The Wounded Name

by D. K. Broster

Avoye de la Rocheterie—Avoye de Villecresne as she had been for the last six years—was Aymar's first cousin. Her father had gone to the guillotine with his parents; her mother, widowed at twenty-three, had adopted the little orphaned boy of five, and for two years had given him such care as her broken heart and delicate health could compass. Then she, too, died, and the two children passed into the guardianship of their paternal grandmother, the dowager Vicomtesse de la Rocheterie, and by that redoubtable lady they had been brought up as brother and sister. When Avoye was eighteen Mme de la Rocheterie, who was determined that Aymar should not marry her, brought about for her granddaughter what she considered a suitable match with a fashionable and wealthy man much older than herself, the Comte Frédéric de Villecresne. The inexperienced girl felt no objections to the marriage, was even rather flattered by the attentions of this man of the world, while Aymar, her almost brother, constituted so natural a part of her life that she hardly figured to herself how little he would fill it in the future. As for Aymar himself, the final arrangements were concluded when he was away, and without his knowledge. Moreover, he was still a minor. The marriage took place. Four months later Avoye left her husband and went to live with relatives of her mother's in Paris.

Over this outcome of Mme de la Rocheterie's schemes there took place at Sessignes a combat as fierce as any which the château could have witnessed since its foundation. Aymar, now of age, insisted that his cousin should be invited to make Sessignes once more her home if she wished. She had no other, and she refused to take her husband's money. His grandmother pointed out that M. de Villecresne's house was still open to her; on which the young man asked her whether even in the crusading days of their ancient race any lady of the line had consented to enter a harem. Plain speech was a luxury from which the Vicomtesse never shrank, and she joined battle. It was most undesirable that Avoye should return to live under the same roof as a young unmarried kinsman. Aymar replied that part of her objection was mere hypocrisy, and twofold at that; he knew that while, on the one hand, she cared not a snap of the fingers for other people's opinion, on the other she considered that no breath of scandal dare attach itself to a menage over which she ruled. The rest was an insult to Mme de Villecresne and to himself. Even apart from the fact, of which he professed himself fully aware, that Avoye had no feelings for him other than for a brother, as a Catholic she would never divorce her husband and marry again—for Mme de la Rocheterie, though herself at heart a free-thinker, was far too aristocratic not to have had her grand-children reared in the strict tenets of the Church. And if his grandmother placed so little reliance on his self-control, he would contrive to absent himself a good deal, to travel, as much as his means permitted, to go and fight abroad, perhaps. But Avoye should come back.

And Avoye, not being to her knowledge in love with her cousin, did come back, and in the end made Sessignes once more her home. Aymar carried out his programme; but perhaps it was his very absences from the house which was so full of the memories of their joint childhood which showed her at last her own heart. Yet, however much now in name only, she was still the wife of Frédéric de Villecresne, and as such she knew quite well that her cousin regarded her. She had made the mistake of her life; she must pay for it. But she did not realize how heavily Aymar was paying, too. And no doubt it was only because of the tenacious, self-denying Northern blood which the cousins shared that they were either of them able to stand the strain of a position which made such difficult demands, to go on waiting year after year, to face the prospect of waiting, most likely, for years longer, until death should remove the barrier to their happiness.

At times, indeed, it did seem as if they might not have to wait much longer. Last year, when Aymar had undertaken his self-imposed and repugnant mission to Bath, to interview M. de Villecresne on a money matter connected with his wife, he had found the profligate very much of an invalid. He had recovered, it was true, and returned to France, but he was ill again now—how seriously Aymar was not sure. Avoye would tell him when he got to Sessignes.

He had something to tell her, too—this new plan which he had just made with M. du Tremblay, for (except his love, of which he was very chary in speaking to her) there was little in his life that she did not share. She was, in thought, the comrade of all his hopes and enterprises—had once been a comrade in deed also. But for that he had scolded her.

(3)

The towers of Sessignes came at last into view—Sessignes, Sept-Cygnes, the castle of the Seven Swans emblazoned on the La Rocheterie shield. Little remained now of the feudal stronghold which the first Aymar de la Rocheterie had built in the days of Philip Augustus, yet the château's very position hinted at a warrior's eye. A later and softer generation would have planted it, not on the scarp, but lower down where the pastures sloped to the Aven, loitering here by banks of meadowsweet.

"Madame is well, Monsieur Aymar; but Mme la Comtesse was summoned away about four days ago to M. de Villecresne, who is very ill," said the old, tremulously smiling man-servant in response to his master's enquiries about the family.

Summoned away! She was not here! But the shock of that disappointment was succeeded by the thought, "De Villecresne must be at the point of death; she would never have gone to him else." Aymar's heart beat so fast that for the moment he hardly heard what the old man was saying further. But he mechanically took the letter which he was holding out, and saw that it was addressed in the hand of his second-in-command, M. de Fresne.

"How did this come here, Célestin?" he asked in some surprise.