and the tutor sat over their supper. Hervé pushed away his plate, and
took his scared and desolated little heart to the solitude of his own
room. During the night, the tutor was awakened by his call.
‘Monsieur, please to tell me what happens when people die.’
‘_Ma foi_, there is nothing more about them,’ cried the tutor.
‘And what are those who do not die supposed to do?’
‘To moderate their feelings,--and go to sleep.’
‘But I cannot sleep, Monsieur. I am very unhappy. Oh, I wish it had
been the count. Why doesn’t God kill wicked persons? Is it wicked to
wish the count to be dead, Monsieur?’
‘Very.’
‘Then I must be dreadfully wicked, for I would like to kill him myself,
if I were big and strong.’
At breakfast next day, he asked if people did not wear very black
clothes when their friends died, and indited a curious epistle to his
father, begging permission to wear the deepest mourning for the lady
he was to have married. Vested in black, his little mouse-coloured
head looked more pitiful and vague than ever, as he sat out the long
funeral service in the church of Saint-Gervais, and lost himself in
endless efforts to count the candles, and understand what the strange
catafalque and velvet pall in the middle of the church meant, and what
had become of the countess.
After the burial his tutor took him to the cemetery. The bereaved child
carried a big wreath to lay upon the grave of his departed lady-love.
Kneeling there, upon the same mission, was M. le Comte, shedding
copious tears, and apostrophising the dead he had made it a point to
wound in life. Hervé knelt opposite him, and stared at him indignantly.
Why should he cry? The countess had not loved him, nor had he loved the
countess. The boy flung himself down on the soft earth, and began to
sob bitterly. The thought that he would never again see his lost friend
took full possession of him for the first time, and he wanted to die
himself. Disturbed by this passionate outbreak, the count rose, brushed
the earth from his new trousers with a mourning pocket-handkerchief
already drenched with his tears, and proceeded to lift Hervé.
‘The dear defunct was much attached to you, little marquis,’ he said,
and began to wipe away Hervé’s tears with the handkerchief made sacred
by his own. ‘You were like a son to her.’
‘I don’t want you to dry my eyes, Monsieur,’ Hervé exploded, bursting
from his enemy’s arms. ‘I do not like you, and I always thought you
would die soon, and not Madame. It isn’t just, and I will not be
friends with you. I shall hate you always, for you are a wicked man,
and you were cruel to Madame.’
The count, who was not himself accounted sane by his neighbours, looked
at the amused and impassable tutor, and significantly touched his
forehead.
‘Hereditary,’ he muttered, and stood to make way for Hervé.
The birds were singing deliciously, the late afternoon sunshine
gathered above the quiet trees (made quieter by here and there an
unmovable cypress and a melancholy yew, fit symbols of the rest of
death) into a pale golden mist shot with slanting rays of light, and
the violets’ was the only scent to shake by suggestion the sense of
soothing negation of all emotion or remembrance. Out upon the road,
running like a broad ribbon to the town, unanimated in the gentle
illumination of the afternoon, the tutor and Hervé met the colonel
limping along one might imagine, upon the sound of a prolonged _boom_.
Hervé’s tears were dried, but his face looked sorrowful and stained
enough to spring tears of sympathy to any kind eyes. The colonel drew
up, touched his cap, and uttered his customary signal with more than
his customary gruffness. Hervé stood his ground firmly, though he
winced, for he was a delicate child unused to rough sounds.
‘How goes it, M. le Marquis? How goes it?’ shouted the colonel.
‘M. le colonel, it goes very badly with me, but I try to bear it. My
tutor tells me that men do not fret; I wish I knew how they manage not
to do so when they are sad. I did want to grow up soon, and explore the
world like my grandpapa, and then I should have married the Countess of
Fresney, if her husband were dead. But now everything is different, and
I don’t even want to see the tower of William the Conqueror again. I
don’t want to grow up. I don’t want anything now.’
‘Poor little man!’ said the colonel, patting his shoulder. ‘You’ve
lost a friend, but you will gain others, and perhaps you’ll be a great
soldier one of these days, like the little Corporal.’
Hervé shook his head dolorously. He saw nothing ahead but unpleasant
lessons varied by sad excursions to the countess’s grave.
The unhappy little marquis was moping and fading visibly. He could
not be got to take an interest in his lessons, and he proudly strove
to conceal the fact that he was afraid of his tutor’s mocking smile.
The news of his ill-health reached M. de Vervainville in Paris, and at
once brought that alarmed gentleman down to Falaise. On Hervé’s life
depended his town luxuries and his importance as a landed proprietor.
Was there anything his son wished for? Hervé reflected a while, then
raised his mouse-coloured head, and sighed his own little sigh. He
thought he should like to see Colonel Larousse. And so it came that one
morning, staring out of the window, the boy saw a familiar military
figure limping up the avenue. Hervé’s worried small countenance almost
glowed with expectation, as he rushed to welcome his visitor, the sound
of whose _boom_ and the tap of his wooden leg upon the parquet, as well
as his dreadful shaggy eyebrows, seemed even cheerful.
‘Do you think, Monsieur,’ Hervé asked gravely ‘that you would mind
having for a friend such a very little boy as I?’
The colonel cleared his throat and felt his eyes required the same
operation, though he concealed that fact from Hervé.
‘Boom! Touchez là, mon brave.’
Never yet had Hervé heard speech so hearty and so republican. It
astonished him, and filled him with a sense of perfect ease and
trust. It was like a free breath in oppressive etiquette,--the
child-prince’s first mud-pie upon the common road of humanity. Hervé
became excited, and confided to the colonel that his father had ordered
a toy sailing-boat for him, and that there was going to be a ball at
Saint-Laurent in honour of his birthday, though he was not quite sure
that he would enjoy that so much as the boat, for he had never danced,
and could not play any games like other children. Still if Colonel
Larousse would come, they could talk about soldiers. Come? Of course
the colonel came, looking in his brushed uniform as one of the heroes
home from Troy, and Hervé admired him prodigiously.
The birthday ball was a great affair. Guests came all the way from
Caen and Lisieux, and Hervé, more bewildered than elated, stood beside
his splendid father to receive them. Ladies in lovely robes, shedding
every delicate scent, like flowers, petted him, and full-grown men,
looking at these ladies, made much of him. They told him that he was
charming, but he did not believe them. One cannot be both ugly and
charming, little Hervé thought, with much bitterness and an inclination
to cry. Their compliments gave him the same singular sensations evoked
by the tutor’s smile.
‘I do not know any of these people,’ he said sadly to Colonel Larousse.
‘I don’t think a ball very cheerful, do you? It makes my head ache to
hear so many strange voices, and feel so much smaller than anybody
else. My papa amuses himself, but I would like to run away to my boat.’
‘_Boom! Mon camarade_, a soldier sticks to his post.’
Hervé sighed, and thought if the countess had been here that he would
have sat beside her all the evening, and have held her hand. And the
knowledge that he would never again hold her hand, and that so many
long weeks had passed since fond lips had kissed his face, and a
sweet voice had called him ‘Little Hervé, little boy,’ brought tears
of desperate self-pitying pain to his eyes. In these large illuminated
salons, vexed with the mingled odours of flowers and scented skirts,
by the scraping of fiddles and the flying feet of laughing dancers,
unmindful of him as other than a queer quiet boy in velvet and Alençon
lace, with a plain grey little face and owlish eyes that never smiled,
Hervé felt more alone than ever he had felt since the countess’s death.
Stealthily he made his escape through the long open window, and ran
down the dewy lawn. How gratefully the cool air tasted and the lovely
stillness of the night after the aching brilliancy within! Hervé
assured himself that it was a pleasant relief, and hoped there would
not be many more balls at the castle.
The lake fringed the lawn, and moored against the branches of a weeping
willow was his toy-boat, just as he had left it in the afternoon. It
would look so pretty, he believed, sailing under the rising moon that
touched the water silver and the blue stars that showed so peacefully
upon it. He unknotted the string, and gaily the little boat swam out
upon his impulsion. If only the countess could come back to him, he
thought, with his boat he would be perfectly happy. ‘But I am so alone
among them all,’ he said to himself, with his broken sigh. ‘I wished
somebody loved me as little children are loved by their mammas.’
The boat had carried away the string from his loose grasp, and he
reached out his arm upon the water to recover it. A soft, moist bank,
a small eager foot upon it, a frame easily tilted by an unsteady
movement, the dark water broken into circling bubbles upon a child’s
shrill cry of terror, and closing impassably over the body of poor
forlorn little Hervé and his pretty velvet suit and Alençon lace,--this
is what the stars and the pale calm moon saw; and over there upon
the further shore of the lake floated the toy-boat as placidly as if
it had worked no treachery, and had not led to the extinction of an
illustrious name and race.
‘Where is M. le Marquis?’ demanded M. de Vervainville, interrupting an
enchanting moment upon discovery of his son’s absence from the salon.
A search, a hurry, a scare,--music stopped, wine-glasses at the
buffet laid down untouched, ices rejected, fear and anxiety upon
every face. M. le Marquis is not in the salons, nor in the tutor’s
apartment, nor in his own. The grounds are searched, ‘Hervé’ and ‘M.
le Marquis’ ringing through the silence unanswered. His boat was found
and the impress of small footsteps upon the wet bank. M. le Marquis de
Saint-Laurent and Baron de Vervainville was drowned.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty at the
Edinburgh University Press
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Some minor inconsistencies and obvious typographical and punctuation
errors have been corrected silently.
On page 184, ‘He will write to you to Paris’ has been changed ‘He will
write to you in Paris’
On page 217: A duplicate ‘for’ has been removed in ‘The less reason
have they for for a vestige of belief in man’