The Battle Of The Strong [A Romance of Two Kingdoms], Volume 4.

G >> Gilbert Parker >> The Battle Of The Strong [A Romance of Two Kingdoms], Volume 4.

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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--'"

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