This was the secret of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy and the Countess of Harborough.
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
To Alice Cockran
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
HERVÉ DE VERVAINVILLE, Marquis de Saint-Laurent, was at once the biggest and smallest landlord of Calvados, the most important personage of that department and the most insignificant and powerless. Into his cradle the fairies had dropped all the gifts of fortune but those two, without which the others taste as ashes—love and happiness. His life was uncoloured by the affections of home, and his days, like his ragged little visage and his dull personality, were vague, with the vagueness of negative misery. Of his nurse he was meekly afraid, and his relations with the other servants were of the most distantly polite and official nature. He understood that they were there to do his bidding nominally, and compel him actually to do theirs, pending his hour of authority. With a little broken sigh, he envied the happiness that he rootedly believed to accompany the more cheerful proportions of the cottager’s experience, of which he occasionally caught glimpses in his daily walks, remembering the chill solitude of his own big empty castle and the immense park that seemed an expansion of his imprisonment, including, as part of his uninterrupted gloom, the kindly meadows and woods, the babbling streams and leafy avenues, where the birds sang of joys uncomprehended by him.
Play was as foreign to him as hope. Every morning he gravely saluted the picture of his pretty mother, which hung in his bedroom, a lovely picture, hardly real in its dainty Greuze-like charm, arch and frail and innocent, the bloom of whose eighteen years had been sacrificed upon his own coming, leaving a copy washed of all beauty, its delicacy blurred in a half-effaced boyish visage without character or colouring. Of his father Hervé never spoke,—shrinking, with the unconscious pride of race, from the male interloper who had been glad enough to drop an inferior name, and was considered by his friends to have waltzed himself and his handsome eyes into an enviable bondage. And the only return he could make to the house that had so benefited him was a flying visit from Paris to inspect the heir and confer with his son’s steward (whose guardian he had been appointed by the old marquis at his death), and then return to his city pleasures, which he found more entertaining than his Norman neighbours.
On Sunday morning little Hervé was conducted to High Mass in the church of Saint-Laurent, upon the broad highroad leading to the town of Falaise. Duly escorted up the aisle by an obsequious Swiss in military hat and clanking sword, with a long blonde moustache that excited the boy’s admiration, Hervé and his nurse were bowed into the colossal family pew, as large as a moderate-sized chamber, roughly carven and running along the flat wide tombs of his ancestors, on which marble statues of knights and mediæval ladies lay lengthways. The child’s air of melancholy and solitary state was enough to make any honest heart ache, and his presence never failed to waken the intense interest of the simple congregation, and supply them with food for speculation as to his future over their mid-day soup and cider. Hard indeed would it have been to define the future of the little man sitting so decorously in his huge pew, and following the long services in a spirit of almost pathetic conventionality and resignation, only very occasionally relieved by his queer broken sigh, that had settled into a trick, or a furtive wandering of his eyes, that sought distraction among ancestral epitaphs.
He was not, it must be owned, an engaging child, though soft-hearted and timidly attracted by animals, whose susceptibilities he would have feared to offend by any uninvited demonstration of affection. He had heard himself described as plain and dull, and thought it his duty to refrain as much as possible from inflicting his presence upon others, preferring loneliness to adverse criticism. But he had one friend who had found him out, and taken him to her equally unhappy and tender heart. The Comtesse de Fresney, a lady of thirty, was, like himself, miserable and misunderstood. Hervé thought she must be very beautiful for him to love her so devotedly, and he looked forward with much eagerness to the time of her widowhood, when he should be free to marry her.
There was something inexpressibly sad in the drollery of their relations. Neither was aware of the comic element, while both were profoundly impressed with the sadness. Whenever a fair, a race, or a company of strolling players took the tyrannical count away from Fresney, a messenger was at once despatched to Saint-Laurent, and gladly the little marquis trotted off to console his friend.
One day Hervé gave expression to his matrimonial intentions. The countess, sitting with her hands in her lap, was gazing gloomily out of the window, when she turned, and said, sighing: ‘Do you know, Hervé, that I have never even been to Paris?’