Chevenix

“ One saw him everywhere—in the city, in Mayfair drawing-rooms, at Kensington tea-parties, and at Lambeth Palace. Chevenix swore that he had met him at a Church Congress—and the only answer to that was that if Chevenix had truly been there to see, Morosine might well have been there to be seen. But this catholicity of experience was characteristic of the man; his attraction to the nice observer lay precisely in that, that he was a nomad, unappeased and unappeasable, ranging hungrily. ”

“ Instead of that I stood looking at it in my hand and laughed out bitterly, as I realised his mistake; then went to the ramparts, and flung it far into the air like blood-money. The night was falling; through an embrasure and across the gardened valley I saw the lamp-lighters hasting along Princes Street with ladder and lamp, and looked on moodily. As I was so standing a hand was laid upon my shoulder, and I turned about. It was Major Chevenix, dressed for the evening, and his neckcloth really admirably folded. I never denied the man could dress. ”

“ And told me just what you did—that it was an affair of honour, and no blame attached to you. O, I must say I like that Major Chevenix!’
At this I was seized with a great pang of jealousy. I remembered the first time that he had seen her, the interest that he seemed immediately to conceive; and I could not but admire the dog for the use he had been ingenious enough to make of our acquaintance in order to supplant me. All is fair in love and war. For all that, I was now no less anxious to do the speaking myself than I had been before to hear Flora. ”

“ Major Chevenix smoked awhile, looking now at his cigar ash, now at me. ‘I’m a soldier myself,’ he says presently, ‘and I’ve been out in my time and hit my man. I don’t want to run any one into a corner for an affair that was at all necessary or correct. At the same time, I want to know that much, and I’ll take your word of honour for it. ”

“ We were just walking away arm in arm, when I spied my friend the Major approaching, stiff as a ramrod and, as usual, obtrusively clean.
"O! there's a man I want to know," said I, taking the bull by the horns. "Won't you introduce me to Major Chevenix?"
"At a word, my dear fellow," said Robbie; and "Major!" he cried, "come here and let me present to you my friend Mr. Ducie, who desires the honour of your acquaintance." ”

“ So Chevenix had beheld her, it seems. Let her see the world, approve her mettle, run her career. Chevenix, watching her, judged in those pondering eyes, in that half-smile which had charmed him before, a kind of quivering expectancy new to her. He judged her tempted, and renewed his suggestions on a later day.
“What you want,” he then told her, “is to try a fall or two with the world. You've been too snug, you know—too long under glass. You left the school-room to go to Wanless—and where were you there? Under cover. You want the sun, the wind, and the rain ”

“ But God has been wiser than you; and the most steadfast of your heroes may prove human, after all. We appeal to the queen for judgment." I added, turning and bowing before Flora.
"And how shall the queen judge?" she asked. "I must give you an answer that is no answer at all. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth': she goes where her heart goes."
Her face flushed as she said it; mine also, for I read in it a declaration, and my heart swelled for joy. But Chevenix grew pale. ”

“ For I must repeat again that our body of prisoners was exceptional: there was in Edinburgh Castle none of that educational busyness that distinguished some of the other prisons, so that men entered them unable to read, and left them fit for high employments. Chevenix was handsome, and surprisingly young to be a 25 major: six feet in his stockings, well set up, with regular features and very clear grey eyes. It was impossible to pick a fault in him, and yet the sum-total was displeasing. Perhaps he was too clean; he seemed to bear about with him the smell of soap. ”

“ In her admiration for the victors, does not there mingle some pity for the vanquished?’
‘Indeed, sir,’ she said, with animation, ‘only too much of it! War is a subject that I do not think should be talked of to a girl. I am, I have to be—what do you call it?—a non-combatant? And to remind me of what others have to do and suffer: no, it is not fair!’
‘Miss Gilchrist has the tender female heart,’ said Chevenix. ”

“ Ronald had stuck to his guns and refused me to the last. It was no news; but, on the other hand, it could not be contorted into good news. I was now certain that during my temporary absence in France, all irons would be put into the fire, and the world turned upside down, to make Flora disown the obtrusive Frenchman and accept Chevenix. Without doubt she would resist these instances ”

“ Speaking, however, as your family adviser"—and he laid enough stress on it to convince me that there was no love lost between him and the interloping Chevenix—"I suggest that we gain nothing by protracting this scene in the face of a crowded assembly. Are you for the card-room. Madam?"
She took his proffered arm, and they swept from us, leaving Master Ronald red and glum, and the Major pale but nonplussed.
"Four from six leaves two," said I; and promptly engaged Flora's arm and towed her away from the silenced batteries. ”

“ By this time the arrivals were following each other thick and fast; and, standing by the tea-table, I heard name after name vociferated at the ball-room door, but never the name my nerves were on the strain to echo. Surely Flora would come: surely none of her guardians, natural or officious, would expect to find me at the ball. But the minutes passed, and I must convey Mrs. and Miss McBean back to their seats beneath the gallery.
"Miss Gilchrist—Miss Flora Gilchrist—Mr. Ronald Gilchrist! Mr. Robbie! Major Arthur Chevenix!" ”

“ It was Byfield's balloon—the monster Lunardi—in process of inflation.
"Confound Byfield!" I ejaculated in my haste.
"Who is Byfield?"
"An aeronaut, my dear, of bilious humour; which no doubt accounts for his owning a balloon striped alternately with liver-colour and pale blue, and for his arranging it and a brass band in the very line of my escape. That man dogs me like fate." I broke off sharply. "And after all, why not?" I cried.
The next instant I swung round, as Flora uttered a piteous little cry; and there, behind us, in the outlet of the cutting, stood Major Chevenix and Ronald. ”

“ You may take this ridge as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five legions camped all round it and almost within view—Salomon and Joani to the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien had finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cévennes, which lasted all through October and November, 1703, and during which four hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe, utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land. ”

“ We are now in the midst of the Camisard country, an inextricable network of mountains of lacerated schist and of deeply furrowed valleys, in which the revolted Cevenols held at bay the armies of Louis XIV. At the present day the department of Gard contains more Protestants than any other in France, and whole villages are entirely Calvinist, with scarce a Catholic in them. The Cevennes are drifting westward. In Hérault they take a definitely western direction. Here comes in the limestone plateau of Larzac, that feeds the countless flocks from which are derived Roquefort cheese. ”

“ Footnote 1 Jean Cavalier, principal leader of the Camisards in the war of the Cevennes, born 1679 in the village of Rebaute, near Anduse, vas the son of a peasant, he lived at Geneva, and was employed in agriculture, when the persecutions of the reformed inhabitants of the Cevennes under Louis XIV. reached their highest pitch, and caused the breaking out of the troubles, enflaming his enthusiasm for his faith, and inducing him to return home. ”

“ From my youth upwards I have never been able to shoot but in a kneeling position; should a hare run by under my nose, I cannot hit it standing, I must first throw myself down; but I have always been much ridiculed by my companions for it."
"For the rest," resumed the priest, "you have mountain-legs, and you must have been born in the Cevennes, or the Pyrenees, your eye too is characteristic of the mountaineer who is far-sighted."
"Just so," said the huntsman, "I come from Lozère, the wildest part of the mountains." ”

“ The nature of the mountains through and by which flows the Orb differs greatly from that of the schisty Cevennes—the Cevennes proper—and the limestone of the causses and of the garigues. They are a ripple rather than a billow, and being sheltered from the north winds by the high range at their back form a sort of natural hothouse, in which the sweetest fruits of a southern clime ripen readily, where the spring comes earliest and the autumn sun lingers longest. ”

“ North of those limestone hills lay the Cévennes, where since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the poor Huguenot peasants were making their desperate fight for liberty of conscience, against the might and the bigotry of Louis XIV. Their leader, Laporte, was dead, but he had been succeeded by Jean Cavalier and Roland, and revolt still raged in the caves and fastnesses of the upper Cévennes, though Maréchal Montrevel and the Intendant of Languedoc assured the king that they had wiped out the insurrection. ”

“ He has had a little quarrel with me, for he has been so intimidated by the insolence of the cardinal that he wishes to persecute me into a base endurance of him. I esteem your courage and affection so highly that I wish you to know all the interests of Madame de Chevreuse. She confides so entirely in you that she believes them to be as safe in your hands as in her own. Love your master faithfully, and however persecuted he may be, believe that in all his actions he will prove himself worthy of love. ”

“ An angry flush came over Chavigni’s countenance, but it quickly subsided; and he replied calmly, “I came here, as your Majesty knows, to give you more minute particulars of the information I rendered you yesterday; and to prove to you that some whom you esteem your dearest friends, and some who are your nearest relations, are the veriest traitors in France. The affair for no one can be more unpleasant than for myself, for there are some to whom I wish well, that have in this merited their death: therefore, Sire, if you find it too painful to hear, in the name of Heaven, let it rest in silence. ”

“ Now the head and forefront of the persecution—after Lamoignon de Bavile—François de Langlade du Chayla (pronounced Chéïla) , Arch-priest of the Cévennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house in which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert. He was a conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the moderation of which he is capable. ”

“ Lord Chesterfield liked and respected him, and wrote with admiration in one of his letters to the Countess of Suffolk of the manner in which Chenevix tried to restrain his wit by saying that 'death was too serious a thing to jest upon' (Lord Chesferfield's Correspondence, ed. Lord Mahon, iii. 87) . When Lord Chesterfield returned to England, Chenevix shared his fortunes when in opposition, and when, in 1745, his patron was appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland, Chenevix, who had taken his D.D. degree at Cambridge in 1744, accompanied him as principal domestic chaplain. ”

“ In a letter to his “very illustrious lord,” the Archbishop of Toledo, dated 26th March, 1616, Cervantes wrote: “If for the malady which affects me there could be any relief, the repeated marks of favour and protection which your illustrious person bestows on me would be sufficient to relieve me: but, indeed, it increases so greatly that I think it will make an end of me, although not of my gratitude.” In his valedictory dedication to the Conde de Lemos he speaks of himself as “with one foot in the stirrup, waiting the call of death.” ”

“ Those who seek sunshine during the winter in the Riviera leave the Cévennes far away as a bank of cloud silver-fringed on their right hand beyond the Rhône. On their way back to England in spring they are disinclined to loiter, and break their home journey for the sake of excursions into this region, so little explored. In like manner, those who go to Pau are carried by the railway far away to the west, and see nothing of the plateau, because it slants downwards from the lofty ridge to the east. ”

“ Intending purchasers were aware of an unrivalled opportunity. Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before noon, after a desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for five-and-thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought freedom into the bargain.
St Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant. The maire, a Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself characteristic of the country. The young women of the Cevennes profit by the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as governesses into England ”

“ Since M. Martel first drew attention to the gorges of the Tarn, and possibly due in a measure to my work, these gorges are becoming annually frequented more and more by tourists. However fine they may be, there are others in the departments of Ardèche, Gard, and Hérault, that fall but little, if at all, short of them in savagery and strangeness.
There are no great towns in the Cévennes. Such as there are are sleepy and stationary; but from Béziers, Montpellier, Nîmes, Le Puy, where every comfort may be found, it is easy to run into the mountains, and [Pg 14] return from them to recruit. ”