Читать книгу The Vision Splendid - D. K. Broster - Страница 5

CHAPTER IV

(1)

There was a certain day in the year the advent of which always imbued the Rector of Compton Regis with an irritability quite foreign to his nature. It was that Sunday, usually occurring somewhere between Lammas and Michaelmas, on which his conscience obliged him to preach a sermon on eternal punishment.

The Rector was not sound on Hell, and he knew it. Every year he sought miserably for some formula which should reconcile what he felt with what he believed, and he sat this afternoon at his study table surrounded by old discourses on the subject, running one hand distractedly through his thick grey hair while the other held the pen of an unready writer. Every now and then his gaze sought help from his beloved little cases of Romano-British coins, or from the backs of Camden and Dugdale, and once, leaving his uncongenial task, he got up and wistfully fingered his latest acquisition, the brass piece of Allectus, which lay waiting to be put in its place with its numismatical peers.

The Honourable and Reverend Stephen Grenville was one of those persons, abounding in these islands, whose theories and practice do not match. He stood, outwardly, for the union on equal terms of Church and State, but in his heart he really assigned to the former a different and a superior plane. His antiquarian leanings, very plainly manifested in his study, were the cause alike of this inconsistency, and of the measure of sympathy which, despite himself, he accorded to the "Oriel young men" whose enthusiasm (a thing he feared and disliked) would, he considered, wear off in time, and whose attachment to the historical foundation of the Church commanded his entire approval.

Aristocrat and Tory, the best-born gentleman in the neighbourhood (and the least likely to lay stress on the fact), he was greatly respected, and with reason. No dissenting chapel reared its head in the parish, and there was not a single public-house. It was his custom to celebrate Holy Communion at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, and on the Sundays immediately following those feasts, and to baptise and catechise on Sunday afternoons. His reading in church was very impressive. He knew every one of his flock personally; he endeavoured always to do his duty as he conceived it, else had he not now been struggling, poor gentleman, with an uncongenial topic....

"Have you any letters for the carrier, dear?" asked Horatia, putting her bonneted head in at the door. Sounds of impatient boundings and whimperings behind her hinted at an accompanying presence.

The Rector abandoned Hell for the moment. "There is the letter to your Aunt Julia, my love. I had to keep it back to make some inquiries about railroads ... and then this sermon ... Where have I put it?" Rumpling his hair still more violently he reflected, and having searched among the litter on his table, found what he sought and gave it to his daughter.

"Try and have your sermon finished when I come back in an hour's time, there's a good Papa," suggested Horatia, kissing him. "I am sure what you said last year would do quite well. I shall go round by Five-Acres and back by the road."

Outside the inn the Oxford carrier was just preparing to start, wrapped in an old many-caped coat, which had probably once adorned a greater luminary, some driver of the numerous London and Oxford coaches. Horatia gave him the letter, acknowledged the landlord's respectful greeting, and summoning her spaniel from some ravishing discovery in the yard, turned along the road.

Presently the carrier passed her, cracking his whip in emulation of the Magnet or the Regulator, and as she watched the lumbering covered cart dwindle gradually in the distance, Horatia found her mind following the odyssey of Aunt Julia's letter; saw it being trundled along the miles of road, past Kingston Bagpuize and Besselsleigh and down the long hill into Oxford; witnessed its transference next morning to the London coach at the Angel, and finally pictured the postman delivering it at Cavendish Square, and Aunt Julia receiving it at breakfast in the big, handsome, gloomy dining-room.

And because, not having any great love of that lady, she had seen little of Aunt Julia since her childhood, she instinctively imaged her as she had appeared in those days, with her smooth brown hair, her rich and smooth brown dress; and she saw, round the breakfast table, her eight cousins, all of the ages which were respectively theirs about the time of the battle of Salamanca. (Horatia herself was born in Trafalgar year, and owed her name to that fact.) Further, she recalled her never-forgotten and scarcely forgiven stay under Aunt Julia's roof at that epoch.

She was six or seven, and she had been deposited in Aunt Julia's care on account of an epidemic at Compton. Her nurse did not accompany her. Mrs. Baird, a strict Evangelical, brought up her children very literally in the fear of the Lord, and she believed in "breaking a child's will." Yet she was kind and perfectly just, while her offspring were such models of good behaviour that it seemed now to Horatia as if this process could not have been painful to them. But the atmosphere of compulsory religion, which attained its apogee on Sunday, caused Horatia to look upon that day with a novel horror. Church in the morning, with a long string of little be-pantalooned worshippers setting out in double file towards Margaret Chapel, the two rearmost reciting to their father, during that short transit, verses and hymns: after church more verses and hymns, and then it three o'clock a heavy meal, at which all the children dined with their parents. The conversation was instructive. Uncle James never failed to quote with approval Mr. Wilberforce's application of the text in Proverbs about the dinner of herbs and the stalled ox, pointing out that his fortunate offspring enjoyed both the better meal and the blessings of affection. Afterwards there was more religious instruction, and family prayers, in the evening, of enormously swollen bulk. The first Sunday of her stay, Horatia bore these multiplied devotions because she was unaware, at any given moment, how much was still to follow. On the second Sunday she restrained herself until the evening. It was Aunt Julia's custom always to hear the prayers of the younger children; but when Horatia in her turn was bidden to kneel at that unyielding lap, she refused. She would not say any more prayers: God, she announced, with confidence, must be tired; He had been hearing them all day. And in this opinion she remained firm.

Only having suffered the mildest reproofs for wrong-doing, Horatia was not warned when the eulogy of the rod of correction taken from the Book of Proverbs was chosen for the nightly reading, but when the other children had been dismissed she suddenly experienced, at the lap she had scorned, the practical effect of the wise man's teaching. Yet Aunt Julia, though she had not spared for her crying, suffered defeat, for Horatia did not say her prayers, and her visit was shortly afterwards terminated lest she should contaminate the other children. Aunt Julia indeed offered to undertake a course of "bringing the child to her senses" at some future date, but the Rector declined the proposal, nor did Horatia visit again in Cavendish Square until she was nearly grown up. It was many a day, too, before she could be coaxed by her father to resume the practice of prayer.

Aunt Julia's hair was not so brown now, and of the eight daughters five were prosperously married. Horatia knew that none of them considered herself to have had a childhood other than happy. Perhaps it was a good preparation for the state of matrimony, to have your "will broken" early in life. If so, how far was she herself from possessing that desired qualification!

Horatia smiled at the thought as she walked along. Since the death of the mother whom she could not remember, and the extinction of the hope of a son (for Mr. Grenville had a feeling against second marriages), she had been to her father almost everything that a son could have been—with the added advantage that she was never obliged to leave him. Latin and Greek and ancient history had been laid open to her as to a boy; she was able to take an interest in the Rector's antiquarian pursuits, and could have abstracted passages from the Fathers for him if he had wanted them. All this Mr. Grenville had taught her himself, turning a deaf ear to family representations on the necessity of a governess, the use of the globes, and deportment. Music and Italian masters, however, visited the Rectory from time to time, imparting knowledge when their pupil was in the mood to receive it, but it was to the old émigré priest settled at East Hendred, whom she loved, that she owed her remarkably good knowledge and pronunciation of French, and her interest in the history of his native land. For after all Horatia was not a typical classical scholar; her acquaintance with Greek and Latin authors was by no means extensive, and need not so much have alarmed her neighbours.

(2)

Decidedly it would, after all, soon be autumn in earnest. Only five days ago, when she was in the garden among the flowers, Horatia had scouted the thought, but there was less of summer here. Farmer Wilson's beeches were actually beginning to turn. There was a tiny trail of leaves along the side of Narrow Lane, as she could see by glancing down it. The high road, less overshadowed, was clearer of these evidences of mortality. How blue was the line of the Downs!

A horseman overtook her, riding fast, and raising his hat as he passed, but without looking at her. It was no one that she knew, yet, a good rider herself, Horatia instinctively remarked his ease and grace, his perfect seat. He was taking the same road as she, but long before she got to the turn he had disappeared round it; and indeed she had forgotten him even sooner, for Rover the spaniel suddenly went delirious over a hedgehog which he just then discovered, and which he had to be coerced into leaving behind. Horatia was still praising and scolding her dog when she got to the turn—and when the sound of loud screaming ahead caused her to hasten her steps.

By the side of the road, a little way down, was a group composed of the gentleman who had passed her, his horse, and a small child in a pinafore. From this infant, seated upon the border of grass, proceeded the loud wails which Horatia had heard; the rider, one buckskinned knee upon the ground, was stooping over it and addressing it in tones that, as Horatia came nearer, sounded alternately anxious and coaxing.

"It is Tommy Wilson," thought Miss Grenville aghast. "He is always playing in the road, and now he's been ridden over.... But it can't be serious, or he would not be able to yell like that." Nevertheless she hastened still more. The gentleman, absorbed in his blandishments, did not hear her.

"Leetle boy," she heard him say—"leetle boy, you are not hurt, not the least in the world. You are frightened, soit, but you are not hurt. See, here is a crown"—the yells ceased for a moment—"now rise and go to your home. Quoi! you cannot stand upon your feet?" For he had lifted the infant to a standing posture, which it instantly abandoned, falling this time prone upon the ground, and emitting now perfect shrieks of rage or terror.

"Dieu! a-t-il des poumons!" exclaimed the young man despairingly to himself. He made a gesture and rose; at the same instant heard Horatia's step and, turning round, snatched off his hat. His mien implored the succour which she would have rendered in any case.

"Is the child really hurt, Sir?" she asked. As well pretend that she took him for an Englishman, since he spoke the tongue so readily!

"Mademoiselle," said the young man dramatically, "I swear to you that my horse never passed within a foot of him. But he runs across the road in front of me, and falls down; I dismount and pick him up—what else could I do?—and since that time he ceases not to yell comme un démon!"

His brilliant, speaking dark-blue eyes rested on her with a mixture of humour, appeal, and (it was impossible not to recognise it) of admiration. His black silk cravat was so high that his chin creased it; his chamois-coloured cashmere waistcoat was fastened with buttons of chased gold, and the cut of his greenish-bronze coat testified to an ultra-fashionable tailor. Horatia looked at Tommy Wilson, now rolling on the grass in a perfect luxury of woe. Bending over him she seized him firmly by the arm.

"Tommy," she commanded, "get up!" More successful than the Frenchman, she restored him to some measure of equilibrium. "Now you are coming with me to the doctor to show him where you are hurt. Come along!"

Her voice, which he knew, had the effect of reducing the youth's lamentations, but at her suggestion a fresh tide of alarm swept over his round, smeared face. He resisted, ejaculating hoarsely: "No, Miss! No, Miss 'Ratia! No, I 'ont!"

"Very well then, I shall bring the doctor to you here," said Miss Grenville firmly. "Now mind, Tommy, that you stay where you are without moving till I come back with him. Do you hear?" She loosed her hold and stood back, holding up a warning finger.

A success almost startling rewarded her manoeuvre. For five seconds, perhaps, Thomas Wilson stood blinking at her through his tears, his mouth working woefully at the corners; then, with an expression of forlorn determination, he turned, ran past the horse, and set off to trot home at a pace which dispelled the least suspicion of injury.

CHAPTER V

(1)

Both Horatia and the stranger whom she had befriended looked after the small vanishing figure with an amused relief; then the young man turned, and, clasping his hat to his breast (for he was still bareheaded), made her a graceful, formal bow.

"Mademoiselle, I am your debtor to my dying day! Conceive how I am alarmed by that so evil boy! Ma foi, I began to see myself in an English prison for attempted murder."

"Mr. Hungerford would soon have effected your release, Monsieur," said Horatia, laughing. "May I ask, indeed, why he has left you to these adventures?" For she would no longer pretend ignorance of his identity.

The young man showed a marked surprise. "Is it possible that I have the good fortune to be known to you?" he exclaimed. "But yes; I am the guest of Mr. Hungerford, and, to make a clean breast of my sins, Mademoiselle, I have lost him. He was taking me to pay a call upon M. le Recteur of Compton Regis, and his daughter—cousins of Mr. Hungerford, I believe—we parted half an hour ago, and I was to meet him at some place whose name I have forgotten; then I have the contretemps with the infant and have lost the way also. I am in despair, because I have it in my mind that the cousine of Mr. Hungerford is une très belle personne, and her father very instructed; and who knows now whether I shall ever see them?"

His air of regret and helplessness was rather attractive; but the suspicion that he really had more than half an inkling who she was restored to Miss Grenville's voice and manner something of the decorum proper to the chance meeting of a young lady with a strange gentleman on the road—a decorum already a good deal impaired by the feeling of complicity in the business of Tommy Wilson.

"I have no doubt," she said, "that you will find Mr. Hungerford already at the Rectory, and I will direct you the shortest way thither. I am myself Miss Grenville."

M. le Comte de la Roche-Guyon smote himself lightly on the breast. "I might have guessed it!" he said in an aside to Tristram's horse. "Mademoiselle, I am more than ever your devoted servant ... Permit me!" He kissed her gloved hand with a singular mixture of reverence and fervour. "But ... if we are going the same way ... might I not have the great honour of accompanying you, or would it not be considered convenable, in England?"

His tone, his innocent, pleading glance suggested that in his own less conventional native land such a proceeding would be perfectly proper; whereas Horatia knew the exact contrary to be the case. However, she always thought that she despised convention; there was the chance that he might get lost again, and meanwhile poor Tristram would be waiting about Heaven knew where. So she said, with sufficient dignity, that she should be very pleased, and they started homewards, conversing with great propriety on such banal subjects as the weather, and with Tristram's horse pacing beside them for chaperon. Yet the shade of Tommy Wilson, hovering cherub-like above them, linked them in a half-guilty alliance.

And thus they came round by Five-Acres into Compton Regis, and at the cross-roads by the farm found Tristram Hungerford, on his old horse, looking for his missing guest.

"My dear La Roche-Guyon, where have you been?" he demanded, as he dismounted and saluted Horatia.

"In Paradise," responded the young man audaciously. "Eh quoi, you were anxious about me, mon ami? I found a guardian angel in the person of Miss Grenville herself."

"So I see," answered his host a trifle drily. "I rode back to Risley to look for you."

The Comte protested that he was desolated, at the same time managing to convey to the girl beside him, without either speech or look, that, for obvious reasons, he was nothing of the sort. But Miss Grenville, with a heightened colour, walked on in silence between them. She had no taste for exaggerated compliments; that foolish utterance about Paradise would not have been at all in good taste for an Englishman. But, of course, M. de la Roche-Guyon was a foreigner.

She had yet to learn that M. de la Roche-Guyon, born and partially educated as he had been in England, had a much less incomplete knowledge of English usage than he found convenient, at times, to publish abroad.

(2)

Armand-Maurice de la Roche-Guyon achieved, in the Rectory drawing-room, the impression which he never failed to make in any society. Man or woman, you wanted instinctively to be friends with him; he had so engaging an air of expecting it. And Horatia noticed afresh how intensely he was alive, and how little he tried to conceal the fact. She thought of the wooden, controlled visages of some of her male acquaintances, and contrasted them with his changing, vivid face, in which every feature, from the clear eyebrows to the rather mocking mouth, could express any shade of feeling from derision to adoration. Such foreign accent as he retained lent a charm to his fluent English, which, though apt to desert him at moments of crisis, carried him gallantly in ordinary conversation, and only required occasional help from a gesture or a French word. But, as he explained, he had been born in England, and therefore the English "th," the shibboleth of his countrymen, troubled him but little.

"M. l'Abbé Dubayet, who taught my daughter, never learnt our language properly, though he had been in England for a quarter of a century," remarked the Rector, commenting on his visitor's proficiency.

"So much the better for Mademoiselle, who speaks, I will wager, like a Tourangelle," responded the young Frenchman, with a little bow in Horatia's direction.

"Yes, she does speak well," said the Rector.

"Her friends complain, I believe, that they cannot follow her on that account," murmured Tristram.

"What nonsense!" exclaimed Horatia. "Do not think to flatter me into talking French with M. de la Roche-Guyon. I shall ask him the inevitable question in English: How do you like England, Monsieur?"

"Mais, mon Dieu!" exclaimed the guest, "how am I to reply to that? If you mean the country, Mademoiselle, it is not new to me; if you mean John Bull, it would not be polite of me to tell you how much he sometimes amuses me; if you mean the English ladies, you would think what I should say too polite, and you would not believe me."

"We had better let you off, La Roche-Guyon," said Tristram. "Far be it from us to ask why John Bull amuses you."

"You have seen Oxford, I suppose, Monsieur?" inquired the Rector.

"Already twice," responded M. de la Roche-Guyon. "I find it beautiful—but of a beauty! We have nothing like it; it must be the wonder of the world, your University. Fortunate young men, to live in those magnificent colleges, and disport themselves on those lawns! I saw there—what did I not see? all the colleges, I think, certainly that of Oriel, the nurse of Mr. Hungerford—and the theatre, with those heads of Roman Emperors (but, indeed, I hope they were not really like that), and the great library, superb, and a museum—I have forgotten its name, where there was a jewel of Alfred, and the sword sent by the Pope to your Henry VIII—he would not send one, I think, to William IV?—and a horn which grew upon the head of a woman (but that I do not believe, naturally) and a picture of the Christ carrying the cross made in the feathers of the humming-bird. Yes, and I also saw in the library, I think, a model of our Maison Carrée at Nîmes. But it is the whole city, with its towers and gardens, which has most ravished me."

"Ah, do you take an interest in Roman remains?" queried the Rector, brightening. "We can't show you another Maison Carrée of course, but there is a very fair Roman villa between here and Oxford, with a Roman cemetery near it. Then there is Cherbury Camp, not far from us—though that is probably pre-Roman, if not pre-British; it is egg-shaped, and has three valla, with fosses outside each—very interesting. I should have great pleasure in showing it to you, Monsieur, if you cared to see it."

"I am sure that M. le Comte will not care for that, Papa," interposed Horatia. "I assure you, Monsieur, it is nothing but a few grassy banks, all ploughed away except in one place. Imagination supplies the rest."

"And what, Miss, supplies the Roman coins in my study, from Augustus to Honorius, all found in this county?" demanded her father. "And the cameo of Hermes with a cornucopia, and the very Anglo-Saxon fibula you are wearing at this moment, ungrateful girl!"

"You have found these things!" exclaimed the young Frenchman eagerly, and his quick glance went to Horatia's neck. "De grace, Monsieur, permit me to avail myself of your so kind offer! I have always desired to behold the traces of our conquerors and yours. What a people, the Romans!"

The Rector, delighted at this responsive enthusiasm, said that he would certainly conduct the visitor to Cherbury Camp next morning, and was warmly thanked for his offer. Tristram, though a little surprised at his guest's unexpected antiquarian zeal, was not ill-pleased at the arrangement, for he had an article to finish. Miss Grenville, however, continued to oppose her father's selection.

"I have a much better idea than that," she announced. "Take M. de la Roche-Guyon to see the White Horse, Papa."

"The White Horse, what is that?" inquired the young man. "An old inn?"

"It is a horse cut in the hillside by the Anglo-Saxons," Horatia informed him. "It is said to have been made by command of Alfred to commemorate his victory over the Danes. Papa does not believe that theory, as everyone else does. But he will no doubt explain his heretical ideas to you if you go with him to-morrow. At any rate, you will get a magnificent view, and see something you have not the like of, I suppose, in France."

"But pardon," retorted the Frenchman, "in France we have the white horse of M. de Lafayette, and that is already an animal—how do you say, légendaire; and some day perhaps he will be laid out as a bed in the gardens of the Tuileries. Oh, la belle idée!"

Horatia laughed. But the mention of Lafayette reminded her of recent events.

"You were in the revolution, perhaps, Monsieur?"

The young man's face darkened. "How do you mean, 'in it,' Mademoiselle? You do not think that I am one of those scoundrelly revolutionaries?"

"No, indeed! But you saw it—you fought in it, perhaps?"

The Comte de la Roche-Guyon shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, I fought a little. But I had bad luck."

What this misfortune was he did not specify. He did not seem to wish to talk about the Days of July, and Horatia liked him for it, feeling sure that the long white seam which she suddenly espied on the back of his right hand was an honourable memento of the occasion, and not realising that the age of so well-healed a wound must be nearer two years than two months.

"Ah, a sad business," said Mr. Grenville sympathetically. "And you have just come from Lulworth, I understand. How did you find the King?"

"His Majesty is lodged tant bien que mal," responded their visitor. "The Castle is out of repair and there is little state. The day before I left I saw Madame la Dauphine and her lady driving out in the rain in a shabby little open carriage drawn by a rough pony. They both had old straw bonnets and Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême a light brown shawl. I believe that they were one day taken for servants, for housekeepers, at a neighbouring château which they went to visit."

"What unparalleled misfortunes have been hers!" said the Rector. "And the Duchesse de Berry?"

"Ah, she finds it too dull there; she goes visiting. Madame la Duchesse de Berry will not stop at anything; she has the spirit of an Amazon. My father tells me that on the way from Paris to Cherbourg she went armed with pistols, and fired them off once, too, in the King's presence. His Majesty was much annoyed."

"It is her little son, is it not, who is the heir to the crown?" asked Horatia. "How old is he?"

"Henry V is this month ten years old," responded the Comte.

"Britwell-Prior in Oxfordshire belongs to the Welds of Lulworth," said the Rector musingly. "Oh, are you going, Tristram? Well, mind that you spare me M. de la Roche-Guyon to-morrow morning. I will be ... let me see—yes, I will be at the cross-roads at half-past ten, if he will join me there, and we will go to the White Horse, if Robin, who is really getting very fat, will carry me up the hill. And when shall I see you again?"

"At the Squire's on Saturday, I expect," said Tristram, adding that he hoped himself to get up a little dinner-party next week, if he could persuade M. de la Roche-Guyon to stay. He was beginning to take his leave when Horatia interrupted him.

"Before you go, Tristram, I want to show you this book which I picked up in Oxford before I went away. Excuse me, M. le Comte."

It is to be presumed that M. le Comte excused her, no other course being open to him, but he bent interested eyes upon her as she and Tristram stooped over the book together, eyes which had already opened wider than their wont when he first heard the mutual use of the Christian name.

"Pardon," he observed in a low voice to the Rector, "but Mademoiselle your daughter and Mr. Hungerford are par—relations, I should say?"

"A sort of cousins," replied Mr. Grenville. "Moreover Tristram Hungerford is almost a son to me—an old pupil whom I have known since he was a child." And wishing further to disarm possible foreign criticism, he added, "Our English girls have much more liberty than yours in France, you know."

"For that reason I have always wished to be an Englishman," was M. de la Roche-Guyon's reply to this.

"Your Miss Grenville is very pretty, to my mind," he observed to his host as they rode homewards some twenty minutes later. "Has she many admirers?"

Mr. Hungerford thought this question decidedly impertinent—especially as he could not answer it in the affirmative—but remembering, like Horatia, that the speaker was a foreigner, abstained from an attempt to snub him. He answered a little stiffly:

"Miss Grenville is not concerned to see every man at her feet."

"So I supposed," returned the young Frenchman.

"She is docte, instruite. Nevertheless——" he broke off and shot a long, keen and rather malicious glance at Tristram's profile—"nevertheless, some day she will find it quite an amusing game. They all do, in the end."

Tristram pulled out his watch. "Shall we trot a little?" he suggested pleasantly. "It is later than I thought."

CHAPTER VI

(1)

"But ... mille pardons ... it is not very resembling—it is not much like a horse," said M. le Comte de la Roche-Guyon a little doubtfully.

The wind of the Berkshire Downs blew through his dark hair as he stood, hat on hip, one hand at his chin, and looked down on the strange beast stretched at his feet on the chalky hillside turf.

"It is not," confessed the Rector, holding on to his hat. "For one thing the tail seems longer than the legs, does it not? (The whole thing, I must tell you, is three hundred and seventy-four feet long, and covers an acre of ground.) And yet the form of the horse's figure as represented on ancient British coins is known to be a debased copy of the elegant animals on the pieces struck by Philip of Macedon. And that is one reason why I take the Horse to be of far older origin than the victory of Ashdown in 871 which it is supposed to commemorate. I take it to be of British, not of Saxon, times."

"Really!" murmured his audience.

"Yes," said Mr. Grenville with growing impressiveness, "it is to me certain that the ceremonies connected with the quinquennial scouring of the Horse, of which I will tell you presently, are religious in origin." And he expanded this theory.

If M. de la Roche-Guyon (as is highly probable) was supremely indifferent to date and origin, and unmoved by the thought of the ancient race to whom the Rector attributed the execution of the chalk steed, he concealed it well. Considering that he was quite ignorant of the pre-Conquest history of England his questions were remarkably intelligent, and Mr. Grenville thoroughly enjoyed his own exposition.

"Well, we must be going," he said regretfully at last, and they went to the place where they had left their horses tethered a little lower down. The descent was steep and stony, and before they had gone very far the Frenchman pulled up with apologies; he feared that his horse, or rather Mr. Hungerford's, had a stone in its shoe. Mr. Grenville whiled away the delay by speaking of the very fine neolithic celt which he had found at his favourite Cherbury, nor did it occur to him that the young man tinkering at his horse's foot had not the remotest idea of what a celt might be. On the contrary, the Comte smiled very pleasantly as he remounted, and congratulated Mr. Grenville on possessing this object. The Rector agreed that he was lucky.

"It is fifteen years ago since I found it," he mused, "but I remember my excitement as if it were yesterday. I must show it to you when we get back—for, of course, Hungerford understands that you are returning to luncheon with me?—Hold up, Robin! I should like also to show you my coins."

M. de la Roche-Guyon, it appeared, asked nothing better, and they proceeded in the September sunshine. They were within a mile of Compton when the Rector suddenly checked his fat cob.

"I believe, M. le Comte, that your horse is losing a shoe. Hungerford's man must be very careless, for I happen to know that the beast was shod only last week. Or perhaps it was that stone? Fortunately we are only a little way from home."

Once again the young man dismounted. "It is true," he said. "It must have been the stone. What a nuisance!" The Rector could not see him biting his lips to hide a smile, nor hear him mutter "Peste! It was not necessary, after all!"

"It does not in the least resemble the horse of M. de Lafayette," he assured Horatia at luncheon, a meal which passed off with much gaiety, but at the conclusion of which the Rector spoke again of his coins and the famous celt. Horatia, though she could not bring herself to believe the vivacious young Frenchman really interested in the contents of Berkshire tumuli, had not the heart to try to prevent her father from bringing out his treasures, and she watched M. de la Roche-Guyon being borne off to the study with mingled amusement and compassion. It was his own fault after all; and she was sure that Papa could not keep him long—because he still had not finished that sermon.

Half an hour later, sitting with some embroidery on the lawn, she knew that the Rector must have returned to his task, for she beheld the Comte to issue alone from the house.

"M. le Recteur permits that I make my adieux," he said as he came towards her. "Will Mademoiselle permit it also?"

Horatia laid down her work. "Pray do not hurry away, Monsieur. Papa has his sermon to finish, and I, as you see, have no serious occupation. Will you not sit down for a little?"

The young Frenchman complied readily enough. His glance went round the garden, over the phloxes and sunflowers, rested a moment on a book lying on the grass, and came back to Horatia. He gave a little, half-checked sigh.

"You cannot think, Mademoiselle," he said after a moment's silence, "how delightful it is for an exile like myself to be admitted again into the intimacy of home life. Not only is it beautiful and touching, but it is unexpected; for in France we are told that you have no life of the family to be compared with ours; and I have been used ... in the past ... to so much."

His voice dropped, and he looked down.

"We think, in England, that we have much of it too," said Horatia rather softly. "But—an exile—why do you call yourself that, Monsieur le Comte? Surely you are returning to France?"

The young man raised his eyes, blue and laughing no longer. "Ah, yes, Mademoiselle," he said with meaning, "my body returns indeed, but my heart remains behind ... at Lulworth, with my King, with my father who is privileged to be, for his sake, an exile in body as well. I go back to my home in Paris, where my father's place will be for ever vacant; I go back to take up my life of yesterday, to meet my friends, to laugh, to talk, and ... if Heaven grant it, to plot for Henry V. That is all I can do.... Yes, I go back, but I am no less an exile, though in my native land. Surely you, Mademoiselle, can understand that?"

Horatia bent her head over her embroidery. "Yes, I think I understand," she said. But she was puzzled; the people she knew did not talk like this.

"Eh bien!" went on Armand de la Roche-Guyon more lightly, "it is Fate. Our house has served the Lilies for a thousand years, and I suppose the time has come to die with them. You can understand that too, you whose ancestors fought for the Stuarts."

None of Miss Grenville's ancestors—persons distinctly Hanoverian in sympathy—had ever supported that romantic cause, but for the moment, moved by the voice, she almost believed that they had.

"But Louis-Philippe is a Bourbon," she suggested. "You would not——"

"Serve the son of Egalité!" exclaimed the Comte. "Serve the man who has usurped the throne of France! Sooner would I die!—— But I do not wish to talk of my affairs. Tell me of yourself, Mademoiselle, of your life here. It is vain that you try to disguise from me that you surpass other women in intellect and character as you surpass them—pardon me that I say it—in beauty. Chez nous, that superiority is recognised; but with you, is it not, you must hide it from people that you do not frighten them by your attainments. But we Frenchmen understand."

His tone and manner were perfect; grave, respectful, sympathetic, quite without commonplace gallantry. Horatia was amazed at his penetration.

"You are quite right," she said, laying down her work. "It is very ridiculous that my small accomplishments should have the effect of walling me off, as it were, from the rest of the world, but so it is. I am no cleverer than other girls, but, thanks to my kind father, I am better educated. You cannot imagine, M. le Comte, how that fact hampers me in ordinary life. When I stay with my cousins in Northamptonshire they think it a joke to introduce me as a 'bluestocking,' as one who knows Greek. Every man—every young man at least—that I meet is frightened of me, or pretends to be so, which is sillier still; every woman in her heart dislikes me. I suppose they think that I am 'superior.'"

"Ah, the women, I can believe that," said Armand de la Roche-Guyon quickly. "But the men, no, that I can never understand; no Frenchman could understand it."

In a flash Horatia was aware how intimately she had been talking to him. But he went on:

"You should have been born a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle. In Paris you would occupy your proper place, reigning at once by beauty and by wit, as only our women do."

Horatia coloured. "Do you then notice so much difference in England?" she asked, for the sake of saying something.

The young man cast up his eyes to heaven. "Mademoiselle, by the very disposition of the chairs in an English drawing-room after dinner one can see it! In a row on one side of the room are the ladies; in a row on the other the gentlemen, perhaps looking at them indeed, but more likely talking among themselves of hunting or of politics. Now with us how different! It is to the ladies that the hour of the drawing-room is consecrated; we pay them court, we cannot help it, it is in the blood with us. Besides, have they not great influence on the situation of a man of the world? But with you, suppose now that M. le mari is at his club, eating a dinner that lasts for hours, and that then he goes to the ballet at the Opera, and afterwards perhaps to supper, all this time his unfortunate spouse must shut her doors to visitors, and, for all amusement, may take a cup of tea tête-à-tête with his armchair—vous savez, c'est du barbarisme!"

He was quite excited, and it did not occur to Horatia, amused and rather pleased, to wonder whether his indignation were on behalf of the excluded visitor or the secluded lady.

"You seem to know a great deal about it," she observed, smiling.

But M. de la Roche-Guyon here got up rather suddenly and said that he must be going. Horatia, could she have read his thoughts, might have reassured him, and told him that the sound he had heard was not the Rector opening the drawing-room window, with a view to sallying forth, but the garden gate, which was loose on the latch.

He had raised her hand in the graceful foreign fashion to his lips before she said, "But shall I not see you to-morrow?"

"To-morrow!" said he with enthusiasm. "Do you tell me that you, Mademoiselle, will be at the dinner-party of the Squire to which I am told I am bidden?"

"Yes," said Miss Grenville. "And I shall be interested to observe whether, after dinner, you follow the English fashion or the French."

"After what you have told me, is there need to ask?"