Chapter II (1)
Chartres, encircling its jewel of stone, was gone like the dreams which Horatia might have dreamed there the previous night if excitement had not kept her wakeful, and now, Versailles, Sèvres, and Passy left in turn behind the wheels of their chaise, she was entering Paris for the first time in her life. This was really the Seine that they were crossing, this river sparkling in the early afternoon sun of New Year’s Eve, and the golden dome glittering in front of them was the Invalides. Streams of people were passing on the bridge as they crossed it.
“Ah, but wait till to-morrow,” said Armand. “Yes, it is cheerful, but what an awful thing to look forward to is New Year’s Day! Truly we French are the last of idiots to have made this annual giving of presents into a nightmare, as we have. And such presents, too! Last year inkpots were all the rage—inkpots in the shape of mandarins, of apples, of crayfishes—que sais-je? Everything you took up was an inkpot. Mercifully you could not put any ink in them.... Look, mon ange, there is one of the new omnibuses!—Here we are in the Rue St. Dominique already!”
But Horatia, instead of looking out, involuntarily closed her eyes. A momentary fear raced through her. She was going to live with these people who had hitherto only been names to her—that imperious old Dowager Duchess whose fat money-bags kept up the position of the ancient, impoverished family, and Emmanuel, the elder brother, the heir, and his young son—and to make the acquaintance of the other relatives of whom she had vaguely heard. This was the real beginning of her new life....
“O, hold me close, Armand!” she whispered.
The chaise slackened, turned, and passed under an archway into a courtyard. Horatia had a fleeting impression of steps and a pilastered doorway, then she found Armand helping her to alight, and passed, on his arm, into a room of extraordinary loftiness and chill. A tall man was standing in the middle; he came forward.
“Ma soeur, soyez la bienvenue!” he said. “Tu permets, mon cher?”
“Put up your veil,” whispered Armand, and when Horatia had thrown back the lace over her bonnet, the tall man kissed her on the cheek. Evidently this was the Marquis Emmanuel.
Armand looked a boy beside him. He had dark hair going grey, a rather melancholy mouth, deeply furrowed at the corners, and eyes that were both troubled and kind.
“I hope that you will be very happy in this house, my sister,” he said, with real warmth in his voice. “Our grandmother anxiously awaits the pleasure of your acquaintance, but she thought that you would prefer to repose yourself a little before she receives you.”
There was consideration in this decree of the Duchesse’s, but also some suggestion of an awful ceremony to come. Horatia thanked her brother-in-law.
“Yes, that will be best,” agreed Armand. “Come, mon amie, and we will go to our apartments.—Tudieu Emmanuel, I was forgetting that I had not seen you since August!”
“And you are four months older!” said his brother, in a tone full of delicate implications, as they embraced.
(2)
When Horatia, supported in spirit, and also to a lesser degree in body, by her husband, entered for the first time the apartments of the Duchess Dowager, she knew that she had, in times past, rather over-estimated the strength of her own self-possession. Her knees shook, while biting phrases of his aged kinswoman’s, repeated by Armand, came uncomfortably into her mind. However, there was nothing for it; the visit had to be gone through.
Her first impression was that the room was suffocatingly hot; the second, that it was not so large as she had expected; the third, that it had a bed in it—rapidly and not surprisingly following on this, the perception that the Duchesse was receiving, French fashion, in her bedroom. And she had, fourthly, the conviction that Madame la Duchesse Douairière de la Roche-Guyon was the most hideous object that she had ever seen.
The Dowager was enthroned in an armchair on the left-hand side of the fireplace. She wore a quilted négligé of puce satin, very formless; but on her head, whose scanty grey hair had been scraped up in the latest—and most appalling—of fashions, à la Chinoise, towered two enormous yellow ostrich feathers. Where the dressing-gown fell away from her withered neck it revealed the fire of a perfect river of diamonds, and she was painted in a style to recall the old days of the Palais Royal; on her small hands were grey kid gloves. Some sort of a dame de compagnie, sitting on the other side of the hearth, rose, laid down the book in her hands, and melted away.
“Tiens, tiens!” then said in a high voice this human parrot (for as such she instantly struck Horatia). “So this is the English bride. Well, my dear, I am very glad to see you.”
She held out her hand, and Horatia, rising from her reverence, supposed she ought to salute its kid covering, but the old lady, pulling her down, bestowed upon her a kiss. The tip of her large nose was exceedingly cold.
“Well, scapegrace,” then observed Madame de la Roche-Guyon to her grandson, as he too kissed her, “what have you to say for yourself?”
“Only this,” replied Armand smiling, and indicating Horatia.
“You probably get your penchant for red hair from your grandfather,” remarked the Duchesse irrelevantly. “Sit down, ma fille; you must be tired.” Her voice, though high, was, thought Horatia, the least disagreeable part of her. Armand pushed forward a chair, first removing from it a pack of cards, and Horatia sat down.
“And so you have been in solitary bliss, English fashion, at Kerfontaine?” said the old lady. “Quite alone, eh? No one for either of you to flirt with?”
“No one,” responded Armand. “It is early days to begin that, grandmother.”
“Ah, but there is always an old flame or two to mourn our marriage, is there not?” The malicious look which she shot at them with this remark might have been intended for either, but the very expressive frown which Armand bestowed on his jocular relative went unseen of Horatia, for he was standing behind her. It had, however, the effect of shaking a cackle of laughter out of the old lady.
“I am sure, my dear,” she said, addressing herself to Horatia, “that you left a great many broken hearts behind you in England.”
“Alas, Madame, not one, I fear,” said the bride.
“Come, that is excellent, ‘I fear,’” said the Dowager approvingly. “I thought you might have said, ‘Thank God!’ Armand, my good child, I think you might leave us. Madame la Comtesse and I will have a little conversation.”
Armand came forward and kissed his ancestress’s hand obediently, while she murmured something inaudible into his ear; and he went out, giving his wife a look that seemed to incite her to courage.
The Duchesse studied her granddaughter-in-law for a moment with her piercing eyes, and Horatia wondered in her turn how it was that, in spite of her appearance, she did somehow give the effect of having always been used to the very highest company.
“You look strong and healthy, my child,” was her first observation, and so unmistakable was her meaning that Horatia blushed hot crimson.
“La la!” ejaculated the Duchesse, “we must not be prudish. When Armand’s son is born he will be heir to my little estate in Burgundy. There are circumstances which prevent my settling it upon Armand himself. All my other property goes, of course, after his father, to that poor Emmanuel, as the eldest son, and to his ill-fated child.”
(Why “poor” and “ill-fated,” Horatia wondered.)
“I do not say,” continued the Duchesse, with an appalling frankness, “that if you present Armand with sons I shall be able to provide for them all. But we shall see. And, of course, he has his mother’s money. Did you like Kerfontaine?”
“Very much indeed, Madame.”
“It will be considered exceedingly improper, your spending your honeymoon alone there. But I,” said the Duchesse, “did not raise any objections. I move with the times—in some things. If you marry an Englishwoman, you may, at the outset, be forgiven if you do as the English do. You can regard me as your friend, my fille, for I never opposed your marriage, as my son did.” She showed her yellow teeth in a brief smile. “A little fresh blood—However, we need not go into that. By the way, you saw my son in England?”
“Yes, I had the honour of being presented to M. le Duc,” answered Horatia. “He was also at my wedding.” Did or did not this loquacious antique look old enough to be the mother of that dignified elderly gentleman?
“Emmanuel’s wife, as you probably know, is in a mad-house,” proceeded the Duchesse serenely, while Horatia literally and unbecomingly gaped. “It is not of much consequence, for she was a person without stamp or merit of any kind, but of course I am always expecting to hear that Claude-Edmond has been brought home raving from the Lycée some afternoon.”
In after days, when Horatia had made the acquaintance of that singularly sane and demure child, she wondered how madness and he could be mentioned in the same breath. Now she was not even quite sure who Claude-Edmond was, and dared not ask. But the Marquis’ melancholy mouth was explained.
“It was no fault on Emmanuel’s part, I will say that for him,” resumed Madame de la Roche-Guyon. “He was almost too model a husband; I trust Armand will make one half as good—but you must not expect too much of him, ma fille.”
How little she knew Armand! But it was more politic not to show indignation, and Horatia only murmured that she would remember.
“That is well,” said the old lady. “More ménages are wrecked by that than by anything else in the world.” She paused, scanning Horatia, and the girl wondered what further gems of information or of counsel were about to fall from her shrivelled, rose-red lips. Her next remark, however, was the usual question:
“You are not a Catholic, my child?”
“No, Madame,” answered Horatia, saying to herself, “Now she will bring out the family Monsignor to convert me.”
But the Duchesse did not; she merely said, “Well, it is the best religion to die in; but, meanwhile, there are other things more amusing.... My dear, would you have the goodness to ring the bell for my maid?... No, I will get it myself. Wait here!” She got out of the chair with no great difficulty, and, hobbling across the floor, disappeared.
Now that its chief ornament was removed, Horatia became conscious of many other things in the room; of the little Italian greyhound in a basket near the fire, hitherto hidden by the Duchesse’s person; of two very gallant, though scarcely indecent, coloured engravings of the last century in a corner facing her, immediately above a print of one of Rubens’ Last Judgments—a singularly edifying conjunction. But the room was so crowded with objects that it was hard to fix the eye on any one in particular, and it took Horatia several visits before she knew that a row of shrouded objects on short stands were Madame de la Roche-Guyon’s wigs—for she did not usually appear in her own hair—and that she habitually kept her false teeth, when out of action, in the priceless little box of Limoges enamel, representing the Flight into Egypt, which now caught Horatia’s attention on a side table. Her diamonds, on the other hand, were frequently tied up in a soiled handkerchief.
Then the Duchesse came back, and Horatia rose. The Dowager had perhaps been rummaging in some obscure corner, for one of the feathers was very much awry. But she possessed an awful majesty, short, ludicrous, and (at the moment) amenable as she was.
“Here, ma fille, is something for you,” she said, putting into Horatia’s hands an old green leather case. “Open it!”
The bride did so. Inside, on a dark and shabby lining, a row of magnificent pearls made moonlight.
“O, Madame,” gasped Horatia. “I could not! they are too...”
“Nonsense, child,” said the old lady, pinching her arm. “You like them, I see. You will not see any finer at the Tuileries—not that you’ll ever go there now. I always meant them for Armand’s wife. They would look well in that hair of yours, too. There are earrings, but I could not put my hand on them. Try these on! They belonged to my sister, the Comtesse de Craon, who was guillotined in ’93, and I did not recover them till the Restoration.”
“Guillotined!” exclaimed Horatia, startled. How was it possible to speak about it in that matter-of-fact tone! And the pearls—in whose hands had they been—round whose neck...?
“Naturally,” answered Madame de la Roche-Guyon calmly. “All my family were. I was in prison myself till Thermidor. Well, perhaps you would like Armand to put them on for you. You can tell him that you are to have the emeralds when—you understand perfectly well what I mean!”
(3)
Horatia wore the pearls, at her husband’s request, for the family gathering on New Year’s Night. She said afterwards that they gave her courage, as proving her an adopted member of the gens, but when, at the conclusion of her toilet, Armand had clasped them round her neck, she declared that she felt more anticipatory terrors than had ever their owner on the way to the guillotine.
“Very likely,” said Armand, in high spirits, walking round her approvingly. “If my lamented great-aunt was like my grandmother I do not suppose that she was in the least afraid of La Veuve.... You look charming; I like that dress.”
“Armand,” said poor Horatia, “this is certainly worse than the guillotine. Supposing Madame la Duchesse does not approve of me to-night; supposing that all your relations think me foreign or dowdy. I am sure their dresses will be quite different from mine.”
“Their coiffures may be,” agreed the young man. “Some of them will wear their hair à la Chinoise and look like Hurons; you must try not to laugh. (And let me warn you, chère amie, that if I see you disfiguring your beautiful hair by adopting that style, I shall desert you on the instant.) Have you remembered all my other warnings? Do not forget that though my aunt des Sablières is very deaf she cannot bear to be shouted at; that if Charles X is mentioned, Madame de Camain will probably burst into tears. Somewhere in the dim past the Comte d’Artois was—well, flirted with her. Do not talk of English admirals, ships, or sailors to the old Comte de Fezensac; he lost an eye at the siege of Gibraltar in 1779. Above all remember to speak of the Duc de Bordeaux as Henri V; you would do well to refer occasionally to the Duchesse de Berry as the Regent, for my father writes that she will shortly be made so. As you cannot disclose anything derogatory to Louis-Philippe you had better not mention him at all. You must be friendly with my cousin Eulalie de Beaulieu, for she will serve as your chaperon on occasions. I think that is all.” He pulled up his high cravat, glanced at himself a moment critically in the long glass, and said to Horatia, “My darling, a little fright becomes you amazingly.... Let us go to the scaffold!”