'Well, then, where did she come from? Not out of the Fourth Dimension? Who was she? Not a wraith, an apparition? Why will you entertain such weird conjectures?'
'She must have come from Bayonne. An officer's wife, beyond a doubt.'
'Oh, you're perfectly remorseless,' sighed Paul, and changed the subject. But he was unconvinced. Officers' wives, in garrison-towns like Bayonne, had, in his experience, always been, as he expressed it, frowsy and provincial.
IV.
One would think, by this time, the priest, poor man, had earned a moment of mental rest; but Paul's thirst for knowledge was insatiable. He began to ply him with questions about the Queen. And though André could tell him very little, and though he had heard all that the night before from Manuela, it interested him curiously to hear it repeated.
It amounted to scarcely more than a single meagre fact. A few months after the divorce, she had returned to Granjolaye, and she had never once been known to set her foot beyond the limits of her garden from that day to this. She had arrived at night, attended by her two German ladies-in-waiting. A carriage had met her at the railway station in Bayonne, and set her down at the doors of her Château, where her aunt, old Mademoiselle Henriette, awaited her. What manner of life she led there, nobody had the poorest means of discovering. Her own servants (tongue-tied by fear or love) could not be got to speak; and from the eyes of all outsiders she was sedulously screened. Paul could imagine her, in her great humiliation, solitary among the ruins of her high destiny, hiding her wounds; too sensitive to face the curiosity, too proud to brook the pity, of the world. She seemed to him a very grandiose and tragic figure, and he lost himself musing of her—her with whom he had played at being married, when they were children here, so long, so long ago. She was the daughter, the only child and heiress, of the last Duc de la Granjolaye de Ravanches,—the same nobleman of whom it was told that when Louis Napoléon, meaning to be gracious, said to him, 'You bear a great name, Monsieur,' he had answered sweetly, 'The greatest of all, I think.' It is certain he was the head of one of the most illustrious houses in the noblesse of Europe, descended directly and legitimately, through the Bourbons, from Saint Louis of France; and, to boot, he was immensely rich, owning (it was said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour. Paul remembered him vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a good deal to stay at Granjolaye.
On the death of Madame de Louvance, the property of Saint-Graal had passed to her son, Edmond,—André's feu Monsieur le Comte. Edmond rarely lived there, and never asked his sister or her boy there; whence, twenty years ago, at the respective ages of thirteen and eleven, Paul and Hélène had vanished from each other's ken. But Edmond never married, either; and when, last winter, he died, he left a will making Paul his heir. Of Hélène's later history Paul knew as much as all the world knows, and no more—so much, that is, as one could gather from newspapers and public rumour. He knew of her father's death, whereby she had become absolute mistress of his enormous fortune. He knew of her princely marriage, and of her elevation by the old king to her husband's rank of Royal Highness. He knew of that swift series of improbable deaths which had culminated in her husband's accession to the throne, and how she had been crowned Queen-Consort. And then he knew that three or four years afterwards she had sued for and obtained a Bull of Separation from the Pope, on the plea of her husband's infidelity and cruelty. The infidelity, to be sure, was no more than, as a Royalty, if not as a woman, she might have bargained for and borne with; but everybody remembers the stories of the king's drunken violence that got bruited about at the time. Everybody will remember, too, how, the Papal Separation once pronounced, he had retaliated upon her with a decree of absolute divorce, and a sentence of perpetual banishment, voted by his own parliament. Whither she had betaken herself after these troubles Paul had never heard—until, yesterday, arriving at Saint-Graal, they told him she was living cloistered like a nun at Granjolaye.
News travels fast and penetrates everywhere in that lost corner of garrulous Gascony. The news that Paul had taken up his residence at Saint-Graal could scarcely fail to reach the Queen. Would she remember their childish intimacy? Would she make him a sign? Would she let him see her, for old sake's sake? Oh, in all probability, no. Most certainly, no. And yet—and yet, he couldn't forbid a little furtive hope to flicker in his heart.
V.
It was only April, but the sun shone with midsummer strength.