The thought of leaving Paris brought to the Marquis, who was almost at his own hotel, the remembrance of another who was also to quit it for safety. He looked at his watch. He had promised to see Lucienne to-day; he was indeed to tell her whether or no Louis would escort her to England. Saint-Ermay’s refusal was now more providential than inexplicable, and he need not tell her that his cousin could not take her, but simply that it had been arranged otherwise. He need not, in fact, alarm and grieve her by letting her know at all of his arrest. Moreover, it was yet early, barely noon; much might be done before he went to see her; he might even carry her news of a peril past. But in his heart of hearts he did not think he could accomplish anything so quickly.
And when he returned, some five hours later, the hopeful visions which he had insisted upon seeing were transmuted into menacing phantoms of gloom. He was no wiser than when he had started out, and he was a great deal more depressed. With much difficulty he had succeeded in seeing Bertrand-Moleville. The Royalist ex-minister knew nothing, could do nothing. If there had been other arrests—and there must have been—they had been kept very quiet. Perhaps the Girondins had found the fish in their net less numerous than they had hoped. But the Comte de Périgny had vanished, as Gilbert discovered when he at last procured his address. In despair, Gilbert went to the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, whom he knew, and, in some sort, had followed. The Liberal leader and philanthropist, standing between the two parties, might, he thought, be induced to mediate, but Gilbert soon found that on that score he had nothing to hope from him. The Duc was kind and sympathetic, but, like most moderates, he knew himself more intolerable to the extremists than a Royalist, perhaps, would have been. He could only advise Château-Foix to go straight to one of the Girondin chiefs, suggesting for the purpose Roland, as an ex-minister and humane, or Condorcet, as an ex-aristocrat. But he did not disguise his belief that any application to the dominant party would be unsuccessful.
“We must face the truth,” he said gravely. “This is what they must have worked for, and can you expect them now to forego the fruits of victory?”
“You think, then, that I am to abandon hope?” Gilbert had asked rather bitterly, but the good Duke replied that what he meant was that no direct exertion of influence was likely to be of use. He promised the matter his earnest consideration, and undertook to communicate with the Marquis early next morning if he had any news.
Profoundly dispirited and weary, Gilbert threw himself down in his own room. But he was too anxious to rest, and, moreover, it was already after the hour he had named for seeing Lucienne. Yesterday he would perhaps have been there before the time, but to-day another face had power to banish hers. Great God! suppose that Fate had sometimes the will to cheat the fortunate!
CHAPTER XI
“YOU ARE HIDING SOMETHING FROM ME!”
A little pensive over lost glories, over periwig and falbala, over lovelock and Flanders point, there stood in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, in the once fashionable quarter of the Marais, the beautiful little Hôtel de la Séguinière, which a peer of France had built in the days of Louis XIII., a chancellor had inhabited under the Roi Soleil, and a favourite under Louis XV., and which, finally, a self-made banker had bought in 1780. All nymphs and garlands within, pilasters and garlands without, it was a house fit for a prince or a royal mistress, a house that smiled and sang, and into this house, in the year named above, the excellent Monsieur Gaumont, well known in the Rue Vivienne, had brought his equally excellent English wife. And the Hôtel de la Séguinière, so incongruous, had not affected either the simplicity of his manners or the goodness of his heart. He had not tried to live up to it; neither had he brought down its airy characteristics to his own bourgeois level. In these abstentions his sensible wife had aided him. Madame Gaumont, when she first entered this dwelling, though a bride, was already mature, and her husband was over fifty. If the good man sometimes found the decorations of his house a little trying, at least he never repented of his selection of a helpmate. During the ten years of his occupancy of the Hôtel, he sang the praises of the nation which had provided him with so good a wife, and at the end of that time he passed quietly out of the troubles of this world (exactly at the epoch when Mirabeau was proposing the creation of more assignats in order to meet the second financial crisis of 1790). M. Gaumont departed consoled with the knowledge that if any woman was able to take care of herself, under any circumstances, that woman was his wife. Nevertheless he had strongly urged her to return, as soon as might be, to her native land.
The widow, though greatly distressed at his death, took some comfort in the thought that she had protected him, at all events during the last decade of his life, from the numerous frauds and impostors who were for ever draining him of his substance. She was herself of a most charitable and kind disposition, but she possessed a certain shrewdness and a power of discrimination which in matters of charity had been lacking to her husband. For the first year of her widowhood she lived in great seclusion, but not in idleness, since she insisted upon concluding the banker's affairs, as far as possible, herself. It was at this time that her common-sense homely nature was extremely touched by a message of sympathy which she had received from Madame Elisabeth, with whom she had once had an audience on matters of charity. When, therefore, having yielded to the continual solicitations of her relatives in England to return, for a time at least, to her own country, she heard, by a mere coincidence, that the Princess was desirous of obtaining an escort thither for a young lady of the Court, she immediately offered her services.
It was with even more than her accustomed kindness and good-nature that Madame Gaumont greeted Lucienne on the afternoon that she bore her away from the Tuileries. Her appearance was in itself a consolation. Tall and stout, but not ungainly, she carried a small head upon massive shoulders, and her eyes twinkled with amusement at the smallest provocation. Her cheerful motherly humour at once understood and felt for the girl’s dejection without losing its slightly bracing temper. It would have been plain indeed to a less sympathetic eye that Lucienne was heart-broken at leaving her beloved mistress. In the coach by Madame Gaumont’s side, and during the first hour or so after her arrival at the Hôtel de la Séguinière, the last words of the Princess and her own resolutions to be brave had sustained her. But that evening, alone in the pretty pink and white boudoir which her hostess had assigned to her, it was different. All the cables which had held her little bark to its anchorage were parting one after the other; she felt herself alone on a hostile sea. It was not only the parting with Madame Elisabeth—it was not only shrinking from the future which unnerved her; it was terror of herself, for herself. And quite suddenly the idea came to her: why not end this eternal warfare, embrace the inevitable? Why not tell Gilbert that she wished to marry him now, before she went to England?
The thought was stunning, but it brought the relief of finality. And, after all, it was what she was going to do in the end. Would not Madame Elisabeth have approved of it? Why had she not done it before? Borne on the tide of impulse, she got up and looked round the unfamiliar room for writing materials. They were there all ready to her hand. She sat down at the escritoire, and seizing a sheet of paper wrote with shaking fingers the first words that occurred to her, folded the letter, sealed and addressed it. . . . Then she paused.