Chapter VI (1)
“But... mille pardons... it is not very resembling—it is not much like a horse,” said M. le Comte de la Roche-Guyon a little doubtfully.
The wind of the Berkshire Downs blew through his dark hair as he stood, hat on hip, one hand at his chin, and looked down on the strange beast stretched at his feet on the chalky hillside turf.
“It is not,” confessed the Rector, holding on to his hat. “For one thing the tail seems longer than the legs, does it not? (The whole thing, I must tell you, is three hundred and seventy-four feet long, and covers an acre of ground.) And yet the form of the horse’s figure as represented on ancient British coins is known to be a debased copy of the elegant animals on the pieces struck by Philip of Macedon. And that is one reason why I take the Horse to be of far older origin than the victory of Ashdown in 871 which it is supposed to commemorate. I take it to be of British, not of Saxon, times.”
“Really!” murmured his audience.
“Yes,” said Mr. Grenville with growing impressiveness, “it is to me certain that the ceremonies connected with the quinquennial scouring of the Horse, of which I will tell you presently, are religious in origin.” And he expanded this theory.
If M. de la Roche-Guyon (as is highly probable) was supremely indifferent to date and origin, and unmoved by the thought of the ancient race to whom the Rector attributed the execution of the chalk steed, he concealed it well. Considering that he was quite ignorant of the pre-Conquest history of England his questions were remarkably intelligent, and Mr. Grenville thoroughly enjoyed his own exposition.
“Well, we must be going,” he said regretfully at last, and they went to the place where they had left their horses tethered a little lower down. The descent was steep and stony, and before they had gone very far the Frenchman pulled up with apologies; he feared that his horse, or rather Mr. Hungerford’s, had a stone in its shoe. Mr. Grenville whiled away the delay by speaking of the very fine neolithic celt which he had found at his favourite Cherbury, nor did it occur to him that the young man tinkering at his horse’s foot had not the remotest idea of what a celt might be. On the contrary, the Comte smiled very pleasantly as he remounted, and congratulated Mr. Grenville on possessing this object. The Rector agreed that he was lucky.
“It is fifteen years ago since I found it,” he mused, “but I remember my excitement as if it were yesterday. I must show it to you when we get back—for, of course, Hungerford understands that you are returning to luncheon with me?—Hold up, Robin! I should like also to show you my coins.”
M. de la Roche-Guyon, it appeared, asked nothing better, and they proceeded in the September sunshine. They were within a mile of Compton when the Rector suddenly checked his fat cob.
“I believe, M. le Comte, that your horse is losing a shoe. Hungerford’s man must be very careless, for I happen to know that the beast was shod only last week. Or perhaps it was that stone? Fortunately we are only a little way from home.”
Once again the young man dismounted. “It is true,” he said. “It must have been the stone. What a nuisance!” The Rector could not see him biting his lips to hide a smile, nor hear him mutter “Peste! It was not necessary, after all!”
“It does not in the least resemble the horse of M. de Lafayette,” he assured Horatia at luncheon, a meal which passed off with much gaiety, but at the conclusion of which the Rector spoke again of his coins and the famous celt. Horatia, though she could not bring herself to believe the vivacious young Frenchman really interested in the contents of Berkshire tumuli, had not the heart to try to prevent her father from bringing out his treasures, and she watched M. de la Roche-Guyon being borne off to the study with mingled amusement and compassion. It was his own fault after all; and she was sure that Papa could not keep him long—because he still had not finished that sermon.
Half an hour later, sitting with some embroidery on the lawn, she knew that the Rector must have returned to his task, for she beheld the Comte to issue alone from the house.
“M. le Recteur permits that I make my adieux,” he said as he came towards her. “Will Mademoiselle permit it also?”
Horatia laid down her work. “Pray do not hurry away, Monsieur. Papa has his sermon to finish, and I, as you see, have no serious occupation. Will you not sit down for a little?”
The young Frenchman complied readily enough. His glance went round the garden, over the phloxes and sunflowers, rested a moment on a book lying on the grass, and came back to Horatia. He gave a little, half-checked sigh.
“You cannot think, Mademoiselle,” he said after a moment’s silence, “how delightful it is for an exile like myself to be admitted again into the intimacy of home life. Not only is it beautiful and touching, but it is unexpected; for in France we are told that you have no life of the family to be compared with ours; and I have been used... in the past... to so much.”
His voice dropped, and he looked down.
“We think, in England, that we have much of it too,” said Horatia rather softly. “But—an exile—why do you call yourself that, Monsieur le Comte? Surely you are returning to France?”
The young man raised his eyes, blue and laughing no longer. “Ah, yes, Mademoiselle,” he said with meaning, “my body returns indeed, but my heart remains behind... at Lulworth, with my King, with my father who is privileged to be, for his sake, an exile in body as well. I go back to my home in Paris, where my father’s place will be for ever vacant; I go back to take up my life of yesterday, to meet my friends, to laugh, to talk, and... if Heaven grant it, to plot for Henry V. That is all I can do.... Yes, I go back, but I am no less an exile, though in my native land. Surely you, Mademoiselle, can understand that?”
Horatia bent her head over her embroidery. “Yes, I think I understand,” she said. But she was puzzled; the people she knew did not talk like this.
“Eh bien!” went on Armand de la Roche-Guyon more lightly, “it is Fate. Our house has served the Lilies for a thousand years, and I suppose the time has come to die with them. You can understand that too, you whose ancestors fought for the Stuarts.”
None of Miss Grenville’s ancestors—persons distinctly Hanoverian in sympathy—had ever supported that romantic cause, but for the moment, moved by the voice, she almost believed that they had.
“But Louis-Philippe is a Bourbon,” she suggested. “You would not——”
“Serve the son of Egalité!” exclaimed the Comte. “Serve the man who has usurped the throne of France! Sooner would I die!—— But I do not wish to talk of my affairs. Tell me of yourself, Mademoiselle, of your life here. It is vain that you try to disguise from me that you surpass other women in intellect and character as you surpass them—pardon me that I say it—in beauty. Chez nous, that superiority is recognised; but with you, is it not, you must hide it from people that you do not frighten them by your attainments. But we Frenchmen understand.”
His tone and manner were perfect; grave, respectful, sympathetic, quite without commonplace gallantry. Horatia was amazed at his penetration.
“You are quite right,” she said, laying down her work. “It is very ridiculous that my small accomplishments should have the effect of walling me off, as it were, from the rest of the world, but so it is. I am no cleverer than other girls, but, thanks to my kind father, I am better educated. You cannot imagine, M. le Comte, how that fact hampers me in ordinary life. When I stay with my cousins in Northamptonshire they think it a joke to introduce me as a ‘bluestocking,’ as one who knows Greek. Every man—every young man at least—that I meet is frightened of me, or pretends to be so, which is sillier still; every woman in her heart dislikes me. I suppose they think that I am ‘superior.’”
“Ah, the women, I can believe that,” said Armand de la Roche-Guyon quickly. “But the men, no, that I can never understand; no Frenchman could understand it.”
In a flash Horatia was aware how intimately she had been talking to him. But he went on:
“You should have been born a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle. In Paris you would occupy your proper place, reigning at once by beauty and by wit, as only our women do.”
Horatia coloured. “Do you then notice so much difference in England?” she asked, for the sake of saying something.
The young man cast up his eyes to heaven. “Mademoiselle, by the very disposition of the chairs in an English drawing-room after dinner one can see it! In a row on one side of the room are the ladies; in a row on the other the gentlemen, perhaps looking at them indeed, but more likely talking among themselves of hunting or of politics. Now with us how different! It is to the ladies that the hour of the drawing-room is consecrated; we pay them court, we cannot help it, it is in the blood with us. Besides, have they not great influence on the situation of a man of the world? But with you, suppose now that M. le mari is at his club, eating a dinner that lasts for hours, and that then he goes to the ballet at the Opera, and afterwards perhaps to supper, all this time his unfortunate spouse must shut her doors to visitors, and, for all amusement, may take a cup of tea tête-à-tête with his armchair—vous savez, c’est du barbarisme!”
He was quite excited, and it did not occur to Horatia, amused and rather pleased, to wonder whether his indignation were on behalf of the excluded visitor or the secluded lady.
“You seem to know a great deal about it,” she observed, smiling.
But M. de la Roche-Guyon here got up rather suddenly and said that he must be going. Horatia, could she have read his thoughts, might have reassured him, and told him that the sound he had heard was not the Rector opening the drawing-room window, with a view to sallying forth, but the garden gate, which was loose on the latch.
He had raised her hand in the graceful foreign fashion to his lips before she said, “But shall I not see you to-morrow?”
“To-morrow!” said he with enthusiasm. “Do you tell me that you, Mademoiselle, will be at the dinner-party of the Squire to which I am told I am bidden?”
“Yes,” said Miss Grenville. “And I shall be interested to observe whether, after dinner, you follow the English fashion or the French.”
“After what you have told me, is there need to ask?”
Horatia went into the house singing. Something shining and vital seemed to have brushed against her in passing to-day.
(2)
The impression which Miss Grenville gained of M. de la Roche-Guyon at the Squire’s dinner-party next day was that, though separated from her by the length of the table, many épergnes and piles of fruit, and though something monopolised by the ladies on either side of him, he was always looking in her direction if she happened to glance in his. It gave her a curious and entirely novel sensation.
In the drawing-room afterwards all the ladies were loud in his praises. “So charming, and with such courtly manners—so distinguished, and O, so handsome! How interesting, too, that he should be a friend of Mr. Hungerford’s—characters so totally unlike, and tastes too, one would imagine. But evidently the Count knows how to be all things to all men!”
Horatia, to whom this last remark was made, stiffened a little on Tristram’s behalf. “I think it was very good of Mr. Hungerford to ask him to stay with him,” she said, “for he is only an acquaintance. It is really M. de la Roche-Guyon’s brother whom Mr. Hungerford knows.”
When the gentlemen came in from the dining-room, rather earlier than they were expected, there was a knot of ladies in the centre of the room, of which, however, Horatia was not a part. Into this circle M. de la Roche-Guyon was immediately absorbed, and a buzz of laughter and conversation at once arose.
Tristram came over to Horatia smiling. “It’s hopeless to get La Roche-Guyon out, but no doubt he is enjoying himself. I do not think his brother would be quite so much at home.”
“Why?” asked Horatia with interest. “What is his brother like? Is he very different?”
“Quite,” responded Tristram laconically, sitting down beside her.
“He is older, is he not?”
“Yes, by nearly twenty years, I should think.”
“I can’t imagine this M. de la Roche-Guyon twenty years older.”
“You need not try. They are not in the least replicas of each other. Emmanuel de la Roche-Guyon was never like his brother, of that I am sure.”
“It is sad for him to be practically an exile,” observed Horatia.
Tristram merely looked at her, then at the laughing group in the middle of the room, and raised his eyebrows. Horatia smiled in spite of herself.
“I see what you mean. Well, I will bestow my sympathy better. It is sad for the Duke to be in exile at Lulworth, with Charles X.”
Tristram lowered his voice. “My dear Horatia, there are compensations even in banishment. Imagine living under the same roof with all the relatives you ever had—with, say, your great-grandmother, your grandmother, all your great-aunts, your brothers, your nephews.... That is what the French generally mean by family life—a kind of hotel, with the additional drawback of knowing intimately all the other occupants. They have not our idea of the home that grows up round two people.”
Once again Horatia was conscious of that new quality in Tristram’s voice, once again she could disregard it, for before she had time to make a reply of any sort she perceived that the Comte de la Roche-Guyon was free, and was coming towards them.
“Ah, here you are!” said Tristram, getting up. “Take my place, and talk to Miss Grenville for a little.” Going off, he crossed the room to speak to a neglected spinster in a corner.
M. de la Roche-Guyon sat down in his vacated place without more ado. He gave one glance round the room, and said, “Si nous causions un peu en français?”
His eyes, as dancing and daring as they had been sad yesterday, challenged her to more than conversation in a foreign tongue. And something in Horatia’s soul responded.
“Volontiers, Monsieur. What shall we talk about?”
The young man drew his chair a thought nearer. Conversation was rippling all around them; they were isolated in a sea of chatter.
“I will tell you a secret,” he said. “I can tell you in French, but you must promise me to forget it in English.”
“Very well, I promise.”
“You remember, Mademoiselle, that we were late yesterday, M. votre père and I, because M. Hungerford’s horse cast a shoe as we came back.”
Horatia nodded.
“And how you blamed the groom of M. Hungerford or the blacksmith? Eh bien, I alone was to blame!”
Miss Grenville opened astonished eyes. “I do not understand you, Monsieur. You did not shoe the horse; and you did not make the shoe come off on purpose.”
“Mais si, si, si!” reiterated the young Frenchman, his eyes sparkling. “Peccavi nimis, cogitatione, verbo, et opere. I loosened the nails before I left the hillside!”
“But why?”
“I am not sure that I dare tell you, after all! But you have promised me absolution. Eh bien, I wanted to make sure of... in other words, I thought I would force M. le Recteur to ask me to luncheon.... You are not annoyed?”
Certainly the emotion which shot through Miss Grenville, and which flew its flag in her cheeks was not annoyance. She did not know what it was.
“I should like to give M. Hungerford a golden horseshoe,” proceeded the Comte, watching her. “It is true that I need not have——”
“Hush!” said Horatia, “Miss Bailey is going to sing.”
In the centre of the room a very blonde lady in white was already displaying her arms to the harp, and her sister, similarly clad, shortly gave commands, in a rather shrill soprano, to light up the festal bower when the stars were gleaming deep, asserting that she had met the shock of the Paynim spears as the mountain meets the sun, but asseverating that naught to her were blood and tears, for her lovely bride was won.
Under cover of the applause which greeted this statement, Tristram made his way back to the couple.
“La Roche-Guyon, be prepared to emulate the songstress. Your fate will be upon you in a moment.”
“Misericorde!” exclaimed the young man, and at that moment, indeed, his hostess was seen to be bearing down upon him.
“M. le Comte, you will sing to us, will you not? Oh, I am sure you can sing without your music—you foreigners are so gifted! Do, pray, favour us!” And, other ladies joining in the request, M. le Comte, with none of the self-consciousness of an Englishman similarly placed, seated himself at the piano. “I shall sing to you, ladies,” he announced after a moment’s thought, “a little old song that was a favourite with Marie Antoinette.”
The fair listeners prepared to be affected, expecting regrets for Trianon or sighs from the Temple. But M. de la Roche-Guyon broke into the gallant impertinence of Joli Tambour, and very well he sang it.
So the assembly heard that there was once a drummer boy returning from the wars, from whom, as he passed under the palace window, the princess asked his rose, but that, when he demanded her hand in marriage, the king, her father, refused it, saying he was not rich enough. However, when Joli Tambour replied that he was “fils d’Angleterre,” with three ships upon the sea, one full of gold, one of precious stones, and the third to take his love a-sailing, the king said that he might have his daughter. But Joli Tambour refused her, for there were fairer in his own land:
“Dans mon pays, y’en a de plus jolies,
Dans mon pays, y’en a de plus jolies,
Et ran, tan, plan!”
“Rather a slap in the face!” laughed a jolly dowager to Horatia. “The young man evidently wishes to intimate that he is not for marrying any of our daughters.”
“Oh, surely he had no such motive!” returned Miss Grenville. “Besides——” she began, and stopped, for it had suddenly occurred to her that she did not really know whether he were married or not.
She had no further speech that evening with the singer, but he appeared, mysteriously and unnecessarily to hand her into the carriage when it came round to the steps, though the master of the house was there for that purpose, and she had her father’s assistance as well. But somehow, when it came to the point, it was the Frenchman who put her in.
“Thank you, thank you,” said the Rector, as he shut the door. “I hope we shall see you again soon.”
Armand de la Roche-Guyon bowed, and, stepping back into the circle of flickering light thrown downwards by the cressets at the foot of the steps, became for the second time that evening a disturbing picture.