In a room at the opposite end of the corridor from that where the apartment was situated which had been bestowed on St. Georges, the mother and daughter sat. It was the sleeping-room of madame la marquise, large, vast, and sombre—save that here, too, a fire burnt in the grate, and that there were many candles alight in the sconces set about the room.
And the marquise, lying back in her deep fauteuil before the fire, her face white and drawn, and with tears upon her cheeks, was speaking to her daughter who knelt by her side.
"The wolf!" she said, "the wolf! How know it? How find out? God! I thought that I alone, of all living people, knew, until I divulged my story to you, until I wrote to Louis asking him to do justice to a much-wronged man. Who—who has betrayed my confidence? Not the king, surely. Oh! not he, not he! Nay, more, I doubt if the letter ever reached his hands."
"Mother," Aurélie said, as she stroked her hand, "there must be some other who knows."
"There was no living soul on earth. Listen, even you do not know all."
The girl seated herself against her mother's knee and gazed up into her face. Then she whispered: "Tell me all now, mother. From to-night let me understand exactly with what he is encompassed. Tell me, I beg."
"You know," the marquise said, "for I have told you often, that the Duc de Vannes and I loved each other when we were young—yet that we never married. No matter for the reason now—it was my fault! Let that suffice. And we parted—he to go his way, I mine. Then, some years later, not many it is true, but still long enough for us to have forgotten what had separated us, we met again, and once more he asked me to be his wife, to renew the love vows we once had made. But it was then impossible. I was affianced to your father—the day was fixed, and I had come to admire him, to respect him; in no case would I have gone back from my plighted word. So again we parted to meet only once more in life."
The girl touched her hand—perhaps—who knows?—in admiration of her mother's strength in keeping her vow to the man who was not her first love and in discarding the man who was. And the marquise continued:
"It was one night a few weeks before he set out to join Turenne in the Palatinate. A great fête was given by Louis to celebrate his birthday at St. Germain-en-Laye, his birthplace, and it was there we met again. Presently, when both of us were able to escape from the great crowd of courtiers, marshals, and ministers who surrounded the king, he told me that he was glad he had met me once more—that he wished to confide a secret to me if I would hear it, a charge if I would accept it. At first I hesitated, then—when I found it would not thrust against your father's honour"—again the girl stroked her mother's hand—"I told him he might confide in me. Aurélie, he told me that, embittered by having lost me, he had married in private an English lady, daughter of a refugee, that he had learned to love her, and that death had parted them after a few years of marriage. Also, he told me, she left him a son, whom he had brought up in ignorance of the position that must be his, but that—should he return from the Palatinate—he meant to acknowledge him. He never did return, and his son has never been acknowledged."
"Why, my mother?" asked Aurélie, with an upward glance. "Why?"