At last, on November 30th, our friends, overflowing with joy and hope, returned to the château of Briantes.
They had received good news from Monsieur de Beuvre. He had written many times; but his messengers had been intercepted or had betrayed their trust. He was to return very soon, and he did, in fact, return. He was welcomed with much feasting and merrymaking; after which they talked of separating.
It was proper that Lauriane should return to her own château, and the bulky De Beuvre felt cramped in the small manor of Briantes. Lauriane could not manifest before her father the slightest reluctance to resume her life with him. Indeed she was conscious of no such reluctance, she was so happy to have him at home again. And yet she felt a sudden and involuntary chill of sadness when she entered the dismal château of La Motte.
The Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré escorted her thither, and, at her father's request, were to remain two or three days with her. Mercedes and Jovelin were of the party. It was not therefore the sensation of solitude taking possession of her already; indeed, might they not, were they not certain to see one another almost every day?
This vague apprehension which disturbed Lauriane was a sort of disenchantment, which she did not fully understand. She had always insisted upon regarding her father as a hero; her anxieties at the convent, due to the thought of the perils he had incurred for his faith, had exalted to enthusiasm the conception she had formed of him. She had been forced to abandon her ideal since he had been at home. In the first place, although De Beuvre had complained that he grew stout in idleness, and they had expected that he would return emaciated and exhausted, he was ruddier and more portly than ever. His mind seemed to have grown dense in proportion. His blunt gayety had become a little vulgar. He posed as a sailor, smoked a pipe, swore beyond all reason, forgot to wrap his scepticism in Montaigne's ingenious aphorisms, and at times adopted an air of sly and mysterious satisfaction which was by no means courteous to his friends.
The solution of this last riddle was let fall by him on the day following his return to La Motte, during a conference which we are about to describe.
[LXV]
They had hunted during the day, then supped, and were sitting about the fire in the large salon, when Guillaume d'Ars, who had been very assiduous in his attentions to Lauriane since the news of the peace, asked leave, with some playful emotion, to make a speech.
They all ceased their games and conversation, and Guillaume, after appealing to Lauriane for special encouragement, which she accorded him without a suspicion of what it was all about, spoke as follows:
"Mesdames"—Mercedes was present,—"messieurs, friends, kinsmen and neighbors, all honored, respected and beloved, I beg you to listen to a story which is my own. In me you see a young man neither better nor worse made than many another; ignorant enough, Master Jovelin will agree; reasonably rich and well-born, but those are not virtues; brave, but that is no subject for boasting; lastly—I pause that some one may kindly eulogize me; for, as you see, I hardly understand praising myself."