“Tell me, Mademoiselle,” he said, for the sake of saying something, for a shadow of constraint seemed to have fallen across them both, “does this Rasselas,” he touched his pocket, “ever escape from his Happy Valley?”
“Yes,” replied Juliana, beginning to move in the direction of the bridge, “he makes a way out, and leaves it in the company of a sage and a lady.—But the lady is his sister,” she added, with the suspicion of a smile. “Do not expect to find a romance of love in so edifying a work as Rasselas. If you want that you must ask Miss Bentley to lend you Richardson.”
“But surely Monsieur le docteur Johnson could have rendered even a romance of love edifying?” protested the student. “Yet, perhaps, for purposes of escape a sister would be a more suitable companion. That is, some kinds of a sister—one like mine, for instance.”
“Ah, you have a sister, Monsieur?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle—au plus haut degré même. I mean that I have a twin sister.”
Miss Forrest was much interested; she had never met a twin, and said so. “Does your sister resemble you very much?”
“Not so much, perhaps, as one pea another in the same pod, which I believe is expected of twins,” answered Raoul, laughing, “but we have changed clothes, Adrienne and I, in our younger and wilder days, and no one has been much the wiser.” He smiled as at some reminiscence, and Juliana knew that he was thinking of his home. Presently, indeed, he began to speak of it a little: of his father, who was old, and old-fashioned in his ideas, not moving with the times but regretting the past—“yet a better father no one could have, Mademoiselle”; of his mother, loved by everyone who came near her, “and not least by me, as you can imagine. . . . I have not seen her for nearly two and a half years,” he went on. “I had leave from Spain once, in the winter, but there was not time to get farther than Bayonne—and we live in the Orléanais! My little mother was ailing; she could not undertake the journey; my father was anxious, and stayed with her. It was a great disappointment. But Adrienne came; she travelled all by herself across two-thirds of France, in the snow; the diligence broke down too, at Dax, but it would take more than that to stop her. So we met in Bayonne, on the jour des Rois, and were very happy—for twenty-four hours.”
They walked on in silence after that, Miss Forrest thinking how simple and modest he was under his lively exterior—this terrible Frenchman who had not made the slightest attempt to take advantage of her rashness—which proved that she had not been rash! So it was a great thing to him to meet his sister; but she could not help wondering a little whether there were not any other lady whom he would have liked to meet in Bayonne, on Twelfth Night.
The bridge was nearly reached again when she said suddenly, “Since I am going away to-morrow, may I ask you what I fear may sound an impertinent question?”
“Pray ask me anything, Mademoiselle. It could not be impertinent.”
“I have had it in my mind for some time,” confessed Juliana, looking down and playing with her reticule. “And now, the sight of old Monsieur de Sainte-Suzanne has revived it. How is it, Monsieur des Sablières, that you, a gentleman of a family no doubt as old as his, find yourself. . . .”
“Find myself an officer of the Emperor’s?” completed Raoul as she hesitated. “Mademoiselle, if when you say ‘find yourself,’ you think that it was due to an accident, or to necessity, I must tell you that it was not Fate but my own choice which has made me serve the greatest soldier that even France has produced. And I am not singular in that. He has many better-known names than mine on his rosters.”
“But when the choice has made you—though surely without your recognizing it or willing it—the enemy of your own class, your own traditions, your own King?”
Raoul looked intently at her. It was a strange coincidence to be taken to task for this delinquency two days running. Yet it was flattering that this young English lady should be sufficiently interested in him to demand an explanation when the action evidently caused her some embarrassment.
He tried to explain his position. They were at the bridge again by the time he had finished.
“France is young, Mademoiselle,” he urged in conclusion—“always young, although she is old! There is sap in her veins, even springing up. And it comes up, up from the root. My family is not a newcomer—not a graft on that tree; the new sap runs through it also. Now Monsieur de Sainte-Suzanne, though I respect him deeply for what he has suffered, I cannot but think of him and his fellows as dead boughs—dropped off. The Bourbons too—a withered branch; France does not need them any more. It is sad. I regret it—though less than my parents regret it, yet more than my sons will regret it when their time comes. Tout tombe, tout pousse à jamais; c’est la loi de la forêt.”
“Yes,” said the girl thoughtfully. “I understand a little better. You forgive the question, I hope . . . And now, I must go on my way.”
She held out her hand. Raoul des Sablières kissed it. “You have been, in everything, too good, Mademoiselle. I shall, I promise you, read every word of Rasselas with the care it deserves. I wish you an agreeable journey to-morrow.”
“The best I could wish you, Monsieur des Sablières,” said Juliana, looking at him with great kindness, “is that on my return I should find you gone on a journey across the Channel! But I suppose there is small chance of that?”
Raoul shook his head with a smile. “Yet there are consolations in every lot. I shall be able to restore your book to you.”
He assisted her over the stile, and watched her progress up the sloping meadow path, where he might not accompany her. When the cherry-colour and ermine had vanished over the brow he returned to the bridge and started to take his rod to pieces. But he had hardly got the first joints apart when he heard a faint scream from the direction of the meadow. Raoul did not wait for its repetition, but, dropping his rod, vaulted over the stile and ran up the path like a hare.
The cry came again as he ran, and joined to it his own name. “Je viens! je viens!” he called out, and burst into the thicket to find a rough-looking man struggling with Miss Juliana Forrest for the possession of her reticule.
CHAPTER IV
“FORTUNE FAVOURS THE——”
“Your ignorance was merely accidental, which, being neither your crime nor your folly, could afford them no reason to applaud themselves; and the knowledge which they had . . . they might as effectually have shown by warning as betraying you.”—Rasselas, chap. ix.
All this while Sir Francis Mulholland was returning towards his mansion and his betrothed in no sunny frame of mind. And he undoubtedly had a grievance, for Juliana, on this, the last afternoon of her stay, had absurdly insisted on going yet again to Northover to take a final and solitary farewell of her dear Laetitia. After yesterday’s scene, and the ominous words with which it had concluded, the lover thought it better to affect complaisance. He obtained the privilege of at least escorting his lady to Mr. Bentley’s door, though he was not allowed to enter, nor to wait, nor to call for her, being given to understand that the exact moment of her return was uncertain, and that Mr. Bentley and Laetitia would perhaps walk back with her. He could occupy himself, he was told, by going on to Stoneleigh to see the horse for sale there, as he had several times said he was anxious to do.
Not too enthusiastically, Sir Francis had agreed to this, and was even now returning from a long interview with the quadruped in question. His shortest way home from Stoneleigh lay by the turnpike road, and by the turnpike alone he would have proceeded thither, had he not fallen in at the crossroads with Mr. Ramage riding, or at least sitting on his old flea-bitten cob taking his usual afternoon’s airing. And Mr. Ramage had implored him to accompany him a little on his homeward path, which, though it lay at an angle