“With madame’s permission I will bid her adieu at the end of the meal.”
“As you will, monsieur. And if you do not find monsieur le duc in Liége?”
“Then I shall go on to Paris.”
“I hope, then, monsieur’s passports are in order?”
“They take me into France by way of the Low Countries. Madame, your mother, is responsible for them.”
“She is at any rate a woman of business. Nevertheless, the borders are disturbed. I wish monsieur a very fair journey. I trust he will not be struck by the lightning; but—Mother of Christ! I think there is a storm coming such as we have never seen. I shall take some peaches and some cake, and sit in the cellars till it is over.”
* * * * * * * *
My lord reached Liége on the morning of the twenty-ninth of July—a day of sullen omen to France. The early noon hours he spent in dully strolling through the streets of the antique city, now grown so familiar to him. He had called at M. de Lawoestine’s address (as supplied him by the young madame), only to find that the count was absent on some expedition and would not return till the morrow. Of the Duke of Orleans’s presence in the town he could obtain no tittle of evidence.
Now he was dull because misgivings were beginning to oppress him, and because the weather made an atmosphere appropriate to the confusion in his brain. Certainly he did not actually face, in the moral sense, the question as to whether or no he had been intentionally committed to a fool’s errand. He could not have conceived how so elaborate a jest should be planned and carried through without suspicion awaking in his heart. Naturally, knowing the soundness of his own financial position, he was not conscious of the supposed bar to his suit. His uneasiness turned rather on his new conception of Madame de Genlis as a woman of that patchwork practicalness that leaves to chance the working out of its design. She may have intended that monsieur le duc should be in Brussels—it would, doubtless, have been convenient to her to find him there—and therefore she may have, through Ned, acted upon her desire rather than upon her information. But, if this were so, what a crazy perspective of possibilities was opened out! to what an endless wild-goose chase might he not be sworn! And, in the meantime, Pamela and Mr Sheridan!
There was such anguish in the thought as to make him augment his pace till his forehead was wet with perspiration. He had come out to escape the intolerable oppressiveness of confinement in an inn. It was such weather as he had experienced upon his first visit to the town—good God! how many years ago was that now? Yet there seemed fewer changes in it than in himself. It was such weather, but intensified—and, with that, at least, his own condition kept pace. He had a warmer core in his breast than had been there before. But the tall, narrow streets, the cool churches, the blazing markets—these had no longer the glamour of the past. His thoughts were always in shadowy English lanes, in fragrant English rooms. A girl’s laugh in the street would make him lift his head as he paced; a jingle of bells on the harness of some sleepy Belgian horse would recall to him with a thrill the tinkle of a triangle. And, for the rest, the sweet pungency of geranium flowers he carried always in his breast, like a very garden of pleasant memories.