(1) May had given place to June before Valentine de Trélan had quite got accustomed to the departure of the handsome boy whose presence had been such an anxiety and yet such a pleasure to her. The five thousand francs which she had in his place—not nearly so large a sum as it appeared owing to the enormous depreciation of paper money under the incapable rule of the Five Kings—she had at first thought of returning to his relatives by Suzon Tessier. But Suzon, by pretending to wish for her own sake to avoid further intercourse with that house, had persuaded the Duchesse to keep their bounty, at least for the present.
Since the evening when she had wept under her husband’s portrait Valentine had never again felt any disposition to tears. Reaction had come after that outburst. If Gaston were alive—and she could not rid herself of the conviction that he was—it was difficult not to draw the conclusion that he was indifferent to her fate. Seven years, and no sign! Then she told herself again, as she had so often done, that her letters had never reached him, that he had not the slightest reason for supposing her to be still in life, since everybody of her world who had survived the tempest believed her murdered, that she had no evidence of his not having made enquiries after her, or unsuccessful efforts to find her. Only of a successful effort would she have heard. But none of these reasoned considerations could remove the sting of that long silence.
Yet, if Gaston were suddenly to appear before her, would she be able to greet him with that unconcern which she had almost persuaded herself that she felt—and that she ought to feel? She knew she would not. Down in the depths of her soul all the time was the emotion which had pierced her in the picture-gallery—the intense longing to see him again. It was Mirabel which had first made her conscious of this longing, and it was Mirabel which had insensibly fed it. And there were times when she cursed the impulse which had brought her here, for under the crust of indifference which she had hoped was forming over her heart she could feel the stirring of that desire, growing daily not less strong, but stronger.
And then one day it occurred to her that if this Chouan chief of Roland de Céligny’s spoke of writing to the Duc de Trélan about the treasure he must know, or think he knew, Gaston’s whereabouts. More, if he were to send someone to Mirabel after the hoard, as Roland had appeared to think certain, she might communicate at least with this self-styled kinsman of her husband’s by his emissary, whoever he were. Yes, even if he were the Comte de Brencourt; for although that mad passion of his must be many times dead after all these years—and, perhaps, just because of its death—he would surely bear a letter for her back to Brittany . . . even as Roland might have done, had she thought of it in time.
This idea grew in her to an impatience for the coming of the next treasure-seeker. But June went on, and he did not come. Paris celebrated (with insufficient enthusiasm to please the Government) the obsequies of the envoys murdered at Rastadt; commerce continued to decline, discontent and lethargy to become more marked, and Republican feelings suffered outrage at the first performances of the opera of Adrien, wherein the stage emperor made his entry with undue pomp. On the eighteenth came a minor revolution, the coup d’état of the 30th Prairial, with a consequent change of ministry. Valentine heard of it with calm, and June slid presently into July.
(2)
Among the few sightseers who passed the sentry on the 20th of Messidor, a visiting day, was one who, though M. Thibault was too much engrossed in conversation to observe it, never entered the chateau at all, but strolled round to the garden front. There was nothing to prevent this, though it was hardly ever done. The really remarkable fact about this enterprising visitor was that he did not reappear again at leaving time; but this also passed without remark. Yet he had not vanished into space; he was seated, when twilight came, in that very grotto of Latona whose spring had refreshed Roland, waiting with some impatience for completer darkness. He had already seen as much of the garden front of Mirabel as he wished—a window on the ground-floor with a badly-broken shutter.
Problems connected with the recruiting and organisation of Finistère had kept the Comte de Brencourt longer in Brittany than the Marquis de Kersaint had bargained for, but he was here at last on his mission. Since a detail of the ancient plan had proved susceptible of two interpretations, he hoped to-night to make a preliminary search; after which he would arrange his plan of campaign with the Royalist agents in Paris with whom he was in touch.
More than the question of his difficult enterprise, however, was occupying M. de Brencourt’s mind as he sat in that fantastic relic of the dead and gone world of which he also was a survival. It was impossible to be at Mirabel, even for the first time in his life, without thinking of Mme de Trélan, and, as his refuge darkened, he found himself thinking of little else, and of the extraordinary chance which had thrown her tragic and sacred shadow across his path again. On the windings of that chance Artus de Brencourt, while he waited, had time to meditate profoundly, and sitting there in the July twilight, his chin on his hand, staring at the arbutus which almost blocked the entrance to the grotto, he was asking himself two questions. Why had the Marquis de Kersaint, that kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s, ceased, after that night at Hennebont, to wear his emerald signet ring; and why had that ring borne, as he then distinctly saw for the first time, the phoenix of the Saint-Chamans? For M. de Kersaint had stated that he was a connection of that house by marriage only. That he was a connection seemed obvious from the minute instructions he had been able to give M. de Brencourt on the topography of Mirabel. This business of the ring intrigued the Comte not a little. He was quite conversant with the device of the great house of Trélan, and over the troop of strange surmises born of the presence of that device on M. de Kersaint’s finger and its abrupt disappearance he was still frowning when the time came for him to make his stealthy entrance into Mirabel.
For all that she had half looked for his arrival, it was chance, of a kind, that directed the Duchesse de Trélan’s steps that evening towards the invader; chance that caused her to have left the special key in the door of the portrait gallery; chance that made her set out, somewhat unnecessarily, to fetch it before she retired for the night—and chance that led her returning footsteps through the great dark spaces of the Salle Verte . . . to hear, as she passed along between the pillars and the wall, a slight muffled noise of tapping—coming whence?
Valentine stopped dead, lamp in hand. The gentle and recurrent sound did not come from the banqueting hall itself, that was plain. From the “sallette,” then?
No more than when she had searched the garden for a possible malefactor and found Roland did she dream of danger to herself, though had she paused to think of it she might have guessed that the intruder would be armed, and, if surprised, might use his weapon. She walked back and softly opened the door of the sallette; her surmise was right.
Her own lamp cast in its beams, but there was light there already—a lantern standing on the floor, making a pool of radiance by the feet of a man who stood in front of the great hearth with his back to her. In this pool, pinned down by the lantern, was an outspread sheet of paper, a plan of some sort. Her eyes were able to take in these details before the man, turning quickly, saw her standing there with her lamp. His one hand went to his breast, doubtless in search of a weapon, but he never produced it, and the tool which he held in the other fell clattering to the floor.
“God in Heaven!” he exclaimed sharply, and recoiled a step or two.
“Who is it?” asked Valentine a little uncertainly. “Is it—is it Monsieur de Brencourt?”
The intruder did not answer—did not even seem to hear her question. He remained literally as if turned to stone, his eyes burning cavernously in his pale face, on which the upcast light of the lantern at his feet, crossing with that of Valentine’s lamp, cast odd shadows. After a moment, moving like a man half stunned from a fall, he came a little towards her. Then he stopped again, and passed his hand over his eyes.
“That light dazzles me . . . you are not real!” he muttered. Stooping, he picked up his own lantern, and held it high in a hand that shook.
“Is it really Madame de Trélan?” he asked huskily. “Was it untrue then . . . September . . . La Force?—Speak, Duchesse, for God’s sake!”
In the matter of astonishment Valentine had the advantage of him, since she had been led to think his coming possible. But she too was shaken by the encounter, the first with anyone of her own world who had known her, for seven long years. And she found herself unable to do more than give a sort of pale acquiescence to his agitated questions by bending her head and saying, “Yes, it was untrue.”
“It is she!” said de Brencourt to himself, his harsh features showing his profound emotion. Suddenly he lowered his lantern. “Give me your lamp, Duchesse, and sit down and tell me—tell me, unless I am to take leave of my senses, how it comes about . . . where you have been all these years . . . what you are doing now? My God, to think—Permit me!”
He deposited his own lantern on the floor and took the lamp from her unresisting grasp, looking round the plundered sallette in vain for something to put it on.
“Give me back the lamp, Monsieur le Comte,” said Valentine, finding speech. “We cannot talk here. Let us go to my room. It is safer also.”
“You have a room here?” he exclaimed. “You are . . .” For the first time he seemed to become aware of her attire, so different from anything which he had ever seen her wear.
She held out her hand for the lamp. “Come,” she said, “unless your business here——” She indicated the tool and the map.
“Oh, that can wait now!” said the treasure-hunter with an accent of scorn. He picked up the chisel and the plan and followed her.
So, beneath the cavernous half-seen gilding of the great Salle Verte, down the basement stairs and along the bare prison-like corridor below, carrying the lamp, went the Duchesse de Trélan in her respectable black dress and fichu, and behind her walked, still half stupefied, the man who had once made such persistent and unavailing love to her. And it was in this guise, very exactly that of a thief in the night, that the Comte de Brencourt came for the first time to her house of Mirabel.
The thought penetrated his stupor with some force during the transit. For, once arrived at Valentine’s little parlour, as she put down the lamp on the table he said abruptly:
“I have never been in Mirabel in my life. And I find you here to greet me!” He gave a sudden laugh.
Valentine did not answer. She was much more moved than she wished to betray. She sat down in a chair near the table and motioned to him to do the same. But he put his hands on the table and remained leaning over it, staring at her with a half-wild eagerness.
“Are you alive, Duchesse? Or am I dead, too?”
“The Duchesse is not alive,” responded Valentine with a faint smile. “You are speaking to Madame Vidal, the concierge of Mirabel.”
“Good God!” exclaimed the Comte de Brencourt, springing upright.
“How else do you suppose I could be here?”
“You are jesting!” cried he, still incredulous. “You . . . you . . . a concierge! Does no one know you? Then you are poor—in want! Madame, Madame! . . .”
Valentine lifted a hand. “Please, Monsieur de Brencourt, do not agitate yourself! I am not in want. There is no one left at Mirabel to recognise me—my portrait had a pike put through it. I came of my own free will, and I am not unhappy here.”
At this, as if it were the most stunning news of all, he did, perhaps unconsciously, subside into a chair, and, leaning his elbows on the table, took his head between his hands.
“Tell me what happened?” he said after a moment. And Mme de Trélan told him, shortly, the history of those seven years.
“Everybody thinks that I was killed,” she finished.
“I thought so,” said he without moving. “I thought so. . . . God pity me, I have carried that picture of your death about with me all these years. Oh, why did you not let me into the secret?”
She looked at him with a sort of maternal regret, a kinder look indeed, had he but met it, than he had ever won from her during all the period of his fruitless passion. “In the beginning I could tell no one, lest I should endanger the Tessiers. I disappeared, Comte, without exactly intending it. In the end I was glad to disappear. No one but Mme Tessier knows to this hour of my identity; I do not mean anyone to know. Believe me, I have not been unhappy with these good friends of mine. After being twice so near death, to see the sky and the green leaves in the spring, to know affection, as I have known it, and faithfulness. . . . But I am sorry if I have caused you so long a pain. . . . I had no news of you—for all I knew you had gone the same road.”
“I nearly did—in another way,” said the Comte briefly, raising his head. He drew a deep breath and gazed at her anew. “Do you know, Duchesse, that this is like—No, I cannot yet grasp that this is you, Valentine de Trélan, not only alive, but in this mean room, this bourgeois dress——”
She interrupted him with a warning. “Comte, this mean room of mine is not too safe a shelter for you! And how did you get into Mirabel?”
Plainly this subject had ceased to interest him for the moment, yet he answered that it were better for her not to know, adding, “But you do not ask me why you found me where you did?”
“No,” said Valentine composedly. “I know why you broke in. You are come, are you not, on behalf of the Marquis de Kersaint, to secure the treasure supposed to have been hidden in the chateau during the time of the Fronde?”
Again M. de Brencourt stared at her. “Are you a witch, Madame, or has some Royalist agent——”
“Neither,” said she smiling. “It is no mystery how I know. You have been preceded in your quest here, Monsieur de Brencourt. Let............