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Thus they talked until the guests began to arrive, and for Madame de Chantonnay the time no doubt seemed short enough. For no one appreciated Albert with such a delicacy of touch as the Abbe Touvent. The Marquis de Gemosac and Juliette were the last to arrive. The Marquis looked worn and considerably aged. He excused himself with a hundred gestures of despair for being late.
Above the stables, quite close to the gate, half a dozen rooms were in the occupation of the Marquis de Gemosac; but it was not to these that the Abbe Touvent directed his tremulous steps. Instead, he went toward the square, isolated house, standing in the middle of that which had once been the great court, and was now half garden, half hayfield.
A bed such as peasants sleep on; a few chairs; a dressing-table tottering against the window-breast, and modestly screened in one corner, the diminutive washing-stand still used in southern France. For Gemosac had been sacked and the furniture built up into a bonfire when Marie was a little child and the Abbe Touvent a fat-faced timorous boy at the Seminary of Saintes.
Our ultimate destination was now the sector of Hébuterne, which had leapt into prominence on the occasion of the successful French attack on Touvent Farm, June 12th, but was now, from all accounts, peaceful enough.
"I expected you. Ask the Abbe Touvent. He will tell you, gentlemen, that I expected you." As Barebone turned away to speak to the Marquis and others, who were pressing forward to greet him, it became apparent that that mantle of imperturbability, which millions made in trade can never buy, had fallen upon his shoulders, too.
Pierre Lawrence had supplied the one ingredient necessary to leaven the talk of these dreamers into action. Even the notary found himself compelled to contribute when Albert de Chantonnay asked him outright for a subscription. And the priests, ably led by the Abbe Touvent, acted after the manner of the sons of Levi since olden times.
The Abbe Touvent made it his special care to preside over the table where small glasses of eau-de-vie d'Armagnac and other aids to digestion were set out in a careful profusion. "It is a theory, my dear Marquis," admitted Madame de Chantonnay. "But it is nothing more. It has no heart in it, your theory. Now I have a theory of my own."
There was only one Abbe Touvent, for morning or afternoon, for church or fete, for the chateau or the cottage. There were a dozen Albert de Chantonnays, fierce or tender, gay or sad, a poet or a soldier a light persifleur, who had passed through the mill, and had emerged hard and shining, or a young man of soul, capable of high ideals.
But he forgot to replace it, and he went away with the cap in his hand. She heard the clink of a chain as he loosed his boat. The Abbe Touvent was not a courageous man, and the perspiration, induced by the climb from the high-road up that which had once been the ramp to the Chateau of Gemosac, ran cold when he had turned the key in the rusty lock of the great gate.
"I will not even tell the story as it was told to me," he said to the Marquis de Gemosac, to the Abbe Touvent and to the Comtesse de Chantonnay, whom he met frequently enough at the house of his cousin, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, in that which is now the Province of the Charente Inferieure. "I will not even tell you the story as it was told to me, until one of you has seen the man.
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