BOOK ONE THE ROAD TO FRANCE

Thomas the Rhymer.

CHAPTER I Anne-Hilarion gets out of Bed

(1)

"And well ye ken, Maister Anne, ye should hae been asleep lang syne!" said Elspeth severely.

Master Anne—M. le Comte Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny—gave a little sigh from the bed. "I have tried . . . if you would say 'Noroway,' perhaps? . . . Say 'Noroway-over-the-foam,' Elspeth, je vous en prie!"

"Dinna be using ony of yer French havers tae me, wean!" exclaimed the elderly woman thus addressed, still more threateningly. "Aweel then. . . . Ye're no' for 'True Thomas' the nicht?"

The silky brown head on the pillow was shaken. "No, please. I like well enough the Queen of Elfland, but best of all 'Noroway-over-the-foam' and the shoes with cork heels."

Elspeth Saunders grunted, for there was something highly congenial to her Calvinistic soul in that verse of 'Thomas the Rhymer' which deals with the Path of Wickedness—'Yon braid, braid road that lies across the lily leven,' and she was accustomed to render it with unction. However, she sat down, took up her knitting, and began:

and the little Franco-Scottish boy in the curtained bed closed his eyes, that he might seem to be composing himself to slumber. In reality he was seeing the pictures which are set in that most vivid of all ballads—Sir Patrick Spens receiving the King's letter as he walked on the seashore, the sailor telling of the new moon with the old in her arms (a phenomenon never quite clear to the Comte de Flavigny), the storm and shipwreck, and the ladies with their fans, the maidens with their golden combs, waiting for those who would never come back again.

finished Elspeth. The knitting needles proceeded a little with their tale, then they too stopped.

"Losh! the bairn's asleep already!" thought Mrs. Saunders, looking over her spectacles. She tiptoed from the room.

Yet although Anne-Hilarion's long lashes lay quietly on his cheeks he was not by any means asleep, and under those dark curtains he watched, not without a certain drowsiness, the gigantic shadow of his attendant vanish from the wall. The night-light shed a very faint gleam on the vast mahogany wardrobe, whose polished doors reflected darkly much that passed without, and suggested, to a lively imagination, all kinds of secret happenings within. It also illumined Anne's minute garments, neatly folded on a chair, his high-waisted blue kerseymere pantaloons on the top of the pile, and the small coat, into which Elspeth had been sewing a fresh ruffle, over the back. This much of his apartment could Anne see between the chintz curtains, figured with many a long-tailed tropic bird, which hung tent-like from the short pole fixed in the wall above his pillow. But he could not see Mme. d'Aulnoy's fairy-tales, in their original French, which were lying face downwards on the floor not very far away (and which he would be scolded for

having left about, when they were found to-morrow); nor the figure of Notre Dame de Pontmain, in her star-decked robe of blue and her long black veil, holding in her hands not her Son but a crucifix—the figure which M. l'Abbé, being of Laval, her country, had given to the little boy. For this image had a knack of disappearing entirely when Anne's father the Marquis was away, since, as may readily be supposed, it found no favour in the eyes of Mrs. Saunders, and was an even more violent irritant than all 'the bairn's Popish exercises,' to which she would so much have liked to put an end. That she might see as little as possible of the heathen idol she had banished it, with its bracket, to an obscure corner of the room, over the discarded high nursery-chair in which Anne, at six years old, no longer took his meals. The fact of the image's being in the room at all just now showed that the Marquis was at home . . . for to him, as to his small son, in this April of the year 1795, the solid Cavendish Square house was home, though it

belonged to neither of them. Anne-Hilarion, for his part, could remember no other.

(2)

The unusual presence of a statue of the Virgin, and of Mme. d'Aulnoy's Contes de fées on the second floor this London house, was, naturally, but a consequence of that same series of events which had brought thither their small owner. Seven years before, the only daughter of James Elphinstone of Glenauchtie, a retired official of high standing in the service of John Company, had lost her heart to a young Frenchman, the Marquis René de Flavigny, whom she had met on a visit to Paris. Although the necessary separation from his daughter was very bitter to him, Mr. Elphinstone could find no real objection to the match, and so the Scotch girl and the Frenchman were married, lived happily on de Flavigny's estate in the Nivernais, and were joined there in due time by a son.

But Anne-Hilarion had not chosen well the date of his entry into this world. On the very July day that René and Janet de Flavigny and all their tenants were celebrating the admirable prowess displayed by M. le Comte in attaining, without accident or illness—without flying back to heaven, as his nurse had it—the age of one year, the people of Paris also were keeping a festival, the first anniversary of the day when the bloody head of the governor of the Bastille had swung along the streets at the end of a pike. Before that summer was out the Marquis de Flavigny, urged by his father-in-law, had decided to place his wife and child in safety, and so, bidding the most reluctant of good-byes to the tourelles and the swans which had witnessed their two short years of happiness, they left France for England. Perhaps they would have fared no worse had they remained there. For Janet de Flavigny caught on the journey a chill from which she never recovered, and died, after a few months, leaving to her little son not even a memory, and to

these two men who had passionately loved her a remembrance only too poignant.

Her death forced both their lives into fresh channels. Mr. Elphinstone left Scotland and settled in London, where, to distract himself from his grief, he began to write those long-planned memoirs of his Indian career which, after more than four years, still absorbed him. As for the Marquis de Flavigny, having once emigrated, he could not now return to France even had he wished it. He therefore threw himself heart and soul into the schemes of French Royalism, at first for the rescue of the Royal Family from their quasi-imprisonment in their own palace, and—now that King and Queen alike were done to death, their children captives and a Republic in being—into all the hopes that centred round the stubborn loyalists of Brittany, Maine, and Vendée, round du Boisguy or Stofflet or Charette. And though the rightful little King might be close prisoner in the Temple, his uncles—the Comte de Provence (Regent in name of France) and the Comte d'Artois—were still at large, as exiles, in Europe, and it was to one or other of these princes that Royalist émigrés looked,

and under their ægis that they plotted and fought. Not many of them, impoverished as they were by the Revolution, had the good fortune to possess, like René de Flavigny, a British father-in-law who put money and house at his son-in-law's disposal, welcomed his friends, and strove to bear his absences on Royalist business with equanimity.

The fact was that the young Frenchman had become very dear to Mr. Elphinstone, not only for Janet's sake but also for his own. He had liked de Flavigny from the first moment that he met him; it was only during the shock of finding that Janet wished to marry him that his feelings had temporarily cooled. Indeed, René de Flavigny's character and disposition were not ill summed up in the word 'lovable.' He had little of the traditional French gaiety—and still less after his wife's death—just as Mr. Elphinstone had little of the traditional Scotch dourness. And the old man knew how happy his daughter was with him. Afterwards, their common bereavement drew the two more than ever together. Mr. Elphinstone discovered in his son-in-law tastes and sympathies more akin to his own than he had imagined, and sometimes, though he would not have had him settle down, at thirty-two, into a bookworm like himself, he regretted the political activities in which the Marquis was immersed, for he knew him to be of too fine a temper to take pleasure in the plottings and intrigues which almost of

necessity accompany the attempts to reinstate a dispossessed dynasty. And while not, perhaps, taking those plottings over-seriously, he realised that his son-in-law's tact and ability made him a very useful person to his own party and a person proportionately obnoxious to the other. The game he was engaged in playing against the French Republic was not without danger; that adversary across the Channel was known to have hidden agents in England, and if these had the opportunity as well as the orders, it was not scruples that would hold them back from actual violence. Still, that was a contingency sufficiently remote, although the thought of it sometimes caused Mr. Elphinstone to feel, during his son-in-law's absences, a certain uneasiness for his safety as well as regret at the loss of his society.

(3)

Anne-Hilarion was quite aware, in a general way, of his father's occupations. In fact, as he lay now in his bed, looking through the curtains at the wardrobe doors, he was meditating on the important meeting which Papa was having with his friends this very evening in the dining-room. He did not know exactly what they were discussing, but from something which Papa had said in his hearing he believed that there was some question of going over to France—in ships, of course, since there was sea (he did not know how much) between England and that country. And because his mind was full of Sir Patrick Spens and his shipwreck, this undertaking seemed to him terribly dangerous, and he much wished that Papa were not thinking of it.

the words lilted in his head like the rocking of a boat. They would be going over the foam to that land which he did not remember:

Anne had no idea what fifty fathoms might mean, but it sounded terrifying. Suppose Papa were to be drowned like that—suppose he too were obliged to stuff 'silken cloth' into the hole of the ship to keep out the water which would not be kept out! . . .

Anne-Hilarion sat up suddenly in bed and threw back the clothes. A very strong impulse, and by no means a righteous, was upon him, but he was ridden by an agonising fear, and there was nothing for it save to go down and ascertain the truth. He slipped out of bed and pattered on to the landing.

The stairs were steep, there was little light upon the road, the balusters looked like rows of brown, square-faced soldiers. Not now, however, was there room for thoughts of Barbe Bleue, that French ogre, who was possibly hanging the last but one of his wives at that moment in the linen-press, nor of the terrible Kelpie of the Flow, which might that evening have left its Scottish loch and be looking in, with its horse face, at the staircase window. No, the chief terror was really Elspeth, who would certainly snatch him swiftly back to bed, not comprehending (nor he either, for that matter) how it was she who had started him on the path of this fear. So he went down as quickly as one foot at a time permitted, knowing that Grandpapa would be safe and busy in his study, and that Baptiste, his father's old body-servant, was, if met, more likely to forward him in his journey than to hinder him. He would, in fact, have been rather glad to encounter that elderly slave of his as he made his solitary way down to the dining-room, past the descending row of

antlers and dirks and lairds of Glenauchtie in their wigs and tartan.

CHAPTER II And is put back again

(1)

But on the dining-room wall it was Janet Elphinstone, a fair-haired child of ten, in a long white dress girt with a blue sash, her arm over the neck of a deerhound, who looked down at the guests assembled round her father's table. Not one was of her own nationality, for Mr. Elphinstone himself had withdrawn after supper, following his custom on similar occasions, and was by now very tolerably engrossed, as usual, with his memoirs. His national shrewdness made him perfectly aware that some of his friends, and probably all of his domestics except Baptiste, esteemed that in his unfailing hospitality to his son-in-law's unfortunate compatriots he was allowing himself to be victimised by a pack of starveling adventurers, as he had once heard them called; but he considered that his conduct in this regard was no one's affair but his own, and for several of the Marquis's friends he had a great respect—they bore misfortune so gallantly. So he scratched away contentedly in the library, while in the dining-room René talked to his companions.

For though it was not primarily the personal attraction of the Marquis de Flavigny which bound together this evening's visitors, but rather devotion to a common cause, they were all his friends, from the old Abbé with the kindly, humorous mouth and the snuffy rabat to the tall, lean man with a scar on his cheek who, at the end of the table, was lazily drawing devices on a map spread before him on the mahogany, among the empty glasses. They were talking of the intrigues and counter-intrigues which ate like a canker into the heart of the Royalist cause, dividing that never very stable house against itself, setting the party of the Comte de Provence against that of his younger brother, the Comte d'Artois, and filling the clear-minded or the generous with mingled sorrow and disgust.

"I declare," said the gentleman with the scar at the end of the table, without lifting his eyes from his occupation, "that the behaviour of the Abbé Brottier, when I think of it, renders me the prey of indigestion. So I try not to think of it."

"Perhaps you remember, my son," interposed the old priest, "what Cardinal Maury is reported to have said of him—that he would bring disunion into the very host of heaven. And we émigrés, alas, are not angels."

"M. de la Vireville's disgust is natural," observed a middle-aged, thin-featured man on the other side of the Abbé. "I have no doubt he finds the atmosphere of London stifling, and is longing to be back in the broom of Brittany with his Chouans."

"It is my desire, de Soucy," confessed he with the map, briefly. "But even there one is not safe from the meddling of that intriguer and the agence de Paris. However, this does seem a chance of moving, for once, without it, for I understand you to say, René, that Mr. Windham seriously suggests your going personally to Verona to see the Regent?"

"He thinks it advisable," answered de Flavigny. "For my part, I would much rather not put my finger between the trunk and the bark, but it has been quite clear since last November that the agence de Paris is trying to get Spanish help instead of accepting that of England, and therefore someone not under the Abbé Brottier's influence ought to lay before the Comte de Provence what the English Government is inclined to do for us—and lay it before him directly, without the intervention of the Duc de la Vauguyon, who, as you know, is also a partisan of Madrid. Let me read to you, if I may, the notes of my conversation with Mr. Windham this morning."

He began to read out what had passed between him and that cultured, high-minded English gentleman, now Secretary for War, to whom the French émigrés in general owed so much. But he had not proceeded very far before the Chevalier de la Vireville, his bright, bold eyes fixed attentively on him, gave an exclamation:

"Messieurs, a new recruit! Welcome, small conspirator! Come in—but shut the door!"

And all the rest turned on the instant to look at the little figure, clad only in a nightshirt, which was visible in the doorway, behind René de Flavigny's back.

"Anne!" exclaimed the latter. "Whatever are you doing here—and in that costume!"

A trifle daunted, the child hung back, clutching the door handle, though he knew all the company, and one of them—he who had hailed him—had his especial favour. Then he made a dash for his father.

"Papa," he burst out, clinging to him, "do not go to Noroway-over-the-foam! You know what it says, how the feather-beds floated about in the waves, and they lost their shoes, and the sea came in, and they were all drowned fifty fathoms deep!"

"My child," said the young man gently, putting his arm round him, "what on earth are you talking about? I think you must be walking in your sleep. Nobody is going to Noroway, so nobody will be drowned. And you must not interrupt these gentlemen. You see, we are busy. You must go back to bed, my little one. La Vireville, have the goodness to ring the bell, will you?"

The tall Chouan leader rose at once from his place, but, instead of obeying, he snatched the cloth off a neighbouring table, and in a moment had picked up the intruder and enveloped him in it. "Bed is not recommended, I think, René, for this parishioner. We cannot, however, have such a sans-culotte amongst us. That lack being remedied, I fancy we shall sleep more comfortably here, don't you, Anne?" And he was back in his place, the boy, wrapped in the red and black tablecloth, on his knee, before even paternal authority could object.

"I am sure that is the best solution," said the old Abbé, smiling at the child over his glasses. "Pray proceed, Marquis."

So René de Flavigny finished his notes, and looked round for opinions, while his son whispered to the Chevalier de la Vireville, "Where is Verona? Could it be fifty fathoms deep there?" And the Chouan said softly, "No, foolish one, for it is nowhere near the sea, and all this talk only means that Papa is going to Italy to see the Regent, who is a stout, middle-aged gentleman, and not a king's daughter, so you need not be frightened."

"I am of Mr. Windham's opinion," the Vicomte de Soucy was meanwhile saying; "and I verily believe that he has our interests at heart, probably more than Mr. Pitt, certainly more than Mr. Dundas. If the British Government really means seriously to support an expedition to France, the Regent should be sounded."

"How much does the Duc d'Harcourt know of the Government's dispositions?" asked someone, referring to the Regent's accredited representative in London.

De Flavigny shook his head. "I do not know."

"In any case you must disregard him—go behind him, in fact," observed the Chevalier de la Vireville, settling Anne-Hilarion in his arms.

"I suppose so," said de Flavigny, with an expression of distaste, for he did not like the task, as he had said.

"And Monseigneur le Comte d'Artois?" asked the Abbé.

"Of course the Government will acquaint him in good time. Almost certainly His Royal Highness will wish to lead the expedition. But since he is so near, at Bremen or thereabouts, there will be little difficulty in personal communication with him later, if this project of the Government comes to anything."

"As no doubt it will not," observed La Vireville sceptically.

"If ever it did, Monsieur Augustin," remarked M. de Soucy, with an emphasis on the name, "it would concern you very much, I imagine. For if, as seems natural, it took place in the West, you could join it with your Chouans, while we, though we should bring our swords, could bring nothing else."

La Vireville nodded.

"It goes without question," said a voice, "that any expeditionary force should be landed in the West; the question is, Where?"

"A port would be needed, of course," said de Flavigny, "and the port would be best as near M. de Charette as possible, if not actually in Vendée."