The Last Hope Part 37

"Madame," he said, "I drink to the hearts you have broken. And now I go to arrange the card tables, for your guests will soon be coming."

It was, in fact, Madame de Chantonnay's Thursday evening to which were bidden such friends as enjoyed for the moment her fickle good graces. The Abbe Touvent was, so to speak, a permanent subscriber to these favours.

The task was easy enough, and any endowed with a patience to listen, a readiness to admire that excellent young n.o.bleman, Albert de Chantonnay, and the credulity necessary to listen to the record (more hinted at than clearly spoken) of Madame's own charms in her youth, could make sure of a game of dominoes on the evening of the third Thursday in the month.

The Abbe bustled about, drawing cards and tables nearer to the lamps, away from the draught of the door, not too near the open wood fire. His movements were dainty, like those of an old maid of the last generation.

He hissed through his teeth as if he were working very hard. It served to stimulate a healthy excitement in the Thursday evening of Madame de Chantonnay.

"Oh, I am not uneasy," said that lady, as she watched him. She had dined well and her digestion had outlived those charms to which she made such frequent reference. "I am not uneasy. He will return, more or less sheepish. He will make some excuse more or less inadequate. He will tell us a story more or less creditable. _Allez_! Oh, you men. If you intend that chair for Monsieur de Gemosac, it is the wrong one. Monsieur de Gemosac sits high, but his legs are short; give him the little chair that creaks. If he sits too high he is apt to see over the top of one's cards.

And he is so eager to win--the good Marquis."

"Then he will come to-night despite the cold? You think he will come, Madame?"

"I am sure of it. He has come more frequently since Juliette came to live at the chateau. It is Juliette who makes him come, perhaps. Who knows?"

The Abbe stopped midway across the floor and set down the chair he carried with great caution.

"Madame is incorrigible," he said, spreading out his hands. "Madame would perceive a romance in a cradle."

"Well, one must begin somewhere, Materialist. Once it was for me that the guests crowded to my poor Thursdays. But now it is because Albert is near. Ah! I know it. I say it without jealousy. Have you noticed, my dear Abbe, that he has cut his whiskers a little shorter--a shade nearer to the ear? It is effective, eh?"

"It gives an air of hardihood," a.s.sented the Abbe. "It lends to that intellectual face something martial. I would almost say that to the timorous it might appear terrible and overbearing."

Thus they talked until the guests began to arrive, and for Madame de Chantonnay the time no doubt seemed short enough. For no one appreciated Albert with such a delicacy of touch as the Abbe Touvent.

The Marquis de Gemosac and Juliette were the last to arrive. The Marquis looked worn and considerably aged. He excused himself with a hundred gestures of despair for being late.

"I have so much to do," he whispered. "So much to think of. We are leaving no stone unturned, and at last we have a clue."

The other guests gathered round.

"But speak, my dear friend, speak," cried Madame de Chantonnay. "You keep us in suspense. Look around you. We are among friends, as you see. It is only ourselves."

"Well," replied the Marquis, standing upright and fingering the snuff-box which had been given to his grandfather by the Great Louis. "Well, my friends, our invaluable ally, Dormer Colville, has gone to England. There is a ray of hope. That is all I can tell you."

He looked round, smiled on his audience, and then proceeded to tell them more, after the manner of any Frenchman.

"What," he whispered, "if an unscrupulous republican government had got scent of our glorious discovery! What if, panic-stricken, they threw all vestige of honour to the wind and decided to kidnap an innocent man and send him to the Iceland fisheries, where so many lives are lost every winter; with what hopes in their republican hearts, I leave to your imagination. What if--let us say it for once--Monsieur de Bourbon should prove a match for them? Alert, hardy, full of resource, a skilled sailor, he takes his life in his hand with the daring audacity of royal blood and effects his escape to England. I tell you nothing--"

He held up his hands as if to stay their clamouring voices, and nodded his head triumphantly toward Albert de Chantonnay, who stood near a lamp fingering his martial whisker of the left side with the air of one who would pause at naught.

"I tell you nothing. But such a theory has been pieced together upon excellent material. It may be true. It may be a dream. And, as I tell you, our dear friend Dormer Colville, who has nothing at stake, who loses or gains little by the restoration of France, has journeyed to England for us. None could execute the commission so capably, or without danger of arousing suspicion. There! I have told you all I know. We must wait, my compatriots. We must wait."

"And in the mean time," purred the voice of the Abbe Touvent, "for the digestion, Monsieur le Marquis--for the digestion."

For it was one of the features of Madame de Chantonnay's Thursdays that no servants were allowed in the room; but the guests waited on each other. If the servants, as is to be presumed, listened outside the door, they were particular not to introduce each succeeding guest without first knocking, which caused a momentary silence and added considerably to the sense of political importance of those a.s.sembled. The Abbe Touvent made it his special care to preside over the table where small gla.s.ses of eau-de-vie d'Armagnac and other aids to digestion were set out in a careful profusion.

"It is a theory, my dear Marquis," admitted Madame de Chantonnay. "But it is nothing more. It has no heart in it, your theory. Now I have a theory of my own."

"Full of heart, one may a.s.sure oneself, Madame; full of heart," murmured the Marquis. "For you yourself are full of heart--is it not so?"

"I hope not," Juliette whispered to her fan, with a little smile of malicious amus.e.m.e.nt. For she had a youthful contempt for persons old and stout, who talk ignorantly of matters only understood by such as are young and slim and pretty. She looked at her fan with a gleam of ill-concealed irony and glanced over it toward Albert de Chantonnay, who, with a consideration which must have been hereditary, was uneasy about the alteration he had made in his whiskers. It was perhaps unfair, he felt, to harrow young and tender hearts.

It was at this moment that a loud knock commanded a breathless silence, for no more guests were expected. Indeed the whole neighbourhood was present.

The servant, in his faded gold lace, came in and announced with a dramatic a.s.surance: "Monsieur de Barebone--Monsieur Colville."

And that difference which Dormer Colville had predicted was manifested with an astounding promptness; for all who were seated rose to their feet. It was Colville who had given the names to the servant in the order in which they had been announced, and at the last minute, on the threshold, he had stepped on one side and with his hand on Barebone's shoulder had forced him to take precedence.

The first person Barebone saw on entering the room was Juliette, standing under the spreading arms of a chandelier, half turned to look at him--Juliette, in all the freshness of her girlhood and her first evening dress, flushing pink and white like a wild rose, her eyes, bright with a sudden excitement, seeking his.

Behind her, the Marquis de Gemosac, Albert de Chantonnay, his mother, and all the Royalists of the province, gathered in a semicircle, by accident or some tacit instinct, leaving only the girl standing out in front, beneath the chandelier. They bowed with that grave self-possession which falls like a cloak over the shoulders of such as are of ancient and historic lineage.

"We reached the chateau of Gemosac only a few minutes after Monsieur le Marquis and Mademoiselle had quitted it to come here," Barebone explained to Madame de Chantonnay; "and trusting to the good-nature--so widely famed--of Madame la Comtesse, we hurriedly removed the dust of travel, and took the liberty of following them hither."

"You have not taken me by surprise," replied Madame de Chantonnay. "I expected you. Ask the Abbe Touvent. He will tell you, gentlemen, that I expected you."

As Barebone turned away to speak to the Marquis and others, who were pressing forward to greet him, it became apparent that that mantle of imperturbability, which millions made in trade can never buy, had fallen upon his shoulders, too. For most men are, in the end, forced to play the part the world a.s.signs to them. We are not allowed to remain what we know ourselves to be, but must, at last, be that which the world thinks us.

Madame de Chantonnay, murmuring to a neighbour a mystic reference to her heart and its voluminous premonitions, watched him depart with a vague surprise.

"_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu_!" she whispered, breathlessly. "It is not a resemblance. It is the dead come to life again."

CHAPTER x.x.xII

PRIMROSES

"If I go on, I go alone," Barebone had once said to Dormer Colville.

The words, spoken in the heat of a quarrel, stuck in the memory of both, as such are wont to do. Perhaps, in moments of anger or disillusionment--when we find that neither self nor friend is what we thought--the heart tears itself away from the grip of the cooler, calmer brain and speaks untrammelled. And such speeches are apt to linger in the mind long after the most brilliant jeu d'esprit has been forgotten.

What occupies the thoughts of the old man, sitting out the grey remainder of the day, over the embers of a hearth which he will only quit when he quits the world? Does he remember the brilliant sallies of wit, the greatest triumphs of the n.o.blest minds with which he has consorted; or does his memory cling to some scene--simple, pastoral, without incident--which pa.s.sed before his eyes at a moment when his heart was sore or glad? When his mind is resting from its labours and the sound of the grinding is low, he will scarce remember the neat saying or the lofty thought clothed in perfect language; but he will never forget a hasty word spoken in an unguarded moment by one who was not clever at all, nor even possessed the worldly wisdom to shield the heart behind the buckler of the brain.

"You will find things changed," Colville had said, as they walked across the marsh from Farlingford, toward the Ipswich road. And the words came back to the minds of both, on that Thursday of Madame de Chantonnay, which many remember to this day. Not only did they find things changed, but themselves they found no longer the same. Both remembered the quarrel, and the outcome of it.

Colville, ever tolerant, always leaning toward the compromise that eases a doubting conscience, had, it would almost seem unconsciously, prepared the way for a reconciliation before there was any question of a difference. On their way back to France, without directly referring to that fatal portrait and the revelation caused by Barebone's unaccountable feat of memory, he had smoothed away any possible scruple.

"France must always be deceived," he had said, a hundred times. "Better that she should be deceived for an honest than a dishonest purpose--if it is deception, after all, which is very doubtful. The best patriot is he who is ready to save his country at the cost of his own ease, whether of body or of mind. It does not matter who or what you are; it is what or who the world thinks you to be, that is of importance."

Which of us has not listened to a score of such arguments, not always from the lips of a friend, but most often in that still, small voice which rarely has the courage to stand out against the tendency of the age? There is nothing so contagious as laxity of conscience.

Barebone listened to the good-natured, sympathetic voice with a make-believe conviction which was part of his readiness to put off an evil moment. Colville was a difficult man to quarrel with. It seemed bearish and ill-natured to take amiss any word or action which could only be the outcome of a singularly tender consideration for the feelings of others.

But when they entered Madame de Chantonnay's drawing-room--when Dormer, impelled by some instinct of the fitness of things, stepped aside and motioned to his companion to pa.s.s in first--the secret they had in common yawned suddenly like a gulf between them. For the possession of a secret either estranges or draws together. More commonly, it estranges. For which of us is careful of a secret that redounds to our credit? Nearly every secret is a hidden disgrace; and such a possession, held in common with another, is not likely to insure affection.

Colville lingered on the threshold, watching Loo make the first steps of that progress which must henceforth be pursued alone. He looked round for a friendly face, but no one had eyes for him. They were all looking at Loo Barebone. Colville sought Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, usually in full evidence, even in a room full of beautiful women and distinguished men.

But she was not there. For a minute or two no one noticed him; and then Albert de Chantonnay, remembering his role, came forward to greet the Englishman.