THE SECOND CHRISTMAS
“Mon fiancé dort sous la noire terre,
Dans la froide tombe il rêve de nous,
Laissez-moi pleurer, ma peine est amère,
Laissez-moi gémir et veiller, ma mère!
Les pleurs me sont doux.”
—LECONTE DE LISLE, _Christine_.
The two women in their black draperies came up the wide staircase
together in silence, but at the top the elder paused and put her hand
on the other’s arm.
“Dear child, I think you are too tired to read to me this evening.”
Lucienne shook her head. “No, indeed not, Madame. I love to do it;
please let me come at the usual time.”
And Madame de Château-Foix, after she had given her a kiss, watched
her for a moment as she went along the landing, before she too entered
her own room.
Only the firelight illumined it, for, though but five o’clock, it was
quite dark outside. The Marquise lit the candles on her escritoire,
unlocked a drawer and, taking out a little packet of papers tied with
a black ribbon, laid them in front of her on the rosewood and sat back
in her chair, her hands in her lap.
There are some letters which a woman knows by heart, and which she yet
reads every day. Of such was the letter in the bundle before Madame de
Château-Foix; she had read it daily for the last three and a half
months. But this evening she was slow to spread it out as heretofore,
and she knew whence proceeded this hesitation. That letter—Gilbert’s
last, written months before his death, found on him and sent to her by
M. des Graves—that letter bade her do a thing which she had not yet
been able to bring herself to do. And this disobeyed request, this
injunction ever speaking from the pages of the last memorial she had
of her dead son, was a living reproach to the poor woman, and gave a
sharper sting to her agonies of grief. Yet she had instinctively
fought against the command. She had told herself that Gilbert was
quixotic, like his father—and like M. des Graves. But she knew that
she would yield in the end, and now, having made up her mind that what
he asked should be done by Christmas Day, she had but a matter of
thirty-six hours or so left. And surely she had conquered her
repugnance at last.
She untied the bundle and spread out the first letter—not very long,
worn and crumpled, strongly creased at the folds and marked in the
middle with a long brown stain. The other two of the trinity,
treasured but less sacred, she knew by heart also—M. des Graves’ long
compassionate epistle, and Louis’ heart-broken scrawl. And she read
the first once more, with the tears gathering in her eyes. “O Gilbert,
Gilbert, I will do it! Oh, forgive me that I have been so long! But it
was hard!” The tears trickled through her ringless fingers, and one
fell quietly on the ink of the letter and blurred it.
But when Lucienne tapped at the door some twenty minutes later, it was
a gentle and composed voice without trace of tears which bade her
enter. The Marquise was not lying on the sofa as was her habit at this
hour; she was sitting in a great chair by the fire.
“Come and sit by me here, petite,” she said. “We will not read just
yet.”
And Lucienne, catching a cushion off the sofa, sat down on the floor
by her, laying her head at once on the elder woman’s knee.
The Marquise’s hand began to pass lightly over her hair. “Has Sir
William come back from Bury?” she asked.
“I do not know, Madame. I have been in my room. I hope so, for it is
snowing fast.”
“I suppose we must expect snow now,” observed Madame de Château-Foix.
“To-morrow is Christmas Eve.”
Lucienne moved a little. “Then it is a year ago to-day,” she said in a
low voice, “since I angered you about Mr Trenchard’s flowers. How long
ago it seems! . . . and how far away that self seems from this! I was
a child then.”
The fingers still caressed her hair, and the eyes above her looked
down at her very kindly.
“. . . But I have learnt much since then . . . and most of all from
you, Madame.”
The hand stopped. “From me, child!” said the Marquise. “You had better
go to another teacher.”
Lucienne raised herself. “Yes, indeed, Madame, from you,” she said,
and her eyes were full of tears. “These last three months . . . how
you have borne it . . . Oh, I cannot say what I would!” She clasped
the Marquise’s knees passionately, and laid her head there again.
“My child—that I was to call daughter,” said Madame de Château-Foix
sadly, “I have a confession to make to you; it will show you that,
passionately as I loved him, I have done Gilbert a wrong—and you,
too. Every day I have been putting off telling you, because it was
difficult for me. . . . Gilbert wished you—if he were killed—to
marry.”
Lucienne slowly drew away from her support and put her hands over her
face. Was she horrified?
“It was his thought for you, Lucienne,” went on the poor mother, as if
pleading an excuse. “He did not want your life to be spoiled. That is
easy for me to understand. But he went further: he named the man he
wished you to marry. Perhaps you could guess him?”
She was trying to spare the girl, not realising that she was but
prolonging her pain.
“He wished you, if you wished it too, to marry Louis.”
It was done! Why did Lucienne not speak? And she was shaking all over.
A wave of pity went over the Marquise, and she bent forward and put
her arms about her shoulders.
“There . . . there . . . we will not speak of it again. I should not
have told you yet, my dear. Of course it seems strange to you—poor,
poor child!”
But the quivering body drew away from her embrace. “Don’t touch me,
Madame!” cried Lucienne wildly, dropping her hands and almost pushing
the Marquise away. “I am not fit for you to touch—I should never have
been fit to be Gilbert’s wife. . . .”
But Madame de Château-Foix, seeing her profound agitation, did not
take these self-accusations very seriously. “Tell me, child,” she said
tenderly, “what is wrong. Tell me—Gilbert would have wished it.”
And Lucienne, too overwrought to soften the blow, gasped out: “I knew
Gilbert’s wish. He gave me up last March.”
The Marquise fell back in her chair as though she had been shot
through the heart. Her face changed till it was an old woman’s. Then
there issued from her lips, in an inhuman voice, the single word:
“Why?”
At the look on her face Lucienne’s rapidly mounting hysteria was
stayed for a moment, and, not for her own sake, but for this stricken
mother’s, she tried to put the thing less nakedly. But there was no
way.
“Because he knew that Louis loved me, and that I loved Louis,” she
said.
There was an awful silence, while the two women faced each other, with
a chasm like a grave sprung open between them. Then the Marquise said,
half choking: “That black dress . . . it is all part of a lie,
then. . . .”
But mercifully Lucienne either did not hear or did not understand.
Twisting her hands together she burst out: “Gilbert was all that
was generous and noble. Louis and I . . . we saw each other so
often . . . we could not help it . . . when he came to the Tuileries,
but we never, never meant to speak of it. Then one day . . . it was
not Louis’ fault . . . it all came out . . . but he left me, he left
me. . . . You do believe me, Madame! M. des Graves believed me. . . .
I did try never to think of him . . . you do believe it?” The last
note in her voice was ominous of the breaking point.
The Marquise had risen, and, withdrawn a little, stood looking
frozenly down at the girl crouched on the floor. “I do not know what
to believe,” she said at last. “Every one seems to have known of
this—this disgraceful affair but myself.”
“But Gilbert did that to spare you!” cried the girl, flinging out
imploring hands. “It was only to spare you—he told me so himself.
He found out about Louis and me, and he gave me up . . . Don’t
you see that it was to spare you—to spare us all, because he
understood. . . .”
But the Marquise gave no sign, and after a minute or two of deadly
silence Lucienne’s nerves gave way, and sinking to the floor she broke
into sobs full of fragmentary entreaties in which Gilbert’s name
was mingled, and out of which detached itself at last, in tortured
and direct appeal: “Gilbert, Gilbert, if you were here you would
explain. . . .”
Madame de Château-Foix’ hands clenched themselves. “Silence, girl!
What right have you now to call on that saint in Paradise? After
deceiving him, deceiving me, posing to Sir William and all the
household as his widowed betrothed, you have the audacity to talk
about explaining and understanding! Explain, indeed! It is a pity that
Louis is not here to explain! I always——”
The sobbing girl flared up with extraordinary ardour. “You shall not
say anything about Louis! You have always misjudged and belittled
him—and yet he did what one man in a million would not have done—and
did it for Gilbert’s sake. If any one was to blame it was I—not
he . . . no, a thousand thousand times not he! He was no less noble
hearted than Gilbert, no less self-sacrificing. . . . And if you knew,
you would not be so cruel to me, for it is all over now . . . since he
is dead.”
Between the fire of her beginning and the profound, hopeless
conviction of her tone at the end, the Marquise’s wrath was stayed
for a moment.
“What do you mean?” she ejaculated.
“Why, Louis was killed this morning. Did you not know?” asked Lucienne
simply.
Madame de Château-Foix stared at her. “The girl is out of her mind,”
she said slowly to herself.
“I dreamed of it all last night,” went on Lucienne with a horrible
calm, “and about midday I knew that it was true. I can see him
now . . . I think it did not hurt him much . . . he was very
tired . . . but he lies there quite cold now—and dead, dead. . . .”
And exclaiming, in accents of breathless horror and longing, “Louis,
Louis, my love, my love!” she knelt upright and gazed with clasped
hands and dilated eyes at a spot on the floor not far from either of
them.
And when the Marquise, having shudderingly turned her head in the
same direction, was conscious of a distinct feeling of relief at not
beholding the lifeless body of her nephew stretched on that tract of
carpet, half in firelight, half in shadow, between the hearth and the
sofa, she was thoroughly frightened, though she did not show it.
She went quickly to the girl and shook her.
“Lucienne, stop! I cannot have this! Wake up, child, and control
yourself. There is nothing there.”
But Lucienne still gazed at the same place, till the passion of love
and despair in her eyes was swamped by a rising tide of horror. “Yes,
there is blood there,” she said, “a pool of blood . . . and no one to
stop it. O Madame, what shall I do? He is dying there and I cannot
help him!” She caught the Marquise’s dress in a fierce and frightened
grip, and, cowering on the ground, hid her face against it. Madame de
Château-Foix, nothing but alarm in her mind, contrived to sit down and
to draw the girl with her, and Lucienne knelt there clutching her, and
shaken with paroxysms of almost tearless sobs, till those, too, were
exhausted, and she slipped down to her old position against the elder
woman’s knees.
There was then presented to Madame de Château-Foix one of the great
opportunities of life, which, when they come unannounced, go sometimes
unrecognised as such. But the Marquise did realise that something
great was being demanded of her, something so foreign to her outlook
that it was almost beyond her powers, but that for the very sake of
the dead son whose memory it seemed to outrage she must try to respond
to the call. Moreover, she knew that she must respond at once—not
to-morrow or the next day, when the bitterness and shock had a little
passed, but now, at this very moment. Yet in that half-hour of tension
and reflection, while she mechanically tried to soothe the girl, she
saw that she was about to do one of those—to her—fantastic actions,
one of those “things which we are not called upon to do,” as she would
have phrased it, such as she had sometimes carped at in her husband,
or Gilbert, or M. des Graves. She did not realise what the result
would be; that she would gain Lucienne for ever; perhaps, indeed,
she never realised that she had need to gain her. For Félicité de
Chantemerle had not the gift of clear thinking; and so, happily,
it did not occur to her to consider that Gilbert, with the best
intentions, had been guilty of a measure of duplicity towards her. To
her mind his course of action was right, because he had taken it, and
there was an end of the matter. Her love for her son had made it hard
to bear patiently the news that another man had been preferred before
him, but the same love would carry her over this crisis—her love and
her rather childlike belief that if she did not act as he would
have acted she would never attain to his company in those blessed
regions whither she never doubted he had gone—regions which, all
unconsciously, she now desired less for their own sake than because he
would be there.
The great effort which she made at last was scarcely perceptible in
her voice. “Lucienne, look at me . . . I am Gilbert’s mother, and if
he could forgive this I must learn to. I promised him once that I
would be a mother to you, and I have tried to keep my promise. I am
afraid that I have failed many times; I have failed most of all
to-night. . . . But I am an old woman, Lucienne, and have always been
jealous for my son—perhaps you cannot understand that, but you may
some day. It has always seemed to me that . . . others . . . have
taken everything, and that he was always ready to give, and never got
the appreciation he deserved. But _I_ knew; he was my boy, my very
own. . . . Sometimes I was afraid that I loved him too much, and that
God would take him from me. . . . And now He has taken him. . . . Some
day—not yet—I shall learn to thank Him for the death He has sent
him. . . .” She struggled for a moment, and went on: “Since I was
allowed to be his mother, I must be worthy of it. And so, my dear
child, we will put away . . . all this . . . and you shall be my
daughter really . . . if you can care for a mother who has loved her
son too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now, my child, you
must be brave, and remember that because we have not heard from
Louis since November it probably only means that his letters have
miscarried. And he will soon be here—he will soon be here! You shall
have him, I promise you!” She stroked the head on her breast. “My poor
child, what you have suffered!”
“But Louis is dead,” repeated Lucienne. “Do not tell me that he will
come, for that hurts more . . . and in time, perhaps, I shall get used
to it . . . like all the other things. . . .”
“My child,” said the Marquise, fighting down her fears, “you are very
greatly overwrought. All these fancies come from what you have gone
through; when you are better you will forget them. Now kiss me, and go
and bathe your eyes. . . . That’s right.” She studied the girl’s
marred face for a moment. “An idea has just occurred to me, my dear;
yes, I believe it would be an excellent plan. Only this afternoon Lady
Milton was telling Amelia of the benefit which her daughter has
derived from the waters of Bath. I shall most certainly take you to
Bath after Christmas.”
* * * * * *
Downstairs in the hall Sir William, with a very grave face, was
reading to his son and daughter, out of the newspaper which he
had brought over from Bury, the belated and scanty news of the
irretrievable disaster which had overtaken the Vendean army at Le
Mans twelve days before.
“Practically cut to pieces,” he summed up, finishing. “Good God, how
shall we tell them!”