“Madame! Madame! I should not have sung the last verse! You are thinking—forgive me, but I can guess—that, when the fighting begins——”
Valentine put her arm round her. “My child, you shame me! You have more courage than I! Have you not given your brother to the same danger, and more than your brother?”
Marthe hid her face on the elder woman’s shoulder, and thus, the dark head and the golden-grey together, they were when the door at the end of the great salon opened. Mlle de la Vergne drew away at the sound, and both ladies looked up. On the threshold stood the tall figure of the Duc de Trélan, with two aides-de-camp behind him; and the aides-de-camp were Roland and Artamène.
A moment the three invaders stood there, smiling, all three of them; then the sun-barred parquet rang under a spurred tread as Gaston came forward to kiss his wife’s hand, and afterwards her cheek. His arm was no longer in a sling; he was wearing the Cross of Maria Theresa. As he lifted Marthe’s fingers to his lips she thought—though she had never been to a court which had ceased to exist by the time she was of an age to be presented—“One sees, just by his manner of doing this, what a great gentleman he is. And I wonder if, in all those brilliant ceremonies at Versailles, in the days when he was first gentleman of the bedchamber to the King, whether Mme de Trélan ever saw him to such advantage as here in our drawing-room, in that plain, dark uniform, with his sword and that air of purpose.”
And the young girl’s reflection was near enough to Valentine’s inmost thought as, clinging to her husband’s arm, she went with him through the long window into the sunshine outside, which was so filled with her thoughts of him. Out there, his arms round her, her hands on his breast, her eyes closed, she took and gave on the lips a kiss at once grave and passionate, a kiss like the first kiss of lovers—a salute which had no special affinity with courts.
“O Gaston, how I have dreamed of this!”
“Not more, my heart of hearts, than I! But I could not well have come, had I not been leaving my headquarters for a few days in any case.”
“To fight? Not yet, surely?”
“No—to talk!” said he with a little rueful look. “But it will end in fighting, I trust. I am bound for the château of La Jonchère, near Pouancé—just over the border in Anjou—where all the chiefs are to meet on the fifteenth, to take a final decision.”
“And you think it will be war?”