"And I, monsieur," said Valentine, "shall never forget this moment. We should have missed your blessing too sadly! You bring it to us. That too is a very great joy, and one which I needed, as Landri did."
She had taken the marquis's hand in hers, and, with filial respect, was about to put it to her lips. He drew her to him and kissed her on the forehead—a kiss of respect, of affection, of blessing, as she had said. He gave a last glance at Landri, a friendly wave of the hand, and left the room, where the young people remained, side by side, stirred to the lowest depths of their being by all that there was of human suffering and loftiness of soul in that despairing but uncomplaining adieu.
"What a great thing is a great heart!" said Valentine at last.
"You understand now how hard it was for me to contend against his influence in the old days, don't you?" said Landri. "And to think that I shall never see him again on earth, perhaps!"
"He'll be there to see you off," she replied.
Three quarters of an hour later, in fact, when the Cambria began to move, and as Valentine and Landri, leaning on the rail near the stern, were watching the crowd on the pier, already some distance away, of those who had come to take leave of the passengers, they espied at the end of the pier a man standing apart from the rest, with his face turned towards them, and in that haughty countenance they recognized the marquis. He had stationed himself there to obtain a last glimpse of Landri, and to be seen by him. At that distance, and in the misty twilight, it was impossible to distinguish his features. The sea breeze blew his dark cloak about him as he stood there motionless, in an almost superhuman immobility; and although Valentine was by his side, breathing, living, loving, Landri felt the chill of death creep into his heart at the sight. The last of the Claviers-Grandchamps, standing there on English soil, alone, on that foggy evening, watching all that he had loved and had sacrificed to the honor of his name sail away into the darkness, was in very truth the "Émigré," he who is not of his country or of his epoch. The private drama, of which this station of the old French gentleman on the planks of the Liverpool pier, was the crowning episode, expanded into a broader and more pathetic symbolism. Behind that living phantom arose the phantoms of all his ancestors. That heir of a long line of nobles, whose race would die out with him, became for a moment, in Landri's eyes, the incarnation of all the melancholy of a vanquished caste. And what was he himself but another "Émigré"? Was not he about to try to reconstruct, beyond the sea, an existence which, with his fortune and with the name which the law recognized as his, he should have passed upon his native soil peacefully and happily? He had sacrificed that destiny, so enviable in the eyes of many people,—to what? To a principle. It was to uphold that principle that he was leaving his fatherland, ceasing to bear a name which was not his, and at the same time to safeguard his mother's memory. Another remark made by M. de Claviers in their discussion at Saint-Mihiel, after his refusal to assist in taking the inventory, came to his mind: "One must sometimes lay down one's life in order to keep intact the germ of the future!" Landri realized all its force, and what a store-house of honor is represented by a genuine aristocrat like him whose form was becoming more and more indistinct in the distance.
Bringing his mind back to his country, he reflected with much sadness that France no longer employs those exemplars of an unchanging and superior type. She paralyzes them by persecution. She degrades them by idleness. She ruins them by her laws concerning inheritance. All her efforts are directed toward destroying the conditions in which others might grow great.
The Cambria was about to leave the Mersey. The great swell of the Channel rose and fell about the steamship's mighty hull. The Channel lights pierced the thickening mist with a duller gleam. Around the exile voices arose in a strange tongue, that of the rivals of centuries, who have been wise enough to retain all of the past, the better to control the present; and the ex-lieutenant mingled pity for that France which he should never again make his home, perhaps, with pity for the old nobleman for whom he should never cease to feel the affection of a son; and he strained his eyes in a vain effort to see once more, across the space that lay between them, the haughty and motionless figure that had disappeared in the darkness—doubtless forever!