CHAPTER VI
BETWEEN THE BRANCHES
With her arm through the arm of the nun and surrounded by her young companions carrying her luggage, the girl with the green eyes walked, smiling happily, towards a brake drawn by three mules. They climbed into it; and it set off up the steep road to Luz, with a tinkling of the mules’ bells. Ralph, who had kept out of sight, hired a Victoria to carry him to Luz.
“Ah, my pretty lady with the green eyes, henceforth you are my prisoner,” murmured Ralph. “An accomplice of a murderer, a burglar, and a blackmailer, murderess yourself, daughter of the polite world, prima donna of light opera, boarder at a convent—whatever you may be, you shall not slip between my fingers again. Trust is a prison from which one cannot escape; and however angry you may be with me for stealing those kisses, in the bottom of your heart you trust the man who never tires of saving you and is always on the spot when you stand on the edge of the abyss. One grows attached to one’s St. Bernard, even if he has bitten you once.
“Lady with the green eyes, who takes refuge in a [117]convent to escape all those who persecute you, till something fresh happens, you shall not be to me a criminal or formidable adventuress, or even a singer of light opera, and I shall not call you Leonide Balli. I shall call you Aurelie. It’s a name I love because it’s old-fashioned and honest and suits a little sister of the poor.
“Lady with the green eyes, I know now what it is you possess, a secret your old confederates do not know, a secret they wish to tear from you and which you keep fiercely. That secret shall belong to me some day because secrets are my strong point; and I shall learn that one, even as I shall scatter the darkness in which you hide yourself, mysterious and fascinating Aurelie.”
This apostrophe satisfied Ralph, and he went to sleep to think no more of the disturbing enigma of the girl with the green eyes.
The little town of Luz and the neighboring town of Saint-Sauveur are famous for their baths which at that season few invalids were taking. Ralph chose a hotel that was nearly empty and gave out that he was a student of botany and mineralogy. He devoted all the afternoon to a careful examination of the country.
A very bad and narrow road, nearly a mile in length and steep, led up to the Maison des Soeurs Sainte-Marie, an old convent which had been turned into a [118]boarding-school. In the midst of a bare and rocky stretch of ground the buildings and gardens of the convent stretch along the point of a projecting cliff, on terraces which rise above one another and support strong walls, along the foot of which Sainte-Marie’s brook formerly boiled. To-day, along this part of its course, it runs under the earth. A pine forest covers the other slope, traversed by two roads, that cross one another, for the use of the wood-cutters. There are grottoes and rocks of strange shapes to which excursions run on Sundays.
It was on this side that Ralph kept watch. It was a deserted spot, the silence of which was only broken by the sound of the axes of the wood-cutters in the distance. From the point he had chosen he looked over the smooth lawns of the garden and an avenue of carefully clipped limes which sheltered the path along which the boarders took the air. In the course of a few days he knew the customs of the convent and the hours of recreation. After the mid-day meal the walk which ran along the edge of the gorge was reserved for the big girls.
It was not till the fourth day that the girl with the green eyes—doubtless she had been so worn out by what she had gone through that it had kept her indoors—appeared on this walk. Thereupon each of the big girls seemed to have no other object in life but to monopolize her, and they quarrelled jealously [119]with one another for the privilege of enjoying her society.
Ralph perceived at once that she was changed like a child who is recovering from an illness and expands in the sunshine and keen air of the mountains. She flitted about among her young companions, dressed as they were, alert and full of life, charming with all, the leader of their games, and enjoyed herself so thoroughly that her silvery laugh was forever echoing among the walls of the gorge.
“She laughs!” murmured the astonished Ralph. “And not with her artificial and almost dolorous stage laugh, but with the care-free laugh of one who has no crimes to remember, a laugh in which her true nature finds expression. She laughs—what a miracle!”
Then the others went back to their lessons and Aurelie remained alone. She did not appear any the more melancholy for that; her gayety did not leave her. She busied herself with trifles such as gathering the pine cones and filling a basket with them, or plucking flowers and laying them on the steps of a neighboring chapel.
Her actions were all gracious. She often talked in a low voice to a little dog who was always with her, or to a cat who was always rubbing itself against her calves. Once she twined herself a garland of roses and laughing, looked at herself in a pocket mirror. Furtively she powdered her cheeks and put a little rouge [120]on them and at once rubbed it roughly off. It must have been forbidden.
On the eighth day she made her way along the wall to the last and highest of the terraces, along the edge of which ran a hedge of shrubs. On the ninth day she returned to it, bringing a book. On the tenth day before the hour of recreation Ralph made up his mind.
First of all he had to force his way through the thick underwood on the edge of the pine forest, then cross a large sheet of water. The brook of Sainte-Marie flows into a basin, as into a large reservoir, and then sinks under the earth. A worm-eaten boat was moored to a stake, and by means of it he was able, in spite of some fairly strong eddies, to reach a little creek at the very foot of the high terrace which rose like the rampart of a fortress.
The walls of it were made of flat stones set, without mortar, on the top of one another, and wild plants grew between them. The rain had worn runnels full of sand along the face of the wall and paths, which the boys of the neighborhood would on occasion climb. Ralph climbed to the top without difficulty. The terrace formed a kind of summer drawing-room, surrounded by shrubs and set with stone benches; its center was adorned with a fine terra cotta bowl.
He heard the murmur of the girls at play below. Then there came silence and a few minutes later the sound of a light footfall coming towards him. A voice [121]was humming an air from an opera. His heart began to beat quickly. What would she say when she saw him?
The branches rustled; the foliage was parted like curtains that hang before the door of a room; Aurelie entered.
She stopped short on the threshold of the terrace with an air of stupefaction; the song died on her lips. Her book and her straw hat, which she had filled with flowers and hung by the ribbons from her arm, fell to the ground. She did not stir, an engaging and delicate figure in her simple dress of chestnut cloth.
For a few seconds she failed to recognize Ralph. Then she blushed deeply and stepped back.
“Go away,” she murmured. “Go away.”
Not for a second had he any intention of obeying her; one might almost have believed that he had not heard her command. He gazed at her with indescribable pleasure such as he had never before felt in the presence of any woman.
She repeated in more imperious accents: “Go away!”
“No,” he said.
“Then I shall go away myself.”
“If you go away I shall follow you,” he declared. “We will go back to the convent together.”
She turned as if to fly. He caught her arm.
“Don’t touch me!” she said indignantly, freeing [122]herself. “I forbid you to touch me. I forbid you to come near me!”
Surprised by her vehemence, he said: “But why?”
In a low voice she replied: “I have a horror of you.”
The answer was so astonishing that he could not refrain from smiling.
“Do you detest me as much as that?”
“Yes.”
“More than you detest Marescal?”
“Yes.”
“More than you detest William and that ruffian at the Villa Faradoni?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
“But they were harming you and without me who protected you——”
She was silent; she had picked up her hat and was holding it across the lower part of her face so that he could not see her lips. Her attitude was explained by that concealment; Ralph had not a doubt of it. If she detested him, it was not because he had been the witness of all the crimes and infamies that had been committed, but because he had held her in his arms and kissed her lips. A strange modesty in a girl like her; yet it was so sincere and threw such a light on the very recesses of her soul and her instincts that, in spite of himself, he murmured:
“I beg you to forget it.” [123]
Then drawing back a few steps to show her that she was free to depart, he continued in a tone of involuntary respect:
“That night was a night of observation of which neither you nor I must cherish the remembrance. Forget the way in which I acted. Besides it is not to recall that to you that I am here, but to continue my work of helping you. Chance threw me across your path and chance willed it that from the beginning I should be useful to you. Do not reject my help. The threat of danger, far from being ended, is growing graver. Your enemies are exasperated. What will you do, if I am not there?”
“Go away,” she said stubbornly.
She remained on the threshold of the terrace as if she were on the threshold of an open door. She avoided Ralph’s eyes and hid her lips. However she did not go. As he had thought, one is the captive of one who indefatigably saves you. Her look was fearful. But the memory of the kisses he had stolen was giving way to the infinitely more terrible memory of the trials she had undergone.
“Go away,” she said again. “I was at peace here. You are mixed up with all those things—with all those—hellish things.”
“Fortunately,” he said gravely. “And also I must be mixed up with all the things that are about to happen. Do you think they are not searching for you? [124]Do you think that Marescal has given you up? At this moment he is on your trail. He will follow it to Marseilles, to Toulouse, to this convent of Sainte-Marie. If you lived here happily during some years of your childhood, as I suppose, he must know and he will come.”
He spoke gently with a conviction which impressed the girl deeply; and he hardly heard her as she murmured once again: “Go away.”
“Yes: I will go,” he said. “But I shall be here again to-morrow at the same hour; I shall be waiting for you here every day. We have to talk. Not of anything which might be painful to you and not about the nightmare of that horrible night. We will not speak about it. I have no need to know; the truth will emerge little by little from the darkness. But there are other points—questions I shall put to you and which you will have to answer. That is what I wanted to say to you to-day, no more. Now you can go. But you will think it over, won’t you? And do not worry any longer. Get used to the idea that I am always here and that you must never despair because I shall always be here—in the hour of peril.”
She went without a word, without a nod of adieu. He watched her descend the terraces and enter the avenue of limes. When he saw her no longer he picked up some of the flowers she had dropped and becoming aware of this unconscious action, he laughed. [125]
“Heavens! This is growing serious,” he murmured in a jeering tone. “Can it be that—come, come Lupin old chap, take a pull.”
He took his way back down the wall, once more traversed the pool, and walked through the forest, throwing away the flowers one by one as if he had lost interest in them. But the image of the girl with the green eyes still hovered before his own.
Next day he climbed up again to the terrace. Aurelie did not come; and she did not come the two following days. But on the fourth day she parted the branches without his having heard the sound of her coming.
“Oh, it’s you—it’s you at last!” he said.
He gathered from her attitude that he was not to advance a step or say a word which might ruffle her sensibilities. She stood as on the first day like an opponent who revolts against being dominated and is angry with an enemy for the service he is rendering.
However her tone was less hard when, with half averted head, she said: “I ought not to have come. It is not fair to my benefactors, the Sisters of Sainte-Marie. But I thought that I ought to thank you—and help you.” She paused, then added: “Besides, I’m frightened, really frightened—frightened by what you said to me. Question me—I will answer.”
“Question you about everything?” he asked.
“No, no!” she said in a tone of anguish. “Not [126]about the night at Beaucourt. But about the other things. As shortly as you can, please. What is it you want to know?”
Ralph reflected. The questions were not easy to put since all of them must tend to throw light on the matter of which she refused to speak.
He began: “First of all what is your name?”
“Aurelie—Aurelie d’Asteux.”
“Then why that name of Leonide Balli? Was it a pseudonym?”
“Leonide Balli exists. She was ill and remained at Nice. Among the actors of her company, with whom I traveled from Nice to Marseilles, there was one I knew because I played Veronique last winter in some private theatricals. So they all begged me to take the place of Leonide Balli for one evening. They were so troubled and upset that I felt obliged to render them this service. We told the manager of the Toulouse theatre, who, at the last moment, decided to make no announcement of the change and let it be believed that I was Leonide Balli.”
“Then you’re not an actress,” said Ralph in a tone of relief. “I am glad you’re not. I prefer that you should be simply the pretty boarder at Sainte-Marie.”
She frowned and said coldly: “Continue.”
“Well, the gentleman who knocked Marescal’s hat off when you came out of the confectioner’s on the Boulevard Haussmann, was he your father?” [127]
“My step-father.”
“And his name?”
“Bregeac.”
“Bregeac?”
“Yes, Director of Judicial Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior.”
“And consequently Marescal’s chief?”
“Yes. And they’ve always disliked one another. Marescal, who is strongly supported by the Minister himself, is trying to supplant my step-father, and my step-father is trying to get rid of him.”
“And Marescal is in love with you?”
“He asked my hand in marriage. I rejected him, and my step-father forbade him the house. He hates us and he has sworn to avenge himself.”
“To pass from one to another, what is the name of the man of the Villa Faradoni?” Ralph asked.
“Jodot.”
“What’s his profession?”
“I don’t know. He used to come to the house occasionally to see my step-father.”
“And the third?”
“William Ancivel. He used to come to the house too. He is on the stock exchange and engaged in other business.”
“More or less doubtful?”
“I don’t know—perhaps.” [128]
Ralph summed up the results of the conversation so far.
“These then are your three enemies—for there aren’t any more, are there?”
“Yes. My step-father,” she said sadly,
“What? Your mother’s husband?”
“My poor mother is dead.”
“And are all these people persecuting you for the same reason—on account of the secret you know and they do not?” said Ralph thoughtfully.
“Yes; except Marescal, who knows nothing about the secret and is only trying to take vengeance.”
“Is it possible for you to give me any information, not about the secret itself, but about the circumstances connected with it?” he asked.
She thought for a few moments and then said: “Yes, I can. I can tell you what the others know, the reason of their fury against me.”
Up to then she had answered the questions briefly and dryly. Now she appeared to be really interested in what she was saying.
“This is the story, briefly,” she began. “My father, who was my mother’s cousin, died before my birth, leaving my mother a fair income to which was added an allowance which came from my grandfather d’Asteux. My mother’s father, an excellent man, an artist and inventor, was always in search of discoveries and great secrets, always traveling on miraculous business [129]which was to bring us an immense fortune. I knew him very well. I can see myself sitting on his knee and hear him staying to me: ‘My little Aurelie will be very rich. It is for her I am working.’ Then, when I was just six years old, he wrote to my mother and begged her to join him, bringing me with her, without letting any one know anything about it. One night we took the train and went to him and stayed two days. At the moment of starting on our return journey, my mother said to me in his presence:
“ ‘Aurelie, never tell any one where you have been the last two days, neither what you have done nor what you have seen. It is a secret which henceforth belongs to you as well as to us, a secret which will give you a great fortune when you are twenty.’
“ ‘A very great fortune,’ said my grandfather. ‘Therefore swear to us never to speak of these things to any one, whatever happens.’
“ ‘To no one, except the man you love and of whom you are as sure as you are of yourself,’ my mother amended.
“I made the promise they demanded of me. I was very much moved by their earnestness, and I cried.
“A few months later my mother married Bregeac. It was an unhappy marriage and did not last long. During the course of the next year she died of pneumonia after having secretly given me a sheet of paper on which was set out all the information about the district [130]we had visited and what I was to do when I was twenty. A little while later my grandfather also died, and I remained alone with my step-father, Bregeac, who got rid of me as soon as he could by sending me to this convent at Sainte-Marie. I came to it very unhappy and sad, but I was upheld by the importance this keeping a secret gave me in my own eyes. Then one Sunday I looked for an out-of-the-way place and came here, up to this terrace, to carry out a plan my childish brain had formed. I knew by heart the information given me by my mother. What good was it to keep a document which all the world would know if I did not get rid of it. I burnt it in this vase.”
Ralph nodded his head and said: “And you have forgotten all the information it contained?”
“Yes,” she said. “As the days passed, without my perceiving it, all that information was effaced from my mind by my absorption in the friendships, the work, and the play I found here. I have forgotten the name of the district, what part of the country it is in, the line which took us to it, and things I was to do—everything.”
“Absolutely everything?” he asked.
“Everything except some views of the country and some impressions which engraved themselves more deeply on my childish eyes and ears—pictures that I have never ceased to see since—noises, the chiming of bells which I still hear as if they were chiming still.” [131]
“And it is these impressions and images that your enemies wish to know, hoping to get at the truth by means of what you can tell them?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“But how did they know?”
“Because my mother was so imprudent as not to destroy certain letters in which my grandfather alluded to the secret which had been intrusted to me. Bregeac, who found those letters, later, never spoke to me of them during my ten years here, ten delightful years, the best years of my life. But the very day I returned to Paris, two years ago, he questioned me about them. I told him what I told you, as I had the right to do, but refused to disclose any of the vague memories which might have put him on the track. After that it was a constant persecution—reproaches, abuse, terrible rages—up to the very moment I resolved to fly.”
“Alone?”
She flushed and replied: “No. But under conditions you may believe. William Ancivel was paying court to me, with great discretion, pretending to be a friend who wished to be useful to me without any hope of being rewarded for it. So he won, if not my sympathy, at least my confidence, and I made the great mistake of informing him of my intention of flying.”
“And no doubt he approved of it?”
“He approved of it warmly, and helped me in my preparations by selling some jewels and securities left [132]me by my mother. On the eve of my flight, since I was uncertain exactly where to take refuge, he said to me: ‘I have just come from Nice and I have to return there to-morrow. Would you like me to escort you there? At this time of year you will not find a quieter place of retreat than the Riviera.’ What motive could I have had for refusing his offer? It is true that I did not love him; but he appeared to be entirely devoted to me. I accepted it.”
“How imprudent!” said Ralph.
“Yes,” she said. “And the more imprudent since we were not on those terms of friendship which would excuse such behavior. But what would you? I was alone in the world, unhappy and persecuted. A helping hand was stretched out to me—for a few hours as I thought. We started.”
Aurelie hesitated for a few moments; then she went on with her story more quickly.
“The journey was terrible—for reasons which you know. When William lifted me into the carriage he had stolen from the doctor, I was utterly done. He dragged me wherever he wanted, towards another station and from there, since we had our tickets, to Nice, where I got my luggage. I was in a fever, almost delirious. I acted without knowing what I was doing. He took advantage of it next day to make me accompany him to an estate where he had to recover, during the absence of the owner, some securities of which he [133]had been robbed. I went there, as I should have gone anywhere. I had lost the power to think. I obeyed him passively. It was at that villa that I was attacked and carried off by Jodot——”
“And saved, for the second time, by me—whom you rewarded a second time by flying as soon as you were rescued. But no matter. Jodot also demanded revelations, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“Then I went back to the hotel to which William had begged me to follow him.”
“But by this time you knew the kind of man he was!” protested Ralph.
“How? One sees clearly enough when one definitely looks; but for two days I had been living in a kind of madness that had been aggravated by Jodot’s attack. I followed William therefore without even asking him the object of the journey. I was alone, ashamed of my cowardice, and harassed by the presence of this man who was becoming more and more a stranger to me. What part did I play at Monte Carlo? It is not very clear to me. William had intrusted some letters to me, which I was to hand over to him in the corridor of the hotel that he might himself hand them over to a gentleman. What letters? What gentleman? Why was Marescal there? How did you snatch me from him? All that is quite obscure. However, my instincts [134]had awakened; I felt a growing hostility to William. I detested him. And I left Monte Carlo resolved to break the agreement which united us and come and hide myself here. He pursued me as far as Toulouse and when I told him my decision to leave him, and he was convinced that nothing would make me return to him, coldly and harshly, with a fury that made him look hideous, he said: ‘Well and good, let us separate. It’s really all the same to me. But I make one condition.’ ”
“A condition?”
“ ‘Yes. One day I heard your step-father speaking of a secret which had been bequeathed to you. Tell me that secret and you are free.’ ”
“Then I understood everything. All his protestations and devotion were so many lies. His sole object was to get from me some day, either by winning my love, or by threats, the revelations which I had refused my step-father and which Jodot had tried to tear from me.”
She was silent. Ralph studied her closely. He had the strongest impression that she had told the whole truth.
He said gravely: “Would you like to know exactly the character of this brute?”
She shook her head.
“Is it really necessary?” she asked.
“It would be better that you should know it. Listen. [135]At Nice the securities which he was seeking at the Villa Faradoni did not belong to him. He had merely come to steal them. At Monte Carlo he demanded a hundred thousand francs for the return of some compromising letters. The fellow is just a crook and a thief, perhaps worse; that’s what he is.”
Aurelie did not protest. She must have had some notion of the real facts, and this brutal enumeration of them did not surprise her.
“You have saved me from him. I thank you,” she said gently.
“Alas, you ought to have confided in me instead of flying from me,” he said. “What a lot of time we have lost!”
She turned to go but paused to say: “Why should I confide in you? Who are you? I don’t know you. Marescal, who accuses you, does not even know your name. You saved me from every danger—for what reason? With what object?”
He laughed gently and said: “With the object of tearing your secret from you, like the others: is that what you mean?”
“I don’t mean anything,” she murmured despondently. “I know nothing, I understand nothing. For two or three weeks I have been dashing myself against walls of darkness on every side. Do not ask more trust from me than I can give. I distrust everything and everybody.” [136]
He took pity on her and let her go.
As he went away himself, he thought: “She has not said a word about that terrible night. Miss Bakersfield was murdered; two men were murdered. And I saw her disguised and masked.”
While waiting for her on the topmost terrace he had seen a little door in the wall of the terrace below it. That terrace also was empty. Keeping under cover, he went down to the little door and easily opened it. It gave him a much easier way of access to the topmost terrace.
He descended to the pool, very thoughtful. For him also everything was mysterious and inexplicable. Round him, as round her, rose those same walls of darkness, through the tiniest cracks in which here and there filtered a dim light. In the presence of the girl herself, moreover—and it had been so since the beginning of the adventure—he never thought for a moment of the oath of vengeance that he had sworn above the body of Miss Bakersfield, or of anything else which could disfigure the gracious image of the girl with the green eyes.
During the next two days he did not see her. Then she came three days in succession without a word of explanation of her return, but as if she was seeking a protection she could not do without.
The first day she stayed for ten minutes, the second [137]for fifteen, the third for thirty. They talked little. Whether she wished it or not confidence in him was slowly taking possession of her. Gentler and less distant with him, she came as far as the breach in the wall and looked down on the eddying waters of the pool. Several times he tried to question her. At once she fled, trembling, terrified by anything which might be an allusion to the terrible hours at Beaucourt. However she talked more, but of events in her distant past, of the life which she formerly led at Sainte-Marie, and of the peace she was again enjoying in its kindly and serene atmosphere.
Once, when her hand lay palm upwards on the rim of the vase, he bent down and, without touching it, examined the lines.
“It is exactly as I guessed the first day I saw you—a double destiny, one dark and tragic, the other happy and quite simple. They cross, are entangled and mixed, and it is not yet possible to say which will win in the long run. Which of them is your true destiny, the destiny that corresponds to your true nature?” he said slowly.
“The happy destiny,” she said. “There is in me something that rises quickly to the surface, which brings me, as it does here, cheerfulness and forgetfulness, whatever be the perils.”
“The danger is passing,” Ralph declared, and he continued to study her hand and added: “Distrust [138]water. Water may be fatal to you—ship-wrecks—floods—what perils! But they are passing. Yes; things are settling down in your life. Already your happier destiny is prevailing over the unhappy one.”
He lied in order to soothe her, out of the constant desire that a smile should sometimes wreathe her delightful lips, at which he dared hardly look. For his part, indeed, he wished to forget, to be deluded. So he lived for a fortnight in a profound lightness of spirit which he forced himself to hide. He was afflicted by the dizziness of those hours in which love casts you into an intoxication and renders you insensible to everything but the joy of contemplating the beloved and listening to her voice. He refused to call up the threatening image of Marescal, of William, or of Jodot. If none of these three enemies appeared, it was because they had certainly lost track of their victim. Why then should he not abandon himself to the delightful ease which he enjoyed in the presence of the girl? Why should he not, since he loved her and confessed to himself that he loved her, abandon himself to this love which was little by little becoming, almost without his knowing it, the very principle of his life and all his actions?
The awakening was rude. One afternoon, leaning over the wall which ran along the edge of the gorge, they were looking down into the mirror of the pool [139]below them, almost still in the middle, its edges ruffled by little waves hurrying towards the narrow outlet through which the brook sank into the earth, when a distant voice called out in the garden below:
“Aurelie! Aurelie! Where are you? Aurelie!”
“Gracious!” cried the girl in troubled accents. “Why are they calling me?”
She ran to the end of the terrace and saw one of the nuns in the avenue of limes.
“Here I am! What is it, sister?”
“A telegram,” cried the sister.
“A telegram? Don’t take the trouble to come up here, sister. I’ll come down to you.”
A few minutes later when she came back to the topmost terrace with a telegram in her hand, she looked distracted.
“It’s from my step-father,” she said.
“Bregeac?”
“Yes.”
“He is summoning you back to Paris?” Ralph said gravely.
“He will be here at any moment.”
“What for?”
“To take me away!” she gasped.
“Impossible!”
“Look!”
He read the two lines of the telegram, which had been dispatched from Bordeaux. [140]
“Shall arrive four o’clock be ready to leave at once. Bregeac.”
Ralph considered the message and asked: “Have you written to tell him that you are here?”
“No: he must have come to the conclusion that I would come here.”
“And what are you going to do?” he asked.
“What can I do?”
“Refuse to go with him.”
“The Mother-superior would never consent to keep me.”
“Then leave here at once,” Ralph suggested.
“How?”
He pointed to the door in the wall of the next terrace and waved towards the forest.
“Go? Run away from the convent as though I were guilty?” she cried in protesting accents. “No. It would cause these poor women, who love me as a daughter too much sorrow. Never will I do that!”
Feebly she sank down on a stone bench under the opposite parapet. Ralph crossed the terrace to her and said gravely:
“I have made a bad mistake in letting myself be distracted from the task I have set myself of protecting you. I ought to have remained as distrustful as I was at the beginning and advised you, urged you rather, to go away from here. From the very first I was sure [141]that it was necessary. But the pleasure of being here, of seeing you every day—no, no: don’t run away. I’m not going to say anything that will upset you; I’m not going to tell you how I feel towards you, or the reasons which make me treat you as I do. But all the same you must quite understand that I am devoted to you as a man is devoted to a woman whom—who is so much to him—and it is necessary that my devotion should give you absolute confidence in me and that you should be ready to obey me blindly. It is the one condition of safety for you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said, wholly dominated.
“Then listen. These are my instructions—my orders—yes: my orders. Welcome your step-father peaceably. Don’t quarrel with him. Don’t even talk to him—not a word. It’s the best way of avoiding mistakes. Go with him. Return to Paris. On the very evening of your arrival get out of the house on some pretext or other. A gray-haired old lady will be waiting for you in a car, twenty yards from your door. I will drive both of you away into the country to a hiding-place in which no one will find you. And I will go away at once, I give you my word, and stay away from you till you tell me to come back. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” she said and bowed her head.
“In that case till to-morrow evening. And remember what I tell you: whatever happens, you understand—whatever happens, nothing shall prevail against [142]my will to protect you and against the success of my enterprise. If everything seems to be against you, do not lose heart. Do not even worry. Tell yourself confidently, fiercely, that when the danger is greatest no danger threatens you. At the very second at which it is necessary I shall be there. I shall always be there. Good-by mademoiselle.”
He bent down and lightly kissed the border of her cloak. Then, pushing aside a piece of old trellis-work he stepped into the bushes and took the hardly visible path which brought him to the door in the wall.
Aurelie did not stir from her seat on the bench of stone.
Barely half a minute had passed when she heard a rustling of branches near the breach in the wall. She raised her head and looked towards it. The shrubs were moving. There was some one there. Yes, beyond a doubt some one was hidden there.
She wanted to call out, to shout for help, but could not. Her voice died in her throat.
The bushes were moving more quickly as some one forced their way through them. Who was going to appear? She hoped that it would be William or Jodot. She feared the two ruffians less than Marescal.
A face appeared among the foliage. Marescal came out of his hiding-place.
From below, on the right, came the sound of the closing of the door in the wall. [143]