Eve's Apple. A novel

Front matter

EVE'S APPLE E V E'S APPLE H IHovel BY M. DEANE ' Though the hearts of men are narrow The gates of Heaven are wide ' IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON publishers in (Drbinarg to gjrr JBajtstj) the (Bitten 1894 AU rights reserved] This story first appeared in a shorte7ied form in the ' Temple Bar' Magazine, under the title of 'A Black Butterfly.' DEDICATED TO THE SISTERS WHO WERE ONCE MY PLAYMATES. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. CHAPTER PAGE I. WHAT BLACK BAT AND WHITE OWL POSSESSED I II. A CONFESSION - - _ - m 19 III. AN INTERLUDE OF PRECIOUS STONES - 42 IV. WHAT THE VIOLIN SAID - - - 66 V. IN THE NAME OF THE LAW - - "79 VI. THE BUTTERFLY'S FLIGHT - - "99 VII. A WREATH OF VINE-LEAVES - - - 1 28 VIII. A BURNT MANOIR - I^j IX. AN AVOCAT l65 X. RANK WEEDS - - - - 1 88 XI. THE PRISONERS' BAR - - - 212 XII.

ST. MAND£ FORGETS - 230 XIII. VIVIENNE MAKES A TRUCE - - 250 XIV. THE PRECIOUS STONES PLAY THEIR PART - 268 XV. THE LITTLE MARQUIS - - - 294 XVI. 'NO FRIEND — NO HOME ' - - -

Chapter I. What Black Bat And White Owl Possessed

Between the rivers Tille and Aube, in a corner of the 'pleasant Bourbonnais, stood two of the finest chateaux in that interesting province of East Central France. They were surrounded by the pomp of ancient forests teeming with game, from the gaunt, unwelcome wolf to the little hare (who only asked his portion of the hard-won crops), and the wren and water-rat, that go to swell the Gallic sportsman's bag, were not wanting. About them lay, moreover, the green hope- VOL. I. I fulness of vineyards and the golden promise of cornfields ; while further away could be seen faint mountain-tops, that looked on the curious volcanic country that forms part of the Bourbonnais. The seigneurs of the respective domains of Surcigny and Roseambeau had been mighty in wealth, as also in feudal power, before King Time, King Louis, and a few ennobled vices had stripped away a portion of rights, duties, and gold.

By the time the great Revolution burst in a thunder-clap over France, a crop of bless ings had been sown on the lands of Roseam beau, and one of curses on those of ducal Surcigny. For the one represented the seigneur who stopped at home, took an interest in his people, and watched the growth of his haystacks ; while the other suffered under the dead weight of absentee rule, which meant, as usual, extortionate exactions combined with careless neglect. The river Aube, in its sprightly infancy, twined its slender ribbon of turquoise blue about the foot of the eminence on which the chateau of Surcigny stood, grandly flanked with round towers. Its square of cloisters and offices represented the fortifications with which its lords and its treasures had once been guarded. The main building (of two stories) was fretted with foreign arabesques and other rich panels of sculpture ; its high, pointed tourelles cut the blue sky in van dykes ; its glittering vanes spangled it with false stars.

The inner or grand court was laid out in knots and parterre of cut shrubs, with coro nets and curly dragons in close turf, and a magnificent fountain in its midst. In its palmy days that fountain of many aspiring jets had cast its capricious veil over a group of nymphs subjugating the dragon cf Surcigny with all the craft of marble ; and peasants, peeping through the immense iron gates, caught glimpses of other mysterious personages of dusky bronze and moonshiny marble, of whose supernatural origin they had no doubts. The feudal dragon os Surcigny had, alas ! fared sumptuously on squeezed serfs, for the Bourbonnais peasantry remained in practical serfdom for a generation later than its political extinction. And those absentee lords had ever regarded their estates as the pockets in which their money was kept, the pegs on which their privileges were hung.

They basked at Court from the hour an astute Minister had invented the plan of draining the provinces of the great nobles in order to increase the power of the Crown. They basked on in their barley - sugar temples, believing them to be golden and eternal, till the end came, teaching their people to hate them. The end ! What an end ! A complete social system shattered. It was like nothing so much as the collision of a couple of express trains at full speed. It has been said on good authority that there never was a more praiseworthy aristocracy than that generation upon which the simoom burst ; and the fact is that intentions in general were admirable, but ignorance was unbounded. Ignorance of the people and their needs ; of what the peasantry really were, and what their wrongs ; of what would happen if they thrust fire into the hand of a drunken lunatic and pushed him into a powder magazine.

When the burning of chateaux was started by the anarchists of the period, whose end was plunder, Surcigny was one of the first to pay in flame for the sins of two hundred years ; but the work of destruction was partial, on account of the small number of ruffians gathered on the spot. The next attack came from the action of that terrible Third Estate, whose snatch at the cake of power was the last thing intended by M. Necker when he held it out to that infant phenomenon. Titles were suppressed and estates confiscated by the stroke of a pen, and, not long after, M. le Due de Sur cigny, etc., died in exile- — last and worst of the elder line. He was succeeded by Count Raymond, his cousin, a very different sort of man, who had been eyed with jealousy as heir presumptive for many years past. His boyhood had been passed at Surcigny, while the head of the family enjoyed scandal and cards, with the other questionable joys of the 'Œil de Bœuf,' at Versailles and in the ante-chambers of Marly.

As the half-neglected, half-persecuted cadet of the great house, Raymond learnt to love the chateau and its surroundings with the faithful attachment that has its roots in the far past. But when it became his own, it had been stripped of its glory and shorn of broad lands. The great white owl and the small black bat disputed its possession, for they had taken the greater number of the famed chateaux of France for the remainder of their lease, and naturally regarded the semi-consumed pile as theirs by right. Raymond had enjoyed a brief outburst of splendour as one of the King's picked body guard, which consisted of young men chosen for good looks as well as for rank. It was during this dragon-fly life of Court soldiering that he came to the turning of the ways, where Fate sits waiting for each man as his hour comes.

The excellent Marquis de Roseambeau died, leaving a son, Charles-Rene, who suc ceeded him, and a beautiful daughter, Monique. The mother of these young people promptly bestowed the hand of the girl on an attractive libertine named Henri de Palcire, at the instance of the Duchesse de Surcigny, whose design was not only to benefit De Palcire, but to spite Count Ray mond. The Marquise herself retired into a religious house. Raymond had seen Monique once or twice, and had lost his heart to that charming young country neighbour in the sudden, irrevocable manner that occasionally exhibits the power of a passion more full of surprises than any other. The emerald goblet with its heavenly nimbus came so near the lips of the pair destined to be parted that they sipped the nectar, and called it — hope or happiness ?

No matter. But the merest wetting of the lips leaves the heart thirsty for ever. A forked stroke of cunning married Made moiselle de Roseambeau to one of those superb and fatal personages who scatter ruin with firebrands drawn from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and her brother to a worthless little lady, only child of the Due de Surcigny. De Palcire was one of Louis XV. 's Garde de la Manche — spangled A polios, like the sun in his glory and the peacock in his pride, and as wicked as they were beautiful ! This fair, foul creature slipped out of the matrimonial noose early in his married life, leaving his sweet and adorable wife as he might have tossed away a glove — leaving her in her earliest youth, sensitive, full of quick intelligence and passionate tenderness, to take her chance in the dangers of Court life, or to retire and hide her wounds grace fully in a nunnery.

He, on his part, trifled away his time with the lightest of hearts in Rome, Naples, and St. Petersburg by turns, and in the year 1794 was still a living sinner, whom no fond, foolish soul would have sainted even if he had been dead. By the arrival of that terrible year of emeutes and reprisals, Raymond de Surcigny had come to the end of a military life full of adventure under La Fayette and Dumauriez, into which he had plunged immediately upon his disappointment in love. There was no public life possible for such as he, and with the meekness so pathetic in fiery human nature he buried himself in the now peaceful solitudes of Surcigny, with no further object, to all appearance, than to complete his collection of precious stones and to be Madame de Palcire's neighbour. To look back to that time when he was a glittering particle of the King's splendour seemed like travelling from one planet to another, across star - spaces and the wide wastes of haunted skies ; but a single clue, golden as a streak of sunlight through a cellar, bound him by that brave heart of his to the past.

It has been said already that his love for Monique — romantic, ideal passion thouofh it was — was irrevocable. The period included the whole reign of the King and Queen whose destiny made them the martyrs of the old world. He dull and virtuous, she with virtue sitting between a light head and light heart, until trouble showed the whole fine nature, were not enough to preserve their Court from courtly quagmires. So the beautiful Madame de Palcire had fled to her brother's house — her own old home, fragrant with her father's memory — taking with her as her excuse the puny only son of that brother. She had not been there long, but still long enough to establish the health of her little nephew, when Marquis Charles- Rene was killed in a duel, and that poor child succeeded to his honours. Who killed the good-hearted, weak, lovable young Marquis ?

Not the fool of passion who stuck his rapier through that heart, but Madame Emilie, the false wife, treacherous woman, fair, vain, cruel, cynical egotist, who in the struggle to outshine the whole of her Court rivals counted a husband's broken heart a trifle. Her little son was yet another uncon sidered trifle, as he was sickly ; but she indulged in the whim of keeping his twin sister under her roof, though she was fonder of her pet dogs than of the child. . As Vivienne proved to be one of those ornamental rose-and-white cherubs who learn tricks with ease, and add a certain piquancy to the young mother — when mothers are in fashion — Emilie used to make use of her. They were all stage-struck in that earthly paradise, so that a precocious cherub as a decorative appendage in a private theatre was an enviable piece of ' property.' Vivienne looked five years old when she was in reality eight — another grace — and was the most finished miniature actress possible to imagine.

She resembled one of those perfect, tiny fruit-trees grown by the Japanese — minute, but lacking nothing in their artificial trimness. She was a match for Madame de Sablon's little boy, who, on being asked about his infantile studies by the beautiful mother of three pretty daughters, put his hand on his dreadful little heart, and, with a courtly bow, replied, ' In this presence, madame, I can think of no others than the works of the poet Anacreon.' Thus it happened that while the little Marquis Rene was leading a happy natural childhood at Roseambeau, his twin sister was the pet of the brilliant world that was already sinking before incredulous eyes into the hopeless morass of pecuniary ruin that foreshadowed the final crash of all things. Versailles was the enchanted city of pleasure and debt ; the glamour was on the eyelids of its brilliant crowd of courtiers to the last instant ; it sat, a crowned queen in its glory, bejewelled with all the world could bestow of sparkling pomp, while philosophers had worked away the foundations under its feet with humble instruments of inkpot and goosequill, and a dull thunder of envious hate was scarce drowned in the music of its cymbals and clarions.

No balanced moment of doom is more breathlessly interesting and astonishing than that, but that, too, had gone by, with its burden of amazed despair, before this story begins. When the stampede of flight across the borders occurred, that in such an incompre hensibly mistaken panic left the poor King and Queen to their fate, Emilie de Roseam beau fled with the rest of the aristocrats who saved their humbled heads, and tossed her ' precious treasure,' the rose-and-white cherub who had been one of her live toys, into the arms of Monique de Palcire, her sister in-law. Here and there, all through the troubles of France, a few chateaux continued to be inhabited by their impoverished owners, and in most instances it was ladies who, with the courage and frugality of true Frenchwomen, clung to their homes, performed their customary duties, and kept together the remnant of property that survived the authorized and unauthorized pillage of those two years that followed upon the meeting of the States General.

Madame de Palcire was one of these women of head and heart. The peasantry adored the Roseambeau family ; but tradition, though strengthened by Monique's own practice, had been somewhat dulled by the grasping and grabbing processes instituted by Madame Emilie. Of course a great many arbitrary acts, enforcing almost obsolete feudal rights, had been done in the name of the Marquis Charles-Rene, and as he had been an absentee ever since his marriage, it was not precisely known how far his wife was responsible for extortions that wrung the hard earnings of poor men from their grudging hands. Thus, even at favoured Roseambeau, the soil was prepared for those unscrupulous agitators who stirred up evil passions and fattened on the fruits of them. Then came the gangs of outlaws, escaped wretches from the galleys, to which many had been condemned for the heinous crime of saving or smuggling salt, but among whom were the very scum of villainy, who roamed the forests and infested the waste lands,, inciting the peasantry to attack chateaux and burn churches.

These assembled one night and swarmed in a hideous, howling crowd round the chateau of Roseambeau ; but the tiny garrison within, headed by a woman who loved every stone of the place, whom love for her father's memory turned into a heroine, defended it so well that the whole damage done was quite inconsiderable. It is probable that the Roseambeau peasants came to the burning and sacking of the house their fathers had reverenced to superstition with half-hearted zeal ; but Squire Young records, in his famous travels, with passionate indignation, that he had heard tale upon tale convincing him that a small amount of firmness had preserved life and property in such cases, and therefore he could not sufficiently condemn the sheeplike panic that seemed to have fallen on the gentlemen of France.

Monique had two or three dependents about her whom she could trust, and thus this terrible danger was passed, but the result of it was that she made a much stronger effort of courage than her defence of Roseam beau had been, in sending away her darling Rene, ' the little Marquis,' to study at Heidelberg. Since her adoption of the child, when no one else wanted him, to that day, he had never been parted from her. Mothers — and she was assuredly his true mother — saw far more of their sons than of their daughters in those days. The girls were brought up at convents, and regarded as the business of future mothers-in-law ; but the boys were kept at home, and unless they were unfortunate in their parentage, that beautiful devotion between mothers and sons developed that continues to adorn the French people with one of their most admirable virtues.

No mother could have been more wrapped up in her child than Monique in her boy Rene. First of all he was her darling ; after that he not only represented her race, but, in a special manner, resembled her father, the best of all the Roseambeaus. Loving and lovable, she understood him so well. Could she say the same of his twin sister, Vivienne ? But although she suffered a little both in heart and taste by reason of the fripperies of Emilie's training still adhering to the girl who had been forced into precocious bloom in a courtly hothouse, Vivienne occupied her thoughts and affections. There was ample time for thought and reverie in the still backwater of life into which she, as well as her friend M. de Surcigny, had drifted after the storms and splendour of youth. And yet the strangest part of all seemed to be that very stillness, with its daily measure of petty interests and VOL. I. cares, while the air seemed still reverberating with cries of rage and torture, for Robes pierre had been dead only two months, and the reaction after the ' Terror ' had only just been realized in the country.

Chapter II

A CONFESSION. Swift, picturesque decay had laid its finger on Roseambeau, and its starting-point had been the death of ' the good seigneur,' since when no money whatever had been found to lay out on the place that formerly had been kept up in the love and pride of its lords' hearts, as it deserved. The blue, placid river Tille cut its grounds in twain, bordering on one side terraces laid out in Italian gardens, edged with marble balustrades, and on the other green glades and vistas going back to wild nature as fast as they could. The terrace immediately under the east side of the house was paved [ with white marble, now stained and time worn. At one end of it stood a little ' temple,' whose carved cornice was cracking among thick clusters of vine-leaves. From this pleasant shelter Monique could look out on the prospect she had always loved best, partly because it had been her father's favourite view, a little, possibly, because it included what had once been his rose-garden, in which countless faience pots of roses had bloomed when money was not wanting, nor labour considered.

That rose-garden and the rose-days of her life had bloomed together, and though blue and-white china pots with their blooming posies of red and white roses were there no longer, she could sit between the marble pillars of the overgrown temple with Ray mond de Surcigny, and they two could see it all as it had been long ago. It was there that she was sitting on one of the early days of September, 1794, stitching many thoughts into the silken flowers that were growing under her clever fingers. The silken flowers, in company with smirk ing shepherdesses and improbable animals, remain to meet the scoff of newer genera tions ; but there is, nevertheless, a haunting fascination about the dim canvas pictures wrought by dead hands. Sad, sweet, bitter thoughts are wrought in with the carefully shaded silks.

That bit of reckless foliage speaks of dark despondency, in which the white hands have wrought mechanically ; ghosts of dead joys troop up that painted glade ; illusions, lovely as they were short-lived, spring from the golden heart of that damask rose ; hope and despair — looking forward, and, ah, poor mortals ! looking back — have thrilled in and out with the busy needle, and now it is pathetic enough to have nothing of it all left but that curious art-production, and a forgotten grave. To Monique herself it had often seemed a touch of life's accustomed irony that she should sit at her needlework, her easel, or her meagre household accounts, while France was being convulsed by paroxysms of revolution, her children raving for her blood. Pown in the provinces no one knew what was going on in Paris until it was over and some new abomination had taken its place.

News filtered slowly, papers dropped down once a week even in Moulin, the capital of the Bourbonnais. If it had not been for M. de Surcigny, who received intelligence when and how he best could, Monique might have learnt to fancy that all France was as quiet as the neighbour hood of Roseambeau had been since its handful of turbulent spirits had rushed up to Paris to assist at the destruction of nine centuries. Monique de Palcire, as she sat working at her embroidery under the delicate shade of the vine-leaves, was still a very beautiful woman, though many years had wrought themselves out since she had been named as the loveliest bride of the season. She was a stately woman, with a grand turn of the head and a fine profile, and yet she was far from being statuesque. There was exquisite sensitiveness — warm, eager, sympathetic — in that cream-pale face ; and the dark-blue eyes, with bistre tint about them, were ready, like her voice, to take every shade of expression.

The black, regularly-formed eyebrows were mobile, only a little less so than the generous mouth, and the dominant expression, although grave, was not melancholy, in spite of all the sorrows she had gone through. Hearing a light step on the terrace, Madame de Palcire looked up from her embroidery-frame, and watched, smiling, the little figure, in its young suppleness and grace, that cast a dark shadow on the white marble as it passed along towards the temple. The sun was shining hotly round this choice human flower, turning to burning, flaming umbers and vermilions a group of copper beeches behind her, and giving a curiously luminous effect to the straight folds of her gown, which was silk the colour of light jadestone, caught round the waist by a sash of white gauze. The girl was small and dainty, with rounded, childlike curves, skin like a white orchid, and blond hair, without a tinge of meretricious yellow in it, of a tint that rarely survives childhood, and clustering about the small head in soft capricious curls that might have graced a human cherub of three years old.

Vivienne de Roseambeau was not far from her eighteenth birthday, and but for a certain exquisite finish about her, and the look in her liquid dark eyes, the head might have been that of a girl of thirteen. The dark eyes and fair hair were in piquant contrast with one another, a rare style of colouring in France, Vivienne's inheritance from a Hun garian grandmother. Two races had met in that ethereal - looking little creature, and wherever diverse races meet there is a struggle, a battle-field. She sauntered towards her aunt with a vague, restless smile, that contributed with her Sevres-china prettiness to an air of un reality that had often struck Madame de Palcire. There should have been little cupidons fluttering round her, flinging unsubstantial roses in her path, and then she should have faded away or been captured in a gilt frame.

Monique had not yet learnt to look at her niece without curiosity she could not exactly express to herself. ' What a droll thing a shadow is, my aunt !' the girl said, flinging out her arms in an airy motion as though to wave away that unshapely dark blot that accompanied her along the worn marble pavement. ' Mine, as I came along, looked exactly as if it had no head — no head !' ' Chut, child ! there are times when one cannot afford to let fancy run loose !' ex claimed Madame de Palcire. ' What is a trifling pleasantry at one time is bad taste at another. Even now, when the worst is over, and even here, where all is tranquil, your nonsense has made me shiver to my very marrow, my dear !' ' Oh, even here !' repeated Vivienne, leaning on the balustrade, and worrying a spider busy with home cares with a dead leaf she picked up for the purpose. 'Poor little one! it is dull for you.

It is frightfully triste at your age to be buried here without companions ; but when Rene comes it will be different.' With a sudden movement Vivienne swept the housewifely spider far from home and larder, and threw her dead leaf after it. She said : ' The difference is so great in everything that no coming or going can alter it, Aunt Monique. Why was I in particular born just when all the horrors in the world sprang up and strangled all that was charming and beautiful ? Someone else might have been born in my place who would not have cared so much. You, Aunt Monique, for example, renounced the world when you were quite young ; but, still, you had tasted it, you had had a little share, you had been seen, people had talked about you, admired you, been sorry for you, I suppose ; but I Think of the injustice of it all !

Until I was seven, and after I was twelve, I had it all — all that beautiful, gay world, where everyone was happy, and nothing disagreeable was so much as thought of! Dancing, music, theatres, petting, applause, wit, a world filled with splendid people and delightful surprises — and then gone, gone, gone, before I was old enough to take my place in it ! Candidly, dear aunt, a few brown peasants grubbing the earth, and blessing one for a spoonful of wine or a bundle of faggots, are scarcely an equivalent for a Court ; they cannot occupy one's mind wholly.' ' A Court cannot do that, my dear. But I grant you that, in a life expressly of the senses, the mind may be so stripped of all but its silver-gilt filigree of wits that it ceases to be of any account. It is perfectly natural that you, who only peeped into the show, should see all fairyland in it — a fairyland that never existed, little one ! — but, alas !

I must beg of you to forget the peep. It is all over ; it has been paid for dearly, God knows ! I am sorry for you, so sorry ; but you are still very young, and all is not over. Nothing — not even winter, and brown peasants, and ennui — lasts for ever — not even regrets !' ' Devotion, even though it be only the adoration of one, must be an immense alle viation,' sighed Vivienne, with a glance of seraphic innocence; 'and I, my charming aunt, have not that.' 1 The devotion of one true friend is worth the so-called adoration of the whole bevy of courtiers who make gallantry their profession. You cannot learn the value of friendship too early, my dear, but you may easily learn the emptiness of butterfly loves too late.' ' Such worldly temptations are just as remote from Roseambeau as they were from the grille of L'Abbaye au Bois, my aunt.

And such is the perversity of one's heart, that I often wish to dip my finger in them just to know how it feels !' 'Naturally! It is in vain the old moth says to the little moth, " Look at me ; I am a scorched, unlovely thing ! Flee the flame that will make you resemble me !" The unloveliness of a moth, mind you, Vivienne, is the sear to the heart, and the disappointment that comes of it, in a human being.' ' You cannot, however, deny that the scorched moth's experiences have been exciting, my charming aunt, and that is the whole point of the matter ! But listen ; I came expressly to confess a sin.' ' It must be the hundred-and-first, little one. ' Oh, the hundred go for nothing ! But, unluckily, that imp of ennui, that is for ever whispering naughtiness, put it into my head to write a brochure.' ' I congratulate you, child, on accomplish ing so serious an enterprise.

What was your subject ?' ' A political satire on the present state of things in Paris. You know I have heard M. de Surcigny talk over it all with you, Aunt Monique, and I have not forgotten the crowds of epigrams, satires, and jeux d 'esprit that used to be read in mamma's salon.' ' Yes, yes ; burn it, my child !' ' But, aunt, this " Black Butterfly " of mine — that is what pamphlets are called just now in Paris, you know — it was really not at all stupid ! I was just twelve when M. l'Abbe Croixmanier read some satirical verses of mine aloud to the company, and then her Majesty asked for a copy. I have written charades, too, by the dozen. However, I am sorry ' ' Burn it, Vivienne ; these are such fright ful times !' ' Alas, aunt, I sent it to Rene, just to amuse him, and he — he sent it to an old college friend in Paris — and he — got it printed !' ' Mon Dieu, Vivienne, you must be light headed !