“Come through, come through, Lieutenant GordonCome through and drink some wine wi’ me!For yesterday I was your prisoner,But now the night I am set free.”—Archie o’ Cawfield.
“Come through, come through, Lieutenant GordonCome through and drink some wine wi’ me!For yesterday I was your prisoner,But now the night I am set free.”
“Come through, come through, Lieutenant GordonCome through and drink some wine wi’ me!For yesterday I was your prisoner,But now the night I am set free.”
“Come through, come through, Lieutenant Gordon
Come through and drink some wine wi’ me!
For yesterday I was your prisoner,
But now the night I am set free.”
—Archie o’ Cawfield.
The long day of suspense was closing into evening before Gilbert, consumed with anxiety at the Hôtel des Etats-Généraux, knew that Madame d’Espaze had not belied her word. From the packet which was brought to him about nine o’clock fell out a scented note.
“Take the accompanying order and present it at La Force without loss of time. It will do all you wish.—C.d’E.”
“Take the accompanying order and present it at La Force without loss of time. It will do all you wish.—
C.d’E.”
Dismissing at the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, for prudence sake, the fiacre which had brought him so far, Château-Foix hurried thence eastwards on foot. His head was in a whirl; he had not time to think how he should greet his cousin, and was glad of it, but threaded his way quickly through the animation of the Rue Saint-Antoine, till he saw on his left the opening of the little Rue des Ballets. Narrow, roughly paved, sloping down to a central gutter with its trickling stream, it ran its thirty paces up to the sombre facade of the Hôtel de la Force. And Gilbert went towards the prison in the July dusk, with no premonition of the September afternoon when the gutter over which he strode should run with a darker stream, and the narrow door which faced him open to let out, into the brief hell of axes and laughter, victim after victim. . . . His thoughts were all of Louis, of Louis immured in that dark mass which rose, its high roof pierced with tiny dormer windows, behind the lower range of the entrance. The sight of La Force and all that it stood for had exorcised for the moment any feelings of his own. He cast a hasty glance to his left, where the building ran along the Rue du Roi de Sicile—lately rebaptized as the Rue des Droits de l’Homme—and accosted the sentry in his box by the door.
Some parley with this individual resulted in his being admitted, and, following a jailor through two successiveguichets, he found himself in the bureau of the prison. Months afterwards he realised that this place must have been the summary tribunal chamber of so many agonies. Bault, theconcierge, was fetched from his supper, registers were brought out and searched, the order of release was entered, not without comment, and, as far as formalities were concerned, Louis was a free man again. Theconcierge, at heart not ill-natured, and further softened by the hundred livres which the Marquis had just slipped into his hand, remarked that it would be as well to let the prisoner out by the little door giving into the Rue des Droits de l’Homme, and not by the chief entrance, whence he might possibly be espied by passers in the Rue Saint Antoine. An aristocrat leaving La Force might chance to be a displeasing sight to the good patriots of the Faubourg, and from what he, Bault, remembered of the citizen Saint-Ermay, there was no disguising the fact that he was an aristocrat.
Gilbert thanked him, and, since he should not return that way, was allowed to follow theguichetierinstead of remaining where he was, as he had expected do. His guide crossed a small courtyard, went through yet a thirdguichet, emerged into a larger court, and turning, ascended a staircase.
“Number 32,” he repeated to himself, and they went down a dirty ill-lit corridor, with rows of doors either side. But, to Gilbert’s astonishment, the door of 32, when they reached it, stood ajar, affording him a glimpse of the narrow abode for which his kinsman had exchanged his own apartments. A horrible thought suddenly visited him that they had been fooling him at the bureau, that Louis had already been transferred, tried, murdered, he knew not what. . . .
“Where is he?” he demanded harshly.
The jailor, turning on his heel, responded with an oath, and began to retrace his steps, asseverating that if he had known he was coming all this —— way for nothing after a ——aristo, some one else could have had the job. However, he seemed to have an objective in view, and Gilbert followed him mutely downstairs again. Half-way along a corridor he stopped, motioned to the Marquis to stay where he was, and disappeared round a corner.
He seemed to be gone long. The lamp above Gilbert’s head stank villainously; the horrible oppression of the place entered his soul and joined forces with the oppression already seated there. Echoing steps came nearer, and Louis, with his head held high, walked down the corridor, alone.
He was on the Marquis before he saw who it was. “Good God! not you as well!” he exclaimed, stopping short with a catch of the breath.
The sound of the familiar, careless voice, pierced with an unfamiliar note of apprehension, swept everything else out of Gilbert’s mind.
“My dear boy—no!” he said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “No—you are free! Did they not tell you?”
“Free!” exclaimed Louis, bewildered. “I thought—— But how the devil——”
The Marquis put a finger on his lips as theguichetiercame up, swinging his keys.
“Little surprise for you,ci-devant, isn't it?” observed that worthy. “I might have told you, hein? But I like my little joke. Come on, then, since we are to part with you.”
A few moments more and they were standing in the dark, narrow street, with the door swung to upon them and the sound of heavy bolts slipping back into their places to bring home, if it were needed, the full savour of release.
Louis drew a long breath, and turning without a word to Gilbert embraced him. The Marquis released himself something hastily, and took off his cloak. “Put this on,” he said hurriedly. “I must tell you that you are now my valet. I have yet to get you out of Paris. There is a suit of clothes in readiness for you at my hotel, to which you must accompany me at once. Meanwhile, it is fortunately dark.” He swung the heavy cloak over Louis’ slim figure. “Not a word now, I beg of you; but follow me as quickly as you can.”
He started to walk rapidly along the Rue du Roi de Sicile, past the prison front, towards the Rue de la Verrerie, and Louis, wrapped in the cloak, followed obediently and still half dazed. At last, at the corner of the Rue de la Verrerie and the Rue Saint Martin, Gilbert hailed a passing fiacre, and they got in.
“Perhaps now I may thank you, or try to,” exclaimed the Vicomte as the vehicle started. “My dear Gilbert, has any one ever relied on you in vain? Though, indeed, I was not relying much on you or on anybody.” He slipped his arm into his cousin’s.
The conflicts through which Château-Foix had passed had clothed his spirit—for the time being, at least—in a sort of exhaustion. He did not return the pressure, but he smiled—a little wearily—and said: “You have small need to thank me. You owe your release to—an enemy.”
Louis appeared to reflect rapidly. “It’s no use—I have too many.”
“It was Madame d’Espaze.”
“The devil!” exclaimed the Vicomte. He seemed genuinely surprised. “I should never have dreamt of such a thing. But you must have asked her?”
“I did.”
Louis was evidently at a loss for an expression of his feelings. “You are amazing, Gilbert!” he said at last. “Did you actually interview her?”
The Marquis nodded.
“I didn’t think she cared enough,” said her admirer thoughtfully. “I suppose you worked on her feelings? Heavens, what a scene! So I owe my release to Célie—and to you. One must not forget the amiable Lecorrier too; I presume she got the order through him.”
“Probably,” returned Château-Foix drily. “I did not enquire as to the means she proposed to adopt.”
Louis laughed. “They have their humorous side. You must give me a full account some time.Parbleu, mon cher,but you must have been having the deuce of a time these two days!”
“And yourself?” asked Gilbert.
The Vicomte gave a shrug. “My only consolation was that the accommodation in the next world would be better. One has always understood that it is exceptionally good there. The company I would not have wished to change. Is this the Place des Victoires already?”
At the hotel a sleepy servant, in response to enquiry, informed Château-Foix that a bed had been prepared for Monsieur’s new valet in the little dressing-room leading out of his own apartment, and within a few minutes the Vicomte stood, candle in hand, looking down at the sober grey suit which his cousin was placing on his pallet bed. The cloak, half slipping off his shoulders, displayed the elegance which he must discard for it.
“I hope these will fit,” said the Marquis. “They are quite new; I got them this afternoon. What is to be done, I wonder, with the compromising clothes you have on?”
Louis suddenly put down the candle, and impulsively, half laughing, half touched, laid his hands on Gilbert’s shoulders from behind. “My dear Gilbert, I don't deserve all this trouble!”
“Don’t you?” asked the Marquis in an odd tone, turning round and facing his kinsman. “Don’t you? Why not?”
“Well,” returned Louis, “let us admit that I am worth some trouble, but not worth running risks for. And I am sure you have run, and will be running, risks for me.”
Château-Foix shrugged his shoulders. “Not if you will do as I ask,” he responded rather coldly. “Let me tell you what that is. To-morrow morning about noon we start for Chantemerle; we will post, and ought to get to Dreux the same night. I am proposing to take rather a circuitous route, for safety’s sake. I have got a passport for you as my valet, in the name of Pierre Jourdain. All I ask is that you shall play the part as well as you can, for both our sakes.”
“But,” broke in Louis, “I would rather stay in Paris. Why—they are all taken, I suppose, D’Aubeville, Périgny, and the rest—and one might try——”
“I am sorry,” said his cousin, “but in the matter you have no choice. I gave my word that you should go at once; it was a condition of your release. The rest, I fear, must pay the penalty—but, by the way, M. d’Aubeville had not been arrested yesterday evening, for it was he who advised me to go to Madame d’Espaze.”
The light died out of the Vicomte’s face as he listened to this pronouncement, and he sat down rather gloomily on the bed and said nothing. The Marquis looked at him for a moment as he stared at the floor, with his hands in his pockets.
“Well, go to bed now,” he said, more kindly. “You can’t help yourself, Louis—and who knows what there may be to do in Poitou? Good-night.” He went out and shut the door between the two rooms.
It had been a day of great tension and fatigue, following on a sleepless night, and the moment that he was alone, Gilbert realised how tired he was—too tired (as he half thankfully realised) to look his haunting idea in the face again at present. Undressing rapidly, he threw himself into bed. Scarcely had he blown out his light before there was a rap on the door between his room and his cousin’s, and Louis, in his shirt and breeches, stood in the doorway. The light behind him threw up his figure, but left his face untouched.
“I forgot to ask you,” he said, “about Lucienne. Is she going with Madame Gaumont to-morrow as arranged?”
It is true that Gilbert then wished that he had not extinguished his candle, but he was too proud to light it again for the purpose of seeing the speaker’s face, and the voice told him nothing.
“Yes,” he answered. “She leaves Paris to-morrow about eleven.”
There was an infinitesimal pause.
“You told her, I suppose, that I could not escort her to England?”
“Yes,” said the Marquis, and then a mad idea rushed into his mind. He raised himself on his elbow. “Am I to understand that you are reconsidering your decision—that you wish to take her—now?” His heart thumped absurdly on his ribs as he waited for the answer—absurdly, because he had no intention of allowing Louis to do so, but the question was a test.
Did Louis mutter something between his teeth? Aloud he only said: “Certainly not. What made you think so? I merely wanted to know if she were going. Good-night.”
“If we must part,Then let it be like this;Not heart on heart,Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss;But touch my hand and say:‘Until to-morrow or some other day,If we must part.’”—Ernest Dowson,A Valediction.
“If we must part,Then let it be like this;Not heart on heart,Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss;But touch my hand and say:‘Until to-morrow or some other day,If we must part.’”
“If we must part,Then let it be like this;Not heart on heart,Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss;But touch my hand and say:‘Until to-morrow or some other day,If we must part.’”
“If we must part,
Then let it be like this;
Not heart on heart,
Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss;
But touch my hand and say:
‘Until to-morrow or some other day,
If we must part.’”
—Ernest Dowson,A Valediction.
Lucienne lay long in the deep sleep which Madame Gaumont’s swiftly-administered potion had produced. They had carried her into her bedroom, and Madame Gaumont had determined to wait for the time when her charge should wake up. Lucienne’s bed was in shadow, but in the far corner of the room there was a bright patch from a shaded lamp, beside which sat the widow knitting. And because of the click of her needles Lucienne dreamt that she was a child again, under the guardianship of her old nurse, until, startled by some distant sound into completer consciousness, she opened her eyes and, with a little cry of disappointment, raised herself in bed.
In a moment the ample figure of Madame Gaumont was bending over her, and before she could ask a question a wine-glass, steadied by Madame Gaumont’s hand, was at her lips, and she was forced to drink its contents to the last drop.
“There, my love,” said her hostess, “you’ll soon be well again now, and you mustn’t talk, but just go off to sleep again, and if you want anything, you’ve only to call, and I shall hear.”
Lucienne fixed her eyes on the shrewd, kind face, and lay down obediently. She knew where she was now, and although it all seemed very odd, she was too sleepy to ask any questions. If it were not her nurse it was a very good substitute. To the music of the needles she floated back to the shore of dreams.
Madame Gaumont, returned to her knitting, had an uneasy feeling that all was not well with the girl. It seemed to her that perhaps there was some other trouble in addition even to the natural grief at parting with her lover and with Madame Elisabeth. “Poor child, poor little soul!” she said to herself; “with no mother, andMonsieur le Marquis, so good, so splendid, no doubt, but perhaps a little overwhelming.” Well, well, she should not lack for creature comforts, for the feeding up of the body went, in Madame Gaumont’s opinion, a long way towards bringing peace to the mind.
But presently the quiet sleep came to an end. Lucienne tossed from side to side, and began to break out into the most pitiful sobbing. Madame Gaumont rose and went over to the bed again. The girl lay with her head deep in the pillows, crying with the unrestrained abandonment of a child, and at intervals whispering a name which the good lady could not catch. For a moment or two the latter stood irresolute, and then began to shake the weeper by the shoulder. “There, there, my pretty one,” she said, “you’ve had a bad dream. You must not cry like that, or we shall never be able to let you seeMonsieur le Marquisto-morrow.”
This statement was not without its effect. Lucienne instantly sat up. “I don’t want to see him,” she wailed. “You must tell him I'm ill—tell him anything—only do not let him come near me. . . . But find out from him about Louis. I must know—I shall go mad if I don’t! You will find out . . . promise me!”
“Yes, yes, love, I promise you; only lie down now and try to keep quiet,” responded Madame Gaumont, whose mind had just come to several sudden conclusions. She busied herself round the bed, shaking the pillow and smoothing the tumbled bedclothes, and Lucienne lay back and watched her, and seemed content to listen to her prattle. And before long she slept again, and slept quietly, till she woke with a start to find the room full of summer sunlight, and her kind watcher gone.
Almost with the first movement of consciousness her mind made that painful mental effort to reproduce in the morning the vague something which has happened before the period of oblivion. First there came faint images of the night—of Madame Gaumont and a shaded lamp, of restless tossings and bad dreams, and then suddenly a mental picture which eclipsed all others, and a familiar voice sounding in her ears—“I had not meant to tell you, but perhaps you had better know.”
She stretched herself to her full length under the bedclothes, her whole body tingling at the recollection, and buried her burning cheeks in the pillows. With eyes tightly shut as if she were unwilling for outward objects to break the trance of misery, she recalled every detail of Gilbert’s visit. Shame, and something like anger at her own stupidity, came over her, for now he must know, he must guess their secret. Not even Gilbert could think that she cared like that for his cousin. But the torturing anxiety for Louis came to banish her own confusion. If only he were safe, nothing mattered; the world might think what it liked. It was only Louis, Louis that she wanted! Why had she not taken him, when she might have called him to herself through all these months? Because it was against honour and right; and what were honour and right set against love and longing such as this? She had deceived herself; she had listened to Madame Elisabeth, and thought that she too could rise to heights of devotion and sacrifice. . . . Oh, it was mockery! She wanted no favours from the cold heaven of the saints! To feel Louis’ arms round her and his kisses on her hair, that were worth an age-long purgatory. But the gates of love had opened, and closed again for ever, as she believed, and a great darkness came down upon her soul.
It was no doubt fortunate for Lucienne that the whole of that day was spent in the most engrossing preparations for departure—the final depositing of articles in chests, the final shrouding up of furniture. Dear to the heart of Madame Gaumont were such doings, and little did she intend to find, when she returned from her English visit, that her property had suffered by her absence. Although she would not allow Lucienne to lift a finger, and kept her in bed most of the day, the salutary sense of bustle pervading the house did something to distract the girl’s mind. Lucienne had another distraction also. In the morning she had said that she could not see M. de Château-Foix when he came; by the evening she was in a fever to know why he had not come. Was it because he had guessed her secret, or because he was somehow engaged in Louis’ affairs? The night of July 4th fell and she was no wiser, but filled with surmises each more agonising than the other.
She rose on the morning of the start pale and heavy-eyed. Madame Gaumont repressed with difficulty the exclamation of dismay which trembled on her lips, when Lucienne appeared in her hostess’s boudoir about ten o’clock. Had she not guessed that there was something very much wrong she would have given vent to it.
“Does Justine want any help, my dear, or has she quite finished your trunk? I declare,” pursued the good lady, “if she has not left out my second-best silk!”
As the injured mistress rang for the erring maid Lucienne sank down into a big chair. “How long before we leave the house, Madame?” she asked listlessly.
“More than three-quarters of an hour, love, so you need not put on your cloak yet. Remember to take your smelling salts in your reticule, my dear. Some persons find them beneficial during the sea passage.—What is it, Henri?”
“M. de Château-Foix’ valet, Madame,” said the man. “He has come with a message for Mademoiselle from his master, and begs that Madame will permit him to give it in person.”
Madame Gaumont gave a sigh of relief. But, not knowing of what disconcerting news the messenger might be the bearer, she felt that she must interview him first herself.
“I will come down immediately,” she said. “It is best that I should see him first, my dear child,” she added, casting a glance on Lucienne, into whose white cheeks had sprung a patch of red, and whose hands were grasping the arms of her chair.
When she came back, panting a little from the ascent, Lucienne was walking nervously up and down the room. She tried to read Madame Gaumont’s face, and found it grave, for the good lady was not sure that she was about to do right.
“There is nothing wrong, dear,” she said. “ButMonsieur le Marquishas sent a better messenger than his valet.”
“Louis—is it Louis?” gasped Lucienne.
“His cousin—M. de Saint-Ermay, I think he said his name was,” went on Madame Gaumont, affecting not to notice the girl’s discomposure. “And so, my dear, as he comes straight fromMonsieur le Marquis,I think you may go down and see him.—If I were a Frenchwoman I shouldn’t let her,” she thought to herself.
“And M. de Château-Foix . . .?” faltered Lucienne.
“I understand that he is following shortly. Go, my child—unless you would rather not.”
Meanwhile Louis stood in the middle of the dismantled salon. It struck him as he waited that the room might be the bare boards of a stage, for the suddenness with which he had been precipitated there had given him something of the unreality of the player. Gilbert had told him how he had promised Lucienne that she should see them both before his departure, and they had been seated side by side in a fiacre on their way from the Hôtel des Etats-Généraux to the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, when the Marquis, who was even more silent than his wont, had pulled out his passport to examine it, and had uttered an exclamation of dismay.
“There has been some mistake,” he said, in answer to his cousin’s query. “Here is a perfectly wrong description of you—it will never pass.” And thrusting his head out of the window he called to the driver to stop. “Go on and tell Lucienne that I will come as soon as I can,” he said hastily. “I must go back and rectify this.” And before Louis realised what had happened he was alone in the vehicle, driving on by himself to bid Lucienne farewell.
The feeling of unreality did not wholly leave him when the door opened, and Lucienne came slowly in, ghostlike in her pallor, her quiet movements, and even in the way she looked at him, as over some indefinable barrier.
He too went forward without saying a word, and catching her cold hands pressed them to his lips.
“You are safe, Louis—you got out of prison?” said the low, shaken voice.
“Gilbert got me out. I am sorry you ever knew I was in. You are not fit to stand—come, let me put you into this chair, though it doesn’t look very comfortable.”
She suffered him to put her into one of the swathed chairs, and asked faintly: “Why have you come?”
“Gilbert sent me on,” said Louis, looking down at her. “He had some business to see to at the last moment—something wrong with the passport—but he is following.”
She said nothing, and after a moment he knelt down beside her.
“This is good-bye, Lucienne.” Whether her evident state of stupor steadied him or no he could not have told, but after a long look at her passionless white face and down-dropped lids he took one of her hands, kissed it gently, and got to his feet again. All the way from the Rue des Petits-Pères the violins of passion had played in his breast little sad airs of farewell, to which he could listen without danger. And in this ghostlike room, with Lucienne who looked like a ghost, who spoke like a ghost, with his kiss on her cold unclinging fingers, it was not so hard then to act like a gentleman, and after last night there could be no question of doing anything else.
“At what time are you leaving the house?” he asked at last; not caring for an answer, since he knew it, but in order to break a silence which was becoming charged with something too potent for safety.
Nor did Lucienne give the answer. She lifted her eyes, and what the young man saw in them sent all the gentle minor airs crashing into discords, overridden by a deeper, insistent, triumphal note. . . . Involuntarily he went a step nearer. . . .
And then—to that music she was in his arms, clinging, sobbing, entreating. “Louis, you shall not go—you shall not, you shall not! It has been a horrible mistake. . . . I have tried—I promised the Princess—but I can’t, I can’t, Louis . . . it’s impossible!”
The heart against which she lay beat furiously, all its hot young blood vibrating to her words. The ghostlike room went dim; she alone was real—too real, overpoweringly human and appealing. And everything pleaded for her—the scent of her hair, Saint-Ermay’s own temperament, his past of facile conquests. . . . Probably only one thing could have saved him; it was on his side now.
“Lucienne,” he said in a strangled voice, “it is impossible. I cannot be such a hound, though God knows I would like to be. Let me go, dear. It is impossible.” And he tried, very gently, with hands that shook a little, to unclasp her twining fingers.
But Lucienne had the tenacity of many impressionable natures, and too little experience to know that there is often more fighting to do after victory than before it. Her victory had been won six months ago; but to-day, after all, she had flung herself into the embrace which then she had repulsed. Unstrung, in bitter revolt against fate and the part she had herself taken in moulding that fate, conscious only of her passionate desire for happiness—conscious, too, that the lover of to-day was not the almost suppliant of that January afternoon—she snatched up arms for a new and a different combat. The force of her love and misery rushed against Saint-Ermay like the tide, and tossing on that impetuous sea like wrack and seaweed went all maidenly reserve and pride.
“Louis, Louis,” she kept repeating over and over again, like a child, and strained him the closer, “I can’t live without you . . . I have tried, but I can’t. . . . I can’t go to England! Oh, why do you say that it is impossible?”
The sight of her beautiful, agonised face, so near his own, made Louis’ head whirl. “Because,” he said hoarsely, looking away, “I owe Gilbert my life, and I can’t do it. Let me go, my darling; it has to be.”
Even with the music of passion in his ears he was conscious of his delicate and ironical situation. It was impossible to avoid the thought that his cousin might at that very moment be coming up the stairs. Nothing but dire catastrophe for all three of them could result if it were so. But he could not bring himself to say it. As he hesitated Lucienne herself loosed her arms from about him.
“Then you do not love me, after all! . . . No, no, Louis—I did not mean it. . . . Do not look like that. . . . I did not mean it. . . . It is God who is against us!” Her voice sank. “If he saved your life——” Turning away she hid her face in her hands and broke into fresh weeping.
And—strange perversity—the moment that she saw the thing as he did, and acknowledged the inevitable, Louis would have given everything he possessed to have her in his arms again. There surged over him a mad desire to dare that inevitable, to defy Gilbert, to claim her, cost what it might. Should he do it? Her sobs, the line of her neck, her shaken body wrung his heart. . . . He could give Gilbert his life if he demanded it. . . .
And there stole into his mind the last recollection that he wished to have at such a moment, the last that he could imagine would be conjured up. For once before he had staked his life for a woman; and had been, too, within an ace of paying it: once before he had felt, with fire in his veins, that a stake so supreme ennobled the cause for which it was ventured. And had it ennobled what followed? No! a thousand times no, and Lucienne was degraded by the parallel. He trampled down the wild impulse.
“Lucienne,” he said unsteadily, “don't cry so—I can’t bear it. I . . . Say good-bye and let me go!”
Still sobbing, and with her face hidden by one hand, she put out the other to him blindly. He did not dare to trust himself at that moment to take it, and it fell like a wounded bird to her side, so that they stood by each other in the big empty room without speaking, she weeping, and he, with his hands clenched, looking at her in torture and impotence. Perhaps it was the fact that her hand had not been taken which enabled Lucienne a little to command herself. And when her tear-blinded eyes rested on her lover, standing so near, but with so white and rigid a face, she recognised the futility of rebelling any more. It seemed to her that all her youth went from her in that moment, and that she was suddenly very old, very prudent, and did not care for anything very much, like the old Marquise de la Ferronière, her grandmother, who spent her days in a convent but was not a nun. So she sank down in the chair behind her, and, shutting her eyes, leant her head against the back, the better to taste this wisdom and detachment, and the sooner to forget Louis, whom henceforth she must never remember.
Saint-Ermay bent hastily over her with an exclamation. She opened her eyes.
“Say good-bye quickly. . . .”
“I thought you had fainted!”
“No,” said Lucienne, “I hardly ever——” She stopped, and a shiver of reminiscence ran through her. Ought she to tell him? But the remembrance was horrible and shameful; she could not.
Louis saw that something was troubling her.
“Does it matter?” he asked tenderly, kneeling down once more beside her. “There is only one thing that matters to me, Lucienne, and that is that I shall love you as long as I live. . . . But perhaps you had best forget that. . . . Good-bye, my darling.”
The passionate kisses which he set on her hand woke on the instant in Lucienne that youth which she had felt slip from her—woke it to a last desperate revolt.
“No . . . no, Louis,” she gasped in agony. “Not yet . . . a little longer. . . . It is too cruel. . . .”
And for a moment longer his head remained bowed on her hand, while she looked down at it to imprint for ever in her mind all that she could see of him, till she felt that she could remember to eternity every rippling strand of his dark-brown hair, the dull black ribbon that tied it, the tiny curl by his ear, and the strong, delicate hand, emerging from the coarse and ruffleless sleeve, that had clenched itself on the other arm of the chair. But before she had made an end of gazing he got up from his knees, and, without a word, without a backward look, walked out of the room and shut the door behind him.
When Gilbert stood a moment in the street watching the fiacre bearing Louis rapidly away from him, his first feeling was one of violent and unrestrained anger against the impulse which had placed him there. But there was no time to indulge in this emotion. Why the devil, he asked himself, had he not, on his discovery, told the driver to drive straight to the Mairie? Cursing himself, he hailed another fiacre, and set off at a tearing pace in that direction. Fortunately the mistake was soon rectified, and he found himself before long in the courtyard of the Hôtel de la Séguinière. Here a great bustle was in progress. The post-chaise was, rather to Gilbert’s surprise, already there. It would have been quite simple, under the circumstances, to walk in unannounced, but because it might have looked as if he intended spying on his cousin, Château-Foix would not do it. He was therefore preceded up the staircase by a flurried domestic.
At the top of the first flight he came on Louis, standing with his back to a door, and having very much the appearance of supporting himself by the lintel. The light was not good, but no great amount of illumination was required to emphasise the fact that he was extremely pale. He moved aside at once.
“I began to wonder if you were coming,” he said very quietly. “Lucienne is in here waiting for you. I am afraid that you will find her rather distressed.”
Gilbert looked him full in the face. “I expected as much,” he said, equally quietly, and went in.
As for Louis, he went slowly away to the far end of the landing, and sitting down on a couch in the corner buried his face in his hands. He had not, however, remained more than a minute or two in this posture when he sprang hastily up. Madame Gaumont was rustling down the staircase from the floor above.
“Is that you,Monsieur le Vicomte?IsMonsieur le Marquishere? Such a to-do; we must start at once. There was a mistake about the tide, and we shall not catch the packet unless we go immediately. IsMonsieur le Marquiswith Mademoiselle? I don’t like to burst in on them. Will you go?”
“I, Madame!” exclaimed Louis with a bitter little laugh. “God forbid!”
Even in her hurry Madame Gaumont looked at him curiously for a second, and seemed about to say something unconnected with travelling arrangements. Then she thought better of it, and entered the room.
The young man looked for a moment at the door which she had left ajar behind her, then turned away, and began slowly to descend the staircase. He would go back to the hotel and wait there for Gilbert. Yet he went so slowly down the stairs, he paused so long at the door, and traversed the courtyard with so lagging a step, that by the time he had reached the gateway a little commotion behind him warned him that the travellers were already starting. Turning, he saw on the steps Madame Gaumont and her maid, and on Gilbert’s arm Lucienne, a hastily but heavily veiled figure; and, as if fascinated, he watched Gilbert helping in the three women. The postilion scrambled to his place, and in another moment the post-chaise came rumbling towards him over the stones. . . . It was gone—passing him as he stood like a statue in the archway, fighting down a wild desire to spring to the horses’ heads and stop it. And Lucienne had not seen him; perhaps it was as well. . . .
Gilbert came across the courtyard, pulling out his watch. “We must get back at once,” he said briefly, and Louis followed him without a word. It suited him well enough that his supposed status required him to walk behind.
Hardly had they got into the yard of the Etats-Généraux when hurrying footsteps were heard behind them, and looking round they both recognised one of Madame Gaumont’s domestics. He held a letter in his hand.
“For you, Sir,” he said, giving it to the Marquis. “It has just been found in Mademoiselle d’Aucourt’s room—in the grate. Thinking it had fallen into the fire by mistake, and seeing that it was addressed to you, I thought it best to bring it on at once.”
“You did quite right,” said Gilbert, giving him a louis. “Pierre, see that the baggage is ready. We start in a quarter of an hour.” And he went in, while Saint-Ermay stared after him, wondering what on earth could be the meaning of this belated missive from Lucienne. It seemed almost like a message from the dead.
To Gilbert also the letter had something of that complexion, as, without opening it, he mounted the stairs to his room. For Lucienne, when he had entered, was not in a condition for a coherent farewell. He had found her bowed over the arm of the big chair in which she sat, weeping her heart out, he would have thought, except that the tears were few. She seemed to have exhausted them. Château-Foix was almost frightened. But his mind had been made up before ever he opened the door. She should have from him neither questions nor reproaches. The fault was not hers; he could not bear that she should have to justify herself. So he had merely raised her up and kissed her wet cheek; then Madame Gaumont had come in, and there was an end.
At last he broke open the letter. It was so short that a second or two sufficed for his eyes to run over the words whose meaning his mind took much longer to grasp.
“I cannot bear it. I cannot go to England. Come to me and tell me that we can be married at once, and that you will take me back with you.—Lucienne.”
“I cannot bear it. I cannot go to England. Come to me and tell me that we can be married at once, and that you will take me back with you.—Lucienne.”
That was all, but at these few lines Gilbert stood staring, stunned. After a moment he sat dizzily down, and resting his elbow on the table put his hand over his eyes the better to taste this enormous, this overwhelming surprise. He was too dumbfounded for consecutive reflection, but the first thought which penetrated his stupor was one of such radiant and piercing joy that his reason seemed to shake beneath its onslaught. The nightmare was but a nightmare after all. “Thank God! thank God!” he cried with his deepest soul. It was all false. The proof had come to him here in this very room which had witnessed his black night of despair; this was the very table on which he had bowed his head, those were the same chimes of Notre Dame des Victoires floating, now, through the sunlight. . . .
And she had gone; he could not thank her for this great proof of her love; for at first he saw it in that aspect, judging the trust and confidence which must have prompted her to so unusual a step. The trust and confidence; yes, and what must she not have suffered when the next evening he had visited her and said no word of her appeal? He looked again at the date: he was not mistaken; the letter had been written on the evening of the day when she had exchanged the guardianship of the Princess for that of Madame Gaumont. Poor child! how horribly she must have suffered! His stirred feelings lent him enough imagination to put himself in her place. Was it any wonder that she had seemed strange, and that overcome by the strain she had fainted at the additional shock given, very naturally, by the news of Louis’ arrest? What must she have thought of him? What, too, if she had known his unworthy, his vile suspicions of her? How large a part had his involuntary silence not played in the state in which he had just found her?
And she was gone, thinking—what? He walked for a minute or two in agitation up and down the room, until going back to the table he picked up the little note, so pathetic in its need and its trustfulness. An idea that was half a hope flashed upon him. That blackened, scorched corner meant one of two things: either the letter had fallen into the fire by mischance, Lucienne being left in the impression that she had sent it, or she had intended to burn it. It had in that case been but the outcry of her distress, destroyed because it had seemed to her unmaidenly. And he devoutly hoped that this was the case, because it left him all the perfume of the message and relieved her of the dreadful tension of waiting for an answer which he had never given.
Since he had looked down at her in his interrupted leave-taking, since he had given her that kiss, whose remembered coldness filled him with the most burning indignation against himself, not half an hour had elapsed. And he had let her go thus—for ever, perhaps—and could not follow her. But he could write to her. He would write here and now. He looked round impulsively for ink and paper—and then remembered, with a checking of his ardour, that he could scarcely with delicacy reveal to her his knowledge of her letter if, as he hoped, she had meant to burn it.
Footsteps, too, were approaching his door. “Yes; I am coming,” he shouted, guessing that he was being summoned, that the post-chaise was waiting. But he lingered a moment, looking with eyes not quite clear at the little scorched letter ere, kissing it, he thrust it into his breast, and left the room which had seen him go down into hell and come forth again.
When the light, two-wheeled post-chaise, with its pair of horses and its postilion, was rolling at last along the sunlit quays, Gilbert forced himself to turn his thoughts from the joy and relief in his own breast to the contemplation of a matter for the moment more urgent—the safe conveyance of his cousin from Paris. He glanced at his kinsman, seated beside him in his unfamiliar dark clothes, and observed with a sort of amused despair that he did not seem to consider that prudence required him to refrain from showing his face at the window, for he had been looking out in silence ever since they started.
“One would think, my dear Louis,” observed the Marquis at length, “that you had never seen Paris before. Your evident wish to remain here may soon, perhaps, be gratified.”
“There’s a most extraordinarily pretty woman just going towards the Allée des Princes,” murmured Louis.—“I beg your pardon, Gilbert. You were saying that we shan’t get through. Well, if we don’t I shall have still less faith in any of the La Rochefoucauld. Wasn’t it Liancourt who helped you to your passport? I suppose that if we have to get out at the barrier, I must hold the door open for you. And you must curse me for a clumsy fool. Oh, I forgot! you never swear at your servants. By the way, have I a name? I’ve forgotten it, at any rate.”
The Marquis handed him in silence the passport, with its emblematic figures supporting a shield, inscribed with the device, “Vivre libre ou mourir”—Minerva bearing the cap of liberty on a pike, and a female typifying the French constitution, seated on a lion. The crown which the latter held over the shield had been struck through with a pen, and the same fate had overtaken the crown surmounting the arms of France which accompanied the mayoral seal in red wax at the bottom. Louis’s lip curled as he observed it.“L’an 4 de la liberté,” he muttered scornfully, running his eye up to the date over Pétion’s signature, and passed on to peruse his own description.
“I don’t know what the original portrait was like,” he remarked, returning the document, “but I don’t call this amended version very flattering. I suppose it was jealousy which led you to dock me of an inch of my height. However, Pierre Jourdain has a very convincing sound for a valet.”
When the chaise drew up with a jerk at the Barrière de Versailles it was possibly on account of the hot July sun that no great alacrity was displayed in demanding credentials. A sleepy-looking official, followed by a couple of National Guards, did at last present himself at the left-hand window—Saint-Ermay’s—and to him the Marquis handed out the passport, throwing a severe glance at Louis, who seemed to be struggling with a most inopportune desire to laugh. The man read it yawning, asked a few questions, signed the paper, returned it, and, suddenly pulling himself together, shut the chaise door with a bang, and magnificently waved a dirty hand to the postilion. The horses sprang forward, the gateway slid past—they were out of Paris.
“Why are you travelling under your own name?” asked the Vicomte abruptly, breaking a silence which was not uneloquent of tension past.
“Why not?” retorted Gilbert. “You observe that there is no title. Moreover, I once met Terrier de Monciel before he was Minister of the Interior, and though, as it happened, he did not recognise me when I went to have the passport countersigned, I thought that the fewer lies I told him the better.”
“Especially as we shall probably want quite a new stock later on. I wonder,” observed Louis thoughtfully, looking at the strongly-cut profile beside him, “what you could best pass yourself off as at a pinch.”
“Occupy your wits, then, with the question,” said Château-Foix, folding up the passport. “If you can hope to become yourself something other than the most hot-headed young fool in the universe, your reflections will not be wasted.” He gave Louis one of his rare smiles as he spoke. Lucienne’s letter met his fingers as he replaced the passport. God! what a cloud was rolled away in the last hour! To him, who was never troubled with excess of spirits, his heart seemed preposterously light—though all the while, deep down, throbbed a remorse which would not easily leave him. The sunshine and the blue sky—even the cheerful trot of the horses—were one with his rejoicing. They were safely out of Paris; Louis was rescued—was sitting here at his side, and once more it was good to have him there. The old feeling of affection came back with a force all the stronger for its temporary suspension, and he turned a little and put a hand on his cousin’s arm.
“I wonder what I should have done if I could not have got you out of La Force!” he said.
After Versailles Louis gradually ceased from converse, and, alleging that he was sleepy, settled himself in the corner of the chaise and closed his eyes. Gilbert, glancing once or twice at him, was struck with the way in which his face in repose had lost its life and gaiety, and attributed the extinction, with compassion, to regret for lost comrades and a ruined cause. For himself, he was composing in his mind an answer to Lucienne’s letter all the way from Saint Cyr to Trappes.
The miles sped on uneventfully, but for the change of horses every two leagues. At Houdan, however, there was a long delay, caused by want of these animals, and it was dark when they got to Dreux.
“I don’t know any of the inns,” said Gilbert. “Tell the postilion to go to a moderate-priced one; that will probably be safest.”
Louis transmitted the order, and, remembering his part, got out when the chaise drew up in the courtyard of the Grand-Cerf and held the door open for his supposed master. But he forgot the baggage, and had to be sent back for it.
“I feel very uneasy about you,” observed the Marquis, as Saint-Ermay deposited a valise on the floor of Gilbert’s room. “I know that you will never be able to keep up this servant role.”
“Shall I not?” asked Louis, with a certain boyish enjoyment. “You will see,Monsieur le Marquis.I shall soon be asking for higher wages, especially if your valise gets any heavier. Are we going to have anything to eat?”
“I shall have some supper served up here,” said Gilbert, looking worried. “But will it not seem strange if you have yours with me?”
“Very,” said the Vicomte, who was evidently pining to play his part elsewhere. “I must have mine downstairs. Am I to engage myself a room?”
“I would rather have you on a truckle-bed in here,” returned his kinsman apprehensively. “Ask them if they have one.”
“All right,” said Louis cheerfully. “I’ll say that you are subject to fits, or melancholia, or walk in your sleep. Au revoir!”
He went out, and did not reappear for so long that the Marquis, after his supper, rang and asked for his valet, only to be told that he had gone out some time ago, and that there were some strolling players in the town, whose performance he was no doubt witnessing. When he at last came back Château-Foix fell upon him.
“For God’s sake, Louis, don’t treat this affair as a jest. You ought never to have left the inn——”
“And have people suggesting that we have a reason for lying low? That’s not my idea of prudent conduct,” retorted his cousin, unabashed. “I have been witnessing that noble play,Le Patriotisme recompensé, ou l’Arrivée à Paris des Sauveurs de la Patrie—in fact, I am not sure that after heartily applauding the artist who acted Drouet I did not join in theÇa ira. It will be an inconceivable protection to you, Gilbert, to have a valet of known Republican principles.”
“I dare say it might, if there were the slightest chance of your remembering them,” said Gilbert gloomily. “Well, there’s no use arguing with you. Let’s get to bed, for we must start early to-morrow.”
“I shall sleep across your door, like a feudal vassal,” announced the Vicomte, dragging at the little bed. “This affair fills me with the spirit of the faithful retainer. I am not sure that it doesn’t make me feel grey-haired—grown old in your service,Monsieur le Marquis. . . .For Heaven’s sake, don’t throw that pillow at me; just think if any one could see in. . . . But I said you were subject to fits.”
“I forbid you to speak another word, then, Pierre,” said Château-Foix, laughing. “I am going to get into bed and sleep.”
And he did both. But Louis, deprived of the safety-valve of talking nonsense, lay miserably wide-awake in the darkness. Yet the high spirits which he had displayed had not been wholly feigned; they were not altogether summoned up at will to hide his heart from Gilbert’s eyes. He was young enough to feel a measure of elation at having done right at great cost, and there had been something too of reaction in his vivacity. But now that there was no longer need to be gay it was very different. Swept back, despite his struggles, into the room at the Hôtel de la Séguinière, every phase of that intolerable parting tortured him afresh. How she had clung to him—how she had besought him! . . . it was as though he should always hear that anguished, pleading voice. . . . He groaned, and flung himself over in the truckle-bed. He must not, dared not, think of it. . . . Denied those images his thoughts went off to others, guessed at; to her on her road. What must she not be suffering now, alone, hourly drawing further away! But he must not think of that either! . . . What was it that she had been going to tell him, and had not?—and, tormenting question, what had she written in the note which Gilbert had so belatedly received? . . . What use to surmise; he had no right to know! . . . So, desperately, he tried to cling to the idea of Gilbert’s goodness to him; that he had come to Paris to warn him, that he had saved him from almost certain death. And, tossed on this ocean of pain, he fell asleep at last, to dream of his lost love, but not with happy dreams.
The Marquis had resolved to continue posting, and they traversed thus the next morning the twenty-five miles or so to Verneuil. But Gilbert soon began to regret his decision. The country seemed strongly patriot; every village through which they passed had its tree of liberty crowned with the red cap, and at Tillières some of the inhabitants ran after the chaise, shouting out abuse of them as aristocrats. By the time the old fortifications of Verneuil came in sight Château-Foix had determined to abandon the post chaise for the humble diligence.
“Of course, as a good Republican, I applaud you,” was Louis’ observation as they entered the town. “This country is certainly too patriotic for comfortable methods of travelling. Even the saints aresans-culottes—look at that.” And he pointed to a statue of Saint Anne which adorned a porch of the Church of the Madeleine. A cap of liberty perched on her stone coif.
“Yes; and I have noticed two or three wayside Calvaries with a tricolour ribbon tied round the arm of the Christ,” said Gilbert. “These are unmistakable signs, and I think we shall do well to observe them.”
At the Hôtel du Saumon, Gilbert therefore paid the postboy and dismissed him. The diligence for Mortagne, their next objective, did not start for an hour or more, and it conveniently left the courtyard of the Saumon itself. The Marquis ordered himself some déjeuner, leaving Louis to procure himself a meal in the kitchen regions, and to see to the baggage. A little before the time appointed he went out into the big yard. The horses were already harnessed, but there was no sign of Louis.
“I suppose you have my baggage on all right?” asked Gilbert of the driver, for the two valises were as invisible as Saint-Ermay.
“Baggage?” echoed the man, a bullet-headed Norman. “I have no baggage from here. There was none to put on.”
“Surely there were two valises out here,” Château-Foix, with a premonition of disaster. “Where is my servant?—he was in charge of them.”
The driver grinned. “Looking after another kind of baggage when I saw him last,” he retorted. “That kind!” and he jerked his thumb at a pretty chambermaid who at that moment ran across the yard.
“Pierre!” cried the Marquis angrily, “where are you?”
The sound of his voice caused the Vicomte to emerge, without undue haste, from a doorway. “Is it time to start?” he asked nonchalantly, and by no means in the tone of a servant addressing his master.
“What have you done with the baggage?” asked his cousin, frowning. “Take your hands out of your pockets when you speak to me!”
Louis’ mouth twitched as he obeyed the hint.
“I told a man to put it on the diligence . . . Monsieur,” he answered soberly. “Isn’t it there? Where has the man got to?” He went back into the hotel, and returning after a moment’s absence beckoned Gilbert aside. “The fool put it on the Nonancourt diligence, which went three-quarters of an hour ago. They never said that there were two diligences starting from here.”
“So that our baggage is now on its way back to Dreux?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m exceedingly sorry. What can we do?”
Gilbert shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing. We must go on without it. Fortunately I have all my papers and money on me. Come along; they are waiting for us.”
“Morbleu,” murmured Louis as he followed him, “you are horribly magnanimous. I could support reproaches better. It was really very careless of me.”
“You are new to your rôle—except, perhaps, to one part of it,” returned his cousin impassively. “But remember not to address me as an equal in public.”
Passing over to the driver, as lightly as he could, the fact that he intended continuing his journey without his baggage, Gilbert mounted into the diligence, which contained only a farmer and his wife and an insignificant-looking man who was probably a small shopkeeper. But in its progress through Verneuil the vehicle further gathered up, from the door of a comfortable-looking house in a main street, a cheerful little old man with apple cheeks and horn-rimmed spectacles, who skipped in, bearing under one arm a large and rotund object done up in newspaper. The two pretty girls who were seeing him off handed in to him two cabbages of great size, a basket which might be presumed to contain onions, and a bunch of flowers. These the old man, amid the laughter of the girls and his own brisk apologies, bestowed beside him. He waved his hand as the diligence lumbered off and then, pulling a book from his pocket, was instantly immersed.
The shopkeeper got out at a village a mile or two from Verneuil, the farmer and his wife at a wayside farm, and having nothing better to do—for he dared not encourage Louis’ possibly unguarded conversation—the Marquis fell to examining their fellow-passenger. In spite of his horticultural impedimenta the latter had not in the least the air of a farmer; the hand which held the book close to his short-sighted eyes was thin and pale, though the nails and finger-tips were a little discoloured; and the book itself, as Gilbert could easily see, was theGeorgicsof Virgil. Had not the road, after crossing the Avre, become very bad his curiosity—such as it was—might have remained unsatisfied, but a violent jolt suddenly causing one of the cabbages to leap headlong to the floor, the Marquis, who sat directly opposite, picked it up and returned it to its owner.
The old man hurriedly put down his book. “A thousand thanks, Citizen,” he murmured, receiving it in careful hands. “You are too kind.” But he was plainly more concerned with the fact that one of two of the vegetable’s outer leaves were damaged than that a stranger had been at the trouble of stooping for it, as, smoothing them as one might the plumage of a bird, he restored it to its place. Hardly, however, had he resumed his study of the classics, before the paper-clad object, falling with a portentous thud, rolled under Gilbert’s legs.
This time there was real commotion, and Louis, who had removed himself to a further corner, shook with stifled mirth as his cousin and the old man made simultaneous dives under the seat. Its wrappings having come off in the transit, it was plainly a large pumpkin with which the latter finally emerged.
“You are very good, citizen,” he exclaimed, as the Marquis’ head and his own narrowly escaped collision. “I am deeply ashamed to have inconvenienced you with my poor pumpkin.” He regarded the erring vegetable with a mixture of pride and sorrow, for it had suffered in its fall.
“The citizen is a very successful gardener,” hazarded Gilbert, also looking at it.
“Gardening is my passion,” returned the old man fervently. And he went off into a tolerably long panegyric of the occupation, concluding by saying: “But I weary you, citizen, for you have not the air of one interested in agricultural pursuits.”
“On the contrary,” replied the Marquis, “I am deeply concerned in them.” And with guarded allusions to a small estate, he spoke, for the sake of being agreeable, of English methods, and how far they might be pursued in France, while Louis gazed from each window in turn at the distant woods of Le Perche and La Ferté-Vidame.
Gilbert’s neighbour heard him enthralled. “But I am listening to a master!” he exclaimed, when Gilbert paused, afraid of saying too much. “Citizen, you are fortunate indeed, in these days of political turmoil, to know such rural delights! How true to-day is what the Mantuan writes—I was just reading it when my cabbage fell down.” He picked up his book and began to declaim—