He walked abreast of them, his rein on his arm, his haughty head bent. A little behind them on the left side walked Roger and the Countess’s steward. Behind these again, at a short distance, followed the mob of troopers, grinning and nudging one another, and scarce deigning to hide their amusement.
Bonne guessed all, yet she talked bravely. “It is quite an adventure!” she said brightly. “We did but half believe it, M. de Vlaye! Until you told us, we thought mademoiselle must be romancing. That she could not be — oh, no, it seemed impossible that she could be the real Countess!”
“Indeed?” M. de Vlaye answered, measuring with his keen eye the distance to the corner of the courtyard. The girl’s chatter embarrassed him. He could not weigh quite coolly the chances and the risks.
“It was after nine o’clock — yes, it must have been nearer midnight!” Bonne continued, with that woman’s power of dissembling which puts men’s acting to shame. “It was quite an alarm when she came! We thought we were to be robbed.”
“It is for that reason,” Vlaye said smoothly, “I wish the Countess to be placed in safety.”
“Or that it was the Crocans — —”
“Precisely — it might have been. And therefore I wish her to place herself without delay — —”
“In proper clothes!” Bonne exclaimed cheerfully. “Of course! So she must, M. de Vlaye, and this minute! To think of the Countess of Rochechouart” — she laughed, and affectionately drew the girl nearer to her— “making hay in a waiting-woman’s clothes! No wonder that she did not wish to be seen!”
M. de Vlaye looked at the chatterer askance, and mechanically gnawed his moustache. He believed, nay, he was almost sure that she knew all and was playing with him. If so she was playing so successfully that here they were at the corner of the courtyard and he no nearer a decision. They had but to pass along one wall, turn, and in forty paces they would be at the gate. He must make up his mind promptly, then! And, curse her! she talked so fast that he could not bring his mind to it, or weigh the emergencies. If he seized the girl here ——
“Roger should not have let her try to cross the brook, M. de Vlaye, should he?” Bonne babbled. “He should have known better. Now she has wet her feet and must change her shoes! Yes,” playfully, “you must, mademoiselle.”
“I will,” the Countess muttered with shaking lips.
One of the troopers who had been of the expedition the day before, and whom the situation tickled, laughed on a sudden outright. M. de Vlaye half halted, turned and looked back in wrath. Was he going to give the signal? Bonne’s arm shook. But no, he turned again. And they were almost at the second corner; now they turned it, and her eyes sought the gate greedily, to learn who awaited them there. If the Vicomte was there, and her sister, it was so much in her favour. He would hardly dare to carry the girl off by force under their eyes.
But they were not there. Even Solomon was invisible; probably he had taken the Abbess’s horse to the stable. Bonne was left to her own resources, therefore, to her own wits; and at the gate, at the moment of interest, at the last moment, the pinch would come.
And still, but with a dry throat, she talked. “To leave the sun for the shade!” she cried with a prodigious sigh as the western wall of the courtyard intervened and protected them from the sun’s heat. “Is it not delightful! It was almost worth while to be so hot, to feel so cool! Are you cool, M. de Vlaye?”
“Yes,” he replied grimly, “but — —”
“Sommes-nous au milieu du bois?”
she sang, cutting him short — they were within seven or eight paces of the gateway, and she fancied that his face was growing hard, that she detected the movements of a man preparing to make his leap —
“Sommes-nous à la rive?
Sommes-nous au milieu du bois?
Sommes-nous à la rive?
A la rive? A la rive!” she chanted, her arm closing more tightly about the Countess. “A la rive!”
With the last word — Pouf! — she thrust the child towards the open gateway, and by the same movement dropped on her knees in front of M. de Vlaye, completely thwarting his first instinctive impulse, which was to snatch at the Countess. “It is my pin!” she cried, rising as quickly as she had knelt — the whole seemed but one movement. “Pardon, M. de Vlaye,” she continued, but by that time the Countess was twenty paces away, and half-way across the court. “Did I interrupt you? How lucky to find it! I must have lost it yesterday!”
He did not speak, but his eyes betrayed his rage — rage not the less that his men had witnessed and understood the manœuvre; nay, dared by a titter to betray their amusement. For an instant he was tempted to seize her and crush the cursed pride out of her — he to be outwitted before his people by a woman! Or why should he not take her a hostage in the other’s room?
Then he remembered that he needed no hostage; he had one already. In a voice that drove the blood from her cheeks, “Take care! Take care, mademoiselle!” he muttered. “Sometimes one pays too much for such a trifle as a pin. You might have hurt yourself, stooping so suddenly! Or hurt — your brother!”
Roger could no longer keep silence. “I can take care of myself, M. de Vlaye,” he said, “and of my sister also, I would have you know.”
But M. de Vlaye had himself in hand again. “It was not to you I referred,” he said coldly and contemptuously. “Take me to your father.”
They found the Vicomte awaiting them on the drawbridge at the farther side of the court. But the Countess had vanished; she had not lost a moment in hiding herself in the recesses of her room. For the first time in their intercourse M. de Vlaye approached his host without ceremony or greeting.
“The Countess must come with me,” he said roughly and roundly. “She cannot stay here. This place,” with a look of naked scorn, “is no place for her. Give orders, if you please, that she prepare to accompany me.”
The Vicomte, shaken by the events of the morning, stood thunderstruck. His hand trembled on his staff, and for a moment he could not speak. At last —
“The Countess is in my care, and under my protection,” he said, in a voice shrill with emotion.
“Neither of which would avail her in the least,” M. de Vlaye answered brutally, “in the event of danger! But it is not to enter into an argument that I am here. I care nothing for the number of your household, or the strength of your house, M. le Vicomte, or,” with a sneer, “what was the condition of either — before Coutras. The point is, this is no place for one in the Countess of Rochechouart’s position. It is my duty to see her placed in a position of greater safety, and I intend to perform that duty!”
The Vicomte, powerless as he was, shook with passion. “Since when,” he exclaimed, “has that duty been laid upon you?”
“It is laid on me,” the Captain of Vlaye answered contemptuously, “by the fact that there is no one else in the district who can perform it.”
“You will perform it at your peril,” the Vicomte said.
“I shall perform it.”
“But if the Countess prefers to stay here?” Roger cried, interfering hotly.
“It is a question of her safety, and not of her preference,” Vlaye retorted, standing grim and cold before them. “She must come.”
A dozen of his troopers had ridden into the courtyard, and from their saddles were watching the group on the drawbridge. The group consisted, besides the Vicomte, of Roger and his sister, old Solomon the porter, and the wild-looking steward. Roger, his heart bursting with indignation, measured with his eye the distance across the courtyard, and had thoughts of flinging himself upon Vlaye, bearing him to the ground, and making his life the price of his men’s withdrawal. But he had no weapon, Solomon and Fulbert were in the like case, and the Captain of Vlaye, a man in the prime of life, and armed, was likely to prove a match for all three.
If the Vicomte’s ancestors in the pride of their day and power had been deaf to the poor man’s cry, if the justice-elm without the castle gates had received in
the centuries past the last sighs of the innocent, if the towers of the old house had been built in groaning and cemented with blood, some part of the debt was paid this day on the drawbridge. To see the sacred rights of hospitality deforced, to stand by while the guest whom he could not protect — and that guest a woman of his rank and kind — was torn from his hearth, to be set for a laughing-stock to this canaille of troopers — such a humiliation should have slain the last of the Villeneuves where he stood.
Yet the Vicomte lived — lived, it is true, with twitching lips and shaking hands — but lived, and, after a few seconds of moody silence, stooped to parry the blow which he could not return.
“To-morrow — if you will wait until to-morrow,” he muttered, “she may be better prepared to — take the journey.”
“To-morrow?”
“Yes, if you will give us till to-morrow” — reluctantly— “we may persuade her.”
M. de Vlaye’s answer was as unexpected as it was decisive. “Be it so!” he said. “She shall have till to-morrow.” He spoke more graciously, more courteously, than he had yet spoken. “I have been — it is possible that in my anxiety for her safety, M. le Vicomte, I have been hasty. Once a soldier, always a soldier! Forgive me, and you, mademoiselle, the same; and I, on my side, will say to-morrow. There, I am not unreasonable,” with a poor attempt at joviality. “Only I must leave with you ten or a dozen troopers for her safe keeping. And beyond to-morrow, in the present state of the country, I cannot spare them.”
At the mention of the troopers the Vicomte’s jaw fell. He stared.
“Will not that suit you?” M. de Vlaye said gaily. He had recovered his usual spirits. He spoke in his old tone.
“It must,” the Vicomte answered sullenly. “But I could answer for her without your troopers.”
M. de Vlaye shook his head. “Ah, no,” he said. “I can say no better than that. With the Crocans so near, and growing in boldness every day, I am bound to be careful. I am told,” with a peculiar smile, “that some ne’er-do-wells of birth have joined them in these parts. The worse for them!”
“Well, be it so,” the Vicomte said with a ghastly smile. “Be it so! Be it so!”
“Good,” Vlaye answered cheerfully — he grew more at his ease with every word. Some might have thought that he had gained all he wanted or saw a new and easy way to it. “Good, and as I must be returning, I will give the necessary orders at once.”
He turned as he spoke, and crossing the courtyard, conferred awhile with Ampoule, his second in command. Hurriedly men were told off to this hand and that, some trotting briskly under the archway — where the hay of more peaceful days deadened the sound of hoofs, and the cobwebs almost swept their heads — and others entering by the same road. Presently M. de Vlaye, whose horse had been brought to him, got to his saddle, rode a few paces nearer the drawbridge, and raised his hat.
“I have done as you wish,” he said. “Until tomorrow, M. le Vicomte! Mademoiselle, I kiss your hands!” And wilfully blind to the coldness of the salutation made in return, he wheeled his horse gracefully, called a man to his side, and rode out of the court.
The Vicomte let his chin fall upon his breast, and beyond a doubt his reflections were of the bitterest. But soon he remembered that there were strange eyes upon him, and he turned and went heavily into his house, the house that others now had in keeping. Old Solomon followed him with an anxious face, and Fulbert, ever desirous to be with his mistress, vanished in their train. The troopers, after one or two glances at the two who remained on the drawbridge, and a jest at which some laughed outright and some made covert gestures of derision, began to lead their horses into the long stable.
Roger’s eye met Bonne’s in a glance of flame. “Do you see?” he said. “He was to leave twelve — at the most. He has left eighteen. Do you understand?”
She shook her head.
“I do!” he said. “I do! We may go to our prayers!”
CHAPTER VII.
A SOLDIERS’ FROLIC.
A few hours later the château of Villeneuve, buried in the lonely woods, wore a strange and unusual aspect.
To all things there comes an end, even to long silences and the march of uneventful years. Summer evening after summer evening had looked its last through darkening tree-tops on the house of Villeneuve, and marked but a spare taper burning here and there in its recesses. Winter evening after winter evening had fallen on the dripping woods and listened in vain for the sounds of revelry that had once beaconed the lost wayfarer, and held wolves doubting on the extremest edge of pasture. Night after night for well-nigh a generation — with the one exception of the historic night of Coutras, when the pursuers feasted in its hall — the house had stood shadowy and silent in the dim spaces of its clearing, and prowling beasts had haunted without fear its threshold. A rotten branch, falling in the depth of the forest, now scared more than its loudest orgy; nay, the dead lords, at rest in the decaying graveyard where the Abbey had stood, made as much impression on the night — for often the will o’ the wisp burned there — as their fallen descendants in his darkling house.
Until this night, when the wild things of the wood saw with wonder the glow in the tree-tops and cowered in their lairs, and the owl mousing in the uplands beyond the river shrank from the light in the meadows, and flew to shelter. Beside the well in the courtyard blazed such a bonfire as frightened the sparrows from the ivy; and the wolf had been brave indeed that ventured within half a mile of the singers, whose voices woke the echoes of the ancient towers.
“Les femmes ne portent pas moustache,
Mordieu, Marion!
Les femmes ne portent pas moustache!
C’était des mûres qu’ell’ mangeait
Mon dieu, mon ami!
C’était des mûres qu’ell’ mangeait!”
As the troopers, seated, some on the well-curb, and some on logs and buckets, beat out the chorus, or broke off to quarrel across the flames, a chance passer might have thought the night of the great battle come again. Old Solomon, listening to the roar of the wood, and watching the train of sparks fly upwards, trembled for his haystacks; nor would the man of peace have been a coward who, looking in at the open gate, preferred a bed in the greenwood to the peril of entrance. The more timid of the serving-men had hidden themselves with sunset; the dogs had fled to kennel with drooping tails. The noise was such that but for one thing a stranger must have supposed that a mutiny was on the point of breaking out. This was the cool demeanour of Ampoule, M. de Vlaye’s lieutenant; who with a couple of confidants sat drinking in the outer hall, where the flames of an unwonted fire shone on torn pennons and dusty head-pieces. When asked by Roger to reduce the men to order, as the women could not sleep, he had shown himself offhand to the point of insolence, curt to the point of brutality. “Have a care of yourselves, and I’ll have a care of my men!” he said. “You go to your own!” And he would hear no more.
The Vicomte for a while noticed none of these things. The events of the morning had aged and shaken him, and for hours he sat speechless, with dull eyes, thinking of God knows what — perhaps of the son he had cast off, or of his own fallen estate, or of the peril of his guest. In vain did Roger and his younger daughter try to rouse him from his reverie — try to gain some counsel, some comfort from him. They could not. But that which their timid efforts failed to effect, the rising tempest of joviality at last and suddenly wrought.
“Where is Solomon?” he cried, lifting his head as one awakened from sleep. And he looked about him in great wrath. “Where is Solomon? Why does he not put a stop to this babel? ‘Sdeath, man, am I to put up with this? Do you hear me?” looking round. “Do you want them to bring the Abbess downstairs?”
Bonne and Roger, who were crouching with the little Countess in one of the two window-recesses that overlooked the courtyard, rose to go to him. But Solomon, who had been hiding in the shadows about the door, was before them. “To be sure, my lord, to be sure!” the old servant said gallantly, thoug
h his troubled face and twitching beard bespoke his knowledge of the real position. “To be sure, my lord, it is not the first time by a many hundred the knaves have forgot themselves, and I’ve had to go with a stirrup-leather and bring them to their senses! The liquor that has run in this house” — he lifted his hands in admiration—”’tis no wonder, my lord, it goes sometimes to the head!”
“Go out, man! Go out and put a stop to it!” the Vicomte retorted passionately. “Your chattering does but add to it!”
“To be sure, my lord, I am going,” Solomon answered bravely. But his eyes asked Roger a question. “To be sure it is like old days, my lord, and I thought that may-be you would like them to have their way a while.”
“I should like it, fool?”
“You might think it better — —”
“Begone!”
“Nay,” Roger said, approaching the Vicomte. “Nay, if any one goes, sir, I must. Solomon is old, and they may mishandle him.”
“Mishandle him?” the Vicomte said, opening his eyes in astonishment. “Mishandle my steward? My — —” He broke off, his hands feeling tremulously for the arms of his chair; he found them and sank back in it. “I — I had forgotten!” he muttered, his head sinking on his breast. “I had forgotten. I dreamt, and now I am awake. I dreamt,” he continued, speaking with increasing bitterness, “that I was Seigneur and Vicomte of Villeneuve, and Baron of Vlaye! With swords at my will, and steeds in stall, and a lusty son to take him by the beard who crossed me! And I am a beggar! A beggar, with no son to call a son, with no sword but that old fool’s blade! Mishandle him?” gloomily. “Ay, they may mishandle him!” he continued feebly, his head sinking yet lower on his breast. “But there. It is over. Let them do what they will!”
He continued to mutter, but incoherently, and Roger, signing to Solomon to go to his place again, slunk back to the window recess. The lad had no hope of effecting more with Ampoule, a brutal man where rein was given him; and he crouched once more where he could see the dark figures carousing in the glare that reached to the range of stables. In order that those in the room might see without being seen, Solomon had lighted no more than two candles, and these were not behind the window, where Roger and the two girls sat in the shadow. They could therefore look out unchecked.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 444