Grey Roses Part 11

'Well, there are none but English at Biarritz at this season.'

'She was never English. Don't try to bully _me_. Besides, she evidently knew the country. Otherwise, how could she have found the Sentier des Contrebandiers?--She wasn't from Granjolaye?'

'There's no one at Granjolaye save the Queen herself.'

'Deceiver! Manuela told me last night. She has her little Court, her maids-of-honour. I think my _inconnue_ looked like a maid-of-honour.'

'She has her aunt, old Mademoiselle Henriette, and a couple of German women, countesses or baronesses or something, with unp.r.o.nounceable names.'

'I can't believe she's German. Still, I suppose there are _some_ Christian Germans. Perhaps....'

'They're both middle-aged. Past fifty, I should think.'

'Oh.--Ah, well, that disposes of them. But how do you know her Majesty hasn't a friend, a guest, staying with her?'

'It's possible, but most unlikely, seeing the close retirement in which she lives. She's never once gone beyond her garden, since she came back there, three, four, years ago; nor received any visitors.

_Personne_--not the Bishop of Bayonne nor the Sous-Prefet, not even _feu_ Monsieur le Comte, though they all called, as a matter of civility. She has her private chaplain. If a guest had arrived at Granjolaye, the whole country would know it and talk of it.'

'Oh, I see what you're trying to insinuate,' cried Paul. 'You're trying to insinuate that she came from Chateau Yroulte.' That was the next nearest country-house.

'Nothing of the sort,' said Andre. 'Chateau Yroulte has been shut up and uninhabited these two years--ever since the death of old Monsieur Raoul. It was bought by a Spanish Jew; but he's never lived in it and never let it.'

'Well, then, where _did_ she come from? Not out of the Fourth Dimension? Who _was_ she? Not a wraith, an apparition? Why _will_ you entertain such weird conjectures?'

'She must have come from Bayonne. An officer's wife, beyond a doubt.'

'Oh, you're perfectly remorseless,' sighed Paul, and changed the subject. But he was unconvinced. Officers' wives, in garrison-towns like Bayonne, had, in his experience, always been, as he expressed it, frowsy and provincial.

IV.

One would think, by this time, the priest, poor man, had earned a moment of mental rest; but Paul's thirst for knowledge was insatiable.

He began to ply him with questions about the Queen. And though Andre could tell him very little, and though he had heard all that the night before from Manuela, it interested him curiously to hear it repeated.

It amounted to scarcely more than a single meagre fact. A few months after the divorce, she had returned to Granjolaye, and she had never once been known to set her foot beyond the limits of her garden from that day to this. She had arrived at night, attended by her two German ladies-in-waiting. A carriage had met her at the railway station in Bayonne, and set her down at the doors of her Chateau, where her aunt, old Mademoiselle Henriette, awaited her. What manner of life she led there, n.o.body had the poorest means of discovering. Her own servants (tongue-tied by fear or love) could not be got to speak; and from the eyes of all outsiders she was sedulously screened. Paul could imagine her, in her great humiliation, solitary among the ruins of her high destiny, hiding her wounds; too sensitive to face the curiosity, too proud to brook the pity, of the world. She seemed to him a very grandiose and tragic figure, and he lost himself musing of her--her with whom he had played at being married, when they were children here, so long, so long ago. She was the daughter, the only child and heiress, of the last Duc de la Granjolaye de Ravanches,--the same n.o.bleman of whom it was told that when Louis Napoleon, meaning to be gracious, said to him, 'You bear a great name, Monsieur,' he had answered sweetly, 'The greatest of all, I think.' It is certain he was the head of one of the most ill.u.s.trious houses in the n.o.blesse of Europe, descended directly and legitimately, through the Bourbons, from Saint Louis of France; and, to boot, he was immensely rich, owning (it was said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour. Paul remembered him vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a good deal to stay at Granjolaye.

On the death of Madame de Louvance, the property of Saint-Graal had pa.s.sed to her son, Edmond,--Andre's _feu_ Monsieur le Comte. Edmond rarely lived there, and never asked his sister or her boy there; whence, twenty years ago, at the respective ages of thirteen and eleven, Paul and Helene had vanished from each other's ken. But Edmond never married, either; and when, last winter, he died, he left a will making Paul his heir. Of Helene's later history Paul knew as much as all the world knows, and no more--so much, that is, as one could gather from newspapers and public rumour. He knew of her father's death, whereby she had become absolute mistress of his enormous fortune. He knew of her princely marriage, and of her elevation by the old king to her husband's rank of Royal Highness. He knew of that swift series of improbable deaths which had culminated in her husband's accession to the throne, and how she had been crowned Queen-Consort. And then he knew that three or four years afterwards she had sued for and obtained a Bull of Separation from the Pope, on the plea of her husband's infidelity and cruelty. The infidelity, to be sure, was no more than, as a Royalty, if not as a woman, she might have bargained for and borne with; but everybody remembers the stories of the king's drunken violence that got bruited about at the time.

Everybody will remember, too, how, the Papal Separation once p.r.o.nounced, he had retaliated upon her with a decree of absolute divorce, and a sentence of perpetual banishment, voted by his own parliament. Whither she had betaken herself after these troubles Paul had never heard--until, yesterday, arriving at Saint-Graal, they told him she was living cloistered like a nun at Granjolaye.

News travels fast and penetrates everywhere in that lost corner of garrulous Gascony. The news that Paul had taken up his residence at Saint-Graal could scarcely fail to reach the Queen. Would she remember their childish intimacy? Would she make him a sign? Would she let him see her, for old sake's sake? Oh, in all probability, no. Most certainly, no. And yet--and yet, he couldn't forbid a little furtive hope to flicker in his heart.

V.

It was only April, but the sun shone with midsummer strength.

After Andre left him, he went down into the garden.

From a little distance the house, against the sky, looked insubstantial, a water-colour, painted in grey and amber on a field of luminous blue. If he had wished it, he could have bathed himself in flowers; hyacinths, crocuses, jonquils, camellias, roses, grew round him everywhere, sending up a symphony of warm odours; further on, in the gra.s.s, violets, anemones, celandine; further still, by the margins of the pond, narcissuses, and tall white flowers-de-luce; and, in the shrubberies, satiny azaleas; and overhead, the magnolia trees, drooping with their freight of ivory cups. The gla.s.s doors of the orangery stood open, a cloud of sweetness hanging heavily before them.

In the park, the chestnuts were in full leaf; and surely a thousand birds were twittering and piping amongst their branches.

'Oh, bother! How it cries out for a woman,' said Paul. 'It's such a waste of good material'

The beauty went to one's head. One craved a sympathetic companion to share it with, a woman on whom to lavish the ardours it enkindled. 'If I don't look out I shall become sentimental,' the lone man told himself. 'Nature's so fearfully lacking in tact. Fancy her singing an epithalamium in a poor fellow's ears, when he doesn't know a single human woman nearer than Paris.' To make matters worse, the day ended in a fiery sunset, and then there was a full moon; and in the rosery a nightingale performed its sobbing serenade. 'Please go out and give that bird a penny, and tell him to go away,' Paul said to a servant.

It was all very well to jest, but at every second breath he sighed profoundly. I'm afraid he _had_ become sentimental. It seemed a serious pity that what his heart was full of should spend itself on the incapable air. His sense of humour was benumbed. And when, presently, the frogs in the pond, a hundred yards away, set up their monotonous plaintive concert, he laid down his arms. 'It's no use, I'm in for it,' he confessed. After all, he was out of England. He was in Gascony, the borderland between amorous France and old romantic Spain.

I don't know whom his imagination dwelt the more fondly with: the stricken Queen, beyond there, alone in the darkness and the silence, where the night lay on the forest of Granjolaye; or the pale horse-woman of the morning.

But surely, as yet, he had no ghost of a reason for dreaming that the two were one and the same.

VI.

'Now, let's be logical,' he said next morning. 'Let's be logical and hopeful--yet not too hopeful, not utopian. Let's look the matter courageously in the face. Since she rode there once, why may she not ride again in the Sentier des Contrebandiers? Why mayn't she ride there often--even daily? I think that's logical. Don't _you_ think that's logical?'

The person he addressed, a tall, slender young man, with a fresh-coloured skin, a straight nose, and rather a ribald eye, was vigorously brushing a head of yellowish hair, in the looking-gla.s.s before him.

'Tush! But of course _you_ think so,' Paul went on. 'You always think as I do. If you knew how I despise a sycophant! And yet--you're not bad looking. No, I'll be hanged if I can honestly say that you're bad looking. You've got nice hair, and plenty of it; and there's a weakness about your mouth and chin that goes to my heart. I hate firm people.--What? So do you? I thought so.--Ah, well, my poor friend, you're booked for a shocking long walk this morning. You must summon your utmost fort.i.tude.--_Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me?_' he carolled forth, to Marzials's tune. 'But come! I say!

That's antic.i.p.ating.'

And he set forth for the Smugglers' Pathway,--where, sure enough, she rode again. As she pa.s.sed him, her eyes met his: at which he was conscious of a good deal of interior commotion. 'By Jove, she's magnificent, she's really stunning,' he exclaimed to himself. He perceived that she was rather a big woman, tall, with finely-rounded, smoothly-flowing lines. Her hair,--velvety blue-black in its shadows,--where the light caught it was dully iridescent. Her features were irregular enough to give her face a high degree of individuality, yet by no means to deprive it of delicacy or attractiveness. She had a superb white throat, and a soft voluptuous chin; and 'As I live, I never saw such a mouth,' said Paul.

Where did she come from? Bayonne? Never. Andre might have been mistaken about Chateau Yroulte; the Spanish Jew had perhaps sold it, or found a tenant. Or, further afield, there were Chateaux Labenne, Saumuse, d'Orthevielle. Or else, the Queen had a guest.

'Anyhow,' he mused, when he got home, 'that makes five, six miles that you have tramped, to enjoy an instant's glimpse of her. Fortunately they say walking is good for the const.i.tution. It only shows what extremities a country life may drive one to.'

The next day, not only did her eyes meet his, but he could have sworn that she almost smiled. Oh, a very furtive smile, the mere transitory suggestion of a smile. But the inner commotion was more marked.

The next day (the fourth) she undoubtedly did smile, and slightly inclined her head. He removed his hat, and went home, and waited impatiently for twenty-four hours to wear away. 'She smiled--she bowed,' he kept repeating. But, alas, he couldn't forget that in that remote countryside it is very much the fashion for people who meet in the roads and lanes to bow as they pa.s.s.

On the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth days she bowed and smiled.

'I fairly wonder at myself--to walk that distance for a bow and smile,' said Paul. 'To-morrow I'm going to speak. _Faut brusquer les choses_.'

And he penetrated into the forest, firmly determined to speak. 'Only I can't seem to think of anything very pat to say,' he sighed. 'h.e.l.lo!

She's off her horse.'

She was off her horse, standing beside it, holding the loose end of a strap in her hand.

Providence was favouring him. Here was his obvious chance. Something was wrong. He could offer his a.s.sistance. And yet, that inner commotion was so violent, he felt a little bewildered about the _mot juste_. He approached her gradually, trying to compose himself and collect his wits.

She looked up, and said in French 'I beg your pardon. Something has come undone. Can you help me?'

Her voice was delicious, cool and smooth as ivory. His heart pounded.

He vaguely bowed, and murmured, 'I should be delighted.'

She stood aside a little, and he took her place. He bent over the strap that was loose, and bit his lips, and cursed his embarra.s.sments.

'Come, I mustn't let her think me quite an a.s.s.' He was astonished at himself. That he should still be capable of so strenuous a sensation!

'And I had thought I was blase!' He was intensely conscious of the silence, of the solitude and dimness of the forest, and of their isolation there, so near to each other, that superb pale woman and himself. But his eyes were bent on the misbehaving strap, which he held helplessly between his fingers.