Chantemerle

In the kitchen Marie-Pierre, having taken off an iron pot from its tripod over the open fire, was pouring its steaming contents into a large bowl. His demeanour was serious and responsible; his father, sitting forward on the settle with his hands on his knees, watched him with something of the expression of the two oxen whose placid and magnificently-horned heads protruded into the apartment, their bodies being without, but their manger, as usual, within the cottage. The arrival of M. des Graves appeared a little to agitate father and son, for he had not as yet taken any meal with them, but finally the three sat down at the table to their soupe à choux.

It was, perhaps, some instinct of etiquette or of consideration which caused the two Bretons to allow M. des Graves to proceed some way with his repast before the younger, jerking his thumb in an upward direction, asked news of the sick man. The priest told them that he was a trifle better; that there was a little hope.

“Then you must eat, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Mathurin, and he pushed towards him an enormous mound of the good salt butter of Brittany.

“Dame! and drink, too,” added his son, seizing the jug of cider. “We will drink with a good heart to the young man’s recovery.”

“I should like to know how you found him,” observed the priest. “Was it by chance?”

“It was, and it was not,” answered Mathurin sententiously. “It was because we started to go into Savenay the day after the battle—Oh, I must tell you, Monsieur l’Abbé, that Marie-Pierre was all for joining the Vendeans himself; he even had the musket down”—he pointed to the usual musket hung over the hearth—“but there was not time. Well . . . Where was I?—Marie-Pierre, you tell his Reverence.”

The young Breton took a long drink from the cider jug. “It was like this,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “All the day of the battle we kept close indoors; we heard firing in the distance, and later hussars came riding through the village. Some demanded drink, and their swords were dripping. But, as your Reverence knows, we are about nine miles from Savenay, and off the main road, and few fugitives got as far as this; they were cut down on the way. We heard the hussars boasting how many they had killed in cold blood. We were very sad, for it is true that I wanted, like many more of our parts, to join the Vendeans. And we were very anxious, my father and I, to go to Savenay to learn exactly what fate had befallen them, though we knew well enough that they were beaten. But we were afraid to go without a good reason, lest the Blues should take us for spies. Then we had the idea of taking in some fodder for the patriots’ cavalry as a pretext. So we started early on the morning of Christmas Eve; it was very cold and almost snowing, and when we began to get near to Savenay the roads were thick with corpses, so that we had often to go at a foot’s pace to avoid driving over them. In some places they were stripped and piled up on top of each other by the roadside; you could see that they had been shot down in batches. It was so dreadful that at last we turned back; we had not the heart to go on into Savenay, and from the sound they were still shooting the prisoners there.

“And as, having turned back, we passed the wood of Blanche-Couronne, where we heard that the Vendeans had made their last stand, my father said to me: ‘Marie-Pierre, what if there were any Royalists still alive in there?’ And I said: ‘No, mon père, it is not possible, first because the Blues would have massacred them by this time, and secondly because of the cold of last night.’ But my father, inspired no doubt by Heaven, said: ‘Still, it would be a deed very acceptable to God and His Mother, the consoler of the afflicted, if we went to see.’ And, pardieu, Monsieur l’Abbé, I was nothing loth, but I knew not what we should do if the Blues found us in there, for their patrols were passing along the road every few minutes, and we had already had difficulty with them. But the Blessed Virgin put it into our heads that if we were questioned we should say that we were gone to strip the dead brigands, for we felt sure that the Blues would not object to that. So we drove the cart a little way up a track that went through the wood, that it should not be seen from the road, and got out to see if there were any living.

“There were not more than a couple of score Vendeans there, but they were all dead, and the snow was beginning to fall on them. We walked through, very sad at heart, to the edge of the wood that looks towards Savenay, and there, under a tree, in what had been a pool of blood, I saw a young man in uniform, with a peasant lying dead across him. It was the uniform, though it was very old and faded, which caught my eye, and I said to my father: ‘See, there is a Republican officer, the only Blue here.’ And then I went a little nearer, out of curiosity, and suddenly, praise to Sainte Anne, I saw the white scarf and the Sacred Heart. And I was filled with pity that he should be lying there dead, young and handsome, with a great wound in his breast. At any rate, I thought, it will be a pious act to lift off the dead man, and since this young seigneur was in his lifetime a good Christian (for I saw that he had died with his rosary in his hand), to fold his hands and put the crucifix of the chaplet between them. My father agreed, and together we lifted the dead peasant off the young man’s body. . . . But when I touched the officer it seemed to me that he was still warm, and I cried to my father, but he said: ‘No, he is dead; look at all the blood; and, besides, as you said yourself, the cold.’ Nevertheless I put my ear to the Vendean’s heart, and I thought that I could hear it beating. So we lifted him carefully and quickly, and carried him to the cart, and put him in and covered him with the fodder, and drove home.”

Marie-Pierre terminated abruptly, and took another long drink of cider. Putting down the jug, he added: “We said the rosary in turns all the way, for if the Blues had discovered the Vendean in our cart, we should never have seen Christmas Day.”

“May God reward you,” said the priest, very moved. “It is not in the power of man.”

“Indeed,” commented Mathurin, who was evidently living through the scene again, “it was no wonder that I disbelieved Marie-Pierre when he said that the young man was not dead, for I do not know how he lived through the cold of the night.”

“I think,” said his son, “that it was the cold which stopped the flow of blood. And then, on the other hand, perhaps the body of the peasant kept some warmth in him for a time.”

“I wonder who it was,” said M. des Graves, running over the names of those who remained at the time of his capture.

“A young man,” replied Marie-Pierre. “He had been shot through the breast.”

“God rest him,” said the priest, and “Amen” said the two Bretons, crossing themselves.

So neither Toussaint Lelièvre’s rosary nor his own body had been given in vain. And since, in a way he did not dream of, he had kept his word to Louis, he would not probably have minded that no one ever knew.

A little metal crucifix was hanging on a beam at the foot of the bed. Surely it had not been there before! And though it was a perfectly ordinary crucifix, and had evidently been much used—indeed, just because it was so worn—Louis seemed somehow to recognise it, seemed even to have seen it recently. It was rather puzzling.

A tiny noise suggestive of snipping made him remove his gaze from this source of bewilderment to a greater. At a short distance a grey-haired man was standing, with his back to him, by a small table on which was a bowl and a heap of something white. It was from him, apparently, that the snipping proceeded. But though he was clad in the short vest and very full pleated breeches with which occasional glimpses of Mathurin and Marie-Pierre had rendered Louis familiar, the back of his head belonged to neither of the Gloannecs. It was too young for one, and too old for the other. And yet he had seen it before. . . . His pulses began to quicken. Why did it suggest amice and chasuble, and candles under bending boughs at daybreak?. . . . He must be delirious . . . and yet—that head had known the tonsure.

The Vicomte’s languid curiosity was all at once transmuted into an emotion much more vivid, and his heart suddenly began to beat suffocatingly. He tried vainly to move, whispering a name.

The scissors dropped from M. des Graves’ hand, and he was at the bedside. “My child, my child, lie still! Yes, I am here. I was not killed. No; no questions—you shall know everything in its proper time. You have been very ill, but now, by God’s mercy, you are going to get well. . . . No, I am not going to leave you. I have already been here—some time. When you have drunk something and gone to sleep again, perhaps we will talk a little.”

Surprise on surprise. Louis did go to sleep again, and for a very long time, for when he woke again it was dusk, and a candle was burning. His eyes searched instantly for M. des Graves, for surely his presence was only a dream, difficult to disentangle from the others. But the priest was seated there close to the bed, reading his breviary with those unnecessary spectacles. A sense of enormous content invaded the young man, so that he was satisfied to lie for some appreciable time, merely looking at him, before he attempted to speak. Then he said, with astonishing difficulty, something quite other than he had meant to say. “What . . . have you . . . done . . . with your cassock?”

M. des Graves started. He put down his book, swept off his spectacles, and leaning forward, said with a smile of amusement: “Have I shocked you by this dress, my child?”

“No,” replied Louis, weighing the question quite seriously, his gaze roaming over the intricate pale blue embroideries of the priest’s vest. “No . . . I rather like it. But please tell me why . . . I don’t understand . . . and I cannot——” He frowned, and, struggling visibly to express himself, broke off like a child that has not words to say what it means.

The smile died from about M. des Graves’ mouth as he saw a painful flush beginning to creep over the horribly thin face. “I understand, my dear boy,” he said gently. “It is difficult to talk, is it not, but you would like to listen. Very well, then, I will tell you; but you must not ask any questions.”

And he told him very simply, dwelling little on the unspeakable orgy of horrors which had made of Nantes a name even more vilely stained than that of Paris, how, after his capture, he had been imprisoned there at Le Bouffay, how day after day those who survived its pestilential conditions had been led out to die, yet his turn never came; how one night the jailor had come to him, had led him, uncomprehending, through many passages, and had thrust him with scarcely a word outside the prison gate, where two men awaited him in a boat; how he had voyaged along the Loire, where the river rolled down the corpses of the drowned by hundreds to the burial that their butchers denied them, and, passed on from village to village, had come at last to the house where Marie-Pierre awaited him. . . . On the necessary heavy bribery of the jailor at Nantes, in which he had had no part, on the strangely complete arrangements outside he laid little stress; had Louis been less weak and dazed he would certainly have wanted to know whose hand had set this mysterious machinery in motion. But he accepted the miracle, as he had been bidden, without comment, and if M. des Graves knew or suspected what power had delivered him from the jaws of death he did not communicate his knowledge. He only told the young man that his deliverance was of none of his own seeking, and ending authoritatively, “There, now you must go to sleep again,” got up and settled the pillow and the bedclothes, and lifted Louis—grown very light now—into a more suitable position for repose.

Thereafter, for Louis, this falling asleep and waking, this unfruitful wish to converse and this contentment with silence, recurred for very many days.

CHAPTER XLVIII
MANY WAYS—AND ALL STEEP

“Clamavi in toto corde meo, exaudi me, Domine,” read M. des Graves, “justificationes tuas requiram. Clamavi ad te, salvum me fac; ut custodiam mandata tua. . . .”

The stream of the Latin, widening and sonorous, bathed all the dusty, comfortless loft with a suggestion of better and unchanging places, of choir or cloister, and washed in waves of security and repose over the mean bed and its occupant. A ray of March sunshine, too, had crept through the tiny window, and fell across the little hillock made by Louis’ feet under the coverlet; earlier in the afternoon, when it had barred his body, M. des Graves had found him looking at it with a sort of incredulity. Now, with shut eyes and head turned a little on the pillow, he lay and listened to the psalms for None.

On his face, colourless as a cameo, and as sharply cut, a rather tired patience had replaced the deadly look of drained vitality. The young man was passing, in his prolonged and difficult convalescence, through the stage of restless fatigue, really more trying to endurance than earlier conditions. How weary he was of the uncomfortable mattress of oat husks on which he had lain for so many weeks, how ardently he longed for a change of position and surroundings, he could not but indirectly betray, though he rarely gave vent to any verbal expression of his desires. But usually, if he asked M. des Graves to read to him, it meant that he was finding his state difficult to bear patiently; and there had been a day when the priest, to keep him quiet, had read to him every office from Prime to Compline. Since his breviary was the only book available there was no choice of literature; and indeed Louis seemed to find the sound of the Latin soothing. M. des Graves never knew how much he attended to the actual words.

“Quia in verba tua. . . . Vocem meam audi. . . .” The reader finished the psalm, glanced at the pallet, and went on to the next. “Principes persecuti sunt. . . . Laetabor ego super eloquia tua sicut——” The river suddenly ceased to flow.

“That is only the cattle hitting their horns against the manger down there,” said Louis, without opening his eyes; “I used always to be thinking it was the Blues. Please go on, Father.”

But M. des Graves did not comply with his request. Instead, he quietly laid down his book, as three thundering blows resounded up from the cottage door.

Peace was vanished in a heart-beat. The invalid, his eyes wide enough now, strained his head from the pillow, but neither he nor the priest uttered a word during the short, supreme tension which sickeningly terminated with loud voices from below, an oath or two, the tramp of feet, and the unmistakable clank of accoutrements.

“O my God, my God!” whispered Louis. “They have come for you! Father, Father, why did I let you stay! . . .” Weak as he was, he contrived, panting, to drag himself a little higher in the bed.

The priest stood a second listening, on his face an expression removed from any earthly emotion. Then he threw himself on his knees by the pallet and clasped the young man in his arms. “Hush, my child, hush! If it has come, for either or for both of us, let us meet it without shrinking. I shall go willingly. And you, Louis, since when have you known fear?”

“You know it is not that,” choked Louis, clinging to him in all the desperation of a last farewell. The priest stooped his head, and they kissed each other. A moment after Louis loosed his passionate embrace and fell back on the pillow, and M. des Graves, risen from his knees, made the sign of the cross over him as once before, and went quietly back to his chair.

Footsteps were coming up the stairs. They were accompanied by the voice of Madame Gloannec, very loud.

“Very well, you can search, of course, for your fugitive, but all you’ll find, as I told you, is my husband’s nephew, Yves Goulven, who has been gored by one of our cattle, and a neighbour who is looking after him. And no use to ask Yves anything, for he only speaks Breton. . . . Mind the top step, Monsieur le sergent.”

And in another moment the soldier stood in the doorway, grizzled, stiff, authoritative, in his blue, cut-away coat with its red epaulettes and cuffs and white facings, his white breeches, gaiters, and bandoliers. “Be quiet, old cackler!” he shouted over his shoulder. “I have eyes and a tongue of my own, thank heaven. Come up, you two; they are here right enough. Now, my men, let’s have some account of you. . . .”

Neither Louis nor M. des Graves responded. Two more grenadiers posted themselves in the doorway, and as their muskets grounded simultaneously on the floor the invader came over to the bed.

“Come, young man. . . .”

Why had Madame Gloannec said that he could only speak Breton, when he knew not a word of it? Sick at heart, Louis summoned his straying wits, and there came haltingly to his tongue something which he had often heard Madame Gloannec repeat in that language. He had not an idea what it was, and hoped that the soldier was equally ignorant. Afterwards he remembered how as the sergeant stood over him he had fixed his eyes on the little transverse strips of gold braid above his cuff, lest he should look at M. des Graves.

The grenadier shrugged his shoulders. “No use your telling me any of that gibberish! However, there seems no humbug about your condition, my friend; and I own I do not see how you could have escaped from Nantes the day before yesterday. Besides, he was older,” he added, looking at a paper in his hand.

On M. des Graves he scarcely bestowed a glance. Evidently his prey was not of his type. He only muttered to himself as he turned on his heel: “Sacré nom, how these old Bretons resemble priests!” Two minutes later he and his men had left the house.

“O my child, my child, how the Blessed Virgin protected you!” said Madame Gloannec a little later, clasping her hands over Louis. “Do you know what you were saying . . . the Hail Mary!”

“I did not know it,” murmured the Vicomte, looking a good deal whiter than his coarse sheets.

“No, but she did. And . . . mon Dieu, was that there all the time, Monsieur l’Abbé? She must also have hidden that from the eyes of the Blues.” For the breviary was lying open at the foot of the bed.

The shock of this narrow escape did not exercise a particularly beneficial effect upon the convalescent, though a few days later he tried, after his old fashion, to laugh at the episode. It seemed also to have revived in his mind the memory of the past, to which he had as yet made little reference. One morning, after the wound-dressing, which was still an exhausting and sometimes a painful process, M. des Graves, having drawn the coverlet up to his chin, and otherwise, as he thought, disposed him to slumber, sat down to his office. The Vicomte lay and looked at him, as he often did, without saying anything. When M. des Graves had finished he was still so engaged, and suddenly said in a meditative voice:

“Father, did I make my confession when I was ill?”

The priest closed his book. “Yes, my child; and I gave you extreme unction.”

“It is odd,” commented Louis in a puzzled tone. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

“You were too ill,” said the priest gently.

“You thought I was dying, then?” pursued the Vicomte.

M. des Graves nodded.

A little of Louis’ former self appeared for a moment in his expression.

“I am sorry to have been such a malingerer,” he observed. “The fact is, that it is not as easy to die as one thinks. Just before that brute of a hussar ran me through I thought, ‘Two or three minutes, and it will be over.’ Ma foi, I was sure that it was, at the time! Imagine my surprise, then, when I came to for a moment, hours afterwards, in the dark and the rain, with a dead man across me. It must have been night; there was a moon, I think. . . . And in my hand, mon père, so they tell me, was a rosary; heaven knows how it got there. It was not mine, and seems unlikely to have been the property of any of Westermann’s parishioners. Well, then, I thought, this is certainly the end, unless it is purgatory already, for it was horribly cold, and I was not—not feeling my best. . . . Not a bit of it! I wake up again, jolting most disagreeably in a cart—and then again in this place . . . many times.” He broke off for a moment, and added: “I should have caused vastly less discomfort, both to myself and to other people, if I had finished, as my hussar intended, quietly under that tree.”

The priest looked at him intently for a moment. “Madame Gloannec tells me,” he said at last, “that before I came you suffered so much pain that she could not always bear to stay and see it. And I could have guessed it for myself. . . . Were you conscious then?”

“Yes,” responded the Vicomte grimly, “I was very much conscious. It was at those times that I regretted Marie-Pierre’s pious intervention.”

“I thought that you must have been conscious,” said the elder man quietly. “Madame Gloannec believed that you were not, always.” He paused, and his voice changed. “Have you ever thought, Louis, what the martyr’s crown must have seemed to the onlookers—objectless, useless suffering? But you know in what terms the Church speaks of it, when she commemorates a martyr at her altars? ‘A crown of precious stones,’ that is what their blood and torments are to her—and were to them.”

“What do you mean?” exclaimed the young man, startled.

“Only that something of their high honour has been yours, my child.”

“Shall we have a bet,” suggested the invalid one day, “that I get off this bed of roses in—in how many days, mon père?”

“Certainly not!” replied M. des Graves. “Louis, if you are going to talk nonsense——”

“Mea culpa! Then if I am to stop here for ever, would you be so good as to move that string of onions, and give me something else to count instead. I am no agriculturist like——” He stopped suddenly, and said, between laughing and something else: “I believe that if Gilbert had been in my place they would have been a comfort to him.” And he turned his head away on the pillow.

Yet they often spoke of Gilbert, and of the others gone down like him to the place of heroes.

“I wonder what has become of Henri,” said Louis, one afternoon towards the end of March. “I suppose that he, too, is dead by now.”

“I sometimes think,” replied M. des Graves, “that in permitting him—I had almost said in forcing him—to cross the Loire again in the way you have described, Heaven had some great design for him, and that we shall hear of him again.”

But La Rochejaquelein had been lying these two months under a hedge with a bullet in his brain.

“Then there is Marigny,” went on Louis. “I would give a great deal for news. I wonder, for instance, if the Princess Elisabeth is still alive. Since she was not murdered with the Queen last October, perhaps they meant to spare her.”

“Whenever she enters Paradise, there will be one saint there the more,” remarked the priest.

“That,” said Louis, “is almost exactly what I overheard M. de Lescure saying to Gilbert just before Luçon, when that false report of the Queen’s death was circulated. I remember that I was struck at the time with Gilbert’s lack of enthusiasm on the point. He flushed, looked down, and said nothing, and seeing that he knew the Princess personally, I wondered why he was so unresponsive.”

“He had strong likes and dislikes, as you know,” returned M. des Graves, who knew to what very human resentment must be assigned this coldness of which he now heard for the first time. But there was no need that Louis should know it.

“Accursed window!” exclaimed the young man, coming suddenly out of the brief reverie into which he had fallen. “It was through the window from which he pulled me back that the bullet came, was it not?”

The priest nodded.

“All my life I shall regret that I was not there!”

“Why?” asked M. des Graves gently. “You have nothing, my son, with which to reproach yourself; you were doing your duty elsewhere. Humanly speaking, you yourself were running a much greater risk than Gilbert.”

“Yes, I know,” assented Louis, sighing. “That is why it is so hard. I suppose one must always feel like that—as if one could have prevented a disaster had one been there.”

“You must remember, Louis, that it was God’s will.”

The young man suddenly stirred—he was a good deal stronger now—and flashed on the priest, out of eyes full of tears, a look of piercing enquiry. “Is that enough for you, Father?”

And in the priest’s eyes, as he bowed his head without speaking, was an echo of that look with which he had faced Louis over his dying cousin.

“Well, it isn’t enough for me!” said the Vicomte, catching a sob between his teeth. He began again after a moment. “Did he have much pain—before I saw him?”

“No, very little, I think.”

“He . . . had it before, in another way?”

“Yes,” said M. des Graves, looking at him very tenderly. “Louis, my dear child, I know what you are thinking of. There is no need to distress yourself. What Gilbert gave up, for you or for right’s sake, put it as you will, was only a symbol. It was only a part, perhaps a small part, of the work that had to be done in him. And he was a thousand-fold repaid even here. Perhaps you have forgotten what I once said to you about your own renunciation, that sacrifice is only exchange.”

“No, I have not forgotten.”

“It is true—and Gilbert learnt it before he died. That is enough for us to know.”

Louis gazed at him long and wistfully. “Yes, he looked happy,” he said to himself.

“To the selfless something of the Beatific Vision is perhaps given in this world,” said the priest. “I think Gilbert had a measure of it before he died.”

They were both silent.

“God knows,” said Louis suddenly, “what I shall say in England, if ever I get there. . . . But you will be there to help me, Father.”

“Are you tired, Louis?” asked the priest suddenly.

“Not at all,” answered Louis, surprised at his tone. “Why?”

For a second M. des Graves hesitated. “I may as well tell you now . . . I shall take you to England, Louis, when we get away, which, if God wills, we shall do as soon as you are fit to travel to the coast—it is all arranged. But I shall not be able to accompany you to Suffolk.”

“Not come with me to Suffolk!” repeated the Vicomte, highly amazed.

“No,” answered M. des Graves quietly. “I must find at Portsmouth, or London, a ship to take me to Hamburg, or some other German port, if indeed I cannot find a vessel sailing direct to Italy. I am going to Rome, Louis, and with as little delay as possible.”

“To Rome, Father! A pilgrimage?”

“No, not a pilgrimage. I may be there for the rest of my life. . . . Louis, do you remember Monsignor Cantagalli?”

“Yes. He annoyed me very much.”

“I am sure you must have wondered why he came to Chantemerle. It was to bring me a command from the Holy Father . . . an unexpected command, touching a matter of which I never thought to hear an echo again——”

But the Vicomte, raising himself in bed, broke in upon him in a sudden violent excitement. “He called you Eminence! I did not believe my ears. . . . Father, it can’t be!”

“No, indeed, my child, I do not wonder at your astonishment,” said the priest, with a touching humility. “There could not be any one so unworthy; I knew that long ago. Nevertheless——”

“Long ago!” exclaimed Louis, with a hand to his head as if he were dizzy. “Good God! how long, then, have you——”

M. des Graves got up and came over to him. “If you will only lie down, Louis, I will tell you the whole story. Let me move that pillow for you first. . . . That’s better. . . . Well, then, there was once a young man, well born and tolerably rich, who at an early age took orders, because his family had influence in ecclesiastical quarters, and because it was the tradition for the third son of his house. He was gifted, and very ambitious. From the first he turned his attention to diplomacy, and here, in an extraordinary way, everything prospered to which he set his hand. Very soon he was swimming on a full tide of success; he was known to be favoured by the Pope; wherever he went he was courted and flattered. And thus circumstances fostered his naturally great ambition till it became an overmastering passion, the very mainspring of his life. Then there came to him a supreme chance of distinguishing himself—a chance such as has seldom fallen to the lot of so young a man. The Pope—it was Clement XIII.—entrusted him with a very difficult and delicate mission to the late King—I mean Louis XV.—and the priest’s conduct of this negotiation brought him to a pinnacle of esteem whence nothing seemed too much for him to grasp. Besides the Pope’s favour he now had the King’s, who told him in no veiled terms that he regretted the days of the great cardinal-ministers, of Fleury, of Richelieu. Yet the hour when the King said that to him, in the park of Fontainebleau, was followed by a stronger renewal of that sense of vague discomfort which, all the while that he walked on this golden path, had followed him like a shadow, trying to whisper to him something which he would not hear.”

“But why?” asked the young man rather impatiently. “What is there wrong in success?”

“Nothing, my son, if it is in God’s purpose for us and if we use it to His glory, being ourselves indifferent to it. But that was just what the priest had never done. He wanted the success for its own sake—though he told himself, indeed, that all he did was to be for the advancement of the Church.”

“Well?” said Saint-Ermay.

“So he went on, shutting out the voices of warning. But God is merciful. He has many weapons. And He struck at him twice . . . Louis, I cannot tell you how . . . it was through a very dear friend, the one man whom he esteemed and admired above all others. The first time the priest would not heed; but the second time . . . he was not disobedient. Then the bandage fell from his eyes; he saw what he had been pursuing, and that all which had been the very breath of life to him was thinner and more vanishing than smoke. And in the enthusiasm of his conversion it became the dearest wish of his heart to give up everything for the glory of God and to enter the religious life.

“He was already in the Benedictine monastery of Valfleury when the news came that the Pope was about to make him a cardinal. That news was nothing to him now; he had something very different to trouble him, for, during the six months in which he tried his vocation, with all the earnestness of which he was capable, he found no peace. And at the end of that time the Abbot, an old man of the greatest sanctity and experience, sent for him and told him the hardest thing of all, that he was not called to be a son of Saint Benedict. He implored the Abbot not to send him away, back to the success which would dog him, which he was not strong enough to bear. But the Abbot was convinced that God’s will for the priest was that he should go back to the world, but only to serve Him from the lowest rank. The religious life was not for him, the diplomatic too great a temptation; his place, the safest, but not the easiest, lay between. He said one thing that I have never forgotten: ‘With some a great sacrifice is made once; with others it is made many times.’”

To the young man gazing in speechless attention from his pillow, it was plain from the little pause that his companion had forgotten him, and was withdrawn into some region of the memory. But it was only for a moment.

“So I went back to the world, to the lowest rank. I had implored His Holiness not to create me cardinal, and at last the Holy Father yielded, but only on one condition. He reserved me a cardinal in petto—you know what that is, Louis; it means a cardinal created, but not announced, whose cardinalate, when it is announced, ranks from the date of the original creation. Then I became the vicaire of a little cure in the Angoumois, dropping my name of De Vergy, and using that of Des Graves, which had long been in my family; and in a year or two after the Pope died. One day there came to me a man who had been my friend since childhood, though not a Catholic, saying, ‘If you are resolved to persist in this folly, at least let me be assured that you have enough to live upon. My benefice at home is vacant; come to it, and you shall educate my boy as well.’ . . . No, wait till I have finished! . . . I accepted. I went to my friend’s living; I was there, as you know, many years . . . many years. Clement XIII. was dead; Clement XIV. knew nothing of me; all the past was forgotten. Suddenly—it was in the autumn of ’92—Pius VI. came on the records of the negotiation which I had carried through twenty-five years before, and the honour reserved for me by Clement XIII. He discovered my whereabouts, and, thinking that he might need a representative in Vendée—Monseigneur de Mercy being dispossessed—sent a special messenger——”

“Monsignor Cantagalli, of course,” ejaculated his listener.

“Yes . . . Lie down, Louis! . . . Out of regard for my personal safety he did not proclaim me cardinal at that dangerous juncture, but he referred to Clement’s action, left me with discretionary powers, and charged me to repair to Rome when I could no longer be of use in Vendée. And since God has seen fit to bless the means employed by His Holiness to get me out of Nantes, I suppose He has some work for an old man to do, in Rome or elsewhere. . . . At any rate, it is my duty to go there. That is why I cannot accompany you to Suffolk.”

There was a long silence, while Louis gazed at the priest, thunderstruck, out of his great hollow eyes. Then he said, in an awed tone: “Did Gilbert ever know all this?”

“I told him,” answered the Cardinal, “the night before he died.”

CHAPTER XLIX
VIOLETS ONCE MORE

One fine May morning Mr Philip Harbenden, on a prolonged visit to London, was the recipient of the following missive from his betrothed:—

Of a truth they said but little, for when Madame de Château-Foix saw the figure which rose slowly and with difficulty at her entrance, which turned towards her a face so startlingly transparent yet so ominously and brightly stained, she stopped and suddenly covered her eyes.

Louis put a hand to the table. “God knows that I would willingly have died,” he said in a wrung voice, “if he could have been here instead of me. . . . I knew I could only bring you pain. . . .”

The Marquise uncovered her face and stretched out her hands. “O Louis, my child . . . it is not that! Gilbert—Gilbert is with God. . . . It is you . . . my poor boy . . . I never realised. . . .” and she went swiftly to him and put her arms about him. “Kiss me, my son!”

Saint-Ermay stooped his head, and then, amazed, vanquished, slipped through her arms to one knee, and put a fold of her black dress to his lips. She bent quickly over him.

“Ah no, child! you must not kneel—or even stand! I know . . . Amelia has told me. . . . See, here is a chair—you will be better there, will you not . . . to please me?”

So, to please her, he sat down again in the chair from which he had risen, and she knelt beside him with his hands in hers.

“My boy, how dreadfully thin you are! . . . I suppose they had to cut your hair off . . . it seems such a pity. . . .” She put up her hand for a moment and gently touched a lock. “But it is beginning to grow again . . . of course you had fever for a long time, and not enough nourishment since—and a long journey . . . no wonder you look so tired and that your hands are so cold. But there . . . thank God that you are here at all! To-morrow we will have Dr Hicks in; he is very clever, but not as clever as the doctor at Bath . . . perhaps later on you could go there to recover. . . .” But to herself she was saying, “My God! suppose Lucienne were not to keep him, after all!”

Louis had thought so little about his own personal reception by her, and so much of what he supposed that the sight of him, unaccompanied, must cost her, that not so much her composure, but this preoccupation with himself appeared unnatural.

He kissed her again. “I am here, safe and well again, through a miracle and M. des Graves. And you will want me to tell you——”

“Not now,” she said, rising from her knees. “Afterwards you shall tell me everything about him. But now—now you must go to Lucienne, to my daughter. . . . I know it all, and she is yours, Louis, and I give her to you as freely as Gilbert gave her. She is down in the copse—you remember it?—if you can go so far. . . .”

Louis got to his feet. “That far and further; but I shall frighten her.”

“Joy does not kill,” said the Marquise. There was a little sadness in her tone, but no tears in her eyes.

Louis looked at her a moment, and then, putting a hand into his breast, drew out something wrapped in a piece of discoloured white silk. “I will give you this first,” he said gravely. “It has always been with me . . . and since I am come back again you have the better right to it. The silk was his too, from his scarf. It is scorched a little, because when the peasants cut my uniform off me and burnt it, for safety’s sake, it fell into the fire for a second . . . so they told me. But it was not hurt . . . and it is yours now. . . . Ma mère, he had a soldier’s death, and a hero’s.” He laid the little packet gently in her hand, and the singed wrapping, slipping open, showed a lock of thick black hair.

Afterwards he passed through the open window into the garden—into May and the sun of May, and all the green things of May which he had never thought to see again. And he went rather uncertainly between the high box hedges, past the bowling-green and the stone nymph, the beehives, the apple trees in blossom, out of the garden and across the lane. At the gate of the copse he stopped, breathless and a little dizzy, but not from bodily weakness alone.

The thicket was green, enchantingly green, feathery green, golden green, and the path was strewn with the tassels of the birch. Had the trees been like this last May, when the grass was red? . . . Last May! And on the very threshold of his happiness he paused to breathe a prayer for his cousin’s soul. “Rest eternal . . . light everlasting. . . .” Then he opened the gate and went through.

And a little way off, white against the glory of green, she was standing like one in a vision who sees a vision. A misty pool of hyacinths lay at her feet, but her hands were full of violets.

EPILOGUE