The elder Marquis de Vauvenargues put down the Gazette in which he had been reading of the opening of the spring campaign and the progress of the Chevalier de St. George through Scotland, and looked across the dining-room at his eldest son.

Luc stood before the window half concealed by the long folds of the dark crimson curtains. It was late afternoon in March, and the garden was grey, misty, and fragrant; beyond the trees, just blurred with green, glowed the pale, clear blue of the fading sky, mournful, remote, and calm.

“Mademoiselle de SÉguy is leaving for Paris to-morrow,” said the Marquis.

“Ah!” answered Luc, without moving his head.

M. de Vauvenargues paused a moment, then added in a low tone—

“It need not have been, Luc, it need not have been.”

The young man did not reply, and his father sighed.

“You were always obstinate, Luc,” he added with a sad tenderness, “from the day you insisted on entering the army—which was Joseph’s place—as the second son.”

Luc moved now; he turned his back to the window, facing now the long, dark room, the table on which the fine cloth, cakes, and wine still gleamed, facing the figure of his father in full peruke and black velvet, brilliants and much Michelin lace.

“I am going to prove myself still further obstinate, Monseigneur,” he said. He stifled a cough and braced his stooping figure. “I have wished—for some weeks—since I returned from the convent—to speak to you. I think this is my chance.”

The old man folded the paper across mechanically, and the great ruffles round his wrists shook with the quivering of his fair hands.

“What can you have to say, Luc?” he asked quickly.

His son came slowly to the table with the hesitating and uncertain step that was the accompaniment of his imperfect sight.

“I want to tell you, Monseigneur, what I mean to do.”

He seated himself on the old, high-backed walnut chair with the fringed leather seat which had been his since the time he had sat there, a stately child in skirts, murmuring grace or eating sugared macaroons.

“What you mean to do?” repeated the Marquis.

Luc raised his face. In the cold light of the early year and the shadows of the dark room this face looked like a mask of colourless clay modelled in lines of perpetual pain. The white curls of his wig fell either side on to his green coat, and his hands were again white, one holding the back of the black chair, one resting on the lace cloth.

He looked at his father steadily, and the blood receded from the Marquis’s strong features.

“What do you mean to do?” he asked. “Eh, Luc?”

“Monseigneur,”—though the voice was hoarse and broken by constant coughing, there were in it the old sweet notes—“I fear to give you pain. Yet I cannot think that you will not understand.”

“I am ready,” said his father, “to do anything you wish—you know that—anything.”

Again Luc braced himself with an obvious effort; his bent shoulders straightened and he held up his head.

“I want—I mean to—go to Paris.”

“To—Paris! You want to leave Aix!”

“Monseigneur, I must.”

“Luc,”—the Marquis also was endeavouring to remain calm,—“why do you wish to leave your home? What do you intend to do in Paris?”

The young man answered swiftly—

“Give myself a chance—a last chance.”

“But you have refused your appointment.”

“Forgive me—I do not mean in that way—that is over. You know. Now it is—my soul, unaided. I must satisfy myself before I die. Who knows what is after? And if I leave my life at this I shall have been a sluggard. I shall not have expressed what was in me to express.”

He pressed his handkerchief to his lips and gave a little sigh, as if what he had said and the force with which he had spoken exhausted him.

The Marquis stared at him with troubled eyes.

“Explain yourself, Luc. If you wish to go you shall—but——” he paused, at a loss.

“I must go,” answered Luc. “I have not very long—not much time. Here I merely let you watch me die.”

“Luc—Luc.”

“I must speak—forgive me again—you may think I go against my duty.”

The Marquis was crumpling the edge of the cloth in nervous fingers.

“What is the object of this resolution?” he demanded. “Tell me clearly. I have a right to know.”

Luc answered steadily and sweetly—

“It is hard to pain you, Monseigneur, and before I speak I would implore you to consider that I have not come to this resolution without struggles—so intense, so bitter that I thought I could not live and endure them.”

“You frighten me,” said the Marquis. “You always had a wild heart—what has it prompted you to now?”

Luc bent his head.

“I know a man in Paris who is shaping the thought of France. I told him once what I meant to do, what goal I set myself, and he gave me advice that I rejected. Now other ways are closed to me I shall take this. I think, after all, that he was right. I am going to Paris to join this man and his friends—the people who are making the future of France, of the world. They will help me to so live my last years, to so express the thoughts that come to me that I may die not utterly useless—perhaps even achieving that inward glory that is the paradise of the soul.” His voice rose full and clear with emotion and enthusiasm, and his marred eyes flashed with something of the old fire the Luc of yester year had so often darted on the world.

The old Marquis sat very still. He looked grey, and hard, and massive; his fine right hand clutched and unclutched on the table.

“Who is this man?” he asked.

Luc paused for a moment, then said, without fear or bravado—

“Voltaire.”

It was the first time that name had been mentioned in this house without loathing or contempt; it was the first time M. de Vauvenargues had heard it on the lips of his son. His face worked with passion: a heavy flush stained his cheeks, and his eyes were almost hidden by his over-hanging, frowning brows.

“You mean to leave Aix to become a follower of M. de Voltaire?” he said in a low, trembling voice.

“Yes.”

“How—what do you mean to do?”

“I mean to collect my writings, to publish them—to write again.”

“How do you mean to live?”

“As they lived when they began.”

“And you will write?”

“Yes—I must.”

The Marquis rose, and his face was distorted.

“Have you forgotten that you are my son—my eldest son?”

“No.” Luc rose also, and stood fronting his father, the table between them.

“And yet you propose to disgrace your blazon!”

“Better disgrace my blazon than my genius!” answered Luc. “I have been fettered all my life—now I have no more time to waste. I am going to answer at my tribunal, remember, Monseigneur, not at yours—and my judge is not pleased with the things that please Him who judges you.”

“You speak blasphemy!” thundered the Marquis. “This twice-damned atheist has poisoned you! There is but one God—beware of Him!”

Luc did not move nor speak. There was no defiance nor anger in his attitude, but a great stillness and sweetness in his air, terrible to his father, who checked his passion as swiftly as he had given it rein and said in a controlled, low, and baffled voice—

“We must speak of these things quietly, Luc. You cannot mean what you say—no, it is not possible. Your whole life cannot have been a lie.”

“My life,” answered Luc quietly, “has borne witness to the truth as it was revealed to me.”

“Yet, if you do mean what you say, you have deceived me until this moment.”

The young man brought his hands to his bosom.

“I never dared tell you what I really believed, Monseigneur,” he said. “Besides, there was no need. I had resolved on the accepted path of honour; I was going the way you had gone, your father before you; I meant to pay all respect to your God; I meant to take a wife of your rank, your faith, your choice—now Fate has ordered differently.” He paused, then added in a deeply moved voice, “I have nothing left save the truth that is in myself.”

The old man turned and pointed haughtily to the shield carved above the marble chimneypiece, the fasces of blue and silver, the golden chief.

“You have that,” he answered with inexpressible pride. “You have your name, me, your house.”

“It is not enough,” said Luc in the same tone. “I want, Monseigneur, my own soul.”

“Leave that in God’s hands,” flashed the Marquis.

“It is in my own,” answered Luc. “Monseigneur, we have come to this issue, and between us—now—it must be decided. I remember when I was a boy you found me writing and reading. You burnt my books and papers; you forbade me to make the acquaintance of men of literature; you instilled into me ideas I am scarcely free of yet. But it is no use—I belong to my age, I am one with those men in Paris.”

“With Voltaire, atheist, canaille.”

“With him, Monseigneur.”

“My son tells this to me!” cried the old man wildly. “If you want to read books, read the history of your house; you will find them much good company and not one pedant! You will be the first of your race to so disgrace yourself!”

With equal fire and decision Luc answered—

“Nothing can move me. I am what I am. There is only that one thing for me to do. I will not betray my inspiration because I am a man of quality—I would sooner degrade my rank than degrade my spirit.”

The Marquis moved back and put out his hand against the chimneypiece. The encroaching shadows began to strengthen in the long, dark chamber; they were over the face of the old noble, these shadows, and gave it a look of hardness, of dreariness, of implacable wrath—a terrible look and a terrible face to be turned on that other marred face opposite, a terrible glance for eyes to dart on those other eyes, half blind, but valiant, that watched patiently.

“There is only one thing for me to do,” he said, in bitter mockery of his son’s words. “If you mean what you say, if you hold the beliefs you avow, you leave at once and for ever the house of de Clapiers, you will never look on me or your mother again, and you will not obtain from me a single louis if you are starving—as you will starve in your folly and wickedness.”

The old clock struck the half-hour. Those same bells had chimed when Luc had first come into his father’s presence in his fine uniform and been blessed with proud gladness by the man who was spurning him now.

Luc trembled a little, then sat down.

“I meant,” he replied, “all I said, Monseigneur.”

“And I also mean what I say.”

Luc was silent; his hands fell into his lap. His father remained motionless, erect, hard, grey in the grey shadows.

“I must go—even on these terms I must go.” His voice was yearning, full of regret, of sorrow, but not of weakness.

“Then go—at once.”

The young man got to his feet.

“Like—this?”

“At once.”

“Monseigneur!”—he held his hands out across the table—“is there nothing in the past that can prevent you from parting so from me—nothing?”

“The present kills the past. You choose to forget your blazon, your quality, your name—you are then nothing to me. I shall forget my eldest son as he has forgotten me.”

Luc answered feverishly, desperately—

“Take care, Monseigneur—you will never be able to undo what you do now—never. Think of it—what a difference it would make to me if I had a kind remembrance of you to take with me into the last endeavour of my life.”

“Go—leave my presence. I do not wish to hear your voice.”

“My father!”

“Go!”

“Will you hear me?”

“Hear you! What do you think it is to me to hear my son speak as you have spoken?”

“Be merciful! Remember I shall never have a child to speak to me—I have nothing but myself.”

The Marquis winced and his face quivered.

“You have boasted that before!” he cried.

“No boast,” said Luc steadily—“the truth.”

“Then on that truth we part. Go to Paris and never think of me again.”

Luc stood for a full minute silent.

“I think you mean it,” he said at last. “I know I might waste my passion on you. I shall never trouble you any more, Monseigneur.”

The shadows gathered with steady swiftness. Luc was reminded of other darknesses: of the retreat from Prague, his journey with Carola to the convent, his parting with ClÉmence. He put his frail hand over his eyes to shut out the pallid bitterness of his father’s face.

“I must see my mother,” he said. “I think she would wish to say farewell.”

Without a word the Marquis pulled the long bell rope. Luc heard his quick orders, when the servant appeared—“To beg Madame for her presence.”

“Thank you, Monseigneur,” he said hoarsely. He seated himself and sank his face in his hands. Were there still depths of anguish, of regret to be sounded? Were there still delicate pangs of pain as yet unknown to him?

He heard the door open. He looked up, to perceive the Marquise entering the room—to perceive her, between his blurred sight and the shadows, very dimly, a gleam of rose-coloured brocade, a flash of brilliants in the fire-glow.

“Madame,” said M. de Vauvenargues, in a voice hard and bitter, “I have brought you here to say farewell to your son.”

Luc was on his feet. He began to speak—he did not know what he was saying.

“No,” interrupted the Marquis. “Hear me first, Madame.”

Madame de Vauvenargues laid her hand on his cuff.

“What has come between you two?” she asked. “Joseph, how is this possible?”

“God and honour have come between us,” he answered. “Luc is going to Paris—to—Voltaire—to earn his bread among mountebanks by writing blasphemies. He—a de Clapiers!—he elects to go down into the gutter.”

“Hush, Monseigneur, hush!” she implored. “There is some mistake. Luc, Luc—speak to me—tell me what you wish.”

His own voice sounded hollow and weary to him as he answered—

“I am a follower of M. de Voltaire, Madame. I choose to use what life I have left in the profession of letters—I am going to Paris for that purpose.”

“You hear!” cried the Marquis—“you hear!”

His wife held herself erect.

“Luc,” she said, “you will not persist in this wicked folly.”

“Alas!” he answered with great sweetness, “does it seem that to you, my mother?”

“Voltaire!” she murmured.

“Say your farewells,” commanded the Marquis fiercely.

Luc came slowly round the table, feeling his way by the edge of it.

“You, at least, will not let me go with harsh words,” he said unsteadily.

“Tell me one thing!” she flashed—“do you turn your back on God?”

He was beyond all subterfuge. Lies seemed then too flimsy to handle—things that broke at a touch—only truth was strong enough for his mood.

“On the God of the Gospels, yes,” he answered. “But what has that to do with you and me?”

She crossed herself and shrank back against her husband.

“You deny Christ?” she asked, quivering.

“I am speaking to you, mother,” he answered passionately. “I am in great need of you, I am very lonely and weak with regrets—give me a kind farewell.”

“Do you deny Christ?” she repeated, and clutched her husband’s hand.

Luc lurched and caught hold of the back of the settle by the fire-place.

“Shall a dead man come between us?” he asked, and his voice was faint.

“The Living God!” answered his mother.

Luc straightened himself.

“I deny Him—before my own soul I deny Him. If He is more to you than your son—then I go—free—even of your love—free,” he laughed. “I cannot see you. Shall I go like this? Mother, does your God let you cast me off like this?”

She stood, taut and cold, at her husband’s side.

“I have no more to say to you,” she replied. “With great anguish I shall pray for you.”

“Is it possible,” murmured Luc—“is it possible?”

The Marquis spoke now.

“Madame, you have heard for yourself what manner of son we have. I have told him never to think or speak of us again. Was I right?”

She steadied herself against his shoulder.

“Quite—right.”

“I have bidden him go to Paris—to never set foot in Aix again. Again, was I right?”

“Quite—right.”

“I tell him, before you, to look for no pity, no charity, no recognition from us until he has made his peace with his outraged God. MarguÉrite, am I right?”

She replied now in one word—

“Yes.”

Luc drew a little broken sigh.

“Farewell,” he said.

His father did not answer nor move from his haughty attitude, but his mother said in an awful voice—

“Farewell, and Christ have mercy on you.”

He could not see either of them. In moving to the door he stumbled several times against the furniture, for the deep twilight meant utter darkness to his partial blindness.

The two before the fire heard his awkward steps, his fumbling for the handle of the door, and never moved.

When he at last had gone from them utterly, the Marquis caught his wife by the shoulders and looked down into her face.

“Never speak his name to me again,” he cried; “never! never!”