CHAPTER I

ANNE-HILARION GETS OUT OF BED

(1)

"And well ye ken, Maister Anne, ye should hae been asleep lang syne!" said Elspeth severely.

Master Anne--M. le Comte Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny--gave a little sigh from the bed. "I _have_ tried . . . if you would say 'Noroway,' perhaps? . . . Say 'Noroway-over-the-foam,' Elspeth, je vous en prie!"

"Dinna be using ony of yer French havers tae me, wean!" exclaimed the elderly woman thus addressed, still more threateningly. "Aweel then. . . . Ye're no' for 'True Thomas' the nicht?"

The silky brown head on the pillow was shaken. "No, please. I like well enough the Queen of Elfland, but best of all 'Noroway-over-the-foam' and the shoes with cork heels."

Elspeth Saunders grunted, for there was something highly congenial to her Calvinistic soul in that verse of 'Thomas the Rhymer' which deals with the Path of Wickedness--'Yon braid, braid road that lies across the lily leven,' and she was accustomed to render it with unction. However, she sat down, took up her knitting, and began:

"'The king sat in Dunfermline toun Drinking the blude-red wine,'"

and the little Franco-Scottish boy in the curtained bed closed his eyes, that he might seem to be composing himself to slumber. In reality he was seeing the pictures which are set in that most vivid of all ballads--Sir Patrick Spens receiving the King's letter as he walked on the seashore, the sailor telling of the new moon with the old in her arms (a phenomenon never quite clear to the Comte de Flavigny), the storm and shipwreck, and the ladies with their fans, the maidens with their golden combs, waiting for those who would never come back again.

"'And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens Wi' the Scots lords at his feet,'"

finished Elspeth. The knitting needles proceeded a little with their tale, then they too stopped.

"Losh! the bairn's asleep already!" thought Mrs. Saunders, looking over her spectacles. She tiptoed from the room.

Yet although Anne-Hilarion's long lashes lay quietly on his cheeks he was not by any means asleep, and under those dark curtains he watched, not without a certain drowsiness, the gigantic shadow of his attendant vanish from the wall. The night-light shed a very faint gleam on the vast mahogany wardrobe, whose polished doors reflected darkly much that passed without, and suggested, to a lively imagination, all kinds of secret happenings within. It also illumined Anne's minute garments, neatly folded on a chair, his high-waisted blue kerseymere pantaloons on the top of the pile, and the small coat, into which Elspeth had been sewing a fresh ruffle, over the back. This much of his apartment could Anne see between the chintz curtains, figured with many a long-tailed tropic bird, which hung tent-like from the short pole fixed in the wall above his pillow. But he could not see Mme. d'Aulnoy's fairy-tales, in their original French, which were lying face downwards on the floor not very far away (and which he would be scolded for having left about, when they were found to-morrow); nor the figure of Notre Dame de Pontmain, in her star-decked robe of blue and her long black veil, holding in her hands not her Son but a crucifix--the figure which M. l'Abbé, being of Laval, her country, had given to the little boy. For this image had a knack of disappearing entirely when Anne's father the Marquis was away, since, as may readily be supposed, it found no favour in the eyes of Mrs. Saunders, and was an even more violent irritant than all 'the bairn's Popish exercises,' to which she would so much have liked to put an end. That she might see as little as possible of the heathen idol she had banished it, with its bracket, to an obscure corner of the room, over the discarded high nursery-chair in which Anne, at six years old, no longer took his meals. The fact of the image's being in the room at all just now showed that the Marquis was at home . . . for to him, as to his small son, in this April of the year 1795, the solid Cavendish Square house was home, though it belonged to neither of them. Anne-Hilarion, for his part, could remember no other.

(2)

The unusual presence of a statue of the Virgin, and of Mme. d'Aulnoy's _Contes de fées_ on the second floor this London house, was, naturally, but a consequence of that same series of events which had brought thither their small owner. Seven years before, the only daughter of James Elphinstone of Glenauchtie, a retired official of high standing in the service of John Company, had lost her heart to a young Frenchman, the Marquis René de Flavigny, whom she had met on a visit to Paris. Although the necessary separation from his daughter was very bitter to him, Mr. Elphinstone could find no real objection to the match, and so the Scotch girl and the Frenchman were married, lived happily on de Flavigny's estate in the Nivernais, and were joined there in due time by a son.

But Anne-Hilarion had not chosen well the date of his entry into this world. On the very July day that René and Janet de Flavigny and all their tenants were celebrating the admirable prowess displayed by M. le Comte in attaining, without accident or illness--without flying back to heaven, as his nurse had it--the age of one year, the people of Paris also were keeping a festival, the first anniversary of the day when the bloody head of the governor of the Bastille had swung along the streets at the end of a pike. Before that summer was out the Marquis de Flavigny, urged by his father-in-law, had decided to place his wife and child in safety, and so, bidding the most reluctant of good-byes to the tourelles and the swans which had witnessed their two short years of happiness, they left France for England. Perhaps they would have fared no worse had they remained there. For Janet de Flavigny caught on the journey a chill from which she never recovered, and died, after a few months, leaving to her little son not even a memory, and to these two men who had passionately loved her a remembrance only too poignant.

Her death forced both their lives into fresh channels. Mr. Elphinstone left Scotland and settled in London, where, to distract himself from his grief, he began to write those long-planned memoirs of his Indian career which, after more than four years, still absorbed him. As for the Marquis de Flavigny, having once emigrated, he could not now return to France even had he wished it. He therefore threw himself heart and soul into the schemes of French Royalism, at first for the rescue of the Royal Family from their quasi-imprisonment in their own palace, and--now that King and Queen alike were done to death, their children captives and a Republic in being--into all the hopes that centred round the stubborn loyalists of Brittany, Maine, and Vendée, round du Boisguy or Stofflet or Charette. And though the rightful little King might be close prisoner in the Temple, his uncles--the Comte de Provence (Regent in name of France) and the Comte d'Artois--were still at large, as exiles, in Europe, and it was to one or other of these princes that Royalist émigrés looked, and under their ægis that they plotted and fought. Not many of them, impoverished as they were by the Revolution, had the good fortune to possess, like René de Flavigny, a British father-in-law who put money and house at his son-in-law's disposal, welcomed his friends, and strove to bear his absences on Royalist business with equanimity.

The fact was that the young Frenchman had become very dear to Mr. Elphinstone, not only for Janet's sake but also for his own. He had liked de Flavigny from the first moment that he met him; it was only during the shock of finding that Janet wished to marry him that his feelings had temporarily cooled. Indeed, René de Flavigny's character and disposition were not ill summed up in the word 'lovable.' He had little of the traditional French gaiety--and still less after his wife's death--just as Mr. Elphinstone had little of the traditional Scotch dourness. And the old man knew how happy his daughter was with him. Afterwards, their common bereavement drew the two more than ever together. Mr. Elphinstone discovered in his son-in-law tastes and sympathies more akin to his own than he had imagined, and sometimes, though he would not have had him settle down, at thirty-two, into a bookworm like himself, he regretted the political activities in which the Marquis was immersed, for he knew him to be of too fine a temper to take pleasure in the plottings and intrigues which almost of necessity accompany the attempts to reinstate a dispossessed dynasty. And while not, perhaps, taking those plottings over-seriously, he realised that his son-in-law's tact and ability made him a very useful person to his own party and a person proportionately obnoxious to the other. The game he was engaged in playing against the French Republic was not without danger; that adversary across the Channel was known to have hidden agents in England, and if these had the opportunity as well as the orders, it was not scruples that would hold them back from actual violence. Still, that was a contingency sufficiently remote, although the thought of it sometimes caused Mr. Elphinstone to feel, during his son-in-law's absences, a certain uneasiness for his safety as well as regret at the loss of his society.

(3)

Anne-Hilarion was quite aware, in a general way, of his father's occupations. In fact, as he lay now in his bed, looking through the curtains at the wardrobe doors, he was meditating on the important meeting which Papa was having with his friends this very evening in the dining-room. He did not know exactly what they were discussing, but from something which Papa had said in his hearing he believed that there was some question of going over to France--in ships, of course, since there was sea (he did not know how much) between England and that country. And because his mind was full of Sir Patrick Spens and his shipwreck, this undertaking seemed to him terribly dangerous, and he much wished that Papa were not thinking of it.

"To Noroway, to Noroway, To Noroway o'er the faem,"

the words lilted in his head like the rocking of a boat. They would be going over the foam to that land which he did not remember:

"Half owre, half owre, to Aberdour, 'Tis fifty fathoms deep. . . ."

Anne had no idea what fifty fathoms might mean, but it sounded terrifying. Suppose Papa were to be drowned like that--suppose he too were obliged to stuff 'silken cloth' into the hole of the ship to keep out the water which would not be kept out! . . .

Anne-Hilarion sat up suddenly in bed and threw back the clothes. A very strong impulse, and by no means a righteous, was upon him, but he was ridden by an agonising fear, and there was nothing for it save to go down and ascertain the truth. He slipped out of bed and pattered on to the landing.

The stairs were steep, there was little light upon the road, the balusters looked like rows of brown, square-faced soldiers. Not now, however, was there room for thoughts of Barbe Bleue, that French ogre, who was possibly hanging the last but one of his wives at that moment in the linen-press, nor of the terrible Kelpie of the Flow, which might that evening have left its Scottish loch and be looking in, with its horse face, at the staircase window. No, the chief terror was really Elspeth, who would certainly snatch him swiftly back to bed, not comprehending (nor he either, for that matter) how it was she who had started him on the path of this fear. So he went down as quickly as one foot at a time permitted, knowing that Grandpapa would be safe and busy in his study, and that Baptiste, his father's old body-servant, was, if met, more likely to forward him in his journey than to hinder him. He would, in fact, have been rather glad to encounter that elderly slave of his as he made his solitary way down to the dining-room, past the descending row of antlers and dirks and lairds of Glenauchtie in their wigs and tartan.