The Last Hope | Page 9

once mixed with
the best on an intellectual equality.
Colville's manners were considered perfect, especially by those who
were unable to detect a fine line said to exist between ease and too
much ease. Mr. Marvin recollected John Turner well. Ten years earlier
he had, indeed, corresponded at some length with the Paris banker
respecting a valuable engraving. Was Mr. Colville interested in
engravings? Colville confessed to a deep and abiding pleasure in this
branch of art, tempered, he admitted with a laugh, by a colossal
ignorance. He then proceeded to give the lie to his own modesty by
talking easily and well of mezzotints and etchings.
"But," he said, interrupting himself with evident reluctance, "I am
forgetting my obligations. Let me present to you my companion, an old
friend, the Marquis de Gemosac."
The two gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Marvin, knowing no French,
proceeded to address the stranger in good British Latin, after the
manner of the courtly divines of his day. Which Latin, from its mode of
pronunciation, was entirely unintelligible to its hearer.
In return, the rector introduced the two strangers to his niece, Miriam
Liston.
"The mainstay of my quiet house," he added, with his vague and
dreamy smile.
"I have already heard of you," said Dormer Colville at once, with his

modest deference, "from my cousin, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence."
He seemed, as sailors say, never to be at a loose end; but to go through
life with a facile readiness, having, as it were, his hands full of threads
among which to select, with a careless affability, one that must draw
him nearer to high and low, men and women, alike.
They talked together for some minutes, and, soon after the discovery
that Miriam Liston was as good a French scholar as himself, and
therefore able to converse with the Marquis de Gemosac, Colville
regretted that it was time for them to return to their simple evening
meal at "The Black Sailor."
"Well," said Colville to Monsieur de Gemosac, as they walked slowly
across the green toward the inn, embowered in its simple cottage-
garden, all ablaze now with hollyhocks and poppies--"well, after your
glimpse at this man, Marquis, are you desirous to see more of him?"
"My friend," answered the Frenchman, with a quick gesture,
descriptive of a sudden emotion not yet stilled, "he took my breath
away. I can think of nothing else. My poor brain is buzzing still, and I
know not what answers I made to that pretty English girl. Ah! You
smile at my enthusiasm; you do not know what it is to have a great
hope dangling before the eyes all one's life. And that face-- that face!"
In which judgment the Marquis was no doubt right. For Dormer
Colville was too universal a man to be capable of concentrated zeal
upon any one object. He laughed at the accusation.
"After dinner," he answered, "I will tell you the little story as it was
told to me. We can sit on this seat, outside the inn, in the scent of the
flowers and smoke our cigarette."
To which proposal Monsieur de Gemosac assented readily enough. For
he was an old man, and to such the importance of small things, such as
dinner or a passing personal comfort, are apt to be paramount.
Moreover, he was a remnant of that class to which France owed her
downfall among the nations; a class represented faithfully enough by its

King, Louis XVI., who procrastinated even on the steps of the
guillotine.
The wind went down with the sun, as had been foretold by River
Andrew, and the quiet of twilight lay on the level landscape like sleep
when the two travellers returned to the seat at the inn door. A distant
curlew was whistling cautiously to its benighted mate, but all other
sounds were still. The day was over.
"You remember," said Colville to his companion, "that six months after
the execution of the King, a report ran through Paris and all France that
the Dillons had succeeded in rescuing the Dauphin from the Temple."
"That was in July, 1793--just fifty-seven years ago--the news reached
me in Austria," answered the Marquis.
Colville glanced sideways at his companion, whose face was set with a
stubbornness almost worthy of the tenacious Bourbons themselves.
"The Queen was alive then," went on the Englishman, half diffidently,
as if prepared for amendment or correction. "She had nearly three
months to live. The separation from her children had only just been
carried out. She was not broken by it yet. She was in full possession of
her health and energy. She was one of the cleverest women of that time.
She was surrounded by men, some of whom were frankly half-witted,
others who were drunk with excess of a