MADAME DE PLOUGASTEL
The postilion drew rein, and the footman opened the
door, letting down the steps and proffering his arm
to his mistress to assist her to alight, since that
was the wish she had expressed. Then he opened
one wing of the iron gates, and held it for her.
She was a woman of something more than forty, who
once must have been very lovely, who was very lovely
still with the refining quality that age brings to
some women. Her dress and carriage alike advertised
great rank.
“I take my leave here, since you have a visitor,”
said Andre-Louis.
“But it is an old acquaintance of your own,
Andre. You remember Mme. la Comtesse de
Plougastel?”
He looked at the approaching lady, whom Aline was
now hastening forward to meet, and because she was
named to him he recognized her. He must, he thought,
had he but looked, have recognized her without prompting
anywhere at any time, and this although it was some
sixteen years since last he had seen her. The
sight of her now brought it all back to him —
a treasured memory that had never permitted itself
to be entirely overlaid by subsequent events.
When he was a boy of ten, on the eve of being sent
to school at Rennes, she had come on a visit to his
godfather, who was her cousin. It happened that
at the time he was taken by Rabouillet to the Manor
of Gavrillac, and there he had been presented to Mme.
de Plougastel. The great lady, in all the glory
then of her youthful beauty, with her gentle, cultured
voice — so cultured that she had seemed to speak
a language almost unknown to the little Breton lad
— and her majestic air of the great world, had
scared him a little at first. Very gently had
she allayed those fears of his, and by some mysterious
enchantment she had completely enslaved his regard.
He recalled now the terror in which he had gone to
the embrace to which he was bidden, and the subsequent
reluctance with which he had left those soft round
arms. He remembered, too, how sweetly she had
smelled and the very perfume she had used, a perfume
as of lilac — for memory is singularly tenacious
in these matters.
For three days whilst she had been at Gavrillac, he
had gone daily to the manor, and so had spent hours
in her company. A childless woman with the maternal
instinct strong within her, she had taken this precociously
intelligent, wide-eyed lad to her heart.
“Give him to me, Cousin Quintin,” he remembered
her saying on the last of those days to his godfather.
“Let me take him back with me to Versailles
as my adopted child.”
But the Seigneur had gravely shaken his head in silent
refusal, and there had been no further question of
such a thing. And then, when she said good-bye
to him — the thing came flooding back to him
now — there had been tears in her eyes.
“Think of me sometimes, Andre-Louis,”
had been her last words.
