THE YELLOW POPPY

BY

D. K. BROSTER

AUTHOR OF Mr. ROWL, Etc.

DUCKWORTH

3, HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W:C:

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

First Published — 1920

Second Impression — 1925

Third Impression — 1926

TO

GERTRUDE SCHLICH

MOST GENEROUS AND INSPIRING OF CRITICS

THIS BOOK

WHICH IS SO MUCH HERS ALREADY

“I love you, loved you . . . loved you first and last,

And love you on for ever . . .

. . . I had known the same

Except that I was prouder than I knew,

And not so honest. Aye, and as I live

I should have died so, crushing in my hand

This rose of love, the wasp inside and all,—

Ignoring ever to my soul and you

Both rose and pain,—except for this great loss,

This great despair . . .”

Aurora Leigh.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

[THE WEDDING GIFT]

BOOK II

[MIRABEL]

BOOK III

[LE CLOS-AUX-GRIVES]

BOOK IV

[THE YELLOW POPPY]

BOOK I

THE WEDDING GIFT

“And so, self-girded with torn strips of hope,

Took up his life, as if it were for death

(Just capable of one heroic aim),

And threw it in the thickest of the world.”

Aurora Leigh.

NOTE

Any reader familiar with the figure of the gallant and unfortunate Louis de Frotté will realise why neither he nor the Normandy which he led so well play any part in these pages—not indeed that he has served as prototype for any character in them, but because to have introduced him also would have been to overblacken the reputation of Bonaparte. Yet that which is here laid to the First Consul’s charge is no libel, for the deeds done at Alençon and Verneuil in mid-February, 1800, are written in history.

CHAPTER I

“WHAT IS MIRABEL?”

“I wish I had been taught how to make a bed!” complained Roland de Céligny, as he wrestled with his blanket in the half-darkness of the attic.

“You may think yourself lucky to have a bed to make!” retorted a comrade who sat cross-legged on a neighbouring pile of sacking. “Mine cannot be ‘made,’ though a careless movement will reduce it to its component elements.”

“The devil! If I tuck in the blanket this side, it won’t reach to the other!” pursued the young grumbler, fiercely demonstrating the truth of his accusation, where he knelt by a mattress placed directly on the floor.

“From this, my paladin, learn that the gifts of Fate are evenly distributed,” returned he of the pile of sacking. Since one of his arms was in a sling, it is possible that he would not have been capable even of the Vicomte de Céligny’s unfruitful exertions, but he did not say so. On the contrary, he looked at his friend’s performance with the air of one who in a moment will say, “Let me do it!”

“If you would only take less——” he began.

“For Heaven’s sake be quiet, you two!” entreated a third voice. “One cannot count, much less think, in your chatter . . . Two tierce-majors. . . .”

The owner of this voice, a man of about forty-five or fifty, sat at a table in a corner playing piquet by candlelight with another. There is no reason why you should not play piquet, even if you are a Chouan officer in the late April of the year of grace 1799—or, if you prefer it, which in that case is unlikely, Floréal of the year VII of the Republic—and are concealed at the top of an old house at Hennebont in Brittany with a bandage on your head, and an ache within it which may well justify a little impatience to noise. When, in addition, your partner refuses to play for money, the game becomes so harmless as almost to be meritorious.

To the appeal of the piquet-player—his superior officer into the bargain—the wounded critic on the sacking made no reply save a grimace. The time selected for bedmaking by the very good-looking young man who was engaged in it was not, as might be guessed, a morning hour; it was, on the contrary, nine o’clock in the evening. Two candles stuck in the necks of bottles gave the card-players their requisite illumination; another, standing on a dilapidated chest of drawers, shone on the book which a third young man, sitting astride a chair, had propped on its back and in which he appeared to be immersed.

The attic thus meagrely lit was spacious, and full of odd corners, but crowded with tables and chairs and cupboards, for it was the top floor of a furniture dealer, where he stored his old or unfashionable goods, many of which had been piled up on the top of each other to make more room, and where two or three huge old wardrobes, jutting out like dark shadowy rocks from the walls, still further reduced the space available for occupation. Yet though it was, patently, a refuge, it was also a rendezvous.

In this spring of 1799 the Directory, the cruel and incapable, was still prolonging its dishonoured existence, and after ten years of torment the French people were still enslaved—to an oligarchy instead of to a monarchy. The liberty dangled so long before their eyes, the liberty in whose name so many terrible crimes had been committed, seemed further away than ever. Inert and exhausted, pining under a leprosy of political corruption, her credit and trade almost ruined, the mere ghost of what she had been, France was sighing for the master that she was impotent to give herself, the man who should overturn her new tyrants and raise her up once more to her full stature. And to most minds in the West, that home of loyalty, only one master was conceivable, and that was Louis XVIII., the King who had never reigned.

In the West, moreover, at this moment, the Chouannerie, that sporadic guerrilla warfare of profoundly Royalist and Catholic stamp, indigenous to Brittany, Anjou, and Maine since the overthrow of the great Vendean effort in 1793, was showing signs of reviving—under persecution. It had indeed been temporarily stamped out at the pacification of three years ago, but that pacification had left the Royalists of Brittany and the neighbouring departments in a position which gradually proved to be intolerable. They were not at war, yet they lived in continual peril, not one of them sure of his liberty or even of his life. After the scandalous coup d’état of Fructidor, ’97, the promised religious freedom was not even a name, and political freedom, especially in the western departments whose elections had been so cynically annulled, was a mere farce. It came, in fact, at last to this, that the Minister of Police could recommend that the Royalists of those regions should be “caused to disappear” if necessary; tyranny unashamed had replaced oppression.

Naturally enough, in 1798 the Chouan began to make his appearance once more. At first he merely robbed couriers and diligences of public money. But this not very creditable activity was on the surface; underneath, in the hands usually of gentlemen, the work went secretly forward of organising that indomitable and tenacious peasantry, at once pious and cruel, and of transforming brigandage into real war; and so, throughout the West, might be found wandering Royalist leaders with their little staffs, striving to keep effective the Chouans who had once fought, and to enrol and arm fresh volunteers. To such a band, commanded by the Marquis de Kersaint, an émigré distinguished in Austrian service who had not long come over from England, belonged these five men in the furniture-dealer’s attic.

They were not, at this moment, in very enviable case, for besides that two of them were wounded, they and their handful of peasants—since scattered—had yesterday come off second best in an unexpected collision with Government troops in the neighbouring department of Finistère, and they were now beginning, moreover, to be anxious about the safety of their leader, who, with a guide, had taken a more circuitous route to Hennebont in order to gather certain information. And his presence here was urgent because it had long been arranged that he and his two elder subordinates should meet and confer in Hennebont with Georges Cadoudal, the famous peasant leader of the Morbihan, concerning the better organisation of the wilder and more westerly region of Finistère, which, it was whispered, M. de Kersaint was eventually to command in its entirety. Yesterday’s misfortune had made such a meeting more, not less, necessary; and so here, half-fugitive, M. de Kersaint’s officers were, having had the luck to slip unobserved into the little town in the dusk. But now there were rumours of a colonne mobile on the road which their leader would probably take; and in any case there was always danger—danger which the three young men who formed a sort of bodyguard of aides-de-camp to him considered would have been lessened for him had they shared his odyssey. But M. de Kersaint had apparently thought otherwise.

The game of cards in the corner came at last to an end, and the opponents added up their scores.

“You have won, Comte,” said the bandaged player’s adversary, leaning back in his chair. The candle-light which threw up his companion’s somewhat harsh features shone in his case on a nondescript round face with no salient characteristics. By this and by his peasant’s attire he might well have been a small farmer; but on the other, him addressed as “Comte,” the gaily embroidered Breton vest and short coat sat less naturally.

“Yes, I suppose I have,” returned the latter. He drew out his watch and frowned. “They ought really to be here by now,” he observed.

“I doubt if it is quite dark enough outside,” replied his late adversary. “Le Blé-aux-Champs would hardly risk bringing M. de Kersaint into Hennebont while light remained.”

“I wish he had not gone to Scaër,” muttered the other.

“You do not think that anything has happened to M. le Marquis, do you, sir?” asked Roland de Céligny.

“No,” replied M. de Kersaint’s second-in-command. “I will not believe in misfortune; it is the way to bring it about.”

“Perhaps this is they,” suggested Artamène de la Vergne, the youth with his arm in a sling, as a step was heard on the echoing stairs. And even the silent reader lifted his head from his book to listen.

But the moment of suspense which followed was not lightened when the door opened and old M. Charlot, the furniture-dealer, himself appeared on the threshold, candle in hand, tinted spectacles on nose. In a silence of expectancy he came in and shut the door carefully behind him, while five pairs of eyes stared at him uneasily.

“Gentlemen,” he began in a cautious voice, looking round on the forms ensconced among his shadowy furniture, “is not one of you a priest?”

The second piquet-player bent forward. “Yes, I am,” he surprisingly admitted. “Do you want me?”

“There is an old lady very ill next door, Monsieur l’Abbé, an old Mlle Magny, who has been a respected inhabitant of this town for many years. It is not that she wants a confessor or the Last Sacraments, because she had them two or three days ago; it is that to-night she is wandering so much that her niece, who looks after her, came in to me about it just now in great distress. The old lady seems to have something on her mind, and Mme Leclerc thought that if she could get a priest, an insermenté, of course——”

The Abbé who looked so little of an Abbé interrupted. “I am quite ready to go to her, Monsieur Charlot, if it is necessary, but I should have thought that, rather than summon a stranger, the poor lady’s relatives would have had recourse to the priest who confessed her the other day.”

“Yes, mon père,” replied the old man, “but you see he lives very retired outside the town since Fructidor, and there is always a certain risk for him in coming, and seeing that you were on the spot, and not known here for a priest . . .”

The word “risk” appeared to have decided the question, for at it the Abbé in the peasant’s dress had risen.

“I will come at once,” he said without more ado, and walked round an intervening barrier of upturned chairs.

“That is very good of your reverence,” said M. Charlot in a tone of relief, moving towards the door. “She has been an excellent Christian in her time, that poor lady, and shrewd enough too, but now she lies there, so her niece says, talking continually of some place—or person, maybe—called Mirabel, and of a wedding. And nothing——”

“Mirabel!” ejaculated the Abbé, stopping short.

“O, Monsieur l’Abbé!” exclaimed M. Charlot, struck by his tone, “if you know something about this Mirabel, then surely the good God has sent you to the poor soul! I will take you there at once.”

He opened the door for the priest, who went through it without another word. None of the three young men, all watching these two protagonists, noticed that the wounded piquet-player also had risen abruptly from his seat at the mention of the name which had so affected his companion, had stared after them a second or two, and that he now let himself fall into his chair again with a despondent gesture, and took his bandaged head between his hands.

“Now the Abbé’s got a job to occupy him,” said Artamène de la Vergne in a sleepy voice. “I wish I had; or that M. de Kersaint and Le Blé-aux-Champs would arrive quickly, so that I could go to sleep without the prospect of being waked up again immediately.”

“The true campaigner can sleep at any time, and for any length of time,” remarked Roland complacently. “It is early yet, at least I think so. My watch has stopped.”

“And mine is lost,” responded the Chevalier de la Vergne. “Lucien is sure to have his, and it is sure to be correct. Ask him the time.”

“Lucien!” said Roland. No answer from the reader.

“Lucien, deaf adder!” supplemented Artamène.

“I believe he is asleep,” muttered the Vicomte de Céligny, and by a snake-like elongation of body and arm he contrived to reach a leg of the student’s chair and to shake the same.

“I wish you were asleep!” exclaimed his victim, lifting a mildly exasperated face. “What in Heaven’s name do you want?”

“The time, dear friend.”

Lucien du Boisfossé pulled the watch from his fob. “A quarter—no, seventeen minutes past nine.”

“What are you reading?” demanded Artamène.

“The Æneid of Virgil,” replied Lucien, his eyes on the page again.

The questioner gave an exclamation, almost of horror. “Ye gods! He is reading Latin—for amusement!”

“A quarter past nine,” remarked Roland reflectively. “This time yesterday I was——”

“Don’t chatter so, Roland le preux! You disturb our Latinist . . . and also,” added Artamène in a lower tone, “run the risk of breaking into M. de Brencourt’s meditations. Look at him!”

The bandaged piquet-player, who still sat by the table, seemed indeed sunk in a profound abstraction, letting the idle cards fall one by one from his fingers. It was plain that he did not know what he was doing.

“I wager he is thinking of a woman,” whispered Artamène, bringing himself nearer to his friend. “It seems a quieting occupation; suppose we think of one too! But on whom shall I fix my thoughts . . . and you, Roland?”

A slight flush, invisible in the poor light, dyed young de Céligny’s cheek as he answered, with a suspicion of embarrassment, “I will think of that poor old lady next door. Will the Abbé exorcise her, do you think, from the spell of . . . what was it—Mirabel? And, by the way, what is Mirabel?”

“The name of a kind of plum, ignoramus,” replied Lucien du Boisfossé unexpectedly. He yawned as he spoke.

“Plainly our Lucien has been studying the Georgics also,” commented Artamène.

“An encyclopaedia would be more to the point!” retorted Roland. And raising his voice, he said, “Comte, what is Mirabel?”

The older man heard, even with a little start. He laid down the cards and came out of his reverie.

“Mirabel, gentlemen, is the name of a property and château near Paris, the château that was begun for François I. You may have heard of it. It belongs, or belonged, to the Duc de Trélan.”

“Trélan,” observed the young Chevalier de la Vergne reflectively. “I seem to remember the name in connection with the prison massacres in September, ’92. He was killed in them, I think?”

“No,” replied the Comte de Brencourt sombrely. “He was never in prison. He had emigrated. It was his wife who was butchered—with Mme de Lamballe.”

“Morbleu!” exclaimed Artamène. “And the Duc is still alive, then?”

“I believe so,” replied M. de Brencourt, even more sombrely.

“Where is he now?” asked Roland.

“Somewhere abroad—in England or Germany.”

“Worse than being dead!” observed Artamène, lying down and pulling the covering over him.

CHAPTER II

THE GIFT IS OFFERED

And next door, in a tidy but overcrowded bedroom, the Abbé Chassin, without any of the marks of his office, sat and listened to the babbling of an old spinster lady who was to terminate an uneventful and singularly respectable life as the messenger of destiny to not a few people.

The heavy curtains were pulled back from the side of the small fourposter by which the priest sat, and the candlelight fell soft and steady on the old, old blanched face within the neat capfrill, itself scarcely whiter than the visage it surrounded. On the waxlike countenance, amid all the signs of nearing death, was the imprint of that masterfulness which sometimes descends with age upon a certain type of old lady. And Mlle Magny was talking, talking continuously and pitifully, her eyes fixed, her shrivelled fingers pleating and plucking the edge of the sheet in the last fatal restlessness. Those hands were the only things that moved.

“I ought to have had it ready . . . but I did not know in time, I did not know! All these years to have had it in the family, and not to have known that it was there! But perhaps I shall be in time after all—they cannot have come back from the chapel yet, surely. But I must be quick, I must be quick! . . . and when the bride gives round the sword-knots and the fans to all the fine company I shall offer my gift to the young Duc. But I must be quick . . .”

And the withered hands, abandoning the sheet, began to fumble over the bed as if searching for something.

The Abbé bent forward and laid one of his own gently on the nearer.

“Cannot I help you, my daughter—cannot I do something for you?”

The eyes turned a moment; the brain, deeply absorbed in the past though it was, seemed to grasp this intrusion from the present, even to the pastoral mode of address.

“You are a priest, Monsieur? That is good—that is good! Yes, you can open this casket for me,” and she made as if she held it. “And inside you will find the wedding gift for the young Duc de Trélan—but you must be quick, quick! They will be back from the chapel! . . . Ah, I cannot find the key—I cannot turn the lock! My God, if I should be too late after all! Mon père, mon père, help me! . . . But, mon père, you are doing nothing!”

The Abbé looked round in desperation. He could see nothing that at all resembled a locked casket among the little treasures of the old lady’s room, the pincushions, the images of devotion, all the prim collection of a blameless lifetime. But in a moment the struggle with the imaginary lock came to an end, and as the tired hands relaxed a smile crept about Mlle Magny’s indrawn mouth.

“How handsome he is, Monseigneur Gaston!” she said in a tone of admiration. “My dear lady will be proud of him to-day! They will dance to-night after the wedding, and I shall see it all, as my lady wishes. But none of the fine ladies there will have given the bride such a gift as I shall give the bridegroom, though I am only his dear mother’s maid. . . . But why does the Abbé not bring it to me? When the bride gives round the swordknots and the fans——”

“Madame,” gently interrupted the priest, “if you will tell me where your gift is, I will bring it to you instantly.”

A look of cunning swept over the dying old woman’s face, and a faint sound that was like a chuckle came from her lips.

“Ah, no, I have hidden it well!” she replied unexpectedly, “hidden it nearly as securely as the treasure of Mirabel itself. You will not find it in a hurry, Clotilde!”

Who was Clotilde, wondered the priest? The niece with whom she lived, probably. But what was this about a ‘treasure’ in Mirabel?

“To think,” went on the old voice musingly, “that the precious paper was all these years in Cousin François’ dining-room, and all those scores of years before that, since the time it was stolen. And all the dead and gone Duchesses might have had the rubies to wear. I might have clasped the necklace round my sainted lady’s own neck. Now the new Duchesse will be the first to put it round her pretty throat.”

The priest gave a little shiver. Still that wedding eight-and-twenty years ago! . . . Since then the pretty throat of which she spoke had known a very different necklace . . . but of the same colour . . .

“But if you have hidden the rubies, Madame,” he hazarded, bewildered between the ‘treasure’ and the ‘paper,’ the ‘gift’ and what was concealed, “you will not be able to give them to the bride.”

“It was not I who hid them!” responded Mlle Magny impatiently. “It was the first Duc, in the days of Mazarin, who hid a great store of money and jewels at Mirabel. And no one was ever able to find them again. Stolen . . . hidden . . . hidden . . . stolen . . . they make a beautiful couple, and when Monseigneur de Paris has married them and the nuptial mass is finished. . . .”

A long pause. Then the old lady whispering, “Sainte Vierge, how tired I am!” clasped her hands on her breast. The Abbé got up and bent over her. Her eyes were closed, and he heard her murmur indistinctly, “Mater amabilis, virgo prudentissima, grant me soon to see my sainted lady!”

To be on the brink of so important, so long-lost a secret—too late for it to be of use . . . yet, after all, perhaps, not too late—and to be baffled at the very moment of discovery! When such an extraordinary coincidence had brought him, of all men in the world, to this bedside, for its possessor to take the secret unrevealed out of life with her! It was hard!

Yet, as M. Chassin was a priest, he put away regret, and tried to think only of the needs of this soul about to pass through the great door. Mlle Magny had had the last rites, that he knew. Was the moment come for the commendatory prayer? He slipped his fingers round her wrist. But the pulse, though feeble and irregular, was not at the last flutter. And slowly, as if his touch had roused her, the old lady opened her eyes again. The look in them was different; meeting it, the priest knew that she was no longer wandering in the mists of nearly thirty years ago. She was back in the present; so much so, indeed, that she was capable of astonishment at seeing this unknown man in peasant’s dress bending over her—more, of resenting it.

“Who are you, Monsieur, and . . . what . . . what are you doing here?” she demanded, in a tone which, if scarcely more than the frailest of whispers, yet conveyed some of that masterfulness which was written on her face.

“I am a priest, Madame, an insermenté, and M. Charlot, your neighbour, brought me here, at your niece’s desire.”

“Clotilde always . . . takes too much upon herself,” said the thread of a voice in a tone of displeasure. “I have already had . . . the Last Sacraments.”

“Yes, Madame,” assented M. Chassin, realising that Mlle Magny’s recovery of her senses was not advancing him much. “It was not for the purpose of administering you that I came.”

Her look asked him what his purpose was.

“Because, my daughter, you were speaking of—Mirabel.”

“Nonsense!” retorted Mlle Magny quite sharply. “I am not in . . . in the habit of . . . discussing my past life with strangers!”

“You have been ill, Madame,” said the priest gently. “And has not Mirabel something to do with your present life too?” Then, being a man who knew how to wait, he took his seat beside her again, and exercised this power.

“Have I been wandering?” asked the dying woman, suddenly turning her eyes upon him.

“A little, yes.”

“I have been very ill . . . and they tell me I shall not get better. . . . Is that so, Father?”

“It is what I have been given to understand, my daughter. But you have made your peace with God.”

“Yes,” said she. “But there is something else that I desire to do . . . before I die . . . yet God knows how I am to do it.”

The priest bent forward. “God does indeed know, my daughter, and it was doubtless He Who sent me here to-day. You wish, do you not, to give into the hands of the Duc de Trélan a paper now in your possession concerning a treasure which has been for many years hidden in his château of Mirabel.”

A flush rose in the ivory face. “I talked of that?”

“Of that—and of a wedding at Mirabel.”

Mlle Magny put a trembling hand over her eyes. “Indeed, you must forgive me! . . . All these years I cannot forget it—the lights, the jewels, the beauty of that couple, my lady’s happiness. For I was tirewoman, mon père, during many years, to the Duchesse Eléonore, the Dowager Duchess, a saint on earth. God rest her soul! She only lived for a short time after her son’s marriage.”

The priest nodded, as one who knows already. “I, too, have cause to say ‘God rest her!’—And the paper you spoke of?”

“What paper?” demanded the old voice, suddenly suspicious again.

“The paper containing the secret of the hoard hidden at Mirabel in Mazarin’s time, which has come into your hands, Madame, and which you were wishing that you could have given to the Duc de Trélan on his wedding day so many years ago.”

There was silence from the bed. “Well,” said the old lady at last, with more animation, “if I told you . . . all that . . . I may as well tell you the rest.”

And slowly, with pauses for breath, she told him how the Duc de Trélan of Mazarin’s day, implicated in the rebellion of the Fronde, and not knowing which party would finally triumph in that kaleidoscope of civil conflict, buried gold and jewels in his once-royal château of Mirabel and made a memorandum of the hiding-place for his son, then away fighting with Condé. The Duc himself had to flee before Mazarin’s vengeance and died in exile; Mirabel was for a space confiscated, and when the next Duc was reinstated the treasure could not be found. The memorandum of its hiding-place had been stolen by the late Duc’s steward, who offered to sell it for a large sum to the successor to the title. Suspecting a hoax the latter refused; yet, as was not difficult for a great noble in those days, he procured a lettre de cachet against the offender, who dragged out the rest of his life in prison. Before his arrest, however, he had placed the memorandum in the hands of a friend; but the friend never took any steps to utilise it, and merely preserved it in such a manner that it was to all intents and purposes lost—for he pasted the parchment, face downwards, against the back of his wife’s portrait. Probably, said the old lady, he was waiting till the man who had confided it to him came out of prison; but this the steward never did, and a short time before his death in captivity his friend, Mlle Magny’s great-great-grandfather, died too. And there, gummed against the picture of the flourishing bourgeoise dame of Louis XIII.’s day, the parchment had remained for nearly a hundred and fifty years, till, some two years ago, on Cousin François’ death, the portrait had come into Mlle Magny’s possession, and the old lady herself, in examining it, had lighted on the parchment, and realised of what irony Fate was capable.

“Ah, if only I had had it earlier!” she concluded wistfully. “What a gift to have made my sainted lady, who was sometimes pressed for money for her charities, since, like all the Saint-Chamans, both her husband and her son spent their means royally. And now these two years that I have had it it is useless! Where is the Duc de Trélan now? Alas, we know where his wife, the Duchesse Valentine, went! . . . And what is Mirabel to-day?”

“No, Madame,” said the priest, as the voice ceased exhausted, “two years ago you could have done nothing. But to-day, as Heaven has so ordered it, you can give that paper to the Duc de Trélan, if you wish.”

She turned her sunken eyes on him again. The lustre was already fading.

“And how is that, if you please?”

“Because I am . . . in close touch with the Duc. If you commit the paper to me he shall have it before—before I am many days older.”

“But—if he is still alive—he is an émigré . . . has been an émigré for many years!” objected Mlle Magny incredulously.

“Nevertheless I am in close touch with him.”

The failing eyes of the sick woman searched his face—that commonplace visage out of which looked neither good nor evil. It was difficult to read.

“I have nothing but your word for that,” she said, while suspicion and a wistful desire to trust him strove together in look and tone.

The priest put his hand into a pocket of his embroidered vest and pulled out an ornate rosary of ebony and silver. Taking one of the silver paternoster beads between his finger and thumb; he bent over Mlle Magny and held it near her eyes. “Can you see what is engraved on that bead, Madame? It is not a sacred emblem.”

The old lady put up her feeble hand and tried to push his a little further off. “You are holding it too near, mon père,” she said irritably. “I am not so blind as that. . . . It looks like . . . it is very worn . . . yet it looks like a bird of some kind, with wings outspread. What is that doing on a chaplet? Is it on the rest of the beads?”

He showed her. “Victor, Cardinal de Trélan, in the early days of the century, seems to have had a strange fancy for his family crest on his rosary. There is his monogram on one bead. That bird, Madame, is the Trélan phoenix, and the present Duc gave me this old rosary at my ordination.”

Instantly she seized his hand. “The Trélan phoenix! Let me look again! Yes, it is, it is! Ah, to see it once more after all these years!” And as the priest relinquished the chaplet, the Duchesse Eléonore’s tirewoman, almost sobbing, put it to her lips.

The Abbé waited, and after a moment she turned on him moist eyes and said, puzzled, “But . . . but . . . I seem to remember . . . ordination . . . the Cardinal’s rosary . . . it was surely to the young Duc’s foster-brother, a Breton peasant, whom I never saw . . . that it was given . . . when he took orders?”

“You remember quite rightly, Madame. And I am that foster-brother, that Breton peasant, Pierre Chassin.”

Had he suddenly revealed himself as Louis XVIII. or the Comte d’Artois the devoted old spinster could scarcely have shown more emotion.

“God be praised! God be praised for this mercy!” she quavered. “His foster-brother! Yes, I remember hearing from my lady all about your mother. Six years before I entered her service it was . . .”

“—Remembering then, Madame, what I too owe to your lady of blessed memory, and to the Duc, who, as you probably know, had me educated and gave me a cure on his estates in the south, you may trust me, may you not, with the document?”

“Yes, indeed!” returned the old lady, and there was no shadow of doubt in her tone now. But the shock of joy, her devotion to the great family with whom her life had been bound up, and the advent of this man who, if he were not himself the rose, was almost a graft from the tree—all these seemed to have benumbed her faculties, for she lay quiet, tears of weakness and happiness stealing from under the closed lids. Presently she said,

“He is in France again then, the Duc?”

“I am afraid I cannot tell you that, my daughter. But, on the faith of a Christian and a priest he shall have the secret in his hands very shortly.”

“He will not be able to make use of it now.”

“Who knows? And if not now, when happier days come, perhaps. If he can make use of it, it will be of immeasurably greater service to him to-day than it would ever have been a quarter of a century ago. For this much I can tell you, Madame, that, wherever he is, he is fighting for the King.”

“As a Trélan should!” she murmured with a smile. But the smile had gone when she added, “And the terrible fate of his wife, the Duchesse Valentine?”

“It broke his heart,” said the priest briefly.

“My lady was spared much,” murmured Mlle Magny. She passed a shaking hand over her eyes. “So much blood . . . and Mirabel deserted. . . . Are the candles going out, mon père, or is it my eyes? N’importe—you can still find the parchment . . . that little closed frame by the mirror yonder. If you open it you will know the face.”

He did. It was a little pastel drawing of the Duchesse Eléonore, his patroness, wearing the widow’s weeds in which he best recalled her. He came back to the bed holding it.

“It was to have been buried with me, that little picture . . . it still shall be. Clotilde knew how fond I was of it—but she would never have guessed anything else, poor fool . . . I took a lesson from my forbear . . . Tear off the paper at the back, mon père.”

M. Chassin obeyed, and as he peeled off the pinkish, speckly paper recently pasted there, a piece of yellow parchment doubled up against the real back of the picture was disclosed. It was folded in four, and on it was written in brownish ink the single word, “Mirabel.”

“Open it!” said the voice from the bed, grown very weak now.

The priest obeyed. As he unfolded the parchment with no very steady hands, his eyes were greeted with a sort of rough sketch-map of some complexity, underneath which was written, in a crabbed seventeenth century hand:

“Plan de l’endroit dans mon chasteau de Mirabel où j’ay fait enterrer plusieurs milliers de pistoles et divers parements de pierreries de feu ma femme, à cause des troubles sévissant en ce royaume.” And he caught sight of “Item, 10 sacs contenant chascun 2,500 pistoles . . . Item, un collier de rubis des Indes fort bien travaillé . . . Item, une coupe en or ciselé dite de la reyne Margueritte” . . .

The whole was inscribed “Pour mon fils hault et puissant seigneur Gui de Saint-Chamans, Marquis de la Ganache, Vicomte de Saint-Chamans,” and signed, “Fait par moy a mon dit chasteau de Mirabel ce six avril de l’an mil six cent cinquante-deux, Antoine-Louis de Saint-Chamans, Duc de Treslan.”

“This is indeed——” began the priest as soon as he could find voice, when, glancing off the parchment, he saw the change which, in the brief space of his study of the document, had come over the face on the pillow. Mlle Magny had used her last reserve of strength over this matter; it was gone now, and she was going too.

“Promise me, Father!” she gasped out as he bent over her.

“I promise you, my daughter, as I hope myself for salvation!”

The drawn lips smiled. “I can say my Nunc Dimittis . . . Bless me, Pierre Chassin!”

He raised his hand. “Benedicat te . . .” and passed straight on to the “Go forth, O Christian soul . . .”

By the end she was unconscious, and a quarter of an hour later, the weeping Clotilde on one side of the bed and the proscribed priest praying on the other, Mlle Magny, her last thoughts on earth occupied with the house of Trélan, went through the great door to meet her sainted lady, leaving on its hither side the secret of Mirabel to bring about results undreamt of.

CHAPTER III

THE GIFT IS RECEIVED

All this while the occupants of M. Charlot’s attic, which the Abbé had so abruptly quitted, were taken up with their own anxieties, and though they had at last fallen silent, the chiaroscuro of their abode was fairly throbbing with uneasiness. What made their leader, with a guide above suspicion, so late in finding his way from Scaër?

At last, just about the moment that M. Chassin, next door, had finished the Proficiscere and was calling for “Clotilde,” the Vicomte de Céligny exclaimed, not for the first time, “This must be they!” The four men strained their ears, for a noise could certainly be heard on the staircase.

“Dame! it sounds as though Le Blé-aux-Champs were drunk!” observed Artamène.

“Or hurt!” added the Comte de Brencourt, listening uneasily.

The heavy, shuffling footsteps which they had heard ascending the stairs paused outside the door. Roland sprang up and opened it, drawing back instantly with a little cry. Two men, both in Breton costume, stood on the threshold, the elder and taller supporting the other, a young saturnine-looking peasant, whose face was sulky with pain, and whose unshod left foot was enveloped in a stained and muddy handkerchief.

“Monsieur le Marquis!” cried Roland and Artamène together, “What has happened?”

“Nothing very serious,” replied the elder newcomer cheerfully. “We startled a colonne mobile in the dusk, that is all, and our poor Blé-aux-Champs has a ball through his foot.”

“But you yourself are unhurt, de Kersaint, I hope?” asked the Comte de Brencourt, not without anxiety, as he came forward from his corner. “We were getting very uneasy about you.”

“I am untouched, thank you. But this lad of mine——”

“Let him lie down on my mattress, sir,” suggested the Vicomte de Céligny, and, as it happened to be the nearest to the door, the young Chouan, after vain protests, hobbled towards it, his arm still round his leader’s neck.

“Yes, lie down, mon gars,” said M. de Kersaint, lowering him to the pallet, “and we will see what can be done for this foot.” He looked round. “Where is our surgeon-in-chief, the Abbé?”

“Confessing or otherwise ministering to a dying woman next door,” replied M. de Brencourt. “M. Charlot came in for him.”

The Marquis de Kersaint raised his eyebrows a trifle, but made no comment. “I am afraid that we are somewhat of an infirmary here altogether,” he remarked. “What of your injuries, Comte—and yours, La Vergne?”

“I do not deny that I have a headache,” returned M. de Brencourt. “But, as for the cause, the Abbé dressed the scratch this afternoon, and reported that it was doing excellently. My wrist” he showed a bandage “will, he says, take a little longer to heal.”

“And your safe arrival, Monsieur le Marquis, has done even more for my arm than the Abbé’s ministrations,” said Artamène.

M. de Kersaint smiled at him and shook his head, as he knelt down by the prostrate guide and began to take the handkerchief off his foot. He would have been more or less than human if he had not known that he was idolised, as well as feared, by these well-born young followers of his.

“Let me do that, Monsieur le Marquis!” now begged Roland, while the thoughtful Lucien produced from the recesses of the attic a bowl of water and some torn linen.

But the Marquis de Kersaint, asking Roland when he had ever dressed a gunshot wound, went through the process with a deftness which suggested that he himself had dressed not a few. The young peasant, who had lain with his face hidden in the pillow, caught his hand as he finished and carried it dumbly to his lips.

“There, mon gars,” said his leader kindly, as he withdrew it. “Lie there and be as comfortable as you can under the circumstances. The ball has gone clean through, which is a great mercy. Roland, put a covering of some kind over him.—Thank you, Lucien; yes, I should like some fresh water. You can put it on that convenient chest of drawers yonder.”

As he stood there, washing the blood off his hands, it was not difficult to understand the attraction that the Marquis de Kersaint might possess for either sex or any age. As a young man he must have been superlatively handsome, and now the grey at his temples only served to emphasize his appearance of extreme distinction. Just as his dark, slightly rippling hair gained by contrast with that touch of Time’s powder, so the peasant’s dress which he wore merely set off the natural air of command that hung about him—an air of which it was plainly impossible for him to divest himself, even for purposes of disguise. It was innate in the whole poise of his tall figure, in the aquiline nose with its delicate nostrils, in the imperious glance of the fine grey eyes. Yet there was a measure of geniality about the mouth—of the kind that it is not wise to presume upon. Everybody in the attic knew that.

“Well, my children, and what have you been doing since you arrived?” he asked, looking round as he dried his hands. “Lucien, I see, has got hold of a book as usual. What have you been reading, Lucien?”

“This is what he has been reading, Monsieur le Marquis!” cried the young Chevalier de la Vergne, snatching up du Boisfossé’s Virgil whence he had laid it, face downwards, on his chair. And holding the book with the hand which rested in the sling, of which he still had the use, he flourished his other arm at Roland, who was standing near, and began to declaim at him the famous lament out of the sixth book for the untimely dead Marcellus—

“Heu miserande puer! si qua fata aspera rumpas,

Tu Marcellus eris. Manibus date lilia plenis

Purpureos——”

He had got no further when, to his enormous surprise, the book was gently but firmly taken out of his hand.

“Do not repeat those lines, boy, over anyone young, as you are doing at this moment,” said M. de Kersaint quietly looking, not at him, but at Roland. “I always think they are unlucky. . . .”

And before the two young men had time to recover from their astonishment he had walked over to the other side of the attic, and joined his second in command at the little table to which the latter had returned.

“I have some papers here, de Brencourt,” he said, sitting down, “which we could look at till the Abbé returns. Undoubtedly our attempt was premature . . . but unless we can get money it always will be premature. I have seen ‘Sincère’; he could join us with at least two hundred and fifty men if we could only provide arms for them.”

“Always the same cry—insufficient arms and ammunition,” remarked his lieutenant rather bitterly. “How is anything considerable going to be done in Finistère if there is always this lack? And we could get both in plenty from England if we only had the money to buy them with.”

“Exactly,” said the Marquis. “But where the money is to come from I do not know—beyond the not very generous subsidy which the British Government has promised me for the summer.—Well, we must take counsel with Georges when he comes. Now, look at these figures.”

And he and the Comte de Brencourt were still bending over the papers which he had spread out on the table when the three young men, who had withdrawn themselves as far as possible from the conclave of their superiors, became aware that the priest was once more in their midst. He had entered among the shadows very quietly.

“A la bonne heure, Monsieur l’Abbé!” said Roland de Céligny. “Monsieur le Marquis has arrived.” And he indicated the other side of the attic.

“And have you been to the wedding at Mirabel?” enquired Artamène mischievously.

The Abbé Chassin quickly turned on him with a frown, putting his finger to his lips. But he was too late; the words were out, and, though the culprit had moderated his voice, they had been heard. And Artamène, roused at once to interest and alertness by the priest’s gesture, was somehow aware of a sudden stiffening of M. de Kersaint’s whole figure, ere he said, turning round from the table, “What is this about . . . Mirabel?”

The Abbé seeming in no great haste to answer, it was M. de Brencourt who replied, “The old lady whom the Abbé has been visiting next door is, apparently, suffering from delusions about Mirabel—that château of the Duc de Trélan’s near Paris. That is what M. de la Vergne means.”

“This is interesting,” observed the Marquis de Kersaint, turning further round to look at the little priest, who had not advanced a step since Artamène’s jest. “And did you learn anything fresh about Mirabel, Abbé?”

“Yes, I did, Monsieur le Marquis,” answered the priest rather shortly.

“May we hear it?”

M. Chassin was silent, and seemed to be considering this request. Artamène saw his face, and it was oddly perturbed.

“We are not, I hope, inviting you to reveal the secrets of the confessional?”

“No.”

“Why may we not hear it, then?”

“Because,” said the Abbé gravely, “it is more suited for your private ear, Monsieur le Marquis.”

“Why?” asked M. de Brencourt, instantly, looking from one to the other, “why for M. de Kersaint’s private ear?”

This question the Abbé seemed totally unable to answer, and after a second or two the Marquis de Kersaint said carelessly to his subordinate, “Because M. Chassin knows that I am a kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s, I suppose.”

“A kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s—you!” exclaimed the Comte de Brencourt in obvious surprise. “A near kinsman?”

“No, no, very distant,” replied his leader quickly. “And that is why I cannot conceive how a disclosure affecting his property can possibly be destined for my ear alone. So let us all hear it, if you please, Monsieur l’Abbé.”

M. de Brencourt, still under the empire of surprise or some other emotion, continued to look at this kinsman of M. de Trélan’s very fixedly; so, from where he still stood near the door, did the priest. A better light would have revealed entreaty in his eyes.

“Well, Monsieur l’Abbé, I am waiting!” said the Marquis de Kersaint rather haughtily, and in the fashion of a man who has never been used to that discipline.

The Abbé set his lips obstinately. “It will keep well enough till to-morrow, Monsieur le Marquis.”

“What, a communication from the dying? And who knows whether we shall all see to-morrow? Come, Abbé, I command you!—Roland, a chair here for M. Chassin.”

Whether the priest could have stood out, had he willed, against that masterful voice and gesture, at any rate he did not.

“Very well, Marquis,” said he, and Artamène, thrilled to the core, thought, “ ‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!’ That’s what he would really like to say, our Abbé!” And since their leader had intimated that the matter was not private after all, he applied himself to listen with all his ears. Roland, looking rather troubled, set a chair at the table for the priest and stood back.

“You must know then, Monsieur le Marquis,” began the Abbé in a low voice, “that the old lady whom I have been visiting had been present at the festivities in 1771, when the . . . the young Duc de Trélan married his bride.”

“That beautiful and most unfortunate lady!” commented M. de Brencourt under his breath.

The Marquis glanced at him for the fraction of a second, and the priest went on, nervously rubbing his hands together, and rather pale:

“It seems that there is a legend of a treasure hidden in Mirabel since the days of the Fronde, a treasure whose whereabouts no one has ever been able to discover. Since you are a kinsman of M. de Trélan’s, Monsieur le Marquis, it is possible that you have heard of the legend?”

M. de Kersaint nodded thoughtfully. “I believe I have heard of it. Yes?”

“The story appears to be true. The document describing the hiding-place of the treasure was stolen at the time—nearly a hundred and fifty years ago—and came into the possession of this old lady’s family, but in such a way that it was only recently rediscovered by the old lady herself.”

“What an extraordinary tale! Well?”

“Since then she had desired to give it to the Duc, but could not, as he was not in France. And in her delirium just now, fancying herself back at the wedding, she was talking so persistently of offering to the . . . the young couple, as a wedding gift, this paper, which would help them to what was after all their own, that M. Charlot——”

“A wedding gift for de Trélan and his wife!” interposed the Comte de Brencourt with a laugh. “Bon Dieu, what irony, considering how their wedded life ended!”

“Surely that need not concern us now, Monsieur de Brencourt!” said his leader coldly. “Go on please, Abbé.”

“By the most curious coincidence,” pursued M. Chassin, his eyes fixed on the Marquis, “M. Charlot asked me, as a priest, to see if I could not set the old lady’s mind at rest by some means. She did at last regain control of her senses, and I was able in the end to assure her that I could and would despatch the document, if she entrusted me with it, to the proper quarter.”

“And she gave it you?” asked the Marquis, bending forward with some eagerness.

“I have it here now,” answered the priest, touching his breast.

M. de Kersaint drew back again, and Artamène was struck with his resemblance to a chess player who is meditating the next move. But only the Marquis de Kersaint himself and the man whom he had forced into playing out this gambit with him, fully realised the awkward position into which his insistence had got them.

“So I must make it my business to despatch it, somehow, to M. le Duc,” finished the Abbé. “It was of course my knowledge that you were kin to him, Monsieur le Marquis, which made me accept the trust, as I knew I could rely on your assistance.”

But the Marquis was looking down at the table and said nothing.

“The document will hardly be of much use to M. de Trélan when he does get it,” remarked the Comte de Brencourt. “Mirabel, I have heard, is now a museum or something of the sort; at any rate it is in government hands. And M. de Trélan—where is M. de Trélan? In England still? No, hardly. One never hears of him. Perhaps he is dead.”

“No, he is alive,” replied his kinsman briefly, lifting his eyes for a second.

“Ah! But how is he going to profit by this treasure, even if it is still there?”

“Nevertheless, I must fulfil my trust,” observed M. Chassin, looking across the table at M. de Kersaint’s lowered head.

“Oh, undoubtedly, Abbé, though I do not know how you are going to do it even with M. de Kersaint’s cousinly . . . is it cousinly? . . . assistance. What do you yourself think of the problem, Marquis?”

The Marquis de Kersaint raised his head. “I think,” he said slowly, looking hard at M. Chassin, “that the Abbé is right. M. de Trélan must be informed, somehow. But at the same time, since it is practically out of the question for him, in exile, to take any steps in the matter—and would be difficult and dangerous even were he in France—and since our need for money is so pressing at this moment, I would propose——”

“What?” asked the Comte.

“To ask, as his kinsman, for his authorisation to use the treasure, if we can come at it, for the needs of Finistère—that is to say, for the King’s service.”

“O sir, do you think we could!” cried Roland eagerly, starting forward.

“O, Monsieur le Marquis, send us to Mirabel!” cried Artamène.

“You are going too fast, gentlemen. We must first get the Duc’s leave to pillage his property, even though it be confiscated.”

“Do you think you will have difficulty in getting it?” asked the Comte de Brencourt, narrowing his eyes.

“No, I do not think so. As you have yourself pointed out, Comte, how is M. de Trélan going to profit, in any case, by this suddenly revealed hoard?”

“Well, when the King comes into his own again, it would be of no small service to the Duc, a fund in his own château! I expect his financial resources, great as they once were, are much embarrassed. He could hardly have been accused of husbanding them!”

“You seem to know a great deal about the private affairs of M. de Trélan, Comte!” observed M. de Kersaint drily, turning and looking at him. “I might observe that no honest man has gained by the Revolution, and that those with much to lose have lost proportionately. However, if my kinsman takes the view that you suggest—which I do not think he will—he must be induced to look upon our present proposed use of the money as a loan to His Majesty. After all, it was never of any advantage to him as long as he was unaware of its existence or of its whereabouts, and of these, apparently, he never would have known but for the extraordinary coincidence of which the Abbé has just told us.”

“But,” suggested M. de Brencourt, “before approaching him on the subject—through you—might it not be as well to get a sight of this precious document, so that we may form some idea as to whether the amount will repay the risking a man’s neck to find, and whether it will prove easy to come at?”

The priest and M. de Kersaint looked at one another. “Yes. I think we might do that without indiscretion,” said the latter, after a moment’s hesitation. “Do not you, Abbé?”

M. Chassin made no reply in words, but drew out from his coat the parchment received from the dying woman and gave it into the hands of his leader. The Marquis de Kersaint spread out the ancient memorandum on the table, moved the candles in their bottles nearer, and the three men studied in silence the rough diagram and its legend. Nor were Roland and Artamène, in the background, innocent of craning their necks to see likewise.

“Ten bags—two thousand five hundred pistoles in each,” murmured the Comte reflectively. “How much is that, I wonder, in modern money? And there are jewels too, apparently.”

The Marquis de Kersaint’s lips were compressed, his face an enigma. “It certainly appears to be worth taking risks for,” he said at last. “Money is what we most need in the world now for Finistère. We can get the men; the last few months have shown me that clearly, but of what use are unarmed men?”

“Less than none,” observed his second in command. “This document, therefore, seems singularly like a gift from heaven.”

“I shall certainly communicate with M. de Trélan without delay,” said the Marquis. “May I keep this parchment, Abbé?”

“I had hoped that you would charge yourself with its despatch, Monsieur le Marquis,” replied the priest, and M. de Kersaint without more ado folded it up and put it in his breast.

“It seems to me, de Kersaint,” said the Comte de Brencourt reflectively, playing with the cards which still strewed the table, “that, considering all things, the exceptional circumstances, our pressing needs, the possibility that you may never succeed in communicating with the Duc—wherever he may be—that we could hardly be blamed if we took the law into our own hands, and did not wait for his authorisation. After all, the risk would be ours.”

“That solution had already occurred to me, I admit,” said the Marquis, with the ghost of a smile, while mute applause from MM. de Céligny and de la Vergne greeted the Comte’s suggestion. “But the affair is in a sense the Abbé’s, and entrusted to him.”

“I am quite content to abide by your decision, Monsieur le Marquis,” replied the priest sedately.

“But, de Kersaint,” objected the Comte, evidently struck by a sudden idea, “have you not some reversionary interest in the treasure yourself, if you are kin to M. de Trélan? Should we not ultimately be robbing you, perhaps?”

“No, I am not sufficiently nearly related to the Duc for that,” returned the Marquis quickly. “I am connected with him by marriage only—a distant kinsman.”

“Perhaps you will allow me to congratulate you on that, then,” said M. de Brencourt in a sombre tone. “For myself, I should not care to think that I had near ties of blood with a man who, in safety himself, left his wife to perish as he did!”

An electric shock seemed at these words to communicate itself to the other two men. M. de Kersaint’s right hand, which rested on the table in the ring of candlelight, was seen instantly to clench itself. The next instant the Abbé, by a sudden clumsy movement, sent the candle nearest to him to the floor where, with a crash of the bottle, it was immediately extinguished.

“Pardon me, Monsieur le Comte!” he interposed quickly, bending forward. “—Dear me, how awkward I am!—Pardon me, but you do the Duc de Trélan a great injustice, surely! How could he, an émigré to whom France was closed, possibly rescue a woman immured in a Paris prison? The thing is preposterous. Besides, he probably knew nothing about her being there till all was over. I have heard that Mirabel was not sacked till August the thirtieth, and the prison massacres, you will remember, began on the second of September.”

“You seem very much the champion of M. de Trélan, Abbé!” remarked the Comte, looking at him hard. “You have wasted a candle over him.”

“One should try, surely, to be just to those who cannot answer for themselves,” retorted the priest. “Moreover, I am certain M. de Kersaint would bear me out in what I say.”

“He does not seem to be in any great haste to do so,” observed the other, half to himself, and his eyes suddenly moved to the clenched hand.

“I am too much amazed at your attack on my kinsman,” retorted the Marquis, in a voice unlike his own. “It is incredible that such a thing should be said in France of M. de Trélan—that he could have saved his wife and did not!”

The Comte shrugged his shoulders. “I do not know that it is what others say, for I imagine that few people trouble their heads about de Trélan now-a-days. But it is what I think—though as a matter of fact you are putting more into my words than I actually uttered. Perhaps I am prejudiced. I knew that lady many years ago,” he went on, with lowered eyes, fidgeting with the cards again, “the most gracious of God’s creatures, and to remember that she went, abandoned by everybody, through that door, saw, as her last glimpse of life, those obscene faces, that gutter running with blood, that mound of——”

The priest jumped up and seized him by the arm. “For God’s sake, stop, Monsieur de Brencourt!” he whispered. “Do you not know that most of M. de Kersaint’s family perished in the massacres!”

And at that the Comte did stop. After a moment M. de Kersaint removed the hand with which he had covered his eyes.

“I should indeed be glad if you would spare me that subject,” he said, in a scarcely audible voice, not looking at either of them. Even the one remaining candle showed him to be frightfully pale. “I . . . I cannot . . . perhaps we should finish this discussion . . . in the morning. It is already very late.”

“Yes, it is very late,” agreed the Comte, plainly rather horrified. He leant over the table. “Can you forgive me, Marquis? Of course I was not aware, and I regret——”

“I knew that,” said M. de Kersaint with a palpable effort, and touched the hand which the other held out. And so ended the reception of Mlle Magny’s wedding gift.

CHAPTER IV

A VERY YOUNG MAN

Roland de Celigny, waking with a start, wondered for a moment where he was. Then he raised himself on his elbow and looked about him.

The dawn was slipping a slim, cool hand into the strangely populated attic, and the grey light invested furniture and sleepers alike with quite a different appearance from last night’s. Roland himself had insisted on giving up his pallet permanently to Le Blé-aux-Champs, because of his hurt, and had ensconced himself at the other side of the attic. Over in his old place Chouan and noble, alike young and alike wounded, lay side by side, the only difference in their condition being that the peasant, for all his protests, had the better couch. But, like M. de Brencourt, huddled on the little sofa of worn, gilt-striped rose brocade, and the Abbé, of whom he could see only the feet projecting round a wardrobe, they both appeared to be asleep, despite their injuries; and Roland knew that Artamène’s gave him no slight pain at times.

But he could not be altogether sorry for his friend’s wound. For, since it was M. de la Vergne’s right arm that had suffered, it had fallen to the Vicomte de Céligny to write at his dictation a line of reassurance to his mother and sister in Finistère. And thus Roland’s own fingers had formed, if his brain had not originated, the words which would undoubtedly have the happiness of penetrating into the little ears of Mlle Marthe de la Vergne, even, probably, that of being read by her brilliant dark eyes. And she would know, too, from the contents of the letter who had penned it. The question whether she would care was one which he did not like to press overmuch, for he had very little to go upon, poor Roland, since Marthe had grown up—one meeting under the eyes of Mme de la Vergne in the wide, cool salon of the château with its shining floor, and Mlle Marthe rising from tambour work at its farther end; and one brief message of good wishes with which his friend Artamène, her fortunate brother, was found to be charged when Roland met him a few weeks ago at the rallying-place.

Roland could have wished that his friend’s flesh wound were his own, that he also had something with a tinge of suffering and heroism about it, of which Mlle Marthe could have been informed, to which she might even have given a moment’s regret. Or, better still, if it could have been, that the injury had happened so near the Château de la Vergne as to leave no alternative but to take the sufferer in and tend him there. Alas, Roland neither possessed the requisite damage, nor had the Château de la Vergne the desired proximity to the scene of the little defeat at la Croix-Fendue.

Besides, if anything untoward happened to him, he was under promise to return, if possible, to his grandfather, with whom he lived.

Roland did not remember his mother, and of his father, though he had died only about a year and a half ago, he had seen extremely little. Three years after Mme de Céligny’s death he had been committed, a child of five years old, to the care of his maternal grandfather, the Baron de Carné, and by him he had been brought up at Kerlidec, in Brittany, separated by the breadth of France from his patrimony near Avignon. He had seldom visited this, or his morose parent, though when he did, M. de Céligny had always made a point of initiating him, young as he was, into the management of the estate which would one day be his—for the Vicomte, unlike so many landowners in those troubled years, had never been dispossessed. But Roland was much fonder of the stern and passionate old man who had brought him up, and who had for him such exquisite tendernesses; and he had become too much accustomed to living with a grandfather rather than with a father to find the arrangement surprising. He had, moreover, few friends of his own age to comment on its unusual character, since his education had been entirely conducted at Kerlidec by his grandfather and a tutor or two. Artamène de la Vergne, who lived at no very great distance, was, in fact, his only intimate.

Yet in the end, through no fault of the Vicomte de Céligny’s other than an unfortunate choice of the moment of his death, his estates did not come to Roland at all. He died very suddenly of heart disease just after the coup d’état of ’97, and the Directory at once seized the property on the specious pretext that the heir was an émigré. Because the events of Fructidor had revived the legislation against that unfortunate class, it had taken a year and a half and very cautious moves indeed on the part of the Baron de Carné even to get his grandson’s name removed from that inauspicious list on which, like many another, it wrongly figured, and Roland was not yet in possession of his inheritance. His present proceedings, if the Government became aware of them, were still less likely to hasten that event.

And these proceedings had been entered into against M. de Carné’s wishes; another had overborne that strong will of his. To this day Roland could not quite understand how it had been done. For a moment he lived again through the episode of his quasi-abduction from Kerlidec last February;—that strained interview (at part of which he had been present) between his grandfather and the tall, commanding visitor who, turning out, to Roland’s surprise and delight, to be the Marquis de Kersaint, the hero of the lost day of Rivoli, enlisting likely young men to fight for the King later on in Finistère, had asked M. de Carné if Roland might come with him——provided Roland himself were willing. Of Roland’s willingness—rather, rapture—there could be no question, but M. de Kersaint had insisted on the Baron’s formal consent; and this, on the understanding that Roland was to be regarded strictly as a loan, and returned, had been given . . . but given with such palpable, almost venomous hostility that the youth could not imagine why it should have been vouchsafed at all.

The end of the episode, too, just because it puzzled him, was bitten into his memory. Grandfather and grandson were on the perron watching the unbidden guest ride away down the dripping avenue—for Roland was to join him, with Artamène, a few days later—and Roland, boylike, had exclaimed at his admirable seat on a horse.

“As you say, Roland, a damnably good seat!” M. de Carné had returned harshly. “A damnable air of assurance altogether! Quite enough to turn a young man’s head, or for that matter a——” He checked himself, and said with bitterness that they must begin to think of Roland’s preparations. And when the young man remorsefully replied, “Not yet, grandpère! It is growing dark; let us think of our game of chess!” his grandfather retorted, looking at him in a way that he could not fathom, “Chess! Poor little pawn, you have been taken!”

But if it were so, the pawn certainly had no objection.

And now, indeed, feeling a sense of elation, almost of importance, at being apparently the only one awake in this company, Roland looked past the intervening furniture towards the two large chairs in which M. de Kersaint had elected to spend the night. Well, he was still stretched in them, long and rather shadowy in outline, but Roland doubted if he were asleep, for as he gazed at him he heard the Marquis move and sigh.

The adoration tempered with awe which Roland felt for him had received, if it needed it, a fresh impetus through last night’s happenings. An eager and interested witness of the scene’s beginning, an unwilling and indignant one of its close, Roland had felt, and still felt, that he hated M. de Brencourt for the torture to which, even unwittingly, he had put him, as anyone could see. And why, as Artamène had whispered to him afterwards, had M. de Brencourt displayed such an aversion to the Duc de Trélan?

What was M. de Kersaint going to do, he wondered, about this business of Mirabel? The name seemed to have a faintly familiar sound, though he could have sworn that he had never heard it before. As he strove to recover the connection a glorious thought shot suddenly into his mind. If only M. de Kersaint would let him go to Paris in search of this treasure! There—if his search were successful, as of course it would be—shone in truth a deed worthy to lay at the feet of Mlle Marthe de la Vergne!

Wrapped in the warm and rosy imaginings which this idea brought to him Roland dropped off to sleep again—a light slumber in which he had a distinct impression that M. de Kersaint came and stood for some time looking down on him, and from which he woke to find the attic grown considerably lighter, and M. de Kersaint’s sleeping-place, to which he instantly glanced, empty. Everybody else seemed to be slumbering as before.

It was a moment or two before Roland’s eyes found his leader, in the farthest corner of the attic, seated sideways at a little table, writing—at least, with a pen between his fingers. His chin was propped on his fist, and the young daylight as it entered silhouetted his fine profile with sufficient clearness for the observer to be sure that his thoughts were not pleasant ones.

“All his family massacred!” sprang into Roland’s mind. “He is thinking of that—or of how to retrieve la Croix-Fendue, or perhaps how to get the treasure from Mirabel . . . How handsome he is!” And on Roland, himself as unconscious of his own good looks as it is possible for a young man to be, came the resolve to use this Heaven-sent opportunity for the furtherance of his own desires.

Rising very quietly from the floor, he picked his way, half dressed as he was, among furniture and sleepers till he came to the window.

“Monsieur le Marquis!”

M. de Kersaint started and looked round. “Roland, what are you doing?” he asked in a whisper.

“I have been awake before,” said Roland, as if that were a reply.

“Well?”

“I want to ask you something, sir.”

“If,” said M. de Kersaint, studying him as he stood there in his shirt and breeches, “if it is to repeat La Vergne’s request of last night about Mirabel, I may as well tell you at once, my boy, that it is of no use.”

The youth’s visage so manifestly fell that his leader could not help smiling.

“I see that I guessed right. No, my dear boy, this business, if ever it gets itself done at all, is work for a much older head than yours.”

“I am not so young, Monsieur le Marquis,” pleaded the aspirant, in the same discreet tone. “I shall be twenty this year.”

“Yes, but not until the very end of it,” retorted M. de Kersaint with promptitude.

The child of December was first taken aback, then flattered, that the date of his obscure birthday should be known to his hero, who was now looking at him half-teasingly, a mood in which Roland especially adored him. Then the petitioner recovered himself.

“But even if you think me young, sir,” he went on with fervour, “nobody here, however much older he is——”

“Has any experience of house-breaking,” he was going on to say, when the words were cut short by a grasp on his arm. He turned, and M. de Kersaint, who had momentarily lowered his gaze, lifted it at the same instant so that they both beheld the Chevalier de la Vergne, sling and all.

“What, another!” exclaimed M. de Kersaint. “Morbleu!”

“I felt sure that he was trying to steal a march on me, Monsieur le Marquis,” explained Artamène. “If anyone is to go to Mirabel——”

“It would certainly not be you, La Vergne, with that arm,” interposed his leader. “However, there is no question of Mirabel for either of you.”

“But——” began both the candidates.

“If you want to know my plans, gentlemen,” said M. de Kersaint then, with a touch of impatience, real or assumed, “they are, as far as regards yourselves, these—a return, for the present, to your own firesides.”

“We are to go back home!” ejaculated the horror-struck Artamène.

Amusement shot again into M. de Kersaint’s eyes at the tone, but because of its pitch he laid his finger on his lips. “It is not designed as a punishment, believe me, my children. But our drawing of the sword was premature; I always feared it, and I have resolved, for the present, to disband. It will only be for a month or two, probably.”

“But—but you will send for us again, sir?” stammered Roland. All the brightness seemed suddenly to have departed from life.

“Most certainly. I could not get on without my aides-de-camp. Now go back to your beds and leave me to finish what I am doing.”

It was two exceedingly dispirited young men who returned to their couches. “To be sent home like schoolboys!” whispered Roland, who had left his with such hopes. But they were too dejected to discuss the catastrophe. Happy Lucien, who had slept through its announcement! They sat side by side on Artamène’s blanket, and looked at each other, while close by the young Chouan, who was awake, moved restlessly. What, if they were going to separate, was to become of him? Perhaps this unspoken query gave Artamène his great idea.

“I am not fit to take the journey to La Vergne alone,” he whispered suddenly in Roland’s ear. “Will you escort me?”

“Will I not?” responded his friend, his eyes sparkling again.

With the full advent of morning came the good M. Charlot and a servant, bringing coffee and rolls to the unaccustomed guestchamber. To this welcome refreshment he joined the more than welcome news that the troops who had nearly intercepted the Marquis and his guide last night had marched out at dawn, and in an hour or so it would be quite safe to depart. Also, the wounded man could now be moved downstairs to a bed and cared for until his foot was healed.

“Excellent, my dear Monsieur Chariot,” said the Marquis de Kersaint. “And—the other matter?”

“I have already sent to the place, Monsieur, and a message has come back that the person your honours are expecting has not yet arrived.”

Artamène and Roland looked at each other over their coffee-bowls. They cherished a faint hope, now rapidly withering, that they might catch a glimpse of this famous person ere departing.

But very shortly afterwards, as it seemed, the three of them had put together their small belongings, had received their last instructions, and had learnt how, when the summons came to them again, it would probably be to a more lasting campaign. The Marquis de Kersaint hoped by the summer to have a regular headquarters at least—to keep always on foot an army of Chouans was impossible—in short, to be in a larger way of business. But even these bright predictions did not cheer ‘les jeunes,’ as the Abbé called them, very much.

“All I can do, mes enfants,” said their leader to them in conclusion, “is to wish you a safe return and a better meeting. Remember my recommendations as to prudence in your journeys.—I am not sure that I ought to let you travel in that condition, Artamène.”

And when the youth hastened to inform him that he would have the advantage of Roland’s care and company M. de Kersaint smiled and said, “Very well. But, Roland, remember that your real destination is not La Vergne, but Kerlidec. My honour is engaged, as you know, in sending you back to your grandfather. Good-bye, Lucien; you will now have leisure to proceed with your study of the Mantuan.”

The Abbé had already given them his blessing; the Comte had gone to the place appointed to await Cadoudal. Even Le Blé-aux-Champs had been carried downstairs. So when the Marquis had shaken hands with them there was nothing for the three young men to do but to go. And they went.

But they had not got beyond the next turn on the dusky staircase before they heard M. de Kersaint’s voice on the landing above them.

“Roland,” it called down, “come back a moment, will you? I have a message for M. de Carné.”

Wondering, the young Vicomte went up again, nearly to the top, where the tall figure was standing.

“I only wish you to point out to him,” said the Marquis, “that I am fulfilling my promise. That is all.”

Then he added, in a different tone, “May God keep you, my boy!” and stooping, kissed him on the forehead.

CHAPTER V

TU MARCELLUS ERIS

“And so, exeunt ‘les jeunes,’ ” said the Marquis de Kersaint, coming back into the attic and shutting the door after him.

Its only remaining occupant, the Abbé Chassin, looked up from his breviary where he sat on the old brocade sofa.

“I could wish,” he observed, “that they had departed earlier—or at least that young La Vergne had done so, before he brought about what happened last night, by his mention of the word ‘Mirabel.’ But what, Gaston, in the name of all the saints, possessed you to force me to give you the memorandum like that, before everybody? Of course I only meant to put it into your hands when we were alone!”

The Marquis de Kersaint, seeming to find it perfectly natural to be addressed thus familiarly by his inferior, shrugged his shoulders. “Why then, my dear Pierre, did you, in your turn, say before everybody that your information was for my private ear? A slip of that kind is unlike you. How could I possibly accept for my private ear any news about the place?”

“No, perhaps not, but your persistence, if you will forgive my saying so, rather drove me into a corner. However, I dare say we were both equally to blame, I for not being readier-witted, and you for—well, for taking the bull a little too much by the horns.”

M. de Kersaint, evidently not at all resenting these criticisms, looked down at the priest. “Above all things I did not want to create a mystery,” he said.

“And instead of that you created a kinsman,” observed the Abbé with a half smile, and then became grave again. “It was very unfortunate, the whole thing, but naturally we had neither of us any idea of what it was going to lead to.”

The Marquis de Kersaint’s face darkened. He turned away, and began to walk up and down. “You made a fine holocaust of my imaginary family,” he said after a moment.

“I had to stop him somehow,” replied the Abbé briefly. He had closed his book, and was watching the pacing figure.

“So that,” said M. de Kersaint after another silence, “that is how a Frenchman, an émigré himself, judges the conduct of the Duc de Trélan! I thought it was only in England that they did not understand.”

The priest had risen. “Gaston,” he said firmly, “as I said to the Comte last night, and as I would repeat it at my last hour, in the matter of Mme de Trélan’s death I hold that no one was to blame—save her murderers. She could not have been saved. Did his Highness the Duc de Penthièvre save his daughter? We know that he tried. Not an archangel could have saved Mme de Lamballe. So with Mme de Trélan that day. You know that as well as I, and M. de Brencourt, if he were not ridden by some demon of spite, knows it too.”

“She went through that door, as he said,” continued M. de Kersaint. He had come to a standstill; his face was ashen. “She saw . . . all that . . . before——And she might have taken the road to England and safety two years earlier.”

“It is true,” answered the priest. “She had the chance.”

“Yes,” said his foster-brother, looking at him as if he did not see him, “she had the chance . . . and refused it. I cannot tell de Brencourt that. But, O my God, what a tragedy of mistakes!”

He was backed now against a huge old wardrobe, motionless, almost as if he were nailed to it, voice and eyes alike full of that seven years’ old horror and anguish.

“It was but a mistake, a misunderstanding, then, Gaston,” said the priest quickly. “You acknowledge that, you see!”

The man against the wardrobe gave a laugh. “But what is worse than a mistake, Pierre? Not a crime, certainly. Mistakes appear, at least, to be more heavily visited in this world. It seems to me that I am about to begin a fresh series of payments for mine. . . . As for her, if she made any, she paid—how much more than paid!—in that moment of martyrdom that does not bear thinking of, that I still dream about, it seems to me, almost every night. . . . Now, if it is to be dragged out as de Brencourt dragged it yesterday, I shall wish you had not turned me from my purpose seven years ago.”

Dear saints, thought the priest, looking at him compassionately, are we, after all he has suffered, to go once more through the inferno of those dreadful days in England? For a moment he saw again that lofty, richly-furnished room in London where the proudest man whom Pierre Chassin had ever met or read of sat with his whole existence fallen in a day to ruins about him—his honour tarnished and his self-respect in the dust. For he had that day received the appalling news of his wife’s butchery in prison—not having known, even, that she was a prisoner—and he had heard also that he was in consequence being talked about in no flattering terms throughout those same London drawing-rooms where he had been so courted. Indeed—not then knowing why—he had that very morning been cut in St. James’s Street by two of his most intimate English acquaintances. . . . The candlelight on his escritoire, running over the darkly shining mahogany before him, had showed the weapon ready to his hand when the shabby little émigré priest, who had come hotfoot at the news, succeeded in forcing his way past the terrified servants into that forbidden room . . . only to be ordered, in a voice that made him quail, to depart instantly. He had sometimes wondered himself what had given him the courage to disobey, and to stand, as he had done, for a whole night between the Duc de Trélan and suicide. Even to-day he could scarcely bear to think of the naked agony and conflict of that vigil, and it was very rarely referred to by either of them.

He went up to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “O my brother, if you would only cease to torment yourself! You have not, you never have had, a shadow of real responsibility for your wife’s death.”

“Easy to believe, is it not?” remarked the other with a ghastly smile, “when men speak still as de Brencourt spoke last night!”

The Abbé made an almost impatient movement. “It is quite impossible that the Comte really thinks what he says! Why, thousands of men emigrated without their wives,—just as some wives without their husbands—and no one thought it anything but natural and right in those days . . . a duty even! All the noblesse were equally blinded as to what was coming. And can you seriously maintain that any blame attaches to you for what happened two years later, because you were no clearer-sighted than the rest—the rest who, like you, were in exile?”

“But the rest,” said the Marquis de Kersaint, staring down before him at his locked hands, “were not, in 1792, merely amusing themselves in exile, whatever they may have been doing in 1790. . . . Even though I had not been by her side, if I had been where I ought to have been long before, in the army of the Princes or with Condé, do you think that de Brencourt would say . . . those things? Or that they would be like death to me, if he did? . . . You see you cannot answer that, Pierre!”

“Mon frère,” said M. Chassin quietly, “that delay has been expiated. The question for the moment is, whether M. le Comte suspects your identity.”

M. de Kersaint moved a little. “Do you think he possibly can? I never remember seeing him before in my life, until he was assigned to me last December in Jersey as my lieutenant.”

“And if he had ever chanced to see you before the Revolution,” went on the priest musingly, “this bitter resentment he seems to have would have shown itself ere now. No, he could have had no grounds for suspicion of any kind before last night and the business of Mirabel. It was evidently only the mention of that name that roused him. If he begins to have . . . ideas . . . my advice to you, Gaston, is to tell him who you are. He knows, as most people do, about the part you played at Rivoli, not to speak of what you are doing now, so he would not continue——”

“Never!” broke in the Marquis, making a violent gesture of negation. “I desire never to hear that old name of mine again in this life! And I forbid you once more to tell anyone in the world—anyone—whatever you might think would be gained by it! Is it a promise?”

“You have had my promise once for all, Gaston.”

“I will never see you again if you break it!” said his foster-brother with vehemence.

“Have I kept it so ill these seven years, then, that you think a threat is necessary?” asked the priest gently.

“Oh, my dear Pierre, forgive me!” cried the other instantly, and he held out his hand. “When a man starts threatening the best friend he ever had, to whom he owes not only his life but his sanity, it looks rather as if that sanity was leaving him!”

“I do not see much signs of that,” said the priest, with a smile, as he took the proffered hand. “And last night’s business was horrible. I have always thought,” he went on reflectively, “that M. le Comte was an embittered man.”

“If I had known,” said his foster-brother in a low voice, “that he had ever met her, I would never have consented to work with him. . . . But I never should have known save for this strange business of Mirabel.”

“And that is a business which must be attended to, I suppose,” the priest reminded him.

“Yes, I suppose so, too,” said M. de Kersaint rather wearily. He went to the nearest table, and sitting down pulled out the parchment and flattened it out on it. The Abbé came and studied it over his shoulder for a while in silence.

“Well, what do you think of it, Gaston?”

“I have very little doubt that it is genuine. As a child, I once heard my grandfather speak of the legend, but he dismissed it as being only a legend. In those days I thought the idea romantic and fascinating. Did I never mention it to you when I came to Rosmadel?”

“Never,” said the priest, suddenly seeing himself as he was in those days, a little barefooted boy going birdsnesting with a young prince in velvet whom he had the right to call brother. “Had you done so I should not have forgotten it.”

“I do not believe that I ever gave it a thought after I came to man’s estate,” went on the Marquis musingly. “It must have gone back to the region of fairy stories. And this old lady—what was her name?—you did not mention it, I think.”

“Purposely so,” replied the Abbé, dropping into a chair beside him. “Her name was Magny, Mlle Magny. She was for years, she said, tiring-woman to Mme la Duchesse Douairière.”

His hearer clasped his hands over his eyes. “I remember the name,” he said after a moment. “I recall her too, I think. She must be well advanced in years now.”

“She was yesterday,” agreed the priest. “To-day—who knows?”

The Marquis looked up. “She is dead then? I did not gather that.”

“She died while I was with her.” They both fell silent, M. de Kersaint fingering the parchment—gone back also, thought the priest, to a distant wedding-day.

“Gaston, give me your hand!” he said suddenly, stretching out his own. “No, not that one, the other.” And when the Marquis in surprise had complied, the Abbé, holding the so dissimilar fingers in his own, tapped with a forefinger on the signet ring that one of them bore, and said, “Are you wise to wear that?”

M. de Kersaint looked down at the crest cut in the emerald. “I have always worn it—without reflecting, I suppose—when I gave up everything else. One is inconsistent, no doubt. I never use it, of course.”

“But anybody—anybody interested—can make out what the device is, though oddly enough it never struck me till last night when your hand was on the table and the candlelight fell on it.”

“It means nothing to him probably.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said the priest, releasing the hand.

The Marquis slipped off the ring. “Very well. I will give up wearing it then.—Though, indeed, I might use it to support my claim of being akin . . . not that I am likely to wish to do that again!”

“Your kinship is by marriage, remember. You would never use the same arms. And, Gaston, having once declared yourself a kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s you will have to keep it up, in order to get at the money.”

The Marquis, putting the ring in his pocket, frowned at this obvious truth.

“I suppose I shall. Let us think about this business then, before de Brencourt comes back, as he may do any moment. Now, am I to take on myself to give permission for the further rifling of my ‘kinsman’s’ property, or shall I go through the farce of writing him a letter?”

“If you do that, a certain time must be allowed to elapse before you could . . . receive a reply.”

“Precisely,” said the Marquis de Kersaint. In spite of everything a gleam of rather grim amusement flitted over his face. “And I need not point out to you that the money would be like manna from heaven at this moment. So large a sum, absolutely at one’s own disposal—why, one might organise and arm Finistère almost as well as Cadoudal is arming the Morbihan. There is no time to lose, for, as it is, when we get possession of the treasure—if we ever do—it will be useless in its present state—coin of the time of Louis XIII. and Henri IV. It would have to go to England. Bertin would see to that, of course.”

The Abbé nodded. “But Bertin is not the man to get it out of Mirabel. What staff, if any, do you suppose the Directory maintains in the place?”

Mirabel’s owner shook his head. “I have no idea. I only know that it is a museum, which implies a guardian of some sort. I had rather for our purposes that it was empty and falling into ruins. Make a note, Pierre, to write to Bertin or someone to find out the dispositions there.”

The Abbé nodded again. “I imagine, then, that you will not write the letter to M. de Trélan—you will take the responsibility on your own shoulders, as you hinted at doing last night.”

“Yes,” said M. de Kersaint, leaning back in his chair. “And I shall probably go to Mirabel myself.”

The priest jumped. “Gaston, that would be madness!”

“Why?”

“Why? You know that as well as I. It is a great risk for anyone to run, and for a general himself to incur a hazard which he should assign to a subordinate is not only folly, but culpable folly. What would happen to all the plans for Finistère if you got laid by the heels? And think of the self-betrayal! Could you wonder if those quick-witted young men of yours, if M. de Brencourt, if all who got to know of it asked themselves why you did such an extraordinary thing as to go on this quest in person?”

M. de Kersaint looked at him musingly. “You have a terrible habit of being in the right, mon frère. I believe you want to go yourself!”

“Well, I think I should not do amiss, though I do not know Mirabel.”

“I wonder if you know what a good opinion of yourself you have!” said the Marquis, smiling. “No—though I dislike sending him there—I think that de Brencourt is the man to go.”

“Has he ever been there, do you think?” asked the priest, hesitating a little.

The Marquis looked away. “No, I should doubt it,” he said after a moment. “I shall have to ask him, I suppose. But here is my ancestor’s plan, and naturally I can give him all necessary details.”

“You must be careful how you do that—remember that you are only a distant kinsman.”

“I am not likely to forget it,” retorted the Marquis. “I would far rather not, but I think I must send the Comte. He is the man I should naturally have sent.”

“Roland de Céligny was dying to go, was he not?”

“Harebrained boy, yes! But I told him and La Vergne that I would have none of it. It is no work for children. He will be safely out of the way with his grandfather till I send for him again—though to be sure I should have preferred to keep him with me.”

“I hope his grandfather will be grateful to you for your self-denial.”

“Highly improbable, I should think,” observed the Marquis sardonically. “I can do no good thing in that quarter.”

“I can understand that it is not work for Roland,” pursued the priest meditatively, “but, as far as risk goes, he ran enough of that with us at la Croix-Fendue the day before yesterday.”

“Of a soldier’s death, perhaps, but not of any other. Not that again, please God!” A look of bitter regret passed over his face. “O Pierre,” he said in a low voice, “if only that boy had been born . . . at Mirabel!”

“Yes, yes!” assented the priest sadly. Things might indeed have been otherwise if Mirabel had not in its last days been a childless house.

“When I see his grandfather again——” the Marquis was beginning—and was cut short by the sound of steps on the stairs. In an instant he was the man who had entered the attic yesterday evening, not the man who for the last three-quarters of an hour had been talking without reserve to his only intimate.

“De Brencourt—and Georges,” he said, and rising, stood waiting to receive the most notable of all the Royalist leaders, and that a peasant. In another moment the latter stood on the threshold, a massive Breton of about thirty, bull-necked, wide-shouldered, with short and very closely curling reddish hair.

The Marquis went forward and held out his hand. “Monsieur Cadoudal, I am honoured to meet the bravest of the brave.”

The Chouan’s great grip engulfed the strong, slender fingers. “And I in my turn,” he said, with a natural dignity, “salute the hero of Rivoli. You bear a Breton name, Monsieur le Marquis.”

“I have—or had—property in Brittany,” replied M. de Kersaint, hesitating for a moment, “but I am not a Breton.”

Georges Cadoudal was Breton—to the backbone—and in the discussion which followed Pierre Chassin had leisure to realise the force and unswervingness of his countryman’s personality, his warlike and (on a small scale) his administrative genius, and his justness of political outlook. For he knew perfectly well that as long ago as last summer, when Cadoudal had come back from his refuge in England to reorganise the Morbihan, he had urged the Bourbons to immediate action, pointing out that Hoche was no more, Bonaparte shut up (as he still was) with his best troops in Egypt, and the Republican armies being drawn off to the frontiers to face other foes. It was the hour to seize. But the advisers of the King and of his brother the Comte d’Artois, who was more particularly concerned with the affairs of the west, were, as usual, swayed by the evil genius which always seemed to haunt their counsels, and did nothing. Against that ineptitude Cadoudal, like all the Royalist leaders, past and present, had continually to struggle—as if there were not enough difficulties and more than enough dangers, without instructions from overseas that were always either futile or too late. If only, thought the Abbé, they do not trip Gaston’s feet in the future . . . He watched him now, listening to Cadoudal’s explanation of his system of “legions” in the Morbihan and in Loire-Inférieure, and how he had brought it about.

“But Finistère, Monsieur le Marquis,” finished the Breton, looking at the keen patrician face opposite him, “will be a much more difficult matter, because it is almost fresh ground. And you will find there many fewer arms stored away than is the case in my command, where we have been fighting on and off for six years.”

“I know it,” returned Finistère’s destined leader gravely. “I know I have a very hard task before me. But I have just received good news, Monsieur Cadoudal. I may be able to supply a good proportion of the necessary arms myself. There is something equivalent to 12,000 louis awaiting me in a kinsman’s château if I can secure it. As to organisation, here is my scheme, if you will be good enough to glance at it. Though I can never look to have a force like yours, I should hope in the event of hostilities to be able to support your rear—though indeed that would by no means counterbalance the immense benefit to me of having you as a bulwark in front of me. Against the tide of attack we of Finistère should at best be only a few pebbles—behind a rock.”

“At any rate, Monsieur le Marquis,” said ‘Georges,’ gazing at him hard out of his deepset eyes, “I can tell, without even looking at your scheme, that I should not have sand behind me!”

An hour later Cadoudal, escorted by M. de Brencourt, having departed as secretly as he had come, M. de Kersaint stood collecting the papers strewn on the table. “I should have been happy to serve under that man, instead of being his colleague,” he said musingly. Then he went and looked out through the attic window at the remains of the mediaeval fortifications of Hennebont, with their memories of the indomitable spirit which had once defended them, housing in the breast of the Comtesse Jeanne de Montfort.

“Pierre,” he said suddenly, “before we leave I have a fancy that I should like to see the giver of this strange and belated wedding gift of mine. Would it be possible, think you?”

“I do not suppose the niece would object, if you give me leave to concoct some reason for the request,” replied the Abbé.

The Marquis gave a sort of smile. “You can say what you like. I am afraid you must be getting inured to deception on my behalf. At any rate I cannot betray myself to Mlle Magny now.”

No, one cannot betray oneself to the dead. And yet, who knows? . . . Perhaps the old lady’s spirit, still hovering round the habitation it had so recently quitted, could realise and be glad that her offering had thus quickly found its goal. But candles burnt now at the head and feet of that empty dwelling, and the face looked austere, and remote from those old desires and admirations. M. de Kersaint took the holy-water sprinkler which the priest handed to him, and shook a few drops on the dead servitress of his house.

“Yes, I remember her,” he said in a low voice. “My mother always thought so highly of her . . . I wish now that I had seen her alive, for I should like to have thanked her for this great gift of hers, with its possibilities for France. Could she have chosen a better time to make it?”

He stooped over the bed, and, reverently lifting one of the old hands folded over the crucifix, put a kiss on its icy, shrivelled surface, while the priest gazed at him, full of sorrowful thoughts. Eight-and-twenty years ago, when those closed eyes had looked on him in his springtime, what might he not have become? Lucien, who had been struck by it, had told him how M. de Kersaint had objected to last night’s use of the Tu Marcellus eris, and the sad and lovely lines rushed into the priest’s mind anew. Yes, more poignant than the lament for youth cut off and blighted promise, was that for youth spent to no end and promise wasted. Tu Marcellus eris! At twenty-three he might have been . . . at fifty-one? . . .

For what the man who stood there with him by the dead had since done to redeem the light and sterile past he could not claim in his own name, and she—the bride of Mlle Magny’s memories—to whom this late justification of her faith in him would have been life’s supremest happiness, was no longer on earth to see it.

Truly, as the great Latin knew, there was a bitter sense of tears in human things.

BOOK II

MIRABEL

“And so, cold, courteous, a mere gentleman,

He bowed, we parted.

Parted. Face no more,

Voice no more, love no more! wiped wholly out

Like some ill scholar’s scrawl from heart and slate,—

Aye, spit on and so wiped out utterly

By some coarse scholar! I have been too coarse,

Too human. Have we business, in our rank,

With blood i’ the veins? I will have henceforth none;

Not even to keep the colour at my lip.”

Aurora Leigh.

CHAPTER I

M. THIBAULT IN CONVERSATION

In spite of the bare six miles which separated it from Paris in spite of its position only a little off the high-road there-from to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a great peace reigned this afternoon over the hamlet of Mirabel-le-Château, those few dwellings which had grown up, for its convenience or by its favour, round the vast oblong mass of the Renaissance palace from which they took their name. It was the light, warm peace of early April sunshine, of occasionally rising April dust, and of trees all brightly and freshly arrayed, but, whatever its ingredients, it was a tranquillity entirely unappreciated by the one human being in sight of Mirabel, the sentry in his box outside that deserted palace. He was so bored with being sentry there!

Years ago, in the bad old days, as he was accustomed to regard them, if he had been in Mirabel-le-Château at all—which was improbable, for he was a Parisian—the village would not have been so deathly quiet, for, vassal though it were of the great house which it was now his untoward lot to guard, it beat at least with the life radiating to it from that centre and reason of its being. But if all the remaining inhabitants of Mirabel-le-Château could boast, in theory, of a glorious liberty, of bowing the knee no more to M. le Duc de Trélan, nor even to the King of France—but only to France’s five kinglets, the Directors, to the military authorities who bled them by incessant conscription, and, in a measure, to that member of the Conseil des Anciens who had charge of the château, Georges Camain—they certainly could not congratulate themselves on the possession of overmuch gaiety or even of bread. In those same bad old days the tyrannical owners of Mirabel had given them work, or bread, or both; no one to-day gave them either, for there was none to give. Besides, there were not now many inhabitants left in the hamlet to receive. The village boys who, as boys will, had cheered on the Paris mob which sacked Mirabel in the summer of 1792 lay, many of them, as quiet as the bodies round which they had unthinkingly danced—corpses themselves in the blood-stained soil of Flanders or Switzerland or Italy or Syria. Those who lived were far away. In Mirabel-le-Château now only the old and the women remained.

Certainly, in the bad old days, Mirabel-le-Château had been a more cheerful and a more populous village; but then it had not been free. Certainly, in that time of oppression, such of its inhabitants as were so minded could flock on Sundays at the sound of the bell to the little church and hear the white-haired curé say Mass and admonish them—two proceedings which some of them found, strangely enough, to be of assistance in their daily lives. Now that old man was slowly dying, a deportee in the swamps of Cayenne, there was no one to say Mass, and even the bell, the symbol of a cult, might on no account be rung. Yet every tenth day these freed citizens were all but hounded into the bare and desecrated church to hear a discourse on patriotism or the social virtues. But were they not delivered from “the imbecile liturgy of the priesthood” and all the superstitions of Catholicism? Was not Sunday replaced by the more enlightened if penetratingly dull Décadi? And whereas, in the bad old days, the master of Mirabel had all but owned them, now, on the contrary they, or at least the French nation, claimed to own Mirabel. It was true that singularly little benefit had accrued to them from the change.

And thus the village of Mirabel-le-Château was less than half animate, and the sentry from the guard-house opposite the Temple of Reason (formerly the church) had to bear his dreadful affliction of ennui unsolaced. Only a wooden barrier and some acres of gravel separated him from the château behind him, for the great wrought iron gates, of the finest Italian workmanship, had been destroyed when the present proprietors entered so tempestuously on their new acquisition seven years ago. These gates had been very economically replaced, all the time that the deceased Convention was in power, by a cord bearing a knot of tricolour ribbon and the legend, “Défense d’entrer,” written on a card in violet ink that had run and paled with the rain. But now, under the Directory, a neat wooden barrier spanned the wide space between the stone gateposts with their mutilated shields and lions, a barrier bearing a painted notice which, headed “Ci-devant château de Mirabel, Bien National,” went on to state that since the Government intended eventually to turn the château into a museum of art treasures, citizens were already at liberty to visit it twice in the “décade,” on payment of a fee. Practically nothing, as yet, had really been done towards the formation of the proposed museum, and if the Directory, always pressed for money, depended for this consummation on the payments of visitors it could have amassed very little towards that object. Meanwhile it had locked up such of the rooms as had not been entirely stripped of pictures and furniture, installed a female concierge with power to summon relays of femmes de journée to her aid, and kept what seemed to be a rather unnecessary sentry till nightfall at the entrance.

And this sentry, fixed bayonet and all, lounged to-day in his box as though he had never known the meaning of drill, as though he were not a National Guard from what had been one of the most turbulent sections of Paris. He sighed as he sat there, his musket between his knees, he fidgeted with his white cross-belts, he drummed with his heels; a member of a free people felt himself very much in bondage this afternoon. He would not be relieved till another hour and a quarter had dragged by. For a few minutes’ conversation with some human being of whatever station, sex, or age, he would have given almost anything that he could think of. But the village, round the corner to his right, seemed uninhabited as well as invisible; even the cabaret on his other hand, between him and the high-road at right angles some half-mile away, might as well have been shut, for all the company it was receiving or emitting. Though he could not betake himself thither, sheer boredom was making the Citizen Grégoire Thibault altruistic. To see anybody go in, even. . . . And it was in looking dejectedly along the poplar-bordered road to the Café du Musée that he became aware of a cloud of dust settling down in the distance.

A little interest sprang into his veiled eye; he leant forward out of his box and spat upon the ground with a return of vigour. That dust must betoken the passing of the diligence from Paris to Saint-Germain. Now, had it set down any one for Mirabel-le-Château? Very improbable; but if it had the traveller would be obliged to pass him to get to the hamlet. . . . There was nobody, of course, and, as to talk, only the conversation of the poplars with the breeze. “Oh, sacré métier!” groaned the Citizen Grégoire, and took out his pipe as a last resource. There was no one to report him to the sergeant.

He pushed down the coarse tobacco by means of a handsome gold and bloodstone seal with a coat of arms, loot from the great pillage, which he had bought last year for ten sous on the Quai de la Mégisserie, began to feel for his tinderbox, and stopped. The diligence had set down a passenger after all!

Down the sunlit road under the poplars was advancing the figure of a woman, carrying a little covered basket in her hand. By her gait she was young. So much the better. Thibault rose to his feet; it seemed too good to be true.

It must be conceded that, as the godsend came nearer, he suffered a measure of disappointment. The woman was not young—but neither was she old. She was walking rather slowly, with her eyes on the ground, but when she was quite near she lifted them and looked at him, and M. Thibault perceived that she was about to stop of her own accord.

“Good-day, la femme!”

“Good-day, citizen sentry,” she returned. “This is the only entrance to the château, is it not?”

Her voice was very sweet—though indeed any voice would have fallen like music on the ears of Grégoire just then. The eyes which she raised to him were noticeably well-set; under her decent black bonnet he saw fair hair turning grey. She was tall and generously made; he took her to be about forty-five. Then her little covered basket and her air of having business there suddenly recalled to him a fact he had totally forgotten.

“Name of a pipe!” exclaimed he, slapping his musket. “Is it possible, citoyenne, that you are the new concierge?”

The woman nodded. “Yes, citizen sentry. I was instructed to come this afternoon. My baggage, a small trunk, should have arrived already.”

“I don’t believe it has,” said M. Grégoire Thibault musingly, and he rubbed a rather bristly chin. “If I had seen anything of it, I shouldn’t have forgotten that you were coming. But perhaps it arrived this morning before I was on duty.” He appeared to be ruminating on this possibility, but in reality he was thinking to himself, “She has been a fine woman, that, once!” Aloud, he said, “I knew, of course, that Mère Prévost was giving up her job, but I had forgotten that she was to leave to-day. Her man has come back from the wars, I believe, short of an arm. And so you are the new caretaker, citoyenne?”

He took another look at her. “Le diable m’emporte,” he thought this time, “if she is not a fine woman still!”

Resting his musket against the sentry-box he went slowly, fishing out a key, to the movable portion of the barrier. But having got there, instead of unfastening the padlock he turned round again, leaning against the bar.

“I’m sure I hope you’ll like this business, citoyenne,” he began conversationally. “Pretty dreary, I take it, living alone in that great house there, full of nothing but memories of the time of the Tyrant, and of the bloodshed the day the people took it. If one believed in ghosts, now——”

“You don’t believe in them, evidently, Citizen?”

“I hope I am a better patriot,” responded the National Guard with dignity. “Ghosts, the so-called saints, prayers for the dead, the Republic has done away with all that nonsense.”

“Yes, there has been a good deal done away with these last ten years.” The tone of this remark a little puzzled Grégoire, but he continued nevertheless, “Still, I must confess that Décadi doesn’t often see me at the Temple, unless there’s a wedding. It’s just a little wearisome. . . . But my wife in Paris goes to the Temple of Genius regularly—the late edifice Roch, as you know—and says she likes it, especially since they have instituted recitations by the children, and our youngest took a prize. But what were we speaking of?—ah, the château. Well, if I were not a good patriot, and disbelieved in saints and angels and all that rubbish, I might be tempted to think that the ci-devant Duchesse walked there o’ nights without her head, or maybe with it, looking in her silks and satins as she did before they stuck it on a pike, for I have heard that she was a famous beauty.”

“Yes, I have heard that,” said the newcomer with a shade of impatience. “But I have also heard that it is incorrect,” she added.

“Well, beauty or not, it was all the same to her, poor wretch, when she came out of La Force that day,” observed Grégoire, comfortably leaning back on his elbows on the barrier. And having thus dismissed the subject he went on, “The ci-devant Duc now,—supposed to be alive, he is. So you won’t meet him walking there. Instead of Monseigneur we have M. le Député Camain; he often comes, and sometimes the Citoyenne Dufour, who used to be at the Opera, with him. She acts at the Ambigu-Comique now. They say he’s going to marry her. Curious world, isn’t it, Citoyenne? Think, if the Duc and Duchesse could see Mirabel now!” He laughed.

The new caretaker drew her shawl round her as if the April breeze caught her. “I think I had better——” she began, making a fresh move towards the barrier. And then she said abruptly, “You spoke just now of the Duc. Has anything been heard—here in Mirabel-le-Château, I mean—about him?”

M. Grégoire shook a waggish finger at her. “No, no, nothing more is known about him. And take care, citoyenne concierge!” he added grinning. “It doesn’t do, since Fructidor, to be too much interested in aristocrats as high up as that, especially when they are still émigrés. But I believe from what I have heard, that Monseigneur le Duc could turn any woman’s head. I don’t suppose, however, that you ever saw him, did you?”

“I am from the provinces,” was the new concierge’s reply. “I only came to Paris after the tenth of August.”

“Ah, you missed something!” said the National Guard regretfully. “I wasn’t at the storming of the Tuileries, but I saw the place afterwards. And this nest of ci-devants, as I daresay you’ve heard, was rushed two days later, by patriots from Paris. Not so much fighting, of course, as in the Place du Carrousel, since there were no troops here, but they barricaded the place as well as they could, and the Duchesse’s maître d’hôtel was killed outside her boudoir, and two or three servants on the stairs and so on. Then the house was pretty well looted; I’ve heard the citizen Camain regret that.”

The concierge looked away from him at the great façade. “And how was it that the Duc escaped?” she asked.

“How did he escape! He did not need to escape!” retorted the sentry. “He wasn’t there. He had emigrated long before that. That’s what saved him.”

“But he could not know, long before, what was going to happen in 1792,” said the woman, almost as if she were defending M. de Trélan.

“Maybe not,” returned the National Guard indifferently. “All I know is that he wasn’t here. But she was—the ci-devant Duchesse—and that was the end of her, after a few days of La Force. Myself, I don’t approve of murdering prisoners, especially those of the sex, though the woman Lamballe, being such a friend of the female Capet—as we used to call her before Thermidor—doubtless deserved what she got. But as for this Duchesse, I have heard that she was always kind to the poor, here and elsewhere. But what would you have? Mistakes happen.”

“Yes,” agreed the concierge, looking at him. “But, no doubt, she is well out of this world. It is not too merry a one, Citizen, even, perhaps, for a Duchesse.”

M. Thibault, who was in reality a sympathetic soul, and by no means the blood-boltered patriot he liked to paint himself at times, said to this, “You have known trouble, Citoyenne?”

“I have known what it is to lose my husband, my home, and every penny I had. But I am not faint-hearted; do not think that! One goes on to the end, does one not, citizen sentry—till the relief?”

“Sacré tonnerre, yes!” asseverated the citizen sentry, struck. “I see you are a good-plucked one, Madame. Well, I shall like to think of you behind me in the château there, and if ever there’s anything you want doing for you, I’m your man. Grégoire Thibault is my name.”

The new concierge thanked him with a smile which caused a sensible warmth to flow over the Citizen Grégoire, and made him regret still more that he could not decently keep her waiting any longer. He fitted the key slowly into the lock, saying, “You’ve got your warrant with you, I suppose, Madame?”

The woman held it out at once—an official document duly stamped and sealed, appointing the widow Vidal, sempstress, of the Rue de Seine, concierge of the ci-devant château of Mirabel, in room of the woman Prévost, resigning that charge. The document was signed by the Deputy Camain, the administrator of Mirabel, and countersigned by one of the five Directors, Larevellière-Lépeaux.

“ ‘Vidal,’ ” murmured the sentry, studying it. “Parfaitement.” He returned the paper and at last unfastened the barrier. “Do you see those two bits of balustrading, Madame Vidal, on either hand of the great steps? When you get there you will find that there is a stairway the other side of them, going down to the basement storey. The left-hand one has ‘Concierge’ on it. You go down there. Mme Prévost will probably be on the look-out for you. Good-luck to you, Citoyenne!”

She bent her head again with that smile which had charmed him.

“Thank you, Citizen. I think I shall find my way. . . . Ah, there is one thing I forgot. I have lived in Paris for some years with my niece Mme Tessier, and it is probable that she may come to see me soon—that she will come regularly, in fact. She will have a pass from M. Camain himself. I suppose therefore that there will be no difficulty?”

“No, that will be all right. No need to bother about that,” replied M. Thibault heartily.

And Mme Vidal passed through the barrier. As she did so she not unnaturally glanced up at the broken stone lion on one of the gateposts which still held between its paws the defaced shield of the Ducs de Trélan. The man, who saw the movement, made a gesture of half-tolerant contempt.

“Those watchdogs won’t bark at you now—nor at any one!” he remarked. But Mme Vidal seemed not to have heard him; nor did he, on his side, observe that she had caught her underlip between her teeth like one in sudden pain. Then she began to walk steadily towards the great house.

CHAPTER II

LE PALAIS DE FAIENCE

A trifle of agitation might easily have been excused in any prospective caretaker confronted for the first time by the château of Mirabel. Since there was, on this side of it, no half-concealing avenue, nor, indeed, trees of any kind whatever, but only the prone skeletons of what had been a series of formal gardens, the whole towering extent of the façade broke in one oppressive moment upon eye and brain. And that, no doubt, was why Mme Vidal, walking at first with fair speed towards it over the wide gravel approach, suddenly came to a standstill, and, gripping tightly the handle of her basket, stood like a statue, gazing, across its forlorn parterres, at the overpowering bulk of her new home.

Forty-two years had gone to the making of Mirabel. Begun in 1528 for François I., at the same time as that other palace of Fontainebleau, it had risen under the eyes of successive Royal architects, de l’Orme and Primaticcio, till it became the great château reckoned, in that day of the French Renaissance, so wonderful a novelty—a residence not built round courtyards one or many, but constructed in a solid mass, a parallelogram of great length and height, whereof the north side exactly reproduced the south and the east the west. And Girolamo della Robbia, brought from Italy, had ornamented it in every part with details of many-coloured majolica.

So it stood, this great pile, before the eyes of Mme Vidal—its five-storeyed façade cut, as it were, into three portions by the two square-faced towers which ran up it, and which were repeated, something larger and more aspiring, at the corners. Along both of the two lower storeys, making a sort of colonnade or loggia in front of the tall windows, went richly decorated arcading, fifteen bays of it, lofty and round-arched. Interrupted by similar towers at intervals the colonnading ran, in fact, round the entire building. But the five bays of the central portion were more deeply recessed than the others, for at their pillar bases stretched, from tower to tower, twelve immensely long, wide and shallow steps. Save for the absence of these steps and of the great entrance door to which they led—and for a difference, also, in the frieze over the arches—the second storey exactly reproduced the first. But the third and fourth gained a measure of variety from the absence of the colonnading; though on the third there was still an uncovered terrace or balcony. Here too the windows, no longer so lofty, showed differing schemes of ornamentation, the frames of the lower row being supported by a sort of winged design, the upper accompanied by flat columns.

Yet, despite these devices to break monotony, it was with relief that the eye, travelling upwards over this regular assemblage of colonnades and windows, came at last to the high-pitched roofs, with their agreeably different levels, their dormer windows, and their tall, ornate chimney-stacks. The roof of the midmost portion of the château, between the two central towers, was the lowest; yet even this, after putting forth two great decorated chimneys, suddenly soared up at each end into a peak higher even than those of the towers. And on either hand of it sprang the great pointed pavilion-roofs of the side wings, much higher again, and blossoming, they also, into the most intricately ornamented chimneys and dormer windows.

And everywhere there was this astounding many-hued, glazed and highly-modelled decoration, lavished in frieze and medallion from the richly diapered soffits of the arcading on the ground floor to the very crests of the roofs themselves. It was true that it did not glitter so brightly in the sun of 1799 as in that of 1570, that more than two centuries of exposure to northern weather had dimmed—not perhaps to its disadvantage—something of the Italian’s lustre and colouring, and that the far more destructive human agencies of the last seven years had obliterated some of his ornaments altogether, yet Mirabel still was a “palais de faïence,” still supported the enthusiastic testimony of a Renaissance contemporary that its mass was “fort éclattante à la veue.” And even if the decoration were too exuberant, even if the whole building were imposing rather from sheer size than from any other architectural virtue, it was undeniably a great house, with a majesty and a history of its own, a house that bore out the proud motto of its vanished owners, Memini et permaneo—‘I remember and I remain.’

Such was the château of Mirabel, built for the first King of the Valois-Angouléme branch, whose salamander still in places adorned it, and given by the last to his favourite, César de Saint-Chamans, Marquis de Trélan. Up and down those great steps, in the last two hundred years, had gone many a prince and warrior and statesman and courtier, many a great lady and fair. Mirabel with its colonnades and majolica had known much revelry, much wit, much evil; some good deeds, no little patronage of art and letters, now and then a liberal charity; once or twice, in brides of the line, some approach to saintliness. And it had sheltered always a brilliant courage, a brilliant egoism, an astoundingly tenacious self-will, and a pride as great as the Rohans’. For these last qualities it had been no unfit setting.

Now it was . . . as it was; and a poor semptress from Paris, whom the warrant of that little hunchbacked, cross-grained Angevin attorney, the Director Larevellière-Lépeaux, had appointed its only tenant, stood in front of the blind, shuttered mass and gazed at it. The sun might strike on the majolica, but how eyeless looked those great lofty windows of the lower storeys, through that empty colonnading where no one ever now walked or talked! The glass was gone from some of them. Everything was dead, ruined, deserted—a pulseless body. Only, over the level central roof, against the clear sky of afternoon, voyaged with light heart a feather of an April cloud, and the April breeze shook cheerfully the few self-sown flowers that flaunted haphazard in what was the mere chart of the formal gardens. But Mme Vidal’s eyes were on the house, and the house only.

Presently a lively discussion of sparrows took place near her on the gravel. The angry cheeping appeared to rouse her, and she began to go on again towards the château, while the victor of the affray, hopping to the basin of a sunken fountain, drank delicately of that water with which the spring rains, and they alone, had filled it.

Very soon the new concierge was close enough to the house to distinguish plainly the winged beasts, like dragon-headed horses, that went in couples, face to face, all along the frieze running above the colonnading of the ground floor, and the medallions of classical heads that filled the spandrils below the frieze, and the Doric entablature of the next storey. Walking now like an automaton, she came nearer and nearer, and stood at last at the foot of the great steps, and, looking up, saw, over the blotched and discoloured marble, through which the grass was pushing triumphant fingers, how the great door, visible now through the richly diapered archway, was roughly mended and yet more roughly boarded up. It still wore the scars of that August day seven years ago when, for the first time in all its proud history, it had been opened to a will that was neither its master’s nor the King’s. At it, too, the concierge stood a moment or two gazing, then, as she had been directed, she turned to her left hand, and began to descend the steps which led from the ground level at the foot of the tower towards the basement offices. These steps, at the base of either tower, were invisible till one was close to the house, since they were screened by a line of stone balustrading, but, as the sentry had said, a board with a legend and a downward-pointing hand directed the feet of the visitor to this subterranean entrance. Mirabel had been greatly admired once for the possession of this very thing.

Just as Mme Vidal got to the bottom of the steps the door at right angles to them opened, and revealed the outgoing caretaker, a dry, thin-lipped woman dressed in rusty black, with a fairhaired child of three or four clinging to her skirts.

“I hope, Madame,” said her successor apologetically, “that I have not inconvenienced you? I fear I am a little late; the diligence was not punctual.”

“You’re not later than I expected,” replied Mme Prévost unemotionally. “I saw Thibault chattering to you at the gate; I know what he is, so I don’t blame you. From the way his tongue goes, it’s a pity he’s not a woman.”

Without more ado she led the way in, the child’s hand in hers, and Mme Vidal followed her along a short passage into a smallish living-room, clean, bare, and distinctly stuffy with an accumulated rather than a recent smell of cooking. Facing the door, high up, were two tall windows, which came just down to the level of the ground outside, itself, naturally, higher than that of the floor. They gave sufficient light, but it was not very easy to see out of them, for they were heavily barred. In the middle of the room, covered with a nightmare of a cloth, stood a round table. On the left hand was the stove, with a few shelves and appurtenances; on the right a press, two chairs and another door.

“Here is the bedroom,” said Mme Prévost, opening this door, and affording a hasty glimpse of a still smaller room, where the chief object to be seen was a short, wide, wooden bed, covered with a patchwork quilt of various shades, and situated in a recess.

“You’ll find these rooms quite comfortable,” said the woman. “The Government provides all necessaries, down to pots and pans, as I expect you’ve been told, so you’ll have what you want for cooking. And I will come again in the morning to show you round the château; I can tell you your duties then. I have left you enough provisions for your supper and breakfast, in case you did not think to bring anything with you. There is a small trunk of yours arrived, however; I put it in the bedroom. I suppose you know that people come to see the place occasionally, though a good portion of it is shut up? There’s keys—a mort of keys. Look, Madame!” She unfastened a small door in the wall, and showed them reposing in a sort of cupboard.

“It will take me time to learn all those,” said Mme Vidal, resting her hand on the table. She had a look, suddenly come upon her, of great fatigue.

“Oh, they are all labelled,” returned Mme Prévost complacently. “Well, I’ll come and show you in the morning, about nine. Yes, ma petite”—for the child was tugging at her skirts—“we are going to see Papa. She hardly knows what the word means; born in Germinal of the year IV, she was, and he away in Germany with General Moreau. . . . I hope you will find everything you want, Madame. I can assure you it’s all clean and as it should be.”

“I am sure it is,” answered Mme Vidal. “But may I not pay you this evening for the provisions you have been kind enough to leave me?”

“Very well, Madame, if you wish,” replied the other, who was gathering together some small possessions. “There’s the bread and the coffee, and a couple of eggs—not so easy to come by in these hard days. The milk-woman comes at half-past six in the morning.” Reflecting a moment she named a sum, and Mme Vidal, pulling out a shabby purse, paid it with reiterated thanks.

“But I see that you have left me some wood too,” she added. “Do I not owe you for that also?”

“No, no,” said Mme Prévost, waving away the proposal. “There’s never any lack of wood here, and the Government lets the concierge have it free. It would be hard indeed if they were stingy with it, considering that it costs them nothing, as it is all off the estate. This lot is particularly good, you’ll find; it comes from the pine avenue, I fancy.”

Mme Vidal took a step backwards. “They are not cutting down the pine avenue, surely?” she exclaimed in a sharp, sudden voice.

A great astonishment dawned in the meagre visage before her. “Why, do you know Mirabel already!” she asked. “I thought—the Citizen Deputy said you came from the provinces.”

“So I did—so I do,” stammered the new concierge. “But even in the provinces . . . one had heard of the pine avenue at Mirabel. My late husband had seen it in his youth.”

“I see,” said Mme Prévost slowly. “Well, I will leave you to settle in, Madame, for you look tired. I’ll come in the morning about nine then. The stairway up to the ground floor is a little to the left out there; not that you will need to go up before I come. The key of the door I let you in at is in the lock; everybody, visitors and all, comes by that door, and you are not responsible for any other; in fact the rest are nearly all barred up. You had better lock that door behind me now. Come along, Mariette.”

Almost in silence Mme Vidal went with her into the passage, and when Mme Prévost and the child had passed through, and she had responded with a pale smile to the outgoing concierge’s “A demain, Madame!” she turned the key and pushed the bolt. Then she went back to the living-room, and locked that door behind her also.

Back in Mirabel! back in Mirabel! Was it possible? Back in Mirabel—though, to be sure, in a region of it that she had never even seen before. Some of the swarm of servants had lived here in old times. Had she betrayed herself about the avenue? How foolish, after all these years of self-repression! She looked slowly round. Yes, this odd couple of rooms was no doubt some lesser steward’s in the past. But, if unfamiliar, it was at least situated within the shell of what had been, what still was, Mirabel—Mirabel the loved, Mirabel the hated, Mirabel the enchanted palace, Mirabel the purgatory. . . .

She went suddenly to the cupboard in the wall, and putting in her hand drew out the keys. Yes, she was once more, in a sense—but in what a sense—the châtelaine of Mirabel.

And, flinging them back clashing into their seclusion, she sat down at the table, buried her face in her hands and began to laugh. There was never a laugh more mirthless, yet the situation had its humours. At her, indeed, the “watchdogs” on the disfigured gateposts, as the sentry had termed them, would never even have growled. The new concierge of Mirabel’s fallen estate had once been the mistress of Mirabel’s magnificence, for Mme Vidal the caretaker was Valentine de Saint-Chamans, was the Duchesse de Trélan in person.

CHAPTER III

NINE YEARS—AND BEYOND

(1)

The general belief that the Duchesse de Trélan, thrown into prison when Mirabel was sacked, had shared the terrible fate of the Princesse de Lamballe, though it was unfounded, had a large amount of probability to justify it. Valentine de Saint-Chamans had come very near to being cut down by the weapons of the killers in that shambles of a street outside La Force on the 3rd of September, 1792—so near it indeed that her entire disappearance from that hour was assigned to that cause and to no other.

But she had been saved on the very brink by a man almost unknown to her, acting under a stimulus not commonly as powerful in this world as it might be—gratitude.

Years and years before the Duchesse de Trélan had discovered in Paris, precariously situated, a former steward of Mirabel, had pensioned him from her own purse, and had continued the pension after his death to his granddaughter, Suzon. Suzon in due time wedded one Alcibiade Tessier, a young watchmaker with ideas—the Duchesse, who was fond of her for her own sake, contributing her dowry. After that Valentine lost sight of her protégée, and for some years before 1792 she had seen nothing of Mme Tessier, so that no one had less idea than she in what good stead her own past generosity was to stand her.

The first intimation of it was the sudden appearance, at one o’clock in the afternoon of that third of September, in the little courtyard of the prison of La Petite Force—where only an hour and a half earlier Mme de Trélan had seen and spoken to the Princesse de Lamballe, now gone to her doom—of a man whom she seemed to have seen before. This man approached her, looked her in the face, said with meaning, “Do not be afraid! I shall be there!” and walked rapidly away again. It was Alcibiade Tessier, now an important member of his “section,” and, as such, decorated with a badge of authority commanding respect, though meaningless to the Duchesse de Trélan.

Sure enough, when a little before three o’clock several men came to take her before that mock tribunal in the adjoining prison of La Force, he was at their head. Still Mme de Trélan had not recognised him, and thought his remark merely ferocious irony. But a measure of enlightenment as to his aim, at any rate, came when she found him confidently taking the words out of her mouth, and answering for her to those questions that she only half understood. It was he who at the end of that rapid interrogatory caught her arm and, raising it, said, “See, she cries ‘Vive la nation’ ”; it was he who, on the pronouncement of acquittal, went out in front of her through the door of death into the swimming Rue des Balais, he who, with some more under his orders, hurried her up the length of that swirling red gutter into the worse carnage of the Rue St. Antoine, and finally he who, when one of the male furies there, with dripping sabre, tried to get her to kneel on the hillock of corpses and shreds of corpses to swear fealty to the nation, pushed her by, covering her face with his hat, asseverating that she was not a friend of the Lamballe, and that she had already sworn.

But it was only when she sank down, half dead, in Alcibiade’s little shop in the Rue de Seine that the Duchesse de Trélan began fully to realise the harvest which she was reaping. In the Tessiers’ attic, where, more or less indisposed, she was hidden for a month, she knew it better still. For Suzon had quite decided that her benefactress was to instal herself there for the present, until she could safely get away, and she and Alcibiade so wrought upon Mme de Trélan that in mid-October she openly appeared as Suzon’s aunt from the provinces, arriving one evening, for the benefit of the neighbours, with a trunk—Suzon’s.

She was then able to attempt to communicate with her émigré husband, and wrote a very guarded letter addressed to his last direction in London. Suzon, who was anxious for her to join him, contrived to get it conveyed somehow across the Channel. Cautiously as (for the Tessiers’ sake) the letter was worded, it showed that Mme de Trélan was waiting for a lead to join the Duc in England. No answer came. The obvious explanation of the silence was that her letter had never reached him. That was quite to be expected. After Christmas she wrote again; fresh difficulties of conveyance, fresh uncertainties as to its arrival. And again no reply.

“The reason is,” Suzon would say, “that M. le Duc is coming himself to take you away. One of these days he will turn up in the Rue de Seine, you will see!”

But Valentine knew—indeed, hoped—that that was out of the question. In that early spring of 1793, after the King’s execution, how could a proscribed noble possibly get into Paris without incurring the most terrible risks? She was haunted sometimes by the thought that he had come, and had paid the penalty. That thought made her hesitate too about fleeing on her own account to England—always supposing such a course were possible without compromising the Tessiers—for her husband might meanwhile be searching for her in Paris, since she had not dared (again for their sakes) to give her address plainly. She would wait a little longer.

And then, in that April, the bloody thundercloud of the Terror broke over France. Ere the first spattering red drops had swelled to the stream which was to run so full Valentine found herself once more in prison—this time in a much obscurer place of detention than La Force. A piece of her underclothing, incautiously sent to be washed out of the house, was found to bear a compromising mark; the washerwoman denounced this widow from the provinces who had a coronet on her shift. The marvel was that the Tessiers themselves were not included in this catastrophe, but they put up such a good defence, Alcibiade’s character for patriotism stood so high, and Suzon affirmed so stoutly that the garment in question belonged to a ci-devant in the country whom her aunt had once served as maid, that in the end Valentine was imprisoned as a suspect merely. And as a suspect she remained in her mean captivity for more than a year, unrecognised—for there were none of her acquaintance there—and forgotten.

The Gironde fell, Marat was murdered, the Queen executed, Vendée defeated. The year 1793 closed; the next began; Hébert’s, then Danton’s head went the way of the rest, and at last the long suspense was ended, when on a May morning of 1794 the widow Vidal stood before Dumas and his assessors in their plumed hats, in that hall of so many anguishes in the Palais de Justice, to find acquittal on an unforeseen ground. There was no evidence against her; the zealous washerwoman was dead, and even Fouquier-Tinville himself, demanding his quota of heads a day, was intent on nobler quarry than this country widow. Her trial only lasted ten minutes. One was quickly lost or saved just then.

The fishwives on the other side of the barrier acclaimed the acquittal, little guessing whom they were applauding. Some of them insisted on accompanying the Duchesse home—to all the home she had. Henceforward she was more or less sacred. But never, now, while that orgy of blood and denunciation lasted, could her real identity be suffered to reveal itself, or the Tessiers would be lost indeed. Moreover, Mme de Trélan was herself beginning to be uncertain of it. And, though her position was improved by her official acquittal, the months of prison and privation had left their mark on her character in a kind of inertia and indifference very foreign to her nature. In common with many others in those days of superhuman strain, the love of life was running low in her. Existence was almost a burden. She was ill, indeed, for months. Then at last, in that stiflingly hot and cloudless Thermidor, the spell of terror was snapped, and the guillotine came back from its ceaseless work in the east of Paris to the centre for Maximilien Robespierre himself.

In the reaction Valentine roused herself to write again to her husband, more because she felt she owed it to him than because of any great wish to do so, or of any hope that he would receive the letter. She did seriously contemplate leaving France, or at least leaving Paris, but the days went on, and she took no steps. . . . It was better to think that Gaston was dead. She did think it at last. If he were not, she was too proud to make an appearance in the world of emigration as a deserted wife. And the few family ties she, an only child and early orphaned, had possessed were all broken now, by nature or violence. She was happy, too, in a sense, with the Tessiers, who had risked so much for her, and to whom, since Thermidor, her presence was no longer a menace—though she was still very careful not to betray herself. She began to earn money by embroidery, which she had always done exquisitely; she began, too, to enjoy the new sensation of earning. And when in ’97 Alcibiade died very suddenly, and his widow, keeping a journeyman to attend to the clocks and watches, turned half the shop into a lingerie, Mme de Trélan’s skill helped to support the new venture.

So—unbelievably when she looked back at their added months—five years, almost, had passed since her release, and she was still in the Rue de Seine, having reached an indifference to outward circumstances which might, on the surface, have earned the commendation accorded by spiritual direction to “detachment.” Yet this state of mind was not in the main the fruit of the astonishing change in her fortunes, of captivity and indignities or suspense—not even the fruit of her husband’s strange silence. It sprang from a tree of older growth than these, though no doubt these conditions, and especially the last, had ripened it; it was the lees of a cup more deadening, even, than that which the Revolution had set to her lips—the cup which she had begun to drink years before, when her heart had been slowly starved amid the luxury and state of Mirabel.

(2)

The marriage of Geneviève-Armande-Marie-Valentine de Fondragon with Gaston-Henri-Hippolyte-Gabriel-Eléonor de Saint-Chamans, Duc de Trélan, had been arranged, as often happened, when the bride was a child in the convent. But Mlle de Fondragon had seen her betrothed before the ceremony rather oftener than fell to the lot of most highborn young girls in her day, and no match, in the end, had been more one of love than hers with the singularly attractive young man who came sometimes, as was permitted, to the parlour of the great aristocratic nunnery of the Panthémont where she was being educated. She was seventeen, beautiful and accomplished, when she was wedded with all imaginable pomp in the chapel of Mirabel to a bridegroom of twenty-three, and began with him an existence out of which custom and the demands of fashion, rather than anything more menacing, were so quickly to suck not only the early enchantment, but the more lasting affection that might have replaced it. For the splendid and handsome young patrician whom she had married went his own way in life—and it was not hers.

It was indeed expected of a man of rank in those days that he should either keep a mistress or be assigned as lover to some married lady of his own world, and that he should see only as much of the society of his own wife as a certain standard of good usage demanded. After a few years of marriage the young Duc de Trélan was conforming most faithfully to both these requirements. And Valentine, formed in that corrupt and polished society which grew up so early, was even at twenty-one too much of her rank and epoch ever to utter reproaches, or even to feel very keenly that her husband’s far from unusual conduct was reprehensible in itself. Practically the whole of the highest society was an amazing chassé-croisé of such arrangements. But she did feel it in another way, and that sharply enough; for there was a factor not always present in like situations—she loved her husband passionately. And so, just as an ordinary woman, she suffered.

Not that Gaston de Trélan was by any means a profligate. He was difficult in his preferences, and she knew well how violently—and for the most part unsuccessfully—he was run after in society. “Saint-Charmant” was the current play on his name in the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain and of the Marais. Nor did he ever fail in attentions to her; nay, as the years went on, she knew that she had his respect always; intermittently, perhaps, almost his love. Of the freedom, not to say licence, which a lady in her high position could claim, she herself had not taken the shadow of an advantage. And yet, though she was herself so unsullied, and though she was also a very proud woman, she would have passed over in her husband what her world, so far from censuring, almost demanded. As youth fell away from both of them she certainly felt it less, and the Duc’s love affairs, never scandalously frequent, became almost negligible. It was not that trait in him which had cut the deepest; it was the gradual conviction that the high promise of his character and gifts would never be fulfilled. Her love for him, which had survived unfaithfulness, was ambitious, and not without reason. More than most of his line Gaston de Trélan had capacity, but unluckily there ran in his blood far more than his share of the indolent pride of the Saint-Chamans. If he could not do a thing supremely well, he would not do it at all. Indeed, he appeared to see no reason why he should trouble to do anything, in a world where all was at his feet, but be uniformly charming, gay, keenwitted—and supremely wilful. Like most young nobles he had had a military training, and had been given a colonelcy at the age of twenty; but not one second more than the obligatory four months of the twelve would he ever spend with his regiment. Indeed he resigned the burden of this command a few years after marriage. In later life the coveted position of First Gentleman of the Bedchamber had been almost forced upon him; fortunately that only entailed a year of service. Valentine, a Dame du Palais herself at the time, had no love for the long and tiring ceremonial of Court attendance, and if only he had accepted the post of ambassador to Sweden which was offered him about the same period, or that of governor of Provence for which he was proposed, she would have forgiven him had he refused the honour at Versailles. But there existed no influence strong enough to make him shoulder responsibility against his will.

Yet the slow disillusionment had not killed her love. After all, when the crash came in 1790 they were neither of them old. And she herself, as she felt bitterly at times, had failed to do the one thing which was really demanded of her. She had not given her husband an heir—and Gaston de Trélan was the last of his line.

It was a shattering blow to a house which dated from the eleventh century. The name would be extinguished altogether, and the property broken up. Mirabel would go to a cousin, the Duc de Savary-Lancosme, who would also inherit the great estates in Berry. Saint-Chamans, that cradle of the race in the South—which for some reason Valentine had never liked and rarely visited—would fall to another branch. So the Duc de Trélan was pitied, as she knew, for what, to a man of his rank, possessions and ancient lineage, was indeed a profound misfortune. Things might indeed have been very different if Mirabel had not been a childless house—not in the accepted sense that the birth of a son would have drawn husband and wife together, for this was doubtful—but because the Duchesse de Trélan would not have felt always, as the hope of one died, the sense of an irremediable shortcoming, and because a certain fatal retort could never have been made.

For her husband’s entire abstention from reproach on that score Valentine had always borne him gratitude. And indeed no one in the world ever counted up more greedily than she his good qualities—his generosity, his courage, his strict regard for honour, his contempt of anything petty or mean. It was nothing but that undying wish of hers to see him openly what he really was which led, after the years of partial estrangement, to their final rupture, when, in July, 1790, the Duc announced his intention of emigrating.

He assumed as a matter of course that his wife would accompany him from a France grown, as he said, insupportable. Most people of their rank had already gone, for with them it had become practically a principle; M. de Trélan was inclined to blame himself for having remained so long. But Valentine did not approve of the principle, and said so; for a man of any weight and authority to leave France at this juncture seemed to her like deserting one’s country in her hour of need—though the opinion was not fashionable. Her husband listened to her, as he always did, with courtesy, but replied that by remaining he regarded himself as tacitly countenancing the growth of theories and practices, both in politics and religion, which he most cordially detested. And the Duchesse on that had frankly told him that, having for so many years refused to take any part in politics, or diplomacy, or military affairs or indeed anything, he had hardly the right now to complain of present developments. Never before had she been within even measurable distance of such plain speech.

And M. de Trélan, who could never brook criticism, was plainly more than annoyed, but he had controlled himself, and recurred more insistently still to the question of his wife’s accompanying him into exile. Once more the Duchesse had refused, saying finally, when pressed for a reason, that she “did not like running away.”

It was true that she had hastily added “from responsibility”—since she knew, none better, that the last weakness on earth of which her husband could be accused was physical cowardice—but it was too late. The Duc was on his feet, quite white. “Madame,” he said, “God made you a woman; you may thank Him for it. Do you stay here then, with your responsibilities. They are doubtless great; and if I do not return”—he took no notice of her as she tried to break in—“if I do not return, you can superintend the bestowal of my property on its legal heirs. Savary-Lancosme and the rest will have cause, as ever, to be grateful to you. I have the honour to wish you good-day.” And he walked out of her boudoir.

She never saw him again. Within an hour he had quitted Mirabel for ever, leaving her to reflect, wounded to the soul as she was, on those two little words “as ever” and what, after all, they revealed.

But in a few days there came a letter from him begging her, not without a certain stiffness, to forgive him for what, in the heat of the moment, had passed his lips, and offering her, if she had reconsidered her decision, his escort to Coblentz, or, if she preferred it, to England. Otherwise, for the short absence which he proposed to make, she would find that his affairs were sufficiently in order not to incommode her, and he prayed her to remain at Mirabel or wherever seemed good to her.

Except for an absence of feeling the letter was perfect, but Mme de Trélan knew that it was the letter of a man who wishes to set himself right in his own eyes for what he considers a lapse from good taste. She thought emigration foolish and unpatriotic—the day had not yet come when it was the only chance of safety for the wellborn—and she could not bring herself to accept an amende prompted less by affection for her than by a desire for rehabilitation. And if it was to be a short absence, why leave France at all? Down at her country house in Touraine she was, besides, interesting herself in a certain philanthropic scheme of her own. So she answered the Duc’s letter in much the same spirit, asked his pardon also for her hasty words—and refused.

The Duc de Trélan never came back. From Coblentz he went to England, and though he and his wife at first kept up a desultory correspondence on matters of business, for five or six months before the sack of Mirabel she had not had a line from him. Intercourse with England was by that time becoming uncertain, but she had news of him through less direct channels. By all accounts Gaston de Trélan was much too popular in English society to find time for writing to the wife who so deeply disapproved of his having taken refuge there.

CHAPTER IV

JADIS

(1)

But the strange twist of Fortune’s wheel which, nine years after her husband’s departure, had brought the Duchesse de Trélan as concierge to her own palace, was first set in motion when M. Georges Camain, originally a builder at Angers, was returned at the elections of 1795 as Deputy for Maine-et-Loire, and, coming up to Paris to take his seat, received, after a time, from the Director Larevellière-Lépeaux—like him an Angevin and the quasi-pontiff of that new and arid creed which M. Camain also professed, Theophilanthropism—the charge of Mirabel. For M. Camain was a cousin of Suzon Tessier’s, though they had not met since Suzon was a child.

Nor indeed did the Deputy discover Suzon’s existence till the year that Alcibiade Tessier died; but after that he was pretty assiduous in his visits. Valentine sometimes wondered if he had a vision of consoling the little widow. She herself met him occasionally at meals—a person of forty-five or so, large, high-coloured, good-humoured, inclined to a florid style in dress and a slightly vulgar gallantry. Report said that down at Angers in ’94 he had been a Terrorist, but Suzon discreetly refrained from making enquiries on that point. Now he seemed so moderate in his politics that it was hard to understand how he had escaped being fructidorisé with the other moderate and Royalist deputies in the coup d’état of 1797.

M. Camain found, of course, that Suzon’s “aunt” had already lived with her for years, and he was not sufficiently conversant with his cousin’s relations by marriage to contest any statements which Mme Tessier chose to make about her kinswoman’s past history. Even her neighbours in the Rue de Seine scarcely remembered now, so fast did events move, that Mme Vidal had begun her residence with the Tessiers at a very significant date in 1792, and had passed more than a year in prison since. Besides, M. Camain did not frequent any house in the street but Suzon’s.

One afternoon, therefore, in March, 1799, the Deputy, dropping in, in his genial way, to his cousin’s little shop, said, after some casual conversation, “By the way, ma cousine, how would you like to live in a château?” and when Mme Tessier, who was sewing behind the counter, replied that she had no such ambition, her kinsman admitted that she might find Mirabel lacking in cosiness.

Mme Tessier’s work left her fingers. “Mirabel!” she exclaimed, in a tone not to be described.

Camain cocked his eyebrow at her. “Yes, Mir-a-bel! The present concierge is leaving, her husband having come home discharged from the army, and I always refuse to have a married couple there. Do you fancy the job?”

“God forbid!” said his cousin fervently.

“Of course, I was forgetting your grandfather. His ghost would certainly walk to see you installed there as the employee of the present régime.”

“Mirabel is full of ghosts,” said Mme Tessier, half unconsciously, her eyes suddenly fixed. Yes, had the Deputy but known, the ghost of ghosts was not even so far away as Mirabel.

As if, startlingly, her cousin had read her thoughts, he said, looking from one counter with its array of clocks to the other with its piles of linen garments, “No, I suppose you would not want to leave this singular union of science and . . . er . . . art which you have created. But what about that aunt of yours? She is very badly off, isn’t she,—and a charge to you, I suspect? How would it suit her? She would have assistance, you know, for the cleaning—she need never touch a brush herself—but she would have to live in the place, and be responsible for its condition. She has always struck me as a notable woman. What do you think of that, Cousin Suzon? You see that I am determined to do you a good turn, whether you will or no!”

And not all Suzon’s hastily found arguments about Mme Vidal’s unwillingness and unsuitability could turn him from his purpose of at least offering her the post. Moreover, during the discussion the Deputy unwittingly gave vent to a number of doubles entendres, such as “Nothing like keeping Mirabel in the family!” and, “It only wants a woman with a head on her shoulders,” so that by the time his threat to go and interview Mme Vidal in person had driven her perforce to undertake the office Suzon Tessier was almost hysterical, and went up the staircase wringing her hands. Never for one wild second did she imagine that the offer would be accepted.

At first, indeed, Mme de Trélan had seemed to see in it an insult thrown at her by Fate—but by Fate’s hand only, for Suzon was certain that the Deputy had no suspicion of her identity. “Caretaker of my own house!” the Duchesse had exclaimed. And then she had begun to laugh, saying that it was so preposterous as to be amusing. Yet the next moment, to Mme Tessier’s horror, she had exclaimed, “Dear God! why should I say it is preposterous, now! Tell me, Suzon, what I should have to do as concierge of Mirabel?”

And when Suzon, brokenly, had told her, hoping against hope that she was only playing with the idea to feed the little vein of ironic humour which she had sometimes observed in her, Valentine said gravely, “Since this strange thing has come to me, Suzon, perhaps it is meant, for some reason, that I should do it.”

“Madame, think what you are saying!” cried the poor Tessier, all her fears back again. “You a concierge!”

“But what am I now, Suzon—a sempstress, almost your pensioner.” She said it without bitterness.

“But at Mirabel—and you its Duchess!”

To that the Duchesse only said calmly, “I could resign, I suppose, when I wished. And you would come to see me sometimes, would you not? I should still have leisure, perhaps, to sew for you. . . . Yes, Suzon, if your good Deputy wants an immediate answer you can give it to him. Tell him that—I accept.”

And as Suzon’s horrified protests against this—to her—monstrous and sacrilegious compliance were broken into by the none too patient benefactor himself tapping on the door, Mme de Trélan was able to tell him in person that, if he really thought her suitable for the post, she should be pleased to take it.

“There!” said Georges Camain triumphantly to the overwhelmed Suzon. And to her “aunt” he announced with a bow, “Madame, one has only to look at you to know that Mirabel is fortunate!”

It was in this manner that the Duchesse de Trélan came to accept her own, and to pass, some three weeks later, into a sort of possession of it.

(2)

Now, at eight o’clock the morning after her entry, she was already going up the stairway to the ground floor, the keys of Mirabel in her hand, for during her night under the patchwork quilt she had discovered that there was one thing about which she had miscalculated her strength. She could not endure to make re-acquaintance with her violated home in the company of Mme Prévost. True, she would probably be obliged to retrace her steps with the ex-concierge when the latter came to instruct her in her new duties, but it would be less desecration of her pride and of her memories if she revisited Mirabel for the first time alone.

But at the top of the stairs she hesitated. What was she going to find? She knew only too well what desolation might greet her. Paris had long been a vast pawnshop for the sale of the plundered goods of noble owners exiled or murdered. She had but to go into the once aristocratic Faubourg St. Germain to see a whole street of empty palaces, stripped, many of them, not only of furniture, mirrors and balustrades, but even of the very lead from the roofs.

And outside Paris it was the same. Where were the galleries and faïence pavements of the château of Ecouen, Mirabel’s contemporary? And Anet, that palace of love, fruit of the same brain as Mirabel, where every door and window bore the interlaced monograms of Henri II. and Diane de Poitiers? Of that jewel of stone, set in its woods in the valley of the Eure, nothing but its walls remained. Its costly canals were rotting mud and rotting water, its parks cut down, the kneeling statue of Diane in pieces, her mausoleum a horse trough. Chantilly, stripped of its marble columns, of its jaspe fleuri, of its panels of agate, had become a manufactory. Bellevue, that haunt of the Pompadour, was a barracks; Marly, a field and four walls.

And Versailles itself? Versailles was the museum of the department. The avenue under whose fourfold ranks of elms had passed Turenne and Colbert and Corneille existed no longer. In the chapel the very marble itself had been split and hacked to get rid of the encrusted Lilies, and the Virgin over the altar still held a pike in her hand. The beds in the park were covered with brambles and weeds, the borders of the Grand Canal were a grazing ground for goats and donkeys, the Pièce des Suisses was muddy, the Naiads were covered with dust. Trianon was for sale. The rooms, said Suzon, who had been there, smelt damp, like a cellar, and the dining-room was full of a strange lumber which Valentine recognised from her description as the remains of those sledges on which the young, laughing Court of 1788 had sped over the ice. . . .

How should she find her house of Mirabel?

The morning sun, at least, knew nothing of change of ownership nor of desecration. It came stooping in through the outer arcading just as it used to do. In room after room, as she went onwards from one to the other, it accompanied her, the only habitual thing left in that desolation. But, though these rooms were stripped, they were not damaged—only, in their aching bareness, very strange.

She came at last to the midmost point of the ground floor, the great banqueting hall, or Salle Verte, a vast apartment so closely resembling in decoration the Salle d’Hercule at Versailles as almost to suggest that it was a copy of it. There was the same effect of green relieved with gold on a white background, the same green marble pillars and heavily gilded cornice. Triumphal deities swam across the ceiling, and, just as at Versailles, two great pictures, set in elaborately carved frames, formed part of the integral scheme of decoration. As Valentine entered and looked down the vista of pillars she was confronted by the same huge canvas, saw that Æneas was still toilfully bearing Father Anchises on his shoulders from the burning town—the huge canvas which had witnessed the dancing on her wedding night and much beside. She turned almost unthinkingly to look at the companion picture which used to face it at the other end of the great room, over the hearth, and was met by a large blank space. Dido surveying the Trojan ships, with Carthage’s proud towers behind her, was gone. Why? A rude scrawl of Les reines à la lanterne on the blank space answered her. Dido was a queen; Æneas probably considered to be the very model of a virtuous and filial Republican. The Duchesse smiled; not a smile of amusement.

One thing the removal of the enormous canvas had brought into prominence, and that was the coat of arms in relief on the stone hood of the chimney. It was blazoned in colour, and gilt to boot; and though it had been partially defaced, among so many quarterings there were still decipherable enough roses and besants and castles and ermine to show the great alliances of the house. And at the top the phoenix of the Saint-Chamans still soared undefeated from the flames, while below was yet clearly to be read their arrogant motto, doubly defiant in this pillaged and ownerless dwelling, charged, too, with a double irony: Memini et permaneo—‘I remember and I remain.’ She, who had lived with it for one-and-twenty years and knew that it proclaimed even more than that—‘I hold out, I stay to the end,’ shivered now as she looked at it.

She turned away at last, and walked half the echoing length of that deserted splendour with a steady step. Small risk of losing foothold now on that once slippery parquet!

The room which next she entered had much more of the Renaissance about it, designed as it had been as a withdrawing-room for Mirabel’s first royal owner. The great feature of this apartment—known always as the “sallette”—was the vast chimneypiece, behind which ran a staircase mounting to a kind of tribune or gallery, as in a chapel. The tapestry representing the history of St. Louis of France, which had clothed the walls of this room since the reign of Louis XIII. at least, had never been removed till the Revolution, nor the furniture of the same epoch, for the “sallette” had always been something of a curiosity, and here the phoenix of the house of Trélan had never replaced the crowned salamander of the Roi Chevalier. But now the place was despoiled alike of the furniture and of the woven story of the royal saint—all but one strip a few feet long, whose scorched edges testified to the passage of fire upon it. It was part of King Louis’ embarkation at Aigues Mortes for the Holy Land, and over his armour, as Valentine remembered, he had worn a mantle sown with fleur-de-lys—indeed, some were still visible. . . .

Mme de Trélan did not spend much longer on the ground floor. On the next, whither she now mounted, were rooms she had preferred, the little Galerie de Diane, for instance (large enough in any smaller house) where most of the older tapestry used to hang. She supposed it would not be there now. But it was: Brussels and Gobelin and Mortlake and some old Arras. Yes, there was the piece of Arras she had loved as a bride—a little world of leaves with its small merry woodland creatures interminably roaming and leaping about in it. And there was the piece of English tapestry, Soho or Mortlake, of which the Duchesse Eléonore had been so fond. Here, too, in a sixteenth century piece from the looms of Paris, was the deathless bird of the Trélans rising from a perfect sea of flames, and surrounded very oddly by a quantity of angels and martyrs, the device floating in a wind-borne scroll from its beak. Oh, what crowds of memories!

Valentine de Trélan passed on. She went through the ante-chamber, where the crimson velvet curtains were embroidered in twisted columns of silver, and came to the jewel of the house, the Galerie de Psyché, for which Mirabel was famous. It was indeed a place of stately beauty, and she, once its possessor, found herself marvelling at it anew, seeing for the first time with a gaze not that of ownership the perfect harmony between its delicate ornament and its splendid proportions, and the charm of Natoire’s beautiful paintings of the story which gave the place its name.

And the Galerie de Psyché seemed to have been purposely preserved as a show-room, for here were gathered together some of the best specimens of furniture from other parts of the house. The Duchesse recognised, for instance, the magnificent Boule escritoire from her husband’s private apartments, with its wonderful marquetry of tortoiseshell and copper, and a little green vernis-Martin cabinet of her own, acquired when vernis-Martin of that shade was the rage, and other things. This assemblage of objects seemed to her more insulting than spoliation, and she stayed for a little by that cabinet of hers. Had she been betrayed into an undertaking which, after all, she had not strength to carry through?

But, having come so far, she would at least go on to her own apartments. She did not think of them with any special affection; she had loved more her less magnificent rooms in her country house near the Loire.

She came first to her bedroom. Much earlier in the century chamber music must have sounded in this room, for all its decorations were trophies of musical instruments, lutes and pipes and tambourines knotted together by fluttering ribbons. All these were carved; there was no painting here, save the delicate ivory paint which covered these and the panelled walls alike. The elaborate bed of gilt and inlaid tulipwood was still there, projecting from the wall, but stripped of its green silk coverlet fringed with gold. This bed stood on three raised steps, outside which, as usually in the bed-chambers of the great, ran a gilt balustrade. Half of it was still there. So was a large armchair of green satin and gilt—but nothing else.

The Duchesse de Trélan stood outside the broken fence and looked at the bed where she had often lain. But it seemed certain to her that it was another woman who had rested under that canopy—a woman, on the whole, unhappier than herself.

She passed into her cabinet de toilette. This room was somewhat famous, for it had been decorated by Huret in the second quarter of the century, when “chinoiseries” and “singeries” were all the fashion, and on the jonquil-coloured paint of its walls, patterned with gold arabesques, queer little apes frolicked in a thousand antics, while sedate Chinamen walked under umbrellas or fished unendingly in bamboo-foliaged streams. Save for these, its fifty years old occupants, the room was empty. Gone was the great toilet table with all its appurtenances where the Duchesse de Trélan had been obliged to spend so much of her time, had sat so often watching her hair being piled up into some elaborate erection à la candeur or à la victoire, and listening, half against her will, to the compliments and small talk of some male visitor. All that was left was the great full-length swinging mirror, mounted by Caffieri, with its couple of doves playfully pecking each other at the bottom, and its coronet at the top—the mirror which had so often reflected the Duchesse de Trélan, majestic in the spreading, festooned hoop and close-fitting square-cut bodice of traditional Court costume, the grande robe parée, pearls lying in a rope on her white breast and pearls across her towering headdress of powder and curls and feathers . . . and which now showed Mme Vidal, the concierge of Mirabel, in a plain black dress with a rather old-fashioned fichu about the shoulders, and above it a courageous, sensitive face with a beautifully modelled brow, surmounted by masses of fair hair going grey—the concierge of Mirabel with the keys in her hand.

Valentine de Trélan looked at her image a moment and then walked to the door. The room opening out of this was her boudoir, where she had been sitting on the day which had put an end to all this life. Two years before that, something else had come to an end there too. Here, for the first time, she knew a real hesitation; but after a second or two she fitted the key into the lock and entered.

When, as a bride, Mme de Trélan had made the acquaintance of this room, she had fallen in love with its decorations, of the purest style of the Regency, and she had ever afterwards refused to have it redecorated—had refused to exchange Pineau’s shells and arabesques and fantastic birds and cornucopias either for the prettinesses of Van Spaendonck’s doves and rose-wreaths and forget-me-nots, or for the thin Pompeian style of a later fashion. And thus the room was very much as it had appeared to her at her first sight of it—and at her last.

For her boudoir with its furniture was quite untouched; its complete preservation seemed almost to argue some cynical purpose. The door giving on to the corridor, which had been broken down by the torrent of bodies that had poured through it, had been carefully put back in place. Perhaps the same care had obliterated the stains on its other side, where her maître d’hôtel had died for her in vain. Here were all the chairs and footstools of rose-coloured taffeta and silver, and the Boule secrétaire that her husband had given her, and the commode made for her on her marriage by Riesener. She had never thought to gaze again on those familiar half-blown roses of its beautiful inlay, all amaranth and laburnum and tulipwood.

Her breath seemed to stop; it all became so real again. Just here, where the mirror with its framework of garlanded palm-stems still hung on the walls between the windows, here she had faced that river of violence and had thought, half hoped, to die. She could see now the door crashing inwards, the evil and stupid faces, the menacing gestures, the bare arms, the eyes alight with the lust of plunder and carnage . . . but the cries, the oaths, that spume on the tide of invasion, she could hear no longer—not even the scream of her murdered servant, which once she had fancied would ring in her ears for ever. No; though she could see the catastrophe, it was like a painting, fixed, and lacking the vitality of sound and motion—more frozen, a good deal, than the tapestry in the Galerie de Diane. In this room only one voice sounded, where it had sounded in her hearing for the last time, and it said only one thing. The room was full of it. . . . Very pale, Valentine turned from looking at the doorway by which Destiny had entered to look at that other, through which all her heart had gone out, with Gaston. The scene to which that exit had been the close had none of the quality of canvas or tapestry; it was alive, burning, as vivid as of yesterday. How had they ever come to it? But that she had asked herself a thousand times in the years between. And regret was so vain and so weak, and tore so terribly. She would not often visit this room again. . . .

As Mme de Trélan locked the door by which she had entered, she noticed that even her work-table was still here—an oval thing of marquetry and ormulu, poised on slender curving legs. Without thinking she opened it, to see inside on the gathered brocade of the lining a few odd skeins of embroidery silks, a tiny pair of scissors and a golden thimble, and wondered whether, since it did not seem to have been examined, any one had discovered the little false bottom that it had. There was nothing in it, she knew; yet her fingers sought it out. And she was mistaken! There in the recess were a couple of brooches and an old locket on a chain—things outworn, ornaments of no value which she did not recollect having placed there. The locket bore her maiden monogram in pearls and garnets, but it was empty, and she could not even remember what it used to hold. She slipped it into her pocket.

A moment later she was hurrying down the great staircase. A glance at her watch had shown her that Mme Prévost was almost due. She did not wish to be found up here. Then she remembered that the ex-concierge could not get in unless she admitted her. Truly she was the châtelaine of Mirabel!

CHAPTER V

THE JASPER CUP

The morning that the Duchesse de Trélan was led through the show portions of her own mansion by the former caretaker, to be initiated into what she was to point out to others, was naturally an initiation into a strange kind of discipline as well. Valentine had anticipated this. But that first morning’s experience was the most painful; afterwards she was to find that to accompany visitors herself was not nearly so trying. To that, she thought, she would become almost accustomed in time.

It was certainly one drop less in the cup of desecration that the family portraits were not displayed to the public view. Their absence, which had puzzled Mme de Trélan at first, had been explained by Mme Prévost. They were all hung in a small locked gallery on the second floor, together with what was left of the collection of china and other objects of rarity, and the Deputy Camain kept the key himself. “And he won’t so much as let you put your nose inside,” had concluded the ex-concierge sourly. “Often have I offered to dust them cups and saucers, and he won’t have it. Afraid of their being broken, I suppose—much more likely to break them himself with that feather brush he keeps in there.”

“And the family pictures are there too, you say?” asked Valentine.

“Every one,” returned Mme Prévost, “except the last Duchess’s, that had a pike stuck through it, and was spoilt.”

But for that pike’s activities, of which she was aware, Mme de Trélan would scarcely have ventured to ratify the assent which she had so precipitately given to Camain’s proposal. There was no other portrait of her at Mirabel, though she had often been painted.

In a week Mme de Trélan had settled down to the strange, lonely, monotonous life in a manner that amazed herself. The days began to follow each other in a regular routine, so many in the décade for cleaning, two for visitors. She contrived to secure her provisions without ever entering the tiny village, lest some of the older inhabitants might recognise her, in spite of her altered appearance. Suzon Tessier, resigned, yet always anticipatory of ill, had been twice to see her. M. Georges Camain had not yet made his appearance, but that he would soon do so Suzon had warned her. Valentine only trusted that he would not bring with him that Mlle Dufour mentioned by the sentry, of whose intimacy with the Deputy she had then heard for the first time, for there were memories connected with the actress which she did not wish revived.

When the bell jangled, therefore, about three o’clock one fine afternoon on a day devoted neither to cleaning nor to visitors the Duchesse felt convinced that it announced her employer. Sure enough, when she opened the door there stood M. Georges Camain, deputy of Maine-et-Loire, debonair even in the bottle-green habit with mother-of-pearl buttons, cut by Heyl and therefore the ne plus ultra of that strange mania which afflicted the fashionables of the Directory for wearing purposely ill-fitting coats. Muffled in approved style to his very underlip in the voluminous folds of his neckcloth, he swept off his hat with a rather exaggerated politeness.

“Ah, our new guardian of the Hesperides! Not that I should wish, Madame, to compare you to a dragon! Have I your permission to enter?”

“You are master here, Monsieur le Député,” replied Mme de Trélan, standing back. She disliked his exuberant politeness.

“Not I, Madame Vidal,” retorted he, coming in, however, with an air of possession somewhat at variance with his words. “I am but the servant of our five kings. Well, I hope that Suzon considers you sufficiently comfortable here? She is always so solicitous about her relations—except about me!”

The Duchesse, still standing in the passage, assured him that she had nothing to complain of. He asked her a few more questions: whether her scrubbers were willing and obedient, whether she found the responsibility too much, and finally revealed what he had more particularly come for—to look over the collection of porcelain before putting it into her charge. And on that he preceded her up to the second floor, talking as he went.

“You observe, Madame Vidal,” he said, when at last he stopped before a door and fitted the key into the lock, “that I preferred the china in here to get dusty rather than to give the breaking of it to your predecessor’s fingers. But needlework keeps the hands fine, does it not?”—he gave as he spoke a glance at hers—“and I feel sure that those of yours could be trusted about the most fragile porcelain. I shall make over this key to you without uneasiness.”

Mme de Trélan followed him into the room with the tiny thrill of distaste which any personal remark from him always raised in her . . . and was instantly confronted, over the glass cases, by the eyes of her husband, looking down at her with a smile from his frame on the grey panelling of the wall.

Drouais, the King’s painter, had depicted him at three-quarter length in the twenty-third year of his age and in a primrose satin coat. His left hand rested lightly on his hip, just above the silver swordhilt which showed below the silk. A signet ring of emerald gleamed on the middle finger, and through the guard of the sword was stuck a yellow rose. And in the pastel the very assurance of the highborn, smiling face beneath the rime of its powdered hair was as seductive as the beauty of its lines. If this young prince with the rose in his swordhilt possessed so obviously everything that life had to offer, who could grudge him those gifts? He would always use them with ease and exquisite taste.

The blood rushed to Mme de Trélan’s heart. She had forgotten that the pictures were here. For a moment she did not hear what the Deputy was saying . . . Gaston de Trélan was not without company on the walls. His father was there, and the Cardinal of Louis XV.’s days, a mixture of sensuality and inscrutability in his lace and scarlet, and Antoine de Trélan, the marshal of France under the Roi Soleil, greatly bewigged and cuirassed, and François de Trélan, the mousquetaire, his hand on his sword, and the first owner of Mirabel, César de Trélan, by Clouet, in his tilted cap and earrings and little pointed beard. That imprisonment was shared by the ladies of the house also, and Diane de Trélan in her great ruff hung side by side with the kind and saintly-visaged Duchesse Eléonore. Only Valentine’s own picture seemed missing.

She hoped that Camain would make no reference to the personages by whom they were surrounded, of whose eyes she felt herself so conscious. And he did not, for his thoughts were set on the porcelain he had come to see, and he went the round with her, taking up with his careful plebeian fingers a fragile little two-handled cup out of which a queen might have drunk, touching a green Sèvres dish affectionately, calling her attention to a biscuit group, tendering her morsels of elementary ceramic information. And she began to see that this self-made, self-educated son of a small Angers builder had really learnt something about the least durable of all the arts, and seemed to appreciate the ephemeral loveliness of its productions.

And thus she went round half the room with him, listening to his commendations, and felt her husband’s eyes watching her.

“This has a crack, I’m afraid,” said the Deputy ruefully, taking up a teapot of yellow Sèvres covered with gold spots. “Hardly wonderful, when one thinks of the risks they have run. Some was smashed that night, I know. The People when inflamed with zeal is not remarkable for discrimination. Now, isn’t that Meissen candlestick delicious, Mme Vidal?”

He went on. As was perhaps natural, the ancient and prized but much less sophisticated Henri Deux ware did not appeal to him. Some of the old Rouen he approved, for it was gay, and some of the Chinese porcelain, but not all.

“I can’t think what the ci-devants could see in some of this foreign stuff!” he declared, stopping before a large bowl of dark blue Chinese pottery, over which crawled sinuous dragons of lighter blue and cream faintly tinged with pink. “I call that coarse!” Valentine, who knew that her father-in-law had prized the bowl because it was early Ming, did not venture to dispute this dictum.

“I like a thing with some work in it,” went on M. Georges Camain. “Now I feel I could have done those beasts myself; look at the rough, raised outline they have. It may be old—I believe it is. Give me something more modern and delicate, like the setting of that jasper cup over there—Gouthière, I fancy. You have a good look at it afterwards, Mme Vidal.”

The jasper cup was still here then! Yes, she would have a good look at it—afterwards, not now.

From the cup, under its glass shade, M. Camain’s eyes strayed up to the portraits.

“It would be strange, would it not, if all these painted gentry round us could really see us in this sanctum of theirs,” he said suddenly, giving voice to Valentine’s own thoughts. “That old lady yonder—she looks a terror!—rather reminds me of my aunt Fourrier, who used to keep the bric-à-brac shop in the Rue St. Julien at Angers.”

And he indicated the portrait of the Duchesse Charlotte-Elisabeth, a voluminous dame who had flourished in the Regency.

“The last Duchesse of all isn’t here,” went on M. Camain, raising his spy-glass again as if, after all, he were not sure. “They destroyed her portrait the night the château was taken—again that undiscriminating zeal of the Sovereign People, more undiscriminating than usual in this case, for I understand that the Duchesse was known for her charities. And I have often regretted the destruction on other grounds, because since Mirabel has been under my charge I wanted to see what she was like, and why the Duc deserted her.”

“Deserted her!” exclaimed Valentine, in a voice that made the Deputy drop his glass and turn and look at her. Then she added faintly, “I never heard. . . . Did he desert her, then?”

“Perhaps that’s putting it rather strongly,” said Camain smiling. “We all know that the aristocrats who hopped so gaily across the frontiers in ’90 and ’91 thought they were coming back again in a few weeks. I daresay the Duc de Trélan had the same delusion. But I have heard it said that he never even gave his wife the chance of going with him—hooked it without her knowing . . . I believe they hardly ever saw one another. So she stayed behind—more fool she!—and lost her life in consequence.”

Fire swept over Valentine’s pale visage. “Ah no, no, but he did——” she broke out, and then, finding a difficulty in speaking, pulled herself together. “I mean, surely he must have given the Duchesse the chance of accompanying him!” She looked down at the floor as she spoke; she was aware how deeply she was discomposed, and how hot an indignation possessed her at this false accusation which she had not the right to deny. And she went on, feverishly, “In any case did not a great many . . . ci-devants . . . emigrate without their wives?”

“Yes—sometimes with other people’s!” retorted the Deputy with a wink. “However, I never heard that the Duc de Trélan did that. Mademoiselle . . . the . . . er . . . lady to whom he was assigned as admirer at the time—untruly as I believe—would certainly never have gone with him; she was too good a patriot for that! That’s Monseigneur himself yonder, over the green console. What do you think of him? He must have been much younger when that was painted, of course.”

Valentine was forced to turn and look with him at the young man in primrose satin. “I . . . I think he must have been very handsome.” Surely that remark was both safe and natural!

“Oh, you women!” exclaimed the Deputy, showing signs of a return to his jocular manner. “That always takes you—never fails! They say the Duchesse herself was not insensible to it. Well, if it is any consolation to you, Madame Vidal, no doubt he is handsome still, for that matter . . . more than can be said for that old boy next him. Who is it?” He put up his glass again to make out the name of Gaston de Trélan’s neighbour, a very early dark portrait of a Knight of Malta.

“And I cannot believe,” went on Valentine with a thrill in her voice, “that he never invited his wife to go with him.”

“ ‘Raoul de Saint-Chamans, Vice-Commander of the Order,’ ” read out Camain. “What Order, I wonder?—I beg your pardon, Madame Vidal; you were saying? . . .”

Mme de Trélan ran a finger nervously along the edge of one of the cases. “I was wondering, Monsieur le Député, from what you said, whether you knew anything of the Duc’s present whereabouts.”

“I? Dame, no, nothing at all! Why should I?”

Valentine tried to perpetrate a jest. “He might appear at Mirabel some day.”

“I shouldn’t advise him to,” returned the Deputy rather grimly. “Not, at all events, till he has made his peace with the Government. . . . If he should turn up I shall expect you to tell me,” he added lightly. “It is part of your duties as concierge. But of course he will never come. Why should he, after all these years? Much too comfortable where he is, I expect—probably married again to some rich English lady. . . . Look here, Madame Vidal, I must be going. No, leave the shutters open, please, because I should like you to go round and have a good dust here when I am gone. I keep a feather duster in the drawer of that console, under Monseigneur the ex-Duc. After you, if you please!”

He held open the door for her.

“Do you know, Madame,” he said abruptly as they went down the great staircase together, “what I should like to do with Mirabel? It is mere extravagant nonsense trying to turn it into a museum. There’s the château of Versailles already for that, and at the Louvre those cart-loads of pictures and statues that General Bonaparte sent from Italy the year before last. No, I should like to see Mirabel made into something like an orphanage,—run by the State, of course, not by nuns—for the children of dead soldiers. If our wars go on much longer, they will need it—poor little devils!”

He spoke with genuine feeling. Valentine was astonished, and listened with a sort of unwilling respect while he developed the theme a little. By this time they were outside her own modest quarters in the lower regions, and here the Deputy, asking if he might come in, entered practically without permission. Once inside, he pulled from his pocket a leather case.

“Permit me, Madame, since I am here,” he said, “to discharge the office of paymaster. The concierge of Mirabel is usually paid on the first of every month, but you have no doubt had to disburse something, and will be glad not to wait till the beginning of Prairial.” And he counted out assignats on to the cloth.

Valentine de Trélan flushed. Although she knew that there was a salary attached to the post she occupied, it was a different thing to receive it in concrete form from the hand of an authority whom she did not recognise. She instantly renewed her resolve of giving it in charity through Suzon Tessier.

“Now I will leave you the key of the china gallery,” said Camain, bringing out the object in question. “None of the cases are locked, as you saw, so do not admit any visitors there at present. Keep everything carefully dusted, Madame Vidal, if you please, the pictures as well. I daresay you will like to give an extra flick now and then to the last Duc’s portrait, as you have evidently constituted yourself his champion against detractors such as myself—No, I like the sentiment; I wish the concierge of Mirabel to identify herself with Mirabel, and I am fortunate in having found one who is capable of it. Madame Prévost, good woman, was not. . . . I fear I must trouble you to accompany me to the door, in order to fasten it after me. . . . Au plaisir de vous revoir, Madame!” He made a sweeping bow and went up the steps.

So Valentine de Saint-Chamans, Duchesse de Trélan, went back to her room, found the assignats, the price of her services, lying on the table, and, with an expression of distaste, locked them away. Then she began to search for a cloth to supplement the feather duster.

No one in the world—that just-foundered world to which she belonged—had had unquestioned right to her services save the Queen of France, but to serve her (as she had done) was the crown of honour. Perhaps for that reason Mme de Trélan found a savour in the situation—commanded to dust her own china! There was even a faint smile on her lips as she entered the gallery again—but she kept her eyes averted from her husband’s portrait.

The Sèvres now was in hands such as it had been made for. She went over it slowly and carefully. Was it hers, or was it Camain’s, or the property of those who had ravished Mirabel? Not for the first time since ’92 the thought of the problem of property came over her. How could anything material be really owned? She, who had had so much of the world’s goods, was now stripped of everything, and all but constrained to accept a pittance from the plunderers. Were the only things that remained to one then, the mind, the heart, what one had learnt and suffered? She had begun to think so. And still the problem remained: were the rights of property inalienable, as it was in her blood to believe them, or was this little Dresden figure in her hand not hers by right any longer because she had no means now to enforce that right?

“Really, I am becoming a Jacobin, or a philosopher,” she said to the little shepherdess. “In any case, my dear, the roses round your hat are very dusty.”

After the Sèvres and Meissen and Vienna she dusted and wiped the Oriental ware; the great Chinese vase that Camain had pronounced “coarse,” and that frail and marvellous eggshell porcelain which must be held to the light before one can see that dragons and clouds and waves live within its walls of moonbeam. Then she came, among the other treasures of ivory and crystal and enamel, on the jasper cup to which the Deputy had directed her attention. As if she did not know it!

The low sun, pleased to find for once an entry at the rarely opened shutters, danced in shafts and motes of brightness over the dull golden mounting that had made of it so costly a thing. Round the curve of the red-brown, half translucent jasper ran a wreath of tiny golden laurel leaves gemmed with pearls; delicate little vine branches laden with grapes were woven together at the bottom to form a framework for the cup, and the whole rested on three faun-headed supports. Underneath, a golden serpent with eyes of topaz wriggled its way towards the vine clusters.

That jasper cup was the last thing which her husband had given her, not long before his emigration. But money could not buy what Valentine de Trélan wanted then. Gouthière, when he designed and mounted the goblet, had not done ill in placing the little snake underneath. Valentine had thought so at the time, and had almost disliked the precious thing—symbol, so it sometimes seemed to her, of her life and Gaston’s, that might have been so different if they had not been born to such idle greatness, a cup too richly set to drink out of.

She gazed at it now with compressed lips, aware that vine and laurel leaves were becoming blurred by the slow, hot tears that were rising to her eyes. Suddenly she turned away from it, and walking at last to the young man over the console looked up at him.

Yes, he had been like that! Yes, he had had that expression—once! “How could I have kept your heart, Gaston?” she asked, gazing at the smiling eyes. For he had a heart as undoubtedly as he had charm and distinction and courage and wit . . . as well as riches and a great name and Mirabel. Yet one thing was lacking always—and after all these years it was hard to be sure what it was.

Or—as she had often and often thought—was it not rather she who lacked? Yet what could she have given him that she had not? That other men in those days of universal gallantry had been so ready to call her cold and heartless, was that a reason for reproach? If she could have the past again, what would she have done differently?—till that last fatal taunt. She did not know. Had it all been inevitable tragedy then, fixed for them before ever they met, from the moment they had been born?

It was double tragedy too. Gaston’s indifference to her love was his wife’s private sorrow, and not his fault, for how could love come at bidding? But his lifelong indifference to the claims of ambition—of duty even—how was that to be condoned or explained? No, he was like some tall ship, gallantly furnished and manned, that had never made the great voyage for which it had been built, but had drifted always with light airs, till drifting was no longer possible . . . at least on a summer sea. Where was it now?

She could not take her eyes from the picture, though the glance the canvas gave her back was like a blade in a wound. But Gaston could not be like that now—nor like the Gaston who had left her presence so mortally insulted. Yet if he knew exile and material loss he had not known the hard discipline of prison and contumely. He, she was sure, had never been reduced to earning his bread. What was he doing—if he lived? Married again, perhaps, to some rich lady, as the Deputy had suggested, for if he had taken the trouble to make enquiries about his wife’s fate he must indubitably, like all her world, believe her dead.

Taken the trouble! Unjust, unjust! She knew that he must have done all he could; she never doubted that. And back leapt the memory of that plebeian’s unworthy accusation—that he had deserted her, had not given her the chance of accompanying him. Had he not! twice over, once repulsed by that utterance of hers which had wounded him so deeply as to betray him into an unforgettable retort, and then, generously, by his letter. And the Deputy had said. . . . Perhaps others had said too—for even Suzon, if she had not told her the truth. . . .

And so, for the first time in all these years, it occurred to Valentine de Trélan that her refusal to accompany her husband into voluntary exile had done him wrong. It was on his head, in this slander, that it had recoiled. It was not that she still did not think his judgment mistaken. But, of the two obstinacies set in the lists against each other that day was not hers, after all, the more culpable? As she could not turn him, ought she not to have stayed by his side? Even though he were wrong it was hardly a crime that he was committing. . . . Deserted her? Was it not rather she, who, remaining against his will, had deserted him?

And again it struck at her, Camain’s accusation. How dared he, an upstart, a man of the people, how dared he throw mud at the Duc de Trélan, as far above him in character as he was removed in rank! But whose action was it that had given him the opportunity of throwing mud? Ah, if they had not separated . . . if she had done what he wished. . . .

The sun had left the window. A blackbird in the overgrown park outside was proclaiming rapturous things. Inside, among the Sèvres and the portraits, the Duchesse de Trélan, her arms outstretched on the cold malachite of the console beneath her husband’s picture was weeping bitterly. She had not known that it would be like this! The life of long ago, sunk for ever beneath those whirlpools of fury and carnage—regret for that was past. She was strong enough to face its cold relics without faltering. But Mirabel held, after all, not only the phantom of a dead existence, but of a love slowly slain . . . and not dead. Oh, if only Gaston were back in Mirabel again!

But there was no living creature in the great house save herself. The young man on the wall, with his indefinable air of charming assurance and good society, looked out into the room over the faded head of his wife, and the blackbird in the garden continued to assert that spring was come. Yet for his only hearer spring would never come again.

CHAPTER VI

THE ROMAUNT OF ROLAND

It may be doubted whether, after all, Roland de Céligny really regretted exchanging Ares for Aphrodite. He hardly knew himself, as he journeyed with his injured friend by discreet routes back to Finistère and that friend’s home near the sea. His heart was certainly sore at leaving the clash of arms, and he still resented the summary separation from his leader. Yet, to balance the sword half drawn and all too quickly sheathed, were the curls of Mlle de la Vergne, enshrined in the château whose tourelles rose, on the third day, from a screen of chestnuts to greet the travellers.

What, in that blest abode, would Marthe be doing when they came on her? Involuntarily Roland pictured their meeting as a replica, and saw her again at embroidery in the salon with its Indian hangings. But one always paints these things wrong. The reality was even better. For there was no duenna of a mother with her, merely a rustic groom, when, mounted on a beautiful black thoroughbred, she suddenly trotted round a bend of the road. . . .

“If that is not my little sister!” exclaimed Artamène spurring forward; and Roland, uncovering, pulled up his horse.

In the dappled sunlight, under the chestnuts, brother greeted sister, bending from the saddle. Roland thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. He was near enough to hear the joy and the anxiety in Mlle de la Vergne’s voice, her stream of enquiries. Then Artamène looked back and beckoned.

“Let me present M. le Vicomte de Céligny, whom you have already met, ma sœur, in a new rôle—that of the trusty garde-malade. Since I cannot dispense with his services he comes to stay with us for a few days.”

The little hand which Marthe, pulling off her gauntlet, surrendered with a smile to his salute, was it not even more shapely, more satin-soft to the lips than when it had dropped the embroidery needle to submit to the same reverential greeting? And she herself, in her long blue habit, her man’s high-crowned buckled hat, seemed even more desirable than in high-waisted white, yellow-sprigged muslin of that afternoon in the salon!

“Tell Séraphin to gallop back and tell Maman,” suggested Artamène.

And so they rode slowly along, Marthe in the middle, and talked of their adventures. The wind blew a fold of the long habit against Roland’s foot. Except on the day when he had joined the Marquis de Kersaint, M. de Céligny had never been so happy in his life—for his rapture on the occasion of the Marquis’s appearance at Kerlidec had been clouded by his grandfather’s hostility. Now there was nothing to stain this perfect joy, and Roland was too deeply enthralled even to envy the solicitous glances which Marthe threw at her brother’s be-slinged left arm.

Sad that out of happiness may spring trouble! If the seeds of Roland’s escapade were not exactly sown during that short ride the ground was at any rate prepared for their reception.

Mme de la Vergne, warned by the herald, was on the perron to greet them. Artamène flung himself off his horse and ran up the steps, and, while the good lady embraced her son, Roland had the bliss of dismounting Mlle de la Vergne—of receiving her for one brief second in his arms as she slipped like a feather from the saddle. Then followed his own reception by Mme de la Vergne, small and fair and so unlike her daughter; and he found himself being thanked—thanked!—for accompanying her son hither.

“Maman,” sang Marthe to the harpsichord that evening, “Maman, dîtes-moi ce qu’on sent quand on aime, Est-ce plaisir, est-ce tourment? Je suis tout le jour dans une peine extrême, Et la nuit je ne sais comment!”

Was she? No! But Roland, that night, could not sleep for exaltation.

Artamène, by his mother’s desire, remained in bed next morning. A surgeon had been summoned to view his arm.

“Come and feed the poultry, Monsieur de Céligny—or are you too proud?” suggested Mlle de la Vergne after breakfast. “We are very rustic here, you must know, for we are short of farm servants.”

Roland, who would have swept a pigsty at her bidding, followed her as to some high festival. The hens who drove clucking round his feet might have been the doves of Venus. And the pigeons did indeed sweep in a cloud over Marthe, and ate out of her hand. Roland feared they pecked too hard.

When Artamène appeared he found them sitting in the lime arbour.

“Is our paladin telling you of his adventures?” he enquired, sitting down beside them.

“I have none to tell,” answered Roland. “It is you, mon cher, with your wound and your sling and your surgeon, who have the beau rôle.”

“And all wasted on a sister!” observed the hero with a grin.

“M. de Céligny has been telling me,” said Marthe, “the strange story about the old lady and the treasure of Mirabel. Do you believe it?”

“I believed it sufficiently to try to get sent after the treasure,” replied her brother. “So, taking a mean advantage of my slumbers, did Roland.”

Marthe turned her brilliant dark eyes from one to the other. Artamène shook his head.

“Our request was not favourably received.”

“O, what a pity!” sighed Mlle de la Vergne.

Flecks of sunlight came through the linden-leaves on to her dark hair, bringing out unsuspected warmth in its ebony, and on to a red stone on her finger.

“There is a ruby necklace there,” said Roland suddenly, his eyes moving from her ringlets to her hand. “And hundreds of louis in pistoles of the time of Louis XIII. So the plan said. Oh, if we could only have gone!”

“And is all that hoard to lie there, then, unused, while the Cause goes short of money?”

“Oh, no!” said both the young men together. “Presently, when M. de Kersaint has got the authority of the Duc de Trélan, wherever he may be, he will send some one after it.”

“Some one—whom?”

“I should think very probably M. de Brencourt,” replied Roland.

“And he must wait—perhaps for weeks and weeks—before he can start?”

“Yes,” said her brother, “unless the Marquis, who, as M. de Céligny will have told you, is a kinsman of M. de Trélan’s, decides to act without his authorisation, which, from what he said, it is quite likely he may do.”

“So that M. de Trélan’s authorisation is not indispensable?”

“No. Only a matter of form, I think. Being an émigré and Mirabel confiscated—he can neither prevent nor forward such an attempt.”

Mlle de la Vergne was silent, pushing at the gravel with a little shoe and looking down at it. “Where is Mirabel, did you say?”

“Quite near Paris, I gather,” replied Artamène.

“I wish,” said Marthe pensively, “that I were in Paris—quite near Mirabel!”

“My dear little sister, what would be the good of that?” asked Artamène, amused.

“I have relatives in Paris,” announced Roland, with sudden and apparent irrelevance, “two old cousins of my father’s—quiet, unsuspected, unsuspicious old gentlemen.”

The little silence which followed this statement was broken by a whirr of wings as one of Marthe’s pigeons alighted on the gravel outside the arbour, and, looking hard and hopefully at them out of one round, red-circled, unemotional eye, began to walk slowly up and down, jerking its burnished neck.

“O, if I were only a man!” exclaimed Mlle de la Vergne, abruptly, springing to her feet with kindling eyes.

“If I only had two arms!” said her brother, following her example, but more slowly.

“But I am a man, and both my arms are sound!” cried Roland, almost brandishing those members.

“And you have relatives in Paris who could help you!” said Marthe, turning her eyes on him.

“Well, no, hardly help,” said Roland slowly, thinking of his ancient and peaceful kinsmen. “But they could give me a roof. . . .”

“And I could give you money to bribe anyone who needed bribing,” declared Marthe. “At least, I have my pearls.”

“Oh, curse this arm!” muttered the wounded hero. “Yet, after all, I do not see why I also——”

“No! no!” exclaimed both the others. “No, we know what the surgeon said. That would be the sheerest folly”—as if what they had in their own inflammable heads were cold wisdom.

Artamène leant dejectedly against the side of the arbour. “I don’t see how you could do anything, Roland. You have not the plan of the late lamented of the time of Mazarin. You could not go and dig all over a place of that size on chance, even if the Directory gave you permission, which it certainly would not!”

“But I saw the plan!” retorted the Vicomte de Céligny. “I saw it perfectly clearly over the Abbé’s shoulder that night. Why, I could draw it now, if I had a pencil. Nobody has one? Well, look here!”

He broke off a twig from the lime-tree and began a series of scratches on the gravel, just as a bell clanged from the house to summon them to the midday meal—scratches which Séraphin diligently raked out during that repast.

By sunlight and by twilight and by lamplight, under the arbour, on the lawn, in the salon, the rough plan made from that fleeting glimpse of the original was constructed and reconstructed and discussed. So much were their young heads bent over it the next evening that Mme de la Vergne said they looked like conspirators.

“Ma mère, you are perspicacious,” replied her son. “We are conspirators.” But, not really believing him, she did not pursue the question, and indeed, before she could revert to it, Artamène looked very hard at his sister and asked her if she were not going to sing to them.

Roland added his entreaties, and attended Mlle de la Vergne to the harpsichord.

“What shall I sing?” asked she. “No, I do not need any music, thank you. You must join in the chorus, then, Monsieur, you and Artamène.” And with a mischievous smile she broke into the old children’s ronde of La Double Violette:

“J’ai un long voyage à faire,

Je ne sais qui le fera;

Si je l’dis à l’alouette

Tout le monde le saura!

La violette double double,

La violette doublera!

“Si je l’dis à l’alouette,

Tout le monde le saura:

Rossignol du vert bocage

Faîtes-moi ce plaisir-là!”

and when she got to

“Rossignol prend sa volée,

Au château d’amour s’en va,”

she looked at Roland.

Afterwards they sang other songs.

Next day the conspirators met again in the arbour for a final council of war. They could not improve upon the map which the two young men had made—indeed, the question rather was whether they had not already improved it out of all resemblance to the original. Roland’s immediate movements were now under discussion. Though it must shorten his visit, they all, even Roland himself, felt that no time was to be lost. M. de Céligny was supposed, of course, to be on his way to Kerlidec and his grandfather.

“But it will be wiser,” said he, “not to go there now. When I return. . . . You see, he might make difficulties about my visiting Paris at all. So I will write to him. . . .”

He would not accept Mlle de la Vergne’s pearls, though he thought it sublime of her to offer them. He had plenty of money, he said. And he settled to start next day. Artamène tried to salve his own fierce dejection by resolving to accompany him part of the way.

But, perhaps from the excitement of these deliberations, the Chevalier de la Vergne’s arm became unexpectedly painful during the night. It was out of the question for him even to leave his bed next morning, and, for once in his life, he did not seem wishful to do so. Roland’s offer to delay his departure was, however, declined by him. Mme de la Vergne, supposing their young guest to be setting off for Kerlidec—a point on which he did not undeceive her—hoped that he would visit them again, and when he asked if he might pay his parting respects to Mlle de la Vergne (having already taken a bedside farewell of her brother), replied rather absently that she was probably in the poultry-yard, and that if M. de Céligny would give himself the trouble. . . . For her thoughts were not at the moment with an unchaperoned daughter and what a susceptible young man might say to her ere he rode away, but with her son in pain upstairs, and whether the surgeon really understood his case, and if the constant poulticing he had ordered were right. Besides—though this even the inquiring mind of Artamène had never come near guessing—there existed a certain understanding between her and M. de Carné on the subject of Roland and Marthe.

Roland was off before the permission could be revoked. But Mlle de la Vergne was not in the poultry yard, though matters connected with her pensioners had drawn her to the spot where he found her, the miniature bridge which spanned the little stream winding through the grounds. From this she was watching with some anxiety the first voyage of a brood of ducklings down that St. Lawrence. Roland was stabbed to the heart. He was going to danger, to prison perhaps, for her—and her mind was set on ducklings!

Erect and noble (so he hoped—at any rate booted and spurred) the young man walked towards the bridge. Directly she turned, the surprise and concern on her face healed him.

“What! you are going already, Monsieur de Céligny! I thought it was not to be for another hour, and that you were closeted with Artamène . . . and I might have missed wishing you Godspeed because of these wretched little adventurers!”

“Ah no, Mademoiselle!” said Roland. “Do you think I should have gone like that? I have need of all the benedictions you can give me.”

And what she gave him satisfied him fully—only a look, but a look so charged with meaning—and both her hands. There on the tiny bridge he raised them with reverence and joy to his lips. Her silence, her faint flush, her movement of surrender, whether it were ultimate or no, dubbed him indeed her knight, going to the ogre’s castle with her colours on his helm—invincible indeed, and supremely blest to serve at once his lady and his King.

And unregarded, in that high moment, went the indignant comments of the little yellow navigator under their very feet, who was finding the stream on which his inexperience had embarked of an unlooked-for strength and volume.

CHAPTER VII

CHILDE ROLAND COMES TO THE DARK TOWER

Valentine de Trélan was kneeling before her crucifix ere retiring to bed when she heard the first shot. The report broke so sharply across her prayers that, like a noise heard in sleep, its first demand on the senses was the question whether it were real. The second shot brought her to her feet in some concern. Who could be firing so late, and at what? The sentry, at some marauder? But, as far as she could judge, the sound came from the great garden at the back, where no sentry was. Her first impulse was to go out in that direction to investigate, but she supposed she must not leave her post, in case she were summoned for any reason. She dressed again, and went out to the passage and listened.

Sure enough, some ten minutes later, there came a knocking on one of the more distant doors that gave on to the garden front. She fetched her keys, and hastening along the lengthy corridor, opened it. Outside were two National Guards, her friend Grégoire Thibault and another. Grégoire had a musket over his shoulder.

“Sorry to disturb you, citoyenne,” said he, half apologetically. “You have not seen anything of a man prowling round here, I suppose?”

“Nothing,” answered Mme de Trélan with perfect truth. “Was that what you were firing at?”

“Jacques here,” said Grégoire, “was going along the road when he saw—or thought he saw—in the distance a man climbing over the wall that goes round the park. He was off duty, so he had not his musket, and instead of going after him he came to tell me, as I was nearer than the guard house.”

“Not being quite the figure for climbing walls either, citoyenne,” put in Grégoire’s companion with reason.

“So we separated, and each went round a different side of the château. The light was getting bad, and the first time I fired at something moving it was comrade Jacques here. Luckily I didn’t hit him. Then a few minutes later I saw my gentleman for a second by a big bush of something, but, parbleu, he slipped round one of those heathen goddesses or whatever they are. I sent a remembrancer after him from this”—Grégoire slapped his musket—“and I am almost sure I hit him; but do you think I could find him anywhere in the garden? No!”

Valentine, who knew the extent of the garden—park, rather—so much better than he, was convinced that the time which had elapsed between the second shot and his appearance at the château was not a quarter long enough for a thorough search, especially in the rapidly failing light, so that the odds were the intruder, if wounded, was still there. She said as much.

“Well, he can stay there till daylight,” announced the Citizen Grégoire composedly, “and reflect on his crimes. If he isn’t there he has made off, and won’t be likely to return in a hurry. You are not nervous, are you, Madame Vidal?”

“Not the least in the world,” the Duchesse assured him. “Did you see what this man was like, or have you any idea why he should come into the garden?”

“From the way in which he slipped over that wall,” remarked Jacques, “I should say he was young.”

“I daresay,” put in Grégoire consolingly, “that it was only some inquisitive lad wanting to see inside the garden. You will be all right, Madame Vidal; he can’t possibly get into the house. If I wasn’t sure of it, parbleu, I would stay the night here.”

If Grégoire Thibault, in the days of the Terror, had been a hunter of suspects, as he gave himself out to be, his zeal had sadly suffered eclipse since that time. It was clear that he wished to minimise the seriousness of the inroad in order to get home to his bed, and for the same reason, had no intention of turning out the rest of the guard. Valentine was not in the least anxious to keep him from that haven, and so after a few reassuring words the twain departed, and Mme de Trélan was free to resume her interrupted orisons, with a conviction that some man, with purpose unknown, was lurking in the precincts of Mirabel.

The affair indeed was a strange interruption to the almost cloistral quiet of the last few weeks, into which news of the outer world came only through Suzon Tessier or Toinon the laitière, or by the unencouraged gossip of the scrubbers. For, since she never went into the hamlet, Valentine might almost have been a recluse living the contemplative life with brief intervals of the active. Sometimes, already, it seemed to her that she had never known Mirabel under conditions any different.

She did go to bed, and after a time went to sleep, but woke about midnight, and remained awake, for she found that she could not well bear the idea of a fellow-creature lying out all night in the dark and lonely park, perhaps in agony to boot, even though he were a thief or something of the kind. But it was useless looking for him before daylight. The thought that he might try to effect an entry she dismissed. At dawn she rose, dressed, and slipped out behind Mirabel.

It was three o’clock, and the first thrush was singing in that vast desert of a garden. Along the weed-infested paths went the Duchesse, and through bosquet after bosquet, tended groves no longer, but thickets so overgrown that some were almost impassable. Nettles, burdocks, thistles, briars, those raiding colonists were everywhere, waging war against the smothering advances of the unclipped ivy. But the little lake in the distance mirrored no tall pines now on its tarnished surface. Of that aisle of scent and murmurs the nearer pillars were but stumps; the farther stood lonely and condemned against the sky. Valentine did not look this morning at those distant martyrs; she kept her gaze on the ground as she made her way between the bushes or skirted the long, dripping grass of some once-shaven little lawn. Such terms and sylvan deities as still had heads looked at their former lady with cold and curious, in some cases with leering eyes. Had she been wandering there without an object she might have had leisure to taste the infinite sadness of that place, made only for pleasure and good company, or to remember, perhaps, certain passages of its light past. But she was searching for an unfortunate; and that the unfortunate, when found, might prove to be a very undesirable person indeed, that, in fact, she was disposed to picture him as such, did not greatly trouble her. The last few incredible years had given her a sympathy with the hunted.

Full though her mind was of her quest, the first indication that it was on the way to prove successful gave her something of a shock. She had come to the head of the flight of shallow marble steps that led from one little terrace to the next, when she suddenly perceived on each a small, reddish, star-shaped splash. She bent down; yes, it was blood—the trail of the pursued. On the grassgrown gravel at the foot of the steps it was more difficult to follow, but the track began again, clearer and larger than before, on a short flight that led once more upwards. On one step there was even a smear, that looked like the print of a hand, as though the wounded man had stumbled and recovered himself.

And thus, finally, in what had been known as the Bosquet de Mercure, she found the invader, fallen sideways at the foot of the bronze statue of Mercury—a young man, pale as marble and as beautiful as the god himself, and so unlike what she had expected that she stood a moment as still as he. That he was a gentleman was plain without the evidence of his clothes; and he wore, as further and indeed defiant proof, the black coat-collar which marked the aristocrat and reactionary, the collet noir which had caused so many pitched battles in the streets of Paris. One arm lay out on the gravel, crushing a little company of that innocent and joyous flower, the speedwell, which had rooted there, intruding in the garden like him, and, like him, shut-eyed. The other hand held a red ball of a handkerchief which had probably, during consciousness, been pressed against the dark patch on the left side of his grey coat.

And Valentine, her heart alight with compassion, began to stoop over her quarry . . . stopped, raised herself again, and put out a hand to the base of the statue for support. In the unconscious face at her feet she suddenly saw. . . . Whence came that resemblance? She was carried back a hundred years, to a morning in her young wifehood here at Mirabel, to an early wakening, to the thrush, just heard, like this, in the summer dawn . . . while by her side lay the husband who still summed up all her dreams, on whom she had looked down with the yet untroubled eyes of love, and whose sleeping visage had been the very counterpart of this.

But in a moment the illusion was fled, and she did not know how it had ever come. Leaving the statue she knelt down by the fallen youth and felt for his heart. It was beating. She began to unfasten his neckcloth. But how was she to convey him into the château? She could not carry him. Besides, how badly was he hurt? Could she possibly get him into that damp little pseudo-classical temple of Ceres on the other side of the grove? But the first thing was to try to revive him. When she had been a fine lady she would have had a vinaigrette or something of the sort about her; now there was nothing for it but to scoop up in her hollowed palms a little stagnant water from the basin at the foot of the statue, and to dash it, greenish as it was, over the white face. Three times she did this without any result but temporary disfigurement, and then set to work to rub the intruder’s hands, long patrician hands like her own, like . . . But that was folly.

“Grandpère!” said the young man suddenly, “Monsieur le Marquis! . . . Artamène . . . Where am I, then?” He opened his eyes, tried rashly to raise himself, and relapsed with a groan, his hand to his wounded side. “What has happened to me? . . . Is this a garden?”

Valentine slipped her arm under his head. “Do not try to move yet, Monsieur,” she said in her beautiful voice. “You are in the park of Mirabel—with a friend.”

He stared up at her, utterly perplexed. (But his eyes were brown, quite unlike that dark grey.) “I am so thirsty,” he said, like a child.

“You cannot drink this stagnant water,” replied Mme de Trélan compassionately, and then, looking closer and seeing how dry and cracked his lips were, bethought her of a spring that flowed, or that used to flow, through a lion’s mouth in the grotto of Latona, a few seconds away. “Wait,” she said, gently withdrawing her arm, “I think I can get you some fresh water.”

She rose and hastened off. Yes, the spring was still flowing, and even the stone goblet that served it, though very green, was still there. The Duchesse brought back that water from the past; and, aided by her, the boy drank long and eagerly, and thanked her.

All this while the dawn was growing brighter, and the solitary thrush now become one of a choir, and, though Mercury was battered and green, he held out the caduceus over the two figures beneath him with an air at once sprightly and benedictory. And the one bright buttercup at his feet, moved by the morning breeze, bent towards them too.

“My child,” said Valentine gently, as she set down the goblet, “I do not know what you were doing here last night, but I suppose you do. At any rate you were shot at by the sentry, and I see that you are hurt in the side, but not, I hope, seriously. The question is, how to move you so that I can do something for your wound.”

The invader was perfectly sensible now. “But, Madame, who are you?” he asked.

“The concierge of Mirabel—of the château,” said she.

“I shall never find it now,” murmured the young man dejectedly. “Instead, I suppose I shall have to go to prison.”

“Yes, in the château,” said Mme de Trélan encouragingly. “And I will be your gaoler.”

He understood. A look of alarm came over his face. “Oh no, Madame, that would never do! The Directory——”

“I am afraid that I care very little for the Directory,” broke in the Duchesse calmly, beginning to unfasten the fichu from her neck. “Now first, Monsieur, I am going to tie this muslin of mine very tightly about you, for I think there has been no bleeding for some time, and then we must see whether you can get to your feet, and whether, with my help, you can walk as far as the château.”

And five minutes or so later, with infinite precautions, the youth trying to put as little weight on a woman as he need, and to stifle the expressions of pain that came to his lips, they were actually progressing very slowly from the Bosquet de Mercure into that of Ceres. And in the pillared shrine of the goddess Mme de Trélan had a moment’s impulse to instal her protégé, seeing his extreme pallor and the possibility of his being unable to reach the house. But the little temple was eminently unsuitable for a hospital, she would find it very awkward to get away to tend him there, and he would be liable to discovery. So, since he assured her rather breathlessly that he was all right, they went forward.

On the edge of the great fountain, however, exposed though it was in its open parterre, he was obliged to sit down and rest a moment or two. The Duchesse sat beside him with her arm round him, lest he should fall backwards off the stone rim into the dark and viscous water behind him. And he, his eyes on the great house, seemed to be realising the extent of his prospective refuge. “I could not see it properly last night,” he murmured.

But Valentine told him not to talk. He did not altogether obey her, and his intermittent remarks as they went onwards in the growing light amid the increasing vociferations of the thrushes were now and then unintelligible. Once he called her “Marthe,” and then apologised.

Certainly there were no eyes to watch them at that early hour save those of the birds, no place for them to watch from but the overgrown thickets. And so Mme de Trélan got Roland de Céligny unobserved into Mirabel by the basement stairway at the back, and along the dark passages to her room. By the time they reached her parlour he was mute and unresisting, and when she had steered him to the bed (left just as she had slipped out of it) and had somehow assisted him on to it, her youthful visitor, as she fully expected, quietly fainted away again.

CHAPTER VIII

HIS SOJOURN THERE

(1)

When the laitière came at half-past six that morning she was sorry to hear that Mme Vidal was indisposed, but not ill-pleased to sell her, in consequence, a double portion of milk. So indisposed indeed was the concierge that she requested Toinon, when she returned to the village, to get conveyed to Paris a note to her niece Mme Tessier, asking the latter to make a few purchases and to visit her.

The sympathetic Toinon gone, Mme de Trélan went back to her patient. Long before this he had come to himself for the second time, and she had fed him with the milk she had reserved for her morning coffee, in a spoon. He took it drowsily, like a child, and dropped off to sleep again.

She thought him asleep now when she came in, and went about noiselessly putting the dark little bedroom to rights, preoccupied all the time with one thought, this boy’s safety. The thought divided itself into two parts; how to secure proper attention for his wound, and how to get the boy himself away without discovery. Her unpractised investigation of his hurt had already led her to suppose that it was a glancing flesh wound off the ribs, probably not dangerous, save from the amount of blood he seemed to have lost. Why he had risked coming by it she had not even a guess.

But though she thought him asleep she saw, after a minute or two, as she passed by the bed, that his eyes were open and that he was looking at her. He was very flushed.

“Is there anything you want, mon enfant?” she asked, stopping.

He continued to look at her mutely, then made these brief statements:

“My name is Roland de Céligny. I ought not to have come. Now I shall be endangering you. Madame, I implore you to let me go!”

“Chut!” retorted Valentine, laying her hand for a second on his forehead. “How could you go, even if I would let you? There is no need, I assure you, to trouble about me. Besides, why should I not care for a wounded man whom I find in the garden. You are not a malefactor, Monsieur de Céligny!”

“Mais si, Madame,” replied Roland earnestly. “In intention, at least . . . that is just what I am. . . . You ought to give me up.”

“If we all did what we ought to do!” exclaimed Valentine lightly, and stood looking down at him, convinced now that that momentary likeness was a trick of the dawn, some enchantment of the garden, anything but fact.

She felt that to ensure silence she ought to leave him; unused as she was to caring for an injured man she was certain that he ought not to talk. In romances the wounded hero was always adjured not to do so, and the boy looked feverish. But not to know a little more about him were to waste the chance of arranging some plan which the faithful Suzon’s arrival would bring her. So, contrary to all romantic tradition, Valentine sat down by the bed and said in a business-like way,

“Tell me, Monsieur de Céligny, as shortly as possible, what you came into the garden to do, and if you know anyone in Paris with whom it would be safe to communicate. I ask you this because I have a trusted friend coming to see me to-day, and through her something might be arranged. Your personal safety is the first thing to consider, your wound—which I believe is not serious—the second.”

“I have cousins in Paris,” said Roland. He gave their address. “I was at their house for three or four days before I came here.”

“Do they know where you are?”

“No, Madame.”

“They will be very anxious about you, then?”

“Yes,” murmured he rather shamefacedly, and sighed.

“Are they likely to track you here?”

“I don’t think so,” said the adventurer. “No, I do not believe it possible.”

“But the sentry saw you; fortunately it was too dark to distinguish your face. They are sure to search again. I think the moment has come, Monsieur de Céligny, if I am to help you further, for you to tell me a little more. You see that I am your friend, and that I am not . . . in fear of the Directory. You need not name anyone unless you wish, but I think you had better tell me for what reason you were in the park of Mirabel last night.”

“Madame,” replied Roland with emotion, “after what you have done for me I should indeed be foolish and ungrateful if I kept back anything from you. I came to Mirabel to find the hidden treasure.”

The Duchesse de Trélan stared at him. “But, my child, there is no such thing!”

From the pillow the young man’s look said as politely as possible, “How can you be sure of that, Madame la concierge?”

“I have known the château for many years,” said Valentine, “and I assure you. . . .” She broke off, puzzled.

“But I have seen a plan of its hiding-place,” said Roland eagerly.

“Where did you see such a thing?”

“When I was in Brittany with M. de——” some remnant of caution checked him, “—with a Chouan leader.”

“A Chouan leader had a plan of a treasure hidden in Mirabel!” exclaimed Mirabel’s mistress, strongest amazement in her tone. “What was his name—no, I will not ask you that. Did he send you here, then?”

“No, Madame,” admitted Roland, with a return of shamefacedness. “He will be very angry with me—if ever I see him again.” He gave a second or two to inward contemplation, presumably, of this anger, and went on, “The money was hidden here during the Fronde by the Duc of those days, but the paper describing its whereabouts was stolen, and came into the hands of an old lady who was dying in the next house to . . . to where we were. Our aumônier went to see her, and she gave him the paper to convey to the Duc de Trélan, who, I believe, is in England, or somewhere of the sort. At any rate he is an émigré—as I suppose you know, Madame.”

Valentine forced herself to remain quietly sitting there. “Well?” she said, and her voice, from sheer self-restraint, sounded quite stony.

“And the aumônier brought it in to give to M. de Kersaint, because he knew that the Marquis was a kinsman of the Duc de Trélan.”

“What name did you say?” asked Valentine, more and more amazed.

“The Marquis de Kersaint,” replied Roland. Then he stopped. “I did not mean to mention the name.”

“De Kersaint—a kinsman!” exclaimed Valentine, from whom all thoughts of encouraging prudence in the fugitive were now miles away. “I never heard the name in my life! A kinsman of——”

And now Roland was staring at her.

“Well, never mind,” said she. “We must keep to the point, which is, how to get you away, Monsieur de Céligny. You saw this . . . this extraordinary plan, then, and—since you say that you were not sent—I assume that you thought that you would like to come on your own account to hunt for the treasure. Had you any accomplices?”

“Not in Paris,” replied Roland, reddening faintly.

“And your cousins know nothing?”

“No, I merely said that I was leaving Paris for the day and might be back late. You see, Madame, I meant to have got here earlier, but it was light so long. I only had a sight of that plan for a moment,” confessed the treasure-hunter with engaging candour, “yet I remember that it looked as though there were an entrance from the garden to a passage leading under the house to the banqueting hall, I think. But I did not realise that the garden was so large.”

Again Valentine stared at him. It was making her dizzy to learn these facts—if they were facts—about her own house after all her years of acquaintance with it.

“You must be crazy, my child,” she said conclusively, “or the plan was a hoax. But to return to these cousins of yours, and how to get you restored to them. The point is whether it would be better to try to smuggle a surgeon in to you, or to smuggle you out. And what to say to them? It is not over safe to tell the exact truth in a letter. It might endanger the bearer also. Let me think.”

She put her shapely, slightly roughened hand over her eyes, and Roland gazed at it.

“Monsieur de Céligny,” she said after a moment, uncovering her eyes, “have you ever fought a duel?”

“No, Madame.”

“Should you object to having come to the park of Mirabel for that purpose last night?”

Roland took her meaning, with a little smile. “There is nothing I should like better.”

“It is the best I can devise for the moment. As I say, it would not do for you to tell the truth in writing. If, to-morrow night, you could walk with my assistance as far as a little door in the park wall that I know of, and if your cousins could procure, with all secrecy, for a carriage to be there. . . . You see, it will be impossible for you to get out of the place you have so rashly entered save in some such clandestine fashion, and even then any mischance——”

“Mischance to me matters not, Madame!” cried the young man. “But if it were to you!”

The Duchesse de Trélan smiled. “Reassure yourself, Monsieur de Céligny. No mischance is likely to come to me. If you feel able I must urge you now to write a line to your cousins about your duel. It might be thought a trap of some kind if I wrote. They must see your hand.”

She fetched him pencil and paper, and together they concocted a letter to his elderly kinsmen, she holding the paper. At the end she fed him again, for the conversation and the effort of writing had exhausted him rather alarmingly. It was no more than was to be expected. But at that price Valentine had the main threads of the affair in her hands now.

(2)

In the early afternoon arrived, as she had been desired, the faithful Tessier, with a basket containing medicaments and comforts.

“I knew the place would not suit you, Madame,” she said, almost as soon as she set foot inside the little parlour. “Ah, I see that you are indeed indisposed!” For Mme de Trélan, to give colour to her statement to Toinon, had wrapped herself in a shawl.

“Suzon, I was never better in my life,” said she, and looked it. “But there is someone ill here. That was really why I sent for you.”

“Someone—in there?” ejaculated Mme Tessier, pointing to the bedroom door.

“Yes, a young man, suffering from a gunshot wound in the side,” responded the Duchesse calmly. “You can give me help and advice.”

For the moment Suzon looked little capable of either. Her eyes turned wildly from Mme de Trélan to the bedroom door.

“But—did he fall from heaven, or through the chimney?” she managed to get out.

“Neither. I found him in the garden at three o’clock this morning. He was shot by the guard last night.”

Suzon sat down heavily on a chair. “Mercy on us! What is his name, Madame, his business?”

“His name—no, I will not tell you his name. And as for his business, suffice it to say that it has not succeeded. I want to keep him here no longer than is necessary for his wound, lest he should be discovered and taken.”

“But you yourself, Madame?”

“My reputation, do you mean?” asked the Duchesse, laughing. She seemed in a mood of unusual exhilaration. “I think, at my age, that will take care of itself.”

“Your safety is what I mean, Madame,” said Suzon reproachfully. “You ought to give him up, whatever he was doing.”

“That is just what I am going to do—to his relations if they will come and fetch him.” And Valentine explained her plan. When she had heard it, poor Suzon, breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of getting rid of the refugee, almost clamoured to take the compromising letter to its destination.

“And I think I had better see these gentlemen and bring back the answer to-morrow,” she volunteered.

“I hardly like to ask you to do that,” said Valentine, hesitating.

“Then how are you going to know, Madame, whether the carriage will be there or not,” objected Mme Tessier. “It will be difficult enough as it is to bring it all off without a hitch. And I am only too anxious for him to be gone. Cleaning day or visiting day, what might happen—Heaven preserve us!”

“My bedroom is not on show to the general public,” observed Valentine lightly. “And I can always lock Louise out.” (Louise commanded the brigade of cleaners.) “However, I am not anxious to keep the boy, for his own sake. Now, what have you brought me for him, Suzette?”

Mme Tessier watched her as, alert and interested, she unpacked the basket. Now and again there would peep out, in this tragically fated lady, whom she worshipped and protected with equal fervour—this lady who for all her lifetime of authority was so wonderfully humble and contented—some trait of those older days when her lightest wish had been a command. Despite her extraordinary consideration for others, and those her inferiors, she did sometimes demand services without counting the cost, and accept devotion as a right. And Suzon loved her for it.

“This is excellent, ma fille,” said the Duchesse in a moment, setting out Suzon’s purchases on the table. “I think that as a reward I must tell you, after all, about this young man’s errand—a wild-goose chase if ever there was one. Did you ever hear, Suzon, from your grandfather, of a treasure hidden in Mirabel from the time of the Fronde?”

“Why, bless you, yes, Madame,” replied Suzon. “Grandpère used often to talk of it. There were supposed to be jewels too. But I never believed it myself.”

Valentine was taken aback at this unexpected reply. “You did know of it! It is extraordinary that I should be the last to hear of it, then.”

And in both their minds, as each guessed, was the unuttered question, Had the Duc known of it too? But for years now Mme Tessier had never mentioned M. de Trélan unless the Duchesse did so first.

“It is very strange,” went on Mirabel’s mistress reflectively. “And stranger still that the man who possesses a plan of the spot where this treasure is supposed to be hidden should be a Chouan leader calling himself—with what truth I cannot tell—a kinsman of . . . of the Duc’s.” A swift, tiny flush ran over her face. “I have never heard his name. I think it must be a false assertion.”

“And that is why the young man is here, then?” interrupted Suzon despite herself. “—sent by this Chouan to secure the treasure! He is a Royalist, therefore!—O, Madame——”

“Not sent, I gather,” corrected the Duchesse. “Yes, a Royalist, a collet noir.”

“A collet noir—one of those hotheads! And the guard—you say they shot him! Did they not search for him? Will they not search again? Really, Madame, I must say it, your imprudence . . .”

“The search, if you can call it so, is over,” said Mme de Trélan with composure, opening a pot of jelly. “It was very perfunctory last night, and little better this morning, when the sergeant and three men came. I of course knew nothing—may Heaven pardon me!”

“Heaven needs to watch over you!” murmured Suzon.

“They think he got away—the obvious conclusion. So now we have nothing to do but to make that surmise a fact.” Suddenly she turned her head. “What, in heaven’s name, is the poor boy doing in there now?”

He was singing; and as the two women went hastily in, it was apparent that his choice was that gay little air, La Double Violette.

“Suzon,” said the Duchesse in alarm, after a moment, “he is light-headed. Is he worse? What ought I to do?”

“I expect,” replied Mme Tessier, “that a surgeon would say he should be bled.”

“Bled! when he has lost so much blood already!”

“Rossignol prend sa volée,

Au château d’amour s’en va,”

chanted Roland, more and more out of tune.

“Oh, poor nightingale!” exclaimed Valentine, half laughing. “ ‘Château d’amour,’ indeed!”

“Trouva la porte fermée,

Par la fenêtre il entra,”

was the songster’s next equally appropriate announcement.

“I will go at once to the village and get a febrifuge of some kind,” said Suzon, making for the door. “I will not be long.”

And Mme de Trélan was left, to be greeted with the nightingale’s message:

“Bonjour l’une, bonjour l’autre,

Bonjour la belle que voilà!

Votre amant m’envoie vous dire

Que vous ne l’oubliez pas!”

“Child,” she said, sitting down and laying her hand on the hot forehead, “you could put your strength to so much better use!”

And at her voice or touch the minstrel suddenly ceased his strain, while his fingers, moving over the bed, found and closed on her other hand. Thereafter he was at least quiet.

CHAPTER IX

HIS DEPARTURE THENCE

Thus it was that Roland de Céligny’s exit from Mirabel was not so speedily effected as his hostess had planned. And without Suzon Tessier it is doubtful whether it would have been effected at all. For if Mme de Trélan was cast for the romantic part in this drama of deliverance, it was Suzon who played the indispensable go-between with MM. de Céligny aînés, she who brought in the additional and choicer provisions required for the invalid, she who supported, on cleaning-day, the fiction of Mme Vidal’s not being able to leave her room, and personally enforced, in consequence, a surprising quiet among the myrmidons of Louise. But Roland hardly realised his debt to Mme Tessier; the ardour of his gratitude glowed at the feet of Mme de Vidal—as he persisted in calling her.

But on the fourth evening he was well enough to go, the two women thought; and, for his part, well enough to be sorry to go.

It had been arranged that at ten o’clock a carriage should be in waiting outside a certain little door in the park wall at the end of the lime-tree avenue known as the Allée des Soupirs—a door which the Duchesse had already investigated, and from which, when she oiled the rusty bolts, she had torn away in readiness the plastered ivy. This door was some distance down the park, and, therefore, to accustom him to the use of his legs, Valentine had caused her patient to walk several times round the room with the assistance of Suzon and herself. It was already getting dark; Suzon had gone back to Paris, and, since Mme de Trélan dared not have her patient in her living-room in case of a surprise, she had taken her armchair into her bedroom and ensconced him in it, to eat his supper before he faced the journey to the door, and herself sat down to bear him company.

And while he ate Roland talked; or, to be more accurate, when he was not talking, he ate. Propped up with pillows in his chair, bright-eyed, with a varying colour, he appeared, as he was, excited, and not the less attractive for his condition. His wound was not, Suzon said, doing very well, but he seemed free from fever, and it was too dangerous for him to stay longer. Both Valentine and he knew that. So he utilised the last remaining half-hour in converse, and not being of a suspicious nature, never considered that this woman who was saving him could quite easily betray him afterwards when she had gained from him all the information she wanted, nor even that it might be worth her while letting him slip for the sake of that information. The concierge’s extraordinary kindness and generosity had earned, besides his undying gratitude, his whole-hearted confidence. Moreover, as he told himself, however she came to her present position, it was not a position natural to her. Apart from her voice, her bearing, what concierge ever had filbert nails like that? Yes, Roland wished he were not going out of Mirabel with the prospect of never seeing its guardian again.

So he chatted unrestrainedly about the little band in Brittany. Chiefly he dwelt upon M. de Kersaint, and manifested astonishment when he learnt that his hostess did not know of the heroic part that gentleman had played in the great Austrian defeat at Rivoli two and a half years ago.

“You forget, Monsieur Roland,” observed Valentine, smiling, “that I do not live in Royalist circles. But I think I do remember hearing at the time that one of the Austrian columns was commanded by a French émigré, but I never learnt his name.”

“It was M. de Kersaint. He has the cross of Maria Theresa for it.”

“Indeed! I am afraid the Directory would give him a very different decoration if they had him in their hands.”

“They are not likely to have him there,” asserted Roland confidently. “But I remember hearing M. de Brencourt say that Masséna in particular—not to speak of General Bonaparte——”

“Whom did you say?” asked Valentine, struck.

“General Masséna. He came up during the night, you know, to Joubert’s assistance, Bonaparte being of course in supreme command——”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted the Duchesse again, less interested in the battle of Rivoli (on which this young man seemed to be an expert) than in something else. “I mean—what name—whom did you say you overheard? . . . M. de Brencourt?”

Roland nodded. “The Comte de Brencourt is M. de Kersaint’s second-in-command. He said that Masséna was furious——”

“Tell me, what is he like, this M. de Brencourt?”

Roland, surprised, described him. “Why, do you know him, Madame?”

“It cannot be the same,” said Valentine hastily. “I did not mean to interrupt you, Monsieur de Céligny. Go on, pray, with what you were telling me about M. de Kersaint and Rivoli.”

But she did not listen. Pictures were floating in her head of her stay at Spa in 1787, of her first meeting at that fashionable resort with the Comte de Brencourt, whose admiration had almost amounted to persecution, who had threatened once to shoot himself because of her coldness, and who had followed her against her bidding to her country house.

It was the same man, of course. Dimly she heard about Lucien and Artamène and the “Abbé,” of the disbanding, of greater plans for the future, and it was not for some moments that she came back entirely to her room and her attractive refugee, and found that the young man, leaning slightly forward in the big chair, was asking her a question.

“Do you not think, Madame de Vidal, that you might add to your never-to-be-forgotten kindness by telling me in your turn, something about yourself? You—pardon me—you are no concierge! You are as gently born as I!”

“You think so? Well, the world has been upside down these ten years, has it not? Ten years ago—if you were old enough then to give a thought to the future—you would not have expected to grow up a house-breaker, Monsieur Roland!”

But from the way he looked at her then she could almost see his young and romantic mind working, and probably making up wild stories about her. She decided to present him with one ready-made, and not so far from the truth.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “it is useless to deny that I am gently born, but I trust that my employer, the Deputy who has charge of the château, is not aware of the fact. For him I am the aunt of his cousin, Mme Tessier. My late husband, an émigré, died abroad, and I was obliged to earn my living, like many a better woman. I used to earn it by needlework; now I do so by looking after Mirabel. There you have my history in the proverbial nutshell. And now”—she glanced at the little clock on the shelf, “it is nearly time to start for the Allée des Soupirs.”

The colour leapt into Roland’s face. “You have been so divinely kind, Madame, that I dare ask one more kindness. Something—the merest trifle—as a memento of what indeed I shall need no memento to keep in lifelong memory!”

It was a long time since young men had asked Valentine de Trélan for souvenirs. That they had asked in vain was neither here nor there.

“But, my child,” she responded with a maternal air, “I have nothing to give you . . . unless you would like a thimble or a pair of scissors!”

“I should like anything,” said the petitioner humbly.

“I suppose,” said she, rising, “that what you would like best would be some of this semi-mythical treasure.—Roland!” she said, struck by a sudden thought, “promise me that you will not come back after it when you are better! Promise me!”

The boy had flushed with pleasure at the sound of his unprefixed name. “Alas, the treasure will probably be gone before I am well enough for that, Madame. The Marquis de Kersaint will send somebody—but not one of us. He said it was work for an older and wiser head, and I suppose he was right. I suspect he will send M. de Brencourt, if he can spare him.”

“Oh!” said Valentine, and was silent all at once.

“But,” went on the youth, unregarding, “if I am to promise not to return, Madame de Vidal, you must give me a remembrance of you to take away with me. Otherwise——”

“I think you are threatening me,” observed Valentine, recovering herself. “For my part I can ill spare my thimble, but if it will prevent your climbing that wall again—Stay, I believe I have something after all.”

And going into the outer room she came back with the locket she had found in the work table in her boudoir.

“If you care for this, Monsieur de Céligny,” she said, “you are welcome to it. It has no value. It was mine as a girl, before my marriage.”

But she need not have said that, for the V, which alone stood out clearly among the twisted pearls and garnets of the monogram, he could easily take for “Vidal.” Getting with some difficulty to his feet the young man reverently received the trinket, looked at it, and having kissed it slipped the worn chain about his neck. Mme de Trélan brought some garments from the bed.

“It is really time to go, mon enfant. You will need all your courage for the journey. Here is your hat; I brought it in afterwards from the guardianship of the statue; and you must put on this cloak, for it is raining hard. All the better, for rain drowns noises—though I hope there is no one to hear in any case. Now, you must lean on me hard, for I am very strong.”

It was indeed raining from a light spring sky which somehow concealed a moon. On the limes of the Allée des Soupirs, when they got there, the drops pattered heavily. The journey had been slow and trying, but at last they reached the door. Roland, panting, leant against the wall while Valentine opened it.

It was lucky that she had oiled bolts and hinges, for even then it protested as she pulled at it. The last ivy tendril gave. Mme de Trélan went through and heard an unseen horse blow out its nostrils and a bit jingle, and then saw two dim forms waiting in the lane. One of them touched her on the shoulder.

“He is there?” asked an educated man’s voice.

“Just inside,” she answered. “Be quick, for he can scarcely stand.”

The two men went through the door, and in a moment Roland came out between them, stumbling a little but not so spent that he did not try to stop as he passed her. His supporters very properly would have none of this, but she heard the boy’s low, broken words of gratitude and farewell before the three had vanished in the shadows.

She turned to go in. And then the same man’s form loomed through the darkness again.

“This is for your inestimable services, and your discretion, my good woman,” he whispered. “You can guess whence it comes.” And, seizing one of her hands in the obscurity, he thrust something into it and closed her fingers round the gift.

Very shortly afterwards the Duchesse de Trélan stood alone in the rain under the wet limes of the Allée des Soupirs in her park of Mirabel. Her arm was lightened of the burden she had supported down the avenue, but her heart, although it knew a great relief, beat to an odd little ache that was almost regret. And she stood there between tears and laughter, because of what she held in her hand as an exchange for Roland de Céligny—a considerable bundle of assignats.

CHAPTER X

THE KNIGHT’S MOVE

(1)

May had given place to June before Valentine de Trélan had quite got accustomed to the departure of the handsome boy whose presence had been such an anxiety and yet such a pleasure to her. The five thousand francs which she had in his place—not nearly so large a sum as it appeared owing to the enormous depreciation of paper money under the incapable rule of the Five Kings—she had at first thought of returning to his relatives by Suzon Tessier. But Suzon, by pretending to wish for her own sake to avoid further intercourse with that house, had persuaded the Duchesse to keep their bounty, at least for the present.

Since the evening when she had wept under her husband’s portrait Valentine had never again felt any disposition to tears. Reaction had come after that outburst. If Gaston were alive—and she could not rid herself of the conviction that he was—it was difficult not to draw the conclusion that he was indifferent to her fate. Seven years, and no sign! Then she told herself again, as she had so often done, that her letters had never reached him, that he had not the slightest reason for supposing her to be still in life, since everybody of her world who had survived the tempest believed her murdered, that she had no evidence of his not having made enquiries after her, or unsuccessful efforts to find her. Only of a successful effort would she have heard. But none of these reasoned considerations could remove the sting of that long silence.

Yet, if Gaston were suddenly to appear before her, would she be able to greet him with that unconcern which she had almost persuaded herself that she felt—and that she ought to feel? She knew she would not. Down in the depths of her soul all the time was the emotion which had pierced her in the picture-gallery—the intense longing to see him again. It was Mirabel which had first made her conscious of this longing, and it was Mirabel which had insensibly fed it. And there were times when she cursed the impulse which had brought her here, for under the crust of indifference which she had hoped was forming over her heart she could feel the stirring of that desire, growing daily not less strong, but stronger.

And then one day it occurred to her that if this Chouan chief of Roland de Céligny’s spoke of writing to the Duc de Trélan about the treasure he must know, or think he knew, Gaston’s whereabouts. More, if he were to send someone to Mirabel after the hoard, as Roland had appeared to think certain, she might communicate at least with this self-styled kinsman of her husband’s by his emissary, whoever he were. Yes, even if he were the Comte de Brencourt; for although that mad passion of his must be many times dead after all these years—and, perhaps, just because of its death—he would surely bear a letter for her back to Brittany . . . even as Roland might have done, had she thought of it in time.

This idea grew in her to an impatience for the coming of the next treasure-seeker. But June went on, and he did not come. Paris celebrated (with insufficient enthusiasm to please the Government) the obsequies of the envoys murdered at Rastadt; commerce continued to decline, discontent and lethargy to become more marked, and Republican feelings suffered outrage at the first performances of the opera of Adrien, wherein the stage emperor made his entry with undue pomp. On the eighteenth came a minor revolution, the coup d’état of the 30th Prairial, with a consequent change of ministry. Valentine heard of it with calm, and June slid presently into July.

(2)

Among the few sightseers who passed the sentry on the 20th of Messidor, a visiting day, was one who, though M. Thibault was too much engrossed in conversation to observe it, never entered the château at all, but strolled round to the garden front. There was nothing to prevent this, though it was hardly ever done. The really remarkable fact about this enterprising visitor was that he did not reappear again at leaving time; but this also passed without remark. Yet he had not vanished into space; he was seated, when twilight came, in that very grotto of Latona whose spring had refreshed Roland, waiting with some impatience for completer darkness. He had already seen as much of the garden front of Mirabel as he wished—a window on the ground-floor with a badly-broken shutter.

Problems connected with the recruiting and organisation of Finistère had kept the Comte de Brencourt longer in Brittany than the Marquis de Kersaint had bargained for, but he was here at last on his mission. Since a detail of the ancient plan had proved susceptible of two interpretations, he hoped to-night to make a preliminary search; after which he would arrange his plan of campaign with the Royalist agents in Paris with whom he was in touch.

More than the question of his difficult enterprise, however, was occupying M. de Brencourt’s mind as he sat in that fantastic relic of the dead and gone world of which he also was a survival. It was impossible to be at Mirabel, even for the first time in his life, without thinking of Mme de Trélan, and, as his refuge darkened, he found himself thinking of little else, and of the extraordinary chance which had thrown her tragic and sacred shadow across his path again. On the windings of that chance Artus de Brencourt, while he waited, had time to meditate profoundly, and sitting there in the July twilight, his chin on his hand, staring at the arbutus which almost blocked the entrance to the grotto, he was asking himself two questions. Why had the Marquis de Kersaint, that kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s, ceased, after that night at Hennebont, to wear his emerald signet ring; and why had that ring borne, as he then distinctly saw for the first time, the phoenix of the Saint-Chamans? For M. de Kersaint had stated that he was a connection of that house by marriage only. That he was a connection seemed obvious from the minute instructions he had been able to give M. de Brencourt on the topography of Mirabel. This business of the ring intrigued the Comte not a little. He was quite conversant with the device of the great house of Trélan, and over the troop of strange surmises born of the presence of that device on M. de Kersaint’s finger and its abrupt disappearance he was still frowning when the time came for him to make his stealthy entrance into Mirabel.

For all that she had half looked for his arrival, it was chance, of a kind, that directed the Duchesse de Trélan’s steps that evening towards the invader; chance that caused her to have left the special key in the door of the portrait gallery; chance that made her set out, somewhat unnecessarily, to fetch it before she retired for the night—and chance that led her returning footsteps through the great dark spaces of the Salle Verte . . . to hear, as she passed along between the pillars and the wall, a slight muffled noise of tapping—coming whence?

Valentine stopped dead, lamp in hand. The gentle and recurrent sound did not come from the banqueting hall itself, that was plain. From the “sallette,” then?

No more than when she had searched the garden for a possible malefactor and found Roland did she dream of danger to herself, though had she paused to think of it she might have guessed that the intruder would be armed, and, if surprised, might use his weapon. She walked back and softly opened the door of the sallette; her surmise was right.

Her own lamp cast in its beams, but there was light there already—a lantern standing on the floor, making a pool of radiance by the feet of a man who stood in front of the great hearth with his back to her. In this pool, pinned down by the lantern, was an outspread sheet of paper, a plan of some sort. Her eyes were able to take in these details before the man, turning quickly, saw her standing there with her lamp. His one hand went to his breast, doubtless in search of a weapon, but he never produced it, and the tool which he held in the other fell clattering to the floor.

“God in Heaven!” he exclaimed sharply, and recoiled a step or two.

“Who is it?” asked Valentine a little uncertainly. “Is it—is it Monsieur de Brencourt?”

The intruder did not answer—did not even seem to hear her question. He remained literally as if turned to stone, his eyes burning cavernously in his pale face, on which the upcast light of the lantern at his feet, crossing with that of Valentine’s lamp, cast odd shadows. After a moment, moving like a man half stunned from a fall, he came a little towards her. Then he stopped again, and passed his hand over his eyes.

“That light dazzles me . . . you are not real!” he muttered. Stooping, he picked up his own lantern, and held it high in a hand that shook.

“Is it really Madame de Trélan?” he asked huskily. “Was it untrue then . . . September . . . La Force?—Speak, Duchesse, for God’s sake!”

In the matter of astonishment Valentine had the advantage of him, since she had been led to think his coming possible. But she too was shaken by the encounter, the first with anyone of her own world who had known her, for seven long years. And she found herself unable to do more than give a sort of pale acquiescence to his agitated questions by bending her head and saying, “Yes, it was untrue.”

“It is she!” said de Brencourt to himself, his harsh features showing his profound emotion. Suddenly he lowered his lantern. “Give me your lamp, Duchesse, and sit down and tell me—tell me, unless I am to take leave of my senses, how it comes about . . . where you have been all these years . . . what you are doing now? My God, to think—Permit me!”