TOURDESTELLE
On the part of Beauchamp, his conversation with Cecilia during the
drive into Bevisham opened out for the first time in his life a
prospect of home; he had felt the word in speaking it, and it signified
an end to the distractions produced by the sex, allegiance to one
beloved respected woman, and also a basis of operations against the
world. For she was evidently conquerable, and once matched with him
would be the very woman to nerve and sustain him. Did she not listen to
him? He liked her resistance. That element of the barbarous which went
largely to form his emotional nature was overjoyed in wresting such a
woman from the enemy, and subduing her personally. She was a prize. She
was a splendid prize, cut out from under the guns of the fort. He
rendered all that was due to his eminently good cause for its part in
so signal a success, but individual satisfaction is not diminished by
the thought that the individual’s discernment selected the cause thus
beneficent to him.
Beauchamp’s meditations were diverted by the sight of the coast of
France dashed in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea. The “three days”
granted him by Renée were over, and it scarcely troubled him that he
should be behind the time; he detested mystery, holding it to be a sign
of pretentious feebleness, often of imposture, it might be frivolity.
Punctilious obedience to the mysterious brevity of the summons, and not
to chafe at it, appeared to him as much as could be expected of a
struggling man. This was the state of the case with him, until he stood
on French earth, breathed French air, and chanced to hear the tongue of
France twittered by a lady on the quay. The charm was instantaneous. He
reminded himself that Renée, unlike her countrywomen, had no gift for
writing letters. They had never corresponded since the hour of her
marriage. They had met in Sicily, at Syracuse, in the presence of her
father and her husband, and so inanimate was she that the meeting
seemed like the conclusion of their history. Her brother Roland sent
tidings of her by fits, and sometimes a conventional message from
Tourdestelle. Latterly her husband’s name had been cited as among the
wildfires of Parisian quays, in journals more or less devoted to those
unreclaimed spaces of the city. Well, if she was unhappy, was it not
the fulfilment of his prophecy in Venice?
Renée’s brevity became luminous. She needed him urgently, and knowing
him faithful to the death, she, because she knew him, dispatched purely
the words which said she needed him. Why, those brief words were the
poetry of noble confidence! But what could her distress be? The lover
was able to read that, “Come; I give you three days,” addressed to him,
was not language of a woman free of her yoke.
Excited to guess and guess, Beauchamp swept on to speculations of a
madness that seized him bodily at last. Were you loved, Cecilia? He
thought little of politics in relation to Renée; or of home, or of
honour in the world’s eye, or of labouring to pay the fee for his share
of life. This at least was one of the forms of love which precipitate
men: the sole thought in him was to be with her. She was Renée, the
girl of whom he had prophetically said that she must come to regrets
and tears. His vision of her was not at Tourdestelle, though he assumed
her to be there awaiting him: she was under the sea-shadowing Alps,
looking up to the red and gold-rosed heights of a realm of morning that
was hers inviolably, and under which Renée was eternally his.
The interval between then and now was but the space of an unquiet sea
traversed in the night, sad in the passage of it, but featureless—and
it had proved him right! It was to Nevil Beauchamp as if the spirit of
his old passion woke up again to glorious hopeful morning when he stood
in Renée’s France.
Tourdestelle enjoyed the aristocratic privilege of being twelve miles
from the nearest railway station. Alighting here on an evening of clear
sky, Beauchamp found an English groom ready to dismount for him and
bring on his portmanteau. The man said that his mistress had been twice
to the station, and was now at the neighbouring Château Dianet. Thither
Beauchamp betook himself on horseback. He was informed at the gates
that Madame la Marquise had left for Tourdestelle in the saddle only
ten minutes previously. The lodge-keeper had been instructed to invite
him to stay at Château Dianet in the event of his arriving late, but it
would be possible to overtake madame by a cut across the heights at a
turn of the valley. Beauchamp pushed along the valley for this visible
projection; a towering mass of woodland, in the midst of which a narrow
roadway, worn like the track of a torrent with heavy rain, wound
upward. On his descent to the farther side, he was to spy directly
below in the flat for Tourdestelle. He crossed the wooded neck above
the valley, and began descending, peering into gulfs of the twilight
dusk. Some paces down he was aided by a brilliant half-moon that
divided the whole underlying country into sharp outlines of dark and
fair, and while endeavouring to distinguish the château of Tourdestelle
his eyes were attracted to an angle of the downward zigzag, where a
pair of horses emerged into broad light swiftly; apparently the riders
were disputing, or one had overtaken the other in pursuit. Riding-habit
and plumed hat signalized the sex of one. Beauchamp sung out a
gondolier’s cry. He fancied it was answered.
He was heard, for the lady turned about, and as he rode down, still
uncertain of her, she came cantering up alone, and there could be no
uncertainty.
Moonlight is friendless to eyes that would make sure of a face long
unseen. It was Renée whose hand he clasped, but the story of the years
on her, and whether she was in bloom, or wan as the beams revealing
her, he could not see.
Her tongue sounded to him as if it were loosened without a voice. “You
have come. That storm! You are safe!”
So phantom-like a sound of speech alarmed him. “I lost no time. But
you?”
“I am well.”
“Nothing hangs over you?”
“Nothing.”
“Why give me just three days?”
“Pure impatience. Have you forgotten me?”
Their horses walked on with them. They unlocked their hands.
“You knew it was I?” said he.
“Who else could it be? I heard Venice,” she replied.
Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it
appeared, searching for something that eluded him under the road-side
bank. He sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked,
as he drew up beside Renée: “What one picks from the earth one may
wear, I presume, especially when we can protest it is our property.”
Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the
breast buttonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some
drooping exotic of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.
Renée pronounced his name: “M. le Comte Henri d’Henriel.”
He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.
“Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine God,
beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer. Thanks to the
storm, I suppose, I have won. I must maintain, madame, that I won.”
“You wear your trophy,” said Renée, and her horse reared and darted
ahead.
The gentleman on each side of her struck into a trot. Beauchamp glanced
at M. d’Henriel’s breast-decoration. Renée pressed the pace, and
threading dense covers of foliage they reached the level of the valley,
where for a couple of miles she led them, stretching away merrily, now
in shadow, now in moonlight, between high land and meadow land, and a
line of poplars in the meadows winding with the river that fed the vale
and shot forth gleams of silvery disquiet by rustic bridge and mill.
The strangeness of being beside her, not having yet scanned her face,
marvelling at her voice—that was like and unlike the Renée of old, full
of her, but in another key, a mellow note, maturer—made the ride
magical to Beauchamp, planting the past in the present like a
perceptible ghost.
Renée slackened speed, saying: “Tourdestelle spans a branch of our
little river. This is our gate. Had it been daylight I would have taken
you by another way, and you would have seen the black tower burnt in
the Revolution; an imposing monument, I am assured. However, you will
think it pretty beside the stream. Do you come with us, M. le Comte?”
His answer was inaudible to Beauchamp; he did not quit them.
The lamp at the lodge-gates presented the young man’s face in full
view, and Beauchamp thought him supremely handsome. He perceived it to
be a lady’s glove that M. d’Henriel wore at his breast.
Renée walked her horse up the park-drive, alongside the bright running
water. It seemed that she was aware of the method of provoking or
reproving M. d’Henriel. He endured some minutes of total speechlessness
at this pace, and abruptly said adieu and turned back.
Renée bounded like a vessel free of her load. “But why should we
hurry?” said she, and checked her course to the walk again. “I hope you
like our Normandy, and my valley. You used to love France, Nevil; and
Normandy, they tell me, is cousin to the opposite coast of England, in
climate, soil, people, it may be in manners too. A Beauchamp never can
feel that he is a foreigner in Normandy. We claim you half French. You
have grander parks, they say. We can give you sunlight.”
“And it was really only the wish to see me?” said Beauchamp.
“Only, and really. One does not live for ever—on earth; and it becomes
a question whether friends should be shadows to one another before
death. I wrote to you because I wished to see you: I was impatient
because I am Renée.”
“You relieve me!”
“Evidently you have forgotten my character, Nevil.”
“Not a feature of it.”
“Ah!” she breathed involuntarily.
“Would you have me forget it?”
“When I think by myself, quite alone, yes, I would. Otherwise how can
one hope that one’s friend is friendship, supposing him to read us as
we are—minutely, accurately? And it is in absence that we desire our
friends to be friendship itself. And... and I am utterly astray! I have
not dealt in this language since I last thought of writing a diary, and
stared at the first line. If I mistake not, you are fond of the
picturesque. If moonlight and water will satisfy you, look yonder.”
The moon launched her fairy silver fleets on a double sweep of the
little river round an island of reeds and two tall poplars.
“I have wondered whether I should ever see you looking at that scene,”
said Renée.
He looked from it to her, and asked if Roland was well, and her father;
then alluded to her husband; but the unlettering elusive moon, bright
only in the extension of her beams, would not tell him what story this
face, once heaven to him, wore imprinted on it. Her smile upon a parted
mouth struck him as two-edged in replying: “I have good news to give
you of them all: Roland is in garrison at Rouen, and will come when I
telegraph. My father is in Touraine, and greets you affectionately; he
hopes to come. They are both perfectly happy. My husband is
travelling.”
Beauchamp was conscious of some bitter taste; unaware of what it was,
though it led him to say, undesigningly: “How very handsome that M.
d’Henriel is!—if I have his name correctly.”
Renée answered: “He has the misfortune to be considered the handsomest
young man in France.”
“He has an Italian look.”
“His mother was Provençale.”
She put her horse in motion, saying: “I agree with you that handsome
men are rarities. And, by the way, they do not set _our_ world on fire
quite as much as beautiful women do yours, my friend. Acknowledge so
much in our favour.”
He assented indefinitely. He could have wished himself away canvassing
in Bevisham. He had only to imagine himself away from her, to feel the
flood of joy in being with her.
“Your husband is travelling?”
“It is his pleasure.”
Could she have intended to say that this was good news to give of him
as well as of the happiness of her father and brother?
“Now look on Tourdestelle,” said Renée. “You will avow that for an
active man to be condemned to seek repose in so dull a place, after the
fatigues of the season in Paris, it is considerably worse than for
women, so I am here to dispense the hospitalities. The right wing of
the château, on your left, is new. The side abutting the river is
inhabited by Dame Philiberte, whom her husband imprisoned for
attempting to take her pleasure in travel. I hear upon authority that
she dresses in white, and wears a black crucifix. She is many centuries
old, and still she lives to remind people that she married a
Rouaillout. Do you not think she should have come to me to welcome me?
She never has; and possibly of ladies who are disembodied we may say
that they know best. For me, I desire the interview—and I am a coward:
I need not state it.” She ceased; presently continuing: “The other
inhabitants are my sister, Agnès d’Auffray, wife of a general officer
serving in Afric—my sister by marriage, and my friend; the baronne
d’Orbec, a relation by marriage; M. d’Orbec, her son, a guest, and a
sportsman; M. Livret, an erudite. No young ladies: I can bear much, but
not their presence; girls are odious to me. I knew one in Venice.”
They came within the rays of the lamp hanging above the unpretending
entrance to the château. Renée’s broad grey Longueville hat curved low
with its black plume on the side farthest from him. He was favoured by
the gallant lift of the brim on the near side, but she had overshadowed
her eyes.
“He wears a glove at his breast,” said Beauchamp.
“You speak of M. d’Henriel. He wears a glove at his breast; yes, it is
mine,” said Renée.
She slipped from her horse and stood against his shoulder, as if
waiting to be questioned before she rang the bell of the château.
Beauchamp alighted, burning with his unutterable questions concerning
that glove.
“Lift your hat, let me beg you; let me see you,” he said.
This was not what she had expected. With one heave of her bosom, and
murmuring: “I made a vow I would obey you absolutely if you came,” she
raised the hat above her brows, and lightning would not have surprised
him more; for there had not been a single vibration of her voice to
tell him of tears running: nay, the absence of the usual French
formalities in her manner of addressing him, had seemed to him to
indicate her intention to put him at once on an easy friendly footing,
such as would be natural to her, and not painful to him. Now she said:
“You perceive, monsieur, that I have my sentimental fits like others;
but in truth I am not insensible to the picturesque or to gratitude,
and I thank you sincerely for coming, considering that I wrote like a
Sphinx—to evade writing _comme une folle!_”
She swept to the bell.
Standing in the arch of the entrance, she stretched her whip out to a
black mass of prostrate timber, saying:
“It fell in the storm at two o’clock after midnight, and you on the
sea!”