CHAPTER XXVIII.

MAJOR BRIAN'S HOME.

A FINE baronial-looking castle, placed on a rocky promontory, rising from the banks of a rapid brawling river, with the blue lines of the distant Pyrenees behind, and the dense forest creeping down from the lower slopes of the distant mountains into the very demesne, which was no trim pleasure-ground, but a beautiful wilderness, with fantastic rocks and brawling waterfalls, and deep narrow glens running up into the encroaching forest, and rustic bridges, under which the torrent sleeps in deep limpid pools, where the sprays of the wild ivy, dangling from the mossy pilasters, danced out and in, the whole day long, as if in an enchanted mirror. Such is St. Pavanne, such the home where Julie St. Pavanne Brian has passed the years of her solitary wedded life. It is the oldest, and is now the sole possession of her family. The Jacobin chiefs refused to make restitution of the Norman château where she was born, and Le Blanc's widow did not press them. She was rather glad than otherwise that it had passed into other hands, its memories were so painful. She could not have borne to have returned to the house which she had last left, a happy thoughtless child, holding, in childish fashion, her father's hand; or among the villagers, some of whom would remember her as the "Lark of Bezie."

She preferred very much to come here, to St. Pavanne, where no one knew her, but where she had now for

many years made herself a name for kindly charities and loving words, and such unvarying gentleness, that she was known far and near as the gentle Lady of St. Pavanne. A certain air of romance surrounded her too; there was something unusual, the neighbours thought, in a woman so young and lovely being left so utterly alone, and coming among them so entirely unknown. Her past life was like a closed book to them. All they knew of her was, that she was the last remaining scion of an ancient family, that she was lovely and good, and the wife of a husband too careless to come near her or St. Pavanne. He was a soldier, of course, that was known also; but it did not altogether excuse him in the estimation of the good neighbours. There were other officers in the neighbourhood who had returned to visit their families more than once during the many years the Countess Julie had lived at St. Pavanne alone.

She knew nothing of what the neighbours said or the pity they felt for her. There was a quiet dignity about her that rebuked gossip, and made even the kindest withhold the advice or sympathy that was unasked and might offend. To visit the poor, to carry nourishing soups to the sick, to attend mass daily, to give prizes to the village school, and to the villagers who kept the neatest gardens, and dowries to the young girls in the village, which nestled in old feudal fashion under the wing of the castle, to tend her flowers, and the tame linnet which fluttered down at her feet in the castle park to escape from the pursuing hawk-such was the quiet routine of the lady's still, monotonous life. It was precisely the life many contented women around her lived. There was occupation enough in it for the happy, but... Well, she is not unhappy as you see her there, seated at the western window of her boudoir, the setting sun falling on her hair, glossy and black as

when it was bound up to please Le Blanc's taste beneath the high Norman cap. The rose tint on her cheek glows now even more brightly than of old, and hides with its vivid bloom a worn thinness of outline, a sharpness of contour, that did not use to be there; the sweet black eyes are even brighter than in the days when a perpetual smile lurked in their sunny depths; but they are bright now with a serenity that speaks of a conquered sorrow and resigned hope-at least, hope for this world. She is reading, as she sits in her favourite chair by her favourite window in the light of the setting sun, not the latest Parisian romance, but one of the strange mystical reveries of Madame de la Motte Guyon. There is considerable mental affinity between the dead enthusiast and the living woman who has dared great dangers, and done bold deeds in her time, and who now in the full bloom of her beauty has retired to this solitary outof-the-way Pavanne, to endure with patient heroism this role of the slighted, despised wife, which she took upon herself years ago in the prison of St. Lazares, well knowing its bitterness, but thinking, with a beautiful woman's pardonable vanity, that it would not long be bitter for her.

That hope has quite died out now. Quite," she murmurs, half audibly, as she closes the book. She has not been reading, and looks wearily down over the bare flower-garden, where the withered ghosts of the autumn flowers lift their gaunt skeleton heads in vain protestation against the winter cold, down to the narrow road beyond, up which Jacques the old steward is slowly trudging from the post. He has been to the post-office in the distant town every day for some time past, and he somewhat wonders at the impatience his lady displays. He does not know how much the short, somewhat formal, letters of her only correspondent are to her.

How much, and yet how little, or rather how cruel and mortifying, are the few short sentences, and cold, formal words of endearment: how cruel they used to be, rather, in the early days of her second marriage, when mortified pride was quick to seek out and resent slights. The pain is not so bitter now, for the anodyne of custom has deadened it, and made them almost sweet. They are the sole events of her life. She numbers her year not by months or days, but by the receipt and answer of those short letters; and yet her answers are as cold, as brief, as formal, as those of which her heart complains. Gentle and sweet-tempered as she is, there is a secret unacknowledged feeling of wrong, of hard usage, in her secret heart, prompting her to make no more submissions, to waste no more tenderness on the ungrateful husband her love saved from death, but to hide the unrequited love, the hidden fondness, so closely in her heart that no one shall know of the secret wound.

This woman's pride, although Julie, looking at it from her peculiar standpoint, thinks it as becoming and praiseworthy as it is natural, has perpetuated and increased the alienation, or rather want of love from which it sprang. When the grateful soldier received the first cold letter, so unlike the frank, cordial Julie he had known, he said to himself, half mournfully, half with an irksome sense of having accepted an obligation he could never repay," She repents already of having acted upon the impulse of the moment; her unconsidered generosity has cut her off from the chances of a wealthy or famous marriage, and she is sorry for it now. What wonder? I almost wish that she may soon be free."

But the chances of war spared him, and his next letter was colder, and more painfully formal. Julie read it with streaming eyes. "Life is distasteful to him when clogged with this poor hand," she moaned.

It was then that she left Paris, which Danton's evident admiration rendered an unsafe and undesirable residence for her, and retired to St. Pavanne, at first with the hope of his speedy return, not to cheer, but to excite and unsettle her. She looked forward to it continually, dreamed of it at night, and spent her days in preparing for it; but days slipped into months, and months into years, and still he did not come. She would not ask him, and he would not come unless he were asked; and so they remained and were likely to remain apart. For a growing delicacy of health warned her that her life in all probability would be short. She was almost glad of it, and repeated, when the doctor had left her, almost the very words which Brian had used when, with a vague sense of disappointment, he had crushed up her first short letter and flung it into the camp fire, "He will soon be free, and I am glad to think so."

She had almost begun to think in the lassitude and languor that were gaining upon her, that the love against which she had so long struggled was losing its power to agitate and distress her, when an unusual delay in the punctually regular correspondence threw her into a state of excitement and alarm, which proved that, however cruel and unkind, he was still and must ever remain to her dangerously dear.

Day after day she sent old Jacques to the post town, and day after day he returned empty-handed, and the agitation of hope and fear gave way to the agitation of disappointment and despair. The doctor had bidden her beware of all excitement, and she almost smiled as she pressed her hand on the tumultuous beatings of the heart she had been warned to guard so carefully from emotion, and looked out on old Jacques plodding slowly and methodically up the steep road as if neither joy nor despair hung upon his steps. On he came, not a