"No."
A bitter smile curled Anne's still beautiful mouth as she stood near his chair and looked at him. Was it only or chiefly Adélaïde's unforgiving anger that weighed on his broad shoulders, bent his clever brow, drove the old contented smile from his face? True, Joseph's death might well have done all this; but she knew Urbain, and he was not the man to cower under the inevitable. It was his way to meet the blows of fate with a brave front, if not a gay one; he was a Frenchman, and had lived and laughed through the great Revolution. And yet Anne was puzzled; for she respected Urbain too much to acknowledge that Adélaïde's anger could have so great an effect upon him.
After a short silence he spoke, and told her all; told her of the disappointment of his dearest hopes, the failure of the schemes and struggles of a lifetime. And as he talked, Anne came gradually nearer, till at last, with a most unusual demonstrativeness, her arm was round his neck, and her cheek pressed against his whitening hair. Large tears ran down the man's face and dropped across his wife's hand and splashed on the tapestried arm of the chair.
The Sainfoys were about to leave Lancilly, and probably for ever. Adélaïde could not endure it; since her daughter's marriage it had become odious to her. Neither did Georges like it; and before going back to the army he had become engaged to the heiress with whom he had danced so much at the ball, who had a castle and large estates of her own in Touraine, and who considered Lancilly far too wild and old-fashioned to be inhabited, except perhaps for a month in the shooting season. Thus it was not unlikely that Lancilly would be sold; and for the present it was to be dismantled and shut up; once more the deserted place, the preservation of which, the restoring to its right inhabitants, had been the dream and ambition of Urbain de la Marinière's life. For his cousin Hervé he had spent all his energies and a considerable part of his fortune; and to no purpose and worse than none. Even Hervé's love and gratitude failed him now; the knowledge that Hervé could never quite forget or forgive his plotting with Adélaïde and Ratoneau, was the sharpest sting of all; worse even, as his wife felt with a throb of rapturous joy, than the fact that Adélaïde would smile on him no more.
"My poor Urbain!" she murmured.
Her sympathy was tender and real, though she felt that her prayer had been answered, that she and her house had been delivered from the crushing weight of Lancilly, that the great castle on the hill would henceforth be a harmless pile of stones, to be viewed without the old dislike and jealousy. It seemed to her now that she had not known a happy day since the Sainfoys came back, or even for long before, while Urbain's whole soul was wrapped up in preparing for them. Yet she was very sorry for Urbain.
"All for nothing, and worse than nothing," he sighed; and she found no words to comfort him.
The fire crackled and blazed; outside, the wind rolled in great thundering blasts over the country. It roared so loudly in the chimneys that nothing else was to be heard. Urbain went on talking, so low that his wife, stooping over his chair, could hardly hear him; but she knew that all he said had the one refrain—"I have worked for twenty years, and this is the end of it all. I might have left poor Joseph in exile. I might have allowed Lancilly to tumble into ruins. What has come of it all! Nothing, nothing but disappointment and failure. Is it not enough to break a man's heart, to give the best of his whole life, and to fail!"
The wind went on roaring. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he did not hear the house door open and shut, then the door of the room, then the light steps of Angelot and Hélène across the floor.
"Look up, Urbain!" his wife said with a sudden inspiration. "There is your success, dear friend!"