“Oh,” she said gratefully, “would you?” Then, with an attempt at her former light manner, and the ghost of a laugh: “It would be a great weight off my mind, I assure you!”
“Ah, by the way, Mademoiselle,” said the Englishman, suddenly stopping, “M. de Saint-Ermay gave me a message for you which, ’pon my soul, I was almost forgetting.”
And now he saw something leap up in those violet eyes. Apologetically, almost shamefacedly he said: “I am afraid that it was not much of a message. Monsieur le Vicomte said that he hoped you were improving in your English.”
Lucienne drew a little sharp breath and looked away. The corner of her mouth quivered for a second, then she turned and faced him, and said without apparent effort: “You will have to be the judge of that, Monsieur. . . . Shall we sit down over there?”
So they sat down at the farther end of the bowling-green, on a rustic seat by a horrible Georgian nymph, who, fortunately, was fast falling to decay. The others had entirely disappeared, but their voices could be distinguished from a neighbouring lawn. In the hearing, therefore, of the nymph alone, Mr Trenchard gave his fair listener a most full, true, and particular account of every hour that he had spent in the company of the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay, beginning with the episode of the horse-holding and ending with the farewell at Candé. When he ended, saying, “That is really all that I can remember about M. de Saint-Ermay—except that I took an uncommon fancy to him,” how was he to know whether the glance of gratitude which he then received was for the trouble which he had taken or for that last remark alone? At any rate, he had a most agreeable feeling of confederacy with its giver; so that when, on departing, he was warmly urged by Sir William and his daughter to come again, the probable arrival of the Marquise de Château-Foix being held out as an inducement, he replied no less warmly that he would do so. The pressure of Lucienne’s little fingers was still lingering in his as he rode away; for she had already learnt the English salutation, though he had supplemented it, as was fitting in a traveller, by the French.
“They have a way with them, a style, a something, these French girls,” he reflected. “Now look at Louisa Oxenham, though she’ll make a treasure of a wife.” Would this commendation be merited by Mademoiselle d’Aucourt, as the spouse of M. de Château-Foix? He wondered. And as he turned in at his own gates, a half-hour later, he said abruptly: “God bless my soul! If I were a girl, I know which of those two men I should have chosen. I believe she regrets it! I’m sure she does! And that good-looking cousin . . . has he been playing fast and loose with her? I’d give something to know.”
The same evening Mr Trenchard enormously startled, dismayed, and shocked the venerable relative who kept house for him by saying suddenly, as he stood in his drawing-room, and looked upon its brood of chairs, all clad in the most hideous chintzes procurable: “If a Frenchwoman had this room, now, aunt, she’d make something very different of it!”
“Henry!” ejaculated the poor lady, absolutely petrified with horror. And before she slept that night she penned a long and tremulous letter to her brother the Admiral, detailing her conviction that Henry, while on his recent tour in France, had fallen into the clutches of one of those dreadful, designing, and immoral women over there, and probably a married one. To the end of her days she never quite got rid of that most baseless and unworthy suspicion.
It is to be noticed that Mr Trenchard had not selected Miss Amelia Ashley, the nearest to his hand, for the typical Englishwoman of his unflattering comparison. He had not forgotten that Amelia was half French. Yet many people were disposed to do so, though over the drawing-room mantelpiece at Ashley Court hung the grave, gentle face of Caroline de Sesmaisons, whom an impetuous Englishman had met in Paris in his Wanderjahr, had wooed and won in forty-eight hours (defeating her parents in an ensuing three months of hard fighting), and had carried off, still knowing nothing but her native tongue, to Suffolk, where she had lived, gracious and idolised, through a short but singularly happy married life. Not even the fact, abhorrent to Sir William, that his children must needs be brought up as Roman Catholics, had disturbed his felicity. He had faced this contingency when he married Mademoiselle de Sesmaisons, and Lady Ashley never had cause to complain of breach of faith. She herself repaired to her duties at Fountainhall Manor, the home of one of the very few old Romanist families in East Anglia, which was visited at intervals by a mission priest. The crux had come when she died. But Sir William was a man of his word, and her memory was too dear to him for outrage. The children (George was seven, Amelia three years younger) should continue to be brought up as Papists. But after two or three years (and it was impossible for Sir William not to regard it as the direct interposition of Providence) Fountainhall Manor, on the death of its octogenarian owner, passed into other hands; there was no one to instruct the children in their mother’s faith, and no chapel at which they could attend its services. So they accompanied their father to the parish church, little brands plucked from the burning, and sat very sedately under the Rector, lifting their infant voices in unison with Sir William’s, though not always with the choir.
When George came of age his father, with great solemnity and a dreadful sinking of the heart, asked him whether he would be a Romanist or an Anglican. The youth not unnaturally chose the Established Church, and Amelia, when her turn came, made the same decision. So all was comfortably for the best, and the detested name of “Rome” had no more need to be mentioned within the walls of Ashley Court.