When night had fairly fallen, Gasselin came into the hall and asked his
master respectfully if he had further need of him.
“You can go out, or go to bed, after prayers,” replied the baron, waking
up, “unless Madame or my sister--”
The two ladies here made a sign of consent. Gasselin then knelt down,
seeing that his masters rose to kneel upon their chairs; Mariotte also
knelt before her stool. Mademoiselle du Guenic then said the prayer
aloud. After it was over, some one rapped at the door on the lane.
Gasselin went to open it.
“I dare say it is Monsieur le cure; he usually comes first,” said
Mariotte.
Every one now recognized the rector’s foot on the resounding steps of
the portico. He bowed respectfully to the three occupants of the room,
and addressed them in phrases of that unctuous civility which priests
are accustomed to use. To the rather absent-minded greeting of the
mistress of the house, he replied by an ecclesiastically inquisitive
look.
“Are you anxious or ill, Madame la baronne?” he asked.
“Thank you, no,” she replied.
Monsieur Grimont, a man of fifty, of middle height, lost in his cassock,
from which issued two stout shoes with silver buckles, exhibited above
his hands a plump visage, and a generally white skin though yellow in
spots. His hands were dimpled. His abbatial face had something of the
Dutch burgomaster in the placidity of its complexion and its flesh
tones, and of the Breton peasant in the straight black hair and the
vivacity of the brown eyes, which preserved, nevertheless, a priestly
decorum. His gaiety, that of a man whose conscience was calm and pure,
admitted a joke. His manner had nothing uneasy or dogged about it, like
that of many poor rectors whose existence or whose power is contested
by their parishioners, and who instead of being, as Napoleon sublimely
said, the moral leaders of the population and the natural justices of
peace, are treated as enemies. Observing Monsieur Grimont as he
marched through Guerande, the most irreligious of travellers would have
recognized the sovereign of that Catholic town; but this same sovereign
lowered his spiritual superiority before the feudal supremacy of the du
Guenics. In their salon he was as a chaplain in his seigneur’s house.
In church, when he gave the benediction, his hand was always first
stretched out toward the chapel belonging to the Guenics, where their
mailed hand and their device were carved upon the key-stone of the arch.
“I thought that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had already arrived,” said the
rector, sitting down, and taking the hand of the baroness to kiss it.
“She is getting unpunctual. Can it be that the fashion of dissipation
is contagious? I see that Monsieur le chevalier is again at Les Touches
this evening.”
“Don’t say anything about those visits before Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel,”
cried the old maid, eagerly.
“Ah! mademoiselle,” remarked Mariotte, “you can’t prevent the town from
gossiping.”
“What do they say?” asked the baroness.
“The young girls and the old women all say that he is in love with
Mademoiselle des Touches.”
“A lad of Calyste’s make is playing his proper part in making the women
love him,” said the baron.
“Here comes Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel,” said Mariotte.
The gravel in the court-yard crackled under the discreet footsteps of
the coming lady, who was accompanied by a page supplied with a lantern.
Seeing this lad, Mariotte removed her stool to the great hall for the
purpose of talking with him by the gleam of his rush-light, which was
burned at the cost of his rich and miserly mistress, thus economizing
those of her own masters.
This elderly demoiselle was a thin, dried-up old maid, yellow as the
parchment of a Parliament record, wrinkled as a lake ruffled by the
wind, with gray eyes, large prominent teeth, and the hands of a man. She
was rather short, a little crooked, possibly hump-backed; but no one had
ever been inquisitive enough to ascertain the nature of her perfections
or her imperfections. Dressed in the same style as Mademoiselle du
Guenic, she stirred an enormous quantity of petticoats and linen
whenever she wanted to find one or other of the two apertures of her
gown through which she reached her pockets. The strangest jingling of
keys and money then echoed among her garments. She always wore, dangling
from one side, the bunch of keys of a good housekeeper, and from
the other her silver snuff-box, thimble, knitting-needles, and other
implements that were also resonant. Instead of Mademoiselle Zephirine’s
wadded hood, she wore a green bonnet, in which she may have visited her
melons, for it had passed, like them, from green to yellowish; as for
its shape, our present fashions are just now bringing it back to Paris,
after twenty years absence, under the name of Bibi. This bonnet was
constructed under her own eye and by the hands of her nieces, out of
green Florence silk bought at Guerande, and an old bonnet-shape, renewed
every five years at Nantes,--for Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel allowed her
bonnets the longevity of a legislature. Her nieces also made her gowns,
cut by an immutable pattern. The old lady still used the cane with the
short hook that all women carried in the early days of Marie-Antoinette.
She belonged to the very highest nobility of Brittany. Her arms bore the
ermine of its ancient dukes. In her and in her sister the illustrious
Breton house of the Pen-Hoels ended. Her younger sister had married a
Kergarouet, who, in spite of the deep disapproval of the whole region,
added the name of Pen-Hoel to his own and called himself the Vicomte de
Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel.
“Heaven has punished him,” said the old lady; “he has nothing but
daughters, and the Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel name will be wiped out.”
Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel possessed about seven thousand francs a year
from the rental of lands. She had come into her property at thirty-six
years of age, and managed it herself, inspecting it on horseback, and
displaying on all points the firmness of character which is noticeable
in most deformed persons. Her avarice was admired by the whole country
round, never meeting with the slightest disapproval. She kept one
woman-servant and the page. Her yearly expenses, not including taxes,
did not amount to over a thousand francs. Consequently, she was the
object of the cajoleries of the Kergarouet-Pen-Hoels, who passed the
winters at Nantes, and the summers at their estate on the banks of the
Loire below l’Indret. She was supposed to be ready to leave her fortune
and her savings to whichever of her nieces pleased her best. Every three
months one or other of the four demoiselles de Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel, (the
youngest of whom was twelve, and the eldest twenty years of age) came to
spend a few days with her.
A friend of Zephirine du Guenic, Jacqueline de Pen-Hoel, brought up to
adore the Breton grandeur of the du Guenics, had formed, ever since the
birth of Calyste, the plan of transmitting her property to the
chevalier by marrying him to whichever of her nieces the Vicomtesse de
Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel, their mother, would bestow upon him. She dreamed
of buying back some of the best of the Guenic property from the farmer
_engagistes_. When avarice has an object it ceases to be a vice; it
becomes a means of virtue; its privations are a perpetual offering;
it has the grandeur of an intention beneath its meannesses. Perhaps
Zephirine was in the secret of Jacqueline’s intention. Perhaps even
the baroness, whose whole soul was occupied by love for her son and
tenderness for his father, may have guessed it as she saw with what
wily perseverance Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel brought with her her favorite
niece, Charlotte de Kergarouet, now sixteen years of age. The rector,
Monsieur Grimont, was certainly in her confidence; it was he who helped
the old maid to invest her savings.
But Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel might have had three hundred thousand
francs in gold, she might have had ten times the landed property
she actually possessed, and the du Guenics would never have allowed
themselves to pay her the slightest attention that the old woman could
construe as looking to her fortune. From a feeling of truly Breton
pride, Jacqueline de Pen-Hoel, glad of the supremacy accorded to her old
friend Zephirine and the du Guenics, always showed herself honored by
her relations with Madame du Guenic and her sister-in-law. She even went
so far as to conceal the sort of sacrifice to which she consented every
evening in allowing her page to burn in the Guenic hall that singular
gingerbread-colored candle called an _oribus_ which is still used in
certain parts of western France.
Thus this rich old maid was nobility, pride, and grandeur personified.
At the moment when you are reading this portrait of her, the Abbe
Grimont has just indiscreetly revealed that on the evening when the
old baron, the young chevalier, and Gasselin secretly departed to join
MADAME (to the terror of the baroness and the great joy of all Bretons)
Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had given the baron ten thousand francs
in gold,--an immense sacrifice, to which the abbe added another ten
thousand, a tithe collected by him,--charging the old hero to offer the
whole, in the name of the Pen-Hoels and of the parish of Guerande, to
the mother of Henri V.
Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel treated Calyste as if she felt that her
intentions gave her certain rights over him; her plans seemed to
authorize a supervision. Not that her ideas were strict in the matter of
gallantry, for she had, in fact, the usual indulgence of the old
women of the old school, but she held in horror the modern ways of
revolutionary morals. Calyste, who might have gained in her estimation
by a few adventures with Breton girls, would have lost it considerably
had she seen him entangled in what she called innovations. She might
have disinterred a little gold to pay for the results of a love-affair,
but if Calyste had driven a tilbury or talked of a visit to Paris she
would have thought him dissipated, and declared him a spendthrift.
Impossible to say what she might not have done had she found him reading
novels or an impious newspaper. To her, novel ideas meant the overthrow
of succession of crops, ruin under the name of improvements and methods;
in short, mortgaged lands as the inevitable result of experiments.
To her, prudence was the true method of making your fortune; good
management consisted in filling your granaries with wheat, rye, and
flax, and waiting for a rise at the risk of being called a monopolist,
and clinging to those grain-sacks obstinately. By singular chance she
had often made lucky sales which confirmed her principles. She was
thought to be maliciously clever, but in fact she was not quick-witted;
on the other hand, being as methodical as a Dutchman, prudent as a cat,
and persistent as a priest, those qualities in a region of routine like
Brittany were, practically, the equivalent of intellect.
“Will Monsieur du Halga join us this evening?” asked Mademoiselle de
Pen-Hoel, taking off her knitted mittens after the usual exchange of
greetings.
“Yes, mademoiselle; I met him taking his dog to walk on the mall,”
replied the rector.
“Ha! then our _mouche_ will be lively to-night. Last evening we were
only four.”
At the word _mouche_ the rector rose and took from a drawer in one of
the tall chests a small round basket made of fine osier, a pile of ivory
counters yellow as a Turkish pipe after twenty years’ usage, and a
pack of cards as greasy as those of the custom-house officers at
Saint-Nazaire, who change them only once in two weeks. These the abbe
brought to the table, arranging the proper number of counters before
each player, and putting the basket in the centre of the table beside
the lamp, with infantine eagerness, and the manner of a man accustomed
to perform this little service.
A knock at the outer gate given firmly in military fashion echoed
through the stillness of the ancient mansion. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel’s
page went gravely to open the door, and presently the long, lean,
methodically-clothed person of the Chevalier du Halga, former
flag-captain to Admiral de Kergarouet, defined itself in black on the
penumbra of the portico.
“Welcome, chevalier!” cried Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.
“The altar is raised,” said the abbe.
The chevalier was a man in poor health, who wore flannel for his
rheumatism, a black-silk skull-cap to protect his head from fog, and a
spencer to guard his precious chest from the sudden gusts which freshen
the atmosphere of Guerande. He always went armed with a gold-headed
cane to drive away the dogs who paid untimely court to a favorite little
bitch who usually accompanied him. This man, fussy as a fine lady,
worried by the slightest _contretemps_, speaking low to spare his voice,
had been in his early days one of the most intrepid and most competent
officers of the old navy. He had won the confidence of de Suffren in
the Indian Ocean, and the friendship of the Comte de Portenduere. His
splendid conduct while flag-captain to Admiral Kergarouet was written
in visible letters on his scarred face. To see him now no one would have
imagined the voice that ruled the storm, the eye that compassed the sea,
the courage, indomitable, of the Breton sailor.
The chevalier never smoked, never swore; he was gentle and tranquil as a
girl, as much concerned about his little dog Thisbe and her caprices as
though he were an elderly dowager. In this way he gave a high idea of
his departed gallantry, but he never so much as alluded to the deeds of
surpassing bravery which had astonished the doughty old admiral, Comte
d’Estaing. Though his manner was that of an invalid, and he walked as if
stepping on eggs and complained about the sharpness of the wind or the
heat of the sun, or the dampness of the misty atmosphere, he exhibited
a set of the whitest teeth in the reddest of gums,--a fact reassuring
as to his maladies, which were, however, rather expensive, consisting
as they did of four daily meals of monastic amplitude. His bodily frame,
like that of the baron, was bony, and indestructibly strong, and covered
with a parchment glued to his bones as the skin of an Arab horse on the
muscles which shine in the sun. His skin retained the tawny color it
received in India, whence, however, he did not bring back either facts
or ideas. He had emigrated with the rest of his friends, lost his
property, and was now ending his days with the cross of Saint-Louis and
a pension of two thousand francs, as the legal reward of his
services, paid from the fund of the Invalides de la Marine. The
slight hypochondria which made him invent his imaginary ills is easily
explained by his actual suffering during the emigration. He served in
the Russian navy until the day when the Emperor Alexander ordered him to
be employed against France; he then resigned and went to live at Odessa,
near the Duc de Richelieu, with whom he returned to France. It was the
duke who obtained for this glorious relic of the old Breton navy the
pension which enabled him to live. On the death of Louis XVIII. he
returned to Guerande, and became, after a while, mayor of the city.
The rector, the chevalier, and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had regularly
passed their evenings for the last fifteen years at the hotel de Guenic,
where the other noble personages of the neighborhood also came. It
will be readily understood that the du Guenics were at the head of the
faubourg Saint-Germain of the old Breton province, where no member of
the new administration sent down by the government was ever allowed to
penetrate. For the last six years the rector coughed when he came to the
crucial words, _Domine, salvum fac regem_. Politics were still at that
point in Guerande.