Before their eyes had recovered the blinding shock of the light coming suddenly on the darkness, a light foot was pattering down the stairs, and Franceline glided into the room. The effect was very much as if a lily had sprouted up from the carpet. An involuntary “God bless my soul!” broke from the admiral, and Clide started to his feet. “My daughter, messieurs,” said M. de la Bourbonais, with a sudden touch of the courtier in his manner, as he took her by the hand, and presented her to them both. Franceline bowed to the young man, and held out her hand to the elder one. The admiral, with an unwonted impulse of gallantry, raised it to his lips, and then held it in both his own, looking steadily into her face with an open stare of fatherly admiration. He had seen many lovely women in his day, and, if report spoke true, the brave sailor had been a very fair judge of the charms of the gentler sex; but he had never seen anything the least like this. Perhaps it was the unexpected contrast of the picture with the frame that took him so much by surprise and heightened the effect; but, whatever it was, he was completely taken aback, and stood looking at it speechless and bewildered.
“Do you mean to tell me that this wild rose belongs to him?” he said at last, addressing himself to Sir Simon, and with an aggressive nod at Raymond, as if he suspected him of having pilfered the article in question, and were prepared to do battle for the rightful owner.
“He says so,” averred the baronet cautiously.
“He may say what he likes,” declared the admiral, “my belief is that he purloined it out of some fairy’s garden.”
“And my belief is that you purloined that!” snubbed Sir Simon. “You never had as much poetry in you as would inspire a fly; had he, Clide?”
Raymond rubbed his spectacles, and put them on again—his usual way of disposing of an awkward situation, and which just now helped to conceal the twinkle of innocent paternal vanity that was dancing in his gray eyes.
“No, you usedn’t to be much of a poet when I knew you, De Vinton,” he said.
“No more he is now,” asserted the baronet. “What do you say, Clide?”
“The most prosaic of us may become poets under a certain pressure of inspiration,” replied the young man, with an imperceptible movement of his head in the direction of Franceline, who blushed under the speech just enough to justify the admiral’s wild-rose simile. She drew her hand laughingly away from his, and then, when everybody had found a seat, she pushed her favorite low stool close to her father’s chair, and sat down by his knee.
The friends had a great deal to say to each other, although the presence of Clide and Sir Simon prevented their touching on certain episodes of the past that were brought vividly to Raymond’s mind by the presence of one whom he had not seen since they had taken place. This kept all painful subjects in the background; and in spite of a wistful look in Raymond’s eyes, as if the sailor’s weather-beaten face were calling up the ghost of by-gone days—joys that had lived their span and died, and sorrow that was not dead, but sleeping—he kept up the flow of conversation with great animation. Meanwhile, the two young people were pushed rather outside the circle. Clide, instead of entering on a tête-à-tête, as it was clearly his right and his duty to do, kept holding on by the fringe of his uncle’s talk, feigning to be deeply interested in it, while all the time he was thinking of something else, longing to go and sit by Franceline, and talk to her. It was not shyness that kept him back. That infirmity of early youth had left him, with other outward signs of boyhood. The features had lost their boyish expression, and matured into that of the man of the world, who had seen life and observed things by the road with shrewd eyes and a mind that had learned to think. Clide had ripened prematurely within the last eight years, as men do who are put to school to a great sorrow. He and his monitress had not parted company, but they had grown used to each other. Sometimes he reproached himself for this with a certain bitterness. It seemed like treason to have forgotten; to have put his grief aside, railed it off, as it were, from his life, like a grave to be visited at stated times, and kept trimmed with flowers that were no longer watered with tears. He accused himself of being too weak to hold his sorrow, of having let it go from want of strength to keep it. Enduring grief, like enduring love, must have a strong, rich soil to feed upon. The thing we mourn, like the thing we love, may contain in itself all good and beauty and endless claims upon our constancy; but we may fail in power to answer them. The demand may be too great for the scanty measure of our supply. It is harder to be faithful in sorrow than in love. Clide had realized this, and he could never think of it without a pang. Yet he was not to blame. What he had loved and mourned was only a mirage, a will-o’-the-wisp the ideal creation of his own trusting heart and generous imagination. He was angry with himself because the thunderbolt that had fallen in his Garden of Eden, and burnt up the leaves of his tree of life, had not torn it up by the roots and killed it. Our lives have deeper roots than we know. Even when they are torn quite up we sometimes plant them again, and they grow afresh, striking their fibres deeper than before, and bringing forth richer fruit. But we refuse to believe this until we have tasted of the fruit. Clide sat apparently listening to the cheery, affectionate talk of his uncle and Raymond; but he was all the while listening to his own thoughts. What was there in the sight of this ivory-browed, mystic-looking maiden to call up so vividly another face so utterly different from it? Why did he hear the sea booming its dirge like a reproach to him from that lonely grave at St. Valery, as if he were wronging or wounding the dead by resting his eyes on Franceline? Yet, in spite of the reproach, he could not keep them averted. Her father sometimes called her Clair de lune. It was not an inappropriate name; there was something of the cold, pure light of the moon in her transparent pallor, and in the shadows of her eyes under the long, black lashes that lent them such a soft fascination. Clide thought so, as he watched her; cold as the face might be, it was stirring his pulse and making his heart beat as he never thought to feel them stir and beat again.