The Marchioness against the County

Front matter

THE MARCHIONESS AGAINST THE COUNTY EY EDWARD H. COOPER AUTHOR OF "MR. BLAKE OF NEWMARKET," ETC. LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ld. F. II. EVANS AND CO., LIMITED, PRINTERS, CRYSTAL PALACE, S.E. HeDtcatfon. Paris, November, 1897. Dearest "Helen," You will not be allowed to read this story for another five years at least, by which time, I doubt not, it will be dead and buried. As you have written the only nice pieces in it, I must put in one page for you to look at — -just a page with this little note to say that the book is dedicated to you, with much love, by your ectionate friend Edward H. Cooper. CONTENTS

Chapter I. To Introduce The County

I. HIGH Mass was being sung at the Madeleine one Sunday morning when Yvonne Renault was young, and the church was filled with its usual crowd of upper-class Parisian tradesmen, provincial French folk come to Paris on a sight-seeing expedition, English and American tourists present on the same business, and a small scattering of society personages. Winter morning sunlight flooded down through the roof-windows, making long motes out of the incense-smoke and touching with sober rays the massive, sombre pillars, the heavy gold candlesticks and crucifixes, the purple vestments of the priests and white marble figures of St. Mary Magdalene and her attendant angels ; while from behind the high altar came a glow of yellow light where lamps shone down on the B choristers' faces. The congregation was standing, sitting, kneeling, in all attitudes of devotion, boredom, and indifference.

A man with his hands in his pockets was looking down with a faint, kindly smile on his young daughter kneeling with her eyes shut and face upturned in the absorption of young religious service ; near by was an English man studying his Baedeker, his forehead wrinkled with anxious lines as he vainly tried to fit each side-chapel with its description. Little children, with rosaries in their hands and rapidly-moving lips, watched with admiring eyes the movements of the lordly Suisses as they promenaded the aisles in their gorgeous plumed hats and sashes. When Canon Rellier mounted the pulpit and announced that during the Sundays of Advent a short dis course of ten minutes would be preached, a look of deep, bitter resentment spread over the small faces, and the boys gave audible expression to their disapprobation.

They had the most pro found disbelief in that sermon lasting only ten minutes, and resented its introduction from the bottom of their souls. While it lasted life was to them an aching desolation, aggravated by inter mittent alarm as to what the Virgin would think of them if they fidgeted over-much on the hard wicker chairs. Only the hope of seeing a quarrel between the Suisses and one of those strange English vauriens, who refuse to kneel down when the consecration bell rings, supported them. One took place to day close to Yvonne. A woman sat rigidly upright in the midst of the bending congregation ; the plumed feathers approached, bristling with indignation ; there was a brief altercation, and the English lady rose from her seat and strutted down the church, flinging glances of scorn at her idolatrous neighbours.

The children's eyes followed her and the shame-faced husband who marched after her with adoring gratitude; while soft and low the chant of the " Salutaris Hostia " swelled down the long aisles, and lifting its prayer to Heaven's gates, carried the soul of little Yvonne up with it. Even now, sometimes, when she is back there of a Sunday morning, and rear to, or maybe in the very place where as a little maid she knelt, thrilling with angel whispers and lost in a trance of adoration and prayer, Madame, world-worn and weary, can drift back into that world of peace on the wings of the music which is rising round her. All guilt and pain, regrets, satiety, and fear are lost, as it seems to her, in the cadence of these prayers ; dead souls are pierced with their inbreathed sense of wor ship ; callous and devout are alike held for the moment in awe and reverence, children again in the almost visible presence of their Father, with b Heaven as close at hand and the Communion of Saints as vivid a reality as when, long years ago, they knelt before the Virgin with their first rosary, and begged her not to be offended if they occasion ally forgot which prayer came next.

"Domine salvam sac rem republican! " . . • Jhe spell was slowly broken ; people were sitting down, looking round them, searching for hats, umbrellas, and friends, glancing up at the clock, and whispering questions. At length the great doors were flung open, and the congregation began to file out of church into the sunlight which flashed down on the gold dome of the Invalides, and the fountains playing in the Place de la Concorde, and the flower-women selling their bunches of violets on the church steps. Among the groups of persons who stood chatting under the portico was the man who had followed his Protestant wife in her pro testing exit from the Madeleine. He was waiting for some one, and scanned the members of the congregation as they came out with brief, uneasy glances, anxious both to find his acquaintance and to avoid being recognised as the hero of the anti papal demonstration.

Being highly unsuccessful in this latter ambition, he was relieved when Mr. Renault appeared. The two men walked down the Rue Royale together, Miss Renault and her sister walking behind. There was a discussion going on about a horse which was to run at Auteuil that afternoon. " He can't stay the four thousand metres, my lord," said Renault. " I had much better run him in the Prix Wasp." " I have a particular reason for wishing him to run in the other," was the reply ; and the trainer shrugged his shoulders in unwilling assent. Their discussion had ended thus at the bottom of the Rue Royale, and both men stood for a moment before parting, so that the two girls came up to them. " My eldest daughter, Rosita," said Renault, indicating a small, neat-looking girl of seventeen with helpless-looking violet eyes and drooping, pretty mouth.

Viscount Tunstall took off his hat. " Have you come up from Chantilly this morning ? " he asked politely. " We come very often," said Rosita. " Yvonne likes the Madeleine so much that she and father and I often come to church there, even though we have to come up to Paris every day in the week." "This is my second daughter, Yvonne, my lord." Lord Tunstall made another bow, this time with a look of very decided astonishment at the person to whom he had just been introduced. In after years, when she had half Paris to talk about her, and scores of people to pay two hundred francs for a rez-de-chaussce box for her rentree at the Capucines, and to send half Lachaume's flower shop to her little flat afterwards ; when she could make the fortune of a cafd-chantant by dancing there for a season, and half empty the Rue de la Paix shops of sapphires by saying that she wanted those stones for her New Year gifts, Yvonne's angriest rivals would admit the complete perfection of her beauty.

Among foreigners and Parisians, men and women, you would hear an involuntary " Oh ! " as the lines of ballet-girls divided, and Yvonne came tripping down the middle. On the lawns of Longchamp and Chantilly and Auteui', when the summer crowd was at its smartest, ar.d all the art of the most famous dressmakers of Paris had been spent on its toilettes, Yvonne would outshine them all, and make every creature present turn and look at her as if she were walking in her Grand Prix toilette through lines of charity schoolgirls. One train of admirers would praise her wit, and the manner in which she would gravely speak a series of bon-mots and then suddenly break into delighted rippling laughter at her own humour ; another could find no words of sufficient admiration for the courtly, perfect manners of this tall young empress, with her old-fashioned Faubourg St. Germain graces and curtsies and stately walk ; for others her eyes were enough — " the Mediterranean with June sunlight on it," said Monsieur de Lestrier, who ruined himself, as he said, buying sapphires to match their colour.

Yet there was one other man, an Englishman, the maddest, most intoxicated lover of them all, as he was the finest gentleman and greatest noble among them, who said always that Yvonne Renault would be nothing without the curious look of serene inno cence and purity which rested on her face to the end of her life, so that no man, even among those who knew her best, both before and after her two marriages, ever willingly began, or felt comfortable in continuing, a conversation which he would not have carried on before his sister or children. The wonderful blue eyes were resting on Lord Tunstall now. He was quite silent with surprise for a moment, and then asked some question or other with regard to the Madeleine, of which he himself scarce knew the meaning. Yvonne answered, adding a remark about his having left in the middle, at which my lord flushed angrily and said that his wife had found the church hot.

The girls laughed when he had gone, for the contest between the Suisse and the English Viscountess had been neither quiet nor of doubtful meaning. Lord Tunstall walked back to his hotel with his mind divided in interest between the horse which he had just bought and put under Renault's charge to run at Auteuil this afternoon, and the trainer's daughter. He spoke about Yvonne to his wife, in whose company he had just returned from Biarritz, recommending her to come to Auteuil and see the prettiest girl in Paris; but Lady Tunstall declined curtly. " Pray do not begin arguing with me again about Sunday racing,'' she said crossly ; " we are not at all likely to change one another's opinions. I dislike it extremely, and should not think of going. Who is this girl ? " My lord growled out her biography in sulky snaps during the intervals of eating whiting and calf's head.

He was the soul of courtesy and patience as a rule, but during the past few days his wife had been decidedly trying. The moral and material atmosphere of Paris jarred on the young American in a fashion more common than a casual observer of her countrywomen in Paris might suppose, and her discords vibrated far and wide. A Parisian custom like Sunday racing dropped into her mind like a stone into a pool of water, creating rings of disapprobation which slowly widened till they disturbed a whole hotel. Toy pleasure-boats like her brother Hugh Rosemont were severely rocked by them, and the very waiter who brought in the cutlets, though he was a loyal subject of the Emperor of Germany, and indifferent to all Parisian institutions except the pourboire, felt their disturbing influence. With the necessary conjunctions added, and her ladyship's disapproving interjections omitted, Lord Tunstall's narrative was as follows : — Yvonne Renault was the daughter of a trainer of race horses at Chantilly, who, being himself half a Frenchman, had married a Frenchwoman, a Breton girl who had been a dancer at the Opera, so that his daughters were three-quarters French.

Their mother being dead, the sisters, who had from an early age been inscribed as candidates for the Opera dancing school, had been accepted, and were now learning dancing there, coming up to Paris every morning for the purpose. So much Lord Tunstall had heard about the girls from his brother-in-law, who had introduced him to Renault. As for the trainer himself, he had very few horses under his charge, but trained and placed them with much skill, and, it was supposed, made a considerable income by betting. His house at Chantilly was a large and pleasant one, frequently full of visitors, and quite celebrated for the gay dinner-parties at which Renault's patrons and friends who had come down to see the next morning's work on the training grounds were present. French and English sportsmen came there; journalists from London and Paris; dis engaged actors and actresses from the middle-class theatrical world to which Mrs. Renault had be longed ; and sometimes even some very great star of the theatres or music-halls, who came in search of racing information.

" It is what we are all after more or less, of course," said Hugh Rosemont, who was Lord Tunstall's informant ; " though Renault gets as much out of us as he gives ; and yet I know that if the stables were burnt down, and all his horses went to the deuce to-morrow, there are plenty of us who would go to dinner there as often as we were invited if we were sure of having the younger daughter to dine with us. Mostly she sits there very quiet and prim-looking, but sometimes she will keep us all half dead with laughter by her talk, and then dance to us after dinner till we wonder why we should ever go to the Opera again. I'll take you there one day if you like." " I sincerely hope you are not thinking of going," said Lady Tunstall when her husband had told her laughingly about the invitation. " It is simply shocking to think of girls living in such company.

Will this horse remain in Renault's stable long? " " I want him to run at Nice in January. I shall leave him with Renault till after the Nice races. I must be off to Auteuil now." Driving up the Champs Elysees, Lord Tunstall smiled a little wearily as he thought over his wife's words. He had no love for dissipation ; the plea sures of such a life as that, for instance, of his young kinsman, Rosemont, were incomprehensible to him. A supper-party beginning at midnight and going on with coarse jokes, risqui stories, screaming, glassbreaking, and baccarat till four in the morning, bored as much as it disgusted him. A wild night at the Cercle du Bois, with a masked ball and profuse supper in stifling, patchouli-scented rooms, to which Rosemont had taken him one day last June, stood out yet in his mind as the very realisation of unsuccessful seeking after happiness.

But for a moment this afternoon he had a petty, childish feeling that if anything could induce him to take part in such a life and try to comprehend and enjoy it, his wife's tiresome, pointless com ments would be the impelling force. Her ladyship was one of those persons who, while in Paris or any place which they dislike, seem to be filled up to the top with ready-written sermons like the drawers of a bishop's writing-table, and to be quite vexed when no occasion can be found for them. As it is told of a certain famous Oxford don, how he wrote an agricultural sermon beginning, " All you who follow the plough," and could find no opportunity to deliver it till, in absence of mind, he preached it in his college chapel after the schools, so Lady Tunstall had a sermon always ready against the small portion of the vice of Paris which her sharp eyes and limited imagination re vealed to her, and could never find a chance to deliver it Her eldest son was only ten years old ; her husband was a man of perfect refinement and almost severe morality ; and as for her brother, Hugh Rosemont, it was out of her power to make him listen.

He shied violently, to use his own ex pression, even at the text. The afternoon at Auteuil was bright and gay, a large company having assembled for one of the last days' racing of the season. The first race was over when Lord Tunstall arrived, and looking round for some one to whom he might address a few questions about it, his eyes fell on the two Renault girls, who were sitting in front of one of the fires which blazed on the lawns. The notorious Vera de Grenelle was sitting between them talking to them. It offended him to see her presence polluting such innocence and youth, and he came up to the girls and stood between Yvonne and Mademoiselle de Grenelle, looking down on the child with an air of protection, which for long afterwards held its place in her memory. " I fell in love with him like a schoolgirl that afternoon," Yvonne used to say afterwards, "and he with me ; but of course he was much too proper to say so.

Vera and I quarrelled about him that very evening, and have quarrelled about him every time we have met since, haven't we, dear? I remember Maxime came up and stood by him, and Maurice Dupenty, too. He seemed, somehow, to make himself a head taller than either of them ; and as for you, dear Vera, he just looked straight through you, somehow, at your chair and the flower-bed at your back, didn't he ? " "Dieu merci! I am not fat enough or red enough to catch English admirers," said Mademoiselle Vera. But the conversation, and the famous quarrel in which it ended, belong not to the story of this December afternoon and Yvonne Renault's first introduction to Lord Tunstall. 2. James Francis Estcourt-Darcy, Viscount Tun stall, eldest grandson of the Marquis of Draycott, and heir to this as well as various other French, English, and Irish titles, belonged to a family whose history was half French and half English.

In the veracious pages of Burke you may read the story of a line of French nobles whose name was connected with all the wars, tyrannies, Court intrigues, plunder, murder, and aristocratic life generally as understood at the French Court during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of these persons came over to England in the train of Henrietta Maria, and, liking what he saw of London, prepared to settle down there ; but from an early period of the Civil War he perceived that the winning side was the one whose victory would not conduce to gaiety, and he returned to France, his descendants for three or four more generations continuing to live there and assist their compeers in provoking the Revolution. The family instinct for discovering the winning side had lasted through these generations, and the Vicom.e d'Estcourt of 1790 having danced up to the edge of the preci pice, made his bow and retired to England, where he had previously sent the greater part of his fortune to await him, while a large number of his less discriminating companions were losing their heads in several senses of the expression.

His successor, Raoul Philippe, having lost money to the First Gentleman in Europe, and allowed him self to be beaten in a love affair by that great and glorious monarch, was made Earl, and subsequently Marquis, of Draycott to reward his loyalty, and received as further recompense the hand and estates of Miss Frances Darcy, one of the wealthiest heiresses at Court. His Majesty himself condescended to interfere on Lord Draycott's behalf, dismissing the young lady's cousin and lover with the promise of a post in the Paris Embassy, and buying the father's consent with a peerage. Finally he did my lord marquis the honour of borrowing thirty thousand pounds of the young lady's money as payment for his own kind offices. Lord Draycott added his wife's name to his own and settled down, with only occasional outbreaks of gaiety, as an English gentleman ; kept a pack of hounds (though he went to Paris on business during most of the hunting season), joined the English Church (a great acquisition for it, truly !), and drank port every night with an air of polite resignation which enchanted his companions. 'Twas edifying to hear his lordship talk, with grave shakes of the head and scraps of repentance thrown in here and there, of the wild days of 1820, when London and Paris were the only civilised places in the world, and he was a prince in both of them.

Blissful hours of youth when one might see Nina de la Torre in her paint and patches, and No^mie Vidal with her matchless pace-dancing at the Opera, and perchance, for the price of a diamond corsage and a wkty speech or two, buy an invitation to the little supper-parties in the Chaussde d'Antin, where all the wits and viveurs of Paris held tourney while their wives made eyes at the Court ■f THE MARCHIONESS AGAINST THE COUNTY. 16 gallants in the salons of the Tuileries ! Where are you now, oh noble army of gamblers, rioters, drinkers, and wits, whose ruffles and diamonds lighted up St. James's Street like a Queen's birth day illumination, whose repartees and bon-mots passed from mouth to mouth in White's and the Cocoa-tree like details about the last crushing of a South African mine to-day ?

Gone for ever, with your graces and burgundies and duels and wit, leaving nothing behind you but gout and mort gaged estates and a dear memory ! Alone now in his great house on the Sussex Downs the old Marquis lived and dreamt over the past glories of his four-score years. His son and only child had been killed in the Crimean War, and his grandson, the present Lord Tunstall, did not spend much of his time at home. As has been hinted, the Viscountess had no taste for the vie Parisienne of the past or present ; she disliked the old lord and his stories, morals, manners, books, food, and life generally, and would only with great reluctance allow her children to be alone with him in the house while she was away. So it was that Hatton Castle had a dreary, deserted look about it, which was not lessened by its yellowing stone walls and dense woods and lonely pools, where herons flashed by and willows hung drooping, and furze bushes grew in thick undergrowth up the banks.

The gardens were large, and in their prim neatness showed the work of gardeners who had no mistress's fastidious eye to please : the paths were without weeds and without footsteps, and a curious silence hung there; while even the deer in the wide, straggling park looked forlornly in want of admiring passers-by. A broad, sluggish stream, which ran into Portsmouth Harbour, passed through the grounds, with a bridge across it in its widest part where it spread out into a pool — an old bridge, yellow and broken with decay, and regarded with fear and awe throughout the neighbourhood as haunted ground. The story went that young Amhurst Darcy, the cousin who had been separated from Frances Darcy in order that the Vicomte d'Estcourt might take his place, had drowned himself in this pool, jumping off the bridge with weights tied to his feet on the night of the marriage, and that his ghost might be seen there any night by men who should foolishly venture near.

Truly, the spot seemed a likely one enough for such gloomy tales. The rotting arches of the bridge with the river lapping by in sullen murmuring flow, the dark mud edging the water from which came the croaking of frogs and the flash of a water rat, the thick undergrowth of furze and bracken and thorn bushes, and the belt of tall, leafless elms looked inexpressibly c melancholy on this gray December afternoon, when Lord and Lady Tunstall were expected home. The Marquis stood on the Ghost's Bridge, as this place was commonly called, wrapped in thought. His eighty-two years had left him up right, active, and fairly contented with life. His eyes still lit up with satisfaction at the sight of a subtly-arranged menu, an epigram in the Spectator, or a bevy of pretty women. There was a look of mellow vice on his face, as though he had lived his life for all it was worth from beginning to end, and had no scrap of repentance for having spent his long years in trying to enjoy himself, because now, at the end of them, he recognised that he had succeeded.

In love and war, in Courts and on gambling tables, he had always won his games, and what is rarer, had been content with his triumphs. Now, when the lights were going out one by one, when the fiddles were dying away, and he was alone on a stage once filled with eager companions, he was not greatly distressed. The aged philosopher had sold his great, old fashioned hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain and his villa at Auteuil, pensioned off his mistresses, grinned and made his last bow in Eugenie Vignaud's dressing-room at the Vari&es, and come to Hatton, meaning to spend the rest of his life with such pleasures as could be furnished by his cook and a few visitors. On fine days in summer he would have out his steam launch and run down the harbour to pay visits to the officers in Portsmouth, or to yachts at Cowes ; but for the most part he stayed at home transacting estate business, reading memoirs (also, it was said, writing some), giving an occasional dinner-party, or strolling along his favourite walk down the Cedar Avenue and across the Ghost's Bridge.

To day he was considering the return of his grandson and of Lady Tunstall, whom he hated as much as he troubled himself to hate any body nowadays. A wing of the Castle with separate entrance, front and even gardens had been assigned to their young family, to which they kept most strictly, except when Lady Tunstall was there. Her appearance was the signal for a general overflow. Swarms of children — a race whom the old Marquis had detested from his own adolescence — overran the quiet old rooms ; there was an irruption of dull matrons and fatiguing squires in the great halls and rambling passages ; nurses and maids appeared in the galleries screaming orders and rebukes. Lord Draycott was polite to them all — to the children, for whom he had low bows and elaborate compliments which scared them into fits ; to the squires and dames, who c patronised him and thought it a kindness to talk their dull slip-slop gossip to him ; to the Puritan young Viscountess, who lent him good books and lectured him about his past; but the prospect of her return did not fill him with joy.

Her ladyship had written saying that she and her husband would be home that evening for dinner, and in timating her intention of dining with him if he would permit her to do so — the last few words being a concession to her husband's prejudices which had been extorted from her by lengthy and repeated wrangling, but which were entirely meaningless. Lord Draycott smiled at them, and felt that he was going to be asked, as usual, to give an account of how he had spent his time during the absence of his monitress. Shortly before eight o'clock he descended from his room to one of the large drawing-rooms, where two big fires were blazing and a profusion of candles in Sevres and silver holders threw their soft light on old chintz and brocades, on ivories and miniatures in tiny jewelled frames, on palms and hothouse flowers, and on Lady Tunstall standing by the fire in her black lace dress with its diamond stars.

There was undeniable beauty in the tall, graceful young person who came forward to meet the Marquis. Her gray eyes, shaded with long lashes, and straight, delicately-pencilled eyebrows, could look very pleasant sometimes. The pale oval face, with its broad white forehead and firm mouth and coronet of brown hair, was dis tinctly pretty in spite of the severely Puritan look which it usually wore. In truth it would be hard to say just why my Lady Tunstall was disliked and laughed at by so many persons, even among those for whom her sermons had no personal sting. She lived up to her creed with the strictest severity, charmed people who knew her but slightly with her grace and kindness, and if she denounced modern social life and prophesied eternal damna tion for its disciples, well, faith ! the world wants such prophets badly enough.

Two-thirds of her enemies were of course the vicious folk against whom she preached her sermons, and the others, who thought that they had pronounced a sufficient condemnation when they cried out " Pharisee ! Pharisee ! " of a surety talked great nonsense. It hath seemed to many persons that it is much harder to be " not as other men are," and to live up to even a lenient moral code, than to break laws and cry " I am a sinner " afterwards. Lord Draycott bowed low before her, and kissed her hand ; then he shook hands with his grandson and made another bow to the little four year-old Helen, who was looking up at him from among her mother's laces. " I am charmed to see you home again," he said, "and greatly flattered by your willingness to dine with me to-night. You are so energetic, you modern people.

Your grandmothers would have gone to their rooms for two days after a journey from Paris." " I hope you have not been at all dull while we have been away ? " " The examination begins promptly," thought my lord, with an inward smile, and answered aloud : " Naturally I have. One or two friends — Arbuthnot, Hudson, young Sackville " — Lady Tunstall's face darkened at the name — " and General Bentley have had compassion on me occasionally, but that was all. I should have sent for the children to come and see me now and then, but I thought it would be dull for them." This latter remark was a stereotyped one, for use on every occasion of Lady Tunstall's return from a visit. The Marquis would as soon have thought of sending for a tribe of Cherokee Indians to come and see him as for his great-grand children.