TO THE UTTERMOST
The Abbé Chassin, who lived to be a very old man, left among his papers a full record of most of the events connected with the death of the Duc de Trélan, but no word of that short drive with Mme de Trélan from Paris to Mirabel. Presumably he could not write of it.
Yet Valentine was quite calm. She leant back nearly all the way with her eyes closed, an image of marble in her grey cloak. Her hands were clasped in her lap; Pierre thought that she, like himself, was praying, but he was not sure. From him, at intervals, scraps of the De Profundis broke aloud, and he did not know it. . . . Domine exaudi vocem meam . . . Quia apud te propitiatio est . . . speravit anima mea in Domino. . . . Underneath it all was the thought that their carriage wheels, once Paris was behind them, were on the very track of Gaston’s, and that they were passing over again, at so short an interval, his via dolorosa. But well he knew that his had been nothing to his wife’s, now.
Was not that the final swordstroke, too—that bitter and glorious knowledge which was to have been kept from her? He was sure that Gaston had not meant her to learn it. And yet, after all, perhaps it fell at this hour on a heart already numbed by shock, and she could better bear it to-day than to-morrow. To have known it yesterday, when her husband was still on earth—that would have been intolerable. But she had said so little, seemed set on so high a pinnacle of loss, that he could only look at her, and conjecture, and pray. And in his own heart the sword turned also.
At last they left the road to Saint-Germain. The poplars passed one by one, those poplars under which Mme Vidal had walked last spring to take up her post. Mud splashed from the wheels; the puddles were melted since this morning. The carriage slackened, then, turning, drove through the empty space between the gateposts with their mutilated lions. But Mirabel bore little trace of what had taken place there four or five hours ago, save that the barrier was entirely removed, and the gravel scored by the passage of troops. And there were certain marks on the base of one of the towers; but these were invisible at a distance.
They drew up before the great steps. The priest got out and assisted Mme de Trélan to alight. The heavy door at the top, barred for so many years, stood wide open, and on either side of it was stationed a hussar with drawn sabre. At least then, ran his thought, the butchers have some proper feeling; they do not intend the curious to pass that door . . . unless, perhaps, it were that young captain’s doing only. He offered his arm. But Valentine refused it. “I would rather go quite alone,” she said gently. “If you would wait here till I summon you . . . or till the others come . . .”
He could not gainsay her. So once more he, too, stood in front of Mirabel, and suddenly realised with intensity the part that Mirabel’s treasure—yielded moreover to his hands—had played in these two lives. It had made possible Gaston de Trélan’s short-lived success in Finistère, and had thereby brought him fame—and death. It had lifted his burden from him, and joined him and Valentine in a union such as they had never known . . . but only to part them. The colonnades wavered for a moment as all this beat upon the priest’s brain. Then he thought of nothing else but what was before his eyes—the figure of Mme de Trélan going up those wide, neglected steps.
He did not know, nor did Valentine till she came to them, that across their discoloured marble trailed, in places, another and a deeper discolouration. She had reached the sixth or seventh of the twelve before its meaning penetrated to her consciousness. She stopped, drawing a long breath; then went slowly on again, looking at it. But when she came to the tenth step Pierre Chassin, watching from below, saw her sink on her knees, and thought her strength was failing her. It was not so. Bending forward, as on the ascent of some great altar, the Duchesse de Trélan deliberately stooped and kissed, on the topmost step of all, one of the little splashes, dull now, and dry, which marked her husband’s return to his house of Mirabel.
Then she rose, and went also, between the guards, through the open door, and into the Salle Verte.