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"I fear only one voice on earth saying that."
"And the fraud I am – de Gruche!" She caught his hand tightly. Never before had it occurred to her to defend or to excuse the transparent fiction.
"I know stars fall," he said, with his pretty gravity, not too grave. "I wish that they may rise to their own height again – and I rise with them."
The sun sank behind the horizon. A gentle afterglow of salmon-pink rested over the palace and city; the forest turned to a frame of smoky, brownish black. Casimir waved a hand towards it and laughed merrily.
"Before we were, it was – after we are, it shall be! I sound as old as Scripture! It has seen old masters – and great mistresses! Saving the proprieties, weren't you Montespan or Pompadour?"
"De la Vallière?" she laughed. "Or Maintenon?"
"For good or evil, neither! Do I hurt you?"
"No; you make me think, though," answered Sophy. "Why?"
"They niggled – at virtue or at vice. You don't niggle! Neither did Montespan nor Pompadour."
"And so I am to be – Marquise de – ?"
"Higher, higher!" he laughed. "Madame la Maréchale – !"
"It is war, then – soon – you think?" She turned to him with a sudden tension.
He pointed a Frenchman's eloquent forefinger to the dark mass of the château, whose chimneys rose now like gloomy interrogation-marks to an unresponsive, darkened sky. "He is there now – the Emperor! Perhaps he walks in his garden by the round pond – thinking, dreaming, balancing."
"Throwing balls in the air, as conjurers do?"
"Yes, my star."
"And if he misses the first?"
"He'll seek applause by the second. And the second, I think, would be war."
"And you would – go?"
"To what other end do I love the Lady of the Red Star – alas! I can't see it – save to bring her glory?"
"That's French," said Sophy, with a laugh. "Wouldn't you rather stay with me and be happy?"
"Who speaks to me?" he cried, springing to his feet. "Not you!"
"No, no," she answered, "I have no fear. What is it, Casimir, that drives us on?"
"Drives us on! You! You, too?"
"It's not a woman's part, is it?"
He caught her round the waist, and she allowed his clasp. But she grew grave, yet smiled again softly.
"If all life were an evening at Fontainebleau – a fine evening at Fontainebleau!" she murmured, in the low clearness which marked her voice.
"Mightn't it be?"
"With war? And with what drives us on?"
He sighed, and his sigh puzzled her.
"Oh, well," she cried, "at least you know I'm Sophy Grouch, and my father was as mean as the man who opens your lodge-gate."
The sky had gone a blue-black. A single star sombrely announced the coming pageant.
"And his daughter high as the hopes that beckon me to my career!"
"You've a wonderful way of talking," smiled Sophy Grouch – simple Essex in contact with Paris at that instant.
"You'll be my wife, Sophie?"
"I don't think Lady Meg will keep me long. Pharos is working hard – so Marie Zerkovitch declares. I should bring you a dot of two thousand five hundred francs!"
"Do you love me?"
The old question rang clear in the still air. Who has not heard it of women – or uttered it of men? Often so easy, sometimes so hard. When all is right save one thing – or when all is wrong save one thing – then it is hard to answer, and may have been hard to ask. With Casimir there was no doubt, save the doubt of the answer. Sophy stood poised on a hesitation. The present seemed perfect. Only an unknown future cried to her through the falling night.
"I'll win glory for you," he cried. "The Emperor will fight!"
"You're no Emperor's man!" she mocked.
"Yes, while he means France. I'm for anybody who means France." For a moment serious, the next he kissed her hand merrily. "Or for anybody who'll give me a wreath, a medal, a toy to bring home to her I love."
"You're very fascinating," Sophy confessed.
It was not the word. Casimir fell from his exaltation. "It's not love, that of yours," said he.
"No – I don't know. You might make it love. Oh, how I talk beyond my rights!"
"Beyond your rights? Impossible! May I go on trying?"
He saw Sophy's smile dimly through the gloom. From it he glanced to the dying gleam of the white houses dropped among the trees, to the dull mass of the ancient home of history and kings. But back he came to the living, elusive, half-seen smile.
"Can you stop?" said Sophy.
He raised his hat from his head and stooped to kiss her hand.
"Nor would nor could," said he – "in the warmth of life or the cold hour of death!"
"No, no – if you die, it's gloriously!" The hour carried her away. "Casimir, I wish I were sure!"
The spirit of his race filled his reply: "You want to be dull?"
"No – I – I – I want you to kiss my cheek."
"May I salute the star?"
"But it's no promise!"
"It's better!"
"My dear, I – I'm very fond of you."
"That's all?"
"Enough for to-night! What's he thinking of down there?"
"The Emperor? I'm not so much as sure he's there, really. Somebody said he had started for St. Cloud this morning."
"Pretend he's there!"
"Then of anything except how many men die for what he wants."
"Or of how many women weep?"
Her reply set a new light to his passion. "You'd weep?" he cried.
"Oh, I suppose so!" The answer was half a laugh, half a sob.
"But not too much! No more than the slightest dimness to the glowing star!"
Sophy laughed in a tremulous key; her body shook. She laid her hands in his. "No more, no more. Surely Marie and the student are bored? Isn't it supper-time? Oh, Casimir, if I were worthy, if I were sure! What's ahead of us? Must we go back? To-night, up here, it all seems so simple! Does he mean war? He down there? And you'll fight!" She looked at him for an instant. He was close to her. She thrust him away from her. "Don't fight thinking of me," she said.
"How otherwise?" he asked.
She tossed her head impatiently. "I don't know – but – but Pharos makes me afraid. He – he says that things I love die."
The young soldier laughed. "That leaves him pretty safe," said he.
She put her arm through his, and they walked down. It had been a night to be forgotten only when all is. Yet she went from him unpledged, and tossed in her bed, asking: "Shall I?" and answered: "I'll decide to-morrow!"
But to-morrow was not at the Calvaire nor in the seducing sweetness of the silent trees. When she rose, he was gone – and the student, too. Marie Zerkovitch, inquisitively friendly, flung a fly for news.
"He's as fine a gentleman as Lord Dunstanbury!" cried Sophy Grouch.
"As who?" asked Marie.
Sophy smiled over her smoking coffee. "As the man who first saw me," she said. "But, oh, I'm puzzled!"
Marie Zerkovitch bit her roll.
"Armand was charming," she observed. The student was Armand. He, too, let it be recorded, had made a little love, yet in all seemly ardor.
So ends this glimpse of the happy days.
III
THE NOTE – AND NO REASONS
That feverish month of July – fitting climax to the scorching, arid summer of 1870 – had run full half its course. Madness had stricken the rulers of France; to avoid danger they rushed on destruction. Gay madness spread through the veins of Paris. Perverse always, Lady Meg Duddington chose this moment for coming back to her senses – or at least for abandoning the particular form of insanity to which she had devoted the last five years.
One afternoon she called her witch and her wizard. "You're a pair of quacks, and I've been an old fool," she said, composedly, sitting straight up in her high-backed chair. She flung a couple of thousand-franc notes across the table. "You can go," she ended, with contemptuous brevity. Mantis's evil temper broke out: "She has done this, the malign one!" Pharos was wiser; he had not done badly out of Lady Meg, and madness such as hers is apt to be recurrent. His farewell was gentle, his exit not ungraceful; yet he, too, prayed her to beware of a certain influence. "Stuff! You don't know what you're talking about!" Lady Meg jerked out, and pointed with her finger to the door. "So we went out, and to avoid any trouble we left Paris the same day. But this man here would not give me any of the money, though I had done as much to earn it as he had, or more." So injured Madame Mantis told Monsieur le Président at Lille.
Early on the morning of Sunday, the 17th, having received word through Lady Meg's maid that her presence was not commanded in the Rue de Grenelle, Sophy slipped round to the Rue du Bac and broke in on Marie Zerkovitch, radiant with her great news and imploring her friend to celebrate it by a day in the country.
"It means that dear old Lady Meg will be what she used to be to me!" she cried. "We shall go back to England, I expect, and – I wonder what that will be like!"
Her face grew suddenly thoughtful. Back to England! How would that suit Sophie de Gruche? And what was to happen about Casimir de Savres? The period of her long, sweet indecision was threatened with a forced conclusion.
Marie Zerkovitch was preoccupied against both her friend's joy and her friend's perplexity. Great affairs touched her at home. There would be war, she said, certainly war; to-day the Senate went to St. Cloud to see the Emperor. Zerkovitch had started thither already, on the track of news. The news in the near future would certainly be war, and Zerkovitch would follow the armies, still on the track of news. "He went before, in the war of 'sixty-six," she said, her lips trembling. "And he all but died of fever; that kills the correspondents just as much as the soldiers. Ah, it's so dangerous, Sophie – and so terrible to be left behind alone. I don't know what I shall do! My husband wants me to go home. He doesn't believe the French will win, and he fears trouble for those who stay here." She looked at last at Sophy's clouded face. "Ah, and your Casimir – he will be at the front!"
"Yes, Casimir will be at the front," said Sophy, a ring of excitement hardly suppressed in her voice.
"If he should be killed!" murmured Marie, throwing her arms out in a gesture of lamentation.
"You bird of ill omen! He'll come back covered with glory."
The two spent a quiet day together, Sophy helping Marie in her homely tasks. Zerkovitch's campaigning kit was overhauled – none knew how soon orders for an advance might come – his buttons put on, his thick stockings darned. The hours slipped away in work and talk. At six o'clock they went out and dined at a small restaurant hard by. Things seemed very quiet there. The fat waiter told them with a shrug: "We sha'n't have much noise here to-night – the lads will be over there!" He pointed across the river. "They'll be over there most of the night – on the grands boulevards. Because it's war, madame. Oh, yes, it's war!" The two young women sipped their coffee in silence. "As a lad I saw 1830. I was out in the streets in 1851. What shall I see next?" he asked them as he swept his napkin over the marble table-top. If he stayed at his post, he saw many strange things; unnatural fires lit his skies, and before his doors brother shed brother's blood.
The friends parted at half-past seven. Marie hoped her husband would be returning home soon, and with news; Sophy felt herself due in the Rue de Grenelle. She reached the house there a little before eight. The concierge was not in his room; she went up-stairs unseen, and passed into the drawing-room. The inner door leading to the room Lady Meg occupied stood open. Sophy called softly, but there was no answer. She walked towards the door and was about to look into the room, thinking that perhaps Lady Meg was asleep, when she heard herself addressed. The Frenchwoman who acted as their cook had come in and stood now on the threshold with a puzzled, distressed look on her face.
"I'm sorry, Mademoiselle Sophie, to tell you, but my lady has gone."
"Gone! Where to?"
"To England, I believe. This morning, after you had gone out, she ordered everything to be packed. It was done. She paid us here off, bidding me alone stay till orders reached me from Monsieur le Marquis. Then she went; only the coachman accompanied her. I think she started for Calais. At least, she is gone."
"She said – said nothing about me?"
"You'll see there's a letter for you on the small table in the window there."
"Oh yes! Thank you."
"Your room is ready for you to-night."
"I've dined. I shall want nothing. Good-night."
Sophy walked over to the little table in the window, and for a few moments stood looking at the envelope which lay there, addressed to her in Lady Meg's sprawling hand. The stately room in the Rue de Grenelle seemed filled with a picture which its walls had never seen; old words re-echoed in Sophy's ears: "If I want you to go, I'll put a hundred-pound note in an envelope and send it to you; upon which you'll go, and no reasons given! Is it agreed?" As if from a long way off, she heard a servant-girl answer: "It sounds all right." She saw the old elm-trees at Morpingham, and heard the wind murmur in their boughs; Pindar chuckled, and Julia Robins's eyes were wet with tears.
"And no reasons given!" It had sounded all right – before five years of intimacy and a life transformed. It sounded different now. Yet the agreement had been made between the strange lady and the eager girl. Nor were reasons hard to find. They stood out brutally plain. Having sent her prophet to the right about, Lady Meg wanted no more of her medium – her most disappointing medium. "They" would not speak through Sophy; perhaps Lady Meg did not now want them to speak at all.
Sophy tore the envelope right across its breadth and shook out the flimsy paper within. It was folded in four. She did not trouble to open it. Lady Meg was a woman of her word, and here was the hundred-pound note of the Bank of England – "upon which you'll go, and no reasons given!" With a bitter smile she noticed that the note was soiled, the foldings old, the edges black where they were exposed. She had no doubt that all these years Lady Meg had carried it about, so as to be ready for the literal fulfilment of her bond.
