Of a truth they said but little, for when Madame de Château-Foix saw the figure which rose slowly and with difficulty at her entrance, which turned towards her a face so startlingly transparent yet so ominously and brightly stained, she stopped and suddenly covered her eyes.
Louis put a hand to the table. “God knows that I would willingly have died,” he said in a wrung voice, “if he could have been here instead of me. . . . I knew I could only bring you pain. . . .”
The Marquise uncovered her face and stretched out her hands. “O Louis, my child . . . it is not that! Gilbert—Gilbert is with God. . . . It is you . . . my poor boy . . . I never realised. . . .” and she went swiftly to him and put her arms about him. “Kiss me, my son!”
Saint-Ermay stooped his head, and then, amazed, vanquished, slipped through her arms to one knee, and put a fold of her black dress to his lips. She bent quickly over him.
“Ah no, child! you must not kneel—or even stand! I know . . . Amelia has told me. . . . See, here is a chair—you will be better there, will you not . . . to please me?”
So, to please her, he sat down again in the chair from which he had risen, and she knelt beside him with his hands in hers.
“My boy, how dreadfully thin you are! . . . I suppose they had to cut your hair off . . . it seems such a pity. . . .” She put up her hand for a moment and gently touched a lock. “But it is beginning to grow again . . . of course you had fever for a long time, and not enough nourishment since—and a long journey . . . no wonder you look so tired and that your hands are so cold. But there . . . thank God that you are here at all! To-morrow we will have Dr Hicks in; he is very clever, but not as clever as the doctor at Bath . . . perhaps later on you could go there to recover. . . .” But to herself she was saying, “My God! suppose Lucienne were not to keep him, after all!”
Louis had thought so little about his own personal reception by her, and so much of what he supposed that the sight of him, unaccompanied, must cost her, that not so much her composure, but this preoccupation with himself appeared unnatural.
He kissed her again. “I am here, safe and well again, through a miracle and M. des Graves. And you will want me to tell you——”
“Not now,” she said, rising from her knees. “Afterwards you shall tell me everything about him. But now—now you must go to Lucienne, to my daughter. . . . I know it all, and she is yours, Louis, and I give her to you as freely as Gilbert gave her. She is down in the copse—you remember it?—if you can go so far. . . .”