One would think, by this time, the priest, poor man, had earned a
moment of mental rest; but Paul's thirst for knowledge was insatiable.
He began to ply him with questions about the Queen. And though André
could tell him very little, and though he had heard all that the night
before from Manuela, it interested him curiously to hear it repeated.
It amounted to scarcely more than a single meagre fact. A few months
after the divorce, she had returned to Granjolaye, and she had never
once been known to set her foot beyond the limits of her garden from
that day to this. She had arrived at night, attended by her two German
ladies-in-waiting. A carriage had met her at the railway station in
Bayonne, and set her down at the doors of her Château, where her aunt,
old Mademoiselle Henriette, awaited her. What manner of life she led
there, nobody had the poorest means of discovering. Her own servants
(tongue-tied by fear or love) could not be got to speak; and from the
eyes of all outsiders she was sedulously screened. Paul could imagine
her, in her great humiliation, solitary among the ruins of her high
destiny, hiding her wounds; too sensitive to face the curiosity, too
proud to brook the pity, of the world. She seemed to him a very
grandiose and tragic figure, and he lost himself musing of her--her
with whom he had played at being married, when they were children
here, so long, so long ago. She was the daughter, the only child and
heiress, of the last Duc de la Granjolaye de Ravanches,--the same
nobleman of whom it was told that when Louis Napoléon, meaning to be
gracious, said to him, 'You bear a great name, Monsieur,' he had
answered sweetly, 'The greatest of all, I think.' It is certain he was
the head of one of the most illustrious houses in the noblesse of
Europe, descended directly and legitimately, through the Bourbons,
from Saint Louis of France; and, to boot, he was immensely rich,
owning (it was said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as
well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the
Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour. Paul remembered him
vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and
a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a
good deal to stay at Granjolaye.
On the death of Madame de Louvance, the property of Saint-Graal had
passed to her son, Edmond,--André's _feu_ Monsieur le Comte. Edmond
rarely lived there, and never asked his sister or her boy there;
whence, twenty years ago, at the respective ages of thirteen and
eleven, Paul and Hélène had vanished from each other's ken. But Edmond
never married, either; and when, last winter, he died, he left a will
making Paul his heir. Of Hélène's later history Paul knew as much as
all the world knows, and no more--so much, that is, as one could
gather from newspapers and public rumour. He knew of her father's
death, whereby she had become absolute mistress of his enormous
fortune. He knew of her princely marriage, and of her elevation by the
old king to her husband's rank of Royal Highness. He knew of that
swift series of improbable deaths which had culminated in her
husband's accession to the throne, and how she had been crowned
Queen-Consort. And then he knew that three or four years afterwards
she had sued for and obtained a Bull of Separation from the Pope, on
the plea of her husband's infidelity and cruelty. The infidelity, to
be sure, was no more than, as a Royalty, if not as a woman, she might
have bargained for and borne with; but everybody remembers the stories
of the king's drunken violence that got bruited about at the time.
Everybody will remember, too, how, the Papal Separation once
pronounced, he had retaliated upon her with a decree of absolute
divorce, and a sentence of perpetual banishment, voted by his own
parliament. Whither she had betaken herself after these troubles Paul
had never heard--until, yesterday, arriving at Saint-Graal, they told
him she was living cloistered like a nun at Granjolaye.
News travels fast and penetrates everywhere in that lost corner of
garrulous Gascony. The news that Paul had taken up his residence at
Saint-Graal could scarcely fail to reach the Queen. Would she remember
their childish intimacy? Would she make him a sign? Would she let him
see her, for old sake's sake? Oh, in all probability, no. Most
certainly, no. And yet--and yet, he couldn't forbid a little furtive
hope to flicker in his heart.