PART I

THE WILL TO LIVE

(Les Roquevillard)

A Novel

By

HENRY BORDEAUX

Author of “The Parting of the Ways,” “The Woollen

Dress,” “The Fear of Living,” “The House,” etc.

_Translated by Pitts Duffield_

NEW YORK

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915 By DUFFIELD & COMPANY

CONTENTS

PART I

I. THE VINTAGE

II. THE CONFLICT

III. THE CALVARY OF LEMENC

IV. THE VENGEANCE OF MR. FRASNE

V. A FAMILY IN DANGER

PART II

I. THE MAKER OF RUINS

II. THE ANNIVERSARY

III. THE RUINS

IV. THE RETURN

PART III

I. THE COMPANION IN ARMS

II. THE FAMILY COUNCIL

III. MR. FRASNE’S CLEVER TRANSACTION

IV. THE COUNSEL OF THE SOIL

V. MARGARET’S BETROTHAL

VI. THE DEFENDER

VII. JEANNE SASSENAY

VIII. THE VOICE OF THE DEAD

IX. THE WILL TO LIVE

TO MONSIEUR FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE

_My dear Master_:

As an answer to those who regard tradition as a dead and heavy weight,

not worth cultivating, you once defined the matter thus:

“Tradition is not something which is dead: it is, on the contrary,

that which lives, that which survives in the present from the past;

something that goes beyond the actual moment; and for those who come

after us, the tradition of any one of us, whatever he is, is only that

which lives beyond himself.”

If we know what we came from we can the better understand our destiny;

we can be happy and do good only by developing ourselves along the line

of our natural sensibilities, by consenting to take our proper place in

the chain of generations by which the future and the past are linked.

Far from constricting our powers of accomplishment, the family and our

native soil give direction to them. I remember to have felt sorry, in

reading Le Play, for that family of Mélougas, who defended their old

home so desperately because they confused its history with the land’s.

In Savoy I have come across so many similar adventures. But the soil,

and the dead who sow the seed of our sensibilities, are carried with us

in our hearts if we have extracted the essential quality of tradition,

that is to say, a sense of honour, and that will to live which

the sentiment of duration incarnate in the family communicates to us.

I have tried in “Les Roquevillard” to illustrate these facts and

observations. In welcoming this story in “La Revue des deux Mondes” you

conferred on it, my dear master, the support of your approval; and I

desire to express here the pride and gratitude you gave me in so doing.

H. B.

PART I

THE WILL TO LIVE

I

THE VINTAGE

FROM the summit of the hill the voice of Mr. Francis Roquevillard

came down to the grape-gatherers, who, ranged along the vines on the

hillside, were lightening the stalks of their dark fruit.

“The night’s coming. All together now! One more good pull.”

It was a benevolent voice, but it had an accent of command. It made

every finger nimbler at the sound of it; even the shoulders of those

labourers that had begun to loaf bent again to work. Good-humouredly

the master added:

“In the morning they are as swift as swallows, and in the afternoon

they idle and chatter like a lot of jays.”

The remark called forth general laughter.

“Yes, Squire.”

They never addressed the master of La Vigie in any other way than

that, adding oftener than not his title of lawyer. La Vigie was a fine

estate, comprising woods, fields and vineyards in a single holding,

at the other end of the canton of Coquin, two or three miles from

Chambéry. You reached it by following a country road, and crossing an

old bridge built on arches over the deep waters of the river Hyère. The

grounds commanded a view of the Lyons road which used to join Savoy and

France, leading across the freestone hills of the Echelles. Its name,

the Look Out, was taken from a tower that once crowned the round hill,

but of which now no trace remained. The estate had belonged for several

centuries to the family of Roquevillard, who had added to it little by

little, as the country house and the outbuildings erected bit by bit

testified, a group of somewhat questionable harmony, but expressive

nevertheless, like some old face on which the vicissitudes of a long

life are traced. Here was written the past history of a strong race,

faithful to its native land. The Roquevillards had been, father and

son, for generations, people of the law. They had produced judges and

leaders of the bar, as well as presidents of the ancient senate of the

province, and had given to the new court of appeals a councillor who

had refused all advancement to die at home. Nevertheless, the country

persisted in regarding them all indifferently as just lawyers, and

no doubt found in this title some sense of mutual protection. Nearly

forty years of practice, an exact acquaintance with the law, a warm and

vigorous eloquence, gave the present proprietor a particular title to

this popularity.

The regular alignment of the vineyard made it easy to oversee

the gathering of the harvest. Already the tints of the leaves began

to hint of October, and on the hills a more vivid earth opposed a

paler sky. The various levels were distinguished more clearly than

before by their new colours: La Mondeuse green and gold, the Grand

Noir and the Douce Noire green and purple. Among the bare branches,

the sombre patches of the grapes caught the eye. With knives open

and dripping hands, the vintagers, prompt for the work of sacrifice,

renewed their efforts, handling the grapes as if they were sacrificial

victims, severing them with one sharp stroke and casting them into

the baskets. The women one and all had raised their skirts, gathering

and fixing them behind in order to be more free in their movements on

the heavy soil, and wearing a motley handkerchief or scarf knotted

round their heads to keep off the rays of the hot sun. From time to

time some one of them, straightening up, would rise from the sea

of branches like a salmon coming up to the surface a moment, and

then plunge down again. Some among them were old women, knotted and

wrinkled, slow and stiff in their joints, capable, nevertheless, of

great endurance and with eyes always on the watch; they were not

regular employees any longer and were struggling all the more to

keep their last jobs. There were young women of twenty, more adroit

and lively, exposing their faces and their bare forearms fearlessly,

safe in the coat of tan that protects the flesh from a too caressing

sky. There were young girls, too, immature as yet, and less

persistent, changing their places, disturbing the ranks or sitting back

quite simply, with the gaiety of school-girls on vacation, as supple

and flexible as the vines they handled. There were even little children

under care of mothers who could not leave them at home, gathering

grapes on their own account, scampering about and besmearing lips and

cheeks with juice like precocious bacchantes.

On the path, about half-way up the hill, which divided the estate and

facilitated its cultivation, the waggon, harnessed to two red oxen,

with horns trained back in the form of a lyre, waited patiently for the

moment of moving toward the wine-press. The men loaded it gravely. You

did not hear laughter from them like the women, but only the exchanging

of brief directions now and then. The younger of them wore white

caps and flannel belts that gave their bodies full play, an Alpine

huntsmen’s fashion much imitated among the young people of Savoy. Two

of them would pass a staff of strong wood through the handles of the

overflowing bushel basket, raise it to their shoulders, and, giving

their burden a slight rocking motion, place it in its turn upon the

truck. One old man with a grey beard, who stood in the vehicle and

directed them, finished the crushing of the grapes in the baskets that

were already filled. Every now and then he would raise himself to his

full height, his hands red and dripping with the blood of the vines.

Opposite La Vigie the shadows of evening were creeping

up the slopes of Vimines and Saint Sulpice, coming nearer

to the range of Lepine which received the setting sun, and on down

the twisting valley of Saint Thibaud de Coux and the Echelles. But

the light flooded the vineyard with purple and gold. It showed forth

the lines of the women, turned their plain kerchiefs into aureoles,

caressed the oxen’s horns, enveloped the grey beard and the ruddy

face of the head cultivator in the waggon, illuminated the energetic

features of Mr. Roquevillard beneath his hat brim, and still further

up flashed on the proud steeple of Montagnole, to rest at last

audaciously, like a crown, on the legendary rock of Mount Granier.

The workers, forming a group round some branches that had been set

aside and saved, were busy gathering a few last grapes. One more basket

was hoisted up, while the voice of old Jeremiah in the waggon announced

in triumph:

“There we are, Squire.”

“How many cart-loads have we?” inquired the master.

“A dozen.”

“It’s a good year.”

As the oxen began to move off, followed by all the band of workers, he

added:

“Now it’s my turn. This way, everybody.”

With their baskets on their arms and knives or bill-hooks in their

hands, the workers climbed to the top of the hill and gathered round

Mr. Roquevillard. He planted his iron-shod cane in the ground, and,

taking out of his pocket a little bag, began to count money from it,

mostly coppers, with some pieces of silver, whereupon even the most

talkative of the women stopped. It was a solemn business, this get ting

paid. Behind the gathering the windowpanes and slate-roofs reflected

the flame of the sun like mirrors.

Friendly and familiar, Mr. Roquevillard called each worker by name,

addressing some of them even with affection, for the oldest of them he

had always known by sight, and the younger he had been acquainted with

from childhood. To the wages of their day’s work he added a pleasant

word in every case, and each acknowledged it in turn with a “Thank you,

Squire.”

One or two of them who had seemed a little lazy during the day got a

bit of blame, pronounced in a pleasant tone, but showing, nevertheless,

that the master kept his two eyes open. Even the children, who had paid

themselves with fruit as they played, got a few coppers from Squire

Roquevillard, who loved them.

“Those that have received their pay pass to the left,” he said, in the

midst of the proceedings. “I don’t want to begin again indefinitely.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea, though,” rejoined a fine-looking young

woman of eighteen or twenty years.

She wore no kerchief on her head, as if to face the

daylight the more openly with her youth. Her hair, a little

disarranged, fell forward. Her mouth was large and her

expression rather common, but she had a look of health, bright eyes,

and in especial a golden tint, as of full white grapes that are

reddened by warmth till they seem full of the elixir of the sun. Mr.

Roquevillard stared at her.

“How fast you’ve grown, Catherine!” he said. “When are they going to

marry you off?”

She reddened with pleasure at this public notice that was taken of her.

“Wait and see!”

“Well, well! You’re not bad looking, Catherine.”

And with the money that he handed her he joined a bit of counsel,

putting it quite seriously:

“Be good, little girl. Virtue’s worth more than beauty.”

She promised it unhesitatingly:

“Yes, Squire.”

As the end of the line was reached the master inspected his troop and

demanded:

“Is every one satisfied?”

Twenty happy voices replied, thanking him.

But one of the children pointed with his finger to an old woman who

stood apart, embarrassed and discomfited.

“Mother Fauchois.”

The child’s words passed unheeded, and no one interfered, as if the old

woman deserved no salutations.

“Well, now, good evening, all of you,” responded the

ringing voice of Mr. Roquevillard. “You’ll reach Saint

Cassin and Vimines all right before dark.”

“Good-bye, Squire.”

Standing quiet at his post of observation he saw the shadows of the

workers, dark against the sunset, grow smaller and then disappear.

Their voices rose to him from below. They separated into two groups,

those from Vimines and Saint Cassin, respectively. These latter, whose

path lay to the left, began to sing: a rustic chorus with a long-drawn

close. Already the sun just touched the mountains. At the master’s side

old Fauchois never stirred, claiming nothing.

“Pierrette,” said Mr. Roquevillard abruptly.

She thrust her head forward, showing features not so much old as

sorrowful and broken.

“Yes, Master Francis,” she murmured.

“Here are one hundred sous. Go home and have some good soup.”

“It’s three days’ work,” said the poor creature, staring at the crown

piece that lay white in her shrivelled hand, “and I’ve only earned one.”

“Take your pay, always. And your daughter. How’s she?”

“She’s gone to Lyons.”

“Does she work there?”

The old woman let her two arms fall at her sides, and said nothing.

“She must work,” said Mr. Roquevillard.

“Since her sentence she can’t find a place. Who wants a thief?”

The lawyer pleaded the circumstances of her case in extenuation. “She

stole from thoughtlessness, coquetry, vanity. She’s not really bad. At

her age she’ll turn over a new leaf. What does she live on?”

“And what do you suppose she lives off? Men, of course.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because once, at first, I sent her a little money order to help her.

She sent it back to me, with another, a big one, which I burned up.”

“You burned it?”

“Yes, Master Francis. It was the wages of shame.”

And her anger straightened up her peasant form once more, making it

seem menacing in the full light, her hands clenched like an accusing

destiny.

“I don’t see how I ever had her. There have never been anything but

good people in our family. I’m ashamed now.”

“It isn’t your fault, Pierrette.”

She shook her head, with an air of conviction: “It’s always the fault

of the family. You know that. You said so yourself.”

“I? When?”

“Yes, once before me, at Julienne, before the conviction. It worried me

even then. And I brought her to see you one day.”

“I remember. And what did I say to her?”

“That when one had the good fortune to belong to an

honest family, one ought to respect oneself all the more for

it. Because in families everything is common property, land and debts,

good conduct and bad.”

“Still, no one can throw a stone at you.”

“People do, though, just the same. And they’re right. Lucky enough I

lost my husband before it all happened.”

“He would have protected you.”

“He would have killed her.”

“And you, you love her just the same?”

“She’s my child.”

“Well, well, Pierrette. Don’t be discouraged. So long as one isn’t

dead, there’s nothing to be lost. Go on home. I’m going to the presses

now, to make sure the vats are all right.”

“Thank you, Master Francis.”

She had worked for the household at the Look Out from time to time,

helping with the washing as well as at vintages, or even occasionally

in the kitchen, so that she exercised the servants’ privilege of using

his first name.

When she had gone Mr. Roquevillard made no haste to move. He lingered,

taking in with a loving eye all the fine land that stretched about

him: the disburdened vines, whose purple and gold would live for him

again in his joyful wines, the fields twice tilled, the orchards,

the little nameless stream beyond them that separated the cantons of

Coquin and Saint Cassin, the woods of oak and beeches, red and white,

their colours shaded off by autumn into a pale bouquet. In these lands and

the varied cultivation of them he read in this quiet hour a history

not of the seasons, but of his own family. Such and such an ancestor

had bought this field here, another had planted that vineyard; and

he himself, had he not passed the boundaries of the canton when he

acquired those woods that were so crowded now they called for cutting?

Turning toward the farm buildings, he could see the first primitive

cabin, changed now into a stable, which the first Roquevillards, honest

peasants, had built. He contrasted it with the present large and

substantial dwelling blazing with Virginia creeper. It was the same

race, abiding in the same place, fortified by a past of honest labour

and economy. He paid homage to it, recalling the words of old Fauchois:

“It’s always the fault of the family.”

His own race, moreover, had given the country men capable of serving

the republic, as useful there as they had been in the administering

of their own affairs. Thus the generations helped each other to a

common prosperity. Had not the earliest of them all prepared his

work for him? This land that he was treading on they had coveted

and earned before him. This wide view had thrilled and exalted them

as it thrilled him. With some difficulty he detached his gaze from

his own domain and prefigured things as they must have seen it,

the combination of lines and tints that made up the landscape, and

on which their sense of it, like his own, must have depended. For

though cultivatism may modify the immediate appearance of the land,

men’s hands change nothing of its splendour and extent: they add

only certain human marks, a roof with smoke above it, telling of the

sweetness of a hearth, a path or hedge, memorials of the social life, a

bell tower that speaks of prayer.

Alone on the hillside he joined to the beauty of the evening the

pleasure of communion with his race. He felt that the obscure past had

given an importance to this corner of the earth. Opposite to him, the

chain of Lepine, its monotony broken by the summit of the Signal, was

edged with red. His gaze descended to the plain, followed a moment the

graceful, flowing range of the Echelles, to which the last spurs of

the mountains seemed to act as escorts on either side, then rose again

to the indentations of the Corbelet, Joigny and Granier, and returned

again to the hills nearer by, to the storeyed valleys and their more

harmonious curves. In this bit of broken nature, hard and soft by

turns, he retraced the characters of his parentage--the audacity of his

grandfather, who bore arms during the Revolution, the nonchalance of

his father, lapsing into mere philosophy and contemplation, and letting

his sacred patrimony become compromised almost unawares.

“Not one of them,” he was thinking, “but could thus behold the

spectacle of the setting sun from this place. One day, when I am no

more, one of my children will take up these comparisons again--my

children, who will continue our work, people of means and worth.”

From the past that buttressed him he made out the future in security.

Absorbed in these reflections, he did not see the woman’s form that had

left the house and was now coming toward him. It was a woman already

aged, with a dark shawl thrown over her shoulders, and using a cane as

she walked, with an air of great lassitude and exhaustion. Her face,

as you saw it in the evening light, must once have been beautiful. The

years had chastened it without taking from it a certain expression of

purity, which surprised one at first and then attracted. It was the

visible imprint of an upright soul, purged of all evil, even a little

mystical.

“Are they not coming yet?” asked Mrs. Roquevillard of her husband.

“Yes, Valentine; there they are.”

Both understood that they were speaking of their children. He pointed

but for her at the foot of the declivity, on the upward path, a

numerous group. At the head of it came two babies, whom their

grandmother recognised at once:

“Peter and Adrienne. They are taking the short cut. I don’t see little

Julian.”

“He has probably good hold of his Aunt Margaret’s hand. He never leaves

her.”

“Of course. I can see him between Margaret and her fiancé. He’s keeping

them apart, the naughty boy. And his mother, where is she?”

“She’s coming behind them, quietly as usual, with her brother Hubert.”

“Our oldest son. Can you make out his decoration?”

Mr. Roquevillard smiled, and glanced at his companion. “How could you,

from this distance?”

She laughed with him at this, graciously.

“There is a large red ribbon on the mountain.”

“And you read in the sky: ‘Hubert Roquevillard, twenty-eight years old,

lieutenant of marines, decorated for bravery in war, recommended for

promotion, campaign in China, defence of Pei-Tung.’”

“Indeed, I do,” she agreed: “I can read it all quite distinctly.”

She scrutinised the path again. “And Maurice. I don’t see Maurice.”

“He’s further back, I think, with some one else.”

Mrs. Roquevillard, satisfied, placed her hand on her husband’s shoulder.

“That must be our son-in-law, Charles Marcellaz. The roll is complete.

I count them always, just as I did when they were little--Germaine,

Hubert, Maurice, Margaret.”

“And Felicie was always absent,” he said.

A shadow darkened his features: he could never accustom himself to

the absence of his second daughter, now a Little Sister of the Poor

across the seas in Hanoi. Mrs. Roquevillard leant more heavily on her

husband’s arm.

“No, Francis, she’s not so far from us. Her thoughts are with us. I

know and feel it. Hubert, who saw her on his way back from China, found her

happy. And then, one day, we shall all be united.”

He was afraid of his feelings, and began counting the approaching group

again.

“That’s not Charles coming with Maurice,” he said. “It’s a woman. They

have left the short cut. They’re spreading out.”

“It’s Mrs. Frasne, perhaps. Do you see her husband?”

“Yes, it’s she; but I don’t see the notary.”

“He’ll come up later with Charles. Their studies keep them till six

o’clock.”

“The Frasnes dine here this evening, don’t they?” he asked.

She seemed to make excuses for it as for a fault.

“Yes. They often ask Maurice there, and he begged me to invite them.”

They were silent a moment, both with the same concern.

“I don’t like that woman,” she said at last.

“And why?”

Mrs. Roquevillard fixed her clear eyes on the sun set.

“I don’t know. We’ve no idea where she came from, and tremble to think

how far she’ll go. She’s not good looking, but just the sight of

her makes the mothers worry for their sons, and the wives for their

husbands.”

“What a pity,” he said. “Who’s been talking to you about her?”

“Nobody. All I know I have guessed at. Those who pray much are not

always the worst informed. She has strange eyes, dark but with fire in

them. She frightens me.”

“Ah! I see. Well, people in the village do talk about her and our son.”

“Maurice should be warned,” said his mother. “He should be warned at

once.”

“But, my dear, how shall we go about it? We are not certain of

anything. Gossip and talk, what do they signify?”

“It isn’t the gossip. I feel trouble coming. I am sure of it. He is in

some danger.”

“Sometimes combating a love affair only brings it to a head,” Mr.

Roquevillard replied. “You know that. You consented to having the

Frasnes asked here. Besides, young people don’t tolerate any meddling

in their lives, Maurice least of all. He’s very proud. He’s not

twenty-four yet, and a doctor of law. He has complete confidence in

himself. He has absurd theories on the right to be happy, the necessity

of one’s own personal development. Paris sends them back to us more

refined, but rebellious. It takes experience to make them really wise.”

“You’ve been worrying about it, too, then?” said his wife. “And you’ve

said nothing about it all to me.”

“What was the use in making you worry? You are already so tired.”

“Yes, when I ought to be strong, too. A mother needs strength.

But you have enough for us both.”

He went on:

“We were wrong in having him go into Frasnes’s offices. I wanted him

to get into the way of a business practice, especially assignments

and liquidations, before he made his début at the bar. Frasne is the

successor of Mr. Clairval, who was my friend, and our own solicitor. I

respected the tradition of the family, and that’s just where I made my

mistake. However, everything will be different very soon now.”

“Soon?”

“Yes. I shall be taking Maurice into my office: he can finish his first

stage there. Or else he can study proceedings with Marcellaz. When we

move back to town I’ll look round and see.”

“Good,” she said, pressing his hand. “There will be less occasion

for him to meet her. But that isn’t enough in itself. You find him

reasonable. I think him rather a bit romantic. I should prefer to turn

his fancy somewhere else.”

“But how?”

“Well, an early engagement, for instance. Early engagements make

young people think and develop character. In France I think we hasten

marriage too much, when you consider that marriage disposes of life and

family and a future all in one.”

“It’s true.”

“Margaret has thought of little Jeanne Sassenay for Maurice.”

“But she’s only a child yet.”

“A pretty one, though, and brought up by a lovely mother.”

Her last words were cut short by shrill young voices squalling out:

“Good-evening, grandmother! Good-evening, grandfather!”

It was the advance guard, Peter and Adrienne, out of breath with

running, just over the edge of the hill, and tumbling out on the level

ground. They struggled to make more speed in spite of the “Not so fast,

not so fast,” from Mrs. Roquevillard, and their grandfather caught them

on the wing.

“You know, grand-dad,” said Adrienne, who was very talkative, and spoke

familiarly to everybody, being no respecter of persons, “Julian stayed

behind with Aunt Margaret, and mamma ordered him to come with us.”

Half-way down the hill the young people who were coming up cried out in

their turn:

“Good-evening!”

Only Maurice and Mrs. Frasne were too far away to join in these

family greetings. By tacit consent, they both walked more and

more slowly as they approached the summit, and following all the

windings of the path they had managed to get a further considerable

space between themselves and the others, although Margaret had

turned several times and called to them. The mountain was hidden

from them by the close angle of the hillside, so that they saw the

figures of Mr. and Mrs. Roquevillard in silhouette against the clear

sky. Mrs. Frasne turned an enigmatic smile upon her companion, whom

their tête-à-tête was making languid.

“Your father must have been handsomer than you,” she said, and added,

quite low, as if to herself: “He’ll find out what he wants to, your

father.”

The young man maintained a perverse silence.

“How old is your father?” she asked again, smiling at her success in

having annoyed him.

“Sixty, I think.”

“Sixty years. Well, he detests me. If he could, he would suppress me

with great pleasure.”

“You’re mistaken: he always welcomes you here.”

“Oh, those things can be felt. He detests me, and yet he interests me.

I’ve always liked characters, myself.”

Just before the top of the hill the path turned and disclosed a new

view framed between the embankment on the right and the border of

shrubs on the left, their leaves half coloured and mingling the green

of spring with autumnal gold. Le Nivolet came abruptly into view, with

its regular architectural lines and gradients, re-echoing the glory of

the vanished sun.

The slender thickets that clung to its rocky sides took on a tint of

violet like the dregs of wine, while the chain of Margeria behind it

showed quite rosy and charming, in its tones of flesh-colour.

“See, what a change in the scene,” murmured Maurice,

not noticing that his companion paid heed much sooner to

the fact of their being alone than to the marvels of the evening light.

She halted in their walk, and he turned back toward her.

“What’s the matter? Are you tired?”

“Oh, no. I’m only giving you time to admire the landscape.”

“Would you be jealous?”

“Yes, you love your country, and I----”

“And you?”

“I shan’t say the rest----”

“But I’ll say it. I’ll tell you how I love you.”

He took her in his arms. She was a thin, dark woman, with large eyes;

her flesh firm and her caresses melting. As she turned her head a

little he could see, beneath the half-closed and palpitant pupils,

that look of black and gold in which all the voluptuous anguish of the

season and the hour were reflected.

“How little she seems against my breast,” he thought, as he clasped her

to him; “a little thing, yet more to me than all the world.” Aloud he

murmured:

“I love you, Edith.”

“Really?” she said, with her same purposed smile.

“When will you be mine?”

“When I can be only yours.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Why?

“You are bound.”

“We could go away together.”

“What should we live on?”

“On my dot.”

“I couldn’t do that. And, besides, you haven’t the control of it.”

“I can take it back.”

“No--no!”

“You could work.”

He was silent. She paid him back in irony, almost in irritation.

“Oh, you prefer to mind your father. Well, be like him, then, a big man

in a little village, with a lot of children.”

She caught an expression of such sadness on his face at this that she

blotted it out against her heart.

“Oh, I love you,” she cried, “and I torment you. But don’t you see, I’m

suffocated here in Chambéry. I want to get away from it, to love you

freely, to live. I’ve a horror of falsehood. And you, you don’t love

me.”

“Edith,” he cried, “how can you say that?”

“No, you don’t,” she repeated. “If you really loved me you would have

made me your own a long time ago.”

Heavy hearted with these reproaches, they began their walk again,

slowly. The view, taken out of its frame now, grew larger, and

in the distance, beyond the last spires of Le Nivolet, disclosed

Lake Bourget, its violet-blue merging with graduated tints into

the purple mists that rose from its further end. But the two

lovers saw nothing of all this. This mortal sweetness of the year, this

high inquietude of nature, this enthusiasm of the autumn evening, like

one long cry of desire--what need had they for anything of this outside

their own hearts?

Near the house they found Mrs. Roquevillard, who came herself to meet

Mrs. Frasne, though she was not supposed to be outdoors after sundown.

... Later in the evening Mr. Roquevillard, returning from the

wine-presses before he was expected, espied his son and the young woman

in a shadowy corner. During the vintage there is much coming and going

in a house, and it is easy to creep outside without being noticed.

“He saw us,” said Maurice.

“All the better,” she replied.

And as Mr. Roquevillard passed behind the stable that had been

the ancient home of his ancestors, to reach the dwelling that his

grandfather had built and he himself enlarged, he tried in vain to

shake off the anxiety that weighed upon him.

“I was young once, too,” he reminded himself.

But even youth had not turned him from his duty toward the

future of his race. Would this younger son of his, who must

continue his father’s work, know in time what it meant in energy

and self-denial to be the head of a family? He was not usually

very impressionable, Mr. Roquevillard, and yet to-night he felt

around him, as if it were a flock of evil birds, a hopelessness

like that of old abandoned Mother Fauchois, a sense of melancholy

and fragility as of the dying year. Only just now, in the midst

of his domain, he had reviewed the rise of the Roquevillards to

power and wealth. It was his own pride. A talk with an old woman,

the surprising of a kiss, and behold him, with a presentiment

that was certainly absurd and unreasonable, remembering how the

seasons pass and family fortunes totter and decay.

II

THE CONFLICT

THE Roquevillards moved in from the country after the departure of

their son Hubert, who was in garrison at Brest, and took up their

winter quarters in Chambéry. They occupied the second story of an old

mansion that lay across the end of Boigne Street, alongside the castle.

October was drawing to a close, and the sittings of the various courts

brought the lawyer back to work.

One day, after luncheon, at which his wife had not been present, owing

to her indisposition, Mr. Roquevillard called to his daughter Margaret,

while Maurice was absorbed in the newspapers.

“Come with me, Margaret. You can give me some advice,” he said.

“What about, father?”

He glanced toward Maurice, who, however, did not hear them.

“On a new arrangement for my study,” he said.

This study and work-room, conforming to the angle of the street, which

widened out at this point, was a spacious room, with a very high

ceiling, lighted by four windows. Two of these windows, in a way,

framed a picture of Savoy an history. They gave a view of the castle

of the former dukes, a great block of stone buildings, blackened with

time, dating from the fourteenth century, of a flat and heavy style of

architecture scarcely relieved by some carving in high relief. This

old and ruinous habitation was flanked on the right by the head of the

Sainte-Chapelle, a delicate Gothic flower, which seemed to uphold,

like some solid shaft, the bases of the fortress. At the right it was

dominated by the tower of the archives, covered with ivy and Virginia

creeper, itself crowned by a turret freshly painted white and looking

quite vainglorious, like an aigrette or plume. These edifices of

different ages and characters, their construction delayed or hastened

according to the financial resources and ambitions of the princely

builders, though less orderly, are more eloquent than the unified

structures of a single master. A long sequence of history, with its

hours of happiness and sorrow, dwells in them. The two towers rose

out of a confused mass of trees planted in two superimposed terraces,

across which they seemed to intermingle. Beneath the plane trees of the

lower level stood the recently erected monuments to Joseph and Xavier

de Maistre. Thus, within a little space, dwelt the memories of many

centuries. The place was as deserted as a tomb: only the past spoke

there.

There is no such thing as getting accustomed to a beautiful

view: one day of sunshine suffices to make it new again.

When Mr. Roquevillard and his daughter came into

this room, if the sun attacked the mournful façade without success,

nevertheless it tinted with rose the fine gothic lace-work of the

chapel, and above the lighter branches that had begun to lose their

leaves, it endowed the vine on the tower of the archives with fresh

splendour, and showed even the vainglorious little turret at its best.

“You’ve everything very comfortable for your work here,” said Margaret.

“I’m glad, for you work so hard.”

“I should have liked your mother to take this room for her

drawing-room,” said her father, “but she would not have it. But don’t

you notice anything special, little girl?”

She looked all round the familiar walls, at the book-cases encumbered

with works on law and jurisprudence, at the portraits of former judges,

her ancestors, more rigid than their justice in the painstaking

canvases of the mediocre artists, a view of the Lake of Bourget by

Hugard, the best of the Savoyan landscapists, and finally the framed

map of La Vigie in the place of honour.

“No, nothing,” she declared, after her inspection.

“That’s because you’re looking too high.”

She noticed then that the heavy oak table, large, enough to

hold as many briefs as one could possibly desire, had made

way for one that was smaller and more elegant, placed so

that it had the best of both light and view.

“Oh,” she cried, “why do you put yourself back like this?”

“Why, to make room for your brother.”

“For Maurice? Is he leaving Mr. Frasne’s office?”

“Yes. He’s to have a place near the window here. See how autumn is

shaking off the plane-tree leaves. I prefer the spring. There’s a Judas

tree beneath the turret that’s a bright red then, and plum trees in

blossom.”

Margaret hardly heard him, and looked quite downcast.

“It’s lovely for Maurice, yes,” she said; “but how about you?”

“Little girl, don’t you know a young man must have things pleasant

round him? See if you can finish arranging that table for me. Put some

flowers on it, for instance.”

“There’s hardly anything left, father. I’ve nothing but chrysanthemums.”

“Let’s, have some chrysanthemums then. One or two, not more, in a long

vase. These young doctors of law come back from Paris with a taste for

pretty things, and I’ve not the least bit myself. But you have taste

and grace for all of us, and you’ll know how to help us keep him.”

He smiled, with a little constrained smile that begged approval.

He moved nearer to the girl and put his hand on her fine dark

chestnut hair, unheeding whether he disarranged it.

“You will be leaving us soon, Margaret. Are you glad you’re going to be

married?”

Instead of replying to him, she leant against her father and began to

weep with a heavy heart. She looked like Mr. Roquevillard, though with

a different expression of countenance. With a figure rather tall and

vigorous, a slightly arched nose, a straight chin, she gave one, like

him, an impression of security and loyalty, an impression to which

large brown eyes, the eyes of her mother, added a profound sweetness,

whereas her father’s eyes, deep-set and small, threw a flame so sharp

that one could hardly bear their gaze.

He was distressed by her sudden burst of tears.

“Why do you cry? Isn’t this marriage all right for you? Raymond Bercy

is a good boy, and comes of a good family. He’s finished his medical

course, and now is definitely settled here in the city. Have you

anything against him? You must not marry him if you don’t love him.”

She stifled her sobs long enough to murmur:

“Oh, I’ve nothing to reproach him with, except----”

“There, there, now, little girl, go on.”

She turned admiring eyes upon her father.

“Except that he isn’t a man like you.”

“You’re absurd, Margaret.” But she began to explain herself further as

she grew more calm.

“I don’t know why I’m crying. I ought to be happy.

Have I not always been happy here? My childhood comes

back to me, with all its joys and sunlight. And I feel quite sorrowful

at the thought of going away.”

He comforted her seriously.

“Don’t look backward, Margaret. Let your mother and me do I that. You

must think of your woman’s life to come. Prepare yourself for your

future, and be strong.”

She tried to smile.

“My future is my family.”

“The family you are going to found for yourself, yes.”

“You have often told me, father, in all our winter walks together, to

cherish the traditions of our family.”

“But traditions, young logician, are not cherished in a wardrobe, after

the manner of our neighbour in the country. Look at old Viscount de la

Mortellerie. He shuts himself up with his heraldry and genealogies,

and is surprised when his farmers make so bold as to steal his wine.

Tradition is not fostered even in an old mansion, or on an old estate,

important as it is to guard our patrimony. Tradition is part and parcel

of our daily life, our sentiments; gives support to it, makes it

lasting and rich in values.”

Again she looked at him with her big, enthusiastic eyes, and sighed:

“I am too much attached to this home of ours.”

“No, no,” protested her father firmly; “you must not say

that. There is always something of the unknown in marriage; I

know how the prospect of such a change in your life must make you stop

and think. But since neither your heart nor your reason finds serious

objections, you must be brave and gay in leaving us. You have been

happy with us, that’s my reward. But you can be happy, you must be,

even away from us. Go find the flowers for me, and send Maurice.”

“Yes, father.”

She came back in a few moments, carrying quite a sheaf of flowers in

her arms. With deft hands she transformed the table intended for her

brother, and made it look attractive.

“I had some roses after all, the very last. There! In that vase that

changes colour in the sun like an opal. They’re very pretty.”

Mr. Roquevillard repeated good-naturedly:

“Very pretty, indeed.”

But it was his daughter that he praised. She laughed and ran off,

saying:

“Now I’ll go and warn Maurice.”

The young man came in promptly after his sister had gone for him.

“You have something to say to me?” he asked as he entered, his hat and

cane in his hand, as if he had only a little while to stay.

He was tall, like his father, but thinner and more

polished. More elegant in manner, too, and in appearance,

he, nevertheless, did not, like his father, bear the same

signs of grandeur in his face and attitude, a natural majesty

which Mr. Roquevillard at this particular moment tried to tone down,

assuming instead an air of affectionate comradeship.

“See how Margaret has arranged your table,” he began.

“My table?”

“Yes, this one, with the roses. You see the castle from it and there’s

a good light. Wouldn’t you like to complete your reading with me,

Maurice?”

A ray of sunlight touched the flowers, and outside the tower of the

archives and the turret were bathed in light. The day made itself

an accomplice with Mr. Roquevillard, courting his son with touching

awkwardness. But only long afterward do sons appreciate their fathers’

patience with them, and then only through the apprenticeship of their

own paternity.

“Then I’m not to return to Mr. Frasne’s office?” asked Maurice.

“No, it’s not necessary. You know enough now of the laws of

succession. You can get an idea of business better here, and can

attend court oftener. If you like, you can spend some months with your

brother-in-law, Charles, who will initiate you into the fine points of

procedure. He’s one of our busiest attorneys. Eventually you will make

your début at the bar. If you want it, I’ve a very pretty case to offer

you. It’s a very interesting point of law. It turns on the validity of

a bill of sale.”

Never had he pleaded with such care and condescension. But the young man

let him talk. He reflected.

“I thought it was understood,” he said, “that I should spend six months

in Frasne’s office.”

“Well, then, the six months have almost rolled by. You began there in

June, and here we are at the end of October.”

“But I took my vacation at the beginning of August, and it’s only

a little while since I began again. And I’ve been examining some

important liquidations these last days.”

“We shall find plenty of liquidations for you in the law courts,”

replied Mr. Roquevillard bluntly. “They come up oftenest of anything at

trials. I have a number of unusual pieces of business for the reopening

this time. You shall help me. Go get your papers from Frasne’s office

and install yourself here.”

“Mr. Frasne is away. It would be more courteous to wait till he gets

back.”

He piled up objections, but his father paid no heed to any of them.

“He’s expected back to-morrow. Besides, I warned him about this before

he went.”

At this news, Maurice, who had been waiting for the excuse, grew

refractory.

“You warned him without saying anything to me about it? I shall never

be anything but a little boy here, then. I am disposed of as if I were

an object. But I don’t see why my independence must be sacrificed.

I am free, and I expect at least to be consulted, even if I can’t have my

own way.”

In the face of this revolt, which he had expected, and of which he

guessed the secret cause, Mr. Roquevillard preserved his calm, despite

the disrespectful tone the conversation was taking on. He knew that

thoroughbreds were the most difficult steeds to manage, as the most

tempered characters required the most skilful handling.

“Little boy or big boy, you are my son,” he said simply, “and I shall

help you in the arrangements for your future.”

But the young man pitched squarely upon the difficulty which both of

them until then had kept in the background.

“What’s the use in dissimulation? I know perfectly well why you are

taking me away from Frasne’s office.”

His father’s presence of mind nearly warded off the blow:

“Will things be so bad for you, then, in my study, and can you so

lightly disdain my guidance? Will your independence be in danger

because you benefit by my professional experience, my forty years at

the bar? I don’t understand you.”

Seeing his son begin to give way, he thought to complete his victory by

a little tenderness.

“Your mother is sick. Your sister is going to leave

us. If you stay, I shall be less lonely.”

For a moment he hoped that he had warded off the storm. Maurice

hesitated a little while, for at the bottom of his heart he really

admired his father; then, persuading himself that he was scoring a

victory over hypocrisy, he threw himself headlong again into the

offensive.

“Yes, people have taken occasion to warn you against me and Mrs.

Frasne. What have they been saying to you? I want to know, and I have

the right to know. Bah! This provincial life is so impossible. One is

watched and spied on, guarded, bound down. The noblest sentiments are

travestied by all the envious hypocrisy and pious venom the village can

muster up. But you, father, I won’t admit that you would listen to such

low slanders, slanders that don’t hesitate to attack the most virtuous

of women.”

Mr. Roquevillard could no longer shun the issue.

“I’ve let you talk, Maurice. Now listen to me. I don’t bother

myself with gossip, and I don’t ask you whether it is true that

you are more often in your chief’s drawing-room than in his office

during his numerous absences on business. All the reasons I gave

you for coming here were true ones. But since you cross-question

me in this way, I won’t dodge the debate. I’ll admit that on Mrs.

Frasne’s account, too, I asked you to finish your studies with me,

the natural thing to do anyway. And I don’t need to lend an ear

to every calumny. I’ve seen enough with my own eyes.”

“And what then?”

“There’s no use telling you. Don’t insist.”

“You’ve threatened me. Now I should like to know.”

“Very well, then. When your mother, at your request, receives your

guests, you should at least respect your own roof. You know what I’m

alluding to.”

But Maurice, made tactless by his anger, for the second time, went too

far in his argumentative eagerness to justify his passion.

“My personal life deserves respect, too. I don’t want people to meddle

with it. I have given you satisfaction on all the points as to which my

father has any right to ask a reckoning.”

“Maurice!”

“I passed my examinations, and brilliantly, too. I came back after six

years in Paris without a single debt. What blame have I ever deserved

from you? You can’t reproach me even with one of those low Latin

Quarter intrigues that are so common among the students.”

“I’ve not reproached you with anything. But, my poor child----”

“I’m not a child.”

“You’ll always be a child to your father; Don’t you understand that

just because work and pride and family traditions have protected your

youth with their sense of order and discipline, this woman, who’s older

than you are, and whose name I’ve not been the first to mention here,

is all the more a danger for you? Do you so much as know who she is?”

“Don’t talk about her!” cried Maurice.

“I will talk about her, though,” said Mr. Roquevillard, in a tone that

had become abrupt and imperious. “Am I the head of the family, or am I

not? By what right do you tell me to keep still? Are you afraid I am

going to use undignified arguments with you? You know that would not be

like me.”

“Mrs. Frasne is a good woman,” repeated the young man.

“Yes, one of those good women who have to play with fire to distract

themselves, who are never satisfied unless they monopolise all the

men in a drawing-room, even the old ones. One of those virtuous

women of to-day, who have read everything except the Gospel, who

understand everything except their duty, who excuse everything except

virtue, who take advantage of every privilege but that of doing

good, which is always open to them. Why are they virtuous? You can’t

tell. Neither faith nor shame deters them, and as for honour, that’s

a religion for men alone. They are all rebels. In their youth they

are content with words. When youth threatens to take wing, believe

me, they want realities. This woman here, the young wife of a man

already well on in years, ought at least to remember that he houses

and feeds her, for he married her without a cent.”

“That’s not true. She had a dot of one hundred thousand francs.”

“Who told you so?”

“She did, herself.”

“I hope so. However, my informant is my old friend Clairval, who

introduced the Frasnes to us when his successor was installed here,

and he does not speak lightly. Between her dread of poverty, or at

least of coming down a long way in the world, and of her husband, whose

grim face is not very reassuring, I’ll admit, if she still prefers her

husband, that’s as much sense as could be expected of her.”

Quite trembling with this contemptuous treatment of his idol, Maurice

took a step forward.

“Enough, father, I beg of you. Don’t accuse her of any baseness. Don’t

challenge her courage. I can assure you that you would be wrong. I

don’t want to hear her defamed any more, and so I’m going.”

“I forbid you to set foot again in Frasne’s offices.”

“Take care that I don’t refuse ever to set foot in yours.”

This last threat was launched by Maurice from the threshold.

“Maurice!” called Mr. Roquevillard in a changed voice, with a tone more

of appeal than of command.

He followed after the boy hastily: only to find that the vestibule was

empty, the young man already half-way down the outer steps.

Alone in the great bare study, the father looked at the little table,

where the sun fell gently on the roses, all the fine preparations of

welcome he had made under the approval of the old portraits, with the

country of the past showing through the windows, and he felt himself

abandoned like the leader of an army in the evening of his defeat.

“Can a son so rebel against his father?” he reflected. “I spoke

gently to him in the beginning. He grew irritable almost at once. How

potent that woman is with him, and how I should like to break her!

He’ll come back. It’s impossible that he should not. I’ll go and find

him, in case----I was too distant with him perhaps. I wounded him

unnecessarily. He loves her, poor child. He believes what she tells

him. With her siren’s voice and her eyes of fire and all her pretty

looks, she has cajoled him, and plays with him. Yes, I was wrong to

defy them. Their scorn of hypocrisy and their revolt against society

make these women more dangerous than those of other days.... He has

run off to her, no doubt. She’ll stir him up against me, against his

father. Against your father, Maurice, who, in his love for you, tried

to keep you in the right track....”

But he was not a man for useless lamentation. Searching some

decision to be made, he went to his wife’s room, for it was there he

customarily repaired for counsel in difficult moments. But he found the

curtains drawn and Mrs. Roquevillard sleeping. Afflicted with a slow

consumption, which had grown more pronounced as she grew older, she

suffered often now from a facial neuralgia that completely exhausted

her. Many a time, for years, he had opened her door like this, counting

on her calm judgment and clear vision, and had had to steal away again

without making any noise, thrown back on his own resources. He always

felt less confidence in himself when she was depressed or laid low.

He was worrying about their son: mothers are more close and have more

influence than fathers. She could perhaps have conjured away this peril

that threatened Maurice.

“I am alone,” he thought sadly, standing by her sick bed.

Quietly as a cat he stole out of the room. In the drawing-room he found

Margaret writing, and from her serene presence drew, as always, some

reassurance.

“Here’s the one to help me,” he said to himself. “There’s no sister

more devoted.”

He went nearer to her, forcing himself to dissemble his anxiety as she

raised her head and smiled.

“What are you doing, little girl? I’ll wager you’re ordering something

for your trousseau from some fine shop.”

“Father, you’re nowhere near it.”

“You’re writing to some of your school friends, then, to tell them of

your engagement.”

“No nearer.”

“Then you’re reminding your fiancé that he dines here this evening.”

“There’s no need of that.”

She held out the pages in which she had been writing, and he recognised

the Roquevillard Book of the Family. According to old-fashioned custom,

the Roquevillards kept one of those common-sense books in which our

ancestors used to note down, side by side with the management of their

estate, certain important facts of private life, such as marriages

and deaths, births and honours, expenses, contracts, etc.--books

which evoke the past with the impressiveness of old wills, and teach

confidence in the future to any one who can draw inspiration from his

forebears’ lives or wants to grow up worthy of them.

“I’m bringing it down to date,” added the girl. “Maurice’s return and

Hubert’s decoration haven’t been entered in it yet.”

Mr. Roquevillard turned over the leaves of this book that bore such

patient witness to the energy of his race, not without pride.

“Who will keep it up after you, Margaret?”

“But I shall go on with it myself, father.”

“No, a woman must belong to her new home.”

She blushed like a school-girl discovered in some fault.

“I’m afraid I shall make a very bad wife,” she said, “for I shall

always remain attached to the old home. Everything that goes on here is

very dear to me, dwells in my very heart.”

He could not keep from murmuring:

“Dear child!”

“And Maurice,” she replied. “Is he pleased with his new place, my roses

and the window? If I were he, I should be enchanted to work near you.”

She had a way of following him in his preoccupations and preparing the

way for confidences.

“It was about Maurice I came to talk with you. We had a discussion

together just now. I was perhaps a little quick.”

“You, father?”

“As a matter of fact, I clashed with him. He left the house in anger,

and anger is a bad counsellor. Go and find him, Margaret. You’ll know

how to bring him back.”

She rose briskly without the slightest hesitation.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps at Frasne’s office. Anyway, the town is not

large. You’ll run across him. God forbid that you shouldn’t.”

“I’ll go there first.”

“You understand,” added Mr. Roquevillard quietly, “I couldn’t go

myself.”

“Oh, no; not you. He isn’t worth it. He’s been too funny for quite a

while. You’d almost say he didn’t like us as much as he used to.”

Father and daughter looked at each other and understood, but did not

pursue the subject further.

She put on her hat and jacket hastily, and vanished in pursuit of

Maurice. In the street she turned her back to the castle, went down

Boigne Street, and by one of those numerous side passages that make

a network of Chambéry, she reached the City Hall Square. It was the old

Place de Lans, where the commercial life of the city flowed in other

days. Some crooked buildings, one of those Italian houses ornamented

with veranda and loggia, which may be decorative in photographs and

postal cards, but which in reality are dirty, worm-eaten and forlorn,

did not succeed in imparting any interest to it. On the wall of a

building that had been restored, a black marble tablet was let in,

bearing this inscription:

IN THIS HOUSE

WERE BORN

JOSEPH DE MAISTRE, APRIL 1ST, 1758

AND

XAVIER DE MAISTRE, NOVEMBER 8TH, 1763

Below, a gilded shield announced a lawyer’s office. Margaret

Roquevillard searched for the historic landmark with her eyes and

mounted the staircase. Her heart beating, for her hurried walk had

taxed her strength, she knocked on the door of the Frasne office,

entered and accosted the first clerk she saw, demanding:

“My brother, Mr. Maurice Roquevillard, please.”

“He’s not here, mademoiselle,” said the young man, rising with great

politeness. “He’s not been here this afternoon.”

But behind a desk, another clerk, whom she did not see, threw out, in

a sour voice that betrayed a long-accumulating grudge:

“Go and ask Mrs. Frasne.”

Margaret blushed up to her ears, but thanked him, and without further

delay went, in fact, and rang the bell of Mrs. Frasne’s apartment. She

was told that madame had gone out. She was relieved for a moment by

this news, but after a few steps, regretted it, for her best chance of

finding her brother had been there. Where should she discover him now?

She went next to Favre Street, to Mrs. Marcellaz, her sister-in-law,

who was just coming back from a walk with her three children. Little

Julian threw himself upon his aunt, and would not let himself be

separated from her, while her sister replied, indifferently:

“No, Maurice is not here. He scarcely ever comes to see me.”

A bump that Adrienne had given herself and was fretting over took up

all her further attention.

After these checks, Margaret began to search first one place, then

another, in the town, without much hope, walking very fast, as if fear

were at her heels. Underneath the Porticoes she passed her fiancé, who

made a movement as if to stop her; she passed beyond him, then turned

and came back to him a moment.

“Good-day, Raymond,” she said, without a moment to lose. “Haven’t you

seen Maurice anywhere?”

“No, Margaret. Are you looking for him?”

“Yes.”

“Shall I help you?”

“No, thanks. I’ll see you this evening.”

Raymond turned and watched her as she walked briskly off.

“She’s not very amiable,” he was thinking. “She’s always so reserved

with me.”

But he followed her with his eyes until she was out of sight.

Margaret, pursuing her futile search, was accosted before the Cathedral

by a young friend, Jeanne Sassenay, who was passing with her maid. She

was a little girl of sixteen or seventeen years, young for her age,

with blonde braids down her back, and a quite pretty mobile little

face. She fell upon Miss Roquevillard, whom she admired very much.

“Miss Margaret, you are in a great hurry,” she cried.

“Good-day, Jeanne.”

“You’re copying your brother, who passed me in the street without

saying a word. I’m old enough to be bowed to just the same.”

And lowering her head a little, she gave a downward glance, as if to

lengthen the bottom of her skirt.

“Evidently,” conceded Margaret. “But where did you meet Maurice?”

“On the Reclus bridge.”

“Just now?”

“Oh, no. It was before my music lesson, an hour or two ago.”

“Where was he going?”

“I’ve not the slightest idea. You tell him for me that he’s not very

nice.”

“I’ll tell him so most assuredly. With my friends especially it was

unpardonable of him.”

“I forgive him just the same,” averred Jeanne Sassenay, bursting into a

laugh, which showed a row of white and hearty little teeth.

Left alone again, Margaret saw the open door of the church, and stepped

inside the holy place a moment. At this hour there were only two or

three forms bent in prayer here and there beneath the vaulted ceiling.

But for herself she had great difficulty in saying any prayers:

sometimes her thoughts would run on what a charming wife this young

girl, so lively and gay and yet serious, too, would make for her

brother Maurice in two or three years: sometimes she would recall her

father’s anxious face as she had left him. Of herself she did not think

at all. At the threshold it struck her all at once that her meditations

had not been for herself or her fiancé.

With new resolution she returned again to the Frasne offices, but with

no more success than before. This time she did not ring Mrs. Frasne’s

bell, but for the sake of peace resigned herself at last to defeat.

As she went up Boigne Street again in the fading daylight, the tower

of the archives and the castle turret opposite her were outlined

against a reddened sky. In the flaming sunset these witnesses of the

past rose up in all their glory, as if to show their splendour one

last time before they crumbled down. It was one of those evenings of

apotheosis that come in autumn, with a glory all the more moving for being

fragile--one of those moments of grandeur that are the prelude to decay.

She was struck with these proud shadows etched on the conflagration

of the sky, but instead of walking the more slowly to take in the

spectacle, she cleared the old familiar porch at one bound.

“Has Mr. Maurice come in yet?” she asked at the very door.

“No, miss, not yet,” explained the maid. “Mr. Roquevillard is waiting

for you.”

Her father had heard her, and was already opening the door of his study

to let her in.

“Well, Margaret?”

“Father, I couldn’t find him.”

They said little, but, nevertheless, both father and daughter felt

all the secret suspense and anguish of some menaced evil--an evil

greater than those which youth is usually guilty of, they felt, for

they had a foreboding fear of the strength of Mrs. Frasne.

III

THE CALVARY OF LEMENC

ON leaving his father’s house Maurice Roquevillard crossed to the other

side of the town and made his way straight up to the Calvary of Lemenc,

the place where Mrs. Frasne had appointed that they should meet.

The choice of this place in itself was a defiance of public opinion.

It was a hill that dominated all Chambéry and was visible from

all sides. In the old days it had been only a bare rock, of such

considerable strategic importance that in the times of the old dukes

there had been a beacon there, answering the signals of Lepine and

Guet, those forward-thrusting summits that stand like redoubtable

sentinels on the frontiers of France. You reach it nowadays by a path

which rises upward from the Reclus district, above the railways,

and follows on one side the high walls of a convent, and on the

other a series of miserable one-story dwellings. At the end of this

defile you come out into the country, and find yourself opposite a

little hill, crowned no longer now with works of war, but with a chapel

that stands out against the dear and distant background of the Revard

hills and Nivolet. From there on the path is quite open. A thin border

of acacias gives it scant protection. Cut into the very rock, it crowds

out the meagre grass. Some unfinished stations of the cross, with empty

niches, occur at intervals on the way up. It is an abandoned promenade,

where even if you are visible from a distance you do not ever meet a

soul.

The little chapel of the cross, Byzantine in style, consists of a dome

and peristyle resting on four columns, their bases raised a few steps

above the ground. An archbishop of Chambéry was buried there in 1889.

His tomb is cut in the rock, and the interior of the monument is quite

empty.

From the first station at the foot of the path Maurice could

distinguish a figure seated on the steps between the columns. It was

she, waiting for him. In vain, beside her, the pale gold branches of

the acacias lightly showed their delicate sprays; in vain the purple

mountains rose before him in their autumn light: he saw only her,

framed at the foot of the cross. Her elbows on her knees, she rested

her face upon her two hands, the fingers open and showing rosy and

transparent in the sunlight. Motionlessly with her eyes of fire she

watched him coming. He hastened to her all out of breath. When he

was near her she rose with a single, unsuspected movement, like a

careless fawn that surprises you with its unexpected play of muscles.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” she said, “and my life was over.”

“I was detained, Edith.”

He was so obviously upset that she could not reproach him. She took him

by the hand and led him round to the other side of the chapel, where

she showed him the lush grass, and a protecting shadow.

“Let’s sit down, shall we? It’s not cold. We shall be all right.”

They ensconced themselves side by side there, leaning against the wall

of the shrine, which shut them out from Chambéry and the world. They

could see nothing in front of them but the peaks of Nivolet in the full

sunlight. She twined herself caressingly round him.

“I love you so much,” she murmured plaintively.

Was not their love delicious and dolorous both at once? They called

each other by endearing terms, and yet they were not lovers. She held

herself away a little to get a better look at him.

“You have been unhappy. Was it on my account?”

He reviewed his scene with his father briefly, telling of his discovery

of their infatuation, and of the still greater difficulties it implied

for their future.

“What’s to become of us?” he asked.

“Yes, what is to become of us?” she repeated. “Our secret is no longer

ours, and I, well, I don’t know how to hide it any longer.”

“Our secret is no longer ours,” he repeated bitterly, “and you, you

have never yet been mine.”

She leaned her head on the young man’s breast and yielded purposefully

to him, lulling him like a child, the wheedling tones of her voice

striking on his heart strings like fingers on the keys of a piano.

“How dare you say I am not yours? When have I refused myself to you,

you bad boy? Will you go away from here with me? I am all yours. But

you are so young, and I shall be thirty very soon. Thirty years, and

my love, which is my whole life, began only a few months ago. I looked

at you, and there was sunlight on you, and I crept out of the shadows

to be with you. One day I’ll tell you about my childhood, my youth and

marriage, and I shall tell it so as to see your tears.”

“Edith!”

“Ah, yes! People who find marriage the gate to light and gladness, and

not the door to a prison, have a fine time of it scorning our frailty.

When fate overtakes them, too, do they get any more than we deserve?

But they don’t ever ask themselves that question. Happiness is due them

as a matter of course. They don’t even do anything to protect it, and

if they happen to lose it, they call it just their bad luck, anybody’s

fault but their own.”

“Edith! I love you, and you’re not happy.”

She half raised herself, and took his face in her hands, with an

adoring gesture.

“Give me one year of your life for the whole of mine,

Will you? Come! Let us go away, let us forget--I don’t

want to lie any more--I don’t want to belong to any one else. I can’t

any more, now that I’m yours.”

She stood up with one bound. Behind the chapel, not far from them, the

rock fell perpendicularly to the Aix road. She went up close to the

edge, defying the empty air.

“Edith!” he cried, jumping up hastily.

She came back to him, more calm, and smiling.

“I love dizzy places, but I’ve more sense than that,” she said, coming

back to her place beside him.

But it was only to begin again the worry about the future.

“Our secret is everybody’s secret now. My husband will know it soon.

He suspects it already. He loves me in his way, but it’s a way that

revolts me. I’m sure that he is spying on us. He’ll revenge himself

somehow. He’ll manage it very deliberately, like everything he

undertakes.”

“Listen, Edith. You must divorce him.”

“Divorce him, yes. I’ve thought of that. But suppose he should oppose

me. And he will, too. And then a divorce always takes a year or two,

perhaps more. It would oblige me to go and live with my people, away

from you. To be always waiting, still two long years of seclusion: I

should come out of it all quite old. I should be separated from you.

From you, do you understand? I have thought it all over, you see. It’s

impossible.”

They were silent a moment, and in the stillness that surrounded them

as they leant against each other the deep calls of their two natures

sounded. A rustling along the wall near them made them start.

“Some one is coming,” he whispered.

“Let us stay,” she replied imperiously.

They stayed. Their destiny was taking its course; already it lay in

their own hands. But their witness was only a she-goat nibbling the

sparse grass. A little girl, who followed after her with a switch,

considered them a moment blankly and went on her way again. And

they were sorry that their imprudence had not been followed by some

irreparable consequence.

Time passed, but decided nothing for them. Should they take up their

heavy chains again and go back down the hill; or should they break

them, refusing to take any new precautions? She crept close along his

side, trying to read the answer in his eyes.

“Your eyes, your dear eyes. Why do they turn away from me?” she pleaded.

“I don’t know,” he sighed, half closing them, growing dizzy as he had

been just now when she leant beyond the precipice.

She kissed him on the eyelids, uttering sweet words that cloaked a bold

resolve.

“These autumn days, these golden days, make me feel as if my heart

were breaking. Each evening as it falls is cruel to me, because it has

robbed me of a happiness. I am going away to-night, do you know it?”

At this unexpected finish he started, and disengaged himself from her

arms.

“Don’t say that, Edith.”

“These last days, when I’ve told you that, you’ve thought it all an

idle threat. You’ve deceived yourself, Maurice. I shall go away this

evening.”

At other times when she had tempted him thus he had put aside her plan

as impractical, even going so far once as to offer to leave first and

send for her afterward when he should have obtained something to do

in Paris. Disturbed, frightened, beggared of devices before this new

assault, more keen than any of the others, and more pressing, he found

himself trying still to hold her back.

“Hush! I’m staying here, and I love you.”

For the third time, masterful and overwrought, she repeated:

“I shall leave to-night. The train for Italy passes through at

midnight. At midnight I shall be free.”

He knotted his hands in despair.

“Hush!”

“Free to cry out my love. Free, if you’re not there, to taste this new

joy of crying without constraint. Free to adore you, if you come.”

“For pity’s sake don’t tempt me any more.”

“I’m suffocated in this town of yours. Its old houses smell musty. I am

suffocated with tenderness, do you see? Here we shall always be kept

apart. I want to enjoy my sorrow if you don’t come: if you do come I

want to live and breathe. Will you come? Will you come to-night?”

In the end she overpowered his senses with her kisses, and he promised.

A moment she tasted her triumph in silence, then murmured:

“I have forgotten all my past.”

She led him away from their retreat, in front of the Calvary, round

toward the sun. What use was there in any more concealment? They

could see now in a great glory, under a clear sky, the radiant

diverse forms of the land. There before them, stretching away to

the farthest horizon, filling in all the empty space between the

black masses of the Granier and the Roche du Guet, were the delicate

outlines of the Dauphine Alps--the Sept-Laux, Berlange, and the

Grand Charnier--powdered with the first snows and rosy now with the

dying light of day. Less distant, and further to the right, the

wooded slopes of Corbelet and Lepine, between which the valley of

the Echelles was hollowed out, bore like a gold-red fleece the woods

and forests that the autumn had set ablaze. Before these chains of

mountains was a garland of delicate hills--Charmettes, Montagnole,

Saint-Cassin, Vimines, whose soft curves and graceful undulations made

one’s eyes love to dwell on them. Floods of light slipped down through

their folds, making shafts of dust between their shadows. The sharp

spires of the bell towers, the green and gold poplars, served as salient

points in the scene. In the plain, Chambéry slumbered. And quite

nearby, at the foot of the hill, a vine of dull red and gold threw in

its striking note of joyousness.

“Show me Italy,” she bade him.

He made a negligent gesture toward the right, but instead of following

the movement of his arm, she turned toward him, and was aghast to

find his face so full of anguish. She understood. For herself she

could view like a passing tourist these lofty beauties of nature’s

mood. Her companion did not feel it thus. Was it not his own land’s

supreme attempt to hold him back? Down there he could see La Vigie,

and memories of his childhood, of a childhood all clean and pure, rose

up from the earth like birds and came to him. Nearer, as he could tell

from the vicinity of the castle, was “The House,” that place which each

of us calls, just like that, “the house,” as if there were but one in

the world.

She followed this last conflict that showed in Maurice’s eyes with a

sort of envy, she who had nothing to give up herself. With a sigh she

touched him on the shoulder.

“Listen,” she said, “let me go away alone.”

But he was uncomfortable at being detected in the most hidden and

instinctive impulses of his soul.

“No, no! You don’t love me, then, any more?”

“As if I didn’t!”

She smiled at him, with an infinitely tender smile that he

did not see. The fires in her eyes grew veiled. A woman of

to-day, keen for sincerity and the individual life, grown suddenly

impatient after nine years of silent waiting, she had decided, cost

what it might, to take advantage of her husband’s temporary absence and

escape out of the prison house of her marriage. Her romantic departure

had been carefully prepared in all its practical details, and in its

chosen hour. Maurice’s irritation with his father favoured her plan

and left him almost at her mercy. And yet now, how could she best

testify to her great love for Maurice? By associating him with her in

her inevitable and dangerous destiny, or, better still, by leaving him

here in his native place? Before her love for him she could not bear

her life. He had, without knowing it, fanned the spirit of revolt in

her. How could she separate herself from him? The offer she had just

made him broke her very heart, and yet she insisted on it. Never before

had she been so conscious of the detachment from herself which passion

now and then lets loose on us, as a humid plain is burned dry by the

devouring sun.

“One thing at a time, slowly,” she replied, “you would forget me. Don’t

protest. Listen to me. You are so young. All your life is before you.

Let me go alone.”

But he revolted against this injurious condescension. What was to keep

him back? Had not his reason--the reasoning of twenty-four--shown the

right of every one to seek his own happiness?

“I don’t want life without you,” he protested.

“I will stay,” she said again, “if you prefer it. I shall learn to tell

better lies, you’ll see. When one is in love all wrongs are right for

the sake of love.”

It was a proposal made too late. This time she knew, and watched for a

refusal. It came, and she threw herself against her lover’s breast.

“I love you so I could die for you,” he murmured.

“Is that all?” she said. “I love you more than that.”

“It’s not possible.”

“Oh, yes. I love you so I could commit crime for you.” And without

transition she added negligently:

“This evening I shall take away my dot with me.”

He recalled his father’s doubts on this point.

“Your dot?”

“Yes. It’s provided for in my marriage settlement. Did I not show it to

you?”

“You haven’t the right to take it. The court only allowed it to you.”

“Shall I surrender what’s my own to my husband? And what should we live

on if I did?”

“Edith, I shall have some money to-night. Then I can find some work

to do in Paris. The father of one of my friends is manager of a large

company there, and he’s promised to save a place for me in their

lawyer’s offices. These last days I have recalled his promise to do so,

at all events.”

She did not discourage this bland optimism.

“Yes, you will have to work. We’ll go to Paris

later. But to-night it’s Italy.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it the regular pilgrimage for honeymoons?”

She bent her head modestly, supple and pliant, and appeared all at once

a young girl just betrothed--woman of thirty though she was, with her

face that could change so easily from disenchantment to childish grace,

as eager to taste of life as children are of those green fruits the

very sight of which sets the teeth on edge.

The shadows were already coming up over the plain. Before them the map

of the landscape grew clearer as its golden tones grew purple. She

suffered from these too beautiful October evenings as from desire.

“To-morrow,” she said, “to-morrow.”

He took a step forward, and turning his back deliberately on the scene,

he looked at her alone, as she stood leaning there against a column

beneath the peristyle of the chapel. Was she not henceforth to be all

his country to him?

They took a sort of revenge against the town by going openly down the

hill of Lemenc together, as far as the Reclus bridge, taking the risk

of meeting people whom they knew.

“It’s almost five,” she said as she was leaving him. “Only seven hours

more.”

Hope revivified the flame in her eyes. Yet Maurice could

only see in these seven hours, distastefully, the cruel

time that he must pass in deception of his family. She

guessed this, and sympathised with her lover’s lot, meaning to destroy

in advance the influence that she feared.

“Poor child, shall you know how to fib for a whole evening?”

He started at finding himself discovered, and repeated to her, not

without bitterness, her own lately uttered words.

“There’s nothing wrong any more when you love.”

“It’s horrible,” she replied, “you see. You can understand my shame

and weariness. As for me, I lie because I love you. Courage, until

to-night.”

Before going home he went hastily round to see various people, from

whom he hoped to borrow the necessary money. From his great-uncle

Stephen Roquevillard, an original old fellow who passed for a

miser, from his Aunt Teresa, pious and charitable, he secured some

loans, about a thousand francs, besides five hundred from his

sister Mrs. Marcellaz, as well as from his future brother-in-law

Raymond Bercy. He had to concoct some story about debts contracted

during his student days in Paris. It was a ruse that caused him

some humiliation--a sacrifice which he offered to his love, but

without deriving much comfort from it. He did not stop to think,

moreover, that all the strangers to whom he had applied had refused

him, while his family, whether with tenderness or crustiness,

had hastened to help him in his imaginary plight.

At six o’clock he returned to Frasne’s offices, just as the clerks were

closing up.

“I’ve a letter or two to write,” he said. “I’ll lock up.”

He did write, as a matter of fact, to the most influential of his

acquaintances, asking that some lucrative place in Paris might be

gotten for him as promptly as possible. Having taken prizes in all his

courses, he counted on the recommendations of his old law professors to

help him. He was not easily dashed by the difficulties of existence,

and had no doubt of his ability to surmount them easily. Where should

the answers to his letters be sent?

He hesitated, then wrote down: _Milan, post restante_.

By these preparations, which kept his mind occupied, he succeeded in

obscuring his regret at parting. It came over him again, however, sharp

and poignant, when he crossed the threshold of his father’s house for

the last time. He slipped in furtively and was at once noticed, but

shut himself up in his room. Margaret came to look for him there at

dinner time, and found him with his head in his hands beneath the lamp,

so absorbed that he did not hear her knock.

“Maurice,” she asked, “what’s troubling you?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m your little sister, and you’re not willing to tell me your

worries. Who knows if I might not be of some use to you?”

To account for his air of worry, which he could not deny, he fell

back again on his pretended need of money, the story that he had just

been telling in various forms. The girl stopped him at once.

“Wait a moment,” she said.

She disappeared, and came back a little later triumphantly, placing in

front of him a fine blue bill for one thousand francs.

“Is that enough? Father gave me three of them for my trousseau, and

luckily this one’s left.”

“You are mad, Margaret. I don’t want it.”

“Yes, yes, take it. I shall be so glad. A few bits of linen more or

less will scarcely make me feel poor.”

She laughed, and he, his nerves all strung, felt the tears gather at

the edge of his eyes. By a great effort he succeeded in controlling

himself, and rested content with drawing the girl to his heart--a heart

which, after all, did not belong entirely to Mrs. Frasne.

“Love me always,” he murmured, “whatever happens.”

She raised her eyes to his inquiringly, but was too generous to demand

a secret in exchange for what she had done. Only, as she went with him

to the dining-room, she let these words slip out quietly, like a prayer:

“Be nice to father, and I shall love you still more.”

Dinner passed without incident, thanks to the presence of Raymond

Bercy, which made the meeting of father and son less trying. In the

evening Maurice withdrew at an early hour, making the excuse of a

headache. He went to his mother’s room, where she lay in bed still

suffering. In his soul’s anguish he embraced the invalid in the

darkness. She knew him by his kiss, and feebly called him by his name,

patting his face with her hands. He stifled a sob and went out. Love

condemned him to such cruelties.

He packed his valise lightly, so that he might carry it himself to

the station, and put all the money he had in a pocket-book. With the

loans he had raised that night, and Margaret’s, it made altogether a

little more than five thousand francs, a total which seemed to him in

his inexperience an important sum of money. Next he packed up the few

pieces of jewelry that belonged to him and might be turned to account,

and then, his toilette for the execution made, sat down and waited like

a criminal condemned to death for the hour that should deliver him to

his beloved. His reason, his infallible reason, sustained him in his

resolve, represented to him the beauty of living his life freely and in

his own way, rather than taking his place as the last of his class in

the uninterrupted line of the Roquevillards.

... Reassured by Maurice’s attitude, and by a half confidence on the

part of Margaret, Mr. Roquevillard went to bed and asleep without any

immediate concern, deciding first, however, that he would send his son

away from Chambéry. He would write to an old friend that he had done

various good turns for at one time and another, who had knocked about the

world a good deal and squandered his inheritance, but who was now

settled in Tunis as a lawyer, and had prospered there. He had lately

expressed in his letters a desire to retire from practice, or at least

to take in an assistant. At twenty-four such a voyage, such a life,

with all its novelty, might mean forgetfulness, salvation, for Maurice.

In the night he thought he heard a door open and shut, but silence

descending on the house again, he fancied he must have been mistaken,

and tried to get to sleep once more. After a rather long struggle, he

lighted a match, and looked at his watch, which showed half an hour

past midnight. He rose and left his room. At the end of the hall a ray

of light appeared beneath Maurice’s door. He went up to it, listened,

and hearing no sound, he knocked. There was no response, and after some

hesitation he went in.

“He must have forgotten to put out his lamp,” he tried to persuade

himself, anxiety already beginning to torment him.

With one glance he saw that the bed was untouched, that a drawer had

been emptied. He went back to his own room, dressed in haste and ran

like a young man, despite his sixty years, to the railway station. The

time for the express to Italy must have passed, but there was still a

last train in the direction of Geneva. An employee, who recognised him,

gave him his information. Maurice had gone away with _her_. They

had taken their tickets for Turin.

Alone there in the night he gave a groan, like some oak straining

at the first blow of the axe. But, like the oak, too, he was full of

resistance, and stiffened himself against fate.

It was not possible that a whole race, a family, not possible even that

one life, could be compromised by a single youthful fault. He would

find his son again, sooner or later, and bring him home. Or else fate

would take charge of him as of the prodigal son; and as in the parable,

too, he would be weak enough to kill the fatted calf on his return,

instead of loading him with reproaches. The paternal hearth: there one

comes back to dress one’s wounds, certain of not being turned away. A

husband may desert his wife, a woman her husband, ungrateful children

may desert their father and mother: a father and mother can never

abandon their child, even if the whole world should give him up.

The town lay as if dead in the moonlight. Mr. Roquevillard’s steps

resounded in the deserted streets. From Boigne Street, as he went up,

he could see the castle tower clear before him, lengthened by the

perspective of the night. A neighbouring tree traced the shadow of its

leaves on the façade. In a few hours the hushed city would come to life

again, to laugh insultingly at this family drama.

When he opened his door a white shadow came to him. It was Margaret.

“Father, what is it?”

In default of his wife he must share the weight of this trial

with Margaret. He thought enough of her not to attempt concealment.

“They have gone,” he muttered briefly.

“Oh,” she breathed, understanding, and remembering the sad phrase her

brother had used to her that evening.

Again father and daughter clasped each other to their hearts in a

common anguish. Then tenderly he led her to her room and left her.

“Let your mother sleep, little girl,” he said. “She

always finds out our troubles soon enough.”

IV

THE VENGEANCE OF MR. FRASNE

MR. FRASNE, bundled up in his overcoat on account of the early

freshness of the air, and carrying a little bag in his hand, descended

from the express in Chambéry at seven in the morning, after an absence

of two days, and walked briskly home.

By the affected air of the maid who opened the door he knew immediately

that something had happened or was happening in the house. He was

a man going on toward fifty, rather well preserved, correct, cold

and distinguished looking at first sight, but with thick lips, and

especially a pair of pop-eyes, half concealed behind his glasses, that

sooner or later gave one an impression of distrust.

“Everything all right?” he asked, in spite of his troublesome

presentiment. “And madame?”

The servant threw a barely perceptible mocking note into her answer:

“Madame left last night for Italy, with her trunks.”

“For Italy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At what hour?”

“At midnight.”

“Without any explanation?”

“Madame told me as she was leaving that you had been informed.”

“That’s true,” replied Mr. Frasne, with some presence of mind. “Bring

me my breakfast to my study.”

And without any further show of surprise he entered his private room,

which adjoined his offices. What use was there in putting any further

questions to this girl, who was ill-disposed and plainly not very well

informed? The unexpected news shot at him point blank had not yet hurt

him. His only sensations were those of astonishment. A wound, even a

mortal one, cannot at first be distinguished from a simple shock. It

takes some time before suffering sets in.

His glance was sharpened and his nerves were taut when he caught sight

of a letter lying on the table, sealed and placed almost aggressively

within view. He took it in his hands, but without opening it, trying

to guess its contents. There would doubtless be some explanation of

this departure--carelessness, bravado, or indiscretion, who could

tell? After nine years of marriage he was so little sure of his wife

that all these conjectures seemed equally likely. Should he look for

a companion in his wife’s flight, or would it be just the caprice of

a neurasthenic, who would ere long come back to the fold? The name of

Maurice Roquevillard did not enter his mind. Mrs. Frasne sought for men’s

attentions, and amused herself with them: every one paid harmless

court to her. He could not take seriously the banal friendship that

she had shown for his clerk, even though he had been warned in some

anonymous letters that the town was already preoccupied with it. He

showed the rather general disdain of mature men for young people, with

their propensity to take time for an ally and content them selves with

hope. In proportion as a man loses his youth, it is always his own age

or an age approaching it that he attributes to seducers. Sentiment in

youth’s eyes goes for nothing unless it leads to some developments, and

he knew how many adulterous thoughts are prevented by moral conditions

in the country from going further. And, besides, how could he admit

so unreasonable a hypothesis as her voluntarily renouncing a place so

comfortable and untroubled? He did not understand it at all, but he

found himself in the presence of a fact, and he attached importance

to nothing but facts. He was irritated by this mystery which his

penetration could not clear up, so he tore open the envelope and read:

SIR:

_I have never loved you, and you knew it. What is a

woman’s heart that it should be taken possession of by a legal

document? I have stood my slavery for nine years because

I loved no one else. To-day everything is changed: I set

myself free in loyalty to myself, refusing to be shared. What

is there to prevent me? In the very beginning of our marriage

you objected to having children. A little hand held out to me might

have been enough to enchain me completely, but our house is empty, and

no one has any need of me. You thought me worth one hundred thousand

francs in our marriage contract. You will think it natural that I take

away with me the price paid for me. I have already paid for it myself

with my youth. In leaving you I pardon you. Good-bye._

EDITH DANNEMARIE.

For Mr. Frasne, whether from professional habit or a positive turn

of mind, everything in life, even sentiment, translated itself into

acts and obligations. Our characters rule us even in our suffering: in

this shipwreck in which his life was going down he was for the moment

conscious only of the loss of his wife, not his money, even though he

was not prodigal with money; but to revive his past and exasperate

his sorrow he went instinctively to an old portfolio and got out the

marriage contract to which the letter made allusion. With this bit of

stamped paper he evoked more clearly the great passion that had taken

his later youth in its grasp. He saw again at the church door a young

girl, delicate and supple, whose movements and eyes betrayed the fever

in her veins. It was at Tronche, near Grenoble, his native country. He

came there each summer for his vacation, from Paris, when he was head

clerk. He could not make up his mind, though on the brink of forty, to

leave the capital for good, and buy a practice in Dauphiné. According to

inquiries that he made, Edith Dannemarie lived with her mother in the

neighbourhood, in a little house to which the two women had retired

almost without resources after the death of the head of the family, who

had ruined himself with cards. A young country girl with those eyes

ought to be easy prey. Two years in succession he had attempted to get

hold of her. She was waiting for a prince, for her fancy flew high, and

was losing her patience with the long waiting, solitude keeping her

imagination warm. Accordingly she rebuffed him, but not severely enough

to send him away for good. She had discovered without preparatory

studies the art of promising and refusing, and she practised it on a

man whom conquests in an easy and sensually minded world must have made

more irritable and nervous in the face of coquetry. He should have

known himself defeated, but his desire was greater than his interest.

Being alone in the world, after the loss of his parents, who had left

him a goodly inheritance, he decided at last to ask formally for her

hand--a hand which at one and the same time repulsed him and coyly

exhibited the proper place for an engagement ring.

How could he construct again from the laconic clauses of a contract

the traces of that love? One article conceded to his future bride,

in consideration of the marriage, a gift of one hundred thousand

francs; not, as is customary and almost fashionable in such

cases, a gift on the condition of her surviving the giver, but an

immediate settlement, resembling a transfer of property. This abnormal

generosity was the proof of his feebleness, the lamentable testimony to

his defeat. It conferred authenticity on his passion.

The maid who brought in his chocolate distracted him a moment from his

examination. She watched her master out of the corner of her eye as she

served him, and was astonished to see him with business papers in his

hands. Here he was examining a brief, while she was watching for an

outbreak of spite or fury, ready to make a good story out of it in the

town. He dismissed her with a wave of his hand, and breakfasted without

appetite, by sheer force of will. Should he not need to keep his forces

all intact, presently, and decide definitely what to do?

As he gulped down his steaming chocolate he succeeded in making the

dead years live again. He revived them from his own point of view,

incapable, like many men and almost all women, of representing

things from that of their partners. There was the marriage at

Tronches, after many hesitations and delays, which had not been

of his making; then the departure for Paris. In Paris there had

been revealed to him an unknown companion, a woman who passed

without transition or surprise from isolation and monotony to the

most delirious gaiety. If she did not manage him in his maturity,

neither did he respect her youth. It was then, in the hope of

finding more quiet in the country, that he had bought out Mr.

Clairval’s practice at Chambéry, in default of an office being

obtainable in Grenoble. His wife had adapted herself, with the

indifference of those whom life cannot satisfy further, to this radical

change in her existence. She appeared to accept their retreat as a

pleasure, without enthusiasm, but with no objections. Two years slipped

by thus, as peacefully as could be expected of a woman who even in

her calmer moments never failed to give him some anxiety. And now,

just as he began to think she was sunk deep in the comfort of good

surroundings, content with their daily jog trot, suddenly, without a

sound of warning, she was leaving her husband and running away with a

lover.

The lawyer was crushed by a catastrophe that had caught him so

unprepared, and mechanically went back over these memories, the deed

of gift bringing back all details to him. For the second time he

stood on the brink, and this time he measured it better. This Maurice

Roquevillard, whom he had disdained just now on his arrival, began

to loom larger in his jealous fury. Edith had not gone away alone.

She had gone with him probably, nay, surely. At this very moment,

far away down there in Italy, safely out of reach, he held her in

his arms. Mr. Frasne took his handkerchief and passed it across his

eyes, then held it savagely to his mouth with both hands, and gritted

his teeth upon it. Presently he gave way and wept without control.

“He loves me in his way,” she had said of him. His way was one which

is not the most noble, but is the most fertile certainly in devising

torments. It knocks itself against definite and cruelly imagined

things, it tears up the heart as a plow tears up the ground, and lays

hatred bare.

Mr. Frasne took up the letter and the contract again, this time not

to sound the depths of his misery, but to search for some plan of

vengeance. The clerks would be invading the office before long. Before

they came he must decide on his inquiry, and prepare to forge his arms.

The money that Edith had taken away, that she had stolen really, for

a gift between betrothed persons would in all cases be annulled in

consequence of a divorce pronounced against the giver, she must have

taken from the safe. He had recently deposited there the proceeds of a

one hundred and twenty thousand francs sale of land, a sum which was to

be turned over in a few days, or as soon as the deed was ready to be

executed. He had indiscreetly spoken of it, and she might have learned

of it from him. A key can be made or stolen, but how had she discovered

the mysterious combination of figures without which this key to the

safe was useless?

He rose and went up to the safe, which bore no trace of any breakage.

He felt in his pocket and took out his bunch of keys. Then he perceived

that this one key was missing. It must have been extracted the very day

of his departure. He had a duplicate, it is true, and had confided the

other, according to his habit, to his head clerk during his absence. He

would wait till the arrival of the clerk, who could open and verify the

contents of the safe, and at the same time serve as a witness.

Returning to his work-table, he found a penal code and began to run

through the paragraphs under the title of crimes and misdemeanours

against property. He read in Article 380 that abstractions made by

husbands to the injury of their wives, and by wives against their

husbands, can only give rise to civil actions. But the end of this

same paragraph that disarmed him against the faithless woman armed him

against her accomplice:

_With respect to all other individuals who shall receive or apply to

their own profit all or any part of the objects stolen, they shall be

punished as if guilty of theft._

Started on this scent, he found things better still. Article 408,

which treated of the abuse of confidence, gave it as an aggravating

circumstance when the theft was committed by a public or administrative

officer, by a domestic servant, a man under employment for wages,

a student, clerk, commissioner, workman, companion or apprentice,

to the injury of his master; and the penalty in such cases was

imprisonment. What was to prevent him from accusing Maurice

Roquevillard, and him alone? Was it not all probable and likely? The

young man knew the premises, the payments made through the office,

the dates of contracts, the absence of his chief. He could have

discovered the secret of the lock, have extracted the key for a moment

from the hands of the head clerk. With no fortune of his own, he must

have had to supply himself with funds to carry off his mistress.

Finally, did not his flight to foreign territory condemn him? Of

course, the statement made by Mrs. Frasne expressly contradicted this

version of the case, but Mrs. Frasne’s declaration, ineffective against

herself, though awkward for her lover, could well enough be suppressed.

This declaration out of the way, nothing could make the latter appear

innocent again. He would even be without any grounds of defence: for

to defend himself, would he not have to turn against his mistress,

admitting at last that they had both been supported by the funds that

she had taken? A man of honour could not do this. Maurice’s conviction

was, therefore, certain. Extradition would put an end to his amorous

flight. He would have to appear at the assizes. Branded, overthrown

and broken, he would expiate their fault for both the culprits. And

finally, his family, to make atonement for his fault, would perhaps

restore the sum that had been taken away. Thus the disaster would at

least result in no material loss. And already the material loss began

to seem not negligible to Mr. Frasne, the more so as he reflected

further upon it.

The more he explored in all its aspects a combination so rich in

inference, and traced all its possibilities to the end, the more he

felt his despair grow lighter. He forgot his sorrow in preparing a fine

punishment for his rival. He considered pitilessly the remotest

consequences of his revenge, not least of them the abasement of the

haughty Roquevillards, and this despite the fact that as Mr. Clairval’s

successor he had been received by them as a friend. In his unhappiness

he hurled his sufferings like curses in the face of the whole world.

For a last time he read this letter, the only source of difficulty to

his plan: then, his mind made up, he threw it in the fire and watched

it twist and blacken into ashes.

Nine o’clock struck.

Punctually the clerks arrived at the office, one by one, and took their

places at their desks. Their chief stepped at once to the door leading

from his own room into the office, and, without any salutations, began

to question the head clerk in a preoccupied manner.

“Philippeaux, I can’t find the key of the safe.”

“Why, here it is, sir,” replied the clerk. “You handed it to me to take

care of while you were away. I have not used it.”

“Good. Come with me, then.”

The two men passed into the study.

Mr. Frasne opened the safe and noticed at once a certain disorder in

its contents.

“You have been looking for something, a will perhaps?” he asked blandly.

Philippeaux protested with the greatest energy.

“No, sir. I can swear to it.”

“Then I don’t understand any better than I did at first.

Wait a moment. This envelope has been torn open. It

contained the money from the purchase of Belvade: one hundred and

twenty thousand francs. We counted it together.”

“That’s true,” agreed the frightened clerk.

Still very calm, the notary did not pursue his investigation any

further, closing the safe carefully.

“Some one has been in here.”

“But it’s not possible, sir.”

“I tell you some one has been here. We’ll check up the contents before

the commissioner of police. Who shut up the office last night?”

“Maurice Roquevillard.”

“Did he stay here alone?”

“Yes, to write some letters.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. I met him under the Porticoes half an hour later. He

gave me the keys.”

“The keys? The key of the safe was in your bunch?”

“Yes.”

“That was imprudent.”

After a silence Mr. Frasne resumed: “Why has he not come yet?”

“Who?”

“Maurice Roquevillard.”

“He won’t come,” flung out the clerk vindictively.

Mr. Frasne fixed him with his perspicacious eyes. He drew two

conclusions from this examination: the rumour of his misfortune was

already running through the town, and Philippeaux, whose jealousy he

suspected, would be a safe ally for him. Nevertheless, he pretended

ignorance.

“That’s right. He ought to be with his father.”

“No, Mr. Frasne. He took the train last night at midnight.”

“Where for?”

“Italy!”

“Ah, I understand at last,” avowed the solicitor this time.

And slowly he pronounced his decree against Maurice:

“It’s he, then, that will have forced my safe. How did he discover the

combination?”

Philippeaux bent his head: fear and envy made an informer out of him.

“The combination is written down in my memorandum book, though with

nothing to identify it: my memory’s not good. Roquevillard might have

seen it and suspected its use.”

Again Mr. Frasne, whom all the circumstances favoured, scrutinised his

clerk and concealed his inward satisfaction.

“You have been doubly imprudent, Philippeaux. Take one of your comrades

and call the commissioner of police. He shall make a strict search here

himself.”

Thus the safe was visited legally in the presence of several witnesses.

Mr. Frasne patiently made his inventory. Not a thing was missing

and the sum of the money deposited proved to be exact.

“The only thing left to examine,” said the solicitor quietly,

conducting the inquest methodically, “is this long envelope, which

has been unsealed. It contained the purchase price of Belvade, twenty

acres, one hundred and twenty thousand francs in banknotes. I counted

them before going away, with my head clerk, here, who can corroborate

me.”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“The sum was put away along there.”

Now the envelope contained no more than twenty bills.

“I have been robbed of one hundred thousand francs,” concluded Mr.

Frasne.

“How do you account for the fact that the thief did not take

everything?” objected the commissioner. “As a rule, they don’t

voluntarily limit their profits.”

“I’ll explain that to the public prosecutor, to whom I shall carry my

complaint at once.”

“That’s for you to say. You suspect some one, then?”

“Yes.”

“Your servants?”

“No. They would not have been in here. And, besides, they would not

have known how to make out the combination.”

“Good. I’ll go and draw up my report.”

“Come with me to the court-house. It’s only a step.”

“As you wish.”

They presented themselves to the prosecutor directly, and the notary

had a long conference with him, a conference that prolonged itself some

time after the commissioner of police had left them. As Mr. Frasne

came down the staircase he met Mr. Roquevillard at the foot, coming in

on his way to court. It was a quarter past twelve, the hour for the

opening of the hearings. The two men looked at each other and bowed.

V

A FAMILY IN DANGER

BEFORE the court sits, the barristers and attorneys customarily meet

and chat a few moments amongst themselves in the lobby. It is the

place where all the town news is subjected to the test. To-day Mr.

Roquevillard, famous for his good humour and redoubtable sallies, took

his robe from its hook in the cloak-room and went directly to his place

at the bar. His colleagues eyed him from a distance, with ill-natured

curiosity, while they made merry over the escapade of young Maurice,

which for the matter of that they treated lightly, and as a revenge

upon the constraints of country manners. As Mr. Roquevillard was

apparently absorbed in the preparation of his plea, a court attendant

came to his bench and touched him on the shoulder.

“Sir, you are wanted in the prosecutor’s office.”

He rose at once, respectfully.

“I’ll come,” he said. It happened every day that the

prosecutor took advantage of the presence of some lawyer

at the sessions to consult with him on some point

of penal business. Mr. Roquevillard, nevertheless, was not without

some anxiety. His encounter with Mr. Frasne at the entrance to the

court-house made him speculate:

“Will he be so foolish as to enter a complaint of adultery?”

Legally adultery remains a misdemeanour in France. A husband, but not a

wife, has the right to enter a complaint, but it is a privilege seldom

exercised. But the notary’s face was so difficult to make out----

The prosecutor, Mr. Vallerois, had held the office in Chambéry for

several years, and had had time to appreciate Mr. Roquevillard’s

professional probity, character and talent. People talked, it is

true, of his possible candidacy at the next election, and the

opposition would find in him, should he accept, its most energetic and

acknowledged chief. Mr. Frasne’s accusation fatally destroyed this

political danger. Ambitious office-holder that he was, Mr. Vallerois

was considering this aspect of things without displeasure when Mr.

Roquevillard entered the room.

But he thought less of this when he began his obligatory talk with him,

and it was to his credit that in the lawyer facing him he saw only an

honest man in trouble. He held out his hand to him and began:

“I have a disagreeable duty to take up with you.”

He stopped and hesitated. Mr. Roquevillard’s moral force showed to best

advantage in difficult circumstances. He appreciated the delicacy of

the prosecutor, but he went straight to the point himself.

“It concerns my son?”

“Yes.”

“In the matter of a divorce in which his name is involved? A complaint

of adultery?”

“No, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately?”

The word could scarcely have any significance. In a firm but muffled

voice, Mr. Roquevillard demanded: “Does it concern an accident? A

suicide?”

“No, no. Reassure yourself,” cried Mr. Vallerois, realising the error

that he had provoked. “He eloped last night with Mrs. Frasne: the

whole town knows it. But what is more serious is that Mr. Frasne, who

has just been here, has placed in my hands a complaint of abuse of

confidence against him.”

In spite of his self-possession, the old lawyer, red to his forehead,

grew indignant.

“Abuse of confidence? I know my son. It’s impossible.”

The prosecutor let him read the accusation which the notary had signed,

together with the examinations made by the commissioner of police. Mr.

Roquevillard read them through attentively and without interruption.

It might be, it was, the foundering of his family, the disgrace of his

name. Master of him self, but stricken to his heart, he said at last:

“Mr. Frasne is taking a base revenge.”

“I believe as you do,” replied Mr. Vallerois, letting his

sympathy appear without circumlocution. “But the money has

disappeared. How can a public trial be prevented?”

“My son is not the only one in this case. When a boy of twenty elopes

with a woman of thirty, which of the two prepares and directs the

expedition?”

“I made him listen to all that just now, in this very place, with some

insistence. I recommended prudence, and insisted upon twenty-four

hours of reflection. I am forced back on taking some formal action.

Justice must take its course. I am obliged to lay the matter before the

examining magistrate.”

Mr. Roquevillard, summoning his courage to meet this blow of fate, said

nothing, while the prosecutor turned the insoluble problem over and

over again.

“There are presumptions against him, serious, precise and

corroborating. In the first place the facilities of his position in

the office, then his presence there last night with the keys, after

the other clerks had gone, his lack of resources with which to carry

through this bold elopement, and even his pains to limit the sum he

took, as if he were fixing the rating of a loan he expected to repay.”

“There are other presumptions in his favour,” replied the father

proudly. “In the first place, his family. The last of a long line of

honest people does not lie. And who told you that he left without any

money? When his own money is used up, he’ll come back. I’ll answer for

it.”

Their interview was interrupted by an attendant coming to summon the

lawyer, for whose argument the court was waiting.

“I’ll follow,” said Mr. Roquevillard, motioning him away.

“But he has been accused. How will he defend himself?” asked Mr.

Vallerois. “You must realise that he has a bad case. Evidence

accumulates against him. And even on the most favourable hypothesis he

must accuse some one else to clear himself. Do you wish that? And he

will pass always as having been an accomplice. At all events, if you

know where he is, advise him to wait there before he re-enters France.

I will deal lightly in the matter of the extradition.”

Mr. Roquevillard shook his head energetically.

“No, no. To run away is to confess. He must come back. I shall find

proof of his innocence.”

And after a moment of reflection, during which he weighed the pros and

cons, he added:

“Since our misfortune touches you, Mr. Prosecutor, give me leave to ask

a service of you, a great service which may yet save us.”

“Which is?”

“Propose to Frasne that he withdraw his complaint in consideration of

the full payment to him of one hundred thousand francs.”

“You would make restitution?”

“I will pay him the money.”

“And if your son is not guilty?”

“He’s in a situation from which there’s no way out, as you have said.

Our honour is worth more than that. Even pursuit must splash mud on it.”

“Mr. Frasne is supposed to be close. His complaint perhaps is only a

way of putting himself in funds again. Try him with half of it.”

“No; no bargaining. Full payment in consideration of withdrawal.”

The attorney was much distressed; naturally desirous of quiet and

propriety, he fell back now on his professional scruples.

“You are right, and I want to oblige you, especially in view of the

sacrifice you propose. But does it become my character to risk such an

abnormal step?”

Mr. Roquevillard put a little emotion in his reply.

“It’s abnormal, yes. But time presses. I am pleading in court. In a

little while the complaint will be noised about. You alone know of it

and can still suspend it. Quash it. I beg of you.”

“It’s impossible. I can’t deliberately seek out a complainant.”

“You can have him come here.”

“So be it,” said Mr. Vallerois. “The means are dear, but effective

surely. I will present the proposal in my own name, so that if by any

chance I fail, you will not be embarrassed. The offer on your part

might seem to be an admission of the crime.”

“Thank you.”

They separated. The lawyer returned to the court-room, where the

councillors were growing impatient, and began his argument with

his customary lucidity. Listening to the ordered closeness of his

reasoning, no one would have suspected that anguish tortured him.

But when he sat down, this old fighter who was never tired, he was

conscious at last of an extreme fatigue, heavy as the mysterious blows

of age.

After the argument in rebuttal and his brief reply, he regained his

liberty at last. He looked at his watch: it was half-past three. In

this interval of three hours the fate of his son had been decided.

He went up again to the prosecutor’s office, where Mr. Vallerois was

waiting for him. At a glance he could see that that officer’s mission

had failed.

“Mr. Frasne came here,” explained the latter. “You were right. He wants

revenge.”

“He refused?”

“Absolutely. He prefers his revenge to his money. In vain I pressed him

in every way in my power. I spoke of the scandal, which would react

against his wife; spoke even of his lack of evidence. He replied that

if I did not begin a public action, he would bring a civil suit before

the examining magistrate. He has the right, and his resolution is

unbreakable.”

“And if I should try myself to move him? Our relations were pleasant.”

“Your visit would be useless, painful; perhaps even

compromising. I don’t advise you that way at all. I spoke to him of

your family, of yourself: He replied: ‘His son has broken my heart. So

much the worse if the innocent pay for the guilty.’”

Mr. Roquevillard reflected a moment, and yielded to this advice, of

which he could not but approve. He took leave of the prosecutor,

stretching out his hand to him.

“There’s nothing left for me but to thank you. You have treated me as a

friend, and I shall not forget it.”

“I’m sorry for you,” replied Mr. Vallerois, who was really touched.

The lawyer, his portfolio under his arm, went on his way home. He

walked briskly, with his always youthful tread, holding his head

high, according to his habit, but his face was very pale. Under the

Porticoes, that resort for loungers, he came across friends, who turned

aside, while passersby stared at him insistently and mockingly. He

perceived that Frasne’s clerks were already hawking the shame of the

Roquevillards about the town. The Roquevillards: it was the first

failing, for centuries, of any of the race. It must have been watched

for, that it should be spread with so much spite. What base envy the

pride in their name stirred up! The weakness of one member undid a

whole past of energy and honour, a past that had furnished such manly

examples for so many years. Did not those who exulted in it understand

that this ruin reached them, too?

He straightened himself up and walked more slowly. No one

now could look him in the eye. Stiffening with contempt, setting his

face to the storm, he reflected: “Dogs, bark and keep away from me.

Don’t come nearer. As long as I’m alive I shall protect my own. I’ll

shield them with all my power. And you shall not see me suffer.”

Outside his door he was accosted by the Viscount de la Mortellerie, his

country neighbour. Must he submit already to condolences and sympathy?

Yet this eccentric, in hunting him out, showed himself the most human

of all. The old nobleman pointed out the castle, bathed in the evening

light.

“At the reception of the Emperor Sigismund in 1416,” he confided

mysteriously, “the Duke Amedeus VIII gave a banquet in the grand hall

there. It was prepared by Jean de Belleville, the inventor of Savoy

cakes. The meats were gilded and covered with ornaments and streamers

bearing the arms of the guests, and each one received the dishes that

were meant for him in single, double or triple portions, according to

his rank. I love the distinction, don’t you? That we should eat, not

according to our appetite, but our importance.”

“One portion would do for me,” replied Mr. Roquevillard, shaking off

his anger.

He could not, himself, beguile the present with these memories of

the past. He disappeared beneath the archway, mounted the stairs,

and reached his study, avoiding the room where his wife, as always,

kept her bed. But she heard him pass and sent for him, hoping that

he might give her some news of her son. He found her alone, sitting up

in bed, in the falling shadows.

“Margaret has gone out,” she murmured; and scarcely daring to frame her

question, she added: “You know nothing of Maurice?”

“No, nothing. For a long time doubtless we shall know nothing.”

“How hard your voice is, Francis,” replied the invalid. “This woman has

bewitched him, you see, the poor boy.”

“Feebleness is one kind of guiltiness.”

She was struck by this rigid tone, and pressing the button of the

electric light, beheld her husband looking as if stricken with a sudden

old age, so pale and hollow-eyed that she felt at once a presentiment

of danger.

“Francis,” she begged of him, “there is something else that you’re

hiding from me. Am I not your comrade as I used to be, from whom you

have no secrets?”

He moved nearer toward the bed. “Why no, dear wife, there’s nothing

else. Isn’t our son’s desertion of us enough?”

Sitting up again, her arms stretched out, she only entreated him the

more.

“I can read in your look some terrible menace that hangs over us. Don’t

spare me as you did last night. Speak. I shall be brave.”

“You are exciting yourself needlessly. There’s nothing.”

“I swear to you that I shall have the courage to bear it. Don’t you

believe me?”

“Valentine, calm yourself.”

“Wait, you shall believe me.”

And joining her hands, the aged woman on her bed of pain called aloud

to her God for help. In her pale and emaciated face, through which the

pulse of life moved so feebly, her eyes flashed with an ardent flame.

“Valentine,” he said softly.

She turned toward him as if transfigured.

“Now,” she said, “now speak. I can bear all. Is he dead?”

“Oh, no!”

Her heart had given the same cry as his. Conquered by this faith that

animated her, he confided to her the terrible accusation that had

attainted their flesh and blood. She thrust it from her indignantly.

“It’s not true. Our son is not a thief.”

“No, but for every one else he is.”

“What of that, if it is not true? And that I know, I’m sure of it.”

He cut her short with a quick gesture, dwelling upon the disaster:

“He has brought disgrace on us.”

It was the crime against his race, head of the family as he was, that

he condemned, while the Christian woman thought only of her boy’s heart.

“God will not abandon us,” she declared solemnly.

As she uttered these single words of hope Margaret entered, much

upset and evidently battling with her dismay. She looked at her father

and mother, saw them both suffering there with the same sorrow, and

like a stream that breaks its barriers her self-restraint gave way in a

burst of tears.

Mrs. Roquevillard drew her to her heart.

“Come to me,” she said.

“Who has been hurting you?” her father demanded.

She was feverish with excitement, but controlled her distress to make

some explanation.

“People are insulting us,” she began.

“Who?”

“I’ve just come from Mrs. Bercy’s. Raymond was there. ‘A pretty brother

you have,’ said Mrs. Bercy to me. It was horrid of her. As for me,

I only kept my head down. Then she began again: ‘You know the story

the clerks in the Frasne office are telling about him?’ Still I held

my tongue. ‘They say your brother wasn’t content with the wife.’

‘Mamma,’ cried Raymond feebly. But I was already on my feet. ‘Go on,

madame, you must,’ I said. And she dared to finish: ‘He took away the

cash-box, too.’ Then I said, ‘I forbid you to insult my brother.’ And

to Raymond I added: ‘You, sir, who can’t protect me in your own house,

may consider yourself free.’ He wanted to keep me back, but I would not

listen to anything more, and here I am.”

“Dear little girl,” murmured her mother, putting her arms around her.

“Oh,” cried Mr. Roquevillard, standing over the two heads, his wife’s

and his daughter’s, “people always condemn you thus, without hearing

you.”

But already Margaret had forgotten her personal troubles in the common

sorrow. She rose and went up to her father, gazing earnestly into his

eyes.

“You, father, in whom I have such confidence, tell me, it isn’t true,

is it?”

“It’s false,” the invalid assured her.

“I hope so,” said the head of the family. “But all the appearances are

against him, and he runs the risk of being sentenced.”

“Sentenced?”

“Yes, sentenced,” replied the lawyer, “and with him all of us that bear

his name, all of us who come from the same past with him and are making

toward the same future.”

He made a movement as if at once to protect the two weeping women and

threaten the deserter:

“One feeble moment has been enough to wreck the efforts of so many

close and solid generations. Oh, let him down there in his shameful

flight measure the damage of his treachery! His sister’s betrothal

is broken, his brother’s future is spoiled, his mother’s health is

shattered, his family’s fortune is compromised, our name spotted and

our honour stained! That’s his work! And that is called love! What

does it matter whether he has stolen a sum of money! From us he has

stolen everything. What is there left to us to-day?”

“You,” cried Margaret. “And you will save him.”

“God,” said Mrs. Roquevillard, finding a strange serenity in

her sorrow. “Have confidence. The worth of a race can never

be undone. It will redeem the culprit’s faults.”