CHAPTER XV. WAR.
“When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.”
“Then,” said the Baroness de Mélide, “I shall go down to St. Germain en Pré, and say my prayers.” And she rang the bell for her carriage.
On all great occasions in life, the Baroness de Mélide had taken her overburdened heart in a carriage and pair to St. Germain en Pré. For she had always had a carriage and pair for the mere ringing of a bell ever since her girlhood, when the Baron de Mélide had, with much assistance from her, laid his name and fortune at her feet. When she had helped him to ask her to be his wife, she had ordered the carriage thus, as she was ordering it now in the month of August, 1870, on being told by her husband that the battle of Wörth had been fought and lost, and that Lory de Vasselot was safe.
“The Madeleine is nearer,” suggested the baron, a large man, with a vacant face which concealed a very mine of common sense, “and you could give me a lift as far as the club.”
“The Madeleine is all very well for a wedding or a funeral or a great public festivity of any sort,” said the baroness, with a harmless, light manner of talking of grave subjects which is a closed book to the ordinary stolid British mind; “but when one has a prayer, there is nowhere like St. Germain en Pré, which is old and simple and dirty, so that one feels like a poor woman. I shall put on an old dress.”
She looked at her husband with a capable nod, as if to convey the comforting assurance that he could leave this matter entirely to her.
“Yes,” said the baron; “do as you will.”
Which permission the world was pleased to consider superfluous in the present marital case.
“It is,” he said, “the occasion for a prayer; and say a word for France. And Lory is safe—one of very, very few survivors. Remember that in your prayers, ma mie, and remember me.”