Читать книгу A Sheaf of Bluebells - Baroness Orczy - Страница 9

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In the evening when, in the small boudoir which had been made habitable, the lamps were lit and a fire burned in the tall hearth, when the shutters were closed and chairs drawn nearer to one another, the place looked a trifle less desolate. Matthieu Renard and his wife Annette had thrown up their work under the farmers and cultivators whom they despised, and returned to serve the masters, whom even in their poverty they recognized as alone worthy of their services. Annette had cooked a good dinner, Matthieu had unearthed a bottle of wine from a disused cellar, which had almost miraculously escaped perquisition. The world did not appear so callous or so inimical as it had done earlier in the day.

“What about Ronnay?” M. de Courson had asked as soon as Matthieu and Annette had gone and the doors were closed on the intimate family circle.

“What about him?” retorted Mme. la Marquise. The sound of her eldest son’s name grated unpleasantly on her ear.

“Does he know you have arrived?”

“Yes. I have written to him.”

“So soon?”

“There was no object in wasting time. He and I will have to meet within the next few days. I want to get that first meeting over.”

“You have asked him to come here?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think that he will come?”

“He cannot refuse to pay his respects to his mother.”

M. de Courson shrugged his shoulders and stared moodily into the fire.

“Have you heard anything fresh about Ronnay de Maurel, Baudouin?” queried Mme. la Marquise sharply. “Anything that I ought to know?”

“Only what is common talk round the neighbourhood, my dear,” he replied.

“And that is?...”

“That Gaston de Maurel has brought up his nephew—your son, my dear Denise—as little better than the workmen in his factories. Ronnay, it seems, is quite illiterate, and his manners are those of a peasant. The most violent democratic principles have been inculcated into him from childhood....”

“Ever since the law freed me from his father’s brutalities ...” broke in Madame coldly.

“Exactly,” assented M. de Courson, in an obviously conciliatory spirit, “when your husband died, my dear, his brother Gaston took up his work with the boy. You know the type of man Gaston de Maurel always was—the Revolution suited his temperament exactly. Cruel, vindictive, jealous, violent, he voted for the September massacres and for the execution of the King. Had Ronnay been old enough he, too, would have been a regicide.”

Mme. la Marquise shuddered.

“And even you, Baudouin,” she said, “have oft rebuked me for my hatred to the boy.”

“Your son, Denise, your own flesh and blood. Aye!” he added more emphatically, “so much your own flesh and blood; that he has your character in a great measure—your energy, your enthusiasm.... Unfortunately he misapplies both....”

“To crime and disloyalty.”

“Yes; there is the pity of it. He is a dangerous man, Denise,” continued M. de Courson earnestly. “It were best to keep him at arm’s-length.”

“At arm’s length,” retorted Madame hotly. “My dear Baudouin, are you serious?”

“I have never been so serious in my life. I think that it is a boundless pity that you have already made overtures in the direction of the de Maurels. I would have left the whole pack of those revolutionary brigands severely alone.”

He spoke with unwonted energy, for in all matters of argument M. de Courson invariably gave in to his more energetic sister. But he felt strongly on the subject, and looked as if he were determined to assert his will this time, at any rate. But Mme. la Marquise was not prepared to give in, and she broke in once more, in her authoritative way:

“I shall not leave the revolutionary brigands alone, my good Baudouin,” she said. “I mean to try and win my son Ronnay over to our cause....”

“You are mad, Denise!” exclaimed M. le Comte.

“Will you deny that he would be invaluable to us if he were on our side?” she argued.

Then as M. le Comte remained silent, with frowning eyes fixed in deep puzzlement before him, she added with ever-growing energy:

“Remember that Ronnay is passing rich, and that old Gaston cannot last long, so they say. I hear that he is dying. When he dies all his accumulated wealth, which is immense, will also go to Ronnay, who will certainly then be one of the richest men in France. Moreover, he already disposes of five thousand skilled men, and of the means of making engines and munitions of war. The men, so I am told, are devoted to him—except for a few malcontents. They look upon him as one of themselves; they would as soon follow him on our side as on that of Bonaparte. Think what that means, my dear Baudouin! Men and money to our cause! and we need both sadly. It means conciliating an ogre who no doubt is too stupid, too illiterate to have any rooted convictions of his own. Tell me!” she concluded, with a note of triumph at her own unanswerable argument, “were it not passing wise to make friends with such a man?”

“Ah! if you could do that, Denise...!” quoth M. de Courson, with an impatient sigh and a dubious shrug of the shoulders. “But if your son Ronnay hath aught of the de Maurels in him, you will fail. Bertrand de Maurel was not amenable, remember, and you tried hard in those days to win him over to our side.”

Mme. la Marquise was silent for a moment or two. It was her turn now to stare moodily into the fire. Memory had carried her back to those early years of her marriage, when Bertrand de Maurel’s dictatorial ways and crude love-making had caused her ever-rebellious spirit to chafe under his tyranny. Brought up under the strict régime of the time which made of the jeune fille little more than a puppet to dance to the piping of her parents, Denise de Courson had hoped to find emancipation in marriage. Bertrand de Maurel, however, soon taught her that a husband’s yoke can be more irksome than a father’s. Where Denise hoped to find independence of thought and of action she found a tyrant whose democratic ideals amounted to bigotry; where she hoped to lead a free and intellectual life of her own, she found herself a slave to a system of philanthropy which was repugnant alike to her aristocratic sense and to her love of her own comforts. Bertrand de Maurel had mapped out for his young wife a life of usefulness and of sound influence among his dependents, and Denise loathed the very propinquity of those whom she was wont to call “the great unwashed.” Bertrand had schemes for improving the conditions of labour, the housing of his peasantry, the production of the land. They were crude, embryotic ideas, perhaps, but they sprang from a mind attuned to the growing discontent of one class against the glaring injustice imposed upon it by the other; they sprang from a heart that was warm and sympathetic, if not always logical. He was at first only feeling his way toward a better understanding with his dependents, scenting the approaching danger of those horrible reprisals which were destined to remain a perpetual stain upon the history of the nation, and which a little conciliation, a little goodwill, a few more men like Bertrand and Gaston de Maurel might perhaps have averted.

But with none of her husband’s aims or his ideals had Denise the slightest sympathy. It was a case of hopeless incompatibility of tempers, further aggravated by irascible and imperious characters on both sides. Bertrand de Maurel had no more understanding of his wife’s nature than she had of his; no more sympathy with her ideals and her train of thought. Perpetual bickering led to outbursts of passionate recrimination; an impassable abyss of divergent political views did the rest. Revolutionary and democratic ideals had already eaten into the soul of Bertrand de Maurel and of his brother Gaston; and with Denise, belief in the divine right of kings was an integral part of her religion. After five years of miserable and acrimonious conflicts separation appeared the only solution of an impossible situation. Denise shook the dust of La Frontenay from her aristocratic feet, leaving all her illusions behind her, together with the child born of this unfortunate marriage—a boy not yet three years old, whom she had already learned to hate.

Ronnay had never been her child. As a tiny baby he was already the image of his father—with the same wilful and tyrannical temper, the same outbursts of passionate wrath, the same characteristic toss of the head that shook recalcitrant curls from the low, square forehead. Ronnay had his father’s auburn hair, his father’s deep-set eyes, which at times were almost black, at others of a deep violet-blue; he had his father’s massive limbs and square-set jaw. Oh, yes! Ronnay was a true de Maurel. Not all the upbringing in the world, not all a mother’s influence, would have trained the lad to walk in the footsteps of his aristocratic forbears. The word “democrat” was already writ plainly upon the sturdy form of the tiny child, as he toddled, unaided, through the sheds of his father’s foundries, scorning the delicate feminine hands of nurse or governess, who would have guided his footsteps, clinging to the overseers and the roughly-clad workmen, who placed their tools in his little hands and showed him the way to use them. The spirit of democracy shone out of the lad’s blue eyes when, standing between his Uncle Gaston’s knees, he listened spellbound to marvellous tales of the tyranny of kings and of the heroic stand which was even then being made in the New World over the ocean far away by a nation which was resolved to be free.

Yes, Ronnay de Maurel was, indeed, a true son of his father—a worthy nephew of Gaston de Maurel and the godson of La Fayette; he had nothing of the de Coursons in him. And in the years that ensued, when Gaston had voted for the death of his King and Ronnay had won his first laurels under the base-born Corsican adventurer fighting against his own kith and kin and against the King’s most holy Majesty, Denise de Mortain—as she now was—often wished that some beneficent Fate had smothered her first-born at birth.