Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories

In the heart of Lorraine, nestled down among its woods, stood an old chateau that might have been the chateau of the Sleeping Beauty of fairy fame, so sequestered it stood amidst its trees chained together by fragrant fetters of honeysuckle and wild vine, so undisturbed slept the morning shadows on the wild thyme that covered the turf, so unbroken was the silence in which the leaves barely stirred, and the birds folded their wings and hushed their song till the heat of the noonday should be passed.

Beyond the purple hills stretching up in the soft haze of distance in the same province of laughing, luxurious, sunlit Lorraine, was Lunéville, the Lunéville of Stanislaus, Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Hénault, of Boufflers, a Versailles in miniature, even possessing a perfect replica of Pompadour in its own pretty pagan of a Marquise. Within a few leagues was Lunéville, but the echo of its mots and madrigals did not reach over the hills, did not profane the sunny air, did not mingle with the vintage-song of the vine-dressers, the silver babble of the woodland brook, the hushed chant of the Ave Maria, the vesper bells chimed from the churches and monasteries, which made the sole music known or heard in this little valley of Lorraine.

The chateau of Grande Charmille stood nestled in its woods, gray, lonely, still, silent as death, yet not gloomy, for white pigeons circled above its pointed towers, brilliant dragon-flies fluttered above the broken basin of the fountain that sang as gayly as it rippled among the thyme as though it fell into a marble cup, and bees hummed their busy happy buzz among the jessamine that clung to its ivy-covered walls-walls built long before Lorraine had ceased to be a kingdom and a power, long before a craven and effeminated Valois had dared to kick the dead body of a slaughtered Guise. Not gloomy with the golden light of a summer noon playing amidst the tangled boughs and on the silvered lichens; not gloomy, for under the elm-boughs on the broken stone steps that led to the fountain, her feet half buried in violet-roots and wild thyme, leaning her head on her hand, as she looked into the water, where the birds flew down to drink, and fluttered their wings fearless of her presence, was a young girl of sixteen-and if women sometimes darken lives, it must be allowed that they always illumine landscapes!

Aline, when Boufflers saw her in the spring morning, in all the grace of youth and beauty, unconscious of themselves, made not a prettier picture than this young dreamer under the elm-boughs of the Lorraine woods, as she bent over the water, watching it bubble and splash from the fountain-spout, and hide itself with a rippling murmur under the broad green reeds and the leaves of the water-lily. She was a charming picture: a brunette with long ebon tresses, with her lashes drooping over her black, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a smile on her half-pouted lips, and all the innocence and dawning beauty of her sixteen years about her, while she sat on the broken steps, now brushing the water-drops off the violets, now weaving the reeds into a pretty, useless toy, now beckoning the birds that came to peck on the rose-sprays beside her.

"Favette! where are your dreams?"

Favette, the young na?ad of the Lorraine elm-woods, looked up, the plait of rushes dropping from her hands, and a warm sudden blush tinging her cheeks and brow with a tint like that on the damask rose-leaves that had fallen into the water, and floated there like delicate shells.

"Mon Dieu, Monsieur Léon! how you frightened me!"

And like a startled fawn, or a young bird glancing round at a rustle amidst the leaves, Favette sprang up, half shy, half smiling, all her treasures gathered from the woods-of flowers, of mosses, of berries, of feathery grasses, of long ivy-sprays-falling from her lap on to the turf in unheeded disorder.

"I frightened you, Favette? Surely not. Are you sorry to see me, then?"

"Sorry? Oh no, Monsieur Léon!" and Favette glanced through her thick curled lashes, slyly yet archly, and began to braid again her plait of rushes.

"Come, tell me, then, what and whom were you dreaming of, ma mie, as you looked down into the water? Tell me, Favette. You have no secrets from your playmate, your friend, your brother?"

Favette shook her head, smiling, and plaited her rushes all wrong, the blush on her cheeks as bright as that on the cups of the rose-leaves that the wind shook down in a fresh shower into the brook.

"Come, tell me, mignonne. Was it-of me?"

"Of you? Well, perhaps-yes!"

It was first love that whispered in Favette's pretty voice those three little words; it was first love that answered in his, as he threw himself down on the violet-tufted turf at her feet, as Boufflers at Aline's.

"Ah, Favette, so should it be! for every hope, every dream, every thought of mine, is centred in and colored by you."

"Yet you can leave me to-day," pouted Favette, with a sigh and a moue mutine, and gathering tears in her large gazelle eyes.

"Leave you? Would to Heaven I were not forced! But against a king's will what power has a subject? None are too great, none are too lowly, to be touched by that iron hand if they provoke its grasp. Vincennes yawns for those who dare to think, For-l'Evêque for those who dare to jest. Monsieur de Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for merely defending a truth and his own honor against De Rohan-Chabot. Who am I, that I should look for better grace?"

Favette struck him, with her plaited rushes, a reproachful little blow.

"Monsieur Vincennes-Monsieur Voltaire-who are they? I know nothing of those stupid people!"

He smiled, and fondly stroked her hair:

"Little darling! The one is a prison that manacles the deadly crimes of Free Speech and Free Thought; the other, a man who has suffered for both, but loves both still, and will, sooner or later, help to give both to the world--"

"Ah, you think of your studies, of your ambitions, of your great heroes! You think nothing of me, save to call me a little darling. You are cruel, Monsieur Léon!"

And Favette twisted her hand from his grasp with petulant sorrow, and dashed away her tears-the tears of sixteen-as bright and free from bitterness as the water-drops on the violet-bells.

"I cruel-and to you! My heart must indeed be badly echoed by my lips, if you have cause to fancy so a single moment. Cruel to you? Favette, Favette! is a man ever cruel to the dearest thing in his life, the dearest name in his thoughts? If I smiled I meant no sneer; I love you as you are, mignonne; the picture is so fair, one touch added, or one touch effaced, would mar the whole in my eyes. I love you as you are! with no knowledge but what the good sisters teach you in their convent solitude, and what the songs of the birds, the voices of the flowers, whisper to you of their woodland lore. I love you as you are! Every morning when I am far away from you, and from Lorraine, I shall think of you gathering the summer roses, calling the birds about you, bending over the fountain to see it mirror your own beauty; every evening I shall think of you leaning from the window, chanting softly to yourself the Ora pro nobis, while the shadows deepen, and the stars we have so often watched together come out above the pine-hills. Favette, Favette! exile will have the bitterness of death to me; to give me strength to bear it, tell me that you love me more dearly than as the brother you have always called me; that you will so love me when I shall be no longer here beside you, but shall have to trust to memory and fidelity to guard for me in absence the priceless treasure of your heart?"

Favette's head drooped, and her hands played nervously with the now torn and twisted braid of rushes: he saw her heart beat under its muslin corsage, like a bee caught and caged in the white leaves of a lily; and she glanced at him under her lashes with a touch of na?ve coquetry.

"If I tell you so, what gage have I, Monsieur Léon, that, a few months gone by, you will even remember it? In those magnificent cities you will soon forget Lorraine; with the grandes dames of the courts you will soon cease to care for Favette?"

"Look in my eyes, Favette, they alone can answer you as I would answer! Till we meet again none shall supplant you for an hour, none rob you of one thought; you have my first love, you will have my last. Favette, you believe me?"

"Yes-I believe!" murmured Favette, resting her large eyes fondly on him. "We will meet as we part, though you are the swallow, free to take flight over the seas to foreign lands, and I am the violet, that must stay where it is rooted in the Lorraine woods!"

"Accept the augury," he whispered, resting his lips upon her low smooth brow. "Does not the swallow ever return to the violet, holding it fairer than all the gaudy tropical flowers that may have tempted him to rest on the wing and delay his homeward flight? Does not the violet ever welcome him the same, in its timid winning spring-tide loveliness, when he returns to, as when he quitted, the only home he loves? Believe the augury, Favette; we shall meet as we part!"

And they believed the augury, as they believed in life, in love, in faith; they who were beginning all, and had proved none of the treacherous triad!

What had he dreamed of in his solitary ancestral woods fairer than this Lorraine violet, that had grown up with him, side by side, since he, a boy of twelve, gathered heaths from the clefts of the rocks that the little child of six years old cried for and could not reach? What had she seen that she loved half so well as M. le Chevalier from the Castle, whom her uncle, the Curé, held as his dearest and most brilliant pupil, whose eyes always looked so lovingly into hers, and whose voice was always lavishing fond names on his petite Favette?

They believed the augury, and were happy even in the sweet sorrow of parting-sorrow that they had never known before-as they sat together in the morning sunlight, while the water bubbled among the violet tufts, among the grasses and wild thyme, and the dragon-flies fluttered their green and gold and purple wings amidst the tendrils of the vines, and the rose-leaves, drifted gently by the wind, floated down the brook, till they were lost in deepening shadow under the drooping boughs.