D. K. Broster

“ The priest, kneeling motionless on the other side, with a hand on Château-Foix’ left wrist, began to take his crucifix from his sash.
Louis saw it, and stretched out a barring arm. “No—you shall not put it there!” he said fiercely. “He is not dead—he is not going to die!” His look at M. des Graves was defiance.
For all answer the priest put the little crucifix, not on Gilbert’s breast, but into Louis’ own hand. “Lay it there yourself, my dear child, when it is time,” he said, and in the inexorable tenderness of his gaze the young man saw that the end was indeed come. ”

“ Gilbert sprang up and went over to him. “Lie down!” he said. “Don’t you know me, Louis?”
“Of course I do,” responded the Vicomte in a thick voice. His eyes were extraordinarily bright. “You are Antoine de Bercy . . . I wish I had killed you . . . liar! . . . you are not fit to speak her name. . . .” His voice tailed off into something incoherent.
“Lie down!” said Gilbert emphatically, and forced him to obey. He was becoming very uneasy. A man of the most punctilious delicacy in a matter of the kind, he would rather have heard anything than his cousin’s private affairs. ”

“ The next instant she was in his arms, and her lips met his, while all the little stucco Cupids round the cornice smiled down, in the half-dusk and the firelight, at the foolish mortals who had resolved that they would never betray their hearts to each other.
“Lucienne, my love, my love!” murmured the young man passionately. “Oh, I never thought . . . I never meant to tell you. . . . Shut your eyes, and let me kiss them . . . your hair smells of violets. . . .”
“Louis, Louis!” said the girl, trying, after a moment, to free herself, “what are we doing?—Oh, what are we doing?” ”

“ Château-Foix put down his ace. “Your question is very pertinent, Louis,” he replied in level tones. “I never did.”
“You never joined!” repeated Saint-Ermay in amazement. “I don’t understand you!”
“It is impossible,” said the Marquis calmly, “to join a plot of the very existence of which you are ignorant. Your letter was absolutely the first intimation that I received of it.”
None, surely, but the most exalted natures are proof against the joy of producing a sensation. And a sensation Château-Foix had certainly produced, for his cousin sat staring blankly at him like a man stunned. ”

“ Ten minutes later Louis with his score of men had dashed into the dusk and the wind and the singing bullets.
The minute hand had made more than half the circuit of the Sèvres clock in the Marquise’s boudoir, the dusk had deepened to dark, the sound of firing had drifted away, before the tramp of feet sounded again outside the little pavilion door. Some one knocked vigorously with the hilt of a sword, and the old man waiting anxiously in the passage hastened to undo the bolts. His round of lantern light fell on a white scarf and a smiling mouth. ”

“ And the priest looked at Gilbert as the latter lay back in his chair smiling at the violent love which Louis and his spaniel were making to each other, and knew that he and his spiritual son were at last in that relationship of perfect understanding which had always been his ideal and which he had never thought would come to be. The ascetic in M. des Graves let itself be swept outwards on that warm tide of affection. He began to experience a very natural and human longing to break down a little the inflexible barriers which he had built about his own inner life. ”

“ But the accompaniments of life had been beyond the ordinary, and the stress of war, the daily perils, the spectacle of the faith which inspired the humble to fight and taught them how to die had ripened to an early unfolding the seed which had never room to grow until, in that bitter conflict, Gilbert had torn up for ever the upas-tree of his own overshadowing will. ”

“ You intend to marry that unhappy lady with the consent of her will but not of her heart. You have been wronged in thought, I grant you; you are within your rights, I grant you—but have you no chivalry, have you no pity? Do you really mean to wreck two lives, and your own also—for nothing but misery and disillusionment can come of such a union?”
“You would suggest that I abdicate in favour of my cousin?” asked the Marquis.
“That is my meaning,” answered M. des Graves.
There was another long silence, while Gilbert, his head between his clenched hands, stared at his shoe buckles. ”

“ I have tried—I promised the Princess—but I can’t, I can’t, Louis . . . it’s impossible!”
The heart against which she lay beat furiously, all its hot young blood vibrating to her words. The ghostlike room went dim; she alone was real—too real, overpoweringly human and appealing. And everything pleaded for her—the scent of her hair, Saint-Ermay’s own temperament, his past of facile conquests. . . . Probably only one thing could have saved him; it was on his side now.
“Lucienne,” he said in a strangled voice, “it is impossible. I cannot be such a hound, though God knows I would like to be. ”

“ Louis was not disturbed at the prospect; he had faced it too often. And amid the wreck of everything that makes a man’s life, of family ties, of high and warlike hopes, of love itself, he had retained a kind of serenity—a gift not always to be found in conjunction with a brilliant and reckless courage such as his, and proportionately the more valuable in the hour of disaster. Yet Gilbert was dead; M. des Graves was gone—killed or taken at Le Mans, he knew not which—he should never see Lucienne now. ”

“ And as his head sank back in profile on the low pillow M. des Graves recognised him.
He was terribly altered; his face, with its shadows, its pinched nostrils and hollow temples, waxlike in pallor and transparency. Round the mouth and on the brow was scored the track of past pain, but what every lineament bore most plainly was the stamp of an exhaustion so profound that it seemed as if physical suffering must be over now for ever—could have no more power over the body on which it had so fully worked its will. ”

“ The coppice which marched with it was plainly their best chance of safety, and Château-Foix plodded on beside it, looking for a gap in its strong boundary hedge of thorn, over which the trees leaned with little rustlings in the night wind, mocking him with the shelter he could not attain. For himself he might have forced a way, but it was out of the question to drag Louis through. A couple of sheep tumbled up almost under his feet, and cantered off, bleating. “Enough to give the alarm,” thought the Marquis. How heavy Louis was, and how still; it was like carrying a dead man. ”

“ It was that very moral change so rightly diagnosed by M. des Graves in Gilbert which accounted for the bewildering subsidence of the emotions that the priest had expected him to manifest. The metamorphosis was like a river which, suddenly swerving from its course, invades a valley and makes of it a lake. A new landscape surprises the traveller, but underneath the encroaching waters lie all the time the features which were there before them, to emerge, perhaps, but little altered from their burial. ”

“ This fact, and the presence of a little bronze crucifix standing on a table which bore a few books of devotion stamped with the arms of France, led him to suppose the room to belong to Madame Elisabeth herself. A half-finished piece of needlework lying on a chair somehow recalled Lucienne. All the shelter and refinement of the place, this very piece of embroidery, the roses and the sunlight, affected Gilbert with an odd sense of the contrast with his own uneasiness. They spelt security; yet its occupants must know—who better?—that the room had no such claim. ”

“ Everything was patent to him now. That he should not have known better! That he could have had the incredible folly to trust Louis near Lucienne; to believe that there was at least one woman in the world whom he would respect. Fool! it had probably made the prize but the more desirable!
The horrible source of light in Gilbert’s brain brought back incident after incident in the past, all pointing to the one goal. No sooner had one swept before him than another rushed upon its heels. “And I! and I!” they cried to him, ghosts of his unutterable folly, of Louis’ treachery, of Lucienne’s weakness. ”

“ It is God who is against us!” Her voice sank. “If he saved your life——” Turning away she hid her face in her hands and broke into fresh weeping.
And—strange perversity—the moment that she saw the thing as he did, and acknowledged the inevitable, Louis would have given everything he possessed to have her in his arms again. There surged over him a mad desire to dare that inevitable, to defy Gilbert, to claim her, cost what it might. Should he do it? Her sobs, the line of her neck, her shaken body wrung his heart. . . . He could give Gilbert his life if he demanded it. ”

“ He kissed her again. “I am here, safe and well again, through a miracle and M. des Graves. And you will want me to tell you——”
“Not now,” she said, rising from her knees. “Afterwards you shall tell me everything about him. But now—now you must go to Lucienne, to my daughter. . . . I know it all, and she is yours, Louis, and I give her to you as freely as Gilbert gave her. She is down in the copse—you remember it?—if you can go so far. . . .”
Louis got to his feet. “That far and further; but I shall frighten her.”
“Joy does not kill,” said the Marquise. ”

“ There was another pause.
“I would give my right hand to have one,” said the Marquis, with a certain passion. “But I have only convictions, and those you won’t listen to.”
“If your convictions are right,” observed Louis reflectively, “it means that we are all Vergniaud’s dupes. That would be amusing. . . Perhaps . . . . perhaps . . . Convictions indeed! Deuce take me, but they must be strong to have brought you so far.”
“Yes, they are strong,” said the Marquis.
The Vicomte sat up in bed, hugging his knees. “Of course it is all guesswork. I wonder how I can most quickly get hold of D’Aubeville.” ”

“ M. des Graves hurriedly pushed open the doors.
In the hall, with his back to him, stood a dusty and travel-stained figure on whose breast Madame de Château-Foix was laughing and crying. Another, not at once recognisable as Louis, in an exceedingly old coat drawn all awry over an invisible left arm, leant rather wearily against the tall cabinet which enshrined the penultimate Marquis’ collection of Chinese porcelain. Gilbert turned his head, and the Vicomte sprang forward.
The most poignant moments of life are always liable to be impinged upon by the commonplace. ”

“ The Marquis did not move a muscle. “I don’t know,” he said.
Saint-Ermay sprang to his feet. “You can’t think it, Gilbert! I will give you my word of honour—I will swear it by anything you please. If you refuse to believe me it is your own doing. . . . My God, you must believe me!”
Still with his horrible and judicial calm Gilbert surveyed his cousin, shaken so violently from his ordinary nonchalance. At last he said slowly: “Yes, in this instance I will believe you.”
“Then, as God sees me,” said Louis solemnly, “you have not the slightest shadow of a foundation for your suspicion. ”

“ Madame Geffroi sniffed. “Huh! And is there no one who expects you back with anxiety, my young man?”
Two patches of colour flared for an instant in Saint-Ermay’s pale cheeks as he responded: “Alas, no, Madame, nobody.—I am wrong; there is an old man who will be very glad to see me. But come now——”
“As if you were fit to think of going away,” grumbled his jailor. “You shall see your cousin to-morrow.”
Louis shook his head. “Like all your sex, you must be convinced, I see, by ocular demonstration. How can you say that I am not fit for anything?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ With eyes tightly shut as if she were unwilling for outward objects to break the trance of misery, she recalled every detail of Gilbert’s visit. Shame, and something like anger at her own stupidity, came over her, for now he must know, he must guess their secret. Not even Gilbert could think that she cared like that for his cousin. But the torturing anxiety for Louis came to banish her own confusion. If only he were safe, nothing mattered; the world might think what it liked. It was only Louis, Louis that she wanted! ”

“ The saints see with clearness that what the world calls suffering is not always misery, and that what the world calls happiness is not always joy, and are separated by this knowledge from the society in which they live far more effectually than by convent walls. And since Madame Elisabeth de France was a saint, it was her ideals, and not the fact that she had never known the force of human passion, which made her feel that she could hardly stop to be sorry for the girl whom she loved as her own daughter. She saw Lucienne’s way so plainly. ”

“ How did you work on her feelings, Gilbert? I have always said that if you would condescend . . . (No, if I am not breaking your arm it is quite enough, thanks.) Did you give her a kiss? Mon Dieu, what I have missed!”
“For Heaven’s sake, be quiet!” urged Château-Foix. “It is no time for laughing. No, I did not kiss her—I should have been afraid. She is a middle-aged proprietress with a tongue, and she will allow me and the friend who has met with an accident to sleep in her loft. She asks no questions, and if we are taken, we are tramps who have sought refuge there without her knowledge. ”