QUITE ALONE.
      BOOK. THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER XXXIII. THE BLANK HEART OF THE
                 SCAPEGRACE.

EDGAR was left to enjoy the remainder of his
Chambertin alone. He did ample justice to it,
and was further privileged to smoke his cigar—
a favour not extended to any other male visitor.
It was, perhaps, as well, for the sake of peace
and quiet, that the baroness did not "receive"
when Edgar favoured the establishment with his
presence. To tell the truth, he rather alarmed
the feeble old ladies and gentlemen who
composed his grand-aunt's social circle. He was a
little too boisterous, and a little too insolent;
and the old ladies and gentlemen, who were
high-spirited, albeit feeble, declined, sometimes
with considerable warmth, to bow to his dictation.
But to his aunt he must always be Lord
Paramount. She invariably deferred to him.
He could never be in the wrong. Was he not
her grand-nephew, the only being upon earth
left to remind her of her English kindred?

The outbreak of the great French revolution
had found Madame de Kergolay young, beautiful,
and the wife of a nobleman of ancient descent
and great wealth, distinguished in arms, and high
in his sovereign's favour. In the haughty
province of Brittany there was no estate better
tended, and no château more stately, than
belonged to the Kergolays of Vieux Sablons. The
baroness bore her husband two daughters. They
were destined to mate with nobles of as
illustrious a line as their own. The revolution came
sweeping down like a crimson deluge on society,
and all was engulfed beneath its waves. M. de
Kergolay emigrated, leaving his wife and infant
children concealed in a convent in Paris. The
manor-house of Vieux Sablons was sacked by
the revolutionary troops, taken by a band of
Chouan peasants, besieged, captured, its defenders
slaughtered, itself at last gutted, fired, and
demolished from basement to coping-stone. The
convent in which Madame de Kergolay and her
daughters had taken refuge was suppressed by the
Convention, and the nuns were driven forth with
blows and insults, some to perish of starvation,
many to die on the Place de la Révolution. The
Baron de Kergolay left the emigrant camp of
Condé in disguise, and sought his wife in Paris.
He was discovered, flung into the Conciergerie,
and guillotined. Her husband's brothers, and
scores of her relatives and friends, had already
undergone the same fate. Her widowhood was
yet green upon her, when she, too, was arrested
and cast into the Abbaye. There, after a short
time, both her children died of malignant fever.
The smell of so much blood, the poor woman
said, choked them. When Fouquier Tinville
denounced the femme Kergolay before the
revolutionary tribunal, she was half frantic, and a far
fitter subject for a cell at Bicêtre than for the
judgment of a criminal court. But she was
condemned to death nevertheless. The revolutionary
tribunal did not stick at trifles. All was fish that
came to the net of terrorism. The Baronne de
Kergolay was arrayed in the fatal camisole, and
was mounting the cart which was to convey her
to the scaffold, when the fall of Robespierre
obtained for her a temporary reprieve, ultimately
enlarged into a pardon. But she was not the
less a proscribed and ruined ci-devant. She
herself used to describe how she had begged for
alms on the Quai des Orfèvres. After a period of
unutterable privation and destitution, a friend
found her out and stealthily helped her. That
friend was her former footman from Vieux
Sablons, Thomas Prudence. He had prospered,
and grown wealthy even. The shipwreck had
cast him, too, on the waves, but he had been
strong and buoyant, and battled with them, and,
clinging to spars and hencoops, had been saved.
A portion of the sequestrated manor of Vieux
Sablons was bestowed upon him by the Convention.
He was looked upon with horror by the
loyalist peasants as an acquirer of the national
domains. Half a dozen attempts were made to
assassinate him. He took army contracts, and
waxed rich, and was hated by the Chouannerie.
His house was decorated with fragments of the
rich furniture and fittings of the château of Vieux
Sablons. He was a staunch republican. He
contrived, however, to furnish his old mistress with
funds enabling her to reach England, and during
her lengthened residence there, from 1796 to the
fall of Napoleon, nearly twenty years, he
conveyed to her no less a sum than ten thousand
pounds sterling. It was but a mere trifle, he
said—a wreck, a windfall—but it was all hers.
Nay, he took advantage of the peace of Amiens