The marriage, the prospect of which failed to commend itself to the coloured maid, took place in due course. The contract which expressed the business side of that alliance was graced by the signature of a prince of the blood, and by two other signatures of a most aristocratic complexion. The French colony in London refrained from audible comments. The gracious behaviour of H.R.H. the Duc de Berry to the bridegroom killed all criticism in the very highest circles of the emigration. In less exalted circles there were slight shrugs and meaning glances, but very little else besides, except now and then a veiled sarcasm which could be ascribed to envy as much as to any other sentiment. Amongst the daughters of the emigration there must have been more than one who in her heart of hearts thought Adèle d’Armand a very lucky girl. The splendour of the entertainments which were given to the London society by the newly-wedded couple after their return from the honeymoon put it beyond all doubt that the man whom Aglae described as wearing a “too-much-laced coat” was very rich. It began also to be whispered that he was a man of fantastic humours, and of eccentric whims of the sort that do not pass current in the best society; especially in the case of a man whose rank was dubious, and whose wealth was but recently acquired. But the embittered and irreconcilable remnant of the exiled aristocracy gave but little of its sympathy to Adèle d’Armand. She ought to have waited till the king was restored, and either married suitably—or else entered a convent for ladies of rank. For these too would soon be restored.

The marquis, before the engagement of his daughter had become public, had written to his friend, Sir Charles, of the impending marriage in carefully selected terms, which demanded nothing but a few words of formal congratulation. Of his son-in-law he mentioned little more than the name. It was, he said, that of a long impoverished Piedmontese family, with good French connections formed in the days before it had fallen into comparative obscurity but, the marquis insisted, fully recognised by the parties concerned. It was the family de Montevesso. The world had heard nothing of it for more than a century, the marquis admitted parenthetically. His daughter’s intended husband’s name was Helion—Count Helion de Montevesso. The title had been given to him by the King of Sardinia just before that unfortunate monarch was driven out of his dominions by the armies of republican France. It was the reward of services rendered at a critical time, and none the less meritorious because, the marquis admitted, they were of a financial nature. Count Helion, who went away very young from his native country, and wandered in many lands, had amassed a large personal fortune—the marquis went on to say—which luckily was invested in a manner which made it safe from political revolutions and social disasters overwhelming both France and Italy. That fortune, as a matter of fact, had not been made in Europe, but somewhere beyond the seas. The marquis’s letter reached Latham Hall in the evening of an autumn day.

The very young Miss Latham, seated before an embroidery-frame, watched across the drawing-room her father reading the letter under the glare of the reflector lamp, and at the feet, as it were, of the Latham in the yellow satin coat. Sir Charles raised his eyebrows, which with passing years had become bushy, and spoiled a little the expression of his handsome face. Miss Latham was made very anxious by his play of physiognomy. She had been already told after the first rustle of unfolded paper that her big friend, Adèle d’Armand (Miss Latham was four years younger), was going to be married, and had become suddenly, but inwardly, excited. Every moment she expected her father to tell her something more. She was dying from impatience; but there was nothing further except the rustle of paper—and now this movement of the eyebrows. Then Sir Charles lowered his hands slowly. She could contain herself no longer.

“Who is it, papa?” she asked with animation.

Henrietta Latham was fifteen then. Her dark eyes had remained as large as ever. The purity of her complexion which was not of the milk-white kind, was admirable, and the rich shade of the brown curls clustering on each side of her faintly glowing cheeks made a rich and harmonious combination. Sir Charles gazed at his daughter’s loveliness with an air of shocked abstraction. But he too could not contain himself. He departed from his stateliness so far as to growl out scathingly:

“An upstart of some kind.”

Miss Latham was, for all her lively manner, not given to outward manifestations of emotions. This intelligence was too shocking for a gasp or an exclamation. She only flushed slowly to the roots of her pretty hair. An upstart simply meant to her everything that was bad in the way of a human being, but the scathing tone of Sir Charles’s outburst also augmented her profound emotion, for it seemed to extend to Adèle d’Armand herself. It shocked her tender loyalty towards the French girl, which had not been diminished by a separation of more than three years. She said quietly:

“Adèle . . . Impossible!”

The flush ebbed out of her healthy cheeks and left them pale, with the eyes darker than Sir Charles had ever seen them before. Those evidences of his daughter’s emotion recalled Sir Charles to himself. After looking at his daughter fixedly for a moment he murmured the word “impossible” without any particular accent, and again raised the letter to his eyes.

He did not find in it anything to modify his first impression of the man whom Adèle d’Armand was about to marry. Once more in his vaguely explanatory message the marquis alluded to the wealth of his prospective son-in-law. It gave him a standing in the best society which his personal merits could not perhaps have secured for him so completely. Then the marquis talked about his wife’s health. The marquise required many comforts, constant care and cheerful surroundings. He had been enabled to leave the disagreeable lodgings in a squalid street for a little house in Chiswick, very near London. He complained to his old friend that the uncompromising Royalists reproached him bitterly for having signed a three years’ lease. It seemed to them an abominable apostacy from the faith in a triumphal return of the old order of things in a month or two. “I have caused quite a scandal by acting in this sensible manner,” he wrote. “I am very much abused, but I have no doubt that even those who judge me most severely will be glad enough to come to Adèle’s wedding.”

Then, as if unable to resist the need to open his heart, he began the next line with the words: “I need not tell you that all this is my daughter’s own doing. The demand for her hand was made to us regularly through Lord G., who is a good friend of mine, though he belongs to the faction of Mr. Fox in which the Count of Montevesso numbers most of his English friends. But directly we had imparted the proposal to Adèle she took a step you may think incredible, and which from a certain point of view might even be called undutiful, if such a word could ever be applied to the sweet and devoted child our Adèle has always been to us. At her personal request, made without consulting either her mother or myself, Lord G. had the weakness to arrange a meeting between her and the count at his own house. What those two could have said to each other I really cannot imagine. When we heard of it, the matter was so far settled that there was nothing left for us but to accept the inevitable. . . .”

Again Sir Charles let his big white aristocratic hands descend on his knees. His daughter’s dark head drooped over the frame, and he had the vision of another head, very different and very fair, by its side. It had been a part of his retired life, and had had a large share of his affection. How large it was he only discovered now, at this moment, when he felt that it was in a sense lost to him for ever. “Inevitable,” he muttered to himself with a half-scornful, half-pained intonation. Sir Charles could understand the sufferings, the difficulties, the humiliations of poverty. But the marquis might have known that, far or near, he could have counted on the assistance of his friend. For some years past he had never hesitated to dip into his purse. But that was for those mysterious journeys and those secret and important missions his princes had never hesitated to entrust him with, without ever troubling their heads about the means. Such was the nature of princes, Sir Charles reflected with complete bitterness. And now came this. . . . A whole young life thrown away perhaps, in its innocence, in its ignorance. . . . How old could Adèle be now? Eighteen or nineteen. Not so very much younger than her mother was when he used to see so much of her in Paris and in Versailles, when she had managed to put such an impress on his heart that later he did not care whom he married, or where he lived. . . . Inevitable! . . . Sir Charles could not be angry with the marquise, now a mere languid shadow of that invincible charm that his heart had not been able to resist. She and her husband must have given up all their hopes, all their loyal Royalist hopes, before they could bow like this to the inevitable. It had not been difficult for him to learn to love that fascinating French child as though she had been another daughter of his own. For a moment he experienced an anguish so acute that it made him move slightly in his chair. Half aloud he muttered the thought that came into his mind:

“Austerlitz has done it.”

Miss Latham raised her lustrous dark eyes with an inquiring expression, and murmured, “Papa?”

Sir Charles got up and seized his stick. “Nothing, my dear, nothing.” He wanted to be alone. But on going out of the room he stopped by the embroidery-frame, and bending down kissed the forehead of his daughter—his English daughter. No issue of a great battle could affect her future. As to the other girl, she was lost to him and it couldn’t be helped. A battle had destroyed the fairness of her life. This was the disadvantage of having been born French or, indeed, of belonging to any other nation of the continent. There were forces there that pushed people to rash or unseemly actions; actions that seemed dictated by despair and therefore wore an immoral aspect. Sir Charles understood Adèle d’Armand even better than he understood his own daughter, or at least he understood her with greater sympathy. She had a generous nature. She was too young, too inexperienced to know what she was doing when she took in hand the disposal of her own person in favour of that apparently Piedmontese upstart with his obscure name and his mysteriously acquired fortune. “I only hope the fortune is there,” thought Sir Charles with grim scepticism. But as to that there could be no doubt, judging from the further letters he received from his old friend. After a short but brilliant period of London life the upstart had carried Adèle off to France. He had bought an estate in Piedmont, which was his native country, and another with a splendid house near Paris. Sir Charles was not surprised to hear a little later that the marquise and the marquis had also returned to France. The time of persecution was over; most of the great Royalist families were returning, unreconciled in sentiment, if wavering in their purposes. That his old friend should ever be dazzled by imperial grandeurs, Sir Charles could not believe. Though he had abandoned his daughter to an upstart, he was too good a Royalist to abandon his principles, for which certainly he would have died if that had been of any use. But he had returned to France. Most of his exiled friends had returned too, and Sir Charles understood very well that the marquis and his wife wanted to be somewhere near their daughter. This departure closed a long chapter in his life, and afterwards Sir Charles hardly ever mentioned his French friends. The only positive thing which Henrietta knew was that Adèle d’Armand had married an upstart, and had returned to France. She had communicated that knowledge to her brother, who had stared with evident surprise but had made no comment. Living away from home at school, and afterwards in Cambridge, his father’s French friends had remained for him as shadowy figures on the shifting background of a very poignant, very real, and intense drama of contemporary history, dominated by one enormously vital, and in its greatness, immensely mysterious individuality—the only man of his time.

Cosmo Latham at the threshold of life had adopted neither of the contrasted views of the Emperor Napoleon entertained by his contemporaries. For him, as for his father before him, the world offered a scene of conflicting emotions, in which facts appraised by reason preserved a mysterious complexity and a dual character. One evening during an artless discussion with young men of his own age, it had occurred to him to say that Bonaparte seemed to be the only man amongst a lot of old scarecrows. “Look how he knocks them over,” he had explained. A moment of silence followed. Then a voice objected.

“Then perhaps he is not so great as some of you try to make him out.”

“I didn’t mean that exactly,” said Cosmo, in a sobered tone. “Nobody can admire that man more than I do. Perhaps the world may be none the worse for a scarecrow here and there left on the borders of what is right or just. I only wished to express my sense of the moving force in his genius.”

“What does he stand for?” asked the same voice.

Cosmo shook his head. “Many things, and some of them too obvious to mention. But I can’t help thinking that there are some which we cannot see yet.”

“And some of them that are dead already,” retorted his interlocutor. “They died in his very hands. But there is one thing for which he stands and that will never die. You seem to have forgotten it. It is the spirit of hostility to this nation; to what we here in this room, with our different views and opinions, stand for in the last instance.”

“Oh, that,” said Cosmo confidently. “What we stand for isn’t an old scarecrow. Great as he is, he will never knock that over. His arm is not long enough, however far his thoughts may go. He has got to work with common men.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What else are we? I believe you admire him.”

“I do,” confessed Cosmo sturdily.

This did not prevent him from joining the army in Spain before the year was out, and that without asking for Sir Charles’s approval. Sir Charles condemned severely the policy of using the forces of the Crown in the Peninsula. He did not like the ministry of the day, and he had a strong prejudice against all the Wellesleys to whose aggrandisement this whole policy seemed affected. But when at the end of a year and a half, after the final victory of Toulouse, his son appeared in Yorkshire, the two made up for the past coolness by shaking hands warmly for nearly a whole minute. Cosmo really had done very little campaigning, and soon declared to his father his wish to leave the army. There would be no more fighting for years and years, he argued, and though he did not dislike fighting in a good cause, he had no taste for mere soldiering. He wanted to see something of the world which had been closed to us for so long. Sir Charles, ageing and dignified, leaned on his stick on the long terrace.

“All the world was never closed to us,” he said.

“I wasn’t thinking of the East, sir,” explained Cosmo. “I heard some people talk about its mystery, but I think Europe is mysterious enough just now, and even more interesting.”

Sir Charles nodded his bare grey head in the chill evening breeze.

“France, Germany,” he murmured.

Cosmo thought that he would prefer seeing something of Italy first. He would go north afterwards.

“Through Vienna, I suppose,” suggested Sir Charles, with an impassive face.

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Cosmo frankly. “I don’t care much for the work which is going on there, and perhaps still less for the men who are putting their hands to it.”

This time Sir Charles’s slow nod expressed complete agreement. He too had no liking for the work that was about to begin there. But no objection could be raised against Italy. He had known Italy well thirty or more years ago, but it must have been changed out of his knowledge. He remained silent, gazing at the wide landscape of blue wooded rises and dark hollows under the gorgeous colours of the sunset. They began to die out.

“You may travel far before you see anything like this,” he observed to his son. “And don’t be in a hurry to leave us. You have only just come home. Remember I am well over sixty.”

Cosmo was quite ready to surrender himself to the peace of his Yorkshire home, so different from the strenuous atmosphere of the last campaign in the south of France. Autumn was well advanced before he fixed the day for his departure. On his last day at home Sir Charles addressed him with perfect calmness:

“When you pass into Italy you must not fail to see my old friend, the Marquis d’Armand. The French king has appointed him as ambassador in Turin. It’s a sign of high favour, I believe. He will be either in Turin or Genoa. . . .” Sir Charles paused, then after a perfectly audible sigh, added with an effort: “The marquise is dead. I knew her in her youth. She was a marvellous woman. . . .” Sir Charles checked himself, and then with another effort: “But the daughter of my old friend is, I believe, with her father now, a married daughter, the Countess of Montevesso.”

“You mean little Adèle, sir,” said Cosmo with interest, but on Sir Charles’s face there passed a distinct shade of distress.

“Oh, you remember the child,” he said, and his tone was tender, but it changed to contempt as he went on: “I don’t know whether the fellow, I mean the man she married, is staying with them, or whether they are living with him, or whether . . . I know nothing!”

The word “upstart,” heard many years ago from his sister Henrietta, crossed Cosmo’s mind. He thought to himself: “There is something wrong there,” and to his father he said: “I will be able to tell you all about it.”

“I don’t want to know,” Sir Charles replied with a surprising solemnity of tone and manner which hid some deeper feeling. “But give the marquis my love, and tell him that when he gets tired of all his grandeurs, he may remember that there is a large place for him in this house as long as I live.”

Late that evening Cosmo, saying good-bye to his sister, took her in his arms, kissed her forehead, and holding her out at arm’s-length, said:

“You have grown into a charming girl, Henrietta.”

“I am glad you think so,” she said. “Alas, I am too dark. I can never be as charming as Adèle must have been at my age. You seem to have forgotten her.”

“Oh, no,” protested Cosmo carelessly. “A marvel of fairness, wasn’t she? I remember you telling me years ago that she married an upstart.”

“That was father’s expression. You know what that means, Cosmo.”

“I do know what it means, exactly,” he said, laughing. “But from what father said this afternoon it seems as if he were a rather nasty upstart. What made Adèle do it?”

“I am awed,” confessed Henrietta. “I don’t know what made her do it. I was never told. Father never talked much about the d’Armands afterwards. I was with him in the yellow drawing-room the evening he got the letter from the marquis. After he read it he said something very extraordinary. You know it’s full nine years ago, and I was yet a child, yet I could not have dreamed it. I heard it distinctly. He dropped his hands and said, ‘Austerlitz has done it.’ What could he have meant?”

“It would be hard to guess the connection,” said Cosmo, smiling at his sister’s puzzled face. “Father must have been thinking of something else.”

“Father was thinking of nothing else for days,” affirmed Henrietta positively.

“You must have been a very observant child,” remarked her brother. “But I believe you were always a clever girl, Henrietta. Well, I am going to see Adèle.”

“Oh, yes, you start in the morning to travel ever so far, and for ever so long,” said Miss Latham enviously. “Oh, Cosmo, you are going to write to me—lots.”

He looked at her appreciatively, and gave her another brotherly hug.

“Certainly I will write, whole reams,” he said.