Chapter XI: “you Are Hiding Something From Me!”

A little pensive over lost glories, over periwig and falbala, over lovelock and Flanders point, there stood in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, in the once fashionable quarter of the Marais, the beautiful little Hôtel de la Séguinière, which a peer of France had built in the days of Louis XIII., a chancellor had inhabited under the Roi Soleil, and a favourite under Louis XV., and which, finally, a self-made banker had bought in 1780. All nymphs and garlands within, pilasters and garlands without, it was a house fit for a prince or a royal mistress, a house that smiled and sang, and into this house, in the year named above, the excellent Monsieur Gaumont, well known in the Rue Vivienne, had brought his equally excellent English wife. And the Hôtel de la Séguinière, so incongruous, had not affected either the simplicity of his manners or the goodness of his heart. He had not tried to live up to it; neither had he brought down its airy characteristics to his own bourgeois level. In these abstentions his sensible wife had aided him. Madame Gaumont, when she first entered this dwelling, though a bride, was already mature, and her husband was over fifty. If the good man sometimes found the decorations of his house a little trying, at least he never repented of his selection of a helpmate. During the ten years of his occupancy of the Hôtel, he sang the praises of the nation which had provided him with so good a wife, and at the end of that time he passed quietly out of the troubles of this world (exactly at the epoch when Mirabeau was proposing the creation of more assignats in order to meet the second financial crisis of 1790). M. Gaumont departed consoled with the knowledge that if any woman was able to take care of herself, under any circumstances, that woman was his wife. Nevertheless he had strongly urged her to return, as soon as might be, to her native land.

The widow, though greatly distressed at his death, took some comfort in the thought that she had protected him, at all events during the last decade of his life, from the numerous frauds and impostors who were for ever draining him of his substance. She was herself of a most charitable and kind disposition, but she possessed a certain shrewdness and a power of discrimination which in matters of charity had been lacking to her husband. For the first year of her widowhood she lived in great seclusion, but not in idleness, since she insisted upon concluding the banker's affairs, as far as possible, herself. It was at this time that her common-sense homely nature was extremely touched by a message of sympathy which she had received from Madame Elisabeth, with whom she had once had an audience on matters of charity. When, therefore, having yielded to the continual solicitations of her relatives in England to return, for a time at least, to her own country, she heard, by a mere coincidence, that the Princess was desirous of obtaining an escort thither for a young lady of the Court, she immediately offered her services.

It was with even more than her accustomed kindness and good-nature that Madame Gaumont greeted Lucienne on the afternoon that she bore her away from the Tuileries. Her appearance was in itself a consolation. Tall and stout, but not ungainly, she carried a small head upon massive shoulders, and her eyes twinkled with amusement at the smallest provocation. Her cheerful motherly humour at once understood and felt for the girl’s dejection without losing its slightly bracing temper. It would have been plain indeed to a less sympathetic eye that Lucienne was heart-broken at leaving her beloved mistress. In the coach by Madame Gaumont’s side, and during the first hour or so after her arrival at the Hôtel de la Séguinière, the last words of the Princess and her own resolutions to be brave had sustained her. But that evening, alone in the pretty pink and white boudoir which her hostess had assigned to her, it was different. All the cables which had held her little bark to its anchorage were parting one after the other; she felt herself alone on a hostile sea. It was not only the parting with Madame Elisabeth—it was not only shrinking from the future which unnerved her; it was terror of herself, for herself. And quite suddenly the idea came to her: why not end this eternal warfare, embrace the inevitable? Why not tell Gilbert that she wished to marry him now, before she went to England?

The thought was stunning, but it brought the relief of finality. And, after all, it was what she was going to do in the end. Would not Madame Elisabeth have approved of it? Why had she not done it before? Borne on the tide of impulse, she got up and looked round the unfamiliar room for writing materials. They were there all ready to her hand. She sat down at the escritoire, and seizing a sheet of paper wrote with shaking fingers the first words that occurred to her, folded the letter, sealed and addressed it. . . . Then she paused.

What did it mean, that square of paper lying in front of her? It meant exactly what it said to her, in her own handwriting—“Monsieur le Marquis de Château-Foix.” (Lucienne never could remember that one was not supposed to use titles any more.) It represented Gilbert. He would come at once, he would probably marry her to-morrow. To-morrow, then, she would be really his. It would be rest of a sort. She was far enough from feeling aversion to him. It would be the best solution. . . .

No, she was not made for so heroic a remedy!

“What shall I do—what shall I do?” she whispered desperately to herself, sitting in front of the letter and twisting her hands. The Caryatids of the fireplace could not advise her, nor that little marquise of the school of La Tour, who looked so rosily out of her tarnished frame over the mantelpiece. But a small sound spoke to her and decided her fate. Because it was a chilly evening Madame Gaumont had had a fire lit in the boudoir. And as Lucienne sat there, tossed on a thousand conflicting currents of thought, a piece of wood, burnt through, fell in with a gentle crash. Almost before she had realised it the girl had risen, crossed the room, flung the letter into the flames, and, returning to the escritoire, buried her face in her hands, drawing long breaths of relief. She had the sensation of having escaped a pursuer. . . .

In the few simple words of commendation that the Princess had spoken to her, Madame Gaumont had learnt that it was also the wish of Lucienne’s affianced husband, the Marquis de Château-Foix, that the girl should go to England. And as the banker’s widow dearly loved all circumstances attending wooings, betrothals, marriages, and the like, she looked forward to the arrival of the happy suitor with more pleasure, had she but known it, than the _future_ herself. But Lucienne made something of a fight for the situation next morning. The weary air of one who has not slept was attributed by her hostess, and with partial accuracy, to her grief at parting with Madame Elisabeth. Being conscious of this Lucienne was able to answer her sympathetic questions about Gilbert naturally enough. But the day dragged on, and still Gilbert did not come. How thankful she was that she had burnt her letter! She was now a prey to all the instincts of conventionality, which had never made themselves heard in her overstrung condition of the previous night. It was her dead mother’s wish which had delayed the marriage; how could she have dreamed of outraging it? And Gilbert—what would he have thought of a girl who offered herself in that fashion? At times she was almost cheerful at the thought of her escape, and, ironically enough, when Madame Gaumont was thinking complacently, “The poor child is reviving already at the prospect of seeing her betrothed,” Lucienne was congratulating herself that the day would see him, after all, in no closer relationship.

It was late in the afternoon before the expected visitor was announced to Madame Gaumont, where she sat in her partially dismantled boudoir doing accounts in preparation for her departure, and where Lucienne, her head on her hand, was gazing out of the window—“looking for her lover,” thought her hostess. But the lover, when he entered, was something of a surprise. He was not the handsome young nobleman whom she had imagined to herself. Gilbert’s serious manner and his rather severe style of dress usually gave him the appearance of an older man, and to-day, fresh from the scene of Louis’ arrest, he was more than usually grave. However, Madame Gaumont had hardly thrown down her pen and risen with delight to receive him before she decided that he had, after all, an air of distinction. Gilbert kissed her hand, and Lucienne’s.

“You will forgive the confusion in which you find us, Monsieur le Marquis, will you not?” asked the good lady cheerfully. “I need hardly apologise to you, since you know that I—we—I should say, are leaving on the day after to-morrow. It is a great pleasure to me to have the companionship of Mademoiselle d’Aucourt—though, to be sure, I am very sorry to be the instrument of taking her away from you! . . . And now,” she added, beaming, “since your time is so short, I will not take from you any of your precious moments. Au revoir, Monsieur.”

She got her bulk out of the door with such surprising alacrity that Gilbert had barely time to open it for her.

Lucienne, very pale in her white dress with its black ribbons, was standing, when he turned again, with her fingers resting on a little gilded table in the centre of the room. Her large dark eyes, which could be so full of laughter, were wide open and eager, and underneath them were black rings of fatigue and perhaps suffering, which Château-Foix had never seen there before. Again he felt the dizzy onslaught of that passion which had surprised him in the Tuileries. He fought it down; he dared not show it; he had frightened her once. He went up to her, and gently possessed himself of her hands instead.

“You are tired, my darling, and sad.”

She smiled a little—very bravely, he thought. “Not very tired. But sad, yes.”

“I wish it need not be; I wish it with all my heart,” he said earnestly. “It is desperately hard for both of us.” He raised her hands to his own shoulders and stood looking down at her. “I only send you away, my dearest, because it is the best for you. You know that, Lucienne, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said the girl dreamily, looking up at him and yet through him.

He tightened his grasp of her hands. “Lucienne, my heart, what is it? You are tired out, and I can’t take care of you. I have got to leave you to a stranger . . . I can't even send Louis with you.”

“I knew that Louis would not be able to leave the King,” said Lucienne, and she gently disengaged herself and sat down. “You should have believed me at the first, Gilbert.”

As he looked at her, sitting there pale but smiling, her spirit, as he conceived it, and her beauty so wrought upon Gilbert that his self-restraint began to give way again, and he walked hastily up and down the room. She was going over the sea, away from him, and he longed to take her back with him to Vendée, to clasp her in his arms and to shower kisses on her little pale face. There was no absolutely valid reason against his doing either of these things, except that the first was not in harmony with what he thought best for her, the second, he had learnt, was not to be yet.

As for Lucienne, she sat still with her eyes fixed almost mechanically upon her lover. She had never in her life seen him so moved, but she had passed beyond the region of surprise or even of acute sensation, and she thought, as far as she could think at all, of a burnt letter.

At last Gilbert came to a stand-still in front of her. “I wish you did not look so tired,” he said under his breath. Then he sat down by her and took her hand in both of his and went on speaking in a voice that showed the restraint which he was putting on himself. “My mother will soon go over to take care of you, I hope, Lucienne; and I am sure you will be happy in Suffolk. You will like my uncle; he is extremely kind, and so are my cousins, George and Amelia.”

Some answer was probably required of her, so she said: “It seems strange that you should have English cousins.”

The Marquis nodded, but was not diverted into enlarging on this relationship, so perhaps he had not expected a remark. He went on to talk a little of the journey, of English habits, of Suffolk, and she could not guess, except that his manner was somehow indefinably different, that, as he described Sir William Ashley’s avenue, he saw himself riding up it to claim her. Yet his thought was almost audible in his voice as he said: “I shall come over myself very soon. It may be that we shall have to be married in England, but you must try not to mind that.”

Lucienne's hand was her own again now, and she looked down at his ring as she twisted it on her finger. “I shall not mind,” she said at length.

“And until that time,” went on Gilbert in a low voice she had never heard before, “there will no day pass in which I shall not think of you and long for you.”

There had been growing in Lucienne’s heart, even in the midst of her apathy, a horrible fear lest, by reason of that very apathy (of which she was fully conscious) she might awaken in Gilbert some suspicion of the truth. She might be compromising Louis. For Louis’ sake—she could not have done it else—she was quickened to a great effort, and stretching out her hand, said with all the warmth of which she was capable, and with a smile to boot: “I shall be waiting for you when you come.”

Château-Foix put a long kiss on the little hand. “You are as brave as I knew you would be. God grant that day may not be far off.”

Rather than discuss that question and run the risk of failing in responsiveness, she said: “Is it true that you are going back to Chantemerle at once?”

“I am going back directly you are out of Paris,” answered Gilbert, looking at her and thinking how prettily the hair grew on her forehead.

“And Louis with you, I suppose?”

The question struck at him like the ache of a recurrent pain. He had actually forgotten for the moment the black cloud on his heart. He must have hesitated for the fraction of a second, for he heard Lucienne say quickly and almost reproachfully: “You are not going to leave him behind in Paris, surely, Gilbert? You know how reckless he is, and that if any one has influence with him it is you!”

A somewhat grim smile flickered over the Marquis’ face at this testimony. “Yes,” he said, trusting that this time he was not betraying hesitation, “Louis must come with me.” And, fearing further questions, he rose to take his leave. He stood towering up above Lucienne, and once again he held out his arms to her. And Lucienne got up and came to him, but she seemed to shrink into nothing in his embrace, and to try to hide her face from him. Then he attempted to comfort her, blaming himself for having made the parting harder for her.

“I must leave you now, dearest,” he said, gently releasing her, “but I shall try to see you again on Thursday, if only for a moment, to say good-bye.”

“You will bring Louis, too?” she asked, and she looked at him with a gaze there was no escaping.

“If I can,” said the Marquis.

Suddenly she started away from him, with a hand at her breast and her whole body quivering with life. “Why ‘if you can’? Why ‘if you can’?” she cried. “You are hiding something from me! He is—he is . . . O tell me!”

Château-Foix looked at the carpet. “I had not meant to tell you,” he answered gravely and reluctantly, “but perhaps you had better know. He was arrested this morning.”

He heard a sort of fluttering sigh, and raised his eyes in time to see the girl, like a broken lily, sway towards the sofa behind her. He took an instinctive step forward to catch her, but she had sunk backward among the rose-coloured cushions, so gently that it was hard to realise she had no volition. She had fainted.