The Bronze Eagle: A Story of the Hundred Days

The fiery blood of his race had rushed into Maurice de St. Genis' head. He was talking volubly and at random, but he believed for the moment everything that he said. Tears of passion and of fervour came to his eyes and he buried his head in the folds of Crystal's white gown and heavy sobs shook his bent shoulders. She, moved by that motherly tenderness which is seldom absent from a good woman's love, stroked with soothing fingers the matted hair from his hot forehead. For a while she remained silent while the paroxysm of his passionate revolt spent itself in tears, then she said quite softly:

"I think, Maurice, that in your heart you do us all an injustice—to me, to father, to yourself, even to the King. The King cannot give you that which is not his; your property—like ours—was confiscated by that awful revolutionary government because your father and mine followed their king into exile. The rich lands were sold for the benefit of the nation: the nation presumably has spent the money, but the people who bought the lands in good faith cannot be dispossessed by our King without creating bitter ill-feeling against himself, as you well know, and once more endangering his throne. Those are the facts, Maurice, against which no hot-blooded argument, no passionate outbursts can prevail. The King gave my father back this dear old castle, because it happened to have proved unsaleable, and was still on the nation's hands. Our rich lands—like yours—can never be restored to us: that hard fact has been driven into poor father's head for the past ten months, and now it has gone home at last. These grey walls, this neglected garden, a few sticks of broken furniture, a handful of money from an over-generous king's treasury is all that Fate has rescued for him from out the ashes of the past. My father is every whit as penniless as you are yourself, Maurice, as penniless as ever he was in England, when he gave French and drawing lessons to a lot of young ragamuffins in a middle-class school. But Victor de Marmont is rich, and his money—once I am his wife—will purchase back all the estates which have been in our family for hundreds of years. For my father's sake, for the sake of the name which I bear, I must give my hand to Victor de Marmont, and pray to God that some semblance of peace, the sense of duty accomplished, will compensate me for the happiness to which I shall bid good-bye to-day."

"And you are willing to be sold to young de Marmont for the price of a few acres of land!" retorted Maurice de St. Genis hotly. "Oh! it's monstrous, Crystal, monstrous! All the more monstrous as you seem quite unconscious of the iniquity of such a bargain."

"Women of our caste, Maurice," she said in her turn with a touch of bitterness, "have often before now been sacrificed for the honour of their name. Men have been accustomed to look to them for help when their own means of gilding their escutcheons have failed."

"And you are willing, Crystal, to be sold like this?" he insisted.

"My father wishes me to marry Victor de Marmont," she replied with calm dignity, "and after all that he has suffered for the honour and dignity of our name, I should deem myself craven and treacherous if I refused to obey him in this."

Maurice de St. Genis once more rose to his feet. All his vehemence, his riotous outbreak of rebellion seemed to have been smothered beneath a pall of dreary despair. His young, good-looking face appeared sombre and sullen, his restless, dark eyes wandered obstinately from Crystal's fair bent head to her stooping shoulders, to her hands, to her feet. It seemed as if he was trying to engrave an image of her upon his turbulent brain, or that he wished to force her to look on him again before she spoke the last words of farewell.

But she wouldn't look at him. She kept her head resolutely averted, looking far out over the undulating lands of Dauphiné and Savoie to where in the far distant sky the stately Alps reared their snow-crowned heads. At last, unable to bear her silence any longer, he said dully:

"Then it is your last word, Crystal?"

"You know that it must be, Maurice," she murmured in reply. "My marriage contract will be signed to-night, and on Tuesday I go to the altar with Victor de Marmont."

"And you mean to tear your love for me out of your heart?"

"Yes!"

"Were its roots a little deeper, a little stronger, you could not do it, Crystal. But they are not so deep as those of your love for your father."

She made no reply . . . perhaps something in her heart told her that after all he might be right, that, unbeknown to herself even, there were tendrils of affection in her that bound her, ivylike, and so closely—to her father that even her girlish love for Maurice de St. Genis—the first hint of passion that had stirred the smooth depths of her young heart—could not tear her from that bulwark to which she clung.

"This is the last time that I shall see you, Crystal," said Maurice with a sigh, seeing that obviously she meant to allow his taunt to pass unchallenged.

"You are going away?" she asked.

"How can I stay—here, under this roof, where anon—in a few hours—Victor de Marmont will have claims upon you which, if he exercised them before me would make me wish to kill him or myself. I shall leave to-morrow—early . . ." he added more quietly.

"Where will you go?"

"To Paris—or abroad—or the devil, I don't know which," he replied moodily.

"Father will be sorry if you go?" she murmured under her breath, for once again the tears were very insistent, and she felt an awful pain in her heart, because of the misery which she had to inflict upon him.

"Your father has been passing kind to me. He gave me a home when I was homeless, but it is not fitting that I should trespass any longer upon his hospitality."

"Have you made any plans?"

"Not yet. But the King will give me a commission. There will be some fighting now . . . there was a rumour in Grenoble last night that Bonaparte had landed at Antibes, and was marching on Paris."

"A false rumour as usual, I suppose," she said indifferently.

"Perhaps," he replied.

There was silence between them for awhile after that, silence only broken by the twitter of birds wakening to the call of spring. The word "good-bye" remained unspoken: neither of them dared to say it lest it broke the barrier of their resolve.

"Will you not go now, Maurice?" said Crystal at last in pitiable pleading, "we only make each other hopelessly wretched, by lingering near one another after this."

"Yes, I will go, Crystal," he replied, and this time he really forced his voice to tones of gentleness, although his inward resentment still bubbled out with every word he spoke, "I wish I could have left this house altogether—now—at once—but your father would resent it—and he has been so kind . . . I wish I could go to-day," he reiterated obstinately, "I dread seeing Victor de Marmont in this house, where the laws of chivalry forbid my striking him in the face."

"Maurice!" she exclaimed reproachfully.

"Nay! I'll not say it again: I have sufficient reason left in me, I think, to show these parvenus how we, of the old regime, bear every blow which fate chooses to deal to us. They have taken everything from us, these new men—our lives, our lands, our very means of subsistence—now they have taken to filching our sweethearts—curse them! but at least let us keep our dignity!"

But again she was silent. What was there to say that had not been said?—save that unspoken word "good-bye." And he asked very softly:

"May I kiss you for the last time, Crystal?"

"No, Maurice," she replied, "never again."

"You are still free," he urged. "You are not plighted to de Marmont yet."

"No—not actually—not till to-night. . . ."

"Then . . . mayn't I?"

"No, Maurice," she said decisively.

"Your hand then?"

"If you like." He knelt down close to her; she yielded her hand to him and he with his usual impulsiveness covered it with kisses into which he tried to infuse the fervour of a last farewell.

Then without another word he rose to his feet and walked away with a long and firm stride down the avenue. Crystal watched his retreating figure until the overhanging branches of the ilex hid him from her view.

She made no attempt now to restrain her tears, they flowed uninterruptedly down her cheeks and dropped hot and searing upon her hands. With Maurice's figure disappearing down the dark avenue, with the echo of his footsteps dying away in the distance, the last chapter of her first book of romance seemed to be closing with relentless finality.

The afternoon sun was hidden behind a bank of grey clouds, the northeast wind came whistling insistently through the trees:—even that feeling of spring in the air had vanished. It was just a bleak grey winter's day now. Crystal felt herself shivering with cold. She drew her shawl more closely round her shoulders, then with eyes still wet with tears, but small head held well erect, she rose to her feet and walked rapidly back to the house.

III

Madame la Duchesse had in the meanwhile followed Hector along the corridor and down the finely carved marble staircase. At a monumental door on the ground floor the man paused, his hand upon the massive ormolu handle, waiting for Madame la Duchesse to come up.

He felt a little uncomfortable at her approach for here in the big square hall the light was very clear, and he could see Madame's keen, searching eyes looking him up and down and through and through. She even put up her lorgnon and though she was not very tall, she contrived to look Hector through them straight between the eyes.

"Is M. le Comte in there?" Madame la Duchesse deigned to ask as she pointed with her lorgnon to the door.

"In the small library beyond, Madame la Duchesse," replied Hector stiffly.

"And . . ." she queried with sharp sarcasm, "is the antechamber very full of courtiers and ladies just now?"

A quick, almost imperceptible blush spread over Hector's impassive countenance, and as quickly vanished again.

"M. le Comte," he said imperturbably, "is disengaged at the present moment. He seldom receives visitors at this hour."

On Madame's mobile lips the sarcastic curl became more marked. "And I suppose, my good Hector," she said, "that since M. le Comte has only granted an audience to his sister to-day, you thought it was a good opportunity for putting yourself at your ease and wearing your patched and mended clothes, eh?"

Once more that sudden wave of colour swept over Hector's solemn old face. He was evidently at a loss how to take Mme. la Duchesse's remark—whether as a rebuke or merely as one of those mild jokes of which every one knew that Madame was inordinately fond.

Something of his dignity of attitude seemed to fall away from him as he vainly tried to solve this portentous problem. His mouth felt dry and his head hot, and he did not know on which foot he could stand with the least possible discomfort, and how he could contrive to hide from Madame la Duchesse's piercing eyes that very obvious patch in the right knee of his breeches.

"Madame la Duchesse will forgive me, I hope," he stammered painfully.

But already Madame's kind old face had shed its mask of raillery.

"Never mind, Hector," she said gently, "you are a good fellow, and there's no occasion to tell me lies about the rich liveries which are put away somewhere, nor about the numerous retinue and countless number of flunkeys, all of whom are having unaccountably long holidays just now. It's no use trying to throw dust in my eyes, my poor friend, or put on that pompous manner with me. I know that the carpets are not all temporarily rolled up or the best of the furniture at a repairer's in Grenoble—what's the use of pretending with me, old Hector? Those days at Worcester are not so distant yet, are they? when all the family had to make a meal off a pound of sausages, or your wife Jeanne, God bless her! had to pawn her wedding-ring to buy M. le Comte de Cambray a second-hand overcoat."

"Madame la Duchesse, I humbly pray your Grace . . ." entreated Hector whose wrinkled, parchment-like face had become the colour of a peony, and who, torn between the respect which he had for the great lady and his horror at what she said was ready to sink through the floor in his confusion.

"Eh what, man?" retorted the Duchesse lightly, "there is no one but these bare walls to hear me; and my words, you'll find, will clear the atmosphere round you—it was very stifling, my good Hector, when I arrived. There now!" she added, "announce me to M. le Comte and then go down to Jeanne and tell her that I for one have no intention of forgetting Worcester, or the pawned ring, or the sausages, and that the array of Grenoble louts dressed up for the occasion in moth-eaten liveries dragged up out of some old chests do not please me half as much round a dinner table as did her dear old, streaming face when she used to bring us the omelette straight out of the kitchen."

She dropped her lorgnon, and folding her aristocratic hands upon her bosom, she once more assumed the grand manner pertaining to Versailles, and Hector having swallowed an uncomfortable lump in his throat, threw open the huge, folding doors and announced in a stentorian voice:

"Madame la Duchesse douairière d'Agen!"

IV

M. le Comte de Cambray was at this time close on sixty years of age, and the hardships which he had endured for close upon a quarter of a century had left their indelible impress upon his wrinkled, careworn face.

But no one—least of all a younger man—could possibly rival him in dignity of bearing and gracious condescension of manner. He wore his clothes after the old-time fashion, and clung to the powdered peruque which had been the mode at the Tuileries and Versailles before these vulgar young republicans took to wearing their own hair in its natural colour.

Now as he advanced from the inner room to meet Mme. la Duchesse, he seemed a perfect presentation or rather resuscitation of the courtly and vanished epoch of the Roi Soleil. He held himself very erect and walked with measured step, and a stereotyped smile upon his lips. He paused just in front of Mme. la Duchesse, then stopped and lightly touched with his lips the hand which she held out to him.

"Tell me, Monsieur my brother," said Madame in her loudly-pitched voice, "do you expect me to make before you my best Versailles curtsey, for—with my rheumatic knee—I warn you that once I get down, you might find it very difficult to get me up on my feet again."

"Hush, Sophie," admonished M. le Comte impatiently, "you must try and subdue your voice a little, we are no longer in Worcester remember—"

But Madame only shrugged her thin shoulders.

"Bah!" she retorted, "there's only good old Hector on the other side of the door, and you don't imagine you are really throwing dust in his eyes do you? . . . good old Hector with his threadbare livery and his ill-fed belly. . . ."

"Sophie!" exclaimed M. le Comte who was really vexed this time, "I must insist. . . ."

"All right, all right my dear André. . . . I won't say anything more. Take me to your audience chamber and I'll try to behave like a lady."

A smile that was distinctly mischievous still hovered round Madame's lips, but she forced her eyes to look grave: she held out the tips of her fingers to her brother and allowed him to lead her in the correct manner into the next room.

Here M. le Comte invited her to sit in an upright chair which was placed at a convenient angle close to his bureau while he himself sat upon a stately throne-like armchair, one shapely knee bent, the other slightly stretched forward, displaying the fine silk stocking and the set of his well-cut, satin breeches. Mme. la Duchesse kept her hands folded in front of her, and waited in silence for her brother to speak, but he seemed at a loss how to begin, for her piercing gaze was making him feel very uncomfortable: he could not help but detect in it the twinkle of good-humoured sarcasm.

Madame of course would not help him out. She enjoyed his obvious embarrassment, which took him down somewhat from that high altitude of dignity wherein he delighted to soar.

"My dear Sophie," he began at last, speaking very deliberately and carefully choosing his words, "before the step which Crystal is about to take to-day becomes absolutely irrevocable, I desired to talk the matter over with you, since it concerns the happiness of my only child."

"Isn't it a little late, my good André," remarked Madame drily, "to talk over a question which has been decided a month ago? The contract is to be signed to-night. Our present conversation might have been held to some purpose soon after the New Year. It is distinctly useless to-day."

At Madame's sharp and uncompromising words a quick blush had spread over the Comte's sunken cheeks.

"I could not consult you before, Sophie," he said coldly, "you chose to immure yourself in a convent, rather than come back straightaway to your old home as we all did when our King was restored to his throne. The post has been very disorganised and Boulogne is a far cry from Brestalou, but I did write to you as soon as Victor de Marmont made his formal request for Crystal's hand. To this letter I had no reply, and I could not keep him waiting in indefinite uncertainty."

"Your letter did not reach me until a month after it was written, as I had the honour to tell you in my reply."

"And that same reply only reached me a fortnight ago," retorted the Comte, "when Crystal had been formally engaged to Victor de Marmont for over a month and the date for the signature of the contract and the wedding-day had both been fixed. I then sent a courier at great expense and in great haste immediately to you," he added with a tone of dignified reproach, "I could do no more."

"Or less," she assented tartly. "And here I am, my dear brother, and I am not blaming you for delays in the post. I merely remarked that it was too late now to consult me upon a marriage which is to all intents and purposes, an accomplished fact already."

"That is so of course. But it would be a great personal satisfaction to me, my good Sophie, to hear your views upon the matter. You have brought Crystal up from babyhood: in a measure, you know her better than even I—her father—do and therefore you are better able than I am to judge whether Crystal's marriage with de Marmont will be conducive to her permanent happiness."

"As to that, my good André," quoth Madame, "you must remember that when our father and mother decided that a marriage between me and M. le Duc d'Agen was desirable, my personal feelings and character were never consulted for a moment . . . and I suppose that—taking life as it is—I was never particularly unhappy as his wife."

"And what do you adduce from those reminiscences, my dear Sophie?" queried the Comte de Cambray suavely.

"That Victor de Marmont is not a bad fellow," replied Madame, "that he is no worse than was M. le Duc d'Agen and that therefore there is no reason to suppose that Crystal will be any more unhappy than I was in my time."

"But . . ."

"There is no 'but' about it, my good André. Crystal is a sweet girl and a devoted daughter. She will make the best, never you fear! of the circumstances into which your blind worship of your own dignity and of your rank have placed her."

"My good Sophie," broke in the Count hotly, "you talk par Dieu, as if I was forcing my only child into a distasteful marriage."

"No, I do not talk as if you were forcing Crystal into a distasteful marriage, but you know quite well that she only accepted Victor de Marmont because it was your wish, and because his millions are going to buy back the old Cambray estates, and she is so imbued with the sense of her duty to you and to the family escutcheon, that she was willing to sacrifice every personal feeling in the fulfilment of that duty."

"By 'personal feeling' I suppose that you mean St. Genis."

"Well, yes . . . I do," said Madame laconically.

"Crystal was very much in love with him at one time."

"She still is."

"But even you, my dear sister, must admit that a marriage with St. Genis was out of the question," retorted the Count in his turn with some acerbity. "I am very fond of Maurice and his name is as old and great as ours, but he hasn't a sou, and you know as well as I do by now that the restoration of confiscated lands is out of the question . . . parliament will never allow it and the King will never dare. . . ."

"I know all that, my poor André," sighed Madame in a more conciliatory spirit, "I know moreover that you yourself haven't a sou either, in spite of your grandeur and your prejudices. . . . Money must be got somehow, and our ancient family 'scutcheon must be regilt at any cost. I know that we must keep up this state pertaining to the old regime, we must have our lacqueys and our liveries, sycophants around us and gaping yokels on our way when we sally out into the open. . . . We must blot out from our lives those twenty years spent in a democratic and enlightened country where no one is ashamed either of poverty or of honest work—and above all things we must forget that there has ever been a revolution which sent M. le Comte de Cambray, Commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost, Grand Cross of the Ordre du Lys, Seigneur of Montfleury and St. Eynard, hereditary Grand Chamberlain of France, to teach French and drawing in an English Grammar School. . . ."

"You wrong me there, Sophie, I wish to forget nothing of the past twenty years."

"I thought that you had given your memory a holiday."

"I forget nothing," he reiterated with dignified emphasis, "neither the squalid poverty which I endured, nor the bitter experiences which I gleaned in exile."

"Nor the devotion of those who saved your life."

"And yours . . ." he interposed.

"And mine, at risk of their own."

"Perhaps you will believe me when I tell you that not a day goes by but Crystal and I speak of Sir Percy Blakeney, and of his gallant League of the Scarlet Pimpernel."

"Well! we owe our lives to them," said Madame with deep-drawn sigh. "I wonder if we shall ever see any of those fine fellows again!"

"God only knows," sighed M. le Comte in response. "But," he continued more lightly, "as you know the League itself has ceased to be. We saw very little of Sir Percy and Lady Blakeney latterly for we were too poor ever to travel up to London. Crystal and I saw them, before we left England, and I then had the opportunity of thanking Sir Percy Blakeney for the last time, for the many valuable French lives which his plucky little League had saved."

"He is indeed a gallant gentleman," said Mme. la Duchesse gently, even whilst her bright, shrewd eyes gazed straight out before her as if on the great bare walls of her own ancestral home, the ghostly hand of memory had conjured up pictures of long ago:—her own, her husband's and her brother's arrest here in this very room, the weeping servants, the rough, half-naked soldiery—then the agony of a nine days' imprisonment in a dark, dank prison-cell filled to overflowing with poor wretches in the same pitiable plight as herself—the hasty trial, the insults, the mockery:—her husband's death in prison and her own thoughts of approaching death!

Then the gallant deed!—after all these years she could still see herself, her brother and Jeanne, her faithful maid, and poor devoted Hector all huddled up in a rickety tumbril, being dragged through the streets of Paris on the road to death. On ahead she had seen the weird outline of the guillotine silhouetted against the evening sky, whilst all around her a howling, jeering mob sang that awful refrain: "Cà ira! Cà ira! les aristos à la lanterne!"

Then it was that she had felt unseen hands snatching her out of the tumbril, she had felt herself being dragged through that yelling crowd to a place where there was silence and darkness and where she knew that she was safe: thence she was conveyed—she hardly realised how—to England, where she and her brother and Jeanne and Hector, their faithful servants, had found refuge for over twenty years.

"It was a gallant deed!" whispered Mme. la Duchesse once again, "and one which will always make me love every Englishman I meet, for the sake of one who was called The Scarlet Pimpernel."

"Then why should you attribute vulgar ingratitude to me?" retorted the Comte reproachfully. "My feelings I imagine are as sensitive as your own. Am I not trying my best to be kind to that Mr. Clyffurde, who is an honoured guest in my house—just because it was Sir Percy Blakeney who recommended him to me?"