There was a long pause, during which the clock on the chimney ticked its forever—never—without remorse. Gradually the synopsis became more complete, for I could trace the outlines of the buried hours in Bentham's grey, impassive face. Then he went on as though soliloquising:—
"Now I return to it, England seems wider—its population smaller. It is as if we lived in a great silence like that in the rarified atmosphere of Swiss heights. Yet the streets are in a turmoil. Beaming girls and bedizened harridans flaunt in the Row, carriages roll, and polite and impolite jostle each other for gain or gaiety. There are great singers at the Opera, great pictures on the Line, great festivities everywhere. There is a frou-frou of silken skirts, with the scent and the laughter of happy women round and about me, from dawn till nightfall. Yet my soul shivers somewhere outside. Shivers"—he repeated, shrinking into his coat as though midsummer were March—"Why is it? I have lived and loved and—as you know—recovered, but now—oh, Louis, is there anything so mutely desolate as fresh spade prints on a grassless grave?"
A Quaint Elopement
"Ah! little sweetheart, the romance
Of life, with all its change and chance,
Is but a sealed book to thee."
It took Ralph Hilyard over twelve hours to journey from Southampton to St Malo on that momentous June night. The sea tossed and bounded and roared, but he kept his footing on deck, well satisfied with Nature's frenzied accompaniment to his own tempestuous thoughts. He was being borne to the historic town where She, from infancy to womanhood, had dwelt; he would meet those frank blue Breton eyes adjured for a year—eyes, whose innocence in one less well descended might have spelt ignorance—he would adore the graceful form, that, while clamouring of beauty, hinted all unconsciously of the haute noblesse, the ghost of which abides in St Malo to this moment, though the substance has long since passed away. He would risk all for the encounter, he told himself. Round the subject his mind had revolved for three hundred and sixty-four days; on the three hundred and sixty-fifth his thoughts had sprung to action—he had set sail.
Her people, an austere mother—who loathed the name of the Republic and rigidly clamped her door against both the bourgeoisie and our British nation of shopkeepers—and her brother, Le Sieur de Quesne, a foolish and thoroughly useless fine gentleman, occupied "La Chaumais," their ancestral domain, near St Servan, on the river Rance. This domain was almost as hermetically sealed as a convent, and far more gloomy. It served to perfection as a prison for the peccant Leonie, when it was discovered that, during a fortnight's stay with an aunt in Paris, she had ventured to eye as a lover a portionless upstart, an artist who worked for mere bread in the Quartier Latin. Here, for twelve months, the poor delinquent was incarcerated. In this mouldy mansion she either knitted or stared vacantly out at the rank unkempt grass and the dilapidated fences, kept by poverty unrepaired, while her parent reiterated stories of the grand old days when the tapestried chairs, woefully faded, had been fresh and beauteous, and when the de Quesne nobles had flitted from the splendours of the Tuilleries to hold rural court within those blackened portals now so severe of aspect, so melancholy and silent with the pulselessness of stagnation.
A sore punishment this for having confessed in her heart's naivete a passion for a hero of the brush, a vagrant in velveteen who painted pictures and—vulgarian!—sold them to any patronising passer-by. It was penalty dire enough for a debutante who had but sipped Paris, it waxed doubly dreadful to inquiring Eve within scent of the apple tree. There were tears at first, sobs of despair, then dumb contumacy, and latterly—when the spring weather returned again—kicks! But the pricks of family pride were sharp to lunge against, and many drops of heart's blood were spilt in the exercise. Restrictions only grew more rigid, and the poor little damsel, who had tricoteed sombrely in the ancestral dungeon during the winter, was, in summer, never permitted to roam without the vigilant companionship of the substantial retainer Valentine, a worthy who, from her elaborately starched coiffe to the heels of her sabots, was strongly imbued with a sense of conscientious vassalage to "Madame," as Leonie's mother in these degenerate days condescended to be styled.
But love, which laughs at iron bars, makes also mock at the effrontery of blue blood. There came a day, not long after Ralph Hilyard's sudden arrival at St Malo, when, Valentine's expansive back being for a moment turned, a two-lined scribble on a shred of drawing paper was placed in Mademoiselle de Quesne's hands.