ARE YOU MY WIFE?
BY THE AUTHOR OF “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.
CHAPTER III.
THE LILIES.
My first step was to pay a visit to the Préfecture de Police. I was received with the utmost courtesy and many half-spoken, half-intimated expressions of sympathy that were touching and unexpected. All that my sensitive pride most shrank from in my misfortune was ignored with a tact and delicacy that were both soothing and encouraging. I had felt more than once, when exposing my miserable and extraordinary situation to the police agents at home, that it required the strongest effort of professional gravity on their part not to burst out laughing in my face. No such struggle was to be seen in the countenances of the French police. They listened with interest, real or feigned, to my story, and invited what confidence I had to give by the matter-of-fact simplicity with which they set to work to put the few pieces of the puzzle together, and to endeavor to read some clew in them. I returned to my hotel after this interview more cheered and sanguine than the incident itself reasonably warranted.
It was scarcely two years since I had been in Paris, yet since that first visit I found it singularly altered. I could not say exactly how; but it was not the same. It had struck me when I first saw it as the place above all I had yet seen for a man to build an earthly paradise to himself; the air was full of brightness, redolent of light-hearted pleasure; the aspect of the city, the looks of the people, suggested at every point the Epicurean motto, “Eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow we die!” But it was different now. Perhaps the change was in me; in the world within rather than the world without. The chord that had formerly answered to the touch of the vivacious gayety of the place was broken. I walked through the streets and boulevards now with wide-open, disenchanted eyes, critical and unsympathetic. Things that had passed unheeded before appeared to me with a new meaning. What struck me as most disagreeable, and with a sense of complete novelty, was the widespread popularity which the devil apparently enjoyed amongst the Parisians. If, as we may assume, the popularity of a name implies the popularity of the person or the idea that it represents, it is difficult to exaggerate the esteem and favor which Satan commands in the city of bonnets and revolutions. You can scarcely pass through any of the thoroughfares without seeing his name emblazoned on a shop-window, or his figure carved or bedaubed in some grotesque or hideous guise on a sign-board inviting you to enter and spend your money under his patronage. There are devils dancing and devils grinning, devils fat and devils lean, a diable vert and a diable rose, a bon diable, a diable à quatre—every conceivable shape and color of diable, in fact, in the range of the infernal hierarchy. He stands as high in favor with the literary guild as with the shop-keepers; books and plays are called after him; his name is a household word in the press; it gives salt to the editor’s joke and point to his epigram. The devil is welcome everywhere, and everywhere set up as a sign not to be contradicted. Angels, on the other hand, are at a discount. Now and then you chance upon some honorable mention of the ange gardien, but the rare exception only serves as a contrast which vindicates the overwhelming popularity of the fallen brethren. Is this the outcome of the promise, “I will give my angels charge over thee”? And does Beelzebub’s protection of his Parisian votaries justify their interpretation of the message? I was revolving some such vague conjectures in my mind as I turned listlessly into the Rue de Rivoli, and saw a cab driving in under the porte cochère of my hotel. I quickened my pace, for I fancied I recognized a familiar face in the distance. The glass door at the foot of the stairs was still swinging, as I pushed it before me, and heard a voice calling my name on the first floor. “Hollo! here you are, uncle!” I cried, and, clearing the intervening stair at three bounds, I seized the admiral by both arms, as he stood with his hand still on my bell-rope.
“Come in, my boy. Come in,” he said, and pushed in without turning his head towards me.
“You have bad news!” I said. I read it in his averted face and the subdued gravity of his greeting. He deliberately took off his hat and flung his light travelling surtout on the sofa before he answered me. Then he came up and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Yes, very bad news, my poor fellow; but you will bear up like a man. It doesn’t all end here, you know.”
“My God! It is all over, then! She is dead!” I cried.
He made a gesture that signified assent, and pressed me down into a chair. I do not remember what followed.
I recollect his standing over me, and whispering words into my ear that came like the sound of my mother’s voice—words that fell like balm upon my burning brain, and silenced, as if by some physical force, other words that were quivering on my tongue. I never knew or cared before whether my uncle believed in anything, whether he had faith in God or in devils; but as he spoke to me then I remember feeling a kind of awe in his presence—awe mingled with surprise and a sense of peace and comfort; it was as if I had drifted unawares into a haven. He never left me for a moment till the hard dumbness was melted, and I let my head drop on his shoulder, and wept.…
He told me that the day I left Dieppe news came of the wreck of a fishing-smack having floated into the harbor of St. Valéry. The police were on the alert, and went at once to inspect the boat. It had capsized, and had drifted ashore, after knocking about on the high seas no one could say how many days; but it bore the name of a fisherman who had been seen in the neighborhood about ten days before. There was nothing in the boat, of course, that could give any indication as to what had become of its owner or how the accident had occurred. About two days later the body of a woman was washed ashore almost on the same spot; the police, still on the qui-vive, went down to see it, and at once telegraphed for my uncle. The body was lying at the morgue of St. Valéry; it was already decomposing, but the work of destruction was not far enough advanced to admit of doubt as to the identity. The long, dark hair was dripping with the slime of the sea, and tangled like a piece of sea-weed; but the admiral’s eyes had no sooner glanced at the face than he recognized it.
I can write this after an interval of many months, but even now I cannot recall it without feeling, almost as vividly as at the moment, the pang that seemed to cleave my very life in two. My uncle had said: “It doesn’t all end here!” and those words, I believe, preserved me from suicide. They kept singing, not in my ears, but within me, and seemed to be coming out of all the common sounds that were jarring and dinning outside. The very ticking of the clock seemed to repeat them: “It does not all end here.” It did, so far as my happiness went. I was a blighted man for ever. The dark mystery of the flight and the death would never be solved on this side of the grave. The sea had given up its dead, but the dead could not speak. I was alone henceforth with a secret that no fellow-creature could unriddle for me. I must bear the burden of my broken life, without any hope of alleviation, to the end. The name of De Winton was safe now. No blot would come upon it through the follies or sins of her who had beamed like a sweet, sudden star upon my path, and then gone out, leaving me in the lonely darkness. Why should I chronicle my days any more? They can never be anything to me but a dreary routine of comings and goings, without joy or hope to brighten them. The sun has gone down. The stone has fallen to the bottom; the trembling of the circles, as they quiver upon the surface of the water, soon passes away, and then all is still and stagnant again.
So Clide lapses into silence again, and for a time we lose sight of him. He is roving about the world, doing his best to kill pain by excitement, and soothe memory with hope; and all this while a new life is getting ready for him, growing and blossoming, and patiently waiting for the summer-time, when the fruit shall be ripe for him to come and gather it. The spot which this new life has chosen for its home is suggestive rather of the past than of the future. A tiny brick cottage, with a thatched roof overgrown with mosses green and brown, a quaint remnant of old-fashioned life, a bit of picturesque long ago forgotten on the skirts of the red-tiled, gas-lit, prosperous modern town of Dullerton. The little brick box, smothered in its lichens and mosses, was called The Lilies from a band of those majestic flowers that dwelt on either side of the garden-wicket, like guardian angels of the place, looking out in serene beauty on the world without.
It was a nine days’ wonder to Dullerton when the Comte Raymond de la Bourbonais and his daughter Franceline came from over the seas, and took up their abode at The Lilies with a French bonne called Angélique. There was the usual amount of guessing amongst the gossips as to the why and the wherefore a foreign nobleman should have selected such a place as Dullerton, when, as was affirmed by those who knew all about it, he had all the world before him to choose from. The only person who could have thrown light upon the mystery was Sir Simon Harness, the lord of the manor of Dullerton. But Sir Simon was not considerate enough to do so; he was even so perverse as to set the gossips on an entirely wrong scent for some time; and it was not until the count and his daughter had become familiar objects to the neighborhood that the reason of their presence there transpired.
The De la Bourbonais were an old race of royalists whose archives could have furnished novels for a generation without mixing one line of fiction with volumes of fact. They had fought in every Crusade, and won spurs on every battle-field wherever a French prince fought; they had produced heroes and heroines in the centuries when such things were expected from the feudal lords of France, and they had furnished scapegraces without end when these latter became the fashion; they had quarrelled with their neighbors, stormed their castles, and misbehaved themselves generally like other noble families of their time, dividing their days between war and gallantry so evenly that it was often difficult to say where the one began and where the other ended, or which led to which. This was in the good old times. Then the Revolution came. The territorial importance of the De la Bourbonais was considerably diminished at this date; but the prestige of the old name, with the deeds of prowess that had once made it a power in the camp and a glory at the court, was as great as ever, and marked its owners amongst the earliest victims of the Terror. They gave their full contingent of blue blood to the guillotine, and what lands remained to them were confiscated to the Regenerators of France. The then head of the house, the father of the present Comte Raymond, died in England under the roof of his friend, Sir Alexander Harness, father of Sir Simon. The son that was born to him in exile returned to France at the Restoration, and grew up in solitude in the old castle that had withstood so many storms, and—thanks partly to its dilapidated condition, but chiefly to the fidelity and courage of an old dependent—had been rescued from the general plunder, and left unmolested for the young master who came back to claim it. Comte Raymond lived there in learned isolation, sharing the ancestral ruin with a population of owls, who pursued their meditations in one wing while he pondered over philosophical problems in another. It was a dreary abode, except for the owls; a desolate wreck of ancient splendor and power. We may poetize over ruins, and clothe them with what pathos we will, the beauty of decay is but the beauty of death; the ivy that flourishes on the grave of a glorious past is but a harvest of death; it looks beautiful in the weird silver shadows of the moon, but it shrinks before the blaze of day that lights up the proud castle on the hill, standing in its strength of battlement and tower and flying buttress, and smiling a grim, granite smile upon the gray wreck in the valley down below, and wondering what poets and night-birds can find in its crumbling arches and gaping windows to haunt them so fanatically. Raymond de la Bourbonais was contented in his weather-beaten old fortress, and would probably never have dreamed of leaving it or changing the owl-like routine of his life, if it had not entered into the mind of his grand-aunt, the only remaining lady of his name, to marry him. Raymond started when the subject was broached, but, with the matter-of-fact coolness of a Frenchman in such things, he quickly recovered his composure, and observed blandly to the aged countess: “You are right, my aunt. It had not occurred to me, I confess; but now that you mention it, I see it would be desirable.” And having so far arranged his marriage, Raymond, satisfied with his own consent, relapsed into his books, and begged that he might hear no more about it until his grand-aunt had found him a wife.
The family of the De Xaintriacs lived near him, and happened just at this moment to have a daughter to marry; so the old countess ordered out the lumbering family coach that had taken her great-grandmother to the fêtes given for Marie de Medicis on her marriage, and rumbled over the roads to the Château de Xaintriac. This ancestral hall was about on a par with its neighbor, De la Bourbonais, as regarded external preservation, but the similarity between the two houses ended here. The De Xaintriacs’ origin was lost in the pre-historic ages before the Deluge, the earliest record of its existence being a curious iron casket preserved in the archives, in which, it was said, the family papers had been rescued from the Flood by one of Noe’s daughters-in-law, “herself a demoiselle de Xaintriac”—so ran the legend. The papers had been destroyed in a fire many centuries before the Christian era, but happily the casket had been saved. It was to a daughter of this illustrious house that the Comtesse de la Bourbonais offered her grand-nephew in marriage. Armengarde de Xaintriac was twenty-five years of age, and shadowed forth in character and person the finest characteristics of her mystic genealogy. In addition to the antediluvian casket, she brought the husband, who was exactly double her age, a dower of beauty and sweetness that surpassed even the lofty pride that was her birthright. For four years they were as happy as two sojourners in this valley of tears could well be. Then the young wife began to droop, perishing away slowly before her husband’s eyes. “Take her to the Nile for a year; there is just a chance that that may save her,” said the doctors. Armengarde did not hear the cruel verdict; and when Raymond came back one day after a short absence, and announced that he had come in unexpectedly to a sum of money, and proposed their spending the winter in Egypt, she clapped her hands, and made ready for the journey. Raymond watched her delight like one transfigured, while she, suspecting nothing, took his happiness as a certain pledge of restored health, and went singing about the house, as if the promise were already fulfilled. The whole place revived in a new atmosphere of hope and security; the low ceilings, festooned with the cobwebs of a generation, grew alight with cheerfulness, and the sunbeams streamed more freely through the dingy panes of the deep windows. It was as if some stray ray from heaven had crept into the old keep, lighting it up with a brightness not of earth.
Angélique was to go with them in charge of little Franceline, their only child.
It was on a mild autumn morning, early in October, that the travellers set out on their journey toward the Pyramids. The birds were singing, though the sun was hiding behind the clouds; but as Raymond de la Bourbonais looked back from the gate to catch a last glimpse of the home that was no longer his, the clouds suddenly parted, and the sun burst out in a stream of golden light, painting the old keep with shadows of pathetic beauty, and investing it with a charm he had never seen there before. Sacrifice, like passion, has its hour of rapture, its crisis of mysterious pain, when the soul vibrates between agony and ecstasy. A sunbeam lighted upon Raymond’s head, encircling it like a halo. “My Raymond, you look like an angel; see, there is a glory round your head!” cried Armengarde.
“It is because I am so happy!” replied her husband, with a radiant smile. “We are going to the land of the sun, where my pale rose will grow red again.”
The sacrifice was not quite in vain. She was spared to him four years; then she died, and he laid her to rest under the shade of the great Pyramid, where they told him that Abraham and Sara were sleeping.
When M. de la Bourbonais set foot on his native soil again, he was a beggar. The money he had received for the castle and the small bit of land belonging to it had just sufficed to keep up the happy delusion with Armengarde to the last, and bring him and Franceline and Angélique home; the three landed at Marseilles with sufficient money to keep them for one month, using it economically. Meantime the count must look for employment, trusting to Providence rather than to man. Providence did not fail him. Help was at hand in the shape of one of those kind dispensations that we call lucky chances, and which are oftener found in the track of chivalrous souls than misanthropes like to own. About three days after his arrival in the busy mercantile port, M. de la Bourbonais was walking along the quay, indulging in sad reveries with the vacant air and listless gait now habitual to him, when a hand was laid brusquely on his shoulder. “As I live, here is the man,” cried Sir Simon Harness. “My dear fellow, you’ve turned up in the very nick of time; but where in heaven’s name have you turned up from?”
The question was soon answered. Sir Simon gave his heartiest sympathy, and then told his friend the meaning of the joyous exclamation which had greeted him.
“You remember a villain of the name of Roy—a notary who played old Harry with some property in shares and so forth that your father entrusted to him just before he fled to England? You must have heard him tell the story many a time, poor fellow. Well, this worthy, as big a blackguard as ever cheated the hangman of his fee, was called up to his reckoning about a month ago, and, by way, I suppose, of putting things straight a bit before he handed in his books, the rascal put a codicil to his will, restoring to you what little remained of the money he swindled your poor father out of. It is placed in bank shares—a mere pittance of the original amount; but it will keep your head above water just for the present, and meantime we must look about for something for you at headquarters—some stick at the court or a nice little government appointment. The executors have been advertising for you in every direction; it’s the luckiest chance, my just meeting you in time to give the good news.”
Raymond was thankful for the timely legacy, but he would not hear of a stir being made to secure him either stick or place. He was too proud to sue at the hands of the regicide’s son who now sat on the throne of Louis Seize, nor would he accept an appointment at his court, supposing it offered unsolicited. The pittance that, in Sir Simon’s opinion, was enough to keep him above water for a time, would be, with his simple habits, enough to float him for the rest of his life. He had, it is true, visions of future wealth for Franceline, but these were to be realized by the product of his own brain, not by the pay of a courtly sinecure or government office. Finding him inexorable on this point, Sir Simon ceased to urge it. He was confident that a life of poverty and obscurity would soon bring down the rigid royalist’s pride; but meantime where was he to live? Raymond had no idea. Life in a town was odious to him. He wanted the green fields and quiet of the country for his studies; but where was he to seek them now? He had no mind to go back to Lorraine and live like a peasant, in sight of his old home, that was now in the hands of strangers. “Come to England,” said Sir Simon. “You’ll stay with me until you grow home-sick and want to leave us. No one will interfere with you; you can work away at your books, and be as much of a hermit as you like.” Raymond accepted the invitation, but only till he should find some suitable little home for himself in the neighborhood. Within a week he found himself installed at Dullerton Court with Franceline and Angélique. The same rooms that his father had occupied sixty years before, and which had ever since been called the count’s apartments, were prepared for them. They were very little changed by the wear and tear of the intervening half-century. There were the same costly hangings to the gilt four-post beds, the same grim, straight-nosed Queen Elizabeth staring down from the tapestry, out of her stiff ruffles, on one wall; the same faded David and Goliath wrestling on the other. Raymond could remember how the pictures used to fascinate him when he was a tiny boy, and how he used to lie awake in his little bed and keep his eyes fixed on them, and wonder whether the two would ever leave off fighting, and if the big man would not jump up suddenly and knock down the little man, who was sticking something into his chest. Outside the house the scene was just as unchanged; the lake was in the same place, and it seemed as if the swan that was sitting in the middle of it, with folded sails and one leg tucked under his wing, was the identical one that the young countess used to feed, and that Raymond cried to be let ride on. The deer were glancing through the distant glade, just as he remembered them as a child, starting at every sound, and tossing their antlers in the sunlight; the gray stone of the grand castellated house may have been a tinge darker for the smoke and fog of the sixty additional years, but this was not noticeable; the sunbeams sent dashes of golden light across the flanking towers with their dark ivy draperies, and into the deep mullioned windows, where the queer small panes hid themselves, as if they were ashamed to be seen, just as in the old days; the fountain sent up its crystal showers on the broad sweep of the terrace, and the lime and the acacia trees sheltering the gravel walks that led through grassy openings into the enclosed flower-garden were as dark and as shady as of yore; the clumps on the mounds swelling here and there through the park had not outgrown the shapes they were in Raymond’s memory; the lawn was as smooth and green as when he rolled over its mossy turf, to the utter detriment of fresh-frilled pinafores and white frocks.
It was a pleasant resting-place, a palm-grove in the wilderness, where the wayfarer might halt peacefully, and take breath for the rest of the journey. Yet Raymond was determined not to tarry there longer than was absolutely needful. Sir Simon did all that a host could do to make him prolong his stay; but he was inexorable. He spied out a tiny brick cottage perched on a bit of rising ground just below the park, half-smothered in moss and lichens. It was beautifully situated as to view; flowing meadows sloped down before it towards the river; beyond the river corn-fields stretched out towards the woods, that rose like dark waves breaking at the foot of the purple hills; the cottage was called The Lilies, and contained six rooms, three above and three below, including the kitchen. When Raymond offered himself as a tenant for it, the baronet burst into a ringing laugh that scared the stately swan out of his dignity, and sent him scudding over the water like a frightened goose. But Raymond was not to be laughed out of his purpose; he should have The Lilies, or he would go away. He must have it, too, like any ordinary tenant, on the same conditions, neither better nor worse. The lease was accordingly drawn out in due form, and M. de la Bourbonais entered into possession after a very short delay. The room that was intended for a drawing-room was fitted up with the count’s books—the few special treasures he had rescued from the fate of all his goods and chattels four years ago—and was called the library. It was not much bigger than a good-sized book-case, but it would answer all the purposes of a sitting-room for the present; Franceline would never be in his way, and might sit there as much as she liked. The landlord had had a little scheme of his own about the furnishing of the cottage, and had sent for a London tradesman to this effect, intending to surprise Raymond by having it all ready for him. But Raymond was as impracticable here as about the lease. Sir Simon was annoyed. Raymond contrived to foil him and have his own way in everything. He seemed to be half his time in the moon; but when you wanted him to stay there, he was suddenly wide-awake and as wilful as a mule. There was a substratum of steel somewhere in him, in spite of his gentleness; and though it never hurt you, it repelled you when you came against it every now and then, and it was provoking. There was altogether something about Raymond that mystified Sir Simon. To see a man as refined and sensitive as he was, endowed with the hereditary instincts that make affluence a necessity of existence to a gentleman, settling down into the conditions and abode of the smallest of small farmers, and doing it as cheerfully as if he were perfectly contented with the prospect, was something beyond Sir Simon’s comprehension. To him life without wealth—not for its own sake, but for what it gives and hinders—was merely a sentence of penal servitude. Raymond had always been poor, he knew; but poverty in the antique splendor of decayed ancestral halls, with the necessaries of life provided as by a law of nature, and in the midst of a loyal and reverent peasantry, was a very different sort of poverty from what he was now embarking on. He would sometimes fix his eyes on Raymond when he was busying himself, with apparently great satisfaction, on some miserable trifle that Angélique wanted done in her room or in the kitchen, and wonder whether it was genuine or feigned, whether sorrow or philosophy had so deadened him to external conditions as to make him indifferent to the material meanness and miseries of his position. He never heard a word of regret, or any expression that could be construed into regret, escape him in their most familiar conversations. Once Raymond, in speaking of poverty, had confessed that he had never believed it had any power to make men unhappy—such poverty as his had been—until he felt the touch of its cruel finger on his Armengarde; then he realized the fact in its full bitterness. But he had foiled the tormenter by a sublime fraud of love, and saved his own heart from an anguish that would have been more intolerable than remorse. Sir Simon remembered the expression of Raymond’s face as he said this; the smile of gentle triumph that it wore, as if gratitude for the rescue and the sacrifice had alone survived. He concluded that it was so; that Raymond had forgiven poverty, since he had conquered her; and that now he could take her to live with him like a snake that had lost its sting, or some bright-spotted wild beast that he had wrestled with and tamed, and might henceforth sport with in safety.
Sir Simon found it hard to reconcile this serene philosophical state of mind with his friend’s insurmountable reluctance to accept the least material service, while, on the other hand, he took with avidity any amount of affection and sympathy that was offered to him. It was because he felt that he could repay these in kind; whereas for the others he must remain an insolvent debtor. “Bourbonais, that is sheer nonsense and inconsistency. I wouldn’t give a button for your philosophy, if it can’t put you above such weakness. It’s absurd; you ought to struggle against it and overcome it.” This was the baronet’s pet formula; he was always ready with this advice to his friends. Raymond never contested the wisdom of the proposition, or Sir Simon’s right to enunciate it; but in this particular at least he did not adopt it.
The gentry of the neighborhood called in due course at The Lilies, and M. de la Bourbonais punctiliously returned the civility, and here the intercourse ended. He would accept no hospitality that he was not in a position to return. He was on very good terms with his immediate neighbors, who were none of them formidable people. There was Mr. Langrove, the vicar of Dullerton, and Father Henwick, the Catholic priest, and Miss Bulpit and Miss Merrywig, two maiden ladies, who were in their separate ways prominent institutions of the place. These four, with Sir Simon, were the only persons who could boast of being on visiting terms with the shy, polite foreigner who bowed to every old apple-woman on the road as if she were a duchess, and kept the vulgar herd of the town and the fine people of the county as much at a distance as if he were an exiled sovereign who declined to receive the homage of other subjects than his own.
Franceline had been eight years at Dullerton, and was now in her seventeenth year. She was very beautiful, as she stood leaning on the garden-rail amongst the lilies, looking like a lily herself, with one dove perched upon her finger, while another alighted on her head, and cooed to it. She was neither a blonde nor a brunette, as we classify them, but a type between the two. Her complexion was of that peculiar whiteness that we see in fair northern women, Scandinavians and Poles; as clear as ivory and as colorless, the bright vermilion of the finely cut, sensitive mouth alone relieving its pallor. Yet her face was deficient neither in warmth nor light; the large, almond-shaped eyes, flashing in shadow, sometimes black, sometimes purple gray, lighted it better than the pinkest roses could have done; and if the low arch of the dark eyebrows gave a tinge of severity to it, the impression was removed by two saucy dimples that lurked in either cheek, and were continually breaking out of their hiding-places, and brightening the pensive features like a sunbeam. Franceline’s voice had a note in it that was as bright as her dimples. It rang through the brick cottage like the sound of running water; and when she laughed, it was so hearty that you laughed with her from very sympathy. Such a creature would have been in her proper sphere in a palace, treading on pink marble, and waited on by a retinue of pages. But she was not at all out of place at The Lilies; perhaps, next to the palace and pink marble, she could not have alighted in a more appropriate frame than this mossy flower-bed to which a capricious destiny had transplanted her. She seemed quite as much a fitting part of the place as the tall, majestic lilies on either side of the garden-gate. But as regarded Dullerton beyond the garden-gate, she was as much out of place as a gazelle in a herd of Alderney cows. Dullerton was the very ideal of commonplace, the embodiment of respectability and dulness—wealthy, fat-of-the-land dulness; if a prize had been set up for that native commodity, Dullerton would certainly have carried it over every county in England. There was no reason why it should have been so dull, for it possessed quite as many external elements of sociability as other provincial neighborhoods, and the climate was no foggier than elsewhere; everybody was conscious of the dulness, and complained of it to everybody else, but nobody did anything to mend matters. There was, nevertheless, a good deal of intercourse one way or another; a vast amount of food was interchanged between the big houses, and the smaller ones periodically called in the neighbors to roll croquet-balls about on the wet grass, and sip tea under the dripping trees; for it seemed a law of nature that the weather was wet on this social occasion. But nothing daunted the good-will of the natives; they dressed themselves in muslins, pink, white, and blue, and came and played croquet, and drank tea, and bored themselves, and went away declaring they had never been at such a stupid affair in their lives. The gentlemen were always in a feeble minority at these festive gatherings, and, instead of multiplying themselves to supplement numbers by zeal, they had a habit of getting together in a group to discuss the crops and the game-laws, leaving their wives and daughters to seek refuge in county gossip, match-making, or parish affairs, according to their separate tastes. Dullerton was not a scandal-mongering place. Its gossip was mostly of an innocent kind; the iniquities of servants the difficulties of getting a tolerable cook or a housemaid that knew her business, recipes for economical soups for the poor, the best place to buy flannels, etc., formed the staple subjects of the matrons’ conversation. The young ladies dressed themselves bravely in absolute defiance of the rudiments of art and taste; vied with each other in disguising their heads—some of them very pretty ones—under monstrous chignons and outlandish head-gears; practised the piano, rode on horseback, and wondered who Mr. Charlton would eventually marry; whether his attentions to Miss X—— meant anything, or whether he was only playing her off against Miss Z——. Mr. Charlton was the only eligible young man resident within a radius of fifteen miles of Dullerton, and was consequently the target for many enterprising bows and arrows. For nine years he had kept mothers and daughters in harassing suspense as to “what he meant”; and, instead of reforming as he grew older, he was more tantalizing than ever now at the mature age of thirty-two. Mothers and maidens were still on the qui-vive, and lived in perpetual hot water as to the real intentions of the owner of Moorlands and six thousand a year. He had, besides this primary claim on social consideration, another that would in itself have made him master of the situation in Dullerton: he had a fine voice, and sang a capital song; and this advantage Mr. Charlton used somewhat unkindly. He was as capricious with his voice as in his attentions, and it was a serious preoccupation with the dinner-givers whether he would make the evening go off delightfully by singing one of his songs with that enchanting high C, or leave it to its native dulness by refusing to sing at all. The moods and phases of the tyrannical tenor were, in fact, watched as eagerly by the expectant hostess as the antics of the needle on the eve of a picnic.
The one house of that side of the county where people did not bore themselves was Dullerton Court. They congregated here, predetermined to enjoy something more than eating and drinking; and they were never disappointed. There was nothing in the entertainments themselves to explain this fact; the house was indeed on a grander scale of architecture, more palatial than any other country mansion in those parts; but the people who met there, and chatted and laughed and went away in high satisfaction with themselves and each other, were the same who congregated in the other houses to yawn and be bored, and go away grumbling. The secret of the difference lay entirely in the host. Sir Simon Harness came into the world endowed with a faculty that predestined him to rule over a certain class of men—the dull and dreary class; people who have no vital heat of their own, but are for ever trying to warm themselves at other people’s fires. He had, moreover, the genius of hospitality in all its charms. He welcomed every commonplace acquaintance with a heartiness that put the visitor in instantaneous good-humor with himself and his host and all the world. Society was his life; he could not live without it. He enjoyed his fellow-creatures, and he delighted in having them about him; his house was open to his friends at all times and seasons. What else was a house good for? What pleasure could a man take in his house, unless it was full of friends? Unhappily for Dullerton, Sir Simon was a frequent absentee. Some said that he could not stand its dulness for long at a time, and that this was why he was continually on the road to Paris and Vienna and the sunny shores of Italy and Spain. But this could not be true; you had only to witness his mercurial gayety in the midst of his Dullerton friends, and hear the ring of his loud, manly voice when he shook them by the hand and bade them welcome, to be convinced that he enjoyed them to the full as much as they enjoyed him. It is true that since M. de la Bourbonais had come to be his neighbor, the squire was less of a rover than formerly. When he was at home, he spent a great deal of time at The Lilies—a circumstance which gave Dullerton a great deal to talk about, and raised the reserved, courteous recluse a great many pegs in the estimation of the county. The baronet and his friend had many points of sympathy besides the primary one of old hereditary friendship, though they were as dissimilar in tastes and character as any two could be. This dissimilarity was, however, a part of the mutual attraction. Sir Simon was an inexhaustible talker, and M. de la Bourbonais an indefatigable listener; he had what Voltaire called a talent for holding his tongue. But this negative condition of a good listener was not his only one; he possessed in a rare degree all the merits that go to the composition of that delightful personage. Most people, while you are talking to them, are more occupied in thinking what they will say to you than in attending to what you are saying to them, and these people are miserable listeners. M. de la Bourbonais gave his whole mind to what you were saying, and never thought of his answer until the time came to give it. He not only seemed interested, he really was interested, in your discourse; and he would frequently hear more in it than it was meant to convey, supplying from his own quick intelligence what was wanting in your crude, disjointed remarks. There was nothing in a quiet way that Sir Simon liked better than an hour’s talk with his tenant, and he always came away from the luxury of having been listened to by a cultivated, philosophical mind in high good-humor with himself. His vanity, moreover, was flattered by the fact beyond the mere personal gratification it afforded him. Everybody knew that the French emigré was a man of learning, given to abstruse study of some abstract kind; the convivial squire must therefore be more learned than he cared to make believe, since this philosophical student took such pleasure in his society. When his fox-hunting friends would twit him jocosely on this score, Sir Simon would pooh-pooh them with a laugh, observing in a careless way: “One must dip into this sort of thing now and then, you see, or else one’s brain gets rusty. I don’t care much myself about splitting hairs on Descartes or untwisting the fibres of a Greek root, but it amuses Bourbonais; you see he has so few to talk to who can listen to this sort of thing.” It was true that the conversation did occasionally take such learned turns, and equally true that M. de la Bourbonais enjoyed airing his views on the schools and dissecting roots, and that Sir Simon felt elevated in his own opinion when the count caught up some hazardous remark of his on one of the classic authors, and worked it up into an elaborate defence of the said author; and when, on their next meeting, Raymond would accost him with “Mon cher, I didn’t quite see at the moment what you meant by pointing that line from Sophocles at me, but I see now,” Sir Simon would purr inwardly like a stroked cat. Every now and then, too, he would startle the Grand Jury by the brilliancy of his classical quotations, and the way in which he bore down on them with a weight of argument worthy of a Q.C. in high practice; little they dreamed that the whole case had been sifted the day before by the orator’s learned friend, who had analyzed it, and put it in shape for the rhetorical purpose of the morrow. The baronet was serenely unconscious of being a plagiarist; he had got into a way of sucking his friend’s brains, until he honestly thought they were his own.
This intellectual piracy is not so rare, perhaps, as at first sight you may imagine. It would be a curious revelation if our own minds could be laid bare to us, and we were enabled to see how far their workings are original and how far imitative. We should, I fancy, be startled to find how small a proportion the former bears to the latter, and how much that we consider the spontaneous operation of our minds is, in reality, but the reflex of the minds of others, and the unconscious reproduction of thoughts and ideas that are suggested by things outside of us.
Franceline’s bonne, as she still called her, though Angélique had passed from that single capacity into the complex position of butler, cook, housemaid, lady’s maid, and general factotum at The Lilies, was as complete a contrast to a name as ever mortal presented. A gaunt, high-cheek-boned, grizzly-haired woman, with a squint and a sharp, aggressive chin, every inch of her body protested against the mockery that had labelled her angelic. She had a gruff voice like a man’s, and a trick of tossing her head and falling back in her chair when she answered you that had gained her the nickname of the French grenadier amongst the rising generation of Dullerton. Yet the kernel of this rough husk was as tender and mellow as a peach, and differed from the outer woman as much as the outer woman differed from her name. When the small boys followed her round the market, laughing at her under her very nose, and accompanying their vernacular comments with very explicative gestures, the French grenadier had not the heart to stop the performance by sending the actors to the right-about, as she might have done with one shake of her soldier-like fist; but if they had dared to look crooked at Franceline, or play off the least of their tricks on M. de la Bourbonais, she would have punched their heads for them, and sent them off yelling with broken noses without the smallest compunction. Angélique had found a husband in her youth, and when he died she had transferred all her wifely solicitude to her master and his wife and child. She could have given him no greater proof of it than by leaving her native village and following him to his foreign home; yet she never let him suspect that the sacrifice cost her a pang. She was of a social turn, and it was no small trial to be shut out from neighborly chat by her ignorance of the language. She took it out, to be sure, with the count and Franceline, and with the few intimates of The Lilies who spoke French; but, let her improve these opportunities as she might, there was still a great gap in her social life. Conversation with ladies and gentlemen was one thing, and a good gossip with a neighbor was another. But Angélique kept this grief to herself, and never complained. With M. le Curé, as she dubbed Father Henwick, the Catholic priest of Dullerton, she went the length of shaking her head, and observing that people who were in exile had their purgatory in this world, and went straight to heaven when they died. Father Henwick had been brought up at S. Sulpice, and spoke French like a native, and was as good as a born Frenchman. She could pour her half-uttered pinings into his ear without fear or scruple; her dreams of returning dans mon pays at some future day, when M. le Comte would have married mademoiselle. She could even confide to this trusty ear her anxieties on the latter head, her fear that M. le Comte, being a philosopher, would not know how to go about finding a husband for Franceline. She could indulge freely in motherful praises of Franceline’s perfections, and tell over and over again the same stories of her nurseling’s babyhood and childhood; how certain traits had frightened her that the petite was going to turn out a very Jezabel for wickedness, but how she had lived to find out her mistake. She loved notably to recall one instance of these juvenile indications of character; when one day, after bellowing for a whole hour without ceasing, the child suddenly stopped, and Mme. la Comtesse called out from her pillows under the palm-tree: “At last! Thank goodness it’s over!” and how Franceline stamped her small foot, and sobbed out: “No-o-o, it’s not over! I repose myself!” and began again louder than ever. And how another day, when a powerful Arab who was leading her mule over the hills suddenly lashed his whip across the shoulders of a little boy fast asleep on the pathway, waking him up with a howl of pain, Franceline clutched her little fist and struck the savage a box on the ear, screaming at him in French: “O you wicked! I wish you were a thief, and I’d lock you up! I wish you were a murderer, and I’d cut your head off! I wish you were a candle, and I’d blow you out!” Father Henwick would listen to the same stories, and delight Angélique by assuring her for the twentieth time that they were certain pledges of future strength and decision in the woman. And when Angélique would wind up with the usual remark, “Ah! our little one is born for something great; she would make a famous queen, Monsieur le Curé,” he would cordially agree with her, revolving, nevertheless, in his own mind the theory that there are many kinds of greatness, and many queens who go through life without the coronation ceremony that crowns them with the outward symbols of royalty.
Miss Merrywig was another of Angélique’s friends; but she had not been educated at S. Sulpice, and so the intercourse was sustained under difficulties. Her French was something terrific. She ignored genders, despised moods and tenses; and as to such interlopers as adverbs and prepositions, Miss Merrywig treated them with the contempt they deserved. Her mode of proceeding was extremely simple: she took a bundle of infinitives in one hand, and pronouns and adjectives in another, and shook them up together, and they fell into place the best way they could. It was wonderful how, somehow or other, they turned into sentences, and Angélique, by dint of good-will, always guessed what Miss Merrywig was driving at. A great bond between them was their love of a bargain. Miss Merrywig delighted in a bargain as only an old maid with an income of two hundred pounds a year can delight in it. She had, moreover, a passion for making everybody guess what she paid for things. This harmless peculiarity was apt to be a nuisance to her friends. The first thing she did after investing in a remnant of some sort, or a second-hand article, was to carry it the rounds of Dullerton, and insist on everybody’s guessing how much it cost.
“Make a guess! You know what a good linsey costs, and you see this is pure wool; you can see that? you have only to feel it. Just feel it! It’s as soft as cashmere. That’s what tempted me. I don’t want it exactly, but then I mightn’t get such a bargain when I did want it; and, as the young man at Willis’ said—they’re so uncommonly civil at Willis’!—a good article always brings its value; and there was no denying it was a bargain, and one never can go wrong in taking a good thing when one gets it cheap; and they do mix cotton so much with the wool nowadays that one can’t be too particular, as my dear mother used to say, though in her time it was of course very different. Now you’ve examined it, what do you think I gave for it?” There was no getting out of it: you might try to fight off on the plea that you had no experience in linseys, that you were no judge—Miss Merrywig would take no excuse.
“Well, but give a guess. Say something. What would you consider cheap? You know what a stuff all pure wool ought to be worth. Just give a guess. Remember, it was a bargain!” Thus adjured and driven into a corner, you timidly ventured a sum, and, whether you hit it or not, Miss Merrywig was aggrieved. If you fell below the mark, there was no describing her astonishment and disappointment. “Fifteen shillings! Dear me! Why, that’s the price of a common alpaca! Fifteen shillings! Good gracious! Oh? you can’t mean it. Do guess again.”
And when, to console her, you guessed double, and it happened to be right, she was still inconsolable.
“So you don’t think it was a bargain after all! Dear me! Well that is a disappointment. All I can say is that my dear mother had a linsey that was not one atom softer or stronger than this, and she paid just double for it—three pounds; she did indeed; she told me so herself, poor soul. I often heard her speak highly of that linsey when I was a child, and I quite well remember her saying that it had cost three pounds, and that it had been well worth the money.”
You might cry peccavi, and eat your words, and declare your conviction that it was the greatest windfall you ever heard of; nothing would pacify Miss Merrywig until she had carried her bargain to some one else, and had it guessed at a higher figure, which you were pretty sure to be informed of at the earliest opportunity, and triumphantly upbraided for your want of appreciation. Angélique was a great comfort to Miss Merrywig on this head. She loved a bargain dearly, and was proud of showing that she knew the difference between one that was and one that was not; accordingly, she was one of the first to whom Miss Merrywig submitted a new purchase. “Voyons!” the grenadier would say, and then she would take out her spectacles, wipe them, adjust them on her nose, and then deliberately rub the tissue between her finger and thumb, look steadily at Miss Merrywig, as if trying to gather a hint before committing herself, and then give an opinion. She generally premised with the cautious formula: “Dans mon pays it would be so-and-so. Of course I can only make a guess in this country; prices differ.” She was not often far astray; but even when she was, this preface disarmed Miss Merrywig, and, when Angélique hit the mark, her satisfaction was unbounded. Other people might say she had been cheated, or that she had paid the full value of the thing. There was Comte de la Bourbonais’ French maid, who said it was the greatest bargain she had ever seen; and being a Frenchwoman, and accustomed to French stuffs, she was more likely to know than people who had never been out of England in the whole course of their lives.
The other old maid who occupied a prominent position at Dullerton, and was on friendly terms with the grenadier, was Miss Bulpit. It would be difficult to meet with a greater contrast between any two people than between Miss Bulpit and Miss Merrywig. The latter talked in italics, emphasizing all the small words of her discourse, so as to throw everything out of joint. Miss Bulpit spoke “in mournful numbers,” brought out her sentences as slowly as a funeral knell, and was altogether funereal in her aspect. She was tall and lank, and wore a black silk wig, pasted in melancholy braids on either side of her face—a perfect foil to the gay little curls that danced on Miss Merrywig’s forehead like so many little bells keeping time to her tongue. Miss Bulpit was enthroned on a pedestal of one thousand five hundred pounds a year, and attended by all the substantial honors that spring from such a foundation. She was fully alive to the advantages of her position, and had never married from the fear of being sought more for her money than for herself. So, at least, rumor has it. Mr. Tobes, the Wesleyan clergyman of the next parish, whose awakening sermons decoyed the black sheep of the surrounding folds to him, had tried for the prize for more than seven years, but in vain. Miss Bulpit smiled with benevolent condescension on his assiduities, allowed him to meet her at the railway station and to hand her a bouquet occasionally; but this was the extent of his reward. He persevered, however; and, when Miss Bulpit shook her black silk head at him with a melancholy smile and a reproof for wasting on her the precious time that belonged to his flock, Mr. Tobes would reply that the laborer was worthy of his hire, and that no man could live without an occasional recompense for his labors.
Miss Bulpit was the lowest of the Low-Church, so zealous in propagating her own views as to be a severe trial to the vicar, Mr. Langrove. The vicar was a shy, scholarly man and a great lover of peace, but he was often hard pushed to keep the peace with Miss Bulpit. She crossed him in every way, and defied him to his very face; but it was done so mildly, with such an unction of zeal and such a sincere desire to correct his errors and make up for his shortcomings, that it was impossible to treat her like an ordinary antagonist. She had a soup-kitchen and a dispensary in her own house, where the poor of his parish were fed and healed; and if Miss Bulpit made these material things the medium of dealing with their souls, and if they chose to be dealt with, how could Mr. Langrove interfere to prevent it? If she had a call to break the word to others, why should she not obey it just as he obeyed his? He had his pulpit, which she did not interfere with—a mercy for which the vicar was not, perhaps, sufficiently grateful. Miss Bulpit was limited to no restriction of place or time; she could preach anywhere and at a moment’s notice; the water was always at high pressure, and only wanted a touch to set it flowing into any channel; the cottages, the wards of the hospital, the village school, the roadside, any place was a rostrum for her. If she met a group of laborers going home with their spades over their shoulders, Miss Bulpit would accost them with a few good words; and if they took them well, as their class mostly do from ladies, she would plunge into the promiscuous depths of that awful leather bag of hers that was Mr. Langrove’s horror, and evolve from a chaos of pill-boxes, socks, spectacles, soap, black draughts, buns, and bobbins, a packet of tracts, and, selecting an appropriate one, she would proceed to expound it, and wind up with a few texts out of the little black Testament that lived by itself in an outside pocket of the black leather bag. This state of things would have been bad enough, even if Miss Bulpit had held sound views; but what made it infinitely worse was that her orthodoxy was more than doubtful. But there was no way of putting her in her place. She was too rich for that. If she had been a poor woman, like Miss Merrywig, it would have been easy enough; but Miss Bulpit’s fortune had built a bulwark of defence round her, and against these stout walls the vicar’s shafts might be pointed in perfect safety to the enemy. It was a great mercy if they did not recoil on himself. Some persons accused him of being ungrateful. How could he quarrel with her for preaching in the school when she had re-roofed it for him, after he had spent six months in fruitless appeals to the board to do it? How could the authorities of the hospital refuse her the satisfaction of saying a few serious words to the inmates, when she supplied them with unlimited port-wine and jellies, and other delicacies which the authorities could not provide? It was very difficult to turn out a benefactor who paid liberally for her privileges, and had so firm a footing in every charitable institution of the county. The vicar was not on vantage-ground in his struggle to hold his own. Miss Bulpit was a pillar of the state of Dullerton. There were not a few who whispered that if either must go to the wall, it had better be the parson than the parishioner. Coals were at famine prices; soup and port-wine are comforting to the soul of man, and the donor’s strictures on S. James and exclusive enthusiasm for S. Paul were things that could be tolerated by those whom they did not concern.
Franceline had been to see Miss Merrywig, who lived like a lizard in the grass, with a willow weeping copious tears over her mouldy little cottage. The cheerful old lady always spoke with thankfulness of the quiet and comfort of her home, and believed that everybody must envy her its picturesque situation, to say nothing of the delights of being wakened by the larks before daylight, and kept awake long after midnight by the nightingales. The woods at Dullerton were alive with nightingales. On emerging from the damp darkness after an hour with Miss Merrywig, Franceline found that the sun had climbed up to the zenith, and was pouring down a sultry glow that made the earth smoke again. There was a stile at the end of the wood, and she sat down to rest herself under the thick shade of a sycamore. The stillness of the noon was on everything. A few lively linnets tried to sing; but, the effort being prompted solely by duty, after a while they gave it up, and withdrew to the coolest nooks, and enjoyed their siesta like the lazy ones. Nobody stirred, except the insects that were chirping in the grass, and some bees that sailed from flower to flower, buzzing and doing field-labor when everybody else was asleep or idle. To the right the fields were brimful of ripening grain of every shade of gold; the deep-orange corn was overflowing into the pale amber of the rye, and the bearded barley was washing the hedge that walled it off from the lemon-colored wheat. To the left the rich grass-lands were dotted with flocks and herds. In the nearest meadow some cattle were herding. It was too hot to eat, so they stood surveying the fulness of the earth with mild, bovine gaze. They might have been sphinxes, they were so still; not a muscle in their sleek bodies moved, except that a tail lashed out against the flies now and then. Some were in the open field, holding up their white horns to the sunlight; others were grouped in twos and threes under a shady tree; but the noontide hush was on them all. Presently a number of horses came trooping leisurely up to the pond near the stile; the mild-eyed kine moved their slow heads after the procession, and then, one by one, trooped on with it. The noise of the hoofs plashing into the water, and the loud lapping of the thirsty tongues, was like a drink to the hot silence. Franceline watched them lifting their wet mouths, all dripping, from the pool, and felt as if she had been drinking too. There was a long, solemn pause, and then a sound like the blast of an organ rose up from the pond, swelling and sweeping over the fields; before it died away a calf in a distant paddock answered it.
If any one had told Franceline, as she sat on her stile, thinking sweet, nothing-at-all thoughts, under the sycamore tree, that she was communing with nature, she would have opened her dark eyes at them, and laughed. It was true, nevertheless. She might not know it, but she drew a great deal of her happiness from the woods and fields, and the birds and the sunsets. Her life had been from its babyhood, comparatively speaking, a solitary one, and the want, or rather the absence, of kindred companions had driven her unconsciously into companionship with nature. Her father’s society was a melancholy one enough for a young girl. Raymond’s mind was like an æolian harp set up in a ruin; every breath of wind that swept over it drew out sounds of sweet but mournful music. Even his cheerfulness—and it was uniform and genuine—had a note of sadness in it, like a lively air set in a minor key; there was nothing morbid or harsh in his spirit, but it was entirely out of tune with youth. He was perfectly resigned to life, but the spring was broken; he looked on at Franceline’s young gayety, as he might do at the flutterings and soarings of her doves, with infinite admiration, but without the faintest response within himself. So the child grew up as much alone as a bird might be with creatures of a different nature, and made herself a little world of her own—not a dream world, in the sense of ordinary romance; she had read no novels and knew nothing about the great problem of the human heart, except what its own promptings may have whispered to her. She made friends with the flowers and the birds and the woods, and loved them as if they were living companions. She watched their comings and goings, and found out their secrets, and got into a way of talking to them and telling them hers. As a child, the first peep of the snowdrop and the first call of the cuckoo was as exciting an event to her as the arrival of a new toy or a new dress to other little girls. She found S. Francis of Assisi’s beautiful hymn to his “brother, the sun, and his sisters, the moon and the stars,” one day in an old book of her father’s, and she learned it by heart, and would warble it in a duet with the nightingale out of her lattice-window sometimes when Angélique fancied her fast asleep. As she grew up the mystery of the poem grew clearer to her, and she repeated it with a deeper sense of sympathy with the brothers and sisters that dwell in the sky, and the clear, pure water, and everywhere in the beautiful creation. I am sorry if this sounds unnatural, but I cannot help it. I am describing Franceline as I knew her. But I don’t think it will seem unnatural if you notice the effect of surroundings on delicate-fibred children; how easily they follow the lights we hold out to them, and how vibratile their little spirits are. There was no absolute want of child society at Dullerton, any more than grown-up society; but Franceline de la Bourbonais did not care for it somehow. She felt shy amongst the noisy, romping children that swarmed in the nurseries of Dullerton, and they thought her a queer child, and did not get on well with her. The only house where she cared at all to go in her juvenile days was the vicarage; but the attraction was the vicar himself, rather than his full home, that was like an aviary of chattering parrots and chirping canaries. Now that the parrots were grown up and “going out,” Franceline saw very little of them. They were occupied making markers on perforated card-board for all their friends, or else “doing up” their dresses for the next dinner or croquet party; the staple topic of their conversation after these entertainments was why Mr. Charlton took Miss This down to dinner, instead of Miss That; whether it was an accident, or whether there was anything in it; and how divinely Mr. Charlton had sung “Ah, non giunge.” These things were not the least interesting to Franceline, who was not “out,” or ever likely to be. Who would take her, and where could she get dresses to go? She hated perforated card-board work, and she did not know Mr. Charlton. It was no wonder, therefore, she felt out of her element at the vicarage, like a wild bird strayed into a cackling farmyard, and that the Langrove girls thought her dull and cold.
It would be a very superficial observer, nevertheless, who would accuse Franceline of either coldness or dulness, as she sits there on this lovely summer day, her gypsy hat thrown back, and showing the small head in its unbroken outline against the sky, with the red gold hair drifting in wavy braids from the broad, ivory forehead, while her dark eyes glance over the landscape with an intense listening expression, as if some inaudible voices were calling to her. It was very pleasant sitting there in the shade doing nothing, and there is no saying how long she might have indulged in the delicious far niente, if a thrush had not wakened suddenly in the foliage over her head, and reminded her that it was time to be stirring. It was nearly three hours since she had left home, and Angélique would be wondering what had become of her. With a fairy suddenness of motion she rose up, vaulted over the stile with the agility of a young kid, and plunged into the teeming field. There was a footpath through it in ordinary times, but it was flooded now, and she had to wade through the rye, putting her arms out before her, as if she were swimming; for a light breeze had sprung up and was blowing the tawny wave in ripples almost into her face. She shut her eyes for a moment, and, opening them, suddenly fancied she was in the middle of the sea, the sun lighting up the yellow depths with myriads of scarlet poppies and blue-bells, that shone like fairy sea-weed through the stems. She had not got quite to the end of the last field when she heard a sound of voices coming down the park toward a small gate that opened into the fields. She hurried on, thinking it must be Sir Simon, and perhaps her father; and it was not until he was close by the gate that she discovered her mistake. One of the voices belonged to Mr. Charlton, the other to a young man whom she had never seen before. Franceline knew Mr. Charlton by sight. She had met him once at Miss Merrywig’s, who was a particular friend of his—but then everybody was a particular friend of Miss Merrywig’s—and a few times when she was out walking with Sir Simon and her father, and the young man had stood to shake hands; but this had not led to anything beyond a bowing acquaintance. That was not Mr. Charlton’s fault. There were few things that would have gratified him more than to be able to establish himself as a visitor at The Lilies; but M. de la Bourbonais had not given him the smallest sign of encouragement, so he had to content himself with raising his hat instinctively an inch higher than to any other lady of his acquaintance when he met Franceline on the road or in the green lanes—he on horseback, she, of course, on foot; and when the young French girl returned his salute by that stately little bend of her head, he would ride on with a sense of elation, as if a royal princess had paid him some flattering attention. This was the first time they had met alone on foot. Mr. Charlton’s first impulse was to speak; but something stronger than first impulse checked him, and, before he had made up his mind about it, he had lost an opportunity. The stranger, whose presence of mind was disturbed by no scruples or timidity, stepped quickly forward, and lifted the latch of the heavy wooden gate, and swung it back, lifting his hat quite off, and remaining uncovered till Franceline had passed in. It was very vexatious to Mr. Charlton to have missed the chance of the little courtesy, and to feel that his companion had the largest share in the bow that included them both as she walked rapidly on. Franceline’s curiosity, meanwhile, was excited. Who could this strange gentleman be, who looked so like a Frenchman, and bowed like one? If he was a guest of Mr. Charlton’s, she would never know, most likely; but if he was staying at the Court, she would soon hear all about him. She wondered which way they were going. The gate had clicked, so they were sure to have gone on. Franceline scarcely stopped to consider this, but, obeying the impulse of the moment, turned round and looked. She did so, and saw the stranger, with his hand still upon the gate, looking after her.
TO BE CONTINUED.