"Anne," said Mr. Tollemache firmly, holding out his hand, "I must be going. Good-bye!"
The Comte de Flavigny came at once and caught him by the cuff of his uniform. "No, no, M. le lieutenant! No, I do not want you to go! Come into the bibliothèque and wait for Grandpapa!" he said, with a little tug, and the domestic crowd, waking all at once to a sense of their forgotten duties, concurred in this request, which, to tell the truth, accorded very well with Mr. Tollemache's most secret wish. It was not that he at all desired to receive the thanks of Mr. Elphinstone, but—though he would have died on the scaffold rather than admit it—he hankered for just a few minutes more of Anne's society before the final good-bye.
"If you would come into Mr. Elphinstone's study, sir?" suggested Elspeth respectfully, as he hesitated. Since she now evinced no desire to embrace him, he was about to accede to her request when there was a knock at the front door, which opened to admit the grinning and curious face of the hackney coachman, demanding to know if he was to wait any longer.
So it was not Anne only who was overjoyed when Mr. Elphinstone walked suddenly in.
Late that evening—much later than he ought to have been up—Anne-Hilarion still sat contentedly though sleepily enfolded in his grandfather's arms. He had ceased to ask questions, for they had all been satisfactorily answered . . . all except that "Did you miss me, Grandpapa?" to which Grandpapa had seemed incapable of replying. So his last remark was a statement.
"I had to leave my goldfish behind with those ladies." For he had satisfied himself that Elspeth had not brought it back with her after all.
"Don't speak of those women!" said the gentle old man fiercely. "As for your goldfish, child, you shall have a whole aquarium if you wish."
"Then I could put my big shell inside," murmured Anne drowsily. "M. le Chevalier said it came from . . . came from. . . ." He ceased suddenly; he was asleep.
Conscience-stricken at last, Mr. Elphinstone rang the bell for Elspeth, and was left by the fire to reflect on the inexhaustible mercy of Heaven, and on the debt that he owed to a man away in Jersey, whom he scarcely knew, whom he could not even thank—a debt that in any case, so far as he could see, must ever go unpaid, for it was unpayable.
CHAPTER XVI
The Agent de la Correspondance
(1)
It was not until the Seaflower's boat was actually pulling off from the shore, and his feet were sunk in the wet sand of Porhoët Bay, that Fortuné de la Vireville realised how much more serious than he had imagined might prove the results of the ridiculous accident which had befallen him a few hours previously at St. Helier. Embarking, according to arrangement with the Prince de Bouillon, on the lugger Seaflower with a view to being landed, not at Kerdronan as usual, but at Porhoët, where Grain d'Orge was to meet him, he had had the misfortune to receive upon his left foot the full weight of a refractory water-cask of considerable size, which, escaping from the hands of a clumsy sailor, had rolled vehemently down a gang-plank upon him before he could get out of its way. It is true that when he had finished swearing he had found the episode rather ludicrous, and had laughed at himself for his ill-luck, and that on board the lugger, slipping along with an easy evening breeze from Jersey, the damaged foot, though it had sufficiently pained, had not greatly incommoded him. But here, at midnight, alone on the hostile coast of France, he knew for the first time that he was indeed disabled, and that he could not fully rely on that vigorous body of his which for thirty odd years had seldom failed to respond to the often exorbitant demands that he made upon it. It was not at all a pleasant thought, and, standing there at the water's edge, La Vireville uttered a final and more fervent malediction upon the water-cask.
The boat which had landed him, with its muffled oars, was already out of hearing, though it was still visible, a lessening dark lump upon the quiet sea. Even the lugger, farther out, could almost be discerned by one who knew where to look for her, though the moon which, a week ago, had lighted the way to Jersey for Anne-Hilarion, was obscured this evening. La Vireville glanced about the beach. As far as could be ascertained in the dusk, it was quite deserted; there was no sound but the lap of the incoming tide, and no sign whatever of Grain d'Orge, who should of course have been there to meet him. And, since the émigré had no acquaintance with these few miles of coast, without a guide he was helpless; an attempt to penetrate inland would probably end in his running into an enemy patrol—in spite of the truce, the last thing he wished to do—and even in Porhoët village he had no idea which house he was to make for. Moreover, he was lame—a great deal more lame than he had had any idea of, or he would hardly have landed. . . . And, cursing Grain d'Orge, he began to limp away from the water's edge. In any case, it would be more prudent to approach the low cliffs, where it was darker, than to stand where he was; and under the cliffs, if nothing better offered, he must wait for his dilatory guide.
M. de la Vireville went painfully over the tract of large, rolling pebbles between him and the cliffs, the sweat breaking out on his forehead; but, not having 'chouanné' for nothing, he set his teeth and persevered, throwing his weight as much as possible on his sound foot and on the stick with which the captain of the Seaflower had furnished him. "Devilish odd I must look from the cliff," he reflected, "if there's a patrol up there." But, apparently, there was no patrol, and having pursued his way unmolested up the purgatorial bank he sat down, with a sigh of relief, his back against the cliff, and waited, either for discovery or guidance.
"There is at least one thing to be thankful for," he reflected, "and that is, that I have not the child with me now." But all the same it seemed strange not to have him, and to know no anxiety but for his own personal safety—a burden he was so accustomed to carrying that he scarcely felt its weight.
La Vireville had been there, propped against the cliff, for perhaps half an hour, before he heard the owl's cry. He answered it faintly and cautiously, perceiving, to his astonishment, that it came from seaward, and in a little beheld the dim figure of a man detach itself from an overturned boat on the shingle. As it came towards him it looked, by some trick of the faint light, as unreal as the little bay itself, though it wore the usual peasant's costume, appropriate enough to the scene, and had over its shoulder a large net. When this individual was within distance, La Vireville told him softly what he thought of him, for the apparition was Grain d'Orge.
"I was under the boat watching the cliff," said the Chouan, undisturbed by his leader's abuse. "If I had taken Monsieur Augustin up the cliffs when he landed we might both have been shot—in spite of the truce. They shot three men yesterday. But now we can go on to the village."
"I wanted to get farther than that to-night," said La Vireville, "though the devil knows how I am to manage it now. Is it impossible to push on to Carhoët at present?"
"There are hussars quartered at Carhoët to-night," answered his guide. "They leave to-morrow, probably."
La Vireville began to struggle to his feet. "I see. That is sufficient reason against attempting it. There is another reason, too, why I should not get so far. You may have to carry me as it is, mon vieux. I am as lame as a duck. If we should chance to meet a patrol, you must run for it, and leave me to take my chance. Do you hear?"
The Breton turned a stolid face on him. "Yes, I hear. But I am not good at running. Is Monsieur Augustin ready?"
"As ready as he is ever like to be. Where are you taking me?"
"To a fisherman's cottage just outside Porhoët. There is no one there but a woman—Madame Rozel."
"The fisherman's wife?"
"His widow, some say," responded Grain d'Orge. And he then added the somewhat surprising information: "It is she who has acted as the agent of the late Monsieur Alexis here."
"Really!" said La Vireville—not that he was particularly surprised at the choice of a woman for such a post. He put his hand on his follower's shoulder, and, with Grain d'Orge's arm round him, moved off towards the cliff path.
(2)
Not a gleam of light came from the solitarily-standing little cottage when at last they reached it, but after Grain d'Orge had knocked softly its door opened as though by magic. A whisper, and the Chouan turned to his disabled leader and helped him into the blackness within, past a figure of which only the glimmering coif could be guessed. The door was shut, and then, standing rather dazed in the dark, La Vireville heard the scrape of flint and steel. In another moment the occupant of the cottage had lit the lamp that stood ready on the table, and had turned towards the two men.
The light, seeming by its suddenness more potent than it really was, showed to the émigré a woman of about thirty, of a face and figure extraordinarily unlike what he expected, just then, to see.
"Welcome, Monsieur," she said in a low voice, and the purity of the accent, coming from under the wide peasant's cap, made La Vireville jump. He stammered out something, staring at her, and then he found that she was asking him if he would not eat.
He sat down, puzzled, to the bread and meat and wine ready on the table, and the Breton, after a moment's hesitation, did the same. As a matter of fact, La Vireville was passably hungry, and not a little exhausted by his painful walk. But he could scarcely eat for watching the slim hands that cut the bread and poured his wine. They were brown enough, but the shape and the well-tended nails betrayed them. At last he began to feel annoyed with Grain d'Orge for keeping him in the dark as to the identity of his hostess, since to believe for a moment that she was a fisherman's wife was impossible. If not a lady of great quality she was no woman of the people. And, seizing an opportunity when she was gone from the room, he addressed his guide.
"What the devil do you mean by foisting me upon a gentlewoman in this fashion? Who is she?"
Grain d'Orge went on stolidly eating.
"As I told Monsieur Augustin, she is the agent for the Jersey correspondence of the late M. Alexis. She passes here as Mme. Rozel, a fisherman's——"
"Fisherman's fiddlestick!" interrupted his leader impatiently. "Do you think I am as blind as the people of Porhoët?"
"But I do not know her other name, if she have another," said the Breton. "I do not even know that of the late M. Alexis, but doubtless Monsieur Augustin knows it."
La Vireville did know it, or thought he did. Under that cognomen, he believed, had been concealed the identity of a gentleman from the St. Pol de Léon country, a M. de Kérouan or something of the sort. This, however, did not help him much, and when Mme. Rozel came back he found himself observing her for the next few minutes with an increasing interest. Her face was rather pale, with an intense clear pallor that was accentuated rather than reduced by the lamplight, and she had wide, beautiful brows. The mouth was sad and resolute; her whole expression was sad, but it was resolute too, and when suddenly she lifted her eyes and looked her guest full in the face he received, for the second time since his entrance, an unmistakable shock. They were, unquestionably, the most expressive eyes he had ever seen in a woman. The Chevalier de la Vireville divined in his hostess depths which it had been interesting to explore had not both leisure and inclination been lacking to him.
Mme. Rozel, however, veiled those eyes again and said very little, and after a time Grain d'Orge rose, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, crossed himself, muttered a prayer, and announced that he was going out to watch the roads and would not be back till morning. But La Vireville still sat on at the table, the lamplight beating full on his own lean, strongly-marked features, with their look of humour and daring, on the cleft in his determined chin, and on his dark hair, clubbed and ribboned indeed, but somewhat disordered from the sea-wind. Yet it was curiosity, not hunger, which kept him there, his half-emptied glass between his fingers, engaging his hostess in talk almost perceptibly against her will. Her replies were very brief, and at first he himself made wary conversational moves; for though he really placed almost absolute reliance on Grain d'Orge's knowledge and discretion in a matter of this kind, yet there existed always in this business, a need for caution, and there was just the hundredth part of a chance that she was not, after all, what that astute old Chouan asserted her to be—the agent de la correspondance. But Mme. Rozel's prudence, if anything, exceeded his own; indeed, after a little fencing on both sides it began to seem to La Vireville that she was—necessary circumspection apart—a trifle hostile to him. Possibly she, on her side, felt that he might not be what Grain d'Orge, when he made arrangements for her to receive him, had given him out to be. And yet, from the trend of their guarded converse, it seemed rather that she tacitly resented his coming to take the dead leader's place—for so much she allowed him to gather that she knew of his purpose. But why should she resent it?
He suddenly fired a direct question at her.
"Have you any reason to believe, Madame, that the death of the late M. Alexis was due to anything other than the fortunes of war? I have heard a rumour of treachery. It is true, at any rate, is it not, that he was surprised?"
He saw the swift colour rush over her face, and flee in an instant, leaving her ivory pallor still more pale. Instead of answering him she got up, and took the remains of the loaf to put away in the press against the wall—a pretext, the questioner was sure, to withdraw her face from his further observation.
"Yes, he was surprised," she said in a low voice, her back to him. "He was sitting at table in the farm. It was all over very suddenly. He was . . . he was shot through the head. He did not suffer. . . . O my God," she burst out suddenly, "if only I knew whether it was treachery or no—and if so, whose!"
Yes, there were indeed hidden fires there! The vehemence, the breaking passion in her voice, had somehow jerked La Vireville, lame as he was, to his feet. The question flashed through him. What then had been Mme. Rozel's relations with the slain 'Alexis' that she felt his loss thus acutely? Purely those of political partisanship? Or had she, perchance, been his mistress? The thing was not unknown among the Royalist leaders in the West of France, though it was rare. There was Charles du Boishardy himself as an example—to be, in fact, in a few weeks a fatal example—of laxity in that respect, and, to cite a greater name, Charette's reputation was by no means conformable to that of the unblemished first leaders of the grande guerre, the Vendée, whose work he carried on.
With that cry, wrung so evidently from a torn heart, M. Alexis' agent had swung round from the press, and was looking full at the man who faced her across the table by which he was supporting himself.
"Que diable!" thought the émigré, "I verily believe she thinks I had something to do with that ball in the head!"
Whether his surmise was painted on his countenance, or for whatever reason, Mme. Rozel next instant recovered herself, and removed those accusing eyes—if they were accusing.
"Pardon me, Monsieur," she said hurriedly, "and pray be seated again. I was so . . . so intimately associated with the plans and hopes of Monsieur Alexis that I have felt his death, I confess, very deeply."
"That is easy to understand, Madame," replied her guest, dropping back, at her bidding, in his chair. "You will perhaps permit me to offer my most sincere condolences on what is, besides, a very great loss to our cause. I hope, however, that since I am here by M. du Boishardy's express wish, and not by any desire of my own, that I may count on your co-operation?"
She too had sat down again, after that brief outburst, and seemed to have got rid, perhaps by its means, of some of her latent hostility. "As long as I can, Monsieur, certainly," she said, sighing, her cheek on her hand. "But my work here is done, and I leave in a day or two for the Channel Islands."
And at that piece of information La Vireville no longer felt any doubts as to the nature of the bond which had united her to the departed leader. He had another thought, too, about the fundamental drawback of employing a woman in a position such as hers—a point on which he kept on other counts an open mind, even recognising certain advantages in it. "A man," he said to himself now, "would not resign a post like this just because his superior officer was killed. A change of leadership is just the time when she could have proved herself of most use."
"I regret to hear that, Madame," he said aloud, drily.
"It was my—Monsieur Alexis' express wish if anything happened to him," said she, as if aware of the unspoken criticism, as if careless, too, what implications of intimacy were contained in that avowal.
CHAPTER XVII
Strange Conduct of the Agent
(1)
Half an hour later M. de la Vireville's half-perfunctory, half-condemnatory regret at Mme. Rozel's approaching departure was a much more genuine and a deeper feeling. At his request she had been giving him particulars about the arrangements of the correspondence at Porhoët, so that he or his delegate could take steps for it to be carried on with as little interruption as might be. And he very quickly saw that she was the right person for the post—a remarkable woman, full of intelligence and resource. M. de Kérouan had been lucky in his 'agent.' And yet, in talking to her much more frankly than he had yet done, or she to him, he could not help speculating as to where that passionate soul which he guessed to be yoked with so much understanding and will might one day lead her. He was to know before long.
She ended by warning him that she thought it would be well in the future to choose some other place on the coast for the Jersey correspondence. The new mayor was exhibiting a certain amount of suspicion and zeal. She hoped that Monsieur Augustin's landing had not been observed; she had warned Grain d'Orge to be very careful. Fortuné, who was a little surprised to learn that so small a place had a mayor at all, thereupon described with some humour the form which Grain d'Orge's inspired caution had taken.
And after this their talk, late as it was, began to range farther afield into the past, and somehow La Vireville found himself touching on his own previous experiences of exile, for he had been in the army of the Princes in 1792.
"I hated Coblentz when I was there," he said frankly, finishing his wine at last. "It is true I was pretty near starving at the time."
And suddenly he felt Mme. Rozel's recovering confidence in him retract, as a sea-anemone shrinks up at the touch of a finger.
"Ah, you have been at Coblentz, Monsieur," she said slowly, looking at him with a curious expression. "When exactly was that, if I may ask?"
He told her, within a week or two of the precise date, as well as he could remember. "You have been there too, Madame?" he hazarded.
"No; I have never been to Coblentz," she answered. Her eyes, that held a more ready speech than her lips, had clouded over, and he could almost see her thoughts playing round that Mecca of the French emigration. Again he wondered why.
He talked on a little more, but the mention of Coblentz seemed to have broken the spell, and he suddenly remembered that it was very late—or, rather, very early.
"I will ask your permission to retire, Madame," said he, a trifle formally. "I must be abroad before the village is awake—especially after what you have told me." He got to his feet, and stood leaning on the back of his chair, waiting for his dismissal. She too got up, and, after lighting a rushlight, threw a glance at the ladder-like stairs in the corner behind her. "I must apologise for your quarters, Monsieur Augustin. They are little better than a loft, I fear. Do you think that, crippled as you are, you can manage that steep ascent? And how will you get to Carhoët to-morrow?"
"I leave that to Grain d'Orge, Madame," replied the émigré. "He is a person of resource in his own line. Besides, I hope that my foot will be better."
The mention of his destination had reminded him of something, and he thrust a hand into his breast. "You were good enough, Madame, to give me some names at Carhoët, and so, to avoid disturbing you in the morning, may I ask you to write them down for me now? I have some paper here."
He drew out from an inner pocket a small bundle of loose letters, a couple of which incontinently slipped to the floor. Before he could prevent her she had stooped to pick them up, and had laid them at his elbow on the table. Thanking her, he meanwhile tore off a blank sheet from his correspondence.
"Now, if you would be so good, Madame," he said, handing her the piece of paper and instinctively looking round for pen and ink.
But Mme. Rozel, at his side, was staring as if transfixed at one of the letters she had rescued, now lying face upwards between them on the table.
"Is that your real name, Monsieur Augustin?" she asked, in an odd voice, pointing to the letter.
Now in Brittany La Vireville's nom de guerre was so much more significant than his own—which, as has been said, he made some endeavours to keep distinct from it—that it was second nature to him to be called by it, and he had never even thought of informing her of the latter. In Brittany communications also were addressed to "M. Augustin." But the topmost of the two letters which his hostess had picked up chanced to be a note from the Prince de Bouillon sent to him during his recent stay at St. Helier, and, presumably for that reason, directed to him in his real name. Hence a large "M. de la Vireville" looked up at them both from the table, for His Serene Highness wrote no crabbed hand.
"Why, yes, Madame," answered the owner carelessly. "Did you not know it? I had no intention of keeping you in the dark on the point."
"Nor had I any intention of . . . prying," she said, and, catching up the two letters, she held them out to him almost feverishly. "I will give you the names you want at once." She well-nigh snatched from him the piece of paper he was holding. "Where is the pen?"
Thoroughly puzzled, La Vireville watched her as, with set mouth and face as white as the paper itself, she wrote out the list he required. Why should his name so discompose her? M. de Kérouan, whom he had never met, had evidently not mentioned it to her while he was alive—possibly did not even know it himself. It was not as if their commands had been contiguous. But why should his 'agent' find the discovery so extremely disconcerting? Was it possible that she, like Mme. de Chaulnes . . .? No, that he could not credit for a moment. It was on the tip of his tongue to pursue the subject—and he knew he was rather a fool not to do so—but somehow he was too sorry for her to probe her distress to-night. She had but recently lost her lover, and she was so pale! When she gave him the list he merely thanked her, and bent over her hand for a moment with a grace oddly at variance with its surroundings. The hand in question was very cold.
Once again, as he took up the rushlight, she began an apology, scarcely audible, for the poorness of his quarters, and the difficulty of getting to them.
"A night in the hayloft used to be the summit of my ambition, Madame, when I was a child," replied he gaily. "I only hope that you will sleep as well as I shall." And with that he limped away to the stairs.
The ascent, indeed, was not too easy to him. At the top a last prompting of curiosity urged him to glance back over his shoulder down into the room. But his hostess was no longer visible, and he opened the door at the top of the ladder-stairs to find himself in a small, bare apartment, containing little save a truckle-bed under the window, with a rush-bottomed chair beside it, a press built into the wall by the door, and a crucifix.
Having ascertained that the crazy door possessed no means of fastening other than a latch, and a bolt on the outside, La Vireville set down the light on a chair and threw off his outer garments with celerity. He had the habit of seizing sleep when he could get it, and in Brittany a bed was something of a luxury. And though in Porhoët village he was probably less safe than he would have been sleeping, as usual, with his men in the lee of a hedge under the open sky, and knew it, and though his curiosity, if not his suspicions, had lately suffered a rousing prick, and though—more disturbing than either—his foot ached persistently, ere a quarter of an hour had elapsed he was in the enjoyment of a very refreshing slumber.
(2)
Perhaps if the guest could have known how his hostess spent the night he might have slept less well; perhaps, even, if, when he had looked back from the head of the stairs, he had seen how she stood rigid against the wall, in the lake of shadow by the press, her hands clenched at her sides, like one who has encountered some terrible vision, he might have descended to prosecute the inquiry he had abandoned. Perhaps he might have felt compassion at the tormented, desperate face she wore as the hours crept on towards morning, and every one brought conviction nearer to her, yet no guidance. "It is he! it must be he!" she said aloud, not once but many times. "He was at Coblentz then—he acknowledged it. Oh, was it god or devil showed me his name? . . . André, André, my darling, tell me what I am to do!" Rent with sobs, she would cease her agonised pacing to and fro, and throw herself down by the table, her head on her outstretched arms. . . . But of these phenomena La Vireville was not a witness.
And soon the dawn was stealing in, comfortless. Mme. Rozel extinguished the lamp, and sat, her hands locked tight together. As the daylight grew, so did the light in her eyes—a steady beacon. Her mouth hardened itself into an inflexible line, and at last, rising as one whose mind is irrevocably set, she began to go cautiously up the stairs to La Vireville's room.
So light was her tread that the steps did not creak. The door yielded to her touch. She went in, noiseless as a ghost, her face like a ghost's save for the flame in her eyes.
Under the tiny window, a little turned on his side, and with one arm crooked beneath his head, her guest lay in a profound sleep. She stood a minute by the door, then crept nearer and looked down at him long and steadily. Yes, it must be he! Here were the same features, as they had been painted to her; the same hair and brows, the same cleft in the chin. The mounting tide of hatred began to lift her off her feet. . . . And even while she studied his sleeping face she saw, hanging from the back of the chair by the bedside, a hunting-knife—his own.
She was not conscious of putting out her hand for it, still less of drawing it from its sheath, yet the moment after the bright blade was somehow in her grip. How absolutely he lay at her mercy!—and so still that his breathing scarcely lifted his half-open shirt. Staring down at the strong, bare throat she suddenly turned giddy. . . .
How far—or how little distance—would that wave of feeling have carried her? Next instant two eyes, quite calm and very alert, were looking up into hers, and the hand that had been under the sleeper's head held her wrist in a clutch like fate.
"Madame, private theatricals are out of fashion," said La Vireville in a lazy voice. A twist of his powerful fingers, and the hunting-knife dropped from her grasp to the coverlet, where his other hand secured it. "My own knife too! May I ask why you were rehearsing this dramatic scene?"
All the while he lay and looked up at her, too contemptuous, it seemed, to be at the trouble of raising himself, so long as he had her wrist prisoner in that hopeless grasp of his. White, silent, choking, her other hand at her throat, she did not even make an attempt to wrench herself away. At last, when her captor had run on a little more, he loosed his hold. "You can go, my fair assassin! In whose pay are you, by the way?"
She paid no heed to the taunt, but, having reached the door, she turned, and spoke in a voice rendered unsteady neither by fear nor shame, but by some more positive emotion.
"Listen, M. de la Vireville, and I will tell you my name. I am Raymonde de Guéfontaine—Raymonde du Coudrais, the sister of André du Coudrais, the man whom you hounded out of Coblentz on a lying charge of cheating at cards, whose reputation you blasted with your tongue, whose health you ruined with your sword! And now, before he is cold in his grave—murdered, for all I know, by your connivance—you come to claim his place! Oh, it is too much! After all, cold steel, could I have used it, is too good for you! I know a better way—a more fitting——"
"Du Coudrais!" broke in the thunderstruck La Vireville, on his elbow. "'Alexis' was du Coudrais! But he . . . it was——"
"Ah, you remember!" cried she, unheeding. "You remember that night at the Three Crowns, and the morning after! Till now you had forgotten, perhaps? Otherwise, surely, you would scarcely have dared to come—even you! I had heard a whisper of your name, but I did not believe——"
"Stop!" cried La Vireville, breaking in, in his turn. "I assure you——"
Her hand was already on the door. "Too late, M. le Marquis! What is done is done. But you shall never step into André's shoes. And at least you know now why I am going to give you up!"
"The devil you are!" said La Vireville, with a very grim face. The pistol in his hand covered her with a perfectly steady aim. "There is this between you and your hospitable project, Mme. de Guéfontaine!" He cocked it.
She stood flattened against the door, wide-eyed, scarcely breathing, but not attempting to move.
"Now swear," commanded the émigré, "swear on the crucifix there that you will do no such thing! Otherwise I shall fire!" For he knew that she would be through the door before he could spring on her.
"I will not swear!" cried she, her face a white flame. "Shoot me if you will—you can do no worse to me than you have already done through André—but if you do not shoot me, as sure as there is a God above us, I shall summon the National Guard of this place to take you!"
Though the colour of a sheet, she did not flinch before the barrel, not ten feet away. La Vireville set his teeth, and himself changed colour. But he could not do it. The pistol sank.
"Madame," he said, in his usual careless tone, "if you are treacherous you are devilish well-plucked. I wish I were as strong-minded. Go and fetch the National Guard then, and be damned to it!"
CHAPTER XVIII
Equally surprising Conduct of "Monsieur Augustin"
(1)
Five seconds, no more, did Fortuné de la Vireville allow himself wherein to reflect that he found himself, as the door was shut and the bolt slid into place, in one of the most unpleasant situations of his life; ten to formulate a plan—a very precarious and weak-kneed plan—of escape therefrom, and about a minute and a half to scramble into the rest of his clothes. He could have done this quicker but for his foot, which hampered him at every turn. Then, kneeling on the bed, he pushed the little casement wide, tore off the sheets, knotted them together, twisted them round into the semblance of a rope, made one end fast to the head of the bed, and threw the slack out of the window. But he did not climb down it. Nor did he attempt to break open the door, which he could probably have done with ease. To escape in either of those ways before the house was surrounded would necessitate running, and, unfortunately he could not run. But he trusted that the sheet hanging out of the window would convince the National Guard that he had run. . . . He thrust his pistols into his belt, picked up his hunting-knife—a smile flitted across his face as he touched it—and limped across the room to his chosen refuge.
If it was a refuge! For his life depended at that moment on what Mme. de Guéfontaine, the 'fisherman's widow,' had a habit of storing in the large press built into the side of the little room. If it were linen, or anything that required the presence of shelves, then—"Good-night, my friend!" said La Vireville to himself.
"But no!—one enters!" he finished, when the door stood wide. There was nothing at all in the cupboard but a row of pegs, from one of which depended, oddly enough, a tricolour sash. So he went in.
The place had a strange, stuffy smell. Light, but not much air, came under the flimsy double doors, and between them. "And if I am to stay here long," thought La Vireville, "a chair would be very acceptable;" for it was tiring to stand, as he was doing, practically on one leg. If he sat upon the floor he could not make much of a fight of it, supposing the necessity arose. He was beginning seriously to contemplate emerging to fetch the chair when he heard numerous and hurried steps on the steep stairway outside. "This cannot, surely, be the National Guard already," thought their quarry. "The vindictive lady has not had the time to summon them!" For he remembered noticing last night that Mme. Rozel's cottage stood at a little distance from Porhoët itself.
Nevertheless the visitors' method of procedure pointed to a raid. Some form of battering ram, presumably the butt of a musket, was hastily applied to the door of the room. A very little hammering, and the portal fell inwards with a crash. As it was fastened on the outside only, the refugee was tickled at this evidence of local zeal. "If these individuals look into this cupboard I fear they will be very ungentle with me," he reflected, a pistol in either hand. "Let me see to it, in that case, that their numbers are somewhat reduced."
But he had no need of his weapons; his ruse had been enough for these simple and enthusiastic souls. La Vireville heard a wild rush to the window and the (as he had hoped) convincing sheet; thereafter cries, stampings, curses, and voices proclaiming that the Chouan had escaped by the window, and that the woman Rozel, in league with him, had warned him.
"Hardly the way that I should have put it!" thought the fugitive.
And from that indictment of complicity to avenging action was but a step. "Arrest her! arrest her!" shouted several voices. And with a fresh rush down the stairs, with noise and loud talking from below, and what La Vireville half took to be a stifled scream, this was evidently accomplished. Five minutes had seen the development of the whole drama.
(2)
With the loud banging of the cottage door a great and signal silence fell upon the dwelling of the 'fisherman's widow,' even upon the cupboard upstairs and its occupant. For La Vireville was filled in the first place with an access of prudence which urged him to make no sound until he was tolerably sure that the house was really empty; in the second with a certain ironical satisfaction. Into a memory not over well stored with such literature had come the words of the Psalmist concerning such as dug a pit and fell into the midst of it themselves, and he stayed to savour them. Poor Mme. de Guéfontaine! she had paid dearly for her vengeful instincts. Moreover, in spite of the poetical justice which had overtaken her, she might have that revenge even yet. La Vireville was helpless, even in the empty house. Grain d'Orge would certainly not come till dusk, always supposing that he were free to come at all. Before his advent, too, the village authorities might return to search the house; it seemed strange, indeed, that they had not already done so.
But, however precarious one's position, it is impossible to live without food. La Vireville hobbled downstairs and found a loaf of bread and some sour milk, with which he clambered back to his little room. Eating the bread thoughtfully, as he sat on his devastated bed, he considered the case of Mme. de Guéfontaine. So 'Alexis' had been the unfortunate du Coudrais, the victim of an odious charge made against him (whether in good faith or for some ulterior object Fortuné had never felt quite sure) by a near kinsman of La Vireville's own, the Marquis of that name! La Vireville himself had only arrived at Coblentz a few days after the duel which ensued upon the Marquis's denunciation of du Coudrais at the Three Crowns, to which Mme. de Guéfontaine had made hot reference; but émigré circles were still ringing with the scandal, and the Marquis de la Vireville, his own arm in a sling, was better able to explain to his cousin how he had run du Coudrais through the lungs than to satisfy him—or anybody else—of the ill-starred gentleman's dishonour. But du Coudrais, when he recovered from his wound, had to leave Coblentz nevertheless . . . and, having left it, was abundantly cleared, too late, of the charge against him by the dramatic unmasking of another man as a professional sharper. And for this affair, in which ironically enough, La Vireville had by no means supported his cousin, of whose past record he knew too much, he had been himself within an ace of paying the penalty—might, indeed, yet pay it.
It was quite clear to him why Mme. de Guéfontaine had taken him for her late brother's aggressor. He had confessed to his name, he had mentioned having been at Coblentz at the time, and he bore a close family resemblance to his kinsman—close enough, at least, to deceive anyone who relied merely on a verbal description; for it was tolerably certain that Mme. de Guéfontaine had never seen the Marquis de la Vireville. Evidently she had been devotedly attached to her brother; had shared in his schemes, worked and plotted for him here at Porhoët, in a position of no small danger, and then, fresh from the shock of that brother's violent death, was called upon—so she thought—to shelter and to help to install in his place the man who had been his worst enemy! She was a woman of strong feelings; she had found the situation, as she had declared to him, intolerable, and in a moment of wild impulse she had resolved to put a term to it and to avenge her brother in one and the same act. And, reviewing the episode dispassionately, La Vireville found he could not blame her overmuch . . . especially as she had failed. True, there was always something of a nauseous flavour about delation, but the matter of the cold steel had a primitive and heroic touch—Jael and Sisera. "And if," he said to himself, "if I had given her a minute longer she need not have been put to the shift of betraying me to the authorities!" . . . Yet, after all, he doubted whether she would have had the nerve to use the knife. And, whatever her intentions with regard to the National Guard, it was by no means certain that she had carried them out. He did not see how she could have done so in the time. And because he found himself oddly reluctant to associate her with the idea of just that form of treachery, he settled that she had not had time. . . . But she was, no doubt of it, a remarkable woman!
And so, commending her spirit, as though he had not nearly been its victim, La Vireville arrived, as the long, featureless day was beginning to close in, at a certain decision.
When the dusk had quite fallen the owl's cry, as he had expected, came prudently to his ears. He answered it, and in a little while the countenance of Grain d'Orge was visible at the window, whence the misleading sheet still trailed into the garden.
"Come in," said his leader, without moving from the chair whereon he sat, with his legs extended on another. "A pretty sort of refuge you selected for me!"
The Chouan scrambled over the sill on to the bed, and broke into violent and ashamed protestations, mingled with horrible curses on the unknown informer. It was plain that he did not suspect where the guilt really lay.
"Never mind," remarked La Vireville carelessly. "I have fallen upon circumstances which you could not possibly have foreseen, and I harbour no grudge against you, mon gars. But have you any plan for getting me away?"
"There will be two horses to-night at the cross-roads, a quarter of a mile away, if you think you can get so far, Monsieur Augustin, and if we have the luck not to be seen."
"I can get there," said La Vireville. "Repose has benefited my foot. But we have a little matter that demands our attention in Porhoët first. You know that Mme. Rozel has been arrested?"
"Yes, the poor woman!"
"The poor woman, as you say. Well, before we leave this place I am minded to repay her hospitality. We must remember, too, that she was the defunct M. Alexis' agent here, and has deserved well of the King's cause. It will therefore be our business, before proceeding to Carhoët, to set her at liberty."
"Monsieur is joking!" said the Chouan, his jaw dropped.
And it took La Vireville, with all his authority, quite twenty minutes to extract from his horrified follower what he knew of the conditions of Mme. Rozel's captivity, and to reduce him, on the point of an attempt at rescue, to an incredibly sulky submission.
"I am about to become a Republican to that end," announced the émigré when this result had at last been attained. "Do you fancy me in the rôle, Grain d'Orge?" And, limping to the cupboard, he snatched the tricolour sash off the peg, wound it twice round his waist and tied a flamboyant bow at the left side.
Mingled horror and disgust strove in the Breton's face.
"For God's sake, Monsieur Augustin!" he protested.
"Citizen Augustin, if you please," corrected La Vireville with dignity. "I have, unfortunately, no cockade. Never mind; it is dark. But we want some little scrap of writing on official paper—just to make an effect. . . . I have it!" and he took from the breast of his coat the Government proclamation for his own head.
"With a trifle of manipulation . . ." said he. "Grain d'Orge, descend into our parlour and bring me the pen and ink that is there."
Unspeakably sullen, the Chouan obeyed, and when La Vireville had, by doubling up the paper, secured a blank space under the "In the name of the Republic one and indivisible," he executed thereon a few specious forgeries and waved the paper about to dry it.
"Observe, my good Grain d'Orge," he said, "to what virtuous use can things evil be put. This paper, instead of being a brave man's death-warrant, shall bring liberty to a woman . . . who very little deserves it," he added to himself. "More, my faithful follower," he pursued impressively, "if you understood better what I was doing, you would be lost in admiration at the nobility of my character. I own that I am myself so lost."
"I understand this, M. le Chevalier," retorted the Breton with passion, "that you are mad, stark mad, to go playing your head like this! The woman Rozel has bewitched you."
"I believe you are right," answered his leader. "And she did it with a knife—my own! It is a potent spell, if an unusual. But you surely would not have a gentleman leave a woman to her fate, be she enchantress or no? . . . Well, we must have our horses before we can pay our visit to the Citizen Botidoux—that, I think you said, was the mayor's name. You can go first down the sheet and steady it for me."
It is not altogether surprising that Grain d'Orge, when his master slid to earth beside him, was muttering mingled prayers and imprecations. La Vireville smiled to himself as he leant his weight on that faithful arm, and the two moved off into the darkness.
(3)
About a quarter after midnight, M. Jacques-Pierre Botidoux, grocer and mayor, sleeping peacefully beside his wife, was aware of a very persistent knocking upon the door of his little shop below him. Arising, not without lamentation, and thrusting a night-capped head out of the window, he was astounded to see in the street two shadowy figures on horseback.
"What do you want?" he shouted ill-temperedly.
The taller figure lifted a dim face. "Silence!" it said in a low, rapid, and singularly impressive voice. "Silence, Citizen, and come down to the door!"
And at M. Botidoux, when, dazed, cross, and sleepy, he finally unfastened his shop door, was launched an imperative demand for the key of the village lock-up. As he gaped at the mandate the tall rider bent from the saddle; a vast tricolour sash showed indistinctly round his middle as he moved his arm under his cloak. "Citizen, I am from the quarters at Carhoët, but I carry orders from the Convention itself. You are to deliver to me without delay the person of the woman Rozel, arrested by you this morning. You did well and wisely in so arresting her, but higher powers than you have need of her, and at once. A conspiracy of great extent . . . the State . . . information . . . you understand?"
"But . . . but . . ." began M. Botidoux, who did not understand at all.
The emissary of the Convention changed his tone. "Eh?" he said sharply. "Will not this satisfy you?" He flapped some kind of paper in the startled face. "Must I bring in my escort to convince you?"
"No, no!" stammered Botidoux. "No, Citizen Commissary, I will get the key, I will come at once!"
"That is well," responded the cloaked figure. "But, look you, not a word! It is of the utmost importance that no one in the village knows of this transfer of a prisoner of State. Others are not to be trusted as the Convention trusts you, Citizen! That is why I left my escort at the cross-roads, and came with only this good fellow to guide me."
"But the woman——"
"Do you think two able men cannot manage one woman, Mr. Mayor?"
Very soon the short, stout, and rattled Botidoux was trotting by the side of the silent horsemen, was leading them towards the little house standing back from the street which served as a lock-up for drunkards. Porhoët was not of sufficient importance for a jail. Towards this Botidoux vanished, important, if puzzled, and in a little while reappeared, bringing by the wrist the figure of a woman. Some other man was vaguely discernible in the background.
"Put her up in front of the guide," ordered the Commissary, who seemed to have no wish to dismount.
Mme. Rozel must have recognised his voice, for she gave a faint scream, which Botidoux had the wit to smother ere he lifted her into Grain d'Orge's unwilling arms. But once there the captive began a fresh protest.
"Where are you taking me—who is it?" she cried, struggling. But, since expostulations were only to be expected in her situation, M. Botidoux was not at all perturbed.
"Be silent, woman!" he urged; and as the riders, turning their steeds, began to move down the street, he added, "I think your escort has come to look for you, M. le Commissaire."
"What!" exclaimed La Vireville, startled out of his sangfroid. "By God, it's true!" For he had heard the jingle of bits at the end of the street. It could be nothing else but the cavalry detachment from Carhoët out to hunt for him.
He uttered a very pretty and comprehensive curse, and turned his horse's head in the opposite direction. "Come on, we must ride for it! Come on, I say!" Grain d'Orge's mount—a grey—sprang forward, and Mme. Rozel screamed again. A shout answered her from a point nearer than the oncoming hussars—from another little group of horses, imperfectly seen, on the left, whose riders were mounting in haste.
"Madame, you have lost us all!" said La Vireville furiously. "Ride like the devil, Grain d'Orge; straight on—straight on, I tell you! I'm going back; they will come after me!" He tugged at his bewildered steed, brought it slithering to its haunches, swung round yet again, and set off in the direction of the hussars at the end of the street.
As he had hoped, the mounting men on their left, confused, hesitated a moment, then decided to follow him and not the doubly-burdened grey. In front was the stationary, or almost stationary, cavalry, as yet only one vague bunch on the road. But, much as La Vireville would have liked to try it, he could scarcely venture to ride past or through them. He checked his horse, hoping that what he took to be a hedge on his left hand was really a hedge, and put the animal at it, somewhat expecting to land in a garden or an orchard. But, apparently, he was in a field, and a large one at that. On the grass he urged his excited horse into a frantic gallop, his blood racing not unpleasantly. Shouts told him that other horsemen had also cleared the hedge and were after him. "I wonder what I shall ride into in this cursed darkness?" he thought. And he thought also, "I did not expect she would be a woman to scream. . . ." Something black rose before him—the usual Breton field hedge, a six-foot bank with forest trees atop, impossible to negotiate on horseback. Should he then abandon his mount? He had but a second in which to make up his mind, for his pursuers, better horsed, were inevitably gaining on him. No, he would go on, and, trusting to find the échalier—the low, ladder-like gate of those parts—he cantered for a moment alongside the bank.
Here, judging by the cessation of the dark mound and its crown of trees, was what he sought. He put his horse at the gap. As he rose, a spattering fire rang out; a bullet sang past his cheek, there was a most unpleasant sensation of a jerking fall, and he found himself among a great deal of wet grass, with his injured foot excruciatingly pinned beneath the weight of his struggling horse. La Vireville instinctively stuffed the back of his hand into his mouth to prevent himself from screaming out, saw all the stars of the dark heaven swoop down on him, and incontinently fainted.
CHAPTER XIX
La Porte du Manoir
(1)
A cold and grey light was in the sky when La Vireville came back to consciousness, and, for the moment greatly puzzled, raised his head and looked about him. There was no fallen horse, no sign of hussars, nothing left of the night's doings but a sick feeling in the mouth, a bruised shoulder, and a foot that ached ten thousand times worse than he had ever thought a foot could ache. But, as he struggled to one elbow, he saw another relic—he tricolour sash about his body. He surveyed it without much approbation. Was it that symbol which had saved him? No; it had been too dark when he came down; they could not have seen it. Had they thought him killed, then, and ridden off and left him? Hardly, because if they knew whom they were hunting, which was probable, they would have been anxious for the reward, since he was equally marketable alive or dead—did he not carry that guarantee on his person? And where was his wounded horse? He came at last to the conclusion that his steed must have picked itself up and galloped on, and that the hussars had pursued it, not seeing that it was riderless, or that their quarry was lying at their mercy by the échalier. They must almost have ridden over him as he lay senseless. All of which was very miraculous, and seemed to denote a special care on the part of Providence that was encouraging. "If only the brute had chosen my other foot to roll on!" thought the victim. "But of course he would not!"
However, long as the grass was, and early as the hour, it was unbecoming to lie there like a lame sheep and wait to be picked up. A coppice ran along the side of this second field, and towards this, on his hands and knees, the ends of the tricolour sash dragging in the wet grass, La Vireville made his way. And in the coppice, having drunk some brandy, cut off his slashed boot and applied the same restorative to his swollen foot, he very stoically lay down under an oak, thinking to sleep. That solace, however, he could not compass; his foot hurt too much. Moreover, he had a fairly knotty problem to solve—how best to remove himself from his present environment to a safer. And he saw no way, short of crawling or hopping. For even if he were physically capable of working his way towards Carhoët he could only safely do it under cover of darkness, and for darkness, near as he was to Porhoët, he could not afford to wait. "I was really better in my cupboard," he reflected. Certainly his knight-errantry, if it had proved of any avail for the lady—which was more than doubtful—had left its author in no happy plight.
And at last it was borne in upon La Vireville that, daylight or no daylight, he must somehow set a greater distance between himself and the now enlightened village of Porhoët. With luck, the copse where he lay might turn out to be a spur of the wood of Roscanvel, which he knew, from a previous study of the map, to be somewhere thereabouts. In that case, by going a little farther he might find shelter till the evening, even if he had to climb a tree to attain it. He sighed, sat up, and tried to draw the remains of his boot over his foot—an attempt that proved out of the question. So he tied up the injured member as best he could, cut himself a stout stick out of the coppice, and, just as the first rays of the sun began to strike through the trees, set his face towards the thickness of the wood.
(2)
Because it had been raining hard since ten in the morning—though now, by sunset, it had ceased—the bad road was exceedingly muddy and full of extensive pools. These it was at the moment so profoundly delighting a small male child to stir up with a twig that he did not observe the slow approach of a wayfarer, nor look up till he heard himself addressed. He then saw a tall man leaning upon a stick and wearing only one boot. He was bareheaded, wet, and very pale; but he wore a tricolour sash.
"Child," said the apparition, and its voice sounded strange and small, like the voice of Uncle Pierre when he was ill of the fever—"child, is there any house along this road . . . not far away?"
The boy was frightened, and much desired to return no answer at all, but he knew that you must not trifle with those who wore the tricolour scarf, or it would be the worse for you. So, rubbing his bare toes for solace in the delicious mud, he responded truthfully:
"Round the next corner, Citizen, you will see the old manoir of L'Estournel. But nobody lives there, and it is full of ghosts, witches, and all manner of evil things. One does not pass it after dark."
"Thank you," said the man with the tricolour. And adding solemnly, "May you live to be an ornament to your country," he gave him a silver piece and limped on. The boy watched him with open mouth till he disappeared round the bend.
It seemed to La Vireville that he had never known the possession of two sound feet; also, that he had been walking for several days, though it was only at noon that he had left the forest, which had not proved a very happy resting-place. But since then he had set he knew not how many miles between himself and Porhoët; indeed, by now he had almost lost count of direction. He was wet and hungry, while his foot was a plaster of mud, blood, and devouring pain. Finally, he was on an open road, where he little desired to find himself. But he hoped now to force an entrance into the deserted house.
Round the turn of the road he saw it at last, steep-roofed, peering greyly at him over its high wall. All round it the overgrown trees flamed with spring and sunset, and, behind, two slim poplars mounted like spires to heaven. The wall brimmed with the stems of matted creepers, and in it, sheltered in a stone archway with a living thatch of grass, was an old green door. He would go through this and rest.
As he had the thought, La Vireville's heart stood still, for he had caught the sound of many hoofs in front of him. Was he neatly trapped after all his fatigue and pain? Then at least he would not be taken alive, nor die with their accursed rag on his body! He tore off the sash and flung it into the ditch, drew behind the row of chestnuts which fringed the road—a perfectly inadequate cover—and, a hand on each pistol, waited. . . .
And they passed, at a canter, half a squadron of red hussars, looking neither to right nor left!
Strong-nerved as he was, Fortuné de la Vireville turned a moment giddy with the revulsion. Then once more he saw the trees beckoning over the wall, the friendly green door, the grey roofs. If only he could get inside he could at least drop down in peace in the garden, and after that he cared little what happened. He hobbled forward, steadying himself from chestnut to chestnut. In all the rainpools the sunset gleamed, and the reflection bothered him, dancing up and down. "I must reach the door! I must reach the door!" he kept repeating. Only twenty-five steps farther, perhaps . . . or count it by trees, that was better. . . . The effort of keeping his head steady in the dizzying pain was as difficult as the actual walking. At last he had shuffled across the road, and was at the old green door, and dared not try whether it were fastened. La Vireville had never in his life, he thought, desired anything so vehemently as to be able to pass it—though in truth he knew not if he should find safety on the other side. . . . The latch was stiff; his fingers seemed stiffening too. . . . It lifted, the door gave, creaking on its old hinges, and he found himself inside. He had just enough sense to close it after him.
Within, it was all as he had guessed it would be, of a neglect so ancient that every growing thing had set itself to repair and clothe it. But all that he saw clearly was the great, nail-studded door above the flight of shallow steps, for it stood wide open, and through the archway, framed in a tangle of still rust-coloured creeper, was cool darkness. It drew him more than the rioting garden, and he got himself somehow up the steps. And, once in the place, that was half-hall, half-kitchen, and that was lofty, with many great beams, he knew himself to be vanquished, for there was mist before his eyes and the sea in his ears. Yet he staggered as far as the huge old table, thick in dust, that stood before the great empty hearth, before he felt himself falling. He made a grab at the oak, missed it, stood swaying, and then sank heavily to the cold hearthstone. Consciousness had left him before he reached it.
(3)
When the familiar pain in his foot laid hold of him once more, and pulled him up, reluctant, from this happy blankness he was aware, as he came, of other sensations. Something wet and cold, smelling strongly of brandy, was passing slowly over his forehead; something hard was rubbing one of his hands. A voice said, "He is coming to," and this being now his own opinion, La Vireville opened his eyes.
He was lying where he had fallen, but his head was resting in the crook of someone's arm. On the other side knelt Grain d'Orge, chafing one of his hands between his own horny palms; he looked ridiculously lugubrious. La Vireville stirred.
"You are safe, Monsieur, you are safe!" said a woman's voice above him—a voice with a break in it. "Oh, your poor foot!"
The émigré removed his gaze from Grain d'Orge, who kissed the hand he was holding, and, looking up, beheld the face of Mme. de Guéfontaine, stamped with a new character of pity and tenderness. He concluded that she was no longer desirous of his blood. But how was it that she and Grain d'Orge were here? He tried to ask her, but the words were unaccountably difficult to say.
"You shall know in good time, Monsieur le Chevalier," she said gently. "Meanwhile, lie still. Grain d'Orge, roll up that cloak and put it under his head. That is better." She slipped her arm from under La Vireville's head, and his eyes closed again in spite of himself. A little time passed; he heard the Chouan murmuring prayers. Then light fingers were unwrapping the rags from about his lacerated foot, and he felt on it the sting of water, deliciously cold. He reopened his eyes.
"I am afraid that I am giving you a great deal of trouble," he said slowly and politely to the kneeling figure.
Mme. de Guéfontaine lifted her head, and, to his amazement, the tears were running down her cheeks. "I did not betray you!" she said, clasping her hands together over the dripping cloth they held. "Oh, believe me, M. le Chevalier, whatever I said to you in my madness, I did not give you up! I could not do it—by the time I was downstairs again I was ashamed of having said I would. But, by the most evil chance, which I still cannot understand, the section having got wind, somehow, of your arrival, chose that very moment to break in to arrest you. And when they found you, as they thought, gone, they arrested me instead . . . and if it had not been for you . . . And you,"—she finished brokenly, looking down at his foot,—"you went through all this for me, thinking I had betrayed you."
"Why," said La Vireville, with more animation, "if it comes to that, Madame, you were yourself under a slight misapprehension with regard to me!"
"I know! I know! Oh, can you ever forgive me?" she cried, leaving her task and kneeling down once more by his side. "I know now—it was your cousin the Marquis—but the name, the likeness, your having been at Coblentz—I felt so sure——"
"Then how do you know now?" queried La Vireville, still more puzzled.
"Because," she answered, "I have had someone to tell me the truth. I told you that I was leaving Porhoët in a day or two. I was, in fact, expecting my other brother from Guernsey to take me away—he is in the Comte d'Oilliamson's regiment there. He was to meet me here at L'Estournel, rather than come to Porhoët, because the manoir was unoccupied, and we both knew it, as it belonged once to our kin. So I made Grain d'Orge bring me here; it seemed the best thing to do, since we could not safely return to Porhoët, and Henri, when he came, could help Grain d'Orge to look for you."
She broke off, and returned to her ministrations.
"And then, Madame?" suggested her patient.
"Henri was here waiting for me! He had come earlier by a day than we had arranged. And he told me about poor André—how that it was your cousin the Marquis. Indeed, I had been already prepared for this, because Grain d'Orge spoke once or twice of you as 'Monsieur le Chevalier.' . . . All day we have been searching for you, as best we could—my brother is not yet returned. (Oh, this foot . . . what you must have suffered!) But I, when I came in a little while ago and saw you lying like a dead man across the hearthstone, I could scarcely believe it—and that fate had given me a chance after all of telling you that—a chance of undoing what I did——"
"What you did not do, rather," corrected La Vireville.
"But you thought I had—and yet you saved me!"
It was impossible categorically to deny this accusation, yet La Vireville was beginning to answer when a step was heard on the flagged floor, and Mme. de Guéfontaine sprang to her feet.
"Henri—he is here!"
And into the prostrate man's somewhat limited field of vision came a dark, good-looking young man whose resemblance to Mme. de Guéfontaine proclaimed his relationship. His sister slipped her arm into his.
("Now I wonder," thought Fortuné, "how far her fraternal affection for this brother would carry her!")
"Monsieur," began Henri du Coudrais, with emotion, standing looking down upon the Chouan. "I have no words to express my apologies, my gratitude, or my sense of your magnanimity. But why did you not tell my sister the truth?"
"Monsieur," replied La Vireville from the floor, "I began to do so, but . . . had not time to finish. And I do not think that I should have been believed. . . . But permit me to say, M. du Coudrais, that if I had a sister, and she had been placed in like circumstances, I could only be flattered if her affection for me had led her to do the same, in all things, as Madame has done."
Mme. de Guéfontaine lifted her head from her brother's shoulder, against which she had suddenly hidden her face. "In all things?" she repeated, stressing the words, and with something like a remembered horror in her eyes.
Fortuné de la Vireville raised himself a trifle, while his fingers, as if unconsciously, tapped out a little tune on the handle of his hunting-knife. "Yes," he said, smiling at her meaningly and half-mischievously, "in all things!"
And the old beams, which had heard so many wise and foolish utterances, caught and flung to each other his perverse and fantastic condonation.
CHAPTER XX
Sea-Holly
(1)
The moon that night, peering through the half-shuttered windows of the manoir, spilt on the dark floor pools that reminded La Vireville of those others in the interminable wet road of the afternoon. Mme de Guéfontaine and her brother had contrived for him a fairly comfortable resting-place by piling some old moth-eaten hangings and a cloak or two on the oak settle, and he had been made, despite his protests, to occupy this couch. But his foot pained him too much to admit of sleep.
From where he lay he could just see Mme. de Guéfontaine lying back in a great chair by the empty hearth, a cloak over her knees; and at one time the direct moonlight itself, falling on her fine, weary profile, showed a wisp or two of hair escaping down her cheek, a relic of her wild ride with the Chouan. But he knew that she slept only in snatches, and that she was concerned for him. Every time that she stirred and turned her head in his direction he deceitfully closed his eyes to delude her into the belief that he was not awake. At her feet lay her brother, wrapped in his cloak; he at least seemed to be enjoying a motionless repose, and evidences of an acoustic kind went to prove that Grain d'Orge, self-banished, out of respect, to the other end of the hall, was certainly not suffering from insomnia.
La Vireville was indeed not without occupation of a sort as he lay there wakeful and the hours went by. He was enabled to devote almost unlimited time to an interesting problem—one now, unfortunately, impossible of exact solution. Would Mme. de Guéfontaine, this modern Jael, really have stabbed him yesterday morning if he had not forestalled her? On the whole, he was almost inclined to think that she would. But probably she would not have done it very well. . . . What irony, though, if she had—if he, Augustin, after all his hazards and escapes, had ended that way, slain in his sleep by a devoted adherent of the same cause, for a private offence that he had never committed, and which the real offender had since, perhaps, almost expiated! (By the way, he must remember to tell Mme. de Guéfontaine of that.)
At any rate, he was heartily glad to know that she had not, after all, betrayed him. To the conception of her now gradually forming in his mind, such a course seemed so foreign as almost to be incredible. But he did believe that she might have used the knife.
Speculations of this kind did not, of course, advance sleep, though they kept him a little from thinking of his injured foot, which was the real obstacle to slumber. As the moon-pools ebbed away and the place became full of a ghostly grey radiance that might or might not be the dawn—for La Vireville had small idea of the time—he changed his position on the settle, thinking it might ease his foot. Stealthily as he did it, he heard Mme. de Guéfontaine stir. He repeated his expedient of shutting his eyes and lying very still. But he knew in a moment that she had risen from her chair and was bending over him, so he reopened them.
"M. le Chevalier, you cannot sleep, I know," she whispered.
"Peu importe, Madame," he replied. "But what of you?"
"If I could see you sleeping perhaps I could do the same," was her retort. "Let me renew the wet cloth round your foot; it is time it was done."
La Vireville protested, but she paid no heed. Flitting about noiselessly in that pale gloom she procured water, and, kneeling by the settle, very intently unwound the heated wrappings, dipped them in the cool liquid, and replaced them.
"Is that better?" she asked, coming like a ghost to his side.
"Much better," he murmured. "Almost worth having it crushed for, in fact."
Mme. de Guéfontaine looked down at him without speaking, but he was aware, almost painfully aware, of the distress and remorse surging in her heart.
"I was sure that the Blues had got you—if they had not killed you," she said in a vibrating voice. "And all for me, for me who . . ."
"As far as I can tell," interrupted La Vireville lightly, "they rode over me and never saw me. I assure you that I have the devil's own luck, Madame; it is mixed with a good deal of an inferior kind, but it has always held to this point, that I have so far succeeded in cheating l'Ankou, as we call him in Brittany."
"My brother André had that kind of luck too," said she sadly. "But it failed him in the end."
La Vireville perceived that she wanted to talk about him—perhaps as a kind of amende honorable for her suspicions and hostility at Porhoët. "If you cannot sleep, Madame," he suggested, "will you not tell me about your brother? You see, I only knew of him as 'Alexis,' and I must tell you that I had got it into my head that his real name was de Kérouan or something of the sort."
"At what cross-purposes were we playing!" she exclaimed. "Do you really wish me to tell you about André?"
"If you will be so good," replied Fortuné. "Consider also, if you please, Madame, that I have procured you a chair here."
She smiled a little, and, bringing one quietly to the side of the settle, sat down, and began in her low and beautiful voice to tell him her history. There was a strange kind of unreal and yet intimate charm in this recital in the morning twilight, that went back now and then to childish days, some of which this old hall itself had witnessed. For here André and Raymonde du Coudrais, from their home in more western Brittany, had been used to visit an old uncle and aunt, and here they and their cousins had played hide-and-seek, and here André himself had lain hid only a week before his death. By reason of its early associations with that beloved brother the old place was now, the narrator confessed, painful to her, yet with a kind of sweetness. But the rest of the Carhoët country, she suddenly acknowledged in a voice that shook, had become intolerable to her.
An extraordinary devotion to her brother André had always been hers from childhood; listening to her, La Vireville thought that so ardent a nature as hers (beating under an exterior that in some ways belied it) must always have needed someone on whom to expend itself, and that having so early found that person, it was singularly fitting that she should never have been forced to transfer her allegiance. For André had never married, and her own marriage, in 1788, to a man many years older than herself, for whom it was evident she had not felt love, but much respect, had left unimpaired the bond between her brother and herself. The Comte de Guéfontaine's death in exile at Hamburg, in 1792, had set her free to serve André and the cause he followed with all her heart and soul. That was the year of the unfortunate Coblentz episode, of which she spoke with far more bitterness than of her brother's death; it was from Coblentz that he had come to her at Hamburg, not yet recovered of the wound to his body, and healed still less of that to his spirit. At Hamburg they had shared the privations of exile—and worse, the slight sneers of compatriots who looked askance at the Marquis de la Vireville's victim. Their pride at last drove them thence to England. And from England André had found the way to Brittany, the command of the Carhoët division, and his death. His sister had been with him all the time, nineteen months—a long spell of life for a Chouan leader.