It was soon plain to Gaston de Trélan that, between bodily pain and mental turmoil, sleep was not likely to visit him much that night. He would, at least, keep that fact from Pierre if he could. . . . Poor Pierre! it seemed to be his fate to cause him anxiety! And he owed him so much, more than a man could ever repay: his life—that was little—but what measure of self-respect he had also. That life he had nearly cast away this evening, and, because of his present position and circumstances, he fully shared the priest’s reprobation of the hazard, but no other course had been possible, for not Pierre himself, who had so quickly penetrated the tale of the “Blue,” could guess the lengths to which he had suffered de Brencourt to go before he consented to fight him. Even to Pierre he was not going to repeat the things the Comte had said. . . .
Seven years ago, in London, only the little priest’s affection and determination had prevented society from saying next day, “You remember that French émigré, the Duc de Trélan, whom we used to meet everywhere? Well, he has just shot himself—and small wonder!” And it was not as if Gaston and his protégé were then on terms of intimacy, for they had seen little of each other for the previous ten years or so, since his own visits to St. Chamans had become so much rarer—above all since the priest had come under his displeasure for something he had ventured to say to him down there not unconnected with Mme de Céligny. Few people, even of his own rank, under M. de Trélan’s displeasure cared to have dealings with him in that condition, and yet this peasant-priest, who had never approached his patron in his own need (for the Duc afterwards discovered that he had been living in London for weeks on the verge of starvation) had the disinterested courage to oppose him in the blackest hour of his life. And Pierre Chassin had done more than stay his finger on the trigger, for when, during that dreadful vigil, Gaston himself had said, out of his agony, that no other path remained open to him, since neither in England nor in France could he ever look an acquaintance in the face again, it was the Abbé who replied, “Then change your name. Do not go to serve with Condé, as you were intending; go where no one knows you.” And so, as the Marquis de Kersaint, the Duc de Trélan—a soldier by education and the descendant of soldiers—entered Austrian service against the French Republic, thinking, mistakenly, that he could soon throw away his life on the battlefield; as the Marquis de Kersaint he rose to command, found a certain anodyne in hard work and fighting, and was in touch by letter during those years with the only man he could really call friend—his only confidant at least—the humbly-born foster-brother who had stood by him in his extremity; and had earned the right to address him more freely than a brother by blood would ever have dared to do.
But of the two things he sought—forgetfulness or death—M. de Trélan had found neither. For him the arrogant motto of his race was only too true—‘Memini et permaneo, I remember and I remain.’ It soon became clear to him that when a man desired extinction he could not have it. What of the hazards of that Italian campaign, of the fights for Mantua, of Castiglione, Caldiero, Arcola, through which he had always come untouched till the day of Rivoli? Even then death had tossed him aside in the end.
Indeed, that disastrous fourteenth of January, 1797, when the young, haggard-eyed general from Corsica had beaten the Austrian marshal on that plateau among the mountains, had brought Gaston de Trélan not death but honour. At Vienna, when he had recovered from his all but fatal wound, the Emperor’s hand had bestowed on him the coveted Cross he wore. So, when the peace of Campoformio had ended Austria’s wars for a time, and the Abbé Chassin, now an accredited agent of the Royalists of the West, had deterred him from entering Russian service and persuaded him, despite his hatred of the place, to come to London, he came, in his borrowed name—and found himself, to his surprise, no little of a hero there also. For there had been attached to Alvintzy’s staff at Rivoli an English officer of discernment, who, greatly struck by the part played in the battle by “Colonel de Kersaint” and his practically forlorn hope of a column, while much criticising the higher command for devoting it to destruction, had not spared in his despatches eulogies of its leader nor regrets for his supposed fate. And after a little while spent in London, in very different circles from those in which he moved before, the “Marquis de Kersaint” was offered by the Comte d’Artois and his council the post of organising and leading Finistère. He accepted; but nothing would induce him to go to Edinburgh for the personal interview which the Prince desired. They had met too often at Versailles for that.
So he had now in his hands the chance to do something that she whom he had lost would have approved. In those years of self-imposed expiation he had learnt what he had thrown away, not so much in failing her at the moment of peril, which he had done in ignorance, but through his insane blindness in having so little prized, through all the best of life, a love and a nobility which many a man would have given his soul to possess. In the great and terrible awakening through which he had passed in London he had seen himself as he must have appeared to other men, and that hell was too sharp at first for any consolation to visit him, and any least thought or memory of Valentine could only be more exquisite torture. Yet there came a day when, instead of averting his mind from what he could not bear to contemplate, he found himself gazing at it as the one hope in the blackness, as a trembling pagan might see the image of the martyr smile upon him, the martyr his own hands had done to death. Valentine had loved him; what if she loved him still?
It grew in him to conviction, that first dim fancy; it saved him, probably, from madness. Lost, sometimes, like a star which the clouds have blotted out, it always reappeared, and shone at last with almost the light of an inspiration, a proof of the strong and steady influence which the dead can wield. So it came about in the end that, for all the suffering and hopeless regret involved, Gaston, Duc de Trélan, was fast in love with his wife’s memory—so fast that he who had once been “Saint-Charmart” in Paris salons had in Vienna the character of a woman-hater—so fast that he felt, if Valentine knew the depth of his repentance and his pain, she, with her wide charity, would forgive him everything . . . as he doubted not that, in the supreme hour, she had.
But to forgive oneself, that was a different matter. His own stark pride, so interwoven with the fabric of his whole nature, seemed to put that possibility ever further and further from him as the years went by. Yet, if he could not himself forget, it seemed at least that others had done so—till that night at Hennebont when the calumny which he had believed dead had reared its head for an instant. Afterwards it had slept again, apparently, through all the directions he had been obliged to give de Brencourt about Mirabel before despatching him thither, in which he knew quite well that he wa............