But Margaret thought indignantly of her cousin Leo.
“That Leo is bad,” she said. “I detest him.”
“His mother is a fine woman,” was her father’s comment.
They were silent. Then both of them glanced at the map of La Vigie on the wall. Instead of a faded sheet of paper, they saw a vision of the place again under the beautiful sunlight of the vintage time, with all its golden vines, the harvested fields, the pastures ready to be tilled, the great comfortable house. The estate which they had sentenced to be sold was making its last appeal to them.
Like Maurice on the Calvary of Lemenc, before he had gone away from them, but with a different sort of love, a love from which all selfish thought of happiness was purged, they said good-bye to La Vigie.
III
MR. FRASNE’S CLEVER TRANSACTION
NOTHING was being talked about in all Chambéry but the clever transaction of Mr. Frasne. It was especially the favourite topic of conversation at the reception given by Mr. and Mrs. Sassenay one evening in celebration of the eighteenth birthday of their daughter Jeanne. One of the characteristics of provincial society seems to be that the men take the occupations and preoccupations of the city into company with them, clinging to the excitements of their business in the midst of social pleasures. At the Sassenays’ they one and all abandoned the ladies to the rivalries of clothes, and between the waltzes made off hastily into corners to take up the burden of their financial slanders and professional cares. On this special occasion, the family drama which had shaken the Roquevillards’ long standing social status, with its climax due to come off the day after to-morrow—it was the evening of December 4th—at the sitting of the court of assizes, was stirring public comment to its depths. Public opinion in Chambéry was tired, no doubt, of the well-founded and continuous ascendancy of the Roquevillards. It was worked up with the desire for levelling down, which is one of the modern zeals, as well as irritation at the persistent pride that refused to plead for itself or beg for sympathy even in misfortune. People, in short, were on the watch for the final collapse of a race which at other times had been considered an ornament to the city.
In the smoking-room were gathered men of law, doctors, manufacturers, capitalists; a few of them now and then, as the first strains of a waltz sounded, made for the group of girls and younger women seated in the drawing-room, like an assaulting party issuing in victorious sallies from a place besieged, to return again shortly to their masculine circle. Only one of them all knew nothing of this lucky speculation of the notary, which some found fault with and others praised, namely, the Viscount de la Mortellerie. His excuse was that he had tarried too long in the fourteenth century, with the history of the ducal castle that he was writing. In vain he tried to interest his neighbours in the ingenuity of Amedeus V, who in 1328 had wooden conduits arranged to bring water from the fountain of Saint Martri to his vast kitchens, where it gushed out in an enormous stone basin, which served also as a pool for the salmon that were destined for the ducal table. People would not listen to this babbler who was almost six hundred years behind the times. Mr. Latache, president of the Chamber of Notaries, sententious, ceremonious, bored, upholding the dignity of his life and business reputation, bore the brunt of the attack made by the little lawyer Coulanges. This latter, a scented, curled and powdered little individual, had assumed the defense of Mr. Frasne on behalf of the younger school.
“No, no,” declared Mr. Latache solemnly, “the criminal action follows the civil in such matters. Frasne should have waited for the jury’s verdict before accepting reparation for material damage. Or rather, since he has been fully indemnified, he should withdraw his complaint altogether. He ought not to mix up money matters with his vengeance.”
“Pardon me, pardon me,” parried the bubbling lawyer, fencing promptly. “Let us reason the thing out, I beg of you. Mr. Frasne made a complaint against Maurice Roquevillard of embezzlement in the sum of one hundred thousand francs, and instituted a civil suit against him. The elder Roquevillard offered to restore this sum to him before the arrest, and you blame him now for accepting it?”