Front matter (continued 6)

The winter's day which brought him, at length, was the second of the New Year. Paris was ringing with the festivities of the season, and Madame de Vigerie's salon was full of gifts and flowers. Into this warm, lamplit, scented atmosphere, when her other visitors had departed, came at last Armand de la Roche-Guyon, pale, almost grim, and empty-handed.

Laurence de Vigerie's heart moved in her breast to meet him, and she made no attempt to disguise that she was glad.

"My dear friend," she exclaimed, giving him both her hands, "where have you been these years—these centuries? And how is Horatia?"

"She is better, thank you," replied Armand in a curious tone, as he lifted her hands to his lips. "And I ... O, I have been playing the devoted husband ... to very small purpose."

After so explicit an avowal the extraction of the whole story was not difficult. Laurence de Vigerie sat motionless while, pacing restlessly to and fro, the young man unfolded it to her. All his bitterly hurt self-esteem was in the tale.

"I have lied to Horatia and I have lied to you," he ended. "You see what wreckage I have made. I have alienated my wife for ever; I have involved you in a scandal. It seems to me that there is nothing left but to blow my brains out, or to slip into the Seine."

"I think Horatia should have believed you," said Madame de Vigerie in rather a hard voice.

"I had lied too much," answered Armand, and there was silence. A petal from a hothouse flower fell on the shining table at the Vicomtesse's elbow. She took it up and began to twist it in her fingers. At the other side of the room, Armand sat on a couch with his head in his hands.

"If I had been seeing her as I used to do it could never have happened. Why did you make up that story to keep us apart?"

The young man gave a sound like a groan. "Must you know the real reason?"

"If I am ever to forgive you."

"It was because I wanted you so madly, and because I saw that I had no chance while you were her friend. You were too honourable. It was a base trick ... but I would have stooped to anything ... I suppose you will never have anything to do with me again, and I have nothing but my own cursed folly to thank for it. If I had not been blinded I should have seen long ago that you were the only woman in the universe for me—Laurence, Laurence, you could have made something of me ... and I have deceived you, and damaged your reputation. I will say good-bye, I think, before you send me away." He got up. Madame de Vigerie had buried her face in her hands.

"Good-bye," he repeated. "Do not fear that I am going to shoot myself. I am not worth such an heroic ending." He laughed unsteadily. "Will you not even say good-bye, Laurence?"

Never, in all his hours of gaiety and success had Armand de la Roche-Guyon so appealed to Laurence de Vigerie as now. He had made wreckage, and he would be the first to suffer. She saw him swept to the feet of the worthless.

"O, I must save you!" she cried, more to herself than to him. "Armand, my poor Armand, I do not cast off my friends like that..." She held out her hands, her eyes full of tears.

CHAPTER XV

(1)

Ensconced on the Tuscan slope of the Apennines, on the road from Bologna to Florence, stood an inn, frequented by travellers less for its comforts than for its convenient situation, and here, under a pergola, on a warm September morning of 1831, Tristram and Dormer were seated. The road, visible from their present position, clung desperately to the side of the mountain; down below was a torrent, faintly clamouring, and opposite rose another mountain wall, green and thickly wooded. At this wall Charles Dormer was now absently gazing, thinking of the spot, further back, from which they had seen, vast and indistinct, the plain of Lombardy, and beyond it, just visible above the horizon like a flock of small clouds, the summits of the Alps. For it was out of the Alps, after all, that they had come to see Florence.

The voyage had done him good, but as soon as they landed and he had begun to sightsee, his headaches came back again. Then he would abstain for a little—and try once more. Matters came at last to a climax in April, at Rome, and very unwillingly indeed he had obeyed the English doctor whom Tristram called in, and gone up to Switzerland for the summer. The air of the mountains and the quiet had worked something of a miracle, and so, having promised themselves, during their exile, that they would still fulfil their intention of seeing Florence, they had recrossed the Alps, proposing, after seeing that city, to take ship at Leghorn. But this morning Dormer, to whom this plan was chiefly due, being in the mood when one can survey oneself with a rather cynical amusement, was quite conscious that he was not now so burningly anxious to see Florence as he had been, for he was beginning to chafe to get back to Oxford. The long letter in his hand had not lessened that anxiety.

He looked across the table at Tristram, who was reading an old English newspaper. If he himself had gained physical health from his travels Tristram had equally come to a measure of spiritual. Dormer knew now that what he had hoped was the true explanation of Tristram's perplexity was indeed true, and that Tristram no longer felt a barrier between himself and the priesthood; in fact he was going to be ordained at Christmas.

"In how many weeks shall we be home again, did you say?" he asked suddenly.

Tristram raised a bronzed face from his newspaper. "In about six, I reckon. Why? Is anything the matter?"

"Oh, no," returned his friend. "I was only wondering if we could just get an idea of Florence in two or three days and then go on to Leghorn."

"But you have been wanting all the summer to be in Florence," said Tristram, laying down his paper.

"Yes, I know, but..."

"What has Newman been writing to you?" asked Tristram suspiciously.

"An enthusiastic account of the woods of Dart. He has been staying with Froude, you know."

"We have seen better things than the Dart—or even the Axe—for that matter," observed Tristram. "Anything else?"

Dormer turned over the pages of his letter. "He sends me a tirade against Liberalism and the anti-dogmatic principle, which makes me long to be home. He says the Bill is bound to pass and the nation is for revolution."

"Well, I suppose we knew that," returned Tristram, unimpressed. "How is he getting on with the Councils?"

"Very well, I think. I told you, Tristram, that he was the right man."

"Oh, I dare say he is good enough," was the grudging reply.

"Listen to this," said Dormer. "'My work opens a grand and most interesting field to me, but how I shall ever be able to make one assertion, much less to write one page, I cannot tell.' That will be all right."

No response from Tristram. Dormer smiled to himself and, seeing the mood he was in, omitted the rest of the page where Newman confided to him his fear that he should be obliged to confine himself to the one Council dealing with the Arian heresy.

"Here is something about you. 'It seems very unlikely that Froude will be able to join Mozley at St. Ebbe's. His father and Keble are both against it, and he himself wants to try his hand first at the Ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages. What a pity it is not a year later, when I suppose Hungerford would have been in priest's orders. It would have been just the thing for him. Remember, anyhow, that Oxford is the proper sphere for him and do not let him escape elsewhere. If, as you say, he must have work amongst the poor, Keble agrees with me that something must be found for him near at hand. The times are troublous, and Oxford will want hot-headed men.'"

"I am much obliged to Newman. No one has ever called me hot-headed before."

"Oh, you know what he means," said Dormer.

"Anyhow, I can't see what good he thinks I am going to be to him. But for the next few years I don't mind very much what I do. Eventually, of course, I should like my parish to be a poor one, and as I shall never marry I shall be able to live in it, however squalid it may be."

"I quite agree," said Dormer conciliatingly, "that you are made for that sort of thing, but for the time being, perhaps..."

"These poor, ignorant, dirty priests are at least one with their people," pursued Tristram unregarding, his eyes fixed on the road below them. "I expect the mere fact of their being quite alone makes them more accessible. Yes, there is a great deal, Charles, from the practical standpoint, in your celibate views. I wish the accompaniments of that state were not sometimes so ugly. I should have expected anyone as fastidious as you to be the first to see that side of it. Look there!" And he pointed to a snuffy, cassocked form toiling up the slope. "If he had had a wife his clothes might have been mended, and perhaps he might even have washed his face sometimes."

"If you come to think of it," said Dormer in a matter-of-fact tone, "the accompaniments of a martyrdom could never have been anything but ugly."

"My dear fellow," retorted Tristram, smiling, "I think I have heard you in that vein before. You are an idealist, and no doubt it's very comforting. I have the misfortune to be unable to get away from facts. Read about this boat race between Oxford and London amateurs which took place in June. I must go and pack if we are to reach Florence to-night."

He threw Dormer the paper, stooped to pat the flea-ridden puppy of the hotel, and went in.

(2)

And they might have reached Florence that night if it had not been for Giulia Barlozzi.

To the human eye Giulia Barlozzi, sitting by the roadside to beg, appeared little but a bundle of rags. To the equine perception she was evidently something much more portentous, and the horses testified their aversion in a very effective way. The postilion basely if prudently contrived to slip off before the pace became impossible, and the masterless animals tore unchecked down the steep Apennine road, the open carriage swaying and banging behind them. The crash came at the bottom, where, to make matters really final, there was a sharp turn and a stone bridge. Tristram was flung clear, landing, slightly stunned, not six inches from the parapet. When he picked himself up, half stupefied, peasants, miraculously sprung from nowhere, had seized the horses and were dragging Dormer, apparently dead, from beneath the shattered carriage.

Frenzied with apprehension, Tristram struggled across the road, but before he got to his friend a curtain seemed to come down over his vision. He heard excited, encouraging voices in his ears, arms supported him, and, half carried, half led, he found himself, after an uncertain interval, seated in a room with someone bathing his head. Around him was a babel more awful than he had ever imagined could proceed from the human tongue, lamentations, explanations, curses, cries and prayers. And on a table in the middle of the room, white, dusty, and bleeding a little from a cut on the temple, lay Dormer, very still.

"Charles!" cried Tristram in a voice of anguish, springing to his feet. Instantly the torrent of talk was turned on to him.

"Non è morto! non è morto!" he was volubly assured a score of times before he had satisfied himself that it was true. A pæan of inward thanksgiving burst from him when he ascertained that Dormer, though unconscious, was certainly breathing. Voices of commiseration and intense sympathy surged round him as he bent over his friend, voices appreciative of Dormer's appearance—"he has a face like San Giovanni himself"—voices informing him that the priest had been sent for——

"A priest!" cried Tristram in his stumbling Italian. "It is a doctor that is wanted!" But when he tried to explain that he and his friend did not belong to their Church, a dirty hand waved before his eyes a missal which Dormer had bought at Bologna, and which had been jerked out of his pocket in the catastrophe, and he was assured that his friend was a Christian, and that the parroco was coming as fast as he could. However, when Tristram gathered that the medical skill of this ecclesiastic—which was represented as being very great—was all that he was likely to obtain that day, there being no doctor within many miles, he was prepared to welcome him more warmly, especially as just at that juncture he had made the unpleasant discovery that Dormer's right leg was certainly broken.

The parroco had not arrived, and discussion was still raging round the table and its burden when Dormer came back to consciousness. Tristram, who was wetting his lips with brandy at the time, stopped as he saw his friend's eyes open, and said, in no very steady voice, "Thank God! ... Charles, my dear fellow, I am afraid your leg is broken. But I thought ... O, thank God it is no worse."

Dormer lay quiet a moment, his head on Tristram's arm. "This ... reminds me ... of Eton, he said at last, faintly. And, sick with pain, he added, very characteristically, "It is entirely my own fault ... for insisting on returning ... to Florence."

CHAPTER XVI

(1)

That Tristram Hungerford, nearly four months later, should still be in Italy, should, indeed, be walking up and down the Cascine at Florence, among other promenaders, on a fine day in January, was due to the fact that an obscure Italian parroco had received from art a shadowy acquaintance with medicine and from nature, unbounded confidence wherewith to make use of it.

Never again was Tristram likely to allow a physician of souls to try his hand at mending a body, least of all the body of a friend. Priestly surgery, as it had been practised on Dormer, he would henceforth eschew like the plague. For the result of the parroco's ministrations had been disastrous, and his setting of the broken leg so bungling that at last Tristram had Dormer removed to Florence and procured the services of a first-class surgeon. The latter pulled a long face, and said that if the English signor did not want to walk lame all his days the leg must be re-set. At the stage then reached this involved breaking the bone again. It is probable that Tristram, sitting in the next room with his hands over his ears, suffered quite as much as the victim himself. The surgeon indeed told him afterwards that, had not his friend been a heretic, he might have thought he had been miraculously relieved, as were sometimes the holy martyrs. Not, however, that when he saw Dormer afterwards, Tristram could discern much evidence of alleviation of any kind.

However, in a week or ten days now they were going home. Dormer's accident had not, at any rate, brought back his headaches; he affirmed, on the contrary, that the long, enforced rest had done just what he needed. He had borne the pain and tedium serenely, almost lightly; the only thing that seemed to try him was his absence from Oxford, and the fact that his misfortune had delayed his friend's ordination. Their prolonged stay had brought them several acquaintances among the English colony at Florence, and of late they had come to know an Italian gentleman connected with the Court, a certain Signor della Torre Vecchia, who had become smitten with an immense admiration for Dormer. Tristram had indeed rather suffered from this worship, and so, though the Italian had been exceedingly kind to them both, putting a carriage at their disposal and doing his utmost to carry off Dormer from their hotel to his villa at Fiesole, Tristram was not altogether sorry that their benefactor was leaving Florence that very afternoon. For when Signor della Torre Vecchia could get Tristram alone he did nothing but talk about his dilettissimo amico, his charm, his looks ("one would say a portrait by Van Dyck, signore"), his intellectual distinction. He drove Tristram into promising him Dormer's book on the Non-Jurors, for he had been in England and manifested a most inexplicable interest in the English Church, though, despite their endeavours to prove to him that she was a part of the Church Catholic—instancing the Catholicity of her Prayer-Book, while admitting the Protestantism of her practice—he persisted in regarding her as a phenomenon, and they never got any further. Afterwards he would take Tristram aside and reiterate his conviction that nobody like Dormer could possibly remain permanently outside the True Church. The only consolation which Tristram derived from these confidences was the power of chaffing Dormer unmercifully on the effect produced by his "romantic appearance."

Towards Horatia Tristram's feelings had changed. He would always, he supposed, love her better than anyone else in the world, but he did not love her now as a lover. Besides the fierce struggle of the past months to tear from his heart what he regarded as sin, a struggle which had slowly been successful, there was the knowledge, conveyed to him by the Rector, that she was about to have a child. Unconsciously this made a difference to him. He felt now as he imagined an elder brother might feel towards a sister who had always been very dear to him, full of an affection essentially protective. The time had been that, even though the sense of sin had left him, he could not receive a letter from her without being plunged in depression. But now he would have been very glad of a letter, for, whether they were lost or delayed in the notoriously uncertain Italian posts, or whether they were non-existent, no communications from the Rector or from Horatia had reached him since August, and he sometimes imagined horrible things, as that Horatia was dead, for he did not know when her child was expected.

Another change, too, had gradually wrought in his spirit, He was, in a sense, quite honest when he mocked at Dormer's idealisation of the single life, though perhaps his mockery was due to the knowledge that the ideas which he derided were not really so very alien to his mind.

Now, indeed, if the truth were known, they had even begun to have a curious attraction for him—a speculative attraction. What if to some souls there did really come a call to win "that little coronet or special reward which God hath prepared (extraordinary and beside the great Crown of all faithful souls)" as the author of Holy Living had it, for those who had made the sacrifice of earthly affection and ties. And persons did make that sacrifice, in numbers—as witness the not very attractive religious whom he saw about the streets of Florence. Most of all, unforgettable, recurring again and again to his mind, there was the great fresco in the monastery of San Marco, where S. Dominic, kneeling at the foot of the Cross, embraces it in a passion of love and pain, and the Crucified looks down at him. It had taken Tristram's breath away when first he saw it at the end of the cloister. After some time he went and looked at it again—and came away very sad. Its message was not for him, whose obedience was loveless. All that the picture's spiritual beauty could do for him now was to remind him painfully of Keble's words, so applicable to himself, of the shame of the thought—

"That souls in refuge, holding by the cross

Should wince and fret at this world's little loss."

Yes, to walk among the lilies might be given to such an one as Dormer, but not to a commonplace person like himself, who had been forced into sacrifice. He had nothing to give of his own free-will. That he would henceforth live without earthly ties was not because he had been smitten by a vision from on high, but because the woman he loved had been taken from him. It was enough for him if he could echo the close of those same lines—

"Wash me, and dry these bitter tears,

O let my heart no further roam,

'Tis Thine by vows and hopes and fears

Long since——"

Some way off a stir among the promenaders and the sight of the Ducal livery, portending, probably, that the Grand Duke was taking the air, reminded Tristram of Torre Vecchia, and his impending departure. Pulling out his watch, he hurried off.

As he entered the hotel he was stopped by the porter.

"The post is in, Excellency, and there are two English letters for you."

The letters were both addressed in Mr. Grenville's handwriting, and one had been posted no less than three months before.

(2)

Dormer crumpled up the paper on which he had been scribbling and pushed it under his cushions, where he lay on a couch near a window looking out on to the Arno. The translation which he had been making of a portion of Andrewes' Preces Privatae did not please his difficult taste, and he took up instead the other book lying beside him—Serenus Cressy's edition of Father Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia, or Directions for the Prayer of Contemplation, a relic of one of his Jacobite ancestors who had afterwards become a Benedictine, which he had found, at his mother's death, among her books. He glanced at the title page, where the hand which more than a hundred years ago had written its owner's name—and his—Carolus Dormer—had traced below a cross and the family motto, 'Ciò che Dio vuole, io voglio—God's Will my will'; and began to read the chapter "Of the Great Desolation." Perhaps because he lived almost always in the conscious presence of God the description of "this most sharp purgatory of love" had for him a curious fascination.

"For what has a soul left to fear that can with a peaceable mind support, yea, and make her benefit of the absence of God Himself."

He closed the book and lay back, gazing out of the window, yet San Miniato and its cypresses were nothing but a blur....

The door opened, and the landlord admitted a tall, fair Italian, wrapped in an ample cloak.

"Do not rise, do not rise, my dear friend, I implore you!" exclaimed the visitor, swooping down upon Dormer and seizing both his hands. "And how do you find yourself this afternoon? Not in pain, I trust!"

"But I am perfectly well," protested Dormer, laughing. Accustomed as he was to these effusive greetings, he was always glad when Tristram was not by to witness them. "In a few days we, too, shall be leaving Florence."

Standing over him in his great black cloak, Signor della Torre Vecchia shook his head dolefully. "I doubt if it is wise—whether you will really be fit to travel."

At this point the landlord, with many apologies, desired to be permitted to set down the coffee on the table near the couch, and the guest had to make way for him.

"Your Excellencies have everything they require?" asked he. "Signor Ungerford is just come in; he reads his correspondence. The courier has arrived, but there are no other letters." One overflowing smile, he bowed himself out.

"Pray sit down, Signore," said Dormer. "We will not wait for Mr. Hungerford." And he stretched out his arm to the coffee.

"Ah, but you must allow me, in the circumstances, to do that!" said Torre Vecchia quickly, and he snatched away the tray. "With what pleasure should I not have done this for you up at Fiesole," he observed wistfully, as he poured out the coffee. "It will always be a life-long regret to me that you would not permit me to remove you to Villa San Giuliano."

"As if I were not sufficiently indebted to you without that!" exclaimed the Englishman. "For all your kindness to a stranger I can make no return but to hope that, when you visit England again, you will come to Oxford as my guest."

Torre Vecchia gave him, with his coffee, a promise that he would do so, and flowed on in a gentle but swift-running stream of converse, while Dormer began to wonder why Tristram did not join them. Finally he apologised for him, suggesting that he did not know of the Italian's presence. Torre Vecchia made a large gesture that excused him.

"We were told," said he, "that he is reading his letters, and who can say whether there is not one from his betrothed. Pray do not have him disturbed.... You know, Signore, that your Church is very fortunate in possessing material of the type of Signor Hungerford for her pastors—for I understand that he is about to enter that estate. Is it not true that the English country gentleman has an equal, if not a superior, in the parson, who is a man of the world, with a training of the University, whereas ours are ... to put it delicately, not high born, and seminary bred.... But here I am on this topic again—and I hope, Signore, that in our most interesting conversation of yesterday, when I said how much I disliked our system of enforced celibacy for the clergy, I did not seem to be criticising Holy Church, of which I trust I am a faithful son."

Dormer relieved him of this apprehension, and he continued:

"But there are these two points which, when I feel I shall not be misunderstood, I cannot help deploring—most of all the enforced celibacy." Torre Vecchia dropped his voice and looked round, apparently to make sure that they were alone, ere he went on earnestly, "'Signore, consider the isolated position of the ordinary priest, consider the number of things enjoyed by his fellow-men that he must renounce—above all, that great happiness, which our holy religion sanctifies for others, but which it forbids him even to think of for himself. His life may inspire respect, even admiration, but it excites—in me, at least—regret for so much rigour, which is surely in contradiction with what Nature and God Himself have implanted.... I find it so extraordinary that you, a divine of the English Church, do not agree with me!"

"But I do, in a sense," retorted Dormer. "I rejoice that our clergy are free to marry or not to marry; only I would wish to see the majority unmarried."

"You would deprive them then of those pure pleasures which your Church allows, the pleasures of a home, of a wife, of children?"

"I would not deprive them of these. But I would have the greater number deprive themselves."

Torre Vecchia lifted his hands and eyes to heaven. "But this is the spirit of Catholic asceticism, and yet you are not a Catholic! I am more puzzled than ever. You and your friends, you tell me, believe in the Real Presence, in the apostolical succession, in the power of the keys, and yet when I was in England last I never met a single person who seemed even to have heard of such things!"

"Perhaps not, but they will hear some day," said Dormer quietly, and at that moment Tristram entered, full of apologies, which were met by counter-apologies from the Italian, and finally merged into a scene of leavetaking, as the latter discovered that it was later than he thought.

"You must make amends for your absence now, Signore," he said, smiling at Tristram, "by allowing me to call upon you when next I am in England. And in spite of your friend's views (which never cease to astonish me) I cannot help hoping that this will be in one of those delicious country parsonages, embowered in roses, bright with wife and child, to which I have before now been welcomed—at what you call the 'family-living,' in short!"

He left Tristram deprived of speech and once more bent over Dormer. "And for you, my dear friend, how I wish I could have seen you restored to perfect health before I left! I am putting a carriage at your entire disposal. Every afternoon one of my people shall come round and see if you need it. No, no thanks, I beg ... I must veritably fly. Addio, caro amico; I trust I may say a rivederci." Uttering further swift and polite phrases, and flinging his cloak round him with the art of the South, he was gone.

Almost ere the door had closed Dormer had rolled over like a boy and buried his face in the sofa-cushions. "Why did you not come in before, you wretch!" he ejaculated. "I have been having such a disquisition, all to myself. What on earth were you doing? It was no time for reading letters." Turning over again, as a thought struck him, he said abruptly: "I hope that well-meaning blunderer did not hurt you?"

"Of course not," answered his friend. "But ... I've just had bad news." And he went and sat down in the Italian's vacant place.

Dormer struggled off the sofa. "My dear fellow, what is it?"

"She's been very ill. The Rector had to go over—her child was born prematurely."

Dormer gave an exclamation. "Did it live?"

"She was in great danger for four days," said Tristram, running his hands through his hair, "in great danger, and I never knew! It must have been about the time that we got here. The letter was temporarily lost, I suppose. Yes, the child lived. This second letter of the Rector's, dated about a month ago, which has reached me at the same time as the first, says that he is not satisfied with the reports he has of her, and that he would be very glad if I could see her before crossing the Channel."

CHAPTER XVII

(1)

A fortnight later they drove into Paris.

Tristram had written to Horatia announcing the probable date of their arrival, but, as in his trouble he had omitted to give their address, there was no letter to greet him, no invitation to stay instead at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon, as there would have been had she known where he would be. He was rather glad when he realised, on arrival, what he had done. It was late. Next day he sent a note by a messenger saying that he and Dormer would call in the early afternoon.

In the morning he went out by himself, and leaning over the Pont Royal watched the Seine running to the sea. Much water had slipped under that bridge since last he was in Paris. He smiled at the commonplaceness of the thought; but it was true, nevertheless. Did Horatia ever cross the bridge?—of course she must often do so. Paris was different from the Paris of old—different from any other city in the world, now.

One of the views of the world was before him, where up the stream Notre Dame lay magnificently at anchor. In his lonely walks in Florence Tristram had acquired the habit of going almost every day into some church or other; the desire to enter one now came upon him, and he left his post and made his way, not however to Notre Dame, but to the church which was to him the most attractive in Paris, St. Etienne du Mont.

The beautiful jubé burst on his senses with a new surprise; the splendid windows blazed again. He knelt down, undisturbed by a couple of tourists who were wandering round. The church was full of light; the wonderful exultant lines of the screen caught up his spirit, and he saw once more, not with the faint sense of regret which once he had, that the most jewelled of the windows were set up high in the clerestory, where the eye had to seek for them. St. Etienne meant that, then—the rapture, the ardour, the flaming ecstasy of sacrifice—more, of sacrifice that seemed uncalled for. Would he ever know it, or must he always feel that he gave, not grudgingly indeed, but without a grain of the incense of joy?

(2)

He thought of the church as he and Dormer walked rather silently along the Rue St. Dominique that afternoon and came at last to the gateway of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon. Yes, he had made the sacrifice completely; it could not be redemanded now, even though he was to see her, to touch her hand. It was relief unspeakable to know this; nine months, six months ago he could not have met her. Yet he had a quite ordinary dread of the encounter, of its strangeness, of the feeling that something had come down and shut her off. Would she be looking ill?

He had said to Dormer that he rather anticipated being received in the midst of a family gathering, since he was known to the Marquis as well, and since Armand was indeed no little in his debt. He was pleased to find that this was not the case. The lackey led them up the stairs to Horatia's boudoir. Madame la Comtesse (how unfamiliar!) was expecting them.

At first sight, as Horatia rose to greet them, Tristram thought, "Yes, she has been ill, she looks a woman, but she is the same." She had for a moment all her old vivacity, her delightful smile, the same trick of screwing her eyes up when she talked. She gave him just the welcome that he might have had in Berkshire. He was even able to remember, as she held out her hand to Dormer, all the hits she used to aim at his friend.

"I hope you are quite recovered from your accident, Mr. Dormer," she said. "You must not stand a moment, I am sure. Let us all sit down, and we can gossip comfortably."

She waved them into chairs. The voice, the words, were just Horatia's own; the air a little more assured, more mature—that of Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon. No harm in that.

She talked on lightly. Papa, she was certain, had been alarming Tristram unnecessarily; she was as well as ever she had been in her life. And why had not Tristram given her an address?—could they not come and stay at the Hôtel now? Presently they must see her son, and Armand would soon be in.

And as she talked the sense of effort began to be apparent, the glow, the first illusion faded. She was not the same Horatia; she was not even the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon, an Horatia ripened by her station, she was somehow different. She had not the same vitality. This was what her illness had done to her, thought Tristram—drained away some of that almost childish and petulant animation which he used to love in her. Spring had left those green boughs, perhaps not to revisit them. He was sad; and sat a little silent while she talked, without telling them much, about Armand, about this, that, and the other, about her own pleasure in seeing them, ending at last by saying, "Perhaps we had better be going now into the salon."

So they followed her to that apartment where, throned in state on a sofa, out of deference to the English prejudice against being received in a bedroom, sat the Duchesse—and Tristram was momentarily startled to perceive that her hair, as he innocently supposed it to be, was of almost the same shade as Horatia's. Beside her, talking with great animation, was a young and fashionably dressed woman, the Marquise de Beaulieu. His old acquaintance Emmanuel was standing by these two, and in a window a tall ecclesiastic whom he did not know was conversing with a shrivelled little old lady equally unknown to him.

"Aha!" said the Dowager, "so this is the celebrated M. Hungerford to whom, I understand, our young couple owe their present felicity." And she tendered her small aged hand with a smile that unmasked the full battery of her false teeth. "I have also to thank you, Monsieur, for your kind hospitality to my son, as well as to my grandson. And why, I pray, are we to be given no opportunity of returning so many obligations?" And while, with half-bantering condescension, she proceeded in this vein, and Emmanuel greeted him again with genuine pleasure, Tristram was conscious that Dormer, rescued from his momentary fall into the clutches of Madame de Beaulieu, was borne off and presented by Horatia to the priest in the window. Then Armand appeared, with a smile for everybody, delighted to see his former host, very gallant to his wife. He had not altered. Eventually he separated Tristram from the Duchesse and his brother, and began to make courteous and tactful inquiries about his "old friends" at Compton, but all the while Tristram's mind was busy trying to account for the change in Horatia. He was beginning to think it due, not to her illness exactly, but to the atmosphere in which she lived, to these over-many relations, amongst whom her identity, once so strong, seemed almost lost.

Presently further stir, and Maurice was borne in like a relic, and deposited in a strange shrine, his great-grandmother's lap. Somewhat to Tristram's surprise, Armand immediately went over to him and presented his finger; the infant, whose face had assumed an anxious expression, crowed loudly and seized it.

"Small doubt that he is thy son, mauvais sujet," Tristram heard the Duchesse to remark sotto voce to her grandson. "His eyes are more like thine every day. Do not throw thyself about thus, little one; I have held many children before thee."

But Tristram, the prey of a curious fascination, remained where he was. And all this while, too, Horatia was sitting leaning her head on her hand, at the other side of the room, alone, almost unnoticed, except that Dormer, though still talking to Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, was looking at her intently. It was true that Horatia's eyes were fixed upon the group round the sofa, or rather upon its centre; their expression was not to be read, but the weariness, the profound lassitude of her pose was the ineffaceable thing which Tristram carried away from the scene—that, and Armand's look as he stooped over their child.

CHAPTER XVIII

(1)

When Tristram and Dormer had departed, and the family party broken up, the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon went to her own apartments and wept hysterically. The following Sunday she resumed her attendance at Morning Prayer.

The reason for her action was not far to seek. Of all the emotions which the sight of Tristram had called up, homesickness was the most piercing. She had not let him see it; she had not thought, before he came, that she was capable of any more feeling. She had told herself, when she got his letter from Italy, that she was far too miserable to care whether he came or no. But when she talked with him, when the sound of his voice had rekindled all the past years of happiness, she desired passionately the things of home, more even than when her father had come over, for then she had hardly strength for a wish of any kind.

She had long been putting off going again to the Embassy chapel, on the score that she was not well enough; on the same pretext she did not read Morning Prayer with Martha either. It was only occasionally that she said her own prayers. She told herself that probably there was no God at all. But now, with Tristram's visit, there sprang up immediately the desire for this renewal of contact with things English, because she felt that there she could indulge in a very luxury of unhappiness. She went with that intention.

But the effect was wholly different from her anticipations. Morning Prayer, both in its religious and national aspects, may be said to produce an atmosphere if repeated often enough. It disposes the mind to the ideals of duty, uprightness, and faithfulness. It does not move immediately to the heights and depths of great sacrifices, as the Mass will do, though in the end the result is perhaps the same. Horatia came away that Sunday from the Embassy Chapel with a most uncomfortable doubt whether she were really being, not a noble, injured, suffering wife, but a rather ignominious and cowardly person. Would not her father be shocked at her failure in wifely duty? Would not all the generations of Grenvilles behind her have been shocked?

The idea was so unpleasant that she strove with it, and, having actually caught a slight cold during the week, absolved herself from attending Divine Service for some time.

(2)

Madame de Vigerie, since her astonishing reception of him at the New Year, had been many times called by Armand de la Roche-Guyon his good angel and his guiding star. And, in a political sense at least, she was not unworthy of these appellations. Horatia never knew to whom she owed it that her husband was not implicated in the conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires to gain access to the Tuileries and assassinate the Royal Family, the discovery of which, at the beginning of February, shook Paris. The enterprise was not chivalrous enough for Laurence de Vigerie's taste. There were more stirring plans afoot, for a rising on which all was to be staked was now much more imminent than it had been in the summer, and she was in even closer communication than before with the Regent's little court at Massa, that combination of the Coblentz of the emigration and the Paris of the Fronde. There was much to keep them occupied, for there was division not only among Madame's immediate counsellors, but also in the Royalist committees in France. That in Paris wished the rising adjourned; those in the provinces desired it immediately. These problems demanded daily intercourse, and, indeed, now that his wife had disavowed all interest in his doings, Armand considered himself free to visit the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin as often as he liked. To many a moth the light of a guiding star may well be attractive above all others.

February slipped away, with the discovery of the plot, the trials of the implicated. The salons of the Faubourg were divided between those who, denying the conspiracy, ridiculed Louis-Philippe's baseless fears, and those who mourned its ill-success. Tristram Hungerford came and left, March entered, and Lent; Maurice was producing his first tooth, and George Sand her first novel. In England the Reform Bill passed the Commons; and in France Horatia was combatting the influence of Morning Prayer.

But to Armand himself the most important event of the month was a little conversation which occurred during its second week. He had sent Madame de Vigerie flowers, as he constantly did, and came in one afternoon to find her bending over some lilies of the valley.

"I wonder who gave me these," she said.

"Cannot you guess?" asked Armand. He took out a spray and held it towards her. "They were meant for a better place than that vase."

The Vicomtesse smiled and shook her head. "I never wear flowers, save those that I pick myself."

"I have noticed that you never wear mine," said Armand.

"Nor anybody else's."

"Why not?"

"Just a whim," said Madame de Vigerie, turning away.

"I believe I can read your mind," said Armand slowly. "Laurence, you are like a bird of the woods. You will not come to any man's whistling, and it means too much to you to wear a favour."

She turned on him half grave, half gay. "Mon ami, you have guessed right. But I love your flowers ... I love to have them near me. I will do anything but wear them."

"And some day," said the young man softly, "you will do that. Or am I never to hope for it, Laurence?"

"No," she said, "I shall never wear them." But she did not meet his eyes.

"But if you ever did..."

"O, suppose that I wore the stars as a necklace!" cried she. "It is as likely."

"But if you ever did," persisted Armand. "Laurence, if you ever did..."

"Yes," she said, turning very pale....

(3)

March had all but completed its course with dust and wind, and at its extreme end Lent had come to a temporary pause for the Carnival.

Armand de la Roche-Guyon had just finished dressing for a costume ball. The long mirror in his dressing-room, reflected him, clad from head to foot in white and gold, in ruff, doublet and hose, a gentleman of the Valois court. The dress, blazing with jewels, had been copied from a well-known picture of Charles IX. From the little flat cap with a feather set on the side of his handsome head to his shoes the costume suited him admirably, and his valet, standing by him, had just expressed this opinion.

"The mask, M. le Comte, and the domino?"

"No dominos to-night, but I will take it for a cloak. At what time did I order the carriage to be ready?"

"Not for a quarter of an hour yet, M. le Comte."

"Well, you can go. Give me the mask."

The man departed, and Armand, humming an air, the mask dangling from his hand, tried altering by at inch or two the position of the dagger at his hip. Then he looked at the clock, and on what seemed a sudden impulse, threw down the mask upon a sofa and went out of the room.

"He'll be frightened to death if he sees you like that, Sir," said Martha, looking with disapprobation at the costume which had already given her "a turn" in the corridor, where she now stood with its wearer.

"But since he is asleep..." said Armand ingratiatingly.

Mrs. Kemblet shook her head, but opening the door with infinite precautions, allowed her master to enter, and watched from the doorway.

"Extraordinary how fond he is of him, to be sure," thought she, to whom the male heart was a perpetual mystery. Horatia very rarely came to say Good-night to the child; and the female heart being an even profounder riddle it was not given to Mrs. Kemblet nor to anyone else to know how often she longed to do so.

As it befell, however, this night the desire had been too strong for her.

Martha saw the Comtesse far down the corridor. She was in her dressing-gown, her hair hanging in great plaits. Two courses were open to Mrs. Kemblet; to prevent, by warning her mistress, a meeting which in the circumstances might have softening consequences, or to further it by removing herself. She chose the latter, and vanished before she could be seen.

The door, ajar and unguarded, surprised Horatia. Very gently, so as to run no risk of waking the child, she pushed it a little wider. Her eyes, accustomed to the brighter light of the corridor, took in slowly the dim room, the shaded nightlight, and, by the side of the crib, a slim silkclad figure stooped over the occupant, its dark head almost touching the pillow.

Without a sound Horatia looked; without a sound she moved away.

(4)

At the door of the ballroom Armand paused a moment adjusted his mask, and entered.

Although everybody was masked none were wearing dominos, and provided a guest's disguise were already known it was easy to identify him. But there was so great a crowd that it was difficult to find a given person, and Armand looked in vain among the throng of monks, courtiers, dancing girls and devils, for the high headdress of Madame de Vigerie's fourteenth century costume, in which, as he knew, she was impersonating Jeanne de Flandre, the wife of Jean de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, as she rode with him into Nantes in 1341. But at last he saw in a doorway, above the sea of heads the peak of the hennin, with its floating veil of golden gauze. It must be she. Before he could get through the crowd he had to watch the hennin vanish without having seen the face beneath it, and ere he could pursue it further he was seized upon by an acquaintance and led up to a mask who represented Esmeralda, the heroine of Hugo's successful novel of the previous year. The lady was lively, and he was engaged in converse with her when, halfway down the long room, he caught sight of the tall headdress again, in the company of a Dominican friar, and he turned eagerly to look.

Yes, it was Laurence, in a flowing dress of purple over gold. The room suddenly filled with mist ... for on her breast, tucked into the high golden girdle, lay two white roses, the flowers he had sent her that afternoon....

"Beau masque, you are pale," said the voice of Esmeralda in his ear. "What has disturbed you—you are ill, perhaps?"

The violins struck up as, for answer, Armand seized her. "You shall see if I am ill! Can you dance till daybreak, Esmeralda?"

In the frenzy of rapture that possessed him he scarcely knew how his partners changed. Now he was dancing deliriously with an odalisque, now with a nun. His tongue ran riot like his blood; but he never came on the gold and purple dress again, though once or twice he saw it in the distance. Well, he could wait ... And at last, the pendulum swinging from exultation into dreams, he escaped from the hot ballroom into the quiet of the garden, and tried to think.

When he came back, twenty minutes later, the dancing had ceased, though the violins were still playing madly. On the shining floor of the great room the dancers were broken up into groups, talking in low voices. Many had unmasked, and showed faces oddly whitened; some were hurrying away. At one end of the room a woman was screaming; near him another, the odalisque, had fainted. No one was caring for her. What had happened? He thought at first that Louis Philippe had been assassinated, that the Duchesse de Berry was dead.

Then he caught the awful whisper that was passing from mouth to mouth. And hearing it, half-crazy with terror, he ran wildly out into the street, in the direction of the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin.

(5)

The Marquis Emmanuel de la Roche-Guyon, never a very good sleeper, was wakeful to-night. He had worked till nearly twelve o'clock at his monograph on the seaweeds of France, now approaching completion. Then he had sat a long time with his chin on his hand, thinking of the past, the only person awake in the great house, where they kept early hours. The lamp lit up his comfortable, untidy, prosperous surroundings, and the little bits of feathered stuff from the deep on which he tried to nourish a starved heart.

After a while he sighed and stirred. The room seemed hot; he would take a turn in the courtyard before retiring, and perhaps the fresh air would bring him sleep.

It was thus that he met his brother. Across the courtyard, lit by a faint, clouded moon and by the single oil lamp that burnt all night, there was coming, staggering, a figure which at first Emmanuel could not believe in, much less recognise—a gallant of the court of the later Valois, in ruff, doublet and hose. The Marquis almost rubbed his eyes; was it a ghost? Then, as the apparition drew nearer, he saw that it was his brother, with a face like death.

"Armand, in God's name, what is the matter?" he cried, catching hold of him as he lurched by. "Are you hurt? are you drunk?"

Armand threw back his head. "They would not let me in!" he said between his teeth. "They would not let me in, and she is dying ... Stand out of the way! I am going to get my pistols."

"Indeed you are not!" said his elder, understanding nothing of his speech, but reading a very frenzy of desperation in his demeanour. He seized him by the shoulders. "You do not go into the house until you have explained yourself. Where have you been? Who is dying?"

"Let me go, curse you!" exclaimed Armand, struggling in his grip. Then the strength seemed suddenly to ebb from him. "It is Laurence, Madame de Vigerie," he gasped. "She was at the ball—I saw her myself; then she disappeared before I could speak to her ... and she was wearing my flowers ... do you hear, Emmanuel, she was wearing my flowers! Then I heard ... she was dying ... I went to her house ... I sat a long time on the steps ... they would not let me in ... then I came here ... she was wearing my roses ... and now she is dying——"

"Dying!" ejaculated his brother. "And at the ball! What——"

"The cholera!" said Armand in a choking voice.

"O my God!" He freed himself from Emmanuel's loosened hold, and throwing himself down on the steps lay there like one bereft of life, his face hidden.

So the pendent sword had descended! The cholera had been advancing on France for years; this, Carnival-tide, was then its chosen time of striking. The Marquis's first thought was of what was to come on Paris; his second, of the immediate future. If Horatia were to see Armand in this condition! ...

He bent over the huddled form, plucking it by the short velvet cloak whose flame-coloured lining showed pale in the faint light.

"Armand, get up! You must not give way like this. Come with me, and I will take you to our cousin's."

He dragged his brother, unresisting, to his feet, and piloted him out into the street, past the horrified concierge, and somehow, a little later, they found themselves at Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon's door. Prosper seemed to keep later hours than his secular kin, and they were admitted without difficulty. Armand wandered unsteadily to a chair and threw himself down in it, and at that moment the curtain at the end of the long room was pulled aside, and Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, looking startlingly tall in his long cassock, came out of what was, in effect, his private oratory.

"Who is that?" he asked in surprise, pointing to the white figure.

His cousin in a low voice gave him a short review of the situation. "Can you keep him here, at least for the night?" he asked in conclusion. "He is scarcely responsible, I think, for his actions."

Prosper's keen, grave gaze ran over the details of costume; of face he could see nothing. "Do you think he is likely to do himself an injury?" he whispered. He too could act quickly on occasions. He went to his cousin. "Armand!" he said, laying a hand on the bowed shoulders, while with the other he successfully plucked from its sheath the jewelled dagger at the young man's hip. This he held out behind his back to Emmanuel, who took and concealed it.

The Comte slowly lifted his head. "What do you want with me?" he asked stupidly. "Are you come to bury her already?"

"Armand," said his cousin, "could you not sleep a little? No one will disturb you here, and in the morning..."

"In the morning she will be dead. They will put my white roses on her coffin. She should not have worn them ... Why are you staring at me like that, Prosper? You had better get back to your candles and things in there ... No, do not say that you will pray for her! She does not want it—no, nor I, by God! I did not come here to be prayed over ... though I suppose you would like to ... Yes, I suppose you would call it the judgment of God. Isn't that so? Answer me, priest—though you are my cousin!"

Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon did not flinch. "I should call it the mercy of God," he said very gently.

An angry flush dyed Armand's pale face. For a second he looked as if he were going to strike Prosper; then he changed his mind, and shrugging his shoulders, he turned away. "Priests will be priests," he said with a sneer. "Come, Emmanuel, I have had my benediction. Let us be going."

"I think it is too late to go back," observed the Marquis quietly. "Prosper will give us hospitality to-night."

His brother gave a short scornful laugh. "So that was why you brought me here! Very well—only for God's sake go away and don't stand staring at me. I don't want a bed. Do you suppose I shall sleep?—Go, you guardians of respectability!"

They left him: there was nothing else to do.

Towards dawn the Marquis came into the room again. All was quiet but the fire, and at first he could not see his brother anywhere. Then for a second or two his heart stood still, for he perceived Armand stretched motionless on the floor in front of the hearth, and there was something ominous in his attitude, in the pool of deep colour round his body, in the living, moving stains of crimson on the breast of his doublet....

It was only a moment's illusion, gone as the elder man came quickly towards the fire. Worn out with emotion, Armand had evidently flung himself down there, had fallen profoundly asleep where he lay on the red Eastern rug, and the firelight winked on the jewels of his masquerade. Nevertheless, as he lay with sealed eyes at Emmanuel's feet, clad in the dress of that period of violent deaths, with one arm outflung on the parquet, his upturned face haggard and unfamiliar in the close-fitting ruff, he looked so lifeless that the Marquis was glad to think that Prosper had abstracted the poniard from its sheath.

Though, indeed, he knew his brother too well to imagine that he would ever dream of sacrificing his life, even for the person he loved best at the moment. A faintly cynical but not untender smile came to Emmanuel's lips as he stood there. "Sleep well, my brother," he said under his breath, and went very quietly out of the room.

(6)

"Cholera? Oh dear no, nor anything like it," said the doctor next morning to the anxious cousins. "Nervous shock, a touch of fever. I have let him blood. Keep him quiet and he will be all right in a couple of days. I wish we were all as far from the grave. But, Messieurs, as for the cholera, though M. le Comte has it not, we are all going to see more of it, I doubt, than we shall like..."

"You have told him, I suppose, that Madame de Vigerie is likely to recover?" asked Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon as the doctor left the room.

"Yes," said Emmanuel, "and also that it has already been arranged for my sister and the children to go to Plaisance at once."

He went in again to his brother, in the priest's own, narrow, cell-like bedroom with its carved prie-dieu, its sacred prints and its agonised ivory crucifix. Armand, pale, but no longer ghastly, was lying back in an arm-chair without his doublet, his knees wrapped in a quilt, with a bandaged left arm to testify to the doctor's activity. He smiled at his visitor.

"Mon vieux, what made you think I had the cholera? I was never so well in my life—since your news, bien entendu. Do you think Prosper will tell me how many candles I should put up to Our Lady—but perhaps St. Roch or St. Sebastian would be more appropriate. Now that old butcher has gone I must dress and go round to the Chaussée d'Antin; but I have no clothes suitable to the streets in daylight. Will Prosper lend me a cassock, think you? I believe I was rather rude to him last night, but his duty as a Christian will oblige him to forgive me.... Sais-tu, Emmanuel, that the cholera, if only it strike hard enough, may be the best ally that Henri V could have? And how can I work for Henri V sitting here in my shirt among these objects of piety? As well be a sacristan...."

CHAPTER XIX

(1)

Out of a cloudless sky a hard, bright, metallic sun was shining upon Paris, as it had shone, without variation, for the last five weeks, looking down unwinking on a Terror worse than that of '93. And along the deserted streets its companion, the glacial East wind, frolicked in a dance of death, stirring the April dust, and fluttering, on the Pont Neuf, the black flag which Henri Quatre held in his hands of stone. Neither Charles X nor Louis-Philippe reigned in Paris now, but the cholera. Long ago the supply of hearses had proved insufficient, and there crawled along, to gather up the daily harvest of eight or nine hundred dead, artillery waggons, furniture vans, even fiacres. Even so, a sheeted corpse could often be seen in a doorway awaiting burial—to receive it, perhaps, at the hands of that devoted company of young men which numbered some of the first names of France. Yet the machinery of life worked on as usual—the Chambers and the law courts sat, the Bourse was open, professors lectured and the theatres were far from empty, though not a soul had more than half a hope of seeing the sun rise next day, and every time a man left his home he said farewell to wife and child.

From an archway in the long Rue de Sèvres, literally a street of the dead, for on one side at least there was not a single house unstricken, came suddenly a tall priest in a cassock, a garb not seen till now, in the streets of Paris, since the Days of July. His eyes, sunk in a tired, strained face, blinked a little as they met the light, for it had been dark in the garret where he had just confessed the dying man—the fourth cholera patient whom he had visited that day. He pulled the cloak he was wearing closer over his breast as he turned north-eastward and met the wind.

As he crossed the end of the Rue du Bac a fiacre passed him at a lumbering trot, a coffin across the seat. Ere the noise and rattle had died away in the sunny, silent street, the priest heard alert steps behind him, and a voice that he knew well crying, "Prosper! Prosper! que diable! stop a moment!"

Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon slackened his pace and turned his head, but did not stop. "I have just come from a case."

Armand, arriving abreast of his cousin, sniffed at the saturated handkerchief which he held. "Peste, so I supposed. (By the way, how very apt is that expletive just now!) But everybody has either come from a case, or is going to a case ... or is about to become a case, so that is nothing. I will walk with you; I am going this way."

"How is our grandmother?" asked the priest, as they fell into step together.

"Never better. Strange how she fears a cold and defies the plague. She keeps her rooms inundated with camphor and chloride. But Madame de Camain died last night, and the Comtesse de Montlivault, I hear this morning, is 'prise.'".

"God have mercy on them!" said Prosper, crossing himself. "It seems to me that in the last few days the Faubourg St. Germain has suffered more than the poorer quarters."

"That is so, I believe," returned his cousin. "Figure to yourself that the rabbit warren of the Palais-Royal is apparently more healthy than our large houses with their gardens, for I am told that there has not been a single case in those airless glass passages."

They walked on in silence for a little, their footsteps echoing in the deserted street, the icy wind cold on their faces, the sun fierce overhead. Even Armand, untouched by the pest, by labours for the stricken, or, apparently, by apprehension, looked ill, though he was jauntily dressed in the new spring fashions, in a peacock-blue coat with olive-green collar, a flowered waistcoat and white cashmere trousers. The sight of a man hurrying past them, holding an onion to his nose, struck him into speech again.

"Heavens!" he exclaimed, "I had really rather have the cholera than carry about a raw onion. You do not carry anything, I notice, Prosper; not, I dare say, that it is much good.—By the way, I have long been wanting to tell you that I regard you as the bravest man I know, and if (as is probable) you have heard me say anything uncomplimentary about priests I beg you will consider it unsaid. I am really proud to be your kinsman.... Don't spoil it by saying that you are only doing your duty, or tell me that the Archbishop of Paris has come out of hiding and the Archbishop of Besançon returned from Rome to do the same as you are doing, for I do not believe that even his Eminence of Rohan dislikes it as much as you. Mort de ma vie, but you must have seen some horrible things lately!"

"The worst thing that I have seen," said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon sadly, "was not the visitation of the plague, but the outburst of the vile passions of men, excited by fear, and played upon by the unscrupulous."

"You mean the murders, at the beginning of the outbreak, due to the report that it was caused by poison? But what can you expect? There was a man hanged on a lamp-post, as in the good old times, in one of those very streets, for the same reason. And the Republican newspapers have proclaimed that even the cholera is a scourge less cruel than the government of Louis-Philippe. You remember how the Duc d'Orléans went with the late Casimir Périer to the Hôtel-Dieu to visit the sick? Well, they said that Louis-Philippe had sent his son there to gloat over the misery of the people, and that the people would return his visit ... after the manner of the Tenth of August and the Twenty-ninth of July!"

The young man's tone was not free from satisfaction. The priest, aware of the alliance between a certain section of the Legitimists and the Extreme Left, turned and looked at him.

"I hope," he said sternly, "that Madame's party does not stain their cause by using such weapons."

"We have no need," returned Armand with an air. "You will soon see the gleam of the noblest weapon of all—the sword."

"The sword, so be it!" said Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon. "But not the dagger—not another conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires, I trust."

They had come to the Place St. Sulpice, and stopped.

"You speak as if I had been implicated in that," said his cousin, rather aggrieved. "Or as if I were M. de Berthier, who tried to run over the King and Queen. No, I am for a stroke of a different kind. Wait a little, a very little, Prosper, and you will see the South in flames for Marie-Caroline, and then the West, Brittany, and Vendée..."

"And then?"

"Then you will see Louis-Philippe, his large family and his umbrella, disencumbering the Tuileries of their presence, and at Rheims a child—a mother and child—crowned ... as you may see at this hour in there." He pointed with one hand to the façade of St. Sulpice, while with the other he tugged something from his pocket.

"Cousin, you do not serve your cause by blasphemy!" said the priest sharply.

Armand looked innocent. "But I thought the idea would appeal to you! It occurs to me, as an omen, every time I enter a church. Mea culpa! ... Take this for your cholera cases, Monsignor, in expiation. I was going to give it you in any case, but now it will atone, perhaps, for comparing Marie-Caroline to Our Lady. Au revoir—if the Fates permit." He thrust a roll of notes into his cousin's hand, lifted his hat, and turned down the Rue du Pot-de-Fer towards the Luxembourg.

(2)

It was not to admire the spring foliage of the trees in that now deserted garden that Armand walked slowly eastwards along one of its alleys. Yet he was engaged, rather strangely, in counting the trunks. When he reached the thirty-fifth, he stopped, looked about for the nearest seat, and sitting down upon it, pulled an opened letter from his pocket and re-read it.

It was from his wife at Plaisance, the family seat in Normandy, whither she and the child had been sent for safety. It informed him merely that she and Maurice were very well, and concluded by hoping that all at the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon were in the same condition.

Armand made a slight grimace as he folded and refolded this epistle. Stretched out on the seat, his eyes raised to the new leaves, it occurred to him again to wish that his wife were a Catholic, and had a director, who might perhaps prescribe to her a more conciliatory line of conduct. Once, indeed, he had congratulated himself that in his domestic affairs, at least, no priest could intermeddle; now he thought regretfully of a certain friend of his acquaintance, a great deal more culpable than he, whose wife, in obedience (he suspected) to her confessor, was trying to win back her husband by a demeanour of unvarying amiability. Well, that was certainly not Horatia's way at present, nor was he sure that he would have liked it if it had been; but it would have made things more comfortable.

He had not set eyes on Laurence de Vigerie since the fatal night of the masked ball a month ago. As soon as she could be moved she had been hurried out of Paris under medical supervision, and she was now completing her convalescence at Spa, whence she wrote to him every few days. It had needed all her influence to keep him from following her thither, indeed he had only been restrained by her express prohibition, and the knowledge that if he left Paris at this juncture he cut himself off from communication with the cause for which they were both working. For, as Armand had hinted to his cousin, a crisis in Legitimist affairs was very near now. Since February the Duchesse de Berry had definitely resolved to come to France. The younger and more ardent spirits of her party, impatient of delay, continually wrote urging her to hasten. Now, with the cholera occupying the attention of the government, which had, moreover, lost Casimir-Périer from its head, with the Republicans about to rise, so it was rumoured, against Louis-Philippe, the favourable moment seemed at last arrived. And Armand, deprived of his regular channel of information through Madame de Vigerie, had come to this peaceful resort in quest of news.

He had not long to wait, for there presently approached along the deserted avenue, from the opposite direction, another gilded youth of about his own age, muffled almost up to his eyes in a cloak. He also appeared to be counting the trees, and when he arrived opposite Armand's seat came and sat down on it, without looking at its occupant. Then, without warning, he suddenly shot out the word "Marie."

"Caroline," responded Armand instantly.

And they both looked at each other and laughed, for if these conspirators resorted sometimes to the methods of opéra-bouffe, they did not take them very seriously.

"Any news this morning?" inquired Armand.

"The best," answered the other. "Late last night the Committee received a letter from Madame for transmission to the chiefs in the West, warning them to be ready by the third of May. She has probably embarked by now!"

Armand stared at him a moment. Then he sprang to his feet, and lifting his olive-green hat, cried aloud to the empty garden: "At last, at last! Vive la guerre!"

CHAPTER XX

(1)

"But, my aunt," protested Claude-Edmond, "what is a 'calender'? It is evidently not an almanac, but a person."

Horatia laid down the "Arabian Nights" and laughed, a little laugh of real enjoyment. "Do you know, Claude," she said, "that I have never been quite sure myself. If you would find out for me I should be very grateful to you." She slid her hand a moment over her nephew's head, and Claude-Edmond, a Gallic child, caught and conveyed it with respect and affection to his lips.

It was impossible to be unhappy this morning. It was May. Behind Horatia's back lay the great mass of Plaisance, all built in the style of the stables of Chantilly, with flanking pavilions, chapel and laundry, and in front the two immense lime-tree avenues, now gloriously green, and the artificial pieces of water reminiscent of Versailles, with stone urns of tortured design, and stone animals, wolves and lions. On the grass by Claude-Edmond lay the rod with which he had been unsuccessfully fishing for carp in these lakes, before his aunt began her present occupation of reading the "Arabian Nights" to him in English. A little way off Maurice was being slowly walked to and fro in Martha's arms. And it was May.

"With your permission, I should like to kiss my cousin," said Claude-Edmond suddenly, indicating his infant relative.

"I have the same desire myself," returned Horatia, and Martha, coming to a stand, offered her charge for inspection.

"Did I once have only two teeth—only one tooth?" inquired Charles-Edmond.

"No teeth at all, once," responded his aunt.

Claude felt his existing dental arrangements. "There is one loose now," he announced. "May I pull it out?"

"Let me see," said Horatia; and, after inspection, "I should wait a little if I were you, Claude. It will be looser yet. Besides, it will hurt."

"I know," said the child. "But one must learn to bear pain, must one not?"

"I wish you were not such a little prig," thought Horatia, and instantly repented of the thought. "Yes," she said gently, "but we need not inflict it on ourselves unnecessarily. Give Maurice to me for a little, Martha. Claude, could you fetch my chair over here?"

Delightedly the boy sped off. That his aunt should give him something to do for her was the summit of his desires. When Horatia sat down he stood by her, studying Maurice, who, sucking his fist, in his turn studied the sky.

"He does not remind me greatly of Uncle Armand," observed his cousin. "His face is ... is..." He paused for a word.

"Never mind," said Horatia. "I know what you mean."

Claude Edmond sat down upon the grass at her feet. After a moment or two of silence he said with solemnity, "Ma tante, I will confide to you my great ambition. It is to grow up like Uncle Armand."

Horatia made a movement. "You should desire to resemble your father."

"But that goes without saying," returned the boy, rather shocked. "I meant, in outward things, voyez-vous. I desire to have the learning of Papa, and to be able to ride like Uncle Armand, to know about plants and flowers and books—yes, and perhaps about animals—and to be able to fence and shoot...."

The child babbled on, but Horatia had fallen suddenly silent, and after a few moments, seeing her for once unresponsive, and mindful of having been warned by his father never to weary her, he tactfully announced that he would return to his attempts on the carp, and went off.

"I'll take the precious now, Mam, if you please," said Martha, bearing down on her mistress. "I don't want you to tire yourself, when you are getting some of your roses back again."

"Oh, I'm not tired," said Horatia smiling, but she kissed and surrendered her son, and having done so leant back in her chair and watched the distant figure of Claude-Edmond, in the eternally hopeful pose of the fisher, and trusted that he would not fall into the water.

It was true, she was not tired. Six weeks in the air of Plaisance had done wonders for her physical well-being. And something—could it have been the power of dulness?—had healed her mind of much of its malady. She was young and healthy, and she no longer troubled to make herself remember that Maurice was Armand's son. Here he was hers.

No doubt of Armand's guilt ever entered her mind. But Claude-Edmond's words about him had roused a picture ... Was it possible that she had behaved like a foolish girl? She had often heard Aunt Julia say, and had been irritated by the dictum, that a woman could make what she liked of her husband. And, though she had had everything in her favour, she had given up the attempt at the first difficulty. If he had gone straight to his mistress, it was largely her own fault.

But if she were regretting that she had not disputed with the Vicomtesse for Armand, that meant that Armand was worth fighting for, and over and over again she had told herself that he was nothing to her now. But was that quite true? If it were, how was it that she scanned so eagerly what newspapers she could procure for accounts of the progress of the cholera in Paris? His own short, polite notes to her told her little of it, but the sight of them stirred her, she could not quite say how.

Something else was stirring in her too. Suppose she had not merely acted foolishly, but wrongly?

The feelings which had surprised her that morning in the Embassy Chapel had returned, but on a different plane. "We have erred and strayed ... there is no health in us." What if the over-familiar words really had a meaning, what if she herself, who uttered them so often and so lightly, had actually done wrong, grave wrong? This conviction grew in her. It was to Horatia the first vivid connection between the spiritual and material worlds, and was bringing her to the resolve that, when she returned, she would in some degree forgive Armand. She would admit that she had been a little hard. And the thought of this great concession pleased her; being in the future, it took on something of the glamour of the noble things we mean to do one day.

(2)

A week later a letter from the Duchesse announced that it was safe for her and the children to return to Paris, where the scourge, though still present, seemed to have spent its force. So they went back.

An air of calamity still brooded over the capital, and as they stopped at the barrier Horatia shuddered to see the street urchins playing at "cholera morbus," dragging one of their companions, a simulated corpse, along the ground. But her mind, after all, was full of a more personal concern. As she drew nearer to the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon, as Claude-Edmond, looking out of the window of the post-chaise, announced, "Here we are in the Place Vendôme," or, "Now we are turning into the Rue de Rivoli," it did not seem so easy a matter to bestow a pardon to which the culprit might now be indifferent.

Emmanuel, not Armand, was on the steps to receive her. He came down and helped her to alight. Claude-Edmond flung himself into his father's arms. And all at once Horatia knew that she was bitterly hurt. That Armand should not care whether she returned or no was one thing; that he should affront her before her brother-in-law and the servants was quite another. Too proud to make any remark at the moment on his absence, she turned to busying herself over Maurice, but once inside she said to Emmanuel, as lightly as she could, "I suppose that Armand was not expecting me so early?"

The Marquis looked disconcerted. "My dear sister, has the letter not reached you? He went very suddenly, the day before yesterday, to join Madame in Vendée."

(3)

Not by the tragic words "Too late" was the situation thus created summed up in Horatia's mind, for she had never been able to take the Duchesse de Berry very seriously. And though she was told that the princess had undoubtedly landed near Marseilles one dark night at the end of April, the very fact that the conflagration in the South which was to spring up at her appearance absolutely failed to emit a single spark only confirmed the English girl in her conviction. Nor did Marie-Caroline's romantic journey in disguise to Vendée (now matter of knowledge in Royalist circles) impress Horatia; it seemed to her too much like Walter Scott to be quite real, and she could not fancy that there would be actual fighting round such a fantastic heroine. Emmanuel did not seem to think so, either; at any rate he took no rosy views of her chances. The Duchesse, on the other hand, was at once more sanguine and more alarming, continually preaching with a mixture of resignation and elation a sort of version of "Paris vaut une messe," thus conceived: "If Henri V. cannot be set on the throne without the life-blood of one of our family, then I am willing that it should be given." This attitude seemed to Horatia so uncalled for that it irritated rather than dismayed her. Nor could she help feeling a tinge of annoyance, even if she would not confess it, at the check given by Armand's absence to her plan of forgiveness, for now she could not set herself right with him. She must wait till his return.

Yet she had her hours of apprehension. As a fortnight, three weeks passed without news these grew more frequent. And at last, when the Republican riots of the 5th and 6th of June burst over Paris, what she heard of the fierce street fighting, the stand at Saint-Merri, the eight hundred slain, brought home to her the political passions of the time with a horrible vividness, and she was at last nakedly afraid. The Duchesse, incurable Frondeuse that she was, was pleased at anything that shook or embarrassed the government, and declared that the news would be very encouraging to Madame's party.

When she made this declaration Madame's party as such no longer existed. Two days later, Horatia, having said good-night to Maurice, found Emmanuel, looking very grave, waiting for her in her boudoir.

"Horatia," he said, "we have news at last. The whole rising has failed. There have been several engagements, and Charette has been defeated. They are all scattered; it is a sauve qui peut. My grandmother does not know yet."

"And Armand?"

"We can only hope for the best. If he could cross the Loire he would go and lie hidden at Kerfontaine. He told me that before he went."

"There has been a battle, you say? But perhaps he was not in it ... you do not even know that? ... O Emmanuel, have you no news of him?"

"Absolutely none; it is impossible. We can only hope for the best, as I say. I think that if he is alive he will probably succeed in making his way up to Brittany."

"I must go down there," she said feverishly. "I must go at once. Emmanuel, you must help me!"

"My dear," said the Marquis, rather amazed, "you cannot do any good by going. Please God, Armand is alive. If he escapes, he escapes.... In any case your presence at Kerfontaine cannot help him."

"I must go," she repeated, twisting her hands together. "It is very important. Emmanuel, you said you would do anything for me...." Her voice began to break.

Her brother-in-law did not fully understand, but he took her hands with his accustomed kindness, and said that if she wished it, she should go, and he would take her. And so, in spite of the vehement opposition of the Duchesse, who was quite broken down by the bad news, but who finally said, weeping, that they could at least bring back Armand's body if it was found, they started early next morning on the road to Chartres.

CHAPTER XXI

(1)

There had been a time when Armand de la Roche-Guyon had certainly not anticipated ever seeing Brittany again, yet here he was in Brittany after all.

When he left Paris in the middle of May he had gone straight down to join Charette in Vendée, for he wanted to offer his sword in person to Madame. He had done so; he had seen her, "Petit-Pierre," in her peasant boy's attire, gay and indomitable, and had kissed her hand in a farmhouse kitchen. Other young men like himself were there, full of hope and ardour; though even then it was beginning to be apparent that Vendée was not really ready to rise, and some of the chiefs did their utmost to dissuade the princess at the eleventh hour from the scheme. The fatal mistake was made of postponing the insurrection, already fixed for the 24th of May, by a counter order, circulated only two days beforehand. When the fourth of June came, much of the fervour of the peasants had evaporated and the Philippistes were on the alert. Nevertheless, two days afterwards, at the hamlet of Le Chêne, Armand had been one of the little band, only two hundred and twenty strong, who, splashing through the ford or firing (in the old manner) from behind the orchard hedges, had beaten off two bodies of Government troops, only to be routed by a third. Nor was theirs the only defeat. It was over, the chance of a restoration, and, disillusioned but unhurt, Armand had, with difficulty and danger, made his way across the Loire.

Yet for prudence' sake he had come back, not to Kerfontaine itself, but to the tiny shooting-box in the wood of St. Clair, and therein, this June evening, the day before Horatia's arrival at Kerfontaine, he lay at full length on a settle, his hands behind his head, and thoughtfully surveyed the unceiled rafters, where the twilight was beginning to weave a veil.

The shooting-box belonged to the château of St. Clair, and stood on the edge of a little clearing in the forest; it consisted only of one room, but a portion had been partitioned off as a kitchen. Armand had known it full of sportsmen. On the table in the centre lay, at this moment, his pistols, in company with a half empty bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a ham; for the place had been provisioned against his coming. He had kicked off his long boots, and flung his cloak on a chair. It was very odd to be, not only without a valet, but without a cook; it did not amuse him, for he was both tired and bored. Already, since his arrival in the early morning, he was beginning to think his concealment absurd. He had heard vague rumours of the presence of soldiers, but since the nearest (and abortive) rising was twenty miles away, he was not disposed to believe them. At any rate, as soon as it was darker he was going to venture out.

For he was back near Laurence de Vigerie, and all that the past week had held of death and broken hopes was shrivelled up in that knowledge. She was at St. Clair, and they, who had never seen each other since the night when she had worn the tell-tale roses in the masquerade, would meet at last. No problematic peril was likely to keep him from her.

The cobwebs of twilight, dropping lower and lower from the rafters, began to reach the young man where he lay on the settle. Surely he could go now. He pulled himself off the hard couch, drew on his boots, picked up his cloak, then, remembering prudence, removed, with visible annoyance, the remains of his meal, and, locking the door behind him, stepped out into the evening.

The wood was sinking into sleep. A gust of subtle, heady scent immediately assailed him, and he saw, on the other side of the little clearing by the hut, a thicket of tall elderbushes, intruders in the ranks of forest trees. The over-fragrant smell seemed to be blown after him down the twilight ride; it was still in his nostrils when he came, twenty minutes later, on the great mass of the château of St. Clair. He jumped down into the fosse, climbed up on the other side, and began cautiously to make his way through the rose garden towards the one lighted window on the ground floor, a long window hung over only with some thin blind or curtain. It was that of Madame de Vigerie's smaller salon, and since there was a light she must be there. Probably, indeed, she was expecting him.

Had the window been open he might have walked in upon her, but since it was closed and he could not see through, she might not be alone. The traditional method of summons would serve him as well as any. He caught up a handful of gravel from the path and flung it sharply against the glass. Almost immediately the light within was extinguished; then a hasp was heard to turn, and the window opened outward, the panes shimmering a little in the dim light. A figure slipped out.

"Who is it?" asked Madame de Vigerie. But there was that in her voice which made the question unnecessary.

Armand gave no answer at all, but taking a step or two forward, caught both her hands. Then, with a sob of laughter, she was in his arms, and he was kissing her lips, her hair.... Was she not given back to him from the grave?

In a little they were wandering among the dew-drenched roses. Roses and nightingales after the reddened swamps of Le Chêne—it was like a dream. For he, too, had been through his baptism of fire, and bore the singe of it, to make him for the moment to the woman by his side what he had never been before—stronger than she.

"You are at the shooting-box, then?" she said at last. "It is well provisioned? I gave orders."

"It wants only one thing."

"What is that?"

"You."

"I cannot come there," said Madame de Vigerie. "Not now, I know. I would not ask it. But to-morrow ... in the afternoon, when the sun is getting low, you will come...?"

She did not answer, but he could feel her tremble.

"I am starving, Laurence. If anyone should see you, it is easy to explain. I am a fugitive—you are a conspirator, too."

"I was not counting that cost," she said in a low voice. "O Armand, Armand, why will you not go away and leave me in peace!"

"Because, at last, you love me."

And she made no denial, but breaking from his hold, stood in the midst of the roses with her face in her hands.

"There is the nightingale," said Armand softly. "It sings for us. There are no nightingales in the forest, nor roses. But if you came to me there, Laurence, in the little hut, it would not lack either. O my world, my rose ... I have waited so long, so patiently! ... Has not death itself spared us for this...?"

Half an hour later he was groping his way across the hut. It was foolish to strike a light, so, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down in the dark on the settle. But his brain was on fire, and phantasmagoric figures danced before his eyes—Charette, and the little princess in her boy's clothes, and he heard himself saying, as he had said to Marie-Caroline, when he had kissed that royal, adventurous hand, "I would gladly die for you, Madame." But in the half-dream Madame had the face of Laurence de Vigerie.

He came back from it. The settle was confoundedly hard, as hard as a coffin. Then he remembered having seen, lying dead on a couch just like this, in a peasant's cottage at Le Chêne, before the engagement began, a young man shot by an Orleanist patrol. He had been sorry for him then; he was sorrier now, for perhaps the blood had once raced and pounded in his veins as now in his own, and he, too, had thought, perhaps, "To-morrow! to-morrow...."

(2)

That night, the last of her journey, the cloud of apprehension lifted from Horatia's mind, and sitting by her window in the inn at Ploermel, she had a clear conviction that Armand was alive, and had escaped from Vendée. She would not be too late. She would forgive him; she would even ask him to forgive her the hardness she had shown him. And—who knew—they might perhaps take up their life together again where it had been broken off, for she had experience now.

But who knows when the cup of experience is fully drained?

When Kerfontaine came in sight next morning she could hardly control herself. Would he have had any word of her approach; was he there at all? ...

"Yes, we know for certain that M. le Comte has escaped from Vendée, praise the saints," said old Jean to Horatia and Emmanuel. "But he has not been here, and we think he is probably in hiding in the wood for a day or two. Then he will come here. It was arranged so."

"He might come any time—to-day even?"

"Yes, Madame la Comtesse, any time, when it is safe. And M. le Comte was never one to be over-cautious."

"But there are no soldiers about here, surely?" asked Emmanuel.

"We have not seen any, Monsieur le Marquis, but there are reported to be some in Pontivy."

Emmanuel drew his sister-in-law aside. "I think I will ride over to Pontivy," he said, "and see if I can get any information. I am not known in these parts, and I may be able to find out something."

So, after déjeuner, he set out. The afternoon crawled slowly on. Horatia went over the château, most of which was shut up. The nurseries were still unfurnished, and behind the screen which she and Claude-Edmond had made a year ago she found a heap of dusty pictures and a pot with dried relics of paste. After supper she sat in the salon. The suspense was beginning to tell on her—not the suspense about Armand's safety, for as he had succeeded in getting away from Vendée he must be out of danger now—but the suspense about his entrance. At any moment he might come in. Would he be surprised to see her there? She could not picture their meeting; she would not try to; she must trust that with the moment would come the right words.