CHAPTER XXXVI

ANNE-HILARION MAKES A PLAN, AND THE BISHOP A REVELATION

(1)

"Always elephants," observed the Comte de Flavigny with interest, holding up the little brass bowl of Indian workmanship which contained the sugar. "Always elephants--and monkeys!"

"The Baba-sahib is spilling it," whispered Lal Khan, bending his turbaned head to the little boy's level, the while he tendered the tray with the coffee-cups to his master.

He had just brought the coffee into the library, and it pleased the Baba-sahib, who had accompanied him, to offer the sugar to the two gentlemen. He was, however, dressed for out-of-doors.

"You are going for a walk, Anne?" asked his father, as he helped himself. He was lying back in a great chair on one side of the fire. A wonderful January sun shone in upon Mr. Elphinstone's books.

"Yes, Papa, with Baptiste. I am going to buy a new money-box, because since M. de Soucy opened my old one for me in the summer--when I thought to go to France--it has sometimes come open of itself."

"Very unsatisfactory for a thrifty bairn," observed Mr. Elphinstone, who was sitting on the other side of the fire with a pile of manuscript on his knee. "Then you will transfer your money, I suppose, from the old to the new box?"

"What is 'transfer'?" inquired Anne. "Oh, I understand. No, Grandpapa," and he shook his head mysteriously. "I am going to spend it."

"Dear me!" said his grandfather. "And on what, pray?"

"Well, first I thought," said Anne-Hilarion, "that I would give all the money in my money-box to M. le Lieutenant Tollemache for saving Papa, for since M. Tollemache is not poor, like M. de Soucy, it is permitted to offer him money--is it not? But Papa said . . . What was it you said, Papa?"

The Marquis smiled at his small and earnest son, and put his arm round him. "I believe I told you to keep it for yourself, Anne."

"But _I_ did not save you, Papa!" exclaimed the child, almost indignantly.

René de Flavigny's eyes sought the fire. "I would not be too sure of that," he said. "On whose account, do you suppose, Anne, did Mr. Tollemache take all that trouble and risk for me?"

"I suppose," replied the little boy, wrinkling his forehead, "for St. Michel, because I asked him very particularly to take care of you."

"Yes," repeated René, "as I say, it was you who saved me, my son. But not, perhaps, quite in the way you think," he added to himself.

There was a moment's pause, during which Anne apparently resolved not to pursue this question, for he went on with a business-like air: "I have now quite resolved what I will do with my money, which is now a great sum, with what Grandpapa gave me at Christmas. I shall not give it to M. le Lieutenant."

"Well?" queried Mr. Elphinstone, looking at him over his spectacles. "This suspense is very hard to bear, Anne."

"I shall spend it on going to Portsmouth to see M. le Chevalier."

The two men looked at each other at this announcement. "What next?" asked the Marquis, amused.

"After that I shall begin to save for the new box," responded his son, taking the inquiry literally. "For though to go to Portsmouth will not cost as much as going to France would have done, I expect it will quite empty the old one."

"And a very good thing too," remarked his grandfather, "if you are going to employ your savings to such ends. We have had enough, in this house, of your jaunts, my bairn."

"But it was _you_, Grandpapa, that sent me to Canterbury!" said Anne, turning an accusing gaze on the old gentleman. Mr. Elphinstone collapsed.

"True, only too true!" he murmured. "But, child, your father is going down to Portsmouth to see M. de la Vireville directly he is able to travel. He has already written to him to that effect."

"But that will be quite a long time yet, I know," returned the Comte wisely. "I heard Dr. Collins say so."

"You could write M. de la Vireville a letter," suggested his grandfather.

"But I want to see him!" repeated Anne. "One does not see a person by writing him a letter."

"This child's arguments are difficult to controvert," remarked Mr. Elphinstone to his son-in-law. "I do not see any reply to that."

"Except perhaps this," suggested the Marquis. "Are you sure, Anne, that on his side M. de la Vireville wants to see you just now? He is rather ill, you know."

Anne-Hilarion gave this due consideration. "But if I were ill, Papa, I should want to see you and Grandpapa. It would make me feel better--as when I had whooping-cough last year."

"And you think that your presence would have a similar good effect on M. de la Vireville? You are not wanting in assurance, my son!"

Anne smiled, because he knew that he was being teased, and, the clock striking at that moment, he slipped out of his father's arm. "Will you please to think about it, Papa, while I have my walk?" he said coaxingly.

After he had gone Mr. Elphinstone turned over his manuscripts for a minute or two. Then he looked across at his son-in-law, who was staring again into the fire.

"I could take the child to Portsmouth, René, if you wish him to go--and can trust him to me," he said. "I do not know what you feel, but it seems to me that it might be some slight attempt to repay that great debt which we owe on Anne's behalf--and M. de la Vireville was so fond of the child that he might really be glad to see him."

René de Flavigny looked up and smiled. "How well you read my thoughts, sir!"

(2)

On that same remarkably sunny day in late January the old Bishop, in a long black cloak, was walking up and down the little walled garden at Portsmouth under a sky as blue as May's. The forerunners of spring had arrived, and the sight of that vanguard evidently gave him a lively pleasure. He was standing looking at the border when he heard a step, and observed Mme. de la Vireville approaching him. She had come to the house earlier in the day, but he had not seen her.

"It is almost spring already, Madame," he remarked to her. "Look at that patch of aconites!"

Mme. de la Vireville did not obey him. She came up, kissed his ring, and said with the directness of a child, "It is not spring in my heart, Monseigneur. Your Grandeur knows why."

The Bishop may have had the eyes of a mystic, but they were by no means blind to mundane affairs. He looked at her now. "Yes, I know, my daughter. I have been wishing for some time to speak with you of this. You will not feel cold if we walk up and down a little in the sun?"

She shook her head and turned with him. At their feet the snowdrops stood smiling and shivering behind little rows of box. "I have just come down from Fortuné's room, Monseigneur. He is no better, this morning--not so well, I think."

They took a turn in silence. "Forgive me if I am impertinent," said the Bishop, rather suddenly. "I have been wondering of late why your son has never married. How old is he--forty?"

Mme. de la Vireville shook her head with a sad little smile. "Only thirty-five, Monseigneur. As for his marrying, I have long greatly desired it, but he will not look at a woman. He has good reason, perhaps." She hesitated, then went on. "There was one, ten years ago . . . he loved her only too well. She too seemed to love him dearly, and became his affianced wife. On the very day before their marriage she fled from her home with another man, whom she had only known for a week or two. That man was Fortuné's intimate friend."

"And then?" asked the Bishop.

"Fortuné called him out--he could hardly do less. The scar which you may have remarked on his face, Monseigneur, is a memorial of their encounter. It is where his false friend's bullet wounded him--he can never look in a glass without seeing that reminder. They used pistols, not swords--I do not know why--and drew lots for the order of firing. And though my son, since he fired second, had this man who had so deeply injured him absolutely at his mercy, though he was half beside himself with grief and rage, he spared him, for her sake, and fired in the air."

"That was well done," said the Bishop.

Mme. de la Vireville laughed. "Was it not, Monseigneur! It was not easily done, either, that I know. Can you guess what Fortuné's reward was? After a year she left this man, to whom she was not wedded, and married another."

The Bishop looked very grave. "And your son, Madame, after so bitter a betrayal, has conceived a hatred of all women?"

"Hardly that, Monseigneur. It is more hopeless even than that--for such an aversion might change. No, I am almost sure that against his will he loves her still. That is the tragedy."

"She is still living--her husband also?"

"I believe so."

"Perhaps M. de la Vireville hopes to marry her in the end, if--as may so easily happen in these sad days--she should be suddenly left a widow?"

"No, Monseigneur, he would never do that. He has never forgiven her. But he will not look at another woman. I think it would make no difference to him if he were to hear of her death to-morrow. For him she has long been dead . . . and yet she is alive. Would God she were not! Her lover was killed by his side at Quiberon; he told me the other day." She paused a moment, looking into the distance, and resumed, with a little gesture: "Do not imagine, Monseigneur, that Fortuné is always thinking of this. He is not a dreamer; he has always been a man of action, and a reckless one at that. It is but a scar now, I think, not a wound--but it is a scar with poison in it. And over there in Jersey, when I saw him with the little boy . . ." She stopped, and the tears came into her eyes. "Monseigneur, I believe that in his heart of hearts Fortuné desires as much to have a son as I desire to see him with one."

"But," said the Bishop, "there is nothing to prevent his marrying some day, if he could cut himself loose from this memory. If he could so cut himself loose, the rest--you must pardon an old man, my daughter--the rest would not be difficult, would it?"

"Monseigneur, a man who will not look at women is always attractive to them."

The Bishop smiled. "I suppose that is true. Now would you be astounded to learn that, before you came, he used sometimes, in sleep or delirium, to repeat a woman's name? I suppose it was hers who betrayed him."

"I do not think that likely, Monseigneur," said Mme. de la Vireville. "He has not mentioned her name for years. And that it should have been any other woman's is impossible."

"Then perhaps my ears deceived me," replied the Bishop, looking as if he were pretty sure that they had not. "In that case I shall perhaps not be indiscreet if I tell you the name--admitting frankly that some of the context puzzled me. It was--'Anne.'"

It may be seen what bond of error united the old French Bishop and the middy of the _Pomone_.

Mme. de la Vireville clasped her little hands together. "But, Monseigneur, that exactly bears out what I said about his desiring a son. Anne is the name of the little boy I was referring to just now--Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny, his friend's son--the friend about whose fate, as Your Grandeur knows, Fortuné was anxious, but who proves, after all, to have been saved at Quiberon. Fortuné had promised the Marquis de Flavigny to look after the child if he--the Marquis--were killed."

"But now, as the Marquis escaped, he will not be called upon to undertake this charge?"

"No, Monseigneur."

"That is a pity," said the Bishop, looking down reflectively at the radiant face of a little beruffed aconite at his feet. "There are all sorts of doors which only a child's hands can unlock." And, still looking at the aconite, he went on gently: "Madame, I should be doing wrong were I to disguise from you that the doctor does not think well of the lethargy which seems latterly to have taken possession of your son, and which appears to have so much connection with his physical condition."

"I know it," said the poor mother, all the delicate colour gone from her cheeks. "But what more can I do, Monseigneur? I know that Fortuné loves me dearly, but I am old, and represent the past to him, not the future, and it is the past that he needs to forget. . . . He is ill, it is true--he has been very ill--but never have I seen him like this. Always, in whatever vicissitudes--and he has been severely wounded before, and I nursed him in Jersey--always he has been full of gaiety and courage. Now all that seems to have deserted him, as if he did not care to live."

"Madame, is that, after all, so much to be wondered at?" asked the Bishop gravely. "If you or I had fought at Quiberon, and had seen nearly all our comrades massacred in cold blood, might we not be tempted to feel the same? There is much buried on that shore which engulfed so many hopes. I think M. de la Vireville has left his there, as others their lives. There is not, I fancy, any great difference between the two losses. . . . Still, as I said, a child's hand holds many keys, to shut or to open." He stooped at last, a little painfully, and picked the aconite, and added to himself, "As we say to the Child who was Himself the Key . . . _O Clavis David, qui aperis et nemo claudit; claudis et nemo aperit, veni et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in umbra mortis_. . . . I wish your son could have had the care of this child you speak of."

Mme. de la Vireville could not reply. She had hidden her face in her hands, and the tears were trickling through them. The little old man, holding the golden flower in his fingers, stood and looked at her with a great pity in his eyes.

* * * * *

Suddenly, however, something else came into them--a gleam of recollection. He looked half doubtfully upon the weeping woman before him, compressed his lips, then appeared to make up his mind.

"My daughter," he said, "it has only just come back to my memory, strangely enough, that one night . . . now this, I fear, really is betraying an involuntary confidence, but for your sake I am going to do it . . . one night I heard your son murmuring to himself a name which can only have been a woman's. But perhaps, again, it was _hers_. . . ."

Mme. de la Vireville raised her tear-stained face from her hands. "What was the name, Monseigneur?"

"'Raymonde,'" said the Bishop.

It was no coup manqué this time. The little mother gazed at him thunderstruck, amazement, incredulity, and something that might almost have been a strangled joy chasing each other over her fragile countenance.

"'Raymonde'?" she repeated. "I . . . it cannot be . . . I know no one of that name!"

"But evidently your son does, Madame," suggested His Grandeur, unable to restrain the phantom of a smile. "It was the only time I ever heard him mention it. He seemed to be beseeching this 'Raymonde' to come to him."

Mme. de la Vireville had no words. Nor had she tears now; her astonishment had dried them. She stared at Monseigneur, who stood there with the bright aconite flower in his pale old hands, which were folded across the purple sash showing between the folds of his cloak, and she said nothing.

"Your experience of the world, my daughter," went on the Bishop, "must have taught you that even the most devoted son does not always confide everything to his mother. In this case, doubtless, the time was not ripe."

The time, however, did seem to him ripe to leave this mother to reflect on the information that he had just given her, and, the sound of a clock striking noon issuing most appositely at this moment from the house, he seized the opportunity to add:

"If you will excuse me, Madame, for a few moments? I must say my office."

And pulling out his shabby breviary he went off down the path in a manner more than diplomatic, for he had said Sext before ever Mme. de la Vireville came into the garden. However, one can always get ahead with advantage.

But when a conviction of ten years' growth--one, moreover, which you have just been stoutly affirming with your own lips--is as suddenly felled as was Mme. de la Vireville's about her son, it is natural to find its collapse somewhat devastating. Fortuné's mother, hardly aware that Monseigneur had left her, stood beside the snowdrops, certainly more engrossed than was Monseigneur himself at the other end of the path--and the antiphon to _her_ Hours was a name she had never heard before.