Cosmo Latham had an inborn faculty of orientation in strange surroundings, most invaluable in a cavalry officer, but of which he had never made much use, not even during the few months when he served as a cornet of horse in the Duke of Wellington’s army in the last year of the Peninsular campaign. There had been but few occasions to make use of it for a freshly-joined subaltern. It stood him in good stead that night, however, while making his way to his inn in a town in which he was a complete stranger, for it allowed him, with but little concern for the direction he took, to think of his home which he loved for itself, every stone and every tree of it—and of the two people he left there, whom he loved too, each in a different way: his father, Sir Charles, and his sister, Henrietta.

Latham Hall, a large straggling building showing traces of many styles, flanked by a romantic park, and commanding a vast view of the Yorkshire hills, had been the hereditary home of Lathams from the times before the great rebellion. That it escaped confiscation then might have been the effect of the worldly prudence of the Latham of the time. He probably took good care not to shock persons of position and influence. That, however, was not the characteristic of the later Lathams down to Sir Charles, Cosmo’s father.

Sir Charles’s unconventional individuality had never been understood by his country neighbours. Born endowed with a good intellect, a lively imagination, and a capacity for social intercourse, it had been his fate, owing to the idiosyncrasies of his own father, to spend his early youth in the depths of Yorkshire in surroundings not at all congenial to his taste. Later he served for a time in the Guards; but he very soon left the army to make an extended tour in France and Italy. In those last days before the Revolution le chevalier Latham obtained a great social recognition in Paris and Versailles amongst the very best people, not so much by his brilliance as by the depth of his character and the largeness of his ideas. But suddenly he tore himself away from his friendships and successes and proceeded to Italy. There, amongst the members of the English colony in Florence he met the two Aston girls and, for some reason or other, became a great favourite with their widowed mother. But at the end of some months he suddenly made up his mind to return home. During a long, sleepless night, which he spent pacing up and down in the agony of an internal struggle with himself in the magnificent rooms of his lodgings in Florence, he concluded that he would go home by sea. It was the easiest way of avoiding coming near Paris. He had heard not long before that the best friends he had made in the brilliant society he had frequented in France, the Marquis and the Marquise d’Armand, had a daughter born to them. At Leghorn, on the very eve of embarking, he had another struggle with himself—but he went by sea. By the time, when after a long sea passage, he put his foot on native soil, he had renounced the idea of hurrying on north to shut himself up in his country home. He lingered in London, disdainful and idle, and began reluctantly to fall into the ways of a man about town, when a friend returning from Italy brought him news that Miss Aston was going to marry a Tuscan nobleman of mature years, and, as a piece of queer Florentine gossip, that if the younger sister, Miss Molly Aston, had refused two suitors in quick succession, it was because she regarded herself in some way as being engaged to him—Charles Latham.

Whether stung by his conscience or urged by indignation, Sir Charles started impulsively for Italy, travelling across the south of France. It was a long road. At first he had been amazed, confounded and angry; but before he came to the end of his journey he had time to reflect upon what might have easily become an absurd and odious situation. He said to himself that a lot of bother of one sort and another would be saved by his marrying Molly Aston. He did so, to the applause of all right-minded people, and at the end of two years spent abroad came home with his wife to shut himself up in his ancestral hall, commanding the view of a wide and romantic landscape, which he thought one of the finest in the world.

Molly Aston had been beautiful enough in her time to inspire several vagrant poets and at least one Italian sculptor; but as Cosmo grew older he began to understand that his mother had been a nonentity in the family life. The greatest piece of self-assertion on her part was his name. She had insisted on calling him Cosmo because the Astons counted, far back in the past, an ancestress of Florentine origin, supposed to have been a connection of the Medici family. Cosmo was fair, and the name was all about him that he had received from his mother. Henrietta was a type of dark beauty. Lady Latham died when both her children were still young. In her life she adorned Latham Hall in the same way as a statue might have adorned it. Her household power was limited to the ordering of the dinner. With habits of meticulous order, and a marvellously commonplace mind, she had a temperament which, if she had not fallen violently in love at the age of eighteen with the man whom she married, would have made her fond of society, of amusement, and perhaps even of dissipation. But her only amusement and dissipation consisted in writing long letters to innumerable relations and friends all over the world, of whom, after her marriage, she saw but very little. She never complained. Her hidden fear of all initiative, and the secret ardour of her temperament, found their fulfilment in an absolute submission to Sir Charles’s will. She would never have dreamed of asking for horses for a visit in the neighbourhood, but when her husband remarked, “I think it would be advisable for you, my lady, to call at such and such a house,” her face would light up, she would answer with alacrity, “Certainly, Sir Charles,” and go off to array herself magnificently indeed (perhaps because of that drop of Medici blood), but also with great taste. As the years went on, Sir Charles aged more than he ought to have done, and even began to grow a little stout, but no one could fail to see that he had been a very handsome man in his time, and that his wife’s early infatuation for him was justified in a way. In politics he was a partisan of Mr. Pitt, rather than a downright Tory. He loved his country, believed in its greatness, in its superior virtue, in its irresistible power. Nothing could shake his fidelity to national prejudices of every sort. He had no great liking for grandees and mere aristocrats, despised the fashionable world, and would have nothing whatever to do with any kind of “upstart.” Without being gentle he was naturally kind and hospitable. His native generosity was so well known that no one was surprised when he offered the shelter of his Yorkshire house to a family of French refugees, the Marquis and the Marquise d’Armand with their little daughter, Adèle. They had arrived in England in a state of almost complete destitution, but with two servants who had shared the dangers and the miseries of their flight from the excesses of the Revolution.

The presence of all these people at Latham Hall which, considered at first as a temporary arrangement, was to last for some years, did not affect in the least Lady Latham’s beautifully dressed idle equanimity. Had not the d’Armands been Sir Charles’s intimate friends years ago, in France? But she had no curiosity. She was vaguely impressed by the fact that the marquise was a god-daughter of the Queen of Naples. For the rest it was only so many people more in the servants’ hall, at the dinner-table, and in the drawing-room, where the evenings were spent.

High up on one of the walls a lamp with a shaded reflector concentrated its light on the yellow satin coat of the half-length portrait of a rubicund Latham in a white Coburg, which, but for the manly and sensitive mouth, might have been the portrait of his own coachman. Apart from that spot of beautiful colour, the vast room with its windows giving on a terrace (from which Sir Charles was in the habit of viewing sunsets) remained dim with an effect of immensity in which the occupants, and even Sir Charles himself, acquired the appearance of unsubstantial shadows uttering words that had to travel across long, almost unlighted distances.

On one side of the mantel-piece of Italian marbles (a late addition designed by Sir Charles himself), Lady Latham’s profuse jewellery sparkled about her splendid and restful person, posed placidly on a sofa. Opposite her, the marquise would be lying down on a deep couch with one of Lady Latham’s shawls spread over her feet. The d’Armands in the flight from the Terror had saved very little besides their lives, and the Marquise d’Armand’s life had by this time become a very precarious possession.

Sir Charles was perhaps more acutely aware of this than the marquis, her husband. Sir Charles remembered her as gentle in her changing moods of gaiety and thought, charming, active, fascinating, and certainly the most intelligent, as she was the most beautiful, of the women of the French court. Her voice reaching him clear, but feeble, across the drawing-room had a pathetic appeal; and the tone of his answers was tinged with the memory of a great sentiment and with the deference due to great misfortunes. From time to time Lady Latham would make a remark in a matter-of-fact tone which would provoke something resembling curtness in Sir Charles’s elaborately polite reply, and the thought that that woman would have made the very Lord’s Prayer sound prosaic. And then in the long pauses they would pursue their own thoughts as perplexed and full of unrest as the world of seas and continents that began at the edge of the long terrace graced by gorgeous sunsets; the wide world filled with the strife of ideas, and the struggle of nations in perhaps the most troubled time of its history.

From the depths of the Italian chimney-piece the firelight of blazing English logs would fall on Adèle d’Armand sitting quietly on a low stool near her mother’s couch. Her fair hair, white complexion and dark blue eyes contrasted strongly with the deeper colour scheme of Henrietta Latham, whose locks were rich chestnut brown, and whose eyes had a dark lustre full of intelligence rather than sentiment. Now and then the French child would turn her head to look at Sir Charles, for whom in her silent existence she had developed a filial affection.

In those days Adèle d’Armand did not see much of her own father. Most of the time the marquis was away. Each of his frequent absences was an act of devotion to his exiled princes, who appreciated it no doubt, but found devotion only natural in a man of that family. The evidence of their regard for the marquis took the shape mainly of distant and dangerous missions to the courts of north Germany and northern Italy. In the general disruption of the old order, those missions were all futile, because no one ever stopped an avalanche by means of plots and negotiations. But in the marquis the perfect comprehension of that profound truth was mingled with the sort of enthusiasm that fabricates the very hopes on which it feeds. He would receive his instructions for those desperate journeys with extreme gravity and depart on them without delay, after a flying visit to the Hall to embrace his ailing wife and his silent child, and hold a grave conference with his stately English friend from whom he never concealed a single one of his thoughts or his hopes. And Sir Charles approved of them both, because the thoughts were sober, and absolutely free from absurd illusions common to all exiles, thus appealing to Sir Charles’s reason, and also to his secret disdain of all great aristocracies—and the second, being based on the marquis’s conviction of England’s unbroken might and consistency, seemed to Sir Charles the most natural thing in the world.

They paced a damp laurel-bordered walk together for an hour or so; Sir Charles lame and stately, like a disabled child of Jupiter himself, the marquis restraining his stride, and stooping with a furrowed brow to talk in measured, level tones. The wisdom of Sir Charles expressed itself in curt sentences in which scorn for men’s haphazard activities and shortsighted views was combined with a calm belief in the future.

After the peace of Amiens the Comte d’Artois, the representative of the exiled dynasty in England, having expressed the desire to have the marquis always by his side, the marquise and Adèle left Latham Hall for the poverty and makeshifts of the life of well-nigh penniless exiles in London. It was as great a proof of devotion to his royal cause as any that could be given. They settled down in a grimy house of yellow brick in four rooms up a very narrow and steep staircase. For attendants they had a dark mulatto maid brought as a child from the West Indies before the Revolution by an aunt of the marquise, and a man of rather nondescript nationality called Bernard, who had been at one time a hanger-on in the country-house of the d’Armands, but following the family in its flight and its wanderings before they had found refuge in England had displayed unexpected talents as a general factotum. Life at Latham Hall had bored him exceedingly. The sense of complete security was almost too much for his patience. The regularity of the hours and the certitude of abundant meals depressed his spirits at times. The change to London revived him greatly, for there he had something to do, and found daily occasion to display his varied gifts. He went marketing in the early morning, dusted the room he called the salon, cooked the meals, washed the floors; and in all his comings and goings was cheered, inspired and made happy by the large white smile of Miss Aglae, the negress, with whom he was very much in love. At twelve o’clock after tidying himself a bit he would go in on the tips of his heavy square shoes and carry the marquise from her room to the sofa in the salon with elaborate sureness and infinite respect, while Aglae followed with pillow, shawl, and smelling-bottle, wearing a forced air of gravity. Bernard was acutely aware of her presence and would be certain—the marquise once settled on her sofa—to get a flash of a white grin all to himself. Later Mlle. Adèle, white and fair, would go out visiting, followed by Aglae as closely as night follows day; and Bernard would watch them down the depths of the staircase in the hope of catching sight of a quickly upturned dark brown face with fine rolling eyes. This would leave him happy for the rest of the afternoon. In the evening his function was to announce visitors who had toiled up the stairs; some of the first names in France that had come trudging on foot through the mud or dust of the squalid streets to fill the dimly-lighted room which was the salon of the Marquise d’Armand. For those duties Bernard would put on a pair of white stockings, which Miss Aglae washed for him every second day, and encase his wide shoulders in a very tight green shabby jacket with large metal buttons. Miss Aglae always found a minute or two to give him a hasty inspection and a brush-down. Those were delightful instants. Holding his breath and in a state of rigid beatitude he turned about as ordered in gay whispers by his exotic lady-love. Later he would sit on a stool outside the closed door listening to the well-bred soft uproar of conversation; and when the guests began to depart he lighted them downstairs, holding a tallow dip in a small candlestick over the banister of the landing. When his duties for the day were over, he made up for himself a bed on the floor of a narrow passage which separated the living rooms from a sort of large cupboard in which Miss Aglae reposed from her daily labours. Bernard, lying under a pair of thin blankets, and with the tallow candle burning on the floor, kept slumber off till Miss Aglae stuck out her head tied up in an old red foulard—nothing but her head through the crack of the door—in order to have a little whispered conversation. That was the time when the servants exchanged their views and communicated to each other their ideas and observations. The black maid’s were shrewder than the white factotum’s. Being a personal attendant of the two ladies she had occasion to see and hear more than her admirer. They commented on the evident decline of the marquise’s health, not dolefully, but simply as a significant fact of the situation; on the marquis’s manner of daily life which had become domestic and almost sedentary. He went out every day, but now he never went away for weeks and months as he used to before. Those sudden and mysterious missions for which a misanthropic Yorkshire baronet had paid out of his own pocket had come to an end. A Marquis d’Armand could not be sent out as a common spy, and there was now no court in Christendom that would dare to receive an emissary, secret or open, of the royal exiles. Bernard, who could read, explained these things shortly to Miss Aglae. All great folk were terrified at that Bonaparte. He made all the generals tremble. On those facts Miss Aglae would have it that he must be a sorcerer. Bernard had another view of Napoleonic greatness. It was nothing but the power of lies. And on one occasion, after a slight hesitation, he burst out: “Shall I tell you the truth about him, Miss Aglae?” The tied-up black head protruding through the crack of the door nodded assent many times in the dim light of the shallow dip. “Well, then,” continued Bernard with another desperate effort, “he is of no account.”

Miss Aglae repressed with difficulty the loud burst of laughter which was the usual expression of her unsophisticated emotions. She had heard ladies and gentlemen in the salon express a very similar opinion on Bonaparte, but she thought suddenly of Miss Adèle and emitted a sigh.

“He seems to get his paw on the whole world, anyhow. What sort of a fellow is he, Bernard? You have seen him.”

Bernard had seen the fellow. He assured Miss Aglae that he was a miserable shrimp of a man in big boots, and with lank hair hanging down his yellow cheeks. “I could break him in two like a straw if I could only get him into my hands.”

Believing it implicitly the black maid suggested that Bernard should go and do it.

“I would go at once,” said the faithful follower. “But if I went I would never see you again. He has always a hundred thousand men around him.”

At this Miss Aglae who had begun to smile ended with a sigh of such a deeply sorrowful nature that Bernard assured her that the time would come; yes, some day the day would come when everybody would get back his own. Aglae was ready to believe this prophecy. But meantime there was Miss Adèle. That sweet child was now ready to get married, but everybody was so very poor. Bernard put on a sentimental expression in the dim light of the tallow dip, the flame of which swayed by the side of his straw mattress, and made the shadow of his head protected by a nightcap dance too high up the wall of the draughty passage. Timidly he muttered of love. That would get over all the difficulties.

“You very stupid man, Mr. Bernard. Love! What sort of trash you talk? Love don’t buy fish for dinner.” Then with sudden anxiety she inquired, “Have you got money for marketing to-morrow?”

Bernard had the money. Not much, but he had the money. “Then you go out early and buy fish for dinner. This Madame le Marquise orders. Easier than killing an emperor,” she continued sarcastically. “And take care fat woman in Billingsgate don’t cheat you too much,” she added with dignity before drawing her head in and shutting the door of her dark cupboard.

A month later, sitting upon his straw bed and with his eyes fixed on the door of Miss Aglae’s cupboard, Bernard had just begun to think that he had done something to offend, and that he would be deprived of his whispered midnight chat, when the door opened, and the head of the girl appeared in its usual position. It drooped. Its white eyeballs glistened full of tears. It said nothing for a long time. Bernard was extremely alarmed. He wanted to know in an anxious whisper what was wrong. The maid let him cudgel his brains for a whole minute before she made the statement that oh! she did not like the looks of a certain gentleman visitor in a “too-much-laced coat.”

Bernard, relieved but uncomprehending, snatched the candlestick off the floor and raised it to the protruded head of the maid.

“What is there to cry about?” he asked. The tears glistening on the dusky cheek astonished him beyond measure; and as an African face lends itself to the expression of sorrow more than any other type of human countenance, he was profoundly moved and, without knowing the cause, by mere sympathy felt ready to cry himself.

“You don’t see! You don’t understand anything, Bernard. You stand there at the door like a stick. What is the use of you, I can’t tell.”

Bernard would have felt the injustice to be unbearable if he had not had a strong sense of his own merits. Moreover it was obvious that Aglae was thoroughly upset. As to the man in the too-much-laced coat, Bernard remembered that he was dressed very splendidly indeed. He had called first in company of a very fine English gentleman, a friend of the family, and he had repeated the call always with that same friend. It was a fact that he had never called by himself yet. The family had dined with him only the day before, as Bernard knew very well, because he had to call the hackney coach and had given the address, not to mention having the confidential task of carrying the marquise down the stairs and then up again on their return from that entertainment. There could be nothing wrong with a man with whom the family dined. And the marquise herself too, she who, so to speak, never went out anywhere!

“What has he done?” he asked without marked excitement. “I have never seen you so distressed, Miss Aglae.”

“Me upset? I should think me upset. I fear him wants carry off Mademoiselle Adèle—poor child.”

This staggered the faithful Bernard. “I should like him to try,” he said pugnaciously. “I keep a cudgel there in this passage.” A scornful exclamation from the maid made him pause. “Oh!” he said, in a changed tone, “carry her off for a wife? Well, what’s wrong in that?”

“Oh! you silly!” whimpered Aglae. “Can’t you see him twice, twice and a half, the age of Mademoiselle Adèle?”

Bernard remained silent a minute. “Fine-looking man,” he remarked at last. “Do you know anything else about him?”

“Him got plenty of money,” sobbed out Aglae.

“I suppose the parents will have something to say about that,” said Bernard after a short meditation. “And if Mademoiselle Adèle herself . . .”

But Aglae wailed under her breath as it were, “It’s done, Bernard, it’s done!”

Bernard, fascinated, stared upwards at the maid. A mental reference to abundance of money for marketing flashed through his mind.

“I suppose Mademoiselle Adèle can love a man like that. Why not?”

“Him got very fine clothes certainly,” hissed Aglae furiously. Then she broke down and became full of desolation. “Oh, Bernard, them poor people, you should have seen their faces this morning when I served the breakfast. I feel as if I must make a big howl while I give plate to M. le Marquis. I hardly dare look at anybody.”

“And mademoiselle?” asked Bernard in an anxious whisper.

“I don’t like to look at her either,” went on Aglae in a tone of anguish. “She got quite a flush on her face. She think it very great and fine, make everybody rich. I ready to die with sorrow, Bernard. She don’t know. She too young. Why don’t you cry with me—you great, stupid man?”