CHANTEMERLE

CHANTEMERLE
A ROMANCE OF THE VENDEAN WAR

BY
D. K. BROSTER AND G. W. TAYLOR

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1911

“Melius est nos mori in bello quam videre mala gentis nostræ et sanctorum”

CONTENTS

CHANTEMERLE

PROLOGUE
SAINT LUCIAN’S DAY

It was a large room, a room in a palace grown to be a prison in all but name. A bright fire crackled on the hearth at one end, the firelight danced on the walls, the dusk drew on, and a girl looked out of the window at the whirling snowflakes.

She stood in the embrasure of the window farthest from the door, leaning her head against the glass, and her pose suggested that she was in a daydream. On this January afternoon of 1792 the Tuileries seemed deserted. Outside, in the great empty garden, the trees stood up black and bare, for the snow was not settling on them. And though the girl’s eyes followed the snowflakes, her thoughts were probably much further away, for she did not hear the door open, nor turn until she was conscious of a footfall behind her.

In front of her stood a young man. His hands were full of violets. It was light enough for her to see perfectly his handsome, smiling face, and for him, though she had her back to the window, to notice, if he chose, how the wild-rose of her cheek was enhanced by the deep mourning which she wore. Apparently the two knew each other intimately, for no greeting passed between them save a smile.

“Are those for me?” asked the girl as one who has no doubt of the answer, and she half held out her hands. “I thought you had forgotten.”

“Have I ever forgotten your name-day?” he retorted. “You should have had them this morning to greet you, but I was on guard, and promised myself the pleasure of bringing them in person.” He placed the fragrant mass in her two hands, and as he did so he caught one lightly by the wrist and kissed it. “Your subject offers his belated homage,” he said gaily.

A slow, beautiful colour mounted to the girl’s cheek, and she laid her face in the violets to cool it. “They are exquisite,” she said in a low voice. “They are more beautiful than—than some of my gifts to-day.”

The giver shook his head. “Those others must be worth very little, then, if my poor flowers can surpass them. You are flattering me, Lucienne.”

For answer the girl laid down her burden on a small table near her. “You shall see,” she said merrily, and, drawing from her pocket a shagreen case of some size, she opened it. “I know that I ought not to make comparisons, but surely your violets are more beautiful than this?”

The young man looked with a critical expression upon its contents. “Yes,” he admitted at length. “I do not care for cameos myself, though if size is a criterion of value it should be a magnificent one. The Marquise, I suppose?”

The girl nodded as she snapped to the case. “She says it is an heirloom. But I like violets better than heirlooms.”

“And what has Gilbert sent you—no, I see it on your finger. May I look?”

She held out her hand without answering, and the firelight caught the single magnificent ruby as she did so. Her companion did not take her hand.

“That,” he said gravely, “is a royal gift. I wonder still more at my presumption in making so worthless an offering, for my flowers won’t even last, like my aunt’s cameo.” And in his tone there was faint but unmistakable bitterness.

“But while they last they are better, and when they are dead you can bring me some more. I sometimes think,” went on the girl a trifle feverishly, fastening a handful of the violets in her breast, “I sometimes think that flowers have souls as we have.”

“I don’t think that they have anything so annoying,” returned the young man. “You would not like them so much if they had. . . . May I have one or two back again?”

She held out a few of the dark blossoms, and he put them silently into his coat, looking the while not at her, but at the ruby on her finger.

“You are standing all this time,” he said abruptly when he had finished, “and it grows cold here. Shall we talk a moment by the fire? I must not stay long.”

The girl moved away at once. A little shiver had indeed gone over her, and she had quite lost the colour of a few moments ago, and more besides. “You are going to the King, perhaps?” she hazarded over her shoulder as he followed her to the fireplace.

“No; to Bertrand-Moleville, if I can find him. I hardly saw a soul as I came up. Where is everybody—where is Madame de Fontenelle—and why are you alone? It is very rare to find you so!”

“The Princess is in her oratory, and will probably be there for some time. Madame de Fontenelle, poor old thing, has a bad migraine, and I think that Madame de Lessay, who is in waiting to-day, is receiving her brother.”

“I see. And what is your news from Chantemerle?”

“Nothing in particular,” replied the girl. The ruddy light from the fire smote upwards on her beautiful, dreamy face. “The Marquise is well, and Gilbert is building some new cottages. He writes that—that——”

“That he would rather you did not stay here much longer,” finished the young man, looking hard at her.

“Yes,” assented the girl indistinctly, dropping her head.

“He is perfectly right,” said Gilbert’s cousin. “Sooner or later you will have to leave the Court. The Princess Elisabeth, too, will insist.” His tone was almost hard, and she looked up with a dawn of surprise.

“Oh, not yet, Louis! There is no danger; no one would harm the Princess. Surely you do not think I need go yet?”

“You should not ask me,” answered the young man slowly in a low voice. He seemed to pick his words from a host of others ready on his lips, looking on the ground the while. “I have no—no right to advise you, and . . . and . . . Lucienne!”

The name burst from him on a cry, for they had both looked up, and with the meeting of their eyes all pretence was over between them. The next instant she was in his arms, and her lips met his, while all the little stucco Cupids round the cornice smiled down, in the half-dusk and the firelight, at the foolish mortals who had resolved that they would never betray their hearts to each other.

“Lucienne, my love, my love!” murmured the young man passionately. “Oh, I never thought . . . I never meant to tell you. . . . Shut your eyes, and let me kiss them . . . your hair smells of violets. . . .”

“Louis, Louis!” said the girl, trying, after a moment, to free herself, “what are we doing?—Oh, what are we doing?”

“What we were always meant to do, my heart,” said he hardily. “No, I shall not let you go. I will never let you go again, little love. But we will both leave France—and in England——”

“Louis, Louis, don’t break my heart! You know we can’t!” And, abandoning her attempt at loosing herself, and clinging all the closer, she broke into pitiful sobbing.

His arms only closed round her the firmer. “Don’t cry, my darling! Of course we can. The Abbé Moustier—you remember him—is in Paris just now; I know where he lodges. He can marry us at once—to-morrow, if you like, at the Recollets. Then, when I have procured a passport, which is the only obstacle to getting away at once——”

“Louis . . . you know that there is another!” she gasped. “Gilbert . . . we can’t—you know we can’t!”

A change passed over her lover’s face; it set and hardened. “My God!” he broke out fiercely, “why should we consider Gilbert? What is his claim compared to mine? What is his happiness compared to yours—his, who has never known what it is to love, else he could never have left you so long unclaimed? Gilbert is nothing to us.” And he kissed her again.

“O Louis . . . for God’s sake let me go! You don’t know what you are doing!”

“I do know very well,” returned the young man. “I am going to take you away from Gilbert. . . . Have I frightened you, my heart? You know that for Heaven itself I would not harm you. There!” He loosed his hold, and she was free.

“Louis . . . you cannot, you dare not do such a thing!”

“Do you think that I am afraid of Gilbert?” he asked.

She put both her hands on his folded arms. “No, Louis, not of him, nor of any man—but of dishonour.”

Something that was not the best part of him leapt into the young man’s eyes as he looked down at her with a sudden little smile. “The dishonour won’t be mine, Lucienne!”

She shrank away at that, and covered her face with her hands. “And he is your cousin—your friend,” she murmured.

“What of that? Does that give him a claim to dispose of both our lives? He is not your husband, Lucienne. What is it that you were affianced to him since you were a child—before you were old enough to have even a nominal choice? Is it such a crime, then, to have loved you, when I have known you as long as he, when I have seen you constantly for years—more often, perhaps, than he has done? Look at me and answer!” Gently but firmly he pulled away her hands.

“It may not be a crime,” she said. “I cannot tell . . . O Louis, what am I to say to you . . . for you know what I would give that it might come true—but it is . . . treachery.”

Dominated as he was by his passion, the young man slowly changed colour. “Treachery is a big word, and a disastrous,” he said after a moment. “Will it—will my wife call me traitor?”

“She will call herself so,” said the girl faintly.

“Listen, Lucienne,” said her lover, catching her hands. “Treachery be it, then! I do not care. I love you too much to consider honour. Of two things one must choose the best. I choose you, and my honour shall go.” He had her in his arms again, and kissed her hair with a dangerous quietness. The plaster Loves smiled at each other, for they had known that they would win, and the struggle only entertained them, since it would grace their victory the better.

The girl lifted a white face. “Louis, I conjure you . . . he trusts you, he trusts us. He has always trusted us, nobly, generously——”

“Are you going to sing Gilbert’s praises to me?”

“—Generously and fully. You have been boys together—we cannot do this. It is like stabbing him in the back. O Louis, dear Louis, you know I would come with you if I could—you do not think it is easy for me either, do you, Louis? . . . You know that I love you with all my heart . . . but I can’t do it. . . . Mary Mother! help me—help him!” Her eyes closed; her hands, imprisoned as she was, joined themselves. And for the second time the young man, now nearly as white as she, let her go.

“I want no saints between us, Lucienne,” he said, very low. “You are saint enough for me. . . . And you have no need to invoke angelic protection against me; you have had it, I think, these many months . . . else you would have known before to-day what I never meant to tell you even now, God knows!”

The sudden agony in his voice showed the girl that the day was not yet lost. Still there was time for the anguish of victory. But was it not for defeat that her soul cried out? . . . Not till now did she realise that under this strife of the heart there lay a jewelled picture in her mind—the little chapel at the Recollets, the decked altar, the priest bending over two figures that knelt there side by side. It flashed up now, warm and brilliant, flashed and faded as she turned away, falteringly crossed the room, and sank down on the brocaded cushions of the couch.

Her lover looked up and slowly followed her out of the firelight. “Is this to be the end of the dream, then?” he asked huskily.

She whispered “Yes” almost inaudibly, and catching at his hand carried it to her lips. He pulled it instantly away, and the lace at his wrist, catching on a bracelet, tore. “Don’t do that!” he exclaimed, “if you want this to be the end. . . . My God, how can it!”

She only said, with a little gasp: “Your ruffle is torn. I am sorry . . .”

And he stood staring at her, as, white as a lily, she sat there propped by the cushions, her hands idle and open on her lap, and seemed scarcely to see him. Then he turned away without a word and went slowly to the fireplace.

The girl sat looking with anguished eyes at the figure thrown up dark against the firelight, and the bent brown head over which showed on the marble the carved lilies of France. There was nothing dramatic in his attitude; he seemed to be examining his torn lace . . . a long time.

Suddenly all the Amorini grew grave, crowded together, and looked down from their coigns in alarm. The young man had turned away from the hearth. His face was very drawn; his eyes, that they and she had always known so gay and kind, were steel-bright and hopeless. He came straight across the room and dropped on his knees beside the girl.

“God knows,” he said hoarsely, “I never meant that you should know. God knows I have struggled against it. If things had been different. . . . Lucienne, at least kiss me once more!”

Unnaturally calm now, she took his upturned face in her hands. “Louis, he trusts us,” she said simply, and stooped her lips to his. “Now go,” she said less assuredly. “Go, Louis. . . .”

“Before you have time to repent,” said he bitterly. “I shall repent all my life. God! what a fool I am being—and all for a word called honour!”

“Dear, dear Louis,” said the girl, half maternal, half frightened, “it is more than that. Oh, believe me, how could we ever be happy together if——”

“Better than we can be happy apart!” he broke in. “But you are right, Lucienne; it is not, after all, for a word; it is for Gilbert himself. If it had been any other man. . . . I wish it were, I wish it were!”

“Yes, he trusts us,” she repeated again. “And he must never know.”

“No, he must never know. But I shall love you, my darling, all my life long. And sometimes—very rarely, of course”—he tried to smile—“you will think of me. . . . And, meanwhile, I shall still see you sometimes.”

“But not often,” she said. “O Louis, not often! It would not be right—I could not bear it. . . . I think I would rather never see you again.” Two great tears ran down her cheeks and lay like dew on the violets at her breast.

All the Cupids on the ceiling stiffened back to their places, and pretended that they had never taken any interest.

CHAPTER I
“MONSIEUR MON COUSIN”

On a certain bleak March afternoon of the year 1774 a solemn, long-legged boy of ten or eleven sat curled up in a window-seat of his father’s château of Chantemerle in Poitevin Vendée, and pressed his nose wistfully against the cold panes. The rain, on the wings of a fitful wind, hurled itself in blurring gusts against the glass, and even hissed now and then on the glowing logs of the great hearth. But the owner of the motionless black head, with its neat ribbon and queue, was not watching for a chance of going out, nor even wishing that the rain would cease; he was awaiting, between doubt and desire, the greatest change of his short young life.

Gilbert-Octavien-Félix-Anne de Chantemerle, Comte de Château-Foix, was an only child, and he had never left the house of his birth, nor had he seen many persons from the outside world come into it—and never one of his own age. To the society of his elders he was well accustomed, owing to it the greater part of his serious demeanour. He had been educated at first chiefly by his father, the student, the follower of the newer lights, and latterly also by the Curé of the parish, who held with the philosophe Marquis a friendship of a very old and tried intimacy. Gilbert was, perhaps, equally fond of both his instructors. When he played—which was seldom—he played alone; but he was not unhappy, and he had no idea that he was lonely. Diligent at his lessons, obedient though not docile to authority, he had one kingdom of which he was absolute master—that of his dreams and his books. He desired no other.

But now everything was changed. He would work and play alone no longer. It was a thought half sad, half delightful, but most of all perplexing, for what would he be like, this mysterious kinsman and playmate? Even Gilbert’s father knew very little about him. The motherless only child of the Marquis’ favourite cousin, confided by the latter on his death-bed to the care of M. de Château-Foix, the boy was not altogether acceptable to the Marquise. But she had to yield to her husband in the matter. Château-Foix did not wish the young Vicomte de Saint-Ermay to be brought up in Paris, where his mother’s relatives were on the way to secure over him an influence which the Marquis did not consider desirable. Like a wise woman, Madame de Château-Foix made in the end something of a virtue of this necessity, and she was really prepared to give the small stranger a warm welcome.

The preparation of that welcome indeed, in the more material sense, had but this moment engaged her when she came down the staircase to await the travellers in the hall. The Marquis had been to Paris to fetch his small relative and was to bring him in the diligence as far as Pouzauges, where his own coach would meet him.

Madame de Château-Foix was a very handsome woman, to whom the term “beautiful” had never been applied. For her years, which were short of forty, she had, possibly, a too majestic port. Wearing her powdered hair in the very high and narrow style of the prevailing fashion, and, for the provinces, somewhat elaborately dressed, she came down the staircase gently chafing her hands.

“How chilly it is!” she said, as she reached the bottom. “Are you not catching cold there, Gilbert?”

“No, thank you, mamma; I am quite warm,” replied the boy, without turning his head.

His mother rustled softly along the hall to the fireplace. She was restless; the arrival of this little boy meant so much—so much, perhaps, of change; more, she was sure, than her husband seemed to realise.

“Come here, Gilbert,” she said suddenly.

The boy slipped obediently off the window-seat. He was not a good-looking nor even a particularly attractive child, but he was tall for his age, and well grown.

The Marquise put her hands on his shoulders and surveyed him for a moment; then she kissed him. “You quite understand, do you not, Gilbert, about your cousin? He is to be a new brother for you, and you are always to treat him as if he were your own younger brother, and make him feel that this is his home. But . . . remember, my dear boy,” her voice trembled a little, “remember that your father and mother love you none the less dearly because—because your cousin Louis is coming to live here; and remember, too, that he has no father nor mother of his own.”

“Yes, mamma,” said the boy, making no allusion to the thousand queries and surmises with which his own mind was filled. His mother kissed him again, and, released, he went slowly back to his post. But hardly had he got there before he called out with real boyish excitement: “Here they come! here they come! They’re in the straight bit of the avenue—and Jean-Baptiste is so wet. I can see the rain running off his hat in a stream!”

A moment or two later the domestics were opening the heavy doors to admit, from a background of torrential rain, a tall man leading by the hand a small figure wrapped about in a cloak. Muffled as this was, it extricated a hand on the threshold, and punctiliously plucked off its hat, revealing a curly, golden-brown head. The Marquise swept to meet the two.

“Here we are,” said her husband cheerfully, uttering the instinctive banality of most arrivals. He kissed Madame de Château-Foix’ fingers, and then her cheek. “And here is the celebrated traveller,” he added, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder and bringing him forward. “Louis, here is your aunt, who is very glad to see you.”

A little to the Marquise’s discomfiture—for she was prepared to clasp him in her arms—the small newcomer made her a profound bow. As he raised himself from his salute she saw, with a pang at her heart, that he was without exception the most beautiful boy on whom she had ever set eyes. He had to the life the head of Greuze’s “Espièglerie”—a face of beauty and mischief—and as Madame de Château-Foix met the gaze of the sparkling grey eyes with their dark lashes, and saw the curves of the youthful mouth, she realised that the Fates had assigned to her lot that difficult if attractive task, a high-spirited child. But, as with most of her sex, the charm of childish beauty was too strong either for maternal jealousy or for premonition of future struggles, and she went down on her knees, and, clasping the boy to her breast, kissed him warmly.

Gilbert had stood in the background, a silent spectator, but as his mother rose he came forward of his own accord, and half shyly, half composedly held out his hand, and said: “Welcome, Cousin Louis.”

When the child had been taken upstairs, and Gilbert had vanished in the same direction, the Marquis looked enquiringly at his wife.

“He is a beautiful boy,” said she slowly.

“And a very bright one,” returned M. de Château-Foix. “I assure you, he has proved an excellent travelling companion.”

“And as a companion for Gilbert?” queried the Marquise.

“He should do him all the good in the world,” responded her husband promptly. “Gilbert wants rousing; you know my views about him, Félicité. Louis is—let me see—just about two years younger than he. I don’t know what sort of an education he has had—probably a somewhat fragmentary one, since his father died, at least—but if it is at all possible for them to have lessons together, the stimulus may be of great gain to Gilbert. We must see what M. des Graves says.”

The Marquise gave a little sigh. “It will all be so different,” she said regretfully.

“Of course it will, my love,” said the Marquis cheerfully. “I hope it will also be better. It is not good for children to play alone.” And, taking his leave of his wife, he went to change his travelling clothes, while Madame de Château-Foix slowly made her way to the apartment of the new arrival. She found him, perfectly undisturbed by the grave and speculating gaze of Gilbert, chatting confidentially to the old nurse who was brushing out his curls.

Between ten and eleven the next morning Madame de Château-Foix espied from the window the cassocked form of M. des Graves coming up the avenue, and she also saw her husband go to meet him, as he often did. From the time of their marriage the Marquis had been wont to speak with pride of a long-trusted friend, who was at once a priest and a man of the great world. His name, she knew, promised to be an illustrious one, and it was whispered that the Papal Court had more than once offered him preferment. But she had never met him until the influence which she had always vaguely felt became a reality. When Gilbert was a boy of six or seven this courtier-priest—for such she had always pictured him—accepted, to her amazement, the living of Chantemerle. For what reason Sébastien des Graves had been content to take upon himself the duties of an obscure village curé she could not guess, and her husband, whom she naturally suspected of knowing, preserved an impenetrable silence on the point.

The Marquise suddenly unfastened the window and stepped out on to the flight of steps which led down to the garden. The two men saw her, and, leaving the gravel, made their way over the wet grass. A clear sky had followed on yesterday’s rain, and the birds were singing.

“Good-morning, Father,” she said as they began to ascend the steps. “Your new pupil is already in the library with Gilbert awaiting you.”

“Not with apprehension, I trust,” returned the priest, smiling. His clearly-cut features were of the type generally associated with the statesman-ecclesiastic. The lines about his mouth, stern almost to harshness, seemed to denote the churchman of high place; it was only the depth of kindness in the eyes which betokened the parish priest to whom no one ever looked in vain. Of middle height and powerful build, he betrayed his forty-two years only by a slight sprinkling of white on his hair.

The Marquis de Château-Foix laughed. “I don't think, Sébastien, that you will find Louis unduly timorous.”

The preceptor found him, on the other hand, endowed by nature with a very healthy aversion to Latin grammar. However, he was quick, and quite reasonably docile, and M. des Graves announced, to the Marquis’ satisfaction, that, at the price of a little extra attention, the two boys could do the same lessons.

A week, a fortnight passed away in great harmony. Gilbert gave his new playmate a much-valued puppy, and lent him his pony. Madame de Château-Foix began to relax her slightly jealous maternal attitude and to feel that all was for the best, since the two got on so well together.

Announcement of a disagreement, however, was formally made to her one morning. “If it please Madame la Marquise, Monsieur le Comte and Monsieur le Vicomte are fighting in the Italian garden. We cannot find Monsieur le Marquis, and Monsieur le Curé has not come up yet.”

Annoyed and a little apprehensive, Madame de Château-Foix went down to separate the combatants, but found the conflict virtually over. Gilbert, looking very hot and untidy, but not particularly elated or vindictive, was standing, in shirt and breeches, watching his cousin, who, sitting on the curved stone bench amid the empty flower-beds, was holding an ensanguined handkerchief to his face. Stains of the same hue were discernible all down the front of his shirt.

The Marquise was seriously alarmed. “Gilbert! what have you done?” she exclaimed.

“It’s only his nose,” replied her son callously. “It makes a mess, but it doesn’t mean anything, you know.”

“I am ashamed of you,” said Madame de Château-Foix severely, “bitterly ashamed. How can you ill-treat a boy smaller and younger than yourself in this disgusting fashion?”

“He hasn’t been ill-treating me,” expostulated Louis through his handkerchief. “I have hit him too, haven’t I, Gilbert? Look at his eye!”

The Marquise did look, but her inexperience received more enlightenment a day or two later, when her son was going about with an eye round which many shades strove for the mastery, and when Louis’ shapely little nose also retained a decidedly swollen appearance. The Marquis laughed when he saw these signs, and pooh-poohed his wife’s remonstrances.

And indeed the two boys, considering their great dissimilarity of character, were unusually good friends. The small Vicomte, as his relatives soon discovered, was endued with a temper which was rarely ruffled. He never sulked, as Gilbert sometimes did, nor, in spite of his high spirits, did he often fly into a rage—partly, perhaps, because he seemed to get what he wanted with so little trouble. For in a quite unassertive and natural way he tyrannised over Gilbert, who, finding himself in the position of a host, continued to bestow on him delightedly many of his choicest treasures. It was the same with the menials, who adored Monsieur le Vicomte with a worship which their sense of what was due to Monsieur le Comte obliged them to keep within bounds.

Conscious of the bondage into which the household was gradually falling, and having approached her husband with small satisfaction, the Marquise one day confided to M. des Graves her fear that Louis was getting spoilt.

The Curé asked her for a definition of a spoilt child.

“I mean a child to whom every one gives way,” she answered. “Now Louis is so attractive that one gives him all he wants—and surely that is not good for him, Father?”

“Does he seem to you any the worse for it, Madame?” asked the Curé, with a little smile.

Madame de Château-Foix was constrained to confess that he did not, but added that she could not suppose that he would remain indefinitely unharmed.

The priest took a turn about the long library, where his pupils’ lesson-books were still scattered on the table. “I have a theory about Louis, Madame,” he said, looking at her in his rather masterful fashion. “Time may show me that I am wrong, but I believe the boy to be one of those rare—those very rare—natures, for whom it is good to be happy.”

The Marquise was shocked. “Good for children to have what they want!” she exclaimed, bringing the particular down to the general.

“And for grown-up people too, Madame,” returned the priest with hardihood. “Sometimes. But such people are rare.”

“Fortunately!” ejaculated Madame de Château-Foix indignantly, and did not pursue the conversation, but retired to reflect on the ridiculous ideas possessed by the two members of her court of appeal—the doctrinaire and the celibate. She must take her own stand, and Louis should not be spoilt. But spoilt he was, for all that.

And thus the days went on to late summer, when a third person, as yet mute, or practically so, appeared upon the stage. Like most landowners in Vendée, the Marquis de Château-Foix possessed a home farm close to the Château, much frequented by his son and nephew—for as such Louis, though strictly his cousin, was always considered. One afternoon, when the corn was being threshed in the great courtyard of this building, Gilbert, with his hands in his pockets, and something the air of the future owner, was standing very seriously watching the operation. The flails rose and fell rhythmically, the farm hands carried off the chaff in cloths and piled it in a great heap, occasional chickens made assaults upon the grain, and the golden afternoon air enshrined everything. Gilbert looked up at a shout. Another laden ox-cart was coming in under the archway, and it was Louis, in the enjoyment of a seat more precarious than comfortable on one of the oxen, who had hailed him.

“Ah, get down now, Monsieur Louis!” said Beaudrier, the Marquis’ farmer, as the teamster put his long goad in front of the beasts’ noses and brought their leisurely progress to a stop. “You’ll be killing yourself one of these days, and the bullocks aren’t accustomed to it, neither!”

“I can’t,” retorted the boy, laughing. “O Beaudrier, if you knew how slippery their backs are! But I suppose you have not ridden one for a long time.”

“Take Monsieur le Vicomte down,” said Beaudrier, himself the father of fourteen children, with a smile to the teamster. But Louis slipped off and ran up to Gilbert.

“Who is it that is coming this evening?” he asked. “My uncle has gone off to Pouzauges to meet somebody, and ever so many bedrooms are being got ready.”

“I expect,” said Gilbert, considering, “that it is Madame d’Aucourt. It is about the time that she generally comes.”

“Does she always come?” enquired his cousin. “Who is she? Will she stay long?”

“She is a friend of mamma’s,” Gilbert informed him. “Yes, she comes every year, and she stays about two months. Last time she brought a baby.”

“A what!” exclaimed Louis. The young hen that he had just captured uttered protests against the tightness of his interested grip.

“A baby—a child.”

“Why?”

“Why?” repeated his senior scornfully. “How stupid you are, Louis! Because it belongs to her, I suppose, and she likes to have it with her. I shouldn’t. It only cries.”

Louis released his chicken. “Do all babies cry?”

“I don’t know. Yes; the one Madame Beaudrier has just now does.”

“Then that’s why people don’t like having babies,” said Louis, with the air of having solved a long-standing problem. “I have so often wondered why M. de Larny—my uncle in Paris, you know—was so very angry when Mademoiselle Claire, his sister, had one. He talked about it a lot, and said it was a disgrace, and sent it away, I think.”

“That is nonsense,” said Gilbert loftily, “because only married people have babies.”

“It’s not nonsense,” retorted Louis earnestly. “It’s quite true. Mademoiselle de Larny cried, and my aunt too. I remember it quite well.” Indeed the reminiscences with which the Vicomte, occasionally and quite innocently, regaled the family dinner-table had sometimes to be checked in mid-career. That tendency afforded the Marquise deep cause for thankfulness at her husband’s act in removing him from his Parisian surroundings.

“You can’t remember what’s impossible,” said Gilbert with decision. “You made a mistake—or else you’re inventing. You were only a little boy then.”

“I was not a little boy!” retorted Louis, flushing. “It was only last year. I shall ask my aunt.” He went off whistling, tried to induce one of the men to lend him a flail, and then returned to his cousin to announce confidentially that he intended to teach the baby to ride a bullock.

It was fortunate for the Comtesse d’Aucourt that her daughter was as yet too young really to run any risk of undergoing this instruction. Louis found to his annoyance that a child of two years old is scarcely steady enough on its legs to be a reliable playmate, and is, moreover, never to be met without a nurse in attendance. Yet for a time Mademoiselle Lucienne was as interesting as a new kitten, and he smiled on her even when she plunged tenacious hands into his curls. Since, after all, she cried very little, he was once more reduced to speculation as to the grounds on which the possession of so pleasing a toy could ever be deprecated. Having no fear of strangers he applied to Madame d’Aucourt for enlightenment, but she referred him to the Marquise, and Madame de Château-Foix put him off with that annoying evasion that he would “know when he was older.” Louis then tried to pin down his aunt to a statement of the epoch when he should be considered to have attained the desired longevity—next year, when he would be nine?—the year after, then? He failed in his attempt, but not until the Marquise had been driven nearly desperate in her efforts to elude him.

The Comtesse d’Aucourt, lady-in-waiting to the Princess Adelaide, the new King’s aunt, had been a friend of Madame de Château-Foix since convent days. If she were able to leave her post at Court she paid the Marquise a visit every year. It was by her that intimate news of Versailles came to the Château, and she had this year a budget of more interest than usual—all the particulars of the old King’s death in May. The two boys, quick to realise that she came from a world other than theirs, would demand to be told again how the beautiful Austrian Dauphine looked now that she was Queen of France, or how M. d’Aucourt, at present away as envoy at one of the smaller German courts, had escaped from the Indians when as a young man he fought in Canada with Vaudreuil and Montcalm. The Comtesse became in some sort installed as a story-teller to them, in the September evenings, round the fire, with Louis cross-legged on the floor and Gilbert leaning against his mother’s chair; or under the mulberry tree in the afternoon, when Louis would be flat on the grass at her feet, his own kicking occasionally in the air and his lips black with mulberries. The faint, rather wearied air that always clung to her, the little gestures of her beautiful hands, her clear, delicate enunciation with its undertone of fatigue, remained for years with Gilbert as a kind of embodiment of a life that seemed so far away and at times so attractive.

Then the Comtesse left, and it was winter, with fresh delights; when the execrable, lane-like roads of Vendée were impassable, and with the coming of the snow one could play, with much semblance of reality, at being besieged. Then the days began to get longer, and the birds sang again, and it would soon be summer once more, the best time of all. And the days were like the year: the morning, when one did one’s lessons, was the Spring, because, though it was pleasant, there were more agreeable things to come; and those things happened in Summer, which was the afternoon; and the evening was the Autumn, because, though warded off with stories, bed-time was approaching; and bed, which meant night, was Winter. And the morning was Spring again. . . . But who can compile the almanac of a happy childhood? Day followed day, week fled after week; where the fields had been crowned with rippling yellow they stood shorn, were brown to the ploughshare, were white with frost, were green again with young life. Then, suddenly as it seemed, it all came to an end, for Gilbert was sixteen, and it was high time for him to begin the military education usual to his age and rank.

Though a dreamy boy, he had grown up not unconscious of his own claims upon the world or of his position as one who would some day exact obedience. With powers of thought developed beyond his years, he had not so much the making of a scholar as of a student and lover of men. Under a heaviness which might almost have been mistaken for sullenness of disposition, there lurked possibilities of imagination and of power which none but M. des Graves guessed, and he kept his own counsel. But those who had eyes to see might have noticed that Gilbert received severer censure for any show of idleness in his studies than ever did Louis for a similar (and infinitely more frequent) offence. The priest was very thoughtful on the day that the marquis told him how few weeks more were left to him of his elder pupil, although he had always known of the career for which Gilbert was destined.

Gilbert, as well as M. des Graves, had long been aware that he was going to the military academy at Versailles. Of another arrangement he was still ignorant. His parents had already selected his future wife in the person of the little girl, now aged seven, with whom he had sometimes played. The match had made itself. The Marquis had always an affection for Lucienne, and the now widowed Madame d’Aucourt desired a closer union with the family of her old friend. The nine years’ difference between the ages of the prospective bride and bridegroom was approved, and Lucienne’s dowry, as an only child, was satisfactory. Gilbert received the news with equanimity; the day when he should marry seemed very far off, obscured behind the peaks of the new life upon which he was entering. For the rest, he was fond of the child.

For a little while Louis remained behind at Chantemerle to struggle with the Latin authors, to plague and charm the servants as of yore, and to look enviously at his cousin when he came home in his new uniform. Then the influence of his mother’s relatives procured him a place in the royal pages, preparatory to his entering the bodyguard, and the Château fell into a quietude which it had never known since his advent on that March afternoon seven years before. A child, however, still woke the echoes in the garden every summer. Till her tenth year Gilbert’s destined bride paid annual—sometimes even more frequent—visits with her mother, and once or twice these visits coincided with the leave of one or other of the boys of whose own childhood she had formed a part. She was now an extremely pretty child, but at this epoch the cousins were both too much absorbed in their new worlds to pay her particular attention, and her future husband took, if possible, less notice of her than did Louis. At ten her mother sent her to be educated in a convent.

A year later Gilbert finished his military studies at Versailles, and, in accordance with his father’s wish, went over for some months to England, where he had relatives, the Marquise’s dead sister having married a Suffolk squire. It was not solely the claims of kinship which had prompted this visit. The Marquis de Château-Foix was deeply imbued with the ideas then prevalent among the Liberal noblesse in France. Like them he desired to better the position of his tenantry; like them he sought help in English methods of agriculture, introducing these not only at Chantemerle, but in the small, distant, and not often visited estate near Lyons from which he took his title of Château-Foix. His father’s projects had been familiar to Gilbert ever since he was old enough to understand them, and, a native of that unique province where the curse of a non-resident nobility was scarcely known, and where seigneur and peasantry were on almost patriarchal terms of intimacy, of mutual respect and often of affection, the young man considered them the outcome of a very natural instinct. He had, therefore, every sympathy with the Marquis’ views; he meant, when he had made his own career, to settle down and carry on his father’s work after the latter’s death, and though this event would not, he trusted, take place till a remote period—for the Marquis was only five-and-forty—Gilbert was pleased to think that if his sojourn in England proved profitable he might even now be of use to him. With these virtuous intentions he embarked for England, and found his stay under the hospitable roof of his English uncle agreeable as well as valuable. Sir William Ashley was pleased to approve of him, saying, indeed—than which there could be no higher praise—that he was almost like an Englishman; his cousin, George Ashley, of about his own age, was at hand to pilot him round neighbouring estates or about London, his younger cousin Amelia to welcome him when he came back. Hither also came Louis for a short visit, to make violent, half-teasing love to Amelia and to embitter the hearts of youthful country gentlemen by his elegance and good looks, and—chiefly for that reason—to create a certain relief in Gilbert’s mind when he departed.

The English turnip, that supremely important root, was receiving Gilbert’s attention when the messenger brought him the news that was to change his whole career. The Marquis de Château-Foix had died in two days of a chill contracted while superintending some building operations on the estate. Voltairean and sceptic, he had given his life for his ideals, and the young man of twenty, whose feet, indeed, were at the moment heavy with the soil of a Suffolk turnip-field, but whose hand was always, in idea, on the hilt of the sword which was to make him a glorious name, was left to reign in his stead—if he chose.

Gilbert de Château-Foix did choose, and at once. It was a real and no forced choice, for, except his father's wishes, not expressed in any document, but clamant in his own heart, there was no binding reason why he should reside on his estate. Throwing up the commission—the result of studies more than satisfactory—which awaited him in Royal-Aunis, and with it his dreams of military glory, he announced his intention of devoting himself to the care of his tenantry. He was not yet twenty-one, but if he knew regrets and distastes, he shared them with no one. His comrades and his friends in Paris thought him bereft of his senses, and stigmatised him as an eccentric. The very handsome youth in the blue, scarlet, and silver of the gardes-du-corps who held an amazed conference with him one afternoon in the Allée du Mail at Versailles was half incredulous, half amused.

“I had hoped, before I died,” he said, “to be pointed out as the kinsman of a marshal of France. You should consider, Gilbert, that you are wrecking the ambitions of other people as well as your own.”

The young Marquis tried to explain that he was not wrecking his ambitions, or, at least, only some of them.

“Then I suppose,” said Louis, “that you are going to be a sort of philosopher, like the late M. Voltaire, in his retreat at Ferney. My cousin, the celebrated philosopher,” he repeated softly to himself.

But though the Vicomte ended, as usual, on a jesting note, Gilbert fancied that he was sorrier, or more sympathetic, than he cared to own. Years afterwards he learned that Louis had subsequently called out a subaltern of Royal-Aunis for saying that the regiment was well delivered from such a milksop as M. de Château-Foix.

CHAPTER II
ON THE TERRACE

“There must be some misunderstanding,” said the Marquis.

“I am afraid,” rejoined the Curé, “that there is something worse.”

They were pacing slowly up and down the terrace at Chantemerle among the roses of the late June of 1792. The little river Lay, curled about the foot of the hill, and hugged by the wooded slopes which clung above it, caught the eye with an occasional sparkle of its shallows, for the south façade of the house, dominating the slightly sloping garden, owned a bolder prospect than many in the province. On the other side, indeed, where the avenue approached it on level ground, the topmost windows of the château showed only the characteristic Vendean expanse of view, which gave the look of a flat country to a region that was not really flat, but which had nothing to catch the eye, among the innumerable stunted trees which bordered every field, save a roof or two with its red and curving tiles. But the garden front looked down on what was almost a ravine.

As they turned at the end of the path the Marquis glanced up at the house, and at that moment Madame de Château-Foix emerged from the structure in the Palladian style by which the Marquis Octavien-François had, in the days of Louis XIV., somewhat disastrously enlarged his semi-Renaissance dwelling-place. She stood for a moment on the level stone space at the head of the flight of steps running down to the terrace, then, smiling at her son, seated herself in a low chair set in the shade of the incongruous pavilion, which was in fact her boudoir. Gilbert and the priest continued their leisurely and absorbed promenade.

Beside the Marquise, on a table, lay some unfinished needlework, and in its bright folds a dingy little volume, to which her hand went out mechanically. But she did not read it; her eyes strayed to the figure of her son, as he passed with bent head and a puzzled expression in the gaze which now and again met her own, but hardly saw her. She glanced quickly at his companion. At that instant the Curé leisurely folded up the letter which he had been reading, and handed it back to the Marquis. In his face, at least, there was no lack of comprehension, no hesitation. But M. des Graves would not attempt more than the bare expression of his thoughts; he would neither urge nor persuade. That was not his way. If it had been, Gilbert de Chantemerle would not have been down there with him now; that his mother knew very well.

She recognised—was rather proud of—the unyielding character of her son, his insusceptibility to influence, his inflexible adherence to his own standards of conduct—and these were high. She realised, though less clearly, how little M. des Graves tried to influence him. Devout Catholic as she was, it was only given to her in rare glimpses to see that the priest had a settled policy of holding his hand, not from the impossibility of accomplishing anything, but from principle. She knew that he held strong views on the abuse of power. There was always about this old friend of her husband’s a sensation—to her uncomfortable—of force voluntarily withheld from exercise. Sometimes the sensation affected her with almost physical irritation. And deep down in her soul, beneath the occasional mild exultation at her son’s untrammelled state, lay the regret that M. des Graves had not brought his influence to bear on Gilbert’s spiritual life. For Gilbert’s somewhat devout boyhood had merged into a manhood of indifference; his preoccupation with Catholicism was ethical, his creed a joyless allegiance to a system of morals. He had never openly broken away from the Church as his father had done, and to her ordinances he paid the bare outward homage that she demanded—but it was less than a minimum payment. Not without reason, as she suspected, did he always absent himself from Chantemerle at Easter, timing his annual visit to his less exacting Southern tenantry to coincide with that critical festival. The Vendean peasantry were thus free to draw the charitable but untrue conclusion that he went to his duties at Château-Foix. Yet in any other part of France his conduct would have passed as exemplary, but here, in the midst of a people ardently faithful, it had not that complexion. And this, with a priest always at hand as counsellor!

Counsellor, indeed, M. des Graves had been, and what a good one! Indeed, it sometimes seemed to the Marquise that almost all through her married life he had been explaining something to some one of them—her husband, herself, her son. Eight years ago, in that episode of supreme joy which shone out amidst her grief, when Gilbert had taken the resolution of living on his estates, it was to the Curé that he had turned for help in his unfamiliar task. And the priest had given him the most unstinted aid. But it was not difficult to see his capacity for assistance in matters of larger import, and Gilbert had discussed with him every political crisis of which the last three years had been so prodigal, from the calling of the States-General in ’89, at which, as a good Liberal, he had rejoiced, to the declaration of war against Austria in the spring of the present year, which had not pleased him at all.

There was, indeed, in recent events material enough for many and many a conference on the terrace walk. In the great flood which was changing the face of France there ran a tide bearing the provinces of the West to a destination which no man could see—a tide whose waves threatened, with the submerging of every familiar landmark, to engulf more particularly M. des Graves and all his caste. Since the suppression of the religious orders, the sales of ecclesiastical property, and the promulgation of the civil constitution of the clergy in 1790, no part of France had suffered more severely from the anti-clerical policy of the Government. Hundreds of parishes had been deprived of the priest who refused the civil oath. In some the “constitutional” curé, the “intrus,” celebrated Masses which the faithful would not attend; in some the church had been devoted to other uses, while the non-juror, if he were not in hiding, or in a foreign country, was probably eating out his heart in the chef-lieu of the department, cut off from his people, and forced to report himself every morning to the authorities. For the Vendean peasant, with his fervid piety, no more cruel persecution could have been devised. But though hundreds of priests were interned at Angers, in order to prevent them from preparing their flocks for the Easter communion, Vendée proper had not suffered to such an extent as the neighbouring departments until, in the early spring of 1792, the authorities decreed that all non-jurors residing there for less than a year, should leave it in a week.

It was the first step of purely local persecution. The municipality of Chantonnay, the little town in whose district lay the village of Chantemerle, had been very slow indeed to take any anti-clerical action. No “constitutional” priest had ever been installed at Chantemerle, and M. des Graves was accustomed to proceed with his ministrations as calmly as though he were ignorant of what was hanging over his head. But he knew well enough—and his flock, too—that he was a favoured exception. His parish was like a little island which the encroaching tide is bound in the end to submerge. Neither château nor village had yet recovered from the horror with which they had heard of Vergniaud’s proposal in the Assembly on May 27th for the deportation of priests to foreign parts, when orders came from Fontenay that all non-jurors not born in the department were to leave it at once. And M. des Graves was not a Vendean born.

Yet, though the thunderbolt had fallen in the first week of June, on this, the 25th of the same month, the Curé had said his Mass as usual in the little church, had visited his parishioners, and was now pacing sedately up and down with the master of the Château, who, as a noble, was only a shade less obnoxious to the Jacobin Directory than himself. The explanation lay in the priest’s resolution, and in the fact that Fontenay-le-Comte, the chef-lieu, was a good deal further away than Chantonnay. The municipality had not moved. Neither had M. des Graves.

On all these things did Madame de Château-Foix reflect as she watched the two figures. She did not allow herself to dwell on what would happen if M. des Graves were actually turned out of his cure. The prospect was too terrible. It had naturally been discussed ere this, and she knew that Gilbert was determined to shelter the priest, as long as possible, in the château itself, turning the chapel into a resort for the villagers, as had been done the previous September, with temporary success, at Saint-Mars-la-Réorthe. To have the Curé permanently in the house would not be so great a change after all.

From this consideration the Marquise passed to that of another imminent change which would, on the other hand, make a vast difference to her. Fate had preserved her son to her long unmarried. Lucienne d’Aucourt, who had left her convent at the age of fifteen nearly four years ago, had spent the ensuing years with her mother—transferred in 1778 to the newly-formed household of the Princess Elisabeth—in her apartments at Versailles, and, afterwards, at the Tuileries, whither Gilbert went twice a year to pay his respects. But the shock of the disastrous flight to Varennes had killed Madame d’Aucourt within three months. Her death would have seemed the signal for Gilbert to claim his bride, but the Comtesse’s last wish was that her daughter should not be married until she had reached the unusually late age of nineteen. Respect for this desire and the friendship which the Princess Elisabeth extended to the daughter of her lady-in-waiting induced Gilbert, unwillingly, to postpone the ceremony, and Lucienne remained at Court under the technical chaperonage of an old cousin of her mother’s, Madame de Fontenelle. But her nineteenth birthday was advancing; by the autumn the château would know a new mistress. It was the plain duty of the present châtelaine to school herself to the thought; repugnance, as she recognised, was insensate, for she was genuinely fond of Lucienne, who was, moreover, the bride of her own choosing. She took up again the little book of devotions as if to find there a corrective for her own rather jealous thoughts.

A moment later the volume was again in her lap. Gilbert was reading to the priest a portion of the letter which he held in his hand. He was too far away for Madame de Château-Foix to hear the words, yet a frown of impatience creased her brow, for she knew from whom the letter came. For perhaps the hundredth time she was submerged in the bewildering rush of affection and annoyance, familiar enough in the years that had passed since Louis de Saint-Ermay had come to amaze them with his naughtiness and hold them captive with his audacious joy. She was as sure as if she had read it that his letter was the harbinger of annoyance. And Gilbert would give him his time and his advice, just as in old days he had given up to him his toys. Life, it seemed, was consistently unfair—always ready to heap fresh gifts on the spoilt child. Louis had always had what he wanted, and there were always to be found persons holding that ridiculous opinion enunciated years ago by M. des Graves—that it was good for him to be happy. And what sort of happiness was his? The Marquise had never closely enquired into the manner of the Vicomte’s life in Paris, but she had every reason to believe that he amused himself somewhat over-well. His modest estate near Poitiers was hopelessly mortgaged; she suspected Gilbert of having more than once paid his debts for him. Now that the King’s constitutional guard, the successor of the bodyguard, had been disbanded also, she might have wondered what kept him still in Paris, had she not known his fervid loyalty—and that, too, of a type rather rare when almost every extreme Royalist conceived it to be his duty to emigrate. This devotion Madame de Château-Foix considered to be the best thing she knew about her nephew; she set it over against his unconquerable levity and extravagance. It was not, in her eyes, a count against him that his reckless temper sometimes got the better of the nonchalant frivolity beneath which it was buried, for she infinitely preferred the volcanic to the surface stratum. He had, for instance, as a garde-du-corps, been at Versailles on the great night of the 5th of October 1789, and, so far as his family had been able to elicit, had had on that occasion a narrow escape of sharing the fate of his massacred comrades, MM. de Varicourt and Deshuttes. The Marquis de Lafayette told Gilbert that his cousin was only saved from the effects of an entirely useless defiance of the mob, as the whole cortège started the next day for Paris, by a fishwife from the Halles, who threw her arms round him and declared that no one should touch un si bel enfant. The Vicomte always denied this tale, which was galling to his dignity—for what youth of twenty-three (as he then was) is pleased to be termed a child?—and doubly so because, in common with most of the extreme Royalists, he hated and distrusted the narrator. When Château-Foix first asked him about it, he replied that the incident was undoubtedly one of the dreams which came to Lafayette in that inopportune and much-derided slumber on which the opposite party laid so much of the blame for that night’s events.