The Battle Of The Strong: Chapter 21

Chapter 21

"The Comtesse Chantavoine, young, rich, amiable. You shall meet her
to-morrow" . . . !--Long after Philip left the Duke to go to his own
chamber, these words rang in his ears. He suddenly felt the cords of fate
tightening round him. So real was the momentary illusion that, as he
passed through the great hall where hung the portraits of the Duke's
ancestors, he made a sudden outward motion of his arms as though to free
himself from a physical restraint. Strange to say, he had never foreseen
or reckoned with this matter of marriage in the designs of the Duke. He
had forgotten that sovereign dukes must make sure their succession even
unto the third and fourth generation. His first impulse had been to tell
the Duke that to introduce him to the Countess would be futile, for he
was already married. But the instant warning of the mind that his
Highness could never and would never accept the daughter of a Jersey
ship-builder restrained him. He had no idea that Guida's descent from the
noble de Mauprats of Chambery would weigh with the Duke, who would only
see in her some apple-cheeked peasant stumbling over her court train.

It was curious that the Duke had never even hinted at the chance of his
being already married--yet not so curious either, since complete silence
concerning a wife was in itself declaration enough that he was unmarried.
He felt in his heart that a finer sense would have offered Guida no such
humiliation, for he knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of
speech.

He had not spoken, partly because he had not yet become used to the fact
that he really was married. It had never been brought home to him by the
ever-present conviction of habit. One day of married life, or, in
reality, a few hours of married life, with Guida had given the sensation
more of a noble adventure than of a lasting condition. With distance from
that noble adventure, something of the glow of a lover's relations had
gone, and the subsequent tender enthusiasm of mind and memory was not
vivid enough to make him daring or--as he would have said--reckless for
its sake. Yet this same tender enthusiasm was sincere enough to make him
accept the fact of his marriage without discontent, even in the glamour
of new and alluring ambitions.

If it had been a question of giving up Guida or giving up the duchy of
Bercy--if that had been put before him as the sole alternative, he would
have decided as quickly in Guida's favour as he did when he thought it
was a question between the duchy and the navy. The straightforward issue
of Guida or the duchy he had not been called upon to face. But,
unfortunately for those who are tempted, issues are never put quite so
plainly by the heralds of destiny and penalty. They are disguised as
delectable chances: the toss-up is always the temptation of life. The man
who uses trust-money for three days, to acquire in those three days a
fortune, certain as magnificent, would pull up short beforehand if the
issue of theft or honesty were put squarely before him. Morally he means
no theft; he uses his neighbour's saw until his own is mended: but he
breaks his neighbour's saw, his own is lost on its homeward way; and
having no money to buy another, he is tried and convicted on a charge of
theft. Thus the custom of society establishes the charge of immorality
upon the technical defect. But not on that alone; upon the principle that
what is committed in trust shall be held inviolate, with an exact
obedience to the spirit as to the letter of the law.

The issue did not come squarely to Philip. He had not openly lied about
Guida: so far he had had no intention of doing so. He even figured to
himself with what surprise Guida would greet his announcement that she
was henceforth Princesse Guida d'Avranche, and in due time would be her
serene highness the Duchesse de Bercy. Certainly there was nothing
immoral in his ambitions. If the reigning Prince chose to establish him
as heir, who had a right to complain?

Then, as to an officer of the English navy accepting succession in a
sovereign duchy in suzerainty to the present Government of France, while
England was at war with her, the Duke had more than once, in almost so
many words, defined the situation. Because the Duke himself, with no
successor assured, was powerless to side with the Royalists against the
Red Government, he was at the moment obliged, for the very existence of
his duchy, to hoist the tricolour upon the castle with his own flag. Once
the succession was secure beyond the imbecile Leopold John, then he would
certainly declare against the present fiendish Government and for the
overthrown dynasty.

Now England was fighting France, not only because she was revolutionary
France, but because of the murder of Louis XVI and for the restoration of
the overthrown dynasty. Also she was in close sympathy with the war of
the Vendee, to which she would lend all possible assistance. Philip
argued that if it was his duty, as a captain in the English navy, to
fight against the revolutionaries from without, he would be beyond
criticism if, as the Duc de Bercy, he also fought against them from
within.

Indeed, it was with this plain statement of the facts that the second
military officer of the duchy had some days before been sent to the Court
of St. James to secure its intervention for Philip's freedom by exchange
of prisoners. This officer was also charged with securing the consent of
the English King for Philip's acceptance of succession in the duchy,
while retaining his position in the English navy. The envoy had been
instructed by the Duke to offer his sympathy with England in the war and
his secret adherence to the Royalist cause, to become open so soon as the
succession through Philip was secured.

To Philip's mind all that side of the case was in his favour, and sorted
well with his principles of professional honour. His mind was not so
acutely occupied with his private honour. To tell the Duke now of his
marriage would be to load the dice against himself: he felt that the
opportunity for speaking of it had passed.

He seated himself at a table and took from his pocket a letter of Guida's
written many weeks before, in which she had said firmly that she had not
announced the marriage, and would not; that he must do it, and he alone;
that the letter written to her grandfather had not been received by him,
and that no one in Jersey knew their secret.

In reading this letter again a wave of feeling rushed over him. He
realised the force and strength of her nature: every word had a clear,
sharp straightforwardness and the ring of truth.

A crisis was near, and he must prepare to meet it.

The Duke had said that he must marry; a woman had already been chosen for
him, and he was to meet her to-morrow. But, as he said to himself, that
meant nothing. To meet a woman was not of necessity to marry her.

Marry--he could feel his flesh creeping! It gave him an ugly, startled
sensation. It was like some imp of Satan to drop into his ear the
suggestion that princes, ere this, had been known to have two wives--one
of them unofficial. He could have struck himself in the face for the
iniquity of the suggestion; he flushed from the indecency of it; but so
have sinners ever flushed as they set forth on the garish road to
Avernus. Yet--yet somehow he must carry on the farce of being single
until the adoption and the succession had been formally arranged.

Vexed with these unbidden and unwelcome thoughts, he got up and walked
about his chamber restlessly. "Guida--poor Guida!" he said to himself
many times. He was angry, disgusted that those shameful, irresponsible
thoughts should have come to him. He would atone for all that--and
more--when he was Prince and she Princess d'Avranche. But, nevertheless,
he was ill at ease with himself. Guida was off there alone in
Jersey--alone. Now, all at once, another possibility flashed into his
mind. Suppose, why, suppose--thoughtless scoundrel that he had
been--suppose that there might come another than himself and Guida to
bear his name! And she there alone, her marriage still kept secret--the
danger of it to her good name. But she had said nothing in her letters,
hinted nothing. No, in none had there been the most distant suggestion.
Then and there he got them, one and all, and read every word, every line,
all through to the end. No; there was not one hint. Of course it could
not be so; she would have--but no, she might not have! Guida was unlike
anybody else.

He read on and on again. And now, somehow, he thought he caught in one of
the letters a new ring, a pensive gravity, a deeper tension, which were
like ciphers or signals to tell him of some change in her. For a moment
he was shaken. Manhood, human sympathy, surged up in him. The flush of a
new sensation ran through his veins like fire. The first instinct of
fatherhood came to him, a thrilling, uplifting feeling. But as suddenly
there shot through his mind a thought which brought him to his feet with
a spring.

But suppose--suppose that it was so--suppose that through Guida the
further succession might presently be made sure, and suppose he went to
the Prince and told him all; that might win his favour for her; and the
rest would be easy. That was it, as clear as day. Meanwhile he would hold
his peace, and abide the propitious hour.

For, above all else--and this was the thing that clinched the purpose in
his mind--above all else, the Duke had, at best, but a brief time to
live. Only a week ago the Court physician had told him that any violence
or mental shock might snap the thread of existence. Clearly, the thing
was to go on as before, keep his marriage secret, meet the Countess,
apparently accede to all the Duke proposed, and wait--and wait.

With this clear purpose in his mind colouring all that he might say, yet
crippling the freedom of his thought, he sat down to write to Guida. He
had not yet written to her, according to his parole: this issue was
clear; he could not send a letter to Guida until he was freed from that
condition. It had been a bitter pill to swallow; and many times he had
had to struggle with himself since his arrival at the castle. For
whatever the new ambitions and undertakings, there was still a woman in
the lonely distance for whose welfare he was responsible, for whose
happiness he had yet done nothing, unless to give her his name under
sombre conditions was happiness for her. All that he had done to remind
him of the wedded life he had so hurriedly, so daringly, so eloquently
entered upon, was to send his young wife fifty pounds. Somehow, as this
fact flashed to his remembrance now, it made him shrink; it had a certain
cold, commercial look which struck him unpleasantly. Perhaps, indeed, the
singular and painful shyness--chill almost--with which Guida had received
the fifty pounds now communicated itself to him by the intangible
telegraphy of the mind and spirit.

All at once that bare, glacial fact of having sent her fifty pounds acted
as an ironical illumination of his real position. He felt conscious that
Guida would have preferred some simple gift, some little thing that women
love, in token and remembrance, rather than this contribution to the
common needs of existence. Now that he came to think of it, since he had
left her in Jersey, he had never sent her ever so small a gift. He had
never given her any gifts at all save the Maltese cross in her
childhood--and her wedding-ring. As for the ring, it had never occurred
to him that she could not wear it save in the stillness of the night,
unseen by any eye save her own. He could not know that she had been wont
to go to sleep with the hand clasped to her breast, pressing close to her
the one outward token she had of a new life, begun with a sweetness which
was very bitter and a bitterness only a little sweet.

Philip was in no fitting mood to write a letter. Too many emotions were
in conflict in him at once. They were having their way with him; and,
perhaps, in this very complexity of his feelings he came nearer to being
really and acutely himself than he had ever been in his life. Indeed,
there was a moment when he was almost ready to consign the Duke and all
that appertained to the devil or the deep sea, and to take his fate as it
came. But one of the other selves of him calling down from the little
attic where dark things brood, told him that to throw up his present
chances would bring him no nearer and no sooner to Guida, and must return
him to the prison whence he came.

Yet he would write to Guida now, and send the letter when he was released
from parole. His courage grew as the sentences spread out before him; he
became eloquent. He told her how heavily the days and months went on
apart from her. He emptied out the sensations of absence, loneliness,
desire, and affection. All at once he stopped short. It flashed upon him
now that always his letters had been entirely of his own doings; he had
pictured himself always: his own loneliness, his own grief at separation.
He had never yet spoken of the details of her life, questioned her of
this and of that, of all the little things which fill the life of a
woman--not because she loves them, but because she is a woman, and the
knowledge and governance of little things is the habit of her life. His
past egotism was borne in upon him now. He would try to atone for it. Now
he asked her many questions in his letter. But one he did not ask. He
knew not how to speak to her of it. The fact that he could not was a
powerful indictment of his relations towards her, of his treatment of
her, of his headlong courtship and marriage.

So portions of this letter of his had not the perfect ring of truth, not
the conviction which unselfish love alone can beget. It was only at the
last, only when he came to a close, that the words went from him with the
sharp photography of his own heart. It came, perhaps, from a remorse
which, for the instant, foreshadowed danger ahead; from an acute pity for
her; or perchance from a longing to forego the attempt upon an exalted
place, and get back to the straightforward hours, such as those upon the
Ecrehos, when he knew that he loved her. But the sharpness of his
feelings rendered more intense now the declaration of his love. The
phrases were wrung from him. "Good-bye--no, a la bonne heure, my
dearest," he wrote. "Good days are coming--brave, great days, when I
shall be free to strike another blow for England, both from within and
from without France; when I shall be, if all go well, the Prince
d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, and you my perfect Princess. Good-bye! Thy
Philip, qui t'aime toujours."

He had hardly written the last words when there came a knocking at his
door, and a servant entered. "His Highness offers his compliments to
monsieur, and will monsieur descend to meet the Marquis Grandjon-Larisse
and the Comtesse Chantavoine, who have just arrived."

For an instant Philip could scarce compose himself, but he sent a message
of obedience to the Duke's command, and prepared to go down.

So it was come--not to-morrow, but to-day. Already the deep game was on.
With a sigh which was half bitter and mocking laughter, he seized the
pouncebox, dried his letter to Guida, and put it in his pocket. As he
descended the staircase, the last words of it kept assailing his mind,
singing in his brain: "Thy Philip, qui t'aime toujours!"

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