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....”