At once the prospect of being snared among armies and cut off from all return to Paris, appalled me as a greater present calamity than being cast out of Mittau. Mittau could wait for another expedition.

"Very well," I said. "Take the road to France."

We met August rains. We were bogged. A bridge broke under us. We dodged Austrian troops. It seemed even then a fated thing that a Frenchman should retreat ignominiously from Russia.

There is a devilish antagonism of inanimate and senseless things, begun by discord in ourselves, which works unreasonable torture. Our return was an abominable journal which I will not recount, and going with it was a mortifying facility for drawing opposing forces.

However, I knew my friend the marquis expected me to return defeated. He gave me my opportunity as a child is indulged with a dangerous plaything, to teach it caution.

He would be in his chateau of Plessy, cutting off two days' posting to Paris. And after the first sharp pangs of chagrin and shame at losing the fortune he had placed in my hands, I looked forward with impatience to our meeting.

"We have nothing, Skenedonk!" I exclaimed the first time there was occasion for money on the road. "How have you been able to post? The money and the jewel-case are gone."

"We have two bags of money and the snuffbox," said the Oneida. "I hid them in the post-carriage."

"But I had the key of the jewel-case."

"You are a good sleeper," responded Skenedonk.

I blessed him heartily for his forethought, and he said if he had known I was a fool he would not have told me we carried the jewel-case into Russia.

I dared not let myself think of Madame de Ferrier. The plan of buying back her estates, which I had nurtured in the bottom of my heart, was now more remote than America.

One bag of coin was spent in Paris, but three remained there with Doctor Chantry. We had money, though the more valuable treasure stayed in Mittau.

In the sloping hills and green vines of Champagne we were no longer hara.s.sed dodging troops, and slept the last night of our posting at Epernay. Taking the road early next morning, I began to watch for Plessy too soon, without forecasting that I was not to set foot within its walls.

We came within the marquis' boundaries upon a little goose girl, knitting beside her flock. Her bright hair was bound with a woolen cap.

Delicious gra.s.s, and the shadow of an oak, under which she stood, were not to be resisted, so I sent the carriage on. She looked open-mouthed after Skenedonk, and bobbed her dutiful, frightened courtesy at me.

The marquis' peasants were by no means under the influence of the Empire, as I knew from observing the lad whom he had sought among the drowned in the mortuary chapel of the Hotel Dieu, and who was afterwards found in a remote wine shop seeing sights. The goose girl dared not speak to me unless I required it of her, and the unusual notice was an honor she would have avoided.

"What do you do here?" I inquired.

Her little heart palpitated in the answer--"Oh, guard the geese."

"Do they give you trouble?"

"Not much, except that wicked gander." She pointed out with her knitting-needle a sleek white fellow, who flirted his tail and turned an eye, quavering as if he said--"La, la, la!"

"What does he do?"

"He would be at the vines and the corn, monsieur."

"Bad gander!"

"I switch him," she informed me, like a magistrate.

"But that would only make him run."

"Also I have a string in my pocket, and I tie him by the leg to a tree."

"Serves him right. Is the Marquis du Plessy at the chateau?"

Her face grew shaded, as a cloud chases sunlight before it across a meadow. "Do you mean the new marquis, the old marquis' cousin, monsieur?

He went away directly after the burial."

"What burial?"'

"The old marquis' burial. That was before St. John's day."

"Be careful what you say, my child!"

"Didn't you know he was dead, _monsieur?_"

"I have been on a journey. Was his death sudden?"

"He was killed in a duel in Paris."

I sat down on the gra.s.s with my head in my hands. Bellenger had told the truth.

One scant month the Marquis du Plessy fostered me like a son. To this hour my slow heart aches for the companionship of the lightest, most delicate spirit I ever encountered in man.

Once I lifted my head and insisted,

"It can't be true!"

"Monsieur," the goose girl a.s.serted solemnly, "it is true. The blessed St. Alpin, my patron, forget me if I tell you a lie."

Around the shadowed spot where I sat I heard trees whispering on the hills, and a cart rumbling along the hardened dust of the road.

"Monsieur," spoke the goose girl out of her good heart, "if you want to go to his chapel I will show you the path."

She tied a string around the leg of the wicked gander and attached him to the tree, shaking a wand at him in warning. He nipped her sleeve, and hissed, and hopped, his wives remonstrating softly; but his guardian left him bound and carried her knitting down a valley to a stream, across the bridge, and near an opening in the bushes at the foot of a hill.

"Go all to the right, monsieur," she said, "and you will come to the chapel where the Du Plessys are buried."

I gave her the largest coin in my pocket, and she flew back as well as the spirit of childhood could fly in wooden shoes. All the geese, formed in a line, waddled to meet her, perhaps bearing a memorial of wrongs from their husband.

The climb was steep, rounding a darkened ferny shoulder of lush forest, yet promising more and more a top of sunlight. At the summit was a carriage road which ascended by some easier plane. Keeping all to the right as the goose girl directed, I found a chapel like a shrine.

It was locked. Through the latticed door I could see an altar, whereunder the last Du Plessy who had come to rest there, doubtless lay with his kin.

I sat down on one of the benches under the trees. The ache within me went deep. But all that sunny hillcrest seemed brightened by the marquis. It was cheerful as his smile. "Let us have a gla.s.s of wine and enjoy the sun," he said in the breeze flowing around his chapel. "And do you hear that little citizen of the tree trunks, Lazarre?"

The perfume of the woods rose invisibly to a cloudless sky. My last tryst with my friend was an hour in paradise's antechamber.

The light quick stepping of horses and their rattling harness brought Madame de Ferrier's carriage quickly around the curve fronting the chapel. Her presence was the one touch which the place lacked, and I forgot grief, shame, impatience at being found out in my trouble, and stood at her step with my hat in my hand.