Soon Grandmother followed Aunt Jael, and took to her bed permanently. One Lord's Day evening I helped her upstairs for the last time.
My life was now spent in the two bedrooms where my Great-Aunt and Grandmother lay, and in crossing the corridor from one to the other as Aunt Jael's voice or my own sense of Grandmother's need alternatively summoned me. In the one room I was chiefly cursed at, in the other principally prayed for.
Sister Briggs came in most days to give me help in the kitchen; even so I found it a heavy task to do the whole work of the big house and to feed and mind and minister to two bedridden old women. But I preferred it to the heavy idleness of Villebecq: found waiting upon others more natural, more agreeable, more self-righteously satisfactory, than being waited upon. There was the pride of humility, the unctuous flattery of fatigue.
I never went out of doors except to Market and (for Breaking of Bread only) to Meeting. I had the lonely livelong day in which to work and to think of Robbie. Here I was back in Devon, the Devon where I had met him, the Devon where he lived: was I any whit the nearer finding him? My brain revolved in a futile circle of planlessness and hope: as usual, my imperial imagination failed cravenly when face to face with need for practical endeavour. The only plan I could decide upon was to broach the subject to Aunt Martha next time she should come over from Torribridge, to ask her brazenly for the address of the family in South Devon and the surname of Uncle Vivian, and then to write direct for news of my Beloved. It was high time Aunt Martha came over again—she had not been near her mother's bedside for a fortnight and more. When would she come?
My only other interest during these days was in the tremendous drama being enacted in the country I had just left. Unknown to my Grandmother I took in the Times newspaper daily, and had French ones specially sent to me. I followed every stage of the war and the political story with a passion that seemed sometimes incongruous in this bare Christian English house. What had Bear Lawn to do with this war?—or any other war? (I forgot that it had been built for barracks in the other Napoleon's day; that maybe redcoats who had seen and smashed Boney had slept and sworn in each familiar room.)
"Shall I tell you anything about the war?" I asked my Grandmother one evening. "There is only one war," she replied, "God's war with evil."
I was so infinitely more interested in persons than things, in the players than in the play, that never at any stage of these events across the Channel did I much reflect on their mighty political significance: how the Ruler of Europe who, through centuries, had lived in Paris, would live from this time onwards in Berlin; or how, together with the sword the last French Emperor handed to the first German Emperor at Sedan, he was handing also the secular leadership of civilization. I could only think of the hunch-shouldered suffering wretch who proffered the sword.
His lady, too, was an object-lesson for would-be empresses. Though if her fate was unambiguous, as the Lord's lessons are, the fashion in which she faced it was more doubtful, as History is. Some accounts spoke of her bravery: how calm and queenly she was while the savage mob in the Tuileries garden shrieked "Dethronement!" and would have torn her limb from limb—others of her cowardice: how cravenly she scuttled away at the first approach of realities, where a Maria Theresa would have driven hardily through the streets and by courage effected a revulsion of the people's feeling. Her Good-bye, how touching!—the last sad glance at the well-loved rooms in which for seventeen imperial years she had reigned, the thought for others, the dignified tears, the bitter "In France no one has the right to be unfortunate!" wrung from her anguished soul—or—the stealthy selfish escape under the protection of foreigners, the abandonment of others, the skulking anxiety for her own skin only, the well-filled purse. The candid selfishness: "Do not think of me, think only of France"—or—the uneasy self-righteousness: "Have I not done my duty to the end?" "Yes, Madam": "I am on your arm" (to the Italian Ambassador): "Am I trembling?" "No, Madam, you are not trembling." "What more could I have done?": "Nothing, Madam."
How loving a wife she had been in the dark preceding weeks! In an agony of fear for her beloved husband's life if he should return to Paris, how she had sent him hourly telegrams, messages of aching anxiety and forethought and tenderness, to dissuade him from the project,—or—to keep him away from the Capital at all costs, since his return would put an end to her power, her Regency, the wreaking of her spites and vendettas, her even darker ambitions. How many hours of unrecorded prayer had she not spent with God!—praying for the sweet Emperor's safety—or—for the stray bullet that would achieve her ends.