Chapter XXXI: Wax Flowers

“O merry was the lilting amang our ladies a’
They danc’d i’ the parlour, and sang in the ha’,
. . . . . . . .
But they canna dight their tears now, sae fast do they fa’.”
—_Lament for Lord Maxwell_.

“Poor Caroline!” said the Marquise, looking up at the portrait of her sister. “How she must have suffered!”

Lucienne, taken by surprise, very nearly ejaculated, “Why?” for, as far as she had been able to gather, Lady Ashley’s English life had been extremely happy. But, feeling that silence was more sympathetic, she said nothing.

“And yet,” pursued Madame de Château-Foix, “her exile was voluntary, whereas ours——” She flung out her hands expressively.

“Perhaps,” hazarded Lucienne, “we shall be able to go back sooner than we expect. Or perhaps . . . Gilbert will come here before very long.”

The Marquise shook her head. “Neither is at all probable. And really, if I continue to suffer from my digestion as I am doing at present, I doubt if he would recognise me should he come. I am getting positively haggard.” And she then spoke, with the candour permitted by her nation, of her stomach, and of the state to which English food and the methods of its preparation were reducing it. Under her handling the subject seemed as tragic as that of separation and exile—and perhaps it really was so.

But the not very refined cuisine of Ashley Court was the only feature in its hospitality open to criticism. The family had proved the kindest and most thoughtful of hosts. Amelia’s tact prevented the Marquise from feeling, as she might have done, the delicacy of her position in a household ruled by her young unmarried niece. Sir William kept open house, and all through the autumn, what with shooting parties, guests staying at the Court—of whom Madame Gaumont had been one—and occasional visits of ceremony from other _émigrés_ in the neighbourhood, dullness was successfully held at bay. And though with George Lucienne never attained any degree of intimacy, with Amelia she soon became fast friends. One bond which drew her to Miss Ashley was the fact that the English girl had known both Gilbert and Louis. Not that Lucienne wished to be always talking about the former, like Madame de Château-Foix, who was only really happy, so Amelia surmised, when speaking of her son. Indeed it had struck Amelia on one or two occasions that Lucienne might have displayed more interest than she did in some recital of her future mother-in-law’s. It never occurred to Miss Ashley that there was one person conversation about whom never failed to interest Mademoiselle d’Aucourt. But then there was never in the nature of things a great deal of talk about Louis de Saint-Ermay, who was merely a connection of the household. Lucienne, however, soon contrived that there should be more.

“And what did Louis do when he was over here?” she would ask, as she and Amelia walked alone about the lanes—a freedom so strange to the French girl—or sat in each other’s rooms at bedtime.

“Oh, he amused himself; he wore a different costume every day and rode about with George and Cousin Gilbert; he—— Really I can’t remember,” the unsuspecting Amelia would reply. “I was only sixteen, you know. I chiefly recollect how gay and amusing he was, and how good-looking. I believe I was rather in love with him.” Amelia’s own heart could best tell her why she soiled her lips with that last gratuitous lie.

Yet if Lucienne had tried she would have found that Gilbert’s doings were much better stored in Miss Ashley’s memory. But she never made the experiment. Instead, she would relate to Amelia, with all the carelessness of which she was mistress, anecdotic fragments relating to the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay. Had Amelia ever heard that he was considered the handsomest young man in the bodyguard; that when he was a boy in the royal pages the Queen had specially noticed him; that he had fought three duels before he was one-and-twenty; that for a wager he had once swum the whole length of the Grand Canal at Versailles, an exploit which had procured him a fortnight’s arrest? And sometimes, in return Amelia would repay herself for listening to these reminiscences by drawing out of Lucienne, half against her own will, details about Gilbert’s daily life—as far as Lucienne knew them.

Thus the autumn went by and winter approached, a season chiefly welcomed, so it seemed to the two _émigrées_, because it was that of the pursuit of the fox. The neighbouring squires who had shot Sir William’s coverts now pranced jovially round the house on their steeds, or consumed enormous quantities of cold beef and ale within its precincts, for Sir William was master of the local pack. Amelia’s betrothed, Mr Philip Harbenden, was his deputy, and it was from the conversation of these two gentlemen that the French ladies were able to rate at its true importance the national sport of their adoptive country.

A rider who often discovered that his way home after a run led him past the Court, a gentleman who found that the well-being of the kennels called for frequent visits of inspection—Mr Harry Trenchard—had carried on since the summer a very agreeable friendship with Mademoiselle d’Aucourt. It is true that at first she had not seemed to understand what he wanted, but, by the exercise of unsuspected tact and perseverance, he had gained her over to a considerable measure of it. Amelia was amused at his attentions, and indeed the two girls were apt to laugh a little over him. But in an odd way Lucienne was grateful to him for his frequent visits. He was another person to whom she could, if she wished, talk of Louis—though any possibility of his giving her the smallest detail of fresh information on that topic had long ago been exhausted. She found him more amusing than Mr Harbenden (who was, besides, occupied with Amelia), more sensible than Sir Francis Stansfield (a youth who, obviously smitten with her charms, was precluded from an intelligible expression of his sentiments by his lack of French and by a fashionable jargon of his own which Lucienne could not understand), less paternal than that distinguished traveller, agriculturist, and near neighbour, Mr Arthur Young of Bradfield Hall, who paid her rather charming compliments in her own tongue. George Ashley she placed in a category apart. She did not understand him, while aware, every time that she encountered his quiet, observant gaze, that he probably understood her only too well.

And Lucienne’s instinct was not at fault. The critical George was classifying his cousin’s betrothed, not, however, without error. In the summer he had not made up his mind; in the autumn he had ranked her as a flirt; during the winter he took back this accusation and was somewhat at a loss. It was plain to him that Lucienne did not care a pin for any of the young men with whom she seemed to enjoy laughing and jesting, and this not because she was heartless—rather the contrary. It seemed to George that she was using their admiration and their friendship as temporary distractions. Somebody had her heart; how else account for the fits of dejection and silence which had been gradually creeping upon her through the autumn? Well, of course, she was affianced yet separated indefinitely from her betrothed. It was quite natural to set down these accesses of depression to regret for him. Sir William did so, sometimes rallying his “niece” openly on the subject; Madame de Château-Foix probably took them as not improper tributes to her son’s attractions. Amelia’s opinion George had never asked, for, except as a student of human nature, he was not interested in Lucienne, and had no desire indirectly to learn her secret. But it seemed to him that there was more than the pain of parted love in her eyes; it appeared more like unhappy love. That look alone, surprised once or twice by him when she was off her guard, obtained for Lucienne her release from the class to which she had been assigned, and caused the young man to regard her with a more lively attention than he himself quite realised.

Had he known, Lucienne’s heartache was at once a simple and a complex suffering. It was simple, even commonplace, in that it arose from the fact that she was in love with a man whom she could not marry. But it was complicated by several other anguishes, such as the knowledge that she was deceiving the betrothed whom, had there not been that other, she fancied she could have loved so well, whom as it was she trusted and admired, and with whom, after his return from Brittany, she kept up a regular correspondence. Then there was the constant companionship with his mother, to whom also she was obliged to show a deceitful bearing, and who would always be talking of him, especially during that time of anxiety when they knew him to be in danger in Brittany. Last and sharpest of all, there was the wild, agonising regret and shame for her own conduct in that scene of farewell with Louis, for having at that supreme moment irretrievably cheapened herself in his eyes, so that, in all probability, she had slain his love for her—a passion which she had not enough altruism to wish dead. For Lucienne had gradually been building her lover a pedestal, whose base was his withstanding of her pleading in that hour. Since Saint Lucian’s Day their parts had been reversed, and it was Louis, not she, who stood for honour now. What must he have thought of her even at the time . . . and afterwards! So she tortured herself into thinking the absence of any letter or message from him a proof that he no longer cared for her—forgetting that the elevated rôle she had assigned him would have precluded him from writing in any case. And the more she exalted him and conceived him now cold to her, the more did her passion increase, so that he was always the one stable thought in her mind, the one figure always before her eyes—except when the presence of strangers distracted her. And the thought of Louis, barbed with this humiliating remorse, having become a veritable torture to her, she ended by craving for this distraction and welcoming it, when it came, with all her heart.

Meanwhile Christmas approached, with its promise of festivities, and the neighbourhood was not more astonished than was Miss Trenchard when Mr Harry Trenchard announced his intention of giving a ball on Christmas Eve. A bachelor, he had never before thus entered the lists. Miss Trenchard was not exactly displeased; the embers of ancient gaiety still smouldered in her respectable breast, and she thought it not unbecoming that Henry should exhibit the resources of his mansion to the public. But all her questions, discreet or indiscreet, failed to wrest from her nephew the motive of his sudden outburst of hospitality. At Ashley Court that motive was guessed at, though not formulated in speech.

It was already the 23rd of December, and an afternoon so dark that Amelia had abandoned her needlework, and, obedient to Lucienne’s request that lamps should not yet be called for, was sitting with her hands in her lap, a posture which had been her companion’s for some time.

“I wonder what they are doing just at this moment at Chantemerle,” came meditatively from Mademoiselle d’Aucourt through the firelit dusk.

“Do you know, Lucy,” said Amelia, “I was just wondering the same thing. Poor Cousin Gilbert is not, I fear, preparing as we are for festivities.”

“I had a letter from him two or three days ago,” remarked Lucienne rather listlessly. “There was not much news in it. He says that he does not know what is going to happen.”

“He is not alone there, is he?” enquired Amelia. “M. de Saint-Ermay is with him?”

“Yes,” answered Lucienne in a hard little voice. “At least I suppose so.” She bit her lips at the remembrance of how she had hastened through the letter for the mere mention of Louis’ name, and had found none. “And then there is always M. des Graves.”

“Ah, yes,” returned the English girl, “I am always meaning to ask you about M. des Graves, when I hear you and Aunt Felicity talking about him. What is he like?”

Lucienne sat up in her chair. “He is the best person in the world. He understands everybody. You can guess that when you know how fond two such different people as Gilbert and Louis are of him. And I too love him,” she added warmly.

“Whom does Miss Lucy love?” enquired a hearty a voice at the door. “I hope she was declaring her passion for her old uncle, but I am afraid it is improbable.”

“It was for some one older than you, mon oncle,” retorted Lucienne, as three male forms advanced into the twilight.

“Is that Mr Trenchard?” asked Amelia, getting up from her chair.

“It is,” replied that gentleman, bowing, while Sir William cried: “Why the deuce you girls sit in the dark like this I can’t conceive!”

“Well, you might guess why, papa, from what you overheard,” returned his daughter. “But now that you are here I will ring for lights.”

“Mr Trenchard has come,” announced the Squire, when the lamps were brought, “to ask you ladies a question. I don’t know what it is, except that it is vastly important. Is it a secret, Trenchard?”

“Not at all,” responded the young man. “I merely wished to enquire of Miss Ashley and Mademoiselle d’Aucourt the colour of the respective gowns with which they intend to dazzle our eyes to-morrow night, and whether——”

“Oh, by Gad!” interrupted Sir William, “to remain is indiscreet. Secrets of the toilet! I’m off. Come, George.”

“No,” said his son. “I am going to stay,” and he sauntered to a chair and sat down.

“Papa, do be quiet!” urged Amelia. “Do let us all be seated, and Mr Trenchard can deliver himself of his message in comfort.”

“I do not think,” put in George Ashley, unmoved, “that Trenchard has any business to ask that question. I stayed on purpose to remonstrate, and I suggest that it be not answered.”

“Wait till you hear why I asked it,” retorted the master of Dewlands. “Ladies, I was going very humbly to beg your permission to present you to-morrow with a few flowers, if there were any prospect of your honouring me by wearing them. And so the colours you would prefer . . .”

Amelia rose and swept him a curtsy. “You have the most charming ideas, sir! We are immensely obliged to you, Lucienne and I.”

“You will really condescend to wear them? Then what may I offer you?”

“Present Amelia with a nosegay of holly,” suggested her brother. “I can conceive its becoming her well.”

“But not my dress, thank you,” responded Miss Ashley. “Let us be serious, for this is a serious question.”

Trenchard went and bent over Lucienne. “And you, Mademoiselle?” he asked in a lower tone.

“I shall wear lilac, Monsieur,” answered the girl softly. “I am still in half-mourning for my mother, you know. If I were at home I should not perhaps be going to a ball. But here Madame permits me to go.”

“Indeed, I should hope so,” murmured the Englishman to himself. “Then, Mademoiselle, would you permit me to offer you a few violets?”

“Ah, no, Monsieur!” said Lucienne suddenly; “not violets!”

“You dislike violets?”

“I would rather not wear them,” said Lucienne.

“What, Lucy?” exclaimed Sir William, overhearing, where he stood leaning against the harpsichord, his hands in his pockets. “You dislike the violet—the modest violet, the flower so suitable to a young girl! Fie!”

“Oh no!” said Lucienne, confused. “I never said that I disliked them. I . . . I would rather not . . . I mean, if Mr Trenchard were so kind as to offer me anything else.”

“Aha!” exclaimed her host, chuckling. “Now I see the reason!” And approaching Lucienne he bent down and observed in a tone perfectly audible to the whole assembly: “A little sentimental reason connected with Gilbert, is it not, my dear? Quite right—quite right and proper!”

Lucienne flushed crimson, and precisely at that moment the Marquise entered the room.

“Amelia——” she began. “Oh, I beg your pardon! I did not know that you had visitors.”

“It is only Mr Trenchard, aunt,” said Amelia quickly, and George placed a chair for Madame de Château-Foix, with whose entrance a slight constraint appeared to have fallen upon the company. Sir William endeavoured to dissipate this by informing his sister-in-law of the object of Trenchard’s visit.

“Indeed!” said the Marquise, elevating her beautifully pencilled eyebrows, and looking at Trenchard where he stood by Lucienne. “Monsieur is really too kind.”

“But Lucy,” pursued Sir William, unheeding, “don’t want to wear violets.”

“Indeed, I should hope not!” exclaimed Madame de Château-Foix, with so much of meaning in her voice that Sir William was suddenly stricken silent.

“Perhaps, Madame,” said Trenchard with that boldness which cloaks timidity, “you would give us your assistance in the choice of suitable flowers.”

“I am afraid, Monsieur,” returned the elder lady with growing coldness, “that I cannot be of service in the matter. I do not consider it good taste to wear flowers of any description while in mourning—even in half-mourning—for a near relative.”

Lucienne looked down, and no one said anything.

“For myself,” pursued the Marquise, evidently gratified with the effect which she was producing, “I have never worn them since the death of my husband—except at my son’s request, on the occasion of his annual banquet to his tenants. And even then,” she added with increased dignity, “the flowers were not real.”

“Dear me, what were they, then?” enquired Sir William, impressed.

“Immortelles, perhaps,” irreverently murmured Trenchard to himself.

“Wax,” said the Marquise. And in the silence produced by this disclosure George remarked evenly:

“I doubt, aunt, if Mr Trenchard’s hothouses can put any such blossoms at his disposal.”

“No, egad!” ejaculated their guest, rather dismayed. “But surely, Madame——”

“No!” suddenly cried Lucienne, with colour in her cheeks and sparkling eyes, “Madame is perfectly right. I ought not to have thought of wearing flowers. Perhaps indeed it would be better if I did not go at all.”

Amelia, Trenchard, and Sir William cried out at this.

“No, no,” said the Marquise, coldly mistress of the situation; “that, I think, is an unnecessary deprivation. Lucienne shall go by all means, but I certainly think that she would do well to postpone the receiving and wearing of flowers till a later date.”

It was left to the judgment of her hearers to fix this epoch. Trenchard, mortified, bowed in silence, stealing a look at Lucienne. He had never admired her so much, for though her type, the clinging, most appealed to him, as to the majority of his sex, he liked on occasion what he considered a spice of the devil, and Mademoiselle d’Aucourt was plainly angry. But, the question of Amelia’s flowers having naturally lapsed, he shortly afterwards took his departure, invoking dubious blessings on the head of Madame de Château-Foix.

That lady, left alone with Lucienne, who was possibly too proud to flee, had produced some embroidery. From time to time, as the needle passed in and out under the lamp she threw a glance at the girl sitting by the fire, in the forlorn and dreamy attitude which was becoming habitual to her.

“I am sorry, my child,” she said at length, “to have been obliged to speak to you as I did about your flowers. Yet it was not the question of wearing flowers while still in half-mourning which distressed me—for, after all, there are many persons comme il faut who do so—but that you should permit yourself to receive them at all.”

“Madame,” responded Lucienne in a suffocated voice, without turning her head, “you made that perfectly plain.”

The Marquise laid down her embroidery. “And if I did, Lucienne, whose was the fault? I am astonished that a young girl of your birth and breeding should need a public reprimand to become acquainted with a matter so elementary. You, an affianced woman, to receive flowers from an unmarried man, who is already——”

Lucienne rose. “Who is already—what, Madame?”

“Doing his best to compromise you,” finished the Marquise unflinchingly.

Lucienne was so angry that she laughed. “And Amelia, your niece?” she asked. “Is it Mr Trenchard’s intention to compromise us both? For he offered her flowers also, and she, though she too is affianced, accepted them without hesitation.”

“Amelia,” retorted Madame de Château-Foix, “is English, and to English girls much is permitted—much, I must acknowledge, that seems strange to me. Sit down, my dear, and let us have this matter out. I have long intended to speak to you on the subject of Mr Trenchard, and since I stand to you in the place of your mother, you must allow me to do so. Lucienne, you are seeing a great deal too much of this young Englishman. He comes here day after day, he who before your arrival was scarcely more than an acquaintance of the household. You are always together; you permit yourself little secrets with him—ah, yes, I have noticed it—and it does not need very great perspicacity to guess for whom he is giving this ball to-morrow night.”

“You mean, Madame, that he is giving it for me?” enquired Lucienne. “If so, this is the first that I have heard of it. And to think that I could prevent it assumes on my part a degree of intimacy with Mr Trenchard of which I trust even you, Madame, will not accuse me.”

“I do not accuse you, my child, of anything more than thoughtlessness,” replied the Marquise gravely. “It is others who are apt to make accusations when they see you so listless when we are alone, so animated when we have company—provided the company include a young man or two, and especially if one of them be Mr Trenchard. No, Lucienne, I do not find your behaviour becoming, and I allow myself to speak thus frankly to you for your own sake, and a little, too, for Gilbert’s.”

“Madame,” returned Lucienne, shaking a trifle but very stately, “I thank you for your concern about my conduct, and I pray you to excuse me.” She crossed the room, and added at the door, in tones less assured: “I only know this, that if Gilbert were here, he would not permit even you to speak to me as you have done!”

Still less, when she was in the harbour of her own room, did Lucienne maintain her dignity of bearing. But the tears, when they came, were tears of rage. To accuse her of flirting with Trenchard! The preposterousness of the indictment stung her to a momentary vision of herself saying unanswerably to the Marquise: “If you only knew who has my heart, and will always have it!” . . . She hated Madame de Château-Foix, hated her!

But her hot anger, a little like a child’s, for all her self-control downstairs, began to sink, and in its place came the child’s instinctive desire to turn to some one for comfort. If that frail and beautiful mother, who had served to the girl as an object of admiration rather than of love, had still been in life, she would not, probably, have had her daughter’s confidence. But dead, dead a little more than a year, she was invested with qualities which had never been hers. And Lucienne wanted her more consciously than she had ever done before.

She had little craving for Madame Elisabeth. It was true that the incident which had caused the explosion had but a slight obvious connection with the hard trial through which the Princess had supported her, but in Lucienne’s mind it had merged into that source of her general unhappiness, from which in truth it was not deeply separated. And the Princess stood for that renunciation which she had never been able really and fully to make. Though in act she had done so, she had never been strong enough to renounce her lover in thought; these last months she had been farther than ever from such a consummation. She knew it, and she perhaps a little realised that it was Madame Elisabeth who, in elevating the matter to higher spheres, had caused her love for Louis to become not merely a conventional, but a moral and spiritual burden as well. So, in soul, she turned her face from her; the atmosphere her mistress breathed was too rarefied for consolation.

Yes, it was Louis himself that she wanted; Louis, whom she could have least of all—not because by her own will she had once kept him at bay, nor because the sea now tossed between them, but because, to her, that old Louis, with all his wilful charm, was gone, and in his place stood quite another person, dearer still, even more desirable, but infinitely above her—her lover once, her hero now, whom, were all that separated them to vanish, she could never have, for she was not worthy. . . . Yet, as she cast herself down by the bed in a passion of abasement, she called on his name with endearments, she evoked an echo of his voice, gay and caressing, saw the way he smiled at one with his eyes. . . . Lost—lost for ever, for he could not love her now!

Where was she to turn? She felt herself so desperate, so friendless. If Gilbert were here at this moment she felt that, in her extremity, she would tell even him. Why “even” indeed? He was like a rock. And though he were wild with anger he would be just, he would help her. . . . What folly! But . . . but there was some one else who gave that sensation of just dealing and stability. . . . Why had she not thought of him before? Would it be possible?

Slowly she got off her knees, poured out water and bathed her eyes, possessed by this new idea and reflecting on it. Then she went as slowly to her escritoire, unlocked it, sat down, and pulled out a bundle of new quills and several sheets of paper. At these she sat staring a long time. Suddenly she leant forward, and plunging her hand into a recess at the back of the escritoire, drew out a red morocco letter-case stamped with little gold pomegranates up the back, with tiny gold pinks at the corners. Several years ago—and quite without _arrière pensée_—Louis had given her this receptacle, which was divided within into compartments for the months. She opened it; but there was nothing there save, in the division consecrated to January, a few flattened, withered, and brittle dark objects, not very reminiscent of a handful of violets.

Lucienne put away the case, selected a quill, drew a sheet of paper towards her, and began.