Soon Grandmother followed Aunt Jael, and took to her bed permanently.
One Lord's Day evening I helped her upstairs for the last time.
My life was now spent in the two bedrooms where my Great-Aunt and
Grandmother lay, and in crossing the corridor from one to the other as
Aunt Jael's voice or my own sense of Grandmother's need alternatively
summoned me. In the one room I was chiefly cursed at, in the other
principally prayed for.
Sister Briggs came in most days to give me help in the kitchen; even so
I found it a heavy task to do the whole work of the big house and to
feed and mind and minister to two bedridden old women. But I preferred
it to the heavy idleness of Villebecq: found waiting upon others more
natural, more agreeable, more self-righteously satisfactory, than being
waited upon. There was the pride of humility, the unctuous flattery of
fatigue.
I never went out of doors except to Market and (for Breaking of Bread
only) to Meeting. I had the lonely livelong day in which to work and
to think of Robbie. Here I was back in Devon, the Devon where I had
met him, the Devon where he lived: was I any whit the nearer finding
him? My brain revolved in a futile circle of planlessness and hope: as
usual, my imperial imagination failed cravenly when face to face with
need for practical endeavour. The only plan I could decide upon was to
broach the subject to Aunt Martha next time she should come over from
Torribridge, to ask her brazenly for the address of the family in South
Devon and the surname of Uncle Vivian, and then to write direct for
news of my Beloved. It was high time Aunt Martha came over again--she
had not been near her mother's bedside for a fortnight and more. When
would she come?
My only other interest during these days was in the tremendous drama
being enacted in the country I had just left. Unknown to my Grandmother
I took in the _Times_ newspaper daily, and had French ones specially
sent to me. I followed every stage of the war and the political story
with a passion that seemed sometimes incongruous in this bare Christian
English house. What had Bear Lawn to do with this war?--or any other
war? (I forgot that it had been built for barracks in the other
Napoleon's day; that maybe redcoats who had seen and smashed Boney had
slept and sworn in each familiar room.)
"Shall I tell you anything about the war?" I asked my Grandmother one
evening. "There is only one war," she replied, "God's war with evil."
I was so infinitely more interested in persons than things, in the
players than in the play, that never at any stage of these events
across the Channel did I much reflect on their mighty political
significance: how the Ruler of Europe who, through centuries, had
lived in Paris, would live from this time onwards in Berlin; or how,
together with the sword the last French Emperor handed to the first
German Emperor at Sedan, he was handing also the secular leadership
of civilization. I could only think of the hunch-shouldered suffering
wretch who proffered the sword.
His lady, too, was an object-lesson for would-be empresses. Though if
her fate was unambiguous, as the Lord's lessons are, the fashion in
which she faced it was more doubtful, as History is. Some accounts
spoke of her bravery: how calm and queenly she was while the savage
mob in the Tuileries garden shrieked "Dethronement!" and would have
torn her limb from limb--others of her cowardice: how cravenly she
scuttled away at the first approach of realities, where a Maria Theresa
would have driven hardily through the streets and by courage effected
a revulsion of the people's feeling. Her Good-bye, how touching!--the
last sad glance at the well-loved rooms in which for seventeen imperial
years she had reigned, the thought for others, the dignified tears,
the bitter "In France no one has the right to be unfortunate!" wrung
from her anguished soul--_or_--the stealthy selfish escape under the
protection of foreigners, the abandonment of others, the skulking
anxiety for her own skin only, the well-filled purse. The candid
selfishness: "Do not think of me, think only of France"--_or_--the
uneasy self-righteousness: "Have I not done my duty to the end?"
"Yes, Madam": "I am on your arm" (to the Italian Ambassador): "Am I
trembling?" "No, Madam, you are not trembling." "What more could I have
done?": "Nothing, Madam."
How loving a wife she had been in the dark preceding weeks! In an agony
of fear for her beloved husband's life if he should return to Paris,
how she had sent him hourly telegrams, messages of aching anxiety and
forethought and tenderness, to dissuade him from the project,--_or_--to
keep him away from the Capital at all costs, since his return would
put an end to her power, her Regency, the wreaking of her spites and
vendettas, her even darker ambitions. How many hours of unrecorded
prayer had she not spent with God!--praying for the sweet Emperor's
safety--_or_--for the stray bullet that would achieve her ends.
France was ungrateful, France who had paid for her food and her
follies for seventeen squandering years. And the journals were
indiscriminating, to print such varying tales. And events were unkind,
to give the poor later historian so embarrassing a choice between black
and white and every colour between. But Fate was just, to turn his
wheel abruptly against this over-fortunate woman; or unjust, maybe, to
visit with spite so calamitous one who was no eviller or vainer than
almost any other woman of us would have been in her place--no worse
than _you_, Mary Lee.
No worse than me: granted. But in what way different from me, then, to
have deserved those incomparable years? Ah, well, she would pay for
them now: God gets even.
The place of pity is where Fate turns upon a nobler soul. I suffered
with this gentle unscrupulous Man who had woo'd Ambition through the
last dismal stages on the road where Ambition ends. A Bonaparte at
the back of his armies, slinking from defeat to defeat. Bodily pain
so monstrous that it could only be borne with the help of morphia
injected every few hours by the sombre-faced young doctor who did duty
for glittering aide-de-camp. A rudderless wretch, dragged at the heels
of "his" army like so much tawdry baggage, a crowned camp-follower, a
commander without a command; flaunted by his officers, mocked by his
soldiers, cajoled, disowned and threatened by his wife; not daring
to return to his capital, not daring to show himself to his troops:
shrinking back in the gorgeous Imperial carriage from the hisses of the
townspeople in the cities of France he was abandoning to the foe, and
the lewd and horrible insults of the troops. A hunchback haggard doll.
For Sedan he rouged himself. Why not? The play had lasted for eighteen
years, and the hollow cheeks needed new cosmetics for the final scene.
He quitted the stage with excruciating agony of soul and body, with
painted dignity, with eternal inseparable calm. Nothing in his reign
became him like the leaving it.
Vanity seeks ambition, and the end of ambition is Vanity. There is only
love.