“The long, long way! O, go warily, for fear of hateful things!”
“Be comforted. I hold my life too dear. Send Fanchette to the little door. Remember—at midnight. The horses will be waiting.”
“Bonbec?”
“Yes, dearest?”
“Call me your slave.”
“My gentle, pretty slave, good-night: kiss the basil for us both.”
“O, yes, yes!”
CHAPTER XXVI.
WITHIN THE PRESBYTERY
The northernmost of the five gates of Parma discharged direct upon the highway that led to Colorno. At intervals from this embouchure came shooting as it were the disjecta membra of a disrupted State. Bodies of high functionaries, coach-loads of subsidiary officials, staffs civil and military, clerks, grooms, secretaries—mounted, perched in dancing carrioles, or drawn heavily behind teams of ponderous Flanders mares, these and their like appeared issuing intermittingly all day from the open culvert, whence they rolled leisurely on their way towards that crystal oasis in the plains ten miles distant. The duke, in short, was changing house, and this anticipatory exodus, which looked like the decimation of his capital, represented no more after all than the adequate personnel of a great lord retiring upon a favoured sylvan retreat. So do our needs enlarge with our state, until, so far as self-help goes, we reach the condition of the paralytic. To Don Philip a fifth and sixth valet de chambre would have appeared more indispensable than a single knife and boot boy might appear to us.
At Colorno itself, connected with the city by this scattered procession of men and vehicles, the business of preparation was being pushed forward as assiduously as though the duke were visiting his summer residence for the first time. Everyone was in a state of agitation, and either tetchy or nervous, or both. Cook, lackey, chambermaid and the rest—they seemed all overtaken, as those roused ones in the sleeping palace might have been, by a vague sense of guilt, and a feverish desire to make up by haste for something unaccountably lost—was it a minute or a hundred years? A general air of rush and panic pervaded the place, extending itself from garret to basement, and affecting the marquise in her salon no less than the little mop-squeezer whitening the boards in her attic. They felt the change in their blood like the first irritating processes of a tonic drug.