Moreover, even from the terrasse of the café below, one needed only to lift one's eyes to see, afar, perched high upon a smiling slope of green, with the highway to Millau at its foot and a beetling cliff behind, the Château de Montalais. Seated on that terrasse, late in the afternoon of his second day in Nant, discussing a Picon and a villainous caporal cigarette of the Régie (to whose products a rugged constitution was growing slowly reconciled anew) Duchemin let his vision dwell upon the distant château almost as constantly as his thoughts.
He was to dine there that very evening. Even taking into account the signal service Duchemin had rendered, this wasn't easy to believe when one remembered the tradition of social conservatism among French gentlefolk. Still, it was true: Duchemin of the open road was bidden to dine en famille at the Château de Montalais. In his pocket lay the invitation, penned in the crabbed antique hand of Madame de Sévénié and fetched to the hotel by a servitor quite as crabbed and antique: Monsieur Duchemin would confer a true pleasure by enabling the ladies of the château to testify, even so inadequately, to their sense of obligation, etc.; with a postscript to say that Monsieur d'Aubrac was resting easily, his wound mending as rapidly as heart could wish.
Of course Duchemin was going, had in fact already despatched his acceptance by the hand of the same messenger. Equally of course he knew that he ought not to go. For a man of his years he was, as a matter of training and habit, amazingly honest with himself. He knew quite well what bent his inclination toward visiting the Château de Montalais just once before effecting, what he was resolved upon, a complete evanishment from the ken of its people. He had yet to hold one minute of private conversation with Eve de Montalais, he had of her no sign to warrant his thinking her anything but utterly indifferent to him; and yet. …
No; he wasn't ass enough to dream that he was in love with the woman; to the contrary, he was wise enough, knew himself well enough, to know that he could be, easily, and would be, given half a chance to lose his head.
His warning had been clear beyond mistake, in that hour in the motor car on the road from La Roque to Nant, when Nature, as she sometimes will, incautiously had shown her hand to one whom she herself had schooled to read shrewdly, letting him discern what was her will with him, the snare that was laid for his feet and in which he must soon find himself trapped beyond extrication … always providing he lacked the wit and resolution to fly his peril, who knew through bitterest of learning that love was never for him.
Now he had seen Madame de Montalais another time, and had found that she fitted to the sweetest detail of perfection his ideal of Woman.
On the previous afternoon, meeting the ladies of the château by arrangement in the bureau of the maire, Duchemin had sat opposite and watched and listened to Eve de Montalais for upwards of two hours--as completely devoted to covert study of her as if she had been the one woman in the room, as if the girl Louise, Madame de Sévénié, and the officials and functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person which had the night before so stirred his pulses.
Posed with consummate grace in a comfortless chair, a figure of slender elegance in her half-mourning, she had narrated quietly her version of last night's misadventure, an occasional tremor of humour lightening the moving modulations of her voice. A deep and vibrant voice, contralto in quality, hinting at hidden treasures of strength in the woman whose superficial mind it expressed. A fair woman, slim but round, with brown eyes level and calm, a translucent skin of matchless texture, hair the hue of bronze laced with intimations of gold …
Her story told, and taken down in longhand by a withered clerk, she supplied without reluctance or trace of embarrassment such intimate personal information as was necessary in order that her signature to the document might be acceptable to the State.
Her age, she said, was twenty-nine; her birthplace, the City of New York; her parents, Edmund Anstruther, once of Bath, England, but at the time of her birth a naturalised citizen of the United States, and Eve Marie Anstruther, née Legendre, of Paris. Both were dead. In June 1914 she had married, in Paris, Victor Maurice de Montalais, who had been killed in action at La Fère-Champenoise on the ninth of September following. Her home? The Château de Montalais.
On the hand she stripped in order to sign her deposition Duchemin saw a blue diamond of such superb water that this amateur of precious stones caught his breath for sheer wonder at its beauty and excellence and worth. Such jewels, he knew, were few and far to seek outside the collections of princes.
Out of these simple elements imagination reconstructed a tragedy, a tragedy of life singularly close to the truth as he later came to learn it, a story not at all calculated to lessen his interest in the woman.
Such women, he knew, are the product of a cultivation seldom to be achieved by poverty. This one had been made before, and not by, her marriage. Her father, then, had commanded riches. And when one knew, as Duchemin knew, what delights New York has for young women of wealth and fashion, one perceived a radiant and many-coloured background for this drab life of a recluse, expatriate from the high world of her inheritance, which Eve de Montalais must lead, and for the six years of her premature widowhood must have led, in that lonely château, buried deep in the loneliest hills of all France, the sole companion and comfort of her husband's bereaved sister and grandmother, chained by sorrow to their sorrow, by an inexorable reluctance to give them pain by seeming to slight the memory of the husband, brother and grandson through turning her face toward the world of life and light and gaiety of which she was so essentially a part, isolate from which she was so inevitably a thing existing without purpose or effect.
How often, Duchemin wondered, had she in hours of solitude and restlessness felt her spirit yearning toward Paris, the nearest gateway to her world, and had cried out: How long, O Lord! how long? …
The mellow resonance of a two-toned automobile horn, disturbing the early evening hush and at the same time Duchemin's meditations, recalled him to Nant in time to see a touring car of majestic proportions and mien which, coming from the south, from the direction of the railroad and Nimes, was sweeping a fine curve round two sides of the public square. Arriving in front of the Hôtel de l'Univers it executed a full stop and stood curbed yet palpitant, purring heavily: an impressive brute of a car, all shining silver plate and lustrous green paint and gold, the newest model of the costliest and best automobile manufactured in France.
Instantly, as the wheels ceased to turn, a young man in the smartest livery imaginable, green garnished with gold, leaped smartly from the driver's seat, with military precision opened the door of the tonneau and, holding it, immobilised himself into the semblance of a waxwork image with the dispassionate eye, the firm mouth, and the closely razored, square jowls of the model chauffeur. Rustics and townsfolk were already gathering, a gaping audience, when from the tonneau descended first a long and painfully emaciated gentleman, whose face was a cadaverous mask of settled melancholy and his chosen toilette for motoring (as might be seen through the open and flapping front of his ulster) a tightly tailored light grey cutaway coat and trousers, with a double-breasted white waistcoat, a black satin Ascot scarf transfixed by a single splendid pearl, and spotless white spats.
His hand, as gaunt as a skeleton's, assisted to alight a young woman whose brilliant blonde beauty, viewed for the first time in evening shadows, was like a shaft of sunlight in a darkened room. A well-made creature, becomingly and modishly gowned for motoring, spirited yet dignified in carriage, she was like a vision of, as she was palpably a visitation from,