"Not only for my own sake, you know. For yours, because I am sure you must be relieved, and for--well, for everybody"s sake. Tell me all about it, please." And she pushed her chair sideways nearer to Colville"s.
John Turner bit the first joint of his thumb reflectively. It is so rare that one can tell any one all about anything.
"Tell me first," Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence suggested, "whether Miriam Liston"s money is all safe as well."
"Miriam"s money never was in danger," he replied. "Miriam is my ward; you are only my client. There is no chance of Miriam being able to make ducks and drakes of her money."
"That sounds as if I had been trying to do that with mine.
"Well," admitted the banker, with a placid laugh, "if it had not been for my failure--"
"Don"t call it hard names," put in Dormer Colville, generously. "It was not a failure."
"Call it a temporary suspension of payment, then," agreed the banker, imperturbably. "If it had not been for that, half your fortune would have been goodness knows where by now. You wanted to put it into some big speculation in this country, if I remember aright. And big speculations in France are the very devil just now. Whereas, now, you see, it is all safe and you can invest it in the beginning of next year in some good English securities. It seems providential, does it not?"
He rose as he spoke and held out his hand to say good-bye. He asked the question of Colville"s necktie, apparently, for he smiled stupidly at it.
"Well, I do not understand business after all, I admit that," Mrs. St.
Pierre Lawrence called out gaily to him as he went toward the door. "I do not understand things at all."
"No, and I don"t suppose you ever will," Turner replied as he followed the servant into the corridor.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
AN UNDERSTANDING
Loo Barebone went back to the Chateau de Gemosac after those travels in Provence which terminated so oddly on board "The Last Hope," at anchor in the Garonne River.
The Marquis received him with enthusiasm and a spirit of optimism which age could not dim.
"Everything is going _a merveille!_" he cried. "In three months we shall be ready to strike our blow--to make our great _coup_ for France. The failure of Turner"s bank was a severe check, I admit, and for a moment I was in despair. But now we are sure that we shall have the money for Albert de Chantonnay"s Beauvoir estate by the middle of January. The death of Madame la d.u.c.h.esse was a misfortune. If we could have persuaded her to receive you--your face would have done the rest, mon ami--we should have been invincible. But she was broken, that poor lady. Think of her life! Few women would have survived half of the troubles that she carried on those proud shoulders from childhood."
They were sitting in the little salon in the building that adjoined the gate-house of Gemosac, of which the stone stairs must have rung beneath the red spurs of fighting men; of which the walls were dented still with the mark of arms.
Barebone had given an account of his journey, which had been carried through without difficulty. Everywhere success had waited upon him--enthusiasm had marked his pa.s.sage. In returning to France, he had stolen a march on his enemies, for nothing seemed to indicate that his presence in the country was known to them.
"I tell you," the Marquis explained, "that he has his hands full--that man in Paris. It is only a month since he changed his ministry. Who is this St. Arnaud, his Minister of War? Who is Maupas, his Prefect of Police? Does Monsieur Manpas know that we are nearly ready for our _coup?_ Bah! Tell me nothing of that sort, gentlemen."
And this was the universally accepted opinion at this time, of Louis Bonaparte the President of a tottering Republic, divided against itself; a dull man, at his wits" end. For months, all Europe had been turning an inquiring and watchful eye on France. Socialism was rampant. Secret societies honeycombed the community. There was some danger in the air--men knew not what. Catastrophe was imminent, and none knew where to look for its approach. But all thought that it must come at the end of the year. A sort of panic took hold of all cla.s.ses. They dreaded the end of 1851.
The Marquis de Gemosac spoke openly of these things before Juliette. She had been present when Loo and he talked together of this last journey, so happily accomplished, so fruitful of result. And Loo did not tell the Marquis that he had seen his old ship, "The Last Hope," in the river at Bordeaux, and had gone on board of her.
Juliette listened, as she worked, beneath the lamp at the table in the middle of the room. The lace-work she had brought from the convent-school was not finished yet. It was exquisitely fine and delicate, and Juliette executed the most difficult patterns with a sort of careless ease.
Sometimes, when the Marquis was more than usually extravagant in his antic.i.p.ations of success, or showed a superlative contempt for his foes, Juliette glanced at Barebone over her lace-work, but she rarely took part in the talk when politics were under discussion.
In domestic matters, however, this new chatelaine showed considerable shrewdness. She was not ignorant of the price of hay, and knew to a cask how much wine was stored in the vault beneath the old chapel. On these subjects the Marquis good-humouredly followed her advice sometimes. His word had always been law in the whole neighbourhood. Was he not the head of one of the oldest families in France?
"But, _pardieu_, she shows a wisdom quite phenomenal, that little one,"
the Marquis would tell his friends, with a hearty laugh. It was only natural that he should consider amusing the idea of uniting wisdom and youth and beauty in one person. It is still a universally accepted law that old people must be wise and young persons only charming. Some may think that they could point to a wise child born of foolish parents; to a daughter who is well-educated and shrewd, possessing a sense of logic, and a mother who is ignorant and foolish; to a son who has more sense than his father: but of course such observers must be mistaken. Old theories must be the right ones. The Marquis had no doubt of this, at all events, and thought it most amusing that Juliette should establish order in the chaos of domestic affairs at Gemosac.
"You are grave," said Juliette to Barebone, one evening soon after his return, when they happened to be alone in the little drawing-room.
Barebone was, in fact, not a lively companion; for he had sat staring at the log-fire for quite three minutes when his eyes might a.s.suredly have been better employed. "You are grave. Are you thinking of your sins?"
"When I think of those, Mademoiselle, I laugh. It is when I think of you that I am grave."
"Thank you."
"So I am always grave, you understand."
She glanced quickly, not at him but toward him, and then continued her lace-making, with the ghost of a smile tilting the corners of her lips.
"It is because I have something to tell you."
"A secret?" she inquired, and she continued to smile, but differently, and her eyes hardened almost to resentment.
"Yes; a secret. It is a secret only known to two other people in the world besides myself. And they will never let you know even that they share it with you, Mademoiselle."
"Then they are not women," she said, with a sudden laugh. "Tell it to me, then--your secret."
There had been an odd suggestion of foreknowledge in her manner, as if she were humouring him by pretending to accept as a secret of vast importance some news which she had long known--that little air of patronage which even schoolgirls bestow, at times, upon white-haired men.
It is part of the maternal instinct. But this vanished when she heard that she was to share the secret with two men, and she repeated, impatiently, "Tell me, please."
"It is a secret which will make a difference to us all our lives, Mademoiselle," he said, warningly. "It will not leave us the same as it found us. It has made a difference to all who know it. Therefore, I have only decided to tell you after long consideration. It is, in fact, a point of honour. It is necessary for you to know, whatever the result may be. Of that I have no doubt whatever."
He laughed rea.s.suringly, which made her glance at him gravely, almost anxiously.
"And are you going on telling it to other people, afterward," she inquired; "to my father, for instance?"
"No, Mademoiselle. It comes to you, and it stops at you. I do not mind withholding it from your father, and from all the friends who have been so kind to me in France. I do not mind deceiving kings and emperors, Mademoiselle, and even the People, which is now always spelt in capital letters, and must be spoken of with bated breath."
She gave a scornful little laugh, as at the sound of an old jest--the note of a deathless disdain which was in the air she breathed.
"Not even the newspapers, which are trying to govern France. All that is a question of politics. But when it comes to you, Mademoiselle, that is a different matter."
"Ah!"
"Yes. It is then a question of love."
Juliette slowly changed colour, but she gave a little gay laugh of incredulity and bent her head away from the light of the lamp.
"That is a different code of honour altogether," he said, gravely. "A code one does not wish to tamper with."
"No?" she inquired, with the odd little smile of foreknowledge again.
"No. And, therefore, before I go any farther, I think it best to tell you that I am not what I am pretending to be. I am pretending to be the son of the little Dauphin, who escaped from the Temple. He may have escaped from the Temple; that I don"t know. But I know, or at least I think I know, that he is not buried in Farlingford churchyard and he was not my father. I can pa.s.s as the grandson of Louis XVI; I know that. I can deceive all the world. I can even climb to the throne of France, perhaps.