The sergeant’s voice broke in upon her misery.
The man had apparently done as the citizen agent had ordered, and had closely examined the little building that stood on the left—a vague, black mass more dense than the surrounding gloom.
“It is all solid stone, citizen,” he said; “iron gates in front, closed but not locked, rusty key in the lock, which turns quite easily; no windows or door in the rear.”
“You are quite sure?”
“Quite certain, citizen; it is plain, solid stone at the back, and the only possible access to the interior is through the iron gate in front.”
“Good.”
Marguerite could only just hear Heron speaking to the sergeant. Darkness enveloped every form and deadened every sound. Even the harsh voice which she had learned to loathe and to dread sounded curiously subdued and unfamiliar. Heron no longer seemed inclined to storm, to rage, or to curse. The momentary danger, the thought of failure, the hope of revenge, had apparently cooled his temper, strengthened his determination, and forced his voice down to a little above a whisper. He gave his orders clearly and firmly, and the words came to Marguerite on the wings of the wind with strange distinctness, borne to her ears by the darkness itself, and the hush that lay over the wood.
“Take half a dozen men with you, sergeant,” she heard him say, “and join citizen Chauvelin at the chateau. You can stable your horses in the farm buildings close by, as he suggests and run to him on foot. You and your men should quickly get the best of a handful of midnight prowlers; you are well armed and they only civilians. Tell citizen Chauvelin that I in the meanwhile will take care of our prisoners. The Englishman I shall put in irons and lock up inside the chapel, with five men under the command of your corporal to guard him, the other two I will drive myself straight to Crecy with what is left of the escort. You understand?”
“Yes, citizen.”
“We may not reach Crecy until two hours after midnight, but directly I arrive I will send citizen Chauvelin further reinforcements, which, however, I hope may not necessary, but which will reach him in the early morning. Even if he is seriously attacked, he can, with fourteen men he will have with him, hold out inside the castle through the night. Tell him also that at dawn two prisoners who will be with me will be shot in the courtyard of the guard-house at Crecy, but that whether he has got hold of Capet or not he had best pick up the Englishman in the chapel in the morning and bring him straight to Crecy, where I shall be awaiting him ready to return to Paris. You understand?”
“Yes, citizen.”
“Then repeat what I said.”
“I am to take six men with me to reinforce citizen Chauvelin now.”
“Yes.”
“And you, citizen, will drive straight back to Crecy, and will send us further reinforcements from there, which will reach us in the early morning.”
“Yes.”
“We are to hold the chateau against those unknown marauders if necessary until the reinforcements come from Crecy. Having routed them, we return here, pick up the Englishman whom you will have locked up in the chapel under a strong guard commanded by Corporal Cassard, and join you forthwith at Crecy.”
“This, whether citizen Chauvelin has got hold of Capet or not.”
“Yes, citizen, I understand,” concluded the sergeant imperturbably; “and I am also to tell citizen Chauvelin that the two prisoners will be shot at dawn in the courtyard of the guard-house at Crecy.”
“Yes. That is all. Try to find the leader of the attacking party, and bring him along to Crecy with the Englishman; but unless they are in very small numbers do not trouble about the others. Now en avant; citizen Chauvelin might be glad of your help. And—stay—order all the men to dismount, and take the horses out of one of the coaches, then let the men you are taking with you each lead a horse, or even two, and stable them all in the farm buildings. I shall not need them, and could not spare any of my men for the work later on. Remember that, above all, silence is the order. When you are ready to start, come back to me here.”
The sergeant moved away, and Marguerite heard him transmitting the citizen agent’s orders to the soldiers. The dismounting was carried on in wonderful silence—for silence had been one of the principal commands—only one or two words reached her ears.
“First section and first half of second section fall in, right wheel. First section each take two horses on the lead. Quietly now there; don’t tug at his bridle—let him go.”
And after that a simple report:
“All ready, citizen!”
“Good!” was the response. “Now detail your corporal and two men to come here to me, so that we may put the Englishman in irons, and take him at once to the chapel, and four men to stand guard at the doors of the other coach.”
The necessary orders were given, and after that there came the curt command:
“En avant!”
The sergeant, with his squad and all the horses, was slowly moving away in the night. The horses’ hoofs hardly made a noise on the soft carpet of pine-needles and of dead fallen leaves, but the champing of the bits was of course audible, and now and then the snorting of some poor, tired horse longing for its stable.
Somehow in Marguerite’s fevered mind this departure of a squad of men seemed like the final flitting of her last hope; the slow agony of the familiar sounds, the retreating horses and soldiers moving away amongst the shadows, took on a weird significance. Heron had given his last orders. Percy, helpless and probably unconscious, would spend the night in that dank chapel, while she and Armand would be taken back to Crecy, driven to death like some insentient animals to the slaughter.
When the grey dawn would first begin to peep through the branches of the pines Percy would be led back to Paris and the guillotine, and she and Armand will have been sacrificed to the hatred and revenge of brutes.
The end had come, and there was nothing more to be done. Struggling, fighting, scheming, could be of no avail now; but she wanted to get to her husband; she wanted to be near him now that death was so imminent both for him and for her.
She tried to envisage it all, quite calmly, just as she knew that Percy would wish her to do. The inevitable end was there, and she would not give to these callous wretches here the gratuitous spectacle of a despairing woman fighting blindly against adverse Fate.
But she wanted to go to her husband. She felt that she could face death more easily on the morrow if she could but see him once, if she could but look once more into the eyes that had mirrored so much enthusiasm, such absolute vitality and whole-hearted self-sacrifice, and such an intensity of love and passion; if she could but kiss once more those lips that had smiled through life, and would smile, she knew, even in the face of death.
She tried to open the carriage door, but it was held from without, and a harsh voice cursed her, ordering her to sit still.
But she could lean out of the window and strain her eyes to see. They were by now accustomed to the gloom, the dilated pupils taking in pictures of vague forms moving like ghouls in the shadows. The other coach was not far, and she could hear Heron’s voice, still subdued and calm, and the curses of the men. But not a sound from Percy.
“I think the prisoner is unconscious,” she heard one of the men say.
“Lift him out of the carriage, then,” was Heron’s curt command; “and you go and throw open the chapel gates.”
Marguerite saw it all. The movement, the crowd of men, two vague, black forms lifting another one, which appeared heavy and inert, out of the coach, and carrying it staggering up towards the chapel.
Then the forms disappeared, swallowed up by the more dense mass of the little building, merged in with it, immovable as the stone itself.
Only a few words reached her now.
“He is unconscious.”
“Leave him there, then; he’ll not move!”
“Now close the gates!”
There was a loud clang, and Marguerite gave a piercing scream. She tore at the handle of the carriage door.
“Armand, Armand, go to him!” she cried; and all her self-control, all her enforced calm, vanished in an outburst of wild, agonising passion. “Let me get to him, Armand! This is the end; get me to him, in the name of God!”
“Stop that woman screaming,” came Heron’s voice clearly through the night. “Put her and the other prisoner in irons—quick!”
But while Marguerite expended her feeble strength in a mad, pathetic effort to reach her husband, even now at this last hour, when all hope was dead and Death was so nigh, Armand had already wrenched the carriage door from the grasp of the soldier who was guarding it. He was of the South, and knew the trick of charging an unsuspecting adversary with head thrust forward like a bull inside a ring. Thus he knocked one of the soldiers down and made a quick rush for the chapel gates.
The men, attacked so suddenly and in such complete darkness, did not wait for orders. They closed in round Armand; one man drew his sabre and hacked away with it in aimless rage.
But for the moment he evaded them all, pushing his way through them, not heeding the blows that came on him from out the darkness. At last he reached the chapel. With one bound he was at the gate, his numb fingers fumbling for the lock, which he could not see.
It was a vigorous blow from Heron’s fist that brought him at last to his knees, and even then his hands did not relax their hold; they gripped the ornamental scroll of the gate, shook the gate itself in its rusty hinges, pushed and pulled with the unreasoning strength of despair. He had a sabre cut across his brow, and the blood flowed in a warm, trickling stream down his face. But of this he was unconscious; all that he wanted, all that he was striving for with agonising heart-beats and cracking sinews, was to get to his friend, who was lying in there unconscious, abandoned—dead, perhaps.
“Curse you,” struck Heron’s voice close to his ear. “Cannot some of you stop this raving maniac?”
Then it was that the heavy blow on his head caused him a sensation of sickness, and he fell on his knees, still gripping the ironwork.
Stronger hands than his were forcing him to loosen his hold; blows that hurt terribly rained on his numbed fingers; he felt himself dragged away, carried like an inert mass further and further from that gate which he would have given his lifeblood to force open.
And Marguerite heard all this from the inside of the coach where she was imprisoned as effectually as was Percy’s unconscious body inside that dark chapel. She could hear the noise and scramble, and Heron’s hoarse commands, the swift sabre strokes as they cut through the air.
Already a trooper had clapped irons on her wrists, two others held the carriage doors. Now Armand was lifted back into the coach, and she could not even help to make him comfortable, though as he was lifted in she heard him feebly moaning. Then the carriage doors were banged to again.
“Do not allow either of the prisoners out again, on peril of your lives!” came with a vigorous curse from Heron.
After which there was a moment’s silence; whispered commands came spasmodically in deadened sound to her ear.
“Will the key turn?”
“Yes, citizen.”
“All secure?”
“Yes, citizen. The prisoner is groaning.”
“Let him groan.”
“The empty coach, citizen? The horses have been taken out.”
“Leave it standing where it is, then; citizen Chauvelin will need it in the morning.”
“Armand,” whispered Marguerite inside the coach, “did you see Percy?”
“It was so dark,” murmured Armand feebly; “but I saw him, just inside the gates, where they had laid him down. I heard him groaning. Oh, my God!”
“Hush, dear!” she said. “We can do nothing more, only die, as he lived, bravely and with a smile on our lips, in memory of him.”
“Number 35 is wounded, citizen,” said one of the men.
“Curse the fool who did the mischief,” was the placid response. “Leave him here with the guard.”
“How many of you are there left, then?” asked the same voice a moment later.
“Only two, citizen; if one whole section remains with me at the chapel door, and also the wounded man.”
“Two are enough for me, and five are not too many at the chapel door.” And Heron’s coarse, cruel laugh echoed against the stone walls of the little chapel. “Now then, one of you get into the coach, and the other go to the horses’ heads; and remember, Corporal Cassard, that you and your men who stay here to guard that chapel door are answerable to the whole nation with your lives for the safety of the Englishman.”
The carriage door was thrown open, and a soldier stepped in and sat down opposite Marguerite and Armand. Heron in the meanwhile was apparently scrambling up the box. Marguerite could hear him muttering curses as he groped for the reins, and finally gathered them into his hand.
The springs of the coach creaked and groaned as the vehicle slowly swung round; the wheels ploughed deeply through the soft carpet of dead leaves.
Marguerite felt Armand’s inert body leaning heavily against her shoulder.
“Are you in pain, dear?” she asked softly.
He made no reply, and she thought that he had fainted. It was better so; at least the next dreary hours would flit by for him in the blissful state of unconsciousness. Now at last the heavy carriage began to move more evenly. The soldier at the horses’ heads was stepping along at a rapid pace.
Marguerite would have given much even now to look back once more at the dense black mass, blacker and denser than any shadow that had ever descended before on God’s earth, which held between its cold, cruel walls all that she loved in the world.
But her wrists were fettered by the irons, which cut into her flesh when she moved. She could no longer lean out of the window, and she could not even hear. The whole forest was hushed, the wind was lulled to rest; wild beasts and night-birds were silent and still. And the wheels of the coach creaked in the ruts, bearing Marguerite with every turn further and further away from the man who lay helpless in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre.
Armand had wakened from his attack of faintness, and brother and sister sat close to one another, shoulder touching shoulder. That sense of nearness was the one tiny spark of comfort to both of them on this dreary, dreary way.
The coach had lumbered on unceasingly since all eternity—so it seemed to them both. Once there had been a brief halt, when Heron’s rough voice had ordered the soldier at the horses’ heads to climb on the box beside him, and once—it had been a very little while ago—a terrible cry of pain and terror had rung through the stillness of the night. Immediately after that the horses had been put at a more rapid pace, but it had seemed to Marguerite as if that one cry of pain had been repeated by several others which sounded more feeble and soon appeared to be dying away in the distance behind.
The soldier who sat opposite to them must have heard the cry too, for he jumped up, as if wakened from sleep, and put his head out of the window.
“Did you hear that cry, citizen?” he asked.
But only a curse answered him, and a peremptory command not to lose sight of the prisoners by poking his head out of the window.
“Did you hear the cry?” asked the soldier of Marguerite as he made haste to obey.
“Yes! What could it be?” she murmured.
“It seems dangerous to drive so fast in this darkness,” muttered the soldier.
After which remark he, with the stolidity peculiar to his kind, figuratively shrugged his shoulders, detaching himself, as it were, of the whole affair.
“We should be out of the forest by now,” he remarked in an undertone a little while later; “the way seemed shorter before.”
Just then the coach gave an unexpected lurch to one side, and after much groaning and creaking of axles and springs it came to a standstill, and the citizen agent was heard cursing loudly and then scrambling down from the box.
The next moment the carriage-door was pulled open from without, and the harsh voice called out peremptorily:
“Citizen soldier, here—quick!—quick!—curse you!—we’ll have one of the horses down if you don’t hurry!”
The soldier struggled to his feet; it was never good to be slow in obeying the citizen agent’s commands. He was half-asleep and no doubt numb with cold and long sitting still; to accelerate his movements he was suddenly gripped by the arm and dragged incontinently out of the coach.
Then the door was slammed to again, either by a rough hand or a sudden gust of wind, Marguerite could not tell; she heard a cry of rage and one of terror, and Heron’s raucous curses. She cowered in the corner of the carriage with Armand’s head against her shoulder, and tried to close her ears to all those hideous sounds.
Then suddenly all the sounds were hushed and all around everything became perfectly calm and still—so still that at first the silence oppressed her with a vague, nameless dread. It was as if Nature herself had paused, that she might listen; and the silence became more and more absolute, until Marguerite could hear Armand’s soft, regular breathing close to her ear.
The window nearest to her was open, and as she leaned forward with that paralysing sense of oppression a breath of pure air struck full upon her nostrils and brought with it a briny taste as if from the sea.
It was not quite so dark; and there was a sense as of open country stretching out to the limits of the horizon. Overhead a vague greyish light suffused the sky, and the wind swept the clouds in great rolling banks right across that light.
Marguerite gazed upward with a more calm feeling that was akin to gratitude. That pale light, though so wan and feeble, was thrice welcome after that inky blackness wherein shadows were less dark than the lights. She watched eagerly the bank of clouds driven by the dying gale.
The light grew brighter and faintly golden, now the banks of clouds—storm-tossed and fleecy—raced past one another, parted and reunited like veils of unseen giant dancers waved by hands that controlled infinite space—advanced and rushed and slackened speed again—united and finally torn asunder to reveal the waning moon, honey-coloured and mysterious, rising as if from an invisible ocean far away.
The wan pale light spread over the wide stretch of country, throwing over it as it spread dull tones of indigo and of blue. Here and there sparse, stunted trees with fringed gaunt arms bending to prevailing winds proclaimed the neighbourhood of the sea.
Marguerite gazed on the picture which the waning moon had so suddenly revealed; but she gazed with eyes that knew not what they saw. The moon had risen on her right—there lay the east—and the coach must have been travelling due north, whereas Crecy...
In the absolute silence that reigned she could perceive from far, very far away, the sound of a church clock striking the midnight hour; and now it seemed to her supersensitive senses that a firm footstep was treading the soft earth, a footstep that drew nearer—and then nearer still.
Nature did pause to listen. The wind was hushed, the night-birds in the forest had gone to rest. Marguerite’s heart beat so fast that its throbbings choked her, and a dizziness clouded her consciousness.
But through this state of torpor she heard the opening of the carriage door, she felt the onrush of that pure, briny air, and she felt a long, burning kiss upon her hands.
She thought then that she was really dead, and that God in His infinite love had opened to her the outer gates of Paradise.
“My love!” she murmured.
She was leaning back in the carriage and her eyes were closed, but she felt that firm fingers removed the irons from her wrists, and that a pair of warm lips were pressed there in their stead.
“There, little woman, that’s better so—is it not? Now let me get hold of poor old Armand!”
It was Heaven, of course, else how could earth hold such heavenly joy?
“Percy!” exclaimed Armand in an awed voice.
“Hush, dear!” murmured Marguerite feebly; “we are in Heaven you and I—”
Whereupon a ringing laugh woke the echoes of the silent night.
“In Heaven, dear heart!” And the voice had a delicious earthly ring in its whole-hearted merriment. “Please God, you’ll both be at Portel with me before dawn.”
Then she was indeed forced to believe. She put out her hands and groped for him, for it was dark inside the carriage; she groped, and felt his massive shoulders leaning across the body of the coach, while his fingers busied themselves with the irons on Armand’s wrist.
“Don’t touch that brute’s filthy coat with your dainty fingers, dear heart,” he said gaily. “Great Lord! I have worn that wretch’s clothes for over two hours; I feel as if the dirt had penetrated to my bones.”
Then with that gesture so habitual to him he took her head between his two hands, and drawing her to him until the wan light from without lit up the face that he worshipped, he gazed his fill into her eyes.
She could only see the outline of his head silhouetted against the wind-tossed sky; she could not see his eyes, nor his lips, but she felt his nearness, and the happiness of that almost caused her to swoon.
“Come out into the open, my lady fair,” he murmured, and though she could not see, she could feel that he smiled; “let God’s pure air blow through your hair and round your dear head. Then, if you can walk so far, there’s a small half-way house close by here. I have knocked up the none too amiable host. You and Armand could have half an hour’s rest there before we go further on our way.”
“But you, Percy?—are you safe?”
“Yes, m’dear, we are all of us safe until morning-time enough to reach Le Portel, and to be aboard the Day-Dream before mine amiable friend M. Chambertin has discovered his worthy colleague lying gagged and bound inside the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. By Gad! how old Heron will curse—the moment he can open his mouth!”
He half helped, half lifted her out of the carriage. The strong pure air suddenly rushing right through to her lungs made her feel faint, and she almost fell. But it was good to feel herself falling, when one pair of arms amongst the millions on the earth were there to receive her.
“Can you walk, dear heart?” he asked. “Lean well on me—it is not far, and the rest will do you good.”
“But you, Percy—”
He laughed, and the most complete joy of living seemed to resound through that laugh. Her arm was in his, and for one moment he stood still while his eyes swept the far reaches of the country, the mellow distance still wrapped in its mantle of indigo, still untouched by the mysterious light of the waning moon.
He pressed her arm against his heart, but his right hand was stretched out towards the black wall of the forest behind him, towards the dark crests of the pines in which the dying wind sent its last mournful sighs.
“Dear heart,” he said, and his voice quivered with the intensity of his excitement, “beyond the stretch of that wood, from far away over there, there are cries and moans of anguish that come to my ear even now. But for you, dear, I would cross that wood to-night and re-enter Paris to-morrow. But for you, dear—but for you,” he reiterated earnestly as he pressed her closer to him, for a bitter cry had risen to her lips.
She went on in silence. Her happiness was great—as great as was her pain. She had found him again, the man whom she worshipped, the husband whom she thought never to see again on earth. She had found him, and not even now—not after those terrible weeks of misery and suffering unspeakable—could she feel that love had triumphed over the wild, adventurous spirit, the reckless enthusiasm, the ardour of self-sacrifice.
It seems that in the pocket of Heron’s coat there was a letter-case with some few hundred francs. It was amusing to think that the brute’s money helped to bribe the ill-tempered keeper of the half-way house to receive guests at midnight, and to ply them well with food, drink, and the shelter of a stuffy coffee-room.
Marguerite sat silently beside her husband, her hand in his. Armand, opposite to them, had both elbows on the table. He looked pale and wan, with a bandage across his forehead, and his glowing eyes were resting on his chief.
“Yes! you demmed young idiot,” said Blakeney merrily, “you nearly upset my plan in the end, with your yelling and screaming outside the chapel gates.”
“I wanted to get to you, Percy. I thought those brutes had got you there inside that building.”
“Not they!” he exclaimed. “It was my friend Heron whom they had trussed and gagged, and whom my amiable friend M. Chambertin will find in there to-morrow morning. By Gad! I would go back if only for the pleasure of hearing Heron curse when first the gag is taken from his mouth.”
“But how was it all done, Percy? And there was de Batz—”
“De Batz was part of the scheme I had planned for mine own escape before I knew that those brutes meant to take Marguerite and you as hostages for my good behaviour. What I hoped then was that under cover of a tussle or a fight I could somehow or other contrive to slip through their fingers. It was a chance, and you know my belief in bald-headed Fortune, with the one solitary hair. Well, I meant to grab that hair; and at the worst I could but die in the open and not caged in that awful hole like some noxious vermin. I knew that de Batz would rise to the bait. I told him in my letter that the Dauphin would be at the Chateau d’Ourde this night, but that I feared the revolutionary Government had got wind of this fact, and were sending an armed escort to bring the lad away. This letter Ffoulkes took to him; I knew that he would make a vigorous effort to get the Dauphin into his hands, and that during the scuffle that one hair on Fortune’s head would for one second only, mayhap, come within my reach. I had so planned the expedition that we were bound to arrive at the forest of Boulogne by nightfall, and night is always a useful ally. But at the guard-house of the Rue Ste. Anne I realised for the first time that those brutes had pressed me into a tighter corner than I had pre-conceived.”
He paused, and once again that look of recklessness swept over his face, and his eyes—still hollow and circled—shone with the excitement of past memories.
“I was such a weak, miserable wretch, then,” he said, in answer to Marguerite’s appeal. “I had to try and build up some strength, when—Heaven forgive me for the sacrilege—I had unwittingly risked your precious life, dear heart, in that blind endeavour to save mine own. By Gad! it was no easy task in that jolting vehicle with that noisome wretch beside me for sole company; yet I ate and I drank and I slept for three days and two nights, until the hour when in the darkness I struck Heron from behind, half-strangled him first, then gagged him, and finally slipped into his filthy coat and put that loathsome bandage across my head, and his battered hat above it all. The yell he gave when first I attacked him made every horse rear—you must remember it—the noise effectually drowned our last scuffle in the coach. Chauvelin was the only man who might have suspected what had occurred, but he had gone on ahead, and bald-headed Fortune had passed by me, and I had managed to grab its one hair. After that it was all quite easy. The sergeant and the soldiers had seen very little of Heron and nothing of me; it did not take a great effort to deceive them, and the darkness of the night was my most faithful friend. His raucous voice was not difficult to imitate, and darkness always muffles and changes every tone. Anyway, it was not likely that those loutish soldiers would even remotely suspect the trick that was being played on them. The citizen agent’s orders were promptly and implicitly obeyed. The men never even thought to wonder that after insisting on an escort of twenty he should drive off with two prisoners and only two men to guard them. If they did wonder, it was not theirs to question. Those two troopers are spending an uncomfortable night somewhere in the forest of Boulogne, each tied to a tree, and some two leagues apart one from the other. And now,” he added gaily, “en voiture, my fair lady; and you, too, Armand. ‘Tis seven leagues to Le Portel, and we must be there before dawn.”
“Sir Andrew’s intention was to make for Calais first, there to open communication with the Day-Dream and then for Le Portel,” said Marguerite; “after that he meant to strike back for the Chateau d’Ourde in search of me.”
“Then we’ll still find him at Le Portel—I shall know how to lay hands on him; but you two must get aboard the Day-Dream at once, for Ffoulkes and I can always look after ourselves.”
It was one hour after midnight when—refreshed with food and rest—Marguerite, Armand and Sir Percy left the half-way house. Marguerite was standing in the doorway ready to go. Percy and Armand had gone ahead to bring the coach along.
“Percy,” whispered Armand, “Marguerite does not know?”
“Of course she does not, you young fool,” retorted Percy lightly. “If you try and tell her I think I would smash your head.”
“But you—” said the young man with sudden vehemence; “can you bear the sight of me? My God! when I think—”
“Don’t think, my good Armand—not of that anyway. Only think of the woman for whose sake you committed a crime—if she is pure and good, woo her and win her—not just now, for it were foolish to go back to Paris after her, but anon, when she comes to England and all these past days are forgotten—then love her as much as you can, Armand. Learn your lesson of love better than I have learnt mine; do not cause Jeanne Lange those tears of anguish which my mad spirit brings to your sister’s eyes. You were right, Armand, when you said that I do not know how to love!”
But on board the Day-Dream, when all danger was past, Marguerite felt that he did.