For a little while Louis remained behind at Chantemerle to struggle with the Latin authors, to plague and charm the servants as of yore, and to look enviously at his cousin when he came home in his new uniform. Then the influence of his mother’s relatives procured him a place in the royal pages, preparatory to his entering the bodyguard, and the Château fell into a quietude which it had never known since his advent on that March afternoon seven years before. A child, however, still woke the echoes in the garden every summer. Till her tenth year Gilbert’s destined bride paid annual—sometimes even more frequent—visits with her mother, and once or twice these visits coincided with the leave of one or other of the boys of whose own childhood she had formed a part. She was now an extremely pretty child, but at this epoch the cousins were both too much absorbed in their new worlds to pay her particular attention, and her future husband took, if possible, less notice of her than did Louis. At ten her mother sent her to be educated in a convent.
A year later Gilbert finished his military studies at Versailles, and, in accordance with his father’s wish, went over for some months to England, where he had relatives, the Marquise’s dead sister having married a Suffolk squire. It was not solely the claims of kinship which had prompted this visit. The Marquis de Château-Foix was deeply imbued with the ideas then prevalent among the Liberal noblesse in France. Like them he desired to better the position of his tenantry; like them he sought help in English methods of agriculture, introducing these not only at Chantemerle, but in the small, distant, and not often visited estate near Lyons from which he took his title of Château-Foix. His father’s projects had been familiar to Gilbert ever since he was old enough to understand them, and, a native of that unique province where the curse of a non-resident nobility was scarcely known, and where seigneur and peasantry were on almost patriarchal terms of intimacy, of mutual respect and often of affection, the young man considered them the outcome of a very natural instinct. He had, therefore, every sympathy with the Marquis’ views; he meant, when he had made his own career, to settle down and carry on his father’s work after the latter’s death, and though this event would not, he trusted, take place till a remote period—for the Marquis was only five-and-forty—Gilbert was pleased to think that if his sojourn in England proved profitable he might even now be of use to him. With these virtuous intentions he embarked for England, and found his stay under the hospitable roof of his English uncle agreeable as well as valuable. Sir William Ashley was pleased to approve of him, saying, indeed—than which there could be no higher praise—that he was almost like an Englishman; his cousin, George Ashley, of about his own age, was at hand to pilot him round neighbouring estates or about London, his younger cousin Amelia to welcome him when he came back. Hither also came Louis for a short visit, to make violent, half-teasing love to Amelia and to embitter the hearts of youthful country gentlemen by his elegance and good looks, and—chiefly for that reason—to create a certain relief in Gilbert’s mind when he departed.
The English turnip, that supremely important root, was receiving Gilbert’s attention when the messenger brought him the news that was to change his whole career. The Marquis de Château-Foix had died in two days of a chill contracted while superintending some building operations on the estate. Voltairean and sceptic, he had given his life for his ideals, and the young man of twenty, whose feet, indeed, were at the moment heavy with the soil of a Suffolk turnip-field, but whose hand was always, in idea, on the hilt of the sword which was to make him a glorious name, was left to reign in his stead—if he chose.
Gilbert de Château-Foix did choose, and at once. It was a real and no forced choice, for, except his father's wishes, not expressed in any document, but clamant in his own heart, there was no binding reason why he should reside on his estate. Throwing up the commission—the result of studies more than satisfactory—which awaited him in Royal-Aunis, and with it his dreams of military glory, he announced his intention of devoting himself to the care of his tenantry. He was not yet twenty-one, but if he knew regrets and distastes, he shared them with no one. His comrades and his friends in Paris thought him bereft of his senses, and stigmatised him as an eccentric. The very handsome youth in the blue, scarlet, and silver of the gardes-du-corps who held an amazed conference with him one afternoon in the Allée du Mail at Versailles was half incredulous, half amused.
“I had hoped, before I died,” he said, “to be pointed out as the kinsman of a marshal of France. You should consider, Gilbert, that you are wrecking the ambitions of other people as well as your own.”
The young Marquis tried to explain that he was not wrecking his ambitions, or, at least, only some of them.
“Then I suppose,” said Louis, “that you are going to be a sort of philosopher, like the late M. Voltaire, in his retreat at Ferney. My cousin, the celebrated philosopher,” he repeated softly to himself.
But though the Vicomte ended, as usual, on a jesting note, Gilbert fancied that he was sorrier, or more sympathetic, than he cared to own. Years afterwards he learned that Louis had subsequently called out a subaltern of Royal-Aunis for saying that the regiment was well delivered from such a milksop as M. de Château-Foix.
CHAPTER II
ON THE TERRACE
“There must be some misunderstanding,” said the Marquis.