“Not at all,” returned the Vicomte. “As a temporary country gentleman I am reaping a perfectly fresh harvest of experience here.” He suddenly dropped his bantering tone, and gripped the priest’s hands for a moment. “If you will go down, Father, I will be with you in a few minutes. Jasmin!” For Jasmin had discreetly vanished.
A broken leg is not commonly a source of satisfaction to the friends of the sufferer, but it is undeniable that Gilbert’s injury did appear in something of this light to M. des Graves and to Louis. So September drew to a close in less agitating circumstances. It was true that any day might still see soldiers coming up the avenue to hunt for the proscribed priest—for whom they had already searched the three months’ empty presbytère—that he had to remain closely hidden, that he was absolutely at the mercy of the denunciation of malice or the indiscretion of devotion. Above all, there was the danger that the authorities should see fit to instal a “constitutional” in the cure—a move which would inevitably have led to the detection of M. des Graves. But the supply of assermentés was fortunately running short, and Chantemerle, being a small village, was evidently to remain (theoretically) priestless. Louis, who really did serve in a measure as M. des Graves’ means of communication with his parish, was driven one day to suggest that he himself should seek orders from the constitutional Bishop of Luçon, and should settle at the presbytère. When Monseigneur de Mercy, the dispossessed prelate, came to his own again, he could declare the orders invalid, and the Vicomte could resume his status as a layman without prejudice.
Louis’ spirit of persiflage could not be imagined as wholly deserting him even in the article of death, but for some time now his gaiety had appeared to his companion to be a little flagging. The inaction was indeed fretting him horribly. He seemed to himself to have dropped out from the contest, he whose ardent royalism had already gone near to cost him his life. Gilbert and he appeared to have changed places; and what would he not give to join La Rouërie too! And when, at the end of August, came the news of Longwy, when, at the beginning of September, Verdun had opened its gates to Brunswick and the émigrés, he abandoned the attempt to conceal his impatience. The Princes and the exiles were once more on French soil, would soon be marching on Paris—and he was not with them. Again he accused himself of deserting his comrades, for D’Aubeville was in the invading ranks, the others still in the prisons whence he might have been helping to deliver them. . . . But that ideal at least could never have known realisation. Almost simultaneously with the news of Verdun came the tidings of the September massacres, a red flood which swept away De Périgny and all the rest with whom Louis had laughed and gamed and plotted. Jasmin, when he arrived, had furnished terrible details of gutters running ankle-deep in blood, of harpies dancing wild measures on the cart-loads of mutilated corpses. And in the smoke of Valmy, a little later, vanished the illusive hopes of the émigrés. That throw was played and lost. Yet to a man of Saint-Ermay’s temperament it was poor consolation to have staked nothing on it.
M. des Graves knew this, and sympathised with all his heart. And, as the monotonous days dragged on, he was touched, even to admiration, by the Vicomte’s unwearied good temper and courtesy towards himself. He gave him, in return, much of his time, and, having always tended to assume in the young man a side for which other people—including Louis himself—never gave him credit, he would often talk to him of subjects near his heart. Louis had a curious faculty of understanding.
But Louis himself had a subject not to be discussed with anybody. Never again, since that evening of fever and weakness, had he been tempted to speak of Lucienne to the priest. His secret and hers must remain inviolate. He thought of her constantly. She was dearer than ever now that the sea lay between them. He could see her in the English autumn; he could even see her in the future—the uncertain future—here at Chantemerle, its mistress, when he himself would be far away fighting under an alien flag. And in the past. . . . But to think of that was madness. He had held her in his arms and had let her go. The sting of the thought sent him out on the long lonely rides to which he was becoming more and more addicted—rides in which the peasants sometimes saw him galloping like one possessed, and which brought Saladin home in a state to horrify the stable-yard. For the old conflict had all to be fought out again between passion and honour, love and conscience, his duty and his desire.
And yet, though time and separation had fanned his love into a more ardent flame, would he have done differently if he had his chance again? He could not bring himself to say so. This seemed strange to him. He did not know that loss and sacrifice, besides intensifying, had purified the fire, and that the heavy price which he had paid to keep his shield in this one thing at least unstained, had come back to him in other ways.
Besides, it was not a purely abstract question. Nothing of the sort ever is. Sometimes Louis thought to himself that if he had the spirit of a man he would go over to England even now at the eleventh hour and claim her. What kept him back? Not, assuredly, the difficulty of getting out of the country. . . . No, it was the thought of Gilbert, of that undemonstrative and reliable kinsman, who held such odd social views, who was so lacking in geniality, who could be so actively unpleasant, whose high moral standard was quixotic and irritating, whom he heartily respected and for whose good opinion he was almost ashamed to find how much he cared. The discovery that he really loved his cousin Louis never consciously made.
M. des Graves, though he did not know the truth, saw quite well, in spite of Louis’ careful and elaborate defences, that he was engulfed in some mental turmoil. As the days went on the young man fell, despite himself, into long and most unusual silences. Were these things merely due to the enforced solitude of what Louis had himself termed his “retreat”? The priest did not think so.
One event only broke the monotony of the end of October. As Louis was standing one morning in the hall awaiting his horse, the Curé opened the library door and came out.