Yet if Lucienne had tried she would have found that Gilbert’s doings were much better stored in Miss Ashley’s memory. But she never made the experiment. Instead, she would relate to Amelia, with all the carelessness of which she was mistress, anecdotic fragments relating to the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay. Had Amelia ever heard that he was considered the handsomest young man in the bodyguard; that when he was a boy in the royal pages the Queen had specially noticed him; that he had fought three duels before he was one-and-twenty; that for a wager he had once swum the whole length of the Grand Canal at Versailles, an exploit which had procured him a fortnight’s arrest? And sometimes, in return Amelia would repay herself for listening to these reminiscences by drawing out of Lucienne, half against her own will, details about Gilbert’s daily life—as far as Lucienne knew them.
Thus the autumn went by and winter approached, a season chiefly welcomed, so it seemed to the two émigrées, because it was that of the pursuit of the fox. The neighbouring squires who had shot Sir William’s coverts now pranced jovially round the house on their steeds, or consumed enormous quantities of cold beef and ale within its precincts, for Sir William was master of the local pack. Amelia’s betrothed, Mr Philip Harbenden, was his deputy, and it was from the conversation of these two gentlemen that the French ladies were able to rate at its true importance the national sport of their adoptive country.
A rider who often discovered that his way home after a run led him past the Court, a gentleman who found that the well-being of the kennels called for frequent visits of inspection—Mr Harry Trenchard—had carried on since the summer a very agreeable friendship with Mademoiselle d’Aucourt. It is true that at first she had not seemed to understand what he wanted, but, by the exercise of unsuspected tact and perseverance, he had gained her over to a considerable measure of it. Amelia was amused at his attentions, and indeed the two girls were apt to laugh a little over him. But in an odd way Lucienne was grateful to him for his frequent visits. He was another person to whom she could, if she wished, talk of Louis—though any possibility of his giving her the smallest detail of fresh information on that topic had long ago been exhausted. She found him more amusing than Mr Harbenden (who was, besides, occupied with Amelia), more sensible than Sir Francis Stansfield (a youth who, obviously smitten with her charms, was precluded from an intelligible expression of his sentiments by his lack of French and by a fashionable jargon of his own which Lucienne could not understand), less paternal than that distinguished traveller, agriculturist, and near neighbour, Mr Arthur Young of Bradfield Hall, who paid her rather charming compliments in her own tongue. George Ashley she placed in a category apart. She did not understand him, while aware, every time that she encountered his quiet, observant gaze, that he probably understood her only too well.
And Lucienne’s instinct was not at fault. The critical George was classifying his cousin’s betrothed, not, however, without error. In the summer he had not made up his mind; in the autumn he had ranked her as a flirt; during the winter he took back this accusation and was somewhat at a loss. It was plain to him that Lucienne did not care a pin for any of the young men with whom she seemed to enjoy laughing and jesting, and this not because she was heartless—rather the contrary. It seemed to George that she was using their admiration and their friendship as temporary distractions. Somebody had her heart; how else account for the fits of dejection and silence which had been gradually creeping upon her through the autumn? Well, of course, she was affianced yet separated indefinitely from her betrothed. It was quite natural to set down these accesses of depression to regret for him. Sir William did so, sometimes rallying his “niece” openly on the subject; Madame de Château-Foix probably took them as not improper tributes to her son’s attractions. Amelia’s opinion George had never asked, for, except as a student of human nature, he was not interested in Lucienne, and had no desire indirectly to learn her secret. But it seemed to him that there was more than the pain of parted love in her eyes; it appeared more like unhappy love. That look alone, surprised once or twice by him when she was off her guard, obtained for Lucienne her release from the class to which she had been assigned, and caused the young man to regard her with a more lively attention than he himself quite realised.
Had he known, Lucienne’s heartache was at once a simple and a complex suffering. It was simple, even commonplace, in that it arose from the fact that she was in love with a man whom she could not marry. But it was complicated by several other anguishes, such as the knowledge that she was deceiving the betrothed whom, had there not been that other, she fancied she could have loved so well, whom as it was she trusted and admired, and with whom, after his return from Brittany, she kept up a regular correspondence. Then there was the constant companionship with his mother, to whom also she was obliged to show a deceitful bearing, and who would always be talking of him, especially during that time of anxiety when they knew him to be in danger in Brittany. Last and sharpest of all, there was the wild, agonising regret and shame for her own conduct in that scene of farewell with Louis, for having at that supreme moment irretrievably cheapened herself in his eyes, so that, in all probability, she had slain his love for her—a passion which she had not enough altruism to wish dead. For Lucienne had gradually been building her lover a pedestal, whose base was his withstanding of her pleading in that hour. Since Saint Lucian’s Day their parts had been reversed, and it was Louis, not she, who stood for honour now. What must he have thought of her even at the time . . . and afterwards! So she tortured herself into thinking the absence of any letter or message from him a proof that he no longer cared for her—forgetting that the elevated rôle she had assigned him would have precluded him from writing in any case. And the more she exalted him and conceived him now cold to her, the more did her passion increase, so that he was always the one stable thought in her mind, the one figure always before her eyes—except when the presence of strangers distracted her. And the thought of Louis, barbed with this humiliating remorse, having become a veritable torture to her, she ended by craving for this distraction and welcoming it, when it came, with all her heart.
Meanwhile Christmas approached, with its promise of festivities, and the neighbourhood was not more astonished than was Miss Trenchard when Mr Harry Trenchard announced his intention of giving a ball on Christmas Eve. A bachelor, he had never before thus entered the lists. Miss Trenchard was not exactly displeased; the embers of ancient gaiety still smouldered in her respectable breast, and she thought it not unbecoming that Henry should exhibit the resources of his mansion to the public. But all her questions, discreet or indiscreet, failed to wrest from her nephew the motive of his sudden outburst of hospitality. At Ashley Court that motive was guessed at, though not formulated in speech.
It was already the 23rd of December, and an afternoon so dark that Amelia had abandoned her needlework, and, obedient to Lucienne’s request that lamps should not yet be called for, was sitting with her hands in her lap, a posture which had been her companion’s for some time.
“I wonder what they are doing just at this moment at Chantemerle,” came meditatively from Mademoiselle d’Aucourt through the firelit dusk.
“Do you know, Lucy,” said Amelia, “I was just wondering the same thing. Poor Cousin Gilbert is not, I fear, preparing as we are for festivities.”
“I had a letter from him two or three days ago,” remarked Lucienne rather listlessly. “There was not much news in it. He says that he does not know what is going to happen.”