The Yellow Poppy. D. K. Broster

left hand, and began to descend the steps which led from the ground level at the foot of the tower towards the basement offices. These steps, at the base of either tower, were invisible till one was close to the house, since they were screened by a line of stone balustrading, but, as the sentry had said, a board with a legend and a downward-pointing hand directed the feet of the visitor to this subterranean entrance. Mirabel had been greatly admired once for the possession of this very thing.

      Just as Mme Vidal got to the bottom of the steps the door at right angles to them opened, and revealed the outgoing caretaker, a dry, thin-lipped woman dressed in rusty black, with a fairhaired child of three or four clinging to her skirts.

      “I hope, Madame,” said her successor apologetically, “that I have not inconvenienced you? I fear I am a little late; the diligence was not punctual.”

      “You’re not later than I expected,” replied Mme Prévost unemotionally. “I saw Thibault chattering to you at the gate; I know what he is, so I don’t blame you. From the way his tongue goes, it’s a pity he’s not a woman.”

      Without more ado she led the way in, the child’s hand in hers, and Mme Vidal followed her along a short passage into a smallish living-room, clean, bare, and distinctly stuffy with an accumulated rather than a recent smell of cooking. Facing the door, high up, were two tall windows, which came just down to the level of the ground outside, itself, naturally, higher than that of the floor. They gave sufficient light, but it was not very easy to see out of them, for they were heavily barred. In the middle of the room, covered with a nightmare of a cloth, stood a round table. On the left hand was the stove, with a few shelves and appurtenances; on the right a press, two chairs and another door.

      “Here is the bedroom,” said Mme Prévost, opening this door, and affording a hasty glimpse of a still smaller room, where the chief object to be seen was a short, wide, wooden bed, covered with a patchwork quilt of various shades, and situated in a recess.

      “You’ll find these rooms quite comfortable,” said the woman. “The Government provides all necessaries, down to pots and pans, as I expect you’ve been told, so you’ll have what you want for cooking. And I will come again in the morning to show you round the château; I can tell you your duties then. I have left you enough provisions for your supper and breakfast, in case you did not think to bring anything with you. There is a small trunk of yours arrived, however; I put it in the bedroom. I suppose you know that people come to see the place occasionally, though a good portion of it is shut up? There’s keys—a mort of keys. Look, Madame!” She unfastened a small door in the wall, and showed them reposing in a sort of cupboard.

      “It will take me time to learn all those,” said Mme Vidal, resting her hand on the table. She had a look, suddenly come upon her, of great fatigue.

      “Oh, they are all labelled,” returned Mme Prévost complacently. “Well, I’ll come and show you in the morning, about nine. Yes, ma petite”—for the child was tugging at her skirts—“we are going to see Papa. She hardly knows what the word means; born in Germinal of the year IV, she was, and he away in Germany with General Moreau. . . . I hope you will find everything you want, Madame. I can assure you it’s all clean and as it should be.”

      “I am sure it is,” answered Mme Vidal. “But may I not pay you this evening for the provisions you have been kind enough to leave me?”

      “Very well, Madame, if you wish,” replied the other, who was gathering together some small possessions. “There’s the bread and the coffee, and a couple of eggs—not so easy to come by in these hard days. The milk-woman comes at half-past six in the morning.” Reflecting a moment she named a sum, and Mme Vidal, pulling out a shabby purse, paid it with reiterated thanks.

      “But I see that you have left me some wood too,” she added. “Do I not owe you for that also?”

      “No, no,” said Mme Prévost, waving away the proposal. “There’s never any lack of wood here, and the Government lets the concierge have it free. It would be hard indeed if they were stingy with it, considering that it costs them nothing, as it is all off the estate. This lot is particularly good, you’ll find; it comes from the pine avenue, I fancy.”

      Mme Vidal took a step backwards. “They are not cutting down the pine avenue, surely?” she exclaimed in a sharp, sudden voice.

      A great astonishment dawned in the meagre visage before her. “Why, do you know Mirabel already!” she asked. “I thought—the Citizen Deputy said you came from the provinces.”

      “So I did—so I do,” stammered the new concierge. “But even in the provinces . . . one had heard of the pine avenue at Mirabel. My late husband had seen it in his youth.”

      “I see,” said Mme Prévost slowly. “Well, I will leave you to settle in, Madame, for you look tired. I’ll come in the morning about nine then. The stairway up to the ground floor is a little to the left out there; not that you will need to go up before I come. The key of the door I let you in at is in the lock; everybody, visitors and all, comes by that door, and you are not responsible for any other; in fact the rest are nearly all barred up. You had better lock that door behind me now. Come along, Mariette.”

      Almost in silence Mme Vidal went with her into the passage, and when Mme Prévost and the child had passed through, and she had responded with a pale smile to the outgoing concierge’s “A demain, Madame!” she turned the key and pushed the bolt. Then she went back to the living-room, and locked that door behind her also.

      Back in Mirabel! back in Mirabel! Was it possible? Back in Mirabel—though, to be sure, in a region of it that she had never even seen before. Some of the swarm of servants had lived here in old times. Had she betrayed herself about the avenue? How foolish, after all these years of self-repression! She looked slowly round. Yes, this odd couple of rooms was no doubt some lesser steward’s in the past. But, if unfamiliar, it was at least situated within the shell of what had been, what still was, Mirabel—Mirabel the loved, Mirabel the hated, Mirabel the enchanted palace, Mirabel the purgatory. . . .

      She went suddenly to the cupboard in the wall, and putting in her hand drew out the keys. Yes, she was once more, in a sense—but in what a sense—the châtelaine of Mirabel.

      And, flinging them back clashing into their seclusion, she sat down at the table, buried her face in her hands and began to laugh. There was never a laugh more mirthless, yet the situation had its humours. At her, indeed, the “watchdogs” on the disfigured gateposts, as the sentry had termed them, would never even have growled. The new concierge of Mirabel’s fallen estate had once been the mistress of Mirabel’s magnificence, for Mme Vidal the caretaker was Valentine de Saint-Chamans, was the Duchesse de Trélan in person.

      CHAPTER III

       NINE YEARS—AND BEYOND

       Table of Contents

      (1)

      The general belief that the Duchesse de Trélan, thrown into prison when Mirabel was sacked, had shared the terrible fate of the Princesse de Lamballe, though it was unfounded, had a large amount of probability to justify it. Valentine de Saint-Chamans had come very near to being cut down by the weapons of the killers in that shambles of a street outside La Force on the 3rd of September, 1792—so near it indeed that her entire disappearance from that hour was assigned to that cause and to no other.

      But she had been saved on the very brink by a man almost unknown to her, acting under a stimulus not commonly as powerful in this world as it might be—gratitude.

      Years and years before the Duchesse de Trélan had discovered in Paris, precariously situated, a former steward of Mirabel, had pensioned him from her own purse, and had continued the pension after his death to his granddaughter, Suzon. Suzon in due time wedded one Alcibiade Tessier, a young watchmaker with ideas—the Duchesse, who was fond of her for her own sake, contributing her dowry. After that Valentine lost