The old serving-man set down the lanthorn and looked about him sorrowfully.
"Thirty-four I've seen sleep here," he said. "The Governor of Poitou, and the Governor of Périgord, and the four Vicomtes of the Limousin, and twenty-eight gentles in truckles."
"Twenty-eight?" the Lieutenant questioned, measuring in some astonishment the space with his eye. "But your master said----"
"Twenty-eight, by your leave," the man answered obstinately. "And every man his dog! A gentleman was a gentleman then, and a Vicomte a Vicomte. But since that cursed battle at Coutras set us down and put these Huguenots up, there is an end of gentry almost. Ay, thirty--was it thirty, I said?"
"Four, you said. Thirty-four," des Ageaux answered, smiling. "Good-night."
The man shook his head sombrely, bade them goodnight, and closed the door on them.
An instant later he could be heard groping his way back through the closet and over the roof. The Lieutenant, as soon as the sound ceased, looked round and thought that he had seldom lain in a gloomier place. The windows were but wooden lattices innocent of glass, and through the slats of the nearest a strong shoot of ivy grew into the room. The night air entered with it and stirred the ragged hangings that covered a part of the walls; hangings that to add to the general melancholy had once been black, a remnant, it is possible, of the funeral trappings of some dead Vicomte. Frogs croaked in a puddle without; one of the lattices creaked open at intervals, only to close again with a hollow report; the rushlights flared sideways in the draught. Des Ageaux had read of such a room in the old romances, inBevis of Hampton, or theHistory of Armida; a room of shadows and gloom, owl-flittings and dead furnishings. But he smiled at the thoughts it called up. He had often lain in his cloak under the sky amid dead men. Nevertheless, "Do you sleep here alone?" he asked, turning to his companion, who had seated himself despondently on one of the beds.
The lad, oppressed by what had gone forward downstairs, barely looked up. "Yes," he began, "since"--and then, breaking off, he added sullenly, "Yes, I do."
"Then you don't lack courage!" des Ageaux replied.
"People sleep well when they are tired," the youth returned, "as I am to-night."
The Lieutenant accepted the hint, and postponed until the morrow the questions he had it in his mind to ask. Nodding a good-humoured assent he proceeded to his simple arrangements for the night, placed his sword and pistols beside the truckle-bed, and in a few minutes was sleeping as soundly on his thin palliasse as if he had been in truth the poverty-stricken gentleman of Brittany he once had been and still might be again.
An hour or two later the Lieutenant awoke suddenly. He rose on his elbow, and listened. Inured to a life of change which had cast him many times into strange beds and the company of stranger bed-fellows, he had not to ask himself where he was, or how he came to be there. He knew these things with a soldier's instinct, before his eyes were open. That which he did ask himself was, what had roused him.
For it was still the dead of night, and all in the château, and all without, save the hoarse voices of the frogs, seemed quiet. Through the lattice that faced him the moonbeams fell on the floor in white, criss-cross patterns; which the pointed shape of the windows made to resemble chequered shields--the black and white escutcheons of his native province. These patches of light diffused about them a faint radiance, sufficient, but no more than sufficient, to reveal the outlines of the furniture, the darker masses of the beds, and even the vague limits of the chamber. He marked nothing amiss, however, except that which had probably roused him. The nearest lattice, that one through which he had noted the ivy growing, stood wide open. Doubtless the breeze, light as it was, had swung the casement inwards, and the creak of the hinge, or the coolness of the unbroken stream of air which blew across his bed, had disturbed him.
Satisfied with the explanation, he lay down with a sigh of content, and was about to sink into sleep when a low, sibilant sound caught his ear, fretted him awhile, finally dragged him up, broadly awake. What was it? What caused it? The gentle motion of the loosened ivy on the sill? Or the wind toying with the leaves outside? Or the stir of the ragged hangings that moved weirdly on the wall? Or was some one whispering?
The last was the fact, and, assured of it, des Ageaux peered through the gloom at the nearer pallet, and discovered that it was empty. Then he reflected. The ivy, which grew through the window, must have held the lattice firm against a much stronger breeze than was blowing. It followed that the casement had been opened by some one; probably by some one who had entered the room that way.
It might be no affair of his, but on the other hand it might be very much his affair. He looked about the room, making no sound, but keeping a hand raised to seize his weapons on the least alarm.
He could discover neither figure nor any sign of movement in the room. Yet the whispering persisted. More puzzled, he raised himself higher, and then a streak of light which the low, lumpy mass of one of the truckle-beds had hidden, broke on him. It shone under the door by which he had entered, and proceeded, beyond doubt, from a lanthorn or rushlight in the antechamber.
What was afoot? It is not as a rule for good that men whisper at dead of night, nor to say their prayers that they steal from their beds in the small hours. Des Ageaux was far from a timid man--or he had not been Lieutenant-Governor of Périgord--but he knew himself alone in a strange house, and a remote corner of that house; and though he believed that he held the map of the country he might be deceiving himself. Possibly, though he had seen no sign of it, he was known. His host styled himself the Captain of Vlaye's friend; he might think to do Vlaye a kindness at his guest's expense. Nor was that all. Lonely travellers ran risks in those days; it was not only from inns that they vanished and left no sign. He bore, it was true, not much of price about him, and riding without attendance might be thought to have less. But, all said and done, the house was remote, the Vicomte poor and a stranger. It might be as well to see what was passing.
He rose noiselessly to his feet, and, taking his sword, crept across the floor. He had lain down in the greater part of his clothes, and whatever awaited him, he was ready. As he drew near the door, the whispering on the farther side persisted. But it was low, the sound lacked menace, and before he laid his ear to the oak some shame of the proceeding seized him.
His scruples were wasted. He could not, even when close, distinguish a word; so wary were the speakers, so low their voices. Then the absurdity of his position, if he were detected and the matter had naught to do with him, took him by the throat. The chamber, with its patches of moonlight and its dim spaces, was all quiet about him, and either he must rest content with that, or he must open and satisfy himself. He took his resolution, found the latch, and opened the door.
He was more or less prepared for what he saw. Not so the three whom he surprised in their midnight conference. The girl whom he had seen at supper sprang with a cry of alarm from the step on which she had her seat, and retreating upwards as quickly as the cloak in which she was muffled would let her, made as if she would escape by the tower stairs. The two men--Roger, the son of the house, and another, a taller youth, who leant against the wall beside him--straightened themselves with a jerk; while the stranger, who had the air of being two or three years older than Roger, laid his hand on his weapon. A lanthorn which stood on the stone floor between the three, and was the only other object in the closet, cast its light upwards; which had the effect of distorting the men's features, and exaggerating looks already disordered.
The Lieutenant, we have said, was not wholly surprised. None the less the elder of the two young men was the first to find his tongue. "What do you here?" he cried, his eyes gleaming with resentment. "We came to be private here. What do you wish, sir?"
Des Ageaux took one step over the threshold and bowed low. "To offer my apologies," he replied, with a tinge of humour in his tone, "and then to withdraw. To be plain, sir, I heard whispering, and, half-roused, I fancied that it might concern me. Forgive me, mademoiselle," he continued, directing an easy and not ungraceful gesture to the shrinking girl, who cowered on the dark stairs as if she wished they might swallow her. "Your pardon also, Monsieur Charles."
"You know my name?" the stranger exclaimed, with a swift, perturbed glance at the others.
"Your name and no more," des Ageaux answered, smiling and not a whit disturbed. His manner was perfectly easy. "I heard it as I opened. But be at rest, that which is not meant for me I do not keep. You will understand that the hour was late, I found the window open, I heard voices--some suspicion was not unnatural. Have no fear, however. To-morrow I shall only have had one dream the more."
"But dream or no dream," the person he had addressed as Charles blurted out, "if you mention it----"
"I shall not mention it."
"To the Vicomte even?"
"Not even to him! The presence of mademoiselle's brother," des Ageaux continued, with a keen glance at Roger, "were warrant for silence, had I the right to speak."
The girl started and the hood of her cloak fell back. With loosened hair and parted lips she looked so pretty that he was sorry he had struck at her ever so slightly. "You think, sir," she exclaimed in a tone half-indignant, half-awestruck, "that this is my lover?"
His eyes passed from her to the taller young man. He bowed low. "I did," he said, the courtesy of his manner redoubled. "Now I see that he is your brother. Forgive me, mademoiselle, I am unlucky this evening. Lest I offend again--and my presence alone must be an offence--I take my leave."
Charles stepped forward. "Not," he said somewhat peremptorily, "before you have assured us again of your silence! Understand me, sir, this is no child's play! Were my father to hear of my presence, he would make my sister suffer for it. Were he to discover me here--you do not know him yet--it might cost a life!"
"What can I say more," des Ageaux replied with a little stiffness, "than I have said? Why should I betray you?"
"Enough, sir, if you understand."
"I understand enough!" And then, "If I can do no more than be silent----"
"You can do no more."
"I take my leave." And, bowing, with an air of aloofness he stepped back and closed the door on them.
When he had done so the three looked eagerly at one another. But they did not speak until his footsteps on the chamber floor had ceased to sound. Then, "What is this?" the elder brother muttered, frowning slightly at the younger. "There is something here I do not understand. Who is he? What is he? You told me that he was some poor gentleman adventuring alone, and without servants, and staying here for the night with a lame horse and an empty purse. But----"
"He was not like this at supper," Roger replied, excusing himself.
"But he has nothing of the tone of the man you described."
"Not now," Bonne said. "But at supper he was different in some way." And recalling how he had looked at her when he thought that Charles was her lover, she blushed.
"He is no poor man," Charles muttered. "Did you mark his ring?"
"No."
"May-be at supper it was turned inward, but as he stood there with his hand on the door post, the light fell on it.Three leopards passant or on a field vert!I have seen that coat, and more than once!"
"But why should not the poor gentleman wear his coat?" Bonne urged. "Perhaps it is all that is left of his grandeur."
"In gold on green enamel?" Charles asked, raising his eyebrows. "Certainly his sword was of the plainest. But I don't like it! Why is he here? What is he doing? Can he be friend to Vlaye, and on his way to help him?"
Abruptly the girl stepped forward, and flinging an arm round her brother's neck, pressed herself against him. "Give it up! Give it up!" she murmured. "Charles! Dear brother, listen to me. Give it up!"
"It were better you gave me up," he replied in a tone between humour and pathos, as he stroked her hair. "But you are Villeneuve at heart, Bonne----"
"Bonne by nature, Bonne by name!" Roger muttered, caressing her with his eyes.
"And stand by those you love, whatever come of it!" Charles continued. "Would you then have me leave those"--with a grimace which she, having her face on his shoulder, could not see--"whom, if I do not love, I have chosen! Leave them because danger threatens? Because Vlaye gives the word?"
"But what can you do against him?" she answered in a tearful tone. "You say yourself that they are but a rabble, your Crocans! Broken men, beggars and what not, peasants and ploughboys, ill-armed and ill-fed! What can they do against men-at-arms? Against Vlaye? I thought when I got word to you to come, in order that I might tell you what he was planning--I thought that you would listen to me!"
"And am I not listening, little one?" he replied, fondling her hair.
"But you will not be guided?"
"That is another thing," he replied more soberly. "Had I known, it is true, what I know now, had I known of what sort they were to whom I was joining myself, I might not have done it. I might have borne a little longer"--his tone grew bitter--"the life we lead here! I might have borne a little longer to rust and grow boorish, and to stand for clown and rustic in M. de Vlaye's eyes when he deigns to visit us! I might have put up a little longer with the answer I got when I craved leave to see the wars and the world--that as my fathers had made my bed I must lie on it. Ay, and more! If he--I will not call him father--had spared me his sneers only a little, if he had let a day go by without casting in my face the lack that was no fault of mine, I would have still tried to bear it. But not a day did he spare me! Not one day, as God is my witness!"
Her sorrowful silence acknowledged the truth of his words. At length, "But if these folk," she said timidly, "are of so wretched a sort, Charles?"
"Wretched they are," he answered, "but their cause is good. Better fall with them than rise by such deeds as have driven them to arms. I tell you that the things I have heard, as I sat over their fires by night in the caves about Bourdeilles where they lie, would arm not men's hands only, but women's! Would spoil your sleep of nights, and strong men's sleep! Poor cottars killed and hamlets burned, in pure sport! Children flung out and women torn from homes, and through a whole country-side corn trampled wantonly, and oxen killed to make a meal for four! But I cannot tell you what they have suffered, for you are a woman and you could not bear it!"
Bonne forgot her fears for him. She leant forward--she had gone back to her seat on the stairs--and clenched her small hands. "And M. de Vlaye it is," she cried, "he who has done more than any other to madden them, who now proposes to rise upon their fall? Monsieur de Vlaye it is who, having driven them to this, will now crush them and say he does the King service, and so win pardon for a thousand crimes?"
But the light had gone out in Charles's eyes. "Ay, and win it he will. So it will go," he said moodily. "So it will happen! He has seen afar the chance of securing himself, and he will seize it, by doing what, for the time, no other has means to do."
"He who kindled the fire will be rewarded for putting it out?"
"Just so!"
"But can you do nothing against him?" Roger muttered.
"We may hold our own for a time, in the caves and hills about Brantôme perhaps," the elder brother answered. "But after a while he will starve us out. And in the open such folks as we have, ill-armed, ill-found, with scarce a leader older than myself, will melt before his pikes like smoke before the wind!"
Roger's eyes glistened. "Not if I were with you," he muttered. "There should be one blow struck before he rode over us! But"--he let his chin sink on his breast--"what am I?"
"Brave enough, I know," Charles answered, putting his hand affectionately on the lad's shoulder. "Braver than I am, perhaps. But it is not the end, be the end what it may, good lad, that weighs me down and makes me coward. It is the misery of seeing all go wrong hour by hour and day by day! Of seeing the cause with which I must now sink or swim mishandled! Of striving to put sense and discipline into the folk who are either clowns, unteachable by aught but force, or a rabble of worthless vagrants drawn to us as to any other cause that promises safety from the gallows. And yet, if I were older and had seen war and handled men, I feel that even of this stuff I could make a thing should frighten Vlaye. Ay, and for a time I thought I could," he continued gloomily. "But they would not be driven, and short of hanging half a dozen, which I dare not attempt, I must be naught!"
"Do you think," Roger muttered, "that if you had me beside you--I have strong arms----"
"God forbid!" Charles answered, looking sadly at him. "Dear lad, one is enough! What would Bonne do without you? It is not your place to go forth."
"If I were straight!"
The girl leaned forward and took his hand. "You are straight for me," she said softly. "Straight for me! More precious than the straightest thing in the world!"
He sighed and Bonne echoed the sigh. It was the first time the three had met since Charles's flight; since, fretted by inaction and stung beyond patience by the gibes of the father--who, while he withheld the means of making a figure in the world, did not cease to sneer at supineness--he had taken a step which had seemed desperate, and now seemed fatal. For if this Crocan rising were not a Jacquerie in name, if it were not stained as yet by the excesses which made that word a terror, it was still a peasant-rising. It was still a revolt of the canaille, of the mob; and more indulgent fathers than the Vicomte would have disowned the son who, by joining it, ranged himself against his caste.
The younger man had known that when he took the step; yet he had been content to take it. The farther it set him from the Vicomte the better! But he had not known nor had Bonne guessed how hopeless was the cause he was embracing, how blind its leaders, how shiftless its followers, how certain and disastrous its end! But he knew now. He knew that, to the attack which M. de Vlaye meditated, the mob of clods and vagrants must fall an easy prey.
Young and high-spirited, moved a little by the peasants' wrongs, and more by his own, he had done this thing. He had rushed on ruin, made good his father's gibes, played into M. de Vlaye's hands--the hands of the man who had patronised him a hundred times, and with a sneer made sport of his rusticity. The contempt of the man of the world for the raw boy had sunk into the lad's soul, and he hated Vlaye. To drag Vlaye down had been one of Charles's day-dreams. He had pined for the hour when, at the head of the peasants who were to hail him as their leader, he should tread the hated scutcheon under foot.
Now he saw that all the triumph would be M. de Vlaye's, and that by his bold venture he had but added a feather to the hated plume. And Bonne and Roger, mute because their love taught them when to speak and when to refrain, gazed sadly at the lanthorn. The silence lasted a long minute, and was broken in the end, not by their voices, but by the distant creak of a door.
Bonne sprang to her feet, the colour gone from her face. "Hush!" she cried. "What was that? Listen."
They listened, their hearts beating. Presently Roger, his face almost as bloodless as Bonne's, snatched up the lanthorn. "It is the Vicomte!" he gasped. "He is coming! Quick, Charles! You must go the way you came!"
"But Bonne?" his brother muttered, hanging back. "What is she to do?"
Roger, his hand on the door of the Tower Chamber, stood aghast. Charles might escape unseen, there was still time. But Bonne? If her father found the girl there? And the stranger was in the Tower Room, she could not retreat thither. What was she to do?
The girl's wits found the answer. She pointed to the stairs. "I will hide above," she whispered. "Do you go!" It was still of Charles she thought. "Do you go!" But the terror in her eyes--she feared her father as she feared no one else in the world--wrung the brothers' hearts.
Charles hesitated. "The door at the top?" he babbled. "It is locked, I fear!"
"He will not go up!" she whispered. "And while he is in the Tower Room I can escape."
She vanished as she spoke, in the darkness of the narrow winding shaft--and it was time she did. The Vicomte was scarce three paces from the outer door when the two who were left sprang into the Tower Chamber.
The Lieutenant was on his feet by the side of his bed. He had not gone to sleep, and he caught their alarm, he had heard the last hurried whispers, he had guessed their danger. He was not surprised when Charles, without a word, crossed the floor in a couple of bounds, flung himself recklessly over the sill of the window, clung an instant by one hand, then disappeared. A moment the shoot of ivy that grew into the chamber jerked violently, the next the door was flung wide open, and the Vicomte, a gaunt figure bearing a sword in one hand, a lanthorn in the other, stood on the threshold. The light of the lanthorn which he held above his head that he might detect what was before him, obscured his face. But the weapon and the tone of his voice proclaimed the fury of his suspicions. "Who is here?" he cried. "Who is here?" And again, as if in his rage he could frame no other words, "Who is here, I say? Speak!"
Roger, on his feet, the tell-tale lanthorn in his hand, could not force a word. He stood speechless, motionless, self-convicted; and had all lain with him, all had been known. Fortunately des Ageaux took on himself to answer.
"Who is here, sir?" he said in a voice a tone louder and a shade easier than was natural. "The devil, I think! For I swear no one else could climb this wall!"
"What do you mean?"
"And climb it," des Ageaux persisted, disregarding the question, "very nearly to this sill! I heard him below five minutes ago. And if I had not been fool enough to rouse your son and bid him light we had had him safe by now on this floor!"
The Vicomte glared. The story was glib, well told, animated; but he doubted it. He knew what he had expected to find. "You lit the lanthorn?" he snarled. "When?"
"Two minutes back--it might be more," des Ageaux replied. "Now he is clean gone. Clean gone, I fear," he added as he stepped into the embrasure of the window and leant forward cautiously, is if he thought a shot from below a thing not impossible. "I hear nothing, at any rate."
The Vicomte, struggling with senile rage, stared about him. "But I saw a light!" he cried. "In the outer room!"
"The outer room!"
"Under the door."
"Shone under both doors, I suppose," des Ageaux replied, still intent to all appearance on the dark void outside. "I'll answer for it," he added carelessly as he turned, "that he did not go out by the door."
"He will not go out now," the Vicomte retorted with grim suspicion, "for I have locked the outer door." He showed the key hung on a finger of the hand which held the lanthorn.
The sight was too much for Roger; he understood at once that it cut off his sister's retreat. A sound between a groan and an exclamation broke from him.
The Vicomte lifted the lanthorn to his face. "What now, booby?" he said. "Who has hurt you?" And, seeing what he saw, he cursed the lad for a coward.
"I did not feel over brave myself five minutes ago," the Lieutenant remarked.
The Vicomte turned on him as if he would curse him also. But, meeting his eyes, he thought better of it, and swallowed the rage he longed to vent. He stared about him a minute or more, stalking here and there offensively, and trying to detect something on which to fasten. But he found nothing, and, having flung the light of his lanthorn once more around the room, he stood an instant, then, turning, went sharply--as if his suspicions had now a new direction--towards the door.
"Good-night!" he muttered churlishly.
"Good-night!" the Lieutenant answered, but in the act of speaking he met the look of horror in Roger's eyes, remembered and understood. "She is still there," the lad's white lips spelled out, as they listened to the grating noise of the key in the lock. "She could not escape. And he suspects. He is going to her room."
Des Ageaux stared a moment nonplussed. The matter was nothing to him, nothing, yet his face faintly mirrored the youth's consternation. Then, in a stride, he was at his bedside. He seized one of the horse-pistols which lay beside his pillow, and, before the lad understood his purpose, he levelled it at the open window and fired into the night.
The echoes of the report had not ceased to roll hollowly through the Tower before the door flew wide again, and the Vicomte reappeared, his eyes glittering, his weapon shaking in his excitement. "What is it?" he cried, for at first he could not see, the smoke obscured the room. "What is it? What is it?"
"A miss, I fear," des Ageaux answered coolly. He stood with his eyes fixed on the window, the smoking weapon in his hand. "I fear, a miss--I had a notion all the time that he was in the ivy outside, and when he poked up his head----"
"His head?" the Vicomte exclaimed. He was shaking from head to foot.
"Well, it looked like his head," des Ageaux replied more doubtfully. He moved a step nearer to the window. "But I could not swear to it. It might have been an owl!"
"An owl?" the Vicomte answered in an unsteady tone. "You fired at an owl?"
"Whatever it was I missed it," des Ageaux answered with decision, and in a somewhat louder tone. "If you will step up here--but I fear you are not well, M. le Vicomte?"
He spoke truly, the Vicomte was not well. He had had a shock. Cast off his son as he might, hate him as he might--and hate him he did, as one who had turned against him and brought dishonour on his house--that shot in the night had shaken him. He leant against the wall, his lips white, his breath coming quickly. And a minute or more elapsed before he recovered himself and stood upright.
He kept his eyes averted from des Ageaux. He turned instead to Roger. Whether he feared for himself and would not be alone, or he suspected some complicity between the two, he signed to the lad to take up the lanthorn and go before him. And, moving stiffly and unsteadily across the floor, he got himself in silence to the door. With something between a bow and a glance--it was clear that he could not trust his tongue--he was out of the room.
The Lieutenant sat on his bed for some time, expecting Roger to return. But the lad did not appear, and after an interval des Ageaux took on himself to search the staircase. It was untenanted. The girl, using the chance he had afforded her, had escaped.
Had Bonne de Villeneuve, a day earlier, paid a visit much in fashion at that time, and consulted the "dark man" who, in an upper room on the wall of Angoulême, followed the stars and cast horoscopes, and was reputed to have foretold the death of the first Duke of Joyeuse as that nobleman passed southwards to the field of Coutras, she might have put faith in such of the events of the night as the magic crystal showed her; until it came to mirror, faint as an evening mist beside the river, her thoughts after the event. Then, had it foretold that, as she lay quaking in her bed, she would be thinking neither of the brother, whose desperate venture wrung her heart, nor of Roger, her dearer self, but of a stranger--a stranger, whose name she had not known six hours, and of whose past she knew nothing, she would have paused, refusing credence. She would have smiled at the phantasm of the impossible.
Yet so it was. Into the quiet pool of her maiden heart had fallen in an hour the stone that sooner or later troubles the sweet waters. As she lay thinking with wide-open eyes, her mind, which should have been employed with her brother's peril, or her own escape, or her father's rage, was busy with the stranger who had dropped so suddenly into her life, and had begun on the instant to play a sovereign part. She recalled his aspect as he looked in on them, cool and confident, at their midnight conference. She heard his tone as he baffled her father's questions with cunning answers. She marvelled at the wit that in the last pinch had saved her from discovery. He seemed to her a man of the world such as had not hitherto come within the range of her experience. Was he also the perfect knight of whom she had not been woman if she had not dreamed?
What, she wondered, must his life have been, who, cast among strange surroundings, bore himself so masterfully, and so shrewdly took his part! What chances he must have seen, what dangers run, how many men, how many cities visited! He might have known the Court, that strangemêlangeof splendour and wickedness, and mystery and valour. He might have seen the King, shrewdest of captains, bravest of princes; he might have encountered eye to eye men whose names were history. He came out of the great outer world of which she had visions, and already she was prepared to invest him with wonderful qualities. Her curiosity once engaged, she constructed for him first one life and then another, and then yet another--all on the same foundation, the one fact which he had told them, that he was a poor gentleman of Brittany. She considered his ring, and the shape of his clothes, and his manner of eating, which she found more delicate than her brothers'; and she fancied, but she told herself that she was foolish to think it, that she detected under his frigid bearing a habit of command that duller eyes failed to discern.
She was ashamed at last of the persistence with which her thoughts ran on him, and she tried to think of other things, and so thought of him again, and, awaking to the fact, smiled. But without blushing; partly because, whatever he was, he stood a great way from her, and partly because it was only her fancy that was touched, and not her heart; and partly again because she knew that he would be gone by mid-day, and could by no possibility form part of her life. Nevertheless, it was not until her time for rising came that anxiety as to her brother's safety and her father's anger eclipsed him. Then, uncertain how much the Vicomte knew, how near the truth he guessed, she forgot her hero, and thought exclusively of her father's resentment.
She might have spared her fears. The Vicomte was a sour and embittered man, but neither by nature nor habit a violent one. Rage had for an hour rendered him capable of the worst, capable of the murder of his son if, having an arm in his hand, he had met him, capable of the expulsion of his daughter from his house. But the fit was not natural to him; it was not so that he avenged the wrongs which the world had heaped upon him--since Coutras. He fell back easily and at once into the black cynical mood that was his own. He was too old and weak, he had too long brooded in inaction, he had too long wreaked his vengeance on the feeble to take strong measures now, whatever happened to him.
But some hours elapsed before Bonne knew this, or how things would be. It was not her father's custom to descend before noon, for with his straitened means and shrunken establishment he went little abroad; and he would have died rather than stoop to the rustic tasks which Roger pursued, and of which Bonne's small brown hands were not ignorant. She had not seen him when, an hour before noon, she repaired to a seat in the most remote corner of the garden, taking with her some household work on which she was engaged.
The garden of the château of Villeneuve--the garden proper that is, for the dry moat which divided the house from the courtyard was planted with pot-herbs and cabbages--formed a square, having for its one side the length of the house. It lay along the face of the building remote from the courtyard, and was only accessible through it. Its level, raised by art or nature, stood more than a man's height above the surrounding country; of which, for this reason, it afforded a pleasant and airy prospect. The wall which surrounded and buttressed it stood on the inner side no more than three feet high, but rose on the outer from a moat, the continuation of that which has just been mentioned.
The pleasaunce thus secured on all sides from intrusion consisted first of a paved walk which ran under the windows of the château, and was boarded by a row of ancient mulberry-trees; secondly, beyond this, of a strip of garden ground planted with gooseberry-bushes and fruit-trees, and bisected by a narrow walk which led from the house to a second terrace formed on the outer wall. This latter terrace lay open towards the country and at either end, but was hidden from the prying eyes of the house by a line of elms, poled and cut espalier fashion. It offered at either extremity the accommodation of a lichen-covered stone bench which tempted the old to repose and the young to reverie. The east bench enabled a person seated sideways on it--and so many had thus sat that the wall was hollowed by their elbows--to look over the willow-edged river and the tract of lush meadows which its loop enclosed. The western seat had not this poetic advantage, but by way of compensation afforded to sharp eyes a glimpse of the track--road it could not be called--which after passing the château wound through the forest on its course to Vlaye and the south.
From childhood the seat facing the river had been Bonne's favourite refuge. Before she could walk she had played games in the dust beneath it. She had carried to it her small sorrows and her small joys, her fits of nursery passion, her moods as she grew older. She had nursed dolls on it, and fancies, dreamed dreams and built castles; and in a not unhappy, thought neglected girlhood, it had stood for that sweet and secret retreat, the bower of the budding life, which remains holy in the memory of worn men and women. The other bench, which commanded a peep of the road, had been more to her elder sister's taste; nor was the choice without a certain bearing on the character of each.
This morning, she had not been five minutes at work before she heard footsteps on the garden path. The sun, near its highest, had driven her to the inner end of the seat, where the elm in summer leaf straggled widely over it, growing low, as elms will. She knew that whoever came she would see before she was seen.
It turned out as she expected. M. des Ageaux lounged onto the terrace, and shading his eyes from the sun's rays, gazed on the prospect. She judged that he thought himself alone, for he took a short turn this way and that. Then, after a casual glance at the empty seats--empty as he doubtless judged, though she from her arbour of leaves could watch his every movement--he wheeled about, and, facing the château, seemed to satisfy himself that the wall of pollard elms sheltered him from sight.
His next proceeding was mysterious. He drew from his breast a packet, of parchment or paper, unfolded it, and laid it flat on the wall before him. Then he stooped and after poring over it, glanced at the view, referred again to the paper, then again to the lie of the country, and the course of the river which flowed on his left. Finally he measured off a distance on the map. For a map it was, beyond doubt.
A shadow fell on her as she watched him. Nor did his next movement dispel the feeling. Folding up the map he replaced it in his breast, and leaning over the wall he scrutinised the outer surface of the brickwork. Apparently he did not discover what he sought, for he raised himself again, and with eyes bent on the tangle of nettles and rough herbage that clothed the bottom of the moat, he moved slowly along the terrace towards her. He reached, without seeing her, the seat on which she sat, knelt on it with one knee, and leaning far over the moat, allowed a low laugh to escape him.
She fought the faint suspicion that, unwelcome, asserted itself. He had behaved so honourably, so reticently, in all that had happened that she was determined not to believe aught to his discredit. But her folly, if foolish she was, must not imperil another. She made a mental note that there was one thing she must not tell him. Very quickly that reflection passed through her brain. And then--
"Why do you laugh?" she said.
He wheeled about so sharply that in another mood she must have laughed, so much she had the advantage of him. For an instant he was so taken aback that he did not speak. Then, "Why did you startle me?" he asked, his eyes smiling.
"Because--yes, my brother came in that way."
"I know it," he answered; "but not why you startled me, mademoiselle, a minute ago."
"Nor I," she retorted, smiling faintly, "why you were so inquisitive, M. des Voeux?"
"I am going to tell you that," he said. He seated himself on the bench so as to face her, and doffing his hat, held it between his face and the sun. He was not, we know, very amenable to the charms of women, and he saw in her no more than a girl of rustic breeding, comely and gentle, and something commonplace, but a good sister whose aid with her brother he needed. "I am going to tell you," he said; "because I am anxious to meet your brother again and to talk with him."
She continued to meet his eyes, but her own were clouded. "On what subject," she asked, "if I am not too curious?"
"The Crocans."
On her guard as she was, the word put her out of countenance. She could not hide, and after one half-hearted attempt did not try to hide, her dismay. "The Crocans?" she said. "But why do you come to me?" her colour coming and going. "What have we to do with them, if you please? Or my brother?"
"He has been banished from his home for some offence," the Lieutenant answered quietly. "Your father forbids the mention of the name Crocans. It is reasonable to infer that the offence is connected with them, and, in a word, that your brother has done what any young man with generous instincts and a love of adventure might do. He has joined them. I do not blame him."
"You do not blame him?" she murmured. Never had she heard such words of the Crocans--except from her brother. "You mean that?"
"I say it and mean it," the Lieutenant replied. But he spoke without emotion, emotion was not his forte. "Nor am I alone," he went on, "in holding such opinions. But the point, mademoiselle, is this. I wish to find a means of communicating with them, and he can and probably will be willing to aid me. For certain, if the worst comes to the worst, I can aid him."
Bonne's heart beat rapidly. She did not--she told herself that she did not distrust him. Had it been her own secret he was seeking she would have delivered it to him freely. But the manner in which he had borne himself while he thought himself alone, the possession of the map, and the shrewdness with which he had traced her brother's movement and surprised a secret that was still a secret from the household, frightened her. And her very inexperience made her pause.
"But first, I take it, you need his aid?" she murmured.
"I wish to speak with him."
"Have you seen my father?"
He opened his eyes and bent a little nearer. "Do you mean, mademoiselle----"
"I mean only," she said gently, "that if you express to him the views on the Crocans which you have just expressed to me, your opportunities of seeing my brother will be scant."
He laughed. "I have not opened them to him," he said. "I have seen him, and whether he thinks that he was a little more exigent last night than the danger required, or he desires to prove to me that midnight alarms are not the rule at Villeneuve, he has not given me notice to go. His invitation to remain is not, perhaps," he smiled slightly, "of the warmest. But if you, mademoiselle, will second it----"
She muttered--not without a blush--that it would give her pleasure. And he proceeded, "Then no difficulty on that point will arise."
She stooped lower over her work. What was she to do? He wanted that which she had decided she must not give him. Just that! What was she to do?
She was so long in answering, that he dubbed her awkward and mannerless. And thought it a pity, too; for she was a staunch sister, and had shown herself resourceful; and in repose her face, though brown and sunburnt, was not without grace. He came to the point. "May I count on you for this?" he asked bluntly.
"For--what?"
"That as soon as you can you will bring me face to face with your brother?"
She looked up and met his gaze. "As soon as I think it safe to do so," she said, "I will. You may depend on me."
He had not divined her doubt, nor did he discern her quibble. Still, "Could I not go to him to-day?" he said. "If he is still in the neighbourhood?"
She shook her head. "I do not know where he is," she answered, glad that she could say so much with truth. "But if he show himself, and it be safe, I will let you know. Roger----"
"Ha! To be sure, Roger may know?"
She smiled. "Roger and I are one," she said. "You must not expect to get from him what I do not give." She said it naïvely, with just so much of a smile as showed her at her best, and he hastened to say that he left himself in her hands. She blushed through her sunburn at that, but clung to her quibble, telling herself that this was a stranger, the other a brother, and that if she destroyed Charles she could never forgive herself.
He saw that she was disturbed, and he changed the subject. "You have always lived here?" he asked.
"Yes," she answered, "but I can remember when things were different with us. We were not always so broken. Before Coutras--but," with a faint smile, "you have heard my father on that, and will not wish to hear me."
"The Vicomte was present at the battle?"
"Yes, he was in the centre of the Catholic army with the Duke of Joyeuse. He escaped with his life. But we lay in the path of the pursuit after the flight, and they sacked the house, and burned the hamlet by the ford--the one you passed--and the two farms in the bend of the river--the two behind you. They swept off every four-legged thing, every horse, and cow, and sheep, and left us bare. One of the servants who resisted was killed, and--and my mother died of the shock."
She broke off with an uncontrollable shiver. She was silent. After a pause, "Perhaps you were at Coutras, M. des Voeux?" she said, looking up.
"I was not of the party who sacked your house," he answered gravely.
She knew then that he had fought on the other side; and she admired him for the tact with which he made it known to her. He was a soldier then. She wondered, as she bent over her work, if he had fought elsewhere, and under whom, and with what success. Had he prospered or sunk? He called himself a poor gentleman of Brittany, but that might have been his origin only, he might be something more now.
In the earnestness of her thoughts she turned her eyes on his ring, and she blushed brightly when with a quick, almost rude movement he hid his hand. "I beg your pardon!" she murmured. "I was not thinking."
"It is I should beg yours," he said quietly. "It is only that I do not want you to come to a false conclusion. This ring--in a word I wear it, but the arms are not mine. That is all."
"Does that apply also," she asked, looking at him ingenuously, "to the pistols you carry, M. des Voeux? Or should I address you--for I saw last evening that they bore a duke's coronet--as your Grace?"
He laughed gaily. "They are mine, but I am not a duke," he said.
"Nor are you M. des Voeux?"
Her acuteness surprised him. "I am afraid, mademoiselle," he said, "that you have a mind to exalt me into a hero of romance--whether I will or no."
She bent over her work to hide her face. "A duke gave them to you, I suppose?" she said.
"That is so," he replied sedately.
"Did you save his life?"
"I did not."
"I have heard," she returned, looking up thoughtfully, "that at Coutras a gentleman on the other side strove hard to save the Duke of Joyeuse's life, and did not desist until he was struck down by his own men."
"He looked to make his account by him, no doubt," the Lieutenant answered coldly. "Perhaps," with a scarcely perceptible bitterness, "the Duke, had he lived, would have given him--a pair of pistols!"
"That were a small return," she said indignantly, "for such a service!"
He shrugged his shoulders. And to change the subject--
"What are the grey ruins," he asked, "on the edge of the wood?"
"They are part of the old Abbey," she answered without looking up, "afterwards removed to Vlaye, of which my sister is Abbess. There was a time, I believe, when the convent stood so close to the house that it was well-nigh one with it. There was some disorder, I believe, and the Diocesan obtained leave to have it moved, and it was planted on lands that belonged to us at that time."
"Near Vlaye?"
"Within half a league of it."
"Your sister, then, is acquainted with the Captain of Vlaye?"
She did not look up. "Yes," she said.
"But you and your brothers?"
"We know him and hate him--only less than we fear him!" She regretted her vehemence the moment she had spoken.
But he merely nodded. "So do the Crocans, I fancy," he said. "It is rumoured that he is preparing something against them."
"You know that?" she exclaimed in surprise.
"Without being omniscient," he answered smiling. "I heard it in Barbesieux. It was that, perhaps," he continued shrewdly, "which you wished to tell your brother yesterday."
On that she was near confessing all to him and telling him, in spite of her resolutions, where on the next day he could find her brother. But she clung to her decision, and a minute later he rose and moved away in the direction of the house.
When they met at table the mystery of the Vicomte's sudden impulse to hospitality, which was something of a puzzle to her, began to clear.
It had its origin in nothing more substantial than his vanity; which was tickled by the opportunity of talking to a man who, with some pretensions to gentility, could be patronised. A little, too, he thought of the figure he had made the night before. It was possible that the stranger had been unfavourably impressed. That impression the Vicomte thought he must remove, and to that end he laboured, after his manner, to be courteous to his guest. But as his talk consisted, and had long consisted, of little but sneers and gibes at the companions of his fallen fortunes, his civility found its only vent in this direction.
Des Ageaux indeed would gladly have had less of his civility. More than once--though he was not fastidious--his cheek coloured with shame, and willingly would he, had that been all, have told the Vicomte what he thought of his witticisms. But he had his cards sorted, his course arranged. Circumstances had played for him in the dangerous game on which he was embarked, and he would have been unworldly indeed had he been willing to cast away, for a point of feeling--he who was no knight-errant--the advantages he had gained.
Not that he did not feel strongly for the two whose affection for one another touched him. Roger's deformity appealed to him, for he fancied that he detected in the lad a spirit which those who knew him better, but knew only his gentler side, did not suspect. And the girl who had grown from child to woman in the rustic stillness of this moated house--that once had rung with the tread of armed heels and been gay with festive robes and tourneys, but now was sinking fast into a lonely farmstead--she too awakened some interest in the man of the world, who smiled to find himself embedded for the time in a life so alien from his every-day experiences. Concern he felt for the one and the other; but such concern as weighed light in the balance against the interests he held in his hands, or even against his own selfish interest.
It soon appeared that the Vicomte had another motive for hospitality, in the desire to dazzle the stranger by the splendours of his eldest daughter, on whom he continued to harp. "There is still one of us," he said with senile vanity--"I doubt if, from the specimens you have seen, you will believe it--who is not entirely as God made her! Thank the Lord for that! Who is neither clod nor clout, sir, but has as much fashion as goes to the making of a modest gentlewoman."
His guest looked gravely at him. "I look forward much to seeing her, M. le Vicomte!" he said for the tenth time.
"Ay, you may say so!" the Vicomte answered. "For in her you will see a Villeneuve, and the last of the line!" with a scowl at Roger. "Neither a lout with his boots full of hay-seeds--pah! nor a sulky girl with as much manner as God gave her, and not a jot to it! Nice company I have, M. des Voeux," he continued bitterly. "Did you say des Voeux--I never heard the name?"
"Yes, M. le Vicomte."
"Nice company, I say, for a Villeneuve in his old age! What think you of it? Before Coutras, where was an end of the good old days, and the good old gentrice----"
"You were at Coutras?"
"Ay, to my cost, a curse on it! But before Coutras, I say, I had at least their mother, who was a Monclar from Rouergue. She had at any rate a tongue and could speak. And my daughter the Abbess takes after her, though may-be more after me, as you will think when you see her. She will be here, she says, to-morrow, for a night or two." This he told for the fifth time that evening.
"I am looking forward to seeing her!" the guest repeated gravely--also for the fifth time.
But the Vicomte could not have enough of boasting, which was doubly sweet to him; first because it exalted the absent, and secondly because it humiliated those who were present. "Thank God, she at least is not as God made her!" he said again, pleased with the phrase. "At Court last year the King noticed her, and swore she was a true Villeneuve, and a most perfect lady without fault or blemish!"
"His Majesty is certainly a judge," the listener responded, the twinkle in his eye more apparent than usual.
"To be sure!" the old man returned. "Who better? But, for the matter of that, I am a judge myself. My daughter--for there is only one worthy of the name"--with a withering glance at poor Bonne--"is not hand in glove with every base-born wench about the place, trapesing to a christening in a stable as readily as if the child were a king's son! Ay, and as I am a Catholic, praying beside old hags' beds till the lazy priest at the chapel has nought left to do for his month's meal! Pah!"
"Ranks are no doubt of God's invention," des Voeux said with his eyes on the table.
The Vicomte struck the board angrily. "Who doubts it?" he exclaimed. "Of God's invention, sir? Of course they are!"
"But I take it that they exist, in part at least," des Ageaux answered, "as a provision for the exercise of charity; and of----" he hesitated, unwilling--he read the gathering storm on the Vicomte's brow--to give offence; and, by a coincidence, he was saved from the necessity. As he paused the door flew open, and a serving-man, not one of the two who had waited on the table, but an uncouth creature, shaggy and field-stained, appeared gesticulating on the threshold. He was out of breath, apparently he could not speak; while the gust of wind which entered with him, by blowing sideways the long, straggling flames of the candles, and deepening the gloom of the ill-lit room, made it impossible to discern his face.
The Vicomte rose. They all rose. "What does this mean?" he cried in a rage. "What is it?"
"There's a party ringing at the gate, my lord, and--and won't take no!" the man gasped. "A half-dozen of spears, and others on foot and horse. A body of them. Solomon sent me to ask what's to do, and if he shall open."
"There's a petticoat with them," a second voice answered. The speaker showed his face over the other's shoulder.
"Imbeciles!" the Vicomte retorted, fired with rage. "It is your lady the Abbess come a day before her time! It is my daughter and you stay her at the door!"
"It is not my lady," the second man answered timidly. "It might be some of her company, my lord, but 'tis not her. And Solomon----"
"Well? Well?"
"Says that they are not her people, my lord."
The Vicomte groaned. "If I had a son worthy the name!" he said, and then he broke off, looking foolish. For Roger had left the room and des Ageaux also. They had slipped by the men while the Vicomte questioned them, and run out through the hall and to the gate--not unarmed. The Vicomte, seeing this, bade the men follow them; and when these too had vanished, and only four or five frightened women who had crowded into the room at the first alarm remained, he began to fumble with his sword, and to add to the confusion by calling fussily for this and that, and to bring him his arquebus, and not to open--not to open till he came! In truth years had worked imperceptibly on him. His nerves, like many things about him, were not what they had been--before Coutras. And he was still giving contrary directions, and scolding the women, and bidding them make way for him--since it seemed there was not a man to go to the gate but himself--when approaching voices broke on his ear and silenced him. An instant later one or two men appeared among the women in the doorway, and the little crowd fell back in wonder, to make room for a low dark man, bareheaded and breathing hard, with disordered hair and glittering eyes, who, thrusting the women to either side, cried--not once, but again, and yet again:--
"Room! Room for the Countess of Rochechouart! Way for the Countess!"
At the third repetition of this--which he seemed to say mechanically--his eyes took in the scene, the table, the room, and the waiting figure of the scandalized Vicomte, and his voice broke. "Saved!" he cried, flinging up his arms, and reeling slightly as if he would fall. "My lady is saved! Saved!"
And then, behind the low, dark man, who, it was plain, was almost beside himself, the Vicomte saw the white face and shrinking form of a small, slight girl little more than a child, whose eyes were like no eyes but a haunted hare's, so large and bright and affrighted were they.