She had it on the tip of her tongue to demand that he should sit beside her in the carriole, or to insist on walking across the ploughed fields with him, but her pride would not permit her to do either. Perhaps, also, she thought that having been intermittently out of tune in the woods, an hour's jolting in a rickety carriole would shake away the cobwebs that clung persistently round her mood. The carriole proved to be of very modern build, high and comfortable; a perfect English cob—priceless in value these days—was in the shafts, looking a picture of gloss and experienced grooming. A young man in sombre livery coat sat with the reins in his hand.
De Maurel lifted Fernande into the vehicle, then stood by, giving a comprehensive glance to the turn-out with an obviously experienced and critical eye. Then, as the driver gave a click of the tongue and the cob started off at a smart trot, he turned brusquely on his heel, and Fernande for a long time could see his tall figure making its way, with its peculiar, halting gait, across the ploughed fields, till a group of trees that marked a homestead hid him from her view.
CHAPTER X THE FOUNDRIES OF LA FRONTENAY
I
It was a strange experience for Fernande to see Ronnay de Maurel in the midst of the men who worked under his orders. Outwardly—by dress and appearance—one of themselves, there was obviously an inward force and authority in him which the workers readily recognized. Somehow her visit to the foundries discouraged and disappointed her. Not that Ronnay was in any way less under her sway than he had been in the romantic atmosphere of the woods. On the contrary, every time that her eyes met his, she read in them more and more clearly the progress which his passion for her was making in the subjugation of his will-power and of his senses; and every time that in the course of his demonstrations to her, of the various processes which went to the making of the "mouths of fire," his hand came in contact with hers, she could feel the tremor which went through him at her touch.
No, indeed! she had no cause to think that the untamed bear would not be ready to dance the moment she began to pipe; but here, in the foundries where he ruled as lord and master, where thousands of men obeyed at a word or sign from him, she first realized that between enslaving a man like de Maurel, through his passions or his sensibilities, to the chariot wheel of her beauty, and gaining a real mastery over his thoughts and actions, there was the immeasurable gulf of ingrained convictions and of the fetish of intellectual freedom.
That de Maurel was the real master in the foundries of La Frontenay Fernande could not doubt for a moment.
"Keep your eyes and ears open, child," Madame la Marquise had said to her, when she at last expressed reluctant approval of her niece's plan to visit the ogre in his lair. "We hear many rumours of discontent at the works—of insubordination—of open revolt. It would serve an abominable democrat like my son Ronnay right, if the proletariat which he upholds against his own traditions and his own caste were to turn against him now as they turned against us in '89. Keep your eyes and ears open, Fernande; the discontent of which we hear may prove a splendid card in our hands."