In the great hall of Condillac, where the Marquise, her son, and
Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye had been at dinner, a sudden confusion had
been spread by the arrival of that courier so soon as it was known that
he bore letters from Florimond, Marquis de Condillac.
Madame had risen hastily, fear and defiance blending in her face,
and she had at once commanded mademoiselle’s withdrawal. Valerie had
wondered might there not be letters--or, leastways, messages--for
herself from her betrothed. But her pride had suppressed the eager
question that welled up to her lips. She would, too, have questioned the
courier concerning Florimond’s health; she would have asked him how the
Marquis looked, and where the messenger had left him. But of all this
that she craved to know, nothing could she bring herself to ask before
the Marquise.
She rose in silence upon hearing the Dowager order Fortunio to summon
Battista that he might re-conduct mademoiselle to her apartments,
and she moved a few paces down the hall, towards the door, in proud,
submissive readiness to depart. Yet she could not keep her eyes from the
dust-stained courier, who, having flung his hat and whip upon the floor,
was now opening his wallet, the Dowager standing before him to receive
his papers.
Marius, affecting an insouciance he did not feel, remained at table,
his page behind his chair, his hound stretched at his feet; and he now
sipped his wine, now held it to the light that he might observe the
beauty of its deep red colour.
At last Fortunio returned, and mademoiselle took her departure, head in
the air and outwardly seeming nowise concerned in what was taking place.
With her went Fortunio. And the Marquise, who now held the package she
had received from the courier, bade the page depart also.
When the three were at last alone, she paused before opening the letter
and turned again to the messenger. She made a brave figure in the
flood of sunlight that poured through the gules and azures of the long
blazoned windows, her tall, lissome figure clad in a close-fitting robe
of black velvet, her abundant glossy black hair rolled back under its
white coif, her black eyes and scarlet lips detaching from the ivory of
her face, in which no trace of emotion showed, for all the anxiety that
consumed her.
“Where left you the Marquis de Condillac?” she asked the fellow.
“At La Rochette, madame,” the courier answered,’ and his answer brought
Marius to his feet with an oath.
“So near?” he cried out. But the Dowager’s glance remained calm and
untroubled.
“How does it happen that he did not hasten himself, to Condillac?” she
asked.
“I do not know, madame. I did not see Monsieur le Marquis. It was his
servant brought me that letter with orders to ride hither.”
Marius approached his mother, his brow clouded.
“Let us see what he says,” he suggested anxiously. But his mother did
not heed him. She stood balancing the package in her hand.
“Can you tell us, then, nothing of Monsieur le Marquis?”
“Nothing more than I have told you, madame.”
She bade Marius call Fortunio, and then dismissed the courier, bidding
her captain see to his refreshment.
Then, alone at last with her son, she hastily tore the covering from
the letter, unfolded it and read. And Marius, moved by anxiety, came to
stand beside and just behind her, where he too might read. The letter
ran:
“MY VERY DEAR MARQUISE,--I do not doubt but that it will pleasure you
to hear that I am on my way home, and that but for a touch of fever that
has detained us here at La Rochette, I should be at Condillac as soon as
the messenger who is the bearer of these presents. A courier from Paris
found me a fortnight since in Milan, with letters setting forth that my
father had been dead six months, and that it was considered expedient at
Court that I should return home forthwith to assume the administration
of Condillac. I am lost in wonder that a communication of this nature
should have been addressed to me from Paris instead of from you, as
surely it must have been your duty to advise me of my father’s decease
at the time of that untoward event. I am cast down by grief at this evil
news, and the summons from Court has brought me in all haste from Milan.
The lack of news from Condillac has been for months a matter of surprise
to me. My father’s death may be some explanation of this, but scarcely
explanation enough. However, madame, I count upon it that you will be
able to dispel such doubts as I am fostering. I count too, upon being
at Condillac by the end of week, but I beg that neither you nor my
dear Marius will allow this circumstance to make any difference to
yourselves, just as, although I am returning to assume the government of
Condillac as the Court has suggested to me, I hope that yourself and my
dear brother will continue to make it your home for as long as it shall
pleasure you. So long shall it pleasure me.
“I am, my dear marquise, your very humble and very affectionate servant
and stepson,
“FLORIMOND”
When she had read to the end, the Dowager turned back and read aloud
the passage: “However, madame, I count upon it that you will be able to
dispel such doubts as I am fostering.” She looked at her son, who had
shifted his position, so that he was now confronting her.
“He has his suspicions that all is not as it should be,” sneered Marius.
“Yet his tone is amiable throughout. It cannot be that they said too
much in that letter from Paris.” A little trill of bitter laughter
escaped her. “We are to continue to make this our home for as long as it
shall pleasure us. So long shall it pleasure him!”
Then, with a sudden seriousness, she folded the letter and, putting her
hands behind her, looked up into her son’s face.
“Well?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”
“Strange that he makes no mention of Valerie” said Marius pensively.
“Pooh! A Condillac thinks lightly of his women. What are you going to
do?”
His handsome countenance, so marvellously like her own, was overcast. He
looked gloomily at his mother for a moment; then with a slight twitch
of the shoulders he turned and moved past her slowly in the direction
of the hearth. He leaned his elbow on the overmantel and rested his brow
against his clenched right hand, and stood so awhile in moody thought.
She watched him, a frown between her arrogant eyes.
“Aye, ponder it,” said she. “He is at La Rochette, within a day’s ride,
and only detained there by a touch of fever. In any case he promises to
be here by the end of the week. By Saturday, then, Condillac will have
passed out of our power; it will be lost to you irretrievably. Will you
lose La Vauvraye as well?”
He let his hand fall to his side, and turned, fully to face her.
“What can I do? What can we do?” he asked, a shade of petulance in his
question.
She stepped close up to him and rested her hand lightly upon his
shoulder.
“You have had three months in which to woo that girl, and you have
tarried sadly over it, Marius. You have now at most three days in which
to accomplish it. What will you do?”
“I have been maladroit perhaps,” he said, with bitterness. “I have
been over-patient with her. I have counted too much upon the chance of
Florimond’s being dead, as seemed from the utter lack of news of him.
Yet what could I do? Carry her off by force and compel at the dagger’s
point some priest to marry us?”
She moved her hand from his shoulder and smiled, as if she derided him
and his heat.
“You want for invention, Marius,” said she. “And yet I beg that you will
exert your mind, or Sunday next shall find us well-nigh homeless. I’ll
take no charity from the Marquis de Condillac, nor, I think, will you.”
“If all fails,” said he, “we have still your house in Touraine.”
“My house?” she echoed, her voice shrill with scorn. “My hovel, you
would say. Could you abide there--in such a sty?”
“_Vertudieu_! If all else failed, we might be glad of it.”
“Glad of it? Not I, for one. Yet all else will fail unless you bestir
yourself in the next three days. Condillac is as good as lost to
you already, since Florimond is upon the threshold. La Vauvraye most
certainly will be lost to you as well unless you make haste to snatch it
in the little moment that is left you.”
“Can I achieve the impossible, madame?” he cried, and his impatience
waxed beneath this unreasonable insistence of his mother’s.
“Who asks it of you?”
“Do not you, madame?”
“I? Pish! All that I urge is that you take Valerie across the border
into Savoy where you can find a priest to marry you, and get it done
this side of Saturday.”
“And is not that the impossible? She will not go with me, as you well
know, madame.”
There was a moment’s silence. The Dowager shot him a glance; then her
eyes fell. Her bosom stirred as if some strange excitement moved
her. Fear and shame were her emotions; for a way she knew by which
mademoiselle might be induced to go with him--not only willingly, but
eagerly, she thought--to the altar. But she was his mother, and even her
harsh nature shuddered before the task of instructing him in this vile
thing. Why had the fool not wit enough to see it for himself?
Observing her silence Marius smiled sardonically.
“You may well ponder it,” said he. “It is an easy matter to tell me what
I should do. Tell me, rather, how it should be done.”
His blindness stirred her anger, and her anger whelmed her hesitation.
“Were I in your place, Marius, I should find a way,” said she, in a
voice utterly expressionless, her eyes averted ever from his own.
He scanned her curiously. Her agitation was plain to him, and it puzzled
him, as did the downcast glance of eyes usually so bold and insolent in
their gaze. Then he pondered her tone, so laden with expression by its
very expressionlessness, and suddenly a flood of light broke upon his
mind, revealing very clearly and hideously her meaning. He caught his
breath with a sudden gasp and blenched a little. Then his lips tightened
suddenly.
“In that case, madame,” he said, after a pause, and speaking as if he
were still without revelation of her meaning, “I can but regret that you
are not in my place. For, as it is, I am thinking we shall have to make
the best of the hovel in Touraine.”
She bit her lip in the intensity of her chagrin and shame. She was no
fool, nor did she imagine from his words that her meaning had been lost
upon him. She knew that he had understood, and that he chose to pretend
that he had not. She looked up suddenly, her dark eyes blazing, a splash
of colour in either cheek.
“Fool!” she snapped at him; “you lily-livered fool! Are you indeed
my son? Are you--by God!--that you talk so lightly of yielding?” She
advanced a step in his direction. “Through your cowardice you may be
content to spend your days in beggary; not so am I; nor shall I be,
so long as I have an arm and a voice. You may go hence if your courage
fails you outright; but I’ll throw up the bridge and entrench myself
within these walls. Florimond de Condillac sets no foot in here while I
live; and if he should come within range of musket-shot, it will be the
worse for him.”
“I think you are mad, madame--mad so to talk of resisting him, as you
are mad to call me coward. I’ll leave you till you are come to a more
tranquil frame of mind.” And turning upon his heel, his face on fire
from the lash of her contempt, he strode down the hall and passed out,
leaving her alone.
White again, with heaving bosom and clenched hands, she stood a moment
where he had left her, then dropped into a chair, and taking her chin
in her hand she rested her elbow on her knee. Thus she remained, the
firelight tinting her perfect profile, on which little might be read of
the storm that was raging in her soul. Another woman in her place would
have sought relief in tears, but tears came rarely to the beautiful eyes
of the Marquise de Condillac.
She sat there until the sun had passed from the windows behind her and
the corners of the room were lost in the quickening shadows. At last she
was disturbed by the entrance of a lackey, who announced that Monsieur
le Comte de Tressan, Lord Seneschal of Dauphiny, was come to Condillac.
She bade the fellow call help to clear the board, where still was set
their interrupted noontide meal, and then to admit the Seneschal.
With her back to the stirring, bustling servants she stood, pensively
regarding the flames, and a smile that was mocking rather than aught
else spread upon her face.
If all else failed her, she told herself, there would be no Touraine
hovel for her. She could always be Comtesse de Tressan. Let Marius work
out alone the punishment of his cowardice.
Away in the Northern Tower, where mademoiselle was lodged, she sat in
eager talk with Garnache, who had returned unobserved and successful
from his journey of espionage.
He had told her what from the conversation of Marius and his mother he
had learned touching the contents of that letter. Florimond lay as near
as La Rochette, detained there by a touch of fever, but promising to be
at Condillac by the end of the week. Since that was so, Valerie opined
there was no longer the need to put themselves to the trouble of the
escape they had planned. Let them wait until Florimond came.
But Garnache shook his head. He had heard more; and for all that he
accounted her at present safe from Marius, yet he made no false estimate
of that supple gentleman’s character, was not deluded by his momentary
show of niceness. As the time of Florimond’s arrival grew nearer, he
thought it very possible that Marius might be rendered desperate. There
was grave danger in remaining. He said naught of this, yet he convinced
mademoiselle that it were best to go.
“Though there will no longer be the need of a toilsome journey as far
as Paris,” he concluded. “A four hours’ ride to La Rochette, and you may
embrace your betrothed.”
“Did he speak of me in his letter, know you, monsieur?” she inquired.
“I heard them say that he did not,” Garnache replied. “But it may well
be that he had good reason. He may suspect more than he has written.”
“In that case,” she asked--and there was a wounded note in her
voice--“Why should a touch of fever keep him at La Rochette? Would a
touch of fever keep you from the woman you loved, monsieur, if you knew,
or even suspected, that she was in durance?”
“I do not know, mademoiselle. I am an old man who has never loved, and
so it would be unfair of me to pass judgment upon lovers. That they
think not as other folk is notorious; their minds are for the time
disordered.”
Nevertheless he looked at her where she sat by the window, so gentle, so
lissome, so sweet, and so frail, and he had a shrewd notion that were he
Florimond de Condillac, whether he feared her in durance or not, not the
fever, nor the plague itself should keep him for the best part of a week
at La Rochette within easy ride of her.
She smiled gently at his words, and turned the conversation to the
matter that imported most.
“Tonight then, it is determined that we are to go?”
“At midnight or a little after. Be in readiness, mademoiselle, and
do not keep me waiting when I rap upon your door. Haste may be of
importance.”
“You may count upon me, my friend,” she answered him, and stirred by a
sudden impulse she held out her hand. “You have been very good to me,
Monsieur de Garnache. You have made life very different for me since
your coming. I had it in my mind to blame you once for your rashness in
returning alone. I was a little fool. You can never know the peace that
has come to me from having you at hand. The fears, the terrors that
possessed me before you came have all been dispelled in this last week
that you have been my sentry in two senses.”
He took the hand she held out to him, and looked down at her out of his
grimy, disfigured face, an odd tenderness stirring him. He felt as might
have felt a father towards his daughter--at least, so thought he then.
“Child,” he answered her, “you overrate it. I have done no less than I
could do, no more than any other would have done.”
“Yet more than Florimond has done--and he my betrothed. A touch of fever
was excuse enough to keep him at La Rochette, whilst the peril of death
did not suffice to deter you from coming hither.”
“You forget, mademoiselle, that, maybe, he does not know your
circumstances.”
“Maybe he does not,” said she, with a half-sigh. Then she looked up
into his face again. “I am sad at the thought of going, monsieur,” she
surprised him by saying.
“Sad?” he cried. Then he laughed. “But what can there be to sadden you?”
“This, monsieur: that after to-night it is odds I shall never see you
more.” She said it without hesitation and without coquetry, for her
upbringing had been simple and natural in an atmosphere different far
from that in which had been reared the courtly women he had known. “You
will return to Paris and the great world, and I shall live out my life
in this, little corner of Dauphiny. You will forget me in the bustle of
your career, monsieur; but I shall always hold your memory very dear
and very gratefully. You are the only friend I have ever known since my
father died excepting Florimond, though it is so long since I have seen
him, and he never came to me in times of stress as you have done.”
“Mademoiselle,” he answered, touched despite himself more touched than
he could have believed possible to his callous, world-worn nature--“you
make me very proud; you make me feel a little better than I am, for if
I have earned your regard and friendship, there must be some good in old
Garnache. Believe me, mademoiselle, I too shall not forget.”
And thereafter they remained a spell in silence, she sitting by the
window, gazing out into the bright October sky, he standing by her
chair, thoughtfully considering her brown head so gracefully set upon
her little shoulders. A feeling came to him that was odd and unusual; he
sought to interpret it, and he supposed it to mean that he wished that
at some time in the dim past he might have married some woman who would
have borne him for daughter such a one as this.