It was on a mild autumn morning, early in October, that the travellers set out on their journey toward the Pyramids. The birds were singing, though the sun was hiding behind the clouds; but as Raymond de la Bourbonais looked back from the gate to catch a last glimpse of the home that was no longer his, the clouds suddenly parted, and the sun burst out in a stream of golden light, painting the old keep with shadows of pathetic beauty, and investing it with a charm he had never seen there before. Sacrifice, like passion, has its hour of rapture, its crisis of mysterious pain, when the soul vibrates between agony and ecstasy. A sunbeam lighted upon Raymond’s head, encircling it like a halo. “My Raymond, you look like an angel; see, there is a glory round your head!” cried Armengarde.
“It is because I am so happy!” replied her husband, with a radiant smile. “We are going to the land of the sun, where my pale rose will grow red again.”
The sacrifice was not quite in vain. She was spared to him four years; then she died, and he laid her to rest under the shade of the great Pyramid, where they told him that Abraham and Sara were sleeping.
When M. de la Bourbonais set foot on his native soil again, he was a beggar. The money he had received for the castle and the small bit of land belonging to it had just sufficed to keep up the happy delusion with Armengarde to the last, and bring him and Franceline and Angélique home; the three landed at Marseilles with sufficient money to keep them for one month, using it economically. Meantime the count must look for employment, trusting to Providence rather than to man. Providence did not fail him. Help was at hand in the shape of one of those kind dispensations that we call lucky chances, and which are oftener found in the track of chivalrous souls than misanthropes like to own. About three days after his arrival in the busy mercantile port, M. de la Bourbonais was walking along the quay, indulging in sad reveries with the vacant air and listless gait now habitual to him, when a hand was laid brusquely on his shoulder. “As I live, here is the man,” cried Sir Simon Harness. “My dear fellow, you’ve turned up in the very nick of time; but where in heaven’s name have you turned up from?”
The question was soon answered. Sir Simon gave his heartiest sympathy, and then told his friend the meaning of the joyous exclamation which had greeted him.
“You remember a villain of the name of Roy—a notary who played old Harry with some property in shares and so forth that your father entrusted to him just before he fled to England? You must have heard him tell the story many a time, poor fellow. Well, this worthy, as big a blackguard as ever cheated the hangman of his fee, was called up to his reckoning about a month ago, and, by way, I suppose, of putting things straight a bit before he handed in his books, the rascal put a codicil to his will, restoring to you what little remained of the money he swindled your poor father out of. It is placed in bank shares—a mere pittance of the original amount; but it will keep your head above water just for the present, and meantime we must look about for something for you at headquarters—some stick at the court or a nice little government appointment. The executors have been advertising for you in every direction; it’s the luckiest chance, my just meeting you in time to give the good news.”
Raymond was thankful for the timely legacy, but he would not hear of a stir being made to secure him either stick or place. He was too proud to sue at the hands of the regicide’s son who now sat on the throne of Louis Seize, nor would he accept an appointment at his court, supposing it offered unsolicited. The pittance that, in Sir Simon’s opinion, was enough to keep him above water for a time, would be, with his simple habits, enough to float him for the rest of his life. He had, it is true, visions of future wealth for Franceline, but these were to be realized by the product of his own brain, not by the pay of a courtly sinecure or government office. Finding him inexorable on this point, Sir Simon ceased to urge it. He was confident that a life of poverty and obscurity would soon bring down the rigid royalist’s pride; but meantime where was he to live? Raymond had no idea. Life in a town was odious to him. He wanted the green fields and quiet of the country for his studies; but where was he to seek them now? He had no mind to go back to Lorraine and live like a peasant, in sight of his old home, that was now in the hands of strangers. “Come to England,” said Sir Simon. “You’ll stay with me until you grow home-sick and want to leave us. No one will interfere with you; you can work away at your books, and be as much of a hermit as you like.” Raymond accepted the invitation, but only till he should find some suitable little home for himself in the neighborhood. Within a week he found himself installed at Dullerton Court with Franceline and Angélique. The same rooms that his father had occupied sixty years before, and which had ever since been called the count’s apartments, were prepared for them. They were very little changed by the wear and tear of the intervening half-century. There were the same costly hangings to the gilt four-post beds, the same grim, straight-nosed Queen Elizabeth staring down from the tapestry, out of her stiff ruffles, on one wall; the same faded David and Goliath wrestling on the other. Raymond could remember how the pictures used to fascinate him when he was a tiny boy, and how he used to lie awake in his little bed and keep his eyes fixed on them, and wonder whether the two would ever leave off fighting, and if the big man would not jump up suddenly and knock down the little man, who was sticking something into his chest. Outside the house the scene was just as unchanged; the lake was in the same place, and it seemed as if the swan that was sitting in the middle of it, with folded sails and one leg tucked under his wing, was the identical one that the young countess used to feed, and that Raymond cried to be let ride on. The deer were glancing through the distant glade, just as he remembered them as a child, starting at every sound, and tossing their antlers in the sunlight; the gray stone of the grand castellated house may have been a tinge darker for the smoke and fog of the sixty additional years, but this was not noticeable; the sunbeams sent dashes of golden light across the flanking towers with their dark ivy draperies, and into the deep mullioned windows, where the queer small panes hid themselves, as if they were ashamed to be seen, just as in the old days; the fountain sent up its crystal showers on the broad sweep of the terrace, and the lime and the acacia trees sheltering the gravel walks that led through grassy openings into the enclosed flower-garden were as dark and as shady as of yore; the clumps on the mounds swelling here and there through the park had not outgrown the shapes they were in Raymond’s memory; the lawn was as smooth and green as when he rolled over its mossy turf, to the utter detriment of fresh-frilled pinafores and white frocks.
It was a pleasant resting-place, a palm-grove in the wilderness, where the wayfarer might halt peacefully, and take breath for the rest of the journey. Yet Raymond was determined not to tarry there longer than was absolutely needful. Sir Simon did all that a host could do to make him prolong his stay; but he was inexorable. He spied out a tiny brick cottage perched on a bit of rising ground just below the park, half-smothered in moss and lichens. It was beautifully situated as to view; flowing meadows sloped down before it towards the river; beyond the river corn-fields stretched out towards the woods, that rose like dark waves breaking at the foot of the purple hills; the cottage was called The Lilies, and contained six rooms, three above and three below, including the kitchen. When Raymond offered himself as a tenant for it, the baronet burst into a ringing laugh that scared the stately swan out of his dignity, and sent him scudding over the water like a frightened goose. But Raymond was not to be laughed out of his purpose; he should have The Lilies, or he would go away. He must have it, too, like any ordinary tenant, on the same conditions, neither better nor worse. The lease was accordingly drawn out in due form, and M. de la Bourbonais entered into possession after a very short delay. The room that was intended for a drawing-room was fitted up with the count’s books—the few special treasures he had rescued from the fate of all his goods and chattels four years ago—and was called the library. It was not much bigger than a good-sized book-case, but it would answer all the purposes of a sitting-room for the present; Franceline would never be in his way, and might sit there as much as she liked. The landlord had had a little scheme of his own about the furnishing of the cottage, and had sent for a London tradesman to this effect, intending to surprise Raymond by having it all ready for him. But Raymond was as impracticable here as about the lease. Sir Simon was annoyed. Raymond contrived to foil him and have his own way in everything. He seemed to be half his time in the moon; but when you wanted him to stay there, he was suddenly wide-awake and as wilful as a mule. There was a substratum of steel somewhere in him, in spite of his gentleness; and though it never hurt you, it repelled you when you came against it every now and then, and it was provoking. There was altogether something about Raymond that mystified Sir Simon. To see a man as refined and sensitive as he was, endowed with the hereditary instincts that make affluence a necessity of existence to a gentleman, settling down into the conditions and abode of the smallest of small farmers, and doing it as cheerfully as if he were perfectly contented with the prospect, was something beyond Sir Simon’s comprehension. To him life without wealth—not for its own sake, but for what it gives and hinders—was merely a sentence of penal servitude. Raymond had always been poor, he knew; but poverty in the antique splendor of decayed ancestral halls, with the necessaries of life provided as by a law of nature, and in the midst of a loyal and reverent peasantry, was a very different sort of poverty from what he was now embarking on. He would sometimes fix his eyes on Raymond when he was busying himself, with apparently great satisfaction, on some miserable trifle that Angélique wanted done in her room or in the kitchen, and wonder whether it was genuine or feigned, whether sorrow or philosophy had so deadened him to external conditions as to make him indifferent to the material meanness and miseries of his position. He never heard a word of regret, or any expression that could be construed into regret, escape him in their most familiar conversations. Once Raymond, in speaking of poverty, had confessed that he had never believed it had any power to make men unhappy—such poverty as his had been—until he felt the touch of its cruel finger on his Armengarde; then he realized the fact in its full bitterness. But he had foiled the tormenter by a sublime fraud of love, and saved his own heart from an anguish that would have been more intolerable than remorse. Sir Simon remembered the expression of Raymond’s face as he said this; the smile of gentle triumph that it wore, as if gratitude for the rescue and the sacrifice had alone survived. He concluded that it was so; that Raymond had forgiven poverty, since he had conquered her; and that now he could take her to live with him like a snake that had lost its sting, or some bright-spotted wild beast that he had wrestled with and tamed, and might henceforth sport with in safety.
Sir Simon found it hard to reconcile this serene philosophical state of mind with his friend’s insurmountable reluctance to accept the least material service, while, on the other hand, he took with avidity any amount of affection and sympathy that was offered to him. It was because he felt that he could repay these in kind; whereas for the others he must remain an insolvent debtor. “Bourbonais, that is sheer nonsense and inconsistency. I wouldn’t give a button for your philosophy, if it can’t put you above such weakness. It’s absurd; you ought to struggle against it and overcome it.” This was the baronet’s pet formula; he was always ready with this advice to his friends. Raymond never contested the wisdom of the proposition, or Sir Simon’s right to enunciate it; but in this particular at least he did not adopt it.