And gazing pensively at the stream and the willows, my lady tried to work herself into a proper frame of mind; now murmuring the name of one gallant, and now, finding it unsuited, the name of another. But the soft inflection would break into a giggle, and finally into a yawn; and, tired of the attempt, she began to pluck grass and throw it from her. By-and-by she discovered that Madame Carlat and the women, who had their place a little apart, had disappeared; and affrighted by the solitude and silence — for neither of which she was made — she sprang up and stared about her, hoping to discern them. Right and left, however, the sweep of hillside curved upward to the skyline, lonely and untenanted; behind her the castled rock frowned down on the rugged gorge and filled it with dispiriting shadow. Madame St. Lo stamped her foot on the turf.
“The little fool!” she murmured pettishly. “Does she think that I am to be murdered that she may fatten on sighs? Oh, come up, Madame, you must be dragged out of this!” And she started briskly towards the alders, intent on gaining company as quickly as possible.
She had gone about fifty yards, and had as many more to traverse when she halted. A man, bent double, was moving stealthily along the farther side of the brook, a little in front of her. Now she saw him, now she lost him; now she caught a glimpse of him again, through a screen of willow branches. He moved with the utmost caution, as a man moves who is pursued or in danger; and for a moment she deemed him a peasant whom the bathers had disturbed and who was bent on escaping. But when he came opposite to the alder-bed she saw that that was his point, for he crouched down, sheltered by a willow, and gazed eagerly among the trees, always with his back to her; and then he waved his hand to some one in the wood.
Madame St. Lo drew in her breath. As if he had heard the sound — which was impossible — the man dropped down where he stood, crawled a yard or two on his face, and disappeared.
Madame stared a moment, expecting to see him or hear him. Then, as nothing happened, she screamed. She was a woman of quick impulses, essentially feminine; and she screamed three or four times, standing where she was, her eyes on the edge of the wood. “If that does not bring her out, nothing will!” she thought.
It brought her. An instant, and the Countess appeared, and hurried in dismay to her side.
“What is it?” the younger woman asked, glancing over her shoulder; for all the valley, all the hills were peaceful, and behind Madame St. Lo — but the lady had not discovered it — the servants who had returned were laying the meal. “What is it?” she repeated anxiously.
“Who was it?” Madame St. Lo asked curtly. She was quite calm now.
“Who was — who?”
“The man in the wood?”
The Countess stared a moment, then laughed. “Only the old soldier they call Badelon, gathering simples. Did you think that he would harm me?”
“It was not old Badelon whom I saw!” Madame St. Lo retorted. “It was a younger man, who crept along the other side of the brook, keeping under cover. When I first saw him he was there,” she continued, pointing to the place. “And he crept on and on until he came opposite to you. Then he waved his hand.”
“To me?”
Madame nodded.
“But if you saw him, who was he?” the Countess asked.
“I did not see his face,” Madame St. Lo answered. “But he waved to you. That I saw.”
The Countess had a thought which slowly flooded her face with crimson. Madame St. Lo saw the change, saw the tender light which on a sudden softened the other’s eyes; and the same thought occurred to her. And having a mind to punish her companion for her reticence — for she did not doubt that the girl knew more than she acknowledged — she proposed that they should return and find Badelon, and learn if he had seen the man.
“Why?” Madame Tavannes asked. And she stood stubbornly, her head high. “Why should we?”
“To clear it up,” the elder woman answered mischievously. “But perhaps, it were better to tell your husband and let his men search the coppice.”
The colour left the Countess’s face as quickly as it had come. For a moment she was tongue-tied. Then —
“Have we not had enough of seeking and being sought?” she cried, more bitterly than befitted the occasion. “Why should we hunt him? I am not timid, and he did me no harm. I beg, Madame, that you will do me the favour of being silent on the matter.”
“Oh, if you insist? But what a pother—”
“I did not see him, and he did not see me,” Madame de Tavannes answered vehemently. “I fail, therefore, to understand why we should harass him, whoever he be. Besides, M. de Tavannes is waiting for us.”
“And M. de Tignonville — is following us!” Madame St. Lo muttered under her breath. And she made a face at the other’s back.
She was silent, however. They returned to the others and nothing of import, it would seem, had happened. The soft summer air played on the meal laid under the willows as it had played on the meal of yesterday laid under the chestnut-trees. The horses grazed within sight, moving now and again, with a jingle of trappings or a jealous neigh: the women’s chatter vied with the unceasing sound of the mill-stream. After dinner, Madame St. Lo touched the lute, and Badelon — Badelon who had seen the sack of the Colonna’s Palace, and been served by cardinals on the knee — fed a water-rat, which had its home in one of the willow-stumps, with carrot-parings. One by one the men laid themselves to sleep with their faces on their arms; and to the eyes all was as all had been yesterday in this camp of armed men living peacefully.
But not to the Countess! She had accepted her life, she had resigned herself, she had marvelled that it was no worse. After the horrors of Paris the calm of the last two days had fallen on her as balm on a wound. Worn out in body and mind, she had rested, and only rested; without thought, almost without emotion, save for the feeling, half fear, half curiosity, which stirred her in regard to the strange man, her husband. Who on his side left her alone.
But the last hour had wrought a change. Her eyes were grown restless, her colour came and went. The past stirred in its shallow — ah, so shallow — grave; and dead hopes and dead forebodings, strive as she might, thrust out hands to plague and torment her. If the man who sought to speak with her by stealth, who dogged her footsteps and hung on the skirts of her party, were Tignonville — her lover, who at his own request had been escorted to the Arsenal before their departure from Paris — then her plight was a sorry one. For what woman, wedded as she had been wedded, could think otherwise than indulgently of his persistence? And yet, lover and husband! What peril, what shame the words had often spelled! At the thought only she trembled and her colour ebbed. She saw, as one who stands on the brink of a precipice, the depth which yawned before her. She asked herself, shivering, if she would ever sink to that.
All the loyalty of a strong nature, all the virtue of a good woman, revolted against the thought. True, her husband — husband she must call him — had not deserved her love; but his bizarre magnanimity, the gloomy, disdainful kindness with which he had crowned possession, even the unity of their interests, which he had impressed upon her in so strange a fashion, claimed a return in honour.
To be paid — how? how? That was the crux which perplexed, which frightened, which harassed her. For, if she told her suspicions, she exposed her lover to capture by one who had no longer a reason to be merciful. And if she sought occasion to see Tignonville and so to dissuade him, she did it at deadly risk to herself. Yet what other course lay open to her if she would not stand by? If she would not play the traitor? If she —
“Madame,” — it was her husband, and he spoke to her suddenly,— “are you not well?” And, looking up guiltily, she found his eyes fixed curiously on hers.
Her face turned red and white and red again, and she faltered something and looked from him, but only to meet Madame St. Lo’s eyes. My lady laughed softly in sheer mischief.
“What is it?” Count Hannibal asked sharply.
But Madame St. Lo’s answer w
as a line of Ronsard.
CHAPTER XX. ON THE CASTLE HILL.
Thrice she hummed it, bland and smiling. Then from the neighbouring group came an interruption. The wine he had drunk had put it into Bigot’s head to snatch a kiss from Suzanne; and Suzanne’s modesty, which was very nice in company, obliged her to squeal. The uproar which ensued, the men backing the man and the women the woman, brought Tavannes to his feet. He did not speak, but a glance from his eyes was enough. There was not one who failed to see that something was amiss with him, and a sudden silence fell on the party.
He turned to the Countess. “You wished to see the castle?” he said. “You had better go now, but not alone.” He cast his eyes over the company, and summoned La Tribe, who was seated with the Carlats. “Go with Madame,” he said curtly. “She has a mind to climb the hill. Bear in mind, we start at three, and do not venture out of hearing.”
“I understand, M. le Comte,” the minister answered. He spoke quietly, but there was a strange light in his face as he turned to go with her.
None the less he was silent until Madame’s lagging feet — for all her interest in the expedition was gone — had borne her a hundred paces from the company. Then —
“Who knoweth our thoughts and forerunneth all our desires,” he murmured. And when she turned to him, astonished, “Madame,” he continued, “I have prayed, ah, how I have prayed, for this opportunity of speaking to you! And it has come. I would it had come this morning, but it has come. Do not start or look round; many eyes are on us, and, alas! I have that to say to you which it will move you to hear, and that to ask of you which it must task your courage to perform.”
She began to tremble, and stood looking up the green slope to the broken grey wall which crowned its summit.
“What is it?” she whispered, commanding herself with an effort. “What is it? If it have aught to do with M. Tignonville—”
“It has not!”
In her surprise — for although she had put the question she had felt no doubt of the answer — she started and turned to him.
“It has not?” she exclaimed almost incredulously.
“No.”
“Then what is it, Monsieur?” she replied, a little haughtily. “What can there be that should move me so?”
“Life or death, Madame,” he answered solemnly. “Nay, more; for since Providence has given me this chance of speaking to you, a thing of which I despaired, I know that the burden is laid on us, and that it is guilt or it is innocence, according as we refuse the burden or bear it.”
“What is it, then?” she cried impatiently. “What is it?”
“I tried to speak to you this morning.”
“Was it you, then, whom Madame St. Lo saw stalking me before dinner?
“It was.”
She clasped her hands and heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank God, Monsieur!” she replied. “You have lifted a weight from me. I fear nothing in comparison of that. Nothing!”
“Alas!” he answered sombrely, “there is much to fear, for others if not for ourselves! Do you know what that is which M. de Tavannes bears always in his belt? What it is he carries with such care? What it was he handed to you to keep while he bathed to-day?”
“Letters from the King.”
“Yes, but the import of those letters?”
“No.”
“And yet, should they be written in letters of blood!” the minister exclaimed, his face kindling. “They should scorch the hands that hold them and blister the eyes that read them. They are the fire and the sword! They are the King’s order to do at Angers as they have done in Paris. To slay all of the religion who are found there — and they are many! To spare none, to have mercy neither on the old man nor the unborn child! See yonder hawk!” he continued, pointing with a shaking hand to a falcon which hung light and graceful above the valley, the movement of its wings invisible. “How it disports itself in the face of the sun! How easy its way, how smooth its flight! But see, it drops upon its prey in the rushes beside the brook, and the end of its beauty is slaughter! So is it with yonder company!” His finger sank until it indicated the little camp seated toy-like in the green meadow four hundred feet below them, with every man and horse, and the very camp-kettle, clear-cut and visible, though diminished by distance to fairy-like proportions. “So it is with yonder company!” he repeated sternly. “They play and are merry, and one fishes and another sleeps! But at the end of the journey is death. Death for their victims, and for them the judgment!”
She stood, as he spoke, in the ruined gateway, a walled grass-plot behind her, and at her feet the stream, the smiling valley, the alders, and the little camp. The sky was cloudless, the scene drowsy with the stillness of an August afternoon. But his words went home so truly that the sunlit landscape before the eyes added one more horror to the picture he called up before the mind.
The Countess turned white and sick. “Are you sure?” she whispered at last.
“Quite sure.”
“Ah, God!” she cried, “are we never to have peace?” And turning from the valley, she walked some distance into the grass court, and stood. After a time, she turned to him; he had followed her doggedly, pace for pace. “What do you want me to do?” she cried, despair in her voice. “What can I do?”
“Were the letters he bears destroyed—”
“The letters?”
“Yes, were the letters destroyed,” La Tribe answered relentlessly, “he could do nothing! Nothing! Without that authority the magistrates of Angers would not move. He could do nothing. And men and women and children — men and women and children whose blood will otherwise cry for vengeance, perhaps for vengeance on us who might have saved them — will live! Will live!” he repeated, with a softening eye. And with an all-embracing gesture he seemed to call to witness the open heavens, the sunshine and the summer breeze which wrapped them round. “Will live!”
She drew a deep breath. “And you have brought me here,” she said, “to ask me to do this?”
“I was sent here to ask you to do this.”
“Why me? Why me?” she wailed, and she held out her open hands to him, her face wan and colourless. “You come to me, a woman! Why to me?”
“You are his wife!”
“And he is my husband!”
“Therefore he trusts you,” was the unyielding, the pitiless answer. “You, and you alone, have the opportunity of doing this.”
She gazed at him in astonishment. “And it is you who say that?” she faltered, after a pause. “You who made us one, who now bid me betray him, whom I have sworn to love? To ruin him whom I have sworn to honour?”
“I do!” he answered solemnly. “On my head be the guilt, and on yours the merit.”
“Nay, but—” she cried quickly, and her eyes glittered with passion— “do you take both guilt and merit! You are a man,” she continued, her words coming quickly in her excitement, “he is but a man! Why do you not call him aside, trick him apart on some pretence or other, and when there are but you two, man to man, wrench the warrant from him? Staking your life against his, with all those lives for prize? And save them or perish? Why I, even I, a woman, could find it in my heart to do that, were he not my husband! Surely you, you who are a man, and young—”
“Am no match for him in strength or arms,” the minister answered sadly. “Else would I do it! Else would I stake my life, Heaven knows, as gladly to save their lives as I sit down to meat! But I should fail, and if I failed all were lost. Moreover,” he continued solemnly, “I am certified that this task has been set for you. It was not for nothing, Madame, nor to save one poor household that you were joined to this man; but to ransom all these lives and this great city. To be the Judith of our faith, the saviour of Angers, the—”
“Fool! Fool!” she cried. “Will you be silent?” And she stamped the turf passionately, while her eyes blazed in her white face. “I am no Judith, and no madwoman as you are fain to make me. Mad?” she continued, overwhelmed with agitation, “My God,
I would I were, and I should be free from this!” And, turning, she walked a little way from him with the gesture of one under a crushing burden.
He waited a minute, two minutes, three minutes, and still she did not return. At length she came back, her bearing more composed; she looked at him, and her eyes seized his and seemed as if they would read his soul.
“Are you sure,” she said, “of what you have told me? Will you swear that the contents of these letters are as you say?”
“As I live,” he answered gravely. “As God lives.”
“And you know — of no other way, Monsieur? Of no other way?” she repeated slowly and piteously.
“Of none, Madame, of none, I swear.”
She sighed deeply, and stood sunk in thought. Then, “When do we reach Angers?” she asked heavily.
“The day after to-morrow.”
“I have — until the day after to-morrow?”
“Yes. To-night we lie near Vendôme.”
“And to-morrow night?”
“Near a place called La Flèche. It is possible,” he went on with hesitation — for he did not understand her— “that he may bathe to-morrow, and may hand the packet to you, as he did to-day when I vainly sought speech with you. If he does that—”
“Yes?” she said, her eyes on his face.
“The taking will be easy. But when he finds you have it not” — he faltered anew— “it may go hard with you.”
She did not speak.
“And there, I think, I can help you. If you will stray from the party, I will meet you and destroy the letter. That done — and would God it were done already — I will take to flight as best I can, and you will raise the alarm and say that I robbed you of it! And if you tear your dress—”
“No,” she said.
He looked a question.
“No!” she repeated in a low voice. “If I betray him I will not lie to him! And no other shall pay the price! If I ruin him it shall be between him and me, and no other shall have part in it!”
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 385