Chapter XXIX: “les Veillées Du Château”

“Shall I not one day remember thy bower,
One day when all days are one day to me!
Thinking, ‘I stirred not and yet had the power!’
Yearning, ‘Ah God, if again it might be!’
Peace, peace! such a small lamp illumes, on this highway,
So dimly so few steps in front of my feet,—
Yet shows me that her way is parted from my way . . .
Out of sight, beyond light, at what goal may we meet?”
—D. G. ROSSETTI, _The Song of the Bower_.

“Jasmin,” said the Vicomte, looking at his retainer in the glass, “does this remind you of the last time you shaved me? If so, please don’t cut me as you did then!”

For the old valet, who had at last succeeded in making his way from Paris, and had arrived the evening before, was now, with joy, tucking the towel round his master’s neck.

“Oh, M. Louis, don’t speak of it!” he implored.

“Well, I was even worse shaved in La Force, if that is any consolation to you,” returned Louis teasingly. “And now, just as you are going to begin, don’t you almost expect to hear a knock at the door?”

“Mon Dieu, I hope not!” said Jasmin with fervour, and ere the words were out the shaving brush fell from his hand. “Mary Virgin!” he exclaimed, for some one had knocked at the bedroom door—the quick, decisive knock of a person who desired to enter at once.

Louis burst out laughing, for, as a matter of fact, his keener ears had heard and recognised the step. “Come in, Father,” he cried. You have just given Jasmin a horrible fright.”

But the sight of the priest’s face and of the open letter in his hand had its effect on the Vicomte also. He jumped up, wrenching away his towel. “Gilbert!” he exclaimed. “Not bad news?”

“No, thank God, good—on the whole,” answered M. des Graves. “Read it.”

“I take the earliest opportunity,” wrote the Marquis, “of letting you know that I am laid up in Brittany—at a place whose name I will not write lest my letter miscarry—with a broken leg. I am in good hands and well looked after, but some weeks must necessarily elapse before I can hope to travel. I regret this the more since I hear rumours of a rising in Deux-Sèvres, and am very anxious to learn that you are still free from molestation. You might, if you wished, write to me at the address of 6 Rue Haute-du-Château, Nantes; the letter would reach me in time. Meanwhile, though I am longing to be back, I must possess my soul in patience. I have seen ‘Monsieur Milet.’”

Louis drew a long breath of relief. “Well, that’s satisfactory as far as it goes,” he said, returning the letter. “Gilbert seems to be seeing life in Brittany. I wonder how he broke his leg. Imagine Monsieur le Marquis de Château-Foix climbing out of a window; for I suppose he was escaping, or something of the kind.”

“I believe,” said the Curé, smiling also, “that you wish you were ‘seeing life’ in Brittany too.”

“Not at all,” returned the Vicomte. “As a temporary country gentleman I am reaping a perfectly fresh harvest of experience here.” He suddenly dropped his bantering tone, and gripped the priest’s hands for a moment. “If you will go down, Father, I will be with you in a few minutes. Jasmin!” For Jasmin had discreetly vanished.

* * * * * *

A broken leg is not commonly a source of satisfaction to the friends of the sufferer, but it is undeniable that Gilbert’s injury did appear in something of this light to M. des Graves and to Louis. So September drew to a close in less agitating circumstances. It was true that any day might still see soldiers coming up the avenue to hunt for the proscribed priest—for whom they had already searched the three months’ empty _presbytère_—that he had to remain closely hidden, that he was absolutely at the mercy of the denunciation of malice or the indiscretion of devotion. Above all, there was the danger that the authorities should see fit to instal a “constitutional” in the cure—a move which would inevitably have led to the detection of M. des Graves. But the supply of _assermentés_ was fortunately running short, and Chantemerle, being a small village, was evidently to remain (theoretically) priestless. Louis, who really did serve in a measure as M. des Graves’ means of communication with his parish, was driven one day to suggest that he himself should seek orders from the constitutional Bishop of Luçon, and should settle at the _presbytère_. When Monseigneur de Mercy, the dispossessed prelate, came to his own again, he could declare the orders invalid, and the Vicomte could resume his status as a layman without prejudice.

Louis’ spirit of persiflage could not be imagined as wholly deserting him even in the article of death, but for some time now his gaiety had appeared to his companion to be a little flagging. The inaction was indeed fretting him horribly. He seemed to himself to have dropped out from the contest, he whose ardent royalism had already gone near to cost him his life. Gilbert and he appeared to have changed places; and what would he not give to join La Rouërie too! And when, at the end of August, came the news of Longwy, when, at the beginning of September, Verdun had opened its gates to Brunswick and the _émigrés_, he abandoned the attempt to conceal his impatience. The Princes and the exiles were once more on French soil, would soon be marching on Paris—and he was not with them. Again he accused himself of deserting his comrades, for D’Aubeville was in the invading ranks, the others still in the prisons whence he might have been helping to deliver them. . . . But that ideal at least could never have known realisation. Almost simultaneously with the news of Verdun came the tidings of the September massacres, a red flood which swept away De Périgny and all the rest with whom Louis had laughed and gamed and plotted. Jasmin, when he arrived, had furnished terrible details of gutters running ankle-deep in blood, of harpies dancing wild measures on the cart-loads of mutilated corpses. And in the smoke of Valmy, a little later, vanished the illusive hopes of the _émigrés_. That throw was played and lost. Yet to a man of Saint-Ermay’s temperament it was poor consolation to have staked nothing on it.

M. des Graves knew this, and sympathised with all his heart. And, as the monotonous days dragged on, he was touched, even to admiration, by the Vicomte’s unwearied good temper and courtesy towards himself. He gave him, in return, much of his time, and, having always tended to assume in the young man a side for which other people—including Louis himself—never gave him credit, he would often talk to him of subjects near his heart. Louis had a curious faculty of understanding.

But Louis himself had a subject not to be discussed with anybody. Never again, since that evening of fever and weakness, had he been tempted to speak of Lucienne to the priest. His secret and hers must remain inviolate. He thought of her constantly. She was dearer than ever now that the sea lay between them. He could see her in the English autumn; he could even see her in the future—the uncertain future—here at Chantemerle, its mistress, when he himself would be far away fighting under an alien flag. And in the past. . . . But to think of that was madness. He had held her in his arms and had let her go. The sting of the thought sent him out on the long lonely rides to which he was becoming more and more addicted—rides in which the peasants sometimes saw him galloping like one possessed, and which brought Saladin home in a state to horrify the stable-yard. For the old conflict had all to be fought out again between passion and honour, love and conscience, his duty and his desire.

And yet, though time and separation had fanned his love into a more ardent flame, would he have done differently if he had his chance again? He could not bring himself to say so. This seemed strange to him. He did not know that loss and sacrifice, besides intensifying, had purified the fire, and that the heavy price which he had paid to keep his shield in this one thing at least unstained, had come back to him in other ways.

Besides, it was not a purely abstract question. Nothing of the sort ever is. Sometimes Louis thought to himself that if he had the spirit of a man he would go over to England even now at the eleventh hour and claim her. What kept him back? Not, assuredly, the difficulty of getting out of the country. . . . No, it was the thought of Gilbert, of that undemonstrative and reliable kinsman, who held such odd social views, who was so lacking in geniality, who could be so actively unpleasant, whose high moral standard was quixotic and irritating, whom he heartily respected and for whose good opinion he was almost ashamed to find how much he cared. The discovery that he really loved his cousin Louis never consciously made.

M. des Graves, though he did not know the truth, saw quite well, in spite of Louis’ careful and elaborate defences, that he was engulfed in some mental turmoil. As the days went on the young man fell, despite himself, into long and most unusual silences. Were these things merely due to the enforced solitude of what Louis had himself termed his “retreat”? The priest did not think so.

One event only broke the monotony of the end of October. As Louis was standing one morning in the hall awaiting his horse, the Curé opened the library door and came out.

“Good-morning, my dear Louis,” he said. “I wanted to see you before you started, to tell you that, with your permission, I shall have a guest at dinner to-day.”

“I shall be delighted,” responded the young man, pulling on his gloves. “It is not, by any good chance, a lady—one of your parishioners, of course.”

“If you want to give a dinner-party a to the tenants’ wives,” replied M. des Graves imperturbably, “I do not see why you should deprive yourself of the pleasure. No, it is merely a priest who is coming to see me, and to whom I should be glad if you would extend your hospitality. He will be here this morning, and has come a long way—from Rome, in fact.”

Louis gave vent to a little whistle. “And is travelling about in France at this juncture? Rather a dangerous occupation. Bring him by all means. He will stay the night?”

M. des Graves replied that he was not sure, and Louis went down the steps to his impatient horse.

He rode far that morning, and had almost forgotten about the prospective guest, so that when he entered the dining-room he was surprised to see, standing by the window in converse with M. des Graves, a tall thin man in lay dress. Turning round, he revealed to Saint-Ermay’s view an emaciated face with a bird-like nose and tight, thin-lipped mouth.

“Louis,” said the Curé, “let me present you to Monsignor Giuseppe Cantagalli. Monsignore, M. le Vicomte de Saint-Ermay.”

The newcomer’s bow savoured as much of a court as Louis’ own. His peculiarly polished air was indeed the first thing to strike the young man as they sat at meat together; next, the resolution which lay coiled beneath it, like a spring of steel. The very way he carried his head, his neat, precise enunciation, were indications of it. Last of all the Vicomte noticed the extreme deference which he surprisingly paid to the Curé.

Monsignor Cantagalli did stay overnight, and at supper Louis got another impression of him. He had been talking easily and rather racily about the Curia, seeming to fling about great names in rather a careless fashion, but giving the listener no clue to the reason of his visit, which Louis, though he would have liked to know it, was much too well-bred to ask outright. The Pope’s patronage of the arts, his love of building, his munificence to the newly-founded Vatican museum next engaged his tongue, and it was plain that he himself appreciated to the full the advantages of living under a cultured Pontiff in an almost Renaissance Rome. Thence the talk had drifted on to the persecution of the Church in Vendée. Enquiring about the expatriated priests, Monsignor Cantagalli had been told the story of one, old and ill, who had been dragged, in a state unfit to travel, to Les Sables, and had there died from the effects of his journey.

Instead of showing pity or horror, the Italian broke into exclamations of envy. “_Dio mio_, how glorious! May I die the death of the righteous, and may my last end be like his!” he said, crossing himself. “And one has wondered whether there was a chance of martyrdom nowadays! Here in France you have it. How enormously favoured a country!”

Louis was tickled. “I think we might manage to do with a little less of the blessing in Vendée,” he observed. “But of course it is a good locality. Do you yearn to be a martyr, Monsignore? Personally I should prefer something a little more sensational than to die of overwalking myself.”

A veritable fire flashed in the priest’s eyes as he turned them on the flippant young man. Yet it was not the flame of indignation nor of reproof but of something else.

“It would be presumption, Monsieur,” was all he said; yet, as Louis remarked afterwards to M. des Graves, “he threw back his head as if he were already at the stake snuffing up the smoke.” The Vicomte added: “If the Monsignore makes a really determined effort to get martyred I think he has every chance of succeeding.” For Louis had not been greatly drawn to the visitor; and another cause of offence, though one which he naturally refrained from mentioning, was his suspicion that M. des Graves had taken advantage of the rare advent of a priest to be shriven, and for some reason the critic did not consider the newcomer worthy to confess a saint like M. des Graves.

One more surprise still Monsignor Cantagalli was to cause the young man before he departed. It was next morning, and Louis, after breakfasting in his room, had descended to the library. There was no one there, and it was not at once that he realised the presence of the two priests outside the open window, for he could not see them in the balcony. But suddenly he caught the words, “The Holy Father’s most express wish,” something in a very low voice from M. des Graves, and then the Monsignore’s clear, finished tones, with an additional ring of expostulation—“But, Eminence, surely—” And then they passed along the balcony out of hearing.

The Vicomte stood stupefied. He felt literally as though he were standing on his head. That title, which not long ago he himself had used in jest! No, it was impossible. His hearing had played him a trick. Granted that the Italian was an envoy charged with some message from the Curia—though that in itself seemed improbable—what he must have said was “His Eminence,” referring to some Cardinal or other of whom he had previously been speaking. But what a queer sensation the misapprehension had caused him, the listener!

He felt a delicacy, on this, of ever asking the priest why Monsignor Cantagalli had come to the château, and abstained from doing so. He had a secret; probably M. des Graves had his. And his own, with the arrival of another letter from Gilbert announcing his return in a week or two, began to press heavily on him again, so heavily that in the end, through no wish or knowledge of his own, it escaped his control.

It had been a long, dull day, during which depression had made inroads on Louis’ mind so noticeable that by the evening M. des Graves had found himself, most unusually, conducting almost a monologue, and at last the young man, on the plea of being tired, had betaken himself early to bed. The priest sat on by the fire reading. At eleven o’clock he rose to look for the second volume of his book, was unable to find it on the library shelves, and recollected that the Marquis had been reading it before he went to Paris. It was probably still in his room, and after a moment’s hesitation he lighted a candle and set forth in search of it. The few servants had gone to bed, and the wide staircase was black, ghostly, and silent as he ascended. He was still immersed in what he had been reading, as he gently opened the door of the Marquis’ empty room and entered.

But the room was not empty! There was a burnt-down fire on the hearth, a couple of candles on the table, and a coat and waistcoat flung upon a chair. For a moment M. des Graves was staggered, until he suddenly remembered having heard that the Vicomte was a temporary occupant of Gilbert’s apartment. Vexed at his intrusion he turned to go, hoping that he had not disturbed the sleeper, and speculating as to the incendiary possibilities of the two guttering candles. “I have a very good mind to blow them out,” he said to himself. “Louis will tell me that I am becoming an old maid, but it is really very careless of him. As he has not heard me he is obviously asleep and cannot need them.”

Having resolved on this precaution the priest advanced softly round the screen which cut off from his view the bed and a portion of the table. He did not get very far.

Louis was not in bed, nor was he asleep. He was sitting half dressed at the table, his face hidden in his arms, in an attitude whose significance there was no mistaking. . . . And as M. des Graves stood petrified he saw the young man’s shoulders move and his right hand tighten convulsively at the same instant round some unseen object which it held. The priest could not avoid knowing what it was, for between the fingers flowed the broad blue ribbon which commonly suspended on the wall the little miniature of Lucienne d’Aucourt.