CHAPTER VI.

SALLE DU SABBAT.

How we all came to visit the _Grottes de S. Jean_ in one large party, I never quite made out, but the fact remains that we went. Some one proposed it, probably Miss Markham (for that gay young creature was always on the alert to concoct a plan by which she should secure the privilege of Mr. Charteris’s company), and some one agreed to it, but neither of them was I.

I found myself one morning in the centre of a group consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Carolus, Sophy Markham, Arthur Thrale and Charlie Sandilands, Cave Charteris, and Ange and Tessie, all habited in walking costumes, and armed with thick sticks, ready to start on an expedition to these famous grottoes of stalactites, and I was told to put on my hat and accompany them.

There was no particular interest to me in the expedition; indeed, had I been given my choice, I would much rather have stayed at home on the chance of getting a lesson in French from the Baron de Nesselrode—the public will see that I am frank in these records, even to detailing my errors of judgment—but consciousness that it was so, and that I showed weakness in encouraging it, urged me to the opposite course, and I agreed, with alacrity, to do all that they required of me. So in a few minutes we had started on our way. Sophy Markham clinging close, of course, to Charteris’s side, as Charlie Sandilands did to mine, and the rest walking, as Ange expressed it, _heegledy-peegledy_. How well I remember that morning: we were all so terribly young. Mrs. Carolus skipped round and about her Willy, whom, more than once, she nearly knocked over in her airy evolutions, as a bride of sixteen might have done; whilst Miss Markham hung upon Charteris’s arm and gazed up into his face with the rapture of a first attachment. The boys caught the youthful infection, and raced Tessie and me down the green slopes we had to traverse, until I told them they reminded me of Greenwich fair. Of all the company only two seemed unequal to taking part in the general hilarity. These two were Cave Charteris and _petite_ Ange.

He walked along with his head in the air, without appearing to take much interest in the conversation of his self-elected companion. Did he or did he not care for the attentions which this woman was always pressing upon him? To love her I was quite sure would be impossible to him—the great difference in their ages alone would render it most unlikely—but he had certainly been more polite and amiable to her lately than he had ever been before.

What motive could he have for it? for I was certain Cave Charter never did anything without a motive. Did he entertain any thoughts of marrying her? Miss Markham was reported at that time to have money, and Madame Marmoret had more than once openly expressed her disgust to see the lady’s favours transferred to the wrong quarter. But Mr. Charteris had told me he was rich; he could never be so mean as to sell his liberty to an old woman when he was not even in want of pecuniary assistance. Yet on what other grounds, except the desire to ingratiate himself with her, could one account for his former rudeness being changed to a curt familiarity? The other dullard of our party, dear Ange, was not so melancholy as she was silent. The burst of grief she had given way to, now more than a week ago, had been succeeded by an unusually subdued manner—an _older_ manner if I may express it so. It was as if the discovery of that day had swept her youth away before it. So I believed, at least, then—now I know that subtler influences were at work to destroy her gaiety.

I tried on that morning, by every means in my power, to make Ange like her former self, but it was in vain. She laughed, it is true, and when we pulled her down the steep hills, the crimson blood mantled in her peachy cheeks and made her beautiful, but there was a sense of care underlying the laughter that spoilt the joyousness of its echo, and the colour faded too fast after each exertion to have been called there by healthy exercise.

The grottoes we were about to visit extended for a great distance under the grounds of Monsieur de Condé, whose property they were, and who charged a certain sum for admission to them. They had been discovered by some workmen whilst excavating on his estate, and had been quite a source of profit to their owner ever since. The visitors to St. Pucelle, naturally, had already heard a great deal about these famous grottoes, and Sophy Markham ‘gushed’ over them to her heart’s content.

‘Oh! I am so _anxious_ to see them! I am anticipating so much pleasure from this little excursion!’ she exclaimed, with a violent and most palpable squeeze of Mr. Charteris’s arm. ‘I have been looking over the book in the hotel where visitors have written down their impressions of them, and they are so terribly tantalising. A Persian describes himself as having been suddenly transported into fairyland—didn’t he, Lizzie dear?—positively into fairyland, and says he can compare the vast caverns to nothing but the palace of his great master the sultan, and the forms of the stalactites to lovely houris frozen around him. Isn’t it poetical? _Frozen houris!_ Oh! I do love poetry so! It is the very life of my soul.’

Tessie laughed quietly.

‘I’m afraid if you do not lessen your anticipations, Miss Markham, that you will be disappointed. I went over the grotto years ago with some friends, but I saw nothing at all like “frozen houris” there.’

‘Ah! but then, my dear Tessie, you are not imaginative. Now, I _am_. I always have been, and it is my _métier_ to make the very best of everything I see. You don’t blame me for it, or think me foolish, Mr. Charteris, do you?’

Of course Mr. Charteris assured her that folly and herself were the two things in his ideas farthest removed from one another, and just as he had given vent to this opinion, we came in sight of the mouth of the grotto, where two _guides_, each bearing a petroleum lamp, awaited our arrival. They tendered us little hats made of grey linen, each trimmed with a cockade and a bunch of red feathers in front, very much after the pattern of those adopted by the monkeys on the organs, and for which we were expected to exchange those we wore, which were liable to be damaged by the drippings from the cave.

They were comical-looking head-dresses, and I hardly wondered at Mrs. Carolus and the fair Sophia hesitating to surmount their hard-lined and puckered faces by them, although Ange and Tessie looked all the prettier from the contrast.

Miss Markham in particular, I could see, would rather have spoiled a dozen hats than assumed the unbecoming linen one, had she not been ridiculed into doing so.

‘Oh! Lizzie dear, we never _can_ wear such things—now can we?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know, dear. I’d much rather keep on my bonnet, but then it cost five guineas, and I shall be crazy if it gets hurt. I really think I must venture to try one of the caps.’

‘Oh! my dear girl, you do look so comical! Excuse my laughing—but you’ve no idea—and grey never did suit your complexion, you know.’

‘Well, I don’t think you need talk, Sophy. So plain a headdress is by no means suited to your own style of features, I can tell you!’

‘Oh! the horrid thing—I will never, never wear it!’ cried the childish Sophia, as she threw the offending cap upon the ground; and I believe, if she had not overheard Mr. Charteris grumble at being kept waiting so long, that she would have been as good as her word.

But, finding that we were all wearing them and she would be singular if she did not do the same, she consented at last to crown her _chignon_ with it, and came simpering forth like a bashful girl that was afraid of being looked at.

No one troubled her, however, and the whole party being ready, we began to descend the first flight of wooden steps which were steep but easy, and went down, down, down, until the ivy and fern covered entrance was left far above us, and we had reached the very centre of the cave, which was yet light enough to let us see that there were several more such flights to be descended before we could touch level earth again.

This was a fine opportunity for Miss Markham and Mrs. Carolus to shriek and laugh hysterically, and cling like grim death to whoever happened to be nearest to them, and they made every use of it. But Mr. Charteris and Mr. Carolus had been wise in their generation, and insisted upon going down first, leaving their women-kind to struggle in the rear with any one they could lay hold of. So poor Charlie and Arthur Thrale had them all to themselves, whilst Tessie and I laughed wickedly in each others’ ears.

At last we stood on level ground, in a cavern as dark as Erebus; there was no light anywhere, except from the lamps of the guides, who waved them over their heads and introduced us to _la grande salle_. I looked up and down and round about me; but all was black as pitch. I felt that I was standing on broken flints and thick mud, and as the guides’ lamps threw their faint gleam here and there, I perceived that the cave we stood in was very vast and damp, and uncommonly like a huge cellar, but I can’t say that I saw anything more.

‘Are these the “frozen houris?”’ asked Cave Charteris, sarcastically.

‘Oh no! I should hardly think so,’ replied Miss Markham, quickly; ‘and—where are you, Mr. Charteris? I feel so dreadfully timid, I can’t tell you—and would give anything to have hold of the hand of some one that I knew!’

‘Take mine!’ I said, with _malice prepense_; ‘it’s quite strong enough to keep you from slipping.’

‘Oh no! I couldn’t think of it. I might fall and pull you down with me. But if Mr. Charteris would help me——’

‘All right! You can take my arm if you wish it. But we can’t walk abreast through the passages,’ he answered, with anything but lover-like alacrity, and something made me turn to Ange and whisper:

‘Are you not frightened, dear, too? If so, I can hold you up.’

But she said calmly:

‘There is nothing to be frightened of, Hilda. We are on the solid ground now, and can fall no lower.’

In another minute the guides had turned and led us through a passage cut in the rock. We were not going up nor down stairs now, but picking our way over slippery stones, and between places sometimes so narrow and so low, that gaunt Mr. Carolus knocked his head more than once, as he disregarded the guides’ warning cry of ‘_Tête!_’ and the majority of us got bruised arms and shoulders. Every now and then we came upon a larger excavation which was called a _salle_, and bore some name consequent on the likeness assumed by the stalactites it contained. One was termed _Salle de Brahma_, because it held a lump of crystal somewhat resembling the idol of that name. Another _Salle du Sacrifice_, its principal attraction being a large flat stone, at the foot of which was another, shaped like a sausage and entitled _tombeau de la victime_.

We paced after the guides through these cavernous passages for what appeared to me to be miles, my mind, meanwhile, being divided between fear that I should leave my best pair of boots behind me in the slushy clay, and apprehension as to the appearance my crape would present when I reached home again. I heard Mrs. Carolus, every now and then, querulously complaining to ‘Willy’ of the pains she was acquiring in her back from the constant stooping, and I knew that Sophy Markham was dogging Mr. Charteris’s steps as closely as the circumstances would admit of, and that Tessie and Ange plodded behind me silent and uncomplaining.

I was beginning to think that we had come on a very foolish expedition and were likely to have more pain than pleasure for our trouble, when I found we were ploughing our way up again, on fungus-covered ladders and wet slippery stairs upon which it was most difficult to keep a footing, until we arrived at what was decidedly the finest sight there, the _Salle du Sabbat_. Here the guides proposed to send up a spirit balloon, in order to show us the height and extent of the vast cavern, and went away, taking the lamps with them, having first planted us in a row on the edge of a precipice, and conjured us not to stir until their return. I think we felt little inclination to do so. The blackness about us was so thick that we could almost _feel_ it, and the silence was that of death. Ange slipped her little hand in mine, and whispered:

‘Hilda, suppose they should never come back!’ and I could not say the supposition was a pleasant one. She had been standing between Sophy Markham and myself, but as she said the words, she slipped round my back and linked her arm in mine on the other side.

Miss Markham, for a wonder, was silent, but Mrs. Carolus was plaintively trying to make her spouse partake her girlish fears, and he was ridiculing them with a kind of rough good sense that made me laugh. Under cover of their expostulations with one another, a mouth approached my ear on the side left vacant by Ange, and I heard a voice say gently:

‘My own darling! How much I love you!’

The announcement took me so completely by surprise, that, for the moment, I imagined it had proceeded from Charlie Sandilands, and it was quite a mercy that, under cover of the darkness, I did not turn round and smartly box his ears in return for his impudence. But before I had had time to prepare the weapon of chastisement, the speaker continued, still in the same soft tones:

‘What a nuisance it is having to play propriety before all these bores! How I long to be alone with you again, and able to tell you what I feel!’

Before this sentence was concluded, I had recognised the voice as that of Cave Charteris, and was bristling with indignation.

‘What do you mean by speaking to me like that?’ I said angrily.

‘Good God, Hilda!’ he rejoined, ‘is it you?’

‘Yes, it is I! Who did you take me for?’

‘Then—where—where—’ he stammered, in order to give himself time to think of what to say, ‘where is Miss Markham?’

We had both raised our voices in our mutual surprise, and his last question was overheard.

‘Here I am, Mr. Charteris!’ ejaculated the fair Sophy, from his other side—I know she had shifted her quarters in hopes of extracting some familiarity from him before the lights came back. ‘Close to you—see!’

The order to ‘see’ was apparently accompanied by a playful pinch, for Charteris gave a sudden yell, and a step forward that might have sent him over the precipice.

‘Do be careful, Miss Markham,’ I exclaimed, with an expression of annoyance, ‘and keep your facetiæ until we stand on safer ground. You might have caused Mr. Charteris to make a false step.’

‘Oh, you needn’t be so alarmed, Miss Marsh,’ she answered meaningly; ‘I assure you I am quite as anxious for Mr. Charteris’s safety as you can be, and I should think you had quite enough to do to look after Mr. Sandilands without troubling yourself about other people!’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I retorted; but at that moment the spirit balloon rose in the air, and half a dozen voices joined in a chorus of admiration at the height and depth and length and breadth of the cavern we stood in, and the glittering clusters of stalactites which the light momentarily revealed as it majestically sailed past them. I looked with the rest, but my thoughts were far away from the scene around me. A question was puzzling my brain which I felt I could not give up until I had unravelled. _For whom_ had Cave Charteris intended the whisper which by mistake he addressed to me?

It worried me all the way home, and long after I had reached it. His subsequent query seemed to imply that he had believed Sophy Markham stood next him, but I could not credit that he had said those words except with the intent to mislead me. Was it possible that he could have seriously called Miss Markham by such a term of endearment, or addressed her with so much earnestness in his voice? And if it were not possible, then—did he intend that speech for Ange, who would have been standing between us had she not slipped round to my other side at the very moment we were left in darkness?

_Cave Charteris and Ange!_ The very combination of names seemed like sacrilege in my ears. The man who had made love to me, and left me in years gone by—who had tried to make love to me only a few weeks back—to have the happiness of that innocent trusting child in his hands! It was too horrible to think of. Whatever his protestations or passions for the moment might be, he was cold and cruel by nature. I could read it in his eyes and the sentiments in which he expressed his opinions, and I trembled to think what Ange’s fate might prove, if he aroused all her deepest feelings, and then basely deserted her as he had deserted me. What was I to do? What was it my duty to do—both towards her and him! If the sentences I heard were meant for Ange, it was not the first time Mr. Charteris had addressed her as a lover. That was evident.

‘My own darling!’ he had said, ‘how much I love you!’

Men don’t call women their ‘own’ until they have proved they are willing to be so. I knew enough of human nature to know that. And then he had added, ‘How I long to be alone with you _again_,’ which showed that whoever he spoke to had already kept appointments with him.

Oh! could it—could it be our little Ange? All my knowledge of her childish manner, her shyness and her modesty, seemed to refute the suspicion as an impossibility; but it was still more impossible to believe that Mr. Charteris had seriously addressed those lover-like speeches to old Sophy Markham. My mind became distracted in its ignorance what to think, and how to act. If he were making love to Ange, I felt as if, at all risk, I ought to fly to her rescue; but if he were only making fun of Miss Markham’s undisguised _penchant_ for himself, why my interference would appear very ridiculous, and bring not only discredit on me as a busybody and meddler, but perhaps lay me open to a false inference of jealousy.

It was evening—nine or ten o’clock—and I was sitting in my own room, leaning my elbows on the open window-sill, and gazing up into the starless sky. The night was very dark—I remember thinking _how_ dark, as I sat and mused there, sadly. I had seen Madame Marmoret, arrayed in her best gown, with her scarlet shawl across her shoulders, her gold earrings dangling from her ears, and the broad strings of her snow-white cap pinned carefully together at the back of her neck, leave the courtyard some time ago, on a visit of ceremony, I presumed, to some of her friends. I knew that Mr. Lovett was busily engaged in the _salle_ playing _écarté_ with Monsieur Condé, who had looked in to hear if we had enjoyed our visit to his immortal grotto: and I had left Tessie and Ange ironing their father’s shirts in the kitchen. Mr. Charteris I was unable to account for, as he had left the house immediately after dinner, and was probably smoking the calumet of peace with his friend Monsieur de Nesselrode, or perhaps repeating the words which so much troubled me for the benefit of Miss Sophy Markham.

Whose then was the figure, decidedly a man’s, which had just entered the courtyard by way of the stables and cow-house, and leant up against the wall outside the kitchen-door? He was smoking a cigar, for I could distinguish the red light as he blew the thin wreaths of smoke into the air; but that was no guide to his personality, since every man in St. Pucelle enjoyed the same privilege. The kitchen window was full in view from where I sat, but the shutters were closed, so I could not see if the girls were still at work within or no. But why did not the stranger, whoever he might be, knock for admittance? Could he have entered the yard with any nefarious intentions? In another moment I am sure I should have spoken to him, had not the kitchen-door opened suddenly, and a second figure stepped out into the darkness.

‘Don’t stay here!’ said a tender voice, which I recognised at once; ‘I cannot come to you. Tessie wants me in the little _salle_!’

‘Cannot my angel spare me _one_ minute?’ asked Cave Charteris.

‘No! not one, until to-morrow! You will not try to keep me now, will you?’—imploringly, as if to say that if he _did_ try, he would certainly succeed—‘because they might hear of it and be angry.’

‘You shall do just as you think best, my darling, on one condition.’

‘What is that?’

‘That you tell me you love me before you go—I cannot sleep without it.’

I could not see, but I fancied, from her stifled tones, that he had clasped his arms about her.

‘Oh! my love! my love!’ she repeated fervently; ‘_I do love you!_’

And then she slipped away and closed the kitchen-door softly, and after an interval of half a minute I heard the other figure step carefully across the paved court and pass into the open street again.

And I turned from the window and sank down on my knees beside my bed, and prayed for a long, long time, for _petite_ Ange and for myself, and judgment to know what best to do.

[Illustration: [Fleuron]]