Calm again, I tried the keys elsewhere. At last, in a little pink soap-box in the cupboard of the dressing-table, I discovered what I knew was the Treasure. One large key and one very fine and small. It was hard breathing as the one opened the safe, then the other a deed-box I found at the back within. Greedy trembling hands snatched packets neatly tied with red tape and endorsed with a description in Italian, with which I knew he was familiar and—God bless Miss de Mesurier and Lord Tawborough her paymaster—I also.
Packets of letters, incriminating documents, tell-tale scrolls! It was the trove, the triumph! What villainous secrets might they not hold?
But when Elise and I, with a rich sense of the historic importance of the occasion, set to, behind locked doors, to investigate our treasure, what did we discover? Long and affectionate letters from M. de Fouquier's mother to her well-loved son, friendly letters from his dead sister: what a meek, pathetic, uncriminal yield! I was moved almost to tears. It was we who were the criminals. And for a while our plots wilted....
I shall pass by much of this kind, as well as the whole diary-remembered general life of the Villebecq days: the excursions, the games, the visits, the chatterings, the mighty meals; the comfortable daily round in which we tasted everything—except everything, except love and God.
CHAPTER XXXI: WAY OF AN EAGLE IN THE AIR
The one happening of that time which was able to summon the Mary of this record from her torpor was outwardly the most vainglorious of all. I can see now that this was natural. For if the Villebecq puppet had a greater love of empty ease as of empty excitement, it was the first Mary who, from the dawn of consciousness, in those Bear Lawn days when the Holy Bible shaped her earliest consciousness, had best loved pomp: the pomp of words, the pomp of hate, the pomp of misery, the pomp of God.
And here now came the pomp of rulers, the peculiar treasure of kings.
Not indeed till later years did I fully realize what a unique event our Imperial visit was. Whether it is that parvenu sovereigns have to be more careful of their dignity, and cannot, like monarchs of ancient line, honour the hospitality of their subjects' roofs; the fact is that throughout their reign Louis-Napoleon and Eugenie seem never to have made a sojourn in any private mansion of their realm. Very occasionally during their progress in the provinces, some château might be used as a halting-place for luncheon or the night in place of the customary palace or prefecture. Ours was one such case. The Countess did not hide (at any rate from us) that she had taken the liberty of addressing herself to the Emperor, begging him on his tour through Normandy to use her house as a halting-place: her humble excuse to His Majesty for her presumption was her dear father's humble share in defending the First Empire, and her dear husband's in founding the Second. She knew she was touching the right chord. To help and to repay those who had befriended him or his House was with the Emperor a principle, nay a mania: if ingratitude be the hall-mark of princes, then was Louis-Napoleon most spurious and unprincely metal. The privilege of a day and a night at Villebecq was graciously accorded.