As it happened I was going to Ste. Clothilde for Easter, a few days later, so I advanced the date of my journey and took her with me.
How much she knew or suspected of what had been going on between Micky and Bianca, I do not know. She never told me. All that she ever said was—“I know he didn’t plan it deliberately, I know he didn’t mean to—when I left him.” But she must have known enough to be terribly anxious, and I imagine that her decision to go off with him to Italy was a last desperate move.
The Simplon Express left Paris at nine and stopped at La Roche at eleven o’clock at night. Micky was to take two tickets and the sleepers and get on the train at Paris, ready to lift her aboard.
“Once I am on the train,” she kept saying, “I feel that I will be safe.”
La Roche was a three hours’ motor run across country from Ste. Clothilde, the roads were winding lanes, confusing and indistinctly marked; so we decided that she had better do the distance before dark. She might puncture a tire, the motor might break down, anything might happen, she was feverishly anxious to allow herself plenty of time. She started at three o’clock.
Her face was strained and seemed no bigger than a little wizened infant’s face as she said good-bye. For a moment, on those immense stone steps in view of Philibert’s great formal gardens with their fountains and statues and broad gravel walks, she clung to me. Then with a final nervous hug flung away and jumped into the car. Her last words were “I’ll not come back till I’m married, Jane, so give me your blessing.” And out of my heart I gave it, kissing both my hands to her as the motor swung down the drive, and through the great iron gates.
I felt singularly depressed. Fan and I in that formal and splendid panorama, were such minute creatures—were no bigger, no stronger than a couple of flies. Never had the Château de Ste. Clothilde seemed so cold, so inhuman, so foreign. I no longer disliked the place, I had grown used to it as I had grown used to other things. Its imposing architectural beauty, delicately majestic, serenely incongruous with nature, had made its effect on my mind. I understood to some extent the idea that had created it, the high peculiarity of taste that had chosen to mock at woods and fields, by building in their midst a palace smooth and fine as a thing of porcelain. Gradually I had come to appreciate the bland assurance of the achievement with all its bold frivolous contradictions of reason and common-sense. The moat that surrounded three sides of the château, was like a marble bath. It had no raison d’être. Never had any owner dreamed of defending this place from any invaders, but the moat was there, full of clear water, palest green in which were reflected the silvery walls and high shining windows. And on the fourth side of the house, a joke perhaps, or to contradict the chilling effect of the moat, the eighteenth century architect who adored Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess costume, built an immense flight of steps straight across the length of the south façade, lovely, smooth, shallow steps, made to welcome a crowd of courtiers in satins and trailing silks, and dainty high-heeled slippers. It had amused me at times to imagine them there in that theatrical setting, and to recreate for myself the spectacle of their fêtes galantes—but on the day that Fan left me to go to her boy lover, I took no pleasure in the ghostly place. The sky was grey, the faintly budding trees marshalled a far-off beyond the formal gardens, showed a haze of green that seemed to me sickly, and the suggestion of spring in the air gave me a feeling of “malaise.”
I remembered that Bianca and Philibert had gone off by the same Simplon Express five years before. They too must have stopped at the station of La Roche at eleven o’clock at night, or had they boarded the train farther down the line? I couldn’t remember what they were supposed to have done. All that had nothing to do with me, yet I was waiting for Philibert to arrive with a dozen people who would be my guests, his and mine.
My chauffeur reported his return at nine o’clock that evening. They had reached La Roche at six as planned. He had left the Princess at the station. The Princess had not wished him to wait until the arrival of her train. He had insisted, auprès de Madame la Princesse, as I had told him to do, but she had been displeased and had sent him away.
It was a rainy night, loud with a gusty April wind. The big rooms of the château were peopled with moving shadows and filled with whisperings and sighs. The wind moaned down the chimneys and set the far branches of the trees in the park to tossing. I was alone in the house save for the servants. Jinny had gone to her grandmother for a few days.