But Gaston could not be like that now—nor like the Gaston who had left her presence so mortally insulted. Yet if he knew exile and material loss he had not known the hard discipline of prison and contumely. He, she was sure, had never been reduced to earning his bread. What was he doing—if he lived? Married again, perhaps, to some rich lady, as the Deputy had suggested, for if he had taken the trouble to make enquiries about his wife’s fate he must indubitably, like all her world, believe her dead.
Taken the trouble!Unjust, unjust! She knew that hemust have done all he could; she never doubted that. And back leapt the memory of that plebeian’s unworthy accusation—that he had deserted her, had not given her the chance of accompanying him. Had he not! twice over, once repulsed by that utterance of hers which had wounded him so deeply as to betray him into an unforgettable retort, and then, generously, by his letter. And the Deputy had said. . . . Perhaps others had said too—for even Suzon, if she had not told her the truth. . . .
And so, for the first time in all these years, it occurred to Valentine de Trélan that her refusal to accompany her husband into voluntary exile had done him wrong. It was on his head, in this slander, that it had recoiled. It was not that she still did not think his judgment mistaken. But, of the two obstinacies set in the lists against each other that day was not hers, after all, the more culpable? As she could not turn him, ought she not to have stayed by his side? Even though he were wrong it was hardly a crime that he was committing. . . . Deserted her? Was it not rather she, who, remaining against his will, had deserted him?
And again it struck at her, Camain’s accusation. How dared he, an upstart, a man of the people, how dared he throw mud at the Duc de Trélan, as far above him in character as he was removed in rank! But whose action was it that had given him the opportunity of throwing mud? Ah, if they had not separated . . . if she had done what he wished. . . .
The sun had left the window. A blackbird in the overgrown park outside was proclaiming rapturous things. Inside, among the Sèvres and the portraits, the Duchesse de Trélan, her arms outstretched on the cold malachite of the console beneath her husband’s picture was weeping bitterly. She had not known that it would be like this! The life of long ago, sunk for ever beneath those whirlpools of fury and carnage—regret for that was past. She was strong enough to face its cold relics without faltering. But Mirabel held, after all, not only the phantom of a dead existence, but of a love slowly slain . . . and not dead. Oh, if only Gaston were back in Mirabel again!
But there was no living creature in the great house saveherself. The young man on the wall, with his indefinable air of charming assurance and good society, looked out into the room over the faded head of his wife, and the blackbird in the garden continued to assert that spring was come. Yet for his only hearer spring would never come again.
It may be doubted whether, after all, Roland de Céligny really regretted exchanging Ares for Aphrodite. He hardly knew himself, as he journeyed with his injured friend by discreet routes back to Finistère and that friend’s home near the sea. His heart was certainly sore at leaving the clash of arms, and he still resented the summary separation from his leader. Yet, to balance the sword half drawn and all too quickly sheathed, were the curls of Mlle de la Vergne, enshrined in the château whose tourelles rose, on the third day, from a screen of chestnuts to greet the travellers.
What, in that blest abode, would Marthe be doing when they came on her? Involuntarily Roland pictured their meeting as a replica, and saw her again at embroidery in the salon with its Indian hangings. But one always paints these things wrong. The reality was even better. For there was no duenna of a mother with her, merely a rustic groom, when, mounted on a beautiful black thoroughbred, she suddenly trotted round a bend of the road. . . .
“If that is not my little sister!” exclaimed Artamène spurring forward; and Roland, uncovering, pulled up his horse.
In the dappled sunlight, under the chestnuts, brother greeted sister, bending from the saddle. Roland thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. He was near enough to hear the joy and the anxiety in Mlle de la Vergne’s voice, her stream of enquiries. Then Artamène looked back and beckoned.
“Let me present M. le Vicomte de Céligny, whom you have already met, ma sœur, in a new rôle—that of the trusty garde-malade. Since I cannot dispense with his services he comes to stay with us for a few days.”
The little hand which Marthe, pulling off her gauntlet,surrendered with a smile to his salute, was it not even more shapely, more satin-soft to the lips than when it had dropped the embroidery needle to submit to the same reverential greeting? And she herself, in her long blue habit, her man’s high-crowned buckled hat, seemed even more desirable than in high-waisted white, yellow-sprigged muslin of that afternoon in the salon!
“Tell Séraphin to gallop back and tell Maman,” suggested Artamène.
And so they rode slowly along, Marthe in the middle, and talked of their adventures. The wind blew a fold of the long habit against Roland’s foot. Except on the day when he had joined the Marquis de Kersaint, M. de Céligny had never been so happy in his life—for his rapture on the occasion of the Marquis’s appearance at Kerlidec had been clouded by his grandfather’s hostility. Now there was nothing to stain this perfect joy, and Roland was too deeply enthralled even to envy the solicitous glances which Marthe threw at her brother’s be-slinged left arm.
Sad that out of happiness may spring trouble! If the seeds of Roland’s escapade were not exactly sown during that short ride the ground was at any rate prepared for their reception.
Mme de la Vergne, warned by the herald, was on the perron to greet them. Artamène flung himself off his horse and ran up the steps, and, while the good lady embraced her son, Roland had the bliss of dismounting Mlle de la Vergne—of receiving her for one brief second in his arms as she slipped like a feather from the saddle. Then followed his own reception by Mme de la Vergne, small and fair and so unlike her daughter; and he found himself being thanked—thanked!—for accompanying her son hither.
“Maman,” sang Marthe to the harpsichord that evening, “Maman, dîtes-moi ce qu’on sent quand on aime, Est-ce plaisir, est-ce tourment? Je suis tout le jour dans une peine extrême, Et la nuit je ne sais comment!”
Was she? No! But Roland, that night, could not sleep for exaltation.
Artamène, by his mother’s desire, remained in bed next morning. A surgeon had been summoned to view his arm.
“Come and feed the poultry, Monsieur de Céligny—or are you too proud?” suggested Mlle de la Vergne after breakfast. “We are very rustic here, you must know, for we are short of farm servants.”
Roland, who would have swept a pigsty at her bidding, followed her as to some high festival. The hens who drove clucking round his feet might have been the doves of Venus. And the pigeons did indeed sweep in a cloud over Marthe, and ate out of her hand. Roland feared they pecked too hard.
When Artamène appeared he found them sitting in the lime arbour.
“Is our paladin telling you of his adventures?” he enquired, sitting down beside them.
“I have none to tell,” answered Roland. “It is you, mon cher, with your wound and your sling and your surgeon, who have the beau rôle.”
“And all wasted on a sister!” observed the hero with a grin.
“M. de Céligny has been telling me,” said Marthe, “the strange story about the old lady and the treasure of Mirabel. Do you believe it?”
“I believed it sufficiently to try to get sent after the treasure,” replied her brother. “So, taking a mean advantage of my slumbers, did Roland.”
Marthe turned her brilliant dark eyes from one to the other. Artamène shook his head.
“Our request was not favourably received.”
“O, what a pity!” sighed Mlle de la Vergne.
Flecks of sunlight came through the linden-leaves on to her dark hair, bringing out unsuspected warmth in its ebony, and on to a red stone on her finger.
“There is a ruby necklace there,” said Roland suddenly, his eyes moving from her ringlets to her hand. “And hundreds of louis in pistoles of the time of Louis XIII. So the plan said. Oh, if we could only have gone!”
“And is all that hoard to lie there, then, unused, while the Cause goes short of money?”
“Oh, no!” said both the young men together. “Presently, when M. de Kersaint has got the authority of the Duc de Trélan, wherever he may be, he will send some one after it.”
“Some one—whom?”
“I should think very probably M. de Brencourt,” replied Roland.
“And he must wait—perhaps for weeks and weeks—before he can start?”
“Yes,” said her brother, “unless the Marquis, who, as M. de Céligny will have told you, is a kinsman of M. de Trélan’s, decides to act without his authorisation, which, from what he said, it is quite likely he may do.”
“So that M. de Trélan’s authorisation is not indispensable?”
“No. Only a matter of form, I think. Being an émigré and Mirabel confiscated—he can neither prevent nor forward such an attempt.”
Mlle de la Vergne was silent, pushing at the gravel with a little shoe and looking down at it. “Where is Mirabel, did you say?”
“Quite near Paris, I gather,” replied Artamène.
“I wish,” said Marthe pensively, “that I were in Paris—quite near Mirabel!”
“My dear little sister, what would be the good of that?” asked Artamène, amused.
“I have relatives in Paris,” announced Roland, with sudden and apparent irrelevance, “two old cousins of my father’s—quiet, unsuspected, unsuspicious old gentlemen.”
The little silence which followed this statement was broken by a whirr of wings as one of Marthe’s pigeons alighted on the gravel outside the arbour, and, looking hard and hopefully at them out of one round, red-circled, unemotional eye, began to walk slowly up and down, jerking its burnished neck.
“O, if I were only a man!” exclaimed Mlle de la Vergne, abruptly, springing to her feet with kindling eyes.
“If I only had two arms!” said her brother, following her example, but more slowly.
“But Iama man, and both my arms are sound!” cried Roland, almost brandishing those members.
“And you have relatives in Paris who could help you!” said Marthe, turning her eyes on him.
“Well, no, hardlyhelp,” said Roland slowly, thinking of his ancient and peaceful kinsmen. “But they could give me a roof. . . .”
“And I could give you money to bribe anyone who needed bribing,” declared Marthe. “At least, I have my pearls.”
“Oh, curse this arm!” muttered the wounded hero. “Yet, after all, I do not see why I also——”
“No! no!” exclaimed both the others. “No, we know what the surgeon said. That would be the sheerest folly”—as if what they had in their own inflammable heads were cold wisdom.
Artamène leant dejectedly against the side of the arbour. “I don’t see how you could do anything, Roland. You have not the plan of the late lamented of the time of Mazarin. You could not go and dig all over a place of that size on chance, even if the Directory gave you permission, which it certainly would not!”
“But I saw the plan!” retorted the Vicomte de Céligny. “I saw it perfectly clearly over the Abbé’s shoulder that night. Why, I could draw it now, if I had a pencil. Nobody has one? Well, look here!”
He broke off a twig from the lime-tree and began a series of scratches on the gravel, just as a bell clanged from the house to summon them to the midday meal—scratches which Séraphin diligently raked out during that repast.
By sunlight and by twilight and by lamplight, under the arbour, on the lawn, in the salon, the rough plan made from that fleeting glimpse of the original was constructed and reconstructed and discussed. So much were their young heads bent over it the next evening that Mme de la Vergne said they looked like conspirators.
“Ma mère, you are perspicacious,” replied her son. “Weareconspirators.” But, not really believing him, she did not pursue the question, and indeed, before she could revert to it, Artamène looked very hard at his sister and asked her if she were not going to sing to them.
Roland added his entreaties, and attended Mlle de la Vergne to the harpsichord.
“What shall I sing?” asked she. “No, I do not need any music, thank you. You must join in the chorus, then, Monsieur, you and Artamène.” And with a mischievous smile she broke into the old children’s ronde ofLa Double Violette:
“J’ai un long voyage à faire,Je ne sais qui le fera;Si je l’dis à l’alouetteTout le monde le saura!La violette double double,La violette doublera!“Si je l’dis à l’alouette,Tout le monde le saura:Rossignol du vert bocageFaîtes-moi ce plaisir-là!”
“J’ai un long voyage à faire,Je ne sais qui le fera;Si je l’dis à l’alouetteTout le monde le saura!La violette double double,La violette doublera!“Si je l’dis à l’alouette,Tout le monde le saura:Rossignol du vert bocageFaîtes-moi ce plaisir-là!”
“J’ai un long voyage à faire,
Je ne sais qui le fera;
Si je l’dis à l’alouette
Tout le monde le saura!
La violette double double,
La violette doublera!
“Si je l’dis à l’alouette,
Tout le monde le saura:
Rossignol du vert bocage
Faîtes-moi ce plaisir-là!”
and when she got to
“Rossignol prend sa volée,Au château d’amour s’en va,”
“Rossignol prend sa volée,Au château d’amour s’en va,”
“Rossignol prend sa volée,
Au château d’amour s’en va,”
she looked at Roland.
Afterwards they sang other songs.
Next day the conspirators met again in the arbour for a final council of war. They could not improve upon the map which the two young men had made—indeed, the question rather was whether they had not already improved it out of all resemblance to the original. Roland’s immediate movements were now under discussion. Though it must shorten his visit, they all, even Roland himself, felt that no time was to be lost. M. de Céligny was supposed, of course, to be on his way to Kerlidec and his grandfather.
“But it will be wiser,” said he, “not to go there now. When I return. . . . You see, he might make difficulties about my visiting Paris at all. So I will write to him. . . .”
He would not accept Mlle de la Vergne’s pearls, though he thought it sublime of her to offer them. He had plenty of money, he said. And he settled to start next day. Artamène tried to salve his own fierce dejection by resolving to accompany him part of the way.
But, perhaps from the excitement of these deliberations, the Chevalier de la Vergne’s arm became unexpectedly painful during the night. It was out of the question for him even to leave his bed next morning, and, for once in his life, he did not seem wishful to do so. Roland’s offerto delay his departure was, however, declined by him. Mme de la Vergne, supposing their young guest to be setting off for Kerlidec—a point on which he did not undeceive her—hoped that he would visit them again, and when he asked if he might pay his parting respects to Mlle de la Vergne (having already taken a bedside farewell of her brother), replied rather absently that she was probably in the poultry-yard, and that if M. de Céligny would give himself the trouble. . . . For her thoughts were not at the moment with an unchaperoned daughter and what a susceptible young man might say to her ere he rode away, but with her son in pain upstairs, and whether the surgeon really understood his case, and if the constant poulticing he had ordered were right. Besides—though this even the inquiring mind of Artamène had never come near guessing—there existed a certain understanding between her and M. de Carné on the subject of Roland and Marthe.
Roland was off before the permission could be revoked. But Mlle de la Vergne was not in the poultry yard, though matters connected with her pensioners had drawn her to the spot where he found her, the miniature bridge which spanned the little stream winding through the grounds. From this she was watching with some anxiety the first voyage of a brood of ducklings down that St. Lawrence. Roland was stabbed to the heart. He was going to danger, to prison perhaps, for her—and her mind was set on ducklings!
Erect and noble (so he hoped—at any rate booted and spurred) the young man walked towards the bridge. Directly she turned, the surprise and concern on her face healed him.
“What! you are going already, Monsieur de Céligny! I thought it was not to be for another hour, and that you were closeted with Artamène . . . and I might have missed wishing you Godspeed because of these wretched little adventurers!”
“Ah no, Mademoiselle!” said Roland. “Do you think I should have gone like that? I have need of all the benedictions you can give me.”
And what she gave him satisfied him fully—only a look, but a look so charged with meaning—and both her hands.There on the tiny bridge he raised them with reverence and joy to his lips. Her silence, her faint flush, her movement of surrender, whether it were ultimate or no, dubbed him indeed her knight, going to the ogre’s castle with her colours on his helm—invincible indeed, and supremely blest to serve at once his lady and his King.
And unregarded, in that high moment, went the indignant comments of the little yellow navigator under their very feet, who was finding the stream on which his inexperience had embarked of an unlooked-for strength and volume.
Valentine de Trélan was kneeling before her crucifix ere retiring to bed when she heard the first shot. The report broke so sharply across her prayers that, like a noise heard in sleep, its first demand on the senses was the question whether it were real. The second shot brought her to her feet in some concern. Who could be firing so late, and at what? The sentry, at some marauder? But, as far as she could judge, the sound came from the great garden at the back, where no sentry was. Her first impulse was to go out in that direction to investigate, but she supposed she must not leave her post, in case she were summoned for any reason. She dressed again, and went out to the passage and listened.
Sure enough, some ten minutes later, there came a knocking on one of the more distant doors that gave on to the garden front. She fetched her keys, and hastening along the lengthy corridor, opened it. Outside were two National Guards, her friend Grégoire Thibault and another. Grégoire had a musket over his shoulder.
“Sorry to disturb you, citoyenne,” said he, half apologetically. “You have not seen anything of a man prowling round here, I suppose?”
“Nothing,” answered Mme de Trélan with perfect truth. “Was that what you were firing at?”
“Jacques here,” said Grégoire, “was going along the road when he saw—or thought he saw—in the distance a man climbing over the wall that goes round the park. He was off duty, so he had not his musket, and instead of going after him he came to tell me, as I was nearer than the guard house.”
“Not being quite the figure for climbing walls either, citoyenne,” put in Grégoire’s companion with reason.
“So we separated, and each went round a differentside of the château. The light was getting bad, and the first time I fired at something moving it was comrade Jacques here. Luckily I didn’t hit him. Then a few minutes later I saw my gentleman for a second by a big bush of something, but, parbleu, he slipped round one of those heathen goddesses or whatever they are. I sent a remembrancer after him from this”—Grégoire slapped his musket—“and I am almost sure I hit him; but do you think I could find him anywhere in the garden? No!”
Valentine, who knew the extent of the garden—park, rather—so much better than he, was convinced that the time which had elapsed between the second shot and his appearance at the château was not a quarter long enough for a thorough search, especially in the rapidly failing light, so that the odds were the intruder, if wounded, was still there. She said as much.
“Well, he can stay there till daylight,” announced the Citizen Grégoire composedly, “and reflect on his crimes. If he isn’t there he has made off, and won’t be likely to return in a hurry. You are not nervous, are you, Madame Vidal?”
“Not the least in the world,” the Duchesse assured him. “Did you see what this man was like, or have you any idea why he should come into the garden?”
“From the way in which he slipped over that wall,” remarked Jacques, “I should say he was young.”
“I daresay,” put in Grégoire consolingly, “that it was only some inquisitive lad wanting to see inside the garden. You will be all right, Madame Vidal; he can’t possibly get into the house. If I wasn’t sure of it, parbleu, I would stay the night here.”
If Grégoire Thibault, in the days of the Terror, had been a hunter of suspects, as he gave himself out to be, his zeal had sadly suffered eclipse since that time. It was clear that he wished to minimise the seriousness of the inroad in order to get home to his bed, and for the same reason, had no intention of turning out the rest of the guard. Valentine was not in the least anxious to keep him from that haven, and so after a few reassuring words the twain departed, and Mme de Trélan was free to resume her interrupted orisons, with a conviction thatsome man, with purpose unknown, was lurking in the precincts of Mirabel.
The affair indeed was a strange interruption to the almost cloistral quiet of the last few weeks, into which news of the outer world came only through Suzon Tessier or Toinon thelaitière, or by the unencouraged gossip of the scrubbers. For, since she never went into the hamlet, Valentine might almost have been a recluse living the contemplative life with brief intervals of the active. Sometimes, already, it seemed to her that she had never known Mirabel under conditions any different.
She did go to bed, and after a time went to sleep, but woke about midnight, and remained awake, for she found that she could not well bear the idea of a fellow-creature lying out all night in the dark and lonely park, perhaps in agony to boot, even though he were a thief or something of the kind. But it was useless looking for him before daylight. The thought that he might try to effect an entry she dismissed. At dawn she rose, dressed, and slipped out behind Mirabel.
It was three o’clock, and the first thrush was singing in that vast desert of a garden. Along the weed-infested paths went the Duchesse, and through bosquet after bosquet, tended groves no longer, but thickets so overgrown that some were almost impassable. Nettles, burdocks, thistles, briars, those raiding colonists were everywhere, waging war against the smothering advances of the unclipped ivy. But the little lake in the distance mirrored no tall pines now on its tarnished surface. Of that aisle of scent and murmurs the nearer pillars were but stumps; the farther stood lonely and condemned against the sky. Valentine did not look this morning at those distant martyrs; she kept her gaze on the ground as she made her way between the bushes or skirted the long, dripping grass of some once-shaven little lawn. Such terms and sylvan deities as still had heads looked at their former lady with cold and curious, in some cases with leering eyes. Had she been wandering there without an object she might have had leisure to taste the infinite sadness of that place, made only for pleasure and good company, or to remember, perhaps, certain passages of its light past. But she was searching for an unfortunate; and that theunfortunate, when found, might prove to be a very undesirable person indeed, that, in fact, she was disposed to picture him as such, did not greatly trouble her. The last few incredible years had given her a sympathy with the hunted.
Full though her mind was of her quest, the first indication that it was on the way to prove successful gave her something of a shock. She had come to the head of the flight of shallow marble steps that led from one little terrace to the next, when she suddenly perceived on each a small, reddish, star-shaped splash. She bent down; yes, it was blood—the trail of the pursued. On the grassgrown gravel at the foot of the steps it was more difficult to follow, but the track began again, clearer and larger than before, on a short flight that led once more upwards. On one step there was even a smear, that looked like the print of a hand, as though the wounded man had stumbled and recovered himself.
And thus, finally, in what had been known as the Bosquet de Mercure, she found the invader, fallen sideways at the foot of the bronze statue of Mercury—a young man, pale as marble and as beautiful as the god himself, and so unlike what she had expected that she stood a moment as still as he. That he was a gentleman was plain without the evidence of his clothes; and he wore, as further and indeed defiant proof, the black coat-collar which marked the aristocrat and reactionary, thecollet noirwhich had caused so many pitched battles in the streets of Paris. One arm lay out on the gravel, crushing a little company of that innocent and joyous flower, the speedwell, which had rooted there, intruding in the garden like him, and, like him, shut-eyed. The other hand held a red ball of a handkerchief which had probably, during consciousness, been pressed against the dark patch on the left side of his grey coat.
And Valentine, her heart alight with compassion, began to stoop over her quarry . . . stopped, raised herself again, and put out a hand to the base of the statue for support. In the unconscious face at her feet she suddenly saw. . . . Whence came that resemblance? She was carried back a hundred years, to a morning in her young wifehood here at Mirabel, to an early wakening, to thethrush, just heard, like this, in the summer dawn . . . while by her side lay the husband who still summed up all her dreams, on whom she had looked down with the yet untroubled eyes of love, and whose sleeping visage had been the very counterpart of this.
But in a moment the illusion was fled, and she did not know how it had ever come. Leaving the statue she knelt down by the fallen youth and felt for his heart. It was beating. She began to unfasten his neckcloth. But how was she to convey him into the château? She could not carry him. Besides, how badly was he hurt? Could she possibly get him into that damp little pseudo-classical temple of Ceres on the other side of the grove? But the first thing was to try to revive him. When she had been a fine lady she would have had a vinaigrette or something of the sort about her; now there was nothing for it but to scoop up in her hollowed palms a little stagnant water from the basin at the foot of the statue, and to dash it, greenish as it was, over the white face. Three times she did this without any result but temporary disfigurement, and then set to work to rub the intruder’s hands, long patrician hands like her own, like . . . But that was folly.
“Grandpère!” said the young man suddenly, “Monsieur le Marquis! . . . Artamène . . . Where am I, then?” He opened his eyes, tried rashly to raise himself, and relapsed with a groan, his hand to his wounded side. “What has happened to me? . . . Is this a garden?”
Valentine slipped her arm under his head. “Do not try to move yet, Monsieur,” she said in her beautiful voice. “You are in the park of Mirabel—with a friend.”
He stared up at her, utterly perplexed. (But his eyes were brown, quite unlike that dark grey.) “I am so thirsty,” he said, like a child.
“You cannot drink this stagnant water,” replied Mme de Trélan compassionately, and then, looking closer and seeing how dry and cracked his lips were, bethought her of a spring that flowed, or that used to flow, through a lion’s mouth in the grotto of Latona, a few seconds away. “Wait,” she said, gently withdrawing her arm, “I think I can get you some fresh water.”
She rose and hastened off. Yes, the spring was still flowing, and even the stone goblet that served it, thoughvery green, was still there. The Duchesse brought back that water from the past; and, aided by her, the boy drank long and eagerly, and thanked her.
All this while the dawn was growing brighter, and the solitary thrush now become one of a choir, and, though Mercury was battered and green, he held out thecaduceusover the two figures beneath him with an air at once sprightly and benedictory. And the one bright buttercup at his feet, moved by the morning breeze, bent towards them too.
“My child,” said Valentine gently, as she set down the goblet, “I do not know what you were doing here last night, but I suppose you do. At any rate you were shot at by the sentry, and I see that you are hurt in the side, but not, I hope, seriously. The question is, how to move you so that I can do something for your wound.”
The invader was perfectly sensible now. “But, Madame, who are you?” he asked.
“The concierge of Mirabel—of the château,” said she.
“I shall never find it now,” murmured the young man dejectedly. “Instead, I suppose I shall have to go to prison.”
“Yes, in the château,” said Mme de Trélan encouragingly. “And I will be your gaoler.”
He understood. A look of alarm came over his face. “Oh no, Madame, that would never do! The Directory——”
“I am afraid that I care very little for the Directory,” broke in the Duchesse calmly, beginning to unfasten the fichu from her neck. “Now first, Monsieur, I am going to tie this muslin of mine very tightly about you, for I think there has been no bleeding for some time, and then we must see whether you can get to your feet, and whether, with my help, you can walk as far as the château.”
And five minutes or so later, with infinite precautions, the youth trying to put as little weight on a woman as he need, and to stifle the expressions of pain that came to his lips, they were actually progressing very slowly from the Bosquet de Mercure into that of Ceres. And in the pillared shrine of the goddess Mme de Trélan had a moment’s impulse to instal her protégé, seeing his extreme pallor and the possibility of his being unable to reach the house.But the little temple was eminently unsuitable for a hospital, she would find it very awkward to get away to tend him there, and he would be liable to discovery. So, since he assured her rather breathlessly that he was all right, they went forward.
On the edge of the great fountain, however, exposed though it was in its open parterre, he was obliged to sit down and rest a moment or two. The Duchesse sat beside him with her arm round him, lest he should fall backwards off the stone rim into the dark and viscous water behind him. And he, his eyes on the great house, seemed to be realising the extent of his prospective refuge. “I could not see it properly last night,” he murmured.
But Valentine told him not to talk. He did not altogether obey her, and his intermittent remarks as they went onwards in the growing light amid the increasing vociferations of the thrushes were now and then unintelligible. Once he called her “Marthe,” and then apologised.
Certainly there were no eyes to watch them at that early hour save those of the birds, no place for them to watch from but the overgrown thickets. And so Mme de Trélan got Roland de Céligny unobserved into Mirabel by the basement stairway at the back, and along the dark passages to her room. By the time they reached her parlour he was mute and unresisting, and when she had steered him to the bed (left just as she had slipped out of it) and had somehow assisted him on to it, her youthful visitor, as she fully expected, quietly fainted away again.