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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Battle Of The Strong, by G. Parker, v4
+#60 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+Title: The Battle Of The Strong [A Romance of Two Kingdoms], Volume 4.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6233]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 10, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BATTLE OF THE STRONG, PARKER, V4 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG
+
+[A ROMANCE OF TWO KINGDOMS]
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 4.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+With what seemed an unnecessary boldness Detricand slept that night at
+the inn, "The Golden Crown," in the town of Bercy: a Royalist of the
+Vendee exposing himself to deadly peril in a town sworn to alliance with
+the Revolutionary Government.  He knew that the town, even the inn, might
+be full of spies; but one other thing he also knew: the innkeeper of "The
+Golden Crown" would not betray him, unless he had greatly changed since
+fifteen years ago.  Then they had been friends, for his uncle of
+Vaufontaine had had a small estate in Bercy itself, in ironical
+proximity to the castle.
+
+He walked boldly into the inn parlour.  There were but four men in the
+room--the landlord, two stout burghers, and Frange Pergot, the porter of
+the castle, who had lost no time carrying his news: not to betray his old
+comrade in escapade, but to tell a chosen few, Royalists under the rose,
+that he had seen one of those servants of God, an officer of the Vendee.
+
+At sight of the white badge with the red cross on Detricand's coat, the
+four stood up and answered his greeting with devout respect; and he had
+speedy assurance that in this inn he was safe from betrayal.  Presently
+he learned that three days hence a meeting of the States of Bercy was to
+be held for setting the seal upon the Duke's formal adoption of Philip,
+and to execute a deed of succession.  It was deemed certain that, ere
+this, the officer sent to England would have returned with Philip's
+freedom and King George's licence to accept the succession in the duchy.
+From interest in these matters alone Detricand would not have remained at
+Bercy, but he thought to use the time for secretly meeting officers of
+the duchy likely to favour the cause of the Royalists.
+
+During these three days of waiting he heard with grave concern a
+rumour that the great meeting of the States would be marked by Philip's
+betrothal with the Comtesse Chantavoine.  He cared naught for the
+succession, but there was ever with him the remembrance of Guida
+Landresse de Landresse, and what touched Philip d'Avranche he had come
+to associate with her.  Of the true relations between Guida and Philip
+he knew nothing, but from that last day in Jersey he did know that Philip
+had roused in her emotions, perhaps less vital than love but certainly
+less equable than friendship.
+
+Now in his fear that Guida might suffer, the more he thought of the
+Comtesse Chantavoine as the chosen wife of Philip the more it troubled
+him.  He could not shake off oppressive thoughts concerning Guida and
+this betrothal.  They interwove themselves through all his secret
+business with the Royalists of Bercy.  For his own part, he would
+have gone far and done much to shield her from injury.  He had seen and
+known in her something higher than Philip might understand--a simple
+womanliness, a profound depth of character.  His pledge to her had been
+the key-note of his new life.  Some day, if he lived and his cause
+prospered, he would go back to Jersey--too late perhaps to tell her what
+was in his heart, but not too late to tell her the promise had been kept.
+
+It was a relief when the morning of the third day came, bright and
+joyous, and he knew that before the sun went down he should be on his way
+back to Saumur.
+
+His friend the innkeeper urged him not to attend the meeting of the
+States of Bercy, lest he should be recognised by spies of government.
+He was, however, firm in his will to go, but he exchanged his coat with
+the red cross for one less conspicuous.
+
+With this eventful morn came the news that the envoy to England had
+returned with Philip's freedom by exchange of prisoners, and with the
+needful licence from King George.  But other news too was carrying
+through the town: the French Government, having learned of the Duke's
+intentions towards Philip, had despatched envoys from Paris to forbid the
+adoption and deed of succession.
+
+Though the Duke would have defied them, it behoved him to end the matter,
+if possible, before these envoys' arrival.  The States therefore was
+hurriedly convened two hours before the time appointed, and the race
+began between the Duke and the emissaries of the French Government.
+
+It was a perfect day, and as the brilliant procession wound down the
+great rock from the castle, in ever-increasing, glittering line, the
+effect was mediaeval in its glowing splendour.  All had been ready for
+two days, and the general enthusiasm had seized upon the occasion with an
+adventurous picturesqueness, in keeping with this strange elevation of a
+simple British captain to royal estate.  This buoyant, clear-faced,
+stalwart figure had sprung suddenly out of the dark into the garish light
+of sovereign place, and the imagination of the people had been touched.
+He was so genial too, so easy-mannered, this d'Avranche of Jersey, whose
+genealogy had been posted on a hundred walls and carried by a thousand
+mouths through the principality.  As Philip rode past on the left of the
+exulting Duke, the crowds cheered him wildly.  Only on the faces of Comte
+Carignan Damour and his friends was discontent, and they must perforce be
+still.  Philip himself was outwardly calm, with that desperate quiet
+which belongs to the most perilous, most adventurous achieving.  Words he
+had used many years ago in Jersey kept ringing in his ears--"'Good-bye,
+Sir Philip'--I'll be more than that some day."
+
+The Assembly being opened, in a breathless silence the Governor-General
+of the duchy read aloud the licence of the King of England for Philip
+d'Avranche, an officer in his navy, to assume the honours to be conferred
+upon him by the Duke and the States of Bercy.  Then, by command of the
+Duke, the President of the States read aloud the new order of succession:
+
+"1.  To the Hereditary Prince Leopold John and his heirs male; in default
+of which to
+
+"2.  The Prince successor, Philip d'Avranche and his heirs male; in
+default of which to
+
+"3.  The heir male of the House of Vaufontaine."  Afterwards came reading
+of the deed of gift by which the Duke made over to Prince Philip certain
+possessions in the province of d'Avranche.  To all this the assent of
+Prince Leopold John had been formally secured.  After the Assembly and
+the chief officers of the duchy should have ratified these documents and
+the Duke signed them, they were to be enclosed in a box with three locks
+and deposited with the Sovereign Court at Bercy.  Duplicates were also to
+be sent to London and registered in the records of the College of Arms.
+Amid great enthusiasm, the States, by unanimous vote, at once ratified
+the documents.  The one notable dissentient was the Intendant, Count
+Carignan Damour, the devout ally of the French Government.  It was he who
+had sent Fouche word concerning Philip's adoption; it was also he who had
+at last, through his spies, discovered Detricand's presence in the town,
+and had taken action thereupon.  In the States, however, he had no vote,
+and wisdom kept him silent, though he was watchful for any chance to
+delay events against the arrival of the French envoys.
+
+They should soon be here, and, during the proceedings in the States, he
+watched the doors anxiously.  Every minute that passed made him more
+restless, less hopeful.  He had a double motive in preventing this new
+succession.  With Philip as adopted son and heir there would be fewer
+spoils of office; with Philip as duke there would be none at all, for the
+instinct of distrust and antipathy was mutual.  Besides, as a Republican,
+he looked for his reward from Fouche in good time.
+
+Presently it was announced by the President that the signatures to the
+acts of the States would be set in private.  Thereupon, with all the
+concourse standing, the Duke, surrounded by the law, military, and civil
+officers of the duchy, girded upon Philip the jewelled sword which had
+been handed down in the House of d'Avranche from generation to
+generation.  The open function being thus ended, the people were enjoined
+to proceed at once to the cathedral, where a Te Deum would be sung.
+
+The public then retired, leaving the Duke and a few of the highest
+officials of the duchy to formally sign and seal the deeds.  When the
+outer doors were closed, one unofficial person remained--Comte Detricand
+de Tournay, of the House of Vaufontaine.  Leaning against a pillar, he
+stood looking calmly at the group surrounding the Duke at the great
+council-table.
+
+Suddenly the Duke turned to a door at the right of the President's chair,
+and, opening it, bowed courteously to some one beyond.  An instant
+afterwards there entered the Comtesse Chantavoine, with her uncle the
+Marquis Grandjon-Larisse, an aged and feeble but distinguished figure.
+They advanced towards the table, the lady on the Duke's arm, and Philip,
+saluting them gravely, offered the Marquis a chair.  At first the Marquis
+declined it, but the Duke pressed him, and in the subsequent proceedings
+he of all the number was seated.
+
+Detricand apprehended the meaning of the scene.  This was the lady whom
+the Duke had chosen as wife for the new Prince.  The Duke had invited the
+Comtesse to witness the final act which was to make Philip d'Avranche his
+heir in legal fact as by verbal proclamation; not doubting that the
+romantic nature of the incident would impress her.  He had even hoped
+that the function might be followed by a formal betrothal in the presence
+of the officials; and the situation might still have been critical for
+Philip had it not been for the pronounced reserve of the Comtesse
+herself.
+
+Tall, of gracious and stately carriage, the curious quietness of the face
+of the Comtesse would have been almost an unbecoming gravity were it not
+that the eyes, clear, dark, and strong, lightened it.  The mouth had a
+somewhat set sweetness, even as the face was somewhat fixed in its calm.
+In her bearing, in all her motions, there was a regal quality; yet, too,
+something of isolation, of withdrawal, in her self-possession and
+unruffled observation.  She seemed, to Detricand, a figure apart, a woman
+whose friendship would be everlasting, but whose love would be more an
+affectionate habit than a passion; and in whom devotion would be strong
+because devotion was the key-note of her nature.  The dress of a nun
+would have turned her into a saint; of a peasant would have made her a
+Madonna; of a Quaker, would have made her a dreamer and a devote; of a
+queen, would have made her benign yet unapproachable.  It struck him all
+at once as he looked, that this woman had one quality in absolute kinship
+with Guida Landresse--honesty of mind and nature; only with this young
+aristocrat the honesty would be without passion.  She had straight-
+forwardness, a firm if limited intellect, a clear-mindedness belonging
+somewhat to narrowness of outlook, but a genuine capacity for
+understanding the right and the wrong of things.  Guida, so Detricand
+thought, might break her heart and live on; this woman would break her
+heart and die: the one would grow larger through suffering, the other
+shrink to a numb coldness.
+
+So he entertained himself by these flashes of discernment, presently
+merged in wonderment as to what was in Philip's mind as he stood there,
+destiny hanging in that drop of ink at the point of the pen in the Duke's
+fingers!
+
+Philip was thinking of the destiny, but more than all else just now he
+was thinking of the woman before him and the issue to be faced by him
+regarding her.  His thoughts were not so clear nor so discerning as
+Detricand's.  No more than he understood Guida did he understand
+this clear-eyed, still, self-possessed woman.  He thought her cold,
+unsympathetic, barren of that glow which should set the pulses of a man
+like himself bounding.  It never occurred to him that these still waters
+ran deep, that to awaken this seemingly glacial nature, to kindle a fire
+on this altar, would be to secure unto his life's end a steady, enduring
+flame of devotion.  He revolted from her; not alone because he had a
+wife, but because the Comtesse chilled him, because with her, in any
+case, he should never be able to play the passionate lover as he had done
+with Guida; and with Philip not to be the passionate lover was to be no
+lover at all.  One thing only appealed to him: she was the Comtesse
+Chantavoine, a fitting consort in the eyes of the world for a sovereign
+duke.  He was more than a little carried off his feet by the marvel of
+the situation.  He could think of nothing quite clearly; everything was
+confused and shifting in his mind.
+
+The first words of the Duke were merely an informal greeting to his
+council and the high officers present.  He was about to speak further
+when some one drew his attention to Detricand's presence.  An order was
+given to challenge the stranger, but Detricand, without waiting for the
+approach of the officer, advanced towards the table, and, addressing the
+Duke, said:
+
+"The Duc de Bercy will not forbid the presence of his cousin, Detricand
+de Tournay, at this impressive ceremony?"
+
+The Duke, dumfounded, though he preserved an outward calm, could not
+answer for an instant.  Then with a triumphant, vindictive smile which
+puckered his yellow cheeks like a wild apple, he said:
+
+"The Comte de Tournay is welcome to behold an end of the ambitions of
+the Vaufontaines."  He looked towards Philip with an exulting pride.
+"Monsieur le Comte is quite right," he added, turning to his council--
+"he may always claim the privileges of a relative of the Bercys; but the
+hospitality goes not beyond my house and my presence, and monsieur le
+comte will understand my meaning."
+
+At that moment Detricand caught the eye of Damour the Intendant, and he
+understood perfectly.  This man, the innkeeper had told him, was known to
+be a Revolutionary, and he felt he was in imminent danger.
+
+He came nearer, however, bowing to all present, and, making no reply to
+the Duke save a simple, "I thank your Highness," took a place near the
+council-table.
+
+The short ceremony of signing the deeds immediately followed.  A few
+formal questions were asked of Philip, to which he briefly replied, and
+afterwards he made the oath of allegiance to the Duke, with his hand upon
+the ancient sword of the d'Avranches.  These preliminaries ended, the
+Duke was just stooping to put his pen to the paper for signature, when
+the Intendant, as much to annoy Philip as still to stay the proceedings
+against the coming of Fouche's men, said:
+
+"It would appear that one question has been omitted in the formalities of
+this Court."  He paused dramatically.  He was only aiming a random shot;
+he would make the most of it.
+
+The Duke looked up perturbed, and said sharply: "What is that--what is
+that, monsieur?"
+
+"A form, monsieur le duc, a mere form.  Monsieur"--he bowed towards
+Philip politely--"monsieur is not already married?  There is no--"  He
+paused again.
+
+For an instant there was absolute stillness.  Philip had felt his heart
+give one great thump of terror: Did the Intendant know anything?  Did
+Detricand know anything.
+
+Standing rigid for a moment, his pen poised, the Duke looked sharply at
+the Intendant and then still more sharply at Philip.  The progress of
+that look had granted Philip an instant's time to recover his composure.
+He was conscious that the Comtesse Chantavoine had given a little start,
+and then had become quite still and calm.  Now her eyes were intently
+fixed upon him.
+
+He had, however, been too often in physical danger to lose his nerve at
+this moment.  The instant was big with peril; it was the turning point of
+his life, and he felt it.  His eyes dropped towards the spot of ink at
+the point of the pen the Duke held.  It fascinated him, it was destiny.
+
+He took a step nearer to the table, and, drawing himself up, looked his
+princely interlocutor steadily in the eyes.
+
+"Of course there is no marriage--no woman?" asked the Duke a little
+hoarsely, his eyes fastened on Philip's.  With steady voice Philip
+replied: "Of course, monsieur le duc."
+
+There was another stillness.  Some one sighed heavily.  It was the
+Comtesse Chantavoine.
+
+The next instant the Duke stooped, and wrote his signature three times
+hurriedly upon the deeds.
+
+A moment afterwards, Detricand was in the street, making towards "The
+Golden Crown."  As he hurried on he heard the galloping of horses ahead
+of him.  Suddenly some one plucked him by the arm from a doorway.
+
+"Quick--within!" said a voice.  It was that of the Duke's porter, Frange
+Pergot.  Without hesitation or a word, Detricand did as he was bid, and
+the door clanged to behind him.
+
+"Fouche's men are coming down the street; spies have betrayed you,"
+whispered Pergot.  "Follow me.  I will hide you till night, and then you
+must away."
+
+Pergot had spoken the truth.  But Detricand was safely hidden, and
+Fouche's men came too late to capture the Vendean chief or to forbid
+those formal acts which made Philip d'Avranche a prince.
+
+Once again at Saumur, a week later, Detricand wrote a long letter to
+Carterette Mattingley, in Jersey, in which he set forth these strange
+events at Bercy, and asked certain questions concerning Guida.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+Since the day of his secret marriage with Guida, Philip had been carried
+along in the gale of naval preparation and incidents of war as a leaf is
+borne onward by a storm--no looking back, to-morrow always the goal.  But
+as a wounded traveller nursing carefully his hurt seeks shelter from the
+scorching sun and the dank air, and travels by little stages lest he
+never come at all to friendly hostel, so Guida made her way slowly
+through the months of winter and of spring.
+
+In the past, it had been February to Guida because the yellow Lenten
+lilies grew on all the sheltered cotils; March because the periwinkle and
+the lords-and-ladies came; May when the cliffs were a blaze of golden
+gorse and the perfume thereof made all the land sweet as a honeycomb.
+
+Then came the other months, with hawthorn trees and hedges all in blow;
+the honeysuckle gladdening the doorways, the lilac in bloomy thickets;
+the ox-eyed daisy of Whitsuntide; the yellow rose of St. Brelade that
+lies down in the sand and stands up in the hedges; the "mergots" which,
+like good soldiers, are first in the field and last out of it; the
+unscented dog-violets, orchises and celandines; the osier beds, the ivy
+on every barn; the purple thrift in masses on the cliff; the sea-thistle
+in its glaucous green--"the laughter of the fields whose laugh was gold."
+And all was summer.
+
+Came a time thereafter, when the children of the poor gathered
+blackberries for preserves and home made wine; when the wild stock
+flowered in St. Ouen's Bay; when the bracken fern was gathered from every
+cotil, and dried for apple-storing, for bedding for the cherished cow,
+for back-rests for the veilles, and seats round the winter fire; when
+peaches, apricots, and nectarines made the walls sumptuous red and gold;
+when the wild plum and crab-apple flourished in secluded roadways, and
+the tamarisk dropped its brown pods upon the earth.  And all this was
+autumn.
+
+At last, when the birds of passage swept aloft, snipe and teal and
+barnacle geese, and the rains began; when the green lizard with its
+turquoise-blue throat vanished; when the Jersey crapaud was heard
+croaking no longer in the valleys and the ponds; and the cows were well
+blanketed--then winter had come again.
+
+Such was the association of seasons in Guida's mind until one day of a
+certain year, when for a few hours a man had called her his wife, and
+then had sailed away.  There was no log that might thereafter record the
+days and weeks unwinding the coils of an endless chain into that sea
+whither Philip had gone.
+
+Letters she had had, two letters, one in January, one in March.  How many
+times, when a Channel-packet came in, did she go to the doorway and watch
+for old Mere Rossignol, making the rounds with her han basket, chanting
+the names of those for whom she had letters; and how many times did she
+go back to the kitchen, choking down a sob!
+
+The first letter from Philip was at once a blessing and a blow; it was a
+reassurance and it was a misery.  It spoke of bread, as it were, yet
+offered a stone.  It eloquently, passionately told of his love; but it
+also told, with a torturing ease, that the Araminta was commissioned with
+sealed orders, and he did not know when he should see her nor when he
+should be able to write again.  War had been declared against France,
+and they might not touch a port nor have chance to send a letter by a
+homeward vessel for weeks, and maybe months.  This was painful, of
+course, but it was fate, it was his profession, and it could not be
+helped.  Of course--she must understand--he would write constantly,
+telling her, as through a kind of diary, what he was doing every day,
+and then when the chance came the big budget should go to her.
+
+A pain came to Guida's heart as she read the flowing tale of his buoyant
+love.  Had she been the man and he the woman, she could never have
+written so smoothly of "fate," and "profession," nor told of this
+separation with so complaisant a sorrow.  With her the words would have
+been wrenched forth from her heart, scarred into the paper with the
+bitterness of a spirit tried beyond enduring.
+
+With what enthusiasm did Philip, immediately after his heart-breaking
+news, write of what the war might do for him; what avenues of advancement
+it might open up, what splendid chances it would offer for success in his
+career!  Did he mean that to comfort her, she asked herself.  Did he mean
+it to divert her from the pain of the separation, to give her something
+to hope for?  She read the letter over and over again--yet no, she could
+not, though her heart was so willing, find that meaning in it.  It was
+all Philip, Philip full of hope, purpose, prowess, ambition.  Did he
+think--did he think that that could ease the pain, could lighten the dark
+day settling down on her?  Could he imagine that anything might
+compensate for his absence in the coming months, in this year of all
+years in her life?  His lengthened absence might be inevitable, it might
+be fate, but could he not see the bitter cruelty of it?  He had said that
+he would be back with her again in two months; and now--ah, did he not
+know!
+
+As the weeks came and went again she felt that indeed he did not know--
+or care, maybe.
+
+Some natures cling to beliefs long after conviction has been shattered.
+These are they of the limited imagination, the loyal, the pertinacious,
+and the affectionate, the single-hearted children of habit; blind where
+they do not wish to see, stubborn where their inclinations lie,
+unamenable to reason, wholly held by legitimate obligations.
+
+But Guida was not of these.  Her brain and imagination were as strong as
+her affections.  Her incurable honesty was the deepest thing in her; she
+did not know even how to deceive herself.  As her experience deepened
+under the influence of a sorrow which still was joy, and a joy that still
+was sorrow, her vision became acute and piercing.  Her mind was like some
+kaleidoscope.  Pictures of things, little and big, which had happened to
+her in her life, flashed by her inner vision in furious procession.  It
+was as if, in the photographic machinery of the brain, some shutter had
+slipped from its place, and a hundred orderless and ungoverned pictures,
+loosed from natural restraint, rushed by.
+
+Five months had gone since Philip had left her: two months since
+she had received his second letter, months of complexity of feeling;
+of tremulousness of discovery; of hungry eagerness for news of the war;
+of sudden little outbursts of temper in her household life--a new thing
+in her experience; of passionate touches of tenderness towards her
+grandfather; of occasional biting comments in the conversations between
+the Sieur and the Chevalier, causing both gentlemen to look at each other
+in silent amaze; of as marked lapses into listless disregard of any talk
+going on around her.
+
+She had been used often to sit still, doing nothing, in a sort of
+physical content, as the Sieur and his visitors talked; now her hands
+were always busy, knitting, sewing, or spinning, the steady gaze upon the
+work showing that her thoughts were far away.  Though the Chevalier and
+her grandfather vaguely noted these changes, they as vaguely set them
+down to her growing womanhood.  In any case, they held it was not for
+them to comment upon a woman or upon a woman's ways.  And a girl like
+Guida was an incomprehensible being, with an orbit and a system all her
+own; whose sayings and doings were as little to be reduced to their
+understandings as the vagaries of any star in the Milky Way or the
+currents in St. Michael's Basin.
+
+One evening she sat before the fire thinking of Philip.  Her grandfather
+had retired earlier than usual.  Biribi lay asleep on the veille.  There
+was no sound save the ticking of the clock on the mantel above her head,
+the dog's slow breathing, the snapping of the log on the fire, and a soft
+rush of heat up the chimney.  The words of Philip's letters, from which
+she had extracted every atom of tenderness they held, were always in her
+ears.  At last one phrase kept repeating itself to her like some
+plaintive refrain, torturing in its mournful suggestion.  It was this:
+"But you see, beloved, though I am absent from you I shall have such
+splendid chances to get on.  There's no limit to what this war may do for
+me."
+
+Suddenly Guida realised how different was her love from Philip's, how
+different her place in his life from his place in her life.  She reasoned
+with herself, because she knew that a man's life was work in the world,
+and that work and ambition were in his bones and in his blood, had been
+carried down to him through centuries of industrious, ambitious
+generations of men: that men were one race and women were another.  A man
+was bound by the conditions governing the profession by which he earned
+his bread and butter and played his part in the world, while striving to
+reach the seats of honour in high places.  He must either live by the
+law, fulfil to the letter his daily duties in the business of life, or
+drop out of the race; while a woman, in the presence of man's immoderate
+ambition, with bitterness and tears, must learn to pray, "O Lord, have
+mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law."
+
+Suddenly the whole thing resolved itself in Guida's mind, and her
+thinking came to a full stop.  She understood now what was the right and
+what the wrong; and, child as she was in years, woman in thought and
+experience, yielding to the impulse of the moment, she buried her face in
+her hands and burst into tears.
+
+"O Philip, Philip, Philip," she sobbed aloud, "it was not right of you
+to marry me; it was wicked of you to leave me!"  Then in her mind she
+carried on the impeachment and reproach.  If he had married her openly
+and left her at once, it would have been hard to bear, but in the
+circumstances it might have been right.  If he had married her secretly
+and left her at the altar, so keeping the vow he had made her when she
+promised to become his wife, that might have been pardonable.  But to
+marry her as he did, and then, breaking his solemn pledge, leave her--it
+was not right in her eyes; and if not right in the eyes of her who loved
+him, in whose would it be right?
+
+To these definitions she had come at last.
+
+It is an eventful moment, a crucial ordeal for a woman, when she forces
+herself to see the naked truth concerning the man she has loved, yet the
+man who has wronged her.  She is born anew in that moment: it may be to
+love on, to blind herself, and condone and defend, so lowering her own
+moral tone; or to congeal in heart, become keener in intellect, scornful
+and bitter with her own sex and merciless towards the other, indifferent
+to blame and careless of praise, intolerant, judging all the world by her
+own experience, incredulous of any true thing.  Or again she may become
+stronger, sadder, wiser; condoning nothing, minimising nothing, deceiving
+herself in nothing, and still never forgiving at least one thing--the
+destruction of an innocent faith and a noble credulity; seeing clearly
+the whole wrong; with a strong intelligence measuring perfectly the
+iniquity; but out of a largeness of nature and by virtue of a high sense
+of duty, devoting her days to the salvation of a man's honour, to the
+betterment of one weak or wicked nature.
+
+Of these last would have been Guida.
+
+"O Philip, Philip, you have been wicked to me!" she sobbed.
+
+Her tears fell upon the stone hearth, and the fire dried them.  Every
+teardrop was one girlish feeling and emotion gone, one bright fancy, one
+tender hope vanished.  She was no longer a girl.  There were troubles and
+dangers ahead of her, but she must now face them dry-eyed and alone.
+
+In his second letter Philip had told her to announce the marriage, and
+said that he would write to her grandfather explaining all, and also to
+the Rev. Lorenzo Dow.  She had waited and watched for that letter to her
+grandfather, but it had not come.  As for Mr. Dow, he was a prisoner with
+the French; and he had never given her the marriage certificate.
+
+There was yet another factor in the affair.  While the island was agog
+over Mr. Dow's misfortune, there had been a bold robbery at St. Michael's
+Rectory of the strong-box containing the communion plate, the parish
+taxes for the year, and--what was of great moment to at least one person
+--the parish register of deaths, baptisms, and marriages.  Thus it was
+that now no human being in Jersey could vouch that Guida had been
+married.
+
+Yet these things troubled her little.  How easily could Philip set all
+right!  If he would but come back--that at first was her only thought;
+for what matter a ring, or any proof or proclamation without Philip!
+
+It did not occur to her at first that all these things were needed to
+save her from shame in the eyes of the world.  If she had thought of them
+apprehensively, she would have said to herself, how easy to set all right
+by simply announcing the marriage!  And indeed she would have done so
+when war was declared and Philip received his new command, but that she
+had wished the announcement to come from him.  Well, that would come in
+any case when his letter to her grandfather arrived.  No doubt it had
+missed the packet by which hers came, she thought.
+
+But another packet and yet another arrived; and still there was no letter
+from Philip for the Sieur de Mauprat.  Winter had come, and spring had
+gone, and now summer was at hand.  Haymaking was beginning, the wild
+strawberries were reddening among the clover, and in her garden, apples
+had followed the buds on the trees beneath which Philip had told his
+fateful tale of love.
+
+At last a third letter arrived, but it brought little joy to her heart.
+It was extravagant in terms of affection, but somehow it fell short of
+the true thing, for its ardour was that of a mind preoccupied, and
+underneath all ran a current of inherent selfishness.  It delighted in
+the activity of his life, it was full of hope, of promise of happiness
+for them both in the future, but it had no solicitude for Guida in the
+present.  It chilled her heart--so warm but a short season ago--that
+Philip to whom she had once ascribed strength, tenderness, profound
+thoughtfulness, should concern himself so little in the details of her
+life.  For the most part, his letters seemed those of an ardent lover who
+knew his duty and did it gladly, but with a self-conscious and flowing
+eloquence, costing but small strain of feeling.
+
+In this letter he was curious to know what the people in Jersey said
+about their marriage.  He had written to Lorenzo Dow and her grandfather,
+he said, but had heard afterwards that the vessel carrying the letters
+had been taken by a French privateer; and so they had not arrived in
+Jersey.  But of course she had told her grandfather and all the island of
+the ceremony performed at St. Michael's.  He was sending her fifty
+pounds, his first contribution to their home; and, the war over, a pretty
+new home she certainly should have.  He would write to her grandfather
+again, though this day there was no time to do so.
+
+Guida realised now that she must announce the marriage at once.  But what
+proofs of it had she?  There was the ring Philip had given her, inscribed
+with their names; but she was sophisticated enough to know that this
+would not be adequate evidence in the eyes of her Jersey neighbours.  The
+marriage register of St. Michael's, with its record, was stolen, and that
+proof was gone.  Lastly, there were Philip's letters; but no--a thousand
+times no!--she would not show Philip's letters to any human being; even
+the thought of it hurt her delicacy, her self-respect.  Her heart burned
+with fresh bitterness to think that there had been a secret marriage.
+How hard it was at this distance of time to tell the world the tale, and
+to be forced to prove it by Philip's letters.  No, no, in spite of all,
+she could not do it--not yet.  She would still wait the arrival of his
+letter to her grandfather.  If it did not come soon, then she must be
+brave and tell her story.
+
+She went to the Vier Marchi less now.  Also fewer folk stood gossiping
+with her grandfather in the Place du Vier Prison, or by the well at the
+front door--so far he had not wondered why.  To be sure, Maitresse
+Aimable came oftener; but, since that notable day at Sark, Guida had
+resolutely avoided reference, however oblique, to Philip and herself.
+In her dark days the one tenderly watchful eye upon her was that of the
+egregiously fat old woman called the "Femme de Ballast," whose thick
+tongue clave to the roof of her mouth, whose outer attractions were so
+meagre that even her husband's chief sign of affection was to pull her
+great toe, passing her bed of a morning to light the fire.
+
+Carterette Mattingley also came, but another friend who had watched over
+Guida for years before Philip appeared in the Place du Vier Prison never
+entered her doorway now.  Only once or twice since that day on the
+Ecrehos, so fateful to them both, had Guida seen Ranulph.  He had
+withdrawn to St. Aubin's Bay, where his trade of ship-building was
+carried on, and having fitted up a small cottage, lived a secluded life
+with his father there.  Neither of them appeared often in St. Heliers,
+and they were seldom or never seen in the Vier Marchi.
+
+Carterette saw Ranulph little oftener than did Guida, but she knew what
+he was doing, being anxious to know, and every one's business being every
+one else's business in Jersey.  In the same way Ranulph knew of Guida.
+What Carterette was doing Ranulph was not concerned to know, and so knew
+little; and Guida knew and thought little of how Ranulph fared: which was
+part of the selfishness of love.
+
+But one day Carterette received a letter from France which excited her
+greatly, and sent her off hot-foot to Guida.  In the same hour Ranulph
+heard a piece of hateful gossip which made him fell to the ground the man
+who told him, and sent him with white face, and sick, yet indignant
+heart, to the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+Guida was sitting on the veille reading an old London paper she had
+bought of the mate of the packet from Southampton.  One page contained an
+account of the execution of Louis XVI; another reported the fight between
+the English thirty-six gun frigate Araminta and the French Niobe.  The
+engagement had been desperate, the valiant Araminta having been fought,
+not alone against odds as to her enemy, but against the irresistible
+perils of a coast upon which the Admiralty charts gave cruelly imperfect
+information.  To the Admiralty we owed the fact, the journal urged, that
+the Araminta was now at the bottom of the sea, and its young commander
+confined in a French fortress, his brave and distinguished services lost
+to the country.  Nor had the government yet sought to lessen the injury
+by arranging a cartel for the release of the unfortunate commander.
+
+The Araminta!  To Guida the letters of the word seemed to stand out from
+the paper like shining hieroglyphs on a misty grey curtain.  The rest of
+the page was resolved into a filmy floating substance, no more tangible
+than the ashy skeleton on which writing still lives when the paper itself
+has been eaten by flame, and the flame swallowed by the air.
+
+Araminta--this was all her eyes saw, that familiar name in the flaring
+handwriting of the Genius of Life, who had scrawled her destiny in that
+one word.
+
+Slowly the monstrous ciphers faded from the grey hemisphere of space, and
+she saw again the newspaper in her trembling fingers, the kitchen into
+which the sunlight streamed from the open window, the dog Biribi basking
+in the doorway.  That living quiet which descends upon a house when the
+midday meal and work are done came suddenly home to her, in contrast to
+the turmoil in her mind and being.
+
+So that was why Philip had not written to her!  While her heart was daily
+growing more bitter against him, he had been fighting his vessel against
+great odds, and at last had been shipwrecked and carried off a prisoner.
+A strange new understanding took possession of her.  Her life suddenly
+widened.  She realised all at once how the eyes of the whole world might
+be fixed upon a single ship, a few cannon, and some scores of men.  The
+general of a great army leading tens of thousands into the clash of
+battle--that had been always within her comprehension; but this was
+almost miraculous, this sudden projection of one ship and her commander
+upon the canvas of fame.  Philip had left her, unknown save to a few.
+With the nations turned to see, he had made a gallant and splendid fight,
+and now he was a prisoner in a French fortress.
+
+This then was why her grandfather had received no letter from him
+concerning the marriage.  Well, now she must speak for herself; she must
+announce it.  Must she show Philip's letters?--No, no, she could not....
+Suddenly a new suggestion came to her: there was one remaining proof.
+Since no banns had been published, Philip must have obtained a license
+from the Dean of the island, and he would have a record of it.  All she
+had to do now was to get a copy of this record--but no, a license to
+marry was no proof of marriage; it was but evidence of intention.
+
+Still, she would go to the Dean this very moment.
+
+It was not right that she should wait longer: indeed, in waiting so long
+she had already done great wrong to herself--and to Philip perhaps.
+
+She rose from the veille with a sense of relief.  No more of this
+secrecy, making her innocence seem guilt; no more painful dreams of
+punishment for some intangible crime; no starting if she heard a sudden
+footstep; no more hurried walk through the streets, looking neither to
+right nor to left; no more inward struggles wearing away her life.
+
+To-morrow--to-morrow--no, this very night, her grandfather and one other,
+even Maitresse Aimable, should know all; and she should sleep quietly--
+oh, so quietly to-night!
+
+Looking into a mirror on the wall--it had been a gift from her
+grandfather--she smiled at herself.  Why, how foolish of her it had been
+to feel so much and to imagine terrible things!  Her eyes were shining
+now, and her hair, catching the sunshine from the window, glistened like
+burnished copper.  She turned to see how it shone on the temple and the
+side of her head.  Philip had praised her hair.  Her look lingered for a
+moment placidly on herself-then she started suddenly.  A wave of feeling,
+a shiver, passed through her, her brow gathered, she flushed deeply.
+
+Turning away from the mirror, she went and sat down again on the edge of
+the veille.  Her mind had changed.  She would go to the Dean's--but not
+till it was dark.  She suddenly thought it strange that the Dean had
+never said anything about the license.  Why, again, perhaps he had.  How
+should she know what gossip was going on in the town!  But no, she was
+quick to feel, and if there had been gossip she would have felt it in the
+manner of her neighbours.  Besides, gossip as to a license to marry was
+all on the right side.  She sighed--she had sighed so often of late--to
+think what a tangle it all was, of how it would be smoothed out tomorrow,
+of what--
+
+There was a click of the garden-gate, a footstep on the walk, a half-
+growl from Biribi, and the face of Carterette Mattingley appeared in the
+kitchen doorway.  Seeing Guida seated on the veille, she came in quickly,
+her dancing dark eyes heralding great news.
+
+"Don't get up, ma couzaine," she said, "please no.  Sit just there, and
+I'll sit beside you.  Ah, but I have the most wonderfuls!"
+
+Carterette was out of breath.  She had hurried here from her home.  As
+she said herself, her two feet weren't in one shoe on the way, and that
+with her news made her quiver with excitement.
+
+At first, bursting with mystery, she could do no more than sit and look
+in Guida's face.  Carterette was quick of instinct in her way, but yet
+she had not seen any marked change in her friend during the past few
+months.  She had been so busy thinking of her own particular secret that
+she was not observant of others.  At times she met Ranulph, and then she
+was uplifted, to be at once cast down again; for she saw that his old
+cheerfulness was gone, that a sombreness had settled on him.  She
+flattered herself, however, that she could lighten his gravity if she had
+the right and the good opportunity; the more so that he no longer visited
+the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison.
+
+This drew her closer to Guida also, for, in truth, Carterette had no
+loftiness of nature.  Like most people, she was selfish enough to hold a
+person a little dearer for not standing in her own especial light.  Long
+ago she had shrewdly guessed that Guida's interest lay elsewhere than
+with Ranulph, and a few months back she had fastened upon Philip as the
+object of her favour.  That seemed no weighty matter, for many sailors
+had made love to Carterette in her time, and knowing it was here to-day
+and away to-morrow with them, her heart had remained untouched.  Why then
+should she think Guida would take the officer seriously where she herself
+held the sailor lightly?  But at the same time she felt sure that what
+concerned Philip must interest Guida, she herself always cared to hear
+the fate of an old admirer, and this was what had brought her to the
+cottage to-day.
+
+"Guess who's wrote me a letter?" she asked of Guida, who had taken up
+some sewing, and was now industriously regarding the stitches.
+
+At Carterette's question, Guida looked up and said with a smile, "Some
+one you like, I see."
+
+Carterette laughed gaily.  "Ba su, I should think I did--in a way.  But
+what's his name?  Come, guess, Ma'm'selle Dignity."
+
+"Eh ben, the fairy godmother," answered Guida, trying not to show an
+interest she felt all too keenly; for nowadays it seemed to her that all
+news should be about Philip.  Besides, she was gaining time and preparing
+herself for--she knew not what.
+
+"O my grief!" responded the brown-eyed elf, kicking off a red slipper,
+and thrusting her foot into it again, "never a fairy godmother had I,
+unless it's old Manon Moignard the witch:
+
+             "'Sas, son, bileton,
+               My grand'methe a-fishing has gone:
+               She'll gather the fins to scrape my jowl,
+               And ride back home on a barnyard fowl!'
+
+"Nannin, ma'm'selle, 'tis plain to be seen you can't guess what a
+cornfield grows besides red poppies."  Laughing in sheer delight at the
+mystery she was making, she broke off again into a whimsical nursery
+rhyme:
+
+                  "'Coquelicot, j'ai mal au de
+                    Coquelicot, qu'est qui l'a fait?
+                    Coquelicot, ch'tai mon valet.'"
+
+She kicked off the red slipper again.  Flying half-way across the room,
+it alighted on the table, and a little mud from the heel dropped on the
+clean scoured surface.  With a little moue of mockery, she got slowly up
+and tiptoed across the floor, like a child afraid of being scolded.
+Gathering the dust carefully, and looking demurely askance at Guida the
+while, she tiptoed over again to the fireplace and threw it into the
+chimney.
+
+"Naughty Carterette," she said at herself with admiring reproach, as she
+looked in Guida's mirror, and added, glancing with farcical approval
+round the room, "and it all shines like peacock's feather, too!"
+
+Guida longed to snatch the letter from Carterette's hand and read it, but
+she only said calmly, though the words fluttered in her throat:
+
+"You're as gay as a chaffinch, Garcon Carterette."  Garcon Carterette!
+Instantly Carterette sobered down.  No one save Ranulph ever called her
+Garcon Carterette.  Guida used Ranulph's name for Carterette, knowing
+that it would change the madcap's mood.  Carterette, to hide a sudden
+flush, stooped and slowly put on her slipper.  Then she came back to the
+veille, and sat down again beside Guida, saying as she did so:
+
+"Yes, I'm gay as a chaffinch--me."
+
+She unfolded the letter slowly, and Guida stopped sewing, but
+mechanically began to prick the linen lying on her knee with the point
+of the needle.
+
+"Well," said Carterette deliberately, "this letter's from a pend'loque
+of a fellow--at least, we used to call him that--though if you come to
+think, he was always polite as mended porringer.  Often he hadn't two
+sous to rub against each other.  And--and not enough buttons for his
+clothes."
+
+Guida smiled.  She guessed whom Carterette meant.  "Has Monsieur
+Detricand more buttons now?" she asked with a little whimsical lift
+of the eyebrows.
+
+"Ah bidemme, yes, and gold too, all over him--like that!"  She made a
+quick sweeping gesture which would seem to make Detricand a very spangle
+of buttons.  "Come, what do you think--he's a general now.
+
+"A general!"  Instantly Guida thought of Philip and a kind of envy shot
+into her heart that this idler Detricand should mount so high in a few
+months--a man whose past had held nothing to warrant such success.  "A
+general--where?" she asked.
+
+"In the Vendee army, fighting for the new King of France--you know the
+rebels cut off the last King's head."
+
+At another time Guida's heart would have throbbed with elation,
+for the romance of that Vendee union of aristocrat and peasant fired her
+imagination; but she only said in the tongue of the people: "Ma fuifre,
+yes, I know!"
+
+Carterette was delighted to thus dole out her news, and get due reward of
+astonishment.  "And he's another name," she added.  "At least it's not
+another, he always had it, but he didn't call himself by it.  Pardi, he's
+more than the Chevalier; he's the Comte Detricand de Tournay--ah, then,
+believe me if you choose, there it is!"
+
+She pointed to the signature of the letter, and with a gush of eloquence
+explained how it all was about Detricand the vaurien and Detricand the
+Comte de Tournay.
+
+"Good riddance to Monsieur Savary dit Detricand, and good welcome to the
+Comte de Tournay," answered Guida, trying hard to humour Carterette, that
+she should sooner hear the news yet withheld.  "And what follows after?"
+
+Carterette was half sorry that her great moment had come.  She wished she
+could have linked out the suspense longer.  But she let herself be
+comforted by the anticipated effect of her "wonderfuls."
+
+"I'll tell you what comes after--ah, but see then what a news I have for
+you!  You know that Monsieur d'Avranche--well, what do you think has come
+to him?"
+
+Guida felt as if a monstrous hand had her heart in its grasp, crushing
+it.  Presentiment seized her.  Carterette was busy running over the pages
+of the letter, and did not notice her colourless face.  She had no
+thought that Guida had any vital interest in Philip, and ruthlessly,
+though unconsciously, she began to torture the young wife as few are
+tortured in this world.
+
+She read aloud Detricand's description of his visit to the Castle of
+Bercy, and of the meeting with Philip.  "'See what comes of a name!'"
+wrote Detricand.  "'Here was a poor prisoner whose ancestor, hundreds of
+years ago, may or mayn't have been a relative of the d'Avranches of
+Clermont, when a disappointed duke, with an eye open for heirs, takes a
+fancy to the good-looking face of the poor prisoner, and voila!  you have
+him whisked off to a palace, fed on milk and honey, and adopted into the
+family.  Then a pedigree is nicely grown on a summer day, and this fine
+young Jersey adventurer is found to be a green branch from the old root;
+and there's a great blare of trumpets, and the States of the duchy are
+called together to make this English officer a prince--and that's the
+Thousand and One Nights in Arabia, Ma'm'selle Carterette.'"
+
+Guida was sitting rigid and still.  In the slight pause Carterette made,
+a hundred confused torturing thoughts swam through her mind and presently
+floated into the succeeding sentences of the letter:
+
+"'As for me, I'm like Rabot's mare, I haven't time to laugh at my own
+foolishness.  I'm either up to my knees in grass or clay fighting
+Revolutionists, or I'm riding hard day and night till I'm round-backed
+like a wood-louse, to make up for all the good time I so badly lost in
+your little island.  You wouldn't have expected that, my friend with the
+tongue that stings, would you?  But then, Ma'm'selle of the red slippers,
+one is never butted save by a dishorned cow--as your father used to
+say."'
+
+Carterette paused again, saying in an aside: "That is M'sieu' all over,
+all so gay.  But who knows?  For he says, too, that the other day a-
+fighting Fontenay, five thousand of his men come across a cavalry as they
+run to take the guns that eat them up like cabbages, and they drop on
+their knees, and he drops with them, and they all pray to God to help
+them, while the cannon balls whiz-whiz over their heads.  And God did
+hear them, for they fell down flat when the guns was fired and the cannon
+balls never touched 'em."
+
+During this interlude, Guida, sick with anxiety, could scarcely sit
+still.  She began sewing again, though her fingers trembled so she could
+hardly make a stitch.  But Carterette, the little egoist, did not notice
+her agitation; her own flurry dimmed her sight.
+
+She began reading again.  The first few words had little or no
+significance for Guida, but presently she was held as by the fascination
+of a serpent.
+
+"'And Ma'm'selle Carterette, what do you think this young captain, now
+Prince Philip d'Avranche, heir to the title of Bercy--what do you think
+he is next to do?  Even to marry a countess of great family the old Duke
+has chosen for him; so that the name of d'Avranche may not die out in the
+land.  And that is the way that love begins.  .  .  .  Wherefore, I want
+you to write and tell me--'"
+
+What he wanted Carterette to tell him Guida never heard, though it
+concerned herself, for she gave a moan like a dumb animal in agony, and
+sat rigid and blanched, the needle she had been using embedded in her
+finger to the bone, but not a motion, not a sign of animation in face or
+figure.
+
+All at once, some conception of the truth burst upon the affrighted
+Carterette.  The real truth she imagined as little as had Detricand.
+
+But now when she saw the blanched face, the filmy eyes and stark look,
+the finger pierced by the needle, she knew that a human heart had been
+pierced too, with a pain worse than death--truly it was worse, for she
+had seen death, and she had never seen anything like this in its dire
+misery and horror.  She caught the needle quickly from the finger,
+wrapped her kerchief round the wound, threw away the sewing from Guida's
+lap, and running an arm about her waist, made as if to lay a hot cheek
+against the cold brow of her friend.  Suddenly, however, with a new and
+painful knowledge piercing her intelligence, and a face as white and
+scared as Guida's own, she ran to the dresser, caught up a hanap, and
+brought some water.  Guida still sat as though life had fled, and the
+body, arrested in its activity, would presently collapse.
+
+Carterette, with all her seeming lightsomeness, had sense and self-
+possession.  She tenderly put the water to Guida's lips, with comforting
+words, though her own brain was in a whirl, and dark forebodings flashed
+through her mind.
+
+"Ah, man gui, man pethe!" she said in the homely patois.  "There, drink,
+drink, dear, dear couzaine."  Guida's lips opened, and she drank slowly,
+putting her hand to her heart with a gesture of pain.  Carterette put
+down the hanap and caught her hands.  "Come, come, these cold hands--
+pergui, but we must stop that!  They are so cold."  She rubbed them hard.
+"The poor child of heaven--what has come over you?  Speak to me .  .  .
+ah, but see, everything will come all right by and by!  God is good.
+Nothing's as bad as what it seems.  There was never a grey wind but
+there's a greyer.  Nanningia, take it not so to heart, my couzaine; thou
+shalt have love enough in the world....  Ah, grand doux d'la vie, but I
+could kill him!" she added under her breath, and she rubbed Guida's hands
+still, and looked frankly, generously into her eyes.
+
+Yet, try as she would in that supreme moment, Carterette could not feel
+all she once felt concerning Guida.  There is something humiliating in
+even an undeserved injury, something which, to the human eye, lessens the
+worthiness of its victim.  To this hour Carterette had looked upon her
+friend as a being far above her own companionship.  All in a moment, in
+this new office of comforter the relative status was altered.  The plane
+on which Guida had moved was lowered.  Pity, while it deepened
+Carterette's tenderness, lessened the gap between them.
+
+Perhaps something of this passed through Guida's mind, and the deep pride
+and courage of her nature came to her assistance.  She withdrew her hands
+and mechanically smoothed back her hair, then, as Carterette sat watching
+her, folded up the sewing and put it in the work-basket hanging on the
+wall.
+
+There was something unnatural in her governance of herself now.  She
+seemed as if doing things in a dream, but she did them accurately and
+with apparent purpose.  She looked at the clock, then went to the fire
+to light it, for it was almost time to get her grandfather's tea.  She
+did not seem conscious of the presence of Carterette, who still sat on
+the veille, not knowing quite what to do.  At last, as the flame flashed
+up in the chimney, she came over to her friend, and said:
+
+"Carterette, I am going to the Dean's.  Will you run and ask Maitresse
+Aimable to come here to me soon?" Her voice had the steadiness of
+despair--that steadiness coming to those upon whose nerves has fallen a
+great numbness, upon whose sensibilities has settled a cloud that stills
+them as the thick mist stills the ripples on the waters of a fen.
+
+All the glamour of Guida's youth had dropped away.  She had deemed life
+good, and behold, it was not good; she had thought her dayspring was on
+high, and happiness had burnt into darkness like quick-consuming flax.
+But all was strangely quiet in her heart and mind.  Nothing more that she
+feared could happen to her; the worst had fallen, and now there came down
+on her the impermeable calm of the doomed.
+
+Carterette was awed by her face, and saying that she would go at once to
+Maitresse Aimable, she started towards the door, but as quickly stopped
+and came back to Guida.  With none of the impulse that usually marked her
+actions, she put her arms round Guida's neck and kissed her, saying with
+a subdued intensity:
+
+"I'd go through fire and water for you.  I want to help you every way I
+can--me."
+
+Guida did not say a word, but she kissed the hot cheek of the smuggler-
+pirate's daughter, as in dying one might kiss the face of a friend seen
+with filmy eyes.
+
+When she had gone Guida drew herself up with a shiver.  She was conscious
+that new senses and instincts were born in her, or were now first
+awakened to life.  They were not yet under control, but she felt them,
+and in so far as she had power to think, she used them.
+
+Leaving the house and stepping into the Place du Vier Prison, she walked
+quietly and steadily up the Rue d'Driere.  She did not notice that people
+she met glanced at her curiously, and turned to look after her as she
+hurried on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+It had been a hot, oppressive day, but when, a half-hour later, Guida
+hastened back from a fruitless visit to the house of the Dean, who was
+absent in England, a vast black cloud had drawn up from the south-east,
+dropping a curtain of darkness upon the town.  As she neared the doorway
+of the cottage, a few heavy drops began to fall, and, in spite of her
+bitter trouble, she quickened her footsteps, fearing that her grandfather
+had come back, to find the house empty and no light or supper ready.
+
+M. de Mauprat had preceded her by not more than five minutes.  His
+footsteps across the Place du Vier Prison had been unsteady, his head
+bowed, though more than once he raised it with a sort of effort, as it
+were in indignation or defiance.  He muttered to himself as he opened the
+door, and he paused in the hall-way as though hesitating to go forward.
+After a moment he made a piteous gesture of his hand towards the kitchen,
+and whispered to himself in a kind of reassurance.  Then he entered the
+room and stood still.  All was dark save for the glimmer of the fire.
+
+"Guida!  Guida!" he said in a shaking, muffled voice.  There was no
+answer.  He put by his hat and stick in the corner, and felt his way to
+the great chair-he seemed to have lost his sight.  Finding the familiar,
+worn arm of the chair, he seated himself with a heavy sigh.  His lips
+moved, and he shook his head now and then, as though in protest against
+some unspoken thought.
+
+Presently he brought his clinched hand down heavily on the table, and
+said aloud:
+
+"They lie--they lie!  The Connetable lies!  Their tongues shall be cut
+out.  .  .  .  Ah, my little, little child!  .  .  .  The Connetable
+dared--he dared--to tell me this evil gossip--of the little one--of my
+Guida!"
+
+He laughed contemptuously, but it was a crackling, dry laugh, painful in
+its cheerlessness.  He drew his snuff-box from his pocket, opened it, and
+slowly taking a pinch, raised it towards his nose, but the hand paused
+half-way, as though a new thought arrested it.
+
+In the pause there came the sound of the front door opening, and then
+footsteps in the hall.
+
+The pinch of snuff fell from the fingers of the old man on to the white
+stuff of his short-clothes, but as Guida entered the room and stood still
+a moment, he did not stir in his seat.  The thundercloud had come still
+lower and the room was dark, the coals in the fireplace being now covered
+with grey ashes.
+
+"Grandpethe!  Grandpethe!" Guida said.
+
+He did not answer.  His heart was fluttering, his tongue clove to the
+roof of his mouth, dry and thick.  Now he should know the truth, now
+he should be sure that they had lied about his little Guida, those
+slanderers of the Vier Marchi.  Yet, too, he had a strange, depressing
+fear, at variance with his loving faith and belief that in Guida there
+was no wrong: such belief as has the strong swimmer that he can reach the
+shore through wave and tide; yet also with strange foreboding, prelude to
+the cramp that makes powerless, defying youth, strength, and skill.  He
+could not have spoken if it had been to save his own life--or hers.
+
+Getting no answer to her words, Guida went first to the hearth and
+stirred the fire, the old man sitting rigid in his chair and regarding
+her with fixed, watchful eyes.  Then she found two candles and lighted
+them, placing them on the mantel, and turning to the crasset hanging by
+its osier rings from a beam, slowly lighted it.  Turning round, she was
+full in the light of the candles and the shooting flames of the fire.
+
+De Mauprat's eyes had followed her every motion, unconscious of his
+presence as she was.  This--this was not the Guida he had known!  This
+was not his grandchild, this woman with the pale, cold face, and dark,
+unhappy eyes; this was not the laughing girl who but yesterday was a babe
+at his knee.  This was not--
+
+The truth, which had yet been before his blinded eyes how long!  burst
+upon him.  The shock of it snapped the filmy thread of being.  As the
+escaping soul found its wings, spread them, and rose from that dun morass
+called Life, the Sieur de Mauprat, giving a long, deep sigh, fell back in
+his great arm-chair dead, and the silver snuff-box rattled to the floor.
+
+Guida turned round with a sharp cry.  Running to him, she lifted up the
+head that lay over on his shoulder.  She felt his pulse, she called to
+him.  Opening his waistcoat, she put her ear to his heart; but it was
+still--still.
+
+A mist, a blackness, came over her own eyes, and without a cry or a word,
+she slid to the floor unconscious, as the black thunderstorm broke upon
+the Place du Vier Prison.
+
+The rain was like a curtain let down between the prying, clattering world
+without and the strange peace within: the old man in his perfect sleep;
+the young, misused wife in that passing oblivion borrowed from death and
+as tender and compassionate while it lasts.
+
+As though with merciful indulgence, Fate permitted no one to enter upon
+the dark scene save a woman in whom was a deep motherhood which had never
+nourished a child, and to whom this silence and this sorrow gave no
+terrors.  Silence was her constant companion, and for sorrow she had been
+granted the touch that assuages the sharpness of pain and the love called
+neighbourly kindness.  Maitresse Aimable came.
+
+Unto her it was given to minister here.  As the night went by, and the
+offices had been done for the dead, she took her place by the bedside of
+the young wife, who lay staring into space, tearless and still, the life
+consuming away within her.
+
+In the front room of the cottage, his head buried in his hands, Ranulph
+Delagarde sat watching beside the body of the Sieur de Mauprat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+In the Rue d'Driere, the undertaker and his head apprentice were right
+merry.  But why should they not be?  People had to die, quoth the
+undertaker, and when dead they must be buried.  Burying was a trade,
+and wherefore should not one--discreetly--be cheerful at one's trade?
+In undertaking there were many miles to trudge with coffins in a week,
+and the fixed, sad, sympathetic look long custom had stereotyped was
+wearisome to the face as a cast of plaster-of-paris.  Moreover, the
+undertaker was master of ceremonies at the house of bereavement as well.
+He not only arranged the funeral, he sent out the invitations to the
+"friends of deceased, who are requested to return to the house of the
+mourners after the obsequies for refreshment."  All the preparations for
+this feast were made by the undertaker--Master of Burials he chose to be
+called.
+
+Once, after a busy six months, in which a fever had carried off many a
+Jersiais, the Master of Burials had given a picnic to his apprentices,
+workmen, and their families.  At this buoyant function he had raised his
+glass and with playful plaintiveness proposed: "The day we celebrate!"
+
+He was in a no less blithesome mood this day.  The head apprentice was
+reading aloud the accounts for the burials of the month, while the master
+checked off the items, nodding approval, commenting, correcting or
+condemning with strange expletives.
+
+"Don't gabble, gabble  next one slowlee!" said the Master of Burials, as
+the second account was laid aside, duly approved.  "Eh ben, now let's
+hear the next--who is it?"
+
+"That Josue Anquetil," answered the apprentice.  The Master of Burials
+rubbed his hands together with a creepy sort of glee.  "Ah, that was a
+clever piece of work!  Too little of a length and a width for the box,
+but let us be thankful--it might have been too short, and it wasn't."
+
+"No danger of that, pardingue!" broke in the apprentice.  "The first it
+belonged to was a foot longer than Josue--he."
+
+"But I made the most of Josue," continued the Master.  "The mouth was
+crooked, but he was clean, clean--I shaved him just in time.  And he had
+good hair for combing to a peaceful look, and he was light to carry--O my
+good!  Go on, what has Josue the centenier to say for himself?"
+
+With a drawling dull indifference, the lank, hatchet-faced servitor of
+the master servitor of the grave read off the items:
+
+     The Relict of Josue Anquetil, Centenier, in account with
+     Etienne Mahye, Master of Burials.
+
+Item:                                     Livres.  Sols.  Farth.
+Paid to Gentlemen of Vingtaine, who
+carried him to his grave .................. 4       4       0
+Ditto to me, Etienne Mahye, for proper
+gloves of silk and cotton ................. 1       0       0
+Ditto to me, E. M., for laying of him
+out and all that appertains ............... 0       7       0
+Ditto to me, E. M., for coffin ............ 4       0       0
+Ditto to me, E. M., for divers ............ 0       4       0
+
+
+The Master of Burials interrupted.  "Bat'dlagoule, you've forgot blacking
+for coffin!"
+
+The apprentice made the correction without deigning reply, and then went
+on
+
+                                          Livres.  Sols.  Farth.
+
+Ditto to me, E. M., for black for blacking
+coffin .................................... 0       3      0
+Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for supper
+after obs'quies ........................... 3       2      0
+Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for wine
+(3 pots and 1 pt. at a shilling) for
+ditto ..................................... 2       5      6
+Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for oil and
+candle .................................... 0       7      0
+Ditto to me, E.  M., given to the poor, as
+fitting station of deceased ............... 4       0      0
+
+
+The apprentice stopped.  "That's all," he said.
+
+There was a furious leer on the face of the Master of Burials.  So, after
+all his care, apprentices would never learn to make mistakes on his side.
+"O my grief, always on the side of the corpse, that can thank nobody for
+naught!" was his snarling comment.
+
+"What about those turnips from Denise Gareau, numskull?" he grunted, in
+a voice between a sneer and a snort.
+
+The apprentice was unmoved.  He sniffed, rubbed his nose with a
+forefinger, laboriously wrote for a moment, and then added:
+
+Ditto to Madame Denise Gareau for turnips
+for supper after obs'quies ...................... 10 sols
+
+"Saperlote, leave out the Madame, calf-lugs--, you!"
+
+The apprentice did not move a finger.  Obstinacy sat enthroned on him.
+In a rage, the Master made a snatch at a metal flower-wreath to throw at
+him.  "Shan't!  She's my aunt.  I knows my duties to my aunt--me," said
+the apprentice stolidly.
+
+The Master burst out in a laugh of scorn.  "Gaderabotin, here's family
+pride for you!  I'll go stick dandelines in my old sow's ear--respe d'la
+compagnie."
+
+The apprentice was still calm.  "If you want to flourish yourself, don't
+mind me," said he, and picking up the next account, he began reading:
+
+     Mademoiselle Landresse, in the matter of the Burial of
+     the Sieur de Mauprat, to Etienne Mahye, &c.  Item--
+
+The first words read by the apprentice had stilled the breaking storm of
+the Master's anger.  It dissolved in a fragrant dew of proud
+reminiscence, profit, and scandal.
+
+He himself had no open prejudices.  He was an official of the public--or
+so he counted himself--and he very shrewdly knew his duty in that walk of
+life to which it had pleased Heaven to call him.  The greater the
+notoriety of the death, the more in evidence was the Master and all his
+belongings.  Death with honour was an advantage to him; death with
+disaster a boon; death with scandal was a godsend.  It brought tears of
+gratitude to his eyes when the death and the scandal were in high places.
+These were the only real tears he ever shed.  His heart was in his head,
+and the head thought solely of Etienne Mahye.  Though he wore an air of
+sorrow and sympathy in public, he had no more feeling than a hangman.
+His sympathy seemed to say to the living, "I wonder how soon you'll come
+into my hands," and to the dead, "What a pity you can only die once--and
+second-hand coffins so hard to get!"
+
+     Item: paid to me, Etienne Mahye,
+
+droned the voice of the apprentice,
+
+     for rosewood coffin--
+
+"O my good," interrupted the Master of Burials with a barren chuckle, and
+rubbing his hands with glee, "O my good, that was a day in a lifetime!
+I've done fine work in my time, but upon that day--not a cloud above,
+no dust beneath, a flowing tide, and a calm sea.  The Royal Court, too,
+caught on a sudden marching in their robes, turns to and joins the
+cortegee, and the little birds a-tweeting-tweeting, and two parsons at
+the grave.  Pardingue, the Lord was--with me that day, and--"
+
+The apprentice laughed--a dry, mirthless laugh of disbelief and ridicule.
+"Ba su, master, the Lord was watching you.  There was two silver bits
+inside that coffin, on Sieur's eyes."
+
+"Bigre!"  The Master was pale with rage.  His lips drew back, disclosing
+long dark teeth and sickly gums, in a grimace of fury.  He reached out to
+seize a hammer lying at his hand, but the apprentice said quickly:
+
+"Sapri--that's the cholera hammer!"
+
+The Master of Burials dropped the hammer as though it were at white heat,
+and eyed it with scared scrutiny.  This hammer had been used in nailing
+down the coffins of six cholera patients who had died in one house at
+Rozel Bay a year before.  The Master would not himself go near the place,
+so this apprentice had gone, on a promise from the Royal Court that he
+should have for himself--this he demanded as reward--free lodging in two
+small upper rooms of the Cohue Royale, just under the bell which said to
+the world, "Chicane--chicane!  Chicane--chicane!"
+
+This he asked, and this he got, and he alone of all Jersey went out
+to bury three people who had died of cholera; and then to watch three
+others die, to bury them scarce cold, and come back, with a leer of
+satisfaction, to claim his price.  At first people were inclined to make
+a hero of him, but that only made him grin the more, and at last the
+island reluctantly decided that he had done the work solely for fee and
+reward.
+
+The hammer used in nailing the coffins, he had carried through the town
+like an emblem of terror and death, and henceforth he only, in the shop
+of the Master, touched it.
+
+"It won't hurt you if you leave it alone," said the apprentice grimly to
+the Master of Burials.  "But, if you go bothering, I'll put it in your
+bed, and it'll do after to nail down your coffin."
+
+Then he went on reading with a malicious calmness, as though the matter
+were the dullest trifle:
+
+Item: one dozen pairs of gloves for mourners.
+
+"Par made, that's one way of putting it!" commented the apprentice, "for
+what mourners was there but Ma'm'selle herself, and she quiet as a mice,
+and not a teardrop, and all the island necks end to end for look at her,
+and you, master, whispering to her: 'The Lord is the Giver and Taker,'
+and the Femme de Ballast t'other side, saying 'My dee-ar, my dee-ar, bear
+thee up, bear thee up--thee.'"
+
+"And she looking so steady in front of her, as if never was shame about
+her--and her there soon to be; and no ring of gold upon her hand, and all
+the world staring!" broke in the Master, who, having edged away from the
+cholera hammer, was launched upon a theme that stirred his very soul.
+"All the world staring, and good reason," he added.
+
+"And she scarce winking, eh?" said the apprentice.  "True that--her eyes
+didn't feel the cold," said the Master of Burials with a leer, for to his
+sight as to that of others, only as boldness had been Guida's bitter
+courage, the blank, despairing gaze, coming from eyes that turn their
+agony inward.
+
+The apprentice took up the account again, and prepared to read it.  The
+Master, however, had been roused to a genial theme.  "Poor fallen child
+of Nature!" said he.  "For what is birth or what is looks of virtue like
+a summer flower!  It is to be brought down by hand of man."  He was
+warmed to his text.  Habit had long made him so much hypocrite, that he
+was sentimentalist and hard materialist in one.  "Some pend'loque has
+brought her beauty to this pass, but she must suffer--and also his time
+will come, the sulphur, the torment, the worm that dieth not--and no
+Abraham for parched tongue--misery me!  They that meet in sin here shall
+meet hereafter in burning fiery furnace."
+
+The cackle of the apprentice rose above the whining voice.  "Murder, too
+--don't forget the murder, master.  The Connetable told the old Sieur de
+Mauprat what people were blabbing, and in half-hour dead he is--he."
+
+"Et ben, the Sieur's blood it is upon their heads," continued the Master
+of Burials; "it will rise up from the ground--"
+
+The apprentice interrupted.  "A good thing if the Sieur himself doesn't
+rise, for you'd get naught for coffin or obs'quies.  It was you tells the
+Connetable what folks babbled, and the Connetable tells the Sieur, and
+the Sieur it kills him dead.  So if he rised, he'd not pay you for
+murdering him--no, bidemme!  And 'tis a gobbly mouthful--this," he added,
+holding up the bill.
+
+The undertaker's lips smacked softly, as though in truth he were waiting
+for the mouthful.  Rubbing his hands, and drawing his lean leg up till it
+touched his nose, he looked over it with avid eyes, and said: "How much--
+don't read the items, but come to total debit--how much she pays me?"
+
+Ma'm'selle Landresse, debtor in all for one hundred and twenty livres,
+eleven sols and two farthings.
+
+Shan't you make it one hundred and twenty-one livres?" added the
+apprentice.
+
+"God forbid, the odd sols and farthings are mine--no more!" returned the
+Master of Burials.  "Also they look exact; but the courage it needs to be
+honest!  O my grief, if--"
+
+"'Sh!" said the apprentice, pointing, and the Master of Burials, turning,
+saw Guida pass the window.  With a hungry instinct for the morbid they
+stole to the doorway and looked down the Rue d'Driere after her.  The
+Master was sympathetic, for had he not in his fingers at that moment a
+bill for a hundred and twenty livres odd?  The way the apprentice craned
+his neck, and tightened the forehead over his large, protuberant eyes,
+showed his intense curiosity, but the face was implacable.  It was like
+that of some strong fate, superior to all influences of sorrow, shame, or
+death.  Presently he laughed--a crackling cackle like new-lighted
+kindling wood; nothing could have been more inhuman in sound.  What in
+particular aroused this arid mirth probably he himself did not know.
+Maybe it was a native cruelty which had a sort of sardonic pleasure in
+the miseries of the world.  Or was it only the perception, sometimes
+given to the dullest mind, of the futility of goodness, the futility of
+all?  This perhaps, since the apprentice shared with Dormy Jamais his
+rooms at the top of the Cohue Royale; and there must have been some
+natural bond of kindness between the blank, sardonic undertaker's
+apprentice and the poor beganne, who now officially rang the bell for the
+meetings of the Royal Court.
+
+The dry cackle of the apprentice as he looked after Guida roused a
+mockery of indignation in the Master.  "Sacre matin, a back-hander on the
+jaw'd do you good, slubberdegullion--you!  Ah, get go scrub the coffin
+blacking from your jowl!" he rasped out with furious contempt.
+
+The apprentice seemed not to hear, but kept on looking after Guida, a
+pitiless leer on his face.  "Dame, lucky for her the Sieur died before he
+had chance to change his will.  She'd have got ni fiche ni bran from
+him."
+
+"Support d'en haut, if you don't stop that I'll give you a coffin before
+your time, keg of nails--you.  Sorrow and prayer at the throne of grace
+that she may have a contrite heart"--he clutched the funeral bill tighter
+in his fingers--"is what we must feel for her.  The day the Sieur died
+and it all came out, I wept.  Bedtime come I had to sop my eyes with
+elder-water.  The day o' the burial mine eyes were so sore a-draining I
+had to put a rotten sweet apple on 'em over-night--me."
+
+"Ah bah, she doesn't need rosemary wash for her hair!" said the
+apprentice admiringly, looking down the street after Guida as she turned
+into the Rue d'Egypte.
+
+Perhaps it was a momentary sympathy for beauty in distress which made the
+Master say, as he backed from the doorway with stealthy step:
+
+"Gatd'en'ale, 'tis well she has enough to live on, and to provide for
+what's to come!"
+
+But if it was a note of humanity in the voice it passed quickly, for
+presently, as he examined the bill for the funeral of the Sieur de
+Mauprat, he said shrilly:
+
+"Achocre, you've left out the extra satin for his pillow--you."
+
+"There wasn't any extra satin," drawled the apprentice.
+
+With a snarl the Master of Burials seized a pen and wrote in the account:
+
+Item: To extra satin for pillow, three livres.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+Guida's once blithe, rose-coloured face was pale as ivory, the mouth had
+a look of deep sadness, and the step was slow; but the eye was clear and
+steady, and her hair, brushed under the black crape of the bonnet as
+smoothly as its nature would admit, gave to the broad brow a setting of
+rare attraction and sombre nobility.  It was not a face that knew inward
+shame, but it carried a look that showed knowledge of life's cruelties
+and a bitter sensitiveness to pain.  Above all else it was fearless, and
+it had no touch of the consciousness or the consequences of sin; it was
+purity itself.
+
+It alone should have proclaimed abroad her innocence, though she said no
+word in testimony.  To most people, however, her dauntless sincerity only
+added to her crime and to the scandalous mystery.  Yet her manner awed
+some, while her silence held most back.  The few who came to offer
+sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity as pity
+in their hearts, were turned back gently but firmly, more than once with
+proud resentment.
+
+So it chanced that soon only Maitresse Aimable came--she who asked no
+questions, desired no secrets--and Dormy Jamais.
+
+Dormy had of late haunted the precincts of the Place du Vier Prison,
+and was the only person besides Maitresse Aimable whom Guida welcomed.
+His tireless feet went clac-clac past her doorway, or halted by it,
+or entered in when it pleased him.  He was more a watch-dog than Biribi;
+he fetched and carried; he was silent and sleepless--always sleepless.
+It was as if some past misfortune had opened his eyes to the awful
+bitterness of life, and they had never closed again.
+
+The Chevalier had not been with her, for on the afternoon of the very day
+her grandfather died, he had gone a secret voyage to St. Malo, to meet
+the old solicitor of his family.  He knew nothing of his friend's death
+or of Guida's trouble.  As for Carterette, Guida would not let her come
+--for her own sake.
+
+Nor did Maitre Ranulph visit her after the funeral of the Sieur de
+Mauprat.  The horror of the thing had struck him dumb, and his mind
+was one confused mass of conflicting thoughts.  There--there were the
+terrifying facts before him; yet, with an obstinacy peculiar to him,
+he still went on believing in her goodness and in her truth.  Of the man
+who had injured her he had no doubt, and his course was clear, in the
+hour when he and Philip d'Avranche should meet.  Meanwhile, from a spirit
+of delicacy, avoiding the Place du Vier Prison, he visited Maitresse
+Aimable, and from day to day learned all that happened to Guida.  As of
+old, without her knowledge, he did many things for her through the same
+Maitresse Aimable.  And it quickly came to be known in the island that
+any one who spoke ill of Guida in his presence did so at no little risk.
+At first there had been those who marked him as the wrongdoer, but
+somehow that did not suit with the case, for it was clear he loved Guida
+now as he had always done; and this the world knew, as it had known that
+he would have married her all too gladly.  Presently Detricand and Philip
+were the only names mentioned, but at last, as by common consent, Philip
+was settled upon, for such evidence as there was pointed that way.  The
+gossips set about to recall all that had happened when Philip was in
+Jersey last.  Here one came forward with a tittle of truth, and there
+another with tattle of falsehood, and at last as wild a story was
+fabricated as might be heard in a long day.
+
+But in bitterness Guida kept her own counsel.
+
+This day when she passed the undertaker's shop she had gone to visit the
+grave of her grandfather.  He had died without knowing the truth, and her
+heart was hardened against him who had brought misery upon her.  Reaching
+the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison now, she took from a drawer the
+letter Philip had written her on the day he first met the Comtesse
+Chantavoine.  She had received it a week ago.  She read it through
+slowly, shuddering a little once or twice.  When she had finished,
+she drew paper to her and began a reply.
+
+The first crisis of her life was passed.  She had met the shock of utter
+disillusion; her own perfect honesty now fathomed the black dishonesty of
+the man she had loved.  Death had come with sorrow and unmerited shame.
+But an innate greatness, a deep courage supported her.  Out of her wrongs
+and miseries now she made a path for her future, and in that path
+Philip's foot should never be set.  She had thought and thought, and had
+come to her decision.  In one month she had grown years older in mind.
+Sorrow gave her knowledge, it threw her back on her native strength and
+goodness.  Rising above mere personal wrongs she grew to a larger sense
+of womanhood, to a true understanding of her position and its needs.  She
+loved no longer, but Philip was her husband by the law, and even as she
+had told him her whole mind and heart in the days of their courtship and
+marriage, she would tell him her whole mind and heart now.  Once more, to
+satisfy the bond, to give full reasons for what she was about to do, she
+would open her soul to her husband, and then no more!  In all she wrote
+she kept but two things back, her grandfather's death--and one other.
+These matters belonged to herself alone.
+
+     No, Philip d'Avranche, [she wrote], your message came too late.  All
+     that you might have said and done should have been said and done
+     long ago, in that past which I believe in no more.  I will not ask
+     you why you acted as you did towards me.  Words can alter nothing
+     now.  Once I thought you true, and this letter you send would have
+     me still believe so.  Do you then think so ill of my intelligence?
+     In the light of the past it may be you have reason, for you know
+     that I once believed in you!  Think of it--believed in you!
+
+     How bad a man are you!  In spite of all your promises; in spite of
+     the surrender of honest heart and life to you; in spite of truth and
+     every call of honour, you denied me--dared to deny me, at the very
+     time you wrote this letter.
+
+     For the hopes and honours of this world, you set aside, first by
+     secrecy, and then by falsehood, the helpless girl to whom you once
+     swore undying love.  You, who knew the open book of her heart, you
+     threw it in the dust.  "Of course there is no wife?" the Duc de
+     Bercy said to you before the States of Bercy.  "Of course," you
+     answered.  You told your lie without pity.
+
+     Were you blind that you did not see the consequences?  Or did you
+     not feel the horror of your falsehood?--to play shuttlecock with a
+     woman's life, with the soul of your wife; for that is what your
+     conduct means.  Did you not realise it, or were you so wicked that
+     you did not care?  For I know that before you wrote me this letter,
+     and afterwards when you had been made prince, and heir to the duchy,
+     the Comtesse Chantavoine was openly named by the Duc de Bercy for
+     your wife.
+
+     Now read the truth.  I understand all now.  I am no longer the
+     thoughtless, believing girl whom you drew from her simple life to
+     give her so cruel a fate.  Yesterday I was a child, to-day----Oh,
+     above all else, do you think I can ever forgive you for having
+     killed the faith, the joy of life that was in me!  You have spoiled
+     for me for ever my rightful share of the joyous and the good.  My
+     heart is sixty though my body is not twenty.  How dared you rob me
+     of all that was my birthright, of all that was my life, and give me
+     nothing--nothing in return!
+
+     Do you remember how I begged you not to make me marry you; but you
+     urged me, and because I loved you and trusted you, I did?  how I
+     entreated you not to make me marry you secretly, but you insisted,
+     and loving you, I did?  how you promised you would leave me at the
+     altar and not see me till you came again to claim me openly for your
+     wife, and you broke that sacred promise?  Do you remember--my
+     husband!
+
+     Do you remember that night in the garden when the wind came moaning
+     up from the sea?  Do you remember how you took me in your arms, and
+     even while I listened to your tender and assuring words, in that
+     moment--ah, the hurt and the wrong and the shame of it!  Afterwards
+     in the strange confusion, in my blind helplessness I tried to say,
+     "But he loved me," and I tried to forgive you.  Perhaps in time I
+     might have made myself believe I did; for then I did not know you as
+     you are--and were; but understanding all now I feel that in that
+     hour I really ceased to love you; and when at last I knew you had
+     denied me, love was buried for ever.
+
+     Your worst torment is to come, mine has already been with me.  When
+     my miseries first fell upon me, I thought that I must die.  Why
+     should I live on--why should I not die?  The sea was near, and it
+     buries deep.  I thought of all the people that live on the great
+     earth, and I said to myself that the soul of one poor girl could not
+     count, that it could concern no one but myself.  It was clear to me
+     --I must die and end all.
+
+     But there came to me a voice in the night which said: "Is thy life
+     thine own to give or to destroy?"  It was clearer than my own
+     thinking.  It told my heart that death by one's own hand meant
+     shame; and I saw then that to find rest I must drag unwilling feet
+     over the good name and memory of my dead loved ones.  Then I
+     remembered my mother.  If you had remembered her perhaps you would
+     have guarded the gift of my love and not have trampled it under your
+     feet--I remembered my mother, and so I live still.
+
+     I must go on alone, with naught of what makes life bearable; you
+     will keep climbing higher by your vanity, your strength, and your
+     deceit.  But yet I know however high you climb you will never find
+     peace.  You will remember me, and your spirit will seek in vain for
+     rest.  You will not exist for me, you will not be even a memory; but
+     even against your will I shall always be part of you: of your brain,
+     of your heart, of your soul--the thought of me your torment in your
+     greatest hour.  Your passion and your cowardice have lost me all;
+     and God will punish you, be sure of that.
+
+     There is little more to say.  If it lies in my power I shall never
+     see you again while I live.  And you will not wish it.  Yes, in
+     spite of your eloquent letter lying here beside me, you do not wish
+     it, and it shall not be.  I am not your wife save by the law; and
+     little have you cared for law!  Little, too, would the law help you
+     in this now; for which you will rejoice.  For the ease of your mind
+     I hasten to tell you why.
+
+     First let me inform you that none in this land knows me to be your
+     wife.  Your letter to my grandfather never reached him, and to this
+     hour I have held my peace.  The clergyman who married us is a
+     prisoner among the French, and the strong-box which held the
+     register of St. Michael's Church was stolen.  The one other witness,
+     Mr. Shoreham, your lieutenant--as you tell me--went down with the
+     Araminta.  So you are safe in your denial of me.  For me, I would
+     endure all the tortures of the world rather than call you husband
+     ever again.  I am firmly set to live my own life, in my own way,
+     with what strength God gives.  At last I see beyond the Hedge.
+
+     Your course is clear.  You cannot turn back now.  You have gone too
+     far.  Your new honours and titles were got at the last by a
+     falsehood.  To acknowledge it would be ruin, for all the world knows
+     that Captain Philip d'Avranche of the King's navy is now the adopted
+     son of the Duc de Bercy.  Surely the house of Bercy has cause for
+     joy, with an imbecile for the first in succession and a traitor for
+     the second!
+
+     I return the fifty pounds you sent me--you will not question why
+     ....And so all ends.  This is a last farewell between us.
+
+     Do you remember what you said to me on the Ecrehos? "If ever I
+     deceive you, may I die a black, dishonourable death, abandoned and
+     alone.  I should deserve that if ever I deceived you, Guida."
+
+     Will you ever think of that, in your vain glory hereafter?
+
+                                   GUIDA LANDRESSE DE LANDRESSE.
+
+
+
+
+
+IN JERSEY FIVE YEARS LATER
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+On a map the Isle of Jersey has the shape and form of a tiger on the
+prowl.
+
+The fore-claws of this tiger are the lacerating pinnacles of the Corbiere
+and the impaling rocks of Portelet Bay and Noirmont; the hind-claws are
+the devastating diorite reefs of La Motte and the Banc des Violets.  The
+head and neck, terrible and beautiful, are stretched out towards the
+west, as it were to scan the wild waste and jungle of the Atlantic seas.
+The nose is L'Etacq, the forehead Grosnez, the ear Plemont, the mouth the
+dark cavern by L'Etacq, and the teeth are the serried ledges of the Foret
+de la Brequette.  At a discreet distance from the head and the tail hover
+the jackals of La Manche: the Paternosters, the Dirouilles, and the
+Ecrehos, themselves destroying where they may, or filching the remains of
+the tiger's feast of shipwreck and ruin.  In truth, the sleek beast, with
+its feet planted in fearsome rocks and tides, and its ravening head set
+to defy the onslaught of the main, might, but for its ensnaring beauty,
+seem some monstrous foot-pad of the deep.
+
+To this day the tiger's head is the lonely part of Jersey; a hundred
+years ago it was as distant from the Vier Marchi as is Penzance from
+Covent Garden.  It would almost seem as if the people of Jersey, like the
+hangers-on of the king of the jungle, care not to approach too near the
+devourer's head.  Even now there is but a dwelling here and there upon
+the lofty plateau, and none at all near the dark and menacing headland.
+But as if the ancient Royal Court was determined to prove its sovereignty
+even over the tiger's head, it stretched out its arms from the Vier
+Marchi to the bare neck of the beast, putting upon it a belt of defensive
+war; at the nape, a martello tower and barracks; underneath, two other
+martello towers like the teeth of a buckle.
+
+The rest of the island was bristling with armament.  Tall platforms were
+erected at almost speaking distance from each other, where sentinels kept
+watch for French frigates or privateers.  Redoubts and towers were within
+musket-shot of each other, with watch-houses between, and at intervals
+every able-bodied man in the country was obliged to leave his trade to
+act as sentinel, or go into camp or barracks with the militia for months
+at a time.  British cruisers sailed the Channel: now a squadron under
+Barrington, again under Bridport, hovered upon the coast, hoping that a
+French fleet might venture near.
+
+But little of this was to be seen in the western limits of the parish of
+St. Ouen's.  Plemont, Grosnez, L'Etacq, all that giant headland could
+well take care of itself--the precipitous cliffs were their own defence.
+A watch-house here and there sufficed.  No one lived at L'Etacq, no one
+at Grosnez; they were too bleak, too distant and solitary.  There were no
+houses, no huts.
+
+If you had approached Plemont from Vinchelez-le-Haut, making for the sea,
+you would have said that it also had no habitation.  But when at last you
+came to a hillock near Plemont point, looking to find nothing but sky and
+sea and distant islands, suddenly at your very feet you saw a small stone
+dwelling.  Its door faced the west, looking towards the Isles of Guernsey
+and Sark.  Fronting the north was a window like an eye, ever watching the
+tireless Paternosters.  To the east was another tiny window like a deep
+loop-hole or embrasure set towards the Dirouilles and the Ecrehos.
+
+The hut had but one room, of moderate size, with a vast chimney.  Between
+the chimney and the western wall was a veille, which was both lounge and
+bed.  The eastern side was given over to a few well-polished kitchen
+utensils, a churn, and a bread-trough.  The floor was of mother earth
+alone, but a strip of handmade carpet was laid down before the fireplace,
+and there was another at the opposite end.  There were also a table, a
+spinning-wheel, and a shelf of books.
+
+It was not the hut of a fisherman, though upon the wall opposite the
+books there hung fishing-tackle, nets, and cords, while outside, on
+staples driven in the jutting chimney, were some lobster-pots.  Upon two
+shelves were arranged a carpenter's and a cooper's tools, polished and in
+good order.  And yet you would have said that neither a cooper nor a
+carpenter kept them in use.  Everywhere there were signs of man's
+handicraft as well as of woman's work, but upon all was the touch of a
+woman.  Moreover, apart from the tools there was no sign of a man's
+presence in the hut.  There was no coat hanging behind the door, no
+sabots for the fields or oilskins for the sands, no pipe laid upon a
+ledge, no fisherman's needle holding a calendar to the wall.  Whatever
+was the trade of the occupant, the tastes were above those of the
+ordinary dweller in the land.  That was to be seen in a print of
+Raphael's "Madonna and Child" taking the place of the usual sampler upon
+the walls of Jersey homes; in the old clock nicely bestowed between a
+narrow cupboard and the tool shelves; in a few pieces of rare old china
+and a gold-handled sword hanging above a huge, well-carved oak chair.
+The chair relieved the room of anything like commonness, and somehow was
+in sympathy with the simple surroundings, making for dignity and sweet
+quiet.  It was clear that only a woman could have arranged so perfectly
+this room and all therein.  It was also clear that no man lived here.
+
+Looking in at the doorway of this hut on a certain autumn day of the year
+1797, the first thing to strike your attention was a dog lying asleep on
+the hearth.  Then a suit of child's clothes on a chair before the fire of
+vraic would have caught the eye.  The only thing to distinguish this
+particular child's dress from that of a thousand others in the island was
+the fineness of the material.  Every thread of it had been delicately and
+firmly knitted, till it was like perfect soft blue cloth, relieved by a
+little red silk ribbon at the collar.
+
+The hut contained as well a child's chair, just so high that when placed
+by the windows commanding the Paternosters its occupant might see the
+waves, like panthers, beating white paws against the ragged granite
+pinnacles; the currents writhing below at the foot of the cliffs, or at
+half-tide rushing up to cover the sands of the Greve aux Langons, and
+like animals in pain, howling through the caverns in the cliffs; the
+great nor'wester of November come battering the rocks, shrieking to the
+witches who boiled their caldrons by the ruins of Grosnez Castle that the
+hunt of the seas was up.
+
+Just high enough was the little chair that of a certain day in the year
+its owner might look out and see mystic fires burning round the
+Paternosters, and lighting up the sea with awful radiance.  Scarce a rock
+to be seen from the hut but had some legend like this: the burning
+Russian ship at the Paternosters, the fleet of boats with tall prows and
+long oars drifting upon the Dirouilles and going down to the cry of the
+Crusaders' Dahindahin!  the Roche des Femmes at the Ecrehos, where still
+you may hear the cries of women in terror of the engulfing sea.
+
+On this particular day, if you had entered the hut, no one would have
+welcomed you; but had you tired of waiting, and followed the indentations
+of the coast for a mile or more by a deep bay under tall cliffs, you
+would have seen a woman and a child coming quickly up the sands.  Slung
+upon the woman's shoulders was a small fisherman's basket.  The child ran
+before, eager to climb the hill and take the homeward path.
+
+A man above was watching them.  He had ridden along the cliff, had seen
+the woman in her boat making for the shore, had tethered his horse in the
+quarries near by, and now awaited her.  He chuckled as she came on, for
+he had ready a surprise for her.  To make it more complete he hid himself
+behind some boulders, and as she reached the top sprang out with an ugly
+grinning.
+
+The woman looked at him calmly and waited for him to speak.  There was no
+fear on her face, not even surprise; nothing but steady inquiry and quiet
+self-possession.  With an air of bluster the man said:
+
+"Aha, my lady, I'm nearer than you thought--me!"  The child drew in to
+its mother's side and clasped her hand.  There was no fear in the little
+fellow's look, however; he had something of the same self-possession as
+the woman, and his eyes were like hers, clear, unwavering, and with a
+frankness that consumed you.  They were wells of sincerity; open-eyed,
+you would have called the child, wanting a more subtle description.
+
+"I'm not to be fooled-me!  Come now, let's have the count," said the man,
+as he whipped a greasy leather-covered book from his pocket.  "Sapristi,
+I'm waiting.  Stay yourself!" he added roughly as she moved on, and his
+greyish-yellow face had an evil joy at thought of the brutal work in
+hand.
+
+"Who are you?" she asked, but taking her time to speak.
+
+"Dame!  you know who I am."
+
+"I know what you are," she answered quietly.
+
+He did not quite grasp her meaning, but the tone sounded contemptuous,
+and that sorted little with his self-importance.
+
+"I'm the Seigneur's bailiff--that's who I am.  Gad'rabotin, don't you put
+on airs with me!  I'm for the tribute, so off with the bag and let's see
+your catch."
+
+"I have never yet paid tribute to the seigneur of the manor."
+
+"Well, you'll begin now.  I'm the new bailiff, and if you don't pay your
+tale, up you come to the court of the fief to-morrow."
+
+She looked him clearly in the eyes.  "If I were a man, I should not pay
+the tribute, and I should go to the court of the fief to-morrow, but
+being a woman--"
+
+She clasped the hand of the child tightly to her for an instant, then
+with a sigh she took the basket from her shoulders and, opening it,
+added:
+
+"But being a woman, the fish I caught in the sea that belongs to God and
+to all men I must divide with the Seigneur whose bailiff spies on poor
+fisher-folk."
+
+The man growled an oath and made a motion as though he would catch her by
+the shoulder in anger, but the look in her eyes stopped him.  Counting
+out the fish, and giving him three out of the eight she had caught, she
+said:
+
+"It matters not so much to me, but there are others poorer than I, they
+suffer."
+
+With a leer the fellow stooped, and, taking up the fish, put them in the
+pockets of his queminzolle, all slimy from the sea as they were.
+
+"Ba su, you haven't got much to take care of, have you?  It don't take
+much to feed two mouths--not so much as it does three, Ma'm'selle."
+
+Before he had ended, the woman, without reply to the insult, took the
+child by the hand and moved along her homeward path towards Plemont.
+
+"A bi'tot, good-bye!" the bailiff laughed brutally.  Standing with his
+legs apart and his hands fastened on the fish in the pockets of his long
+queminzolle, he called after her in sneering comment: "Ma fistre, your
+pride didn't fall--ba su!"  Then he turned on his heel.
+
+"Eh ben, here's mackerel for supper," he added as he mounted his horse.
+
+The woman was Guida Landresse, the child was her child, and they lived in
+the little house upon the cliff at Plemont.  They were hastening thither
+now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+A visitor was awaiting Guida and the child: a man who, first knocking at
+the door, then looking in and seeing the room empty, save for the dog
+lying asleep by the fire, had turned slowly away, and going to the cliff
+edge, looked out over the sea.  His movements were deliberate, his body
+moved slowly; the whole appearance was of great strength and nervous
+power.  The face was preoccupied, the eyes were watchful, dark,
+penetrating.  They seemed not only to watch but to weigh, to meditate,
+even to listen--as it were, to do the duty of all the senses at once.
+In them worked the whole forces of his nature; they were crucibles
+wherein every thought and emotion were fused.  The jaw was set and
+strong, yet it was not hard.  The face contradicted itself.  While not
+gloomy it had lines like scars telling of past wounds.  It was not
+despairing, it was not morbid, and it was not resentful; it had the look
+of one both credulous and indomitable.  Belief was stamped upon it; not
+expectation or ambition, but faith and fidelity.  You would have said he
+was a man of one set idea, though the head had a breadth sorting little
+with narrowness of purpose.  The body was too healthy to belong to a
+fanatic, too powerful to be that of a dreamer alone, too firm for other
+than a man of action.
+
+Several times he turned to look towards the house and up the pathway
+leading from the hillock to the doorway.  Though he waited long he did
+not seem impatient; patience was part of him, and not the least part.
+At last he sat down on a boulder between the house and the shore, and
+scarcely moved, as minute after minute passed, and then an hour and more,
+and no one came.  Presently there was a soft footstep beside him, and he
+turned.  A dog's nose thrust itself into his hand.
+
+"Biribi, Biribi!" he said, patting its head with his big hand.
+"Watching and waiting, eh, old Biribi?"  The dog looked into his eyes as
+if he knew what was said, and would speak--or, indeed, was speaking in
+his own language.  "That's the way of life, Biribi--watching and waiting,
+and watching--always watching."
+
+Suddenly the dog caught its head away from his hand, gave a short joyful
+bark, and ran slowly up the hillock.
+
+"Guida and the child," the man said aloud, moving towards the house--
+"Guida and the child!"
+
+He saw her and the little one before they saw him.  Presently the child
+said: "See, maman," and pointed.  Guida started.  A swift flush passed
+over her face, then she smiled and made a step forward to meet her
+visitor.
+
+"Maitre Ranulph--Ranulph!" she said, holding out her hand.  "It's a long
+time since we met."
+
+"A year," he answered simply, "just a year."  He looked down at the
+child, then stooped, caught him up in his arms and said: "He's grown.
+Es-tu gentiment?" he added to the child--"es-tu gentiment, m'sieu'?"
+
+The child did not quite understand.  "Please?" it said in true Jersey
+fashion--at which the mother was troubled.
+
+"O Guilbert, is that what you should say?" she asked.  The child looked
+up quaintly at her, and with the same whimsical smile which Guida had
+given to another so many years ago, he looked at Ranulph and said:
+"Pardon, monsieur."
+
+"Coum est qu'on etes, m'sieu'?" said Ranulph in another patois greeting.
+
+Guida shook her head reprovingly.  The child glanced swiftly at his
+mother as though asking permission to reply as he wished, then back at
+Ranulph, and was about to speak, when Guida said: "I have not taught him
+the Jersey patois, Ranulph; only English and French."
+
+Her eyes met his clearly, meaningly.  Her look said to him as plainly as
+words, The child's destiny is not here in Jersey.  But as if he knew that
+in this she was blinding herself, and that no one can escape the
+influences of surroundings, he held the child back from him, and said
+with a smile: "Coum est qu'on vos portest?"
+
+Now the child with elfish sense of the situation replied in Jersey
+English: "Naicely, thenk you."
+
+"You see," said Ranulph to Guida, "there are things in us stronger than
+we are.  The wind, the sea, and people we live with, they make us sing
+their song one way or another.  It's in our bones."
+
+A look of pain passed over Guida's face, and she did not reply to his
+remark, but turned almost abruptly to the doorway, saying, with just the
+slightest hesitation: "You will come in?"
+
+There was no hesitation on his part.  "Oui-gia!" he said, and stepped
+inside.
+
+She hastily hung up the child's cap and her own, and as she gathered in
+the soft, waving hair, Ranulph noticed how the years had only burnished
+it more deeply and strengthened the beauty of the head.  She had made the
+gesture unconsciously, but catching the look in his eye a sudden thrill
+of anxiety ran through her.  Recovering herself, however, and with an air
+of bright friendliness, she laid a hand upon the great arm-chair, above
+which hung the ancient sword of her ancestor, the Comte Guilbert Mauprat
+de Chambery, and said: "Sit here, Ranulph."
+
+Seating himself he gave a heavy sigh--one of those passing breaths of
+content which come to the hardest lives now and then: as though the
+Spirit of Life itself, in ironical apology for human existence, gives
+moments of respite from which hope is born again.  Not for over four long
+years had Ranulph sat thus quietly in the presence of Guida.  At first,
+when Maitresse Aimable had told him that Guida was leaving the Place du
+Vier Prison to live in this lonely place with her newborn child, he had
+gone to entreat her to remain; but Maitresse Aimable had been present
+then, and all that he could say--all that he might speak out of his
+friendship, out of the old love, now deep pity and sorrow--was of no
+avail.  It had been borne in upon him then that she was not morbid, but
+that her mind had a sane, fixed purpose which she was intent to fulfil.
+It was as though she had made some strange covenant with a little
+helpless life, with a little face that was all her face; and that
+covenant she would keep.
+
+So he had left her, and so to do her service had been granted elsewhere.
+The Chevalier, with perfect wisdom and nobility, insisted on being to
+Guida what he had always been, accepting what was as though it had always
+been, and speaking as naturally of her and the child as though there had
+always been a Guida and the child.  Thus it was that he counted himself
+her protector, though he sat far away in the upper room of Elie
+Mattingley's house in the Rue d'Egypte, thinking his own thoughts, biding
+the time when she should come back to the world, and mystery be over, and
+happiness come once more; hoping only that he might live to see it.
+
+Under his directions, Jean Touzel had removed the few things that Guida
+took with her to Plemont; and instructed by him, Elie Mattingley sold her
+furniture.  Thus Guida had settled at Plemont, and there over four years
+of her life were passed.
+
+"Your father--how is he?" she asked presently.  "Feeble," replied
+Ranulph; "he goes abroad but little now."
+
+"It was said the Royal Court was to make him a gift, in remembrance of
+the Battle of Jersey."  Ranulph turned his head away from her to the
+child, and beckoned him over.  The child came instantly.
+
+As Ranulph lifted him on his knee he answered Guida: "My father did not
+take it."
+
+"Then they said you were to be connetable--the grand monsieur.  "She
+smiled at him in a friendly way.
+
+"They said wrong," replied Ranulph.
+
+"Most people would be glad of it," rejoined Guida.  "My mother used to
+say you would be Bailly one day."
+
+"Who knows--perhaps I might have been!"
+
+She looked at him half sadly, half curiously.  "You--you haven't any
+ambitions now, Maitre Ranulph?"  It suddenly struck her that perhaps she
+was responsible for the maiming of this man's life--for clearly it was
+maimed.  More than once she had thought of it, but it came home to her
+to-day with force.  Years ago Ranulph Delagarde had been spoken of as one
+who might do great things, even to becoming Bailly.  In the eyes of a
+Jerseyman to be Bailly was to be great, with jurats sitting in a row on
+either side of him and more important than any judge in the Kingdom.
+Looking back now Guida realised that Ranulph had never been the same
+since that day on the Ecrehos when his father had returned and Philip had
+told his wild tale of love.
+
+A great bitterness suddenly welled up in her.  Without intention, without
+blame, she had brought suffering upon others.  The untoward happenings of
+her life had killed her grandfather, had bowed and aged the old
+Chevalier, had forced her to reject the friendship of Carterette
+Mattingley, for the girl's own sake; had made the heart of one fat old
+woman heavy within her; and, it would seem, had taken hope and ambition
+from the life of this man before her.  Love in itself is but a bitter
+pleasure; when it is given to the unworthy it becomes a torture--and so
+far as Ranulph and the world knew she was wholly unworthy.  Of late she
+had sometimes wondered if, after all, she had had the right to do as she
+had done in accepting the public shame, and in not proclaiming the truth:
+if to act for one's own heart, feelings, and life alone, no matter how
+perfect the honesty, is not a sort of noble cruelty, or cruel nobility;
+an egotism which obeys but its own commandments, finding its own straight
+and narrow path by first disbarring the feelings and lives of others.
+Had she done what was best for the child?  Misgiving upon this point made
+her heart ache bitterly.  Was life then but a series of trist condonings
+at the best, of humiliating compromises at the worst?
+
+She repeated her question to Ranulph now.  "You haven't ambition any
+longer?"
+
+"I'm busy building ships," he answered evasively.  "I build good ships,
+they tell me, and I am strong and healthy.  As for being connetable,
+I'd rather help prisoners free than hale them before the Royal Court.
+For somehow when you get at the bottom of most crimes--the small ones
+leastways--you find they weren't quite meant.  I expect--I expect," he
+added gravely, "that half the crimes oughtn't to be punished at all; for
+it's queer that things which hurt most can't be punished by law."
+
+"Perhaps it evens up in the long end," answered Guida, turning away from
+him to the fire, and feeling her heart beat faster as she saw how the
+child nestled in Ranulph's arms--her child which had no father.  "You
+see," she added, "if some are punished who oughtn't to be, there are
+others who ought to be that aren't, and the worst of it is, we care so
+little for real justice that we often wouldn't punish if we could.  I
+have come to feel that.  Sometimes if you do exactly what's right, you
+hurt some one you don't wish to hurt, and if you don't do exactly what's
+right, perhaps that some one else hurts you.  So, often, we would rather
+be hurt than hurt."
+
+With the last words she turned from the fire and involuntarily faced him.
+Their eyes met.  In hers were only the pity of life, the sadness, the
+cruelty of misfortune, and friendliness for him.  In his eyes was purpose
+definite, strong.
+
+He went over and put the child in its high chair.  Then coming a little
+nearer to Guida, he said:
+
+"There's only one thing in life that really hurts--playing false."
+
+Her heart suddenly stopped beating.  What was Ranulph going to say?
+After all these years was he going to speak of Philip?  But she did not
+reply according to her thought.
+
+"Have people played false in your life--ever?" she asked.
+
+"If you'll listen to me I'll tell you how," he answered.  "Wait, wait,"
+she said in trepidation.  "It--it has nothing to do with me?"
+
+He shook his head.  "It has only to do with my father and myself.  When
+I've told you, then you must say whether you will have anything to do
+with it, or with me....  You remember," he continued, without waiting for
+her to speak, "you remember that day upon the Ecrehos--five years ago?
+Well, that day I had made up my mind to tell you in so many words what I
+hoped you had always known, Guida.  I didn't--why?  Not because of
+another man--no, no, I don't mean to hurt you, but I must tell you the
+truth now--not because of another man, for I should have bided my chance
+with him."
+
+"Ranulph, Ranulph," she broke in, "you must not speak of this now!  Do
+you not see it hurts me?  It is not like you.  It is not right of you--"
+
+A sudden emotion seized him, and his voice shook.  "Not right!  You
+should know that I'd never say one word to hurt you, or do one thing to
+wrong you.  But I must speak to-day-I must tell you everything.  I've
+thought of it for four long years, and I know now that what I mean to do
+is right."
+
+She sat down in the great arm-chair.  A sudden weakness came upon her:
+she was being brought face to face with days of which she had never
+allowed herself to think, for she lived always in the future now.
+
+"Go on," she said helplessly.  "What have you to say, Ranulph?"
+
+"I will tell you why I didn't speak of my love to you that day we went to
+the Ecrehos.  My father came back that day."
+
+"Yes, yes," she said; "of course you had to think of him."
+
+"Yes, I had to think of him, but not in the way you mean.  Be patient a
+little while," he added.
+
+Then in a few words he told her the whole story of his father's treachery
+and crime, from the night before the Battle of Jersey up to their meeting
+again upon the Ecrehos.
+
+Guida was amazed and moved.  Her heart filled with pity.  "Ranulph--poor
+Ranulph!" she said, half rising in her seat.
+
+"No, no--wait," he rejoined.  "Sit where you are till I tell you all.
+Guida, you don't know what a life it has been for me these four years.
+I used to be able to look every man in the face without caring whether he
+liked me or hated me, for then I had never lied, I had never done a mean
+thing to any man; I had never deceived--nannin-gia, never!  But when my
+father came back, then I had to play a false game.  He had lied, and to
+save him I either had to hold my peace or tell his story.  Speaking was
+lying or being silent was lying.  Mind you, I'm not complaining, I'm not
+saying it because I want any pity.  No, I'm saying it because it's the
+truth, and I want you to know the truth.  You understand what it means to
+feel right in your own mind--if you feel that way, the rest of life is
+easy.  Eh ben, what a thing it is to get up in the morning, build your
+fire, make your breakfast, and sit down facing a man whose whole life's a
+lie, and that man your own father!  Some morning perhaps you forget, and
+you go out into the sun, and it all seems good; and you take your tools
+and go to work, and the sea comes washing up the shingle, and you think
+that the shir-r-r-r of the water on the pebbles and the singing of the
+saw and the clang of the hammer are the best music in the world.  But all
+at once you remember--and then you work harder, not because you love work
+now for its own sake, but because it uses up your misery and makes you
+tired; and being tired you can sleep, and in sleep you can forget.  Yet
+nearly all the time you're awake it fairly kills you, for you feel some
+one always at your elbow whispering, 'you'll never be happy again, you'll
+never be happy again!'  And when you tell the truth about anything, that
+some one at your elbow laughs and says: 'Nobody believes--your whole
+life's a lie!'  And if the worst man you know passes you by, that some
+one at your elbow says: 'You can wear a mask, but you're no better than
+he, no better, no--"'
+
+While Ranulph spoke Guida's face showed a pity and a kindness as deep as
+the sorrow which had deepened her nature.  She shook her head once or
+twice as though to say, Surely, what suffering!  and now this seemed to
+strike Ranulph, to convict him of selfishness, for he suddenly stopped.
+His face cleared, and, smiling with a little of his old-time
+cheerfulness, he said:
+
+"Yet one gets used to it and works on because one knows it will all come
+right sometime.  I'm of the kind that waits."
+
+She looked up at him with her old wide-eyed steadfastness and replied:
+"You are a good man, Ranulph."  He stood gazing at her a moment without
+remark, then he said:
+
+"No, ba su, no!  but it's like you to say I am."  Then he added suddenly:
+"I've told you the whole truth about myself and about my father.  He did
+a bad thing, and I've stood by him.  At first, I nursed my troubles and
+my shame.  I used to think I couldn't live it out, that I had no right
+to any happiness.  But I've changed my mind about that-oui-gia!  As I
+hammered away at my ships month in month out, year in year out, the truth
+came home to me at last.  What right had I to sit down and brood over my
+miseries?  I didn't love my father, but I've done wrong for him, and I've
+stuck to him.  Well, I did love--and I do love--some one else, and I
+should only be doing right to tell her, and to ask her to let me stand
+with her against the world."
+
+He was looking down at her with all his story in his face.  She put out
+her hand quickly as if in protest and said:
+
+"Ranulph--ah no, Ranulph--"
+
+"But yes, Guida," he replied with stubborn tenderness, "it is you I mean
+--it is you I've always meant.  You have always been a hundred times more
+to me than my father, but I let you fight your fight alone.  I've waked
+up now to my mistake.  But I tell you true that though I love you better
+than anything in the world, if things had gone well with you I'd never
+have come to you.  I never came, because of my father, and I'd never have
+come because you are too far above me always--too fine, too noble for me.
+I only come now because we're both apart from the world and lonely beyond
+telling; because we need each other.  I have just one thing to say: that
+we two should stand together.  There's none ever can be so near as those
+that have had hard troubles, that have had bitter wrongs.  And when
+there's love too, what can break the bond!  You and I are apart from the
+world, a black loneliness no one understands.  Let us be lonely no
+longer.  Let us live our lives together.  What shall we care for the rest
+of the world if we know we mean to do good and no wrong?  So I've come to
+ask you to let me care for you and the child, to ask you to make my home
+your home.  My father hasn't long to live, and when he is gone we could
+leave this island for ever.  Will you come, Guida?"
+
+She had never taken her eyes from his face, and as his story grew her
+face lighted with emotion, the glow of a moment's content, of a fleeting
+joy.  In spite of all, this man loved her, he wanted to marry her--in
+spite of all.  Glad to know that such men lived--and with how dark
+memories contrasting with this bright experience-she said to him once
+again: "You are a good man, Ranulph."
+
+Coming near to her, he said in a voice husky with feeling: "Will you be
+my wife, Guida?"
+
+She stood up, one hand resting on the arm of the great chair, the other
+half held out in pitying deprecation.
+
+"No, Ranulph, no; I can never, never be your wife--never in this world."
+
+For an instant he looked at her dumfounded, then turned away to the
+fireplace slowly and heavily.  "I suppose it was too much to hope for,"
+he said bitterly.  He realised now how much she was above him, even in
+her sorrow and shame.
+
+"You forget," she answered quietly, and her hand went out suddenly to the
+soft curls of the child, "you forget what the world says about me."
+
+There was a kind of fierceness in his look as he turned to her again.
+
+"Me--I have always forgotten--everything," he answered.  "Have you
+thought that for all these years I've believed one word?  Secours d'la
+vie, of what use is faith, what use to trust, if you thought I believed!
+I do not know the truth, for you have not told me; but I do know, as I
+know I have a heart in me--I do know that there never was any wrong in
+you.  It is you who forget," he added quickly--"it is you who forget.
+I tried to tell you all this before; three years ago I tried to tell you.
+You stopped me, you would not listen.  Perhaps you've thought I did not
+know what has happened to you every week, almost every day of your life?
+A hundred times I have walked here and you haven't seen me--when you were
+asleep, when you were fishing, when you were working like a man in the
+fields and the garden; you who ought to be cared for by a man, working
+like a slave at man's work.  But, no, no, you have not thought well of
+me, or you would have known that every day I cared, every day I watched,
+and waited, and hoped--and believed!"
+
+She came to him slowly where he stood, his great frame trembling with his
+passion and the hurt she had given him, and laying her hand upon his arm,
+she said:
+
+"Your faith was a blind one, Ro.  I was either a girl who--who deserved
+nothing of the world, or I was a wife.  I had no husband, had I?  Then I
+must have been a girl who deserved nothing of the world, or of you.  Your
+faith was blind, Ranulph, you see it was blind."
+
+"What I know is this," he repeated with dogged persistence--"what I know
+is this: that whatever was wrong, there was no wrong in you.  My life a
+hundred times on that!"
+
+She smiled at him, the brightest smile that had been on her face these
+years past, and she answered softly: "'I did not think there was so great
+faith--no, not in Israel!'"  Then the happiness passed from her lips to
+her eyes.  "Your faith has made me happy, Ro--I am selfish, you see.
+Your love in itself could not make me happy, for I have no right to
+listen, because--"
+
+She paused.  It seemed too hard to say: the door of her heart enclosing
+her secret opened so slowly, so slowly.  A struggle was going on in her.
+Every feeling, every force of her nature was alive.  Once, twice, thrice
+she tried to speak and could not.  At last with bursting heart and eyes
+swimming with tears she said solemnly:
+
+"I can never marry you, Ranulph, and I have no right to listen to your
+words of love, because--because I am a wife."
+
+Then she gave a great sigh of relief; like some penitent who has for
+a lifetime hidden a sin or a sorrow and suddenly finds the joy of a
+confessional which relieves the sick heart, takes away the hand of
+loneliness that clamps it, and gives it freedom again; lifting the poor
+slave from the rack of secrecy, the cruelest inquisition of life and
+time.  She repeated the words once more, a little louder, a little
+clearer.  She had vindicated herself to God, now she vindicated herself
+to man--though to but one.
+
+"I can never marry you; because I am a wife," she said again.  There was
+a slight pause, and then the final word was said: "I am the wife of
+Philip d'Avranche."
+
+Ranulph did not speak.  He stood still and rigid, looking with eyes that
+scarcely saw.
+
+"I had not intended telling any one until the time should come"--once
+more her hand reached out and tremblingly stroked the head of the child
+--"but your faith has forced it from me.  I couldn't let you go from me
+now, ignorant of the truth, you whose trust is beyond telling.  Ranulph,
+I want you to know that I am at least no worse than you thought me."
+
+The look in his face was one of triumph, mingled with despair, hatred,
+and purpose--hatred of Philip d'Avranche, and purpose concerning him.
+He gloried now in knowing that Guida might take her place among the
+honest women of this world,--as the world terms honesty,--but he had
+received the death-blow to his every hope.  He had lost her altogether,
+he who had watched and waited; who had served and followed, in season and
+out of season; who had been the faithful friend, keeping his eye fixed
+only upon her happiness; who had given all; who had poured out his heart
+like water, and his life like wine before her.
+
+At first he only grasped the fact that Philip d'Avranche was the husband
+of the woman he loved, and that she had been abandoned.  Then sudden
+remembrance stunned him: Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, had another
+wife.  He remembered--it had been burned into his brain the day he saw
+it first in the Gazette de Jersey--that he had married the Comtesse
+Chantavoine, niece of the Marquis Grandjon-Larisse, upon the very day,
+and but an hour before, the old Duc de Bercy suddenly died.  It flashed
+across his mind now what he had felt then.  He had always believed that
+Philip had wronged Guida; and long ago he would have gone in search of
+him--gone to try the strength of his arm against this cowardly marauder,
+as he held him--but his father's ill-health had kept him where he was,
+and Philip was at sea upon the nation's business.  So the years had gone
+on until now.
+
+His brain soon cleared.  All that he had ever thought upon the matter now
+crystallised itself into the very truth of the affair.  Philip had
+married Guida secretly; but his new future had opened up to him all at
+once, and he had married again--a crime, but a crime which in high places
+sometimes goes unpunished.  How monstrous it was that such vile
+wickedness should be delivered against this woman before him, in whom
+beauty, goodness, power were commingled!  She was the real Princess
+Philip d'Avranche, and this child of hers--now he understood why she
+allowed Guilbert to speak no patois.
+
+They scarcely knew how long they stood silent, she with her hand stroking
+the child's golden hair, he white and dazed, looking, looking at her and
+the child, as the thing resolved itself to him.  At last, in a voice
+which neither he nor she could quite recognise as his own, he said:
+
+"Of course you live now only for Guilbert."
+
+How she thanked him in her heart for the things he had left unsaid, those
+things which clear-eyed and great-minded folk, high or humble, always
+understand.  There was no selfish lamenting, no reproaches, none of the
+futile banalities of the lover who fails to see that it is no crime for a
+woman not to love him.  The thing he had said was the thing she most
+cared to hear.
+
+"Only for that, Ranulph," she answered.
+
+"When will you claim the child's rights?"
+
+She shook her head sadly.  "I do not know," she answered with hesitation.
+"I will tell you all about it."
+
+Then she told him of the lost register of St. Michael's, and about the
+Reverend Lorenzo Dow, but she said nothing as to why she had kept
+silence.  She felt that, man though he was, he might divine something of
+the truth.  In any case he knew that Philip had deserted her.
+
+After a moment he said: "I'll find Mr. Dow if he is alive, and the
+register too.  Then the boy shall have his rights."
+
+"No, Ranulph," she answered firmly, "it shall be in my own time.  I must
+keep the child with me.  I know not when I shall speak; I am biding my
+day.  Once I thought I never should speak, but then I did not see all,
+did not wholly see my duty towards Guilbert.  It is so hard to find what
+is wise and just."
+
+"When the proofs are found your child shall have his rights," he said
+with grim insistence.
+
+"I would never let him go from me," she answered, and, leaning over, she
+impulsively clasped the little Guilbert in her arms.
+
+"There'll be no need for Guilbert to go from you," he rejoined, "for when
+your rights come to you, Philip d'Avranche will not be living."
+
+"Will not be living!" she said in amazement.  She did not understand.
+
+"I mean to kill him," he answered sternly.
+
+She started, and the light of anger leaped into her eyes.  "You mean to
+kill Philip d'Avranche--you, Maitre Ranulph Delagarde!" she exclaimed.
+"Whom has he wronged?  Myself and my child only--his wife and his child.
+Men have been killed for lesser wrongs, but the right to kill does not
+belong to you.  You speak of killing Philip d'Avranche, and yet you dare
+to say you are my friend!"
+
+In that moment Ranulph learned more than he had ever guessed of life's
+subtle distinctions and the workings of a woman's mind; and he knew that
+she was right.  Her father, her grandfather, might have killed Philip
+d'Avranche--any one but himself, he the man who had but now declared his
+love for her.  Clearly his selfishness had blinded him.  Right was on his
+side, but not the formal codes by which men live.  He could not avenge
+Guida's wrongs upon her husband, for all men knew that he himself had
+loved her for years.
+
+"Forgive me," he said in a low tone.  Then a new thought came to him.
+"Do you think your not speaking all these years was best for the child?"
+he asked.
+
+Her lips trembled.  "Oh, that thought," she said, "that thought has made
+me unhappy so often!  It comes to me at night as I lie sleepless, and I
+wonder if my child will grow up and turn against me one day.  Yet I did
+what I thought was right, Ranulph, I did the only thing I could do.  I
+would rather have died than--"
+
+She stopped short.  No, not even to this man who knew all could she speak
+her whole mind; but sometimes the thought came to her with horrifying
+acuteness: was it possible that she ought to have sunk her own
+disillusions, misery, and contempt of Philip d'Avranche, for the child's
+sake?  She shuddered even now as the reflection of that possibility came
+to her--to live with Philip d'Avranche!
+
+Of late she had felt that a crisis was near.  She had had premonitions
+that her fate, good or bad, was closing in upon her; that these days in
+this lonely spot with her child, with her love for it and its love for
+her, were numbered; that dreams must soon give way for action, and this
+devoted peace would be broken, she knew not how.
+
+Stooping, she kissed the little fellow upon the forehead and the eyes,
+and his two hands came up and clasped both her cheeks.
+
+"Tu m'aimes, maman?" the child asked.  She had taught him the pretty
+question.
+
+"Comme la vie, comme la vie!" she answered with a half sob, and caught
+up the little one to her bosom.  Now she looked towards the window.
+Ranulph followed her look, and saw that the shades of night were falling.
+
+"I have far to walk," he said; "I must be going."  As he held out his
+hand to Guida the child leaned over and touched him on the shoulder.
+"What is your name, man?" he asked.
+
+He smiled, and, taking the warm little hand in his own, he said: "My name
+is Ranulph, little gentleman.  Ranulph's my name, but you shall call me
+Ro."
+
+"Good-night, Ro, man," the child answered with a mischievous smile.
+
+The scene brought up another such scene in Guida's life so many years
+ago.  Instinctively she drew back with the child, a look of pain crossing
+her face.  But Ranulph did not see; he was going.  At the doorway he
+turned and said:
+
+"You know you can trust me.  Good-bye."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Being tired you can sleep, and in sleep you can forget
+Cling to beliefs long after conviction has been shattered
+Futility of goodness, the futility of all
+Her voice had the steadiness of despair
+Joy of a confessional which relieves the sick heart
+Often, we would rather be hurt than hurt
+Queer that things which hurt most can't be punished by law
+Rack of secrecy, the cruelest inquisition of life
+Sardonic pleasure in the miseries of the world
+Sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity
+Thanked him in her heart for the things he had left unsaid
+There is something humiliating in even an undeserved injury
+There was never a grey wind but there's a greyer
+Uses up your misery and makes you tired (Work)
+We care so little for real justice
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BATTLE OF THE STRONG, PARKER, V4 ***
+
+********** This file should be named 6233.txt or 6233.zip ***********
+
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