Angelot reflected as he walked down the quiet lane. "Well! the Prefect and my father would have been vexed, and he had his little punishment.

Some day we shall meet independently, and then we shall see, Monsieur Ratoneau, we shall see! But what a somersault the creature made! If the bushes had not broken his fall, he would have been hurt, or killed, perhaps."

He laughed at the remembrance of the scene, and thought how he would describe it to his mother. Then he became grave, remembering all that had gone before. The Prefect was a friend, and a gentleman, neither of which the General could ever be. But it was a serious thought that the Prefect was at present by far the most dangerous person of the two.

Uncle Joseph's life and liberty were in his hands, at his mercy.

Angelot frowned and whistled as he strode along. How did the Prefect find out all that? Why, of course, those men of his were not mere gendarmes; they were police spies. Especially that one with the villanous face who was lurking round the woods!

"We are all in their hands; they are the devil's own regiment," Angelot said to himself. "How can Monsieur de Mauves bring himself to do such work among his old friends, in his old country! It is inconceivable."

Another rough lane brought Angelot into the rough road that led past the Manor of La Mariniere to the church and village lying beneath it, and so on into the valley and across the bridge to Lancilly.

The home of his family was one of those large homesteads, half farm, half castle, which are entirely Angevin in character; and it had not yet crumbled down into picturesque decay. Its white walls, once capable of defence, covered a large s.p.a.ce on the eastern slope of the valley; it was much shaded all about by oak, beech, and fir trees, and a tall row of poplars bordered the road between its gateway and the church spire.

The high white arch of the gateway, where a gate had once been, opened on a paved road crossing the lower end of a farmyard, and up to the right were lines of low buildings where the cows, General Ratoneau's enemies, were now being safely housed for the night, and a dove-cote tower, round which a few late pigeons were flapping. To the left another archway led into a square garden with lines of tall box hedges, where flowers and vegetables grew all together wildly, and straight on, through yet a third gate, Angelot came into a stone court in front of the house, white, tall, and very ancient, with a quaint porch opening straight upon its wide staircase, which seemed a continuation of the broad outside steps where Madame de la Mariniere was now giving her chickens their evening meal.

In spite of the large cap and ap.r.o.n that smothered her, it was plain to see where Angelot got his singular beauty. His little mother, once upon a time, had been the loveliest girl in Brittany. Her small, fine, delicate features, clear dark skin, beautiful velvet eyes and cloud of dusky hair that curled naturally,--all this still remained, though youth and freshness and early happiness were gone. Her cheeks were thin, her eyes and mouth were sad, and yet there was hardly a grey hair in that soft ma.s.s which she covered and hid so puritanically. She had been married as almost a child, and was still under forty. Her family, very old but very poor, had married her to Urbain de la Mariniere, quite without consulting any wishes of hers. He was well off and well connected, though his old name had never belonged exactly to the _grande n.o.blesse_. The Pontvieux were too anxious to dispose of their daughter to consider his free opinions, which, after all, were the fashion in France before 1789, though never in Brittany. And probably Madame de la Mariniere's life was saved by her marriage, for she was and remained just as ardently Catholic and Royalist as her relations who died one by one upon the scaffold.

She lived at La Mariniere through the Revolution, in outward obedience to a husband whose opinions she detested, and most of whose actions she cordially disapproved, though it was impossible not to love him personally. Grat.i.tude, too, there might very well have been; for Urbain's popularity had not only guarded his wife and son; it had enabled her to keep the old Cure of the village safe at La Mariniere till some little liberty was restored to the Church and he was able to return to his post without danger. When madame used hard words of the Empire--and she was frank in her judgments--monsieur would point to the Cure with a smile. And the old man, come back from ma.s.s to breakfast at the manor, and resting in the chimney corner, would say, "Not so bad--not so bad!" rubbing his thin hands gently.

"Little mother!" Angelot said, and stepped up into the porch among the chickens.

His eyes, quick to read her face, saw a shadow on it, and he wondered who had done wrong, himself or his father.

"Enfin, te voila!" said Madame de la Mariniere. "Have you brought us any game? Ah, I am glad--" as he showed her his well-filled bag. "Your father came home two hours ago; he expected to find you here; he wanted you to do some service or other for these cousins."

"I am sorry," said Angelot. "I could not leave Uncle Joseph. I have a hundred things to tell you. Some rather serious, and some will make you die of laughing, as they did me."

"Mon Dieu! I should be glad to laugh," said his mother.

Angelot had taken the basket from her hand, and was throwing the chickens their last grain. She stood on the highest step, with a little sigh which might have been of fatigue or of disgust, and her eyes, as she gazed across the valley, were half angry, half melancholy. The sun had gone down behind the opposite hills, and the broad front of the Chateau de Lancilly, in full view of La Mariniere, looked grey and cold against the woods, even in the warm twilight of that rosy evening.

"Strange, that it should be inhabited again!" Angelot had emptied the basket, and stood beside his mother; the chickens bustled and scrambled about the foot of the steps.

"Yes, and as I hear, by all the perfections," said Madame de la Mariniere. "Herve de Sainfoy is more friendly than ever--and well he may be--his wife is supremely pretty and agreeable, his younger girls are most amiable, and as for Helene, nothing so enchantingly beautiful has ever set foot in Anjou. Take care, my poor Ange, I beseech you."

Angelot laughed. "Then I suppose my father's next duty will be to find a husband for her. I hear she is difficult--or her parents for her, perhaps."

"Who told you so?"

"Monsieur de Mauves."

"What? the Prefect?"

"Yes. He sent his respectful compliments to you. I have been spending the day at Les Chouettes with him and the new General. He--oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu!"

Angelot burst into a violent fit of laughing, and leaned, almost helpless, against a pillar of the porch.

"Are you mad?" said his mother.

"Ah--" he struggled to say--"if only you had seen the cows--our cows--and the General in the air--oh!"

A faint smile dawned in the depths of her eyes. "You have certainly lost your senses," she said, and slipped her hand into his arm. "Come down into the garden: I like it in the twilight--and that pile of stones over there will not weigh upon our eyes; the trees hide it. Come, my Ange: tell me all your news, serious and laughable. I am glad you were helping your uncle; but I do not like you to be away all day."

"I could not help it, mother," Angelot said. "Yes; I have indeed a great deal to tell you."

They strolled down together into the garden, where the vivid after-glow flushed all the flowers with rose. His mother leaned upon his arm, and they paced along by the tall box hedges. The serious part of the story was long, and interested her far more than the General's comic adventure, at which Angelot could only make her smile, though the telling of it sent him off into another fit of laughter.

"Poor Monsieur de Mauves, to go about with such a strange animal!" she said. "As for you, my child, you grow more childish every day. When will you be a man? Now be serious, for I hear your father coming."

CHAPTER VI

HOW LA BELLE HeLeNE TOOK AN EVENING WALK

Monsieur Urbain de la Mariniere was always amiable and indulgent. He did not reproach his son for his long absence or ask him to give any account of himself; not, that is, till he had talked to his heart's content, all through the evening meal, of the coming of the Sainfoys, their adventures by the way, their impressions on arrival.

He was glad, on the whole, that he had not organised any public reception. Herve had decided against it, fearing some jarring notes which might prejudice his wife against the place and the country. As it was, she was fairly well pleased. A few old people in the village had come out of their doors to wave a welcome as the carriages pa.s.sed; groups of children had thrown flowers; the servants, some sent on from Paris, others hired by Urbain in the neighbourhood, had stood in lines at the entrance. Urbain himself had met them at the door. The Sainfoys, very tired, of course, after their many hours of rough driving, were delighted to find themselves at last within the old walls, deserted twenty years ago. Only the son, now fighting in Spain, had been born at Lancilly; the three girls were children of emigration, of a foreign land.

The excellent Urbain had indeed some charitable work to pride himself upon. Even he himself hardly knew how it had all been managed: the keeping of the chateau and its archives, the recovery of alienated lands, so that the spending of money in repairing and beautifying was all that was needed to set Lancilly in its place again as one of the chief country houses of Anjou, a centre of society. Urbain had worked for his cousin all these twenty years, quietly and perseveringly. To look at his happy face now, it would seem that he had gained his heart's desire, and that his cousin's grat.i.tude would suffice him for the rest of his life. His eyes were wet as he looked at his wife and said: "There was only one thing lacking--I knew it would be so. If only you and Joseph had gone with me to welcome them! I never felt so insignificant as when I went out alone from that doorway to help my cousins out of the coach. And I saw her look round--Adelade--she was surprised, I know, to find me alone."

"Did she ask for me--or for Joseph?" said Madame de la Mariniere, in her dry little voice.

"Not at the moment--no--afterwards, of course. She has charming manners.

And she looks so young. It is really hard to believe that she has a son of twenty-two. My dear old Herve looks much older. His hair is grey. He has quite left off powder; nearly everybody has, I suppose. I wish you had been there! But you will go to-morrow, will you not?"

"Whenever you please," said Madame de la Mariniere. "In my opinion, allow me to say, it was much better that I should not be there to-day.

You had done everything; all the credit was yours. Madame de Sainfoy, tired and nervous, no doubt,--what could she have done with an unsympathetic old distant cousin, except wish heartily for her absence?

No, no, I did not love Adelade twenty years ago. I thought her worldly and ambitious then--what should I think her now! I will be civil for your sake, of course,--but my dear Urbain, what have I to do with emigrants who have changed their flag, and have come back false to their old convictions? No--my place is not at Lancilly. Nor is Joseph's--and I hardly believe we should be welcome there."

"My dear, all this is politics!" cried Monsieur Urbain, flourishing his hands in the air. "It is agreed, it is our convention, yours and mine, that we never mention politics. It must be the same between you and our cousins. What does it matter, after all? You live under the Empire, you obey the laws as much as they do. Why should any of us spoil society by waving our private opinions. It is not philosophical, really it is not."

"I did not suppose it was," she said. "I leave philosophy to you, my dear friend."

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at Angelot, who was sitting in silence, watching his father with the rather puzzled and qualified admiration that he usually felt for him. This admiration was not unmixed with fear, for Urbain, so sweet and so clever, could be very stern; it was an iron will that had carried him through the past twenty years. Or rather, perhaps, a will of the finest steel, a character that had a marvellous faculty for bending without being broken.

"And you--" said Monsieur Urbain to his son--"you had a long day's sport with the uncle. Did you get a good bag?"

Angelot told him. "But that was only by myself till breakfast time," he said. "Since then I have been helping my uncle in other ways. I am afraid you wanted me, monsieur, but it was an important matter, and I could not leave him."

"Ah! Well, the other was not a very important matter--at least, I found another messenger who did as well. It was to ride to Sonnay, to tell the _coiffeur_ there to come to Lancilly early to-morrow. Madame de Sainfoy's favourite maid was ill, and stayed behind in Paris. No one else can dress her hair. It was she herself who remembered the old hairdresser at Sonnay, a true artist of the old kind. I had a strong impression that he--well, that he died unfortunately in those unhappy days--you understand--but she thought he had even then a son growing up to succeed him, and it seemed worth while to send to enquire."

Angelot smiled; his mother frowned. "I am glad you were not here!" she murmured under her breath.

Later on they were sitting in the curious, gloomy old room which did duty for salon and library at La Mariniere. Nothing here of the simple, cheerful, though old-time grace of Les Chouettes. Louis Quatorze chairs, with old worked seats, stood in a solemn row on the smooth stone floor; the walls were hung with ancient tapestry, utterly out of date and out of fashion now. A large bookcase rose from the floor to the dark painted beams of the ceiling, at one end of the room. It contained many books which Madame de la Mariniere would gladly have burnt on the broad hearth, under her beautiful white stone chimney-piece--itself out of date, old and monstrous in the eyes of the Empire. But Madame de la Mariniere was obliged to live with her husband's literary admirations, as well as with his political opinions, so Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, with many earlier and healthier geniuses, such as Montaigne, looked down in handsomely gilt bindings from the upper shelves. High up they were: there was a concession. In the lower shelves lived Bousset, and other Catholic writers; the modern spirit in religion being represented by Chateaubriand's five volumes of _Le Gene du Christianisme_ and two volumes of _Les Martyrs_. Corneille and Racine, among poets, had the honour of accessibility. When Monsieur Urbain wanted one of his own books, he had to fetch a little ladder from a cupboard in the hall. Angelot, from a child, was forbidden to use that ladder. The prohibition was hardly necessary. Angelot seldom opened a book at all, or read for more than five minutes at a time. He followed his uncle in this, as in so much else. The moors, the woods, the riverside, were monsieur Joseph's library: as to literal books, he had none but a few volumes on sport and on military history.

In this old room Madame de la Mariniere would sit all the evening long, working at her tapestry frame; Urbain would read, sometimes aloud; Angelot would draw, or make flies and fishing tackle. On this special evening the little lady sat down to her frame--she was making new seats in cross-st.i.tch for the old chairs against the wall. Two candles, which lighted the room very dimly, and a tall gla.s.s full of late roses, stood on a solid oak table close to her chair.