"To the duchy," answered the other shortly, and relapsed into sombre meditation.
CHAPTER XX
The castle of the Prince d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, was set upon a vast rock, and the town of Bercy huddled round the foot of it and on great granite ledges some distance up. With fifty defenders the castle, on its lofty pedestal, might have resisted as many thousands; and, indeed, it had done so more times than there were rubies in the rings of the present Duke, who had rescued Captain Philip d'Avranche from the clutches of the Red Government.
Upon the castle, with the flag of the duchy, waved the republican tricolour, where for a thousand years had floated a royal banner. When France's great trouble came to her, and the nobles fled, or went to fight for the King in the Vendee, the old Duke, with a dreamy indifference to the opinion of Europe, had proclaimed alliance with the new Government. He felt himself privileged in being thus selfish; and he had made the alliance that he might pursue, unchecked, the one remaining object of his life.
This object had now grown from a habit into a passion. It was now his one ambition to arrange a new succession excluding the Vaufontaines, a detested branch of the Bercy family. There had been an ancient feud between his family and the Vaufontaines, whose rights to the succession, after his eldest son, were to this time paramount. For three years past he had had a whole monastery of Benedictine monks at work to find some collateral branch from which he might take a successor to Leopold John, his imbecile heir—but to no purpose.
In more than a little the Duke was superstitious, and on the day when he met Philip d'Avranche in the chamber of M. Dalbarade he had twice turned back after starting to make the visit, so great was his dislike to pay homage to the revolutionary Minister. He had nerved himself to the distasteful duty, however, and had gone. When he saw the name of the young English prisoner—his own name—staring him in the face, he had had such a thrill as a miracle might have sent through the veins of a doubting Christian.
Since that minute he, like Philip, had been in a kind of dream; on his part, to find in the young man, if possible, an heir and successor; on Philip's to make real exalted possibilities. There had slipped past two months, wherein Philip had seen a new and brilliant avenue of life opening out before him. Most like a dream indeed it seemed. He had been shut out from the world, cut off from all connection with England and his past, for M. Dalbarade made it a condition of release that he should send no message or correspond with any one outside Castle Bercy. He had not therefore written to Guida. She seemed an interminable distance away. He was as completely in a new world as though he had been transplanted; he was as wholly in the air of fresh ambitions as though he were beginning the world again—ambitions as gorgeous as bewildering.
For, almost from the first, the old nobleman treated him like a son. He spoke freely to him of the most private family matters, of the most important State affairs. He consulted with him, he seemed to lean upon him. He alluded often, in oblique phrase, to adoption and succession. In the castle Philip was treated as though he were in truth a high kinsman of the Duke. Royal ceremony and state were on every hand. He who had never had a servant of his own, now had a score at his disposal. He had spent his early days in a small Jersey manor-house; here he was walking the halls of a palace with the step of assurance, the most honoured figure in a principality next to the sovereign himself. "Adoption and succession" were words that rang in his ears day and night. The wild dream had laid feverish hands upon him. Jersey, England, the Navy, seemed very far away.
Ambition was the deepest passion in him, even as defeating the hopes of the Vaufontaines was more than a religion with the Duke. By no trickery, but by a persistent good-nature, alertness of speech, avoidance of dangerous topics, and aptness in anecdote, he had hourly made his position stronger, himself more honoured at the Castle Bercy. He had also tactfully declined an offer of money from the Prince—none the less decidedly because he was nearly penniless. The Duke's hospitality he was ready to accept, but not his purse—not yet.
Yet he was not in all acting a part. He was sincere in his liking for the soured, bereaved sovereign, forced to endure alliance with a Government he loathed. He even admired the Duke for his vexing idiosyncrasies, for they came of a strong individuality which, in happier case, should have made him a contented and beloved monarch. As it was, the people of his duchy were loyal to him beyond telling, doing his bidding without cavil: standing for the King of France at his will, declaring for the Republic at his command; for, whatever the Duke was to the world outside, within his duchy he was just and benevolent, if imperious.