Dross Part 21

"See," I said, opening the drawer of my writing table, "I have the money here. All is prepared, and in England I have arranged for your reception at a house which, if it is not palatial, will at all events be comfortable."

"Where is the house?"

"At a place called Hopton, on the border of Suffolk and Norfolk. It stands empty and quite ready for your reception. The servants are there."

"And the rent?" said she, without looking at me. "Is that within our means?"

"The rent will be almost nominal," I replied. "That can be arranged without difficulty. Many of our English country houses are now neglected. It is the fas.h.i.+on for our women, Madame, to despise a country life. They prefer to wear out themselves and their best attributes on the pavement."

Madame smiled.

"Everything is so strong about you," she said; "especially your prejudices. And this house to which we are to be sent--is it large? Is it well situated? May one inquire?"

I could not understand her eyes, which were averted with something like a smile.

"It is one of the best situated houses in England," I answered, unguardedly, and Madame laughed outright.

"My friend," she said, "one reason why I like you is that you are not at all clever. This house is yours, and you are offering Lucille and me a home in our time of trouble--and I accept."

She laid her hand, as light as a leaf, on my shoulder, and when I looked up she was gone.

On the morning of Sat.u.r.day, September 3d, I received a note from John Turner.

"If you have not gone--go!" he wrote.

Our departure had been fixed for a later date, but the yacht of an English friend had been lying in the port of Fecamp at my disposal for some days. We embarked there the same evening, having taken train at the St. Lazare station within two hours of the receipt of John Turner's warning. The streets of Paris, as we drove through them, were singularly quiet, and men pa.s.sing their friends on the pavement nodded in silence, without exchanging other greeting. Hope seemed at last to have folded her wings and fled from the bright city. Some indefinable knowledge of coming catastrophe hovered over all.

It was a quiet sunset that clothed sea and sky with a golden splendour as we steamed out of Fecamp harbour that evening. I walked on the deck of the trim yacht with its captain until a late hour, and looked my last on the white cliffs and headlands of the doomed land about midnight--the hour at which the news was spreading over France, as black, swift and terrible as night itself, that hope was dead, that the whole army had been captured at Sedan, and the Emperor himself made prisoner. All this, however, we did not learn until we landed in England, although I have no doubt that John Turner knew it when he gave us so sharp a warning.

The weather was favourable to us, and the ladies came on deck the next morning in a calm sea as we sped past the North Foreland between the Goodwin Lights.h.i.+ps and the land. It was a lovely morning, and the sea all stripes of deep blue and green, and even yellow where the great sand banks of the Thames estuary lay beneath the rippled surface.

Lucille thought but little of England, as she judged it from the tame bluffs of Thanet.

"Are these the famous white cliffs of England?" she said to the captain, for she rarely addressed herself unnecessarily to me. "Why they are but one quarter of the height of those of St. Valery that I saw from the cabin window last night."

The captain, a simple man, sought to prove that England had counterbalancing advantages. He knew not that in certain humours a woman will find fault with anything. I thought that Mademoiselle took exception to the poor cliffs because they were those of my native land.

Madame proved more amenable to reason, however, and the captain, whose knowledge of French was not great, made an easier convert of her than of Lucille, who spoke English prettily enough, while her mother knew only the one tongue.

"There is bad weather coming," said the captain to me later in the day. "And I wish the tide served for Lowestoft harbour earlier than ten o'clock."

We anch.o.r.ed just astern of the coast-service gunboat, and a few hundred yards south of the pier at Lowestoft, awaiting the rise of the tide. At eleven o'clock we moved in, and pa.s.sing through the dock into the river, anch.o.r.ed there for the night. I gave Madame the choice of pa.s.sing the night on board and going ash.o.r.e to the hotel, as it was too late to drive to Hopton. She elected to remain on board.

As ill fortune would have it, the evil weather foreseen by the captain came upon us in the night, and daylight next morning showed a grey and hopeless sea, with lowering clouds and a slantwise rain driving across all. The tide was low when the ladies came on deck, and the muddy banks of the river looked dismal enough, while the flat meadowland stretched away on all sides into a dim and mournful perspective of mist and rain.

The Hopton carriage was awaiting us at the landing-stage, and to those unaccustomed to such work the landing in a small boat no doubt presented difficulties and dangers of which we men took no account.

The streets of Lowestoft were sloppy and half-deserted as we drove through them. A few fishermen in their oilskins seemed to emphasise the wetness and dismalness of England as they hurried down to the harbour in their great sea-boots. On the uplands a fine drizzle veiled the landscape, and showed the gnarled and spa.r.s.e trees to small advantage.

Lucille sat with close-pressed lips and looked out of the streaming windows. There were unshed tears in her eyes, and I grimly realised the futility of human effort. All my plans had been frustrated by a pa.s.sing rain.

At home, however, I found all comfortable enough, and fires alight in the hall and princ.i.p.al rooms.

It was late in the day that I came upon Lucille alone in the drawing-room. She was looking out of the window across the bleak table-land to the sea.

"I am sorry, Mademoiselle," I said, suddenly conscious of the stiff bareness of my ancestral home, "that things are not brighter. I have done my best."

"Thank you," she said, and there was still resentment in her voice.

"You have been very kind."

She stood for a few moments in silence, and then turning flashed an angry glance at me.

"I do not know who const.i.tuted you our protector," she said scornfully.

"Fate, Mademoiselle."

Chapter XVI

Exile

"Il y a donc des malheurs tellement bien caches que ceux qui en sont la cause, ne les devinent meme pas."

The first to show kindness to the ladies exiled at Hopton was Isabella Gayerson, who, in response to a letter from the rightful owner of the old manor house, called on Madame de Clericy. Isabella's pale face, her thin-lipped, determined mouth and reserved glance seem to have made no very favourable impression on Madame, who indeed wrote of her as a disappointed woman, nursing some sorrow or grievance in her heart.

With Lucille, however, Isabella speedily inaugurated a friends.h.i.+p, to which Lucille's knowledge of English no doubt contributed largely, for Isabella knew but little French.

"Lucille," wrote Madame to me, for I had returned to London in order to organise a more active pursuit of Charles Miste, "Lucille admires your friend Miss Gayerson immensely, and says that the English _demoiselles_ suggest to her a fine and delicate porcelain--but it seems to me," Madame added, "that the grain is a hard one."

So rapid was the progress of this friends.h.i.+p that the two girls often met either at Hopton or at Little Corton, two miles away, where Isabella, now left an orphan, lived with an elderly aunt for her companion.

Girls, it would appear, possess a thousand topics of common interest, a hundred small matters of mutual confidence, which conduce to a greater intimacy than men and boys ever achieve. In a few weeks Lucille and Isabella were at Christian names, and sworn allies, though any knowing aught of them would have inclined to the suspicion that here, at all events, the confidences were not mutual, for Isabella Gayerson was a woman in a thousand in her power of keeping a discreet counsel. I, who have been intimate with her since childhood, can boast of no great knowledge to this day of her inward hopes, thoughts and desires.

The meetings, it would appear, took place more often at Hopton than in Isabella's home.

"I like Hopton," she said to Lucille one day, in her quiet and semi-indifferent way. "I have many pleasant a.s.sociations in this house. The squire was always kind to me."

"And I suppose you played in these sleepy old rooms as a child," said Lucille, looking round at the portraits of dead and gone Howards, whose mistakes were now forgotten. "Yes."

Lucille waited, but the conversation seemed to end there naturally.

Isabella had nothing more to tell of those bygone days. And, unlike other women, when she had nothing to say she remained silent.

"Did you know Mr. Howard's mother?" asked Lucille presently. "I have often wondered what sort of woman she must have been."

"I did not know her," was the answer, made more openly. It was only in respect to herself that Isabella cultivated reticence. It is so easy to be candid about one's neighbour's affairs. "Neither did he--it was a great misfortune."