Chapter XLIV: The Second Christmas

“Mon fiancé dort sous la noire terre,
Dans la froide tombe il rêve de nous,
Laissez-moi pleurer, ma peine est amère,
Laissez-moi gémir et veiller, ma mère!
Les pleurs me sont doux.”
—LECONTE DE LISLE, _Christine_.

The two women in their black draperies came up the wide staircase together in silence, but at the top the elder paused and put her hand on the other’s arm.

“Dear child, I think you are too tired to read to me this evening.”

Lucienne shook her head. “No, indeed not, Madame. I love to do it; please let me come at the usual time.”

And Madame de Château-Foix, after she had given her a kiss, watched her for a moment as she went along the landing, before she too entered her own room.

Only the firelight illumined it, for, though but five o’clock, it was quite dark outside. The Marquise lit the candles on her escritoire, unlocked a drawer and, taking out a little packet of papers tied with a black ribbon, laid them in front of her on the rosewood and sat back in her chair, her hands in her lap.

There are some letters which a woman knows by heart, and which she yet reads every day. Of such was the letter in the bundle before Madame de Château-Foix; she had read it daily for the last three and a half months. But this evening she was slow to spread it out as heretofore, and she knew whence proceeded this hesitation. That letter—Gilbert’s last, written months before his death, found on him and sent to her by M. des Graves—that letter bade her do a thing which she had not yet been able to bring herself to do. And this disobeyed request, this injunction ever speaking from the pages of the last memorial she had of her dead son, was a living reproach to the poor woman, and gave a sharper sting to her agonies of grief. Yet she had instinctively fought against the command. She had told herself that Gilbert was quixotic, like his father—and like M. des Graves. But she knew that she would yield in the end, and now, having made up her mind that what he asked should be done by Christmas Day, she had but a matter of thirty-six hours or so left. And surely she had conquered her repugnance at last.

She untied the bundle and spread out the first letter—not very long, worn and crumpled, strongly creased at the folds and marked in the middle with a long brown stain. The other two of the trinity, treasured but less sacred, she knew by heart also—M. des Graves’ long compassionate epistle, and Louis’ heart-broken scrawl. And she read the first once more, with the tears gathering in her eyes. “O Gilbert, Gilbert, I will do it! Oh, forgive me that I have been so long! But it was hard!” The tears trickled through her ringless fingers, and one fell quietly on the ink of the letter and blurred it.

But when Lucienne tapped at the door some twenty minutes later, it was a gentle and composed voice without trace of tears which bade her enter. The Marquise was not lying on the sofa as was her habit at this hour; she was sitting in a great chair by the fire.

“Come and sit by me here, petite,” she said. “We will not read just yet.”

And Lucienne, catching a cushion off the sofa, sat down on the floor by her, laying her head at once on the elder woman’s knee.

The Marquise’s hand began to pass lightly over her hair. “Has Sir William come back from Bury?” she asked.

“I do not know, Madame. I have been in my room. I hope so, for it is snowing fast.”

“I suppose we must expect snow now,” observed Madame de Château-Foix. “To-morrow is Christmas Eve.”

Lucienne moved a little. “Then it is a year ago to-day,” she said in a low voice, “since I angered you about Mr Trenchard’s flowers. How long ago it seems! . . . and how far away that self seems from this! I was a child then.”

The fingers still caressed her hair, and the eyes above her looked down at her very kindly.

“. . . But I have learnt much since then . . . and most of all from you, Madame.”

The hand stopped. “From me, child!” said the Marquise. “You had better go to another teacher.”

Lucienne raised herself. “Yes, indeed, Madame, from you,” she said, and her eyes were full of tears. “These last three months . . . how you have borne it . . . Oh, I cannot say what I would!” She clasped the Marquise’s knees passionately, and laid her head there again.

“My child—that I was to call daughter,” said Madame de Château-Foix sadly, “I have a confession to make to you; it will show you that, passionately as I loved him, I have done Gilbert a wrong—and you, too. Every day I have been putting off telling you, because it was difficult for me. . . . Gilbert wished you—if he were killed—to marry.”

Lucienne slowly drew away from her support and put her hands over her face. Was she horrified?

“It was his thought for you, Lucienne,” went on the poor mother, as if pleading an excuse. “He did not want your life to be spoiled. That is easy for me to understand. But he went further: he named the man he wished you to marry. Perhaps you could guess him?”

She was trying to spare the girl, not realising that she was but prolonging her pain.

“He wished you, if you wished it too, to marry Louis.”

It was done! Why did Lucienne not speak? And she was shaking all over. A wave of pity went over the Marquise, and she bent forward and put her arms about her shoulders.

“There . . . there . . . we will not speak of it again. I should not have told you yet, my dear. Of course it seems strange to you—poor, poor child!”

But the quivering body drew away from her embrace. “Don’t touch me, Madame!” cried Lucienne wildly, dropping her hands and almost pushing the Marquise away. “I am not fit for you to touch—I should never have been fit to be Gilbert’s wife. . . .”

But Madame de Château-Foix, seeing her profound agitation, did not take these self-accusations very seriously. “Tell me, child,” she said tenderly, “what is wrong. Tell me—Gilbert would have wished it.”

And Lucienne, too overwrought to soften the blow, gasped out: “I knew Gilbert’s wish. He gave me up last March.”

The Marquise fell back in her chair as though she had been shot through the heart. Her face changed till it was an old woman’s. Then there issued from her lips, in an inhuman voice, the single word: “Why?”

At the look on her face Lucienne’s rapidly mounting hysteria was stayed for a moment, and, not for her own sake, but for this stricken mother’s, she tried to put the thing less nakedly. But there was no way.

“Because he knew that Louis loved me, and that I loved Louis,” she said.

There was an awful silence, while the two women faced each other, with a chasm like a grave sprung open between them. Then the Marquise said, half choking: “That black dress . . . it is all part of a lie, then. . . .”

But mercifully Lucienne either did not hear or did not understand. Twisting her hands together she burst out: “Gilbert was all that was generous and noble. Louis and I . . . we saw each other so often . . . we could not help it . . . when he came to the Tuileries, but we never, never meant to speak of it. Then one day . . . it was not Louis’ fault . . . it all came out . . . but he left me, he left me. . . . You do believe me, Madame! M. des Graves believed me. . . . I did try never to think of him . . . you do believe it?” The last note in her voice was ominous of the breaking point.

The Marquise had risen, and, withdrawn a little, stood looking frozenly down at the girl crouched on the floor. “I do not know what to believe,” she said at last. “Every one seems to have known of this—this disgraceful affair but myself.”

“But Gilbert did that to spare you!” cried the girl, flinging out imploring hands. “It was only to spare you—he told me so himself. He found out about Louis and me, and he gave me up . . . Don’t you see that it was to spare you—to spare us all, because he understood. . . .”

But the Marquise gave no sign, and after a minute or two of deadly silence Lucienne’s nerves gave way, and sinking to the floor she broke into sobs full of fragmentary entreaties in which Gilbert’s name was mingled, and out of which detached itself at last, in tortured and direct appeal: “Gilbert, Gilbert, if you were here you would explain. . . .”

Madame de Château-Foix’ hands clenched themselves. “Silence, girl! What right have you now to call on that saint in Paradise? After deceiving him, deceiving me, posing to Sir William and all the household as his widowed betrothed, you have the audacity to talk about explaining and understanding! Explain, indeed! It is a pity that Louis is not here to explain! I always——”

The sobbing girl flared up with extraordinary ardour. “You shall not say anything about Louis! You have always misjudged and belittled him—and yet he did what one man in a million would not have done—and did it for Gilbert’s sake. If any one was to blame it was I—not he . . . no, a thousand thousand times not he! He was no less noble hearted than Gilbert, no less self-sacrificing. . . . And if you knew, you would not be so cruel to me, for it is all over now . . . since he is dead.”

Between the fire of her beginning and the profound, hopeless conviction of her tone at the end, the Marquise’s wrath was stayed for a moment.

“What do you mean?” she ejaculated.

“Why, Louis was killed this morning. Did you not know?” asked Lucienne simply.

Madame de Château-Foix stared at her. “The girl is out of her mind,” she said slowly to herself.

“I dreamed of it all last night,” went on Lucienne with a horrible calm, “and about midday I knew that it was true. I can see him now . . . I think it did not hurt him much . . . he was very tired . . . but he lies there quite cold now—and dead, dead. . . .” And exclaiming, in accents of breathless horror and longing, “Louis, Louis, my love, my love!” she knelt upright and gazed with clasped hands and dilated eyes at a spot on the floor not far from either of them.

And when the Marquise, having shudderingly turned her head in the same direction, was conscious of a distinct feeling of relief at not beholding the lifeless body of her nephew stretched on that tract of carpet, half in firelight, half in shadow, between the hearth and the sofa, she was thoroughly frightened, though she did not show it.

She went quickly to the girl and shook her.

“Lucienne, stop! I cannot have this! Wake up, child, and control yourself. There is nothing there.”

But Lucienne still gazed at the same place, till the passion of love and despair in her eyes was swamped by a rising tide of horror. “Yes, there is blood there,” she said, “a pool of blood . . . and no one to stop it. O Madame, what shall I do? He is dying there and I cannot help him!” She caught the Marquise’s dress in a fierce and frightened grip, and, cowering on the ground, hid her face against it. Madame de Château-Foix, nothing but alarm in her mind, contrived to sit down and to draw the girl with her, and Lucienne knelt there clutching her, and shaken with paroxysms of almost tearless sobs, till those, too, were exhausted, and she slipped down to her old position against the elder woman’s knees.

There was then presented to Madame de Château-Foix one of the great opportunities of life, which, when they come unannounced, go sometimes unrecognised as such. But the Marquise did realise that something great was being demanded of her, something so foreign to her outlook that it was almost beyond her powers, but that for the very sake of the dead son whose memory it seemed to outrage she must try to respond to the call. Moreover, she knew that she must respond at once—not to-morrow or the next day, when the bitterness and shock had a little passed, but now, at this very moment. Yet in that half-hour of tension and reflection, while she mechanically tried to soothe the girl, she saw that she was about to do one of those—to her—fantastic actions, one of those “things which we are not called upon to do,” as she would have phrased it, such as she had sometimes carped at in her husband, or Gilbert, or M. des Graves. She did not realise what the result would be; that she would gain Lucienne for ever; perhaps, indeed, she never realised that she had need to gain her. For Félicité de Chantemerle had not the gift of clear thinking; and so, happily, it did not occur to her to consider that Gilbert, with the best intentions, had been guilty of a measure of duplicity towards her. To her mind his course of action was right, because he had taken it, and there was an end of the matter. Her love for her son had made it hard to bear patiently the news that another man had been preferred before him, but the same love would carry her over this crisis—her love and her rather childlike belief that if she did not act as he would have acted she would never attain to his company in those blessed regions whither she never doubted he had gone—regions which, all unconsciously, she now desired less for their own sake than because he would be there.

The great effort which she made at last was scarcely perceptible in her voice. “Lucienne, look at me . . . I am Gilbert’s mother, and if he could forgive this I must learn to. I promised him once that I would be a mother to you, and I have tried to keep my promise. I am afraid that I have failed many times; I have failed most of all to-night. . . . But I am an old woman, Lucienne, and have always been jealous for my son—perhaps you cannot understand that, but you may some day. It has always seemed to me that . . . others . . . have taken everything, and that he was always ready to give, and never got the appreciation he deserved. But _I_ knew; he was my boy, my very own. . . . Sometimes I was afraid that I loved him too much, and that God would take him from me. . . . And now He has taken him. . . . Some day—not yet—I shall learn to thank Him for the death He has sent him. . . .” She struggled for a moment, and went on: “Since I was allowed to be his mother, I must be worthy of it. And so, my dear child, we will put away . . . all this . . . and you shall be my daughter really . . . if you can care for a mother who has loved her son too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now, my child, you must be brave, and remember that because we have not heard from Louis since November it probably only means that his letters have miscarried. And he will soon be here—he will soon be here! You shall have him, I promise you!” She stroked the head on her breast. “My poor child, what you have suffered!”

“But Louis is dead,” repeated Lucienne. “Do not tell me that he will come, for that hurts more . . . and in time, perhaps, I shall get used to it . . . like all the other things. . . .”

“My child,” said the Marquise, fighting down her fears, “you are very greatly overwrought. All these fancies come from what you have gone through; when you are better you will forget them. Now kiss me, and go and bathe your eyes. . . . That’s right.” She studied the girl’s marred face for a moment. “An idea has just occurred to me, my dear; yes, I believe it would be an excellent plan. Only this afternoon Lady Milton was telling Amelia of the benefit which her daughter has derived from the waters of Bath. I shall most certainly take you to Bath after Christmas.”

* * * * * *

Downstairs in the hall Sir William, with a very grave face, was reading to his son and daughter, out of the newspaper which he had brought over from Bury, the belated and scanty news of the irretrievable disaster which had overtaken the Vendean army at Le Mans twelve days before.

“Practically cut to pieces,” he summed up, finishing. “Good God, how shall we tell them!”