The Last Hope Part 24

The larger room had been a.s.signed to Loo. There was a subtle difference in the Marquis's manner toward him. He made an odd bow as he quitted the room.

"There," said Colville, whose room communicated with this great apartment by a dressing-room and two doors. He spoke in English, as they always did when they were alone together. "There--you are launched. You are _lance_, my friend. I may say you are through the shoals now and out on the high seas--"

He paused, candle in hand, and looked round the room with a reflective smile. It was obviously the best room in the house, with a fireplace as wide as a gate, where logs of pine burnt briskly on high iron dogs. The bed loomed mysteriously in one corner with its baldachin of Gobelin tapestry. Here, too, the dim scent of fallen monarchy lingered in the atmosphere. A portrait of Louis XVI in a faded frame hung over the mantelpiece.

"And the time will come," pursued Colville, with his melancholy, sympathetic smile, "when you will find it necessary to drop the pilot--to turn your face seaward and your back upon old recollections and old a.s.sociations. You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, my friend."

"Oh yes," replied Barebone, with a brisk movement of the head, "I shall have to forget Farlingford."

Colville had moved toward the door that led to his own room. He paused, examining the wick of the candle he carried in his hand. Then, though glib of speech, he decided in favour of silence, and went away without making reply.

Loo sat down in a grey old arm-chair in front of the fire. The house was astoundingly noiseless, though situated in what had once been the heart of Paris. It was one of the few houses left in this quarter with a large garden. And the traffic pa.s.sing in and out of the Ruelle St. Jacob went slipshod on its own feet. The busy crackle of the wood was the only sound to break a silence which seemed part of this vast palace of memories.

Loo had ridden far and was tired. He smiled grimly at the fire. It is to be supposed that he was sitting down to the task he had set himself--to forget Farlingford.

There was a great reception at the Hotel Gemosac that night, and after twenty years of brooding silence the rooms, hastily set in order, were lighted up.

There was, as the Marquis had promised, no man or woman present who was not vouched for by a n.o.ble name or by history. As the old man presented them, their names were oddly familiar to the ear, while each face looking at Loo seemed to be the face of a ghost looking out of a past which the world will never forget so long as history lives.

And here, again, was the subtle difference. They no longer talked to Loo, but stood apart and spoke among themselves in a hushed voice. Men made their bow to him and met his smile with grave and measuring eyes. Some made a little set speech, which might mean much or nothing. Others embarked on such a speech and paused--faltered, and pa.s.sed on gulping something down in their throats.

Women made a deep reverence to him and glanced at him with parted lips and white faces--no coquetry in their eyes. They saw that he was young and good-looking; but they forgot that he might think the same of them.

Then they pa.s.sed on and grouped themselves together, as women do in moments of danger or emotion, their souls instinctively seeking the company of other souls tuned to catch a hundred pa.s.sing vibrations of the heart-strings of which men remain in ignorance. They spoke together in lowered voices without daring, or desiring perhaps, to turn and look at him again.

"It only remains," some one said, "for the d.u.c.h.esse d'Angouleme to recognise his claim. A messenger has departed for Frohsdorf."

And Barebone, looking at them, knew that there was a barrier between him and them which none could cast aside: a barrier erected in the past and based on the sure foundations of history.

"She is an old woman," said Monsieur do Gemosac to any who spoke to him on this subject. "She is seventy-two, and fifty-eight of those years have been marked by greater misfortunes than ever fell to the lot of a woman.

When she came out of prison she had no tears left, my friends. We cannot expect her to turn back willingly to the past now. But we know that in her heart she has never been sure that her brother died in the Temple.

You know how many disappointments she has had. We must not awake her sleeping sorrow until all is ready. I shall make the journey to Frohsdorf--that I promise you. But to-night we have another task before us."

"Yes--yes," answered his listeners. "You are to open the locket. Where is it?--show it to us."

And the locket which Captain Clubbe's wife had given to Dormer Colville was handed from one to another. It was not of great value, but it was of gold with stones, long since discoloured, set in silver around it. It was crushed and misshapen.

"It has never been opened for twenty years," they told each other. "It has been mislaid in an obscure village in England for nearly half a century."

"The Vicomte de Castel Aunet--who is so clever a mechanician--has promised to bring his tools," said Monsieur de Gemosac. "He will open it for us--even if he find it necessary to break the locket."

So the thing went round the room until it came to Loo Barebone.

"I have seen it before," he said. "I think I remember seeing it long ago--when I was a little child."

And he handed it to the old Vicomte de Castel Aunet, whose shaking fingers closed round it in a breathless silence. He carried it to the table, and some one brought candles. The Viconite was very old. He had learnt clock-making, they said, in prison during the Terror.

"_Il n'y a moyen,_" he whispered to himself. "I must break it."

With one effort he prised up the cover, but the hinge snapped, and the lid rolled across the table into Barebone's hand.

"Ah!" he cried, in that breathless silence, "now I remember it. I remember the red silk lining of the cover, and in the other side there is the portrait of a lady with--"

The Vicomte paused, with his palm covering the other half of the locket and looked across at Loo. And the eyes of all Royalist France were fixed on the same face.

"Silence!" whispered Dormer Colville in English, crushing Barebone's foot under the table.

CHAPTER XXII

DROPPING THE PILOT

"The portrait of a lady," repeated Loo, slowly. "Young and beautiful.

That much I remember."

The old n.o.bleman had never removed his covering hand from the locket.

He had never glanced at it himself. He looked slowly round the peering faces, two and three deep round the table. He was the oldest man present--one of the oldest in Paris--one of the few now living who had known Marie Antoinette.

Without uncovering the locket, he handed it to Barebone across the table with a bow worthy of the old regime and his own historic name.

"It is right that you should be the first to see it," he said. "Since there is no longer any doubt that the lady was your father's mother."

Loo took the locket, looked at it with strangely glittering eyes and steady lips. He gave a sort of gasp, which all in the room heard. He was handing it back to the Vicomte de Castel Aunet without a word of comment, when a crashing fall on the bare floor startled every one. A lady had fainted.

"Thank G.o.d!" muttered Dormer Colville almost in Barebone's ear and swayed against him. Barebone turned and looked into a face grey and haggard, and shining with perspiration. Instinctively he grasped him by the arm and supported him. In the confusion of the moment no one noticed Colville; for all were pressing round the prostrate lady. And in a moment Colville was himself again, though the ready smile sat oddly on such white lips.

"For G.o.d's sake be careful," he said, and turned away, handkerchief in hand.

For the moment the portrait was forgotten until the lady was on her feet again, smiling rea.s.surances and rubbing her elbow.

"It is nothing," she said, "nothing. My heart--that is all."

And she staggered to a chair with the rea.s.suring smile frozen on her face.

Then the portrait was pa.s.sed from hand to hand in silence. It was a miniature of Marie Antoinette, painted on ivory, which had turned yellow.

The colours were almost lost, but the face stood clearly enough. It was the face of a young girl, long and narrow, with the hair drawn straight up and dressed high and simply on the head without ornament.

"It is she," said one and another. "_C'est bien elle_."

"It was painted when she was newly a queen," commented the Vicomte de Castel Aunet. "I have seen others like it, but not that one before."

Barebone stood apart and no one offered to approach him. Dormer Colville had gone toward the great fireplace, and was standing by himself there with his back toward the room. He was surrept.i.tiously wiping from his face the perspiration which had suddenly run down it, as one may see the rain running down the face of a statue.

Things had taken an unexpected turn. The Marquis de Gemosac, himself always on the surface, had stirred others more deeply than he had antic.i.p.ated or could now understand. France has always been the victim of her own emotions; aroused in the first instance half in idleness, allowed to swell with a semi-restraining laugh, and then suddenly sweeping and overwhelming. History tells of a hundred such crises in the pilgrimage of the French people. A few more--and historians shall write "Ichabod"

across the most favoured land in Europe.

It is customary to relate that, after a crisis, those most concerned in it know not how they faced it or what events succeeded it. "He never knew," we are informed, "how he got through the rest of the evening."