The Chaplet of Pearls | Page 8

immediately on
the receipt of the reply, before the Chevalier's information can lead to
any hindrance or detention of Eustacie.'
'Then Eustacie will go with us, Monsieur?'
'Certainly. Nothing is more important than that her faith should be the
same as yours! But discretion, my son: not a word to the little one.'
'And Landry, father? I had rather Landry went than Eustacie. And
Follet, dear father, pray take him.'
After M. de Ribaumont's grave confidence to his son and heir, he was a

little scandalized at the comparative value that the boy's voice
indicated for wife, foster-brother, and pony, and therefore received it in
perfect silence, which silence continued until they reached the chateau,
where the lady met them at the door with a burst of exclamations.
'Ah, there you are, safe, my dear Baron. I have been in despair. Here
were the Count and his brother come to call on you to join them in
dispersing a meeting of those poor Huguenots and they would not
permit me to send out to call you in! I verily think they suspected that
you were aware of it.'
M. de Ribaumont made no answer, but sat wearily down and asked for
his little Eustacie.
'Little vixen!' exclaimed the Baroness, 'she is gone; her father took her
away with him.' And as her husband looked extremely displeased, she
added that Eustacie had been meddling with her jewel cabinet and had
been put in penitence. Her first impulse on seeing her father had been
to cling to him and poor out her complaints, whereupon he had
declared that he should take her away with him at once, and had in
effect caused her pony to be saddled, and he had ridden away with her
to his old tower, leaving his brother, the Chevalier, to conduct the
attack on the Huguenot conventicle.
'He had no power or right to remove her,' said the Baron. 'How could
you let him do so in my absence? He had made over her wardship to
me, and has no right to resume it!'
'Well, perhaps I might have insisted on his waiting till your return; but,
you see, the children have never done anything but quarrel and fight,
and always by Eustacie's fault; and if ever they are to endure each
other, it must be by being separated now.'
'Madame,' said the Baron, gravely, 'you have done your utmost to ruin
your son's chances of happiness.'
That same evening arrived the King's passport permitting the Baron de
Ribaumont and his family to pay a visit to his wife's friends in England.

The next morning the Baron was summoned to speak to one of his
farmers, a Huguenot, who had come to inform him that, through the
network of intelligence kept up by the members of the persecuted faith,
it had become known that the Chevalier de Ribaumont had set off for
court that night, and there was little doubt that his interference would
lead to an immediate revocation of the sanction to the journey, if to no
severer measures. At best, the Baron knew that if his own absence were
permitted, it would be only on condition of leaving his son in the
custody of either the Queen-mother or the Count. It had become
impossible to reclaim Eustacie. Her father would at once have pleaded
that she was being bred up in Huguenot errors. All that could be done
was to hasten the departure ere the royal mandate could arrive. A little
Norman sailing vessel was moored two evenings after in a lonely creek
on the coast, and into it stepped M. de Ribaumont, with his Bible,
Marot's Psalter, and Calvin's works, Beranger still tenderly kissing a
lock of Follet's mane, and Madame mourning for the pearls, which her
husband deemed too sacred an heirloom to carry away to a foreign
land. Poor little Eustacie, with her cousin Diane, was in the convent of
Bellaise in Anjou. If any one lamented her absence, it was her
father-in-law.
CHAPTER III.
THE FAMILY COUNCIL

He counsels a divorce Shakespeare, KING HENRY VIII.
In the spring of the year 1572, a family council was assembled in Hurst
Walwyn Hall. The scene was a wainscoted oriel chamber closed off by
a screen from the great hall, and fitted on two sides by presses of books,
surmounted the one by a terrestrial, the other by a celestial globe, the
first 'with the addition of the Indies' in very eccentric geography, the
second with enormous stars studding highly grotesque figures, regarded
with great awe by most beholders.
A solid oaken table stood in the midst, laden with books and papers,

and in a corner, near the open hearth, a carved desk, bearing on one
slope the largest copy of the 'Bishops' Bible'; on the other,