“My God! It is all over, then! She is dead!” I cried.
He made a gesture that signified assent, and pressed me down into a chair. I do not remember what followed.
I recollect his standing over me, and whispering words into my ear that came like the sound of my mother’s voice—words that fell like balm upon my burning brain, and silenced, as if by some physical force, other words that were quivering on my tongue. I never knew or cared before whether my uncle believed in anything, whether he had faith in God or in devils; but as he spoke to me then I remember feeling a kind of awe in his presence—awe mingled with surprise and a sense of peace and comfort; it was as if I had drifted unawares into a haven. He never left me for a moment till the hard dumbness was melted, and I let my head drop on his shoulder, and wept.…
He told me that the day I left Dieppe news came of the wreck of a fishing-smack having floated into the harbor of St. Valéry. The police were on the alert, and went at once to inspect the boat. It had capsized, and had drifted ashore, after knocking about on the high seas no one could say how many days; but it bore the name of a fisherman who had been seen in the neighborhood about ten days before. There was nothing in the boat, of course, that could give any indication as to what had become of its owner or how the accident had occurred. About two days later the body of a woman was washed ashore almost on the same spot; the police, still on the qui-vive, went down to see it, and at once telegraphed for my uncle. The body was lying at the morgue of St. Valéry; it was already decomposing, but the work of destruction was not far enough advanced to admit of doubt as to the identity. The long, dark hair was dripping with the slime of the sea, and tangled like a piece of sea-weed; but the admiral’s eyes had no sooner glanced at the face than he recognized it.
I can write this after an interval of many months, but even now I cannot recall it without feeling, almost as vividly as at the moment, the pang that seemed to cleave my very life in two. My uncle had said: “It doesn’t all end here!” and those words, I believe, preserved me from suicide. They kept singing, not in my ears, but within me, and seemed to be coming out of all the common sounds that were jarring and dinning outside. The very ticking of the clock seemed to repeat them: “It does not all end here.” It did, so far as my happiness went. I was a blighted man for ever. The dark mystery of the flight and the death would never be solved on this side of the grave. The sea had given up its dead, but the dead could not speak. I was alone henceforth with a secret that no fellow-creature could unriddle for me. I must bear the burden of my broken life, without any hope of alleviation, to the end. The name of De Winton was safe now. No blot would come upon it through the follies or sins of her who had beamed like a sweet, sudden star upon my path, and then gone out, leaving me in the lonely darkness. Why should I chronicle my days any more? They can never be anything to me but a dreary routine of comings and goings, without joy or hope to brighten them. The sun has gone down. The stone has fallen to the bottom; the trembling of the circles, as they quiver upon the surface of the water, soon passes away, and then all is still and stagnant again.
So Clide lapses into silence again, and for a time we lose sight of him. He is roving about the world, doing his best to kill pain by excitement, and soothe memory with hope; and all this while a new life is getting ready for him, growing and blossoming, and patiently waiting for the summer-time, when the fruit shall be ripe for him to come and gather it. The spot which this new life has chosen for its home is suggestive rather of the past than of the future. A tiny brick cottage, with a thatched roof overgrown with mosses green and brown, a quaint remnant of old-fashioned life, a bit of picturesque long ago forgotten on the skirts of the red-tiled, gas-lit, prosperous modern town of Dullerton. The little brick box, smothered in its lichens and mosses, was called The Lilies from a band of those majestic flowers that dwelt on either side of the garden-wicket, like guardian angels of the place, looking out in serene beauty on the world without.
It was a nine days’ wonder to Dullerton when the Comte Raymond de la Bourbonais and his daughter Franceline came from over the seas, and took up their abode at The Lilies with a French bonne called Angélique. There was the usual amount of guessing amongst the gossips as to the why and the wherefore a foreign nobleman should have selected such a place as Dullerton, when, as was affirmed by those who knew all about it, he had all the world before him to choose from. The only person who could have thrown light upon the mystery was Sir Simon Harness, the lord of the manor of Dullerton. But Sir Simon was not considerate enough to do so; he was even so perverse as to set the gossips on an entirely wrong scent for some time; and it was not until the count and his daughter had become familiar objects to the neighborhood that the reason of their presence there transpired.
The De la Bourbonais were an old race of royalists whose archives could have furnished novels for a generation without mixing one line of fiction with volumes of fact. They had fought in every Crusade, and won spurs on every battle-field wherever a French prince fought; they had produced heroes and heroines in the centuries when such things were expected from the feudal lords of France, and they had furnished scapegraces without end when these latter became the fashion; they had quarrelled with their neighbors, stormed their castles, and misbehaved themselves generally like other noble families of their time, dividing their days between war and gallantry so evenly that it was often difficult to say where the one began and where the other ended, or which led to which. This was in the good old times. Then the Revolution came. The territorial importance of the De la Bourbonais was considerably diminished at this date; but the prestige of the old name, with the deeds of prowess that had once made it a power in the camp and a glory at the court, was as great as ever, and marked its owners amongst the earliest victims of the Terror. They gave their full contingent of blue blood to the guillotine, and what lands remained to them were confiscated to the Regenerators of France. The then head of the house, the father of the present Comte Raymond, died in England under the roof of his friend, Sir Alexander Harness, father of Sir Simon. The son that was born to him in exile returned to France at the Restoration, and grew up in solitude in the old castle that had withstood so many storms, and—thanks partly to its dilapidated condition, but chiefly to the fidelity and courage of an old dependent—had been rescued from the general plunder, and left unmolested for the young master who came back to claim it. Comte Raymond lived there in learned isolation, sharing the ancestral ruin with a population of owls, who pursued their meditations in one wing while he pondered over philosophical problems in another. It was a dreary abode, except for the owls; a desolate wreck of ancient splendor and power. We may poetize over ruins, and clothe them with what pathos we will, the beauty of decay is but the beauty of death; the ivy that flourishes on the grave of a glorious past is but a harvest of death; it looks beautiful in the weird silver shadows of the moon, but it shrinks before the blaze of day that lights up the proud castle on the hill, standing in its strength of battlement and tower and flying buttress, and smiling a grim, granite smile upon the gray wreck in the valley down below, and wondering what poets and night-birds can find in its crumbling arches and gaping windows to haunt them so fanatically. Raymond de la Bourbonais was contented in his weather-beaten old fortress, and would probably never have dreamed of leaving it or changing the owl-like routine of his life, if it had not entered into the mind of his grand-aunt, the only remaining lady of his name, to marry him. Raymond started when the subject was broached, but, with the matter-of-fact coolness of a Frenchman in such things, he quickly recovered his composure, and observed blandly to the aged countess: “You are right, my aunt. It had not occurred to me, I confess; but now that you mention it, I see it would be desirable.” And having so far arranged his marriage, Raymond, satisfied with his own consent, relapsed into his books, and begged that he might hear no more about it until his grand-aunt had found him a wife.
The family of the De Xaintriacs lived near him, and happened just at this moment to have a daughter to marry; so the old countess ordered out the lumbering family coach that had taken her great-grandmother to the fêtes given for Marie de Medicis on her marriage, and rumbled over the roads to the Château de Xaintriac. This ancestral hall was about on a par with its neighbor, De la Bourbonais, as regarded external preservation, but the similarity between the two houses ended here. The De Xaintriacs’ origin was lost in the pre-historic ages before the Deluge, the earliest record of its existence being a curious iron casket preserved in the archives, in which, it was said, the family papers had been rescued from the Flood by one of Noe’s daughters-in-law, “herself a demoiselle de Xaintriac”—so ran the legend. The papers had been destroyed in a fire many centuries before the Christian era, but happily the casket had been saved. It was to a daughter of this illustrious house that the Comtesse de la Bourbonais offered her grand-nephew in marriage. Armengarde de Xaintriac was twenty-five years of age, and shadowed forth in character and person the finest characteristics of her mystic genealogy. In addition to the antediluvian casket, she brought the husband, who was exactly double her age, a dower of beauty and sweetness that surpassed even the lofty pride that was her birthright. For four years they were as happy as two sojourners in this valley of tears could well be. Then the young wife began to droop, perishing away slowly before her husband’s eyes. “Take her to the Nile for a year; there is just a chance that that may save her,” said the doctors. Armengarde did not hear the cruel verdict; and when Raymond came back one day after a short absence, and announced that he had come in unexpectedly to a sum of money, and proposed their spending the winter in Egypt, she clapped her hands, and made ready for the journey. Raymond watched her delight like one transfigured, while she, suspecting nothing, took his happiness as a certain pledge of restored health, and went singing about the house, as if the promise were already fulfilled. The whole place revived in a new atmosphere of hope and security; the low ceilings, festooned with the cobwebs of a generation, grew alight with cheerfulness, and the sunbeams streamed more freely through the dingy panes of the deep windows. It was as if some stray ray from heaven had crept into the old keep, lighting it up with a brightness not of earth.
Angélique was to go with them in charge of little Franceline, their only child.