CHAPTER XXXII
Dead Leaves
(1)
In the Square garden, behind the statue of Butcher Cumberland, the leaves fell early that year. Anne-Hilarion, Comte de Flavigny, playing under their fading splendour, daily collected those he most esteemed, and bore them indoors to hoard in a rosewood box, lined with tartan, that had once been his mother's. Alas, like many other of this world's treasures, these precious things proved very evanescent. Either they fell to pieces, so brittle was their beauty, or else Mrs. Saunders, declaring that she would not have a rubbish heap in her nursery, threw them implacably away.
Those were rather sorrowful days altogether in Cavendish Square. It had seemed at first, when August was beginning, that Anne's father had been snatched by a British naval officer's pertinacity from that shore of death in the Morbihan only to die in England. And the Chevalier de la Vireville, like so many others, had never come back at all. . . . Ere August was over M. de Flavigny, it is true, was out of danger; now, by mid-October, he was mending fast. But he was very sad; and of M. le Chevalier no one ever spoke to Anne-Hilarion, since a certain dreadful fit of crying, occasioned by his queries about his friend—or rather, by the answers which had to be given to those queries. And all the tragedy of Quiberon, its waste of life and loyalty and devotion, lay heavy over that London house, though no English existence or interests had suffered loss there.
All the more, therefore, did it seem good to the powers governing Anne-Hilarion's days that he should frequent the Square garden this autumn more than in previous years. And this morning he was doing so, unattended, too, since John Simms, the gardener, was there sweeping up the leaves, and the child was under engagement not to go outside the enclosure. Elspeth had therefore left him for a space to his own devices, and Anne was supremely happy, transporting fallen leaves from one side of the garden to the other, in a little painted cart indissolubly united to a horse of primitive breed. The lack of playmates did not trouble him, and indeed his experience of these had not been uniformly happy. There had been the episode of Lord Henry Gower's two little boys, who also, as dwellers in that house overlooking the garden where the Princess Amelia had used to hold her court, sometimes took their pastimes therein. To them, on one occasion, 'French and English' had seemed a highly suitable game, and since Anne-Hilarion bore a Gallic name, it was quite clear what part he was to sustain. He sustained five distinct bruises also, and relations with the Masters Gower languished a little in consequence.
"A'll lairn them play Scots and English!" had threatened Elspeth, on discovering these evidences of realism; but the culprits never gave her the chance.
To-day, however, there was no one in the garden but John Simms and Anne himself; and John Simms, though amenable and ready to reply when addressed, never bothered him with tiresome questions, as strangers were apt to do, nor exercised an undue control over the dispositions of his game, like Elspeth. He was a person of intermittent spasms of labour, alternating with intervals of reflection, during which he scratched his head, and silently watched whatever was going forward—in this case Anne-Hilarion busily conveying to and fro minute quantities of dead leaves, under the impression that he was helping him.
Accustomed to these periods of inaction, Anne, as he passed the clump of laurels on the other side of which John Simms was at the moment working—or meditating, as the case might be—would have paid no attention to the cessation of the sound of the broom, had he not just then heard the gardener thus deliver himself to some person or persons unknown:
"The Markis dee Flavinny, the French gentleman? Why, Mam, he lives over there, just by where Cap'n Nelson used to live. But the 'ouse ain't the Markis's, though, 'tis the old gentleman's, Mr. Elphinstone's. And as it 'appens, the Markis's little boy's here in the garden along o' me at this very minute—him with the gal's name, Master Anne."
Taking this as a summons, Anne-Hilarion at that came round the laurel bush, his horse and cart behind him, to find that John Simms' questioner was a lady in deep mourning, with a long veil.