Chapter XXVIII: Land of Exile

The decades of shearing and rolling undergone by the bowling-green had rendered it of a fabulous smoothness. Yet the bowl which a cunning hand had launched with confident care trickled slowly to rest a good half-inch from its goal.

“Well, I’m hanged!” remarked Sir William Ashley, raising himself from his stooping posture. “George, you scoundrel, you’ve beaten your father. Where’s the filial respect of the present generation, hey?”

Sir William was large and ruddy. As he now gazed jollily upon his victorious offspring his face had some kinship with the westering sun, which at the moment lighted his property, and glowed upon the dull-red brick of the Queen Anne house behind him, the trim box hedge, the very green grass, and upon his own blue coat and gilt buttons.

“I’ll have no more to do with you, George,” continued his parent. “Here come the ladies—not to congratulate you, but to console me, I hope. My dears, this villain has had the effrontery to win, after all.”

“I am sure, papa, that it is good for you,” responded the voice of Miss Amelia Ashley, as, dark, bright-eyed, and clad in a rose-sprigged muslin, she came through the opening in the yard-thick hedge. “And here is Lucienne thinks the same.”

“Do you, Miss Lucy?” asked the Squire, turning towards the white figure which followed the pink. “No; I am sure that pretty head of yours never harboured such an idea.”

“But no,” said Lucienne, smiling at him, in her slow, careful English, “I do not think so, for if it is good for you to lose, then is it perhaps bad for Monsieur Georges to win, and——”

“Hear that, George?” broke in Sir William, slapping on the shoulder the tall, silent young man who had, to Lucienne’s eyes, so extraordinary a look of his cousin Gilbert. “Lucy don’t wish you ill; she has a care for your character.”

“She is too kind,” said George. “Shall I get you chairs, Amelia?”

“No, thank you, brother,” replied Miss Ashley; “we will sit upon the seat. Go on with your game, and let papa beat you this time.” She unfolded and spread upon the stone of the bench an Indian shawl which she was carrying over her arm. “Now, Lucienne, sit down, and pray that papa may have better luck. . . . No, don’t allow Rover to put his paws on your gown. Rover! Down, sir! Lie there and be quiet.”

The setter subsided at their feet, and, to the accompaniment of criticism or applause from the two girls, Sir William and his son began a fresh game.

As she sat there looking at them the golden content of that English afternoon swam into Lucienne’s soul. It was so peaceful; they were so kind to her—Sir William, George—if only he had not reminded her oddly of the Marquis—and above all Amelia, with her brisk high spirits and her warm heart. The memory of those last racking days in Paris was beginning to grow a little less unbearable, or, rather, there were things here which made it possible for her to keep from thinking of them always—even little things such as those which soothed her now, the click of the bowls, the sun on the grass, Amelia’s pleasant chatter, the silky coat of the setter at her feet. Perhaps in time such influences would lay those two spectres of her own creating—her possible betrayal of Louis to Gilbert, her certain betrayal of herself to Louis.

Presently a servant came out and spoke to the master of the house, who, when the man retired, broke off his game and came over to the girls.

“Mr Harry Trenchard of Dewlands has just ridden over to see us, my dear,” he said to his daughter, pulling down his waistcoat. “I’ve told ’em to show him out here. Can’t think what he wants; we don’t often see him in these parts. He’ll make yet another beau for Miss Lucy here, eh?”

Lucienne, looking up without any particular enthusiasm, beheld, walking along an alley, an alert and personable young man in riding costume. He came up, was greeted by Sir William and his son, paid his respects to Amelia, and was presented to Mademoiselle d’Aucourt, at whom he looked with an interest which he was at little pains to hide.

“Well, and what wind blows you here, Trenchard?” asked Sir William bluntly.

“A wind from France,” replied Harry Trenchard, smiling, inspired perhaps to this unwonted diction by the remembrance of his mission.

“Oh, ay!” assented the Squire, after staring at him for a second, “I had forgot you’d been abroad. Admired the ladies of Paris and come to see my new French niece, perhaps?”

“Papa!” exclaimed Amelia reprovingly.

Sir William laughed gently. “Lucy don’t mind my jokes, I know,” he said, patting her arm.

And Lucienne, smiling and sketching a curtsy, said: “Mais non, Monsieur mon oncle.”

“And when I was in France,” said Trenchard, directing his remarks at no one in particular, but keeping the corner of his eye on Lucienne, “I met with a little adventure, which might have proved exceedingly unpleasant had it not been for the kind offices of two French gentlemen.”

“Oh, tell us the story, sir,” urged Amelia. “Come and sit down here beside us, and make the tale as long as possible, I beg of you!”

So Trenchard, nothing loth, seated himself with the two girls on one side of him and Sir William on the other. Many exclamations greeted him at the end of his recital.

“And did you never find out who the gentlemen were?” asked Amelia, for the narrator had cunningly concealed the names of his acquaintances. “Perhaps they are in England now; so many aristocrats are over here.”

“No, they were going back to Poitou. And what would you say, Miss Ashley, if I told you that they—or at least one of them—was a very near relative of your own? . . . Yes, Sir William, it was your nephew, M. de Château-Foix, and his cousin—not so nearly connected with you, I suppose—the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay. It was he who pulled me out of bed.” And he surveyed with pride the profound sensation he had produced.

“Well, I’m . . . astounded!” said Sir William.

“Well done, Cousin Gilbert!” murmured George, where he leant over the back of the seat. And the beautiful French girl, on whom Trenchard’s gaze was fixed—she had changed colour, was staring at him with wide eyes and parted lips, had half risen and sat down again.

Trenchard got up. “I am proud, Sir William,” he said handsomely, “to be in debt to connections of yours. And as a slight token of my gratitude to Monsieur le Marquis I undertook to be the bearer of a letter from him.” His hand went to a pocket. “When we parted he gave me this—for Mademoiselle Lucienne d’Aucourt.”

He held it out, with a deep bow, towards the young lady in question, where she still sat with Amelia on the Indian shawl.

And would you not have thought, he reflected to himself afterwards, that a girl would snatch rosily at such a letter? But not a bit. All the colour had ebbed from the face of Monsieur le Marquis’ betrothed as she put out a trembling and by no means an eager hand. But Amelia instantly intervened to shield her discomposure.

“Go into the arbour, dear, and read your letter there,” she suggested kindly. And Lucienne, murmuring she knew not what, got up and left them.

They all looked after her as her white dress vanished through the hedge.

“Poor child!” said Sir William. “It is terrible for her, this separation from Gilbert. This is the first letter she has had from him. A good fellow, didn’t you think, Trenchard?”

“Excellent, sir, I am sure, if a trifle serious for his age—you’ll forgive my criticising a kinsman of yours, I hope.”

“That seriousness is just what I liked in him,” replied the Squire. “He might have been an Englishman. None of your confounded French airs and graces, like that young scamp of a cousin of his.”

“Why, papa, I am sure,” protested Amelia, “you yourself spoilt Louis de Saint-Ermay when he was over here!”

“Well, well,” said her parent, not denying the charge, “I daresay I did. I am afraid that young reprobate always has been spoilt, and always will be.”

But Trenchard had a sudden vision of the spoilt child of fortune with his fettered arm and his set, smiling mouth as they jogged along the interminable road to Candé. “Still, do you know,” he said frankly, “I was very much taken with him. He was hurt, you know, but he—— Ah, here is Mademoiselle coming back.”

Amelia got up to meet her guest. Trenchard reflected that the girl had not spent much time over her lover’s letter. On the other hand, the missive had undoubtedly had a salutary effect upon her appearance; she looked much happier than she had done when she took it from him. He supposed—and had a glow of self-congratulation on his perspicacity—that she had hurried back in order to hear from him further details about her betrothed. Well, to furnish her with such would be a pleasant enough occupation.

“Mademoiselle will no doubt want to hear more about Monsieur le Marquis,” he said in pursuance of this idea. “Anything further which I can tell her is very much at her service.”

“Thank you, Monsieur,” said Lucienne shyly; “but I shall be tiring your patience, and, besides, we had your interesting story. . . . Still, there are one or two questions. . . .” There were a hundred; would she have time to ask them? Surely, since one of her ghosts was laid, laid by the letter. Gilbert had not interpreted her swoon as she had feared; had he done so, he could never have written like that. The secret was still safe, thank God!

. . . Was it she, afterwards wondered Trenchard, who had withdrawn him from the rest, or had he led her apart? Perhaps it was the others who had melted tactfully away. At any rate, he soon found himself, by no means to his displeasure, pacing up and down the bowling-green alone with this beautiful creature in her clinging white and her large black hat.

“And now I want to hear about M. de Saint-Ermay,” she said in a light tone, after a few questions duly answered about her betrothed. “I know him very well. He was not badly hurt, I hope?”

And Trenchard had no idea that, under the filmy scarf which floated about her in so graceful a manner, her hands were gripped together till the nails dinted the flesh.

“No, I suppose not,” he answered a little doubtfully; “otherwise he could not have ridden so far. But perhaps that was his pluck. He looked deuced bad at one time.”

The girl put up a hand to the ribbon at her throat, and he wondered why women could not leave their fallals alone. The brooch on the velvet was not unfastened.

“I didn’t quite understand how he got this stab I spoke of,” continued Trenchard after this reflection. “It was in some brawl at an inn, I believe. Does not M. de Château-Foix mention it? Oh, I beg your pardon!” he interrupted himself in confusion; “I had no intention of asking what was in your letter.”

“He doesn’t say anything about it,” said the girl, and her voice, so light a moment ago, was charged with emotion of some sort. “And I wondered . . . I mean I thought . . . you see I have known M. de Saint-Ermay for a great many years . . .”

Her distress was patent now, and a momentary speculation shot through Trenchard’s mind. He suddenly felt paternal.

“I quite understand your very natural anxiety, Mademoiselle,” he said kindly. “Shall we sit down for a moment, and I will tell you everything that I can remember about the Vicomte.”

“Oh,” she said gratefully, “would you?” Then, with an attempt at her former light manner, and the ghost of a laugh: “It would be a great weight off my mind, I assure you!”

“Ah, by the way, Mademoiselle,” said the Englishman, suddenly stopping, “M. de Saint-Ermay gave me a message for you which, ’pon my soul, I was almost forgetting.”

And now he saw something leap up in those violet eyes. Apologetically, almost shamefacedly he said: “I am afraid that it was not much of a message. Monsieur le Vicomte said that he hoped you were improving in your English.”

Lucienne drew a little sharp breath and looked away. The corner of her mouth quivered for a second, then she turned and faced him, and said without apparent effort: “You will have to be the judge of that, Monsieur. . . . Shall we sit down over there?”

So they sat down at the farther end of the bowling-green, on a rustic seat by a horrible Georgian nymph, who, fortunately, was fast falling to decay. The others had entirely disappeared, but their voices could be distinguished from a neighbouring lawn. In the hearing, therefore, of the nymph alone, Mr Trenchard gave his fair listener a most full, true, and particular account of every hour that he had spent in the company of the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay, beginning with the episode of the horse-holding and ending with the farewell at Candé. When he ended, saying, “That is really all that I can remember about M. de Saint-Ermay—except that I took an uncommon fancy to him,” how was he to know whether the glance of gratitude which he then received was for the trouble which he had taken or for that last remark alone? At any rate, he had a most agreeable feeling of confederacy with its giver; so that when, on departing, he was warmly urged by Sir William and his daughter to come again, the probable arrival of the Marquise de Château-Foix being held out as an inducement, he replied no less warmly that he would do so. The pressure of Lucienne’s little fingers was still lingering in his as he rode away; for she had already learnt the English salutation, though he had supplemented it, as was fitting in a traveller, by the French.

“They have a way with them, a style, a something, these French girls,” he reflected. “Now look at Louisa Oxenham, though she’ll make a treasure of a wife.” Would this commendation be merited by Mademoiselle d’Aucourt, as the spouse of M. de Château-Foix? He wondered. And as he turned in at his own gates, a half-hour later, he said abruptly: “God bless my soul! If I were a girl, I know which of those two men I should have chosen. I believe she regrets it! I’m sure she does! And that good-looking cousin . . . has he been playing fast and loose with her? I’d give something to know.”

The same evening Mr Trenchard enormously startled, dismayed, and shocked the venerable relative who kept house for him by saying suddenly, as he stood in his drawing-room, and looked upon its brood of chairs, all clad in the most hideous chintzes procurable: “If a Frenchwoman had this room, now, aunt, she’d make something very different of it!”

“Henry!” ejaculated the poor lady, absolutely petrified with horror. And before she slept that night she penned a long and tremulous letter to her brother the Admiral, detailing her conviction that Henry, while on his recent tour in France, had fallen into the clutches of one of those _dreadful_, _designing_, and _immoral_ women over there, and _probably a married one_. To the end of her days she never quite got rid of that most baseless and unworthy suspicion.

It is to be noticed that Mr Trenchard had not selected Miss Amelia Ashley, the nearest to his hand, for the typical Englishwoman of his unflattering comparison. He had not forgotten that Amelia was half French. Yet many people were disposed to do so, though over the drawing-room mantelpiece at Ashley Court hung the grave, gentle face of Caroline de Sesmaisons, whom an impetuous Englishman had met in Paris in his _Wanderjahr_, had wooed and won in forty-eight hours (defeating her parents in an ensuing three months of hard fighting), and had carried off, still knowing nothing but her native tongue, to Suffolk, where she had lived, gracious and idolised, through a short but singularly happy married life. Not even the fact, abhorrent to Sir William, that his children must needs be brought up as Roman Catholics, had disturbed his felicity. He had faced this contingency when he married Mademoiselle de Sesmaisons, and Lady Ashley never had cause to complain of breach of faith. She herself repaired to her duties at Fountainhall Manor, the home of one of the very few old Romanist families in East Anglia, which was visited at intervals by a mission priest. The crux had come when she died. But Sir William was a man of his word, and her memory was too dear to him for outrage. The children (George was seven, Amelia three years younger) should continue to be brought up as Papists. But after two or three years (and it was impossible for Sir William not to regard it as the direct interposition of Providence) Fountainhall Manor, on the death of its octogenarian owner, passed into other hands; there was no one to instruct the children in their mother’s faith, and no chapel at which they could attend its services. So they accompanied their father to the parish church, little brands plucked from the burning, and sat very sedately under the Rector, lifting their infant voices in unison with Sir William’s, though not always with the choir.

When George came of age his father, with great solemnity and a dreadful sinking of the heart, asked him whether he would be a Romanist or an Anglican. The youth not unnaturally chose the Established Church, and Amelia, when her turn came, made the same decision. So all was comfortably for the best, and the detested name of “Rome” had no more need to be mentioned within the walls of Ashley Court.

Neither their mother’s creed, then, nor any undue trace of her blood, had clung to George and Amelia. The former was a particularly silent and undemonstrative young man, and Amelia, under her more Gallic exterior, had the same equable temperament. Kind, sensible, practical, spirited, she had ruled her father’s house since she could remember, and would shortly rule Mr Philip Harbenden’s and make him an excellent wife, though she was very little in love with him. He loved her and required taking care of, which was sufficient. Eight years ago her heart had gone out to the taciturn French cousin, who was already affianced and whom she had never seen again. It had never wholly returned to her. Nobody suspected this, and she never intended that they should, having put the episode behind her, in all the maturity of her four-and-twenty years, as a foible of her girlhood.

* * * * * *

The letter which Trenchard bore to Ashley Court, although he had delivered it immediately upon his arrival, preceded by but a few days another from the same writer, dated this time from Chantemerle, and announcing to Sir William the approaching advent of his sister-in-law. Two days later that worthy man, who had not expected her so soon, was gone to meet her on her landing and to bring her to Suffolk.

On the day of the Marquise’s arrival Lucienne, restless and rather nervous, was trying to read _Sir Charles Grandison_ in her own room, when she heard, from the front of the house, a faint crunching of wheels on gravel. She abandoned Harriet Byron in the midst of her abduction, looked in the glass to see that her hair was in order, and went slowly downstairs.

In the hall a group composed of Sir William, Amelia, and George, already surrounded the Marquise, very stately in a full cloak of dull purple silk and a hood. At a little distance stood her maid. Sir William’s setter leapt about the party, and his master’s voice, as usual, dominated the rest.

“’Pon my soul, Madame, ’tis no use denying it—you must be tired. Down, Rover, down; confound the dog! Take him away, George, for God’s sake! Amelia, your aunt’s room is ready, ain’t it? Come, my lady, Amelia will show you the way. But where is Miss Lucy?”

“Here, mon oncle,” said Lucienne, coming forward, and the group opened for her.

The Marquise threw back her hood. “My child!” she exclaimed, as she folded her future daughter-in-law in an embrace at once warm and dignified. Then she looked at her kindly, said that she hoped the English air would soon put roses in her cheeks, and was borne off by Amelia to her room.

She supped in that apartment, and afterwards Lucienne, at her request, went up to see her. She found the Marquise seated in an arm-chair, all traces of travel effaced, her plentiful white hair arranged to perfection. Her maid was unpacking her trunks.

“Come and sit by me here, dear child,” she said, indicating a stool at her feet. “That will do for the present, Thérèse. Now, Lucienne, tell me about yourself. You look a little paler than I could wish, but that is natural, after what you have been through. I hope that in time you will forget it. You are happy here, I trust, my dear?”

“Quite happy, Madame, thank you,” responded Lucienne, seating herself on the stool, and thinking that if the Marquise was referring to the 20th of June—and she could have meant nothing else—she had almost forgotten it already. “They are kindness itself—Sir William, and M. Georges, and Mademoiselle Amélie.”

“I am glad to hear you call my brother-in-law uncle,” remarked Madame de Château-Foix in a tone of approbation. “I hope the relationship will soon be a fact. And you have quite won his heart, Lucienne. Gilbert would be very pleased.”

At this juncture Mademoiselle d’Aucourt begged for all the news of Chantemerle, intimating that she had heard a good deal of Gilbert’s journey from Paris from the lips of Mr Trenchard. The Marquise complied copiously with this request.

“But,” she said, ending her account of the journey to Nantes with her son, and her embarkation, “you have forgotten to ask after our poor Louis. That is not kind of you, petite, after what you owe him.”

“What I owe him?” The girl turned up to the Marquise a very discomposed countenance.

Madame de Château-Foix gave a little amused laugh. “Don’t look so horrified, child. I am sure he was glad to do it. The English gentleman told you, I daresay, that he had met with an injury—Louis, I mean?”

“Yes,” said Lucienne breathlessly.

“Perhaps he did not tell you that—though Louis, of course, denies it—he saved Gilbert’s life in the affray they had at that place whose name I cannot remember. It seems that one of the dreadful men there had a knife which he would have plunged into Gilbert’s back if Louis had not thrown himself between just in time. . . . My dear child, what is the matter? The knife did _not_ go into Gilbert’s back, though, of course, it is very terrible to think that it might have done so.”

But Lucienne, with her face hidden in the Marquise’s lap, made no answer. It was not Gilbert’s peril which had struck her speechless.