The cost of wings, and other stories

by Richard Dehan

II

The boar, a ragot, had met his end at the point of the Marquis’s hunting knife, an ancestral couteau de chasse with a blade about three feet long. The field had dispersed, one or two of the valets de chien gone after the missing hounds, leading the decoy dogs on leashes. Afternoon tea at the château was a very lively affair, the clatter of tongues, cups, and teaspoons almost deafening. A cuirassier, whose polished boot had suffered abrasion from the tusk of the wounded animal, recounted his adventure to a circle of sympathetic ladies. A fire of beech logs blazed on the wide hearth, the leaping flames playing a color symphony, from peacock green to sapphire, from ruby to orange, dying into palest lemon-yellow, leaping up in lilac, deepening to violet, and so da capo.... The silver andirons had sphinx heads adorned with full-bottomed periwigs of the period of Louis le Grand.... The exquisite Watteaus and Bouchers, set in the paneling—painted white because the little Marquise had found oak so triste—shone with a subdued splendor. The perfume of fine tobacco, green tea, and many roses, loaded the atmosphere, producing a mild intoxication in the brain of the tall, fair, well-dressed young fellow, unmistakably British, whom a servant had announced as Monsieur Brown....

“Monsieur Brown?� Monsieur de Courvaux read the card passed over to him by his wife. “Who under the sun is Monsieur Brown?�

“Fie, Frédéric!� rebuked the little Marquise. “It is the English tutor!�

Then they rose together and welcomed the newcomer with hospitable warmth. Charny les Bois was hideously difficult of access; the railway from the junction at which one had to change was a single line, and a perfect disgrace. Monsieur de Courvaux had long intended to bring the question—a burning one—before the proper authorities. Both Monsieur and Madame were horrified to realize that Monsieur Brown had walked from the station, where cabs were conspicuous by their absence. A conveyance had been ordered to be sent, but at the last moment it was wanted for the hunt. Monsieur Brown had hunted in England, of course?

Mr. Brown admitted that he had followed the hounds in several counties. Looking at the new tutor’s square shoulders, sinewy frame, long, well-made limbs, and firmly knit, supple hands, tanned like his face and throat by outdoor exercise, Monsieur de Courvaux did not doubt it. Brown came of good race, that was clear at the first glance. Harrow and Oxford had added the cachet of the high public school and the university. He had recommendations from the Duke of Atholblair, who mentioned him as the son of a dear old friend. And Atholblair was of the old régime, a great nobleman who chose his friends with discretion. Clearly Brown would do. His French was singularly pure; his English was the English of the upper classes. Absolutely, Brown was the thing. He was, he said, a Scotchman. The late Queen of England, to whom the little Marquise had the honor of being god-daughter’s daughter, had had a valuable attendant—also a Scotchman—of the name of Brown! Did Monsieur Brown happen to be any relation?

“Unhappily no, Madame!� said Mr. Brown, who seemed rather tickled by the notion. He took the next opportunity to laugh, and did it heartily. He was standing on the bear-skin before the fireplace, measuring an equal six feet of height with Monsieur de Courvaux, when he laughed, and several people, grouped about a central figure—that of the elder Madame de Courvaux, who sat upon a gilt fauteuil with her back to the great windows, beyond which the fires of the sunset were burning rapidly away—the people glanced round.

“What a handsome Englishman!� a lady whispered, a tiny brunette, with eyes of jet and ebony hair, who consequently adored the hazel-eyed, the tawny-haired, the tall of the opposite sex. Madame de Courvaux, superb in her laces and dove-colored silks, sat like a figure of marble. Under her broad white brow, crowned by its waves of gray-gold hair, her eyes, blue and brilliant still, fixed with an intensity of regard almost devouring upon the face of the new tutor, whom the Marquis, stepping forward, presented to his mother with due ceremony, and to whom, offering her white, jeweled hand, she said:

“Welcome once more to France, Monsieur Dunbar!�

“But, Mamma,� put in Monsieur de Courvaux, as young Mr. Brown started and crimsoned to the roots of his tawny hair, “the name of Monsieur is Brown, and he has never before visited our country.�

“Monsieur Brown will pardon me!� Madame de Courvaux rose to her full height and swept the astonished young fellow a wonderful curtsy. “The old are apt to make mistakes. And—there sounds the dressing gong!�

Indeed, the metallic tintamarre of the instrument named began at that instant, and the great room emptied as the chatterers and tea drinkers scurried away. A rosy, civil footman in plain black livery showed Mr. Brown to his room, which was not unreasonably high up, and boasted a dressing cabinet and a bath. As Brown hurriedly removed the smuts of the railway with oceans of soap and water, and got into his evening clothes—much too new and well cut for a tutor—he pondered. As he shook some attar of violets—much too expensive a perfume for a tutor, who, at the most, should content himself with Eau de Cologne of the ninepenny brand—upon his handkerchief, he shook his head.

“I’ll be shot if she didn’t, and plainly too! It wasn’t the confusion of the beastly all-night train journey from Paris. It wasn’t the clatter of French talk, or the delusion of a guilty conscience—decidedly not! The thing is as certain as it is inexplicable! I arrive under the name of Brown at a country house in a country I don’t know, belonging to people I have never met, and the second lady I am introduced to addresses me as Mr. Dunbar. There’s the second gong! I wonder whether there is a governess for me to take in, or whether I trot behind my superiors, who aren’t paid a hundred and fifty pounds a year to teach English?�

And Mr. Brown went down to dinner. Somewhat to his surprise, he was placed impartially, served without prejudice, and conversed with as an equal. The De Courvaux were charming people, their tutor thought—equal to the best-bred Britons he had ever met. His pupils—the freckled boy with hair cropped à la brosse, and the pretty, frank-mannered girl of sixteen—interested him. He was uncommonly obliged to the kind old Duke for his recommendation; the bread of servitude eaten under this hospitable roof would have no bitter herbs mingled with it, that was plain. He helped himself to an entrée of calves’ tongues stewed with mushrooms, as he thought this, and noted the violet bouquet of the old Bordeaux with which one of the ripe-faced, black-liveried footmen filled his glass. And perhaps he thought of another table, at the bottom of which his place had been always laid, and of the grim, gaunt dining-room in which it stood, with the targets and breast-pieces, the chain and plate mail of his—Brown’s—forebears winking against the deep lusterless black of the antique paneling; and, opposite, lost in deep reflection, the master of the house, moody, haggard, gray-moustached and gray-haired, but eminently handsome still, leaning his head upon his hand, and staring at the gold and ruby reflections of the wine decanters in the polished surface of the ancient oak, or staring straight before him at the portrait, so oddly out of keeping with the Lord Neils and Lord Ronalds in tartans and powdered wigs, the Lady Agnes and the Lady Jean in hoops and stomachers, with their hair dressed over cushions, and shepherds’ crooks in their narrow, yellowish hands.... That portrait, of an exquisite girl—a lily-faced, gold-haired, blue-eyed child in the ball costume of 1870—had been the object of Mr. Brown’s boyish adoration. Varolan painted it, Mr. Brown’s uncle—whose name was no more Brown than his nephew’s—had often said. And on one occasion, years previously, he had expanded sufficiently to tell his nephew and expectant heir that the original of the portrait was the daughter of a ducal family of France, a star moving in the social orbit of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, married to a Minister of the Imperial Government a few weeks previous to that Government’s collapse and fall.

“I believe the dear old boy must have been in love with her before Uncle Ronald died, and he came in for the family honors,� mused Mr. Brown, and then began to wonder whether he had treated the dear old boy badly or vice versa. For between this uncle and nephew, who, despite a certain chilly stiffness and rigor of mental bearing, often mutually exhibited by relations, were sincerely attached to each other, a breach had opened, an estrangement had occurred. Hot words and bitter reproaches had suddenly, unexpectedly been exchanged, old wrongs flaming up at a kindling word, forgotten grudges coming to light in the blaze of the conflagration....

And so it had come to pass that the son of Lord Hailhope’s younger brother, named Angus after his uncle, had not been thrown, had hurled himself upon his own resources. And the Duke of Atholblair had found him the place of English tutor in the family of Madame de Courvaux.

“It is the only thing that presents itself,� the aged peer had explained, “and therefore, my dear boy, you had better take it until something better turns up.�

For the present. But the future? Mr. Brown wondered whether he and the English grammar and lexicon—the phrase book, dictionary, and the other volumes which constituted his tutorial equipment—were doomed to grow gray and dog’s-eared, drooping and shabby together?

Then he looked up, for some one touched him upon the arm.

“The ladies permit us to smoke in the library, which is the best room for music in the house,� said the pleasant voice of Monsieur de Courvaux; “so we will take our café and chasse in their company, if you please.�

Mr. Brown reached the door in time to open it, and to comprehend that the act of gallantry was not expected of him. And the feminine paroquets and the sable-coated male rooks went by, and Mademoiselle Lucie gave the handsome, well-groomed Englishman a shy glance of approval from under her black eyelashes, and Monsieur Frédéric, puffy with incipient indigestion, grinned feebly. Brown put his hand upon the boy’s shoulder, and followed the rest.

“You don’t want me to do any English to-night, do you, Monsieur Brown?� young hopeful insinuated, as they went into the long walnut-paneled room with another bay at the southern end with blinds undrawn, revealing a wonderful panorama of moonlit forest and river and champaign. “I can say ‘all-a-raight!’ ‘wat-a-rot!’ and ‘daddle-doo!’ already,� the youth continued. “The English groom of papa, I learned the words of him, voyez! You shall know Smeet, to-morrow!�

“Thanks, old fellow!� said Mr. Brown, with a good-humored smile.

“Grandmamma is making a sign that you are to go and speak to her, Monsieur,� said Mademoiselle Lucie, Brown’s elder pupil-elect. “Everybody in this house obeys Grandmamma, and so must you. Mamma says it is because she was so beautiful when she was young—young, you comprehend, as in that portrait over the fireplace—that everybody fell down and worshiped her. And she is beautiful now, is she not, sir? Not as the portrait; but——�

“The portrait, Mademoiselle?... Over the fireplace.... Good Lord, what an extraordinary likeness!� broke from Mr. Brown. For the counterpart of the exquisite picture of Varolan that had hung in the dining hall of the gray old northern castle where Mr. Brown’s boyhood, youth, and earliest manhood had been spent, hung above the hooded fifteenth-century fireplace of the noble library of this French château.

There she stood, the golden, slender, lily-faced, sapphire-eyed young aristocrat of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with her indefinable air of pride and hauteur and exclusiveness mingled with girlish merriment and mischief. And there she sat—the original in the flesh—Madame la Marquise de Courvaux, the Grandmamma of these young people—regal in sweeping folds of amethyst velvet and wonderful creamy Spanish point lace.

Obedient to the bidding of her fan, Mr. Brown crossed the library and took the chair she indicated near her. And the diamond cross upon her still beautiful bosom moved quickly, with the beating of Grandmamma’s heart, as he did this.

“How like he is!—how like!� she whispered to herself; and the electric lights became crystal girandoles, and the library became a ballroom at the Tuileries. The Empress, beautiful and cold, passed down the ranks of curtsying, bare-backed, bejeweled women and bowing, gold-laced men. Monsieur de Courvaux, with his orders, his bald forehead, and his white whiskers, released mademoiselle at the claim of a tall, tawny-haired, hazel-eyed, fair-faced partner, a Highland gentleman, in plaid and philabeg, with sporran and claymore, the antique gold brooch upon his shoulder set with ancient amethysts, river pearls and cairngorms. And he told her how he loved her, there in the alcove of palms, and heard her little confession that, had she not been bound by a promise of marriage to Monsieur de Courvaux she would—oh, how gladly!—become the wife of Monsieur Angus Dunbar.

“As you say.... Fate has been cruel to both of us.... And—and I am engaged. She lives in Leicestershire. I met her one hunting season. She is in Paris, staying at Meurice’s with her mother now. They’re buying the trousseau.... God help me!� groaned Angus Dunbar.

But the little lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain drew back the hand he snatched at, and swept him a haughty little curtsy, looking straight in his face: “The State Quadrille is beginning. Be so good as to take me to Mamma.... And I wish you all happiness, sir, and your fiancée also.� Another little curtsy he got, poor lad, with her “Adieu, and a thousand thanks, Monsieur!� and then—he walked the dusty streets of Paris until morning; while Mademoiselle lay sleepless on her tear-drenched lace pillows. And——

Grandmamma awakened as though from a dream, to meet the frank hazel eyes of Mr. Brown, the English tutor.

“Monsieur will forgive the curiosity of an old woman,� she said, with her inimitable air of grace and sweetness. “I wished to ask whether you were not of Northern race—a Scot, for example? Yes? Ah, I thought I had guessed correctly. The type is not to be mistaken, and I once had—a dear friend!—whom Monsieur resembles to identity. But his name was not Brown.�

“I was within an ace of telling her mine was not, either,� reflected the English tutor as, an hour or so later, he got into bed. “How perfectly beautiful Madame—not the agaçante, espiègle little Madame, but the old one—must have been in the rich prime of her womanhood! Did she and my uncle ever meet again, I wonder? No, I should think not. The dear old boy is just the sort of character to hug a romance all his life, and she—she is just the woman to be the heroine of one. Are all French country-house beds in this style, and is one supposed to draw these rosebudded chintz curtains modestly round one, or let them alone?� Mr. Brown concluded to let them alone, and fell very soundly asleep.

At the late breakfast, an elaborate meal, beginning with soup and fish, and ending with tea and cakes, it was explained to the tutor that no English lesson was to be given that day, as a costume ball of the calico type was to take place that evening, and the children’s study, a homely, comfortable little wainscoted parlor on the ground floor, looking out upon a grass-grown courtyard with a bronze fountain in the middle, was to be given up to hats, coats, and opera cloaks. Monsieur Frédéric was to personate one of his own ancestors, page to the Duke of Burgundy, killed in a jousting match in 1369, Monsieur le Marquis and Madame respectively appearing as the Chevalier de Courvaux and his lady, parents of the youth referred to, represented in a miniature by Othea. Mademoiselle Lucie chose to be “Undine� in gauze and water-lilies. For Monsieur Brown a character could surely be found, a costume devised, even at the eleventh hour. There were jack-boots, salades, and coats of mail innumerable in the great hall, Mr. Brown, who shared the objection of his British countrymen to being made to appear ridiculous, shook his head. He preferred not to dress up; but he had, or thought he had, packed away in one of his portmanteaux (which were too numerous for a tutor) something that would do. A Highland costume, in fact, of the modified kind worn by gentlemen of Caledonia as dinner dress or upon occasions of festivity.

Thus Mr. Brown unconsciously pledged himself to bring about a crisis in the lives of two people, one of whom was actively engaged at that moment in trying to find him. For Lord Hailhope was genuinely attached to his nephew, and the basis of the quarrel between them, never very secure, had been shaken and shattered, firstly, by the indifference manifested by the young lady concerned, a rather plain young heiress, at the news of the said nephew’s disappearance, and, secondly, by her marriage with her father’s chaplain, a Presbyterian divine of thunderous eloquence and sweeping predestinary convictions.

“Tell him that I was in the wrong—that I apologize—that everything shall be as it was before, if he will come back! The money shall be secured to him; I will guarantee that,� Lord Hailhope wrote to the London solicitor employed in the search for Young Lochinvar, who had sprung to the saddle and ridden away—without the lady. “If he will not come to me, I will go to him. The insult was gross; I admit it, and will atone to the best of my ability!�

“The hot-headed old Highlander!� commented the man of law, as he filed the letter. “He adopts the boy—his dead brother’s son—brings him up in the expectation of inheriting his private fortune as well as the title, and then turns him out of doors because he won’t marry a girl with teeth like tombstones and a fancy for another man. If Master Angus Dunbar is wise, he will hold out against going back until that question of the money has been disposed of irrevocably. Though people never have sense—lucky for my profession!�

Meanwhile, at Charny les Bois preparations for the ball—the materials of which owed much more to the lordly silkworm than the plebeian cotton pod—went on apace. Evening came, the band of the cuirassiers, generously lent by Monsieur the Colonel, drove over from the barracks in a couple of chars-à -bancs, the Colonel and the officers of that gallant regiment, arrayed to kill in the green and gold costumes of the hunt of the Grand Monarque, followed upon their English drague. Voitures of every description disgorged their happy loads. Monsieur, Madame, the young ladies and the young gentlemen, hot, happy, smiling, and fearfully and wonderfully disguised.

“Their unconsciousness, the entire absence of the conviction that they are ridiculous, makes them quite lovable,� thought Mr. Brown. “That fat, fair papa, with spectacles and large sandy whiskers, as Pluton, from Orphée aux Enfers, in red satin tunic and black silk tights spotted with yellow, a satin cloak with a train, a gilt pasteboard crown and trident pleases me tremendously. He is, I believe, a magistrate from Charny. His wife is the even fatter and fairer lady attired as Norma, and those three little dumpy girls, flower girls of a period decidedly uncertain.�

“Does not Monsieur dance?� said Mademoiselle Lucie, looking, with her filmy green draperies, her fair locks crowned, and her slim waist girdled with water-lilies and forget-me-nots, a really exquisite river sprite.

“If Mademoiselle would accord me the honor of her hand in a valse,� Mr. Brown began; then he broke off, remembering that in England the tutor did not usually dance with the daughters of the house—if, indeed, that functionary danced at all. But——

“Mamma has been telling me that Englishmen dance badly,� observed Mademoiselle, with a twinkle in her blue eyes. “Grandmamma will have it, by the way, that you are Scotch! Do not look round for her; she was a little fatigued by so much conversation and fuss, and will not come down to-night.... Heavens! look at Frédéric,� she added, in a tone of sisterly solicitude, as the page of the Court of Burgundy moved unsteadily into sight, clinging to the arm of a bosom friend in a “celadon� costume and a condition of similar obfuscation. “Alas! I comprehend!� she continued. “Those plums conserved in cognac have a fatal fascination for my unhappy brother. Quick, Monsieur! make to remove him from the view of Papa, or the consequences will be of the most terrible.... Frédéric has been already warned....�

And outwardly grave and sympathetic, albeit splitting with repressed laughter, Mr. Brown went in chase of the unseasoned vessels, and conveyed them to the safe harbor of the small study on the second floor, which had been allotted to him as a den. Locking them in, he was about to descend in search of seltzer water, when, in the act of crossing the gallery, unlighted save for the dazzling moonlight that poured through the long mullioned windows, giving a strange semblance of fantastic life to the dark family portraits on the opposite wall, and lying in silver pools upon the shining parquet islanded with threadbare carpets of ancient Oriental woof, he encountered the elder Madame de Courvaux, who came swiftly toward him from the opposite end of a long gallery, carrying a light and a book that looked like a Catholic breviary. With the glamour of moonlight upon her, in a loose silken dressing robe trimmed with the priceless lace she affected, her wealth of golden-gray tresses in two massive plaits, drawn forward and hanging over her bosom, almost to her knees, her beauty was marvelous. Mr. Brown caught his breath and stopped short; Madame, on her part, uttered a faint cry—was it of delight or of terror?—and would have dropped her candle had not the tutor caught it and placed it on a console that stood near.

“Pardon, Madame!� he was beginning, when....

“Oh, Angus Dunbar! Angus, my beloved, my adored!� broke from Madame de Courvaux. “There is no need that either of us should ask for pardon.� Her blue eyes gleamed like sapphires, her still beautiful bosom heaved and panted, her lips smiled, though the great tears brimmed one by one over her underlids and chased down her pale cheeks. “We did what was right. The path of honor was never easy. You married, and I also, and all these years no news of you has reached me. But I understand now that you are dead, and bound no longer by the vows of earth, and that you have come, brave as of old, beautiful as of old, to tell me that you are free!�

With an impulse never quite to be accounted for, Angus Dunbar, the younger, stepped forward and enclosed in his own warm, living grasp Madame’s trembling hands....

“My name is Angus Dunbar, Madame,� he said, “but—but I believe you must be speaking of my uncle. He succeeded to the peerage twenty years ago; he is now Lord Hailhope, but he—he never married, though I believe he loved, very sincerely and devotedly, a lady whose portrait by Varolan hangs in the dining-room at Hailhope, just as it hangs in the library here at Charny les Bois.�

“I—I do not understand.... How comes it that——� Madame hesitated piteously, her hands wringing each other, her great wistful eyes fixed upon the splendid, stalwart figure of the young man. “You are so like.... And the costume——�

“It is customary for Highland gentlemen to wear the kilt at social functions; and when I left Hailhope—or, rather, was turned out of doors, for my uncle disowned me when I refused to marry a girl who did not care for me, and who has since married to please herself—Gregor packed it in one of my kit cases. The cat is out of the bag as well as the kilt.... I came here as English tutor to your grandchildren, Madame, at the suggestion of an old friend, the Duke of Atholblair, to whom I told the story of the quarrel with my uncle.�

Madame began to recover her courtly grace and self-possession. Her hands ceased to tremble in Dunbar’s clasp; she drew them away with a smile that was only a little fluttered.

“And I took you for a ghost ... a revenant.... I was a little agitated.... I had been suffering from an attack of the nerves.... Monsieur will make allowances for a superstitious old woman. To-morrow, after breakfast, in the garden Monsieur will explain the whole story to me—how it came that Monsieur Dunbar, his uncle, now Lord Hailhope—ah, yes! there was a crippled elder brother of that title—disowned his nephew for refusing to give his hand to one he did not love.... I should have imagined—— Good-night, Monsieur!�

In the garden, after breakfast, Angus Dunbar, no longer handicapped by the plebeian name of Brown, told his story to a sympathetic listener. Madame’s head was bent—perhaps her hearing was not so good as it had been when, more than forty years previously, Angus Dunbar, the elder, had whispered his secret in that delicate ear. But as footsteps sounded upon the terrace, and one of the fresh-faced, black-liveried footmen appeared, piloting a stranger, a tall, somewhat stern-featured, gray-moustached gentleman, she started and looked round. In the same moment the late Mr. Brown jumped up, over-setting his chair, the pugs barked, and——

“I owed it to you to make the first move,� said Lord Hailhope, rather huskily, as the uncle and nephew grasped hands. “Forgive me, Angus, my dear boy!�

“Lady Grisel has married the Presbyterian minister, sir, and we’re all going to be happy for ever after, like people in a fairy tale,� said Angus Dunbar. Then he turned to Madame de Courvaux, and bowed with his best grace. “Madame, permit me to present my uncle, Lord Hailhope, who I believe has had the honor of meeting you before!�

And, being possessed of a degree of discretion quite proper and desirable in a tutor, Mr. Angus Dunbar moved away in the direction of a rose walk, down which Mademoiselle Lucie’s white gown had flitted a moment before, leaving the two old lovers looking in each other’s eyes.