Tourdestelle enjoyed the aristocratic privilege of being twelve miles from the nearest railway station. Alighting here on an evening of clear sky, Beauchamp found an English groom ready to dismount for him and bring on his portmanteau. The man said that his mistress had been twice to the station, and was now at the neighbouring Chateau Dianet. Thither Beauchamp betook himself on horseback. He was informed at the gates that Madame la Marquise had left for Tourdestelle in the saddle only ten minutes previously. The lodge-keeper had been instructed to invite him to stay at Chateau Dianet in the event of his arriving late, but it would be possible to overtake madame by a cut across the heights at a turn of the valley. Beauchamp pushed along the valley for this visible projection; a towering ma.s.s of woodland, in the midst of which a narrow roadway, worn like the track of a torrent with heavy rain, wound upward.
On his descent to the farther side, he was to spy directly below in the flat for Tourdestelle. He crossed the wooded neck above the valley, and began descending, peering into gulfs of the twilight dusk. Some paces down he was aided by a brilliant half-moon that divided the whole underlying country into sharp outlines of dark and fair, and while endeavouring to distinguish the chateau of Tourdestelle his eyes were attracted to an angle of the downward zigzag, where a pair of horses emerged into broad light swiftly; apparently the riders were disputing, or one had overtaken the other in pursuit. Riding-habit and plumed hat signalized the s.e.x of one. Beauchamp sung out a gondolier"s cry. He fancied it was answered.
He was heard, for the lady turned about, and as he rode down, still uncertain of her, she came cantering up alone, and there could be no uncertainty.
Moonlight is friendless to eyes that would make sure of a face long unseen. It was Renee whose hand he clasped, but the story of the years on her, and whether she was in bloom, or wan as the beams revealing her, he could not see.
Her tongue sounded to him as if it were loosened without a voice. "You have come. That storm! You are safe!"
So phantom-like a sound of speech alarmed him. "I lost no time. But you?"
"I am well."
"Nothing hangs over you?"
"Nothing."
"Why give me just three days?"
"Pure impatience. Have you forgotten me?"
Their horses walked on with them. They unlocked their hands.
"You knew it was I?" said he.
"Who else could it be? I heard Venice," she replied.
Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it appeared, searching for something that eluded him under the road-side bank. He sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked, as he drew up beside Renee: "What one picks from the earth one may wear, I presume, especially when we can protest it is our property."
Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the breast b.u.t.tonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some drooping exotic of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.
Renee p.r.o.nounced his name: "M. le Comte Henri d"Henriel."
He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.
"Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine G.o.d, beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer. Thanks to the storm, I suppose, I have won. I must maintain, madame, that I won."
"You wear your trophy," said Renee, and her horse reared and darted ahead.
The gentleman on each side of her struck into a trot. Beauchamp glanced at M. d"Henriel"s breast-decoration. Renee pressed the pace, and threading dense covers of foliage they reached the level of the valley, where for a couple of miles she led them, stretching away merrily, now in shadow, now in moonlight, between high land and meadow land, and a line of poplars in the meadows winding with the river that fed the vale and shot forth gleams of silvery disquiet by rustic bridge and mill.
The strangeness of being beside her, not having yet scanned her face, marvelling at her voice--that was like and unlike the Renee of old, full of her, but in another key, a mellow note, maturer--made the ride magical to Beauchamp, planting the past in the present like a perceptible ghost.
Renee slackened speed, saying: "Tourdestelle spans a branch of our little river. This is our gate. Had it been daylight I would have taken you by another way, and you would have seen the black tower burnt in the Revolution; an imposing monument, I am a.s.sured. However, you will think it pretty beside the stream. Do you come with us, M. le Comte?"
His answer was inaudible to Beauchamp; he did not quit them.
The lamp at the lodge-gates presented the young man"s face in full view, and Beauchamp thought him supremely handsome. He perceived it to be a lady"s glove that M. d"Henriel wore at his breast.
Renee walked her horse up the park-drive, alongside the bright running water. It seemed that she was aware of the method of provoking or reproving M. d"Henriel. He endured some minutes of total speechlessness at this pace, and abruptly said adieu and turned back.
Renee bounded like a vessel free of her load. "But why should we hurry?"
said she, and checked her course to the walk again. "I hope you like our Normandy, and my valley. You used to love France, Nevil; and Normandy, they tell me, is cousin to the opposite coast of England, in climate, soil, people, it may be in manners too. A Beauchamp never can feel that he is a foreigner in Normandy. We claim you half French. You have grander parks, they say. We can give you sunlight."
"And it was really only the wish to see me?" said Beauchamp.
"Only, and really. One does not live for ever--on earth; and it becomes a question whether friends should be shadows to one another before death. I wrote to you because I wished to see you: I was impatient because I am Renee."
"You relieve me!"
"Evidently you have forgotten my character, Nevil."
"Not a feature of it."
"Ah!" she breathed involuntarily.
"Would you have me forget it?"
"When I think by myself, quite alone, yes, I would. Otherwise how can one hope that one"s friend is friendship, supposing him to read us as we are--minutely, accurately? And it is in absence that we desire our friends to be friendship itself. And... and I am utterly astray! I have not dealt in this language since I last thought of writing a diary, and stared at the first line. If I mistake not, you are fond of the picturesque. If moonlight and water will satisfy you, look yonder."
The moon launched her fairy silver fleets on a double sweep of the little river round an island of reeds and two tall poplars.
"I have wondered whether I should ever see you looking at that scene,"
said Renee.
He looked from it to her, and asked if Roland was well, and her father; then alluded to her husband; but the unlettering elusive moon, bright only in the extension of her beams, would not tell him what story this face, once heaven to him, wore imprinted on it. Her smile upon a parted mouth struck him as two-edged in replying: "I have good news to give you of them all: Roland is in garrison at Rouen, and will come when I telegraph. My father is in Touraine, and greets you affectionately; he hopes to come. They are both perfectly happy. My husband is travelling."
Beauchamp was conscious of some bitter taste; unaware of what it was, though it led him to say, undesigningly: "How very handsome that M.
d"Henriel is!--if I have his name correctly."
Renee answered: "He has the misfortune to be considered the handsomest young man in France."
"He has an Italian look."
"His mother was Provencale."
She put her horse in motion, saying: "I agree with you that handsome men are rarities. And, by the way, they do not set our world on fire quite as much as beautiful women do yours, my friend. Acknowledge so much in our favour."
He a.s.sented indefinitely. He could have wished himself away canva.s.sing in Bevisham. He had only to imagine himself away from her, to feel the flood of joy in being with her.
"Your husband is travelling?"
"It is his pleasure."
Could she have intended to say that this was good news to give of him as well as of the happiness of her father and brother?
"Now look on Tourdestelle," said Renee. "You will avow that for an active man to be condemned to seek repose in so dull a place, after the fatigues of the season in Paris, it is considerably worse than for women, so I am here to dispense the hospitalities. The right wing of the chateau, on your left, is new. The side ab.u.t.ting the river is inhabited by Dame Philiberte, whom her husband imprisoned for attempting to take her pleasure in travel. I hear upon authority that she dresses in white, and wears a black crucifix. She is many centuries old, and still she lives to remind people that she married a Rouaillout. Do you not think she should have come to me to welcome me? She never has; and possibly of ladies who are disembodied we may say that they know best. For me, I desire the interview--and I am a coward: I need not state it." She ceased; presently continuing: "The other inhabitants are my sister, Agnes d"Auffray, wife of a general officer serving in Afric--my sister by marriage, and my friend; the baronne d"Orbec, a relation by marriage; M. d"Orbec, her son, a guest, and a sportsman; M. Livret, an erudite. No young ladies: I can bear much, but not their presence; girls are odious to me. I knew one in Venice."
They came within the rays of the lamp hanging above the unpretending entrance to the chateau. Renee"s broad grey Longueville hat curved low with its black plume on the side farthest from him. He was favoured by the gallant lift of the brim on the near side, but she had overshadowed her eyes.