Chapter XII (1)
Horatia had been so little in shops of late that it was quite a pleasure to find herself again in Herbault’s, whither, the day after this episode, she had gone on her afternoon drive. Smiling assistants hurried forward in the big mirrored room, and when they found that she only required a few yards of fine lace to match a pattern, which she drew from her reticule, they were just as eager to serve her as if she had been ordering one of their most expensive hats. Would Madame la Comtesse be seated, and they would see what could be done; was not the original lace from the border of a hat frilling which Madame had of them in the spring? It was, said Horatia, and she wanted some more if they still had it.
“Madame la Comtesse will permit me to observe that frillings round the face are out of date now,” said the assistant doubtfully. “As Madame sees, we are not using any at present.” She waved her hand at the rows of hats and bonnets perched on their stands.
Horatia smiled a little. “I want it for a different purpose—for a small cap,” she said. “I liked the pattern so much, and I thought that if it would not give you too much trouble to find it...”
Nothing was too much trouble to serve Madame, she was assured, and the young milliner fluttered away.
Horatia felt pleasantly languid, content to study the latest creations, and to look at those who were trying them on. Not far away a customer was viewing, with satisfaction, a béret of brilliant violet velvet, trimmed with acanthus green, and quite close to her, on her left, was a large gilt screen, behind which, to judge from the conversation which flowed over it, two ladies were trying on canezous, or blouses, and gossiping at the same time. Horatia heard that though some unnamed “she” passed for one of the best dressed women in Paris, the speaker, for her part, thought otherwise. The other lady laughed, and said, “Are you not prejudiced, ma chère, because she would not receive your cousin after his little affair—you know what I mean?”
The first lady was plainly roused at this. “It was abominable of her!” she exclaimed. “And poor Georges, he was terribly chagrined about it. Besides, what business has she to set herself up as so much better than her neighbours, when everybody knows that she is overfond of Florian?”
“I thought that was only gossip,” said the other.
“Gossip! when she sees him nearly every day! Why, everybody knows it. It began this summer when they were down in the country. I know that for a fact; and now, if you doubt it, come and stay in my appartement and you will see him go into her house every day as regular as clockwork, at hours when she receives no one else. I will wager you he is there now.”
“After all,” remarked the second lady thoughtfully, “it would be rather natural, when he was, as report says, so near marrying her. And certainly it would be difficult to be hardhearted where he is concerned. But it does not fall in with what we heard of his fondness for his wife. Why, they were always about together at one time!”
“Like Armand and me!” thought Horatia with a rather bitter amusement. “What an offence it must have been! I wonder who is this too-attractive ‘Florian.’” Here the milliner brought her a card of lace of the pattern required, but a little too wide, intimating, however, her willingness to go back and have another search for the narrower kind.
By the time that the girl had gone off again on her errand there were signs that the ladies on the other side of the screen were departing. “Yes, send me those two canezous, the pink and the white... I don’t think Herbault’s cut is as good as it used to be... Shall I drive you anywhere, Elise? You are leaving your reticule.—By the way, I forgot to tell you the cream of the business about Florian’s poor wife, as you call her, the Englishwoman. She and Madame de Vigerie were bosom friends at one time—isn’t it amusing?” They rustled away.
“Madame is ill!” said the young milliner anxiously. “Shall I get a glass of water—some eau-de-vie? If Madame would but sit down again!”
Horatia, as white as death, was standing up, supporting herself by the back of her chair. Seeing that she did not even appear to understand what was said to her, the girl hastily fetched an older assistant. Horatia’s maid was also summoned from her errands in another part of the shop, but by the time she arrived her mistress appeared to have recovered herself, and was able, in a few minutes, to return to her carriage.
Once there, deaf to the solicitous inquiries of Joséphine, and almost, indeed, ignorant of her own purpose, Horatia gave the order to drive to Madame de Vigerie’s house in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, She had no conscious thoughts during the short transit. There was no time for them—no room in her head, round which a piercing band seemed to be drawn, suffocating them. But when the carriage began to slacken something external to herself said:
“You cannot go in. Ask at the porter’s lodge if he is still there, and say you have come to drive him home. Then you will know!”
And she told the footman this. He disappeared under the archway. It might yet all be a horrible lie. The concierge would be astonished, would tell the man that M. de la Roche-Guyon never came there now.
The footman came back to the carriage and said respectfully:
“M. le Comte left about a quarter of an hour ago, Madame.”
“I am too late, then,” said Horatia quietly. “Home, please.”
(2)
Four or five dried specimens of rare seaweeds, neatly fastened with slips of paper to little cards, lay before the Marquis de la Roche-Guyon on his writing-table, and he was agreeably occupied in identifying them, for he was contemplating a monograph on the algæ of France. He would shortly have to ring for a light, but, like all absorbed persons, he preferred working under conditions which were momentarily becoming worse to getting up to the bell. There is always a spark of hope, never realised, that the decline of daylight will somehow be arrested.
However, though Emmanuel would not interrupt himself, he was interrupted, with the last seaweed under a magnifying glass, by a knock.
“Come in,” he called out, rather vexed. On removing his gaze from the brown fronds, he beheld his sister-in-law.
“O, come in, my dear sister,” he said, springing to his feet. “Permit me to clear you a chair. I fear there is not an empty one in the room. It is rather dark—I will ring for lights.”
“Please do not trouble,” returned Horatia. “I only wanted to ask you a trifling question.—How far is the château of Rosdael from Kerfontaine?”
Emmanuel, already on his way to the bell, stopped, looking surprised. “Rosdael? Do you mean where old M. des Charnières used to live?”
“Used to live!” repeated Horatia like a flash. “Why do you say ‘used to live’? Does he not live there now?”
“He died recently,” replied the Marquis, drifting back almost unconsciously to his writing-table, the bell still unrung. “What an extraordinary thing!” he continued with fresh interest, “that you should mention him, for I have just been buying some early botanical works from the sale of his library. They are somewhere here.” He stooped to one of the many piles of books on the floor.
Horatia sank on the nearest chair, book-laden as it was.
“What do you mean, Emmanuel, by ‘recently’?” she asked. “Last week—last month?”
The Marquis raised himself, looking thoughtful and a little puzzled. “I think it was in August, when I was with you at Kerfontaine, though I did not hear of it till afterwards, and I was so sorry, because if I had known I might have gone over and bought——”
“Are you sure it was August?” interrupted Horatia leaning forward.
“If you want to know the exact date,” said Emmanuel beginning to hunt about afresh, “I think I can find you the sale catalogue of his books. He had a wonderful collection, mostly inherited. I remember having seen him once. He was a great miser; nothing would induce him to pay his night’s lodging at a hotel, so he bought a house at every stage to Paris.”
“Yes, I have heard that story before,” said Horatia in a strange voice, which the Marquis was too busy to notice.
“Here it is,” he said triumphantly. “You see, he died on August the 12th.” And he handed her, over the writing-table, a thin ill-printed little pamphlet, the catalogue of the library of M. Adolphe des Charnières, chevalier de St. Louis, décedé le 12 Août 1831.
“I am sure those books of his are here somewhere,” he said, seeing the fixity with which his sister-in-law was staring at the catalogue. “I think they would interest you if I could only find them.” And he made another dive floorwards.
“Please do not trouble—another time...” came in a breathless voice from Horatia, and when Emmanuel turned, she had gone, taking the catalogue with her.
“Dear me,” thought the Marquis, “I must tell her that it is no use trying to buy any books from that list; they were all sold, every one.” And at last he rang for a light.
(3)
With the catalogue of M. des Charnières’ books still clutched tightly in her hands, Horatia was standing perfectly still in the middle of the half-furnished nursery. She did not know when Armand would return, nor how much more she would have of this sick agony. Why she had carried it to this place, where it seemed a thousand times more poignant, she did not know.
It was yesterday that she had sat here by the fire; yesterday that she had had a happy dream; yesterday that Armand, out of solicitude, had awakened her. On the table lay the pattern of the little cap for which she had been to get the lace; over the mantel-piece the Madonna gazed with absorbed, serene eyes at her Son....
Armand’s step at the door—already.
“They said you wanted to see me at once,” said he, coming briskly in. “I was sure I should find you here. But—whatever is the matter?”
Horatia looked at his handsome, alert face, and did not hasten to answer. Then she said, “I know now why Madame de Vigerie and I are never to meet!”
“But you have always known it!” exclaimed her husband, with every sign of amazement, “Politics——”
She checked him. “Don’t say it again—spare me that! Politics! And I have only to go into a milliner’s to hear your ‘politics’ discussed!”
A demeanour of kindly calm descended on Armand. “My dear, you ought not to be standing. If you will only sit down we will go into this. I must insist.” He pushed forward the big armchair from the fire, and, partly because she could indeed no longer stand, Horatia sank into it. “Now, tell me what you have been hearing in the milliner’s?”
“What is the use,” asked Horatia, “of being polite and considerate in private and humiliating me in public? I, your wife, have only to enter Herbault’s to hear the whole story of your connection with Madame de Vigerie, from its beginning in Brittany this summer, under my eyes—to hear how you go to see her every day, how... O, I don’t know how I bore it!” She buried her face in her shaking hands.
Armand bent over her. “For Heaven’s sake don’t agitate yourself so, Horatia! Everybody is gossipped about in Paris, you must know that, surely! I give you my word of honour that it is false. I did not think you were the sort of woman to listen to such things.”
“Nor did I think—once—that you were the sort of man to do them.”
“I have not,” said he steadily. “Madame de Vigerie is of a reputation as unsullied as you yourself.”
Horatia smiled very bitterly. “Do you usually leave her house as early as you did this afternoon?”
“Not being in the habit of going there regularly, I have naturally no ‘usual’ hour for leaving,” countered Armand.
“Ah, I forgot—you never go there now because of ‘politics’; it is too dangerous!”
He was not to be caught so. “I did not say that I never went,” he replied coolly. “I have been occasionally. Affairs demanded it. As a matter of fact I was there this afternoon.”
“I knew that,” said Horatia.
“I thought so,” said her husband to himself. “May I ask how you knew it?”
“After what those women said, I came to see.”
The young man shrugged his shoulders. “In spite of all my adjurations and your promise! Well, let us hope that nobody saw you!”
Horatia gave a little gasp of anger. “And what of the people who have seen you going there?”
“A man must take some risks,” replied the Comte indifferently. “I knew that there was a certain amount of danger, but I did not expect that you, of all people, would be the person to denounce me.”
His adroitness in constantly pushing her from her position was maddening. “O, if I were only a man!” she broke out. “Do you really think that I am still the dupe, as I have been so long, of your pitiful ‘politics’? It is all lies—lies everywhere; they choke me—lies here, lies in Brittany——did that woman ever really have any letters from the Duchesse de Berry—were not all your interviews with her just a cloak? Why, I could almost believe the Regent herself to be a lie, too—a lie incarnate, as you are!”
“Horatia, for God’s sake control yourself,” said Armand, rather anxiously. “You do not know what you are saying, and this agitation is very bad for you.”
“For the child, you mean! How can you pretend to care for me—except that falsehood comes so easily to you? She helps you, I suppose, that treacherous woman, to make up these plots for keeping me in the dark?”
Armand stiffened. “Please do not speak of Madame de Vigerie like that! You have no right—none whatever, on my soul.”
Horatia laughed. “It is your duty to champion her. Which of you invented the story about your visit to Rosdael last August?”
“Rosdael? I do not know what you mean,” said Armand; but he looked uneasy.
“Is it possible that you have forgotten the interesting account you gave me of your visit to old M. des Charnières, and how he received you, that day when I thought I had seen you riding near St. Clair, and was fool enough to believe you when you said you had not done so? Whichever of you invented that tale to gull me with blundered badly, did they not, when they arranged for you a political interview with a man who had been dead for nearly a week? You had better take this to your accomplice when next you ‘run the risk’ of seeing her!”
The young man mechanically took the catalogue which she held out to him, no doubt inwardly cursing the antiquarian tastes of his brother, and there was silence for a moment while he looked frowningly at its date.
“You cannot, I imagine,” pursued Horatia, “say anything to that. It was a pity that you did not know that he was dead; still, it was very unlikely that I should ever find out.”
Armand lifted his head. “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “I did know that M. des Charnières was dead. I will tell you exactly what happened. I started to ride to Rosdael, not knowing of his recent decease, when I had gone two or three miles I heard of it, and turned back. It was necessary, owing to this check to our plans, that I should see Madame de Vigerie at once. I told you the lie—for I admit that it was a lie... you will misunderstand me, I know—but as a precaution.”
“Precaution!” exclaimed Horatia. “Precaution against what?”
Armand made a gesture. “Ma chère, against the very attitude which you are now taking up. It seems it was not unneeded.”
There was a touch of faint derision and of triumph in his tone. How was it that he always got within her guard? Horatia’s head swam for a moment; it was like a duel, in which she knew her skill inferior.
“No, I do not understand you. How could I ever need to be told a lie, for any reason?”
“Well, because—— Did Eulalie de Beaulieu, when she was at Kerfontaine, ever put any ideas into your head about Madame de Vigerie and me?”
“Certainly not,” replied Horatia haughtily. “And for one thing I should not have listened to her.”
“No, you only listen to unknown scandalmongers in milliners’ shops, is it not?” riposted her husband like lightning. “It was against just such lying tongues as those to whom you apparently gave this easy credence that I was trying to protect Madame de Vigerie. But I was foolish in my choice of weapons. It was senseless of me to lie to you that day, and I sincerely ask your pardon.”
Horatia looked very fixedly at him. “A lie cannot be so easily wiped out,” she said. “You seem to hold them very lightly, so that I see you will think nothing of telling me others—have told them, doubtless, many, many times. Do not tell me another now, the greatest of all, for I shall not believe it.”
Armand drew himself up, the pattern of slandered honour.
“I cannot accuse myself of what I have not done,” he said with quiet dignity. “I admit that things look very black against me; but that is chiefly due to my own incredible folly, and if you were generous you would believe me when I swear to you, on the crucifix if you like—no, that is nothing to you—that there is not, and never has been, anything between me and Madame de Vigerie. If I cannot make you believe me I am sorry, for your sake as well as mine; but it is the truth, nevertheless.”
“The truth,” exclaimed Horatia, “when day after day you have gone on deceiving me, pretending that you never saw the Vicomtesse, pretending that I must not see her—I do not know why you did that, since you seem to have less sense of shame than I thought—pretending that you were so concerned for my comfort...”
She stopped abruptly, very white, with dilated eyes sind a hand at her heart.
“I begin to see,” she said in a strangled voice. “You wanted an heir. After that it did not matter. O, how I loathe myself....” And she began to sob, putting her hands wildly to her head. “Take the picture down... I don’t want it there... take the child away...” She struggled to get up, but as Armand, greatly alarmed, bent over her to help her she shrank back, trying to keep him off, and crying, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!... I hate you!... I hate your child! I hate it, I hate it!”
Armand had the sense to dash to the bell and to pull it furiously.
Maurice-Victor-Stanislas-Etienne-Marie-Charles de la Roche-Guyon was born next day, at half past eleven in the morning.