Part 51 (2/2)

Adelade could not endure it; since her daughter's marriage it had become odious to her. Neither did Georges like it; and before going back to the army he had become engaged to the heiress with whom he had danced so much at the ball, who had a castle and large estates of her own in Touraine, and who considered Lancilly far too wild and old-fas.h.i.+oned to be inhabited, except perhaps for a month in the shooting season. Thus it was not unlikely that Lancilly would be sold; and for the present it was to be dismantled and shut up; once more the deserted place, the preservation of which, the restoring to its right inhabitants, had been the dream and ambition of Urbain de la Mariniere's life. For his cousin Herve he had spent all his energies and a considerable part of his fortune; and to no purpose and worse than none. Even Herve's love and grat.i.tude failed him now; the knowledge that Herve could never quite forget or forgive his plotting with Adelade and Ratoneau, was the sharpest sting of all; worse even, as his wife felt with a throb of rapturous joy, than the fact that Adelade would smile on him no more.

”My poor Urbain!” she murmured.

Her sympathy was tender and real, though she felt that her prayer had been answered, that she and her house had been delivered from the crus.h.i.+ng weight of Lancilly, that the great castle on the hill would henceforth be a harmless pile of stones, to be viewed without the old dislike and jealousy. It seemed to her now that she had not known a happy day since the Sainfoys came back, or even for long before, while Urbain's whole soul was wrapped up in preparing for them. Yet she was very sorry for Urbain.

”All for nothing, and worse than nothing,” he sighed; and she found no words to comfort him.

The fire crackled and blazed; outside, the wind rolled in great thundering blasts over the country. It roared so loudly in the chimneys that nothing else was to be heard. Urbain went on talking, so low that his wife, stooping over his chair, could hardly hear him; but she knew that all he said had the one refrain--”I have worked for twenty years, and this is the end of it all. I might have left poor Joseph in exile. I might have allowed Lancilly to tumble into ruins. What has come of it all! Nothing, nothing but disappointment and failure. Is it not enough to break a man's heart, to give the best of his whole life, and to fail!”

The wind went on roaring. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he did not hear the house door open and shut, then the door of the room, then the light steps of Angelot and Helene across the floor.

”Look up, Urbain!” his wife said with a sudden inspiration. ”_There_ is your success, dear friend!”

There was a bright pink colour in Helene's cheeks; her eyes and lips, once so sad, were smiling in perfect content; her fair curls were blown about her face; she was gloriously beautiful. Angelot held her hand, and his dark eyes glowed as he looked at her.

”We have been fighting the elements,” he said.

Urbain and Anne gazed at them, these two splendid young creatures for whom life was beginning. The philosopher's brow and eyes lightened suddenly, and he smiled.

”And by your triumphant looks, you have conquered them!” he said. ”Is that my doing, Anne? Is that my success, my victory?” he added after a moment in her ear. ”Yes, dearest, you are right. Embrace me, my children!”

Les Chouettes was shut up for seven years, and the country people were shy of pa.s.sing it in the dusk, for they said that under the old oaks you might meet Monsieur Joseph with his gun and dog as of old, coming back from a day's shooting. When old Joubard heard that, he said--and his wife crossed herself at the saying--that he would rather meet Monsieur Joseph, dead, than any living gentleman of Anjou.

But there came a time when young life took possession again of Les Chouettes, and lovely little children played in the sandy court and picked wild flowers and ran after b.u.t.terflies in the meadow; when Madame Ange de la Mariniere wandered out in the soft twilight, without fear of ghosts or men, to meet her husband as he walked down the rugged lane from the _landes_ after a long day's shooting.

And there were no plots now in Anjou, and neither Chouans nor police haunted the woods; for Napoleon was at St. Helena, and France could breathe throughout her provinces, for the iron bands were taken off her heart, and the young generation might grow up without being cut down in its flower.

It was at this time that Henriette de la Mariniere decided to give Les Chouettes to her cousin Angelot, and finally to enter the convent where she had spent much time since her father's death, and where she died as Prioress late in the nineteenth century, having seen in France three Kings, a second Empire, and a Republic.

She remained through all, of course, a consistent Royalist like her father. But to some minds, such an ebb and flow may seem to justify the philosophy of Urbain, and even more, perhaps, the light and happy indifference of Angelot.

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