Front matter (continued 4)

He laughed, and rallied Tristram on his despotism, but it was pleasant enough, and he obeyed it. There had been no snow the previous day; it was yet to come. They walked between the bare hedgerows, still talking plans, discussing the rival attractions of Sicily and Corfu, settling how, when Dormer was well enough, they would take the opportunity of seeing Naples and Rome, and possibly Florence, and returning by sea, perhaps, from Leghorn, if they got as far north. Animation grew upon both of them as they realised the delightful possibilities of their journey, and was not damped when a sudden storm of sleet, descending on them, drove them into an open shed by the side of the road, where, seated on the shafts of a hay-waggon, they continued for a while, scarcely conscious of the change of place.

At last, however, the subject suddenly ran dry, and Tristram, getting up, went to the doorway to see if the storm were over.

"I am afraid we must make up our minds to another quarter of an hour or so," he reported. "I do trust that you are not cold, Charles. Pull your cloak properly about you."

Dormer obeyed, and then, still sitting on the shaft, he launched a disturbing question.

"What did you mean last night, Tristram, when you said that there was no hurry for your ordination? Is it that you are glad to get away because of all that has happened, or is there something else?"

Tristram hesitated a second, then he took the plunge. "I am glad to get away, but there is something else."

"I thought so," said his friend quietly. "Do you mean to tell me about it?"

"Of course," replied Tristram. "I should have told you last night, but I didn't want my affairs to keep you awake."

"Well, what is it? I am awake now and am not going to bed for eight hours at least, so this is a good opportunity to tell me," observed Dormer, who was not troubled by incongruities of time or place.

"Charles, I cannot be ordained!"

The effort to get out these words was apparent; not so the effort which it cost Dormer to hide the shock they gave him. He merely asked coolly, "Why not?"

"Because I'm thinking day and night of another man's wife. Charles, Charles, it's unbearable! I see her always as she was on her wedding-day, and ... I see him standing beside her, too. I picture them in their own house. The Rector reads little things from her letters. He does not say much, out of consideration for me perhaps—only I know that she is happy so far—thank God!—very happy."

Dormer looked at him compassionately as he sat, his head in his hands, on a log near the door. "My poor Tristram!" he said gently. "I know. I quite understand." And then he was silent.

After a little he went on again. "All the same I hardly see how you could expect it to be otherwise. Of course you see her. If one image has been in a person's mind for many years, how can it be suddenly expelled at a certain hour, on a certain day? God does not ask from us impossibilities."

"But I want her," said Tristram from between his hands, "more than I have ever wanted her in my life ... and sometimes I think I could kill him!"

It appeared to Dormer that these statements might or might not be serious. For the present he ignored them, and only said, "I'm thankful you are coming away with me. You need to give yourself a rest." And then, because, for Tristram's sake, he himself wanted time to think, he got up and went to the door. "The storm is nearly over, isn't it?"

It was not, but since the carrier's cart was at that moment descried coming along the road, and since Tristram thought that Dormer looked cold, he felt obliged to take the opportunity of getting him home without further delay. After all, his own affairs could wait a little longer.

(4)

But Tristram's need was too pressing to let them wait for very long; and this time he made the opening himself. It was after dinner, and they were in the library again, and Dormer was not looking nearly as tired as the night before. So he said, almost directly they had sat down:

"Tell me what you think I should do, Charles. Surely you see that I can't be ordained?"

And Dormer, who had spent the afternoon in preparation for this question, said, gazing at the fire, "My advice is that you should be patient with yourself. You see you have been through a long strain. You have acted, God knows. Anyone would say that you had given her up absolutely, and you have certainly been a friend to both of them, to him as well as to her. Give yourself time, and your feelings will follow."

"Oh, yes, I've acted," said Tristram. "But what is that but a case of necessity after all? All these years I have watched her and tried ineffectually to do whatever small things I could for her, so that it was impossible to fail her in a big thing."

"Impossible for you, perhaps, but then you are one of the most unselfish people I have ever met."

"If you think I'm unselfish," returned Tristram rather bitterly, "how do you explain that at this moment I hate Armand just because I know Horatia to be blissfully happy with him? If she were unhappy I should hate him still more, but that does not affect my present feeling."

"My dear Tristram, don't put yourself to the trouble of telling me that sort of thing! Of course it is wrong, utterly wrong, but if your will is constant, if you hate and repudiate such thoughts, they only amount to a suggestion of the Evil One."

"I wish I could believe you."

"I am sure," said Dormer, "that in time you will come to hold the same view. And meanwhile I should just put away the idea of ordination. You were going to wait till Lent anyhow if necessary, and you can wait till June."

Tristram looked straight at him to see if he could read anything more in his expression.

"I don't know that I can trust you, so to speak," he said slowly. "I think you are too kind—to other people."

Dormer raised his eyebrows with a little smile. "Am I?"

"I know that I did what I could," went on Tristram in a sort of outburst, "and it hurt all the time like a knife. But now I feel swamped with a sense of failure, and I pray and go on praying, but there is no comfort anywhere. Sometimes I begin to wonder if, apart from my own feelings, I did right in helping on the marriage at all." And he laughed, because he was conscious of his own habit of introspection, and half ashamed to lay it bare.

At that Dormer sat up a little in his chair, and turned a very penetrating gaze upon him. "Now what do you mean exactly by that? I thought you felt quite sure from the beginning?"

"So I did," responded his friend, "and so I do, but—it's no use. I cannot really trust Armand. I know nothing against him, but I have a very shrewd suspicion that he only thinks of himself, and that he will always put his own interests before Horatia's. And for all Horatia's apparent independence she needs protection far more than many of her sex."

"Well?"

"You see I know Horatia," pursued Tristram, "and I realised that if she were once awakened, and then her hopes were frustrated, it might be a very serious thing for her; and there was always the chance that Armand might turn out better than I expected. Of course I put all that to the Rector, and, as you know, by degrees he came round."

"I quite understand. It would have been hard enough to resign her to a man whom you knew and trusted, especially as it practically devolved on you to plead your rival's cause, but it would have been easy compared with this."

"Yes, that's just it. It fairly breaks me to feel that I have given her up, perhaps, only to sorrow and neglect."

"You can't tell about that, Tristram," said Dormer very gravely. "When you resigned her, you gave her absolutely into the hands of God, and that means you gave her as you would give yourself, for joy or for sorrow. It has always seemed to me that it is quite possible for vicarious resignation to the Divine Will to be a higher thing than the resignation of oneself; certainly it can be a harder.... And, besides," he went on after a moment's pause, "I have something more to say. I have a favourite theory of my own. That rather hackneyed phrase of two people being made for one another is capable of another interpretation. It may mean that from all eternity Providence has intended two souls to meet to play upon each other, and that it is only through the discipline of married life that they can become what God intended them to become. I should never think of any two people as necessarily destined to happiness, but as destined by their union to work out God's Will. After all, what have any of us to do with happiness?"

There was a long silence. Tristram lay back in his chair, and Dormer looked as if he were thinking that the two souls in question would perhaps be the better for any kind of discipline. But at last he said:

"To go back to what you said this morning, that you wanted her more than you have ever wanted her in your life—"

"Yes?"

"The more I think of it the more I believe you to be experiencing the inevitable struggle after the sacrifice has been made. Even our Lord knew what that was."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing was wanting to the completeness of the sacrifice when He offered the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, and yet—afterwards—came the Agony in the Garden."

(5)

That night again his bedroom fire was the companion of Dormer's vigil. He sat long before it, thinking of all that Tristram had told him. He had always had a high ideal for his friend, but now he had even a higher, for he could not help the conviction that God was dealing specially with him, and that disappointment meant that He had some particular work for him to do. But he saw that Tristram had still a hard fight before him, for though he was, perhaps, tormenting himself unnecessarily about his feelings, yet if he was to become what Dormer believed, more and more, that God meant him to be, his loss must be turned from mere endurance into the painful joy of sacrifice. He guessed that it was possible for a soul fully to submit, and yet to fret, and that such an one would for the time lie beyond the reach of consolation.

Charles Dormer could never so much as think of consolation without the memory of Mrs. Hungerford coming back to him. Yes, if anyone could have comforted Tristram it would have been his own mother. This was her room; Dormer had it always when he stayed here, and it seemed full of her. Downstairs in the dining-room—he had glanced at it several times to-day over Tristram's head—was a picture, representing her as standing and looking down at her husband, seated at a table that bore a map of the West Indies outspread upon its crimson cloth. Curtains of a darker crimson, looped back to columns, and a vista of mixed landscape completed the ill-painted composition, which was only made beautiful by Mrs. Hungerford's expression. But, looking at that, Dormer knew why, as boy and young man, he had told her so many things.

It was impossible to think of her as anything else but a mother, and yet she had not married till she was nearly forty, and she had only had one child. To him she had always seemed the ideal of motherhood. That he should think so was no disloyalty to his own mother, to whose memory he still gave the almost awed worship of his childish days, for he saw now how that mother, despite her early marriage and her five sons, had never had just this gift which would always have been Mrs. Hungerford's, married or single. He knew that Mrs. Hungerford had understood what his own mother had been to him, as she understood everything else. Perhaps, indeed, she understood about Tristram now....

CHAPTER V

(1)

The pillaging of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the fact that it now bore the legend "Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement" upon its doors had, of course, no direct effect on Horatia—beyond teaching her of what the Paris mob was capable, and how exiguous were the titles to respect of the Laffitte ministry, already on its deathbed. Her places of worship lay elsewhere—the Embassy chapel in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, or that of the Reverend Lewis Way in the Avenue de Neuilly. For the Hon. and Rev. Stephen Grenville, if he wished to keep his daughter faithful to the Church of her baptism, had done a very shrewd thing when he extracted from her a promise to attend Morning Prayer every Sunday, when possible, and, if not, to read it herself. Horatia kept her promise faithfully. However bright the day, however alluring the prospect of going out with Armand, she resisted the temptation, and set forth, rather scandalised at the crowd of pleasure-seekers in the Tuileries gardens or elsewhere.

On the whole the service was pleasant to her, chiefly because it was a link with all things English, and in particular with her home. However commonplace and familiar "Dearly beloved brethren" might sound in English sunoundings, Horatia found that it had power greatly to stir her heart in a foreign land. It gave her, too, a sort of happy sadness to displace the Evangelical minister by her father, and his chapel (which had been a café) by Compton church.

Armand could not accompany Horatia to church, nor could she go with him—if he ever went there. This separation she had, of course, anticipated from the first, and it did not seem really to be of great importance. It mattered more to her that he did not care so much about the things of the past as she did—a discovery which she was gradually making, and which appeared to her all the more disconcerting because he, by his ancestors, belonged to that past in a way that she never could. But it interested him infinitely less, convinced and even fanatical Legitimist that he was.

She saw the thing clearly at last on the day that he drove her to Versailles in his smart phaeton lined with blue flower-dotted piqué, wherein, however, as a "fashionable" should, he sat upon so high a seat that it was extremely difficult to talk to him. Besides, there was the ridiculous little tiger behind, in his overcoat to the ankles, his gaiters and his shiny hat, who could, Horatia imagined, hear everything that they said. But she enjoyed the drive exceedingly, and looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing the palace. Yet, when they got there, Armand displayed small concern as to which part of the great pile had stood in the days of Louis the Just, and which had been built by the Grand Monarque, or on what balcony the King and Queen had showed themselves to the mob on that wild day in October, 1789. She could not but be disappointed, for she regarded her husband, quite justly, as the scion of a long line of devoted royalists, and she remembered how he had spoken, in England, of the Lilies. To her the deserted palace, abandoned for want of means to keep it up and shortly, it was said, to be converted into a museum, was heart-rending in its associations of fallen glory. And Armand's ancestors had been among the very people who had moved, gay and gallant, upon its wide terraces; in no point would he have disgraced the cohort himself. But it was evident that the empty basins of the royal fountains, the forlorn bosquets, roused in him no pleasurable melancholy, and that the Allée d'Apollon was merely a place where he could tell her, undisturbed, how charming she looked, and laugh at her sad face. In the end he took her away before she had seen all she desired, lest the drive back should not be accomplished without rain, "and your pretty dress be spoiled."

(2)

Horatia had reason to remember that day at Versailles, because of what occurred on the following morning.

She was paying her accustomed visit to her grandmother-in-law. The Duchesse was sitting propped up in bed, looking unusually grim, and not by any means beautified by the wrap in which she was enveloped.

"My dear," said the old lady, after some desultory conversation, "I have something to say to you which you probably will not like. You really must not see so much of Armand."

"Not ... not see so much of Armand!" gasped Horatia, stupefied. "Not see so much of my husband!"

"No," replied Madame de la Roche-Guyon emphatically, and the flaps on her lace cap waggled. "You are always about with him, and it is not convenable. I hear that you spent the whole day together at Versailles yesterday."

"But, Madame," ejaculated Horatia, scarcely believing her ears, "I don't under——what can you possibly mean? If I cannot spend the day with Armand——"

"Now listen, ma fille," said the Duchesse, not unkindly. "I do not know how it may be with the bourgeoisie, but in our world it is not the thing for a husband to be always dancing attendance on his wife. A man who does so, after the first few weeks of marriage, is looked on as a nincompoop, or a bore. He is, in fact, despised. And no one wants to receive husband and wife together at their salons; it is gênant, it destroys all wit and freedom of intercourse. Armand will naturally attach himself to some salon, and you must not expect him to accompany you to those which you frequent—nor, above all, to be constantly seen about with you in public places. It is not the part of a galant homme. And you have, for the present, the chaperon we have provided for you, Eulalie de Beaulieu."

A red spot came into Horatia's cheek. "But I do not like Madame de Beaulieu. I do not wish to go about with her."

Even the snort which the Dowager permitted herself did not destroy the air of cold dignity with which she replied. "You seem to forget the class of society into which you have married. It would be unheard of for a bride to be seen about alone. When her husband does not accompany her—and, as I say, the time for that is already long past—she must be under the escort of her mother or her mother-in-law. You have neither. Did my years and health permit I would myself fulfil the duty, but if you do not wish to have my death at your door you will accept the chaperonage of the Marquise de Beaulieu. When you have been married a year—above all when you have had a child—you will be perfectly free to go where you will, to receive whom you will——"

"Even my own husband!" flashed Horatia.

For a second or two the Duchesse seemed staggered by the interruption and its bitterness; then, for she rather liked spirit, a slow smile revealed the absence of her false teeth.

"Let me tell you, my child," she riposted, "that if you do not take my advice you will end by making Armand ridiculous. Perhaps—having known him only so short a time—you have not yet discovered that there is nothing in the world that he hates so much. I counsel you to remember this."

The victory—or at all events the last stroke in battle—undoubtedly remained with Madame de la Roche-Guyon.

(3)

"'The Tenth Muse'?" asked Horatia. "Who is she?"

The opulent but sentimental-looking lady in purple who sat next her in Madame de Chastenay's drawing-room lifted up her hands. "Is it conceivable that you have never heard of Mademoiselle Delphine Gay?" she exclaimed. "But I forgot that you were English. Mademoiselle Gay is the literary prodigy of our sex; figure to yourself a young girl already celebrated at eighteen for her verse, pensioned by His Majesty, and crowned at twenty-three in the Capitol, by the Academy of the Tiber!"

"And she is going to read us some of her poems now?"

"To recite them. She has a divine voice and manner."

Horatia looked round the room wherein, on this March evening, were seated many ladies and a few men, awaiting the intellectual treat in the midst of a light reflected with dazzling effect from the chandeliers, lustres and chimney-ornaments of cut steel, with which the apartment had lately been beautified. A little way off Armand was bending over the chair of a lady whom she did not know; he was evidently laughing. More than a week had passed since Horatia's passage of arms with the Duchesse. For two days she had refused to go and see her, then, through the agency of old Mademoiselle de la Roche-Guyon—a trembling mediator—a truce was patched up between the combatants. But if the affair appeared to have passed from the Dowager's mind it had not so quitted Horatia's. She did not say a word about it to Armand. Once or twice she was tempted to think the whole thing nonsense, the creation of a malicious brain, and certainly this evening it tended so to appear to her, for here was her husband with her at this salon, and a literary salon too. It was the first of this class that Horatia had attended, and devoutly did she hope that it might be the entry, at last, into that heaven where Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and so many constellations swam in glory.

She was recalled from her musings by a stir. Two ladies entered the room—the elder with an indescribable brio. Madame Gay had been a celebrity of the Empire, and kept about her an extraordinary aroma of those great days, a suggestion of staff-officers, mamelukes, the flash of sabres in the sun and the dust cloud over wheeling squadrons, seeming indeed as if she might at any moment break into "Partant pour la Syrie" or some hymn to Glory and Victory. Mademoiselle Delphine gained by the contrast with her parent. Tall, well-built, with a fine head beautifully set on an equally fine neck, clad in a simple white semi-classical dress wearing no ornaments, and with her abundant fair hair hanging in ringlets, she had something of the air of a sibyl. She looked about twenty-five, but was in reality a little older.

Madame Gay settled herself, and the Tenth Muse was led to a chair apart—an honourable chair, whose horse-hair seat was painted with roses and camellias. She composed herself in a suitable attitude, brought her beautiful bare arms to one side, clasped her hands loosely together, and, looking up at the ceiling, began to recite in a grave, deep, almost languorous voice, her poem on the last days of Pompeii, commemorating the fate of Théora the priestess of Apollo, and the young warrior Paulus, and recounting how, two thousand years after,

"On trouva dans l'enceinte où le temple s'élève

Sur l'autel une lyre ... et près du seuil un glaive."

"Is it not touching!" said the purple lady to Horatia. The green plumes in her headdress quivered, and she dabbed her eyes rather ostentatiously. "Ces pauvres gens.... Ah, she is beginning again!"

This time it was a Hymn to Ste Généviève.

"Patronne de France, amour de nos aieux ..."

At the conclusion of this poem, amid the hum of applause, Madame Gay was observed to approach her offspring, and to whisper something into her ear. The poetess shook her head; then, seeming to relent, and smiling, she announced

"Le bonheur d'être belle. Dedicated to Madame

Récamier."

"Quel bonheur d'être belle, alors qu'on est aimée!

Autrefois de mes yeux je n'étais pas charmée;

Je les croyais sans feu, sans douceur, sans regard;

Je me trouvais jolie un moment par hasard.

Maintenant ma beauté me parait admirable.

Je m'aime de lui plaire, et je me crois aimable....

Il le dit si souvent! Je l'aime, et quand je vois

Ses yeux avec plaisir se reposer sur moi,

Au sentiment d'orgueil je ne suis point rebelle,

Je bénis mes parents de m'avoir fait si belle.

Mais ... pourquoi dans mon coeur ces subites alarmes?—

Si notre amour tous deux nous trompait sur mes charmes:

Si j'étais laide enfin? Non ... il s'y connaît mieux!

D'ailleurs pour m'admirer je ne veux que ses yeux!—

Bientôt il va venir! bientôt il va me voir!

Comme, en me regardant, il sera beau ce soir!

Le voilà! je l'entends, c'est sa voix amoureuse!

Quel bonheur d'être belle! Oh, que je suis heureuse!"

The extraordinary appropriateness of these verses to Horatia's own attitude of mind during the past months made her forget to join in the applause which followed their recitation. Yes, it had been exactly her own case; she knew it, and Armand knew it too. He would tease her about them going home. She looked round, with a little half-shy smile, for her husband, but he was nowhere to be seen, and she remembered that since Mademoiselle Gay's entrance she had been too much occupied to notice his whereabouts.

And then came his voice in her ear, sudden and by no means "amoureuse."

"For God's sake let us go!"

Horatia turned round, startled. "Certainly, if you wish it," she responded, and, the recitation having apparently come to an end, she was able to take her leave almost at once. Her first thought had been that Armand was ill.

"You were bored, I am afraid?" she hazarded, as the carriage started.

"Mon Dieu!" answered her husband, throwing himself back in the corner, "could one be otherwise? It was intolerable—to listen to all that stuff about Pompeii and Ste. Généviève. Madame de Chastenay is preposterous with her female phenomena. Don't ever ask me to go there again!"

And, had it not been Armand who spoke, Horatia would have thought the voice thoroughly bad-tempered.

"But, my dear Armand," she protested, putting a hand on his arm, "I would willingly have come away sooner if I had known. I thought you were admiring the poetess; she is very pretty—no, she is beautiful."

"Entendu. It is a woman's business to be beautiful, but not to declaim wearisome verses. Don't ask me to go to any more of these functions with you!"

Horatia turned a little pale and drew back. Could it be true after all, that incredible thing which the Duchess had said, that she would make him ridiculous—that he himself thought it, feared it?

Armand could not but perceive her shrink, and the lover conquered the sulky male. He caught her hand.

"My darling, forgive me! I didn't mean to hurt you. You know that there is no greater pleasure for me than to be with you, but ... I was so bored!"

Impossible to resist the half-humorous, half-pleading tone, and the look in his eyes. As the carriage rolled under their own gateway she bent forward and put a light kiss on his temple.

"I forgive you," she said.

"Mademoiselle Gay did not then give you the canto of her poem on the Magdalene where the devil, to tempt the saint, takes on the form of Joseph of Arimathea?" inquired the Duchesse that evening. "That must, ma foi, be very striking, and I regret that I have never even read it."

CHAPTER VI

(1)

"O temps, suspends ton vol, et vous, heures propices,

Suspendez votre cours!

Laissez-nous savourer les rapides délices

Des plus beaux de nos jours!"

—sang M. Alphonse de Lamartine to the Comtesse Armand de la Roche-Guyon from the beautifully bound copy of Les Meditations which, with his just-published Harmonies, Horatia had found in her room. A line from Emmanuel had asked her to please him by accepting them. And, having turned over the new poems, she had reverted to that earlier and famous elegy over past happiness, Le Lac, and its passion and melancholy had sent her into a half reverie.

How kind, how thoughtful, Emmanuel was! This gift could be but the outcome of his knowledge of her desire for personal acquaintance with the poet. He could not give her that, and Armand would not.

"My dear child," the latter had said, "it is quite out of the question. If you want to see M. Victor Hugo, Dumas, de Vigny, and this young de Musset, you must go to the sort of club they have at Charles Nodier's, the Cénacle I think they call it—and, of course, you cannot do that. Comte Alfred de Vigny does belong to our world, it is true, but he hardly goes anywhere. But as for these Gautiers and Balzacs, where do you expect to find them? In some dingy lodgings in the Quarter, not anywhere that you are likely to visit!"

"But a great many ladies of your world, as you call them, have literary salons, surely," pleaded Horatia.

"Like the one the other day? No, not many are left now, and what there are are mostly Orleanist."

"What about Madame Récamier?" suggested Horatia. "Would not the presence of Monsieur de Chateaubriand be a guarantee of right principles?"

Armand laughed. "I cannot deny that. Now that there is no monarch the great Renæ is more of a monarchist than ever. Very well, little tease, I will get you the entrée to the Abbaye-aux-Bois as soon as I can."

And with that promise—as yet unfulfilled, Horatia was forced to be content....

Her eyes went back to her book.

"O temps, suspends ton vol——"

But the thoughts came bubbling up, displacing the flow of the verses. She did not want the flight of time suspended this afternoon; rather the contrary. Armand was away, and would not be back till to-morrow; the flight of time was a mere crawl.

"Laissez-nous savourer les rapides délices..."

But this was no fleet delight, to sit here in her boudoir, full of flowers though it was, with nothing to do, and the rain falling outside. Besides, if she went out, it must be with the Marquise.

The last time they had driven out together, Madame de Beaulieu had taken her to see the villa outside Paris which she was furnishing for a summer retreat—the latest craze. This was no ancestral château, and everything in it must be new, and, said the Marquise, marked by extreme simplicity of taste. And in the drawing-room, where the blinds were painted to resemble stained-glass windows, where the chairs, stools and sofas were of bamboo and Persian-figured chintz, the ottomans and floorcloths of split reeds, Madame de Beaulieu described the style of dress which she had designed for herself when inhabiting this seclusion—a plain white jacconet gown, with an apron of dove-coloured gros de Naples, worked round with green foliage, the pockets cut en coeur, the hair to be done smoothly with but one high bow and a comb, and no ornaments whatsoever.

It was after this expedition that Horatia had suddenly taken the resolution of unpacking her books. She felt haunted by the dove-coloured apron with green foliage and heart-shaped pockets, and with Martha's assistance she brought the prisoners once more to the light of day. Some had been among her childhood's treasures—Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, a few sheets of the Arabian Nights, The Scottish Chiefs, Susan Gray—and then there were all the favourites of later years. She welcomed them with an almost guilty pleasure, and there they were now, most of them in a bookcase under the window looking out into the Rue Saint-Dominique, for under the other, which gave on to the courtyard of the Hôtel, stood the Duchesse's New Year's gift to her—a satinwood table inlaid with ebony, encumbered on every side with drawers from which hung workbags of blue satin, stocked with the requirements for a hundred and one useless handicrafts—with velvet to make flowers, and gauze for painting upon. Horatia had just opened these pouched drawers, no more, and at present used the table rather ruthlessly for a sort of jardinière, so that the inlay was slowly deteriorating under pots of camellias and baskets of violets in moss.

She took up the other volume of Lamartine. Between the pages she had put an old letter of her father's to mark the place, and idly she unfolded this and read it again. The Rector spoke of many things; among others of Tristram's tour in Italy with his friend; they were reported to be enjoying themselves and Mr. Dormer's health was improving slowly. A passage she had forgotten struck her again.

"By the way, I have been having a correspondence with the Duke of Devonshire, who is a very keen numismatist, about some coins of mine; in the course of it he mentioned that he supposed you and Lady Granville (who is, as you know, his sister) had made acquaintance with each other. Thinking this over, I came to the conclusion that, from what you tell me of the political views of your new relations, it is improbable that you have been presented at the Embassy, but I cannot see any reason why you should not call upon her privately if she has no objection, since you are, after all, English by birth. I met her many years ago at Devonshire House with Tom Grenville; I think she would remember me. The Duke said he was going to write to Lady Granville about you; I do not know if he has done so; perhaps you have heard from her."

Horatia had not. The letter passed on to the projected Reform Bill which, Mr. Grenville wrote, was occupying everybody to the exclusion of anything else, and he heard that after dinner even ladies fell to at Potwallopers, Outvoters and Rotten Boroughs! "Now it has once been broached," went on the writer, "the rumpus if it is not carried will be appalling, in fact I think immediate combustion will be the result. It seems to me impossible now that the people could ever sit down quietly without Reform, or that they should be content with less than they have been promised; but the longer it is delayed the more exasperated they will get. Your cousin Chandos is much exercised about it."

Horatia looked at the date; it was the 9th of March. As she knew, since those words were written, the first reading of the Bill had been carried by a majority of one. But how little these great events seemed to touch her here.

The letter concluded, "I hope, my darling, that you are still very happy. If you are, so is your old Papa."

The letter fell on to Les Harmonies. Was she "still very happy?" .... How could she ask herself the question! Of course she was, blissfully happy—provided Armand were with her. But, of course, as she often told herself—and thought how sensible she was for being able to do so—he could not always be with her. Quite apart from the Dowager's odious recommendations she was determined not to be a drag upon him. The time had come when she must try to fill in her own life. That had been one motive for the unpacking of her books. She attended, of her own volition, one or two salons—that of the Marquise de Montglas, who always received lying in a chaise longue, draped with shawls, for she was a permanent invalid, though she held firmly the threads of conversation in the circle which spread fanwise round her couch—and that of her sister, Madame de Juvelcourt. The latter was deformed, a fact of which Horatia had been warned; but she was hardly prepared to find, as she did, a really hideous little dwarf, black and vivacious, literally perched on cushions, dressed in the latest fashion, making no attempt to hide her disadvantages, and not, indeed, seeming to mind them in the least. She had received the English wife very kindly, and as she was one of the Duchesse's rare visitors, Horatia felt more at home at her receptions than at any others. She even managed to enjoy herself there, and excited perhaps by Madame de Juvelcourt's own gaiety and wit, to return full of spirits, but when she got in her first inquiry was always for Armand. She was restless, feverishly restless, despite her resolve, when she was not with him. And he had naturally his own avocations, the usual diversions of a young man of fashion. She did not expect to share these, she did not even question him about them, but as the weeks went on, she could not but be aware that they seemed to claim him much more than they had done. He was always charming to her, and yet—and yet, she was conscious of something slipping. What was it, this tiny foreboding at her heart, an asp in Eden? She could not tell. Was it possible that there could be such a thing as over-sweetness, and had he begun to feel it, was she herself beginning to feel it? ...

Horatia came back to her present surroundings. Of course she did not really think these things—they were treachery to her great love. But one thought she did not drive away, a thought that was daily becoming more pursuing, the realisation of how much she was in bondage in her own house—if indeed it could be called her own. Marriage had not given her liberty; she had been far freer in Berkshire—free to come and go, to walk or ride—free to do, within reasonable limits, exactly as seemed good to her. Here she was more or less in the position of a child in the nursery. And when, as now, reflection on this topic ended by making her angry, she would try to stifle her impatience with some occupation, or to forget in Armand's society the price she was paying for it. With an exclamation she arose from her chair, and went to the window to see if it were still raining.

Nothing was doing in the courtyard—nothing was ever doing there. The little trees stood orderly in their tubs. A childish desire seized Horatia to throw something down ... Someone went out; it was Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, summoned, probably to the Duchesse, who had an attack of indigestion and devotion. She wished he had been to see her. She liked him, and he interested her; she thought that he was probably of that particular type of French piety represented by Fénelon. But she knew very little about him, and after all he had made no attempt to convert her.

Certainly the rain was stopping, for the major-domo was now observed by the watcher to go forth, armed with an enormous bunchy umbrella, which, however he did not unfurl. Even he could go out, if not when he liked, at least without being accompanied against his will! She would rather stay in than go driving with the Marquise.

But then the sun suddenly began to shine, and Horatia could withstand no longer. She rang for her maid, ordered the carriage, changed her dress, and drove round to Madame de Beaulieu's house in the Rue de l'Universite"—a five minutes' drive.

And there unexpected tidings greeted her ravished ears. "Madame la Marquise is indisposed; she prays Madame la Comtesse to excuse her; she cannot go out to-day."

"And I am expected to go home again like a good child," thought Madame la Comtesse. "Never! Very well," she said to the footman, "tell Jean to drive me to Herbault's."

The dome of the Invalides glittered again in the sun, but as she crossed the river the giant statues on the Pont de la Concorde looked threateningly at her. She drove across the great expanse of the Place with the feeling of a child let out of school. The Rue Neuve St. Augustin came all too soon. She had no intention of going into Herbault's, and had only mentioned the famous shop because it would necessitate crossing the Seine. When the carriage was drawing up she leant forward and said that she had changed her mind, and would go to Houbigant's in the Rue St. Honoré instead.

At Houbigant's she went in and bought some essence de mousseline, imagining that the other ladies making purchases looked at her curiously. As the assistant was tying up the bottle of scent she racked her brains to think what she could do next. Though her drives in the Bois de Boulogne had not enchanted her, she would have gone thither, since it would have been quiet, had she not known that Jean would immediately say that it was too far for the horses—an opinion which he shared or affected to share with other ancient coachmen of the Faubourg.

Suddenly her father's old letter flashed into her mind. Was not the English Embassy quite near, practically in the same street? and had not the Duke of Devonshire said that he would write? This was certainly her chance; she might never have such another. She could but be refused entrance if the Ambassadress did did not wish to see her. In a few moments she found herself in front of the house which had been Princess Borghese's.

The man admitted her and took her card, and returning said that Madame l'Ambassadrice was in the serre and would receive her. He proceeded to conduct her thither, and passing through a white and gold drawing-room she came to a long gallery of a conservatory, filled with spring flowers, where, on a divan in a little grove of orange-trees and lilacs and double red camellias, a lady of about forty, wrapped in a shawl, was taking farewell of a youth of French appearance, who was, however, talking very good English to her. The young Frenchman passed Horatia, tall, very young, good-looking. She was announced, and found herself being warmly greeted.

"And this is Stephen Grenville's daughter! My brother has just written to me about you. My dear, I would like to kiss you, but I have a horrible cold. Come and sit on the divan by me if you are not afraid of catching it. I have gargled and blistered till I am sure there can be no infection left!"

So Horatia sat down by the side of this daughter of the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, who had not indeed inherited her mother's looks, but who had to the full the Cavendish charm of voice and manner, and, as she soon discovered, inexhaustible supplies both of humour and of wit. Lady Granville assumed, rather to her visitor's dismay, that her new relatives had "allowed" her to come, whereat Horatia, feeling something like a truant schoolgirl, had to confess that such was not the case. The Ambassadress looked grave, and Horatia was still more uncomfortable when it transpired that Lady Granville had, for her sake, relaxed her rule about formal presentations to herself. However, nobody could have been more kind or amusing. Horatia being English born, Lady Granville was able to permit herself some remarks on French society not untinged with malice, asking her visitor if she had yet become acquainted with "the type of woman made by Herbault, Victorine and Alexandre, the woman who looks to see if you have six curls or five on the side of your head," and whether it had yet been patronisingly said of her that no one would take her for an Englishwoman—"just as I sometimes tell Charles de Montalembert—that young man who was leaving as you came in—that he will some day be taken for an Englishman. But then he is half English, or rather Scotch. Yet no true Englishman would ever permit himself to be so enthusiastic about the Church."

"The Church!" exclaimed Horatia. "That young man! Oh, Lady Granville, how ... how unusual! Is he going to be a priest?"

"Oh no, my dear. He will be a peer of France when his father dies. He is an angel, rather too good for this earth of ours, but enthusiastic to the last degree! You have heard, I dare say, of Lamennais, the great preacher? Well, he and some friends started last autumn a most violent clerical paper, called L'Avenir, to which M. de Montalembert is one of the chief contributors. They want an alliance between Catholics and the people, they have alienated the Legitimists, hitherto the main supporters of the Church, by saying they sacrificed their God to their King, and now they are pressing the Bishops and clergy to give up all their endowments and palaces, without thinking how the poor things are to live. And the latest is that Charles and his great friend, a young abbé named Lacordaire, are talking of opening a 'free school' next month, and teaching in it themselves."

"And all this excitement is about the Church?" said Horatia musingly. "How strange, because in England too—at least at Oxford..."

"My dear, surely there are no Charles de Montalemberts at Oxford—of all places! Besides, why should there be?"

Horatia could not say, but the question had so vividly called up another Charles—and his friend—that for a moment she hardly heard Lady Granville discussing the prospects of the Reform Bill.

When she took her leave, pressed by the Ambassadress to come soon on one of her Mondays—her Fridays were so crowded—she drove home in the highest spirits, feeling that she had really made a friend, and a most delightful friend.

CHAPTER VII

(1)

Horatia drove with the Marquise next afternoon. The Champs Elysées were very gay, and her spirits always went up when the sun shone. There was the indefinable romance of spring, the eternal romance of Paris—and Armand was coming back to-night. She was inclined to wonder at her restlessness of yesterday.

"Dear me," observed Madame de Beaulieu suddenly, "I smell essence de mousseline. When have you been to Houbigant's?" And without waiting for an answer she went on, "You are improving, ma chère. As a rule you English have organs for which no odour is too strong, and no colour is too striking. Lavender is the basis of all your perfumes, and the rainbow of all your colours."

As she spoke a very pretty woman, elaborately dressed in violet drap d'Algers and swansdown, and extravagantly painted, passed them for the third or fourth time in her carriage. She was alone, and was driving very slowly; many glances, of which she seemed pleasurably conscious, were cast at her from other carriages and by the male loungers under the trees. Chiefly to avoid the subject of Houbigant's, Horatia asked who she was.

The Marquise put up her lorgnettes. "That?" she said carelessly—"oh, Mademoiselle Blanchette Delmar of the Opera of course. Yes, she is pretty, isn't she? Armand thought so once, too, but they apparently got tired of each other very soon. I forget who is the favoured swain at present."

A curious sick coldness came over Horatia; yet the red mounted to her cheeks. The Marquise observed it.

"Ma chère," she said with a laugh, "surely you have not been placing your husband on a pinnacle apart from other men! Armand as an anchorite! Mon Dieu!"

"No, of course not," said Horatia, battling for composure, "but..."

"But!" repeated Madame de Beaulieu, "But what? The young person is very well, in her way. And it is quite a year ago. Then you are shocked at me for knowing about it? Well, I grant you that we are not supposed to know these things, for it is not good taste for a gentleman to parade his love-affairs. But pardon, for perhaps in England (though I had not guessed it such an Eden of purity) these things do not exist, and I have soiled your innocence unnecessarily. Forgive me!"

All the distaste of Horatia's soul for the Marquise blossomed at this moment into a sudden flower of hatred. She wanted to stop the carriage and get out. What need to have told her! Her brain went on working furiously as they continued to drive up and down and the Marquise continued to talk. Horatia had heard a good many things since she came to Paris, but they had never seemed to touch her—she had never imagined that they could touch her.... It hurt; it burned like poison....

When she got back to the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon she was told, to her surprise, that M. le Comte had already returned, and that he was waiting for her in her boudoir.

She had not expected him till night, and she went up the stairs very slowly. Part of her was crying out for joy that he was back, would have liked to run to him, to throw her arms round his neck and say to him, "Darling, I don't think of it, now that you are here: it is past, it is untrue." And part of her did not feel thus.

If she had had any intention of referring to the subject she had not, in the event, much chance of doing so. It was to be a day of shocks. Armand was standing with his back to her, looking out of the window giving on to the courtyard; evidently he had been watching her arrival. He turned at her entrance, came forward and kissed her hand, her cheek, and then said gravely, "Horatia, I am sorry to have to scold you."

"What is it?" she asked, genuinely amazed.

"You went yesterday to the English Embassy."

"O, that!" she exclaimed, moved by the ludicrous disparity between this enormity and what she had been hearing of him. And she began to walk across the room, pulling off her gloves.

"And is 'that' so small a thing to you?" demanded Armand angrily. "You know that for nothing in the world would one of us be seen setting foot in a house which is on intimate terms with the Palais Royal, which receives the Orléans princes. Yet you choose a day when I am away, when my cousin cannot accompany you..."

Horatia turned round. "Please be careful what you are saying to me, Armand! I think you cannot realise that you are accusing me—me—of duplicity."

"Eh bien, what is it then?" asked her husband.

"Ignorance, stupidity, what you like, but not that," she said, "How was I to know of these ... these petty restrictions? I am English, and Lady Granville is English, and knew my father."

"Pardon me, you are French now," retorted Armand. "Permit me to remind you that you have duties towards the name which you honoured me by accepting."

His tone a little suggested that the honour was the other way round. The caged feeling came over her for a moment. "I am the prisoner of the tribe," she thought to herself. "Armand will never liberate me." She said coldly, "Lady Granville enlightened me. I am sorry, very sorry, if I have injured your prestige, but it was done in ignorance." With that she turned her back on him once more, and went and sat down by the window. Her husband followed her, biting his lip.

"I beg your pardon for supposing that you knew what you were doing," he said, still rather stiffly. "You see, Horatia, do you not—"

"I see a great many things," she said. "I see that I am to have no friends, no will, no identity of my own. I may not go out when I wish; I may not see you when I wish..."

Suddenly she heard her own voice; it sounded shrill. The ache, the disgust of the afternoon swung back on her. Was she driving him to that? She stopped; and, more electric than a lightning flash, it came to her how most triumphantly she could end this situation. So, rising, she laid her hand on his breast and, looking up at him, said very gently and deliberately,

"Are you really angry with me, Armand?"

Her victory was instantaneous.

(2)

Martha, pulling back her lamb's curtains next morning, was, all unsuspecting, like the gaoler who rouses the captive. As the daylight flooded the room Horatia woke more fully to the realisation of an extraordinary weight on her spirits. While she lay there waiting for her coffee the whole of yesterday's scene in the Champs Elysées played itself through again. That woman with her laughing, reddened lips.... There was time to taste shock, and yet she did not taste it fully; the soreness at her heart had in it much more of the most primitive of all passions—jealousy.

Her coffee and rolls came; she could scarcely touch them. She wanted Armand to enter; but he had been out late last night at the bal de l'Opéra. He might not come for a long time. Tears began to well out under her lashes; and presently Horatia de la Roche-Guyon, her head half buried in the pillow, was sobbing like a child that cries for it knows not what.

"Bon jour, chère amie!"

She had not heard his knock, nor his entrance. Hastily and stealthily she dabbed at her eyes.

"You are late this morning," observed the Comte cheerfully. "Look at me, not home till three this morning, but already risen.... My darling, what is the matter?"

Horatia, her face nearly concealed by the pillow and the tumbled masses of her hair, murmured something unintelligible.

Armand sat down on the bed. "My angel, what is it? Is it because I scolded you yesterday? But you forgave me.... Look at me, Horatia, and tell me what is the matter." He had gently to draw away the hand which held the handkerchief to her eyes. "Come, my darling—Bon Dieu, what hair you have!" He took up a lock.

"Madame de Beaulieu says it is hideous," sighed Horatia between two little sobs.

"That is because she cannot succeed in buying any like it, I expect," retorted her husband. "Is that why you were crying, my child? Listen then, and I will tell you a secret. The Duchesse is having a wig made as nearly as possible the colour of your hair; she is going to wear it on her fête or on the next saint's day. There's a compliment for you! Do not mind, therefore, what my cousin says. All women are jealous of one another.... Come now, take away that handkerchief and let me kiss you!"

She let him do so, and even clung to him. "Promise me, promise me, that you will always love me, Armand!"

"The good old phrase again!" whispered a little imp in the young man's ear. "Foolish, foolish child," he said, smiling his delightful smile. "What do you think I am made of then?"

"You do really forgive me for yesterday?" she murmured, hiding her tear-stained face in his breast. "It must never happen again. I could not bear that anything should come between us.... As long as you are with me, Armand, nothing can."

"My darling," he said, and kissed the top of her head.

"I am very, very sorry about Lady Granville," she went on after a moment, and with a heavy sigh. "Is the Duchesse exceedingly angry with me?"

"Perhaps the slaughter she made of me yesterday will content her," suggested her husband cheerfully.

Horatia clasped him closer, "O poor Armand! I will never, never see Lady Granville again! I will write to her to-day and say so."

When, a few minutes later, Armand had gone, after assuring her again that he would love her as long as the Seine ran through Paris, that she was probably the one woman in the world who could look beautiful after tears, and that he had found the bal de l'Opéra last night very dull because he could not hope to come on a lock of her hair peeping out from the hood of a domino, Horatia slipped out of bed and went to her mirror. Was she beautiful, pale and heavy-eyed as she was? She propped her face on her hands, her hair falling about her shoulders in a cloud of sunset, and stared into the glass. As long as the Seine ran through Paris! Would he love her just as much when her colour was not as clear and fresh as now it was, when there were lines on her white forehead, when her bright hair began to lose its lustre ... when, in short, she was no longer young, and, as he called her now, beautiful? Would he?

And would he love her just as much ... or more ... if, if—

She was still gazing, with a dream in her half-smiling eyes, when Martha came to dress her.

CHAPTER VIII

(1)

Circumstances were beginning to prove, as usual, too strong for Armand de la Roche-Guyon. For all his self-will he was generally at the mercy of his surroundings; too light a bark to struggle with the stream, too buoyant to be wholly swamped by it. In England Horatia had been his circumstances; before her, Laurence de Vigerie; before her, not a few other ladies; and now Paris, his friends, his family had enveloped him again. For it was quite true, as the Duchesse had hinted, that his friends were beginning to tease him about his devotion to his wife, while on the other hand he suspected that his wife would soon come to consider him not devoted enough. This morning's little scene was all very well in its way, but a melancholy prescience whispered to him that the day might dawn when he would find it a bore to keep on assuring Horatia that he loved her. There was no excitement now in the situation, and she was so entirely a captive that he felt his own chains. A certain standard of behaviour was evidently going to be demanded of him, whereas what he craved for was not obligations but diversion. And that the two things he most held in horror, the possibilities of becoming ridiculous and of being made uncomfortable, should descend upon him at once, from different quarters, was rather damnable.

He was in this mood when he crossed the Pont Royal that afternoon, turned to the left and began to walk beside the wall of the Tuileries garden. It was two o'clock, the fashionable hour for promenaders within, but Armand chose the comparative peace of the quay. The sun shone; a little breeze blew off the Seine, and he walked along frowning, no less handsome and attractive for his ill-temper, while two soubrettes, linked arm in arm, turned to look after him speculating on its cause.

Diversion, excitement, a stimulating uncertainty as to his reception—all these had been his at the hands of Madame de Vigerie. Armand had long admired this young, fashionable, and widowed lady, had paid her marked court, and had arrived last summer at the conclusion that, if she would have him—which was by no means certain—he could not do better than to marry her. Then had come his visit to England, and the intrusion of a sudden, genuine passion. But his intention had nevertheless held till the night of that ball in Berkshire. Afterwards he had lain awake till morning fighting the new emotion with the remembrance of the old, then, with a characteristic mixture of coolness and impetuosity, had decided that the new was better. Probably it was, yet he wished that he were at this moment on his way to the familiar drawing room in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, if only to have his present irritation put to flight.

So he walked, swinging his gold and tortoiseshell cane, and behind him, in an open carriage, a lady in lie-de-vin and ermine was overtaking him. With her furs she had a little parasol against the April sun; a boa was wound twice round her neck. She was not pretty, but she was supremely elegant. Leaning forward, she spoke to her coachman; the pace of her horses was moderated, and thus, while still overtaking him, she was able to contemplate at her leisure the figure of the young man to which she drew near. And she did so with a smile on her lips, and her head a little on one side.

Abreast of Armand she called out softly,

"Monsieur de la Roche-Guyon!" and the carriage drew up.

Armand turned. It is always startling when the subject of one's meditations suddenly appears before one, and the slowness with which his hand went to his hat was sufficient proof of the degree to which he was amazed.

"You in Paris—you!" he exclaimed.

"With your permission," said the Vicomtesse, smiling. "Or even, Monsieur, without it."

Armand, hat in hand, stared at her.

"Where have you been all this while?" he asked at last.

"In Italy," replied she. "And you?"

"Further than that," returned the young man rather meaningly, coming nearer to the carriage. He had now regained his composure, and looked at her to see if she understood. "I have—but may I not come and tell you about it?"

"Mon Dieu, is it so tragic as all that?" asked Madame de Vigerie with gravity. "But, my poor friend, I know all about it. You are in the most serious of all scrapes. Yes, I know all about it. Nevertheless, come and see me some day," She rearranged her furs; the coachman looked round for orders.

"When?" asked the Comte eagerly. "At the usual time—three?"

Madame de Vigerie shook her head. "Oh no, not now! I am at home on Tuesdays at eight.—Yes, to the Champs Elysées."

She drove off. So she did not care the snap of a finger ... unless she were dissembling very well. And she had relegated him to the hour of her salon, where, for the sake of a sight of her, he would have to endure all sorts of bores.

Nevertheless, she was back, and Armand was conscious of a distinct lightening of his spirits.

(2)

It was, no doubt, a dark and shameful blot on the family blazon that the heir of the house of La Roche-Guyon should be an amateur botanist of some distinction. Not the tragic life-in-death of his wife, nor the unmothered state of his only son was to be compared, in the eyes of the Dowager Duchess, with the fact that Emmanuel, Marquis de la Roche-Guyon was delivered over to a taste which she considered suitable enough in an apothecary but unspeakably derogatory for a man of family. The Marquis, however, never betrayed much discomposure at the sarcasms of his venerable grand-parent. Forty-one years of a not very happy life had taught him calm, and, kindly and unostentatiously courteous though he was to everyone, he went his own way. Despite his name and connections, he had done nothing in the world of politics or diplomacy, and never would; he was merely an ineffective, reserved, tolerant and melancholy gentleman who desired to lead the life of a recluse and did not always succeed in doing it.

It was in accordance with his habits that when he took his walks abroad such exercises were likely sooner or later to lead him past the bookstalls on the quays of the Seine—for he was something of a bibliophile too. On a certain afternoon in April therefore, about ten days after Armand's meeting with the Vicomtesse de Vigerie, he was passing slowly along by the lidded boxes on the Quai Voltaire, when he observed a fashionably dressed and elegant young man turning over the old books at a stall a little further on, and recognised, to his no small surprise, his own brother. Armand was humming a tune between his teeth, and seemed gay above the ordinary; the lamentable old proprietor of the box watched him with respect.

"This is a new avocation for you, mon cher," observed the Marquis, tapping him on the shoulder.

"Just the person I wanted," retorted the young man, glancing up. "Find me that, and I will never call you herbalist or bookworm again." He put into the hand of his elder a slip of paper inscribed in a feminine writing. Emmanuel looked at it and gave it back.

"You are not in the least likely to find that here. It is rather rare."

"Dame! so it seems. I have ruined a clean pair of gloves over the search already. I must go to a bookseller's, I suppose."

"Well, I was going to say that if you want it for yourself or for your wife I have a copy, and would lend it you with pleasure."

"A thousand thanks," replied Armand, turning away from the box. "But I want it for someone else, so that would not do. I must try down the Rue des Saints-Pères. Are you coming my way? No; au revoir then."

He crossed the road; and the Marquis looked after his alert young back with a certain wistfulness before he continued his peregrination.

A little later Armand emerged from a second-hand bookshop in the Rue des Saints-Pères with the coveted volume under his arm. As he did so he saw himself presenting it to Madame de Vigerie. He had really taken a good deal of trouble for her, and probably, in his ignorance, paid twice as much as the book was worth. But that did not matter if Laurence was pleased. He had seen her now three times since their meeting on the Quai des Tuileries—never alone, it is true, nor had he succeeded in penetrating to her real attitude of mind towards him. He intended to make the book an excuse for calling at an hour different from that to which he had been restricted. Since it was not a matter of life and death to him he found it distinctly exciting not to know what she really felt about him. But that was part of Laurence's attraction. Meditating on the pleasant and even piquant prospect opening before him he reached the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon.

Horatia was sitting in the salon, wearing a gown in which he had once expressly admired her—though, as he had already forgotten this fact, the choice had no significance for him. A book lay open in her lap. But as her husband came over to her and kissed her hand, uttering one of the agreeable nothings that came so easily to him, he was instantly aware that she had been waiting for him, that she was on tiptoe with expectation about something. She was looking more than usually beautiful. He told her so, sitting down beside her.

She gave him in return a bright, soft glance, and closed the open book. "I wanted to ask you something, dear," she said. "Do you think we could go down to Brittany soon, next week perhaps.... I should like it so much."

"Tiens! what an odd idea!" said Armand. His voice sounded indolent and vaguely caressing, but in his mind was surprise, considerable distaste, and a premonition of conflict.

"I don't think that it is odd," urged Horatia earnestly. "I enjoyed Kerfontaine so much in the winter. We shall be going there in May, shall we not? and it is nearly May now."

"Yes, if you consider the middle of April to be nearly May," remarked her husband, putting his hands behind his head and smiling at her with a sort of easy indulgence.

"No, that was a foolish thing to say. But surely it would not matter so very much if we did go in April?"

"I am afraid that it would."

Horatia had been gripping the closed book with a curious intensity. "Why would it matter, Armand? I do want so much to be there."

Armand shifted uneasily. "My dear, I am very sorry——"

"But, Armand, if you are really sorry surely you could arrange it? You see, it is the first thing I have ever asked of you."

She looked so lovely and pleading that the young man was annoyed with destiny, for he would have liked to yield to her. But he had not the slightest intention of losing the way he had already made in his recovered friendship with Madame de Vigerie. He unclasped his hands, sat up, and said firmly, "One has one's own engagements and plans, you know, chère amie; it is impossible to put them off and alter them without due cause. I am very sorry, as I said before, but I could not do it."

Horatia leant forward, two bright spots in her cheeks. "Would it then be 'without due cause' if the reason you gave your friends was that I had most particularly asked you to do it?"

Armand raised his eyebrows. "My dear, I am afraid that is the last reason I could ever give them."

It took a second or two for the stinging though unintentional brutality of this to penetrate, so composedly and gently did it slip out. All the more had it the accent of truth.... The brilliant, wandering colour went out of Horatia's face; she raised one hand a little uncertainly, the book slipped from the other. Then she rose.

"I am much obliged to you for being so outspoken," she said in a slow, rather bewildered voice. "I thin. ... I think I rather admire it. It is better to know. You see, I did not really believe what the Duchesse said; now I do. Yes, it is better to know...." She ended vaguely, turned, and began to move towards the door of her boudoir.

"Know what?" asked Armand, uncomfortably conscious that he had struck much harder than he intended. "Horatia, do not go like that. I——"

Horatia did stop, and faced him. "She said that I should make you ridiculous." The words seemed to be forced from her. Then, turning away, and in a very different tone, she added, "But that is impossible, is it not, when you take such good care of yourself!"

"Horatia, listen to me! Do not be so foolish!" cried Armand, springing after her, for she was at the door. But she went through, and he heard the key turn in the lock.

(3)

The Comtesse Armand de la Roche-Guyon had gathered in her boudoir all the relics that she cared to preserve of Horatia Grenville, and in the place of honour on the mantelpiece stood a silhouette of her father as a young man, gazing straight in front of him with the spirited yet stony gaze of its kind. And, having locked the door, Horatia went almost mechanically towards it, and flinging herself down in the chair, gave way to a tempest of tears—tears of rage, humiliation, and the bitterest disappointment.

While she had, unaided, put on this dress this afternoon, her hands shaking with excitement, she had acted over the scene. Armand would very naturally be surprised at her request, would raise objections perhaps, but in the end—or at the beginning, for the matter of that—he would ask her why she was so set on going to Kerfontaine. And then she would tell him her secret....

And this was the realisation of that dream, this was the shallow pool to which all the sea of rapture of the past had shrunk! "I love him—I have given him everything—I am to bear his child, and he thinks more of his friends' laughter than of me...." No use to fight that tiny doubt that had been growing lately in her heart, that he did not love her as she loved him.... But what did that matter, doubt or certainty, for she did not love him any more. "I shall not tell him now," was her thought, joined with that other, half vengeful, half wistful, "Ah, if he only knew!"

She looked up with swimming eyes at the silhouette on the mantelpiece. What was her father doing, poor darling, without her? Oh, if she could only have gone with her news to him! A passion of home-sickness came over her; she was indeed alone in a strange land. She had always known that she was setting out into exile, but by Armand's side it could never have been real banishment. Now...

A quarter of an hour later she passed into her bedroom, and, without ringing for her maid, took off her dress, resolving that she would never wear it again, bathed her eyes, put on a négligé and returned to her boudoir. Then, with an heroic attempt at self-discipline, she selected a stiff book from the case and sat down to read it.

(4)

M. le Comte de la Roche-Guyon, when his wife's boudoir door was shut in his face, gave a philosophical little shrug of his shoulders and turned away without more ado. He proceeded to his own apartment, made some changes in his attire, and taking up the book for Madame de Vigerie, set out forthwith to bear it to that lady, trusting that on his return the sky would have cleared.

He did not, however, reach her house in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, for under the chestnut trees in the Tuileries garden he happened upon the Vicomtesse herself, seated with two other ladies upon the straw-bottomed chairs that stood there. He sat down beside her, and, her companions being for the moment engrossed with their own conversation, was able to say to her unheard,

"I was coming to see you. I have got your book."

"So soon?" said she. "You are a marvel; a thousand thanks!" And she held out her hand.

The young man shook his head, smiling. "I was coming to see you," he repeated.

Madame de Vigerie smiled too. "Very well," she said, "But not now, for I am not going home. Come some afternoon next week."

Armand's face fell a little. "That is very much deferred payment," he observed. "And perhaps I may not be in Paris."

"Indeed? And where are you going?"

"My wife is absolutely set on going to Brittany at once."

"But why?"

"Heaven alone knows. I do not."

The Vicomtesse considered a moment, the point of her parasol patterning the gravel. Then a sort of flash passed over her countenance, "You will go," she predicted. "So had you not better give me the book now?"

Armand stared at her, nonplussed by the certainty of her tone and by the mischievous amusement in her face. "Mark my words," she continued, "you will not be here next week—though I am quite aware that you were only using that possibility as a threat. Adieu; my friends, you see, are waiting for me. We shall see who is right. I shall be at St. Clair in June; I suppose I must resign myself to wait for the book till then." And so she left him, outraged with the thought that she considered him the plaything of a wife's idle wishes, and he returned, not too well pleased, to the Rue St. Dominique.

But no sooner had he set foot there than he received a message that the Duchesse desired to see him immediately. Up to the Dowager's suite he then mounted, to find his venerable relative playing piquet with her dame de compagnie.

"Aha! here you are at last!" said the Duchesse, evidently in high good humour. "Masson, you can go. Well, my child, what have you to say for yourself?"

Was it possible—incredible though it seemed—that Horatia had been complaining to Madame de la Roche-Guyon? If so, the old lady had evidently not taken her part.

"What do you want me to say?" enquired the Comte, cautiously.

"What do I want you to say? Armand, you are unpayable!" And the Dowager went off into a scream of laughter, causing the little Italian greyhound to spring up shivering in his basket. "Sit down, and tell me why you rushed out of the house directly you had heard the news. I was waiting to send for you to congratulate you."

"To congratulate me? ... On what?" Enlightenment came in the midst of his wonder. "Juste ciel! So that was why——"

"You don't mean to say that you really did not know—that she did not tell you just now?"

Armand sat down, feeling rather dizzy. "No, not a word. She only said that she wanted to go to Brittany at once, and I—— What a fool I was not to guess!"

"In that sentiment," observed his grandmother, "I fully concur. And what did you say about Brittany?"

"I—well, I refused to go."

The Duchesse appealed to the saints. "It is true, I have always known that men were idiots, but I did think that in you, child, resided what little sense there is in the family.... And you refused—you refused! You, to whom she is to give an heir in December, refused her first request!" More to the same effect was proceeding from the Dowager when her grandson, who had made no attempt to defend himself, suddenly got up.

"I have been worse than a fool, I have been a brute," he said. He was rather white. "Forgive me if I go to her now." And waiting neither for further admonitions nor even for permission he hurriedly kissed her hand and left the room.

So Horatia had not read more than four pages of "Locke on the Human Understanding" (which she was finding, if not consoling, at least astringent against tears) when she heard his knock. Upborne, probably, by the philosopher (for it was the last thing that she wanted to do), she rose, unlocked the door in silence, and returning to her place without so much as looking at the intruder, stood there, one hand on the marble mantelshelf.

But Armand too came without a word to her side, and just when—still not turning or looking at him—she imagined that he was going to speak, perhaps to try to take her in his arms, he dropped on one knee, and taking a fold of her négligé put it silently to his lips.

CHAPTER IX

(1)

In one of the enormous rooms of her château of St. Clair, which not even her taste could make other than oppressive, Laurence-Héloïse de Vigerie sat waiting for her carriage. The apartment, with its six great windows, its consoles of alabaster, its porphyry vases and chandelier of rock-crystal, still kept its air of pomp from the time of Louvois, unsubdued by flowers or books. Even Madame de Vigerie herself had an air of being in perpetual warfare with her stiff surroundings, an appearance of being at this moment, in her pelisse of lemon-yellow silk and her delicate white jacconet gown, something rather incongruous and sylphlike shut up by mistake in a monument.

Sitting near one of the great porphyry vases she looked impatiently at the clock—monumental also—she tapped with her little foot in its lilac cashmere boot; finally she took a rose out of a jardinière and began to twirl it round and round. In a moment or two her lips parted in a smile. The scent of the rose reminded her of something.

This time last summer, chance having kept her late in Paris, some of these very roses had been sent by her command from St. Clair. Armand de la Roche-Guyon had been with her when, somewhat faded, they had arrived, and he had asked for one. And she remembered how, afterwards, with the fragrance of the dying roses round her, she had pondered for a little time whether she would marry Armand if he asked her—a contingency obviously likely to occur any day. She had his measure by heart; she knew his fickleness, was perfectly aware that he was the slave of caprice (his own or another's), but she knew, too, that he always came back to her in the end. For her, with her connections, wealth and position, it was no great match, perhaps, the younger son of an impoverished though very ancient house. Yet sometimes ... Well, she had never had to make up her mind!

And, after all, he had fallen under the sway of an empire stronger, momentarily, than hers. He had not come back to her! The news of his English marriage had struck her, it is true, as an affront, but she was persuaded that it was more of a wound to her pride than to her heart. And he would have been so much trouble to keep!

Yet he had some curious quality of charm. How easy, in spite of his defection, it had been to take him back into favour. It was true that she had caused him to feel anything but thoroughly reinstated.... And now she was going to return his wife's visit.—Heigho, what an odd world!

Madame de Vigerie had not seen Horatia, having been out when the bride had called, but Armand had described her. Evidently she was beautiful. But that, in the Vicomtesse's experience, did not count for very much, and certainly her own lack of beauty had never troubled her. Laurence de Vigerie was a finished type of the belle laide, dowered with the attraction which, once it has subjugated, can never lose its hold by the mere passage of time. Her power came from other sources than her complexion or her hair. Passing through life as she did, always a little amused, apparently rather cold, and inclined to experiment, elusive in her relations, absolutely without petty jealousy and very nearly without malice, she had given no cause for scandal, and had driven more men distracted than she cared, sometimes, to remember.

(2)

Horatia put down her embroidery and rose. She was dreading this interview. She was sure that she should not like Madame de Vigerie, and she would probably have to see a good deal of her.

Beneath the four upright ostrich plumes which topped her lemon-yellow bonnet, beneath its wide brim lined with Adelaide-blue crepe, Horatia saw the irregular features of the woman who might have been in her place. And Laurence de Vigerie beheld the chosen bride, the woman preferred before her, serious, rather pale, with a crown of red-gold hair and a simple muslin gown. "She is but a child" was her first thought (instantly corrected), and Horatia's, that the Vicomtesse was not beautiful, not even pretty, as she had expected. Among her gifts Madame de Vigerie possessed the double power of making the banalities of ordinary intercourse sound interesting, and of getting them over quickly, for in the course of a few minutes they had been left behind, and the two were conversing on more interesting themes.

"You read a great deal, Madame, do you not?"

"I used to," answered Horatia rather wistfully. "I have always been fond of reading French," she added.

"Yes, indeed," said Madame de Vigerie, "it is easy to see that your knowledge of our tongue is profound. Perhaps if you are not well provided with French books, you would allow me to send you over a few, I daresay the library at Kerfontaine is not very up to date. I know that mine is not, and I have to bring books from Paris. Let me lend you the new book of Hugo's which everyone is devouring, Notre Dame de Paris."

Horatia thanked her warmly, and the visitor went on to admire the garden and the fountain, "which I always envy so much," she said.

Horatia, too, looked out of the window at the little figure.

"I am very fond of it," she said, "and I wish I knew something of its history, for I believe that an ancestor of my husband's brought it from Italy, but I have never been able to find out for certain."

Madame de Vigerie gave her a bright and friendly glance. "I can tell you all about it," she was beginning, when the door opened and Armand came in.

He greeted her with composure. "Do not let me deprive my wife of the information which you were about to give her, Vicomtesse," he said. "Unless, indeed, it be some fashionable detail of which I am better left ignorant."

Madame de Vigerie's eyes, as they rested on him, held a little sprite of mockery which he knew very well. "We were discussing Art," she said gravely. "Since you permit it, Monsieur, I will continue. Madame la Comtesse is doubtless aware that her fountain is a copy of Verrochio's famous boy and dolphin at Florence. But you, Monsieur, have not told her how, in the Italian wars of Louis XII, Raoul de Kerfontaine, your grandfather heaven knows how many times removed on the mother's side, being desirous of bringing a fairing to his lady, decided on this not very portable mark of his affection; how it took so long to copy and to convey, that when he got back to Brittany the lady was married to another. So he set it up in his own garden and, I daresay, used often to wander round it in the moonlight, poor gentleman, thinking sad thoughts."

"Vicomtesse," said Armand laughing, "you have made that up!"

"Fi donc, Monsieur!" retorted the guest. "You do not know the history of your own family!"

"He is scandalously ignorant," agreed Horatia. "But, Madame, if I may ask, how do you know it so well?"

"Because," replied Madame de Vigerie, "by an odd chance, the lady of M. de Kerfontaine's blighted affections happened to be an ancestress of my husband's. I can show you the tale in a book at St. Clair—not of course that St. Clair in its present state existed then.... And so M. le Comte has never shown you, Madame, the inscription which the poor Raoul had carved on the base of the statue?"

"Never. But if you, Madame, would remedy his negligence?"

"Willingly," responded the Vicomtesse. "I am never so happy as when I am imparting information."

Armand unfastened the window and followed them out. The visit was going well. It was long since he had seen Horatia so animated. Feeling that there might be a slight constraint in the situation, he had purposely refrained from coming in until the two women should have broken the ice, and even when he entered had thought it possible that he should find the temperature below freezing point. But you could never tell about women, for they seemed to have taken a fancy to each other. He followed the yellow pelisse and the white muslin down between the lime-trees, wondering what Laurence was thinking about.

"You see," said Madame de Vigerie, "what the poor man thought of women." She took off a glove and traced with a delicate finger the remains of the eroded fettering round the base of the bronze. "Cor muliebre his aquis mutabilius," she read, and Horatia fell an instant convert to the continental mode of pronouncing Latin.

"And was the faithless lady happy?" she asked.

"Supremely, I regret to say. It was only sad for M. le Comte's unlucky ancestor. Mais que voulez-vous? He should not have been so slow. And you had never been told this moving tale?"

"Certainly not," responded Armand. "It is derogatory to my ancestor, and for my part I am little disposed to believe it now."

"In the face of that evidence?" asked Madame de Vigerie, pointing to the statue.

"That inscription is a commonplace known to mankind since the days of Horace," retorted the young man. "It is just as true to-day as then, and is therefore no evidence at all."

The Vicomtesse removed her gaze from him. "Madame, you must not let your husband talk in this manner. But the real evidence is at St. Clair, and if you will promise to come and see me soon I will hunt out the old book.—M. le Comte, would you be good enough to see if my carriage is there?"

Armand went obediently, but when he returned, he found his wife and her visitor strayed into the rose-garden, and talking of gardening matters. Not even when putting the Vicomtesse into her carriage had he the opportunity of a word alone with her, for Horatia accompanied them. She had apparently been bidden to St. Clair next day.

"I do not invite you, M. le Comte," was Madame de Vigerie's parting remark. "Since you do not believe the legend, research would only bore you, and I want no unwilling converts."

(3)

Tristram Hungerford had been right; the Comte de la Roche-Guyon, young as he was, did consider himself to be thoroughly versed in the ways of women. But there were occasions during the next three or four weeks of his sojourn in Brittany when the connoisseur found himself hopelessly puzzled by the behaviour of the two nearest specimens of the sex, women, too, of whose idiosyncrasies he might have been supposed to have an intimate knowledge—his wife that was and his wife that might have been. That these two, of characters so different, placed in a mutual relationship not of the most comfortable, should become, not mere acquaintances but, apparently, actual friends, was beyond him. And since, in that short space of time, this miracle had happened; since two days did not pass that Laurence did not come over to see Horatia, or Horatia go driving with Laurence, and since miracles were not within his sphere of belief, Armand refused to credit the evidence. He thought that the two women were playing at being friends, for some reason unknown.

But, since Armand had, along with the scepticism, the logical mind of his race, he did not long occupy this position. He could not discover a motive strong enough to produce so much dissimulation. Horatia had nothing very much to gain from intimacy with Madame de Vigerie; she would naturally be predisposed against the woman who might have had her place. And as for the Vicomtesse, Armand was not fatuous enough to imagine that she was consciously cultivating a friendship with the wife in order that she might see more of the husband. Indeed, Madame de Vigerie seemed to take especial care that no such flattering thought should find even a momentary lodging in his mind. If he was not definitely excluded from their society—which would in a sense have been complimentary—he was made to feel that his presence or absence was immaterial. His position began to be rather galling, and he strongly suspected Laurence, with her diabolical intuition, of being pleasantly aware of the fact.

He never saw her alone—a consummation which could easily have been brought about had she wished it. Already she had begun to have her house full of guests; their own, chiefly members of the family, would soon be upon them. But one day he got an opportunity when, coming home from a ride, and going into the garden in search of Horatia he perceived, seated by the fountain in a lilac muslin gown, not his wife, but Madame de Vigerie.

"At last!" said he, and approached. The Vicomtesse's large hat lay on the ground by her side; the low sun struck gleams from her brown hair. At his step she looked round.

"How much I envy you this garden," she said, undisturbed. "Above all I love this little green fountain."

Armand sat down on the rim of the basin, facing her.

"Permit me to offer it to you," he said. "It should have been yours this four hundred years or more."

"Ah, my fickle ancestress!" said Madame de Vigerie, dabbling her hand in the water. Goldfish from all parts hurried towards it.

"What a bait!" said Armand below his breath.... "Where is my wife?"

"Showing a visitor round the garden. You should be there, too."

"Doubtless," replied the Comte, without stirring. He crossed one booted leg over the other, and looked at her. She withdrew her hand, and, shaking it, dried it on her handkerchief.

"Laurence," said the young man suddenly, "don't you think that you are treating me very badly?"

"O, I hope not!" said the Vicomtesse quite seriously.

"We were friends once," said Armand.

"And now—surely not enemies?"

"On my soul, I had rather have you for an enemy than for—an acquaintance!"

"A compliment?" asked the Vicomtesse. "Yes, I suppose it is.... Armand, I have fallen in love ... with your wife."

"If that is, in return, a compliment to me, I thank you."

"Really, I do not know whether it is or no. If you will permit me to say so, I do not know how she came to marry you."

"You find me not worthy?" he inquired.

For the first time Madame de Vigerie smiled, shaking her head slightly. "I will not mount into the pulpit, mon ami, however much you press me. The day when I shall make you a homily is, I hope, distant. Meanwhile, I wish you every happiness, and a son like his mother.... Here they are returning."

When the visitor had departed and Armand, too, had vanished, the two friends walked up and down under the limes.

"I have a house full to-morrow," said Madame de Vigerie. "When can you come over and see me quietly, ma chère. Of course you will both dine with us next week."

"The Marquis is coming next week," said Horatia, "and Claude-Edmond. And, rather to my horror, the Duchesse has expressed a desire to stay here. It is a royal command."

"You will be as busy as I for the next few weeks, then?"

Horatia nodded. "Yes, except that this house is not so capacious as St. Clair. I shall not be able to get much time for reading, I expect. I have finished Ourika, however, and the other tales of Madame de Duras. I did not admire them very much; perhaps I ought to have done so."

"They had a vogue some years ago," said Madame de Vigerie, "probably because she was a great lady. But I do not think that any woman who keeps a famous salon, as she did, can do much else."

"I do not want to write," said Horatia, "but it is a dream of mine to have a little salon—a literary salon—some day. But my husband does not encourage it."

"Monsieur le Comte is quite right," responded Madame de Vigerie rather unexpectedly. "To have a salon is a life in itself. It is true that the possession of one is a Frenchwoman's ambition in youth, and her glory in old age. But, mon Dieu, what sacrifices does it not entail on her! She can be neither wife, mother, nor lover, and in friendship she can have but one preference—for the most illustrious man whom she can attract to her gatherings. To retain him there she must sacrifice everything else; she and all her surroundings must be vowed to his cult. If she cannot procure such a great man for the pivot of her circle she must wear herself out in attentions to a host of lesser lights.—My dear, you are too good for either of these rôles; do not regret your lost salon!"

(4)

Madame de Vigerie, being gifted with the seeing eye, found Horatia pathetic. "She is losing him, and she knows it," was her verdict now. In this she was perhaps attributing to the girl more clearness of vision than she had yet attained to, but the tragedy of the situation she had not overestimated.