Chapter 10

'It's possible, but most unlikely, seeing the close retirement in which she lives. She's never once gone beyond her garden, since she came back there, three, four, years ago; nor received any visitors. _Personne_--not the Bishop of Bayonne nor the Sous-Préfet, not even _feu_ Monsieur le Comte, though they all called, as a matter of civility. She has her private chaplain. If a guest had arrived at Granjolaye, the whole country would know it and talk of it.'

'Oh, I see what you're trying to insinuate,' cried Paul. 'You're trying to insinuate that she came from Château Yroulte.' That was the next nearest country-house.

'Nothing of the sort,' said André. 'Château Yroulte has been shut up and uninhabited these two years--ever since the death of old Monsieur Raoul. It was bought by a Spanish Jew; but he's never lived in it and never let it.'

'Well, then, where _did_ she come from? Not out of the Fourth Dimension? Who _was_ she? Not a wraith, an apparition? Why _will_ you entertain such weird conjectures?'

'She must have come from Bayonne. An officer's wife, beyond a doubt.'

'Oh, you're perfectly remorseless,' sighed Paul, and changed the subject. But he was unconvinced. Officers' wives, in garrison-towns like Bayonne, had, in his experience, always been, as he expressed it, frowsy and provincial.

IV.

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.

V.

It was only April, but the sun shone with midsummer strength.

After André left him, he went down into the garden.

From a little distance the house, against the sky, looked insubstantial, a water-colour, painted in grey and amber on a field of luminous blue. If he had wished it, he could have bathed himself in flowers; hyacinths, crocuses, jonquils, camellias, roses, grew round him everywhere, sending up a symphony of warm odours; further on, in the grass, violets, anemones, celandine; further still, by the margins of the pond, narcissuses, and tall white flowers-de-luce; and, in the shrubberies, satiny azaleas; and overhead, the magnolia trees, drooping with their freight of ivory cups. The glass doors of the orangery stood open, a cloud of sweetness hanging heavily before them. In the park, the chestnuts were in full leaf; and surely a thousand birds were twittering and piping amongst their branches.

'Oh, bother! How it cries out for a woman,' said Paul. 'It's such a waste of good material'

The beauty went to one's head. One craved a sympathetic companion to share it with, a woman on whom to lavish the ardours it enkindled. 'If I don't look out I shall become sentimental,' the lone man told himself. 'Nature's so fearfully lacking in tact. Fancy her singing an epithalamium in a poor fellow's ears, when he doesn't know a single human woman nearer than Paris.' To make matters worse, the day ended in a fiery sunset, and then there was a full moon; and in the rosery a nightingale performed its sobbing serenade. 'Please go out and give that bird a penny, and tell him to go away,' Paul said to a servant. It was all very well to jest, but at every second breath he sighed profoundly. I'm afraid he _had_ become sentimental. It seemed a serious pity that what his heart was full of should spend itself on the incapable air. His sense of humour was benumbed. And when, presently, the frogs in the pond, a hundred yards away, set up their monotonous plaintive concert, he laid down his arms. 'It's no use, I'm in for it,' he confessed. After all, he was out of England. He was in Gascony, the borderland between amorous France and old romantic Spain.

I don't know whom his imagination dwelt the more fondly with: the stricken Queen, beyond there, alone in the darkness and the silence, where the night lay on the forest of Granjolaye; or the pale horse-woman of the morning.

But surely, as yet, he had no ghost of a reason for dreaming that the two were one and the same.

VI.

'Now, let's be logical,' he said next morning. 'Let's be logical and hopeful--yet not too hopeful, not utopian. Let's look the matter courageously in the face. Since she rode there once, why may she not ride again in the Sentier des Contrebandiers? Why mayn't she ride there often--even daily? I think that's logical. Don't _you_ think that's logical?'

The person he addressed, a tall, slender young man, with a fresh-coloured skin, a straight nose, and rather a ribald eye, was vigorously brushing a head of yellowish hair, in the looking-glass before him.

'Tush! But of course _you_ think so,' Paul went on. 'You always think as I do. If you knew how I despise a sycophant! And yet--you're not bad looking. No, I'll be hanged if I can honestly say that you're bad looking. You've got nice hair, and plenty of it; and there's a weakness about your mouth and chin that goes to my heart. I hate firm people.--What? So do you? I thought so.--Ah, well, my poor friend, you're booked for a shocking long walk this morning. You must summon your utmost fortitude.--_Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me?_' he carolled forth, to Marzials's tune. 'But come! I say! That's anticipating.'

And he set forth for the Smugglers' Pathway,--where, sure enough, she rode again. As she passed him, her eyes met his: at which he was conscious of a good deal of interior commotion. 'By Jove, she's magnificent, she's really stunning,' he exclaimed to himself. He perceived that she was rather a big woman, tall, with finely-rounded, smoothly-flowing lines. Her hair,--velvety blue-black in its shadows,--where the light caught it was dully iridescent. Her features were irregular enough to give her face a high degree of individuality, yet by no means to deprive it of delicacy or attractiveness. She had a superb white throat, and a soft voluptuous chin; and 'As I live, I never saw such a mouth,' said Paul.

Where did she come from? Bayonne? Never. André might have been mistaken about Château Yroulte; the Spanish Jew had perhaps sold it, or found a tenant. Or, further afield, there were Châteaux Labenne, Saumuse, d'Orthevielle. Or else, the Queen had a guest.

'Anyhow,' he mused, when he got home, 'that makes five, six miles that you have tramped, to enjoy an instant's glimpse of her. Fortunately they say walking is good for the constitution. It only shows what extremities a country life may drive one to.'

The next day, not only did her eyes meet his, but he could have sworn that she almost smiled. Oh, a very furtive smile, the mere transitory suggestion of a smile. But the inner commotion was more marked.

The next day (the fourth) she undoubtedly did smile, and slightly inclined her head. He removed his hat, and went home, and waited impatiently for twenty-four hours to wear away. 'She smiled--she bowed,' he kept repeating. But, alas, he couldn't forget that in that remote countryside it is very much the fashion for people who meet in the roads and lanes to bow as they pass.

On the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth days she bowed and smiled.

'I fairly wonder at myself--to walk that distance for a bow and smile,' said Paul. 'To-morrow I'm going to speak. _Faut brusquer les choses_.'

And he penetrated into the forest, firmly determined to speak. 'Only I can't seem to think of anything very pat to say,' he sighed. 'Hello! She's off her horse.'

She was off her horse, standing beside it, holding the loose end of a strap in her hand.

Providence was favouring him. Here was his obvious chance. Something was wrong. He could offer his assistance. And yet, that inner commotion was so violent, he felt a little bewildered about the _mot juste_. He approached her gradually, trying to compose himself and collect his wits.

She looked up, and said in French 'I beg your pardon. Something has come undone. Can you help me?'

Her voice was delicious, cool and smooth as ivory. His heart pounded. He vaguely bowed, and murmured, 'I should be delighted.'

She stood aside a little, and he took her place. He bent over the strap that was loose, and bit his lips, and cursed his embarrassments. 'Come, I mustn't let her think me quite an ass.' He was astonished at himself. That he should still be capable of so strenuous a sensation! 'And I had thought I was blasé!' He was intensely conscious of the silence, of the solitude and dimness of the forest, and of their isolation there, so near to each other, that superb pale woman and himself. But his eyes were bent on the misbehaving strap, which he held helplessly between his fingers.

At last he looked up at her. 'How warm and beautiful and fragrant she is,' he thought. 'With her white face, with her dark eyes, with those red lips and that splendid figure--what an heroic looking woman!'

'This is altogether disgraceful,' he said, 'and I assure you I'm covered with confusion. But I won't dissemble. I haven't the remotest notion what needs to be done. I'm afraid this is the first time in my life I have ever touched anything belonging to a horse.'

He said it with a pathetic drawl, and she laughed.--'And yet you're English.'

'Oh, I dare say I'm English enough. Though I don't see how you knew it. Don't tell me you knew it from my accent.'

'_Oh, non pas_,' she hastened to protest. 'But you're the new owner of Saint-Graal. Everybody of the country knows, of course, that the new owner of Saint-Graal, Mr. Warringwood, is English.'

'Ah, then she's of the country,' was Paul's mental note.

'And I thought all Englishmen were horsemen,' she went on.

'Oh, there are a few bright exceptions--there's a little scattered remnant. It's the study of my life to avoid being typical.'

'Ah, well, then give _me_ the strap.'

He gave her the strap, and in the twinkling of an eye she had snapped the necessary buckle. Then she looked up at him and smiled oddly. It occurred to him that the entire comedy of the strap had perhaps been invented as an excuse for opening a conversation; and he was at once flattered and disappointed. 'Oh, if she's that sort ...' he thought.

'I'm heart-broken not to have been able to serve you,' he said.

'You can help me to mount,' she answered.

And, before he quite knew how it was done, he had helped her to mount, and she was galloping down the path. The firm grasp of her warm gloved hand on his shoulder accompanied him to Saint-Graal. 'It's amazing how she sticks in my mind,' he said. He really couldn't fix his attention on any other subject. 'I wonder who the deuce she is. She's giving me my money's worth in walking. That business of the strap was really brazen. Still, one mustn't quarrel with the means if one desires the end. I hope she _isn't_ that sort.'

VII.

On the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth days, she passed him with a bow and a good-morning.

'This is too much!' he groaned, in the silence of his chamber. 'She's doing it with malice. I'll not be trifled with. I--I'll do something desperate. I'll pretend to faint, and she'll have to get down and bandage up my wounds.'

On the thirteenth day, as they met, she stopped her horse.

'You're at least typically English in one respect,' she said.

'Oh, unkind lady! To announce it to me in this sudden way. Then my life's a failure.'

'I mean in your fondness for long walks.'

'Ah, then you're totally in error. I hate long walks.'

'But it's a good ten kilometres to and from your house; and you do it every morning.'

'That's only because there aren't any omnibuses or cabs or things. And' (he reminded himself that if she was that sort, he might be bold) 'I'm irresistibly attracted here.'

'It's very pretty,' she admitted, and rode on.

He looked after her, grinding his teeth. _Was_ she that sort? 'One never can tell. Her face is so fine--so noble even.'

The next day, 'Yes, I suppose it's very pretty. But I wasn't thinking of Nature,' he informed her, as she approached.

She drew up.

'Oh, it has its human interest too, no doubt.' She glanced in the direction of the Château of Granjolaye.

'The Queen,' said he. 'But one never sees her.'

'That adds the charm of mystery, don't you feel? To think of that poor young exiled woman, after so grand a beginning, ending so desolately--shut up alone in her mysterious castle! It's like a legend.'

'Then you're not of her Court?'

'I? Of her Court? _Mais quelle idée_!'

'It was only a hypothesis. Of course, you know I'm devoured by curiosity. My days are spent in wondering who you are.'

She laughed. 'You must have a care, or you'll be typical,' she warned him.

'I never said I wasn't human,' he called after her, as she cantered away.

VIII.

The next day still (the fifteenth), 'Haven't I heard you lived at Saint-Graal when you were a child?' she asked.

'If you have, for once in a way rumour has told the truth. I lived at Saint-Graal till I was thirteen.'

'Then perhaps you knew her?'

'Her?'

'The Queen. Mademoiselle de la Granjolaye de Ravanches.'

'Oh, I knew her very well--when we were children.'

'Tell me all about her.'

'It would be a long story.'

She leaped from her horse; then, raising her riding whip, and looking the animal severely in the eye, 'Bézigue! Attention,' she said impressively. 'You're to stop exactly where you are and not play any tricks. _Entendu? Bien_.' She moved a few steps down the pathway, and stopped at an opening among the trees, where the ground was a cushion of bright green moss. 'By Jove, she _is_ at her ease,' thought Paul, who followed her. 'How splendidly she walks--what undulations!' From the French point of view, as she must be aware, the situation gave him all sorts of rights.

She sank softly, gracefully, upon the moss.

'It's a long story. Tell it me,' she commanded, and pointed to the earth. He sat down facing her, at a little distance.

'It's odd you should have chosen this place,' said he.

'Odd? Why?' She looked at him inquiringly. For a moment their eyes held each other; and all at once the blood swept through him with suffocating violence. She was so beautiful, so sumptuous, so warmly and richly feminine; and surely the circumstances were not anodyne. Her softly rounded face, its very pallor, the curve and colour of her lips, her luminous dark eyes, the smooth modulations of her voice, and then her loose abundance of black hair, and the swelling lines of her breast, the fluent contour of her waist and hips, under the fine black cloth of her dress--all these, with the silence of the forest, the heat of the southern day, the woodland fragrances of which the air was full, and the sense of being intimately alone with her, set up within him a turbulent vibration, half of delight, half of pained suspense. And the complaisant informality with which she met him played a sustaining counterpoint. 'What luck, what luck, what luck,' were the words which shaped themselves to the strong beating of his pulses. What would happen next? Whither would it lead? He had savoured the bouquet, he was famished to taste the wine. And yet, so complicated are our human feelings, he was obscurely vexed. Only two kinds of woman, he would have maintained yesterday, could conceivably do a thing like this: an _ingénue_ or 'that sort.' She wasn't an _ingénue_. Something, at the same time, half assured him that she wasn't 'that sort,' either. But--the circumstances! The situation!

'Why odd?' she repeated.

'Oh, I don't want to talk about the Queen,' he said, in a smothered voice.

'The oddity relates itself to the Queen?'

'Oh, this is where we used to waste half our lives when we were children. That's all. This was our favourite nook.'

'Perfect then for the story you're going to tell me.'

'What story?'

'You said it was a long story.'

'There's really no story at all.' His eyes were fastened upon her hands, small and tapering, in their tan gauntlets. The point of a patent-leather boot glanced from the edge of her skirt. A short gold watch-chain dangled from her breast, a cluster of charms at the end.

'You said it was a long story,' she repeated sternly.

'It would be a dull one. We knew each other when we were infants, and used to play together. That is all.'

'But what was she like? Describe her to me. I adore _souvenirs d'enfance_.' Her eyes were bright with eagerness.

'Oh, she was very pretty. The prettiest little girl I've ever seen. She had the most wonderful eyes--deep, deep, into which you could look a hundred miles; you know the sort; dreamy, poetical, sad; oh, lovely eyes. And she used to wear her hair down her back; it was very long, and soft--soft as smoke, almost; almost impalpable. She always dressed in white--short white frocks, with broad sashes, red or blue. That was the fashion then for little girls. Perhaps it is still--I've never noticed.'

'Yes. Don't stop. Go on.'

'Dear me, I don't know what to say. I used to see her a good deal, because they were our neighbours. Her father used to ask me over to stay at Granjolaye. She needed a playmate, and I was the only one available. Sometimes she would come and spend a day at Saint-Graal. Do you know Granjolaye? The castle? It's worth going over. It used to belong to the Kings of Navarre, you know. We used to play together in the great audience chamber, and chase each other through the secret passages in the walls. At Saint-Graal we confined ourselves to the garden. Her head was full of the queerest romantic notions. You couldn't persuade her that the white irises that grew about our pond weren't enchanted princesses. One day we filled a bottle with holy water at the Church, and then she sprinkled them with it, pronouncing an incantation. "If ye were born as ye are, remain as ye are; but if ye were born otherwise, resume your original shapes." They remained as they were; but that didn't shake her faith. Something was amiss with the holy water, or with the form of her incantation.'

She laughed softly. 'Then she was nice? You liked her?' she asked.

'Oh, I was passionately in love with her. All children are passionately in love with somebody, aren't they? A real _grande passion_. It began when I was about ten.' He broke off, to laugh. 'Do you care for love stories? I'm a weary, wayworn man; but upon my word, I've never in all my life felt any such intense emotion for a woman, anything that so nearly deserved to be called _love_, as I felt for Hélène de la Granjolaye when I was an infant. Night after night I used to lie awake thinking how I loved her--longing to tell her so--planning how I would, next day--composing tremendous declarations--imagining her response--and waiting in a fever of impatience for the day to come. But then, when I met her, I didn't dare. Bless me, how I used to thrill at sight of her, with love, with fear. How I used to look at her face, and pine to kiss her. If her hand touched mine, I almost fainted. It's very strange that children before their teens should be able to experience the whole gamut of the spiritual side of love; and yet it's certain.'

She was looking at him with intent eyes, her lips parted a little. 'But you did tell her at last, I hope?' she said, anxiously.

He had got warmed to his subject, and her interest inspired him. 'Oh, at last! It was here--in this very spot. I had picked a lot of celandine, and stuck them about in her hair, where they shone like stars. Oh, the joy of being allowed to touch her hair! It made utterance a necessity. I fumbled and stammered, and blushed and thrilled, and almost choked. And at last I blurted it out. "I love you so. I love you so." That--after the eloquent declarations I had composed overnight!'

'And she?'