She made a charming picture as she sat there, seemingly absorbed in her work, yet glancing up every instant to listen to the talk of the two men. Angelot was giving his father an account of the day's adventures, and Monsieur Urbain was as much annoyed as his easy-going temper would allow.

"Is he not mad and bad, that brother of mine!" he cried. "But what was it all about? What were they plotting and planning, these foolish men?

Why could he not have two more places laid at table and entertain the whole party together? That would have been the clever thing to do. The Prefect has nothing special against any of those gentlemen--or had not, before this. What were they plotting, Angelot?"

Angelot knew nothing about that. He thought their consciences were bad, from the readiness with which they scuttled off into the woods. And from things they said as they went, he thought they and the imperial officers were best apart. The Messieurs d'Ombre especially, from their talk, would have been dangerous companions at table. Pistols, prisons, a general insurrection and so forth.

"My poor brother will be punished enough," said Urbain, "if he has to spend his time in Purgatory with these d'Ombres."

He glanced at his wife, who did not like such allusions as this; but she bent over her frame and said nothing.

"Go on, tell me all," he said to his son.

Angelot told him the whole story. He was an emotional person, with a strong sense of humour. The Prefect's generosity brought tears into his eyes; the General's adventure made him laugh heartily, but he was soon grave again.

"I have not seen General Ratoneau," he said. "But I have heard that he is a very revengeful man, and I am sorry you should have offended him, my boy."

"He offended me!" said Angelot, laughing. "I tried to save him; he swore at me and would not be saved. Then he tried to strike me and I would not be struck. And it was I who pulled him out of the bushes, and a clumsy lump he was, too. I a.s.sure you, father, the debt is on his side, not mine. One of these days he shall pay it, if I live."

"Nonsense! forget all about it as soon as you can," said his father. "As to his language, that was natural to a soldier. Another time, leave a soldier to fight his own battles, even with a herd of cows. To run between a soldier and his enemy is like interfering between husband and wife, or putting your hand between the bark and the tree. Never do it again."

"You do not practise what you preach," said Madame de la Mariniere, while Angelot looked a little crestfallen. "I wonder who has run between more adversaries than yourself, in the last few years!"

"My dear friend, I never yet differed with an imperial officer, or presumed to know better than my superiors, even on Angevin country subjects," said her husband, smiling.

"Ah!" she sighed. Her brows wrinkled up a little, and there was a touch of scorn in the pretty lines of her mouth. "Ah! Ange and I will never reach your philosopher's level," she said.

"I wish--I wish--" Monsieur Urbain muttered, pacing up and down, "that Joseph would grow a little wiser as he grows older. The Prefect is excellent--if it were only the Prefect--but the fellows who were with him--yes, it would be disagreeable to feel that there was a string round Joseph's neck and that the police held the end of it. A secret meeting to-day--at Joseph's house--and Joseph's and Angelot's the only names known!"

"Ange was not at the meeting!" cried Madame de la Mariniere.

"I know--but who will believe that?"

Angelot was a little impressed. He had very seldom seen his father, so hopeful, so even-tempered, with a cloud of anxiety on his face. The very rarity of such uneasiness made it catching. A sort of apprehensive chill seemed to creep from the corners of the dark old room, steal along by the shuttered windows, hover about the gaping cavern of the hearth. It became an air, breathing through the room in the motionless September night, so that the candle-flames on madame's table bent and flickered suddenly.

Then the dogs out in the yard began to bark.

"They are barking at the moon," said Monsieur Urbain. "No, at somebody pa.s.sing by."

"Somebody is coming in, father," said Angelot, "I hear footsteps in the court--they are on the steps--in the porch. Shall I see who it is?"

"Do, my boy."

The mother turned pale, half rose, as if to stop him. "Not the police!"

were the words on her lips; but her husband's calmness rea.s.sured her.

Angelot went out into the hall, and reached the house-door just as somebody outside began to knock upon it. He opened it, and saw two figures standing in the half-darkness: for the moon was not yet very high, and while she bathed all the valley in golden light, making Lancilly's walls and windows shine with a fairy beauty, the house at La Mariniere still cast a broad shadow. The figures were of a man and a woman, strangers to Angelot; he, standing in the dark doorway, was equally strange to them and only dimly visible. The stranger lifted his hand courteously to his hat, and there was a touch of hesitation in his very musical voice, as if--which was the fact--he did not know to whom he was speaking.

"Madame de la Mariniere is at home? She receives this evening?"

"Certainly, monsieur," said Angelot. "One moment, and I will fetch a light--madame--" and he bowed low to the stranger's companion.

"What? Are you Angelot? Shake hands: there is light enough for that,"

said the visitor with sudden friendliness. "Let me present you to my daughter Helene--your cousin, in fact."

The slender, silent girl who stood by Monsieur de Sainfoy might have been pretty or ugly--there was no light to show--but Angelot seemed to know by instinct at once all that he was to discover afterwards. He bowed again, and kissed Helene's glove, and felt a most unreasonable dizziness, a wildfire rushing through his young veins; all this for the first time in his boyish life and from no greater apparent cause than the sweetness of her voice when she said, "Bonjour, mon cousin!"

Then, before he could turn round, his father was there, carrying one of the heavy candlesticks, and all the porch was full of light and of cheerful voices.

"I am triumphant," cried the Comte de Sainfoy. "My wife said I could not find my way. I felt sure I had not forgotten boyish days so completely, and Helene was ready to trust herself to me, and glad to wait upon madame her cousin."

"She is most welcome--you are both most welcome," the beaming master of the house a.s.sured him. "Come in, dear neighbours, I beg. What happiness!

What an end to all this weary time! If a few things in life were different, I could say I had nothing left to wish for."

"A few things? Can we supply them, dear Urbain?" said the Comte, affectionately.

"No, Herve, no. They do not concern you, my beloved friend. On your side all is perfection. But alas! you are not everybody, or everywhere. Never mind! This is a joy, an honour, indeed, to make one forget one's troubles."

Angelot had taken the candlestick from his father as they crossed the hall. He carried it in before the party and set it down in its place, then stepped back into the shadow while Monsieur Urbain brought them in, and his mother, still pale, and a little shy or stiff in manner, went forward to receive them.

"After twenty years!" The Comte de Sainfoy bowed low over the small hand that lay in his, thin, delicate, if not so white and soft as a court lady's hand. His lips touched it lightly; he straightened himself, and looked smiling into her face. He had always admired Anne de Pontvieux.

He might himself have thought of marrying her, in those last days of old France, from which so great a gulf now parted them, if her family had been richer and more before the world. As a young man, he had been surprised at Urbain's good fortune, and slightly envious of it.

"Utterly unchanged, belle cousine!" he said. "What does he mean, that discontented man, by finding his lot anything short of perfection! Here you have lived, you and he, in that quietest place that exists in the very heart of the storm. Both of you have kept your youth, your freshness, while as for me, wanderings and anxieties have turned me as grey as a badger."

"Your wife is still young and beautiful, I hear," said Madame de la Mariniere. "And your hair, cousin, is the only thing that proves you more than twenty. At any rate, you have not lost a young man's genius for paying compliments."

"My compliments are simple truth, as they always were, even before I lived in more plain-spoken countries than this," said the Comte. "And now let me ask your kindness for this little eldest girl of mine--the eldest child that I have here--you know Georges is with the army."

"I know," said Madame de la Mariniere.

Her look had softened, though it was still grave and a little distant.

It was with a manner perfectly courteous, but not in the least affectionate, that she drew Helene towards her and kissed her on the cheek. "She is more like you than her mother," she said. "I am charmed to make your acquaintance, my dear."

Words, words! Angelot knew his mother, and knew that whatever pretty speeches politeness might claim, she did not, and never could rejoice in the return of the cousins to Lancilly. But it amused and astonished him to notice the Comte's manner to his mother. Did it please her? he wondered. Grat.i.tude to his father was right and necessary, but did she care for these airs of past and present devotion to herself, on the part of a man who had outraged all her notions of loyalty? It began to dawn on Angelot that he knew little of the world and its ways.

Standing in the background, he watched those four, and a more interesting five minutes he had never yet known. These were shadows become real: politics, family and national, turned into persons.

There stood his father beside the man to whose advantage he had devoted his life; whom he had loved as that kind of friend who sticks closer than a brother, almost with the adoration of a faithful dog, ever since the boys of the castle and of the old manor played together about the woods of La Mariniere and Lancilly.

They were a contrast, those two. Urbain was short and broad, with quick eyes, a clever brow, a strong, good-tempered mouth and chin. He was ugly, and far from distinguished: Joseph had carried off the good looks and left the brains for him. Herve de Sainfoy was tall, slight, elegant; his face was handsome, fair, and sleepy, the lower part weak and irresolute. A beard, if fashion had allowed it, would have become him well. His expression was amiable, his smile charming, with a shade of conscious superiority.

But Angelot understood, when he remembered it, the Prefect's remark that the Emperor found Monsieur de Sainfoy "a little half-hearted."

However, from that evening, Angelot ceased to think of Monsieur de Sainfoy as the unknown cousin, his father's friend, the master of Lancilly; he was Helene's father, and thus to be, next to herself, the most important personage in poor Angelot's world. For it is not to be imagined that those few minutes, or even one of them, were spent in noting the contrast between the cousins, or in considering the Comte's manner to Madame de la Mariniere, and hers to him. There in the light of the candles, curtseying to the unknown cousin with a simple reverence, accepting her kiss with a faint smile of pleasure, stood the loveliest woman that young Angelot had ever seen, ever dreamed of--if his dreams had been occupied with such matters at all! Helene was taller than French women generally; taller than his mother, very nearly as tall as himself. She was like a lily, he thought; one of those white lilies that grew in the broad border under the box hedge, and with which his mother decked the Virgin's altar, not listening at all to the poor old Cure when he complained that the scent made his head ache. Helene had thrown off the hooded cloak that covered her white gown; the lovely ma.s.ses of fair hair seemed almost too heavy for her small, bent head.

"No wonder they wanted a _coiffeur_! Oh, why was I not here to fetch him!" thought Angelot.

The beauty of whiteness of skin and perfect regularity of feature is sometimes a little cold; but Helene was flushed with her walk in the warm night, her lips were scarlet; and if her grey eyes were strangely sad and wistful, they were also so beautiful in size, shape, and expression that Angelot felt he could gaze for ever and desire no change.