The room in which he waited for Lucienne was the same in which his cousin had brought her violets on a winter’s day six months ago. Now a pleasant sunlight filtered into it through the striped blinds, and it was full of the scent of roses. Among the pictures on the walls hung two portraits, both of women, and the Marquis guessed them to be those of Madame de Raigecourt and Madame de Bombelles, the Princess’ friends. This fact, and the presence of a little bronze crucifix standing on a table which bore a few books of devotion stamped with the arms of France, led him to suppose the room to belong to Madame Elisabeth herself. A half-finished piece of needlework lying on a chair somehow recalled Lucienne. All the shelter and refinement of the place, this very piece of embroidery, the roses and the sunlight, affected Gilbert with an odd sense of the contrast with his own uneasiness. They spelt security; yet its occupants must know—who better?—that the room had no such claim. It was but eleven days since the 20th of June.
On that thought the Marquis found himself at the window. The great garden which it overlooked was deserted, as usual; yet, away on the other side, at right angles to the palace, he could see the terrace of the Feuillants swarming with people. Nothing, he knew, but a trivial bit of ribbon stretched between two chairs kept the crowd from overflowing into the garden of the Tuileries. But the ribbon was symbolic; moreover, it proclaimed those green alleys accursed—the “country of Coblentz,” the “black forest.” Nobody but the Royal Family, accursed too, and for whose sake they were banned, walked in them now.
Gilbert sighed and turned away. What would be the end of it all? Not indeed that he had much thought to spare at the moment for the fate of France; his present preoccupations were Louis, with his reckless loyalty, and Lucienne, with her clinging to her royal mistress. . . . And that step in the corridor must be hers.
When Madame Vigée-Lebrun, about three years before, was painting Lucienne’s portrait, she had remarked to the Comtesse d’Aucourt that the girl was like a wood-nymph, and that she wished she had painted her as Daphne or Procris. And if a wood-nymph be a creature set apart from human passions—which is doubtful—then the term well represents the aspect under which his affianced bride appeared to the Marquis de Château-Foix also. For the last few years Lucienne had seemed to him a sort of elemental creature, a being fresh from the hands of nature, to be reverenced because she was so extraordinarily untouched and innocent. In those dark hours which he had known, and still knew, when the problem of existence weighed heavily upon him, Lucienne with her goodness and her beauty was always the one glimmer which never failed him, the one little star, free from all taint of passion and raised above the possibility of pollution, which swung clear of the mists in which he sometimes walked.
But, in truth, Lucienne was no elemental being of the sort. Her training had rendered it impossible. On the very lovable characteristics which were hers by nature Madame d’Aucourt, no mean architect, had superimposed a structure designed indeed to show them to the best advantage, but not intrinsically meritorious. She had a little exploited her daughter’s charm. And the result of the Comtesse’s example and training was that to some people the girl seemed to live in a series of pictures. Lucienne was herself quite innocent of any artistic intentions, but she constantly caused other people to see her, in memory or in imagination, in pictures too. Gilbert had a whole gallery of such compositions.
He had occasion at once to add a fresh canvas to his collection as the door opened now, and she came in. The whiteness of the soft dress she wore, the pallor of the rose drooping in the folds of her kerchief—a rose no whiter than her own long throat with its narrow band of black ribbon—the lovely freshness of her cheek, the poise of her head with its shining burden, the smile on her beautiful mouth—all these Gilbert suddenly saw anew, as for the first time, and was aware of a strange and dizzying sensation.
In another moment he was bending over her hand.
“I know why you have come,” said the girl’s delicious voice above him, alive with the very spirit of youth. “You all seem very anxious to get rid of me!” And she laughed—a trickle of clear merriment.
“Let me look at you!” he exclaimed. He held her wrists prisoner for a moment, and then drew her down to a sofa. “What you must have gone through—what you must have gone through!” he repeated. “I can’t think how I ever let you remain here! No, I ought never to have done it!” He had a sudden flashing vision of this exquisite creature, so nearly his, at bay in a window in the palace, insulted, frightened, helpless. . .
The momentary mirth died out of Lucienne’s eyes, and her mouth took on the shadow of a pout.