The False Chevalier Part 19

Though in his successes at Court he affected to forget that he was of Canadian extraction, he yet evinced an interest in Lecour on that account and showed courtesy to him. When the Count therefore one day heard the Queen refer with favour to the graceful Guardsman, he added him to the next list of invitations.

The guests, about forty, all approved by Marie Antoinette, included members of both the rival sets at Court. The young d.u.c.h.ess of Polignac, a simple, pleasant woman whom the liking of the Queen had alone raised to importance, was there with several of her connections and friends.

The Noailles family, with its haughty alliances, its long-standing greatness, and its contempt for those new people the Polignacs, was to be chiefly represented by the amiable young d.u.c.h.ess of Mouchy, who came late.

No picnic could have been more free and easy. The Queen herself looked a Venus-like dairymaid in straw hat and flowered skirt, and it was announced that the game of the afternoon should be that called "Descampativos." The guests trooped like children from the Little Trianon to a sequestered spot where lofty woods combined to cast a Druid shade upon the lawn. Here Vaudreuil was elected high priest.

a.s.suming a white robe and mock-heroic solemnity, and standing out in the centre of the gra.s.s, he sang forth in a strikingly rich voice--

"Let us raise an altar to Venus the G.o.ddess of these groves."

Four attendants, moving quickly forward in response, carrying squares of turf, piled them into an altar as rapidly as possible. The party arranged themselves in a quadrangle around it.

The altar being completed, Pontiff Vaudreuil proceeded with the mystery thus--

"Listen, dryads and demi-G.o.ds, to the oracles of the divinity. The decree of Aphrodite hath it that for the s.p.a.ce of one hour there shall be fair amity between----" Here he named the company off in pairs, carefully pre-meditated. As pair after pair were called, they stepped forward on the lawn amid a chorus of laughter, and swelled a procession facing the priest and altar.

Lecour wondered as he saw the remaining number dwindle, who should be paired with himself. Strict rules of precedence he knew would govern it.

At length, to his astonishment, he heard the words--

"Madame la Baronne de la Roche-Vernay, and Monsieur de Repentigny."

He looked hastily around.

It was then that two ladies were seen hurrying into the arena from the direction of the Trianon. One was the d.u.c.h.ess de Mouchy; the other, of the same age and dressed in a simple cloud of white tulle, came behind her, and Germain, as if in an apparition, saw his Cyrene. Her obeisances to the Queen and company over, she turned and courtesied very deeply to her lover, who trembled with delight under her smile.

He was quickly recalled by the voice of de Vaudreuil, this time crying--

"Her Majesty of France, and her Majesty's servant and subject the High Priest of the G.o.ddess."

It was the invariable custom of the ambitious and confident courtier to appropriate the Queen to himself.

Pausing at the close, he raised his arm ritually towards the trees and rested thus a moment speechless.

"Descampativos!" he suddenly exclaimed in a stentorian tone, throwing off his robe.

At the word, the pairs broke ranks, the ladies screamed with merriment, and all the pairs scampered into the woods in different directions to follow what paths might suit them, bound only by the rule of the game to return in an hour.

Germain and Cyrene strayed from the others into the groves, until the voices grew fainter and fainter and at last died away. They walked on without finding any necessity of speaking, for their glances and the ever sweet pang of love in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s sufficed. At last they found a little s.p.a.ce with a fountain where the water spurted up in three jets out of the points of a Triton's spear, and there being a seat there, they took it, sat down, and looked in each other's eyes.

"My love," he whispered, kissing her cheek.

"Germain," breathed she slowly, her fair breast heaving, and suddenly threw her arms around his neck and burst into tears. Sweet, sweet, sweet, were the moments of their supreme bliss.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HOUSE OF THE GOLDEN DOG

_From the model by Thomas O'Leary in McGill University._]

CHAPTER XXI

THE SHADOW OF THE GOLDEN DOG

Two old marquises sat together in a parlour in Paris.

"Bring us the best wine in the house," exclaimed one of them, a bronzed and dried soldier in a maroon coat, waving his hand to his lackey, who responded and disappeared.

"Nothing," continued the soldier, turning to his friend, "could be too good for my schoolmate Lotbiniere. Here are two chairs worthy of us, generals among this spindle-shanked regiment. Sit down in that one while I draw up here opposite. Throw off the wigs; there. We shall see now how much of each other remains after our long parting. In India I never wore a wig except to receive the Maharajah."

"Excellent, Pierre! There goes mine. Let us sit back and talk ourselves into the good old days when you and I were youngsters."

"And a French king ruled Canada."

"And the French regiments marched its soil. Do you remember the hot morning we stood hand in hand watching the Royal Rousillons wheel into the Place d'Armes in front of the church?"

"How old were we then?"

"I was eleven; it was my birthday. Don't you remember?"

The wine came in and was set on a little table. The first speaker opened a bottle and poured out two gla.s.ses.

Pierre le Gardeur, Knight of St. Louis, Brigadier-General, Governor of Mahe and Marquis de Repentigny--for this was he--was a tall, spare man whose complexion the suns of the tropics had browned, whose hair was whitened with foreign service, and whose blue eyes and sensitive, handsome features wore a strange, settled look of melancholy. Evidently some long-standing sorrow threw its shadow over his spirit.

His friend, the Marquis de Lotbiniere, was a person of much more worldly aspect, of largish build and beginning to incline to flesh, but whose dark eyes were steady with the air of business capability and self-possession. The care and finish of his dress and manner showed p.r.o.nounced pride of rank--a kind of well-regulated ostentation. His family were descended from the best of the half-dozen petty gentry in the rude, early days of the colony of his origin. He had by his ability become engineer-in-chief under Montcalm. Yet from the point of view of the Versailles n.o.bility--the standard he himself was most ambitious to apply--he was but an obscure colonel, and his t.i.tle a questionable affair. He acquired it in this wise.

At the fall of New France the last French Governor, Vaudreuil, pa.s.sed over to Europe and sold out his Canadian properties. De Lotbiniere, who remained, bought them for a song, including the chateau in Montreal and several large seigniories, chiefly wild lands, but growing in value. In the original grant of one of them to the Marquis de Vaudreuil, he found that it had been intended as a Canadian marquisate, an honorary appellation, however, which the Vaudreuils never pursued any further.

This lapsed marquisate of the former proprietors gave Lotbiniere his idea; proprietor of a marquisate, he ought to be a marquis. He determined to find some way of procuring the t.i.tle for himself. He visited Paris as much and long as possible, and, by various devices, kept his name and services before the War Office. During the American Revolution he conceived the project of secretly negotiating with the Revolutionists for the re-transfer of Canada to the French. He persuaded the War Office to permit him to try his hand in the matter without publicly compromising Versailles, and received, on pressing his request, an equivocal grant of the coveted t.i.tle, to be attached to his Canadian seigniory, _but only if held of the Crown of France, and not of any foreign power_. His secret negotiations at Washington failed and were never heard of. He nevertheless called himself Marquis.

The two gentlemen were united by relationship, for besides the inextricable genealogical links which bound together the chief families of the colony, each had espoused a daughter of the Chevalier Chaussegros de Lery, king's engineer, an excellent gentleman, who, like de Lotbiniere, had returned to Canada after its cession and become a subject, a truly loyal one, of the English Crown.

"I expect our good nephew, Louis de Lery, here in a few minutes," said Repentigny. "He is in the Bodyguard, his father wrote."

"Yes, the company de Villeroy--a fine position."

"I wonder what the boy is like. Has he grown up tall like the de Lerys?"

"Yes, he does them credit, is very distinguished looking, with an air which does not allow everybody to be familiar. Some call Louis cold, but we _n.o.blesse_ ought to have a little of that."

"No, no, Lotbiniere, none of it to white men. Not even to blacks and coolies, but certainly none of it to white men."

"You speak from India where all French naturally are high-caste."

A look of pain came over Repentigny's features.

"No, Michel, that is not the reason. Alas! I once despised a man of lower degree. My G.o.d, how could I do it again!" And his head dropped upon his breast in profound dejection.

Lotbiniere started and paused, looking at him with great sympathy, a cruel old remembrance awaking.