M. le Comte de Cambray was at this time close on sixty years of age, and the hardships which he had endured for close upon a quarter of a century had left their indelible impress upon his wrinkled, careworn face.
But no one--least of all a younger man--could possibly rival him in dignity of bearing and gracious condescension of manner. He wore his clothes after the old-time fashion, and clung to the powdered peruque which had been the mode at the Tuileries and Versailles before these vulgar young republicans took to wearing their own hair in its natural colour.
Now as he advanced from the inner room to meet Mme. la d.u.c.h.esse, he seemed a perfect presentation or rather resuscitation of the courtly and vanished epoch of the Roi Soleil. He held himself very erect and walked with measured step, and a stereotyped smile upon his lips. He paused just in front of Mme. la d.u.c.h.esse, then stopped and lightly touched with his lips the hand which she held out to him.
"Tell me, Monsieur my brother," said Madame in her loudly-pitched voice, "do you expect me to make before you my best Versailles curtsey, for--with my rheumatic knee--I warn you that once I get down, you might find it very difficult to get me up on my feet again."
"Hush, Sophie," admonished M. le Comte impatiently, "you must try and subdue your voice a little, we are no longer in Worcester remember--"
But Madame only shrugged her thin shoulders.
"Bah!" she retorted, "there"s only good old Hector on the other side of the door, and you don"t imagine you are really throwing dust in _his_ eyes do you? . . . good old Hector with his threadbare livery and his ill-fed belly. . . ."
"Sophie!" exclaimed M. le Comte who was really vexed this time, "I must insist. . . ."
"All right, all right my dear Andre. . . . I won"t say anything more.
Take me to your audience chamber and I"ll try to behave like a lady."
A smile that was distinctly mischievous still hovered round Madame"s lips, but she forced her eyes to look grave: she held out the tips of her fingers to her brother and allowed him to lead her in the correct manner into the next room.
Here M. le Comte invited her to sit in an upright chair which was placed at a convenient angle close to his bureau while he himself sat upon a stately throne-like armchair, one shapely knee bent, the other slightly stretched forward, displaying the fine silk stocking and the set of his well-cut, satin breeches. Mme. la d.u.c.h.esse kept her hands folded in front of her, and waited in silence for her brother to speak, but he seemed at a loss how to begin, for her piercing gaze was making him feel very uncomfortable: he could not help but detect in it the twinkle of good-humoured sarcasm.
Madame of course would not help him out. She enjoyed his obvious embarra.s.sment, which took him down somewhat from that high alt.i.tude of dignity wherein he delighted to soar.
"My dear Sophie," he began at last, speaking very deliberately and carefully choosing his words, "before the step which Crystal is about to take to-day becomes absolutely irrevocable, I desired to talk the matter over with you, since it concerns the happiness of my only child."
"Isn"t it a little late, my good Andre," remarked Madame drily, "to talk over a question which has been decided a month ago? The contract is to be signed to-night. Our present conversation might have been held to some purpose soon after the New Year. It is distinctly useless to-day."
At Madame"s sharp and uncompromising words a quick blush had spread over the Comte"s sunken cheeks.
"I could not consult you before, Sophie," he said coldly, "you chose to immure yourself in a convent, rather than come back straightaway to your old home as we all did when our King was restored to his throne. The post has been very disorganised and Boulogne is a far cry from Brestalou, but I did write to you as soon as Victor de Marmont made his formal request for Crystal"s hand. To this letter I had no reply, and I could not keep him waiting in indefinite uncertainty."
"Your letter did not reach me until a month after it was written, as I had the honour to tell you in my reply."
"And that same reply only reached me a fortnight ago," retorted the Comte, "when Crystal had been formally engaged to Victor de Marmont for over a month and the date for the signature of the contract and the wedding-day had both been fixed. I then sent a courier at great expense and in great haste immediately to you," he added with a tone of dignified reproach, "I could do no more."
"Or less," she a.s.sented tartly. "And here I am, my dear brother, and I am not blaming you for delays in the post. I merely remarked that it was too late now to consult me upon a marriage which is to all intents and purposes, an accomplished fact already."
"That is so of course. But it would be a great personal satisfaction to me, my good Sophie, to hear your views upon the matter. You have brought Crystal up from babyhood: in a measure, you know her better than even I--her father--do and therefore you are better able than I am to judge whether Crystal"s marriage with de Marmont will be conducive to her permanent happiness."
"As to that, my good Andre," quoth Madame, "you must remember that when our father and mother decided that a marriage between me and M. le Duc d"Agen was desirable, my personal feelings and character were never consulted for a moment . . . and I suppose that--taking life as it is--I was never particularly unhappy as his wife."
"And what do you adduce from those reminiscences, my dear Sophie?"
queried the Comte de Cambray suavely.
"That Victor de Marmont is not a bad fellow," replied Madame, "that he is no worse than was M. le Duc d"Agen and that therefore there is no reason to suppose that Crystal will be any more unhappy than I was in my time."
"But . . ."
"There is no "but" about it, my good Andre. Crystal is a sweet girl and a devoted daughter. She will make the best, never you fear! of the circ.u.mstances into which your blind worship of your own dignity and of your rank have placed her."
"My good Sophie," broke in the Count hotly, "you talk _par Dieu_, as if I was forcing my only child into a distasteful marriage."
"No, I do not talk as if you were forcing Crystal into a distasteful marriage, but you know quite well that she only accepted Victor de Marmont because it was your wish, and because his millions are going to buy back the old Cambray estates, and she is so imbued with the sense of her duty to you and to the family escutcheon, that she was willing to sacrifice every personal feeling in the fulfilment of that duty."
"By "personal feeling" I suppose that you mean St. Genis."
"Well, yes . . . I do," said Madame laconically.
"Crystal was very much in love with him at one time."
"She still is."
"But even you, my dear sister, must admit that a marriage with St. Genis was out of the question," retorted the Count in his turn with some acerbity. "I am very fond of Maurice and his name is as old and great as ours, but he hasn"t a sou, and you know as well as I do by now that the restoration of confiscated lands is out of the question . . . parliament will never allow it and the King will never dare. . . ."
"I know all that, my poor Andre," sighed Madame in a more conciliatory spirit, "I know moreover that you yourself haven"t a sou either, in spite of your grandeur and your prejudices. . . . Money must be got somehow, and our ancient family "scutcheon must be regilt at any cost. I know that we must keep up this state pertaining to the old regime, we must have our lacqueys and our liveries, sycophants around us and gaping yokels on our way when we sally out into the open. . . . We must blot out from our lives those twenty years spent in a democratic and enlightened country where no one is ashamed either of poverty or of honest work--and above all things we must forget that there has ever been a revolution which sent M. le Comte de Cambray, Commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost, Grand Cross of the Ordre du Lys, Seigneur of Montfleury and St. Eynard, hereditary Grand Chamberlain of France, to teach French and drawing in an English Grammar School. . . ."
"You wrong me there, Sophie, I wish to forget nothing of the past twenty years."
"I thought that you had given your memory a holiday."
"I forget nothing," he reiterated with dignified emphasis, "neither the squalid poverty which I endured, nor the bitter experiences which I gleaned in exile."
"Nor the devotion of those who saved your life."
"And yours . . ." he interposed.
"And mine, at risk of their own."
"Perhaps you will believe me when I tell you that not a day goes by but Crystal and I speak of Sir Percy Blakeney, and of his gallant League of the Scarlet Pimpernel."
"Well! we owe our lives to them," said Madame with deep-drawn sigh. "I wonder if we shall ever see any of those fine fellows again!"
"G.o.d only knows," sighed M. le Comte in response. "But," he continued more lightly, "as you know the League itself has ceased to be. We saw very little of Sir Percy and Lady Blakeney latterly for we were too poor ever to travel up to London. Crystal and I saw them, before we left England, and I then had the opportunity of thanking Sir Percy Blakeney for the last time, for the many valuable French lives which his plucky little League had saved."
"He is indeed a gallant gentleman," said Mme. la d.u.c.h.esse gently, even whilst her bright, shrewd eyes gazed straight out before her as if on the great bare walls of her own ancestral home, the ghostly hand of memory had conjured up pictures of long ago:--her own, her husband"s and her brother"s arrest here in this very room, the weeping servants, the rough, half-naked soldiery--then the agony of a nine days" imprisonment in a dark, dank prison-cell filled to overflowing with poor wretches in the same pitiable plight as herself--the hasty trial, the insults, the mockery:--her husband"s death in prison and her own thoughts of approaching death!
Then the gallant deed!--after all these years she could still see herself, her brother and Jeanne, her faithful maid, and poor devoted Hector all huddled up in a rickety tumbril, being dragged through the streets of Paris on the road to death. On ahead she had seen the weird outline of the guillotine silhouetted against the evening sky, whilst all around her a howling, jeering mob sang that awful refrain: "Ca ira!
Ca ira! les aristos a la lanterne!"
Then it was that she had felt unseen hands s.n.a.t.c.hing her out of the tumbril, she had felt herself being dragged through that yelling crowd to a place where there was silence and darkness and where she knew that she was safe: thence she was conveyed--she hardly realised how--to England, where she and her brother and Jeanne and Hector, their faithful servants, had found refuge for over twenty years.
"It was a gallant deed!" whispered Mme. la d.u.c.h.esse once again, "and one which will always make me love every Englishman I meet, for the sake of one who was called The Scarlet Pimpernel."
"Then why should you attribute vulgar ingrat.i.tude to me?" retorted the Comte reproachfully. "My feelings I imagine are as sensitive as your own. Am I not trying my best to be kind to that Mr. Clyffurde, who is an honoured guest in my house--just because it was Sir Percy Blakeney who recommended him to me?"
"It can"t be very difficult to be kind to such an attractive young man,"
was Mme. la d.u.c.h.esse"s dry comment. "Recommendation or no recommendation I liked your Mr. Clyffurde and if it were not so late in the day and there was still time to give my opinion, I should suggest that Mr.