Sophy of Kravonia. Anthony Hope

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II

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THE LORD OF YOUTH

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      Sophy's enemies were at work—and Sophy was careless. Such is the history of the next twelve months. Mantis was installed medium now—and the revelations came. But they came slow, vague, fitful, tantalizing. Something was wrong, Pharos confessed ruefully—what could it be? For surely Lady Meg by her faith (and, it may be added, her liberality) deserved well of the Unseen Powers? He hinted at that Evil Eve again, but without express accusation. Under "the influence" Mantis would speak of "the malign one"; but Mantis, when awake, thought Mademoiselle de Gruche a charming young lady! It was odd and mysterious. Pharos could make nothing of it; he, too, thought Mademoiselle Sophie—he advanced to that pleasant informality of description—quite ravishing and entirely devoted to Lady Meg, only, unhappily, so irresponsive to the Unseen—a trifle unsympathetic, it might be. But what would you? The young had no need to think of death or the dead. Was it to be expected, then, that Mademoiselle Sophie would be a good subject, or take much interest in the work, great and wonderful though it might be?

      The pair of rogues did their work well and quietly—so quietly that nothing of it would be known were it not that they quarrelled later on over the spoils of this and other transactions, and Madame Mantis, in the witness-box at Lille, used her memory and her tongue freely. "The plan now was to get rid of the young lady," she said, plainly. "Pharos feared her power over my lady, and that my lady might leave her all the money. Pharos hated the young lady because she would have nothing to say to him, and told him plainly that she thought him a charlatan. She had courage, yes! But if she would have joined in with him—why, then into the streets with me! I knew that well enough, and Pharos knew I knew it. So I hated her, too, fearing that some day she and he would make up their differences, and I—that for me! Yes, that was how we were, Monsieur le Président." Her lucid exposition elicited a polite compliment from Monsieur le Président—and we also are obliged to her.

      But Sophy was heedless. She showed afterwards that she could fight well for what she loved well, and that with her an eager heart made a strong hand. Her heart was not in this fight. The revelation of mad Lady Meg's true motive for taking her up may well have damped a gratitude otherwise becoming in Sophy Grouch transmuted to Sophie de Gruche. Yet the gratitude remained; she fought for Lady Meg—for her sanity and some return of sanity in her proceedings. In so fighting she fought against herself—for Lady Meg was very mad now. For herself she did not fight; her heart and her thoughts were elsewhere. The schemes in the Rue de Grenelle occupied her hardly more than the clash of principles, the efforts of a falling dynasty, the struggles of rising freedom, the stir and seething of the great city and the critical times in which she lived.

      For she was young, and the Lord of Youth had come to visit her in his shower of golden promise. The days were marked for her no more by the fawning advances or the spiteful insinuations of Pharos than by the heroics of an uneasy emperor or the ingenious experiments in reconciling contradictions wherein his ministers were engaged. For her the days lived or lived not as she met or failed to meet Casimir de Savres. It was the season of her first love. Yet, with all its joy, the shadow of doubt is over it. It seems not perfect; the delight is in receiving, not in giving; his letters to her, full of reminiscences of their meetings and talks, are shaded with doubt and eloquent of insecurity. She was no more than a girl in years; but in some ways her mind was precociously developed—her ambition was spreading its still growing wings. Casimir's constant tone of deference—almost of adulation—marks in part the man, in part the convention in which he had been bred; but it marks, too, the suppliant: to the last he is the wooer, not the lover, and at the end of his ecstasy lies the risk of despair. For her part she often speaks of him afterwards, and always with the tenderest affection; she never ceased to carry with her wherever she went the bundle of his letters, tied with a scrap of ribbon and inscribed with a date. But there is one reference, worthy of note, to her innermost sentiments towards him, to the true state of her heart as she came to realize it by-and-by. "I loved him, but I hadn't grown into my feelings," she says. Brief and almost accidental as the utterance is, it is full of significance; but its light is thrown back. It is the statement of how she came to know how she had been towards him, not of how in those happy days she seemed to herself to be.

      He knew about Grouch; he had been told by a copious superfluity of female friendliness—by Lady Meg, cloaking suspicious malignity under specious penitence; by Madame Mantis with impertinent and intrusive archness; by Marie Zerkovitch in the sheer impossibility of containing within herself any secret which had the bad fortune to be intrusted to her. Sophy's own confession, made with incredible difficulty—she hated the name so—fell flat and was greeted with a laugh of mockery.

      It happened at the Calvaire at Fontainebleau, whither they had made a day's and night's excursion, under the escort of Marie Zerkovitch and a student friend of hers from the Quartier Latin. These two they had left behind sipping beer at a restaurant facing the château. On the eminence which commands the white little town dropped amid the old forest, over against the red roofs of the palace vying in richness with the turning leaves, in sight of a view in its own kind unsurpassed, in its own charm unequalled, Sophy broke the brutal truth which was to end the infatuation of the head of a house old as St. Louis.

      "It's bad to pronounce, is it?" asked Casimir, smiling and touching her hand. "Ah, well, good or bad, I couldn't pronounce it, so to me it is nothing."

      "They'd all say it was terrible—a mésalliance."

      "I fear only one voice on earth saying that."

      "And the fraud I am—de Gruche!" She caught his hand tightly. Never before had it occurred to her to defend or to excuse the transparent fiction.

      "I know stars fall," he said, with his pretty gravity, not too grave. "I wish that they may rise to their own height again—and I rise with them."

      The sun sank behind the horizon. A gentle afterglow of salmon-pink rested over the palace and city; the forest turned to a frame of smoky, brownish black. Casimir waved a hand towards it and laughed merrily.

      "Before we were, it was—after we are, it shall be! I sound as old as Scripture! It has seen old masters—and great mistresses! Saving the proprieties, weren't you Montespan or Pompadour?"

      "De la Vallière?" she laughed. "Or Maintenon?"

      "For good or evil, neither! Do I hurt you?"

      "No; you make me think, though," answered Sophy. "Why?"

      "They niggled—at virtue or at vice. You don't niggle! Neither did Montespan nor Pompadour."

      "And so I am to be—Marquise de—?"

      "Higher, higher!" he laughed. "Madame la Maréchale—!"

      "It is war, then—soon—you think?" She turned to him with a sudden tension.

      He pointed a Frenchman's eloquent forefinger to the dark mass of the château, whose chimneys rose now like gloomy interrogation-marks to an unresponsive, darkened sky. "He is there now—the Emperor! Perhaps he walks in his garden by the round pond—thinking, dreaming, balancing."