Part 16

But as she wept, not the freely-flowing tears of girlhood, but with the dry sobbings and painful convulsions that tortured women know, there chimed from the great cathedral Church of St. Louis close by, the first long triple of the Angelus, echoed by the thinner-sounding bells from the Convent of the Augustinian Sisters, from the Priory of the Bernardine Fathers, from the House of the Sœurs de l'Esperance, from the House of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Mechanically Juliette's hand went to her bosom, her pale lips moved, shaping the sacred words. And then she went to her room and knelt at the little straw-bottomed _prie-Dieu_ that stood before her Crucifix, and prayed with passionate earnestness that He, Who when hanging upon His Cross of Agony gave His Mother to be our Mother, would hear Her pure prayer of intercession for that mother who had deserted her child. Wherever she might be, however low she might have fallen, whatever the sins, vices, follies that yet environed her, held her back or dragged her down, the ray of Divine Grace had power to reach her, raise her up, and lead her back by the path of Penance into the Way of Peace.

And pending the miracle, toward which end Masses should be offered and Communions given; obedience to that father so cruelly betrayed, so bitterly wronged, must, more than ever, be the watchword of Juliette. For the conviction began to dawn in her that belief in the innate purity and truth of her sex having been destroyed in him by the unfaith of that most beloved, most unhappy one; he sought to safeguard her daughter's virtue by means of a husband, who, being the only son of a widow, and therefore exempt from the obligations of military service, must always be on the spot. Sorrowfully she sought her bed, to remember, the moment her head touched the pillow, that although she had mustered courage to plead against the Colonel's sentence of marriage, provoking him thereby to reveal the long-hidden secret of his betrayal, she had never mentioned Charles except by inference.

What was he like, this young man, pious, virtuous, devoted to his mother, energetic, frugal, a manufacturer of, and merchant in, the commodity of woolen cloth? Could one build a husband out of such materials? Was it possible?

She tried once more. The effort led to tossing and turning. Conscience is most active in the night-watches. Juliette's bosom-monitor reproached her with having boasted to dear Monica's untidy brother of the faceless Charles's mastery of the art of fence. Other lapses from the strict line of veracity had preceded and followed. She had told one curious girl that Charles owned the form of an athlete, and hair of ruddy chestnut; another had reaped the information that he possessed a profile resembling that of Edgar Ravenswood, with dark, melancholy eyes, and a jet-black mustache of the kind that is silky and sweeps. Yet another eager inquirer had elicited the information that Charles was quite a duodecimo edition of a lover, slender, brilliantly fair, and not much taller than the bride-elect. Should it occur to these girls to compare notes in some hour of recess or exercise, what would be the impression conveyed to the Great Class?

One had left School, however, and one was glad of it. To go back with that tragic secret locked in one's bosom, and mingle with fortunate girls whose mothers were good women, happily alive or safely in Paradise, how could one have borne that?

A well-known footstep outside the door of her room, which opened from the little salon, and a gentle rustling sent a shiver through her. When the step moved away with its soldierly jingle of spurs accompanying it, De Bayard's daughter sat up in bed and kissed both hands to him, passionately; stretching out her arms with a wide gesture as though something of the maternal mingled with her love for him now.... When "Lights Out" sounded, and the gas was extinguished, and no line of yellow showed under the door, and the footsteps retreated and his door shut upon them, Juliette crept out of bed, lighted the candle, and picked up the scrap of paper that had been pushed across her threshold by the strong, beloved hand.

It proved to be a note dated that day, and addressed from the Tessier's house in the Rue de Provence, in Madame's angular, spidery caligraphy. Felicitations to her dear friend on the safe return of his cherished one were followed by regrets. "My Charles, alas! will be detained in Belgium at least until the Mardigras. The meeting of these dear young people must necessarily be deferred until that date. But to-morrow being the Feast of Saint Polycarpe, possibly M. le Colonel would bring Mademoiselle to visit a friend, old and most affectionate, punctually at the hour of one _midi_?" With tender remembrances the note concluded. Beneath the signature--Marie-Anastasie Tessier--M. le Colonel had scrawled in pencil the curt intimation: "Arranged.--H.A.A. de B."

Knowing Charles safely bestowed in Belgium, Juliette sank back upon her pillow, and soon was calmly sleeping between her two great hair-plaits. But slippered footsteps patroled the Colonel's room until gray dawn showed between the slits of the window-shutters, and the heavy sighs and muttered words that broke from him would have wrung his daughter's faithful heart. Sleepless and haggard, the first pale beams of January daylight found him still pacing his brown-striped drugget, a letter--the cause of his own and another's misery,--crushed in his strong right hand:

"555, AVENUE DE L'ALMA, PARIS, "_December_ 18, 1869.

"MONSIEUR,

"Acting upon instructions received from the senior partner of the Berlin branch of our firm, we beg to acknowledge your reply to his communication of the 7th instant, and must point out to you that the attitude you assume with regard to our client is equally unjust and indefensible. No legal remedy was sought by you for the injuries you allege that you sustained through the infidelity of the lady who until the autumn of 1856 occupied--and without reproach--the position of your wife.

"Further, during the years of her absence from your side, she has neither asked nor received from you any monetary payments toward her support and maintenance, facts which certainly appear to suggest consent and knowledge upon your part. You may further be aware that His deceased Excellency, Count Maximilian von Schön-Valverden, late junior military _attaché_ to the Prussian General Staff, fully atoned for an indiscretion of his earlier years, by making an ample settlement upon Madame de Bayard; and that she is now in a position to render liberal assistance to relatives whom Fortune has not dowered with ample means.

"Under the circumstances, we have advised our client, whose natural affection for her daughter strongly urges her to assert her maternal rights to the society of Mademoiselle de Bayard, to enforce her claim by the reëstablishment of personal influence.

"The young lady in question is still unmarried, under age, and therefore subject to maternal authority; and our client does not disguise her hope that, by awakening the long silent chords of filial tenderness, she may gain a powerful advocate upon the side of reconciliation, reunion, and that unblemished and peaceful happiness which is only to be found by the domestic fireside.

"Recollect, Monsieur, that no legal bar exists to this most virtuous and irreproachable aspiration. And understand that unless a favorable answer is shortly received by our firm to the application now made by us to you on behalf of our client, her next appeal will be made to your daughter and hers.

"We remain, etc., "WIEGELT, NADIER AND BIDUQUET, "_Solicitors_."

By the chill light of the new day the Colonel for the twentieth time re-read the letter, and its cunning mixture of truth and falsehood, the venomed hint at knowledge and complicity, struck fangs once more into his quivering heart.

A devout Catholic, he had never sought to divorce the wife who had betrayed him. Thus a civil marriage with her paramour had been rendered impossible to Adelaide, even had the Count desired it. Now, furnished with ample means by the generosity of her dead lover, did the false wife seek at the hands of the injured husband rehabilitation, in return for a heap of tainted gold?

Horrible thought! The walls of the room seemed to close upon De Bayard suffocatingly. He opened the window and leaned out, drawing in deep drafts of the frosty morning air. It cleared his brain; he realized, in the event of his contemptuous rejection of the hideous bargain, a menace to his daughter's peace of mind.

Motherhood is of all earthly relationships the most sacred. Yet there are mothers who in revenge for disappointed hopes and thwarted ambitions have not hesitated to strike, through their own offspring, at husbands abhorred. More than ever the husband of Adelaide bent to his determination of placing Juliette, at the earliest moment, safe out of reach of that spotted maternal embrace.

XXI

Upon the following afternoon the Colonel duly escorted Mademoiselle to the dwelling of Madame Tessier. You may conceive that the portly little warrior, when panoplied in the full-skirted, black frock-coat, gray peg-top trousers, black cravat and vest, and curly-brimmed silk chimney-pot of private life, looked a very gallant gentleman; and that his daughter, attired in a new and charming costume of fine blue cloth, trimmed with velvet and loops of black silk cord, and wearing a sealskin coat and a minute bonnet, consisting of a knot or two of blue velvet, a froth of lace, and half-a-dozen richly-tinted oak-leaves on her coils of black hair, conveyed an effect of elegant simplicity and youthful grace, such as only a well-bred French girl knows how to combine perfectly.

During the walk, which absorbed the best part of a quarter of an hour, Juliette occupied herself in the endeavor to glean a few meager items of information with regard to her destined husband. To her timidly-cast bait the Colonel barely vouchsafed a rise. One may imagine a dialogue of timid interrogations and baffling replies, running somewhat after this fashion:

"Dear father, upon reflection, I find myself unable to recall the features of M. Charles Tessier with anything approaching clearness. I pray you be kind enough to describe him to me?"

"My daughter, I myself experience--how shall I phrase it?--a difficulty in verbally portraying the form and features of that excellent young man. But his mother carries his image in her heart, and doubtless has it on her walls and in her albums. Look in the one before you search the others; it will be wise."

"Assuredly. But, my father----"

"Chut!" The Colonel twirled a waxed end of his magnificent mustache, and resumed presently: "M. Charles Tessier is a gentleman of honor, an excellent man of business, and a most desirable _parti_ for any young girl of good family and limited fortune. Could the most exacting bride-elect demand more than this? In addition, he has a fine hand----"

"Indeed, dear father----"

A fine hand was something tangible. The owner of the commended extremity might in addition be possessor of a good figure, broad shoulders, a handsome nose.... And yet hunchbacks occasionally have neat hands, and the Colonel had only testified to one. That idea might be dismissed as fanciful. Of course, Charles had the proper complement of legs and arms. Half-smiling at her own terrors, Juliette murmured:

"Pray go on, dear father! You said--a fine hand..."

"Hah--aha! yes. A fine hand for a stroke at billiards. In addition, it cannot be denied that Charles has a magnificent head----"

"I am listening, dear father!..."

"A truly magnificent head for figures! Book-keeping by double-entry is infant's play to this admirable young man. He must teach thee the logarithms, my child, when thou art married.... Docile and intelligent as thou art, thou wouldst quickly learn to be his secretary and head-clerk. It should be a true wife's ambition to help her husband in business, and this is alone possible when his avocations are of the strictly civil kind."

It was tragic. In her dreams Juliette Bayard had aided to put on the casque, and buckle the cuirass of a stately warrior. Now she must perforce mend the gray goose-quill of a knight of the counting-house. You might have seen how her slender throat swelled against the encircling band of velvet. Tears sprang to her eyes. To keep them back she bit her lip, straightened her back, and shrugged,--one barely perceptible shrug. The Colonel said,--was his kind glance a little troubled as it turned on her?--

"The letter of Madame Tessier has made it clear to thee, that although thou wilt see thy future husband soon, the meeting will not take place upon the present occasion. Since October M. Charles Tessier"--the Colonel twisted his mustache--"has been detained by affairs at Mons-sur-Trouille in Belgium. I understand that at this country hamlet--near the town of Mons--is situated the manufactory of his partner, M.--the name for the moment escapes me. He is a wealthy gentleman of excellent Flemish family. The daughter, I remember, was called Clémence or Clémentine."

The Colonel cleared his throat. Juliette expressed a preference for the name of Clémentine. The Colonel begged her pardon. After all, it was Clémence. That did not matter. Mademoiselle liked the name of Clémence nearly as well as Clémentine. The Colonel tugged at the other side of the fiercely-waxed mustache, and changed the subject.

"The pavement rings beneath the heel; I prophesy frost to-night. Thou art cold, my child, I saw thee shiver. Shall we walk more quickly? It will be better so."

She quickened her steps at the suggestion. There had already been frost, and the air was keen and sparkling as champagne. The young blood in her veins answered to the pleasant stimulus of exercise. Her cheeks were rose-tinted porcelain, her eyes blue stars, despite her wretchedness, by the time they reached Madame Tessier's door.

The house of the Widow Tessier was in the Rue de Provence, which runs north from the Avenue de Saint Cloud, not far from above its junction with the Carrefour de Montreuil, and ends at the corner of the Boulevard de la Reine.

A quiet, retiring street, its houses separated by ample gardens, hidden by high walls of brick faced with fine gray Caen stone, generally festooned with pretty creepers and overtopped by stately trees. A noble pine shaded the green glass conservatory, large enough to be termed a winter-garden, which projected on the south side, from what was a solidly built villa plastered yellow, with a raised ground-floor, second story and attic story with Mansard windows; the short sloping roof, and these--indeed, the whole of the attic story to the floor-line, where a fine-worked cornice of stone ran round the building--being covered with grayish-blue slates.

You rang at a gate of open ironwork, white-painted, in which was a smaller gate to admit pedestrians, and while you were waiting for someone to answer the bell, you had leisure to admire the heavy _porte cochère_ upon your left, of solid oak timbers, studded with iron bolts, surmounted with a fine arch of stone, centered with a blank lozenge; and the neat balcony railing topping the wall to your right, in which was a modest little iron-studded door leading to the kitchen and servants' offices, always secured by a huge lock, and opened with much groaning of inward bolts.

You are to understand that the roof of the kitchen formed a leaden terrace upon which the bay of the drawing-room and other ground-floor windows opened; these, like the windows on the basement and upper stories, being furnished with outside shutters, the slatted wooden pattern with which Continental travelers are familiar, yellow-painted to match the plaster of the walls. The terrace could be gained by a short flight of stone steps rising upon your right as you entered. But upon a visit of ceremony you went on to the main entrance, which was reached by a handsome ascent of five broad, shallow steps of the Caen stone, continued along the north and east sides of the house, so that from any of the ground-floor windows, which were all of antique French door-pattern, you could descend into the garden at will. The hall-door commanded a view of the stables and the cottage attached to them, whose tenant combined the office of coachman with the duties of a gardener. You could not call those buildings unpicturesque, covered as they were with the now leafless branches of a great vine and a magnificent wistaria. Beyond there stretched a kitchen-garden, with beds of flowers and vegetables, under glass and in the open; and splendid espaliers, whence many a basket of luscious cherries, huge blue plums, brown Bon Chrétien pears, and melting nectarines, were gathered for the table in the season of such luscious fruits. And behind and to the north side of the villa was the pleasance, which must have formed part of a nobleman's park at one time. For winding walks bordered with ground-ivy led you in and out and among clumps of oak and chestnut, and stately limes and acacias stood upon the sunlit spaces of its velvet-lawns; while near its bounds shrubberies and thickets of Portugal laurel and lilac, bird-cherry and hawthorn, syringa and arbutus harbored thrush and blackbird, and in spring rejoiced the lover of beauty and perfume; and one great tulip tree opened its crimson-purple chalices beneath the rains and suns of early June. From the eastern boundary-wall jutted a stone pipe, ending in a mask, from the mouth of which fell a jet of clear water, forming a tiny pond, and a brook that ran away between stones covered with moss and overgrown with ferns and water-plants. But just now the pond was frozen, and a great icicle hung from the jaws of the grinning Satyr, and the blackened leaves of the water-loving plants and club-mosses were hidden under a thin covering of recently-fallen snow. What strange uses this place was to serve before the terrible year of 1870 was ended! How many letters signed "Charles" were to be drawn by the tiny hand of P. C. Breagh's Infanta from that grinning satyr-mouth.

Entering the house--for you are to see it plainly, serving as it did for a theater upon whose table the life-blood of France was to flow; and her body, beneath the steady, skillful hands of a man well fitted to perform such operations, was fated to undergo a terrible mutilation--entering the house by the double glass-doors, you found yourself in a parqueted hall, furnished with Empire consoles and large mirrors in frames of tarnished gilding. The chief staircase, covered with striped drugget in gray-and-red, you found immediately upon your right. Under this was the opening to a servants' stairway leading down to the kitchen beneath the terrace. Upon your left was a small door masking another servants' stairway leading to the attics; and beyond this two large folding-doors, covered with green baize, led into a medium-sized but lofty apartment, used as the dining-room, looking out on the garden, and hung with a crimson flock paper patterned with gilt palm-leaves, against which hung some large landscapes and antique hunting-scenes in oils. There was a handsome white marble fireplace, with a high mantel-slab supported by terminal figures, one a nymph, wanton-lipped and languid-eyed, her full voluptuous bosom partly veiled by a leopard skin, her disheveled hair crowned with ivy, like that of her companion; a faun, and young, judging by his budding horns.

A third pair of folding-doors facing the hall-entrance opened into the drawing-room; a fourth to the right of these gave entrance to the billiard-room, from which access might be gained by a low glass door into the winter-garden, a high-domed glass house full of palms and tree-ferns, boasting a little fountain, whose leaden dolphin, balanced almost perpendicularly on his tail in the center of a moss-stained basin, could spout high enough to wet the green roof when any charitable hand might set him going. A door at the farther end of this winter-garden gave access to a small room lined with books, classical works by standard French authors for the most part, smelling moldy, and apt, when a curious hand strove to remove them from their shelves, to stick to their neighbors on either side. And looking at the conservatory from outside, one perceived, running along the entire length of the rounded glass roof, a wrought-iron gangway, or double-sided balcony. From which, according to the testimony of Madame, the late M. Tessier, from whose dressing-room this aerial promenade could be gained by a glass door had been, accustomed to enjoy the prospect and breathe the air.

XXII

Madame, a discreet and sensible-looking person, with very little more mustache than is becoming to a Frenchwoman of sixty, embraced Juliette warmly on both cheeks, and graciously received the Colonel's salute upon her mittened left hand. The mittens were invariably black in tribute to the memory of the late M. Tessier. Madame's half-mourning, gray poplin gown, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt and upon the waist and shoulder-lappets, might have been the same she had always worn, in Juliette's memory. Her cap had lavender ribbons, her front was bay, whereas it had been chestnut, and the net of black chenille-velvet, in which she confined her back hair, plentiful in quantity and iron gray like her mustache and eyebrows, had silver beads upon it here and there.

Father and daughter were made welcome, were entertained with wine of Madeira, raspberry-vinegar--for which sweet, subacid beverage, diluted with water, young ladies were expected to express a preference--macaroons, ratafias, and little pink ice-cakes. The Colonel, having accepted a glass of the good vintage and consumed a biscuit, expressed a desire to walk round the garden; Madame, who had suggested the excursion, and Juliette, who had gone goose-flesh all over--were left to a _tête-à-tête_.

During the collation described above, Mademoiselle's blue eyes had discreetly raked the walls of the dining-room in search of portraits. Nothing rewarded her search but a highly varnished oil presentment of a simpering young woman in the vast flowery bonnet, the bunches of side-curls, and the high-waisted gown of 1830, in whom one must perforce discover Madame in her twentieth year. A case of three miniatures hung beside the copper wood-tongs on the left of the fireplace. When Madame affectionately leaned to her young guest, patted her hand, and bade her take her seat upon a green velvet fauteuil between Madame's own high-backed arm-chair and the carved-oak-framed, glass-covered embroidery picture of Dido on her funeral pyre that served as fire-screen, Juliette, in the act of transit, cast a rapid glance at this case. In vain. Only M. Tessier, in a high satin stock, gray curls and strips of side-whisker, Madame in a lace cap, fiddle-bodied brown silk gown, berthe, and cameo brooch, and a chubby infant of indeterminate sex, with sausage curls and tartan shoulder-knots, rewarded her anxious scrutiny. She could not restrain a sigh.

To be taken by the chin is not unpleasant to a young lady, under the right conditions and given certain circumstances. But when the ringed and bony fingers enclosed in Madame's black mitten, turned the small, pale oval to the light, a choking lump rose in Juliette's throat, and the black lashes veiled the eyes her aged friend would have peered in. She felt given over to harpies, abandoned and alone. Almost she could have rushed to one of the long French windows, wrenched it open, and fled to the shelter of her father. I wonder whether the Colonel was as ill at ease as his daughter, as he paced the winding paths under the leafless trees, between the beds of snow-powdered ground ivy, already sprinkled with patches of aconite in partially thawed places, shining yellow as little suns against dark leaves and wet brown earth....