THE MAN SHE WOULD HAVE MARRIED
(1)
So he was dead--was lying with his comrades in a hasty trench
at Auray, or under the bloodstained sand of Quiberon itself.
Sometimes--for she had heard that many had been drowned--Raymonde
de Guéfontaine had fancied that the sea, out of which he had come
to her, had claimed him again, and that his body lay forgotten on
some lonely Breton beach, or swayed gently, far down, with the
drift of the full Atlantic. It was not so; French soil held him,
as she hoped it would hold her some day. Yet, no more than the
little boy, should she look on him again.
The October sunshine seemed to hurt her eyes as she went along
Oxford Street. These English people too, prosperous and indifferent,
who walked the streets of their dull city without a care, with such
satisfied faces, such garish-coloured clothes--she hated them!
Why had not England done more, lent the full weight of her arm
to that doomed enterprise? England had not shed a drop of her blood
for it. There were even those who said that she was not sorry to
know that so much French blood had flowed, and was glad to have
rid herself so cheaply of some of her pensioners. Raymonde de
Guéfontaine had too generous a nature herself to lend a ready
credence to that rumour, and yet she felt that the country which
sheltered her had wounded her too. For someone had told her that,
to England, the main significance of the expedition which had meant
so much to her and hers was that it had served as a diversion in
favour of England's ally, Austria; and seeing how, at the end, it
had been hurried forward, she did not wholly disbelieve this.
Mme. de Guéfontaine had come over to London from Guernsey, where
her brother Henri was stationed, to visit an old aunt who, unlike
most of her compatriots, had succeeded in saving no inconsiderable
sum from the wreck of her fortunes, and was now enjoying life
and society in an atmosphere perhaps greyer, but certainly less
inflammable, than that of Paris. Mme. de Nantillac was fond of her
niece, and, being one of those to whom bodily comfort is paramount,
was set upon driving Raymonde into giving up the lodging she shared
with her brother at St. Peter Port and living with her in comparative
affluence in Sloane Street. She had even selected a parti for her,
the most eligible of her circle. And for these reasons Mme. de
Guéfontaine felt a strong repugnance towards returning immediately
to her society. Instead of summoning a hackney coach she would go
into this great park, and sit there a little under the trees, alone
with the strange guest that had lodged all at once like a bird in
her heart--grief.
She should never see him again. Now she realised that all the early
summer, when she had been in Guernsey, she had felt that only a few
miles of sea sundered them, were he in Brittany or in Jersey, and
that perhaps some day he would fulfil his promise, and come to St.
Peter Port. And then, on that day, she could try again to convince
him that, once that wild moment of fury and pain and vengeance past,
she had not even in will betrayed him. For it haunted her sometimes
that she had not really persuaded him, though she could point to no
look or word of his to prove it.
Then had come Quiberon--yet she had hoped, and hoped . . .
But now she could never plead her cause--now she could never convince
him. She could never have again that moonlit vigil at L'Estournel,
nor their twilight parting above the little bay. . . . But it was
only now that she really knew--only now, in this stinging, choking
mist of pain and regret, that two things, the most simple and
ordinary and terrible in the world, were made plain to her: that she
loved him, and that he was dead.
And Raymonde de Guéfontaine, a Catholic, was transported in mind
from the bench in Hyde Park to the little church of her faith in
Guernsey, where every day she went to pray for André's soul. It was
unfamiliar to her, and she always found it stiff and new-looking,
with its pews and whitewash and self-complacent plaster saints. The
feet of her spirit faltered now upon its threshold. No, better far
to be in that little old pinnacled chapel in Finistère where she
and André had knelt as children, a marvel of delicate and lovely
tracery, set away from mortal haunts in a world of shining chestnut
trees--the little chapel where woodland beasts and grotesques chased
each other about the intricate carving of the ancient painted screen;
where St. Christopher, uncouth and truly gigantic, looked across at
St. Roch, whose dog no longer possessed tail or ears; where the floor
was worn by generations of use, and the pillars green with damp.
There, before the rude wooden Pietà, wrought centuries ago with much
love if with little skill, she could have prayed indeed to the Mother
who knew, if ever woman did, what loss meant. . . . And there, in
spirit, she did so pray, while her bodily eyes, long exiled from that
shrine, watched the fans of the alien horse-chestnuts flutter to
the ground about her.
(2)
The Vicomtesse de Nantillac was stout, she wheezed when she spoke,
and was sometimes besprinkled with snuff; but she had been a beauty
at the court of Louis XV., and did not forget it.
"You know, child," she said that evening, as they awaited a guest
in her comfortable drawing-room, which faced the fields towards
Westminster, "it really is time that you were rangée. You have been
in that barbarous island since the spring, and Henri might well
part with you now. What further do you propose to do there--or
he with you?"
"I may find means of making myself useful," said her niece placidly.
Having not the slightest intention of yielding to these attacks,
she was not disturbed by their recurrence.
"You know," went on the old lady, shaking her elaborate grey curls,
"M. de Pontferrand thinks----"
"But it is nothing to me what M. de Pontferrand thinks!" interrupted
Mme. de Guéfontaine with vigour.
Mme. de Nantillac turned up her eyes to heaven, then addressed a
much more mundane deity, her lapdog. "Cupidon, you hear!" she
wheezed. "And as for that time in Brittany with poor André . . .
Tell me, Raymonde, what did you wear there? Did you really go about
with pistols and a cartridge belt? I said something about it to M.
le Duc, and though of course he thought it was most unfitting, he
vowed you must have looked like Minerva or la Grande Mademoiselle."
Mme. de Guéfontaine gave a laugh. Out of deference to her aunt's
wishes, she was not wearing deep mourning this evening, and the
full grey silk and abundant fichu from which her neck rose like
an ivory column had about them nothing of the Amazon.
"Ma tante, the Duc would never have looked twice at me in Brittany.
I wore a coarse stuff skirt, pleated into a thousand folds all
round, and a peasant's embroidered bodice, and a peasant's coif.
But as to settling down--no! I must fight in some way. I cannot
live at ease."
The Vicomtesse bent her large pug face forwards. "You know, my dear
child," she whispered, "M. le Duc has . . . has recovered a good
deal of his money, and if you wanted to assist the cause in that
way, as I am sure we all do" (she never gave a penny herself),
"you would find him by no means parsimonious."
"Possibly," said Mme. de Guéfontaine, shrugging her shoulders. "But
I do not want M. le Duc either as a banker or in any other capacity."
"All I can say is that you do very wrong, Raymonde," urged her aunt.
"You should always think of the future. Who is going to look after
you in the years to come, when Henri is married and I am gone,
and perhaps the English are not as generously disposed as they
are at present?"
"I do not want the charity of the English!" said Raymonde, flushing.
"And as for someone to take care of me--I am not a young girl. You
forget; like you, ma tante, I am a widow."
"I do not know what that has to do with it, child," retorted her
fellow-bereaved. "Even I sometimes, not so young as I was, feel . . ."
She left her sensations of unprotectedness to the imagination. "Let
me implore you to think about it seriously. If you are determined not
to have the Duc (I am certain he is going to ask you, and probably
this evening), you might even marry an Englishman. You are so odd,
who knows?--it might be a success! There are English officers of
family in Guernsey, I suppose?"
"I suppose so," returned Raymonde indifferently.
"My dear child, if they were there you must have seen them, in six
months. I have met English officers, quite proper men. You have
not taken a vow against marrying again, I imagine?"
"Not that I remember."
"Of course I know--your first marriage, your husband was somewhat
old for you. And on that score, perhaps, M. le Duc . . ."
"The man I would marry," began Mme. de Guéfontaine suddenly, looking
down and pleating the silken folds of her gown, "would not be like
M. le Duc in any way. He would be lean and sinewy and agile. He
would not be rich, but he would have a mouth that held always a
shade of mockery, and he would do the most unexpected things with
an air of being amused by them, from befooling a Republican official
to saving the life of a woman who had tried to kill him."
"You are describing some man you know," said Mme. de Nantillac, with
a certain measure of excitement. "Cela se voit. Who is it? And who
was the woman?"
Raymonde de Guéfontaine checked herself. The light which had been
in her downcast eyes was extinguished. "Oh no, ma tante. My portrait
has no original . . . _now_," she added inaudibly, and, turning
away, she began to rearrange the flowers at her breast, just one
minute before M. le Duc de Pontferrand, with his smile and his smooth,
portly, debonair presence, was announced.
* * * * *
That night she revisited Porhoët in her dreams. The tide was up, the
moon was full, and from her little cottage, as she stood on the sand
and looked up at it, shone a light. She went up the path, lifted
the latch, and entered; and sitting at the table, breaking bread
together, were the two who had never met in life--André, pale and
smiling, with the fatal bullet wound in his forehead, and . . . the
Chevalier de la Vireville. They both rose as she came in, and held
out their glasses towards her, and as La Vireville moved she saw
the blood run through the fingers of the hand which he held pressed
against his side.
She stretched out her arms towards the two phantoms with a great
cry--"Mes morts!" and with that woke, and lay sobbing.
* * * * *
A week later she was on her way back to Guernsey--Guernsey, whence
she could sometimes see the coast of that France for which they
both had died.