Chapter VIII (1)
Circumstances were beginning to prove, as usual, too strong for Armand de la Roche-Guyon. For all his self-will he was generally at the mercy of his surroundings; too light a bark to struggle with the stream, too buoyant to be wholly swamped by it. In England Horatia had been his circumstances; before her, Laurence de Vigerie; before her, not a few other ladies; and now Paris, his friends, his family had enveloped him again. For it was quite true, as the Duchesse had hinted, that his friends were beginning to tease him about his devotion to his wife, while on the other hand he suspected that his wife would soon come to consider him not devoted enough. This morning’s little scene was all very well in its way, but a melancholy prescience whispered to him that the day might dawn when he would find it a bore to keep on assuring Horatia that he loved her. There was no excitement now in the situation, and she was so entirely a captive that he felt his own chains. A certain standard of behaviour was evidently going to be demanded of him, whereas what he craved for was not obligations but diversion. And that the two things he most held in horror, the possibilities of becoming ridiculous and of being made uncomfortable, should descend upon him at once, from different quarters, was rather damnable.
He was in this mood when he crossed the Pont Royal that afternoon, turned to the left and began to walk beside the wall of the Tuileries garden. It was two o’clock, the fashionable hour for promenaders within, but Armand chose the comparative peace of the quay. The sun shone; a little breeze blew off the Seine, and he walked along frowning, no less handsome and attractive for his ill-temper, while two soubrettes, linked arm in arm, turned to look after him speculating on its cause.
Diversion, excitement, a stimulating uncertainty as to his reception—all these had been his at the hands of Madame de Vigerie. Armand had long admired this young, fashionable, and widowed lady, had paid her marked court, and had arrived last summer at the conclusion that, if she would have him—which was by no means certain—he could not do better than to marry her. Then had come his visit to England, and the intrusion of a sudden, genuine passion. But his intention had nevertheless held till the night of that ball in Berkshire. Afterwards he had lain awake till morning fighting the new emotion with the remembrance of the old, then, with a characteristic mixture of coolness and impetuosity, had decided that the new was better. Probably it was, yet he wished that he were at this moment on his way to the familiar drawing room in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, if only to have his present irritation put to flight.
So he walked, swinging his gold and tortoiseshell cane, and behind him, in an open carriage, a lady in lie-de-vin and ermine was overtaking him. With her furs she had a little parasol against the April sun; a boa was wound twice round her neck. She was not pretty, but she was supremely elegant. Leaning forward, she spoke to her coachman; the pace of her horses was moderated, and thus, while still overtaking him, she was able to contemplate at her leisure the figure of the young man to which she drew near. And she did so with a smile on her lips, and her head a little on one side.
Abreast of Armand she called out softly,
“Monsieur de la Roche-Guyon!” and the carriage drew up.
Armand turned. It is always startling when the subject of one’s meditations suddenly appears before one, and the slowness with which his hand went to his hat was sufficient proof of the degree to which he was amazed.
“You in Paris—you!” he exclaimed.
“With your permission,” said the Vicomtesse, smiling. “Or even, Monsieur, without it.”
Armand, hat in hand, stared at her.
“Where have you been all this while?” he asked at last.
“In Italy,” replied she. “And you?”
“Further than that,” returned the young man rather meaningly, coming nearer to the carriage. He had now regained his composure, and looked at her to see if she understood. “I have—but may I not come and tell you about it?”
“Mon Dieu, is it so tragic as all that?” asked Madame de Vigerie with gravity. “But, my poor friend, I know all about it. You are in the most serious of all scrapes. Yes, I know all about it. Nevertheless, come and see me some day,” She rearranged her furs; the coachman looked round for orders.
“When?” asked the Comte eagerly. “At the usual time—three?”
Madame de Vigerie shook her head. “Oh no, not now! I am at home on Tuesdays at eight.—Yes, to the Champs Elysées.”
She drove off. So she did not care the snap of a finger... unless she were dissembling very well. And she had relegated him to the hour of her salon, where, for the sake of a sight of her, he would have to endure all sorts of bores.
Nevertheless, she was back, and Armand was conscious of a distinct lightening of his spirits.
(2)
It was, no doubt, a dark and shameful blot on the family blazon that the heir of the house of La Roche-Guyon should be an amateur botanist of some distinction. Not the tragic life-in-death of his wife, nor the unmothered state of his only son was to be compared, in the eyes of the Dowager Duchess, with the fact that Emmanuel, Marquis de la Roche-Guyon was delivered over to a taste which she considered suitable enough in an apothecary but unspeakably derogatory for a man of family. The Marquis, however, never betrayed much discomposure at the sarcasms of his venerable grand-parent. Forty-one years of a not very happy life had taught him calm, and, kindly and unostentatiously courteous though he was to everyone, he went his own way. Despite his name and connections, he had done nothing in the world of politics or diplomacy, and never would; he was merely an ineffective, reserved, tolerant and melancholy gentleman who desired to lead the life of a recluse and did not always succeed in doing it.
It was in accordance with his habits that when he took his walks abroad such exercises were likely sooner or later to lead him past the bookstalls on the quays of the Seine—for he was something of a bibliophile too. On a certain afternoon in April therefore, about ten days after Armand’s meeting with the Vicomtesse de Vigerie, he was passing slowly along by the lidded boxes on the Quai Voltaire, when he observed a fashionably dressed and elegant young man turning over the old books at a stall a little further on, and recognised, to his no small surprise, his own brother. Armand was humming a tune between his teeth, and seemed gay above the ordinary; the lamentable old proprietor of the box watched him with respect.
“This is a new avocation for you, mon cher,” observed the Marquis, tapping him on the shoulder.
“Just the person I wanted,” retorted the young man, glancing up. “Find me that, and I will never call you herbalist or bookworm again.” He put into the hand of his elder a slip of paper inscribed in a feminine writing. Emmanuel looked at it and gave it back.
“You are not in the least likely to find that here. It is rather rare.”
“Dame! so it seems. I have ruined a clean pair of gloves over the search already. I must go to a bookseller’s, I suppose.”
“Well, I was going to say that if you want it for yourself or for your wife I have a copy, and would lend it you with pleasure.”
“A thousand thanks,” replied Armand, turning away from the box. “But I want it for someone else, so that would not do. I must try down the Rue des Saints-Pères. Are you coming my way? No; au revoir then.”
He crossed the road; and the Marquis looked after his alert young back with a certain wistfulness before he continued his peregrination.
A little later Armand emerged from a second-hand bookshop in the Rue des Saints-Pères with the coveted volume under his arm. As he did so he saw himself presenting it to Madame de Vigerie. He had really taken a good deal of trouble for her, and probably, in his ignorance, paid twice as much as the book was worth. But that did not matter if Laurence was pleased. He had seen her now three times since their meeting on the Quai des Tuileries—never alone, it is true, nor had he succeeded in penetrating to her real attitude of mind towards him. He intended to make the book an excuse for calling at an hour different from that to which he had been restricted. Since it was not a matter of life and death to him he found it distinctly exciting not to know what she really felt about him. But that was part of Laurence’s attraction. Meditating on the pleasant and even piquant prospect opening before him he reached the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon.
Horatia was sitting in the salon, wearing a gown in which he had once expressly admired her—though, as he had already forgotten this fact, the choice had no significance for him. A book lay open in her lap. But as her husband came over to her and kissed her hand, uttering one of the agreeable nothings that came so easily to him, he was instantly aware that she had been waiting for him, that she was on tiptoe with expectation about something. She was looking more than usually beautiful. He told her so, sitting down beside her.
She gave him in return a bright, soft glance, and closed the open book. “I wanted to ask you something, dear,” she said. “Do you think we could go down to Brittany soon, next week perhaps.... I should like it so much.”
“Tiens! what an odd idea!” said Armand. His voice sounded indolent and vaguely caressing, but in his mind was surprise, considerable distaste, and a premonition of conflict.
“I don’t think that it is odd,” urged Horatia earnestly. “I enjoyed Kerfontaine so much in the winter. We shall be going there in May, shall we not? and it is nearly May now.”
“Yes, if you consider the middle of April to be nearly May,” remarked her husband, putting his hands behind his head and smiling at her with a sort of easy indulgence.
“No, that was a foolish thing to say. But surely it would not matter so very much if we did go in April?”
“I am afraid that it would.”
Horatia had been gripping the closed book with a curious intensity. “Why would it matter, Armand? I do want so much to be there.”
Armand shifted uneasily. “My dear, I am very sorry——”
“But, Armand, if you are really sorry surely you could arrange it? You see, it is the first thing I have ever asked of you.”
She looked so lovely and pleading that the young man was annoyed with destiny, for he would have liked to yield to her. But he had not the slightest intention of losing the way he had already made in his recovered friendship with Madame de Vigerie. He unclasped his hands, sat up, and said firmly, “One has one’s own engagements and plans, you know, chère amie; it is impossible to put them off and alter them without due cause. I am very sorry, as I said before, but I could not do it.”
Horatia leant forward, two bright spots in her cheeks. “Would it then be ‘without due cause’ if the reason you gave your friends was that I had most particularly asked you to do it?”
Armand raised his eyebrows. “My dear, I am afraid that is the last reason I could ever give them.”
It took a second or two for the stinging though unintentional brutality of this to penetrate, so composedly and gently did it slip out. All the more had it the accent of truth.... The brilliant, wandering colour went out of Horatia’s face; she raised one hand a little uncertainly, the book slipped from the other. Then she rose.
“I am much obliged to you for being so outspoken,” she said in a slow, rather bewildered voice. “I thin.... I think I rather admire it. It is better to know. You see, I did not really believe what the Duchesse said; now I do. Yes, it is better to know....” She ended vaguely, turned, and began to move towards the door of her boudoir.
“Know what?” asked Armand, uncomfortably conscious that he had struck much harder than he intended. “Horatia, do not go like that. I——”
Horatia did stop, and faced him. “She said that I should make you ridiculous.” The words seemed to be forced from her. Then, turning away, and in a very different tone, she added, “But that is impossible, is it not, when you take such good care of yourself!”
“Horatia, listen to me! Do not be so foolish!” cried Armand, springing after her, for she was at the door. But she went through, and he heard the key turn in the lock.
(3)
The Comtesse Armand de la Roche-Guyon had gathered in her boudoir all the relics that she cared to preserve of Horatia Grenville, and in the place of honour on the mantelpiece stood a silhouette of her father as a young man, gazing straight in front of him with the spirited yet stony gaze of its kind. And, having locked the door, Horatia went almost mechanically towards it, and flinging herself down in the chair, gave way to a tempest of tears—tears of rage, humiliation, and the bitterest disappointment.
While she had, unaided, put on this dress this afternoon, her hands shaking with excitement, she had acted over the scene. Armand would very naturally be surprised at her request, would raise objections perhaps, but in the end—or at the beginning, for the matter of that—he would ask her why she was so set on going to Kerfontaine. And then she would tell him her secret....
And this was the realisation of that dream, this was the shallow pool to which all the sea of rapture of the past had shrunk! “I love him—I have given him everything—I am to bear his child, and he thinks more of his friends’ laughter than of me....” No use to fight that tiny doubt that had been growing lately in her heart, that he did not love her as she loved him.... But what did that matter, doubt or certainty, for she did not love him any more. “I shall not tell him now,” was her thought, joined with that other, half vengeful, half wistful, “Ah, if he only knew!”
She looked up with swimming eyes at the silhouette on the mantelpiece. What was her father doing, poor darling, without her? Oh, if she could only have gone with her news to him! A passion of home-sickness came over her; she was indeed alone in a strange land. She had always known that she was setting out into exile, but by Armand’s side it could never have been real banishment. Now...
A quarter of an hour later she passed into her bedroom, and, without ringing for her maid, took off her dress, resolving that she would never wear it again, bathed her eyes, put on a négligé and returned to her boudoir. Then, with an heroic attempt at self-discipline, she selected a stiff book from the case and sat down to read it.
(4)
M. le Comte de la Roche-Guyon, when his wife’s boudoir door was shut in his face, gave a philosophical little shrug of his shoulders and turned away without more ado. He proceeded to his own apartment, made some changes in his attire, and taking up the book for Madame de Vigerie, set out forthwith to bear it to that lady, trusting that on his return the sky would have cleared.
He did not, however, reach her house in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, for under the chestnut trees in the Tuileries garden he happened upon the Vicomtesse herself, seated with two other ladies upon the straw-bottomed chairs that stood there. He sat down beside her, and, her companions being for the moment engrossed with their own conversation, was able to say to her unheard,
“I was coming to see you. I have got your book.”
“So soon?” said she. “You are a marvel; a thousand thanks!” And she held out her hand.
The young man shook his head, smiling. “I was coming to see you,” he repeated.
Madame de Vigerie smiled too. “Very well,” she said, “But not now, for I am not going home. Come some afternoon next week.”
Armand’s face fell a little. “That is very much deferred payment,” he observed. “And perhaps I may not be in Paris.”
“Indeed? And where are you going?”
“My wife is absolutely set on going to Brittany at once.”
“But why?”
“Heaven alone knows. I do not.”
The Vicomtesse considered a moment, the point of her parasol patterning the gravel. Then a sort of flash passed over her countenance, “You will go,” she predicted. “So had you not better give me the book now?”
Armand stared at her, nonplussed by the certainty of her tone and by the mischievous amusement in her face. “Mark my words,” she continued, “you will not be here next week—though I am quite aware that you were only using that possibility as a threat. Adieu; my friends, you see, are waiting for me. We shall see who is right. I shall be at St. Clair in June; I suppose I must resign myself to wait for the book till then.” And so she left him, outraged with the thought that she considered him the plaything of a wife’s idle wishes, and he returned, not too well pleased, to the Rue St. Dominique.
But no sooner had he set foot there than he received a message that the Duchesse desired to see him immediately. Up to the Dowager’s suite he then mounted, to find his venerable relative playing piquet with her dame de compagnie.
“Aha! here you are at last!” said the Duchesse, evidently in high good humour. “Masson, you can go. Well, my child, what have you to say for yourself?”
Was it possible—incredible though it seemed—that Horatia had been complaining to Madame de la Roche-Guyon? If so, the old lady had evidently not taken her part.
“What do you want me to say?” enquired the Comte, cautiously.
“What do I want you to say? Armand, you are unpayable!” And the Dowager went off into a scream of laughter, causing the little Italian greyhound to spring up shivering in his basket. “Sit down, and tell me why you rushed out of the house directly you had heard the news. I was waiting to send for you to congratulate you.”
“To congratulate me?... On what?” Enlightenment came in the midst of his wonder. “Juste ciel! So that was why——”
“You don’t mean to say that you really did not know—that she did not tell you just now?”
Armand sat down, feeling rather dizzy. “No, not a word. She only said that she wanted to go to Brittany at once, and I—— What a fool I was not to guess!”
“In that sentiment,” observed his grandmother, “I fully concur. And what did you say about Brittany?”
“I—well, I refused to go.”
The Duchesse appealed to the saints. “It is true, I have always known that men were idiots, but I did think that in you, child, resided what little sense there is in the family.... And you refused—you refused! You, to whom she is to give an heir in December, refused her first request!” More to the same effect was proceeding from the Dowager when her grandson, who had made no attempt to defend himself, suddenly got up.
“I have been worse than a fool, I have been a brute,” he said. He was rather white. “Forgive me if I go to her now.” And waiting neither for further admonitions nor even for permission he hurriedly kissed her hand and left the room.
So Horatia had not read more than four pages of “Locke on the Human Understanding” (which she was finding, if not consoling, at least astringent against tears) when she heard his knock. Upborne, probably, by the philosopher (for it was the last thing that she wanted to do), she rose, unlocked the door in silence, and returning to her place without so much as looking at the intruder, stood there, one hand on the marble mantelshelf.
But Armand too came without a word to her side, and just when—still not turning or looking at him—she imagined that he was going to speak, perhaps to try to take her in his arms, he dropped on one knee, and taking a fold of her négligé put it silently to his lips.