Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 662
“Before God,” he said, “I was never yet in a situation that made me want for words!”
Mr. Feilding was coming out of another convulsion; in panting for breath he turned his eyes, bloodshot and fixed on the girl. She then addressed him — for it was he that she desired to pain.
“Father!” she said. “You call yourself a father and acquiesce at the first offset with those that would pour dishonour on your son.... And on me! You who are acquainted with my sainted, my martyred mother! You come to me from the country where that saint lies and call dishonourable names me who was brought up at her knee. It is amazing that you dare look me in the face....” He was indeed, now, leaning back on the table, his eyes bloodshot and fixed on her as if he saw a vision — shaken, dishevelled and appalled. “Why,” she said, “if you had a daughter... But you have no daughter. If then you had bastard daughters they might be what you have called me and lie with whom you will — your son or others.... It would well befit them!” Mr. Feilding stretched out his hands, clawing the air, and swayed, leaning back on the table. He moaned inarticulately like a great beast in agony. Mr. Assheton Smith turned white under her eyes and said sharply: “Madam! I beseech you. No more of that!”
“Why,” she said to him, “this gentleman’s words were inopportune. I wish no ill to his daughters. But he should not call me strumpet at the moment when they are both jailed — my husband and my lover!”
Mr. Feilding said feebly to Mr. Assheton Smith:
“You observe! She said ‘my lover’!”
Mr. Smith began: “They have then arrested...”
Hélène however was talking, a thought compassionately, to that miserable-seeming squire.
“It would appear,” she said, “that your worship was not in a position to hear me when I said lately that I..
Mr. Smith interjected with urgency:
“Pocas palabras. Enough said. You will ruin...”
She continued however, remorselessly:
“I do not know what I should call your son, Mr. Feilding, if not my lover — since I love him with all my soul and so he loves me. Nor do I see why you should call me foul names. For I am sure that my husband in writing to you — and I presume you have hastened here at the urging of a letter from my husband — I am sure that my husband made no innuendoes against my honour.... So I beg you to finish this discussion. I am aware that in your country a man is accounted a simpleton or worse who marries his mistress. That maybe is why I never consented to become your son’s mistress. Or I do not know. I was debating upon that with myself when I heard your voice and thought it was your son’s. But your son will be in that respect no simpleton if he marries me, for in truth I am no mistress of his....”
“It would kill your mother!” the squire muttered suddenly. “It would kill... Assheton, tell her it would kill her mother....”
Assheton Smith raised his crop and beat the air hesitatingly.
“I would rather,” he said, “infinitely, that we went on debating on the topic of turning hunters out to grass in the summer, though you had become plaguily ill-tempered already over that.... And this is no time...”
“It is no time for hunters, in the name of God,” Hélène said. “But I am sure it would kill my mother. She is against divorces. But this would be no divorce, there being no marriage....”
Mr. Assheton Smith suddenly interrupted her.
“Child,” he said, “you are talking beside the mark!” He then addressed the other man with great earnestness.
“Squire,” he said, “you and I have not half enough debated this matter to let you settle it with this girl....” The squire mumbled: “More than enough of your talk of Egypt and the like.... It would kill her mother.”
“Why,” Mr. Assheton Smith said, “we old fellows have done harm enough to these young ones. I am not one to cry over spilt milk. But I cannot conceal from myself that in my desire for knowledge I have run your son into a plaguy awkward position. Whatever Wellington may say — and you heard him! — I will save him from the firing squad. No Duke nor Devil shall say me nay!”
Hélène said: “O Heaven! You have seen the Duke of Wellington!”
“We rode,” he answered deferentially, “we rode, Madam, Hell-for-Leather from the young man’s rooms to the Duke’s office in the Tuileries. I had sworn to release the young man instanter. But the Duke would not. He is a damned, cold, unrelenting ramrod and has a great case against your... against the young man. I am even afraid it will come to a trial. But do not be alarmed. What the Duke will not do shall be done by a greater personage than he. Of that I assure you!” he spoke again to the Squire:
“So,” he said, “I have injured the young man very sorely in truth — for as we are agreed our country will be no place for him now, nor in many years — or ever. He must to the greenwood go: that is sure. And if he consent to cut the entail he may well and start again in a new world that no doubt has its agréments, or so they say. And if Madame la Baronne consent to share his exile, the least I can do, as having injured him, is to beseech you not to stand in their way; and the least you can do, as having injured... the other party, is to... I beg you to consider this!... to leave them in ignorance. I cannot be more plain. Bethink you of the pain you wish to inflict on these young and exiled things — the pain, the mortification, the despair!”
The Squire shook his head numbly.
“It would kill the marchioness!” he said.
“There is,” Mr. Assheton Smith said, “no essential inconvenience in such marriages if the secret be kept. There are two cases you know well in your own country and they have proved agreeable, prosperous and productive unions. There is a case not a mile from my Quorn kennels that has all those characteristics. The youngsters I swear to you ride to hounds on ten-hand ponies like little devils — the pluckedest of the plucked. So I appeal to your humanity...”
The Squire shook and shook his head. Hélène exclaimed:
“Mr. Smith, this seems to be enough of talking and too much. I do not know the meaning of your allocution though it appears to be benevolent. The fact is however that neither you nor Squire Feilding have any say in this matter. Till this moment I was in doubt whether my duty was towards my husband or my lover. From what you say of my lover’s mournful case, he being fated for exile, unjust obloquy — what know I?... But this I know. From this place I go straight to the palace of the Cardinal Archbishop, and though he be busy he will see me for I have helped him much with stoles and albs and frontals.... And that will be the beginning of the end, for Rome will not refuse justice to a petitioner in my case.... I shall go there not because of violent haste or eagerness but so that my lover having news of it at the earliest moment in his dungeon may know that one faithful being watches beyond its walls!”
The hostess coming round the house-corner with a great tray of white earthen plates, bread, a great yellow omelette and knives, Hélène saw all these familiar objects bright with a melting sentiment that she was never again to know.... But her problem seemed at least settled; she had judged between the claimants to her cares, and the sight of the fair-haired hostess, a boy-child clinging to her apron, gave her new visions of a pleasant forest-and-champaign country where, a boy-child at her apron too, she should stand in her cabin door — they would be poor, poor — and watch the beloved figure in white with a great palmetto hat and a bare, manly throat, walk out from amongst great forest trees and across the glade come towards solace, union, and utter, utter contentment.
Mr. Feilding, looking at her with doomed eyes, said with extreme slowness:
“Poor fool! The boy...”
She heard Assheton Smith give a hoarse cry and saw him start towards the other.
Mr. Feilding completed slowly:
“The boy is your brother!”
There was no surprise: the thought she was aware had been for ever at the back of her mind. Nevertheless her knees gave way beneath her and she fell in blackness to the ground.
PART III
CHAPTER ONE
GEORGE FEILDING paced furiously up and down a small section of an immense carpet in a great, mournful room. The great furniture, the bergères, divans, day-beds and simple chairs were alike shrouded in drugget; like an immense, a supernaturally gigantic pear made of grey sheeting, the great lustre depended from the centre of the ceiling. The great mirrors that went all round the walls had that cold air of grey-blue steel mirrors have that for long have reflected neither the master of the house nor his guests; the white statues of Hebes and Niobes appeared chill and yellowing. The windows gazed on an irregularly shaped courtyard whose naked tree dripped great gouts of moisture though the rain was over.
He tore furiously at a red-worsted and gold bell-pull that depended beside the marble of the mantel. On the right side of the fire-place was a great bust upon a green marble pedestal: it showed a bull-nosed, great-necked man, very decolleté until the marble ended in the rolls of a marble blanket; on the left was a bust, not quite so large and in bronze of a young woman.
Long, long after, a short-skirted, deftly slippered maid, in black with a black apron, flitted deftly round an opening door and stood holding the handle of blown glass. He cried out:
“Madame la Baronne... Madame de Frèjus. Is she not returned? This is intolerable.”
“She stays often,” the maid said, “till late, late into the night with Monsieur le Baron. At the Conciergerie!”
He lugged impetuously from his fob a net purse that jingled. He poured guinea after guinea into his palm.
“Listen,” he said; “you are at least human, mademoiselle.” She was a dark girl, her hair parted in the middle and topped by the small cap and the huge black ribbons that give to the Alsaciennes their proud and graceful gait. She sighed and her dark eyes were soft.
“I entreat you,” the young man said, “I beseech you as you hope to savour the joys of love: that you will conceal me in a closet or put me in an alcove where Madame de Frèjus shall pass. Bethink yourself.... Calumnies have driven her to deny me her society... I was lately a prey to calumnies. But now I am cleared.... Heavens! But that cannot be the reason! She was a witness to all my actions that were questioned!”
“I am glad that you do not offer me gold!” the girl said. “Monsieur’s entreaties would move me far more. Monsieur’s entreaties move my heart itself. They would move a heart of stone. But no emotions at this moment could induce me to depart from the orders of my beloved mistress!”
“Then you admit,” he cried out, “that this infamous cruelty is commanded by Madame Ney — for you are the servant of Madame Ney, not of Madame de Frèjus. But what can Madame Aglaë have against me? It is but a short time since we were to have crossed the world to go into a common exile.... And I have worked for the Prince her husband. Even cloistered up...”
He suddenly changed the tone of his entreaty, speaking much faster.
“See,” he cried out. “Here is gold. Good guineas.. She exclaimed with singular passion:” No, no, sir. It is ungenerous thus to tempt and torture a poor girl.”
He answered, however: “Listen child; let me speak. It is Madame Ney that I beg you to ask to see me, no other. You have no orders against that.”
She twisted her fingers in her apron. She had no specific orders against that but merely general orders that her mistress would see no one on that day save Mr. Assheton Smith and a banker on business.
“Then run, child, run,” he exclaimed; “take the gold; it shall help you the sooner to marry your sweetheart.” She wavered and then went.
He fumbled for his belt in the pouch of which he had kept usually letters or documents of great importance. He swore between his teeth. That accursed habit would never leave him. He had been a week out of uniform and was dressed in the fantastically modish bottle-green clothes that Mr. Assheton Smith had ordered for him whilst he had been in confinement. Nay, he had not worn a belt during the four months that that confinement had lasted. There came into his mind the singular accent of the old captain of the 42d Highlanders who at the Court Martial had asked, after the conclusion of the evidence of each of the witnesses:
“Wass Cahptn Feilding weering hiss uniforrm? Did you effer see him not in hiss uniforrm?”
The old man had asked it so often that it had become a humorous burden to the days the interminable trial had lasted. In effect it had saved, if not George’s life, then at least what small share of his honour he was regarded as retaining. But only Elizabeth Coleman and her uncle had noticed that he was then not wearing a belt and had answered:
“Yes, he had a uniform similar to that he now wears, but with a belt.” Elizabeth Coleman had a queer, clear enunciation as if she took pains to keep all her words spaced apart. At the trial the English banker-uncle had been generous to him. In Lyons they had debated very hotly as to the propriety of his being with the Emperor’s forces. He and the uncle had parted at night frequently with great anger so that Hélène had been depressed, for she had foreseen the Court Martial. But in his evidence Mr. Coleman had slurred all that very nicely over, dwelling only on the fact that George had insisted that England was not at war with France and, even if she had been, he could not have done otherwise than follow the Napoleonic expedition, he being a prisoner on parole.
As for Elizabeth Coleman she had delivered a queer, unstoppable American-rebel oration which the honourable Court — the colonel, the major, the two elderly captains and the second lieutenant — had had to listen to in embarrassment, for they only half understood what she said and did not know how to silence a young female; whilst owing to dislike for the Bourbons the prosecuting captain found his task already so distasteful that he was certainly not going to check her if the honourable Court was inclined to listen.
George Feilding even smiled at the memory. The girl’s point of view was, for a democrat, so enthusiastically Imperialist, inasmuch as Napoleon was his people’s choice whereas the Allies in the name of Liberty had revived the long-exploded doctrine of the divine right of kings. She got that in apropos of George’s ignorance of the fact that his country had declared war — for how could he even conceive of the possibility that an obese monster could be inflicted on a people of whose madly enthusiastic loyalty to their Emperor he had evidence every day? That was unthinkable!
These Christian kings, he remembered her saying, did not propose to kill Bonaparte himself, nor did they in so many words offer a reward for his head, dead or alive; they were like the Quaker who would not kill his dog but only give him a bad name. He accordingly cried “Mad dog!” so that the first man it met killed it. This, coming after the enthusiastic panegyric on George’s valour in saving her and Hélène from the mob, and being uttered with tears in her eyes and, indeed, between sobs, had seemed so curious an illustration that the honourable court had dissolved in laughter and relief.
The truth is that the whole affair had been extremely distasteful to the Court. The war was by then sufficiently long over, the actions of the Royalists, the wholesale arrests and murders, the assassination of Marshal Brune, the arrest of Ney — the whole dreary and ignoble process of the White Terror, disinclined even the senior officers for a trial that seemed much of a type with the others. The Court Martial that was to try Ney had not then yet declared itself incompetent, but it was said that Masséna, and even Auguereau, had so audibly, if in private, expressed their distaste at their occupation that there could be no doubt as to the results of the trial. And although Feilding was not Ney, the colonel of his regiment had spoken very generously of the gallantry of his behaviour in the Peninsular, the young girl had eulogized his courage in the blind alley at Lyons; his handing his sword to Hélène and using only a cudgel as an arm had given a very favourable impression both of his prudence and humanity; and above all his success in the duel with the chief fencing-master-inspector of the Imperial Army made him appear no mean soldier for a youngster. That last was a feat that no other man could lay to his credit. So that if he was not le beau sabreur himself he could be called no mean one, and it was attested by no less persons than Mr. Assheton Smith, the greatest connoisseur of duelling in the world — and by the fencing master himself. So that, but for the testimony of General Gorsin of Antibes and a couple of elderly Englishmen as to George’s utterances at Cannes in the first flush of Napoleonic triumph, and but most of all for the imprudent eloquence of George’s defender, a barrister whom Mr. Assheton Smith had brought over from London, and who addressed and bullied the Court and made attacks on the Duke of Wellington and his staff with the vulgar fervour of an Old Bailey criminal practitioner, the case might have been over very much sooner.
The want of generosity of the Duke of Wellington in refusing under a very shabby pretext to plead for the release of Ney, and the extreme severity of the nature of the confinement that he personally had ordered for Feilding, had already prejudiced the officers who made up the Court a little in George’s favour. For it was absurd to imagine that George, in the custody of officers of unspotted honour, could foment a plot amongst the subjects of the Bourbons, and although the Ultras amongst the Royalists actually had requested that George should be treated with special rigours of confinement, it was carrying subserviency to the divine right of the obese incumbent of the French throne more than a little too far to allow these singularly odious foreigners a voice in the treatment of themselves, His Majesty’s Officers. That was one thing — but to allow an insolent fellow in a wig and gown to cast odium from his odiously gaping, almost radical mouth over the Field Marshal Commanding-in-Chief was carrying matters a little too far the other way. So that the comments from time to time uttered by one or other elderly member of the Court were at times singularly bitter and aged and disapproving of the counsel. That fellow was again and again hauled up for attempting directly to browbeat witnesses in cross-examination, whereas in a Court Martial all questions to witnesses must be put through the mouth of one or other member of the honourable Court. Indeed, during the cross-examination of General Gorsin, at the end of an unseemly quarrel with the presiding Colonel, the barrister, Sergeant Coffin, had violently cast off his wig and gown and had left the court.
