Leaving Dan on guard outside the door of the sitting-room, Roger went out and saddled his own charger and a spare horse that he and Dan shared between them. On his return he found Athénaïs ready. Quickly he wrote one note for Captain Labord, placing Dan in charge of the death circus on its return to Paris, and another about Athénaïs for Dan to show the Rennes Municipals in the morning; then they collected their bundles, said good-bye to Dan, and left the hotel without being seen by anyone. Roger’s visit to the prison had occupied no more than a few minutes, and his removal of Athénaïs from Maître Léger’s house little longer, so it was only just past eleven when they mounted and turned out of the yard.
As they entered the main square of the town, she asked, “Where do you intend to take me, Rojé?”
“To an inn near Dinan, where I have friends who will hide you until you can be got away to England,” he replied. Then, having made up his mind what he would tell her about himself, he went on, “Just over a year ago I returned to France as an unofficial observer for my Government. Naturally they are anxious to be kept well informed on the progress of the Revolution, and it seemed to me that the best way to carry out my mission was to pose as a revolutionary myself.”
“You must have played your part exceeding well to have become a Citizen Representative,” she remarked coldly; “but having seen you as President of the Tribunal this morning I can hardly wonder at the high standing you have achieved among these satanists.”
“’Twas all or nothing. I’d have learned no secrets worth having had I remained one of the mob.”
“True; and you were ever ruthless, Rojé, where anything you had set your heart upon was concerned. Even so, in the past twelve hours I have done little but marvel that you could bring yourself to send innocent people to the guillotine.”
“Had I not, some genuine terrorist would have done so in my stead, and my position enables me to save at least a proportion of those who would otherwise be sent to die. ’Tis the thought of that alone which has given me sufficient resolution to continue with the ghastly task the Committee of Public Safety thrust upon me. Long before I left Paris I was in touch with a League of gallant Englishmen who smuggle suspects and escaped prisoners across the Channel. Since carrying out my assize in Brittany I have been able to work much more closely with them, so have been the means of having scores of victims of the terror rescued and conveyed to safety. It is to a member of the League that I am now taking you.”
She lifted a hand and laid it on his arm. “Oh, Rojé, how could I ever have doubted that you were on the side of the angels, and I have not even thanked you yet for rescuing myself; but seeing you acknowledged by all as one of these terrible Citizen Representatives seemed so utterly inexplicable.”
When they reached the Dinan road they trotted and cantered for a time, then while they gave the horses a breather at a walk, he spoke of the terrible strain he had been under in going from town to town with his guillotine, and sitting day after day in judgment. But now she praised him for having borne it, and when he told her something of the way in which he had used the excuse of purging the Municipal Councils to send some of the worst criminals to the scaffold, she eagerly asked on how many he had exacted vengeance.
“I’ve kept no count,” he replied, “but since joining Dumouriez’s Army on a similar mission last September I should say that I have ordered the execution of not less than two hundred self-confessed murderers.”
“Oh, Rojé, how marvellous!” Her voice thrilled with admiration. “Had I my life to live over again I’d willingly give half my happy years could I buy with them the satisfaction of having killed even a hundred. But I have not been idle; I too belong to a secret organisation—not for rescue, but to further revolt and revenge. For that reason I do not intend to accept your kind offer to take me to your friends at Dinan; while the Revolution lasts I will never desert the cause I serve by leaving France.”
Remembering how she had been arrested for sheltering M. de Charette, Roger was not at all surprised to learn that she was actively engaged in assisting the Royalists of La Vendée. In view of the fact that such a high proportion of the men of her caste had fled abroad, he felt that, for a woman, her attitude was a particularly brave one. But this sudden announcement of hers clearly called for an alteration in his plans, so he said:
“Why, then, did you let me bring you so far along the Dinan road? We must have covered three miles of it already.”
“Because it is the road I would have chosen for myself,” she laughed. “Surely you have not forgotten that my father’s Château of Bécherel lies only a mile or two off it?”
“That I would never forget, since it was there you first confessed that you loved me. But when I enquired in Rennes about the château, I was told that it had been burnt down.”
“Indeed it was, and is now no more than a gutted shell; but I have a secret hiding-place among the ruins which is moderately comfortable. It will not be the first time that I have taken refuge there, as Bécherel is the very last place in which those fiends would look for me.”
Her reasoning seemed sound to Roger, particularly as he had lain a false trail behind them to Nantes; so they again let their mounts have their heads in a canter. The night was fine and warm, with a myriad stars shining overhead; so they had no difficulty in seeing their way, and at intervals when they walked their horses they asked and answered innumerable questions. Roger learned that Athénaïs’s father had died in ’91, and that her brother Lucien, the present Marquis de Rochambeau, was with the émigré army on the Rhine. He told her of his own marriage and, when pressed, endeavoured to describe Amanda; but he did not feel that he had succeeded very well, and they did not pursue the subject further. They talked of the murder of the King and of what the poor brave Queen must be suffering as a prisoner; of people they had known in their youth; of the iniquities of the Convention and of the prospects of the revolt in La Vendée.
Bécherel was little more than half-way to Dinan, so they reached it half an hour after midnight. Roger had lived for many months at the château whilst employed by the late Marquis as an additional secretary to conduct exhaustive researches among old title deeds, so he well remembered the splendid mansion with its great marble entrance-hall and staircase, its scores of rooms furnished with rich carpets, hangings and tapestries, its cabinets filled with precious china, and its library of rare books. On occasions when the family had been in residence the huge house had swarmed with people—old Aldegone, the major-domo, pompous in his black and silver; Chenou, the chief huntsman, resplendent in his green and gold; chaplains, musicians, chefs, wine-butlers, coachmen, gardeners, grooms, housemaids, footmen, scullions, and laundry-hands had made the place as busy as a township.
Now it was as silent as the grave; the spacious forecourt was waist-high in weeds, the gaunt and blackened walls of the ruin towered up against the star-spangled sky, while here and there a row of frameless windows gaped, making lighter rectangles in the dark patches of still-standing masonry.
One end of the long stables had escaped destruction; so having watered their horses at the trough in the yard, they put them into two loose-boxes. While Roger unsaddled, Athénaïs prised up a board in the floor of a nearby shed and fetched a feed for them from a secret store of corn that she kept there; then, side by side, they made their way round to the back of the main building.
When they had mounted the broken steps to the terrace and crossed it, she took his hand and led him in among the heavy shadows of the ruin. Picking their way through the debris, they advanced for about thirty feet until they reached a gaping black hole; it was the entrance to a stone stairway, which they descended into pitch darkness. At the bottom of the stairs she let go his hand and fumbled for a minute with some loose stones in the wall; from a hiding-place there she took a big key, a flint and tinder-box and a piece of candle. As the candle flickered into flame, Roger saw that they were in a broad, stone-flagged passage. Along either side of it was a row of heavy wooden door
s; leading the way over to the third on the left, she unlocked it, then turned to him with a cynical little smile, and said, “Monsieur le Chevalier, I bid you welcome to my home.”
As Roger followed her inside she began to light some more candles, and he saw that it was a fair-sized room, warm, dry and fully furnished. It contained a table, chairs, three chests of drawers, a big divan, at one side of which there was a prie-dieu, and at the far end from them two cupboards and a charcoal stove with a pipe to carry off the fumes. The carpet and most of the furniture was badly singed, so had evidently been salvaged after the fire; but in summer, if not in winter, anyone could have lived concealed there for weeks without suffering any discomfort. All the same, recalling Athénaïs as she had been when living two floors above where they now stood, surrounded with every conceivable luxury, it seemed quite extraordinary to Roger to think of her sleeping, cooking, eating and washing in this dungeon, entirely alone, unserved and unprotected; and his admiration for her courage was further increased at the thought that few women would have been brave enough to live alone in this grim and eerie ruin.
The contrast with the past was all the more striking when she threw off her borrowed cloak, as she still had the Indian shawl knotted about her shoulders and, below it, was wearing Roger’s breeches and boots, which were much too large for her. But she seemed quite unconscious of her appearance, and even those unbecoming garments could not disguise her grace of movement as she quickly fetched from one of the cupboards a bottle of wine and two glasses.
Roger pulled the cork and poured the wine; silent but smiling they drank to one another. Now, for the first time, they had the leisure to study one another’s faces. She thought him as handsome as ever, but pitifully thin and worn-looking; he thought her bright-blue eyes even bigger than he remembered them, and her imperious features even more perfectly chiselled. Her mouth was harder, and tiny lines were forming round the corners of her eyes; but her figure had filled out, and she looked marvellously healthy in spite of the harassing life she must have led.
“You’ve altered only for the better,” he said, after a moment, “except that I cannot help regretting that to disguise yourself you committed the sacrilege of dyeing your wonderful golden hair.”
“My dear,” she smiled, “tragedy had robbed it of its lustre. Although I am only twenty-four it was already turning grey; I assure you that it was no loss.”
“Do you remember . . .” he began, and for an hour that sped swiftly they recalled the high spots of their old love affaire. At length they touched upon the desperate day on which Roger had gone out to waylay and kill the fiancé whom she feared and loathed, so that her father would not be able to force her into that hateful marriage. Smiling at him across the table, she murmured:
“Oh, Rojé, in that time long ago you must have loved me very dearly.”
“Indeed I did!” he assured her quickly, “and I think with a greater passion than I have ever felt for any other woman, because you were my first real love.”
“I loved you that way too, Rojé; and since we knew that we could never marry, it is all the more remarkable that we never consummated our love. It was certainly not for lack of opportunity, and I cannot believe that many young men would have behaved towards me with such chivalry.”
“In that belief I think you wrong the young,” he smiled. “When a youth is truly smitten in the heart it brings out all the best in him. By some strange alchemy he can be ravished to distraction by the kisses of his beloved, yet have no thought of tempting her from the seventh heaven to which she has lifted him and turning her to common clay. ’Tis age and experience that make men unscrupulous and cynical.”
They fell silent for a moment, then he said, “Talking to you of old times has made me selfishly forget that you woke this morning in prison. After the terrible experiences you have been through today you must be quite exhausted; I ought not to keep you up any longer.”
She shrugged. “It was the third time I had been in prison, so I have become armoured against the barbarous conditions one meets with in such places.”
“Perhaps; but I imagine you have never before been condemned to death. I dared take no other course, from fear that if I publicly reprieved you there would be such an outcry that I might be greatly hampered in any attempt to effect your rescue later.”
“I guessed as much; but my mind was so fully engaged by wondering how you could conceivably have become the President of a Revolutionary Tribunal that I thought little of the possibility that you might not rescue me after all, and that I would have to mount the scaffold. In any case, I am not afraid of death. My only really bad moments were when, instead of yourself, that man Hutot took me from prison and began to ‘question’ me.”
“I was in half a mind to finish what you had begun, and pisto him where he lay; but I am still a trifle squeamish about killing a helpless man. Thank God you got the best of him; but that half hour must have been a ghastly strain, and then there was our long ride on top of it. Really, it is time for you to get some sleep.”
Athénaïs nodded, stood up and stretched herself, then walked over to the prie-dieu and knelt down at it. While she was saying her prayers, Roger quietly collected the cloaks, some rugs and a couple of cushions, and made himself a shakedown on the floor. When she had finished her prayers she came back to the table and snuffed out the candles until only one remained, a little pool of light which cast their shadows on the walls. Then, her eyes still fixed upon the flame, she said softly:
“Rojé, do you remember my favourite fairy story?”
“Yes,” he smiled; “you were the beautiful princess and I was the miller’s penniless youngest son.”
“Times have changed, have they not?” she murmured. “And a different story is now more suited to us. In it, I am reduced to the poor beggar maid, while you have become, in appearance at least, a prince of this new bloody era.”
Suddenly she lifted her eyes to his. They were wide and shining. A mocking smile twitched the corners of her mouth, and she went on, “Yet we are the same people, and only a few years older. Now that the terrible Citizen Representative has me alone and in his power, does he not wish to ‘question’ me?”
Only a pace separated them. In an instant he had taken it. His pulses throbbing with excitement and delight, he drew her to him.
So, at last, the years between forgotten, these two, who in their youth had loved one another so desperately, gave, in their maturity, free reign to passion; and spent the remaining hours of the night locked in each other’s arms.
For them the night had no morning, as no ray of daylight penetrated to Athénaïs’s secret retreat. When they awoke they made love again, laughing and teasing like a honeymoon couple who had not a care in the world on the first morning of their marriage.
Roger had no qualms of conscience at having been unfaithful to Amanda. Men were not expected to be faithful to their wives in those times and he had been so to her for longer than most husbands would have been. His love for her was not lessened by his newly-aroused passion for Athénaïs, as he thought of his marriage as a thing apart, and an enduring bond which could be severed only by wanton neglect and cruelty. He knew that on his return to England Amanda would be far too wise to question him, and he counted his honour involved in protecting her from any knowledge that he had entered on a clandestine love affair. In the meantime he considered himself free to enjoy to the uttermost the glorious gift that a strange fate had sent him.
It was Athénaïs who, with a woman’s natural curiosity, brought up the subject of his marriage, and he told her his views about it; upon which she said, “Your attitude is, then, the same as that adopted by most women of quality in France. After marriage we consider ourselves free to take lovers, provided that we do not bring shame upon our husbands; and I will confess to you that, deeply attached as I was to M. le Vicomte, I was more than once persuaded to let another find happiness in my bed, although I exercised the greatest care that my lord should know nothin
g of it. Yet, had I married you, Rojé, after our four-year courtship my love had grown so intense that I believe I would have remained completely faithful.”
“And I to you,” he replied; then added on an impulse to be entirely honest, “That is, as long as I had stayed in France. But had I been called upon to go to England, or elsewhere abroad, for long periods, and met, shall we say, Amanda, I’ll not say that what has happened between you and me would not have happened between her and me.”
Athénaïs withdrew her arm from beneath his neck and half-rolled over on to him. Looking down into his face she said with sudden intensity, “I hate her! Thank God she is in England, or I would fight her for possession of you. As things are, I shall endeavour to put her existence from my mind. Rojé, while you are in France I want you to think of me as though we had married, and that it was with her, while staying in England, that you had no more than an affaire. I have never truly loved anyone but you, and in these years I have thought of you and longed for you so often. Will you give me a greater happiness than I have ever known by promising to think of me like that?”
He smiled. “Now that fate has restored you to me, that will be no hard thing to do. Yes, as long as I remain in France I promise that I will think of you and regard you in all things as my wife.”
They sealed their pact with a long sweet kiss.
It was afternoon before they rose and set about preparing a meal. In an iron chest, for protection from mice, Athénaïs kept a store of pickled eggs, pork in brine, dried fruits, wheaten biscuits, sugar and other things which would not seriously deteriorate when she was absent for several weeks.
As she lit the stove she told Roger how she had managed to establish herself there. On first being proscribed she had fled to Bécherel in the hope of finding a hiding-place with one of the tenant families that she had befriended in her youth. At a keeper’s lodge in the forest she had pulled up to beg a meal, and found that Chenou, the ex-chief huntsman, had moved in there after his quarters at the château had been burnt out. He was completely loyal, and it was he who had helped her organise her hide-out, dug its furnishings out of the rubble, fixed the stove and generally made it habitable. Whenever she returned to it she went over to his lodge to let him know that she was back, and he then kept her supplied with game, butter, fresh milk and vegetables.
The Man who Killed the King Page 35