Stray Pearls: Memoirs of Margaret De Ribaumont, Viscountess of Bellaise by Yonge (summer reads txt) 📕

wanted a certain check upon him, and that it was good for him to be in the presence of persons who expected him to be delighted to see his wife and children.

I believe that that quarter of an hour was actual pain to Cecile from the very overflowing rush of felicity. To have her husband seated beside her, with his son upon his knee, had been the dream and prayer of her life for six years, and now that it was gratified the very intensity of her hopes and fears choked her, made her stammer and answer at random, when a woman without her depth of affection might have put out all kinds of arts to win and detain him.

After a time he put the child down, but still held his hand, came up to the rest of the company and mingled with it. I could have wished they had been younger and more fashionable, instead of a poor old Scottish cavalier and his wife, my mother’s old contemporary Madame de Delincourt, and a couple of officers waiting for Solivet. Annora was the only young brilliant creature there, and she had much too low an opinion of M. d’Aubepine to have a word to say to him, and continued to converse in English with old Sir Andrew Macniven about the campaigns of the Marquis of Montrose, both of them hurling out barbarous names that were enough to drive civilized ears out of the room.

Our unwilling guest behaved with tolerably good grace, and presently made his excuse to my mother and me, promising immediately to send back Solivet to his friends. His wife went with him into the outer room, and when in a few minutes Armantine ran back to call me—

‘Papa is gone, and mama is crying,’ she said.

It was true, but they were tears of joy. Cecile threw herself on my bosom perfectly overwhelmed with happiness, poor little thing, declaring that she owed it all to me, and that though he could not remain now, he had promised that she should hear from him. He was enchanted with his children; indeed, how could he help it? And she would have kept me up all night, discussing every hair of his moustache, every tone in the few words he had spoken to her. When at last I parted from her I could not help being very glad. Was the victory indeed won, and would my Philippe’s sister become a happy wife?

I trusted that now he had seen her he would be armed against Madame Croquelebois, who you will remember had been his grandmother’s dame de compagnie, and a sort of governess to him. She had petted him as much as she had afterwards tyrannized over his poor little wife, and might still retain much influence over him, which she was sure to exert against me. But at any rate he could not doubt of his wife’s adoration for him.

We waited in hope. We heard of the Prince in attendance on the Queen-Regent, and we knew his aide-de-camp could not be spared, and we went on expecting all the morning and all the evening, assuring Cecile that military duty was inexorable, all the time that we were boiling over with indignation.

My mother was quite as angry as we were, and from her age and position could be more effective. She met M. d’Aubepine one evening at the Louvre, and took him to task, demanding when his wife was to hear from him, and fairly putting him out of countenance in the presence of the Queen of England. She came home triumphant at what she had done, and raised our hopes again, but in fact, though it impelled him to action, there was now mortified vanity added to indifference and impatience of the yoke.

There was a letter the next day. Half an hour after receiving it I found Cecile sunk down on the floor of her apartment, upon which all her wardrobe was strewn about as if to be packed up. She fell into my arms weeping passionately, and declaring she must leave us. to leave us and set up her menage with her husband had always been her ambition, so it was plain that this was not what she meant; but for a long time she neither would nor could tell me, or moan out anything but a ‘convent,’ ‘how could he?’ and ‘my children.’

At last she let me read the letter, and a cruel one it was, beginning ‘Madame,’ and giving her the choice of returning to Chateau d’Aubepine under the supervision of Madame Croquelebois, or of entering a convent, and sending her son to be bred up at the Chateau under a tutor and the intendant. She had quite long enough lived with Madame de Bellaise, and that young Englishman, her brother, who was said to be charming.

It was an absolute insult to us all, and as I saw at once was the work of Madame Croquelebois, accepted by the young Count as a convenient excuse for avoiding the ennui and expense of setting up a household with his wife, instead of living a gay bachelor life with his Prince. I did not even think it was his handwriting except the signature, an idea which gave the first ray of comfort to my poor sister-in-law. It was quite provoking to find that she had no spirit to resent, or even to blame; she only wept that any one should be so cruel, and, quite hopeless of being heard on her own defence, was ready to obey, and return under the power of her oppressor, if only she might keep her son. All the four years she had lived with us had not taught her self-assertion, and the more cruelly she was wounded, the meeker she became.

The Abbe said she was earning a blessing; but I felt, like Annora, much inclined to beat her, when she would persist in loving and admiring that miserable fellow through all, and calling him ‘so noble.’

We did not take things by any means so quietly. We were the less sorry for my brother’s absence that such an insinuation almost demanded a challenge, though in truth I doubt whether they would have dared to make it had he been at hand. Annora did wish she could take sword or pistols in hand and make him choke on his own words, and she was very angry that our brother de Solivet was much too cool and prudent to take Eustace’s quarrel on himself.

Here, however, it was my mother who was most reasonable, and knew best how to act. She said that it was true that as this was my house, and the charge of M. d’Aubepine had been committed to me, I had every right to be offended; but as she was the eldest lady in the house it was suitable for her to act. She wrote a billet to him demanding a personal interview with him that he might explain the insinuations which concerned the honour of herself, her son, and her daughter.

I believe a duel would have been much more agreeable to him than such a meeting, but my mother so contrived it that he knew that he could not fail to meet her without its being known to the whole Court, and that he could not venture. So he came, and I never saw anything more admirably managed than the conference was on my mother’s part, for she chose to have me present as mistress of the house. She had put on her richest black velvet suit, and looked a most imposing chatelaine, and though he came in trying to carry it off with military bravado and nonchalance, he was evidently ill at ease.

My mother then demanded of him, in her own name, her son’s, and mine, what right or cause he had to make such accusations, as he had implied, respecting our house.