The Battle of the Strong

V.

ELEVEN years passed.

The King of France was no longer sending adventurers to capture the outposts of England, but rather was beginning hopelessly to wind in again the coil of disaster which had spun out through the helpless fingers of Necker, Calonne, Brienne, and the rest, and in the end was to bind his own hands for the guillotine.

The island of Jersey, like a scout upon the borders of a foeman’s country, looked out over St. Michael’s Basin to those provinces where the war of the Vendée was soon to strike France from within, while England, and presently all Europe, should strike her from without.

War, or the apprehension of war, was in the air. The people of the little isle, always living within the influence of natural wonder and the power of the elements, were superstitious ; and as news of dark deeds done in Paris crept across from Carteret or St. Malo, as men-ofwar anchored in the tideway, and English troops, against the hour of trouble, came, transport after transport, into the harbor of St. Helier’s, they began to see visions and dream dreams. One peasant heard the witches singing a chorus of carnage at Rocbert; another saw, toward the Minquiers, a great army, like a mirage, upon the sea; others declared that certain French refugees in the island had the evil eye and bewitched the cattle ; and one peasant woman, wild with grief because her child had died of a sudden sickness, meeting a little Frenchman, the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir, in the Rue des Très Pigeons, made a stroke at his face with a knitting-needle, and then, Protestant though she was, crossed herself several times, after the custom of her forefathers.

This superstition and fanaticism, so strong in the populace, now and then burst forth in untamable fury and riot; so that when, on the 16th of September, 1792, the gay morning was suddenly overcast and a black curtain was drawn over the bright sun, the people of Jersey, working in the fields, vraicking among the rocks, or knitting in their doorways, stood aghast, and knew not what was upon them.

Some began to say the Lord’s Prayer. Some, in superstitious terror, ran to the secret hole in the wall, to the chimney, or to the bedstead, or dug up the earthen floor, to find the stocking full of notes and gold, which might perchance come with them safe through any cataclysm, or start them again in business in another world. Some began tremblingly to sing hymns, and a few to swear freely. The latter were mostly carters, whose salutations to one another were mainly oaths because of the extreme narrowness of the island roads, and sailors, to whom profanity was as daily bread.

In St. Helier’s, after the first stupefaction, people poured into the streets. They gathered most where met the Rue d’Drière and the Rue d’Egypte. Here stood the old prison, and the spot was called the Place du Vier Prison.

Men and women, with their breakfasts still in their mouths, mumbled in terror to one another. A woman shrieked that the Day of Judgment was come, and instinctively straightened her cap, smoothed out her dress of molleton, and put on her sabots. A carpenter, hearing her terrified exclamations, put on his sabots also, stooped, whimpering, to the stream running from the Rue d’Egypte, and began to wash his face. Presently a dozen of his neighbors did the same. Some of the women, however, went on knitting hard as they gabbled prayers and looked at the fast-blackening sun. Knitting was to Jersey women, like breathing or talebearing, life itself. With their eyes closing on earth, they would have gone on knitting and dropped no stitches.

A dusk came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The gray stone walls of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the dismayed, terrified, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting the word of command to an imaginary company of militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price, simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect past; and from a window a notorious evil liver was calling out in frenzied voice that she had heard the devil and the witches from Rocbert reveling in the dungeons of the prison the night before. Thereupon, a disheveled, long-haired fanatic, once a barber, with a gift for mad preaching and a well-known hatred of the French, sprang upon the Pompe des Brigands, and, declaring that the Last Day had come, cried : —

“ The spirit of the Lord is upon me ! He hath sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound ! ”

Some one thrust into his hand a torch. He waved it to and fro in his wild harangue ; he threw up his arms toward the darkened sun and the ominous gloom, and with blatant fury commanded that the prison doors be opened. Other torches and candles appeared, and the mob trembled to and fro in their helpless delirium of excitement.

“ The prison ! Open the Vier Prison ! Break down the doors! Gatd’en’àle, drive out the devils! Free the prisoners, the poor vauriens! ” the crowd shouted, and they rushed forward with sticks and weapons.

The prison arched the street as Temple Bar once spanned the Strand. They pressed through the archway, overpowered the terror-stricken jailer, and, battering open the door in frenzy, called the prisoners forth.

They looked to see issue some sailor arrested for singing too loud of a Sabbath, some profane peasant who had presumed to wear patins in church, some profaner peasant who had not doffed his hat to the connétable, or some slipshod militiaman who had worn sabots on parade, thereby offending the red - robed dignity of the royal court.

Instead, there appeared a little Frenchman of the most refined and unusual appearance. The blue cloth of his coat set off the extreme paleness of his small but serene face and the high, round forehead. The hair, a beautiful silver gray, which time only had powdered, was tied in a queue behind. The little gentleman’s hand was as thin and fine as a lady’s ; his shoulders were narrow and slightly stooped; his eyes were large, eloquent, and benign. His clothes were amazingly neat; they showed constant brushing, and here and there signs of the friendly repairing needle.

The whole impression was that of a man whom a whiff of wind would blow away, with the body of an ascetic and the simplicity of a child, while the face had some particular sort of wisdom, difficult to define and impossible to imitate. He held in his hand a small cane of the sort carried at the court of Louis XV. Louis Capet himself had given it to him ; and you might have had the life of the little gentleman, but not this cane with the tiny golden bust of his unhappy monarch.

He stood on the steps of the prison and looked serenely on the muttering, excited crowd.

“ I fear there is a mistake,” said he, coughing slightly into his fingers. “ You do not seek me. I — I have no claim upon your kindness. I am only the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir.”

For a moment the mob had been stayed in amazement by this small, rare creature stepping from the doorway, like a porcelain colored figure from a noisome wood in a painting by Boucher. In the instant’s pause, the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir took from his pocket a timepiece and glanced at it; then looked over the heads of the crowd toward the hooded sun, which was beginning to show its face again.

“ It was due at eight less seven minutes,” said he ; “ clear sun again was set for ten minutes past. It is now upon the stroke of the hour ! ”

He seemed in no way concerned with the swaying crowd before him. Undoubtedly they wanted nothing of him, and therefore he did not take their presence seriously; but, of an inquiring mind, he was deeply interested in the eclipse. His obliviousness of them and their intentions was of short duration.

“ He’s a French sorcerer ! He has the evil eye ! Away with him to the sea ! ” shouted the fanatical preacher from the Pompe des Brigands.

“ It’s a witch turned into a man ! ” cried a drunken woman from her window. “ Give him the wheel of fire at the blacksmith’s forge.”

“ That’s it ! Gad’rabotin — the wheel of fire ’ll turn him back again to a hag ! ”

The little gentleman protested, but they seized him and dragged him from the steps. Tossed like a ball, so light was he, he grasped his gold-headed cane as one might cling to life, and declared that he was no witch, but a poor French exile, arrested the night before for being abroad after nine o’clock, against the orders of the royal court.

Many of the crowd knew him well enough by sight, but that natural barbarity which is in humanity, not far from the surface, was at work, and, like their far ancestors who, when in fear, sacrificed human victims, these children of Adam maltreated the refugee now. The mob was too delirious to act with intelligence. The dark cloud was lifting from the sun, and the dread of the Judgment Day was declining ; but as the pendulum swung back from that fear toward normal life again, it carried with it the one virulent and common prejudice of the country : radical hatred of the French, which often slumbered, but never died ; which sometimes broke forth relentlessly and unreasoningly, as now it did against du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir.

The wife of an oyster-fisher from Rozel Bay, who lived in hourly enmity with the oyster-fishers of Carteret, gashed his cheek with the shell of an ormer. A potato-digger from Grouville parish struck at his head with a hoe, for the Granvillais had crossed the strait to the island the year before, to work in the harvestfields for a smaller wage than the Jersiais, and this little French gentleman should be held responsible for that. The weapon missed the chevalier, but laid low a centenier, who, though a municipal officer, had lost his head, like his neighbors, in the excitement and terror. This only increased the rage of the mob against the foreigner, and was another crime to lay to his charge. A smuggler thereupon kicked him in the side.

At that moment there came a cry of indignation from a girl at an upper window of the Place. The chevalier evidently knew her, for even in his hard case he smiled; and then he heard another voice ring out over the heads of the crowd, strong, angry, determined.

From the Rue d’Drière a tall, athletic man was hurrying. He had on his shoulders a workman’s basket, from which peeped a ship-builder’s tools. Seeing the chevalier’s danger, he dropped the basket through the open window of a house, and forced his way through the crowd, roughly knocking from under them the feet of two or three ruffians who opposed him. He reproached the crowd, he berated them, he handled them fiercely ; with dexterous strength he caught the little gentleman up in his arms, and, driving straight on to the open door of the smithy, placed him inside, and blocked the passage with his own body.

Like all mobs, this throng had no reason, no sense. They were balked in their malign intentions, and this man, Maître Ranulph Delagarde, was the cause of it, — that was all they knew. It was a strange picture : the preacher in an ecstasy of emotion haranguing the foolish rabble, who now realized, with an unbecoming joy, that the Last Day was yet to face ; the gaping, empty prison; the open windows crowded with excited faces ; the church bell from the Vier Marchi ringing an alarm ; Norman lethargy roused to froth and fury ; one strong man holding two hundred back !

Above them all, at a hus in the gable of a thatched cottage, stood the girl whom the chevalier had recognized. She was leaning across the lower closed half of the door, her hands in apprehensive excitement clasping her cheeks, the fingers making deep indentations in the soft flesh. The eyes were bewildered, and, though quivering with pain, watched the scene below with an unwavering intensity.

A stone was thrown at Delagarde as he stood in the doorway, but it missed him.

“ Oh — oh — oh ! ” the girl exclaimed, shrinking as if the stone had struck her. “ Oh, shame ! Oh, you cowards ! ” she added, her hands now indignantly beating the hus.

Three or four men rushed forward on Ranulph. He hurled them back. Others came on with weapons. The girl fled for an instant, then reappeared with a musket, as the people were crowding in on Delagarde with threats and execrations.

“ Stop ! stop ! ” she cried from above, and.Ranulph seized a blacksmith’s hammer to meet the onset.

“ Stop, or I ‘ll fire ! ” she called again, and she aimed her musket at the foremost assailants.

Every face turned in her direction, for her voice had rung out clear as music: it had a note of power and resonance like an organ. There was a moment of silence ; the leveled musket had a deadly look, and the girl seemed determined. Her fingers, her whole body, trembled; but there was no mistaking the strong will and the indignant purpose.

In the pause another sound was heard : it was a quick tramp! tramp! tramp! and suddenly through the prison archway came an officer of the King’s navy with a company of sailors. The officer, with drawn sword, his men following with drawn cutlasses, drove a way through the mob, who scattered like sheep; for, at this time, far more dreaded and admired than the military were the sailors whom Howe and Nelson were soon to make still more famous throughout the world.

Delagarde threw aside his hammer, and saluted the officer. The little chevalier lifted his hat, made a formal bow, and begged to say that he was not at all hurt. With a droll composure he offered snuff to the officer, who nodded and accepted, and then looked up to the window where the girl stood, and saluted with confident gallantry.

“ Why, it’s little Guida Landresse ! ” he murmured under his breath. “I’d know her anywhere. Death and Beauty, what a face ! ” Then he turned to Ranulph in recognition. “ Ranulph Delagarde, eh ? ” said he good - humoredly. “ You ’ve forgotten me, I see. I ’m Philip d’Avranche, of the Narcissus.”

Ranulph had forgotten. The slight lad, Philip, had grown bronzed and rosycheeked, and stouter of frame. In the eleven years since they had met at the battle of Jersey, events, travel, and responsibility had altered him vastly. Ranulph had changed only in growing very tall and athletic and strong; the look of him was still that of the Norman lad of the island of Jersey, though the power and intelligence of his face were most unusual.

The girl had not forgotten at all. The words that d’Avranche had said to her years before, when she was a child, came to her mind: “ My name is Philip. Won’t you call me Philip? ”

The recollection of that day when she snatched off the bailly’s hat brought a smile to her lips, so quickly were her feelings moved one way or another. Then she grew suddenly serious, for the memory of the hour when Philip saved her from the scimiter of the Turk came to her, and her heart throbbed hotly ; but she smiled again, though more gently and a little wistfully now.

Philip d’Avranche looked up toward her once more, and returned her smile. Then he addressed the awed crowd. He did not spare his language ; he unconsciously used an oath or two. He ordered them off to their homes. When they hesitated (for they were slow to acknowledge any authority save their own sacred royal court) the sailors advanced on them with fixed bayonets, and a moment later the Place du Vier Prison was clear. Leaving a half dozen sailors on guard till the town corps should arrive, d’Avranche prepared to march.

“ You have done me a good turn, Monsieur d’Avranche,” said Ranulph.

D’Avranche smiled. “ There was a time you called me Philip. We were lads together.”

“ It’s different now,” answered Delagarde.

“ Nothing is different at all, of course,” replied d’Avranche carelessly, yet with the slightest touch of condescension and vanity, as he held out his hand. Then he said to the chevalier, “ Monsieur, I congratulate you on having such a champion,” with a motion toward Ranulph. “ And you, monsieur, on your brave protector.” .He again saluted the girl at the window above.

“ I am the obliged and humble servant of monsieur — and monsieur,” responded the little gentleman, turning from one to the other with a courtly bow, the three-cornered hat under his arm, the right foot forward, the thin fingers making a graceful salutation. “ But I — I think — I really think I must go back to prison. I was not formally set free. I was out last night beyond the hour set by the court. I lost my way, and ” —

“ Not a bit of it,” d’Avranche interrupted. “ The centeniers are too free with their jailing here. I ’ll be guarantee for you, monsieur.”

The little man shook his head dubiously. “ But, as a point of honor, I really think ” —

D’Avranche laughed. “ As a point of honor, I think you ought to breakfast. A la bonne heure, Monsieur le Chevalier ! ”

He looked up once more to the cottage window. Guida was still there. The darkness over the sun was withdrawn, and now the clear light began to spread itself abroad. It was like a second dawn after a painful night. It touched the face of the girl ; it burnished the wonderful red-brown hair which fell loosely and lightly over her forehead; it gave her beauty a touch of luxuriance. D’Avranche thrilled at the sight of her.

“ It’s a beautiful face ! ” he said to himself, as their eyes met.

Ranulph had seen the glances that had passed between the two, and he winced. He remembered how, eleven years before, Philip d’Avranche had saved Guida from death. It galled him that then and now this young gallant should step in and take the game out of his hands. He was sure that he himself, and alone, could have mastered this crowd. It would seem that always he was destined to stand fighting in the breach, while another should hoist the flag of victory and win the glory.

“ Monsieur ! Monsieur le Chevalier ! ” the girl called down from the window. “ Grandpèthe says you must breakfast with us. Oh, but you must come, or we shall be offended! ” she added, as Champsavoys shook his head in hesitation and glanced toward the prison.

“ As a point of honor ” — the little man still persisted, lightly touching his breast with the Louis-Quinze cane and taking a step toward the sombre prison archway.

But Ranulph interfered, hurried him inside the cottage, and, standing in the doorway, said to some one within, “ May I come in also, Sieur de Mauprat ? ”

Above the pleasant answer of a quavering voice came another, soft and clear, in pure French: “ Thou art always welcome, without asking, as thou knowest, Ro.”

“ Then I ’ll go and fetch my tool-basket first,” Ranulph said cheerily, his heart beating more quickly, and, turning, he walked across the Place.

VI.

The cottage in which Guida lived at the Place du Vier Prison was in jocund contrast to the dungeon from which the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir had complacently issued. Even in the hot summer the prison walls dripped moisture ; for the mortar had been made of wet sea-sand which never dried, and beneath the gloomy tenement of crime a dark stream flowed to the sea. But the walls of the cottage were dry, for, many years before, Guida’s mother had herself seen it built stone by stone, and every corner of it was as free from damp as the mielles which stretched in sandy desolation behind it to the Mont ès Pend us, where the law had its way with the necks of criminals. In early childhood Madame Landresse had come with her father into exile from the sunniest valley in the hills of Chambéry, where flowers and trees and sunshine had been her life ; and here, in the midst of irregular grimness of architecture, her heart traveled back to the valley where she was born, and the château where she had lived before the storm of oppression and tyranny drove her forth. She spent her heart and her days in making this cottage, upon the western border of St. Helier’s, a delight to the quiet eye.

Yet it was a Jersey cottage, not French. There were scores like it throughout the island ; but hers had a touch of unusual lightness and of taste, while it followed to the smallest detail every fashion of the life of the community. The people of the island had been good to her and her husband during the two short years of their married life, had caused her to love the land which necessity had made her home. Her child was brought up after the manner of the better class of Jersey children, — wore what they wore, ate what they ate, lived as they lived. She spoke the country patois in the daily life, teaching it to Guida at the same time that she taught her pure French and good English, which the mother had learned as a child, and cultivated later here. She did all in her power to make Guida a Jersiaise in instinct and habit, and to beget in her a contented disposition. There could be no future for her daughter outside this little green oasis of exile, she thought. Not that she lacked ambition, but she felt that in their circumstances ambition could yield only one harvest to her child, and that was marriage. She herself had married a poor man, a master builder of ships, like Maître Ranulph Delagarde, and she had been very happy while he lived. Her husband had come of an ancient Jersey family, who were in Normandy before the Conqueror was born ; scarcely a gentleman according to the standard of her father, the distinguished exile and retired watchmaker, but almost a man of genius in his craft. If Guida should chance to be as fortunate as herself, she could ask no more.

She had watched the child anxiously, for the impulses of Guida’s temperament now and then broke forth in indignation as wild as her tears, and tears as mad as her laughter. As the girl grew in health and stature, she tried, tenderly, carefully, and strenuously, to discipline the sensitive nature, her heart bursting with grief at times because she knew that these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of refined ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.

Four things were always apparent in the girl’s character : sympathy with suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense candor.

Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hunting for a bone, stopping at Guida’s door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the hawthorn hedge of the garden. In the morning the little patch of gravel at the kitchen door was always white with crumbs for the birds, and they would be seen in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the lilac - bushes, waiting for the tiny snowstorm of bread to fall. Was he good or bad, ragged or neat, honest or a thief, not a deserting sailor or a homeless lad, halting at the cottage, but was fed from the girl’s private larder behind the straw beehives in the back garden, among the sweet lavender and the gooseberrybushes. No matter how rough the vagrant, the sincerity and pure impulse of the child seemed to throw round him a sunshine of decency and respect.

The garden behind the house was the girl’s Eden. She had planted upon the hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the jonquil, until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers. They streamed in profusion down the hedge, and the hedge expanded into clumps of peonies, white lilies, snowdrops, daffodils, dog-violets, and wild strawberries. The walls of the cottage were covered with vines, like a loggia in Sardinia, hung with innumerable clusters of white grapes. In this garden the child was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the sweet scabious and the wild thyme, until all the villagers who were friendly, and even those who were envious, said of Guida’s garden that it was “ fleuri comme un mai.”

In this corner was a little hut for rabbits and white mice; in that there was a hole dug in the bank for a porcupine ; in the middle, a flower-grown inclosure for cats in various stages of health or convalescence, and a pond for frogs: amongst all of which wandered her faithful dog, Biribi by name, as master of the ceremonies.

Besides the mother, there had been one other proud but garrulous spectator of the growth of the child to girlhood and maidenhood. M. Larchant do Mauprat, the grandfather, was not less interested in Guida than her mother, but in a different way. He saw no fault, admitted no imperfection. He was rhetorical over her good qualities, indeed very demonstrative for a Huguenot, and confident that Guida would restore the humbled fortunes of his house.

Madame Landresse’s one ambition was to live long enough to see her child’s character well formed. She knew that her own years were numbered. Month by month she felt her strength going, but a beautiful tenacity kept her where she would be until Guida was fifteen years of age. Her great desire had been to live till the gill was eighteen. Then — well, then might she not perhaps leave her to the care of a husband ? At best, M. de Mauprat could not live long. He had been forced to give up the little watchmaker’s shop in the Vier Marchi, where for so many years, in simpleness and independence, he had wrought, always putting by secretly, from work done after hours, Jersey bank-notes and gold, to give Guida a dot, if not worthy of her, at least a guarantee against reproach when the great man came who should seek her in marriage. But at last his hands trembled among the tiny wheels, and his eyes failed. He had his dark hour by himself ; then he sold the shop and his tools and his stock to a native, who thenceforward sat in the ancient exile’s place ; the two brown eyes of the stooped, brown old man looked out no more from the window in the Vier Marchi; and then they all made their new home in the Place du Vier Prison.

Until she was fifteen Guida’s life was unclouded. Once or twice her mother tried to tell her of a place that must soon be empty ; that erelong the linked initials carved in stone above the cottage door (after the Jersey custom) would be but a monogram of death, an announcement to all who entered in that here had once lived Joseph and Josephine Landresse. But her heart failed her, and so at last the end came like a sudden wind out of the north.

One midnight the life of the woman chilled. She called aloud, “ Guida! Guida! my child ! ” And when the sun crept again over the western heights the little fire of life had died down to ashes. Henceforth Guida Landresse de Landresse must fight the fight and finish the journey of womanhood alone.

When her trouble came, white and dazed in the fresh terror of loss, she went for comfort to her grandfather, but she ended by comforting him. He sat in his armchair looking straight before him, with close-pressed lips and hands clasped rigidly upon the ivory handle of his walking-stick, all the color gone from his dark eyes, the blood from his cheek, the sound from his voice, — he spoke only in whispers. He had been so long used to being cared for that the selfishness of the aged was developed in him more than he knew.

Though that which had bereaved them had taken the blood from his cheek, it had squeezed the blood from out the girl’s heart. That octopus which we call nature, in the operation of its laws, had drawn from her the glow and pulse of life. Sometimes the house seemed weighing down on her, crushing her. Going to the door of the room where her mother lay, and leaning against it with her head upon her arm, she would say in the homely and tender Jersey patois, “ Ma mèthe! ma p’tite mèthe ! mais que je t’aime, ma mèthe!” Then she would go into the little garden. There she was able to breathe ; there the animals she had made her friends came about her softly, as if they knew ; the birds peeped at her plaintively ; the bees hummed around her, settling on her, singing in her ears. Did the bees understand, she wondered. She remembered the words which the old Huguenot preacher had once uttered in the little church in the Rue d’Drière : “ The souls of men are as singing bees which God shall gather home in a goodly swarm.” Who could tell ? Perhaps these very bees were the busy souls of other people who had lived and had not fulfilled themselves, but here in her sweet - smelling garden were working out an industrious livelihood until their time might come again. Presently the thought linked itself to the ancient Jersey legend of telling the bees.

Remembering it, she went quietly into the house, and brought out several pieces of crape. Upon every beehive she tied crape, according to the legend. Then she told the bees of the cavalcade which had come in the last shadows of the night, and had ridden to and fro through the house with soft but furious impatience, until a beloved spirit, worn with the foot-travel of life, mounted the waiting chariot and was gone. And she said, according to the legend : —

“ Gather you home, gather you home ! Mèthe, ma mèthe, she is dead and gone ! Honey is for the living ; flowers are for the dead ! Mèthe, ma mèthe, she is dead and gone ! Gather you home ! ”

This time was the turning-point in Guida’s life. What her mother had been to the Sieur de Mauprat she soon became. They had enough to live on simply. Every week her grandfather gave her a fixed sum for the household. Upon this she managed, so that the tiny income left by her mother might not be touched. She shrank from using it yet; and besides, dark times might come when it would be needed. Death had surprised her once, but it should bring no more amazement. She knew that M. de Mauprat’s days were numbered, and when he was gone she would be left without one near relative in the world. She realized how unprotected her position would be when death came knocking at the door again. What she would do she knew not. She thought long and hard. Fifty things occurred to her, and fifty were set aside. The immediate relatives of her mother in France were scattered or dead. There was no longer any interest at Chambéry in the watchmaking exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone from the beak of the black bird of persecution on one of the Iles de la Manche.

There remained the alternative which was whispered into the ears of Guida by the Sieur de Mauprat as the months grew into years after the mother died, — marriage, a husband, a notable and wealthy husband. That was the magic destiny M. de Mauprat figured for her. It did not elate her, it did not disturb her ; she scarcely realized it. She loved animals, and she saw no reason to despise a stalwart youth. It had been her fortune to know two or three in the casual, unconventional manner of villages, and there were few in the land, great or humble, who did not turn twice to look at her as she passed through the Vier Marchi, so noble was her carriage, so graceful and buoyant her walk, so lacking in self - consciousness her beauty. More than one young gentleman of family had been known to ride down through the Place du Vier Prison, hoping to catch sight of her, and to afford her the view of a suggestively empty pillion behind him.

She understood it all in her own way. Her mind saw clearly, but it saw innocently. She would have been less than human if she had not had in her a touch of coquetry, though she loathed deceit. She was forceful enough to like power, even in this small way of attracting admiration, yet she would not have gone far out of her path to receive incense orattention. She was at once proud and humble, and as yet she had not loved. She had never listened to flatterers, and she had never permitted young men to visit her — save one. Ranulph Delagarde had gone in and out at his will; but that was casually and not too often, and he was discreet and spoke no word of love. Sometimes she talked to him of things concerning the daily life with which she did not care to trouble M. de Mauprat.

The matter of the small income from her mother, — it was Ranulph who advised her to place it with the gi-eat fishing company whose ships he built in the little dockyard at St. Aubin’s. In fifty other ways, quite unknown to Guida, he had made life easier for her. She knew that her mother had thought of Ranulph for her husband, although she blushed hotly whenever — and it was not often — the idea came to her. She remembered how her mother had said that Ranulph would be a great man in the island some day ; that he had a mind above all the youths in St. Helier’s ; that she would rather see Ranulph a master ship-builder than a babbling écrivain in the Rue des Très Pigeons, a smirking leech, or a penniless seigneur with neither trade nor talent. Her own husband had been the laborious son of a poor, idle, and proud seigneur. Guida was attracted to Ranulph through his occupation ; for she loved strength, she loved all clean and wholesome trades, — the mason’s, the carpenter’s, the blacksmith’s, and most of all the ship - builder’s. Her father, whom of course she did not remember, had been a ship-builder, and she knew that he had been a notable man, — every one had told her that.

But as to marriage, there was one influenee — unconscious of it though she might be — which, balanced against all others, would weigh them down, rightly or wrongly : the love between man and woman, which so few profess to believe in, and so many waste lives and lands to attain.

“ She has met her destiny,” say the village gossips, when some man in the dusty procession of life sees a woman’s face in the pleasant shadow of a home, and drops out of the ranks to enter at the doorway and cry, “ Mio destino ! ”

Was Ranulph to be Guida’s destiny ? Fine and handsome though he looked, as he entered the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison, on that September morning after the rescue of the chevalier, his toolbasket on his shoulder, his brown face enlivened by one simple sentiment, she was far from sure that he was, — far from sure.

VII.

The little hallway into which Ranulph stepped from the street led through to the kitchen. Guida stood holding back the door for him to enter this real livingroom of the house, which opened directly on the garden behind. It was so cheerful and secluded, looking out from the garden to the wide space beyond and the changeful sea, that since Madame Landresse’s death the Sieur de Mauprat had made it reception-room, dining-room, and kitchen all in one. He would willingly have slept there, too, but noblesse oblige : the last glimmer of family pride, and the thought of what the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir might think, prevented him. There was something patriarchal, moreover, in a kitchen as a reception-room ; and both he and the chevalier loved to watch Guida busy with her household duties : at one moment her arms in the dough of the kneading - trough ; at another, rubbing the pewter plates or scouring the wooden trenchers ; picking the cherries from the garden for a jelly, or perchance casting up her weekly accounts with a little smiling and a little sighing too.

If by chance it had been proposed by M. de Mauprat to adjourn to the small sitting-room looking out upon the Place du Vier Prison, a gloom would instantly have settled upon them both.

On one memorable occasion the sieur had made a last attempt to revive the glory of bygone days. In the little front room there was an ancient armchair, over which hung the sword that the Comte Guilbert Mauprat de Chambéry had used at Fontenoy against the English. Here, then, one day, he received the chevalier, who on his part flourished the cane the gracious Louis had given him.

After an interchange of aristocratic passwords, as it were, they both became gloomy and irritable, they stiffened into bas-reliefs. Their excellent tempers developed a subacidity which might have spoiled at least one day of their lives, had it not been for the chevalier’s ingenuity. He was suddenly stricken with a pain in his right leg, where, as he had often told the sieur in confidence, he had been wounded in a duel in youthful days. For so innocent a man, his unrehearsed dissimulation was good. He caught his knee with a hand, straightened up in his seat, compressed his lips, frowned, looked apprehensive, and the apprehension developed into a spasm.

That was enough: de Mauprat knew those signs of anguish. He begged his visitor to lean on him, and, with a flickering smile on the side of his face turned from the chevalier, he led his distinguished friend to the kitchen. There the well-known remedy was administered by Guida : three thimblefuls of cherry brandy, dashed with a little elderberry cordial, had never been known to fail. This day the cure was almost instantaneous. De Mauprat watched with grave solicitude the pouring of each thimbleful, and its absorption : and he sat back at last with a sense of almost jocund relief, meeting the satisfied smile of du Champsavoys ; and the three smiled at one another in the simplicity of an elementary happiness.

So it was that this cheerful, housewifely room became like one of those ancient corners of camaraderie in some exclusive inn where gentlemen of quality were wont to meet. The floor was paved with square flagstones and sanded. It was a spacious room, the full length of the cottage and more than half its depth. The fireplace was huge, and inside it were oak benches where one might sit on a cold winter night. At the left of the chimney was the great settle, or veille, padded with baize, flourished with satinettes, and spread with ferns and rushes. The spinning-wheel was in one corner of the room, to the right of the fireplace, with the bread - trough near it; and at the end was the dreschiaux, covered with pewter pots, hanaps, wooden trenchers, wooden spoons, and a little old china worth the ransom of a prince at least. Not far from it was the table, from which, looking out at the door, the hills and sea were in pleasant prospect. At the side of the table, opposite the doorway, were the two great armchairs where in summertime sat the chevalier and the sieur.

These, with a few constant visitors, formed a coterie or compact: the big, grizzly-bearded boatman, Jean Touzel, who wore spectacles, befriended smugglers, was approved of all men, and secretly worshiped by his wife ; Amice Ingouville, the fat avocat, with a stomach of gigantic proportions, with the biggest heart and the tiniest brain in the world ; Maître Ranulph Delagarde ; and lastly, M. Yves Savary dit Détricand (in truth the Comte de Tournay, of the house of Vaufontaine), that officer of Rullecour’s who, being released from the prison hospital, when the hour came for him to leave the country was too drunk to find the shore. By some whim of negligence the royal court was afterward too lethargic to remove him, and he stayed on, between successive carousals vainly making efforts to leave. In sober hours, which were none too frequent, he was rather sorrowfully welcomed by the sieur and the chevalier.

All these, if they came, — and when they came, — sat on the veille, loitered in the doorway, or used the three-legged stools scattered here and there. If it was winter, they all sat on the veille save the chevalier and the sieur ; and Guida had her little straight-backed oak chair beside her grandfather. If they came while she was at work, it made no difference to her, for it was a rule with her that no one should suggest that he was in the way, nor offer help of any kind. At first, if by chance she wished to roll the churn from its corner near the dresser toward the oaken doorway, they would all move ; the sieur putting his snuff-box carefully on the chair-arm, the chevalier laying his cane upon the table, Jean Touzel dropping his huge pipe on the sanded floor, and the fat avocat making apoplectic efforts to rise, — all producing a commotion of politeness quite disconcerting, till she insisted that no one should stir or lift a hand for her unless she requested it.

If she left the room, conversation flagged, although maybe she had had no part in it. If perchance she hummed a little to herself, conversation strayed after her, requiring all the elaborate and affected precision of the fat avocat’s mind to get it to its natural amble again.

In winter, the fire of vraic and the little lozenge-paned windows of bottle-glass gave light enough in the daytime; and at night the cresset filled with colza, suspended by osier rings from the ceiling, lightened the darkness. Sometimes of a particular night, such as Christmas Eve or the birthday of M. de Mauprat, the two horn lanterns hanging from the raclyii were lit also.

If Maître Ranulph chanced to be present on these fête nights, he became master of the ceremonies by virtue of the favor of M. de Mauprat, who could not have endured him as the prospective husband of Guida, but admired him for his skill as a ship-builder and his ability to speak three languages, — French, English, and the Jersey patois.

When Ranulph entered the kitchen this morning, his greeting to the sieur and the chevalier was in French, but to Guida he said, rather stupidly, for late events had embarrassed him, “ Ah bah ! es-tu gentiment ? ”

“ Gentiment,” she repeated, with a queer little smile. “You ’ll have breakfast ? ” she said in English, for she spoke it better than he.

“ Et ben ! ” Ranulph answered, still embarrassed ; “ a bouchi, that’s all.”

He laid aside his tool - basket, shook hands with the sieur, and seated himself at the table. Looking at du Champsavoys, he said, “ I’ve just met the connétable, and he regrets the riot, chevalier, and says the royal court extends its mercy to you.”

“ I should prefer to accept no favors,” answered the chevalier. “ As a point of honor, I had thought that, after breakfast, I should return to prison, and ” — He paused reflectively.

“ Gentlemen of the Isle of Paris stand upon points of honor. If they break the law, they ask no favors. Punishment has its dignity as well as its indignity,” interposed the sieur, helping out his friend’s hesitation, for the chevalier seemed always searching in his mind for the exact meaning of his thoughts, often without immediate success.

“ The connétable said it was cheaper to let the chevalier go free than to feed him in the Vier Prison,” somewhat drolly explained Ranulph, helping himself meanwhile to roasted conger-eel, and eying hungrily the freshly made black butter which Guida was taking from a wooden trencher. “ The royal court is stingy,” he added, “ ‘ nearer than Jean Noé, who got married in his red queminzolle,’ as we say on Jersey.”

“ There’s cause for it now, Maître Ranulph,” answered the little brown watchmaker. “ Two shiploads of our poor French refugees arrived from St. Malo yesterday, and corn is getting scarcer and scarcer.”

“ They must work, they must work,” said the chevalier, drawing himself up. “ You, de Mauprat, you and I have set the example to our race; we, we have established the right of men of our class to labor with their hands.” He spread out his thin, almost transparent hands before him, clasped them, and shook them with a gentle energy suitable to the filmy quality of the conception of labor in his mind. “We are all workers here,— you, de Mauprat, Maître Ranulph there, and this friend of each of us, the dear Guida, who has taught us so much, so much ! ”

He fixed his eyes on Guida with an expression at once benevolent and reflective. Guida would have smiled if she had dared. Often before had the chevalier spoken of this brotherhood of labor : it was a pleasant fiction with him. He talked with a warm, magnanimous simplicity of the joys of his own handiwork ; but not even the sieur knew what was this labor of which he spoke so eloquently. His suite of rooms was on the top floor of the house of one Elie Mattingley, — a fisherman by trade and a piratical smuggler by practice, with a daughter Carterette, whom he loved passing well.

“ They must work, — our countrymen must work,” repeated the chevalier. “ Then the people of this amiable isle will have no reason to disturb us.”

“ Amiable isle — nannin-gia ! ” interjected Ranulph bitterly. “ Yesterday two priests of your country were set upon in La Colomberie by a drunken quarryman. A lady — Madame la Marquise Vincennes de Miraman — was insulted in the Rue Trousse Cotillon the day before by drunken fishwomen from St. Clement’s, and was only saved from violence by the brave Carterette Mattingley.”

“ Ah yes, the dear Carterette,—my brave young friend Carterette Mattingley,” said the chevalier, with a reflective enthusiasm.

“ As you were saying, chevalier " — began M. de Mauprat.

But he got no further at the moment, for shots rang out suddenly before the house. They all started to their feet, and Ranulph, running to the front door, threw it open. As he did so, a young man, with blood flowing from a cut on the temple, stepped inside.

VIII.

It was M. Savary dit Détricand.

“ Whew ! what a lot of fools there are in the world ! Pish ! you silly apes ! ” the young man said, glancing through the open doorway to where the connétable’s men were dragging two vile-looking ruffians into the Vier Prison.

“ What’s happened, Monsieur Détricand ? ” said Ranulph, closing the door and bolting it.

Détricand did not reply at once. The kitchen door was open, and as he came toward it the anxious faces of the three occupants of the room drew back. The morning sun, streaming through the open doorway beyond, cast a brilliant light upon the young man, showing his pale face and the gash in his temple. He was smiling, however, and as he came toward them he nodded nonchalantly and goodnaturedly.

“ What was it ? What was it, monsieur ? ” asked Guida tremulously, for painful events had crowded upon her too fast that morning.

Détricand was stanching the blood from his temple with the scarf he had snatched from his neck.

“ Get him some cordial, Guida ! ” said de Mauprat. “ He ’s wounded ! ”

Détricand waved a hand almost impatiently, and dropped lightly upon the veille.

“ It’s nothing, I protest, — nothing whatever ; and I ’ll have no cordial, — no, not a drop. A drink of water, — a little of that, if I must drink.”

Guida caught up a hanap from the dresser, filled it with water, and passed it to him. Her fingers trembled a little. His were steady enough as he took the hanap and drank the water off at a gulp. Again she filled it, and again he drank. The blood was running in a tiny stream down his cheek. She caught her handkerchief from her girdle impulsively, and gently wiped away the blood.

“ Let me wash and bandage the wound,” she said. Her eyes were alight with compassion, not because it was the dissipated, reckless French invader, M. Savary dit Détricand, — no one knew that he was the young Comte de Tournay, — who had come over with Rullecour eleven years before, but because he was a wounded fellow creature. She would have done the same for the poor béganne Dormy Jamais, who still prowled the purlieus of St. Helier’s, or for Elie Mattingley, or for any criminal, for that matter, who needed medicament and care.

It was quite clear, however, that Détricand felt differently. The moment she touched him he became suddenly still. He permitted her to wash the blood from his temple and cheek, to stanch it first with jèru leaves preserved in brandy, then with cobwebs, and afterward to bind it with her own kerchief.

Ranulph had offered to help her, but his hands were big and clumsy, and in any case she needed no help. So the others looked on with an admiring simplicity which suggested almost a cult of worship, while Détricand thrilled at the touch of the warm, still slightly trembling fingers. He had never been quite so near her before. His face was not far from hers. Now her breath touched him. As he bent his head for her to bind his temple, he could see the soft pulsing of her bosom and hear the beating of her heart. Her neck was so full and round and soft, and her voice — surely he had never heard a voice so sweet and strong, a tone so well poised and so resonantly pleasant to the ear.

When she had finished, he had an impulse to catch the hand as it dropped away from his forehead and kiss it, — not as he had kissed many a hand, hotly one hour and coldly the next, but with an unpurchasable kind of gratitude which is the characteristic of this especial sort of sinner. He was young enough and there was still enough natural health in him to know the healing touch of a perfect decency and a pure truth of spirit. Yet he had been drunk the night before, drunk with three non-commissioned officers, — and he a gentleman in spite of everything, as could be plainly seen.

He turned his head away from the girl quickly, and looked straight into the eyes of her grandfather.

“ I ’ll tell you how it was, Sieur de Mauprat,” said he. “ I was crossing the Place du Vier Prison when a brute threw a cleaver at me from a window. If it had struck me on the head — well, the royal court would have buried me, and without a slab like Rullecour’s. I burst open the door of the house, ran up the stairs, gripped the ruffian, and threw him from the window into the street. As I did so a door opened behind, and another cut-throat came at me with a pistol. He fired, — fired wide. I ran in on him, and before he had time to think he was through the window, also. Then the other brute below fired up at me. The bullet gashed my temple, as you see. After that it was an affair of the connétable and his men. I had had enough fighting before breakfast. I saw an open door — and here I am — monsieur, monsieur, monsieur, mademoiselle ! ” He bowed to each of them, and glanced toward the table hungrily.

Ranulph placed a seat for him. He viewed the conger-eel and limpets with an avid eye, but waited for the chevalier and de Mauprat to sit. He had hardly taken a mouthful, however, and thrown a piece of bread to Biribi, the dog, when, starting again to his feet, he said : —

“ Your pardon, Monsieur le Chevalier, — that brute in the Place seems to have knocked all sense from my head! I ’ve a letter for you, brought from Rouen by one of our countrymen who came yesterday.” He drew forth a packet and handed it over. “ I went out to their ship in the harbor last night, and this was given to me for you.”

The chevalier looked with surprise and satisfaction at the seal on the letter, and, breaking it, spread open the paper, fumbled for the eyeglass which he always carried in his vest, and began reading diligently. Presently, under his breath he made exclamations, now of surprise, again of pain. It was clear that the letter contained unpleasant things.

Meanwhile Ranulph turned to Guida. “To-morrow Jean Touzel, his wife, and I go to the Ecréhos rocks in Jean’s boat,” said he. “ A vessel was driven ashore there three days ago, and my carpenters are at work on her. If you can go and the wind holds fair, you shall he brought back safe by sundown.”

Guida looked up quickly at her grandfather. She loved the sea ; she could sail a boat, and knew the tides and currents of the south coast as well as most fishermen. Jean Touzel had taken her out numberless times even while her mother was alive ; for Madame Landresse, if solicitous for her daughter’s safety, had been concerned that she should be fearless, though not reckless. Of all boatmen and fishermen on the coast, Jean Touzel was most to be trusted. No man had saved so many shipwrecked folk, none risked his life so often, and he had never had a serious accident at sea. To go to sea with Jean Touzel, people said, was safer than living on land.

M. de Mauprat met the inquiring glance of Guida and nodded assent, and she then said gayly to Ranulph, “ I shall sail her, shall I not ? ’’

“ Every foot of the way,” he answered. She laughed and clapped her hands. Suddenly the little chevalier broke in. “ By the head of John the Baptist! ” exclaimed he.

So unusual was strong language with him that Détricand put down his knife and fork in amazement, and Guida almost blushed, the words sounded so improper upon the chevalier’s lips.

Du Champsavoys held up his eyeglass, and, turning from one to the other, looked at each of them imperatively, yet abstractedly too. Then pursing up his lower lip, and with an air of growing amazement which carried him to a distant height of reckless language, he said again, “By the head of John the Baptist on a charger ! ”

He looked at Déricand with a fierceness which was merely the tension of his thought. If he had looked at a wall, it would have been the same. But Détricand, who had an almost whimsical sense of humor, — when sober and in his right mind, — felt his neck in an affected concern as though to be quite sure of it.

“ Chevalier,” said he, “ you shock us, — you shock us, Monsieur le Chevalier! ”

“ The most painful things, and the most wonderful too,” said the chevalier, tapping the letter with his eyeglass, “ the most terrible and yet the most romantic things are here. A drop of cider, if you please, mademoiselle, before I begin to read it to you, if I may — if I may — eh ? ”

They all nodded eagerly. Guida brought a hanap of cider, and the little gray thrush of a man sipped it, and in a voice no bigger than a bird’s began : —

From Lucillien du Champsavoys, Comte de Chanier, by the hand of a most faithful friend, who goeth hence from among divers dangers, unto my cousin, the Chevalier du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir, late Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the best of monarchs, Louis XV., this writing:

MY DEAR AND HONORED COUSIN [the chevalier paused, frowned a trifle, and tapped his lips with his finger in a little lyrical emotion], — My dear and honored cousin, all is lost. The France we loved is no more! The 20th of June saw the last vestige of Louis’ power pass forever. That day ten thousand of the sans-culottes forced their way into the palace to kill him. A faithful few surrounded him. In the mad turmoil, we were fearful, he was serene. “ Feel,” said Louis, placing his hand on his bosom, “ feel whether this is the beating of a heart shaken by fear.” Ah, my friend, your heart would have clamped in misery to hear the Queen cry, “ What have I to fear ? Death ? It is as well to-day as to-morrow. They can do no more ! ” Their lives were saved, the day passed, but worse came after.

The 10th of August came. With it, too, the end—the dark and bloody end — of the Swiss Guards. The Jacobins had their way at last. The Swiss Guards died in the court of the Carrousel as they marched to the Assembly to save the King. Thus the last circle of defense round the throne was broken. The palace was given over to flame and the sword. Of twenty nobles of the palace I alone escaped. France became a slaughter-house. The people cried out for more liberty, and their liberators gave them the freedom of death. A fortnight ago, Danton, the incomparable fiend, let loose his assassins upon the priests of God, and Paris is made a theatre where the people whom Louis and his nobles would have died to save have turned every street into a stable of carnage, every prison and hospital into a vast charnel-house. One last revolting thing remains to be done, — the murder of the King; then this France that we have loved will have no name and no place in our generation. She will rise again, but we shall not see her, for our eyes have been blinded with blood, forever darkened by disaster. Like a mistress upon whom we have lavished the days of our youth and the strength of our days, she has deceived us; she has stricken us while we slept. Behold a Caliban now for her paramour.

Weep with me, for France has robbed me and has tricked me. One by one my friends have fallen beneath the axe. Of my four sons but one remains. Henri was stabbed by Danton’s ruffians at the Hôtel de Ville ; Gaston fought and died with the Swiss Guards, whose hacked and severed limbs were broiled and eaten in the streets by the monsters who mutilate the land ; Isidore, the youngest, defied a hundred of Robespierre’s cowards on the steps of the Assembly, and was torn to pieces by the mob. Etienne alone is left. But for him and for the honor of my house I too would find a place beside the King and die with him. Etienne is with de la Roche jaquelein in Brittany. I am here at Rouen.

Brittany and Normandy still stand for the King. In these two provinces begins the regeneration of France: we call it the war of the Vendée. On that Isle of Jersey there you should almost hear the voice of de la Rochejaquelein and the marching cries of our loyal legions. If there be justice in God, we shall conquer. But there will be joy no more for such as you or me, nor hope, nor any peace. We live only for those who come after. Our duty remains ; all else is dead. You did well to go, and I do well to stay.

By all these piteous relations you shall know the importance of the request I now set forth.

My cousin by marriage of the house of Vaufontaine has lost all his sons. With the death of the Prince of Vaufontaine there is in France no heir to the house, nor can it by the law revert to my house or my heirs. Now of late the prince hath urged me to write to you, — for he is here in seclusion with me, — and to unfold to you what has hitherto been secret. Eleven years ago, the only nephew of the prince, after some compromising escapades, disappeared from the court with Rullecour, the adventurer, who invaded the Isle of Jersey. From that hour he has been lost to France. Some of his companions in arms returned after a number of years. All, with one exception, declared that he was killed in the battle at St. Helier’s. One, however, strongly maintains that he was still living and in the prison hospital when his comrades were released from confinement.

It is of him I write to you. His name — as you will know—is the Comte de Tournay. He was then not more than seventeen years of age, slight of build, with brownish hair, dark gray eyes, and had over the right shoulder a scar from a sword-thrust. It seemeth little possible that, if living, he should still remain in the Isle of Jersey, but would rather have returned to obscurity in France, or have gone to England to be lost to name and remembrance, — or indeed to America.

That you may perchance give me word of him is the object of my letter, written in no more hope than I live, and you can guess well how faint that is. One young nobleman preserved to France may be the great unit that will save her.

Greet my poor countrymen yonder in the name of one who still waits at a desecrated altar ; and for myself, you must take me as I am, with the remembrance of what I was, even

Your faithful friend and loving kinsman,

DE CHANIER.

All this, though in the chances of war you read it not till wintertide come, was told you at Rouen this first day of September, 1792.

During the reading of this letter, which was broken by many feeling and reflective pauses on the chevalier’s part, the listeners showed emotion after the nature of each. The Sieur de Mauprat’s fingers clasped and unclasped on the top of his cane, little explosions of breath came from his compressed lips, his eyebrows beetled over till the eyes themselves seemed like two small glints of flame. Delagarde dropped a fist heavily upon the table, and held it there clinched, while his heel beat a tattoo of excitement upon the floor. Guida’s breath came quick and fast; as Ranulph said afterward, she was “ blanc comme un linge.” She shuddered painfully when she heard of the slaughter and burning of the Swiss Guards. Her brain was so confused with the horrors of anarchy that the latter part of the letter, dealing with the vanished Comte de Tournay, was almost unheeded.

But this matter interested Delagarde and de Mauprat greatly. They both leaned forward eagerly, seizing every word, and both instinctively turned toward Détricand when the description of the Comte de Tournay was read.

As for Détricand himself, he listened to the first part of the letter like a man suddenly roused out of a dream. For the first time since the Revolution had begun, the horror of it and the meaning of it were brought home to him. He had been so long expatriated and so busy in dalliance and dissipation, had loitered so long in the primrose path of daily sleep and nightly revel, had fallen so far, that he had not realized how the fiery wheels of Death were spinning in France, and how black was the smoke of the torment of the people. His face turned scarlet as the thing came home to him. Once during the reading his features seemed to knot with a spasm of pain. Conscience, ghostlike, rising from the ghastly pictures drawn by the aged fugitive at Rouen, struck him in the face, and he winced from the blow. He dropped his head in his hand as if to listen more attentively, but it was, in truth, to hide his emotion. When the names of the Prince of Vaufontaine and of the Comte de Tournay were mentioned, he gave a little start, then suddenly ruled himself to a strange stillness and listened with intentness. His face seemed all at once to clear; he even smiled a little. But at last, conscious that de Mauprat and Delagarde were watching him, he appeared to listen with an inquisitive but impersonal interest, not without its effect upon his scrutinizers. He nodded his head as though he understood the situation. He acted very well; he bewildered the onlookers. They might think he tallied with the description of the Comte de Tournay, yet he gave the impression that the matter was not vital to himself. But when the little chevalier stopped and turned his eyeglass upon him with a sudden startled inquiry, he found it harder to preserve his composure.

“ Singular! singular ! ” said the old man, and returned to the reading of the letter.

When it was finished there was absolute silence for a moment. Then the chevalier lifted his eyeglass again and looked at Détricand intently.

“ Pardon me, monsieur,” he said, “ but you were with Rullecour — as I was saying.”

Détricand nodded with a droll sort of helplessness, and answered, “ In Jersey I never have chance to forget it, Monsieur le Chevalier.”

Du Champsavoys, with a naïve and obvious attempt at playing counsel, fixed him again with the glass, pursed his lips, and, with the importance of the greffier at the ancient Cour d’Héritage, came one step nearer to his goal.

“ Have you knowledge of the Comte de Tournay, Monsieur Détricand ? ”

“ I knew him — as you were saying, chevalier,” answered Détricand lightly.

Then the chevalier struck home. He dropped his fingers upon the table, stood up, and, looking straight into Détricand’s eyes, exclaimed, “ Monsieur, you are the Comte de Tournay ! ”

The chevalier involuntarily held the situation for an instant. Nobody stirred. De Mauprat dropped his chin upou his hands, and his eyebrows contracted in excitement. Guida gave a little cry of astonishment. But Détricand answered the chevalier with a look of blank surprise and a shrug of the shoulders, which had the effect desired.

“ Thank you, chevalier,” said he, with a quizzical humor. “ Now I know who I am, and if it is n’t too soon to presume upon the relationship, I shall dine with you to-day, chevalier. I spent my last sou yesterday. One can’t throw one’s self upon charity ; but since we are distant cousins I may claim grist at the family mill, eh ? ”

The chevalier dropped into his chair again. “ Then you are not the Comte de Tournay, monsieur ! ” he said hopelessly.

“ Then I shall not dine with you today,” said Détricand gayly.

“ You answer the description,” remarked de Mauprat dubiously.

“ Let me see,” rejoined Détricand. “ I’ve been a donkey - farmer, a shipmaster’s assistant, a tobacco-peddler, a quarryman, a miner, a wood-merchant, an interpreter, a fisherman : that’s very like the Comte de Tournay ! On Monday night I supped with a smuggler ; on Tuesday I breakfasted on soupe à la graisse and limpets with Manon Moignard, the witch ; on Wednesday I dined with Dormy Jamais and an avocat disbarred for writing lewd songs for a chocolate-house ; on Thursday I went oyster-fishing with a native who has three wives, and a butcher who has been banished four times for not keeping holy the Sabbath Day; and I drank from eleven o’clock till sunrise this morning with three Scotch sergeants of the line : which is very like the Comte de Tournay — as you were saying, chevalier ! I am five feet eleven, and the Comte de Tournay was five feet ten — which is no lie,” he said under his breath. “ I have a scar, but it’s over my left shoulder, and not over my right — which is also no lie,” he said under his breath. “ De Tournay’s hair was brown, and mine, you see, is almost a dead black—fever did that,” he said under his breath. “ De Tournay escaped the day after the battle of Jersey from the prison hospital; I was left, and here I’ve been ever since, — Yves Savary dit Détricand, at your service, Monsieur le Chevalier ! ”

A pained expression crossed the chevalier’s face. “ I am most sorry, — I am most sorry,” he said hesitatingly. “ I had no wish to wound your feelings.”

“ Ah, it is the Comte de Tournay to whom yon must apologize,” returned Détricand, with a droll look.

“ It is a pity,” continued the chevalier, “ for somehow all at once I recalled a resemblance. I saw de Tournay when he was fourteen, — yes, I think it was fourteen, — and when I looked at you, monsieur, his face came back to me. It would have made my cousin so happy if you had been the Comte de Tournay, and I had found you here.” The old man’s voice trembled a little. “ We are growing fewer every day, we Frenchmen of the noble families. And it would have made my cousin so happy

— as I was saying, monsieur.”

Détricand’s manner changed ; he became serious. The devil-may-care, irresponsible shamelessness of his face dropped away like a mask. Something had touched him. His voice changed, too.

“ De Tournay was a much better fellow than I am, chevalier — and that’s no lie,” he said under his breath. “ De Tournay was a brave, fiery, ambitious youngster, with bad companions. De Tournay told me that he repented of coming with Rullecour, and he felt he had spoilt his life, —that he could never return to France again and to his people.”

The old chevalier shook his head sadly. “ Is he dead ? ” he asked.

There was a slight pause, and then Détricand answered, “No, he is living.’'

“ Where is he ? ”

“ I promised de Tournay that I would never reveal that.”

“ Might I not write to him ? ”

“ Assuredly, Monsieur le Chevalier.”

“ Could you — will you — deliver a letter to him from me, monsieur ? ”

“ Upon my honor, yes ! ”

“ I thank you, I thank you, monsieur ; I will write it to-day.”

“ As you will, chevalier. I will ask you for it to-night,” rejoined Détricand. “ It may take some time to reach the Comte de Tournay ; but he shall receive it into his own hands.”

De Mauprat tremblingly asked the question which he knew the chevalier dreaded to ask: “ Do you think that Monsieur le Comte will return to France ? ”

“ I think he will,” answered Détricand slowly.

“ It will make my cousin so happy, so happy ! ” sighed the little chevalier, and his voice quavered. “ Will you take snuff with me, monsieur ? ” He took out his silver snuff-box and offered it to his vagrant countryman. This was a mark of favor which the chevalier had seldom shown to any one save M. de Mauprat since he came to Jersey.

Détricand bowed, accepted, and took a pinch. “ I must be going,” he said.

Gilbert Parker.

(To be continued.)