He asked my pardon most touchingly for his share in trying to abduct me, and Clement Darpent’s also for the attack on him, though, as he said, Darpent had long before shown his forgiveness. His little children were brought to him, making large eyes with fright at his deathlike looks, and clinging to their mother, too much terrified to cry when he kissed them, blessed them, and bade Maurice consider his mother, and obey her above all things, and to regard me as next to her.
‘Ah! if I had had such a loving mother I should never have become so brutally selfish,’ he said; and, indeed, the sight of her sweet, tender, patient face seemed to make him grieve for all the sins of his dissipated life. His confessor declared that he was in the most pious disposition of penitence. And thus, one summer evening, with his wife, Madame Darpent, and myself watching and praying round him, Armand d’Aubepine passed away from the temptations that beset a French noble.
I took my poor Cecile home sinking into a severe illness, which I thought for many days would be her death. All her old terror of Madame Croquelebois returned, and for many nights and days Madame Darpent or I had to be constantly with her, though we had outside troubles enough of our own. Those two sick-rooms seem to swallow up my recollection.
CHAPTER XXXII. — ESCAPE
(Annora’s Narrative)
There was indeed a good deal passing beyond those rooms where Margaret was so absorbed in her d’Aubepines that I sometimes thought she forgot her own kindred in them. Poor things! they were in sad case, though how Cecile could break her heart over a fellow who had used her so vilely, I could never understand. He repented, they said. So much the better for him; but a pretty life he would have led her if he had recovered. Why, what is there for a French noble to do but to fight, dance attendance on the King, and be dissipated? There is no House of Lords, no Quarter-Sessions, no way of being useful; and if he tried to improve his peasantry he is a dangerous man, and they send him a lettre de cachet. He has leave to do nothing but oppress the poor wretches, and that he is fairly obliged to do, so heavy are his expenses at Court. The King may pension him, but the pension is all wrung out of the poor in another shape! Heaven knows our English nobles are far from what they might be, but they have not the stumbling-blocks in their way that the French have under their old King, who was a little lad then, and might have been led to better things if his mother had had less pride and more good sense.
Gaspard de Nidemerle does the best he can. He is a really good man, I do believe, but he has been chiefly with the army, or on his own estate. And he can effect little good, hampered as he is on all sides.
In those days, Clement Darpent was sad enough at heart, but he did not quite despair of his country, though things were getting worse and worse. Mademoiselle had saved the Prince and his crew, besotted as she was upon them; and finely they requited Paris, which had sheltered them. All the more decent folk among them were lying wounded in different houses, and scarcely any of their chiefs were left afoot but the Duke of Beaufort, with his handsome face and his fine curls of flaxen hair, looking like a king, but good for nothing but to be a king of ruffians.
What does the Prince do but go to the Hotel de Ville with the Duke of Orleans and Beaufort, at six o’clock in the evening of the 4th of July, under pretence of thanking the magistrates and deputies of letting him in. Then he demanded of them to proclaim that the King was a prisoner in Mazarin’s hands, and to throw themselves into the war. They would do no such thing, nor let themselves be intimidated, whereupon the Prince went out on the steps, and shouted to his rabble rout, where there were plenty of soldiers in disguise, who had been drinking ever since noon: ‘These gentlemen will do nothing for us,’ he cried. ‘Do what you like with them.’