Front matter (continued 3)

Tristram tried to reassure him, for he did not believe this to be the case. After the Rector, somewhat comforted, had gone, there was nothing left for him to do but to pray convulsively for Horatia's happiness.

And when, two days later, he got a letter from Armand, saying that as the King was moving to Holyrood in mid-October he had prevailed on his father to break the journey northward and come with him to Compton Regis, and that he, Armand, had hopes ... it was with real relief as well as with repugnance that Tristram did what Armand obviously hoped he would do, and invited his father and him to honour his roof during their sojourn. And if anything could have nerved him this evening to endure the position in which he had placed himself, it was the brief sight which he had of Horatia that day when he went over to tell the Rector that everything was arranged—of Horatia as she turned on him a sort of rainbow look of gratitude.

That was this morning. Now he was out in the dark and the damp to welcome his guests, exchanging suitable greetings with the elder and submitting to Armand's embrace.

"Ah, mon cher, how amiable of you to receive us thus! We have had a dog of a journey. Mon père, enter then, while I pay the postilion; you should not expose yourself thus to the damp."

"No, indeed," said Tristram. "If you will come in, M. le Duc..."

In the hall, the face of M. le Duc de la Roche-Guyon appeared above the high collar of his full cloak, old, pale, rather bleached-looking. He was beginning a stately little speech when his son appeared, full of solicitude and hurried him upstairs. And Armand in person reappeared alone before dinner in order to get a few words with his host. Tristram had been preparing himself for this. The young man professed profound gratitude, was sure that if his father once saw the lady of his choice, all would be well. He himself was more hopeful than he had been for weeks past.

"In fact," he went on, his eyes sparkling, "I believe the day is already won. My grandmother supports me—and that will turn the scale. My father has great respect for her wishes. Her letter arrived, praise the saints, just before we left Lulworth."

Tristram now remembered to have heard something of an autocratic old Dowager Duchess, the Duke's mother.

"She says—mais n'importe," went on the Comte. "Now, with your permission, and if my father does not appear too tired, I will leave you after dinner to yourselves."

"You are trusting me with a good deal, La Roche-Guyon," Tristram was moved to remark.

"Parbleu, are you not my friend!" retorted the Frenchman. "Besides, you are one of those people whom it is natural to trust."

Although the Duc, when he appeared, was very plainly, if immaculately attired, he somehow radiated from his person an air of courts and of diplomacy very foreign to Tristram's dining-room and its solid British furniture. He was grand seigneur to his finger-tips, polished, melancholy, affable, and perfectly simple in his address; but it required no effort to imagine the absent cordon bleu and stars on his breast. Armand behaved towards him with a mingled air of deference and affection which, while it amused Tristram—so far as he was capable of being amused by anything—did not displease him, for it appeared genuine and habitual. Apparently the young man considered the paternal health equal to a discussion, for after one glass of port he very unembarrassedly excused himself, and left the others still seated with their wineglasses at the polished mahogany.

The Duc looked after him with a little smile of amusement and affection flitting across his delicate bloodless lips.

"That is the signal for us to begin our 'conversations,' Monsieur. You have plenipotentiary powers, I think?"

"I—not in the least!" said Tristram, somewhat alarmed. "I have no—no official position at all in the matter. It will be between yourself, M. le Duc, and the lady's father. Anything that I can arrange, in the way of a meeting between you, I shall be happy to do, and any information I have is at your service. Beyond that I cannot go."

The older man bowed. "You are a kinsman, I think, Monsieur?"

"Distant," said Tristram. "I rather count myself an old friend."

"Of M. Grenville or of Mademoiselle?"

"Of both."

"And—pardon me if I ask an impertinent question, but we must know where we stand—as a kinsman and as an old friend, you have yourself no objection to this alliance?"

"I am solely desirous of Miss Grenville's happiness," responded Tristram, his eyes on the foot of his wineglass.

"And you think that the match with my son will ensure it?"

"How can I possibly say? But I hope that it may take place."

"Merci, Monsieur, for your courtesy," said the Duc, very courteously himself. "Now I in my turn must make my position clear to you. I had other views for my son—in fact I thought he ... had other views for himself. I am, however, convinced that he is passionately in love with this lady, whom I doubt not I shall find to be all and more than all that he represents. But you know, Monsieur, that we French people do not look with favour upon marriages of love. We prefer that love should come after marriage. We find it better so. Then there is the difference of race. To these young people that seems nothing now, but it tells, Monsieur, it tells more and more through life. This objection naturally applies on your side also; not so the former, for you are more sentimental than we are." He was arranging two little groups of almonds with fingers as blanched as they.

"I seem to remember," commented Tristram, "that the Comte de Flahault, coming over to England, fell in love with an English lady and married her, and that they are living happily in Paris at this very moment."

"Quite true," said the Duc, with the air of one acknowledging a point, and he added another almond to the smaller pile. "But I cannot wholly allow the parallel. M. de Flahault was an Imperialist—an aide-de-camp of Napoleon in fact; he is now an Orleanist, and the lady, she was titrée, noble in her own right, I believe, the Baroness Keats, or Keat, il me semble."

"Keith," said Tristram. "But surely I do not need to remind M. le Duc, who has, I understand, lived much in England, that many of the members of our best families bear no titles, that with us the grandson of an earl, not being the heir, is plain Mr. So-and-so, and that some of the oldest families have never had titles at all—have, indeed, refused them."

"That I know," conceded M. de la Roche-Guyon. "But it is not generally understood in France."

Tristram pushed away his wineglass. "You must not suspect me of flattery, Sir, if I say that I should have thought your own ancient and illustrious name capable of covering any disparity in station between the parties, did such exist. But I should wish to remind you that Mr. Grenville is by no means the ordinary country parson that you have perhaps imagined. He is himself the younger son of a noble family; he has connections among the highest of our English nobility, and he is no pauper. I can sketch you his family tree if you wish.... As for the lady herself, she would grace the most exalted rank, and, as a kinsman and an old friend, I think I have the right to say that the man who wins her is to be congratulated indeed."

The Duc lifted his eyes from the almonds and shot him a keen, rather disconcerting glance. "Ah, yes. You, Monsieur, the accredited ambassador, have espoused the match with warmth. How is it that M. Grenville then refused, in no uncertain terms, to entertain the thought of it; indeed, so far as I could gather, forbade my son the house?"

For a second Tristram was taken aback by this pertinent inquiry, for he had really forgotten the Rector's one time vehement opposition.

"I think," he said, "that you will find Mr. Grenville ... in short, that that difficulty does not now exist."

The Duc leant back in his chair. "Will you permit me, Monsieur, to say (since I am a man so much older than you) that there is something in you, I know not what, which pleases me very much. I will be franker with you than I had meant to be. My mother, the Dowager Duchess, to whose judgment I pay great deference, is in favour of this match. I have learnt the fact but this morning. I own that I am surprised, but Armand is her favourite grandson. There are reasons, with which I need not trouble you, why her wishes should have great weight with me. I am, therefore, little likely when I see this lady, by all accounts so charming, to find her unsuitable. But what of M. son père? It will not consort very well with my dignity (to which you must permit me to hold) if I approve my son's choice only to find that M. Grenville does not approve his daughter's."

And in the gaze which he directed upon Tristram, in the tones of his thin, well-bred voice, there peeped out something of the arrogance of an ancient race.

The younger man smiled. He felt suddenly very weary.

"You need not apprehend anything on that score, I can assure you, Sir. I saw Mr. Grenville this morning. When your son first asked for his daughter's hand he was startled, greatly startled, and surprised. He probably spoke words which he would have recalled afterwards. You will find him, I think, more than reconciled to the idea."

The Duke seemed to have fallen into a short reverie.

"It is well to be young," he said at last, and there was faint regret in his tone. "The fire of youth—who shall give us that again? When I married my first wife, Emmanuel's mother, I was only twenty—but that was a mariage de convenance. Armand's mother was very beautiful; I loved her as Armand loves this lady, but he has the advantage of me ... he has the advantage of me ... for then I was no longer young." He sighed, and passed his handkerchief over his lips, and his face, deeply marked, seemed to wither and grow older than its sixty-five years. "But why am I talking thus to you, Monsieur, who still have that inestimable gift of youth? Mais tout passe, tout lasse ... I will do myself the honour of calling upon Mr. Grenville to-morrow morning at eleven, if you think that hour will be convenient to him."

And he flicked with one long, polished nail at the two heaps of almonds, scattering them.

(3)

Not being present next morning at the momentous interview between the Duc and Mr. Grenville, Tristram could only guess at what happened. Armand, on fire with restlessness, spent the time walking round and round the not very extensive garden like a caged animal, and when Tristram went out to say that his father had returned and would like to see him in the study, he found the young man slashing with a stick at his rose trees.

"Oh, pardon if I have hurt them!" he exclaimed. "Mon Dieu, que je suis énervé! Yes, I will go at once. I had better have borrowed one of your horses and gone for a gallop.—He is in the study, you say, this good father of mine?"

The irony of Tristram's own position oppressed him the more in proportion as his anxiety about Armand's intentions was relieved. Neither the Duc nor his son said much when they emerged from their conference, only the elder man informed his host that he was to dine alone at the Rectory that evening, and that he hoped then to make the acquaintance of Miss Grenville. As good luck so ordered, a colleague of Tristram's on the bench turned up at dinner time and had to be asked to stay. Never had Tristram so blessed his boring but steady flow of conversation, nor so welcomed his presence, which effectually prevented Armand from pouring out his own hopes and fears.

There was no one, however, to save Tristram from the Duke's really enthusiastic praises of Miss Grenville when he returned from the Rectory, and expatiated on the gifts of heart and mind and person which he discerned in her.

"I shall keep that young rascal on tenterhooks a little longer," he declared. "Another sleepless night will not do him any harm, if he has had as many as he asserts. Besides, it is not absolutely arranged. With your permission, Mr. Grenville will come over here to-morrow morning to discuss matters with me. I will send Armand out; no doubt, even in this misty weather, his flame will keep him warm."

He kept his word, and next morning the Comte, refusing a horse, went soberly off on foot in the direction of the Downs. Mr. Grenville arrived; Tristram was unable, and did not indeed particularly desire, to make an opportunity of seeing him alone before he left him and the Duc to their discussion. The whole thing was getting dreamlike to him now, losing the outlines of its reality as the Downs had lost theirs with the death of summer. He would be glad when this whirl of conferences was over, the result—already certain—announced, and Armand de la Roche-Guyon no longer under his roof—not that he minded even his presence very much. How he should get on afterwards, from day to day, he did not know, but at present he seemed to himself a being without passions, energy, or desires—a mere leaf whirled on the engulfing stream of destiny, and the future was hardly worth speculating about.

He walked in his little orchard, for it was a morning gilded with the mellow brilliance of October, and noted the fallen apples. After a while, turning, he saw the Duc de la Roche-Guyon, his son and the Rector all coming over the grass towards him, conversing with an amiability which could have only one meaning. And dream-enveloped though he felt himself, leaf on the tide of fate though he might be, for a second Tristram saw nothing at all, neither figures, nor grass, nor sky, nor the bricks of his house; he was conscious only of a surging wave of rebellion that blotted them all out. Then they reappeared, and Armand, coming forward with both hands outstretched, said, in a voice of radiant happiness:

"Congratulate me, mon ami! And ah, how much I owe it to you!"

Next evening it was observed in Oriel Common Room that Dormer was unusually quiet. He withdrew earlier even than his wont, and while Newman and Hurrell Froude, going up their staircase, were commenting on the absence of light from his windows on the other side of the quadrangle, he was sitting by the fire, Tristram's read and re-read letter on his knee, and the half-bitter postscript of it running in his head, "Henceforward your fanatical ideas will easily carry the day with me. I shall never marry now." What he had dreamed of had come to pass—and his heart within him was desolate with pity.

CHAPTER XIV

(1)

Morning on the Downs, with the clean, the thrilling wind, intoxicating even in autumn, the air that gives the sensation of a draught of the barest and intensest life, the air of the world's morning. Add to this youth, a good horse beneath you, and by your side, never henceforth to leave it, that one person who to you sums up the spirit of all these other things. What can Heaven give more?

So, flashingly, thought Horatia, as she and Armand finished their gallop, and her green veil, outstreaming from her tall hat, fell to a position a little more composed. Laughing, a trifle breathless, "O, I should like to ride like this for ever!" she exclaimed, as the horses fell to a walk. "It was glorious!"

Armand de la Roche-Guyon, sitting his big brown mare with the ease of the born rider—a lover of whom any girl might be proud—bent on her a long and smiling look. "We shall often ride in Brittany," he said. "If the peasants know mythology—which I doubt—they will take you for Diane chasseresse."

Moving on, they came to the edge of the Downs, the great wind still blowing steadily upon them.

"There is Compton Regis, and there is Compton Parva," observed Horatia, pointing with her whip. "Do they not seem low from here? And—do you see?—that looks like Papa and Robin, deserting us and making off home." For the Rector, having ridden with the affianced couple, for propriety's sake, as far as the Downs, had refused to come any further. The protestations which his action had drawn forth had been singularly lacking in fervour.

"I think," went on Horatia, "that before we have another gallop, you had better tighten my girth for me, if you will.... But what are you looking at, down there?"

"I was trying to distinguish the road on which you first came to me, like an angel of mercy," said the young man, swinging off. "And the spot where Mr. Hungerford's horse so inexplicably cast a shoe! By the way," he went on, pulling at the girth, "speaking of your cousin, ma toute belle, reminds me that I have long wanted to ask you——"

"My cousin!" broke in Horatia, laughing. "Whom do you mean?—That is tight enough, I think."

"Mais ce bon Tristram. He is your kinsman ... or have you all been deceiving me?"

"Certainly he is my kinsman, but a very distant one. His mother was my mother's third cousin, or something of the sort. I never think of him as a cousin, exactly; rather as a brother."

"Not in any other capacity?" inquired Armand, his eyes mocking her as he leant against her horse's neck. "I have no right to ask you, perhaps—si, I think I have the right." He laughed. "If he were never in love with you, he ought to have been."

Horatia looked away from his amused, lazily penetrating glance. "To tell you the truth," she said, flushing a little, "he was once—years ago. But that is all over, and the proof is, that we have been very good friends ever since."

"Ah, I wondered. I am glad he had the good taste to be a soupirant once. Were you very cruel to him? He is an original; but I am very grateful to him. Had he been a rival I should have found things much more difficult."

"No, you would not," said Horatia suddenly. "He would have behaved just the same, when he found that I really loved you."

The Comte lifted his expressive eyebrows. "Forgive me, my angel, but I am totally unable to follow you there. Men don't do those things nowadays; we are not in the pages of Scudéry. You have a soul of the most romantic, my Horatia, in spite of your Greek and Latin; but romance is not in harmony with facts. Your 'cousin' is a capital fellow, but if I believed him capable of that sort of thing, ma foi, I should be inclined to recommend him for a madhouse. As it is, shall we ask him to stay with us one day?"

"If you like," said Horatia, looking at her horse's ears. There was a vague trouble in her voice.

"If I like! But yes, that is perhaps what it comes to. I warn you, I shall be like a tiger for jealousy, and you will turn every man's head who sees you.... Par exemple, I am sure you must have had many more victims than you will acknowledge. Passe Mr. Hungerford, but what of that so dear friend of his at the college of Oriel?"

Horatia looked absolutely horrified. "Mr. Dormer!"

"Eh bien, why not? You shrink, my angel, as if I had suggested a thing improper, as though he were a priest—one of our priests. But he is not, and you must have met sometimes, and he is bel homme too, for all that austere air of his. Why, now I come to think of it in Mr. Hungerford's very drawing-room——"

"I cannot conceive why he talked to me that evening," said Horatia. "I have often thought of it since.... But I will not be catechised about such absurdities. And suppose I were to insist on knowing how many fair ladies have been in love with you, Monsieur?"

"And pray, Mademoiselle, what would you think of me if I answered that question?" asked her betrothed, regaining his saddle. "Ask me how many I have admired, and some day—perhaps—I will tell you."

They rode on, talking of the—to French eyes—daring honeymoon that they were to spend, alone, at the Breton château, which had come to Armand through his mother. For, since they were to be married in England, nobody could prevent their going straight to Brittany after the tying, by civil as well as by double religious rites, of the triple knot which should, as Armand said, make the most beautiful hand in the world so very securely his.

(2)

Horatia was to stay in London with her aunt for some weeks previous to her marriage. The day before her departure, Tristram rode over to say good-bye. She was out when he arrived, but he was told that she would return shortly, and he went, he did not quite know why, into the garden, where he had so often sat and walked with her, where they had had so many discussions, where—to go back into a life that now scarcely seemed his own—he had run shouting as a boy, glad to escape from his lessons.

Nothing remained of the glory of the summer, not even the corpses of the hollyhocks and the great sunflowers. All had been tidily removed for burial. It would have been more consonant with the wintry misery in his heart that those flowers which had witnessed his happiness should have been there still, black and withered, like his hopes. But the past seemed to have been neatly obliterated, for the Rector's gardener was very sedulous; the whole place had cast off its last guest and was ready for a new—the winter. To welcome this a bush or two of Michaelmas daisies was in flower, and a robin was singing. And it came into Tristram's mind, a reminiscence of his year abroad, that in foreign countries they would be keeping the festival of the dead, for it was the second of November.

The garden was intolerable to him, yet he stayed there, walking up and down in the chilly twilight, because he was afraid that if he went in he would find that she had returned, and the moment of farewell would be upon him. For though he had promised her that he would be at her wedding—her threefold wedding—in London, this was to him the real parting. The other could not hurt after this.

At last he saw the comfortable form of Mrs. Martha Kemblet, Horatia's maid, coming towards him.

"Miss Horatia has just come in, Sir; she's in the drawing-room."

"Thank you," said Tristram. "By the way, you are going to France with her, Mrs. Kemblet, are you not?"

"Indeed I am, Sir," responded the faithful retainer with emphasis. She had been nurserymaid in the days of Horatia's childhood, had returned to the Rectory on her husband's death, and had successfully compassed the airs of the old family nurse. "My lamb shall have someone English about her in the midst of them jabbering foreigners." Evidently Mrs. Kemblet was not a fervent of the French marriage.

After all, their parting was unimaginably short. Perhaps he would not have had it otherwise.

She was standing in the drawing-room, when he got in, turning up a newly-lit lamp.

"Oh, my dear Tristram," she said, in a tone too matter-of-fact to be natural. "I am afraid that you have been here a long time, waiting. I am so sorry."

"I was in the garden," he answered. "I could well wait..."

"I shall see you in London?" asked Horatia needlessly, turning to the lamp again.

"Yes, without fail. But you will be so occupied then that I must tell you now what I want to say. It is only this ... I want you to remember that if ever, at any time, you need me to ... to do anything for you, I am always ... I shall always..." Firmly as he had begun, he could not finish.

"You do not need to say that to me, Tristram," came her voice, very soft and moved. She still had her back half turned to him; the lamplight glanced through her hair. "I know it ... I am not worthy of it.... You have been a friend more kind..." Then she too stopped, and put her hands over her face.

Tristram stood like a stone. He could not trust himself to go nearer. Moreover, the dark room, with its island of light and her at the heart of it, was threatening to turn round. Seconds passed; then he said more steadily, "I should very much like a memento of you—something you have worn. Is there anything you could spare?"

He saw her drop her hands to her throat and unfasten something—something which, still half turned away, she held out to him without a word. He went forward to take it, and, dropping on one knee, kissed the hand that gave it to him, the hand lost to him for ever.

Then he found himself outside the room, and in his palm, warm from her throat, the little gold fibula, saucer-shaped and delicately worked, which she habitually wore. A thousand years ago it had clasped the cloak over the breast of a woman as beloved, perhaps, as she, but the heart that had once beat under it was not now more dust and ashes than his own.

BOOK II

BOOK II

GARISH DAY

CHAPTER I

(1)

A great deal of wind made its entry with Armand and Horatia, and two dry leaves, scurrying gleefully over the polished floor, hurled themselves into oblivion under a chest. Roland the deerhound paced, very dignified, across the hall, and let himself down in front of the fire with a sigh. But his master and mistress lingered at the door, and when the tails of old Jean's livery had disappeared, Armand took Horatia into his arms and kissed her three times without a word. Then, hand in hand, like lovers and like children, they also crossed the hall to the fire.

"How I love coming in!" whispered Horatia. "Everyday it is different. Yesterday it was not so dark, but the portraits looked rather forbidding. To-day they are more friendly. Are they getting more used to me, do you think?" Her eyes ran along the row of observers.

"They are getting more jealous of you, I am afraid," said the young man, devouring her face, all aglow from the wind. "Unfasten your furs—let me do it. Not one of them was ever as beautiful as you." His hands shook a little as he unclasped the pelerine of marten skins. "How could they help but be jealous?"

The heavy furs slipped to the ground. "Am I beautiful?" asked Horatia, slim and straight and smiling. "I never used to be." She sat down in the great carved chair in front of the fire, and pulled off her gloves. "Tell me about them; tell me about her." She indicated the portrait over the hearth—the lady in flowing draperies, half reclining in a sylvan landscape, a Louis Quinze Diana, the goddess's crescent moon shining in her close-dressed powdered hair, and on her lips a narrow riddle of a smile that already haunted the newcomer.

"Another day," answered Armand, kneeling beside her. "She is not lucky, my great-great-grandmother. I think I will have her removed from here. Besides, there is only one thing that I can possibly tell you—that I love you, I love you ... and that none of them was ever loved so much!" And, prisoning her hands, he kissed her.

Ancestors and ancestresses round the half-dusk hall looked on unruffled, having seen something like this not once nor twice in the centuries of their vigils, having most of them enacted it themselves—except that young man in wig and cuirass, faintly resembling Armand himself, who fell at Fontenoy before he could bring home his bride. But Roland was disturbed by something outside his comprehension, and getting up, he tried to thrust his nose between the two.

"O, Armand, he is licking me—he is eating me!" protested Horatia, who could not lift a hand to keep off the intruder. "Let me go, dearest; I must change my dress."

"But I like you in your furs," answered Armand, raising his head. His dark blue eyes sparkled. "I thought when we were walking together just now that you should always wear them. They do something—I don't know what—to that incomparable hair of yours." He touched it. "Will you always wear your furs, to please me?"

"Silly boy!" retorted his wife. "And only two or three years ago there was such an outcry against the danger of wearing even cloth dresses instead of muslins indoors! What is more foolish than a man?"

"Nothing, indeed, but a woman," replied the Comte, gazing at her. "Well, I shall at least come and prescribe what you are to wear for me to-night."

"For you, Monsieur!" exclaimed Horatia. "Learn that I dress entirely to please myself! Adieu. Bring my furs." And slipping cleverly from her chair she was round it before he could get from his knees. If she did not actually run full-paced up the great staircase, at any rate she flitted up it with little of the dignity of a new-made wife. Armand, snatching up the pelerine, overtook her three stairs at a time.

(2)

That was part of the charm of those wonderful days, that Horatia found she could be a child, playing with another child. Armand was not only the most fervent of lovers; he was an enchanting playmate as well. It seemed to come naturally to him, like all he did, and Horatia was amazed to find how naturally it came to her also, who had never played much in her childhood, and who judged herself now, at twenty-four, so much too old for such high spirits. But there was no one of their own condition to witness them, and most of the servants were old and indulgent.

And not Armand only, but the house itself seemed to conspire against Horatia's gravity. Had her imagination been nourished, like that of most of her contemporaries, on the pseudo-Gothic poetry of the Annuals, on the Mysteries of Udolpho or the Tales of Terror and Wonder, she might have been disappointed to find, in the château of Kerfontaine, neither drawbridge, portcullis, nor moat, neither battlements from which the heroine could espy the approach of her chosen knight, nor dungeons where a hero could languish, but only a residence of the time of Louis XIII, symmetrical, many windowed, tall-chimneyed, steep-roofed, with an atmosphere entirely unsuited to visors, palfreys, distressed damsels, falchions, or jongleurs. But the history she knew was different; and here, in this house which had its own harmony, she could place the people who had really lived in it—ladies of the time of her admired Arthénice, and of Madame de Sévigné, and men who had rhymed in Paris with Voiture and fought with the great Condé at Rocroi. She was enchanted with the odd nests of tiny rooms, dressing-rooms, powdering closets, which squired all the bedrooms; with the tall white doors, with the old pre-Revolution furniture, with the absence of carpets, with the long narrow gallery hung with armour; with old Jean the butler, and young Françoise the laundry-maid, with the dinner service of St. Cloud, with the yellowed books on heraldry and hawking, with the thousand and one things which Armand showed her when they explored their domain. And she knew not whether she were most pleased to sit by the flaming log-fire in the hall, or in the salon, which opened out by a double flight of curving stone steps on to the lawn, a walk of cut lime-trees, and a carefully contrived view of the little pièce d'eau, or whether she preferred to walk in the garden, all dank and flowerless as it was, and watch the leaves sailing on the surface of the water, the three decrepit Tritons blowing their soundless horns, and the little Florentine boy in the fountain pressing the captive dolphin which had not spouted for so many years.

And it was all hers, to do as she liked with. Sometimes she and Armand planned alterations, chiefly for the pleasure of the planning alone, for she would not rearrange even the drawing-room under the eyes—though they were so like Armand's—of that beautiful mother of his who smiled above the spinet, looking down over her shoulder in her yellow Empire gown. And Armand promised her new furniture; but she did not want it.

There was indeed only one thing on earth that he would not promise her at present, and that was, not to go wolf-hunting. When first she heard a rumour of the existence of this sport in Brittany she did not believe it; surely there were no wolves nowadays, and if there were, he would not be so unkind as to go after them and leave her. But she was doubly mistaken; there were wolves, and savage wolves, as she discovered from questioning not only him, but the servants, and her entreaties quite failed to move him. He went... It was a day of long-drawn agony, and she was almost speechless with apprehension when at nightfall he returned, dirty, dishevelled, bloodstained, and full of the joyous fatigue of the successful hunter. Sobbing and clinging to him she reproached him with his cruelty to her; he only laughed and kissed her, and next day she was able to admire his courage.

(3)

Full intimation had been given to Armand de la Roche-Guyon from headquarters—in other words from his grandmother the Duchesse—that he and his bride must be in Paris for New Year's Day, that feast sacred to the ties of kindred. Before they left Kerfontaine, Horatia and he felt it incumbent on them to give a dinner-party for the neighbours on whom, as a newly-married wife, she had called, and Horatia therefore sat one morning in her boudoir writing out the invitations, while her husband, leaning lazily against her escritoire, made appropriate comments on each. A little snow had fallen, and lit up the room with its reflected light; and Horatia, who loved snow, felt that only this was needed to add the last touch of glamour to her home.

"I think I know where everyone lives now," she said, putting down her pen. "By the way, Armand, whose is that rather large château in the classical style, which we passed when we were riding two or three days ago? I forgot to ask you."

"You mean the ugly building on the way to Lanvaudan?" inquired her husband.— "(Silly child, you have inked your fingers.)—That is Saint-Clair, which belongs to the Vicomtesse de Vigerie. She is away at present—in Italy, I believe."

"A widow, I suppose," commented Horatia, trying to rub the dry ink off her fingers. "Is she old or young? It is a large place. Why have you never told me about her before?"

"Because," answered Armand, with equal candour and cleverness, "I was within an ace or two of marrying her."

Horatia jumped. "O!" she exclaimed. Her eyes opened wide at him, and she could find no more to say.

"At least," went on the Comte, with entire tranquillity, "that is what you will probably be told sooner or later. And, after all, it is better that I should tell you myself."

Horatia was dumb. The yellowing paint of the panel behind Armand's head, with its impossible combinations of the flowers of every season, seemed to intensify the feeling of unreality.

"Did you ... did you...?"

"No, I did not. And I doubt if she would have had me in any case.—No, mon amie, your expression flatters me too much. But think, if I had! However, Providence sent me over to England in time..." His glance set Horatia's heart beating.

"Think, my angel," went on Armand, ticking off the links on his fingers, "think, if the King had not published the Ordonnances, there would not have been a revolution; if there had not been a revolution, His Majesty would not have fled to England; if he had not fled to England my father would not have accompanied him thither; if my father had not accompanied him I should not have gone over to see my father; if I had not gone over to see him..."

"O, did it need a revolution to bring us together!" cried Horatia, half laughing, half serious, for indeed effect and cause did not seem at that moment disproportionate.

"Or think," continued Armand, "that if my brother Emmanuel had not got to know that good Hungerford—what is it you call him, Tristan?—at the Embassy Ball..."

He went on developing his theme, but for a couple of seconds Horatia did not hear him. It passed over her, swift as the wind, that she had never so much as given a thought to Tristram since she left England—not so much as one thought.

"... So you see," she heard Armand concluding, "that it was very much an affair of chance, was it not?"

And, coming back fully to the present, she realised that the half-jesting hypotheses were indeed playing round the fringes of truth. So very little—and they had never met!

"O my darling!" she cried with a shudder.

(4)

Half-past five on her last day at Kerfontaine found Horatia, a trifle nervous, receiving her guests of the dinner-party, all of that class of country gentry forced by the modesty of their incomes to live on their little estates, and able but rarely to afford a visit to Paris. The ladies' modes were a little antiquated, and one old gentleman was even wearing powder. It was evident that all were curious to see the English bride.

Among the somewhat crude tones of the women's dresses and the old-fashioned coloured coats of the men, the village curé in his cassock was easily discernible, and him, to Horatia's momentary surprise, she found in the place of honour at her right hand when they were at last seated round the table. He was a little, snuffy old man, very noticeably of peasant origin, and not above relishing better fare than ordinary, for he looked with an appreciative eye upon the large piece of boiled beef in the middle of the table, and upon the other dishes round it, the roast mutton, the sweetbreads, the pâtes de cervelle. He was also, to Horatia's further surprise, served before any of the ladies, and made good use of his start.

"Madame la Comtesse is not Catholic?" he asked after a while, turning on her a not unkindly gaze.

"No," answered Horatia, flushing a little. "I am English, you know, M. le Curé."

"It will come, it will come," said the old man, and he polished his plate strenuously with a bit of bread. Then, his utterance impeded by the sodden morsel, he added, "No doubt M. le Comte will get Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon to convert you."

Armand, looking very handsome, gay and debonair at the other end of the table, must have caught this stifled remark, for he flashed an amused glance at his wife. But the subject was not pursued, and the old Baron on Horatia's left hand, who had been all through the Chouannerie, and had left two fingers in it, began to discourse on the battle of Navarino, and after that the lady nearest to him desired to know of Horatia the motion of a steam-packet; oh, of course Madame had not come by Calais, but by sailing-vessel to St. Malo; and she actually preferred the long voyage? Incredible! ...

The last couple had scarcely taken their leave before Armand gave a sigh of relief. "Are they not strange old fossils?" he inquired. "I think you can have nothing so curious in England. Some of these ladies have never been to Paris in their lives.... You shall give me sixteen kisses, one for each guest."

The due was in course of payment when the young man suddenly drew away with an ejaculation. "What, M. le Curé, are you still here?" For a short, stout, cassocked figure was standing under the crystal chandelier regarding them with approbation.

"I wished," said the old priest benevolently, "to give my blessing to you, M. le Comte, if you will permit it, and to Madame la Comtesse also—though as yet a heretic—and so I retired until the others should be gone. But I have not heard what you were saying to each other, only I perceive that you are indeed a wedded pair, such as the Church approves, and I will give you the Church's blessing on your union. May it be sanctified with mutual love and regard, and made happy by many children, and ended only by a Christian death—Benedicat vos Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus!" He cut the air crosswise with his not overclean hand, and before the astonished couple could find speech, had hurried from the room.

"Mort de ma vie, he has an assurance, our old curé!" exclaimed Armand, staring after him. "Darling, do not look so startled; it is a sort of pious compliment. But I am glad that he had the tact to wait until the rest had gone; not but what they would have been edified by it. Ces dames are all as devout as even the heart of Prosper could desire."

"Prosper?" questioned Horatia doubtfully.

"My cousin the Monsignor, who is said to be going to convert you, little heretic. Not that it is necessary; you would go straight to Heaven anyhow; and there you would pray for your poor husband grilling in Purgatory, would you not?—Come and sit by the fire in the hall and confide to me the ideas of your Church on the future state. Ours, you know, are very consoling to sinners like myself!"

Armand had long ago stopped talking nonsense, and lay silent on the floor, his head in Horatia's lap. Her fingers wandered slowly among the dark, fine, and waving hair. To come back to this dear intimacy after the chatter was bliss too profound for speech. The fire began to sink; the deerhound sighed, fixing melancholy eyes upon them, his nose along his paws, and Horatia, with the weight of Armand's body against her, felt that she should not know an hour more exquisite than this, which the great clock was tolling so relentlessly into eternity. And again she wondered why such happiness had been given to her, who had done so little to deserve it; for surely no woman before her had known so penetrating a joy!

Then suddenly she felt the gaze of the lady over the hearth, and looked up.

"I, too, have known," the enigmatical, half-closed eyes said to her—"and I have been dust and ashes these many years—and so shall you be, and so shall he." O, it was awfully, cruelly true! "Please God I die first!" she thought, and sliding her hand round Armand's neck kissed the head on her knee to register the hope.

Next morning, amid all the clatter of an early departure, she bent forward from the chaise for a last look at the place of so much happiness. The transient snow had melted, and the château stood as she had first seen it.

"I wonder shall I ever be so happy anywhere," she murmured. "Good-bye, dear house!"

"It appears to me," said Armand gaily, "that my wife is on the way to love the house better than its owner."

No articulate response was, naturally, required to this accusation, but after a moment Horatia said, still a little wistfully, "I wish it were not all over!"

"You belong to the Romantics, mon amie, that is clear," observed her husband, laughing outright. "And it is only just beginning." He drew her head down to his shoulder, and the horses sprang forward on the first stage to Paris.

CHAPTER II

(1)

Chartres, encircling its jewel of stone, was gone like the dreams which Horatia might have dreamed there the previous night if excitement had not kept her wakeful, and now, Versailles, Sèvres, and Passy left in turn behind the wheels of their chaise, she was entering Paris for the first time in her life. This was really the Seine that they were crossing, this river sparkling in the early afternoon sun of New Year's Eve, and the golden dome glittering in front of them was the Invalides. Streams of people were passing on the bridge as they crossed it.

"Ah, but wait till to-morrow," said Armand. "Yes, it is cheerful, but what an awful thing to look forward to is New Year's Day! Truly we French are the last of idiots to have made this annual giving of presents into a nightmare, as we have. And such presents, too! Last year inkpots were all the rage—inkpots in the shape of mandarins, of apples, of crayfishes—que sais-je? Everything you took up was an inkpot. Mercifully you could not put any ink in them.... Look, mon ange, there is one of the new omnibuses!—Here we are in the Rue St. Dominique already!"

But Horatia, instead of looking out, involuntarily closed her eyes. A momentary fear raced through her. She was going to live with these people who had hitherto only been names to her—that imperious old Dowager Duchess whose fat money-bags kept up the position of the ancient, impoverished family, and Emmanuel, the elder brother, the heir, and his young son—and to make the acquaintance of the other relatives of whom she had vaguely heard. This was the real beginning of her new life....

"O, hold me close, Armand!" she whispered.

The chaise slackened, turned, and passed under an archway into a courtyard. Horatia had a fleeting impression of steps and a pilastered doorway, then she found Armand helping her to alight, and passed, on his arm, into a room of extraordinary loftiness and chill. A tall man was standing in the middle; he came forward.

"Ma soeur, soyez la bienvenue!" he said. "Tu permets, mon cher?"

"Put up your veil," whispered Armand, and when Horatia had thrown back the lace over her bonnet, the tall man kissed her on the cheek. Evidently this was the Marquis Emmanuel.

Armand looked a boy beside him. He had dark hair going grey, a rather melancholy mouth, deeply furrowed at the corners, and eyes that were both troubled and kind.

"I hope that you will be very happy in this house, my sister," he said, with real warmth in his voice. "Our grandmother anxiously awaits the pleasure of your acquaintance, but she thought that you would prefer to repose yourself a little before she receives you."

There was consideration in this decree of the Duchesse's, but also some suggestion of an awful ceremony to come. Horatia thanked her brother-in-law.

"Yes, that will be best," agreed Armand. "Come, mon amie, and we will go to our apartments.—Tudieu Emmanuel, I was forgetting that I had not seen you since August!"

"And you are four months older!" said his brother, in a tone full of delicate implications, as they embraced.

(2)

When Horatia, supported in spirit, and also to a lesser degree in body, by her husband, entered for the first time the apartments of the Duchess Dowager, she knew that she had, in times past, rather over-estimated the strength of her own self-possession. Her knees shook, while biting phrases of his aged kinswoman's, repeated by Armand, came uncomfortably into her mind. However, there was nothing for it; the visit had to be gone through.

Her first impression was that the room was suffocatingly hot; the second, that it was not so large as she had expected; the third, that it had a bed in it—rapidly and not surprisingly following on this, the perception that the Duchesse was receiving, French fashion, in her bedroom. And she had, fourthly, the conviction that Madame la Duchesse Douairière de la Roche-Guyon was the most hideous object that she had ever seen.

The Dowager was enthroned in an armchair on the left-hand side of the fireplace. She wore a quilted négligé of puce satin, very formless; but on her head, whose scanty grey hair had been scraped up in the latest—and most appalling—of fashions, à la Chinoise, towered two enormous yellow ostrich feathers. Where the dressing-gown fell away from her withered neck it revealed the fire of a perfect river of diamonds, and she was painted in a style to recall the old days of the Palais Royal; on her small hands were grey kid gloves. Some sort of a dame de compagnie, sitting on the other side of the hearth, rose, laid down the book in her hands, and melted away.

"Tiens, tiens!" then said in a high voice this human parrot (for as such she instantly struck Horatia). "So this is the English bride. Well, my dear, I am very glad to see you."

She held out her hand, and Horatia, rising from her reverence, supposed she ought to salute its kid covering, but the old lady, pulling her down, bestowed upon her a kiss. The tip of her large nose was exceedingly cold.

"Well, scapegrace," then observed Madame de la Roche-Guyon to her grandson, as he too kissed her, "what have you to say for yourself?"

"Only this," replied Armand smiling, and indicating Horatia.

"You probably get your penchant for red hair from your grandfather," remarked the Duchesse irrelevantly. "Sit down, ma fille; you must be tired." Her voice, though high, was, thought Horatia, the least disagreeable part of her. Armand pushed forward a chair, first removing from it a pack of cards, and Horatia sat down.

"And so you have been in solitary bliss, English fashion, at Kerfontaine?" said the old lady. "Quite alone, eh? No one for either of you to flirt with?"

"No one," responded Armand. "It is early days to begin that, grandmother."

"Ah, but there is always an old flame or two to mourn our marriage, is there not?" The malicious look which she shot at them with this remark might have been intended for either, but the very expressive frown which Armand bestowed on his jocular relative went unseen of Horatia, for he was standing behind her. It had, however, the effect of shaking a cackle of laughter out of the old lady.

"I am sure, my dear," she said, addressing herself to Horatia, "that you left a great many broken hearts behind you in England."

"Alas, Madame, not one, I fear," said the bride.

"Come, that is excellent, 'I fear,'" said the Dowager approvingly. "I thought you might have said, 'Thank God!' Armand, my good child, I think you might leave us. Madame la Comtesse and I will have a little conversation."

Armand came forward and kissed his ancestress's hand obediently, while she murmured something inaudible into his ear; and he went out, giving his wife a look that seemed to incite her to courage.

The Duchesse studied her granddaughter-in-law for a moment with her piercing eyes, and Horatia wondered in her turn how it was that, in spite of her appearance, she did somehow give the effect of having always been used to the very highest company.

"You look strong and healthy, my child," was her first observation, and so unmistakable was her meaning that Horatia blushed hot crimson.

"La la!" ejaculated the Duchesse, "we must not be prudish. When Armand's son is born he will be heir to my little estate in Burgundy. There are circumstances which prevent my settling it upon Armand himself. All my other property goes, of course, after his father, to that poor Emmanuel, as the eldest son, and to his ill-fated child."

(Why "poor" and "ill-fated," Horatia wondered.)

"I do not say," continued the Duchesse, with an appalling frankness, "that if you present Armand with sons I shall be able to provide for them all. But we shall see. And, of course, he has his mother's money. Did you like Kerfontaine?"

"Very much indeed, Madame."

"It will be considered exceedingly improper, your spending your honeymoon alone there. But I," said the Duchesse, "did not raise any objections. I move with the times—in some things. If you marry an Englishwoman, you may, at the outset, be forgiven if you do as the English do. You can regard me as your friend, my fille, for I never opposed your marriage, as my son did." She showed her yellow teeth in a brief smile. "A little fresh blood—However, we need not go into that. By the way, you saw my son in England?"

"Yes, I had the honour of being presented to M. le Duc," answered Horatia. "He was also at my wedding." Did or did not this loquacious antique look old enough to be the mother of that dignified elderly gentleman?

"Emmanuel's wife, as you probably know, is in a mad-house," proceeded the Duchesse serenely, while Horatia literally and unbecomingly gaped. "It is not of much consequence, for she was a person without stamp or merit of any kind, but of course I am always expecting to hear that Claude-Edmond has been brought home raving from the Lycée some afternoon."

In after days, when Horatia had made the acquaintance of that singularly sane and demure child, she wondered how madness and he could be mentioned in the same breath. Now she was not even quite sure who Claude-Edmond was, and dared not ask. But the Marquis' melancholy mouth was explained.

"It was no fault on Emmanuel's part, I will say that for him," resumed Madame de la Roche-Guyon. "He was almost too model a husband; I trust Armand will make one half as good—but you must not expect too much of him, ma fille."

How little she knew Armand! But it was more politic not to show indignation, and Horatia only murmured that she would remember.

"That is well," said the old lady. "More ménages are wrecked by that than by anything else in the world." She paused, scanning Horatia, and the girl wondered what further gems of information or of counsel were about to fall from her shrivelled, rose-red lips. Her next remark, however, was the usual question:

"You are not a Catholic, my child?"

"No, Madame," answered Horatia, saying to herself, "Now she will bring out the family Monsignor to convert me."

But the Duchesse did not; she merely said, "Well, it is the best religion to die in; but, meanwhile, there are other things more amusing.... My dear, would you have the goodness to ring the bell for my maid? ... No, I will get it myself. Wait here!" She got out of the chair with no great difficulty, and, hobbling across the floor, disappeared.

Now that its chief ornament was removed, Horatia became conscious of many other things in the room; of the little Italian greyhound in a basket near the fire, hitherto hidden by the Duchesse's person; of two very gallant, though scarcely indecent, coloured engravings of the last century in a corner facing her, immediately above a print of one of Rubens' Last Judgments—a singularly edifying conjunction. But the room was so crowded with objects that it was hard to fix the eye on any one in particular, and it took Horatia several visits before she knew that a row of shrouded objects on short stands were Madame de la Roche-Guyon's wigs—for she did not usually appear in her own hair—and that she habitually kept her false teeth, when out of action, in the priceless little box of Limoges enamel, representing the Flight into Egypt, which now caught Horatia's attention on a side table. Her diamonds, on the other hand, were frequently tied up in a soiled handkerchief.

Then the Duchesse came back, and Horatia rose. The Dowager had perhaps been rummaging in some obscure corner, for one of the feathers was very much awry. But she possessed an awful majesty, short, ludicrous, and (at the moment) amenable as she was.

"Here, ma fille, is something for you," she said, putting into Horatia's hands an old green leather case. "Open it!"

The bride did so. Inside, on a dark and shabby lining, a row of magnificent pearls made moonlight.

"O, Madame," gasped Horatia. "I could not! they are too..."

"Nonsense, child," said the old lady, pinching her arm. "You like them, I see. You will not see any finer at the Tuileries—not that you'll ever go there now. I always meant them for Armand's wife. They would look well in that hair of yours, too. There are earrings, but I could not put my hand on them. Try these on! They belonged to my sister, the Comtesse de Craon, who was guillotined in '93, and I did not recover them till the Restoration."

"Guillotined!" exclaimed Horatia, startled. How was it possible to speak about it in that matter-of-fact tone! And the pearls—in whose hands had they been—round whose neck...?

"Naturally," answered Madame de la Roche-Guyon calmly. "All my family were. I was in prison myself till Thermidor. Well, perhaps you would like Armand to put them on for you. You can tell him that you are to have the emeralds when—you understand perfectly well what I mean!"

(3)

Horatia wore the pearls, at her husband's request, for the family gathering on New Year's Night. She said afterwards that they gave her courage, as proving her an adopted member of the gens, but when, at the conclusion of her toilet, Armand had clasped them round her neck, she declared that she felt more anticipatory terrors than had ever their owner on the way to the guillotine.

"Very likely," said Armand, in high spirits, walking round her approvingly. "If my lamented great-aunt was like my grandmother I do not suppose that she was in the least afraid of La Veuve.... You look charming; I like that dress."

"Armand," said poor Horatia, "this is certainly worse than the guillotine. Supposing Madame la Duchesse does not approve of me to-night; supposing that all your relations think me foreign or dowdy. I am sure their dresses will be quite different from mine."

"Their coiffures may be," agreed the young man. "Some of them will wear their hair à la Chinoise and look like Hurons; you must try not to laugh. (And let me warn you, chère amie, that if I see you disfiguring your beautiful hair by adopting that style, I shall desert you on the instant.) Have you remembered all my other warnings? Do not forget that though my aunt des Sablières is very deaf she cannot bear to be shouted at; that if Charles X is mentioned, Madame de Camain will probably burst into tears. Somewhere in the dim past the Comte d'Artois was—well, flirted with her. Do not talk of English admirals, ships, or sailors to the old Comte de Fezensac; he lost an eye at the siege of Gibraltar in 1779. Above all remember to speak of the Duc de Bordeaux as Henri V; you would do well to refer occasionally to the Duchesse de Berry as the Regent, for my father writes that she will shortly be made so. As you cannot disclose anything derogatory to Louis-Philippe you had better not mention him at all. You must be friendly with my cousin Eulalie de Beaulieu, for she will serve as your chaperon on occasions. I think that is all." He pulled up his high cravat, glanced at himself a moment critically in the long glass, and said to Horatia, "My darling, a little fright becomes you amazingly.... Let us go to the scaffold!"

CHAPTER III

(1)

If Kerfontaine had been to Horatia a kind of fairy castle, the Faubourg St. Germain resembled a land half savage, half enchanted, something between the domains of Haroun al Raschid and the country round the Niger, a place full of the oddest customs, and demanding considerable intrepidity in the explorer. The tribal gathering on New Year's Day had been alarming, but its members were kinder to her than she had expected. Afterwards, her chief impressions were: of faded dowagers, condescending or cold; of Madame la Marquise de Beaulieu, a cousin of Armand's and her destined chaperon, a high blonde of thirty-five or so, coiffée à la Minerve, wearing a sky-blue velvet dress encircled at the knees with a row of pink feathers; of a little creeping old lady, as grey as dust, Mlle Claire de la Roche-Guyon, some remote kinswoman of the Duke's, who lived in the Hôtel; of men, old or middle-aged, and extremely courtly and gallant; of two or three youths, and a small boy of eleven, Claude-Edmond, the "ill-fated" heir, quiet and extraordinarily self-possessed, who, oddly enough, did not live in the house, but boarded with a tutor near the Lycée Louis-le-Grand—and of a tall, grey-haired priest with a young face, Monsignor Prosper de la Roche-Guyon, a striking figure in his cassock touched with purple, though ecclesiastical garb had been unsafe to wear in the streets since the Days of July. Dominating all was the Duchesse in her chair, crowned with a toupée in lustre like sealskin, in hue like the pelt of a fox, accepting graciously the offerings of her descendants—from one, the latest clock, Queen Blanche in gold reclining on a seat, whereon were marked the hours; from another, such an inkpot as Armand had described, in the form of a crocodile; from an undiscriminating but inspired great-nephew, one of the newest parasols with eye-glasses in the handle. And, though the Dowager scarcely ever went out, she was pleased with this gift; while a highly suitable foot-basket, lined with violet velvet and trimmed with chinchilla, drew from her the snorting exclamation, that the donor evidently regarded her as decrepit. It was a thoroughly matriarchal scene ...

Ere a couple of weeks had passed, Horatia had both learnt and done many things. She had had, first of all, her visites de noces to pay; the earliest of these had been to the oldest inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Germain, the aged dowagers who never stirred from their armchairs, but whose word was still a power. To them, as to some elders of a tribe, a bride must always be taken for ten minutes' inspection; by them were the frankest of opinions expressed on her looks and gait, on eyes and teeth. Three of these ancients, in succession, having pronounced of Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon that "elle était très bien," Horatia was thenceforward established upon a proper footing.

She soon learnt, also, how many more visits she would have had to pay but for recent political events. (Those events, too, had disposed of the question of her presentation at Court, which would otherwise have taken precedence of all else.) Half the ladies of the Faubourg—or at least of the ultra section of the Faubourg—had shut up their hôtels, countermanded all their orders at the shops, and reclaiming from their maids, so it was said, their last year's dresses and hats, had gone to endure the martyrdom of a winter in their châteaux in the country, hoping thereby to ruin an ungrateful and disloyal Paris. Of those remaining Horatia found that she might only know the elect, the ultras, the "Carlistes," the "Dames de la Résistance," those who, in the expressive phrase of the day, were "sulking"—those who had not and never would bow the knee to Baal in the person of Louis-Philippe and the Orleanist monarchy. One or two former friends of the Duchesse's were reported to be among the "Dames de l'Attente," those who waited to see how the wind blew; they had already been scratched off that lady's visiting list. And one—O horror!—had gone over to the "Dames du Mouvement," and had been received in the house of Rimmon at the Palais-Royal (for Louis-Philippe had not yet migrated to the Tuileries). Of all objects in any way connected with her—her old visiting-cards, a forgotten pair of gloves, and what not—there had been, so Armand assured his wife, a solemn auto-da-fé in the Dowager's bedroom.

But some of the receptions which she was allowed to attend were to Horatia rather trying. Not Semiramis nor Catherine of Russia could have presented a more imposing front, nor have swayed a more despotic sceptre, than Madame la Princesse de Ligniville, with her little red-bordered eyes, her false front of fair hair, her dropsical corpulence, who, seated almost immoveably in her green damask armchair in her famous library of lemon wood, and surrounded by a throng of politicians, received her one evening. Madame de Ligniville could never have had any pretensions to beauty, yet for years she had exercised an absolute dominion. She was very well read, by no means religious, lively and sarcastic, and devoured with a passion for politics. Horatia, as well as being somewhat terrified of the great lady herself, felt lost among these political lights, whose names she did not even know. The lemon-wood library was not a salon—it was a throne-room.

There was, indeed, one salon which surprised Horatia by its unlikeness to the rest, that of the Duchesse de Montboissier. Here seven ladies of varying ages, from eighty to eighteen, sat round a table lit by a hanging lamp and did fancy work while they chattered to their guests—and these were some of the bluest blood in France. The conversation was lively, natural, and totally devoid of any intellectual interest, circling round tales of the day and fashions, and interspersed with scandal. The old Comtesse de Montboissier-Saligny, who presided, contributed indeed anecdotes of a kind highly unsuited to the ears of her youngest granddaughter. Horatia commented on this afterwards to the Marquise de Beaulieu, her companion on this occasion.

"Que voulez-vous?" asked that lady. "It was not the fashion to be prudish at the time of the emigration, and the Comtesse, by all accounts, was by no means averse to the society of the gallant abbés and worldly prelates of the days before '93. But you must not think, ma chère," she added, "when you hear these old dames telling racy stories, that their own morals are questionable. The more free their tongues, the more irreproachable, probably, their past conduct. One must have some compensation. Our own respected grandmother, for instance, makes even my hair stand on end sometimes. But I am sure she has always been discretion itself."

Horatia did not like the Marquise de Beaulieu.

(2)

By the beginning of February, Horatia was beginning to feel much more at home in her new surroundings. She knew what milliners to frequent, and frequented them a good deal; she, whom the question of clothes had always rather bored, and whose well-dressed appearance in the past had been due chiefly to her father's wish and the excellence of her dressmaker, now spent hours in choosing a hat, days in deciding between the attractions of drap d'Algers and soie de chaméléon, between the becomingness, as colours, of Poland earth, wood violet, lie de vin, and souris. Rightly to accompany the fashionable hats, her hair must be more elaborately dressed than Martha's fingers could accomplish, so Martha made way in this respect for one Joséphine. Armand had admired her pose, the turn of her hand and wrist one afternoon when he had found her doing embroidery, so she gave herself assiduously to embroidery. All these avocations took up an immense amount of time. Her days seemed very full. She never opened a book, nor missed those once-constant companions; the case of them which she had brought with her was not even unpacked. If she had not Armand always to talk to, she had him to dress for, for the hours she spent before her mirror, the afternoons she fleeted in Herbault's shop, were far, very far, from being ends in themselves.

Horatia's was indeed the exaggerated fervour of the convert. She looked back now on that blind and self-complacent person who, in the Rectory garden, only a few months ago, had wondered about her married friends "how can they!" Armand had come, and in a moment of time she had realised "how they could." Like all converts she had turned against her old life, and found nothing good in it at all. She would gladly have burned that which she once adored. For this glorious thing was love, and in her ignorance she had jeered at it; could a life-long repentance and years vowed to the joys she had once derided ever atone for her neglect? Her books, the tastes that she had shared with her father and Tristram, all these things were hollow and useless, for love had called to her, and she had answered. Henceforward she would go singing through the world with Armand, always with Armand. Together they had found and would keep the divine secret.

Together, at least, they saw Paris. He showed her sometimes the Paris of history in general, sometimes the Paris of his own history. For, wonderful and almost terrible as it was to stand on the site of the guillotine in the great Place, to shudder in the narrow cell of the Conciergerie that had held Marie Antoinette, to walk down the street where Henri IV had met his death, it was even more wonderful to think that for twenty-six years this other self of hers had inhabited the fortunate city—and that she had not known it. So her husband, laughing at her, had to show her the haunts of his boyhood, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he had been an externe, the little private pension in the Rue d'Enfer where he had boarded, even the academy at which he had learnt to fence and to ride. Pursuing her researches into this delightful region of the past, she discovered that Armand had previously had a private tutor, who, in order more easily to lead an unruly pupil in the paths of learning, had invented a method of combining amusement and instruction on their walks abroad. Hence the Champs Elysées were sacred to her because here the youthful Armand, taken to watch other children playing at ball, learnt the laws of gravity, and she could not see the old soldiers stooping at bowls under the trees of the Invalides without remembering that this sight had served to illustrate, to his childish mind, the double law governing the movements of a spherical body propelled along the ground.

When they drove or walked together, passers-by sometimes turned smiling to bestow a glance on so much youth and happiness. Horatia was sure that Armand's good looks were the magnet; he affirmed that it was hers, or the fact that she was English. This she would deny, asserting that she was now indistinguishable from a Frenchwoman. But one day, in a perfumer's, before she could even open her mouth, the owner of the shop had pushed forward divers bottles of English manufacture, had offered her "Vindsor soap" and Hunt's blacking, and had shaken out before her a silk handkerchief with a portrait of O'Connell in the middle of it. Armand, delighted at her confusion, immediately led her to a neighbouring pastry-cook's, displaying the legend "Here is to be had all sorts of English pastry," and speaking, by notices in its windows, of such insular delicacies as "hot mutton pies," "oyster patties," "Devonshire cider," and "Whitbread's entire." "We are suffering from Anglomania at present," he explained, "and everything English is deemed 'romantic,' so you need not, my angel, pretend to be French."

The magic word brought to Horatia's memory a young man whom she had seen a few days ago walking gloomily in the garden of the Luxembourg, a young man evidently aspiring to the aspect of "l'homme fatal," with open shirt collar, tumbled black hair, wild, melancholy eyes, and smile of conscious bitterness, in whom she recognised a product of the new French Byronism. Although she hoped in time to meet some of the adherents of this school, she was secretly glad that Armand was not of its type.

Thus they visited the Jardin des Plantes and the Boulevards, Notre Dame, the still unfinished Arc de Triomphe, the pictures in the Louvre, and (not altogether willingly on Armand's part) M. Sommerard's collection of mediæval antiquities in the Rue Mesnars.

(3)

Horatia was destined also to see Paris under a less smiling aspect.

An air as mild as milk, a sun almost of May, saluted her on the morning of the fourteenth of February, as Armand helped her from the family coach outside St. Germain l'Auxerrois. She was going into that church, of name ominous to Protestant ears, to hear her first Mass, and that a Requiem—the Requiem for the Duc de Berry, murdered in 1820, and father of the little boy whom all good Legitimists now regarded as their King. The occasion was therefore gloomy, but it was also exciting; though Horatia was clad in black she had no grief in her heart for an assassinated prince whom she had never seen, and though during the drive she had composed her features to a decent melancholy, she was secretly attacked by mirth at the overpoweringly funereal aspect of the Duchesse. It was an event when that lady left the Hôtel; and she had left it now swathed in crape, a-dangle with jet chains, and—unprecedented mark of mourning—devoid of her toupée. A large black rosary depended from her wrist. Armand and the Marquis sat opposite. Emmanuel had his usual air of sad patience; he was in fact the only one of the four who looked perfectly appropriate to the occasion (since the Dowager was merely ludicrous), yet Horatia knew that his Royalist sentiments were the least strong of all his family. Armand, his head thrown back against the brown silk lining of the vehicle, directed from time to time a glance at Horatia between his half-closed lids. He looked very well in black. From time to time also the Duchesse speculated on the likelihood of there being a riot; it was true that nothing of the sort had occurred on the 21st of January, the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI, when there had also been a Requiem; moreover the Government was forewarned. However, the fact that the ceremony had been forbidden to take place at St. Roch looked, she said with some unction, suspicious. It was plain that the old lady had no objection to the idea of a tumult, and perhaps even pictured herself as a martyr to the throne and the altar.

There were already two rows of emblazoned carriages on either side the church; a few curious sightseers, the usual beggars. The portals were hung with black. The Duchesse, on Emmanuel's arm, hobbled towards them; the leather door squeaked, Armand caught it from his brother, and they were inside. The Comte dipped his finger in the holy-water stoup and held it out half-smiling to his wife; finding, however, that she had no idea what he intended her to do, he crossed himself carelessly and preceded her up the aisle. The Swiss (whose semi-martial appearance Horatia supposed to be peculiar to this particular ceremony) having found seats for the Dowager and the Marquis, waved them into two chairs just behind.

The church too was hung with black—Horatia had never imagined an effect so gloomy. It was already nearly full of bowed, sable figures. In the middle of the nave was a great black-draped catafalque surrounded by enormous candles; the Bourbon arms glinted on the top, and at the end hung a large wreath of immortelles.

And the Mass began—but Horatia paid small attention to what, after all, she could not follow. Rather she came increasingly to realise that this was history. The old white-haired priest of whom she could catch glimpses at the altar, had, so they said, taken the last consolations of religion forty years ago to the murdered Queen; now he was praying (so she supposed) for the soul of the murdered Prince, her nephew. "Dona ei requiem," sang the choir, and it became impossible for her not to fancy that the Duc de Berry's actual body lay under the pall.

(4)

The Mass was finished, or nearly finished, Horatia conjectured, for people were moving their chairs about, when something was passed from hand to hand along the row in front of her—a paper of some kind. The Duchesse, when it came to her, kissed it; the Marquis Emmanuel glanced at it a moment and then, slightly turning, passed it to his brother behind him. And Horatia, looking at it with her husband (and having imagined it to be some holy relic) saw only a coloured lithograph of a boy about ten years of age, wearing a crown and a royal mantle.

"The Duc de Bordeaux—Henri V," whispered Armand, and he passed it on. Evidently there were other copies going round the congregation, for a moment or two later Horatia saw a young man in the uniform of the National Guard walk up to the catafalque and affix one to the end, just above the wreath of immortelles. A murmur rippled through the congregation then chairs scraped in all directions, and half a dozen ladies heavily veiled, and one or two men, were out of their places detaching the flowers, which, after kissing, they placed in their bosoms or their paroissiens. More came, till the catafalque was the centre of a crowd, and it took Emmanuel a long time to get the flower for which his grandmother asked him. Progress down the church was equally difficult, and Armand and Horatia became separated from their elders, who were in front. At the door there was difficulty in getting out and a sound of loud voices, and when they did at length emerge it was into the midst of a vociferating and hostile crowd.

"Take tight hold of my arm!" said Armand. "No, it is all right—they will not dare to touch us, the canaille!" And indeed they got through to the coach without much difficulty, except for the press of bodies. Threats were flying about, but nothing else, and Horatia was really more thrilled than frightened. Emmanuel was at the door of the coach, and opened it; Horatia, relinquishing Armand's arm, put her foot on the step. A man, slipping at that moment round the horses' heads, shouted something almost in her face; startled, she missed her footing on the high step, slipped and half fell into Emmanuel's arms, and was by him pushed into the coach, but not before she had a glimpse of Armand, white with fury, striking out at the man's face. The man went down; she stumbled into the coach, saw the Marquis catch his brother by the arm, and somehow, in the midst of cries, the two men also were in, the door was banged and the coach started.

It had all happened in a moment, and here was Armand, with blazing blue eyes, leaning forward with her hands in his, beseeching her to tell him that she was not hurt, that the scoundrel had not really touched her.

"No, no," reiterated Horatia. "He did not mean to, I am sure. It was my stupidity ... I slipped."

"Take my vinaigrette, child," said the Duchesse, fumbling among her blackness and beads.

"My sister was not frightened," observed the Marquis quietly. It was true; but Armand continued to breathe out slaughter all the way home.

"Well, it is over now," said the Dowager as they turned into the courtyard, "and you need not work yourself into a fever, mon petit."

But it was not over, it was only beginning. Late that afternoon came the news that the mob was breaking into St. Germain l'Auxerrois and pillaging it, smashing the glass, the statues, the pictures, the confessionals, all to the accompaniment of parodies of the services, in the vestments of the church. The great iron cross with the three fleurs-de-lis, which surmounted the building, was pulled down by order of the mayor of the district, destroying the organ in its fall, and by night one of the chef d'oeuvres of the Renaissance was merely bare walls and a heap of debris. Thus did the people of Paris testify their objection to the Legitimists.

On the Legitimists fell also the displeasure of the government, who, instead of proceeding against the rioters, arrested a prominent Royalist or two and issued warrants against the Archbishop of Paris (who was in hiding) and the curé of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. The Duchesse, not from nervousness, but rather from the joy of battle, ordered the great gates of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon to be closed and barricaded. But the Faubourg was quite quiet, though hundreds were howling outside the minister Dupin's house in the Rue Coq-Héron. And there were rumours that the mob had publicly given itself rendez-vous for the next day outside the Archbishop's palace.

On the morrow, therefore, Armand, unmoved by his wife's entreaties, sallied forth to see what was afoot. He was away about an hour and a half, a time that seemed to Horatia as long as the whole day of the wolf-hunt in Brittany. When, to her inexpressible relief, he returned, he announced that there was not a stone left of the Archevêché, that even the iron railings were gone, all the books and furniture in the river, and that the rioters were threatening Notre-Dame itself.

But it passed, that brief sirocco of popular fury, and Paris was gay again—had in fact been gay all the time, after the manner of Paris (seeing it was carnival-tide), though, or perhaps because, the richest ecclesiastical library in France was voyaging down the Seine, and the maskers on the quays were amusing themselves by trying to fish out the Archbishop's furniture from the stream.

CHAPTER IV

(1)

"Then, if you please, Sir, will you have dinner at a quarter after six?" suggested Mrs. Thwaites. "Mr. Dormer can hardly get here before six o'clock."

Tristram glanced at the leaden sky. "I am afraid that he will not be here then if we have snow, as seems probable. We had better say half-past. You will see that there is a good fire in his room, Mrs. Thwaites? He is ill, you know."

When she had withdrawn he got up from his writing-table and poked his own fire. It was ten o'clock on a morning late in February. In eight or nine hours Dormer would be here. And after dinner they would sit by the fire, and, if his friend were not too tired by the journey, perhaps he could have the relief of talking to him a little—or, if not that, at any rate the comfort of being with him, as on that day at Oxford. He was intensely anxious to see how he was, for about the beginning of December Dormer's headaches had become of alarming severity, and he had been ordered away from Oxford at a day or two's notice. Having spent the vacation and more at his brother's house at Colyton, he had now been to London to consult a well-known physician, and was at this moment on his way to Compton Parva.

Tristram stood a moment with his elbow on the mantelpiece, passed his hand once or twice over his eyes, and with a short, quick sigh went back to his letters.

As a watcher by the crisis of fever is cut off from all else, untouched by the life of every day that surges round the house but is powerless to enter it, unconcerned at great calamities, unresponsive to great joys, so, until Horatia's wedding-day, had it been with Tristram Hungerford. He was watching the last moments, as it were, of the person he loved best on earth. He did not care that the whole country was in a state of ferment, that the agricultural riots were spreading all over the south, and that men were being hanged for them, that there were tumults in London, nor even that in mid-November Wellington and Peel resigned and were succeeded by a Whig ministry under Lord Grey—which meant Reform. If the strain reached its acutest point on the evening that he said farewell to Horatia in the drawing-room at the Rectory, it was nevertheless prolonged, with very little alleviation, until the day that he stood behind her at the altar, and the vigil was over. Some means of relief indeed he had, for he prayed as he had never prayed before, fierce and desperate daily prayers for strength to endure; and he knew, too, at any rate, that his own life and circumstances would be changed by his ordination. More, he even saw, in the interval before the wedding, when Horatia was gone from Compton, a real ray of comfort in that prospect; there was still something he could do in life.

Then had come the marriage in December, the triple marriage. And after that a numbness and a merciful fatigue fell upon him for a while. He had returned with Mr. Grenville to Berkshire and taken up his ordinary occupation. Nearly every day he went over to see the old man, and Horatia's spaniel leapt up at him, and he sat in the rooms which would know her no more. It seemed to him sometimes that he was always there, to such an extent did Mr. Grenville lean on him. But so mortal a weariness had laid hold of him, body and mind, that he could not fully taste the pain. He often fell asleep in the middle of the morning, alarming Mrs. Thwaites. At night he slept long and almost dreamlessly. One waking dream pursued him indeed, for once again he stood behind Horatia in the little French Roman Catholic chapel in King Street, with its memories of banished royalty and the emigration, and in front of him was a figure in white silk and swansdown, with wired orange flowers, that shook when she moved, upon her deep satin bonnet, and with the long veil of a bride. At the time he had derived some self-control by pretending that it was someone else. "Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine..." he heard the words, too, in the unfamiliar pronunciation of the old French priest, and he saw the altar with its four pillars and canopy and some dark picture that he could not distinguish, and the strange little gallery beside it, and the Rector, looking old and bowed, and the Duke ... and another figure. Neither the civil marriage at the Embassy nor the more familiar ceremony at Margaret Chapel remained with him like this ... and this, he supposed, would wear itself off his brain in time; he was too tired to wrestle with it.

This state of blurred consciousness continued till about the middle of December. Then one day, quite suddenly, the fatigue, the mental mist, seemed to lift, and brighter and sharper than before the picture shone before him. And gradually it came to him what it meant. He was in love with another man's wife. He could not present himself for Orders. The straw of comfort to which he had clung was swept away, and now he saw, or thought he saw, the tarnished motives which had made him look forward to his entrance to the priesthood. It was not wonderful that Dormer's coming meant much to him, for he could not write about these things—he was not even sure that he could bring himself to talk about them.

(2)

The two friends each suffered a shock at dinner, for Tristram saw, in the full candle-light, how ill Dormer looked, and Dormer noticed that in two months Tristram had begun to grow grey at the temples.

But they talked during the meal of other things. Once settled in the study before the fire, however, Tristram began without preamble.

"Now, Charles, I want to hear exactly what the doctor says."

"Oh, the usual silly sort of thing that can never be carried out," replied Dormer with a weary smile. "If I were a farm labourer and lived out of doors and did not use my brain, I should never have another headache."

"But, seriously, doesn't he think you any better for these weeks at Colyton?"

"Not permanently, if at all." Dormer stirred his coffee. "The worst of it is that I'm almost afraid that he is right in what he says."

"What does he say—beyond the farm labourer idea?" asked Tristram anxiously.

"He says that I cannot think of going back to work this term; that if I do, I shall have a bad breakdown, and it may be years before I am able to write another word."

Tristram's heart sank.

"Then what are you going to do?"

"Well, there isn't much choice for me," responded his friend sighing. "He recommends, I might say he orders, a voyage."

And as Dormer struck Tristram as being extraordinarily submissive to this decree, Tristram was proportionately alarmed. But he concealed this fact, and merely said, "So he recommends a voyage, does he? Where to?"

"The Mediterranean."

"That," said Tristram with decision, "is where I have wanted to go all my life. I shall come with you."

"You!" exclaimed Dormer, a gleam of animation on his face. "I only wish it were possible. But how about your ordination? Would it be worth while for you to come for part of the time? I admit I had thought of you."

And in this confession he was certainly not overstepping the mark, having indeed schemed to get Tristram away at once from his present surroundings, so full of painful memories, but not having hoped that Tristram would himself jump at the idea.

"Certainly it would be worth it," replied his friend. "Besides, there is no hurry about my ordination ... This is a godsend to me. Now tell me what you have done. What about Rose and the Councils?"

"Rose is arranging for Newman to do them," replied Dormer. "He offered to wait for me, but I should not like the work to be delayed on my account. Newman knows as much about the subject as I do—probably more. But there is a great deal of reading to be done, and I should not be fit for that under a year. Of course I know that he is overworked as it is, and doesn't sleep well, but as he sees the importance to the cause that this particular book should not be delayed, he will drop something else. So that is settled."

Tristram vented his feelings without mercy on the fire. "I'm sorry to hear it," he observed very shortly. "I think Rose might have waited."

"I knew you would feel like that," said his friend with a half-amused smile that ended, despite himself, in a sigh. "Let's leave it alone ... About yourself—I don't understand what you said about your ordination?"

"Oh, never mind that now," said Tristram, abandoning the poker. "I never did like those Cambridge men!—Suppose we go to bed."

As Tristram, later, sat stretched out alone by the fire, he was realising acutely what it must mean to Dormer to give up the work on which he had entered with such hopes, and, quite unreasonably, he felt that he hated Rose and Newman, although he knew quite well that Dormer must have over-ridden both of them. It was just like him. Life was a sorry place. As for his own troubles, how could he, with Charles looking like that, risk keeping him awake by talking about them. It was not his sympathy that he wanted, for that he knew he had always, under its veil of more than ordinary reserve, but his counsel. So badly did he want the latter that it seemed an aggravation to have him in the house and to be silent, to know that if he went upstairs now he could have it—at a price for the giver. But he had not so learned friendship.

(3)

Yet, after all, Dormer was not asleep. The fire to which Mrs. Thwaites had paid special attention was burning with the disturbing brilliance which comes to a fire when one is in bed and desires the dark, and, lying wakeful, he watched it leaping on the faded chintzes. And he, too, was going through a dark hour.

The austerity of Charles Dormer's religion was the measure of its passion. Knight and lover, he was set upon a quest, whereof the road was holiness, and the end—God. And that he might not follow wandering fires he had looked back for guidance to the first ages of the Church, to the training of the confessors and martyrs, who had learnt of the divine pattern from those who had themselves seen the Lord. In this school of character he found no comfortable complacency, no sickly sentimentality, but hardness, and reality and the cross.

From a boy, just as he had been sure that he was called to serve God as a priest, so had he been certain that he would never marry. It fitted in, therefore, with his own instinct when he came to realise that the Fathers had given honour to those who lived the life of sacrifice for the kingdom of Heaven's sake, and that, taking literally the words of their Master and of St. Paul, they had applied them in particular to the priesthood. The memory that an almost renaissance love of the beautiful had once entered into fierce conflict with this ideal disposed him to follow still more closely the principles of asceticism. To observe the primitive duty of fasting during the first decades of the nineteenth century, and that in an Oxford college, might have seemed a task likely to tax the highest ingenuity, but others besides Charles Dormer accomplished it. Like his friend Hurrell Froude, though unknown to him, he devised methods of self-chastisement which would have seemed morbid and ludicrous not only to that generation but also to its descendants. Of their extent Keble knew a little and Tristram guessed. And now Dormer himself suspected—in fact he partly knew—that his own self-discipline was partly responsible for his state of health. Had he been right, or was it after all only some subtle form of pride or self-will that had set him on this path? Perhaps he had been making an idol both of his warfare with himself and of his work, and this was why he was going to be taken away from both ... At any rate it was clearly God's Will that he should be thus taken away, and therefore, however hard, it was the best for him.... Tristram, too, was coming with him, and he fell asleep, as the fire died down, wondering why it had been so easy to persuade him to this course.

When he came downstairs next morning, after breakfasting, by orders, in his room, Dormer discovered Tristram engaged with maps and guide-books, in the business-like mood of one who intends to get things settled up at once. They talked over plans for about an hour; after which, since there was a gleam of sun, he was commanded to wrap up and come for a walk.