wrathfully. ‘Malcolm Fitzroy her ladyship’s lover! Poor woman, poor
woman! I thought you knew, and now I must break confidence, to clear
her, and tell you the wretched story.’
He drew Fred into his study, carefully closed the door, and there laid
bare a situation as odd as the personality of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. A
titled lady in Northumberland lost a new-born infant, and was herself
pronounced in danger unless a child could be found to take its place.
A gypsy outcast was discovered to have given birth to twins on the
same day, and was glad enough to resign the baby girl to the bereaved
aristocrat. The twins were the result of an intrigue between an English
gentleman and a handsome gypsy. The little girl blossomed into youth,
as English and refined as could be, and her foster-mother, whose
life she had saved, could not bring herself to part with her. As no
other children came, she grew up the daughter of the house, adored by
her self-made parents. The boy was his mother’s son, an intractable
vagrant, incapable of control, with the saving grace of a passionate
attachment to his sister.
When the Earl of Harborough came forward as a suitor, the old lord
and his wife debated long upon their duty to him and to his house,
and their desire for their darling’s advancement. The latter instinct
prevailed, and the earl believed himself the husband of a well-born
English maiden. The adopted parents were both dead, and the countess,
unhappy in her marriage, had nobody to turn to in her troubles but her
gypsy brother. To make good his dubious footing at the Hall, Fitzroy
had cast himself in the way of the earl, and secured an extraordinary
popularity in the village and upon the estate. The earl thought him a
droll fellow, unbent patronisingly to him, and enjoyed his odd vagabond
habits.
This was the secret of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy and the Countess of
Harborough.
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
_To Alice Cockran_
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
HERVÉ DE VERVAINVILLE, Marquis de Saint-Laurent, was at once the
biggest and smallest landlord of Calvados, the most important personage
of that department and the most insignificant and powerless. Into his
cradle the fairies had dropped all the gifts of fortune but those two,
without which the others taste as ashes--love and happiness. His life
was uncoloured by the affections of home, and his days, like his ragged
little visage and his dull personality, were vague, with the vagueness
of negative misery. Of his nurse he was meekly afraid, and his
relations with the other servants were of the most distantly polite and
official nature. He understood that they were there to do his bidding
nominally, and compel him actually to do theirs, pending his hour of
authority. With a little broken sigh, he envied the happiness that he
rootedly believed to accompany the more cheerful proportions of the
cottager’s experience, of which he occasionally caught glimpses in his
daily walks, remembering the chill solitude of his own big empty castle
and the immense park that seemed an expansion of his imprisonment,
including, as part of his uninterrupted gloom, the kindly meadows and
woods, the babbling streams and leafy avenues, where the birds sang of
joys uncomprehended by him.
Play was as foreign to him as hope. Every morning he gravely saluted
the picture of his pretty mother, which hung in his bedroom, a lovely
picture, hardly real in its dainty Greuze-like charm, arch and frail
and innocent, the bloom of whose eighteen years had been sacrificed
upon his own coming, leaving a copy washed of all beauty, its delicacy
blurred in a half-effaced boyish visage without character or colouring.
Of his father Hervé never spoke,--shrinking, with the unconscious pride
of race, from the male interloper who had been glad enough to drop
an inferior name, and was considered by his friends to have waltzed
himself and his handsome eyes into an enviable bondage. And the only
return he could make to the house that had so benefited him was a
flying visit from Paris to inspect the heir and confer with his son’s
steward (whose guardian he had been appointed by the old marquis at
his death), and then return to his city pleasures, which he found more
entertaining than his Norman neighbours.
On Sunday morning little Hervé was conducted to High Mass in the church
of Saint-Laurent, upon the broad highroad leading to the town of
Falaise. Duly escorted up the aisle by an obsequious Swiss in military
hat and clanking sword, with a long blonde moustache that excited the
boy’s admiration, Hervé and his nurse were bowed into the colossal
family pew, as large as a moderate-sized chamber, roughly carven and
running along the flat wide tombs of his ancestors, on which marble
statues of knights and mediæval ladies lay lengthways. The child’s air
of melancholy and solitary state was enough to make any honest heart
ache, and his presence never failed to waken the intense interest of
the simple congregation, and supply them with food for speculation as
to his future over their mid-day soup and cider. Hard indeed would it
have been to define the future of the little man sitting so decorously
in his huge pew, and following the long services in a spirit of almost
pathetic conventionality and resignation, only very occasionally
relieved by his queer broken sigh, that had settled into a trick, or a
furtive wandering of his eyes, that sought distraction among ancestral
epitaphs.
He was not, it must be owned, an engaging child, though soft-hearted
and timidly attracted by animals, whose susceptibilities he would have
feared to offend by any uninvited demonstration of affection. He had
heard himself described as plain and dull, and thought it his duty to
refrain as much as possible from inflicting his presence upon others,
preferring loneliness to adverse criticism. But he had one friend who
had found him out, and taken him to her equally unhappy and tender
heart. The Comtesse de Fresney, a lady of thirty, was, like himself,
miserable and misunderstood. Hervé thought she must be very beautiful
for him to love her so devotedly, and he looked forward with much
eagerness to the time of her widowhood, when he should be free to marry
her.
There was something inexpressibly sad in the drollery of their
relations. Neither was aware of the comic element, while both were
profoundly impressed with the sadness. Whenever a fair, a race, or
a company of strolling players took the tyrannical count away from
Fresney, a messenger was at once despatched to Saint-Laurent, and
gladly the little marquis trotted off to console his friend.
One day Hervé gave expression to his matrimonial intentions. The
countess, sitting with her hands in her lap, was gazing gloomily out of
the window, when she turned, and said, sighing: ‘Do you know, Hervé,
that I have never even been to Paris?’
Hervé did not know, and was not of an age to measure the frightful
depth of privation confessed. But the countess spoke in a sadder voice
than usual, and, in response to her sigh, his childish lips parted in
his own vague little sigh.
‘When I am grown up, I’ll take you to Paris, Countess,’ he said, coming
near, and timidly fondling her hand.
‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess, and she stooped to kiss him.
‘M. le Comte is so old that he will probably be dead by that time,
and then I can marry you, Countess, and you will live always at
Saint-Laurent. You know it is bigger than Fresney.’
‘Yes, Hervé,’ said the countess musingly, thinking of her lost years
and dead dreams, as she stared across the pleasant landscape.
Hervé regarded himself as an engaged gentleman from that day. The
following Sunday he studied the epitaph on the tomb of the last
Marquis, his grandfather, who had vanished into the darkness of an
unexplored continent, with notebook and scientific intent, to leave his
bones to whiten in the desert and the name of a brave man to adorn his
country’s annals. Hervé was all excitement to learn from the countess
the precise meaning of the words _distinguished_ and _explorer_.
‘Countess,’ he hurried to ask, ‘what is it to be distinguished?’
‘It is greatly to do great things, Hervé.’
‘And what does _explorer_ mean?’
‘To go far away into the unknown; to find out unvisited places, and
teach others how much larger the world is than they imagine.’
This explanation thrilled new thoughts and ambition in the breast
of the little marquis. Why should not he begin at once to explore
the world, and see for himself what lay beyond the dull precincts of
Saint-Laurent? He then would become distinguished like his grandfather,
and the countess would be proud of him. The scheme hurried his pulses,
and gave him his first taste of excitement, which stood him in place
of a very small appetite. He watched his moment in the artful instinct
of childhood with a scheme in its head. It was not difficult to elude
a careless nurse and gossiping servants, and he knew an alley by which
the broad straight road, leading from the castle to the town, might
be reached over a friendly stile that involved no pledge of secrecy
from an untrustworthy lodge-keeper. And away he was scampering along
the hedge, drunk with excitement and the glory of his own unprotected
state, drunk with the spring sunshine and the smell of violets that
made breathing a bliss.
Picture a tumble-down town, with a quantity of little streets breaking
unexpectedly into glimpses of green meadow and foliage; rickety
omnibuses, jerking and rumbling upon uncouth wheels, mysteriously held
by their drivers from laying their contents upon the jagged pavements;
little old-fashioned squares, washed by runlets for paving divisions,
with the big names of _La Trinité_, _Saint-Gervais_, _Guillaume le
Conquérant_, and the _Grand Turc_,--the latter the most unlikely form
of heretic ever to have shaken the equilibrium of the quaint town;
a public fountain, a market-place, many-aisled churches, smelling
of damp and decay, their fretted arches worn with age, and their
pictures bleached of all colour by the moist stone; primitive shops,
latticed windows, asthmatical old men in blouses and night-caps, in
which they seem to have been born and in which they promise to die;
girls in linen towers and starched side-flaps concealing every curl
and wave of their hair, their _sabots_ beating the flags with the
click of castanets; groups of idle huzzars, moustached and menacing,
strutting the dilapidated public gardens like walking arsenals, the
eternal cigarette between their lips, and the everlasting _sapristi_
and _sacré_ upon them. Throw in a _curé_ or two, wide-hatted, of
leisured and benevolent aspect, with a smile addressed to the world as
a general _mon enfant_; an _abbé_, less leisured and less assured of
public indulgence; a discreet _frère_, whose hurrying movements shake
his robes to the dimensions of a balloon; an elegant _sous-préfet_,
conscious of Parisian tailoring, and much in request in provincial
salons; a wooden-legged colonel, devoted to the memory of the first
Napoleon, and wrathful at that of him of Sedan; a few civilians of
professional calling, deferential to the military and in awe of the
colonel; the local gossip and shopkeeper on Trinity Square, Mère
Lescaut, who knows everything about everybody, and the usual group of
antagonistic politicians. For the outskirts, five broad roads diverging
star-wise from a common centre, with an inviting simplicity of aspect
that might tempt the least adventurous spirit of childhood to make,
by one of those pleasant, straight, and leafy paths, for the alluring
horizon. Add the local lion, Great William’s Tower, a very respectable
Norman ruin, where a more mythical personage than William might easily
have been born, and which might very well hallow more ancient loves
than those of Robert and the washerwoman Arletta; a splendid equestrian
statue of the Conqueror, and a quantity of threads of silver water
running between mossy banks, where women in mountainous caps of linen
wash clothes, and the violets in spring and autumn grow so thickly,
that the air is faint with their sweet scent. Afar, green field upon
green field, stretching on all sides, till the atmospheric blue blots
out their colour and melts them into the sky; sudden spaces of wood
making shadows upon the bright plains and dusty roads, fringed with
poplars, cutting uninterrupted paths to the horizon.
The weekly fair was being held on the Place de la Trinité, when Hervé
made his way so far. The noise and jollity stunned him. Long tables
were spread round, highly coloured and decorated with a variety of
objects, and good-humoured cleanly Norman women in caps, and men in
blue blouses, were shouting exchanged speech, or wrangling decorously.
Hervé thrust his hands into his pockets in a pretence of security,
like that assumed by his elders upon novel occasions, though his
pulses shook with unaccustomed force and velocity; and he walked round
the tables with uneasy impulses towards the toys and sweetmeats, and
thought a ride on the merry-go-round would be an enviable sensation.
But these temptations he gallantly resisted, as unbecoming his serious
business. Women smiled upon him, and called him, _Ce joli petit
monsieur_, a fact which caused him more surprise than anything else,
having heard his father describe him as ugly. He bowed to them, when
he rejected their offers of toys and penknives, but could not resist
the invitation of a fresh cake, and held his hat in one hand, while he
searched in his pocket to pay for it. Hervé made up for his dulness by
a correctness of demeanour that was rather depressing than captivating.
Munching his cake with a secret pleasure in this slight infringement of
social law, he wandered upon the skirt of the noisy and good-natured
crowd, which, in the settlement of its affairs, was lavish in smiles
and jokes. What should he do with his liberty and leisure when his
senses had tired of this particular form of intoxication? He bethought
himself of the famous tower which Pierrot, the valet, had assured him
was the largest castle in the world. Glancing up the square, he saw
the old wooden-legged colonel limping towards him, and Hervé promptly
decided that so warlike a personage could not fail to be aware of the
direction in which the tower lay. He barred the colonel’s way with his
hat in his hand, and said: ‘Please, Monsieur, will you be so good as to
direct me to the castle of William the Conqueror?’
The colonel heard the soft tremulous pipe, and brought his fierce glare
down upon the urchin with hawklike penetration. Fearful menace seemed
to lie in the final tap of his wooden leg upon the pavement, as he
came to a standstill in front of Hervé, and he cleared his chest with
a loud military sound like _boom_. Hervé stood the sound, but winced
and repeated his request more timidly. Now this desperate-looking
soldier had a kindly heart, and loved children. He had not the least
idea that his loud _boom_, and his shaggy eyebrows, and his great
scowling red face frightened the life out of them. A request from a
child so small and feeble to be directed to anybody’s castle, much less
the Conqueror’s, when so many strong and idle arms in the world must
be willing to carry him, afflicted him with an almost maternal throb
of tenderness. By his smile he dispersed the unpleasant impressions
of his _boom_ and the click of his artificial limb, and completely
won Hervé’s confidence, who was quite pleased to find his thin little
fingers lost in the grasp of his new companion’s large hand, when the
giant in uniform turned and volunteered to conduct him to the tower.
Crossing the Square of Guillaume le Conquérant, Hervé even became
expansive.
‘Look, Monsieur,’ he cried, pointing to the beautiful bronze statue,
‘one would say that the horse was about to jump, and throw the knight.’
The colonel slapped his chest like a man insulted in the person of a
glorious ancestor, and emitted an unusually gruff _boom_, that nearly
blew little Hervé to the other side of the square, and made his lips
tremble.
‘I’d like, young sir, to see the horse that could have thrown that
man,’ said the Norman.
‘There was a Baron of Vervainville when Robert was Duke of Normandy.
He went with Robert to the Crusades. The countess has told me that
only very distinguished and brave people went to the Crusades in those
days. They were wars, Monsieur, a great way off. I often try to make
out what is written on his tomb in Saint-Laurent, but I can never get
further than Geoffroi,’ Hervé concluded, with his queer short sigh,
while in front of them rose the mighty Norman ruin upon the landscape,
like the past glancing poignantly through an ever youthful smile.
The colonel, enlightened by this communication upon the lad’s identity,
stared at him in alarmed surprise.
‘Is there nobody in attendance upon M. le Marquis?’ he asked.
‘I am trying to be an explorer like my grandpapa; that is why I
have run away at once. I am obliged to you, Monsieur, but it is not
necessary that you should give yourself the trouble to come further
with me. I shall be able to find the way back to the Place de la
Trinité.’
The colonel was dubious as to his right to accept dismissal. The sky
looked threatening, and he hardly believed that he could in honour
forsake the child. But, _sapristi!_ there were the unread papers down
from Paris waiting for him at his favourite haunt, the Café du Grand
Turc, to be discussed between generous draughts of cider. He tugged
his grey moustache in divided feelings, and at last came to a decision
with the aid of his terrible _boom_. He would deliver the little
marquis into the hands of the _concierge_ of the tower, and after a
look in upon his cronies at the Grand Turc and a glass of cider, hasten
to Saint-Laurent in search of proper authority.
Hervé was a decorous sightseer, who left others much in the dark as to
his private impressions of what he saw. The tower, he admitted, was
very big and cold. He did not think it would give him much satisfaction
to have been born in the chill cavernous chamber wherein William had
first seen the light, while the bombastic lines upon the conquest of
the Saxons, read to him in a strong Norman accent, gave him the reverse
of a desire to explore that benighted land. With his hands in his
pockets, he stood and peeped through the slit in the stone wall, nearly
as high as the clouds, whence Robert is supposed to have detected the
charming visage of Arletta, washing linen below, with a keenness of
sight nothing less diabolical than his sobriquet, _le diable_.
‘I couldn’t see anybody down so far, could you?’ he asked; and then
his attention was caught by the big rain-drops that were beginning to
fall in black circles upon the unroofed stone stairs. The _concierge_
watched the sky a moment, then lifted Hervé into his arms, and hurried
down the innumerable steps to the shelter of his own cosy parlour.
Excitement and fatigue were telling upon the child, who looked nervous
and scared. The rain-drops had gathered the force and noise of several
waterfalls, pouring from the heavens with diluvian promise. Already
the landscape was drenched and blotted out of view. An affrighted
peasant, in _sabots_ large enough to shelter the woman and her family
of nursery rhyme, darted down the road, holding a coloured umbrella
as big as a tent. The roar of thunder came from afar, and a flash of
lightning broke through the vapoury veil, making Hervé blink like a
distracted owl caught by the dawn. Oh, if he were only back safely
at Saint-Laurent, or could hold the hand of his dear countess! No,
he would not explore any more until he was a grown-up man. A howl of
thunder and a child’s feeble cry----
Meanwhile confusion reigned in the castle. Men and women flew
hither and thither, screaming blame upon each other. In an agony of
apprehension, the butler ordered the family coach, and was driven into
town, wondering how M. le Vervainville would take the news if anything
were to happen to remove the source of his wealth and local importance.
_Parbleu!_ he would not be the man to tell him. Crossing the Place de
la Trinité, he caught sight of Mère Lescaut gazing out upon the deluged
square. In a happy inspiration, he determined to consult her, and while
he was endeavouring to make his knock heard above the tempest and to
shield his eyes from the glare of the lightning flashes, Mère Lescaut
thrust her white cap out through the upper half of the shop door, and
screamed, ‘You are looking for M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent, and I
saw him cross the square with Colonel Larousse this afternoon.’
‘_Diable! Diable!_’ roared the distracted butler. ‘I passed the colonel
on the road an hour ago.’
The endless moments lost in adjuring the gods, in voluble faith in
calamity, in imprecations at the storm, and shivering assertions of
discomfort which never mend matters, and at last the dripping colonel
and swearing butler meet. M. le Marquis de Saint-Laurent and Baron de
Vervainville was found asleep amid the historic memories of Robert and
Arletta.
This escapade brought M. de Vervainville down from Paris, with a new
tutor. The tutor was very young, very modern, and very cynical. He was
not in the least interested in Hervé, though rather amused when, on the
second day of their acquaintance, the boy asked--‘Monsieur, are you
engaged to be married?’ The tutor was happy to say that he had not that
misfortune.
‘Is it then a misfortune? I am very glad that I am engaged, though I
have heard my nurse say that married people are not often happy.’
The tutor thought it not improbable such an important personage as
the Marquis de Saint-Laurent had been officially betrothed to some
desirable _parti_ of infant years, and asked her age and name.
‘The Countess de Fresney. She is not a little girl, and at present
her husband is alive, but I daresay he will be dead soon. You know,
Monsieur, she is a great deal older than I am, but I shall like that
much better. It will not be necessary for me to learn much, for she
will know everything for me, and I can amuse myself. I will take you
to see her to-morrow. She is very beautiful,--but not so beautiful as
my mamma--and I love her very dearly.’
It occurred to the cynical tutor that the countess might be bored
enough in this uncheerful place to take an interest in so captivating a
person as himself. But when they arrived at Fresney, they learnt that
the countess was seriously ill. Hervé began to cry when he was refused
permission to see his friend, and at that moment M. le Comte, an
erratic, middle-aged tyrant, held in mortal terror by his dependants,
burst in upon him, with a vigorous--‘Ho, ho! the little marquis, my
rival! Come hither, sirrah, and let me run the sword of vengeance
through your body.’
And the merry old rascal began to roll his eyes, and mutter strange
guttural sounds for his own amusement and Hervé’s fright.
‘I do not care if you do kill me, M. le Comte,’ the boy sobbed. ‘You
are a wicked man, and it is because you make dear Madame unhappy that
she is so ill. You are as wicked and ugly as the ogre in the story she
gave me last Christmas. But she will get well, and you will die, and
then I will marry her, and she will never be unhappy any more.’
‘Take him away before I kill him--the insolent little jackanapes! In
love with a married woman, and telling it to her husband! Ho, ho! so
I am an ogre! Very well, let me make a meal of you.’ With that he
produced an orange and offered it to Hervé, who turned on his heel, and
stumbled out of the room, blinded with tears.
But the countess did not get well. She sent for Hervé one day, and
kissed him tenderly.
‘My little boy, my little Hervé, you will soon be alone again. But you
will find another friend, and by and by you will be happy.’
‘Never, never, if you die, Countess. I shall not care for anything, not
even for my new pony, though it has such a pretty white star on its
forehead. I do not want to grow up, and I shall never be married now,
nor--nothing,’ he cried, with quivering lips.