A LOVER’S TRICK
THE March sun was setting on the hamlet of La Rivière, in the pleasant
land of Touraine--Touraine the fit home of so many noble châteaux, the
cradle of so many of the proudest traditions and the most inspiring
memories of the romance of love and chivalry in the history of France.
André was standing in the churchyard of the hamlet, but it was not at
the landscape that he knew so well that he was looking, nor even up the
slope beyond, where the great Château de Beau Séjour shot its towers
and pointed turrets through its encircling domain of wood. Ten leagues
away in the dim distance lay Nérac, the poverty-stricken home from
which he took his title, and whose meagre patrimony encumbered with the
debts of his ancestors and his own barely sufficed to provide a living
for the widowed mother to whom that morning he had said good-bye and
whom the English in the Low Countries might decide he should never see
again.
Yet it was not of his mother that he was thinking, still less of
the enchantress of the forest whose identity he had discovered--one
Mademoiselle d’Étiolles she had proved to be, “La Petite d’Étiolles,”
as that gay Lothario the Duc de Richelieu called her, the daughter of
a Farmer-General, a _bourgeoisie_ notorious for her beauty, her wit,
and her friendship with the wits. Indeed he had forgotten the rose-pink
divinity in the azure phaeton entirely. No, he was striving to pluck up
courage to face Denise and receive her answer. For if that answer was
not what he desired it would be better to ride straight down into the
Loire and let the last male of the House of Nérac put an end to it for
ever.
Twinkling lights began to shine in the great château; its towers and
gables insolent in the majesty of their beauty, strong in the might of
their antiquity, challenged and defied him in the dusk. That was the
château of his Denise, the Marquise de Beau Séjour whom he, gallant
fool, rich only in his noble pedigree, dared to love and hoped to win,
Denise the richest heiress in France. Yet it had not been hers so long;
its broad seignories were a thing of yesterday for her. Fifteen years
ago she, as he, had been only the child of a vicomte as poor if as
noble as himself. And Beau Séjour lay not here, but ten leagues away,
a mile from Nérac, where that church spire hung its cross above the
horizon.
The soft gloom of the growing dusk imaged for André at that moment
the sombre pall of tragedy which twelve years ago had fallen on the
great château. An ancient house, a venerated name had been its owner’s;
were not their achievements written in the chronicles of France? was
not their origin lost in the twilight of dim ages far, so far away?
Capets and Valois and Bourbons that house had seen coming and going
on the throne, honour and fame and wealth and high endeavour had been
theirs, and then shame and doom, swift, unexpected, irreversible. The
story of their downfall had been his first lesson learned in budding
manhood of the harshness of the world and the mystery of fate. Such a
simple story, too. The wife of the Marquis had run away with a lover,
a baseborn stranger gossip called him. The lover had deserted her,
why and where no one knew, and disowned by her husband she had died
miserably. Her husband, a soldier and ambassador of the great Louis
Quatorze, had in despair or madness plunged into treason, and had paid
the traitor’s penalty on the scaffold. His only son and heir, from
remorse or consciousness of guilt, had perished by his own hand in
Poland, whither he had gone to fight in the war. And here to-day at his
feet a rough and stained tombstone marked the neglected grave of the
only daughter who had remained. Had she lived she would to-night have
been just two years older than Denise; had there been no treason, she
and not Denise would have been mistress of that château now called De
Beau Séjour.
Denise’s father for service to the state had been awarded the lands
of the traitor; the old name for centuries noted in this soil had
been annulled in infamy; its blood was corrupted by the decree of the
law, and by the King’s will the new Marquis had carried to his new
possessions the title of his old, that Beau Séjour yonder so near
to his own Nérac. The law and the King so far as in them lay had
determined that the very name and memory of the ancient house should be
blotted out for ever. But blot out the château they could not. There
it stood haughty as of old, to tell to all what had once been, and the
curious could still read here and there in its storied walls the arms
and emblems, the scutcheons and shields of a family which had given
nine Marshals to France, and in whose veins royal blood had flowed.
What did that matter now? To-day it belonged to Denise, once poor as he
was, and destined to be his bride before this sudden swoop upward on
the ruins of another to the high places of France.
As André paced to and fro in the dusk the ghostly memories thickened.
Twenty years ago as a boy he had ridden with his father to that
château. He remembered but two things, but he remembered them as
vividly as yesterday. Over the chief gateway a splendid coat of arms
had caught his boyish fancy and he had asked what the motto “_Dieu Le
Vengeur_” might mean. “Why, father, there it is again,” he had cried,
for in the noble hall, above the famous sculptured chimney-piece, the
first thing that caught the boy’s eye was the scroll with those three
words “_Dieu Le Vengeur_.” And the second memory was of a little girl
playing with a huge wolf-hound in the dancing firelight under that
motto, a little girl with blue eyes and fair hair, innocent of the
evil to come, playing in her hall which had seen kings and queens for
guests. “_Dieu Le Vengeur_” she had repeated--“God will protect me,”
and they had all laughed. But had God protected her? Here was her grave
at his feet. André now recalled his dying father’s remark five years
later, when he had heard how his neighbour the Comte de Beau Séjour had
been rewarded with the treason-tainted marquisate. “That would have
been yours, André, my son,” he had said. And no one had understood, and
he had died before he could explain, if explain he could. That, too,
had been another bitter lesson in the cruelty of fate, in the bleak,
bitter tragedy of baffled and unfulfilled ambitions.
Smitten with a sudden pity, a sharp anguish, André kneeled in the damp,
tangled grass and peered at the tombstone which marked the humble
resting-place of the dead, worse than dead, dishonoured and infamous.
“Marie Angélique Jeanne Gabrielle ...” the rest was eaten away. But in
the church close by lay the coffins of her ancestors, the crusaders and
nobles, and Marshals of France. The names had been obliterated. But
not even a wronged king had dared to remove the tombs with which that
church was eloquent of the glories that had once been theirs. Yes, they
lay there of right, but she, little Marie, cradled in splendour, who
had prattled of “_Dieu Le Vengeur_,” she, the daughter of a wanton and
a traitor, lay here in the rain, and the sheep and the goats browsed
over her, and the sabots of those once her serfs and tenants made an
insulting path over her grave. And up there another reigned in her
place.
A traitor! Yes, his daughter deserved her fate. There should be no
mercy for traitors.
“What seek you, Monsieur le Vicomte?”
He started at the question. It was the Chevalier de St. Amant, boyish,
insolent, though his tone was strangely soft.
“I was finding a lesson,” André replied quietly.
“In a tombstone?”
André explained. The Chevalier seemed impressed, for he went down on
his knees and peered for some minutes at the weather-beaten stone.
“Poor child!” he muttered. “Poor child!”
André was thinking the Chevalier was better than he had supposed,
but his next action jarred harshly. Standing carelessly on the stone
he gathered his cloak about him. “Ah, well,” he remarked, with his
dare-devil lightness, “it is perhaps more fortunate for you or me that
little Marie is where she is.”
“For you or me?” André questioned, peering into his young face.
“The Marquise awaits you, Vicomte,” he twitched his thumb towards the
château, “perhaps you will understand better when you have seen her,”
and with a careless tip of his saucy hat he strode away.
For one minute André burned to seize that cloak and speak to him very
straightly. “Pah!” he muttered, “it will do later. Perhaps it will not
be necessary at all.”
But it was with increased misgiving that he rode up to the château.
Denise received him in the great hall, unconsciously reproducing the
picture which was burnt into André’s memory, for she stood with a
certain sweet stateliness by the sculptured chimney-piece and a huge
hound lay at her feet. Above her head the emblazoned scutcheon of the
old house still adorned the noble carving--indeed you could not have
destroyed the one without destroying the other--and the glad firelight
which threw such subtly entrancing shadows on the dress and girlish
figure of the young Marquise seemed to point with tongues of flame to
that sublime motto, “_Dieu Le Vengeur!_” above her head.
André bowed and halted. Ambition, passion, and hope conspired to choke
him for the moment. How fair and noble she was! yes, surpassingly fair
and noble.
Denise said nothing. She stared at the buckle of her slipper.
“I have come for my answer,” he said, in a low voice.
She met his pleading eyes fearlessly. “The answer is, ‘No,’” she
replied, and her voice, too, was low, as if she could not trust it.
“No?” he repeated, half stunned.
She simply bowed her head.
“You mean it? Oh, Denise, you cannot mean it?”
“I have reflected and I mean it.”
“For always?”
“Yes.”
André stepped nearer. “I do not remind you, Denise,” he said, speaking
with a composure won by a mighty mastery of himself, “that I love you,
that I have loved you since I could love any woman. If you would not
believe it before I was taken prisoner, when I spoke in the woods of
Versailles, you would not believe it now. Nor do I remind you that
twelve months ago you spoke very differently. A lover and a gentleman
does not speak of these things when the answer has been ‘No.’ But I do
ask you, before you say ‘No,’ always to remember that it was the wish
of your dead father and of mine that the answer should be ‘Yes.’”
“My father died five years ago, yours even longer,” she answered.
“Do the years alter their wish?” he asked, with a touch of passion, “do
they make a promise, good faith, honour, less a promise, less----”
“There was no promise,” she interrupted.
He bowed calmly. The gesture was better than speech.
“And your reason, Denise?”
“I said I would give you an answer, I did not undertake to give
reasons.”
“Certainly. May I plead, however, that perhaps, remembering the past,
what you and I have been to each other since childhood, I have some
right to ask?”
She placed her fan on the shelf of the chimney with sharp decision.
The firelight flashed in her grey eyes. “I refuse,” she said, very
distinctly, “to marry a man who does not love me.”
“Then you do not believe my words?” he questioned quickly.
“You are a noble, André,” she answered; “the courtesy of a noble and
a gentleman requires that when he demands a woman’s hand in marriage
he should profess to love her. For the honour you have done me I thank
you, but a woman finds the proof not in words but in deeds. You are a
brave soldier, but you do not love me. That is enough.”
“No, it is not enough for me,” he answered.
“Very well.” She took a step forward. “I had no desire to discuss
things not fit for a girl to speak of to a man who has done her the
honour to ask her hand in marriage, and I would have spared both myself
and you unnecessary pain. Plainly then and briefly, when I take a
husband I do not choose to share what he professes is his love with any
other woman. That is my reason and my answer in one.”
A flush darkened his sallow cheek. “It is not true,” he protested
passionately, “it is not true.”
“You would deny it?” she cried, passion too leaping into her voice. “Is
that letter to the Comtesse des Forges, one of my friends--my friends,
_mon Dieu!_--yours, or is it not?” She handed it to him with hot scorn.
“It was written twelve months ago,” he said, somewhat lamely.
“And the duel which it caused is twelve months ago, too, I suppose?
The right arm of her husband the Comte des Forges is healed, but the
wound--my God! the wound in his heart and mine, that you can never
heal. And she is not alone. Does not Paris ring with the gallantries of
the Vicomte de Nérac? For aught I know there may be a dozen husbands in
England who have lost their sword arm because André de Nérac professed
to love their wives.” She checked herself and was calm again. “I
thank you for the honour you have done me, but--” she offered him the
stateliest, coldest curtsey, “Vicomte, I am your servant.”
She would have escaped by the door behind her, but André intercepted
her. “No,” he said, “you do not leave me yet. I, too, have something to
say and you, Marquise, will be pleased to hear it.”
Their eyes met and then Denise walked back to her place by the
fireplace. She was trembling now, and she no longer looked him in the
face.
[Illustration: “Is that letter to the Comtesse des Forges, one of my
friends--my friends, _Mon Dieu!_--yours, or is it not?”]
“As to the past,” he said in a low voice, “I say nothing, for I deserve
your reproaches. I have been foolish, wicked, unworthy of you. But
there is no noble to-day at Versailles of whom the same could not be
said. Men are men, and I have never concealed from you what I have
been. But such things do not destroy love. They cannot and they never
will, and every woman knows it. My past, I assert, is not your reason.”
“What then is?” she asked proudly.
“I am poor, you are rich, but that is not the reason, either. Do not
think I would dishonour you by supposing that I believed that, though
some whom you call your friends say it is. No, the reason is that while
I have been away, a prisoner, defenceless, silent, some one--” he
paused, “some one has been poisoning your mind, some one who hopes to
take the place----”
“Take care----” she interrupted.
“You speak of the gossip of Paris. I will not tell you what the gossip
of Paris and Versailles says, for you will hear it and more fitly from
other lips than mine. But I say, that poisoner will answer to me.”
She was about to speak, but checked herself.
“And I will tell you why. First because I love you and I love no one
else. You do not believe it. You ask for deeds, not words. In the
future you shall have them. And second, because you, Denise, love me,
yes, love me.”
“Have done, have done with this mockery!” she cried.
“Tell me,” was his answer, “on your word of honour, that it is not so,
tell me that you do not love me and never will, tell me that you love
another and on my word as a gentleman I will never speak of love to you
again.”
Dead silence. André waited quietly.
“I refuse,” she said, slowly, picking the words, “to be questioned in
this manner. But as you insist, I repeat--I do not love you.”
André bowed. “One word more, Denise, if you please,” he said, “one word
and I leave your presence for ever.”
She drew herself up. “Yes,” she said, “leave me for ever.” But for all
that she, as he, seemed spellbound to the spot.
André deliberately drew from his pocket the letter that she had thrown
in his teeth and faced her. “Thank you,” he said, very calmly. “Now
that I know you mean what you said, I, too, know what I must do.” He
walked away.
“Give me that letter,” she said with a swift flash of command. “It
belongs to me.”
“Pardon,” he answered, quietly, “yesterday the Comte des Forges was
killed by a friend of his whose honour he had betrayed. The letter
belongs to the lady to whom it was written, the lady who will be the
Vicomtesse de Nérac.”
A faint cry escaped from Denise’s lips. For the moment she leaned faint
against the chimney-piece, white and sick.
André looked at her, but he made no effort to offer her either sympathy
or help. Then he walked back, Denise watching him, and flung the letter
into the fire. Denise started, but she said nothing, though her great
grey eyes were eloquent with half a dozen questions.
“The letter has served its purpose,” André said. “Adieu, Marquise!”
“What does this--this trickery mean?” she demanded, hotly.
“You must forgive one who loves you,” was the calm reply, “for love
laughs at tricks. The Comte des Forges is alive and well: he has a
wound in his shoulder which is only a scratch, for the poor Comte is
always believing that some one is betraying his honour and Madame the
Comtesse has a fickle heart. Yesterday I was his second, so I know.”
“Then--then--” she cried and stopped.
André bowed most courteously. “You refused to believe me, Mademoiselle:
I returned the compliment and refused to believe you--and I proved it
by a lover’s trick, if you choose to call it such. That is all, but it
is enough.”
“Ah!” She crumpled up the fan in speechless indignation.
“No, Denise,” he said softly. “I shall not trouble you now or soon,
but--” he had caught her hand--“you shall yet be mine, I swear it. You
think you do not love me, but you shall be convinced--you shall.”
He kissed her fingers with a tender reverence. “Adieu, Marquise! I go
to my duty and revenge,” he said, and he left her there under the spell
of his mastery, with her boar-hound at her feet, and the flames of fire
pointing to the motto “_Dieu Le Vengeur!_”