“YOU ARE HIDING SOMETHING FROM ME!”
A little pensive over lost glories, over periwig and falbala, over
lovelock and Flanders point, there stood in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple,
in the once fashionable quarter of the Marais, the beautiful little
Hôtel de la Séguinière, which a peer of France had built in the days
of Louis XIII., a chancellor had inhabited under the Roi Soleil, and a
favourite under Louis XV., and which, finally, a self-made banker had
bought in 1780. All nymphs and garlands within, pilasters and garlands
without, it was a house fit for a prince or a royal mistress, a house
that smiled and sang, and into this house, in the year named above,
the excellent Monsieur Gaumont, well known in the Rue Vivienne, had
brought his equally excellent English wife. And the Hôtel de la
Séguinière, so incongruous, had not affected either the simplicity of
his manners or the goodness of his heart. He had not tried to live up
to it; neither had he brought down its airy characteristics to his own
bourgeois level. In these abstentions his sensible wife had aided him.
Madame Gaumont, when she first entered this dwelling, though a bride,
was already mature, and her husband was over fifty. If the good man
sometimes found the decorations of his house a little trying, at least
he never repented of his selection of a helpmate. During the ten years
of his occupancy of the Hôtel, he sang the praises of the nation which
had provided him with so good a wife, and at the end of that time he
passed quietly out of the troubles of this world (exactly at the epoch
when Mirabeau was proposing the creation of more assignats in order
to meet the second financial crisis of 1790). M. Gaumont departed
consoled with the knowledge that if any woman was able to take care
of herself, under any circumstances, that woman was his wife.
Nevertheless he had strongly urged her to return, as soon as might be,
to her native land.
The widow, though greatly distressed at his death, took some comfort
in the thought that she had protected him, at all events during the
last decade of his life, from the numerous frauds and impostors who
were for ever draining him of his substance. She was herself of a
most charitable and kind disposition, but she possessed a certain
shrewdness and a power of discrimination which in matters of charity
had been lacking to her husband. For the first year of her widowhood
she lived in great seclusion, but not in idleness, since she insisted
upon concluding the banker's affairs, as far as possible, herself.
It was at this time that her common-sense homely nature was extremely
touched by a message of sympathy which she had received from Madame
Elisabeth, with whom she had once had an audience on matters
of charity. When, therefore, having yielded to the continual
solicitations of her relatives in England to return, for a time at
least, to her own country, she heard, by a mere coincidence, that the
Princess was desirous of obtaining an escort thither for a young lady
of the Court, she immediately offered her services.
It was with even more than her accustomed kindness and good-nature
that Madame Gaumont greeted Lucienne on the afternoon that she
bore her away from the Tuileries. Her appearance was in itself a
consolation. Tall and stout, but not ungainly, she carried a small
head upon massive shoulders, and her eyes twinkled with amusement at
the smallest provocation. Her cheerful motherly humour at once
understood and felt for the girl’s dejection without losing its
slightly bracing temper. It would have been plain indeed to a less
sympathetic eye that Lucienne was heart-broken at leaving her beloved
mistress. In the coach by Madame Gaumont’s side, and during the first
hour or so after her arrival at the Hôtel de la Séguinière, the last
words of the Princess and her own resolutions to be brave had
sustained her. But that evening, alone in the pretty pink and white
boudoir which her hostess had assigned to her, it was different. All
the cables which had held her little bark to its anchorage were
parting one after the other; she felt herself alone on a hostile sea.
It was not only the parting with Madame Elisabeth—it was not only
shrinking from the future which unnerved her; it was terror of
herself, for herself. And quite suddenly the idea came to her: why not
end this eternal warfare, embrace the inevitable? Why not tell Gilbert
that she wished to marry him now, before she went to England?
The thought was stunning, but it brought the relief of finality. And,
after all, it was what she was going to do in the end. Would not
Madame Elisabeth have approved of it? Why had she not done it before?
Borne on the tide of impulse, she got up and looked round the
unfamiliar room for writing materials. They were there all ready to
her hand. She sat down at the escritoire, and seizing a sheet of paper
wrote with shaking fingers the first words that occurred to her,
folded the letter, sealed and addressed it. . . . Then she paused.
What did it mean, that square of paper lying in front of her? It meant
exactly what it said to her, in her own handwriting—“Monsieur le
Marquis de Château-Foix.” (Lucienne never could remember that one was
not supposed to use titles any more.) It represented Gilbert. He
would come at once, he would probably marry her to-morrow. To-morrow,
then, she would be really his. It would be rest of a sort. She was
far enough from feeling aversion to him. It would be the best
solution. . . .
No, she was not made for so heroic a remedy!
“What shall I do—what shall I do?” she whispered desperately to
herself, sitting in front of the letter and twisting her hands. The
Caryatids of the fireplace could not advise her, nor that little
marquise of the school of La Tour, who looked so rosily out of her
tarnished frame over the mantelpiece. But a small sound spoke to her
and decided her fate. Because it was a chilly evening Madame Gaumont
had had a fire lit in the boudoir. And as Lucienne sat there, tossed
on a thousand conflicting currents of thought, a piece of wood, burnt
through, fell in with a gentle crash. Almost before she had realised
it the girl had risen, crossed the room, flung the letter into the
flames, and, returning to the escritoire, buried her face in her
hands, drawing long breaths of relief. She had the sensation of
having escaped a pursuer. . . .
In the few simple words of commendation that the Princess had spoken
to her, Madame Gaumont had learnt that it was also the wish of
Lucienne’s affianced husband, the Marquis de Château-Foix, that the
girl should go to England. And as the banker’s widow dearly loved all
circumstances attending wooings, betrothals, marriages, and the like,
she looked forward to the arrival of the happy suitor with more
pleasure, had she but known it, than the _future_ herself. But
Lucienne made something of a fight for the situation next morning. The
weary air of one who has not slept was attributed by her hostess, and
with partial accuracy, to her grief at parting with Madame Elisabeth.
Being conscious of this Lucienne was able to answer her sympathetic
questions about Gilbert naturally enough. But the day dragged on,
and still Gilbert did not come. How thankful she was that she had
burnt her letter! She was now a prey to all the instincts of
conventionality, which had never made themselves heard in her
overstrung condition of the previous night. It was her dead mother’s
wish which had delayed the marriage; how could she have dreamed of
outraging it? And Gilbert—what would he have thought of a girl who
offered herself in that fashion? At times she was almost cheerful at
the thought of her escape, and, ironically enough, when Madame Gaumont
was thinking complacently, “The poor child is reviving already at the
prospect of seeing her betrothed,” Lucienne was congratulating herself
that the day would see him, after all, in no closer relationship.
It was late in the afternoon before the expected visitor was announced
to Madame Gaumont, where she sat in her partially dismantled boudoir
doing accounts in preparation for her departure, and where Lucienne,
her head on her hand, was gazing out of the window—“looking for her
lover,” thought her hostess. But the lover, when he entered, was
something of a surprise. He was not the handsome young nobleman whom
she had imagined to herself. Gilbert’s serious manner and his rather
severe style of dress usually gave him the appearance of an older man,
and to-day, fresh from the scene of Louis’ arrest, he was more than
usually grave. However, Madame Gaumont had hardly thrown down her pen
and risen with delight to receive him before she decided that he had,
after all, an air of distinction. Gilbert kissed her hand, and
Lucienne’s.
“You will forgive the confusion in which you find us, Monsieur le
Marquis, will you not?” asked the good lady cheerfully. “I need hardly
apologise to you, since you know that I—we—I should say, are leaving
on the day after to-morrow. It is a great pleasure to me to have the
companionship of Mademoiselle d’Aucourt—though, to be sure, I am very
sorry to be the instrument of taking her away from you! . . . And
now,” she added, beaming, “since your time is so short, I will not
take from you any of your precious moments. Au revoir, Monsieur.”
She got her bulk out of the door with such surprising alacrity that
Gilbert had barely time to open it for her.
Lucienne, very pale in her white dress with its black ribbons, was
standing, when he turned again, with her fingers resting on a little
gilded table in the centre of the room. Her large dark eyes, which
could be so full of laughter, were wide open and eager, and underneath
them were black rings of fatigue and perhaps suffering, which
Château-Foix had never seen there before. Again he felt the dizzy
onslaught of that passion which had surprised him in the Tuileries. He
fought it down; he dared not show it; he had frightened her once. He
went up to her, and gently possessed himself of her hands instead.
“You are tired, my darling, and sad.”
She smiled a little—very bravely, he thought. “Not very tired. But
sad, yes.”
“I wish it need not be; I wish it with all my heart,” he said
earnestly. “It is desperately hard for both of us.” He raised her
hands to his own shoulders and stood looking down at her. “I only send
you away, my dearest, because it is the best for you. You know that,
Lucienne, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said the girl dreamily, looking up at him and yet through him.
He tightened his grasp of her hands. “Lucienne, my heart, what is it?
You are tired out, and I can’t take care of you. I have got to leave
you to a stranger . . . I can't even send Louis with you.”
“I knew that Louis would not be able to leave the King,” said
Lucienne, and she gently disengaged herself and sat down. “You should
have believed me at the first, Gilbert.”
As he looked at her, sitting there pale but smiling, her spirit, as
he conceived it, and her beauty so wrought upon Gilbert that his
self-restraint began to give way again, and he walked hastily up and
down the room. She was going over the sea, away from him, and he
longed to take her back with him to Vendée, to clasp her in his arms
and to shower kisses on her little pale face. There was no absolutely
valid reason against his doing either of these things, except that the
first was not in harmony with what he thought best for her, the
second, he had learnt, was not to be yet.
As for Lucienne, she sat still with her eyes fixed almost mechanically
upon her lover. She had never in her life seen him so moved, but she
had passed beyond the region of surprise or even of acute sensation,
and she thought, as far as she could think at all, of a burnt letter.
At last Gilbert came to a stand-still in front of her. “I wish you did
not look so tired,” he said under his breath. Then he sat down by her
and took her hand in both of his and went on speaking in a voice that
showed the restraint which he was putting on himself. “My mother will
soon go over to take care of you, I hope, Lucienne; and I am sure you
will be happy in Suffolk. You will like my uncle; he is extremely
kind, and so are my cousins, George and Amelia.”
Some answer was probably required of her, so she said: “It seems
strange that you should have English cousins.”
The Marquis nodded, but was not diverted into enlarging on this
relationship, so perhaps he had not expected a remark. He went on to
talk a little of the journey, of English habits, of Suffolk, and she
could not guess, except that his manner was somehow indefinably
different, that, as he described Sir William Ashley’s avenue, he saw
himself riding up it to claim her. Yet his thought was almost audible
in his voice as he said: “I shall come over myself very soon. It may
be that we shall have to be married in England, but you must try not
to mind that.”
Lucienne's hand was her own again now, and she looked down at his ring
as she twisted it on her finger. “I shall not mind,” she said at
length.
“And until that time,” went on Gilbert in a low voice she had never
heard before, “there will no day pass in which I shall not think of
you and long for you.”
There had been growing in Lucienne’s heart, even in the midst of her
apathy, a horrible fear lest, by reason of that very apathy (of which
she was fully conscious) she might awaken in Gilbert some suspicion of
the truth. She might be compromising Louis. For Louis’ sake—she could
not have done it else—she was quickened to a great effort, and
stretching out her hand, said with all the warmth of which she was
capable, and with a smile to boot: “I shall be waiting for you when
you come.”
Château-Foix put a long kiss on the little hand. “You are as brave as
I knew you would be. God grant that day may not be far off.”
Rather than discuss that question and run the risk of failing in
responsiveness, she said: “Is it true that you are going back to
Chantemerle at once?”
“I am going back directly you are out of Paris,” answered Gilbert,
looking at her and thinking how prettily the hair grew on her
forehead.
“And Louis with you, I suppose?”
The question struck at him like the ache of a recurrent pain. He had
actually forgotten for the moment the black cloud on his heart. He
must have hesitated for the fraction of a second, for he heard
Lucienne say quickly and almost reproachfully: “You are not going to
leave him behind in Paris, surely, Gilbert? You know how reckless he
is, and that if any one has influence with him it is you!”
A somewhat grim smile flickered over the Marquis’ face at this
testimony. “Yes,” he said, trusting that this time he was not
betraying hesitation, “Louis must come with me.” And, fearing further
questions, he rose to take his leave. He stood towering up above
Lucienne, and once again he held out his arms to her. And Lucienne got
up and came to him, but she seemed to shrink into nothing in his
embrace, and to try to hide her face from him. Then he attempted to
comfort her, blaming himself for having made the parting harder for
her.
“I must leave you now, dearest,” he said, gently releasing her, “but I
shall try to see you again on Thursday, if only for a moment, to say
good-bye.”
“You will bring Louis, too?” she asked, and she looked at him with a
gaze there was no escaping.
“If I can,” said the Marquis.
Suddenly she started away from him, with a hand at her breast and her
whole body quivering with life. “Why ‘if you can’? Why ‘if you can’?”
she cried. “You are hiding something from me! He is—he is . . . O tell
me!”
Château-Foix looked at the carpet. “I had not meant to tell you,” he
answered gravely and reluctantly, “but perhaps you had better know. He
was arrested this morning.”
He heard a sort of fluttering sigh, and raised his eyes in time to see
the girl, like a broken lily, sway towards the sofa behind her. He
took an instinctive step forward to catch her, but she had sunk
backward among the rose-coloured cushions, so gently that it was hard
to realise she had no volition. She had fainted.