Читать книгу Sir Isumbras at the Ford - D. K. Broster - Страница 5

The unusual presence of a statue of the Virgin, and of Mme. d'Aulnoy's Contes de fées on the second floor this London house, was, naturally, but a consequence of that same series of events which had brought thither their small owner. Seven years before, the only daughter of James Elphinstone of Glenauchtie, a retired official of high standing in the service of John Company, had lost her heart to a young Frenchman, the Marquis René de Flavigny, whom she had met on a visit to Paris. Although the necessary separation from his daughter was very bitter to him, Mr. Elphinstone could find no real objection to the match, and so the Scotch girl and the Frenchman were married, lived happily on de Flavigny's estate in the Nivernais, and were joined there in due time by a son.

But Anne-Hilarion had not chosen well the date of his entry into this world. On the very July day that René and Janet de Flavigny and all their tenants were celebrating the admirable prowess displayed by M. le Comte in attaining, without accident or illness—without flying back to heaven, as his nurse had it—the age of one year, the people of Paris also were keeping a festival, the first anniversary of the day when the bloody head of the governor of the Bastille had swung along the streets at the end of a pike. Before that summer was out the Marquis de Flavigny, urged by his father-in-law, had decided to place his wife and child in safety, and so, bidding the most reluctant of good-byes to the tourelles and the swans which had witnessed their two short years of happiness, they left France for England. Perhaps they would have fared no worse had they remained there. For Janet de Flavigny caught on the journey a chill from which she never recovered, and died, after a few months, leaving to her little son not even a memory, and to these two men who had passionately loved her a remembrance only too poignant.

Her death forced both their lives into fresh channels. Mr. Elphinstone left Scotland and settled in London, where, to distract himself from his grief, he began to write those long-planned memoirs of his Indian career which, after more than four years, still absorbed him. As for the Marquis de Flavigny, having once emigrated, he could not now return to France even had he wished it. He therefore threw himself heart and soul into the schemes of French Royalism, at first for the rescue of the Royal Family from their quasi-imprisonment in their own palace, and—now that King and Queen alike were done to death, their children captives and a Republic in being—into all the hopes that centred round the stubborn loyalists of Brittany, Maine, and Vendée, round du Boisguy or Stofflet or Charette. And though the rightful little King might be close prisoner in the Temple, his uncles—the Comte de Provence (Regent in name of France) and the Comte d'Artois—were still at large, as exiles, in Europe, and it was to one or other of these princes that Royalist émigrés looked, and under their ægis that they plotted and fought. Not many of them, impoverished as they were by the Revolution, had the good fortune to possess, like René de Flavigny, a British father-in-law who put money and house at his son-in-law's disposal, welcomed his friends, and strove to bear his absences on Royalist business with equanimity.

The fact was that the young Frenchman had become very dear to Mr. Elphinstone, not only for Janet's sake but also for his own. He had liked de Flavigny from the first moment that he met him; it was only during the shock of finding that Janet wished to marry him that his feelings had temporarily cooled. Indeed, René de Flavigny's character and disposition were not ill summed up in the word 'lovable.' He had little of the traditional French gaiety—and still less after his wife's death—just as Mr. Elphinstone had little of the traditional Scotch dourness. And the old man knew how happy his daughter was with him. Afterwards, their common bereavement drew the two more than ever together. Mr. Elphinstone discovered in his son-in-law tastes and sympathies more akin to his own than he had imagined, and sometimes, though he would not have had him settle down, at thirty-two, into a bookworm like himself, he regretted the political activities in which the Marquis was immersed, for he knew him to be of too fine a temper to take pleasure in the plottings and intrigues which almost of necessity accompany the attempts to reinstate a dispossessed dynasty. And while not, perhaps, taking those plottings over-seriously, he realised that his son-in-law's tact and ability made him a very useful person to his own party and a person proportionately obnoxious to the other. The game he was engaged in playing against the French Republic was not without danger; that adversary across the Channel was known to have hidden agents in England, and if these had the opportunity as well as the orders, it was not scruples that would hold them back from actual violence. Still, that was a contingency sufficiently remote, although the thought of it sometimes caused Mr. Elphinstone to feel, during his son-in-law's absences, a certain uneasiness for his safety as well as regret at the loss of his society.