“When Bertrand comes,” she entreated, “will you see him?”
But he only shook his head, whereupon she let go his hand and turned her face away. And he went dejectedly out of the room.
Bertrand came over to the mas in the early part of the forenoon. Vague hints dropped by Pérone had already alarmed him, and he spent a miserable evening and a sleepless night marvelling what had happened.
As soon as he returned from the marvellous walk which had changed the whole course of his existence, he had told his mother and Micheline first, then grandmama, what had happened. Marcelle de Ventadour, who, during the past four and twenty hours had been in a state of prostration, due partly to sorrow and anxiety for her son, and partly to the reaction following on excitement, felt very much like one who has been at death’s door and finds himself unaccountably alive again. She was fond of Nicolette in a gentle, unemotional way: she knew that Deydier was very rich and his daughter his sole heiress, and she had none of those violent caste prejudices which swayed old Madame’s entire life; moreover, she had never been able to endure Rixende’s petulant tempers and supercilious ways. All these facts conduced to make her contented, almost happy, in this new turn of events.
Not so old Madame! Bertrand’s news at first appeared to her unworthy of consideration: the boy, she argued, partly to herself, partly to him, had been inveigled at a moment when he was too weak and too wretched to defend himself, by a designing minx who had a coronet and a fine social position in her mind’s eye. The matter was not worth talking about. It just would not be: that was all. When she found that not only did Bertrand mean to go through with this preposterous marriage, but that he defended Nicolette and sang her praises with passionate warmth, she fell from contempt into amazement and thence into wrath.
It should not be! It was preposterous! Impossible! A Comte de Ventadour marry the descendant of a lacquey! the daughter of a peasant! It should not be! not whilst she was alive. Thank God, she still had a few influential friends in Paris, she would petition the King to forbid the marriage.
“You would not dare——” Bertrand protested vehemently.
But old Madame only laughed.
“Dare?” she said tartly. “Of course I should dare. I have dared more than that before now, let me tell you, in order to save the honour of the Ventadours. That marriage can not be,” she went on determinedly, “and if you are too foolish or too blind to perceive the disgrace of such a mésalliance, then I will apply to the King. And you know as well as I do that His Majesty has before now intervened on the side of the family when such questions have been on the tapis, and that no officer of the King’s bodyguard may marry without the consent of his sovereign.”
This Bertrand knew. That archaic law was one of those petty tyrannies in which the heart of a Bourbon delighted, and was one of the first in connection with his army that Louis XVIII replaced upon the statute book of his reconquered country.