IX. CLON…

IX. CLON

"You!" she cried, in a voice which pierced me, "You--M. de Berault? Impossible!" But, glancing askance at her.--I could not face her,--I saw that the blood had left her cheeks.

"Yes, Mademoiselle," I answered, in a low voice. "De Barthe was my mother's name. When I came here, a stranger, I took it that I might not be known; that I might again speak to a good woman and not see her shrink. That--but why trouble you with all this?" I continued proudly, rebelling against her silence, her turned shoulder, her averted face. "You asked me, Mademoiselle, how I could take a blow and let the striker go. I have answered. It is the one privilege M. de Berault possesses."

"Then," she replied quickly, but almost in a whisper, "if I were M. de Berault, I would use it, and never fight again."

"In that event, Mademoiselle," I answered cynically, "I should lose my men friends as well as my women friends. Like Monseigneur, the Cardinal, I rule by fear."

She shuddered, either at the name or at the idea my words called up, and, for a moment, we stood awkwardly silent. The shadow of the sundial fell between us; the garden was still; here and there a leaf fluttered slowly down, or a seed fell. With each instant of silence I felt the gulf between us growing wider, I felt myself growing harder; I mocked at her past, which was so unlike mine; I mocked at mine, and called it fate. I was on the point of turning from her with a bow--and a furnace in my breast--when she spoke.

"There is a late rose lingering there," she said, a slight tremor in her voice. "I cannot reach it. Will you pluck it for me, M. de Berault?"

I obeyed her, my hand trembling, my face on fire. She took the rose from me, and placed it in the bosom of her dress. And I saw that her hand trembled too, and that her cheek was dark with blushes.

She turned at once, and began to walk towards the house. Presently she spoke. "Heaven forbid that I should misjudge you a second time!" she said, in a low voice. "And, after all, who am I that I should judge you at all? An hour ago, I would have killed that man had I possessed the power."

"You repented, Mademoiselle," I said huskily. I could scarcely speak.

"Do you never repent?"

"Yes. But too late, Mademoiselle."

"Perhaps it is never too late," she answered softly.

"Alas, when a man is dead--"

"You may rob a man of more than life!" she replied with energy, stopping me by a gesture. "If you have never robbed a man--or a woman--of honour! If you have never ruined boy or girl, M. de Berault! If you have never pushed another into the pit and gone by it yourself! If--but for murder? Listen. You may be a Romanist, but I am a Huguenot, and have read. 'Thou shalt not kill!' it is written; and the penalty, 'By man shall thy blood be shed!' But, 'If you cause one of these little ones to offend, it were better for you that a mill-stone were hanged about your neck, and that you were cast into the depths of the sea."

"Mademoiselle, you are too merciful," I muttered.

"I need mercy myself," she answered, sighing. "And I have had few temptations. How do I know what you have suffered?"

"Or done!" I said, almost rudely.

"Where a man has not lied, nor betrayed, nor sold himself or others," she answered firmly, but in a low tone, "I think I can forgive all else. I can better put up with force," she added, smiling sadly, "than with fraud."

Ah, Dieu! I turned away my face that she might not see how it paled, how I winced; that she might not guess how her words, meant in mercy, stabbed me to the heart. And yet, then, for the first time, while viewing in all its depth and width the gulf which separated us, I was not hardened; I was not cast back on myself. Her gentleness, her pity, her humility, softened me, while they convicted me. My God! How could I do that which I had come to do? How could I stab her in the tenderest part, how could I inflict on her that rending pang, how could I meet her eyes, and stand before her, a Caliban, a Judas, the vilest, lowest, basest thing she could conceive?

I stood, a moment, speechless and disordered; stunned by her words, by my thoughts--as I have seen a man stand when he has lost his all, his last, at the tables. Then I turned to her; and for an instant I thought that my tale was told already. I thought that she had pierced my disguise, for her face was aghast, stricken with sudden fear. Then I saw that she was not looking at me, but beyond me, and I turned quickly and saw a servant hurrying from the house to us. It was Louis. His face, it was, had frightened her. His eyes were staring, his hair waved, his cheeks were flabby with dismay. He breathed as if he had been running.

"What is it?" Mademoiselle cried, while he was still some way off. "Speak, man. My sister? Is she--"

"Clon," he gasped.

The name changed her to stone. "Clon?" she muttered. "What of him?"

"In the village!" Louis panted, his tongue stuttering with terror. "They are flogging him! They are killing him, Mademoiselle! To make him tell!"

Mademoiselle grasped the sundial and leant against it, her face colourless, and, for an instant, I thought that she was fainting. "Tell?" I said mechanically. "But he cannot tell. He is dumb, man."

"They will make him guide them," Louis groaned, covering his ears with his shaking hands, his face like paper. "And his cries! Oh, Monsieur, go!" he continued, suddenly appealing to me, in a thrilling tone. "Save him. All through the wood I heard them. It was horrible! horrible!"

Mademoiselle uttered a low moan, and I turned to support her, thinking each second to see her fall. But with a sudden movement she straightened herself, and, slipping by me, with eyes which seemed to see nothing, she started swiftly down the walk towards the meadow gate.

I ran after her, but, taken by surprise as I was, it was only by a great effort I reached the gate before her, and, thrusting myself in the road, barred the way. "Let me pass!" she panted fiercely, striving to thrust me on one side. "Out of my way, Sir! I am going to the village."

"You are not going to the village," I said sternly. "Go back to the house, Mademoiselle, and at once."

"My servant!" she wailed. "Let me go! Oh, let me go! Do you think I can rest here while they torture him? He cannot speak, and they--they--"

"Go back, Mademoiselle," I said, cutting her short, with decision. "You would only make matters worse! I will go myself, and what one man can do against many, I will! Louis, give your mistress your arm and take her to the house. Take her to Madame."

"But you will go?" she cried. Before I could stay her--I swear I would have done so if I could--she raised my hand and carried it to her trembling lips. "You will go! Go and stop them! Stop them," she continued, in a tone which stirred my heart, "and Heaven reward you, Monsieur!"

I did not answer; nor did I once look back, as I crossed the meadow; but I did not look forward either. Doubtless it was grass I trod; doubtless the wood was before me with the sun shining aslant on it, and behind me the house with a flame here and there on the windows. But I went in a dream, among shadows; with a racing pulse, in a glow from head to heel; conscious of nothing but the touch of Mademoiselle's warm lips, seeing neither meadows nor house, nor even the dark fringe of wood before me, but only Mademoiselle's passionate face. For the moment I was drunk: drunk with that to which I had been so long a stranger, with that which a man may scorn for years, to find it at last beyond his reach--drunk with the touch of a good woman's lips.

I passed the bridge in this state; and my feet were among the brushwood before the heat and fervour in which I moved found on a sudden their direction. Something began to penetrate to my veiled senses--a hoarse inarticulate cry, now deep, now shrilling horribly, which seemed to fill the wood. It came at intervals of half a minute or so, and made the flesh creep, it was so full of dumb pain, of impotent wrestling, of unspeakable agony. I am a man and have seen things. I saw the Concini beheaded, and Chalais ten years later--they gave him thirty-four blows; and when I was a boy I escaped from the college and viewed from a great distance Ravaillac torn by horses--that was in the year ten. But the horrible cries I now heard filled me, perhaps because I was alone and fresh from the sight of Mademoiselle, with loathing that was intense. The very wood, though the sun wanted an hour of setting, seemed to grow dark. I ran on through it, cursing, until the hovels of the village at length came in sight. Again the shriek rose, a pulsing horror, and this time I could hear the lash fall on the sodden flesh, I could see in fancy the strong man, trembling, quivering, straining against his bonds. And then, in a moment, I was in the street, and, as the scream once more tore the air, I dashed round the corner by the inn, and came upon them.

I did not look at him. I saw Captain Larolle and the lieutenant, and a ring of troopers, and one man, bare-armed, teasing out with his fingers the thongs of a whip. The thongs dripped blood, and the sight fired the mine. The rage I had suppressed when the lieutenant bearded me earlier in the afternoon, the passion with which Mademoiselle's distress had filled my breast, at last found vent. I sprang through the line of soldiers, and striking the man with the whip a buffet between the shoulders, which hurled him breathless to the ground, I turned on the leaders. "You devils!" I cried. "Shame on you! The man is dumb! I tell you, if I had ten men with me, I would sweep you and your scum out of the village with broomsticks. Lay on another lash," I continued recklessly, "and I will see if you or the Cardinal be the stronger."

The lieutenant glared at me, his grey moustache bristling, his eyes almost starting from his head. Some of the troopers laid their hands on their swords, but no one moved, and only the captain spoke. "Mille diables!" he swore. "What is all this about? Are you mad, Sir?"

"Mad or sane!" I cried, still in a fury. "Lay on another lash, and you shall repent it."

"I?"

"Yes, you!"

For an instant there was a pause of astonishment. Then to my surprise the captain laughed--laughed loudly. "Very heroic!" he said. "Quite magnificent, M. le Chevalier-errant. But you see, unfortunately, you come too late!"

"Too late!" I said incredulously.

"Yes, too late," he replied, with a mocking smile. And the lieutenant grinned too. "You see the man has just confessed. We have only been giving him an extra touch or two, to impress his memory, and save us the trouble of tying him up again."

"I don't believe it," I said bluntly--but I felt the check, and fell to earth. "The man cannot speak."

"No, but he has managed to tell us that he will guide us to the place we want," the captain answered drily. "The whip, if it cannot find a man a tongue, can find him wits. What is more, I think, he will keep his word," he continued, with a hideous smile. "For I warn him that if he does not, all your heroics shall not save him! He is a rebel dog, and known to us of old, and I will flay his back to the bones--ay, until we can see his heart beating through his ribs--but I will have what I want--in your teeth, too, you d--d meddler."

"Steady, steady!" I said, somewhat sobered. I saw that he was telling me the truth. "He is going to take you to M. de Cocheforet's hiding-place, is he?"

"Yes, he is!" the captain retorted offensively. "Have you any objection to make to that, Master Spy?"

"None," I replied. "But I shall go with you. And if you live three months, I shall kill you for that name--behind the barracks at Auch, M. le Capitaine."

He changed colour, but he answered me boldly enough. "I don't know that you will go with us. That is as we please," he continued, with a snarl.

"I have the Cardinal's orders," I said sternly.

"The Cardinal?" he exclaimed, stung to fury by this repetition of the name. "The Cardinal be--"

But the lieutenant laid his hands on his lips, and stopped him. "Hush!" he said. Then more quietly, "Your pardon, M. le Capitaine. Shall I give orders to the men to fall in?"

The captain nodded sullenly.

"Take him down!" the lieutenant ordered, in his harsh, monotonous voice. "Throw his blouse over him, and tie his hands. And do you two, Paul and Lebrun, guard him. Michel, bring the whip, or he may forget how it tastes. Sergeant, choose four good men and dismiss the rest to their quarters."

"Shall we need the horses?" the sergeant asked.

"I don't know," the captain answered peevishly. "What does the rogue say?"

The lieutenant stepped up to him. "Listen!" he said grimly. "Nod if you mean yes, and shake your head if you mean no. And have a care you answer truly. Is it more than a mile to this place? The place you know of?"

They had loosened the poor wretch's fastenings, and covered his back. He stood leaning against the wall, his mouth still panting, the sweat running down his hollow cheeks; his sunken eyes were closed; a quiver now and again ran through his frame. The lieutenant repeated his question, and, getting no answer, looked round for orders. The captain met the look, and crying savagely, "Answer, will you, you mute!" struck the half-swooning miserable across the back with his switch. The effect was magical. Covered, as his shoulders were, the man sprang erect with a shriek of pain, raising his chin, and hollowing his back; and in that attitude stood an instant with starting eyes, gasping for breath. Then he sank back against the wall, moving his mouth spasmodically. His face was the colour of lead.

"Diable! I think we have gone too far with him!" the captain muttered.

"Bring some wine!" the lieutenant replied. "Quick with it!"

I looked on, burning with indignation, and wondering besides what would come of this. If the man took them to the place, and they succeeded in seizing, Cocheforet, there was an end of the matter as far as I was concerned. It was off my shoulders, and I might leave the village when I pleased; nor was it likely--since he would have his man, though not through me--that the Cardinal would refuse me an amnesty. On the whole, I thought that I would prefer that things should take that course; and assuming the issue, I began to wonder whether in that event it would be necessary that Madame should know the truth. I had a kind of a vision of a reformed Berault, dead to play and purging himself at a distance from Zaton's, winning, perhaps, a name In the Italian war, and finally--but, pshaw! I was a fool.

However, be that as it might, it was essential that I should see the arrest made; and I waited patiently while they revived the tortured man, and made their dispositions. These took some time; so that the sun was down, and it was growing dusk, when we marched out, Clon going first, supported by his two guards, the captain and I following,--abreast, and eyeing one another suspiciously,--the lieutenant, with the sergeant and five troopers, bringing up the rear. Clon moved slowly, moaning from time to time, and but for the aid given him by the two men with him, must have sunk down again and again.

He went out between two houses close to the inn, and struck a narrow track, scarcely discernible, which ran behind other houses, and then plunged into the thickest part of the wood. A single person, traversing the covert, might have made such a track; or pigs, or children. But it was the first idea that occurred to us, and it put us all on the alert. The captain carried a cocked pistol, I held my sword drawn, and kept a watchful eye on him; and the deeper the dusk fell in the wood, the more cautiously we went, until at last we came out with a sort of jump into a wider and lighter path.

I looked up and down it, and saw before me a wooden bridge, and an open meadow, lying cold and grey in the twilight; and I stood in astonishment. It was the old path to the Chateau! I shivered at the thought that he was going to take us there, to the house--to Mademoiselle!

The captain also recognised the place, and swore aloud. But the dumb man went on unheeding, until he reached the wooden bridge. There he paused as if in doubt, and looked towards the dark outline of the building, which was just visible, one faint light twinkling sadly in the west wing. As the captain and I pressed up behind him, he raised his hands and seemed to wring them towards the house.

"Have a care!" the captain growled. "Play me no tricks, or--" But he did not finish the sentence; for Clon turned back from the bridge, and, entering the wood on the left hand, began to ascend the bank of the stream. We had not gone a hundred yards before the ground grew rough, and the undergrowth thick; and yet through all ran a kind of path which enabled us to advance, dark as it was growing. Very soon the bank on which we moved began to rise above the water, and grew steep and rugged. We turned a shoulder, where the stream swept round a curve, and saw we were in the mouth of a small ravine, dark and steep-walled. The water brawled along the bottom, over boulders and through chasms. In front, the slope on which we stood shaped itself into a low cliff; but half-way between its summit and the water, a ledge, or narrow terrace, running along the face, was dimly visible.

"Ten to one, a cave!" the captain muttered. "It is a likely place."

"And an ugly one!" I sneered. "Which one to ten might safely hold for hours!"

"If the ten had no pistols--yes!" he answered viciously. "But you see we have. Is he going that way?"

He was. "Lieutenant," Larolle said, turning and speaking in a low voice, though the chafing of the stream below us covered ordinary sounds, "shall we light the lanthorns, or press on while there is still a glimmering of day?"

"On, I should say, M. le Capitaine," the lieutenant answered. "Prick him in the back if he falters. I will warrant he has a tender place or two!" the brute added, with a chuckle.

The captain gave the word, and we moved forward; it being very evident now that the cliff-path was our destination. It was possible for the eye to follow the track all the way to it through rough stones and brushwood; and though Clon climbed feebly and with many groans, two minutes saw us step on to it. It did not turn out to be the perilous place it looked at a distance. The ledge, grassy and terrace-like, sloped slightly downwards and outwards, and in parts was slippery; but it was as wide as a highway, and the fall to the water did not exceed thirty feet. Even in such a dim light as now displayed it to us, and by increasing the depth and unseen dangers of the gorge, gave a kind of impressiveness to our movements, a nervous woman need not have feared to breast it. I wondered how often Mademoiselle had passed along it with her milk-pitcher.

"I think we have him now!" Captain Larolle muttered, twisting his mustachios, and looking round to make his last dispositions. "Paul and Lebrun, see that your man makes no noise. Sergeant, come forward with your carbine, but do not fire without orders. Now, silence, all, and close up, Lieutenant. Forward!"

We advanced about a hundred paces, keeping the cliff on our left, then turned a shoulder, and saw, a few paces in front of us, a black blotch standing out from the grey duskiness of the cliff-side. The prisoner stopped, and raising his bound hands pointed to it.

"There?" the captain whispered, pressing forward. "Is that the place?"

Clon nodded. The captain's voice shook with excitement. "You two remain here with him!" he muttered, in a low tone. "Sergeant, come forward with me. Now, are you ready? Forward!"

He and the sergeant passed quickly, one on either side of Clon and his guards. The path was narrow here, and the captain passed outside. The eyes of all but one were on the black blotch, the hollow in the cliff-side, and no one saw exactly what happened. But somehow, as the captain passed abreast of him, the prisoner thrust back his guards, and springing sideways, flung his unbound arms round Larolle's body, and in an instant swept him, shouting, to the verge of the precipice.

It was done in a moment. By the time the lieutenant's startled wits and eyes were back, the two were already tottering on the edge, looking in the gloom like one dark form. The sergeant, who was the first to find his head, levelled his carbine; but as the wrestlers twirled and twisted, the captain shrieking out oaths and threats, the mute silent as death, it was impossible to see which was which; and the sergeant lowered his gun again, while the men held back nervously. The ledge sloped steeply there; the edge was vague; already the two seemed to be wrestling in mid-air,--and the mute was a man beyond hope or fear.

That moment of hesitation was fatal. Clon's long arms were round the other's arms, crushing them into his ribs; Clon's skull-like face grinned hate into the other's eyes; his long limbs curled round him like the folds of a snake. Suddenly Larolle's strength gave way. "Damn you all! Why don't you--Mercy! mercy!" came in a last scream from his lips; and then, as the lieutenant, taken aback before, sprang forward to his aid, the two toppled over the edge, and in a second hurtled out of sight.

"Mon Dieu!" the lieutenant cried, in horror. The answer was a dull splash in the depths below.

He flung up his arms. "Water!" he said. "Quick, men, get down! We may save him yet! They have fallen into water!"

But there was no path, and night was come, and the men's nerves were shaken. The lanthorns had to be lit, and the way to be retraced; and by the time we reached the dark pool which lay below, the last bubbles were gone from the surface, the last ripples had beaten themselves out against the banks. True, the pool still rocked sullenly, and the yellow light showed a man's hat floating, and near it a glove three parts submerged. But that was all. The mute's dying grip had known no loosening, nor his hate any fear. Later, I heard that when they dragged the two out next day, his fingers were in the other's eye-sockets, his teeth in his throat. If ever man found death sweet, it was he.

As we turned slowly from the black water, some shuddering, some crossing themselves, the lieutenant looked vengefully at me. "Curse you!" he said, in sudden fury. "I believe you are glad!"

"He deserved his fate," I answered coldly. "Why should I pretend to be sorry? It was now or in three months. And for the other poor devil's sake I am glad."

He glared at me a moment, in speechless anger. At last, "I should like to have you tied up!" he said, between his teeth.

"I should have thought that you had had enough of tying up for one day!" I retorted. "But there; it comes of making officers out of the canaille. Dogs love blood. The teamster must still lash something, if he can no longer lash his horses."

We were back, a sombre little procession, at the wooden bridge, when I said this. He stopped suddenly. "Very well," he replied, nodding viciously, "That decides me. Sergeant, light me this way with a lanthorn. The rest of you to the village. Now, Master Spy," he continued, glancing at me with gloomy spite, "your road is my road. I think I know how to cook your goose."

I shrugged my shoulders in disdain, and together, the sergeant leading the way with the light, we crossed the meadow, and passed through the gate where Mademoiselle had kissed my hand, and up the ghostly walk between the rosebushes. I wondered uneasily what the lieutenant would be at, and what he intended; but the lanthorn light which now fell on the ground at our feet, and now showed one of us to the other, high-lit in a frame of blackness, discovered nothing in his grizzled face but settled hostility. He wheeled at the end of the walk to go to the main door; but as he did so, I saw the flutter of a white skirt by the stone seat against the house, and I stepped that way. "Mademoiselle," I said softly, "is it you?"

"Clon?" she muttered, her voice quivering. "What of him?"

"He is past pain," I answered gently. "He is dead, but in his own way. Take comfort, Mademoiselle." And then before I could say more, the lieutenant with his sergeant and light were at my elbow. He saluted Mademoiselle roughly. She looked at him with shuddering abhorrence.

"Are you come to flog me, Sir?" she said icily. "Is it not enough that you have murdered my servant?"

"On the contrary, it was he killed my captain," the lieutenant answered, in another tone than I had expected. "If your servant is dead, so is my comrade."

She looked with startled eyes, not at him, but at me. "What! Captain Larolle?" she muttered.

I nodded.

"How?" she asked.

"Clon flung the captain and himself into the river-pool," I explained, in a low voice. "The pool above the bridge."

She uttered an exclamation of awe, and stood silent. But her lips moved; I think she was praying for Clon, though she was a Huguenot. Meanwhile I had a fright. The lanthorn, swinging in the sergeant's hand, and now throwing its smoky light on the stone seat, now on the rough wall above it, showed me something else. On the seat, doubtless where Mademoiselle's hand had lain, as she sat in the dark, listening and watching, stood a pitcher of food. Beside her, in that place, it was damning evidence. I trembled lest the lieutenant's eye should fall upon it, lest the sergeant should see it; I thought what I could do to hide it; and then in a moment I forgot all about it. The lieutenant was speaking, and his voice was like doom. My throat grew dry as I listened. My tongue stuck to my mouth; I tried to look at Mademoiselle, but I could not.

"It is true, the captain is gone," he said stiffly. "But others are alive, and about one of them, a word with you,--by your leave, Mademoiselle. I have listened to a good deal of talk from this fine gentleman friend of yours. He has spent the last twenty-four hours saying, 'You shall!' and 'You shall not!' He came from you, and took a very high tone because we laid a little whip-lash about that dumb devil of yours. He called us brutes and beasts, and but for him I am not sure that my friend would not be alive. But when he said a few minutes ago that he was glad,--glad of it, damn him!--then I fixed it in my mind that I would be even with him. And I am going to be!"

"What do you mean?" Mademoiselle asked, wearily interrupting him. "If you think you can prejudice me against that gentleman--"

"That is precisely what I do think! And I am going to do it. And a little more than that!"

"You will be only wasting your breath!" she answered proudly.

"Wait! wait, Mademoiselle, until you have heard!" he said. "If ever a black-hearted scoundrel, a dastardly, sneaking spy, trod the earth, it is this fellow! This friend of yours! And I am going to expose him. Your own eyes and your own ears shall persuade you. Why, I would not eat, I would not drink, I would not sit down with him! I would not! I would rather be beholden to the meanest trooper in my squadron than to him! Ay, I would, so help me Heaven!" And the lieutenant, turning squarely on his heels, spat on the ground.

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X. THE ARREST

So it had come! And come in such a fashion that I saw no way of escape. The sergeant was between us, and I could not strike him. And I found no words. A score of times I had thought with shrinking how I should reveal my secret to Mademoiselle, what I should say, and how she would take it. But in my mind it had always been a voluntary act, this disclosure. It had been always I who had unmasked myself, and she who listened--alone; and in this voluntariness and this privacy there had been something which seemed to take from the shame of anticipation. But here--here was no voluntary act on my part, no privacy, nothing but shame. I stood mute, convicted, speechless--like the thing I was.

Yet if anything could have braced me, it was Mademoiselle's voice, when she answered him. "Go on, Monsieur," she said, with the perfect calmness of scorn. "You will have done the sooner."

"You do not believe me?" he replied hotly. "Then, I say, look at him! Look at him! If ever shame--"

"Monsieur!" she said abruptly--she did not look at me. "I am ashamed myself!"

"Why, his very name is not his own!" the lieutenant rejoined jerkily. "He is no Barthe at all. He is Berault the gambler, the duellist, the bully--"

Again she interrupted him. "I know it," she said coldly. "I know it all. And if you have nothing more to tell me, go, Monsieur. Go!" she continued, in a tone of infinite scorn. "Enough that you have earned my contempt as well as my abhorrence!"

He looked for a moment taken aback. Then, "Ay, but I have more!" he cried, his voice stubbornly triumphant. "I forgot that you would think little of that! I forgot that a swordsman has always the ladies' hearts. But I have more. Do you know, too, that he is in the Cardinal's pay? Do you know that he is here on the same errand which brings us here,--to arrest M. de Cocheforet? Do you know that while we go about the business openly and in soldier fashion, it is his part to worm himself into your confidence, to sneak into Madame's intimacy, to listen at your door, to follow your footsteps, to hang on your lips, to track you--track you until you betray yourselves and the man? Do you know this, and that all his sympathy is a lie, Mademoiselle? His help, so much bait to catch the secret? His aim, blood-money--blood-money? Why, morbleu!" the lieutenant continued, pointing his finger at me, and so carried away by passion, so lifted out of himself by wrath and indignation, that in spite of myself I shrank before him,--"you talk, lady, of contempt and abhorrence in the same breath with me! But what have you for him? What have you for him, the spy, the informer, the hired traitor? And if you doubt, if you want evidence, look at him. Only look at him, I say!"

And he might well say it! For I stood silent still; cowering and despairing, white with rage and hate. But Mademoiselle did not look. She gazed straight at the lieutenant. "Have you done?" she said.

"Done?" he stammered. Her words, her air, brought him to earth again. "Done? Yes, if you believe me."

"I do not," she answered proudly. "If that be all, be satisfied, Monsieur. I do not believe you."

"Then tell me," he retorted, after a moment of stunned surprise, "why, if he was not on our side, do you think we let him remain here? Why did we suffer him to stay in a suspected house bullying us, and taking your part from hour to hour?"

"He has a sword, Monsieur," she answered, with fine contempt.

"Mille diables!" he cried, snapping his fingers in a rage. "That for his sword! No. It was because he held the Cardinal's commission; because he had equal authority with us; because we had no choice."

"And that being so, Monsieur, why are you now betraying him?" she asked keenly.

He swore at that, feeling the stroke go home. "You must be mad," he said, glaring at her. "Mad, if you cannot see that the man is what I tell you he is. Look at him! Listen to him! Has he a word to say for himself?"

Still she did not look. "It is late," she replied, coldly and irrelevantly. "And I am not very well. If you have quite done, perhaps you will leave me, Monsieur."

"Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders; "you are mad! I have told you the truth, and you will not believe it. Well, on your head be it then, Mademoiselle. I have no more to say. But you will see."

He looked at her for a moment as if he thought that she might still give way; then he saluted her roughly, gave the word to the sergeant, turned, and went down the path. The sergeant went after him, the lanthorn swaying in his hand. We two were left alone in the gloom. The frogs were croaking in the pool; the house, the garden, the wood,--all lay quiet under the darkness, as on the night when I first came to the Chateau.

And would to Heaven I had never come! That was the cry in my heart. Would to Heaven I had never seen this woman, whose nobility and faith and singleness were a continual shame to me; a reproach, branding me every hour I stood in her presence, with all vile and hateful names. The man just gone, coarse, low-bred, brutal soldier as he was, man-flogger, and drilling-block, had yet found heart to feel my baseness, and words in which to denounce it. What, then, would she say when the truth some day came home to her? What shape should I take in her eyes then? How should I be remembered through all the years--then?

Then? But now? What was she thinking, now, as she stood, silent and absorbed, by the stone seat, a shadowy figure with face turned from me? Was she recalling the man's words, fitting them to the facts and the past, adding this and that circumstance? Was she, though she had rebuffed him in the body, collating, now he was gone, all he had said, and out of these scraps piecing together the damning truth? The thought tortured me. I could brook uncertainty no longer. I went nearer to her and touched her sleeve. "Mademoiselle," I said, in a voice which sounded hoarse and forced even in my own ears, "do you believe this of me?"

She started violently and turned. "Pardon, Monsieur," she answered. "I had forgotten that you were here. Do I believe--what?"

"What that man said of me," I muttered.

"That!" she exclaimed; and she stood a moment gazing at me in a strange fashion. "Do I believe what he said, Monsieur! But come, come," she continued, "and I will show you if I believe it. But not here."

She led the way on the instant into the house, going in through the parlour door, which stood half open. The room inside was pitch dark, but she took me fearlessly by the hand, and led me quickly through it, and along the passage, until we came to the cheerful lighted hall, where a great fire burned on the hearth. All traces of the soldiers' occupation had been swept away. But the room was empty.

She led me to the fire, and there, in the full light, no longer a shadowy creature, but red-lipped, brilliant, throbbing with life, she stood opposite me, her eyes shining, her colour high, her breast heaving. "Do I believe it?" she said. "I will tell you. M. de Cocheforet's hiding-place is in the hut behind the fern-stack, two furlongs beyond the village, on the road to Auch. You know now what no one else knows, he and I and Madame excepted. You hold in your hands his life and my honour; and you know also, M. de Berault, whether I believed that tale."

"My God!" I cried. And I stood looking at her, until something of the horror in my eyes crept into hers, and she shuddered and stepped back.

"What is it? What is it?" she whispered, clasping her hands. And with all the colour gone from her cheeks she peered trembling into the corners and towards the door. "There is no one here. Is there any one--listening?"

I forced myself to speak, though I shook all over, like a man in an ague. "No, Mademoiselle, there is no one here," I muttered. And then I let my head fall on my breast, and I stood before her, the statue of despair. Had she felt a grain of suspicion, a grain of doubt, my bearing must have opened her eyes. But her mind was cast in so noble a mould, that having once thought ill of me and been converted, she could feel no doubt again. It was her nature to trust all in all. So, a little recovered from her fright, she stood looking at me in great wonder; and at last she had a thought.

"You are not well?" she said suddenly. "It is your old wound, Monsieur."

"Yes, Mademoiselle," I muttered faintly. "It is my old wound."

"I will call Clon!" she cried impetuously. And then, with a sob, "Ah! poor Clon! He is gone. But there is Louis. I will call him, and he will get you something."

She was gone from the room before I could stop her; and I was left leaning against the table, possessor at last of the great secret which I had come so far to win. Possessor of that secret, and able in a moment to open the door, and go out into the night, and make use of it--and yet the most unhappy of men. The sweat stood on my brow, my eyes wandered round the room; I even turned towards the door, with some mad thought of flight--flight from her, from the house, from everything. And God knows if I might not have chosen that course; for I still stood doubting, when on the door, that door, there came a sudden hurried knocking which jarred every nerve in my body. I started. I stood in the middle of the floor, gazing at the door, as at a ghost. Then glad of action, glad of anything that might relieve the tension of my feelings, I strode to it, and pulled it sharply open.

On the threshold, his flushed face lit up by the light behind me, stood one of the knaves I had brought with me to Auch. He had been running, and panted heavily, but he had kept his wits. He grasped my sleeve instantly. "Ah! Monsieur, the very man!" he cried, tugging at me. "Quick! come this instant, and you may yet be first. They have the secret. They have found Monsieur."

"Found whom?" I echoed. "M. de Cocheforet?"

"No; but the place where he lies. It was found by accident. The lieutenant was gathering his men to go to it when I came away. If we are quick, we may be there first."

"But the place?" I said.

"I could not hear where it was," he answered bluntly. "We can hang on their skirts, and at the last moment strike in."

The pair of pistols I had taken from the shock-headed man lay on a chest by the door. I snatched them up, and my hat, and joined him without another word; and in a moment we were running down the garden. I looked back once before we passed the gate, and I saw the light streaming out through the door which I had left open; and I fancied that for an instant a figure darkened the gap. But the fancy only strengthened the one single iron purpose which had taken possession of me and all my thoughts. I must be first. I must anticipate the lieutenant, and make the arrest myself. I ran on only the faster.

We seemed to be across the meadow and in the wood in a moment. There, instead of keeping along the common path, I boldly singled out--my senses seemed preternaturally keen--the smaller track by which Clon had brought us, and ran unfaltering along it, avoiding logs and pitfalls as by instinct, and following all its turns and twists, until it brought us to the back of the inn, and we could hear the murmur of subdued voices in the village street, the sharp low words of command, and even the clink of weapons; and could see, above and between the houses, the dull glare of lanthorns and torches.

I grasped my man's arm and crouched down, listening. "Where is your mate?" I said, in his ear.

"With them," he muttered.

"Then come," I whispered, rising. "I have seen enough. Let us go."

But he caught me by the arm and detained me. "You don't know the way!" he hissed. "Steady, steady, Monsieur. You go too fast. They are just moving. Let us join them, and strike in when the time comes. We must let them guide us."

"Fool!" I said, shaking off his hand. "I tell you, I know where he is! I know where they are going. Come; lose not a moment, and we will pluck the fruit while they are on the road to it."

His only answer was an exclamation of surprise; at that moment the lights began to move. The lieutenant was starting. The moon was not yet up; the sky was grey and cloudy; to advance where we were was to step into a wall of blackness. But we had lost too much time already, and I did not hesitate. Bidding my companion follow me, and use his legs, I sprang through a low fence which rose before us, and stumbling blindly over some broken ground in the rear of the houses, came, with a fall or two, to a little watercourse with steep sides. Through this I plunged recklessly, and up the farther side, and, breathless and panting, gained the road just beyond the village, and fifty yards in advance of the lieutenant's troop.

They had only two lanthorns burning now, and we were beyond the circle of light these cast; while the steady tramp of so many footsteps covered the noise we made. We were unnoticed. In a twinkling we turned our backs, and as fast as we could ran down the road. Fortunately, they were thinking more of secrecy than speed, and in a minute we had doubled the distance between us; in two minutes their lights were mere sparks shining in the gloom behind us. We lost, at last, even the tramp of their feet. Then I began to look out and go more slowly; peering into the shadows on either side for the fern-stack.

On one hand the hill rose steeply; on the other it fell away to the stream. On neither side was close wood,--or my difficulties had been immensely increased,--but scattered oak-trees stood here and there among gorse and bracken. This helped me, and in a moment, on the upper side, I came upon the dense substance of the stack looming black against the lighter hill.

My heart beat fast, but it was no time for thought. Bidding the man in a whisper to follow me and be ready to back me up, I climbed the bank softly, and with a pistol in my hand, felt my way to the rear of the stack; thinking to find a hut there, set against the fern, and M. de Cocheforet in it. But I found no hut. There was none; and all was so dark that it came upon me suddenly as I stood between the hill and the stack that I had undertaken a very difficult thing. The hut behind the fern-stack? But how far behind? How far from it? The dark slope stretched above us, infinite, immeasurable, shrouded in night. To begin to climb it in search of a tiny hut, probably well-hidden and hard to find in daylight, seemed a task as impossible as to meet with the needle in the hay! And now, while I stood, chilled and doubting, the steps of the troop in the road began to grow audible, began to come nearer.

"Well, M. le Capitaine?" the man beside me muttered--in wonder why I stood. "Which way? Or they will be before us yet."

I tried to think, to reason it out; to consider where the hut would be; while the wind sighed through the oaks, and here and there I could hear an acorn fall. But the thing pressed too close on me: my thoughts would not be hurried, and at last I said at a venture, "Up the hill! Straight from the stack."

He did not demur, and we plunged at the ascent, knee deep in bracken and furze, sweating at every pore with our exertions, and hearing the troop come every moment nearer on the road below. Doubtless they knew exactly whither to go! Forced to stop and take breath when we had scrambled up fifty yards or so, I saw their lanthorns shining like moving glow-worms; and could even hear the clink of steel. For all I could tell, the hut might be down there, and we two be moving from it! But it was too late to go back now; they were close to the fern-stack: and in despair I turned to the hill again. A dozen steps, and I stumbled. I rose and plunged on again; again I stumbled. Then I found that I was no longer ascending. I was treading level earth. And--was it water I saw before me, below me, a little in front of my feet, or some mirage of the sky?

Neither; and I gripped my fellow's arm, as he came abreast of me, and stopped him sharply. Below us, in the centre of a steep hollow, a pit in the hill-side, a light shone out through some aperture and quivered on the mist, like the pale lamp of a moorland hobgoblin. It made itself visible, displaying nothing else; a wisp of light in the bottom of a black bowl.

Yet my spirits rose with a great bound at sight of it, for I knew that I had stumbled on the place I sought. In the common run of things I should have weighed my next step carefully, and gone about it slowly. But here was no place for thought, nor room for delay, and I slid down the side of the hollow, and the moment my feet touched the bottom, sprang to the door of the little hut whence the light issued. A stone turned under my foot in my rush, and I fell on my knees on the threshold; but the fall only brought my face to a level with the startled eyes of the man who lay inside on a bed of fern. He had been reading. At the sound I made he dropped his book, and stretched out his hand for a weapon. But the muzzle of my pistol covered him before he could reach his; he was not in a posture from which he could spring, and at a sharp word from me he dropped his hand. The tigerish glare which had flickered for an instant in his eyes, gave place to a languid smile; and he shrugged his shoulders. "Eh, bien?" he said, with marvellous composure. "Taken at last! Well, I was tired of it."

"You are my prisoner, M. de Cocheforet," I answered.

"It seems so," he said.

"Move a hand, and I kill you," I answered. "But you have still a choice."

"Truly?" he said, raising his eyebrows.

"Yes. My orders are to take you to Paris alive or dead. Give me your parole that you will make no attempt to escape, and you shall go thither at your ease and as a gentleman. Refuse, and I shall disarm and bind you, and you will go as a prisoner."

"What force have you?" he asked curtly. He had not moved. He still lay on his elbow, his cloak covering him, the little Marot in which he had been reading close to his hand. But his quick, black eyes, which looked the keener for the pallor and thinness of his face, roved ceaselessly over me, probed the darkness behind me, took note of everything.

"Enough to compel you, Monsieur," I replied sternly. "But that is not all. There are thirty dragoons coming up the hill to secure you, and they will make you no such offer. Surrender to me before they come and give me your parole, and I will do all for your comfort. Delay, and you will fall into their hands. There can be no escape."

"You will take my word," he said slowly.

"Give it, and you may keep your pistols, M. de Cocheforet," I replied.

"Tell me at least that you are not alone."

"I am not alone."

"Then I give it," he said, with a sigh. "And for Heaven's sake get me something to eat and a bed. I am tired of this pig-sty--and this life Arnidieu! it is a fortnight since I slept between sheets."

"You shall sleep to-night in your own house if you please," I answered hurriedly. "But here they come. Be good enough to stay where you are a moment, and I will meet them."

I stepped out into the darkness, in the nick of time. The lieutenant, after posting his men round the hollow, had just slid down with a couple of sergeants to make the arrest. The place round the open door was pitch dark. He had not espied my knave, who had lodged himself in the deepest shadow of the hut; and when he saw me come out across the light, he took me for Cocheforet. In a twinkling he thrust a pistol into my face, and cried triumphantly, "You are my prisoner!" At the same instant one of the sergeants raised a lanthorn and threw its light into my eyes.

"What folly is this?" I said savagely.

The lieutenant's jaw fell, and he stood for half a minute, paralyzed with astonishment. Less than an hour before he had left me at the Chateau. Thence he had come hither with the briefest delay; and yet he found me here before him! He swore fearfully, his face dark, his mustachios stiff with rage. "What is this? What is it?" he cried at last. "Where is the man?"

"What man?" I said.

"This Cocheforet!" he roared, carried away by his passion. "Don't lie to me! He is here, and I will have him!"

"You will not. You are too late!" I said, watching him heedfully. "M. de Cocheforet is here, but he has already surrendered to me, and he is my prisoner."

"Your prisoner?"

"Yes, my prisoner!" I answered facing the man with all the harshness I could muster. "I have arrested him by virtue of the Cardinal's special commission granted to me. And by virtue of the same I shall keep him!"

He glared at me for a moment in utter rage and perplexity. Then on a sudden I saw his face lighten. "It is a d--d ruse!" he shouted, brandishing his pistol like a madman. "It is a cheat and a fraud! And by G--d you have no commission! I see through it! I see through it all! You have come here, and you have hocussed us! You are of their side, and this is your last shift to save him!"

"What folly is this?" I exclaimed.

"No folly at all!" he answered, conviction in his tone. "You have played upon us! You have fooled us! But I see through it now! An hour ago I exposed you to that fine Madame at the house there, and I thought it a marvel that she did not believe me. I thought it a marvel that she did not see through you, when you stood there before her, confounded, tongue-tied, a rogue convicted! But I understand it now. She knew you! By----, she knew you! She was in the plot, and you were in the plot; and I, who thought I was opening her eyes, was the only one fooled! But it is my turn now. You have played a bold part, and a clever one, and I congratulate you! But," he continued, a sinister light in his little eyes, "it is at an end now, Monsieur! You took us in finely with your tale of Monseigneur, and his commission, and your commission, and the rest. But I am not to be blinded any longer, or bullied! You have arrested him, have you? You have arrested him! Well, by G--d, I shall arrest him, and I shall arrest you too!"

"You are mad!" I said, staggered as much by this new view of the matter as by his perfect conviction of its truth. "Mad, Lieutenant!"

"I was!" he snarled drily. "But I am sane now. I was mad when you imposed upon us; when you persuaded me that you were fooling the women to get the secret out of them, while all the time you were sheltering them, protecting them, aiding them, and hiding him--then I was mad! But not now. However, I ask your pardon, M. de Barthe, or M. de Berault, or whatever your name really is. I ask your pardon. I thought you the cleverest sneak and the dirtiest hound heaven ever made, or hell refused! I find that you were cleverer than I thought, and an honest traitor. Your pardon."

One of the men who stood about the rim of the bowl above us laughed. I looked at the lieutenant, and could willingly have killed him. "Mon Dieu!" I said, so furious in my turn that I could scarcely speak. "Do you say that I am an impostor--that I do not hold the Cardinal's commission?"

"I do say that!" he answered coolly. "And shall abide by it."

"And that I belong to the rebel party?"

"I do," he replied, in the same tone. "In fact," with a grin, "I say that you are an honest man on the wrong side, M. de Berault. And you say that you are a scoundrel on the right. The advantage, however, is with me, and I shall back my opinion by arresting you."

A ripple of coarse laughter ran round the hollow. The sergeant who held the lanthorn grinned, and a trooper at a distance called out of the darkness, "A bon chat bon rat!" This brought a fresh burst of laughter, while I stood speechless, confounded by the stubbornness, the crassness, the insolence, of the man. "You fool!" I cried at last, "you fool!" And then M. de Cocheforet, who had come out of the hut, and taken his stand at my elbow, interrupted me.

"Pardon me one moment," he said airily, looking at the lieutenant, with raised eyebrows, and pointing to me with his thumb. "But I am puzzled between you. This gentleman's name? Is it de Berault or de Barthe?"

"I am M. de Berault," I said brusquely, answering for myself.

"Of Paris?"

"Yes, Monsieur, of Paris."

"You are not then the gentleman who has been honouring my poor house with his presence?"

"Oh, yes!" the lieutenant struck in, grinning. "He is that gentleman, too!"

"But I thought--I understood that that was M. de Barthe."

"I am M. de Barthe, also," I retorted impatiently. "What of that, Monsieur? It was my mother's name. I took it when I came down here."

"To--er, to arrest me, may I ask?"

"Yes," I answered doggedly. "To arrest you. What of that?"

"Nothing," he replied slowly and with a steady look at me, a look I could not meet. "Except that, had I known this before, M. de Berault, I should have thought long before I surrendered to you."

The lieutenant laughed, and I felt my cheek burn. But I affected to see nothing, and turned to him again. "Now, Monsieur," I said sternly, "are you satisfied?"

"No!" he answered point blank. "I am not. You two gentlemen may have rehearsed this pretty scene a dozen times. The only word it seems to me, is, Quick March, back to Quarters."

I found myself driven to play my last card--much against my will. "Not so," I said; "I have my commission."

"Produce it!" he replied brusquely.

"Do you think that I carry it with me?" I said, in scorn. "Do you think that when I came here, alone, and not with fifty dragoons at my back, I carried the Cardinal's seal in my pocket for the first lackey to find? But you shall have it. Where is that knave of mine?"

The words were scarcely out of my mouth before his ready hand thrust a paper into my fingers. I opened it slowly, glanced at it, and amid a pause of surprise gave it to the lieutenant. He looked for a moment confounded. He stared at it, with his jaw fallen. Then with a last instinct of suspicion he bade the sergeant hold up the lanthorn, and by its light proceeded to spell out the document.

"Umph!" he ejaculated, after a moment's silence; and he cast an ugly look at me. "I see." And he read it aloud.

"By these presents I command and empower Gilles de Berault, sieur de Berault, to seek for, hold, arrest, and deliver to the Governor of the Bastile the body of Henri de Cocheforet, and to do all such acts and things as shall be necessary to effect such arrest and delivery, for which these shall be his warrant.

"(Signed) RICHELIEU, Lieut.-Gen."

When he had done,--and he read the signature with a peculiar intonation,--some one said softly, "Vive le roi!" and there was a moment's silence. The sergeant lowered his lanthorn. "Is it enough?" I said hoarsely, glaring from face to face.

The lieutenant bowed stiffly. "For me?" he said. "Quite, Monsieur. I beg your pardon again. I find that my first impressions were the-correct ones. Sergeant, give the gentleman his paper." And turning his shoulder rudely, he tossed the commission towards the sergeant, who picked it up, and gave it to me, grinning.

I knew that the clown would not fight, and he had his men round him; and I had no choice but to swallow the insult. As I put the paper in my breast, with as much indifference as I could assume, he gave a sharp order. The troopers began to form on the edge above, the men who had descended, to climb the bank. As the group behind him began to open and melt away, I caught sight of a white robe in the middle of it. The next moment, appearing with a suddenness which was like a blow on the cheek to me, Mademoiselle de Cocheforet glided forward, and came towards me. She had a hood on her head, drawn low; and for a moment I could not see her face. I forgot her brother's presence at my elbow; from habit and impulse rather than calculation, I took a step forward to meet her---though my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth, and I was dumb and trembling.

But she recoiled with such a look of white hate, of staring, frozen-eyed loathing, that I stepped back as if she had indeed struck me. It did not need the words which accompanied the look, the "Do not touch me!" which she hissed at me as she drew her skirts together, to drive me to the farther edge of the hollow; there to stand with clenched teeth and nails driven into the flesh while she hung, sobbing tearless sobs, on her brother's neck.

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XI. THE ROAD TO PARIS

I remember hearing Marshal Bassompierre, who, of all men within my knowledge, had the widest experience, say that not dangers, but discomforts, prove a man, and show what he is; and that the worst sores in life are caused by crumpled rose-leaves and not by thorns.

I am inclined to agree with this. For I remember that when I came from my room on the morning after the arrest, and found hall and parlour and passage empty, and all the common rooms of the house deserted, and no meal laid, and when I divined anew from this discovery the feeling of the house towards me,--however natural and to be expected,--I felt as sharp a pang as when, the night before, I had had to face discovery and open rage and scorn. I stood in the silent, empty parlour, and looked round me with a sense of desolation; of something lost and gone, which I could not replace. The morning was grey and cloudy, the air sharp; a shower was falling. The rose-bushes at the window swayed in the wind, and where I could remember the hot sunshine lying on floor and table, the rain beat in and stained the boards. The main door flapped and creaked to and fro. I thought of other days and meals I had taken there, and of the scent of flowers, and I fled to the hall in despair.

But here, too, was no sign of life or company, no comfort, no attendance. The ashes of the logs, by whose blaze Mademoiselle had told me the secret, lay on the hearth white and cold; and now and then a drop of moisture, sliding down the great chimney, pattered among them. The great door stood open as if the house had no longer anything to guard. The only living thing to be seen was a hound which roamed about restlessly, now gazing at the empty hearth, now lying down with pricked ears and watchful eyes. Some leaves which had been blown in rustled in a corner.

I went out moodily into the garden, and wandered down one path, and up another, looking at the dripping woods and remembering things, until I came to the stone seat. On it, against the wall, trickling with rain-drops, and with a dead leaf half filling its narrow neck, stood the pitcher of food. I thought how much had happened since Mademoiselle took her hand off it and the sergeant's lanthorn disclosed it to me. And sighing grimly, I went in again through the parlour door.

A woman was on her knees, kindling the belated fire. I stood a moment, looking at her doubtfully, wondering how she would bear herself, and what she would say to me: and then she turned, and I cried out her name in horror; for it was Madame!

She was very plainly dressed; her childish face was wan, and piteous with weeping. But either the night had worn out her passion and drained her tears, or this great exigency gave her temporary calmness; for she was perfectly composed. She shivered as her eyes met mine, and she blinked as if a light had been suddenly thrust before her. But she turned again to her task, without speaking.

"Madame! Madame!" I cried, in a frenzy of distress. "What is this?"

"The servants would not do it," she answered, in a low but steady voice. "You are still our guest, Monsieur, and it must be done."

"But--I cannot suffer it!" I cried, in misery. "Madame de Cocheforet, I will--I would rather do it myself!"

She raised her hand, with a strange, patient expression on her face. "Hush, please," she said. "Hush! you trouble me."

The fire took light and blazed up as she spoke, and she rose slowly from it, and, with a lingering look at it, went out; leaving me to stand and stare and listen in the middle of the floor. Presently I heard her coming back along the passage, and she entered, bearing a tray with wine and meat and bread. She set it down on the table, and with the same wan face, trembling always on the verge of tears, she began to lay out the things. The glasses clinked pitifully against the plates as she handled them; the knives jarred with one another; and I stood by, trembling myself, and endured this strange, this awful penance.

She signed to me at last to sit down and eat; and she went herself, and stood in the garden doorway, with her back to me. I obeyed. I sat down; but though I had eaten nothing since the afternoon of the day before, and a little earlier had had appetite enough, I could not swallow. I fumbled with my knife, and munched and drank; and grew hot and angry at this farce; and then looked through the window at the dripping bushes, and the rain, and the distant sundial, and grew cold again.

Suddenly she turned round and came to my side. "You do not eat," she said.

I threw down my knife, and sprang up in a frenzy of passion. "Mon Dieu! Madame!" I cried. "Do you think I have no heart?"

And then in a moment I knew what I had done. In a moment she was on her knees on the floor, clasping my knees, pressing her wet cheeks to my rough clothes, crying to me for mercy--for life! life! life! his life! Oh, it was horrible! It was horrible to see her fair hair falling over my mud-stained boots, to see her slender little form convulsed with sobs, to feel that this was a woman, a gentlewoman, who thus abased herself at my feet.

"Oh, Madame! Madame!" I cried, in my agony. "I beg you to rise. Rise, or I must go! You will drive me out!"

"Grant me his life!" she moaned passionately. "Only his life! What had he done to you, that you should hunt him down? What had we done to you, that you should slay us? Ah, Sir, have mercy! Let him go, and we will pray for you; I and my sister will pray for you every morning and night of our lives."

I was in terror lest some one should come and see her lying there, and I stooped and tried to raise her. But she would not rise; she only sank the lower until her tender hands clasped my spurs, and I dared not move. Then I took a sudden resolution. "Listen then, Madame," I said, almost sternly, "if you will not rise. When you ask what you do, you forget how I stand, and how small my power is! You forget that were I to release your husband to-day, he would be seized within the hour by those who are still in the village, and who are watching every road--who have not ceased to suspect my movements and my intentions. You forget, I say, my circumstances--"

She cut me short on that word. She sprang abruptly to her feet and faced me. One moment, and I should have said something to the purpose. But at that word she was before me, white, breathless, dishevelled, struggling for speech. "Oh yes, yes," she panted eagerly, "I know! I understand!" And she thrust her hand into her bosom and plucked something out and gave it to me--forced it upon me into my hands. "I know! I know!" she said again. "Take it, and God reward you, Monsieur! We give it freely--freely and thankfully! And may God bless you!"

I stood and looked at her, and looked at it, and slowly froze. She had given me the packet--the packet I had restored to Mademoiselle, the parcel of jewels. I weighed it in my hands, and my heart grew hard again, for I knew that this was Mademoiselle's doing; that it was she who, mistrusting the effect of Madame's tears and prayers, had armed her with this last weapon--this dirty bribe, I flung it down on the table among the plates, all my pity changed to anger. "Madame," I cried ruthlessly, "you mistake me altogether. I have heard hard words enough in the last twenty-four hours, and I know what you think of me! But you have yet to learn that I have never turned traitor to the hand that employed me, nor sold my own side! When I do so for a treasure ten times the worth of that, may my hand rot off!"

She sank into a seat, with a moan of despair, and at that moment the door opened, and M. de Cocheforet came in. Over his shoulder I had a glimpse of Mademoiselle's proud face, a little whiter to-day, with dark marks under the eyes, but still firm and cold. "What is this?" he said, frowning and stopping short as his eyes lighted on Madame.

"It is--that we start at eleven o'clock, Monsieur," I answered, bowing curtly. "Those, I fancy, are your property." And pointing to the jewels, I went out by the other door.

* * * * *

That I might not be present at their parting, I remained in the garden until the hour I had appointed was well passed; then without entering the house I went to the stable entrance. Here I found all ready, the two troopers (whose company I had requisitioned as far as Auch) already in the saddle, my own two knaves waiting with my sorrel and M. de Cocheforet's chestnut. Another horse was being led up and down by Louis, and, alas, my heart winced at the sight. For it bore a lady's saddle, and I saw that we were to have company. Was it Madame who meant to come with us? or Mademoiselle? And how far? To Auch? or farther?

I suppose that they had set some kind of a watch on me; for, as I walked up, M. de Cocheforet and his sister came out of the house,--he looking white, with bright eyes and a twitching in his cheek, though through all he affected a jaunty bearing; she wearing a black mask.

"Mademoiselle accompanies us?" I said formally.

"With your permission, Monsieur," he answered, with grim politeness. But I saw that he was choking with emotion. I guessed that he had just parted from his wife, and I turned away.

When we were all mounted, he looked at me. "Perhaps, as you have my parole, you will permit me to ride alone," he said, with a little hesitation, "and--"

"Without me!" I rejoined keenly. "Assuredly, so far as is possible." I directed the troopers to ride in front and keep out of ear-shot; my two men followed the prisoner at a like distance, with their carbines on their knees. Last of all I rode myself, with my eyes open and a pistol loose in my holster. M. de Cocheforet, I saw, was inclined to sneer at so many precautions, and the mountain made of his request; but I had not done so much and come so far, I had not faced scorn and insults, to be cheated of my prize at last. Aware that until we were beyond Auch there must be hourly and pressing danger of a rescue, I was determined that he who would wrest my prisoner from me should pay dearly for it. Only pride, and, perhaps, in a degree also, appetite for a fight, had prevented me borrowing ten troopers instead of two.

We started, and I looked with a lingering eye and many memories at the little bridge, the narrow woodland path, the first roofs of the village; all now familiar, all seen for the last time. Up the brook a party of soldiers were dragging for the captain's body. A furlong farther on, a cottage, burned by some carelessness in the night, lay a heap of black ashes. Louis ran beside us, weeping; the last brown leaves fluttered down in showers. And between my eyes and all, the slow, steady rain fell and fell and fell. And so I left Cocheforet.

Louis went with us to a point a mile beyond the village, and there stood and saw us go, cursing me furiously as I passed. Looking back when we had ridden on, I still saw him standing; and after a moment's hesitation I rode back to him. "Listen, fool," I said, cutting him short in the midst of his mowing and snarling, "and give this message to your mistress. Tell her from me that it will be with her husband as it was with M. de Regnier, when he fell into the hands of his enemy--no better and no worse."

"You want to kill her, too, I suppose?" he answered, glowering at me.

"No, fool! I want to save her!" I retorted wrathfully. "Tell her that, just that and no more, and you will see the result."

"I shall not," he said sullenly. "I shall not tell her. A message from you, indeed!" And he spat on the ground.

"Then on your head be it!" I answered solemnly. And I turned my horse's head and galloped fast after the others. For, in spite of his refusal, I felt sure that he would report what I had said--if it were only out of curiosity; and it would be strange if Madame did not understand the reference.

And so we began our journey; sadly, under dripping trees and a leaden sky. The country we had to traverse was the same I had trodden on the last day of my march southwards, but the passage of a month had changed the face of everything. Green dells, where springs welling out of the chalk had made of the leafy bottom a fairies' home, strewn with delicate ferns and hung with mosses--these were now swamps into which our horses sank to the fetlock. Sunny brows, whence I had viewed the champaign and traced my forward path, had become bare, windswept ridges. The beech woods, which had glowed with ruddy light, were naked now; mere black trunks and rigid arms pointing to heaven. An earthy smell filled the air; a hundred paces away a wall of mist closed the view. We plodded on sadly, up hill and down hill; now fording brooks already stained with flood-water, now crossing barren heaths.

But up hill or down hill, whatever the outlook, I was never permitted to forget that I was the jailer, the ogre, the villain; that I, riding behind in my loneliness, was the blight on all, the death-spot. True, I was behind the others; I escaped their eyes. But there was not a line of Mademoiselle's drooping figure that did not speak scorn to me, not a turn of her head that did not seem to say, "Oh God, that such a thing should breathe!"

I had only speech with her once during the day, and that was on the last ridge before we went down into the valley to climb up again to Auch. The rain had ceased; the sun, near its setting, shone faintly; and for a few moments we stood on the brow and looked southwards while we breathed the horses. The mist lay like a pall on all the country we had traversed; but beyond it and above it, gleaming pearl-like in the level rays, the line of the mountains stood up like a land of enchantment, soft, radiant, wonderful, or like one of those castles on the Hill of Glass of which the old romances tell us. I forgot, for an instant, how we were placed, and I cried to my neighbour that it was the fairest pageant I had ever seen.

She--it was Mademoiselle, and she had taken off her mask--cast one look at me; only one, but it conveyed disgust and loathing so unspeakable that scorn beside them would have been a gift. I reined in my horse as if she had struck me, and felt myself go first hot and then cold under her eyes. Then she looked another way.

I did not forget the lesson; after that I avoided her more sedulously than before. We lay that night at Auch, and I gave M. de Cocheforet the utmost liberty; even permitting him to go out and return at his will. In the morning, believing that on the farther side of Auch we ran less risk of attack, I dismissed the two dragoons, and an hour after sunrise we set out again. The day was dry and cold, the weather more promising. I planned to go by way of Lectoure, crossing the Garonne at Agen; and I thought with roads continually improving as we moved northwards, we should be able to make good progress before night. My two men rode first; I came last by myself.

Our way lay for some hours down the valley of the Gers, under poplars and by long rows of willows; and presently the sun came out and warmed us. Unfortunately, the rain of the day before had swollen the brooks which crossed our path, and we more than once had a difficulty in fording them. Noon, therefore, found us little more than half-way to Lectoure, and I was growing each minute more impatient, when our road, which had for a little while left the river bank, dropped down to it again, and I saw before us another crossing, half ford, half slough. My men tried it gingerly, and gave back, and tried it again in another place and finally, just as Mademoiselle and Monsieur came up to them, floundered through and sprang slantwise up the farther bank.

The delay had been long enough to bring me, with no good will of my own, close up to the Cocheforets. Mademoiselle's horse made a little business of the place; this delayed them still longer, and in the result, we entered the water almost together, and I crossed close on her heels. The bank on either side was steep; while crossing we could see neither before nor behind. At the moment, however, I thought nothing of this, nor of her delay, and I was following her quite at my leisure, when the sudden report of a carbine, a second report, and a yell of alarm in front, thrilled me through.

On the instant, while the sound was still in my ears, I saw it all. Like a hot iron piercing my brain, the truth flashed into my mind. We were attacked! We were attacked, and I was here helpless in this pit, this trap! The loss of a second while I fumbled here, Mademoiselle's horse barring the way, might be fatal.

There was but one way. I turned my horse straight at the steep bank, and he breasted it. One moment he hung as if he must fall back. Then, with a snort of terror and a desperate bound, he topped it, and gained the level, trembling and snorting.

It was as I had guessed. Seventy paces away on the road lay one of my men. He had fallen, horse and man, and lay still. Near him, with his back against a bank, stood his fellow, on foot, pressed by four horsemen, and shouting. As my eye lighted on the scene, he let fly with a carbine and dropped one.

I snatched a pistol from my holster, cocked it, and seized my horse by the head--I might save the man yet. I shouted to encourage him, and in another second should have charged into the fight, when a sudden vicious blow, swift and unexpected, struck the pistol from my hand.

I made a snatch at it as it fell, but missed it; and before I could recover myself, Mademoiselle thrust her horse furiously against mine, and with her riding-whip, lashed the sorrel across the ears. As my horse reared madly up, I had a glimpse of her eyes flashing hate through her mask; of her hand again uplifted; the next moment, I was down in the road, ingloriously unhorsed, the sorrel was galloping away, and her horse, scared in its turn, was plunging unmanageably a score of paces from me.

I don't doubt that but for that she would have trampled on me. As it was, I was free to draw; and in a twinkling I was running towards the fighters. All I have described had happened in a few seconds. My man was still defending himself; the smoke of the carbine had scarcely risen. I sprang with a shout across a fallen tree that intervened; at the same moment, two of the men detached themselves, and rode to meet me. One, whom I took to be the leader, was masked. He came furiously at me, trying to ride me down; but I leaped aside nimbly, and evading him, rushed at the other, and scaring his horse, so that he dropped his point, cut him across the shoulder before he could guard himself. He plunged away, cursing, and trying to hold in his horse, and I turned to meet the masked man.

"You double-dyed villain!" he cried, riding al. me again. And this time he man[oe]uvred his horse so skilfully that I was hard put to it to prevent him knocking me down; and could not with all my efforts reach him to hurt him. "Surrender, will you!" he continued, "you bloodhound!"

I wounded him slightly in the knee for answer; but before I could do more his companion came back, and the two set upon me with a will, slashing at my head so furiously and towering above me with so great an advantage that it was all I could do to guard myself. I was soon glad to fall back against the bank--as my man had done before me. In such a conflict my rapier would have been of little use, but fortunately I had armed myself before I left Paris with a cut-and-thrust sword for the road; and though my mastery of the weapon was not on a par with my rapier-play, I was able to fend off their cuts, and by an occasional prick keep the horses at a distance. Still they swore and cut at me, trying to wear me out; and it was trying work. A little delay, the least accident, might enable the other man to come to their help, or Mademoiselle, for all I knew, might shoot me with my own pistol; and I confess, I was unfeignedly glad when a lucky parade sent the masked man's sword flying across the road. He was no coward; for unarmed as he was, he pushed his horse at me, spurring it recklessly; but the animal, which I had several times touched, reared up instead and threw him at the very moment that I wounded his companion a second time in the arm, and made him give back.

This quite changed the scene. The man in the mask staggered to his feet, and felt stupidly for a pistol. But he could not find one, and was, I saw, in no state to use it if he had. He reeled helplessly to the bank, and leaned against it. He would give no further trouble. The man I had wounded was in scarcely better condition. He retreated before me for some paces, but then losing courage, he dropped his sword, and, wheeling round, cantered off down the road, clinging to his pommel. There remained only the fellow engaged with my man, and I turned to see how they were getting on. They were standing to take breath, so I ran towards them; but, seeing me coming, this rascal, too, whipped round his horse, and disappeared in the wood, and left us masters of the field. The first thing I did--and I remember it to this day with pleasure--was to plunge my hand into my pocket, take out half the money I had in the world, and press it on the man who had fought for me so stoutly, and who had certainly saved me from disaster. In my joy I could have kissed him! It was not only that I had escaped defeat by the skin of my teeth,--and his good sword,--but I knew, and thrilled with the knowledge, that the fight had altered the whole position. He was wounded in two places, and I had a scratch or two, and had lost my horse; and my other poor fellow was dead as a herring. But speaking for myself, I would have spent half the blood in my body to purchase the feeling with which I turned back to speak to M. de Cocheforet and his sister. I had fought before them.

Mademoiselle had dismounted, and with her face averted and her mask pushed on one side, was openly weeping. Her brother, who had scrupulously kept his place by the ford from the beginning of the fight to the end, met me with raised eyebrows and a peculiar smile. "Acknowledge my virtue," he said airily. "I am here, M. de Berault--which is more than can be said of the two gentlemen who have just ridden off."

"Yes," I answered, with a touch of bitterness. "I wish they had not shot my poor man before they went."

He shrugged his shoulders. "They were my friends," he said. "You must not expect me to blame them. But that is not all."

"No," I said, wiping my sword. "There is this gentleman in the mask." And I turned to go towards him.

"M. de Berault!" There was something abrupt in the way in which Cocheforet called my name after me.

I stood. "Pardon?" I said, turning.

"That gentleman?" he answered, hesitating, and looking at me doubtfully. "Have you considered--what will happen to him, if you give him up to the authorities?"

"Who is he?" I said sharply.

"That is rather a delicate question," he answered, frowning, and still looking at me fixedly.

"Not from me," I replied brutally, "since he is in my power. If he will take off his mask, I shall know better what I intend to do with him."

The stranger had lost his hat in his fall, and his fair hair, stained with dust, hung in curls on his shoulders. He was a tall man, of a slender, handsome presence, and though his dress was plain and almost rough, I espied a splendid jewel on his hand, and fancied I detected other signs of high quality. He still lay against the bank in a half-swooning condition, and seemed unconscious of my scrutiny. "Should I know him if he unmasked?" I said suddenly, a new idea in my head.

"You would," M. de Cocheforet answered simply.

"And?"

"It would be bad for every one."

"Ho, ho!" I said softly, looking hard, first at my old prisoner, and then at my new one. "Then, what do you wish me to do?"

"Leave him here," M. de Cocheforet answered glibly, his face flushed, the pulse in his cheek beating. I had known him for a man of perfect honour before, and trusted him. But this evident earnest anxiety on behalf of his friend touched me. Besides, I knew that I was treading on slippery ground; that it behoved me to be careful. "I will do it," I said, after a moment's reflection. "He will play me no tricks, I suppose? A letter of--"

"Mon Dieu, no! He will understand," Cocheforet answered eagerly. "You will not repent it, I swear. Let us be going."

"Well,--but my horse?" I said, somewhat taken aback by this extreme haste.

"We shall overtake it," he replied urgently. "It will have kept to the road. Lectoure is no more than a league from here, and we can give orders there to have these two fetched in and buried."

I had nothing to gain by demurring, and so it was arranged. After that we did not linger. We picked up what we had dropped, M. de Cocheforet mounted his sister, and within five minutes we were gone. Casting a glance back from the skirts of the wood, as we entered it, I fancied that I saw the masked man straighten himself and turn to look after us; but the leaves were beginning to intervene, the distance was great and perhaps cheated me. And yet I was not disinclined to think the unknown a little less severely injured and a trifle more observant than he seemed.

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XII. AT THE FINGER-POST

Through all, it will have been noticed, Mademoiselle had not spoken to me, nor said one word, good or bad. She had played her part grimly; had taken her defeat in silence, if with tears; had tried neither prayer, nor defence, nor apology. And the fact that the fight was now over, the scene left behind, made no difference in her conduct--to my surprise and discomfiture. She kept her face averted from me; she rode as before; she affected to ignore my presence. I caught my horse feeding by the road-side, a furlong forward, and mounted, and fell into place behind the two, as in the morning. And just as we had plodded on then in silence, we plodded on now, while I wondered at the unfathomable ways of women, and knowing that I had borne myself well, marvelled that she could take part in such an incident and remain unchanged.

Yet it had made a change in her. Though her mask screened her well, it could not entirely hide her emotions, and by-and-bye I marked that her head drooped, that she rode sadly and listlessly, that the lines of her figure were altered. I noticed that she had flung away, or furtively dropped, her riding-whip, and I understood that to the old hatred of me were now added shame and vexation; shame that she had so lowered herself, even to save her brother, vexation that defeat had been her only reward.

Of this I saw a sign at Lectoure, where the inn had but one common room, and we must all dine in company. I secured for them a table by the fire, and leaving them standing by it, retired myself to a smaller one, near the door. There were no other guests, and this made the separation between us more marked. M. de Cocheforet seemed to feel this. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at me with a smile half sad, half comical. But Mademoiselle was implacable. She had taken off her mask, and her face was like stone. Once, only once, during the meal I saw a change come over her. She coloured, I suppose at her thoughts, until her face flamed from brow to chin. I watched the blush spread and spread, and then she slowly and proudly turned her shoulder to me, and looked through the window at the shabby street.

I suppose that she and her brother had both built on this attempt, Which must have been arranged at Auch. For when we went on in the afternoon, I saw a more marked change. They rode now like people resigned to the worst. The grey realities of the brother's position, the dreary, hopeless future, began to hang like a mist before their eyes; began to tinge the landscape with sadness; robbed even the sunset of its colours. With each hour their spirits flagged and their speech became less frequent, until presently, when the light was nearly gone and the dusk was round us, the brother and sister rode hand in hand, silent, gloomy, one at least of them weeping. The cold shadow of the Cardinal, of Paris, of the scaffold, was beginning to make itself felt; was beginning to chill them. As the mountains which they had known all their lives sank and faded behind us, and we entered on the wide, low valley of the Garonne, their hopes sank and faded also--sank to the dead-level of despair. Surrounded by guards, a mark for curious glances, with pride for a companion, M. de Cocheforet could doubtless have borne himself bravely; doubtless he would bear himself bravely still when the end came. But almost alone, moving forward through the grey evening to a prison, with so many measured days before him, and nothing to exhilarate or anger,--in this condition it was little wonder if he felt, and betrayed that he felt, the blood run slow in his veins; if he thought more of the weeping wife and ruined home, which he left behind him, than of the cause in which he had spent himself.

But God knows, they had no monopoly of gloom. I felt almost as sad myself. Long before sunset the flush of triumph, the heat of the battle, which had warmed my heart at noon, were gone; giving place to a chill dissatisfaction, a nausea, a despondency, such as I have known follow a long night at the tables. Hitherto there had been difficulties to be overcome, risks to be run, doubts about the end. Now the end was certain, and very near; so near that it filled all the prospect. One hour of triumph I might still have; I hugged the thought of it as a gambler hugs his last stake. I planned the place and time and mode, and tried to occupy myself wholly with it. But the price? Alas, that would intrude too, and more as the evening waned; so that as I passed this or that thing by the road, which I could recall passing on my journey south,--with thoughts so different, with plans that now seemed so very, very old,--I asked myself grimly if this were really I, if this were Gil de Berault, known as Zaton's premier joueur; or some Don Quichotte from Castile, tilting at windmills, and taking barbers' bowls for gold.

We reached Agen very late in the evening, after groping through a by-way near the river, set with holes and willow-stools and frog-spawns--a place no better than a slough. After it the great fire and the lights at the Blue Maid seemed like a glimpse of a new world, and in a twinkling put something of life and spirits into two at least of us. There was queer talk round the hearth here of doings in Paris,--of a stir against the Cardinal, with the Queen-mother at bottom, and of grounded expectations that something might this time come of it. But the landlord pooh-poohed the idea, and I more than agreed with him. Even M. de Cocheforet, who was for a moment inclined to build on it, gave up hope when he heard that it came only by way of Montauban; whence, since its reduction the year before, all sorts of canards against the Cardinal were always on the wing.

"They kill him about once a month," our host said, with a grin. "Sometimes it is Monsieur who is to prove a match for him, sometimes Cesar Monsieur--the Duke of Vendome, you understand,--and sometimes the Queen-mother. But since M. de Chalais and the Marshal made a mess of it, and paid forfeit, I pin my faith to His Eminence--that is his new title, they tell me."

"Things are quiet round here?" I asked.

"Perfectly. Since the Languedoc business came to an end, all goes well," he answered.

Mademoiselle had retired on our arrival, so that her brother and I were for an hour or two thrown together. I left him at liberty to separate himself if he pleased, but he did not use the opportunity. A kind of comradeship, rendered piquant by our peculiar relations, had begun to spring up between us. He seemed to take pleasure in my company, more than once rallied me on my post of jailer, would ask humorously if he might do this or that, and once even inquired what I should do if he broke his parole.

"Or take it this way," he continued flippantly "Suppose I had stuck you in the back this evening, in that cursed swamp by the river, M. de Berault? What then? Pardieu! I am astonished at myself that I did not do it. I could have been in Montauban within twenty-four hours, and found fifty hiding-places, and no one the wiser."

"Except your sister," I said quietly.

He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. "Yes," he said, "I am afraid I must have put her out of the way too, to preserve my self-respect. You are right." And on that he fell into a reverie which held him for a few minutes. Then I found him looking at me with a kind of frank perplexity that invited question.

"What is it?" I said.

"You have fought a great many duels?"

"Yes," I said.

"Did you never strike a foul blow in one of them?"

"Never. Why do you ask?"

"Well,--I wanted to confirm an impression," he said. "To be frank, M. de Berault, I seem to see in you two men."

"Two men?"

"Yes, two men," he answered. "One, the man who captured me; the other, the man who let my friend go free to-day."

"It surprised you that I let him go? That was prudence, M. de Cocheforet," I replied, "nothing more. I am an old gambler--I know when the stakes are too high for me. The man who caught a lion in his wolf-pit had no great catch."

"No, that is true," he answered, smiling. "And yet--I find two men in your skin."

"I dare say that there are two in most men's skins," I answered, with a sigh, "but not always together. Sometimes one is there, and sometimes the other."

"How does the one like taking up the other's work?" he asked keenly.

I shrugged my shoulders. "That is as may be," I said. "You do not take an estate without the debts."

He did not answer for a moment, and I fancied that his thoughts had reverted to his own case. But on a sudden he looked at me again. "Will you answer me a question, M. de Berault?" he said, with a winning smile.

"Perhaps," I said.

"Then tell me--it is a tale that is, I am sure, worth the telling. What was it that, in a very evil hour for me, sent you in search of me?"

"The Cardinal," I answered.

"I did not ask who," he replied drily. "I asked, what. You had no grudge against me?"

"No."

"No knowledge of me?"

"No."

"Then what on earth induced you to do it? Heavens, man," he continued bluntly, rising and speaking with greater freedom than he had before used, "nature never intended you for a tip staff! What was it, then?"

I rose too. It was very late, and the room was empty, the fire low. "I will tell you--tomorrow!" I said. "I shall have something to say to you then, of which that will be part."

He looked at me in great astonishment; with a little suspicion, too. But I put him off, and called for a light, and by going at once to bed, cut short his questions.

Those who know the great south road to Agen, and how the vineyards rise in terraces north of the town, one level of red earth above another, green in summer, but in late autumn bare and stony, will remember a particular place where the road two leagues from the town runs up a long hill. At the top of the hill four ways meet; and there, plain to be seen against the sky is a finger-post, indicating which way leads to Bordeaux, and which to Montauban, and which to Perigueux.

This hill had impressed me on my journey down; perhaps, because I had from it my first view of the Garonne valley, and there felt myself on the verge of the south country where my mission lay. It had taken root in my memory; I had come to look upon its bare, bleak brow, with the finger-post and the four roads, as the first outpost of Paris, as the first sign of return to the old life.

Now for two days I had been looking forward to seeing it again. That long stretch of road would do admirably for something I had in my mind. That sign-post, with the roads pointing north, south, east, and west, could there be a better place for meetings and partings?

We came to the bottom of the ascent about an hour before noon--M. de Cocheforet, Mademoiselle, and I. We had reversed the order of yesterday, and I rode ahead. They came after me at their leisure. At the foot of the hill, however, I stopped and, letting Mademoiselle pass on, detained M. de Cocheforet by a gesture. "Pardon me, one moment," I said. "I want to ask a favour."

He looked at me somewhat fretfully, with a gleam of wildness in his eyes that betrayed how the iron was eating into his heart. He had started after breakfast as gaily as a bridegroom, but gradually he had sunk below himself; and now he had much ado to curb his impatience. The bonhomie of last night was quite gone. "Of me?" he said. "What is it?"

"I wish to have a few words with Mademoiselle--alone," I explained.

"Alone?" he answered, frowning.

"Yes," I replied, without blenching, though his face grew dark. "For the matter of that, you can be within call all the time, if you please. But I have a reason for wishing to ride a little way with her."

"To tell her something?"

"Yes."

"Then you can tell it to me," he retorted suspiciously. "Mademoiselle, I will answer for it, has no desire to--"

"See me, or speak to me!" I said, taking him up. "I can understand that. Yet I want to speak to her."

"Very well, you can speak to her before me," he answered rudely. "Let us ride on and join her." And he made a movement as if to do so.

"That will not do, M. de Cocheforet," I said firmly, stopping him with my hand. "Let me beg you to be more complaisant. It is a small thing I ask; but I swear to you, if Mademoiselle does not grant it, she will repent it all her life."

He looked at me, his face growing darker and darker. "Fine words!" he said presently, with a sneer. "Yet I fancy I understand them." Then with a passionate oath he broke out in a fresh tone. "But I will not have it. I have not been blind, M. de Berault, and I understand. But I will not have it! I will have no such Judas bargain made. Pardieu! do you think I could suffer it and show my face again?"

"I don't know what you mean!" I said, restraining myself with difficulty. I could have struck the fool.

"But I know what you mean," he replied, in a tone of repressed rage. "You would have her sell herself: sell herself body and soul to you to save me! And you would have me stand by and see the thing done! Well, my answer is--never! though I go to the wheel! I will die a gentleman, if I have lived a fool!"

"I think you will do the one as certainly as you have done the other," I retorted, in my exasperation. And yet I admired him.

"Oh, I am not such a fool," he cried, scowling at me, "as you have perhaps thought. I have used my eyes."

"Then be good enough now to favour me with your ears," I answered drily. "And listen when I say that no such bargain has ever crossed my mind. You were kind enough to think well of me last night, M. de Cocheforet. Why should the mention of Mademoiselle in a moment change your opinion? I wish simply to speak to her. I have nothing to ask from her; neither favour nor anything else. And what I say she will doubtless tell you afterwards. Ciel, man!" I continued angrily, "what harm can I do to her, in the road, in your sight?"

He looked at me sullenly, his face still flushed, his eyes suspicious. "What do you want to say to her?" he asked jealously. He was quite unlike himself. His airy nonchalance, his careless gaiety, were gone.

"You know what I do not want to say to her, M. de Cocheforet," I answered. "That should be enough."

He glowered at me for a moment, still ill content. Then, without a word, he made me a gesture to go to her.

She had halted a score of paces away, wondering doubtless what was on foot. I rode towards her. She wore her mask, so that I lost the expression of her face as I approached, but the manner in which she turned her horse's head uncompromisingly towards her brother, and looked past me--as if I were merely a log in the road--was full of meaning. I felt the ground suddenly cut from under me. I saluted her, trembling. "Mademoiselle," I said, "will you grant me the privilege of your company for a few minutes, as we ride."

"To what purpose, Sir?" she answered, in the coldest voice in which I think a woman ever spoke to a man.

"That I may explain to you a great many things you do not understand," I murmured.

"I prefer to be in the dark," she replied. And her manner said more than her words.

"But, Mademoiselle," I pleaded,--I would not be discouraged,--"you told me one day that you would never judge me hastily again."

"Facts judge you, not I, Sir," she answered icily. "I am not sufficiently on a level with you to be able to judge you--I thank God."

I shivered though the sun was on me, and the hollow where we stood was warm. "Still--once before you thought the same!" I exclaimed. "Afterwards you found that you had been wrong. It may be so again, Mademoiselle."

"Impossible," she said.

That stung me. "No!" I said fiercely. "It is not impossible. It is you who are impossible! It is you who are heartless, Mademoiselle. I have done much, very much, in the last three days to make things lighter for you. I ask you now to do something for me which can cost you nothing."

"Nothing?" she answered slowly; and her scornful voice cut me as if it had been a knife. "Do you think, Monsieur, it costs me nothing to lose my self-respect, as I do with every word I speak to you? Do you think it costs me nothing to be here, where I feel every look you cast on me an insult, every breath I take in your presence a contamination. Nothing, Monsieur?" She laughed in bitter irony. "Oh, be sure, something! But something which I despair of making clear to you."

I sat for a moment in my saddle, shaken and quivering with pain. It had been one thing to feel that she hated and scorned me, to know that the trust and confidence which she had begun to place in me were changed to loathing. It was another to listen to her hard, pitiless words, to change colour under the lash of her gibing tongue. For a moment I could not find voice to answer her. Then I pointed to M. de Cocheforet. "Do you love him?" I said, hoarsely, roughly. The gibing tone had passed from her voice to mine.

She did not answer.

"Because, if you do," I continued, "you will let me tell my tale. Say no but once more, Mademoiselle,--I am only human,--and I go. And you will repent it all your life."

I had done better had I taken that tone from the beginning. She winced, her head drooped, she seemed to grow smaller. All in a moment, as it were, her pride collapsed. "I will hear you," she answered feebly.

"Then we will ride on, if you please," I said, keeping the advantage I had gained. "You need not fear. Your brother will follow."

I caught hold of her rein and turned her horse, and she suffered it without demur. In a moment we were pacing side by side, the long, straight road before us. At the end where it topped the hill, I could see the finger-post,--two faint black lines against the sky. When we reached that, involuntarily I checked my horse and made it move more slowly.

"Well, Sir," she said impatiently. And her figure shook as if with cold.

"It is a tale I desire to tell you, Mademoiselle," I answered, speaking with effort. "Perhaps I may seem to begin a long way off, but before I end, I promise to interest you. Two months ago there was living in Paris a man, perhaps a bad man, at any rate, by common report, a hard man."

She turned to me suddenly, her eyes gleaming through her mask. "Oh, Monsieur, spare me this!" she said, quietly scornful. "I will take it for granted."

"Very well," I replied steadfastly. "Good or bad, this man, one day, in defiance of the Cardinal's edict against duelling, fought with a young Englishman behind St. Jacques Church. The Englishman had influence, the person of whom I speak had none, and an indifferent name; he was arrested, thrown into the Chatelet, cast for death, left for days to face death. At the last an offer was made to him. If he would seek out and deliver up another man, an outlaw with a price upon his head, he should himself go free."

I paused and drew a deep breath. Then I continued, looking not at her, but into the distance: "Mademoiselle, it seems easy now to say what course he should have chosen. It seems hard now to find excuses for him. But there was one thing which I plead for him. The task he was asked to undertake was a dangerous one. He risked, he knew he must risk, and the event proved him right, his life against the life of this unknown man. And--one thing more--there was time before him. The outlaw might be taken by another, might be killed, might die, might--. But there, Mademoiselle, we know what answer this person made. He took the baser course, and on his honour, on his parole, with money supplied to him, went free,--free on the condition that he delivered up this other man."

I paused again, but I did not dare to look at her, and after a moment of silence I resumed. "Some portion of the second half of this story you know, Mademoiselle; but not all. Suffice it that this man came down to a remote village, and there at a risk, but Heaven knows, basely enough, found his way into his victim's home. Once there, his heart began to fail him. Had he found the house garrisoned by men, he might have pressed on to his end with little remorse. But he found there only two helpless, loyal women; and I say again that from the first hour of his entrance he sickened of the work he had in hand. Still he pursued it. He had given his word, and if there was one tradition of his race which this man had never broken, it was that of fidelity to his side; to the man that paid him. But he pursued it with only half his mind, in great misery sometimes, if you will believe me, in agonies of shame. Gradually, however, almost against his will, the drama worked itself out before him, until he needed only one thing."

I looked at Mademoiselle. But her head was averted; I could gather nothing from the outlines of her form. And I went on. "Do not misunderstand me," I said, in a lower voice. "Do not misunderstand what I am going to say next. This is no love story, and can have no ending such as romancers love to set to their tales. But I am bound to mention, Mademoiselle, that this man, who had lived about inns and eating-houses, and at the gaming-tables almost all his days, met here for the first time for years a good woman; and learned by the light of her loyalty and devotion to see what his life had been, and what was the real nature of the work he was doing. I think,--nay, I know--that it added a hundredfold to his misery, that when he learned at last the secret he had come to surprise, he learned it from her lips, and in such a way that had he felt no shame, hell could have been no place for him. But in one thing she misjudged him. She thought, and had reason to think, that the moment he knew her secret he went out, not even closing the door, and used it. But the truth was that, while her words were still in his ears, news came to him that others had the secret; and had he not gone out on the instant, and done what he did, and forestalled them, M. de Cocheforet would have been taken, but by others."

Mademoiselle broke her long silence so suddenly that her horse sprang forward. "Would to Heaven he had!" she wailed.

"Been taken by others?" I exclaimed, startled out of my false composure.

"Oh, yes, yes!" she answered passionately. "Why did you not tell me? Why did you not confess to me even then? I--oh, no more! No more!" she continued, in a piteous voice. "I have heard enough. You are racking my heart, M. de Berault. Some day I will ask God to give me strength to forgive you."

"But you have not heard me out," I replied.

"I want to hear no more," she answered, in a voice she vainly strove to render steady. "To what end? Can I say more than I have said? Did you think I could forgive you now--with him behind us going to his death? Oh, no, no!" she continued. "Leave me! I implore you to leave me. I am not well."

She drooped over her horse's neck as she spoke and began to weep so passionately that the tears ran down her cheeks under her mask, and fell and sparkled like dew on the mane before her; while her sobs shook her so painfully that I thought she must fall. I stretched out my hand instinctively to give her help; but she shrank from me. "No!" she gasped, between her sobs. "Do not touch me. There is too much between us."

"Yet there must be one thing more between us," I answered firmly. "You must listen to me a little longer, whether you will or no, Mademoiselle, for the love you bear to your brother. There is one course still open to me by which I may redeem my honour; it has been in my mind for some time back to take that course. To-day, I am thankful to say, I can take it cheerfully, if not without regret; with a steadfast heart, if with no light one. Mademoiselle," I continued earnestly, feeling none of the triumph, none of the vanity, I had foreseen, but only joy in the joy I could give her, "I thank God that it is still in my power to undo what I have done; that it is still in my power to go back to him who sent me, and telling him that I have changed my mind and will bear my own burdens, to pay the penalty."

We were within a hundred paces of the brow of the hill and the finger-post now. She cried out wildly that she did not understand. "What is it you have just said?" she murmured. "I cannot hear." And she began to fumble with the ribbon of her mask.

"Only this, Mademoiselle," I answered gently. "I give back to your brother his word and his parole. From this moment he is free to go whither he pleases. You shall tell him so from me. Here, where we stand, four roads meet. That to the right goes to Montauban, where you have doubtless friends, and can lie hid for a time; or that to the left leads to Bordeaux, where you can take ship if you please. And in a word Mademoiselle," I continued, ending a little feebly, "I hope that your troubles are now over."

She turned her face to me--we had both come to a standstill--and plucked at the fastenings of her mask. But her trembling fingers had knotted the string, and in a moment she dropped her hands with a cry of despair. "And you? You?" she said, in a voice so changed I should not have known it for hers. "What will you do? I do not understand. This mask! I cannot hear."

"There is a third road," I answered. "It leads to Paris. That is my road, Mademoiselle. We part here."

"But why? Why?" she cried wildly.

"Because from to-day I would fain begin to be honourable," I answered, in a low voice. "Because I dare not be generous at another's cost I must go back to the Chatelet."

She tried feverishly to raise her mask with her hand. "I am--not well," she stammered. "I cannot breathe."

She swayed so violently in her saddle as she spoke, that I sprang down, and running round her horse's head, was just in time to catch her as she fell. She was not quite unconscious then, for, as I supported her, she murmured, "Leave me! Leave me! I am not worthy that you should touch me."

Those words made me happy. I carried her to the bank, my heart on fire, and laid her against it just as M. de Cocheforet rode up. He sprang from his horse, his eyes blazing with anger. "What is this?" he cried harshly. "What have you been saying to her, man?"

"She will tell you," I answered drily, my composure returning under his eye,--"amongst other things, that you are free. From this moment, M. de Cocheforet, I give you back your parole, and I take my own honour. Farewell."

He cried out something as I mounted, but I did not stay to hear or answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past the crossroads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland stretching before me, dry, bare, almost treeless--and behind me all I loved. Once, when I had gone a hundred yards, I looked back and saw him standing upright against the sky, staring after me across her body. And again I looked back. This time I saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark blurred mass.

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XIII. ST. MARTIN'S EVE

It was late evening on the last day but one of November, when I rode into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the northeast, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. The air seemed to be full of wood smoke, the kennels reeked, my gorge rose at the city's smell; and with all my heart I envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly two months before, with his face to the south, and the prospect of riding day after day across heath and moor and pasture. At least he had had some weeks of life before him, and freedom, and the open air, and hope and uncertainty, while I came back under doom; and in the pall of smoke that hung over the huddle of innumerable roofs, saw a gloomy shadowing of my own fate.

For make no mistake. A man in middle life does not strip himself of the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does not run counter to all the cynical saws and instances by which he has governed his course so long, without shiverings and doubts and horrible misgivings and struggles of heart. At least a dozen times between the Loire and Paris, I asked myself what honour was; and what good it would do me when I lay rotting and forgotten; if I was not a fool following a Jack-o'-lanthorn; and whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man to whom I was returning, would not be the first to gibe at my folly.

However, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of Mademoiselle's looks and words. I dared not be false to her again; I could not, after speaking so loftily, fall so low. And therefore--though not without many a secret struggle and quaking--I came, on this last evening but one of November, to the Orleans gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the streets by the Luxembourg, on my way to the Pont au Change.

The struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the first whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted gamins under my horse's hoofs, the first babel of street cries, the first breath, in a word, of Paris, there came a new temptation--to go for one last night to Zaton's to see the tables again and the faces of surprise; to be, for an hour or two, the old Berault. That could be no breach of honour; for in any case I could not reach the Cardinal before tomorrow. And it could do no harm. It could make no change in anything. It would not have been a thing worth struggling about--only I had in my inmost heart suspicions that the stoutest resolutions might lose their force in that atmosphere; that even such a talisman as the memory of a woman's looks and words might lose its virtue there.

Still I think I should have succumbed in the end, if I had not received at the corner of the Luxembourg a shock which sobered me effectually. As I passed the gates, a coach followed by two outriders swept out of the palace courtyard; it was going at a great pace, and I reined my jaded horse on one side to give it room. As it whirled by me, one of the leather curtains flapped back, and I saw for a second, by the waning light,--the nearer wheels were no more than two feet from my boot,--a face inside.

A face, and no more, and that only for a second! But it froze me. It was Richelieu's, the Cardinal's; but not as I had been wont to see it, keen, cold, acute, with intellect and indomitable will in every feature. This face was distorted with rage and impatience; with the fever of haste and the fear of death. The eyes burned under the pale brow, the mustachios bristled, the teeth showed through the beard; I could fancy the man crying "Faster! Faster!" and gnawing his nails in the impatience of passion; and I shrank back as if I had been struck. The next moment the galloping outriders splashed me, the coach was a hundred paces ahead, and I was left chilled and wondering, foreseeing the worst, and no longer in any mood for the gaming-table.

Such a revelation of such a man was enough to appall me. Conscience cried out that he must have heard that Cocheforet had escaped, and through me! But I dismissed the idea as soon as formed.

In the vast meshes of the Cardinal's schemes, Cocheforet could be only a small fish; and to account for the face in the coach I needed a cataclysm, a catastrophe, a misfortune, as far above ordinary mishaps, as this man's intellect rose above the common run of minds.

It was almost dark when I crossed the bridges, and crept despondently to the Rue Savonnerie. After stabling my horse, I took my bag and holsters, and climbing the stairs to my old landlord's,--the place seemed to have grown strangely mean and small and ill-smelling in my absence,--I knocked at the door. It was opened by the little tailor himself, who threw up his arms at the sight of me. "By St. Genevieve!" he said. "If it is not M. de Berault!"

"No other," I said. It touched me a little, after my lonely journey, to find him so glad to see me--though I had never done him a greater benefit than sometimes to unbend with him and borrow his money. "You look surprised, little man!" I continued, as he made way for me to enter. "I'll be sworn you have been pawning my goods and letting my room, you knave!"

"Never, your excellency!" he answered, beaming on me. "On the contrary, I have been expecting you."

"How?" I said. "To-day?"

"To-day or to-morrow," he answered, following me in and closing the door. "The first thing I said, when I heard the news this morning, was, Now we shall have M. de Berault back again. Your excellency will pardon the children," he continued, as I took the old seat on the three-legged stool before the hearth. "The night is cold, and there is no fire in your room."

While he ran to and fro with my cloak and bags, little Gil, to whom I had stood at St. Sulpice's--borrowing ten crowns the same day, I remember--came shyly to play with my sword-hilt "So you expected me back when you heard the news, Frison, did you?" I said, taking the lad on my knee.

"To be sure, your excellency," he answered, peeping into the black pot before he lifted it to the hook.

"Very good. Then, now, let us hear what the news was," I said drily.

"Of the Cardinal, M. de Berault."

"Ah? And what?"

He looked at me, holding the heavy pot suspended in his hands. "You have not heard?" he exclaimed, his jaw falling.

"Not a tittle. Tell it me, my good fellow."

"You have not heard that His Eminence is disgraced?"

I stared at him. "Not a word," I said.

He set down the pot. "Your excellency must have made a very long journey indeed, then," he said, with conviction. "For it has been in the air a week or more, and I thought it had brought you back. A week? A month, I dare say. They whisper that it is the old Queen's doing. At any rate, it is certain that they have cancelled his commissions and displaced his officers. There are rumours of immediate peace with Spain. His enemies are lifting up their heads, and I hear that he has relays of horses set all the way to the coast, that he may fly at any moment For what I know he may be gone already."

"But, man," I said--"the King! You forget the King. Let the Cardinal once pipe to him, and he will dance. And they will dance, too!" I added grimly.

"Yes," Frison answered eagerly. "True, your excellency, but the King will not see him. Three times to-day, as I am told, the Cardinal has driven to the Luxembourg, and stood like any common man in the ante-chamber, so that I hear it was pitiful to see him. But His Majesty would not admit him. And when he went away the last time, I am told that his face was like death! Well, he was a great man, and we may be worse ruled, M. de Berault, saving your presence. If the nobles did not like him, he was good to the traders, and the bourgeoisie, and equal to all."

"Silence, man! Silence, and let me think," I said, much excited. And while he bustled to and fro, getting my supper, and the firelight played about the snug, sorry little room, and the child toyed with his plaything, I fell to digesting this great news, and pondering how I stood now and what I ought to do. At first sight, I know, it seemed that I had nothing to do but sit still. In a few hours the man who held my bond would be powerless, and I should be free. In a few hours I might smile at him. To all appearance, the dice had fallen well for me. I had done a great thing, run a great risk, won a woman's love, and after all was not to pay the penalty!

But a word which fell from Frison as he fluttered round me, pouring out the broth, and cutting the bread, dropped into my mind and spoiled my satisfaction. "Yes, your excellency," he exclaimed, confirming something he had said before, and which I had missed, "and I am told that the last time he came into the gallery, there was not a man of all the scores who attended his levee last Monday would speak to him. They fell off like rats,--just like rats,--until he was left standing all alone. And I have seen him!" Frison lifted up his eyes and his hands and drew in his breath. "Ah, I have seen the King look shabby beside him! And his eye! I would not like to meet it now."

"Pish!" I growled. "Some one has fooled you. Men are wiser than that."

"So? Well, your excellency understands. But--there are no cats on a cold hearth."

I told him again that he was a fool. But withal I felt uncomfortable. This was a great man if ever a great man lived, and they were all leaving him; and I--well, I had no cause to love him. But I had taken his money, I had accepted his commission, and I had betrayed him. Those three things being so, if he fell before I could--with the best will in the world--set myself right with him, so much the better for me. That was my gain, the fortune of war. But if I lay hid, and took time for my ally, and being here while he stood still,--though tottering,--waited until he fell, what of my honour then? What of the grand words I had said to Mademoiselle at Agen? I should be like the recreant in the old romance, who, lying in the ditch while the battle raged, came out afterwards and boasted of his courage. And yet the flesh was weak. A day, twenty-four hours, two days, might make the difference between life and death. At last I settled what I would do. At noon the next day, the time at which I should have presented myself, if I had not heard this news, at that time I would still present myself. Not earlier; I owed myself the chance. Not later; that was due to him.

Having so settled it, I thought to rest in peace. But with the first light I was awake; and it was all I could do to keep myself quiet until I heard Frison stirring. I called to him then to know if there was any news, and lay waiting and listening while he went down to the street to learn. It seemed an endless time before he came back; an age, after he came back, before he spoke.

"Well, he has not set off?" I cried at last, unable to control my eagerness.

Of course he had not. At nine o'clock I sent Frison out again; and at ten, and at eleven--always with the same result. I was like a man waiting, and looking, and, above all, listening for a reprieve, and as sick as any craven. But when he came back at eleven, I gave up hope, and dressed myself carefully. I suppose I still had an odd look, however; for Frison stopped me at the door and asked me, with evident alarm, whither I was going.

I put the little man aside gently. "To the tables," I said. "To make a big throw, my friend."

It was a fine morning; sunny, keen, pleasant. Even the streets smelled fresh. But I scarcely noticed it. All my thoughts were where I was going. It seemed but a step from my threshold to the Hotel Richelieu. I was no sooner gone from the one than I found myself at the other. As on the memorable evening, when I had crossed the street in a drizzling rain, and looked that way with foreboding, there were two or three guards in the Cardinal's livery, loitering before the gates. But this was not all. Coming nearer, I found the opposite pavement under the Louvre thronged with people; not moving about their business, but standing all silent, all looking across furtively, all with the air of persons who wished to be thought passing by. Their silence and their keen looks had in some way an air of menace. Looking back after I had turned in towards the gates, I found them devouring me with their eyes.

Certainly they had little else to look at. In the courtyard, where some mornings when the court was in Paris I had seen a score of coaches waiting and thrice as many servants, were now emptiness and sunshine and stillness. The officer, who stood twisting his mustachios, on guard, looked at me in wonder as I passed. The lackeys lounging in the portico, and all too much taken up with whispering to make a pretence of being of service, grinned at my appearance. But that which happened when I had mounted the stairs, and come to the door of the ante-chamber, outdid all. The man on guard there would have opened the door; but when I went to take advantage of the offer, and enter, a major-domo, who was standing near, muttering with two or three of his kind, hastened forward and stopped me.

"Your business, Monsieur, if you please?" he said inquisitively. And I wondered why the others looked at me so strangely.

"I am M. de Berault," I answered sharply. "I have the entree."

He bowed politely enough. "Yes, M. de Berault, I have the honour to know your face," he said. "But pardon me. Have you business with His Eminence?"

"I have the common business," I answered bluntly, "by which many of us live, sirrah!--to wait on him."

"But--by appointment, Monsieur?" he persisted.

"No," I said, astonished. "It is the usual hour. For the matter of that, however, I have business with him."

The man looked at me for a moment, in apparent embarrassment. Then he stood reluctantly aside, and signed to the door-keeper to open the door. I passed in, uncovering, with an assured face, ready to meet all eyes. Then in a moment, on the threshold, the mystery was explained.

The room was empty.

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XIV. ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER

Yes, at the great Cardinal's levee I was the only client. I stared round the room, a long narrow gallery, through which it was his custom to walk every morning, after receiving his more important visitors. I stared, I say, round this room, in a state of stupefaction. The seats against either wall were empty, the recesses of the windows empty too. The hat, sculptured and painted here and there, the staring R, the blazoned arms, looked down on a vacant floor. Only, on a little stool by the main door, sat a quiet-faced man in black, who read, or pretended to read, in a little book, and never looked up. One of those men, blind, deaf, secretive, who fatten in the shadow of the great.

At length, while I stood confounded and full of shamed thought,--for I had seen the ante-chamber of Richelieu's old hotel so crowded that he could not walk through it,--this man closed his book, rose, and came noiselessly towards me. "M. de Berault?" he said.

"Yes," I answered.

"His Eminence awaits you. Be good enough to follow me."

I did so, in a deeper stupor than before. For how could the Cardinal know that I was here? How could he have known when he gave the order? But I had short time to think of these things. We passed through two rooms, in one of which some secretaries were writing; we stopped at a third door. Over all brooded a silence which could be felt. The usher knocked, opened, and with his finger on his lip, pushed aside a curtain, and signed to me to enter. I did so, and found myself standing behind a screen.

"Is that M. de Berault?" asked a thin, high-pitched voice.

"Yes, Monseigneur," I answered, trembling.

"Then come, my friend, and talk to me."

I went round the screen; and I know not how it was, the watching crowd outside, the vacant antechamber in which I had stood, the stillness,--all seemed concentrated here, and gave to the man I saw before me, a dignity which he had never possessed for me when the world passed through his doors, and the proudest fawned on him for a smile. He sat in a great chair on the farther side of the hearth, a little red skull-cap on his head, his fine hands lying motionless in his lap. The collar of lawn which fell over his red cape was quite plain, but the skirts of his red robe were covered with rich lace, and the order of the Holy Ghost shone on his breast. Among the multitudinous papers on the great table near him I saw a sword and pistols lying; and some tapestry that covered a little table behind him failed to hide a pair of spurred riding-boots. But he--in spite of these signs of trouble--looked towards me as I advanced, with a face mild and almost benign; a face in which I strove in vain to find traces of last night's passion. So that it flashed across me that if this man really stood--and afterwards I knew he did--on the thin razor-edge between life and death, between the supreme of earthly power, lord of France, and arbiter of Europe, and the nothingness of the clod, he justified his fame. He gave weaker natures no room for triumph.

The thought was no sooner entertained than it was gone. "And so you are back at last, M. de Berault?" he said, gently. "I have been expecting to see you since nine this morning."

"Your Eminence knew then--" I muttered.

"That you returned to Paris by the Orleans gate last evening, alone?" He fitted together the ends of his fingers, and looked at me over them with inscrutable eyes. "Yes, I knew all that last night. And now of your mission? You have been faithful, and diligent, I am sure. Where is he?"

I stared at him, and was dumb. Somehow the strange things I had seen since I left my lodging, the surprises I had found awaiting me here, had driven my own fortunes, my own peril, out of my head, until this moment. Now, at his question, all returned with a rush. My heart heaved suddenly in my breast. I strove for a savour of the old hardihood; but for the moment I could not find a word.

"Well?" he said lightly, a faint smile lifting his mustache. "You do not speak. You left Auch with him on the twenty-fourth, M. de Berault. So much I know. And you reached Paris without him last night. He has not given you the slip?" with sudden animation.

"No, Monseigneur," I muttered.

"Ha! That is good," he answered, sinking back again in his chair. "For the moment--but I knew I could depend on you. And now where is he?" he continued. "What have you done with him? He knows much, and the sooner I know it, the better. Are your people bringing him, M. de Berault?"

"No, Monseigneur," I stammered, with dry lips. His very good humour, his benignity, appalled me. I knew how terrible would be the change, how fearful his rage, when I should tell him the truth. And yet that I, Gil de Berault, should tremble before any man! I spurred myself, as it were, to the task. "No, Your Eminence," I said, with the courage of despair. "I have not brought him, because I have set him free."

"Because you have--what?" he exclaimed. He leaned forward, his hands on the arm of his chair; and his glittering eyes, growing each instant smaller, seemed to read my soul.

"Because I have let him go," I repeated.

"And why?" he said, in a voice like the rasping of a file.

"Because I took him unfairly," I answered desperately. "Because, Monseigneur, I am a gentleman, and this task should have been given to one who was not. I took him, if you must know," I continued impatiently,--the fence once crossed, I was growing bolder,--"by dogging a woman's steps, and winning her confidence, and betraying it. And, whatever I have done ill in my life,--of which you were good enough to throw something in my teeth when I was last here,--I have never done that, and I will not!"

"And so you set him free?"

"Yes."

"After you had brought him to Auch?"

"Yes."

"And in point of fact saved him from falling into the hands of the commandant at Auch?"

"Yes," I answered desperately.

"Then what of the trust I placed in you, sirrah?" he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward, he probed me with his eyes. "You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that! What of the trust I placed in you?"

"The answer is simple," I said, shrugging my shoulders with a touch of my old self. "I am here to pay the penalty."

"And do you think that I do not know why?" he retorted, striking his one hand on the arm of the chair with a force which startled me. "Because you have heard, Sir, that my power is gone! That I, who was yesterday the King's right hand, am to-day dried up, withered, and paralyzed! Because--but have a care! Have a care!" he continued not loudly, but in a voice like a dog's snarl. "You, and those others! Have a care I say, or you may find yourselves mistaken yet!"

"As Heaven shall judge me," I answered solemnly, "that is not true. Until I reached Paris last night I knew nothing of this report. I came here with a single mind, to redeem my honour by placing again in Your Eminence's hands that which you gave me on trust."

For a moment he remained in the same attitude, staring at me fixedly. Then his face somewhat relaxed. "Be good enough to ring that bell," he said.

It stood on a table near me. I rang it, and a velvet-footed man in black came in, and gliding up to the Cardinal placed a paper in his hand. The Cardinal looked at it while the man stood with his head obsequiously bent; my heart beat furiously. "Very good," the Cardinal said, after a pause, which seemed to me to be endless. "Let the doors be thrown open."

The man bowed low, and retired behind the screen. I heard a little bell ring, somewhere in the silence, and in a moment the Cardinal stood up. "Follow me!" he said, with a strange flash of his keen eyes.

Astonished, I stood aside while he passed to the screen; then I followed him. Outside the first door, which stood open, we found eight or nine persons,--pages, a monk, the major-domo, and several guards waiting like mutes. These signed to me to precede them, and fell in behind us, and in that order we passed through the first room and the second, where the clerks stood with bent heads to receive us. The last door, the door of the ante-chamber, flew open as we approached; a score of voices cried, "Place! Place for His Eminence!" We passed without pause through two lines of bowing lackeys, and entered--an empty room!

The ushers did not know how to look at one another. The lackeys trembled in their shoes. But the Cardinal walked on, apparently unmoved, until he had passed slowly half the length of the chamber. Then he turned himself about, looking first to one side; and then to another, with a low laugh of derision. "Father," he said, in his thin voice, "what does the psalmist say? 'I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, and like an owl that is in the desert!'"

The monk mumbled assent.

"And later, in the same psalm is it not written, 'They shall perish, but thou shalt endure!'"

"It is so," the father answered. "Amen."

"Doubtless that refers to another life," the Cardinal continued, with his slow, wintry smile. "In the meantime we will go back to our book? and our prayers, and serve God and the King in small things, if not in great. Come, father, this is no longer a place for us. Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas! We will retire."

So, as solemnly as we had come, we marched back through the first and second and third doors, until we stood again in the silence of the Cardinal's chamber; he and I and the velvet-footed man in black. For a while Richelieu seemed to forget me. He stood brooding on the hearth, with his eye's on the embers. Once I heard him laugh; and twice he uttered in a tone of bitter mockery, the words, "Fools! Fools! Fools!"

At last he looked up, saw me, and started. "Ah!" he said. "I had forgotten you. Well, you are fortunate, M. de Berault. Yesterday I had a hundred clients. To-day I have only one, and I cannot afford to hang him. But for your liberty--that is another matter."

I would have said something, but he turned abruptly to the table, and sitting down wrote a few lines on a piece of paper. Then he rang his bell, while I stood waiting and confounded.

The man in black came from behind the screen. "Take that letter and this gentleman to the upper guard-room," His Eminence said sharply. "I can hear no more," he continued wearily, raising his hand to forbid interruption. "The matter is ended, M. de Berault. Be thankful."

And in a moment I was outside the door, my head in a whirl, my heart divided between gratitude and resentment. Along several passages I followed my guide; everywhere finding the same silence, the same monastic stillness. At length, when I had begun to consider whether the Bastile or the Chatelet would be my fate, he stopped at a door, gave me the letter, and, lifting the latch, signed to me to enter.

I went in in amazement, and stopped in confusion. Before me, alone, just risen from a chair, with her face one moment pale, the next red with blushes, stood Mademoiselle de Cocheforet. I cried out her name.

"M. de Berault!" she said, visibly trembling. "You did not expect to see me?"

"I expected to see no one so little, Mademoiselle," I answered, striving to recover my composure.

"Yet you might have thought that we should not utterly desert you," she replied, with a reproachful humility which went to my heart. "We should have been base indeed, if we had not made some attempt to save you. I thank Heaven that it has so far succeeded that that strange man has promised me your life. You have seen him?" she continued eagerly, and in another tone, while her eyes grew suddenly large with fear.

"Yes, Mademoiselle, I have seen him," I said. "And he has given me my life."

"And?"

"And sent me to imprisonment."

"For how long?" she whispered.

"I do not know," I answered. "I expect, during the King's pleasure."

She shuddered. "I may have done more harm than good," she murmured, looking at me piteously. "But I did it for the best. I told him all, and--yes, perhaps I did harm."

But to hear her accuse herself thus, when she had made this long and lonely journey to save me; when she had forced herself into her enemy's presence, and had, as I was sure she had, abased herself for me, was more than I could bear. "Hush, Mademoiselle, hush!" I said, almost roughly. "You hurt me. You have made me happy: and yet I wish that you were not here, where I fear you have few friends, but back at Cocheforet. You have done more than I expected, and a hundred times more than I deserved. But I was a ruined man before this happened. I am no more now, but I am still that; and I would not have your name pinned to mine on Paris lips. Therefore, good-bye. God forbid I should say more to you, or let you stay where foul tongues would soon malign you."

She looked at me in a kind of wonder; then with a growing smile, "It is too late," she said gently.

"Too late?" I exclaimed. "How, Mademoiselle?"

"Because--do you remember, M. de Berault, what you told me of your love story, by Agen? That it could have no happy ending? For the same reason I was not ashamed to tell mine to the Cardinal. By this time it is common property."

I looked at her as she stood facing me. Her eyes shone, but they were downcast. Her figure drooped, and yet a smile trembled on her lips. "What did you tell him, Mademoiselle?" I whispered, my breath coming quickly.

"That I loved," she answered boldly, raising her clear eyes to mine. "And therefore that I was not ashamed to beg, even on my knees. Nor ashamed to be with my lover, even in prison."

I fell on my knees, and caught her hand before the last word passed her lips. For the moment I forgot King and Cardinal, prison and the future, all--all except that this woman, so pure and so beautiful, so far above me in all things, loved me. For the moment, I say. Then I remembered myself. I stood up and thrust her from me, in a sudden revulsion of feeling. "You do not know me," I said. "You do not know me. You do not know what I have done."

"That is what I do know," she answered, looking at me with a wondrous smile.

"Ah, but you do not," I cried. "And besides, there is this--this between us." And I picked up the Cardinal's letter. It had fallen on the floor.

She turned a shade paler. Then she said, "Open it! Open it! It is not sealed, nor closed."

I obeyed mechanically, dreading what I might see. Even when I had it open I looked at the finely scrawled characters with eyes askance. But at last I made it out. It ran thus:--

"The King's pleasure is, that M. de Berault, having mixed himself up with affairs of state, retire forthwith to the manor of Cocheforet, and confine himself within its limits, until the King's pleasure be further known.

"Richelieu."

On the next day we were married. The same evening we left Paris, and I retraced, in her company, the road which I had twice traversed alone and in heaviness.

A fortnight later we were at Cocheforet, in the brown woods under the southern mountains; and the great Cardinal, once more triumphant over his enemies, saw, with cold, smiling eyes, the world pass through his chamber. The flood-tide, which then set in, lasted thirteen years; in brief, until his death. For the world had learned its lesson, and was not to be deceived a second time. To this hour they call that day, which saw me stand for all his friends, "The day of Dupes."

THE END

COUNT HANNIBAL

SORORI SUA CAUSSA CARAE PIO ERGA MATREM AMORE ETIAM CARIORI HOC FRATER

CONTENTS

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I. CRIMSON FAVOURS

II. HANNIBAL DE SAULX, COMTE DE TAVANNES.

III. THE HOUSE NEXT THE GOLDEN MAID.

IV. THE EVE OF THE FEAST.

V. A ROUGH WOOING.

VI. "WHO TOUCHES TAVANNES?"

VII. IN THE AMPHITHEATRE.

VIII. TWO HENS AND AN EGG.

IX. UNSTABLE.

X. MADAME ST. LO.

XI. A BARGAIN.

XII. IN THE HALL OF THE LOUVRE.

XIII. DIPLOMACY.

XIV. TOO SHORT A SPOON.

XV. THE BROTHER OF ST. MAGLOIRE.

XVI. AT CLOSE QUARTERS.

XVII. THE DUEL.

XVIII. ANDROMEDA, PERSEUS BEING ABSENT.

XIX. IN THE ORLEANNAIS.

XX. ON THE CASTLE HILL.

XXI. SHE WOULD, AND WOULD NOT.

XXII. PLAYING WITH FIRE.

XXIII. A MIND, AND NOT A MIND.

XXIV. AT THE KING'S INN.

XXV. THE COMPANY OF THE BLEEDING HEART.

XXVI. TEMPER.

XXVII. THE BLACK TOWN.

XXVIII. IN THE LITTLE CHAPTER HOUSE.

XXIX. THE ESCAPE.

XXX. SACRILEGE!

XXXI. THE FLIGHT FROM ANGERS.

XXXII. THE ORDEAL BY STEEL.

XXXIII. THE AMBUSH.

XXXIV. "WHICH WILL YOU, MADAME?"

XXXV. AGAINST THE WALL.

XXXVI. HIS KINGDOM.

COUNT HANNIBAL.

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I. CRIMSON FAVOURS

M. de Tavannes smiled. Mademoiselle averted her eyes, and shivered; as if the air, even of that close summer night, entering by the door at her elbow, chilled her. And then came a welcome interruption.

"Tavannes!"

"Sire!"

Count Hannibal rose slowly. The King had called, and he had no choice but to obey and go. Yet he hung a last moment over his companion, his hateful breath stirring her hair. "Our pleasure is cut short too soon, Mademoiselle," he said, in the tone and with the look she loathed. "But for a few hours only. We shall meet to-morrow. Or, it may be--earlier."

She did not answer, and "Tavannes!" the King repeated with violence. "Tavannes! Mordieu!" his Majesty continued, looking round furiously. "Will no one fetch him? Sacre nom, am I King, or a dog of a----"

"I come, sire!" Count Hannibal cried in haste. For Charles, King of France, Ninth of the name, was none of the most patient; and scarce another in the Court would have ventured to keep him waiting so long. "I come, sire; I come!" Tavannes repeated, as he moved from her side.

He shouldered his way through the circle of courtiers, who barred the road to the presence, and in part hid Mademoiselle from observation. He pushed past the table at which Charles and the Comte de Rochefoucauld had been playing primero, and at which the latter still sat, trifling idly with the cards. Three more paces, and he reached the King, who stood in the ruelle with Rambouillet and the Italian Marshal. It was the latter who, a moment before, had summoned his Majesty from his game.

Mademoiselle, watching him go, saw so much; so much, and the King's roving eyes and haggard face, and the four figures, posed apart in the fuller light of the upper half of the Chamber. Then the circle of courtiers came together before her, and she sat back on her stool. A fluttering, long-drawn sigh escaped her. Now, if she could slip out and make her escape! Now--she looked round. She was not far from the door; to withdraw seemed easy. But a staring, whispering knot of gentlemen and pages blocked the way; and the girl, ignorant of the etiquette of the Court and with no more than a week's experience of Paris, had not the courage to rise and pass alone through the group.

She had come to the Louvre this Saturday evening under the wing of Madame d'Yverne, her fiance's cousin. By ill hap Madame had been summoned to the Princess Dowager's closet, and perforce had left her. Still, Mademoiselle had her betrothed, and in his charge had sat herself down to wait, nothing loth, in the great gallery, where all was bustle and gaiety and entertainment. For this, the seventh day of the fetes, held to celebrate the marriage of the King of Navarre and Charles's sister--a marriage which was to reconcile the two factions of the Huguenots and the Catholics, so long at war--saw the Louvre as gay, as full, and as lively as the first of the fete days had found it; and in the humours of the throng, in the ceaseless passage of masks and maids of honour, guards and bishops, Swiss in the black, white and green of Anjou, and Huguenot nobles in more sombre habits, the country-bred girl had found recreation and to spare. Until gradually the evening had worn away and she had begun to feel nervous; and M. de Tignonville, her betrothed, placing her in the embrasure of a window, had gone to seek Madame.

She had waited for a time without much misgiving; expecting each moment to see him return. He would be back before she could count a hundred; he would be back before she could number the leagues that separated her from her beloved province, and the home by the Biscay Sea, to which even in that brilliant scene her thoughts turned fondly. But the minutes had passed, and passed, and he had not returned. Worse, in his place Tavannes--not the Marshal, but his brother Count Hannibal--had found her; he, whose odious court, at once a menace and an insult, had subtly enveloped her for a week past. He had sat down beside her, he had taken possession of her, and, profiting by her inexperience, had played on her fears and smiled at her dislike. Finally, whether she would or no, he had swept her with him into the Chamber. The rest had been an obsession, a nightmare, from which only the King's voice summoning Tavannes to his side had relieved her.

Her aim now was to escape before he returned, and before another, seeing her alone, adopted his role and was rude to her. Already the courtiers about her were beginning to stare, the pages to turn and titter and whisper. Direct her gaze as she might, she met some eye watching her, some couple enjoying her confusion. To make matters worse, she presently discovered that she was the only woman in the Chamber; and she conceived the notion that she had no right to be there at that hour. At the thought her cheeks burned, her eyes dropped; the room seemed to buzz with her name, with gross words and jests, and gibes at her expense.

At last, when the situation had grown nearly unbearable, the group before the door parted, and Tignonville appeared. The girl rose with a cry of relief, and he came to her. The courtiers glanced at the two and smiled.

He did not conceal his astonishment at finding her there. "But, Mademoiselle, how is this?" he asked in a low voice. He was as conscious of the attention they attracted as she was, and as uncertain on the point of her right to be there. "I left you in the gallery. I came back, missed you, and----"

She stopped him by a gesture. "Not here!" she muttered, with suppressed impatience. "I will tell you outside. Take me--take me out, if you please, Monsieur, at once!"

He was as glad to be gone as she was to go. The group by the doorway parted; she passed through it, he followed. In a moment the two stood in the great gallery, above the Salle des Caryatides. The crowd which had paraded here an hour before was gone, and the vast echoing apartment, used at that date as a guard-room, was well-nigh empty. Only at rare intervals, in the embrasure of a window or the recess of a door, a couple talked softly. At the farther end, near the head of the staircase which led to the hall below, and the courtyard, a group of armed Swiss lounged on guard. Mademoiselle shot a keen glance up and down, then she turned to her lover, her face hot with indignation.

"Why did you leave me?" she asked. "Why did you leave me, if you could not come back at once? Do you understand, sir," she continued, "that it was at your instance I came to Paris, that I came to this Court, and that I look to you for protection?"

"Surely," he said. "And----"

"And do you think Carlat and his wife fit guardians for me? Should I have come or thought of coming to this wedding, but for your promise, and Madame your cousin's? If I had not deemed myself almost your wife," she continued warmly, "and secure of your protection, should I have come within a hundred miles of this dreadful city? To which, had I my will, none of our people should have come."

"Dreadful? Pardieu, not so dreadful," he answered, smiling, and striving to give the dispute a playful turn. "You have seen more in a week than you would have seen at Vrillac in a lifetime, Mademoiselle."

"And I choke!" she retorted; "I choke! Do you not see how they look at us, at us Huguenots, in the street? How they, who live here, point at us and curse us? How the very dogs scent us out and snarl at our heels, and the babes cross themselves when we go by? Can you see the Place des Gastines and not think what stood there? Can you pass the Greve at night and not fill the air above the river with screams and wailings and horrible cries--the cries of our people murdered on that spot?" She paused for breath, recovered herself a little, and in a lower tone, "For me," she said, "I think of Philippine de Luns by day and by night! The eaves are a threat to me; the tiles would fall on us had they their will; the houses nod to--to----"

"To what, Mademoiselle?" he asked, shrugging his shoulders and assuming a tone of cynicism.

"To crush us! Yes, Monsieur, to crush us!"

"And all this because I left you for a moment?"

"For an hour--or well-nigh an hour," she answered more soberly.

"But if I could not help it?"

"You should have thought of that--before you brought me to Paris, Monsieur. In these troublous times."

He coloured warmly. "You are unjust, Mademoiselle," he said. "There are things you forget; in a Court one is not always master of oneself."

"I know it," she answered drily, thinking of that through which she had gone.

"But you do not know what happened!" he returned with impatience. "You do not understand that I am not to blame. Madame d'Yverne, when I reached the Princess Dowager's closet, had left to go to the Queen of Navarre. I hurried after her, and found a score of gentlemen in the King of Navarre's chamber. They were holding a council, and they begged, nay, they compelled me to remain."

"And it was that which detained you so long?"

"To be sure, Mademoiselle."

"And not--Madame St. Lo?"

M. de Tignonville's face turned scarlet. The thrust in tierce was unexpected. This then was the key to Mademoiselle's spirt of temper. "I do not understand you," he stammered.

"How long were you in the King of Navarre's chamber, and how long with Madame St. Lo?" she asked with fine irony. "Or no, I will not tempt you," she went on quickly, seeing him hesitate. "I heard you talking to Madame St. Lo in the gallery while I sat within. And I know how long you were with her."

"I met Madame as I returned," he stammered, his face still hot, "and I asked her where you were. I did not know, Mademoiselle, that I was, not to speak to ladies of my acquaintance."

"I was alone, and I was waiting."

"I could not know that--for certain," he answered, making the best of it. "You were not where I left you. I thought, I confess--that you had gone. That you had gone home."

"With whom? With whom?" she repeated pitilessly. "Was it likely? With whom was I to go? And yet it is true, I might have gone home had I pleased--with M. de Tavannes! Yes," she continued, in a tone of keen reproach and with the blood mounting to her forehead, "it is to that, Monsieur, you expose me! To be pursued, molested, harassed by a man whose look terrifies me, and whose touch I--I detest! To be addressed wherever I go by a man whose every word proves that he thinks me game for the hunter, and you a thing he may neglect. You are a man and you do not know, you cannot know what I suffer! What I have suffered this week past whenever you have left my side!"

Tignonville looked gloomy. "What has he said to you?" he asked, between his teeth.

"Nothing I can tell you," she answered with a shudder. "It was he who took me into the Chamber."

"Why did you go?"

"Wait until he bids you do something," she answered. "His manner, his smile, his tone, all frighten me. And to-night, in all these there was a something worse, a hundred times worse than when I saw him last--on Thursday! He seemed to--to gloat on me," the girl stammered, with a flush of shame, "as if I were his! Oh, Monsieur, I wish we had not left our Poitou! Shall we ever see Vrillac again, and the fishers' huts about the port, and the sea beating blue against the long brown causeway?"

He had listened darkly, almost sullenly; but at this, seeing the tears gather in her eyes, he forced a laugh. "Why, you are as bad as M. de Rosny and the Vidame!" he said. "And they are as full of fears as an egg is of meat! Since the Admiral was wounded by that scoundrel on Friday, they think all Paris is in a league against us."

"And why not!" she asked, her cheek grown pale, her eyes reading his eyes.

"Why not? Why, because it is a monstrous thing even to think of!" Tignonville answered, with the confidence of one who did not use the argument for the first time. "Could they insult the King more deeply than by such a suspicion? A Borgia may kill his guests, but it was never a practice of the Kings of France! Pardieu, I have no patience with them! They may lodge where they please, across the river, or without the walls if they choose, the Rue de l'Arbre Sec is good enough for me, and the King's name sufficient surety!"

"I know you are not apt to be fearful," she answered, smiling; and she looked at him with a woman's pride in her lover. "All the same, you will not desert me again, sir, will you?"

He vowed he would not, kissed her hand, looked into her eyes; then melting to her, stammering, blundering, he named Madame St. Lo. She stopped him.

"There is no need," she said, answering his look with kind eyes, and refusing to hear his protestations. "In a fortnight will you not be my husband? How should I distrust you? It was only that while she talked, I waited--I waited; and--and that Madame St. Lo is Count Hannibal's cousin. For a moment I was mad enough to dream that she held you on purpose. You do not think it was so?"

"She!" he cried sharply; and he winced, as if the thought hurt him. "Absurd! The truth is, Mademoiselle," he continued with a little heat, "you are like so many of our people! You think a Catholic capable of the worst."

"We have long thought so at Vrillac," she answered gravely.

"That's over now, if people would only understand. This wedding has put an end to all that. But I'm harking back," he continued awkwardly; and he stopped. "Instead, let me take you home."

"If you please. Carlat and the servants should be below."

He took her left hand in his right after the wont of the day, and with his other hand touching his sword-hilt, he led her down the staircase, that by a single turn reached the courtyard of the palace. Here a mob of armed servants, of lacqueys, and foot-boys, some bearing torches, and some carrying their masters' cloaks and galoshes, loitered to and fro. Had M. de Tignonville been a little more observant, or a trifle less occupied with his own importance, he might have noted more than one face which looked darkly on him; he might have caught more than one overt sneer at his expense. But in the business of summoning Carlat--Mademoiselle de Vrillac's steward and major-domo--he lost the contemptuous "Christaudins!" that hissed from a footboy's lips, and the "Southern dogs!" that died in the moustachios of a bully in the livery of the King's brother. He was engaged in finding the steward, and in aiding him to cloak his mistress; then with a ruffling air, a new acquirement, which he had picked up since he came to Paris, he made a way for her through the crowd. A moment, and the three, followed by half a dozen armed servants, bearing pikes and torches, detached themselves from the throng, and crossing the courtyard, with its rows of lighted windows, passed out by the gate between the Tennis Courts, and so into the Rue des Fosses de St. Germain.

Before them, against a sky in which the last faint glow of evening still contended with the stars, the spire and pointed arches of the church of St. Germain rose darkly graceful. It was something after nine; the heat of the August day brooded over the crowded city, and dulled the faint distant ring of arms and armour that yet would make itself heard above the hush; a hush which was not silence so much as a subdued hum. As Mademoiselle passed the closed house beside the Cloister of St. Germain where only the day before Admiral Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, had been wounded, she pressed her escort's hand, and involuntarily drew nearer to him. But he laughed at her.

"It was a private blow," he said, answering her unspoken thought. "It is like enough the Guises sped it. But they know now what is the King's will, and they have taken the hint and withdrawn themselves. It will not happen again, Mademoiselle. For proof, see the guards"--they were passing the end of the Rue Bethizy, in the corner house of which, abutting on the Rue de l'Arbre Sec, Coligny had his lodgings--"whom the King has placed for his security. Fifty pikes under Cosseins."

"Cosseins?" she repeated. "But I thought Cosseins----"

"Was not wont to love us!" Tignonville answered with a confident chuckle. "He was not. But the dogs lick where the master wills, Mademoiselle. He was not, but he does. This marriage has altered all."

"I hope it may not prove an unlucky one!" she murmured. She felt impelled to say it.

"Not it!" he answered confidently. "Why should it?"

They stopped, as he spoke, before the last house, at the corner of the Rue St. Honore opposite the Croix du Tiroir; which rose shadowy in the middle of the four ways. He hammered on the door.

"But," she said softly, looking in his face, "the change is sudden, is it not? The King was not wont to be so good to us!"

"The King was not King until now," he answered "That is what I am trying to persuade our people. Believe me, Mademoiselle, you may sleep without fear; and early in the morning I will be with you. Carlat, have a care of your mistress until morning, and let Madame lie in her chamber. She is nervous to-night. There, sweet, until morning! God keep you, and pleasant dreams!"

He uncovered, and bowing over her hand, kissed it; and the door being open he would have turned away. But she lingered as if unwilling to enter. "There is--do you hear it--a stir in that quarter?" she said, pointing across the Rue St. Honore. "What lies there?"

"Northward? The markets," he answered. "'Tis nothing. They say, you know, that Paris never sleeps. Good-night, sweet, and a fair awakening!"

She shivered as she had shivered under Tavannes' eye. And still she lingered, keeping him. "Are you going to your lodging at once?" she asked--for the sake, it seemed, of saying something.

"I?" he answered a little hurriedly. "No, I was thinking of paying Rochefoucauld the compliment of seeing him home. He has taken a new lodging to be near the Admiral; a horrid bare place in the Rue Bethizy, without furniture, but he would go into it to-day. And he has a sort of claim on my family, you know."

"Yes," she said simply. "Of course. Then I must not detain you. God keep you safe," she continued, with a faint quiver in her tone; and her lip trembled. "Good-night, and fair dreams, Monsieur."

He echoed the words gallantly. "Of you, sweet!" he cried; and turning away with a gesture of farewell, he set off on his return.

He walked briskly, nor did he look back, though she stood awhile gazing after him. She was not aware that she gave thought to this; nor that it hurt her. Yet when bolt and bar had shot behind her, and she had mounted the cold, bare staircase of that day--when she had heard the dull echoing footsteps of her attendants as they withdrew to their lairs and sleeping-places, and still more when she had crossed the threshold of her chamber, and signed to Madame Carlat and her woman to listen--it is certain she felt a lack of something.

Perhaps the chill that possessed her came of that lack, which she neither defined nor acknowledged. Or possibly it came of the night air, August though it was; or of sheer nervousness, or of the remembrance of Count Hannibal's smile. Whatever its origin, she took it to bed with her; and long after the house slept round her, long after the crowded quarter of the Halles had begun to heave and the Sorbonne to vomit a black-frocked band, long after the tall houses in the gabled streets, from St. Antoine to Montmartre and from St. Denis on the north to St. Jacques on the south, had burst into rows of twinkling lights--nay, long after the Quarter of the Louvre alone remained dark, girdled by this strange midnight brightness--she lay awake. At length she too slept, and dreamed of home and the wide skies of Poitou, and her castle of Vrillac washed day and night by the Biscay tides.

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II. HANNIBAL DE SAULX, COMTE DE TAVANNES

"Tavannes!"

"Sire."

Tavannes, we know, had been slow to obey the summons. Emerging from the crowd he found that the King, with Retz and Rambouillet, his Marshal des Logis, had retired to the farther end of the Chamber; apparently Charles had forgotten that he had called. His head a little bent--he was tall and had a natural stoop--the King seemed to be listening to a low but continuous murmur of voices which proceeded from the door of his closet. One voice frequently raised was beyond doubt a woman's; a foreign accent, smooth and silky, marked another; a third, that from time to time broke in, wilful and impetuous, was the voice of Monsieur, the King's brother, Catherine de Medicis' favourite son. Tavannes, waiting respectfully two paces behind the King, could catch little that was said; but Charles, something more, it seemed, for on a sudden he laughed, a violent, mirthless laugh. And he clapped Rambouillet on the shoulder.

"There!" he said, with one of his horrible oaths, "'tis settled! 'Tis settled! Go, man, and take your orders! And you, M. de Retz," he continued, in a tone of savage mockery, "go, my lord, and give them!"

"I, sire?" the Italian Marshal answered in accents of deprecation. There were times when the young King would show his impatience of the Italian ring, the Retzs and Biragues, the Strozzis and Gondys, with whom his mother surrounded him.

"Yes, you!" Charles answered. "You and my lady mother! And in God's name answer for it at the day!" he continued vehemently. "You will have it! You will not let me rest till you have it! Then have it, only see to it, it be done thoroughly! There shall not be one left to cast it in the King's teeth and cry, 'Et tu, Carole!' Swim, swim in blood if you will," he continued with growing wildness. "Oh, 'twill be a merry night! And it's true so far, you may kill fleas all day, but burn the coat, and there's an end. So burn it, burn it, and----" He broke off with a start as he discovered Tavannes at his elbow. "God's death, man!" he cried roughly, "who sent for you?"

"Your Majesty called me," Tavannes answered; while, partly urged by the King's hand, and partly anxious to escape, the others slipped into the closet and left them together.

"I sent for you? I called your brother, the Marshal!"

"He is within, sire," Tavannes answered, indicating the closet. "A moment ago I heard his voice."

Charles passed his shaking hand across his eyes. "Is he?" he muttered. "So he is! I heard it too. And--and a man cannot be in two places at once!" Then while his haggard gaze, passing by Tavannes, roved round the Chamber, he laid his hand on Count Hannibal's breast. "They give me no peace, Madame and the Guises," he whispered, his face hectic with excitement. "They will have it. They say that Coligny--they say that he beards me in my own palace. And--and, mordieu," with sudden violence, "it's true! It's true enough! It was but to-day he was for making terms with me! With me, the King! Making terms! So it shall be, by God and Devil, it shall! But not six or seven! No, no. All! All! There shall not be one left to say to me, 'You did it!'"

"Softly, sire," Tavannes answered; for Charles had gradually raised his voice. "You will be observed."

For the first time the young King--he was but twenty-two years old, God pity him!--looked at his companion. "To be sure," he whispered; and his eyes grew cunning. "Besides, and after all, there's another way, if I choose. Oh, I've thought and thought, I'd have you know." And shrugging his shoulders, almost to his ears, he raised and lowered his open hands alternately, while his back hid the movement from the Chamber. "See-saw! See-saw!" he muttered. "And the King between the two, you see. That's Madame's king-craft. She's shown me that a hundred times. But look you, it is as easy to lower the one as the other," with a cunning glance at Tavannes' face, "or to cut off the right as the left. And--and the Admiral's an old man and will pass; and for the matter of that I like to hear him talk. He talks well. While the others, Guise and his kind, are young, and I've thought, oh, yes, I've thought--but there," with a sudden harsh laugh, "my lady mother will have it her own way. And for this time she shall, but, All! All! Even Foucauld, there! Do you mark him? He's sorting the cards. Do you see him--as he will be to-morrow, with the slit in his throat and his teeth showing? Why, God!" his voice rising almost to a scream, "the candles by him are burning blue!" And with a shaking hand, his face convulsed, the young King clutched his companion's arm, and pinched it.

Count Hannibal shrugged his shoulders, but answered nothing.

"D'you think we shall see them afterwards?" Charles resumed, in a sharp, eager whisper. "In our dreams, man? Or when the watchman cries, and we awake, and the monks are singing lauds at St. Germain, and--and the taper is low?"

Tavannes' lip curled. "I don't dream, sire," he answered coldly, "and I seldom wake. For the rest, I fear my enemies neither alive nor dead."

"Don't you? By G--d, I wish I didn't," the young man exclaimed. His brow was wet with sweat. "I wish I didn't. But there, it's settled. They've settled it, and I would it were done! What do you think of--of it, man? What do you think of it, yourself?"

Count Hannibal's face was inscrutable. "I think nothing, sire," he said drily. "It is for your Majesty and your council to think. It is enough for me that it is the King's will."

"But you'll not flinch?" Charles muttered, with a quick look of suspicion. "But there," with a monstrous oath, "I know you'll not! I believe you'd as soon kill a monk--though, thank God," and he crossed himself devoutly, "there is no question of that--as a man. And sooner than a maiden."

"Much sooner, sire," Tavannes answered grimly. "If you have any orders in the monkish direction--no? Then your Majesty must not talk to me longer. M. de Rochefoucauld is beginning to wonder what is keeping your Majesty from your game. And others are marking you, sire."

"By the Lord!" Charles exclaimed, a ring of wonder mingled with horror in his tone, "if they knew what was in our minds they'd mark us more! Yet, see Nancay there beside the door? He is unmoved. He looks to-day as he looked yesterday. Yet he has charge of the work in the palace----"

For the first time Tavannes allowed a movement of surprise to escape him. "In the palace?" he muttered. "Is it to be done here, too, sire?"

"Would you let some escape, to return by-and-by and cut our throats?" the King retorted with a strange spirt of fury; an incapacity to maintain the same attitude of mind for two minutes together was the most fatal weakness of his ill-balanced nature. "No. All! All!" he repeated with vehemence. "Didn't Noah people the earth with eight? But I'll not leave eight! My cousins, for they are blood-royal, shall live if they will recant. And my old nurse whether or no. And Pare, for no one else understands my complexion. And----"

"And Rochefoucauld, doubtless, sire?"

The King, whose eye had sought his favourite companion, withdrew it. He darted a glance at Tavannes. "Foucauld? Who said so?" he muttered jealously. "Not I! But we shall see. We shall see! And do you see that you spare no one, M. le Comte, without an order. That is your business."

"I understand, sire," Tavannes answered coolly. And after a moment's silence, seeing that the King had done with him, he bowed low and withdrew; watched by the circle, as all about a King were watched in the days when a King's breath meant life or death, and his smile made the fortunes of men. As he passed Rochefoucauld, the latter looked up and nodded.

"What keeps brother Charles?" he muttered. "He's madder than ever to-night. Is it a masque or a murder he is planning?"

"The vapours," Tavannes answered with a sneer. "Old tales his old nurse has stuffed him withal. He'll come by-and-by, and 'twill be well if you can divert him."

"I will if he come," Rochefoucauld answered, shuffling the cards. "If not 'tis Chicot's business and he should attend to it. I'm tired and shall to bed."

"He will come," Tavannes answered, and moved, as if to go on. Then he paused for a last word. "He will come," he muttered, stooping and speaking under his breath, his eyes on the other's face. "But play him lightly. He is in an ugly mood. Please him, if you can, and it may serve."

The eyes of the two met an instant, and those of Foucauld--so the King called his Huguenot favourite--betrayed some surprise; for Count Hannibal and he were not intimate. But seeing that the other was in earnest, he raised his brows in acknowledgment. Tavannes nodded carelessly in return, looked an instant at the cards on the table, and passed on, pushed his way through the circle, and reached the door. He was lifting the curtain to go out, when Naucay, the Captain of the Guard, plucked his sleeve.

"What have you been saying to Foucauld, M. de Tavannes?" he muttered.

"I?"

"Yes," with a jealous glance, "you, M. le Comte." Count Hannibal looked at him with the sudden ferocity that made the man a proverb at Court. "What I chose, M. le Capitaine des Suisses!" he hissed. And his hand closed like a vice on the other's wrist. "What I chose, look you! And remember, another time, that I am not a Huguenot, and say what I please."

"But there is great need of care," Nancay protested, stammering and flinching. "And--and I have orders, M. le Comte."

"Your orders are not for me," Tavannes answered, releasing his arm with a contemptuous gesture. "And look you, man, do not cross my path to-night. You know our motto? Who touches my brother, touches Tavannes! Be warned by it."

Nancay scowled. "But the priests say, 'If your hand offend you, cut it off!'" he muttered.

Tavannes laughed, a sinister laugh. "If you offend me I'll cut your throat," he said; and with no ceremony he went out, and dropped the curtain behind him.

Nancay looked after him, his face pale with rage. "Curse him!" he whispered, rubbing his wrist. "If he were anyone else I would teach him! But he would as soon run you through in the presence as in the Pre aux Clercs! And his brother, the Marshal, has the King's ear! And Madame Catherine's too, which is worse!"

He was still fuming when an officer in the colours of Monsieur, the King's brother, entered hurriedly, and keeping his hand on the curtain, looked anxiously round the Chamber. As soon as his eye found Nancay, his face cleared. "Have you the reckoning?" he muttered.

"There are seventeen Huguenots in the palace besides their Highnesses," Nancay replied, in the same cautious tone. "Not counting two or three who are neither the one thing nor the other. In addition, there are the two Montmorencies; but they are to go safe for fear of their brother, who is not in the trap. He is too like his father, the old Bench-burner, to be lightly wronged! And besides, there is Pare, who is to go to his Majesty's closet as soon as the gates are shut. If the King decides to save anyone else, he will send him to his closet. So 'tis all clear and arranged here. If you are as forward outside, it will be well! Who deals with the gentleman with the toothpick?"

"The Admiral? Monsieur, Guise, and the Grand Prior; Cosseins and Besme have charge. 'Tis to be done first. Then the Provost will raise the town. He will have a body of stout fellows ready at three or four rendezvous, so that the fire may blaze up everywhere at once. Marcel, the ex-provost, has the same commission south of the river. Orders to light the town as for a frolic have been given, and the Halles will be ready."

Nancay nodded, reflected a moment, and then with an involuntary shudder, "God!" he exclaimed, "it will shake the world!"

"You think so?"

"Ay, will it not!" His next words showed that he bore Tavannes' warning in mind. "For me, my friend, I go in mail to-night," he said. "There will be many a score paid before morning, besides his Majesty's. And many a left-handed blow will be struck in the melee!"

The other crossed himself. "Grant none light here!" he said devoutly. And with a last look he nodded and went out.

In the doorway he jostled a person who was in the act of entering. It was M. de Tignonville, who, seeing Nancay at his elbow, saluted him, and stood looking round. The young man's face was flushed, his eyes were bright with unwonted excitement. "M. de Rochefoucauld?" he asked eagerly. "He has not left yet?"

Nancay caught the thrill in his voice, and marked the young man's flushed face, and altered bearing. He noted, too, the crumpled paper he carried half-hidden in his hand; and the Captain's countenance grew dark. He drew a step nearer and his hand reached softly for his dagger. But his voice when he spoke was smooth as the surface of the pleasure-loving Court, smooth as the externals of all things in Paris that summer evening. "He is here still," he said. "Have you news, M. de Tignonville?"

"News?"

"For M. de Rochefoucauld?"

Tignonville laughed. "No," he said. "I am here to see him to his lodging, that is all. News, Captain? What made you think so?"

"That which you have in your hand," Nancay answered, his fears relieved.

The young man blushed to the roots of his hail "It is not for him," he said.

"I can see that, Monsieur," Nancay answered politely. "He has his successes, but all the billets-doux do not go one way."

The young man laughed, a conscious, flattered laugh. He was handsome, with such a face as women love, but there was a lack of ease in the way he wore his Court suit. It was a trifle finer, too, than accorded with Huguenot taste; or it looked the finer for the way he wore it, even as Teliguy's and Foucauld's velvet capes and stiff brocades lost their richness and became but the adjuncts, fitting and graceful, of the men. Odder still, as Tignonville laughed, half hiding and half revealing the dainty, scented paper in his hand, his clothes seemed smarter and he more awkward than usual. "It is from a lady," he admitted. "But a bit of badinage, I assure you, nothing more."

"Understood!" M. de Nancay murmured politely. "I congratulate you."

"But----"

"I say I congratulate you!"

"But it is nothing."

"Oh, I understand. And see, the King is about to rise. Go forward, Monsieur," he continued benevolently. "A young man should show himself. Besides his Majesty likes you well," he added with a leer. He had an unpleasant sense of humour, had his Majesty's Captain of the Guard; and this evening somewhat more than ordinary on which to exercise it.

Tignonville held too good an opinion of himself to suspect the other of badinage; and thus encouraged he pushed his way to the front of the circle. During his absence with his betrothed, the crowd in the Chamber had grown thin, the candles had burned an inch shorter in the sconces. But though many who had been there, had left, the more select remained, and the King's return to his seat had given the company a fillip. An air of feverish gaiety, common in the unhealthy life of the Court, prevailed. At a table abreast of the King, Montpensier and Marshal Cosse were dicing and disputing, with now a yell of glee, and now an oath, that betrayed which way fortune inclined. At the back of the King's chair, Chicot, his gentleman-jester, hung over Charles's shoulder, now scanning his cards, and now making hideous faces that threw the onlookers into fits of laughter. Farther up the Chamber, at the end of the alcove, Marshal Tavannes--our Hannibal's brother--occupied a low stool, which was set opposite the open door of the closet. Through this doorway a slender foot, silk-clad, shot now and again into sight; it came, it vanished, it came again, the gallant Marshal striving at each appearance to rob it of its slipper, a dainty jewelled thing of crimson velvet. He failed thrice, a peal of laughter greeting each failure. At the fourth essay, he upset his stool and fell to the floor, but held the slipper. And not the slipper only, but the foot. Amid a flutter of silken skirts and dainty laces--while the hidden beauty shrilly protested--he dragged first the ankle, and then a shapely leg into sight. The circle applauded; the lady, feeling herself still drawn on, screamed loudly and more loudly. All save the King and his opponent turned to look. And then the sport came to a sudden end. A sinewy hand appeared, interposed, released; for an instant the dark, handsome face of Guise looked through the doorway. It was gone as soon as seen; it was there a second only. But more than one recognised it, and wondered. For was not the young Duke in evil odour with the King by reason of the attack on the Admiral? And had he not been chased from Paris only that morning and forbidden to return?

They were still wondering, still gazing, when abruptly--as he did all things--Charles thrust back his chair. "Foucauld, you owe me ten pieces!" he cried with glee, and he slapped the table. "Pay, my friend; pay!"

"To-morrow, little master; to-morrow!" Rochefoucauld answered in the same tone. And he rose to his feet.

"To-morrow!" Charles repeated. "To-morrow?" And on the word his jaw fell. He looked wildly round. His face was ghastly.

"Well, sire, and why not?" Rochefoucauld answered in astonishment. And in his turn he looked round, wondering; and a chill fell on him. "Why not?" he repeated.

For a moment no one answered him: the silence in the Chamber was intense. Where he looked, wherever he looked, he met solemn, wondering eyes, such eyes as gaze on men in their coffins. "What has come to you all?" he cried with an effort. "What is the jest, for faith, sire, I don't see it?"

The King seemed incapable of speech, and it was Chicot who filled the gap. "It is pretty apparent," he said with a rude laugh. "The cock will lay and Foucauld will pay--to-morrow!"

The young nobleman's colour rose; between him and the Gascon gentleman was no love lost. "There are some debts I pay to-day," he cried haughtily. "For the rest, farewell my little master! When one does not understand the jest it is time to be gone."

He was half-way to the door, watched by all, when the King spoke. "Foucauld!" he cried in an odd, strangled voice. "Foucauld!" And the Huguenot favourite turned back, wondering.

"One minute!" the King continued in the same forced voice. "Stay till morning--in my closet. It is late now. We'll play away the rest of the night!"

"Your Majesty must excuse me," Rochefoucauld answered frankly. "I am dead asleep."

"You can sleep in the Garde-Robe," the King persisted.

"Thank you for nothing, sire!" was the gay answer. "I know that bed! I shall sleep longer and better in my own."

The King shuddered, but strove to hide the movement under a shrug of his shoulders. He turned away. "It is God's will!" he muttered. He was white to the lips.

Rochefoucauld did not catch the words. "Good night, sire," he cried. "Farewell, little master." And with a nod here and there, he passed to the door, followed by Mergey and Chamont, two gentlemen of his suite.

Nancay raised the curtain with an obsequious gesture. "Pardon me, M. le Comte," he said, "do you go to his Highness's?"

"For a few minutes, Nancay."

"Permit me to go with you. The guards may be set."

"Do so, my friend," Rochefoucauld answered. "Ah, Tignonville, is it you!"

"I am come to attend you to your lodging," the young man said. And he ranged up beside the other, as, the curtain fallen behind them, they walked along the gallery.

Rochefoucauld stopped and laid his hand on Tignonville's sleeve. "Thanks, dear lad," he said, "but I am going to the Princess Dowager's. Afterwards to his Highness's. I may be detained an hour or more. You will not like to wait so long."

M. de Tignonville's face fell ludicrously. "Well, no," he said. "I--I don't think I could wait so long--to-night."

"Then come to-morrow night," Rochefoucauld answered with good nature.

"With pleasure," the other cried heartily, his relief evident. "Certainly. With pleasure." And, nodding good-night, they parted. While Rochefoucauld, with Nancay at his side and his gentlemen attending him, passed along the echoing and now empty gallery, the younger man bounded down the stairs to the great hall of the Caryatides, his face radiant. He for one was not sleepy.

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III. THE HOUSE NEXT THE "GOLDEN MAID."

We have it on record that before the Comte de la Rochefoucauld left the Louvre that night he received the strongest hints of the peril which threatened him; and at least one written warning was handed to him by a stranger in black, and by him in turn was communicated to the King of Navarre. We are told further that when he took his final leave, about the hour of eleven, he found the courtyard brilliantly lighted, and the three companies of guards--Swiss, Scotch, and French--drawn up in ranked array from the door of the great hall to the gate which opened on the street. But, the chronicler adds, neither this precaution, sinister as it appeared to some of his suite, nor the grave farewell which Rambouillet, from his post at the gate, took of one of his gentlemen, shook that chivalrous soul or sapped its generous confidence. M. de Tignonville was young and less versed in danger than the Governor of Rochelle; with him, had he seen so much, it might have been different. But he left the Louvre an hour earlier--at a time when the precincts of the palace, gloomy-seeming to us in the light cast by coming events, wore their wonted aspect. His thoughts, moreover, as he crossed the courtyard, were otherwise employed. So much so, indeed, that though he signed to his two servants to follow him, he seemed barely conscious what he was doing; nor did he shake off his reverie until he reached the corner of the Rue Baillet. Here the voices of the Swiss who stood on guard opposite Coligny's lodgings, at the end of the Rue Bethizy, could be plainly heard. They had kindled a fire in an iron basket set in the middle of the road, and knots of them were visible in the distance, moving to and fro about their piled arms.

Tignonville paused before he came within the radius of the firelight, and turning, bade his servants take their way home. "I shall follow, but I have business first," he added curtly.

The elder of the two demurred. "The streets are not too safe," he said. "In two hours or less, my lord, it will be midnight. And then----"

"Go, booby; do you think I am a child?" his master retorted angrily. "I've my sword and can use it. I shall not be long. And do you hear, men, keep a still tongue, will you?"

The men, country fellows, obeyed reluctantly, and with a full intention of sneaking after him the moment he had turned his back. But he suspected them of this, and stood where he was until they had passed the fire, and could no longer detect his movements. Then he plunged quickly into the Rue Baillet, gained through it the Rue du Roule, and traversing that also turned to the right into the Rue Ferronerie, the main thoroughfare, east and west, of Paris. Here he halted in front of the long, dark outer wall of the Cemetery of the Innocents, in which, across the tombstones and among the sepulchres of dead Paris, the living Paris of that day, bought and sold, walked, gossiped, and made love.

About him things were to be seen that would have seemed stranger to him had he been less strange to the city. From the quarter of the markets north of him, a quarter which fenced in the cemetery on two sides, the same dull murmur proceeded, which Mademoiselle de Vrillac had remarked an hour earlier. The sky above the cemetery glowed with reflected light, the cause of which was not far to seek, for every window of the tall houses that overlooked it, and the huddle of booths about it, contributed a share of the illumination. At an hour late even for Paris, an hour when honest men should have been sunk in slumber, this strange brilliance did for a moment perplex him; but the past week had been so full of fetes, of masques and frolics, often devised on the moment and dependent on the King's whim, that he set this also down to such a cause, and wondered and no more.

The lights in the houses flung their radiance high, and did not serve his purpose; but beside the closed gate of the cemetery, between two stalls, was a votive lamp burning before an image of the Mother and Child. He crossed to this, and assuring himself by a glance to right and left that he stood in no danger from prowlers, he drew a note from his breast. It had been slipped into his hand in the gallery before he saw Mademoiselle to her lodging; it had been in his possession barely an hour. But brief as its contents were, and easily committed to memory, he had perused it thrice already.

"At the house next the 'Golden Maid,' Rue Cinq Diamants, an hour before midnight, you may find the door open should you desire to talk farther with C. St. L."

As he read it for the fourth time the light of the lamp fell athwart his face; and even as his fine clothes had never seemed to fit him worse than when he faintly denied the imputations of gallantry launched at him by Nancay, so his features had never looked less handsome than they did now. The glow of vanity which warmed his cheek as he read the message, the smile of conceit which wreathed his lips, bespoke a nature not of the most noble; or the lamp did him less than justice. Presently he kissed the note, and hid it. He waited until the clock of St. Jacques struck the hour before midnight; and then moving forward he turned to the right by way of the narrow neck leading to the Rue Lombard. He walked in the kennel here, his sword in his hand and his eyes looking to right and left; for the place was notorious for robberies. But though he saw more than one figure lurking in a doorway or under the arch that led to a passage, it vanished on his nearer approach. In less than a minute he reached the southern end of the street that bore the odd title of the Five Diamonds.

Situate in the crowded quarter of the butchers, and almost in the shadow of their famous church, this street--which farther north was continued in the Rue Quimcampoix--presented in those days a not uncommon mingling of poverty and wealth. On one side of the street a row of lofty gabled houses built under Francis the First, sheltered persons of good condition; on the other, divided from these by the width of the road and a reeking kennel, a row of pent-houses, the hovels of cobblers and sausage-makers, leaned against shapeless timber houses which tottered upwards in a medley of sagging roofs and bulging gutters. Tignonville was strange to the place, and nine nights out of ten he would have been at a disadvantage. But, thanks to the tapers that to-night shone in many windows, he made out enough to see that he need search only the one side; and with a beating heart he passed along the row of newer houses, looking eagerly for the sign of the "Golden Maid."

He found it at last; and then for a moment he stood puzzled. The note said, next door to the "Golden Maid," but it did not say on which side. He scrutinised the nearer house, but he saw nothing to determine him; and he was proceeding to the farther, when he caught sight of two men, who, ambushed behind a horse-block on the opposite side of the roadway, seemed to be watching his movements. Their presence flurried him; but much to his relief his next glance at the houses showed him that the door of the farther one was unlatched. It stood slightly ajar, permitting a beam of light to escape into the street.

He stepped quickly to it--the sooner he was within the house the better--pushed the door open and entered. As soon as he was inside he tried to close the entrance behind him, but he found he could not; the door would not shut. After a brief trial he abandoned the attempt and passed quickly on, through a bare lighted passage which led to the foot of a staircase, equally bare. He stood at this point an instant and listened, in the hope that Madame's maid would come to him. At first he heard nothing save his own breathing; then a gruff voice from above startled him, "This way, Monsieur," it said. "You are early, but not too soon!"

So Madame trusted her footman! M. de Tignonville shrugged his shoulders; but after all, it was no affair of his, and he went up. Half-way to the top, however, he stood, an oath on his lips. Two men had entered by the open door below--even as he had entered! And as quietly!

The imprudence of it! The imprudence of leaving the door so that it could not be closed! He turned and descended to meet them, his teeth set, his hand on his sword, one conjecture after another whirling in his brain. Was he beset? Was it a trap? Was it a rival? Was it chance? Two steps he descended; and then the voice he had heard before cried again, but more imperatively, "No, Monsieur, this way! Did you not hear me? This way and be quick, if you please. By-and-by there will be a crowd, and then the more we have dealt with the better!"

He knew now that he had made a mistake, that he had entered the wrong house; and naturally his impulse was to continue his descent and secure his retreat. But the pause had brought the two men who had entered face to face with him, and they showed no signs of giving way. On the contrary.

"The room is above, Monsieur," the foremost said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and with a slight salutation. "After you, if you please," and he signed to him to return.

He was a burly man, grim and truculent in appearance, and his follower was like him. Tignonville hesitated, then turned and ascended. But as soon as he had reached the landing where they could pass him, he turned again.

"I have made a mistake, I think," he said. "I have entered the wrong house."

"Are you for the house next the 'Golden Maid,' Monsieur?"

"Yes."

"Rue Cinq Diamants, Quarter of the Boucherie?"

"Yes."

"No mistake then," the stout man replied firmly. "You are early, that is all. You have arms, I see. Maillard!"--to the person whose voice Tignonville had heard at the head of the stairs--"A white sleeve, and a cross for Monsieur's hat, and his name on the register. Come, make a beginning! Make a beginning, man."

"To be sure, Monsieur. All is ready."

"Then lose no time, I say. Here are others, also early in the good cause. Gentlemen, welcome! Welcome all who are for the true faith! Death to the heretics! 'Kill, and no quarter!' is the word to-night!"

"Death to the heretics!" the last comers cried in chorus. "Kill and no quarter! At what hour, M. le Prevot?"

"At day-break," the Provost answered importantly. "But have no fear, the tocsin will sound. The King and our good man M. de Guise have all in hand. A white sleeve, a white cross, and a sharp knife shall rid Paris of the vermin! Gentlemen of the quarter, the word of the night is 'Kill, and no quarter! Death to the Huguenots!'"

"Death! Death to the Huguenots! Kill, and no quarter!" A dozen--the room was beginning to fill--waved their weapons and echoed the cry.

Tignonville had been fortunate enough to apprehend the position--and the peril in which he stood--before Maillard advanced to him bearing a white linen sleeve. In the instant of discovery his heart had stood a moment, the blood had left his cheeks; but with some faults, he was no coward, and he managed to hide his emotion. He held out his left arm, and suffered the beadle to pass the sleeve over it and to secure the white linen above the elbow. Then at a gesture he gave up his velvet cap, and saw it decorated with a white cross of the same material. "Now the register, Monsieur," Maillard continued briskly; and waving him in the direction of a clerk, who sat at the end of the long table, having a book and an ink-horn before him, he turned to the next comer.

Tignonville would fain have avoided the ordeal of the register, but the clerk's eye was on him. He had been fortunate so far, but he knew that the least breath of suspicion would destroy him, and summoning his wits together he gave his name in a steady voice. "Anne Desmartins." It was his mother's maiden name, and the first that came into his mind.

"Of Paris?"

"Recently; by birth, of the Limousin."

"Good, Monsieur," the clerk answered, writing in the name. And he turned to the next. "And you, my friend?"

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IV. THE EVE OF THE FEAST

IT was Tignonville's salvation that the men who crowded the long white-walled room, and exchanged vile boasts under the naked flaring lights, were of all classes. There were butchers, natives of the surrounding quarter whom the scent of blood had drawn from their lairs; and there were priests with hatchet faces, who whispered in the butchers' ears. There were gentlemen of the robe, and plain mechanics, rich merchants in their gowns, and bare-armed ragpickers, sleek choristers, and shabby led-captains; but differ as they might in other points, in one thing all were alike. From all, gentle or simple, rose the same cry for blood, the same aspiration to be first equipped for the fray. In one corner a man of rank stood silent and apart, his hand on his sword, the working of his face alone betraying the storm that reigned within. In another, a Norman horse-dealer talked in low whispers with two thieves. In a third, a gold-wire drawer addressed an admiring group from the Sorbonne; and meantime the middle of the floor grew into a seething mass of muttering, scowling men, through whom the last comers, thrust as they might, had much ado to force their way.

And from all under the low ceiling rose a ceaseless hum, though none spoke loud. "Kill! kill! kill!" was the burden; the accompaniment such profanities and blasphemies as had long disgraced the Paris pulpits, and day by day had fanned the bigotry--already at a white heat--of the Parisian populace. Tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. But for his life he dared not. And presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and offered him a whetstone.

"Are you sharp, noble sir?" he asked with a leer. "Are you sharp? It's surprising how the edge goes on the bone. A cut and thrust? Well, every man to his taste. But give me a broad butcher's knife and I'll ask no help, be it man, woman, or child!"

A bystander, a lean man in rusty black, chuckled as he listened. "But the woman or the child for choice, eh, Jehan?" he said. And he looked to Tignonville to join in the jest.

"Ay, give me a white throat for choice!" the cripple answered, with horrible zest. "And there'll be delicate necks to prick to-night! Lord, I think I hear them squeal! You don't need it, sir?" he continued, again proffering the whetstone. "No? Then I'll give my blade another whet, in the name of our Lady, the Saints, and good Father Pezelay!"

"Ay, and give me a turn!" the lean man cried, proffering his weapon. "May I die if I do not kill one of the accursed for every finger of my hands!"

"And toe of my feet!" the cripple answered, not to be outdone. "And toe of my feet! A full score!"

"'Tis according to your sins!" the other, who had something of the air of a Churchman, answered. "The more heretics killed, the more sins forgiven. Remember that, brother, and spare not if your soul be burdened! They blaspheme God and call Him paste! In the paste of their own blood," he continued ferociously, "I will knead them and roll them out, saith the good Father Pezelay, my master!"

The cripple crossed himself. "Whom God keep," he said. "He is a good man. But you are looking ill, noble sir?" he continued, peering curiously at the young Huguenot.

"'Tis the heat," Tignonville muttered. "The night is stifling, and the lights make it worse. I will go nearer the door."

He hoped to escape them; he had some hope even of escaping from the room and giving the alarm. But when he had forced his way to the threshold, he found it guarded by two pikemen; and glancing back to see if his movements were observed--for he knew that his agitation might have awakened suspicion--he found that the taller of the two whom he had left, the black-garbed man with the hungry face, was watching him a-tiptoe, over the shoulders of the crowd.

With that, and the sense of his impotence, the lights began to swim before his eyes. The catastrophe that overhung his party, the fate so treacherously prepared for all whom he loved and all with whom his fortunes were bound up, confused his brain almost to delirium. He strove to think, to calculate chances, to imagine some way in which he might escape from the room, or from a window might cry the alarm. But he could not bring his mind to a point. Instead, in lightning flashes he foresaw what must happen: his betrothed in the hands of the murderers, the fair face that had smiled on him frozen with terror; brave men, the fighters of Montauban, the defenders of Angely, strewn dead through the dark lanes of the city. And now a gust of passion, and now a shudder of fear, seized him; and in any other assembly his agitation must have led to detection. But in that room were many twitching faces and trembling hands. Murder, cruel, midnight, and most foul, wrung even from the murderers her toll of horror. While some, to hide the nervousness they felt, babbled of what they would do, others betrayed by the intentness with which they awaited the signal, the dreadful anticipations that possessed their souls.

Before he had formed any plan, a movement took place near the door. The stairs shook beneath the sudden trampling of feet, a voice cried "De par le Roi! De par le Roi!" and the babel of the room died down. The throng swayed and fell back on either hand, and Marshal Tavannes entered, wearing half armour, with a white sash; he was followed by six or eight gentlemen in like guise. Amid cries of "Jarnac! Jarnac!"--for to him the credit of that famous fight, nominally won by the King's brother, was popularly given--he advanced up the room, met the Provost of the merchants, and began to confer with him. Apparently he asked the latter to select some men who could be trusted on a special mission, for the Provost looked round and beckoned to his side one or two of higher rank than the herd, and then one or two of the most truculent aspect.

Tignonville trembled lest he should be singled out. He had hidden himself as well as he could at the rear of the crowd by the door; but his dress, so much above the common, rendered him conspicuous. He fancied that the Provost's eye ranged the crowd for him; and to avoid it and efface himself he moved a pace to his left.

The step was fatal. It saved him from the Provost, but it brought him face to face and eye to eye with Count Hannibal, who stood in the first rank at his brother's elbow. Tavannes stared an instant as if he doubted his eyesight. Then, as doubt gave slow place to certainty, and surprise to amazement, he smiled. And after a moment he looked another way.

Tignonville's heart gave a great bump and seemed to stand still. The lights whirled before his eyes, there was a roaring in his ears. He waited for the word that should denounce him. It did not come. And still it did not come; and Marshal Tavannes was turning. Yes, turning, and going; the Provost, bowing low, was attending him to the door; his suite were opening on either side to let him pass. And Count Hannibal? Count Hannibal was following also, as if nothing had occurred. As if he had seen nothing!

The young man caught his breath. Was it possible that he had imagined the start of recognition, the steady scrutiny, the sinister smile? No; for as Tavannes followed the others, he hung an instant on his heel, their eyes met again, and once more he smiled. In the next breath he was gone through the doorway, his spurs rang on the stairs; and the babel of the crowd, unchecked by the great man's presence, broke out anew, and louder.

Tignonville shuddered. He was saved as by a miracle, saved he did not know how. But the respite, though its strangeness diverted his thoughts for a while, brought short relief. The horrors which impended over others surged afresh into his mind, and filled him with a maddening sense of impotence. To be one hour, only one short half-hour without! To run through the sleeping streets, and scream in the dull ears which a King's flatteries had stopped as with wool! To go up and down and shake into life the guests whose royal lodgings daybreak would turn to a shambles reeking with their blood! They slept, the gentle Teligny, the brave Pardaillan, the gallant Rochefoucauld, Piles the hero of St. Jean, while the cruel city stirred rustling about them, and doom crept whispering to the door. They slept, they and a thousand others, gentle and simple, young and old; while the half-mad Valois shifted between two opinions, and the Italian woman, accursed daughter of an accursed race, cried "Hark!" at her window, and looked eastwards for the dawn.

And the women? The woman he was to marry? And the others? In an access of passion he thrust aside those who stood between, he pushed his way, disregarding complaints, disregarding opposition, to the door. But the pikes lay across it, and he could not utter a syllable to save his life. He would have flung himself on the door-keepers, for he was losing control of himself; but as he drew back for the spring, a hand clutched his sleeve, and a voice he loathed hummed in his ear.

"No, fair play, noble sir; fair play!" the cripple Jehan muttered, forcibly drawing him aside. "All start together, and it's no man's loss. But if there is any little business," he continued, lowering his tone and peering with a cunning look into the other's face, "of your own, noble sir, or your friends', anything or anybody you want despatched, count on me. It were better, perhaps, you didn't appear in it yourself, and a man you can trust----"

"What do you mean?" the young man cried, recoiling from him.

"No need to look surprised, noble sir," the lean man, who had joined them, answered in a soothing tone. "Who kills to-night does God service, and who serves God much may serve himself a little. 'Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn,' says good Father Pezelay."

"Hear, hear!" the cripple chimed in eagerly, his impatience such that he danced on his toes. "He preaches as well as the good father his master! So frankly, noble sir, what is it? What is it? A woman grown ugly? A rich man grown old, with perchance a will in his chest? Or a young heir that stands in my lord's way? Whichever it be, or whatever it be, trust me and our friend here, and my butcher's gully shall cut the knot."

Tignonville shook his head.

"But something there is," the lean man persisted obstinately; and he cast a suspicious glance at Tignonville's clothes. It was evident that the two had discussed him, and the motives of his presence there. "Have the dice proved fickle, my lord, and are you for the jewellers' shops on the bridge to fill your purse again? If so, take my word, it were better to go three than one, and we'll enlist."

"Ay, we know shops on the bridge where you can plunge your arm elbow-deep in gold," the cripple muttered, his eyes sparkling greedily. "There's Baillet's, noble sir! There's a shop for you! And there's the man's shop who works for the King. He's lame like me. And I know the way to all. Oh, it will be a merry night if they ring before the dawn. It must be near daybreak now. And what's that?"

Ay, what was it? A score of voices called for silence; a breathless hush fell on the crowd. A moment the fiercest listened, with parted lips and starting eyes. Then, "It was the bell!" cried one, "let us out!" "It was not!" cried, another. "It was a pistol shot!" "Anyhow let us out!" the crowd roared in chorus; "let us out!" And they pressed in a furious mass towards the door, as if they would force it, signal or no signal.

But the pikemen stood fast, and the throng, checked in their first rush, turned on one another, and broke into wrangling and disputing; boasting, and calling Heaven and the saints to witness how thoroughly, how pitilessly, how remorselessly they would purge Paris of this leprosy when the signal did sound. Until again above the babel a man cried "Silence!" and again they listened. And this time, dulled by walls and distance, but unmistakable by the ears of fear or hate, the heavy note of a bell came to them on the hot night-air. It was the boom, sullen and menacing, of the death signal.

The door-keepers lowered their pikes, and with a wild rush as of wolves swarming on their prey, the band stormed the door, and thrust and struggled and battled a way down the narrow staircase, and along the narrow passage. "A bas les Huguenots! Mort aux Huguenots!" they shouted; and shrieking, sweating, spurning with vile hands viler faces, they poured pell-mell into the street, and added their clamour to the boom of the tocsin that, as by magic and in a moment, turned the streets of Paris into a hell of blood and cruelty. For as it was here, so it was in a dozen other quarters.

Quickly as they streamed out--and to have issued more quickly would have been impossible--fiercely as they pushed and fought and clove their way, Tignonville was of the foremost. And for a moment, seeing the street clear before him and almost empty, the Huguenot thought that he might do something. He might outstrip the stream of rapine, he might carry the alarm; at worst he might reach his betrothed before harm befel her. But when he had sped fifty yards, his heart sank. True, none passed him; but under the spell of the alarm-bell the stones themselves seemed to turn to men. Houses, courts, alleys, the very churches vomited men. In a twinkling the street was alive with men, roared with them as with a rushing tide, gleamed with their lights and weapons, thundered with the volume of their thousand voices. He was no longer ahead, men were running before him, behind him, on his right hand and on his left. In every side-street, every passage, men were running; and not men only, but women, children, furious creatures without age or sex. And all the time the bell tolled overhead, tolled faster and faster, and louder and louder; and shots and screams, and the clash of arms, and the fall of strong doors began to swell the maelstrom of sound.

He was in the Rue St. Honore now, and speeding westward. But the flood still rose with him, and roared abreast of him. Nay, it outstripped him. When he came, panting, within sight of his goal, and lacked but a hundred paces of it, he found his passage barred by a dense mass of people moving slowly to meet him. In the heart of the press the light of a dozen torches shone on half as many riders mailed and armed; whose eyes, as they moved on, and the furious gleaming eyes of the rabble about them, never left the gabled roofs on their right. On these from time to time a white-clad figure showed itself, and passed from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, or, stooping low, ran along the parapet. Every time that this happened, the men on horseback pointed upwards and the mob foamed with rage.

Tignonville groaned, but he could not help. Unable to go forward, he turned, and with others hurrying, shouting, and brandishing weapons, he pressed into the Rue du Roule, passed through it, and gained the Bethizy. But here, as he might have foreseen, all passage was barred at the Hotel Pouthieu by a horde of savages, who danced and yelled and sang songs round the Admiral's body, which lay in the middle of the way; while to right and left men were bursting into houses and forcing new victims into the street. The worst had happened there, and he turned panting, regained the Rue St. Honore and, crossing it and turning left-handed, darted through side streets until he came again into the main thoroughfare a little beyond the Croix du Tiroir, that marked the corner of Mademoiselle's house.

Here his last hope left him. The street swarmed with bands of men hurrying to and fro as in a sacked city. The scum of the Halles, the rabble of the quarter poured this way and that, here at random, there swayed and directed by a few knots of men-at-arms, whose corselets reflected the glare of a hundred torches. At one time and within sight, three or four houses were being stormed. On every side rose heartrending cries, mingled with brutal laughter, with savage jests, with cries of "To the river!" The most cruel of cities had burst its bounds and was not to be stayed; nor would be stayed until the Seine ran red to the sea, and leagues below, in pleasant Normandy hamlets, men, for fear of the pestilence, pushed the corpses from the bridges with poles and boat-hooks.

All this Tignonville saw, though his eyes, leaping the turmoil, looked only to the door at which he had left Mademoiselle a few hours earlier. There a crowd of men pressed and struggled; but from the spot where he stood he could see no more. That was enough, however. Rage nerved him, and despair; his world was dying round him. If he could not save her he would avenge her. Recklessly he plunged into the tumult; blade in hand, with vigorous blows he thrust his way through, his white sleeve and the white cross in his hat gaining him passage until he reached the fringe of the band who beset the door. Here his first attempt to pass failed; and he might have remained hampered by the crowd if a squad of archers had not ridden up. As they spurred to the spot, heedless over whom they rode, he clutched a stirrup, and was borne with them into the heart of the crowd. In a twinkling he stood on the threshold of the house, face to face and foot to foot with Count Hannibal, who stood also on the threshold, but with his back to the door, which, unbarred and unbolted, gaped open behind him.

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