"Ah! little sweetheart, the romance
Of life, with all its change and chance,
Is but a sealed book to thee."
It took Ralph Hilyard over twelve hours to journey from Southampton to
St Malo on that momentous June night. The sea tossed and bounded and
roared, but he kept his footing on deck, well satisfied with Nature's
frenzied accompaniment to his own tempestuous thoughts. He was being
borne to the historic town where She, from infancy to womanhood, had
dwelt; he would meet those frank blue Breton eyes adjured for a
year--eyes, whose innocence in one less well descended might have spelt
ignorance--he would adore the graceful form, that, while clamouring of
beauty, hinted all unconsciously of the _haute noblesse_, the ghost of
which abides in St Malo to this moment, though the substance has long
since passed away. He would risk all for the encounter, he told himself.
Round the subject his mind had revolved for three hundred and sixty-four
days; on the three hundred and sixty-fifth his thoughts had sprung to
action--he had set sail.
Her people, an austere mother--who loathed the name of the Republic and
rigidly clamped her door against both the bourgeoisie and our British
nation of shopkeepers--and her brother, Le Sieur de Quesne, a foolish
and thoroughly useless fine gentleman, occupied "La Chaumais," their
ancestral domain, near St Servan, on the river Rance. This domain was
almost as hermetically sealed as a convent, and far more gloomy. It
served to perfection as a prison for the peccant Leonie, when it was
discovered that, during a fortnight's stay with an aunt in Paris, she
had ventured to eye as a lover a portionless upstart, an artist who
worked for mere bread in the Quartier Latin. Here, for twelve months,
the poor delinquent was incarcerated. In this mouldy mansion she either
knitted or stared vacantly out at the rank unkempt grass and the
dilapidated fences, kept by poverty unrepaired, while her parent
reiterated stories of the grand old days when the tapestried chairs,
woefully faded, had been fresh and beauteous, and when the de Quesne
nobles had flitted from the splendours of the Tuilleries to hold rural
court within those blackened portals now so severe of aspect, so
melancholy and silent with the pulselessness of stagnation.
A sore punishment this for having confessed in her heart's _naivete_ a
passion for a hero of the brush, a vagrant in velveteen who painted
pictures and--vulgarian!--sold them to any patronising passer-by. It was
penalty dire enough for a _debutante_ who had but sipped Paris, it waxed
doubly dreadful to inquiring Eve within scent of the apple tree. There
were tears at first, sobs of despair, then dumb contumacy, and
latterly--when the spring weather returned again--kicks! But the pricks
of family pride were sharp to lunge against, and many drops of heart's
blood were spilt in the exercise. Restrictions only grew more rigid, and
the poor little damsel, who had tricoteed sombrely in the ancestral
dungeon during the winter, was, in summer, never permitted to roam
without the vigilant companionship of the substantial retainer
Valentine, a worthy who, from her elaborately starched _coiffe_ to the
heels of her _sabots_, was strongly imbued with a sense of conscientious
vassalage to "Madame," as Leonie's mother in these degenerate days
condescended to be styled.
But love, which laughs at iron bars, makes also mock at the effrontery
of blue blood. There came a day, not long after Ralph Hilyard's sudden
arrival at St Malo, when, Valentine's expansive back being for a moment
turned, a two-lined scribble on a shred of drawing paper was placed in
Mademoiselle de Quesne's hands.